Chaneysville Incident

by David Bradley

  “I guess all that’s pretty normal. People live in a different way, they tend to not understand each other. But I was in the middle of it, you see. Because I had a toilet and a shower and a furnace and a wringer-washer. I was lucky. Only I didn’t understand, either. Because I’d smelled that air all my life, and I didn’t think the people or the Hill smelled any different than it should have; the Town didn’t smell the same way, but it was different, not right or wrong.”

  I took a swallow from my cup and looked at her. She wasn’t looking at me; her eyes were lowered.

  “Come to think of it,” I said, “I do know which way your face was turned when you came up the Hill: away.”

  She looked up at me.

  “There’s nothing wrong with that,” I said. “It takes some getting used to, I guess. I don’t know. I never had to get used to it. I always saw it that way. I grew up over there, smelling the smells and looking at those houses falling apart, breathing that air. And I grew up over here. When I was at home I used a toilet, and over here I used an outhouse. So you see, what you see as being strange for me isn’t strange at all: I can’t go native; I am native.”

  She lowered her head again. I took another sip from my cup.

  “No,” she said softly. She brought her head up again and looked at me. “No. It’s not good enough. You’re getting closer to it, but you aren’t making sense yet. Oh, it’s a reason for what you feel, but it’s not the reason you feel it. It’s something you can use to explain it and justify it without telling me why you feel what you feel. It’s just a symbol.”

  “It sounds corny to say this,” I said, “but these are my people.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “It sounds corny. It is corny. It might be true. But I know you better; you’re no font of brotherhood. You don’t like anybody that much.”

  I set the coffee down. “All right,” I said. “All right, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you how they killed my brother.”

  “No,” she said. “You’ve used that one. I fell for that one already.”

  “No,” I said. “I never told you this. I never told you how they murdered him.” I waited a minute, but she didn’t say anything. “It goes back a long way. Most murders do. And it was slow. So slow you wouldn’t have thought they were killing him at all. It looked like they were doing fine by him; he was a high school hero, and they gave him block letters for his sweater, and they actually made him the King of the Pigskin Hop and the Winter Sports Dance. They wrote him up in the newspaper. You really would have thought they liked him. They probably did like him then. Because it didn’t matter; he was already dead by that time, living on borrowed time. And this is how they killed him. When he was fourteen years old he was supposed to take algebra. He wasn’t stupid, but he wasn’t much interested in studying, either. He flunked the first quiz. He flunked the second. He flunked the first test. He flunked the second. He was going to get an F on his report card. But it was football season, and he was the starting halfback on the junior high school team. An F would have made him ineligible. So the coach talked to the teacher. Bill promised to get help. They gave him a C. I tried to help him; it wasn’t any use. Oh, he did a little better, passed a quiz or two, but he flunked the exams. Only when the second marking period rolled around, it was still football season. So they gave him another C. Then it was too late. I kept on trying, but even if he had wanted to catch up, he couldn’t; by then he didn’t even know what they were talking about. He couldn’t have passed a test for love or money. And he didn’t think he needed to. He figured so long as he could play, they’d pass him. And he was right. Because by the time the third marking period rolled around it was wrestling season. Wrestling is a very big thing in western Pennsylvania, and they let ninth-graders try for the Varsity. He tried. He made it. So it didn’t make a bit of difference that he didn’t know an exponent from a subscript; he got his C. And they gave him his C the last marking period because that was what determined eligibility to play in the fall. The next year they gave him Algebra Two. And they gave him C’s. The next year it was geometry. And chemistry. That was his junior year. He set the state rushing record that year. He went to the State Wrestling Tournament that year. He won it. They thought he could do it the next year. They gave him C’s. The trouble showed up when he took the College Boards. Oh, he did okay on the aptitude tests, but he did so badly on the achievement tests in math and science, he would have been better off just flipping a coin; he knew just enough to pick out the wrong answers. Well, that didn’t matter; he could take the tests again, and stay away from the math and science. All he had to do was be good enough at football. So they gave him C’s in trig. They even let him take physics. And they passed him. Right through football season. And they had the first undefeated year in about twenty. They passed him through wrestling season, and he won the States for them again. He was twelve weeks away from graduation. He was ignorant as sin, but his grades weren’t bad. Syracuse and Michigan and Ohio State wanted him. They would have gotten around the Boards; they do that all the time. But Bill had already delivered everything he could for the local people. So they flunked him. And there wasn’t any way the scouts or whoever could get around the fact that he hadn’t graduated from high school. And so he went to work on a loading dock to try and build himself up to try out with the pros. He lifted weights and ran the hills and threw boxes around. He talked about how Big Daddy Lipscomb never went to college, either. He worked for a year, almost. He might have made it. But he was born in the wrong month; he turned nineteen before the tryouts. Instead of getting drafted by the NFL he got drafted by Uncle Sam. You know the rest of it. But what it all comes down to is they killed him so they could have a better chance of winning a couple of junior high school football games.”

  She looked at me for a long time. Then she moved, leaving the stove and coming over and putting her hands on me. But she didn’t rub my shoulders this time. She leaned over and wrapped her arms across my chest and held me tightly. She held me for long minutes. Then she spoke. “I’m sorry, John,” she said. “It’s still not good enough.”

  I came up out of the chair, tearing her arms from around me, whirling around. “What the hell do you mean, it’s not good enough? Who the hell are you to tell me what’s good enough? That was my brother!” I knew I was shouting; I had to be—the lamp name flickered with the sound.

  “Oh,” she said. “Aren’t we noble. My people. My brother. Next thing you’ll be telling me how you have a dream. And of course you’re going to shoulder the burden for all those poor dead darkies that got exploited to death, and for the ones that moved away and got good jobs too, the ones that don’t even know how beat on they were. That’s mighty big of you, Johnny boy. But I’m not sure you’re big enough.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “The truth,” she said. “I want the truth.”

  Suddenly I needed to be out of there. I went to the door and pushed it open and went outside and pushed the door shut behind me.

  She had been right: it was beautiful out there. The sky was darkening, but the sun was strong enough to make sharp highlights in the clouds. The snow was stopping, gradually, and it seemed that I could make out the individual flakes. But I had been right too: it was cold out there. And as I stood looking at the tracks she had made going down to the outhouse, the south wind suddenly gusted fiercely, sweeping a cloud of snow over the ridge and dumping it down into the hollow. I turned and went back inside, shivering.

  She was waiting for me, sitting in my chair, her back to the door. I went and stood by the stove, warming my hands. Then I turned to warm my back and looked at her.

  “When I was six years old,” I said, “I went to school. Up until then I don’t think I had ever really talked to anybody white. Not really. And I know I had never played with any white kids. And it’s funny, nobody had ever said anything about white people that I can remember. I know there was a lot of bad feeling from time to time, and I know that sometimes older kids would
get into trouble with white kids, but I just never paid much attention. Anyway, I went to school. I didn’t know what to do in school. For one thing, I had never been anywhere without Bill before. For another thing, I knew how to read already, so there wasn’t much to do for a long while, except color. I loved to color. I remember how every morning they’d give us something made with that purple ditto ink, and we’d color it. I was always the neatest in the class, except for this one girl, I think her name was Lisa…. I don’t know. But the other thing was the playground. It was stupid; they put guards at the crossings so we wouldn’t get hit by a car crossing the street, and they had blunt scissors so we wouldn’t cut ourselves, but they’d turn us loose on the playground and let us try and kill each other.”

  “Did you get into fights?” she said.

  “Fights? Me? No. No, I didn’t know how to fight. Not for a long time. For a long time it never even occurred to me that I ought to fight. I remember the first time a little boy punched me; I didn’t even know what he’d done. All I knew was it hurt.”

  “Why did he punch you?”

  “Because I was black.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Oh, that’s nothing,” I said. “There was that kind of stuff, and name calling. I guess that’s supposed to be real traumatic. Maybe it was; I don’t remember it that way. They called you a nigger and chased you home; they called the little kids runt and chased them home. The teacher wouldn’t believe I could read all the way through the Dick and Jane book after two weeks and made me stand in the corner; she said I’d gotten somebody to read it to me and memorized it—that was worse than being called nigger. Or maybe it was the same thing. But what I remember from the playground was this joke. Stupid joke. You go up to somebody and say, ‘Shake hands with Abe Lincoln.’ After the other kid shakes, you say, ‘Congratulations. Now you’re a free nigger.’ ”

  “I remember that one,” she said. “We all laughed. We didn’t know what it meant. And there weren’t any blacks in the school….” She stopped.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You have to have a nigger handy to make the joke funny. I don’t think the kids who were doing it knew what it meant, either; they knew about calling people nigger but they didn’t know who Abe Lincoln was. I knew who he was, but I didn’t understand the joke any better than they did, so I laughed too. And I went home and tried it on my mother. She just about went crazy. She wanted to know exactly who had told me that joke, and where they lived, and she told me not to worry about it, she was going to call their mother, and I still didn’t know what was going on. But right in the middle of all of it, Moses Washington came in. He’d been up in his attic and he came down I don’t know why. Maybe he heard all the noise she was making. And he wanted to know what was happening. And she told me to tell him the joke. So I did. Or I tried. I got as far as ‘Now you’re a free…’ and he laid one up against the side of my head…. Well, I guess it wasn’t that hard, really, because he didn’t knock me down, but my ears sure did ring, and I could barely hear him, which was funny since he was shouting. He shouted a good while; I don’t know what he said. And then he picked me up and carried me out into the back yard and he set me down, and he said to me, ‘Don’t you ever say anything like that again.’ I tried to tell him that I was just repeating what a white boy said, and I wasn’t calling him a nigger, but he didn’t want to hear it. He said, ‘I don’t care about words, or white boys; but I want you to know this: your great-grandfather had his freedom before Abraham Lincoln was out of short pants. He didn’t beg for it and nobody gave it to him. He didn’t even buy it. He took it. And if some white man ever looks at you and says, “Congratulations, boy, now you’re free,” you look right back at him and say, “Jackass, I been free.” ’ And then he started to go away and leave me there, but he turned around and came back and picked me up and carried me back inside, and he set me down on the floor and he kissed me and he said, ‘I’m sorry I hit you. I didn’t mean to do it.’ And I said, ‘That’s all right.’ And he said, ‘No it isn’t. A man shouldn’t hit another man unless he means to do it.’ And then he went back to the attic.

  “I went to school the next day and that same boy came up to me and tried that joke on me, and I let him deliver the punch line, and then I said, ‘Jackass, I been free.’ And that’s when I learned how to fight. I didn’t like it. I got beat. And I knew I’d have to do it all over again. I was right. The next day, first thing in the morning, he came up to me. There were a whole lot of other kids around. He went through the joke. Did the punch line. Only nobody laughed; they were waiting to see what I’d do. What I did was wait until the silence got real heavy, and then I said, ‘My great-grandfather was free before Abraham Lincoln was out of short pants. And he didn’t beg for it, and nobody gave it to him, and he didn’t buy it. He took it.’ And nobody said anything. Because they didn’t know what to say. And that boy didn’t know whether to hit me or not. So he had to let me walk away. That’s when I learned about knowing. That’s when I learned that knowing nothing can get you humiliated and knowing a little bit can get you killed, but knowing all of it will bring you power. A few years later I read some of Lincoln’s speeches and I found out he was about as much an emancipator as George Wallace, and it was a good thing too, because as soon as I got to high school they started in with that Emancipation Proclamation nonsense, and I was ready for them. I just about gave the American history teacher heart failure. I loved it. I just gobbled history right up, and after a while it didn’t have anything to do with protection or getting even. It just had to do with history. And just about that time I found somebody just like me. His name was Robert. He was a little runty white kid with thick glasses and pop eyes and hair about the shade of dishwater, but he was just like me: he loved history. The Civil War was what got him going. He knew everything about the Civil War, right down to the times of the charges and the three-hour delay at Gettysburg. It was funny; otherwise he wasn’t very smart at all. He was in Special Education. Couldn’t read anything but history, and he couldn’t read that very well, but he studied and he worked, and he never forgot a thing. And he had history books all over the place. I don’t think anybody in the school even knew it. I forget now how I found out. But I did, and we’d spend hours talking. We’d sit down by the creek and he’d set up the whole battlefield and move the rocks around: this was somebody’s cavalry, that was somebody’s infantry. He lent me books. And I lent him a few; I didn’t have many, but he took a long time with them so it didn’t much matter. And I could get books out of the library; they wouldn’t let him in. Well, everything was fine. I think I was even happy. And then school ended for the summer. But I had a whole bunch of his books, and I knew he had a whole lot more, so one day I went over to his house. He lived over in the Scott Edition—well, it wouldn’t mean anything to you. A pretty good section of town. Not the best, but pretty good. They complained when the truckdrivers started making enough money to move in. Anyway, I went over there with the books. He wasn’t home, but I left the books. Later that night, it must have been about nine o’clock because it was dark, there was a knock on the door, and I opened it, and he was standing there with the books of mine he’d had. He hadn’t had them long; I knew he couldn’t have finished them. So I said to him, ‘Just because I brought yours back, it doesn’t mean you have to bring mine back.’ And he said, ‘I’m done with them.’ But I knew he was lying; he couldn’t read that fast. But he handed me the books and he turned away. I remember it was so dark he disappeared right away. But I could hear him going down the Hill. I was just about ready to go back inside when I heard him stop. And he said, ‘Johnny?’ and I said, ‘Yeah?’ and he said, ‘My mother said for you not to come to the house no more.’ And then he went on down the Hill. I listened to him going all the way to the bottom, and then I heard a door slam and a car start up, and then I heard it drive away.”

  I had to step away from the stove then; I could smell my clothes starting to scorch. But I didn’t feel the heat.

 
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Why… Oh.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You don’t have to hate, John,” she said. “I’ll do it for you.”

  “For us,” I said. I turned to the stove and mixed myself a toddy. When I had mixed it I stood there, feeling the warmth of the stove but not being warmed by it. “There was a girl.” I listened, waiting for her to say something, but she didn’t; there was nothing for me to do but go on. “Her name,” I said, “was Mara. She was the younger daughter of Miss Linda Jamison. Miss Linda was…well, you couldn’t call her the town whore, since there were other women—white women—who did that kind of work. Miss Linda was more of a courtesan. She didn’t have customers, or even clients; she had friends. Powerful friends. She had a house on the Hill, but Miss Linda never had anything to do with colored men. Strictly white trade. I don’t think she had anything against colored men; it was just that she didn’t think white men wanted their women having anything to do with black men, even if the women were black themselves. I suspect she was right.