Chaneysville Incident

by David Bradley

  “I feel fine.”

  “You look like hell.”

  “I ain’t never been pretty.”

  I turned away then and went to the stove. I started to put more wood in, but I realized that would be a step towards giving in. “Jack,” I said. “You can’t stay here.”

  “Hell I can’t. I stayed here for fifty years. If I got sick, I took care a myself. I didn’t need no hospital then, I don’t need one now. Don’t nobody do nothin’ in the hospital ’cept die.”

  “It’s startin’ to snow,” I told him. I let it go at that; he would know what it meant.

  “You had to go out there to find that out? I could smell it.” He started to cough again. I stepped across and stood above him while he coughed. He looked up at me over the rag he held clamped to his mouth, his eyes wide and guilty, as if he were a little boy who was being naughty. When he had finished I moved to clean the mucus from his face before he could even begin to do it for himself. And when it was over, when he lay back panting for breath, I took the rag away from him and went and threw it into the gathering darkness and the accumulating snow. Then I washed my hands. I did not look at him.

  “Johnny,” he said, “they’ll kill me.”

  I spun around to face him. “Goddammit, Jack, they don’t kill people. They take care of ’em.”

  “White people, maybe.”

  “Jack, things have changed a little—”

  “Listen to him: ‘Things have changed.’ I spent the best part a my life tryin’ to teach you up from down an’ left from sideways, an’ now you come tryin’ to tell me that things have changed to the point where they give a good Goddamn about what happens to a colored man.” He was silent for a moment, and I thought he was getting ready to cough again, but he wasn’t; he was thinking. “Johnny, sit down there.” I hesitated. “Go on,” he said. I shrugged, pulled out my chair, sat. “Do you recall when you got your hair cut the first time?”

  “What does that—”

  “Do you recall it? I don’t mean when your mama first took the shears to you; I mean when you went to the barber the first time?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “What happened?”

  “What do you mean, what happened? We went to the barber an’ he cut my hair. You took me.”

  “Where’d we go?”

  “Altoona. What—”

  “An’ after that first time, where’d you get your hair cut?”

  “Everett. Jack, you know that as well as—”

  “Well, now, as I recollect it, Altoona’s pert near forty mile off, an’ Evert’s eight. An’ this here is the county seat. You mean to tell me there wasn’t no barbershops in the county seat?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You know why you didn’t go to none a them barbershops, Johnny? I’ll tell you why. On accounta every colored man in this town knowed that if he was to walk in an’ set down they’d tell him they didn’t know how to cut a colored man’s hair. Wasn’t that they didn’t want to, now; it was just that they didn’t know how. An’ a course it wasn’t their fault that they didn’t learn, on accounta after the third or fourth colored man come out ’thout gettin’ his hair cut, didn’t no more go in. Well, we coulda done a lotta things; if we’da been like some these folks nowadays, we’da probly burnt them barbershops to the ground. Maybe we shoulda. Folks now probly think we didn’t even think about it, but we did. But then that didn’t seem to make no sense. So what we done, Johnny, was we worked it out like it was some kinda ceremony down to the Legion—just like that, on accounta it was Bunk that thought it up, an’ Bunk surely loves his Legion ceremonies. We kept it secret; wasn’t moren ten, twelve of us knowed. What we done was to keep a real close watch on the young boys—wasn’t never that many—an’ soon as a colored boy looked like he was gettin’ tall enough to go to his first real barber, we’d get together an’ scratch up some way to carry him over the mountain to Altoona, so’s he could get his hair cut by a colored man. After that, the white fella down to Evert was good enough; an’ he sure as hell was smartern the barbers around here; a head a nappy hair didn’t slow him down one bit. Now, we done that so you young boys wouldn’t have to set there an’ hear some damn peckerwood tell you that you was such a strange kinda animal that the same pair a scissors that cut a white man’s hair wouldn’t make a dent in yours. We didn’t want you to have to hear that; figured you’d hear somethin’ like it soon enough. Mose said we was all crazy. Said there wasn’t no use puttin’ it off. Said what we was doin’ was lettin’ boys go along thinkin’ the world was one way when it wasn’t, that this here town was one way when it was just about as near to the other as it could be. An’ I think now maybe he was right; we shoulda let you find out. We shoulda let you bleed the same damn way we did every damn day; maybe then you wouldn’t be tryin’ to tell me I oughta go runnin’ to the hospital jest to hear some white man tell me he don’t know where a colored man’s gizzard is at.”

  I shifted uncomfortably in the chair. I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t. Because things that I had never really understood were suddenly coming clear: the time when Bill and I had decided that the river wasn’t good enough for us and had scraped together the nickels and dimes with which to pay the admission to the Town’s one swimming pool, and had set out to walk the three or four miles to get there, but had never made it because we had come across Uncle Bunk (who hadn’t taken a day off in twenty years that anybody could recollect, but who for some reason had that day), who had asked us where we were going and, when we told him, had proceeded to tell us about the eye-burning chemicals in pool water, and to point out that we could swim in the river for free and buy sodas with the money. Or another time: when, after a football game, I had been heading for one of the high school hangouts, a coffee shop on Juliana Street, and Old Jack had appeared as if by magic, and had asked me to help him with some odd or end, and had kept me with him by spinning out one of his long, involved tales—which had more attraction for me than any milk shake—and by the time we were finished, the time for milk shakes was past. Eventually, of course, we had come to know that we were not welcome at the swimming pool or in that particular coffee shop, but by then we had been scarred by so many of the little assumptions and presumptions that go with dormant racism or wellmeaning liberalism that a little overt segregation was almost a relief.

  Old Jack watched me, his black eyes sharp. “There,” he said. “You see? An’ you want me to go over there an’ trust them people. Like hell I will. I ain’t sayin’ they’d kill me, now, but they sure as hell would let me die. Wouldn’t be the first time it happened, neither. Lord knows, your mama, she’s anxious to think well a white folks, but even she’ll tell you ’bout what happened to one a them big-time colored Methodist bishops, took sick an’ they put him in a white folks’ hospital an’ before they could turn around them white folks had just like forgot to give him what he was supposed to be gettin’ an’ he up an’ died.”

  “That was down South,” I said weakly.

  He stared at me. Shook his head. Struggled to sit up. I moved to help him. “Lemme be,” he snapped. I sat back and watched as he fought his way up and then turned so that he could lean against the wall. “Plague take it, Johnny,” he said. “I know you think I’m dyin’, an’ maybe I was, but now I don’t dare, ’cause if your daddy heard that, he’s gonna be settin’ up to chase my tail from one end a hell to t’other. An’ when he catches me, he’s gonna say, ‘Jack, I told you to teach my boy, an’ you taught him to trail a deer an’ drink whiskey, but you let him grow to man size still thinkin’ that you can draw a line an’ put somethin’ on one side without it sneaks over to t’other side by an’ by. You let him grow up thinkin’ the whole world changes on account of somebody draws a mark on a map, or passes a law. You let him grow up thinkin’ like a white man, an’ a dumb white man at that.’ Goddamnit, Johnny, you may a been to college, but you don’t know nothin’; you don’t know where you growed up at.”

  I looked at him, t
rying to think of something I could say that would have enough truth in it to make him seem wrong. But there wasn’t anything.

  “Johnny,” he said. “I ain’t no fool. I know I ain’t doin’ too good. I knowed it for a while. An’ I knowed I needed help—that’s why I called for you. On accounta, if somebody has to see me like this, I wouldn’t want it to be nobody but you….”

  “Jack,” I said. “Jack. You can’t just lay here an’—just lay here because you don’t want anybody to see you sick.”

  “I know that too,” he said. “But it don’t make no difference. On accounta they get me over there they’ll kill me. On accounta they don’t know what I need. They’ll take away my whiskey an’—”

  “I’ll bring you whiskey,” I said. “I’ll bring you anything you need….”

  “What I need don’t travel.”

  “What you need is help,” I said. “Their kind of help.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Look,” I said. “I’ll stay with you. Right there. I won’t go anywhere. I’ll watch every move they make, make sure they do everything right.”

  He smiled sadly, shook his head.

  “Why not? What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothin’,” he said. “Nothin’s wrong with it. It’s a fine idea. Only you can’t do it.”

  “Why can’t I?”

  “Because you can’t. You’d have to set up day an’ night. It’d be just like waitin’ for a buck on a game trail….”

  “I can do that,” I said. “You know I can.”

  “I know you done it. I know you know how. But you’d forget somethin’.”

  I turned away from him then, and busied myself putting wood in the stove. When I turned around again he was looking at me, his eyes half closed.

  “You don’t think I’d forget anything,” I said. “You think I’ve already forgotten it.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Why?” I said. “Why do you think that?”

  “Why? On accounta it’s true. I can see it in you, the way you move. You useta move strong an’ easy. You still got the strength, I guess, but you ain’t used it. You ain’t kept up with it. That’s what comes a city livin’….”

  “Oh, hogwash,” I said.

  “Hogwash, nothin’,” he said. “I know what I’m sayin’. Your blood’s got thin from livin’ inside a houses all the time, with no time in the woods. You walk funny; that’s on accounta your feet is all flattened out from standin’ around on cement all the time. You set in a chair like it’s home. I don’t know what’s at the bottom of it. Maybe you ain’t been eatin’ enough fresh-kilt meat, or you been drinkin’ watered whiskey, or you been messin’ with the wrong kind of women….” He stopped. I hadn’t said anything, but he must have seen something in my face. “That’s it, ain’t it,” he said. “It’s a woman.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I wondered if that was it,” he said. “It happens to men sometimes. They find a woman an’ they start in to changin’. If she’s a bad woman they change on accounta she makes ’em, but if they’re any kinda man at all they get tired a that, an’ they end up walkin’ free, lessen of course they don’t get kilt first. That ain’t so bad. But if it’s a good woman, that’s dangerous. On accounta she don’t try to change a man, she jest makes him think he oughta change. Makes changin’ his ways seem…sensible. That’s the dangerous kind. Which kind is yours?”

  “She’s the…dangerous kind,” I said.

  “You love her?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Well,” he said. “It ain’t no sickness. But it does make a man weak. Not in every way, but in a lotta ways. Anyways, you can see why…” He stopped.

  “Why you can’t trust me to watch out for you,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “No, I don’t see. You’re tellin’ me that Moses Washington got weak on accounta my mother….”

  “ ’Deed he did. He put down his gun an’ he put down his whiskey an’ he went over there an’ lived butt-to-belly with them Methodists, an’ when he tried to take his gun up again he ended up killin’ hisself. I call that weak.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Johnny,” he said. “You started trustin’ white people, ain’t you?”

  “Hell, no,” I said.

  “Yes you have. You want to take me over there to ’em on accounta you started trustin’ ’em.”

  “No,” I said.

  “It looks that way,” he said.

  “It ain’t that way,” I said.

  He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “This woman a yours. She’s a white woman, ain’t she?”

  I just looked at him. Then I got out of there, and went to stand in the falling snow.

  “Why don’t you ever talk about home?” Judith had said. It had been a night in late fall, the moon full and milk white, the naked tree branches, shaken by the cold wind, clattering against each other like dry bones. We were going west on Pine Street, a quiet street, far from the cars and the people. We moved slowly, despite the cold, our arms around each other, keeping each other warm.

  “There’s not much to talk about,” I said. “It’s a one-horse town on the road to no place. They’ve got five traffic lights now. It used to be four, but they had to put one in to control the traffic on the detour while they built the bypass; now there’s nobody to stop at any of them.”

  “Well, what about the history?”

  I hadn’t answered her. I had shivered a little in the cold, but I hadn’t answered her.

  “Oh, hell,” she said. “I don’t care about any of it, really. It’s just that you don’t talk to me.”

  “I talk all the time,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “About the Ottoman Empire or European nationalism. But you never talk about anything that has to do with you.”

  “That is what has to do with me,” I said. “I’m a historian.”

  “That’s what you hide behind, All the Goddamn time. Quotes and anecdotes. Humorous little lectures guaranteed to make you the wittiest fellow at any cocktail party. Only I’m not a cocktail party.”

  “What do you want to know?” I said.

  She stopped suddenly and whirled, spinning out from inside the circle of my arm. “What do I want to know? I don’t want to know anything. I just want you to talk to me. I just want you to tell me things. I just want you to want to tell me things.”

  “What things?”

  “Jesus! I don’t know. How am I supposed to know? I want you to tell me what you want to tell me.”

  “I do,” I said.

  “Yeah. Nothing.” She turned and started to walk again. She crossed her arms in front of her, hugging herself against the wind. I went with her, trailing her slightly.

  “John,” she said, clenching her teeth against the cold. “Usually when two people, a man and a woman, spend as much time together as we do, there is some kind of…basis for that. Trust, I guess. Sharing. Something between them. I don’t know what there is between us.”

  We stopped at Forty-second Street to let a trolley rattle past. Judith took a deep breath. “John, a man asked me to go out with him today.”

  I didn’t say anything. We crossed the street, moved on half a block to the building in which she lived. There was a low wrought-iron gate across the walk that led up from the street. It had come unlatched and swung in the wind, making tiny little metallic screeches, fingernails on a blackboard. She took her arm from around me and turned to face me. I let my arm drop away from her. “You ought to oil that gate,” I said.

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “You haven’t said anything yet.”

  “I said a man asked me to go out with him. He’s an attractive man. An intelligent man. I like him. I told him no.”

  “Look,” I said, “I never asked you to—”

  “Shut up,” she said. “I know you didn’t ask, and if you had I would have told you that who I
see is my decision, not yours. And that isn’t the point. The point is I tried to tell him about you and it just sounded…silly. Oh, not to him; he just heard what I was saying, that there was a man I had known for six months that I was spending a lot of time with and that I thought maybe I was in love with. And he went away thinking all kinds of things were happening between us that just aren’t. And it bothers me that they aren’t. You think I’m talking about sex, but I’m not. Oh, I think it’s pretty damned odd that we haven’t ever gone to bed together, but it’s even odder that I’ve never seen your apartment. After six months I’ve never seen where you live.”

  She looked at my face, searching it with her eyes, waiting for me to say something, but I didn’t have anything to say. Finally she looked away.

  “I guess what I’m trying to say, John, is that there are some things I can do without and there are other things I can’t do without. I can do without sex, I guess, but I can’t do without learning about you, and who you are and what you want. I can’t do without love.”

  “I see,” I said. “Well, let me tell you something: the things I don’t talk about I don’t talk about because I don’t like to talk about them. I don’t like to think about them. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to wring my guts out to get some blood on the floor so you can feel loved.”

  I glared at her. I couldn’t see her eyes, because the wind caught her hair and blew it across them, but I could see her lips tremble for a moment before she turned and went up the walk towards the door. I didn’t move. She pulled it open, stepped into the foyer, and let it swing behind her without looking back. It was a heavy door, and it made a solid bang as it hit the jamb. I stood there looking at it. Then I reached down and pushed the gate open and went up the walk.

  She had not gone beyond the foyer. She was huddled in the corner, crying. She looked up when I came in, her eyes wide, saying nothing. I put my hands on her shoulders and pulled her to me, and she came into my arms easily, but stood stiffly, her arms still crossed across her breasts. I turned her and pulled her with me out into the night.