A Man Without Shoes

by John Sanford

  He left the car at 20th Street and walked westward from Sixth Avenue to an old four-story brownstone; under the stoop, he found a battery of bell-buttons opposite slotted names, and he pressed one of them marked G. Paul. A buzzer clicked the door-catch, and he entered the dim ground-floor hallway; at the far end, a figure stood on a threshold against a purpling courtyard beyond.

  “We had no phone listed for you, Miss Paul,” Dan said, “so I thought I’d come in person.”

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “I want to see you. Aren’t you going to ask me in?”

  “Come in if you like,” she said, and she went to a window and looked out at calcimined brick and the tangents and secants of clotheslines. “Have you got a job for me?”

  “Do we have to talk about that right away?”

  “What else is there to talk about?”

  “You said you’d do anything for a job, so I hoped you’d have supper with me.”

  “What else do I have to do?”

  “You don’t really have to do anything.”

  “You have no right to hold me to what I said the other day. I said whatever came into my mind. I needed a job, and that’s what did the talking. It isn’t fair to hold me to my word—not about a thing like this.”

  “Do you still need a job?”

  “Of course I do—more than ever.”

  “I came to offer you one.”

  “That isn’t all. It can’t be. I don’t understand you! What’re you doing here?”

  “I’m trying to get you to go out to supper.”

  “You want more than that, and you know it!”

  “Ah, hell,” Dan said, and taking the card from his pocket, he dropped it on a table. “There’s the job, and I hope you have a great success with the Caribbean Fruit Growers. I even hope you marry Mr. Caribbean. We’ll send you a bill on the first of the month. Good evening.”

  She let him reach the door before saying, “I’m sorry I spoke that way. You’ve been good to me, and if you still want me to, I’ll eat with you. I’m hungry, but that’s not the only reason.”

  [You thought, “For Christ’s sake, go away!” and you thought, “Stay, you damn fool!” and you stayed.] “Put your coat on,” he said. “I’m hungry too.”

  Afterward, they walked back to the brownstone in a bright cold night under a star-punctured sky, and at the door she said, “Would you care to come inside?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I would.”

  She turned on a gas-log below the mantel, and they sat watching blue fire simmer. “I lied to you before,” she said. “I knew what I’d promised, and I wanted to take it back. I don’t any more, though, and whatever you tell me to do, I’ll do.”

  “I don’t want you to do anything.”

  “You’re the one that’s lying now. You came here with that card because you expected me to make good. Otherwise you’d’ve mailed it to me.”

  “I came because I wanted the pleasure of telling you about the job face to face. That’s all.”

  “Is that what you do with everybody you get a job for—hunt them up and tell them face to face?”

  “No. This is the first time.”

  “Why do you do it now?”

  “The way you acted at the office that day. The things you told me about yourself.”

  “But more than anything, the promise I made.”

  “It wasn’t the promise: the promise almost kept me away. I wanted to see you again, but I knew that if I ever did, I’d remember what you’d said and feel like a dog.”

  “Even if you came here only for the pleasure of seeing my gratitude?”

  “I’m no nobleman, Genevieve, and when I die, I won’t look saintly: I’ll look like what I am, an ordinary guy. If you want all the truth, though, I’ll tell it: the promise mixed up my thinking so much that I honestly don’t know whether I’m here to give something or to get something. There’s some of each in it, I suppose, but which there’s more of I couldn’t possibly say. I like to find jobs for people: it’s the only consolation I have for working as a capitalist pimp. When I’m able to help somebody, and he tells me, ‘Gee, Johnson, thanks a million!’ I feel great, really great. Lots of times I’ve been offered tips, bribes, sad little presents, but the only thing I ever kept was a nickel bunch of flowers that an old lady left on my desk. I don’t want any tips. I don’t want any bribes. I only want to help a whole lot of people, one by one. Before you came in, everybody was on an equal footing, and God Himself couldn’t’ve gotten me to put Christ ahead of any other carpenter—before you came in. I took your application and put it right up on top; I put you before girls with sixteen times your ability and twenty-nine times your experience, girls who can type you blind in an hour and dead in a day. Why? Why did I do that? to see your face light up, to get you to deliver, or both? You shouldn’t’ve said anything, Genevieve. You shouldn’t’ve made any promises.”

  The girl rose and went behind the couch, saying, “Dan, please don’t turn till I tell you to.”

  He stared at the clambering flames, the blue bees pouring from the perforated log, and then he heard the sound of cloth sliding on cloth, and he knew that he would have to turn, not when told, but now.

  PIER 56, NORTH RIVER

  The siren began to sound at five minutes before midnight, and for four of those minutes, Dan and Mig shouted at each other in a deafening world, and then the final minute came, and their words broke off with the siren, and they stood looking at each other, shaking hands and smiling.

  And then the final seconds came, and Dan said, “You’re such a wonderful guy, Mig.”

  And Mig said, “A lot of people’re wonderful guys, Mr. Lovejoy,” and he ran for the gangplank.

  INTRODUCING JOHN CARLOS HILL

  “For Get it, Jack,” Dan said, cocking his head to wedge the telephone-receiver between his ear and shoulder. “That’s what we’re in business for. Forget it.”

  [“Forget nothing. The first time you’re anywhere near the Street, give me a ring, and I’ll blow you to the best lunch in town. I know just the place. The waiters’ve all been there since the War of 1812, but there’s fresh food every hour. And the coffee—man, it’s so rare they have to buy it a bean at a time.”]

  “Quit, or I’ll jump a train and meet you right now.”

  [“Jump it. See how sore I get.”]

  “You’re on. Where do we meet?”

  [“Corner of New Street and Exchange Place. The joint’s only a few doors away.”]

  “How about twelve-thirty?”

  [“Sharp.”]

  MAIL-POUCH

  Dan wrote, “… Going downtown the other morning, I rammed myself into an express at 96th Street, and when the train started, a voice behind me said, ‘Careful where you’re standing, white boy.’ I was in so tight that I couldn’t turn around, so I said over my shoulder, ‘I’m sorry.’ That didn’t satisfy this egg, and he said, ‘Think you own the earth, eh, white boy?’ I said, ‘I told you I was sorry. What more do you want?’ and he said, ‘You’d probably like it if we had Jim Crow cars, wouldn’t you, white boy?’ I was good and sore by that time, and when the train hit the bend at Columbus Circle, I managed to twist myself a little—and there I was, scowling the famous Johnson scowl at a grinning shine name of Julie Pollard! We hadn’t seen each other for months, and getting out at Times Square, we stood in the snow chewing the fat for a solid hour. He’d been on his way to the Library, he told me, and do you know what he was going to do when he got there? He was going to write. That’s what I said: write. He still takes a fight now and then, but he says he found out it’s one thing to be champ of the block and another to be Sam Langford, and he only keeps his hand in for coffee-and-cake money and rent. He spends the rest of his time putting words together—and with some success, the way it looks. He’s been at it for about a year, he tells me, and out of a dozen-or-so stories, he’s had one published and two more accepted, and right now he’s working on a longer thing that might tur
n out to be a novel. What’s he like these days? Well, the best way to put it is, he’s still Julie Pollard—the hardest-hating black man in North America. He still won’t fight an ofay, you know—says he hates to touch ’em—and I’ll bet I’m the only one he’s ever shaken hands with in his life. I think he’ll always be that way. He simply can’t forget he’s black.…”

  Tootsie wrote, “… I went up to see if I could have a talk with some of the Scottsboro boys, and when I asked a deputy how to go about getting a pass, he reached under his arm and pulled out a big blue pistol, and he cocked the hammer and pointed the hole at my head, saying, ‘Only kind of a pass a nigra gets is with a three and a foah. High-tail it, you sonabitchin’ black bastard!’ Have you read any of Julie’s stories, Danny…?”

  Danny wrote, “…The published one. It’s called ‘Jig-chaser,’ and reading it was like watching Julie fight—or, better, like fighting him myself. He comes out fast, and he never lets up; he’s a swarm of words, all of them hard; and I got the feeling that he wasn’t only the Julie Pollard that didn’t get to read his composition at graduation, and he wasn’t only the Julie Pollard that wanted so much to be a lawyer and ‘get justice in the court,’ but he was also every other Negro that started out with big beautiful brown eyes and wound up with a broken back…”

  HE OPENED HIS MOUTH AND TAUGHT THEM, SAYING

  Dan and Julie crossed 106th Street to the house that Hill lived in, a converted granite-front a few doors east of the Franz Sigel statue on the Drive.

  As they entered the flat, Hill was saying to three friends lounging near the fireplace, “… Christ was a flop. He had the chance of all eternity, and He muffed it because what He preached was vertical instead of horizontal. I can’t understand what God had in mind. He turned His only son loose on a world that needed Him more than rain, and what fell was dust, because Christ brought an up-and-down love that neither watered the spirit nor flowered the flesh nor flowed from heart to heart and made fruit, and when He died, man dried on the vine for eighteen centuries. God must’ve been tired when He cooked up Jesus. With unlimited assets and raw materials, all He could generate among men was hatred, and it remained for an epileptic Russian—a Jew-hater, a wife-beater, a salt-mine convict—to preach what Jesus could’ve had for a dime. It’s a pity. The world would’ve been saved eighteen hundred years of slaughter if God had written The Brothers Karamazov instead of The Sermon on the Mount….”

  “What’s this Russian’s name?” Julie said.

  Dan made the introductions. “Jack Hill on the couch, along with Maury Pastor,” he said, “and Al Clay and Jake Harris on the floor. This is one of my oldest and best friends—Julie Pollard.” There were greetings, but no handshakes.

  “You were talking about some Russian,” Julie said to Hill. “Who do you mean?”

  “Dostoevsky,” Hill said.

  “I never heard of him. What does he stand for?”

  “It’s hard to put in a few words,” Hill said, “especially if you haven’t read his books.”

  “I’ve read The Sermon on the Mount, though, and from what you say, this Brothers book has something better. What?”

  “It has an understanding of man and a love for him as he is,” Hill said, “not as he might’ve been if God had known what He was doing when He threw him together. The Christian religion doesn’t hold water: God creates man in His image and finds him defective. What does that argue? Either that God Himself is defective, or He purposely held out on man. If God is defective, we can stop right there and forget the whole business, so let’s assume He had a reason for not creating a couple of billion other Gods. What was it? The first thing that comes to mind, naturally, is that He wasn’t sucker enough to split the universe two billion ways: He seen it first. But that isn’t being very charitable to God, so let’s hunt for a better reason. How about this? He built man to fall short so that in the end He could reach down and save him, as a brand from the burning, provided only that he had shown himself worthy of entering the kingdom of Heaven. But what does it mean to be worthy though defective? If defective, man can never be absolutely worthy; he can only be worthy in relation to other defectives. Under this hypothesis, God made man defective in order to reward those who proved the least defective. But that’s nonsense, and it leads nowhere—except to the conclusion that God is blaming man for His own damned uneven work. So let’s dismiss that reason too. What else is there? We have the poorest of reasons, of course, the one you’d suppose most theologians would prefer to forget, for it gives God a mighty poor character: He made man the way he is, brutal, forsworn, avaricious, and full of spleen, because He desired limited corporeal lives of misery, oppression, and bloodshed in order to purge man for splendid and never-ending lives in the spirit. But, my God, what a God that would be! Deliberately torturing every born man in preparation for a remission from torture! There’s as little sense to that as living in a sewer in order to enjoy a bath. A man doesn’t have to become dirty in order to become clean; he can start clean and stay clean. No, this hogwash about life on earth being a trial won’t go down. What’s next? We mustn’t forget the appeal to sentiment: God so loved the world that He let His only begotten son die for it. Reason reels before such reasoning. Why waste a perfectly good Savior on a perfectly imperfect world? If man is worth saving at the end, he must’ve been worth a break at the beginning, but for some queer reason, God doesn’t see it that way: He likes to make it tough; He prefers to pull man through a knothole into the Hereafter. In the Old Testament, at least, no Hereafter was promised; in the New, you can choose between two, Heaven and everlasting hell. For me, the Jews have the merit of being realists: they give you hell or Heaven right here on the ground. Something must’ve happened to God along about the time He changed His religion, and God only knows what it was, but whatever, He put reality behind Him, and ahead lay the ages of the bloody spirit, with Heaven straight up and hell straight down, and the time came for man to stop loving man for man’s sake and start loving him for God’s sake, which meant that the time was ripe for man to murder in the name of the Lord and be forgiven on Friday. Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. But who with appetites here in the dirt, all God-given, wants pie in the sky? Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. But why have they been made to mourn, and where shall their grief be assuaged—here and now, or there and then? Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. But is Morgan meek, is Henry Ford, is John D.? Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. But with what—with food and drink, or with bayonets and tear-gas? Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. But from whom—the merciless? Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. But not yesterday, when they asked for bread and were given a stone; and not today, when they ask for time and are foreclosed; and not tomorrow, when they will ask for jobs and be shot down by the Hessians. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in Heaven. In Heaven, in Heaven, always in Heaven!”

  “This Russian man,” Julie said. “What did he do about all that?”

  “What did he do?” Hill said. “He reached up into the sky and dragged Heaven down to earth, where it belonged. He expropriated God and distributed His estates among the people. He merged the next life with this, so that the seat of the Hereafter became the living hearts of living men.”

  “Did he do all that?” Julie said.

  “Read his books,” Hill said.

  “I’ll take your word about the books, but I’ll gamble they never heard of ’em in Paint Rock, Alabama.”

  “They’ll hear all over the world some day.”

  “What’s the good of some day? I want the news to get around now, when nine of my people are sitting in jail, waiting to be lynched for raping a couple of white hustlers on a freight-train. This Russian man don’t mean a thing to them, and he don’t mean a thing to me, either, not unless Victoria Price and Ruby Bates go and get religion, and walk in
the court, and take back their lies. No such luck, though. Takes a long time for news to travel in Alabama, and my people’ll die before yours see the light. Love everybody, this Russian man says, but he can’t tell me nothing about love. I’m black, and I know what loving is because I know what hating is. When a black loves you, he does it with his whole body, all at once, but when a white loves you, he does it with talk, sweet-sweet. We’ve had talk for three hundred years, sweet-sweet, but your people’re still on the toilets, and mine’re still swabbing ’em out. That ain’t going to last for another three hundred years, and you can build high on it—but when it’s changed, it won’t be changed by Jesus or this Russian saying sweet-sweet. It’ll be changed by knives, buckshot, and a flood of blood.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Pollard. People have to love each other to rise up against slavery.”

  “Tough on me, then. I’m a hating-type man.”

  ON TACK 14

  A slope of morning sunlight cut the glass jar of Penn Station into gloom and gold, and in the gold, gold-flakes tumbled past Dan as he stood near a train-board bearing the words GULF EXPRESS. A growing pound-and-pound shook the floor and died away, and after a few moments passengers began to emerge from a stairhead beyond the gates. One of these carried a suitcase on the end of which was a scuffed-up Tuskegee sticker.

  “Mr. Powell,” Dan said. “Mr. Tudor Powell.”

  Tootsie grinned, saying, “Little more respect, there, boy. Mr. Tudor Powell, M. A.”

  Dan bowed. “Smash your baggage, Mr. M. A. Powell.”

  ORIGIN OF AN AMERICAN