by Ann Petry
The girl sitting beside him was silent. He glanced at her and her eyes were on the road, or what could be seen of the road, the fog so thick the headlights of the car couldn’t cut through the white vapor. She was sitting with her legs crossed and he could see the sheer sheer stockings over the lovely ankles, the skirt flaring over the calves of the lovely legs. And he thought he had never seen one quite so beautifully put together—like a swimmer or a racehorse or an airplane, all the essential parts in the exact right place. Lovely.
The car had veered to the right, even in that brief moment in which he took his eyes off the road to look at her. It was a damn fool business to be driving on a night like this anyway, watching or trying to watch what he could see of the black line that was the center of the road, maintaining a thirty-mile-an-hour pace; he stepped it up to thirty-five. Not safe. Slowed down to thirty, slow steady pace. He became aware of the sound of the motor, hum, hum, hum, on and on, eyes on the black line dividing the road. Occasionally he glanced off to the right, toward the shoulder of the road, and when he looked that way the car went off to the right, seemingly of its own volition. Hum of motor, slow steady motion, slow steady pace, slow steady motion, slow, steady, thin black line in the center of the road, graywhite of the concrete barely visible, headlights not strong enough to cut through the fog, fog swallowing the lights. He shifted the wheel sharply to the left because for a fraction of a second he had gone to sleep, dozed off, watching that black line.
I’ve got to change this pace, he thought, go faster or go slower, sing or whistle or talk, or I’ll go to sleep, hypnotized watching that black line. Go to sleep and drive smack into the side of somebody’s house, drive right into the front porch, the sunporch, over the straw-matting rug they put on sunporches, right into the glider they put on sunporches, knock over the plants, crashbang as the plants go over, always have plants on sunporches. It’s a little early for breakfast though. Wonder what the farmer in the dell would say if a gentleman of color accompanied by a lady not of color should arrive suddenly on the sunporch, driving right up into the sunporch.
Good morning. We came for breakfast.
Ah, but your colors don’t match. We will not serve breakfast to a lady and a gentleman who are of a color, who have colors, one of whom is colored, and one of whom is not. Don’t match.
They may all look alike in the fog, brother, but not under electric light.
Besides it wouldn’t be the farmer in the dell who would give expression to his outrage at the sight of the unmatched colors of the male and the female encased in the red convertible. The farmer takes a wife. It would be the farmer’s wife who would shriek and scream at the sight of them.
Scarlet woman! Whore of Babylon!
Say not so, farmer’s wife, wife of the farmer in the dell. I found her on the dock. She was a lost and lonely one, a little running lonely little lost one on the loose on the dock in Niggertown. I am here by her invitation. It was not of my making nor of hers, farmer’s wife. It was the hand of Fate. It was an Act of God.
I have not laid even so much as the finger of my left hand upon the finger of her left hand. It was, in fact, the other way around. It was she who held on to me, who clutched me to her bosom. She has a lovely lovely bosom. Has she not, farmer’s wife? She would not let me go. It was not of my doing at all at all. I was merely the instrument, the vessel, the clay in the potter’s hand and the potter turned the wheel, the little wheel run by Fate and the big wheel run by the grace of God. I saved her from a fate worse than death. Actually he only wanted to look. He could not walk, has not walked for years. But she did not know that.
You see? You see how it was, wife of the farmer in the dell? You ask the farmer. He knows about such matters. He will tell you. The old Adam left in him will immediately recognize the situation and he will nod his head and he will tell you, It was the woman.
He dozed off again, and the car went imperceptibly toward the right, way over toward the right-hand side of the road. He jerked himself awake. Jesus, he thought, I’ve got to talk or I’ll be in a firstclass position to find out whether Old Hell and Damnation Hill was right about the blackness of the Pit. He glanced at the girl again, and then back at the black line in the center of the road. She had the concentrated look of someone contemplating the past or the future. It won’t make any difference what I talk about. She won’t hear me. She’s looking into her own personal crystal ball. Well, honey, I’ll take mine out, too.
He said, “I started to tell you about the time I saw my first movie.” He paused. She didn’t even turn her head, and that was okay, because he wouldn’t have to worry about making sense. He could just talk. “I never quite got over it.” Weak Knees was shocked when he found out Link had never been to a movie, “Name-a-God, Sonny, here’s a buck, you go this afternoon, down to the Emporium. And buy yourself some chocolit to eat. Name-a-God, Sonny, a kid your age ain’t never seen a movie.”
He went to the matinee. Saturday afternoon. He couldn’t remember much about the picture but there had lingered in him down through the years a faint echo of the excitement, the amazement that had grown in him as he stared at the screen.
“It was broad daylight when I went into the Emporium. I was only a kid. And I remember that I stopped and looked at the sunlight on the pillars in front of the place.”
He had paused to look at the flickering, moving sunlight on the big white pillars. It filtered through the leaves and branches of the elm trees and because the leaves kept moving, the sunlight moved or seemed to. If he stared hard enough and long enough he could convince himself that it wasn’t the sunlight or the leaves that moved but the pillars themselves, moving in small irregular places.
It had occurred to him that the pillars might actually be disintegrating, breaking up into leaf-shaped bits, branch-shaped sections. He thought about Samson pulling down the pillars to which he’d been chained. He touched one of the big columns with his hands to reassure himself. When those other pillars came down, the ones Samson had been so tightly chained to, they probably broke up into bits and separate parts like these sunlit, moving pillars seemed to be doing.
“I touched one of the pillars. Because the sun made them look as though they were moving. It was made of wood. The pillar. It was an awful shock. I almost forgot that I was going to my first movie. I thought those pillars were marble, stone, that they would be cold to the touch. Instead they were wood. Warm, almost yielding when compared to the feel of stone.”
He had stared up at the column in utter disbelief. It mounted straight up to the roof of the building. There were nine others, spaced along the front at intervals. He couldn’t help himself, he had to touch each one of them. They were all made of wood. He felt cheated, defrauded, and angry, too.
“I began to wonder if there were other things I hadn’t known about, other things that weren’t what they seemed to be. People kept going past me, in through the big doors while I stood staring up at those columns, trying to figure out what other things there were that were something else. It made me furious to find out that a thing could look like something else, not be the thing I had always believed it to be.”
Freckled Willie Pratt came bursting out through the door and grabbed him by the arm and said, “Hey, Link, come on in. The pitcher’s goin’ to start. Mis’ Bushnell just set down to the organ with her music and me and Johnnie been spreadin’ across three seats in the front row tryin’ to save one for you. Come on because he can’t keep spreadin’ over three seats by himself and somebody’s goin’ to grab one of them front seats sure. Come on.”
When he got inside the music was loud and strong, and everybody got quiet, and he began to get a prickly feeling all over down his back. Then he forgot about the music. Because the picture started and he was gazing into a new and wonderful world, looking straight into it, and as he looked he became a part of it. It was the kind of world that he had suspected must exist somewhere, but here was th
e proof. The sight of it pulled him forward until he was sitting on the very edge of the hard wooden chair. He held tight to the sides of the chair because he was afraid that if he didn’t he would float off around the ceiling, he had grown so light and buoyant. He had left everything solid and commonplace and ordinary that composed his everyday world far behind him.
When the picture ended, the lights came on in the hall. Mrs. Bushnell played some fast, lively march music on the organ, so fast and so lively that the kids got out of their seats, fast, like the music. There was a stir around him, feet scraping on the floor, giggles, talk, scrambling for position, and then the kids were plunging into the aisles. He was pushed out of his seat, caught up, carried along, by the general movement toward the door. He wasn’t aware that he was walking or moving his feet and legs, he did it automatically, without thought, really not of his own volition at all. It was like sleepwalking, a trance.
“I went in the Emporium and it was daylight when I went in. When I came out it was dark. It confused me because I thought time should have come to a stop while the movie was being shown. I kept thinking that somehow I had been leading a double life, my own life as the boy Link Williams, and another far more exciting life. The fact that it got dark while I was in the world that was the movie made the whole thing very strange.”
Afterwards he stood on the steps of the Emporium, shaking with excitement.
He heard a woman say, “Good picture, wasn’t it?”
A man said, “Sure was. The feller who climbed up to the top of the ship was okay.”
That was all they said about the picture. Someone else said, “Think it’s goin’ to rain?”
They all looked up at the sky. Even the kids. He realized then that for them the picture was over and done with. No part of its glory lingered in their minds. But because all of them were looking up, he did too. Far off at the edge of the sky, but faintly, because of the big bright lights outside the Emporium, he could see the evening star.
It looked very small and faint and faraway in the dark sky. Yet the sight of it reassured him. That star could be seen in distant places. Someday, he didn’t know when it would be, but someday he would see those places, those big cities with their easily found adventures. As he waited his turn to go down the steps, he tried to find appropriate words to express the feeling that had enveloped him while he was looking at the picture.
The only words that seemed to fit, that were fine words with a special high sound to them were “the power and the glory.” He was shocked when he remembered that these words came from the Lord’s Prayer. He couldn’t quite place them at first and when he did he debated with himself as to whether it was proper to use them ordinary like that in reference to something that had nothing to do with God or the church or Sunday School.
He never did decide about the right or wrong of it. He had to use those words because they summed up how he felt about the new, fabulous, exciting world he’d just looked at, been a part of, could almost touch. A world of buildings, high up, with thousands of people moving around, of traffic so heavy it snarled up constantly, shifting, moving, getting hopelessly entangled and then moving on again. Ships pulled into a dock the like of which he hadn’t dreamed existed and the city itself stretched out behind the dock for miles, with its buildings pushing up against the very sky itself.
“I never quite got over it,” he said. “I made up my mind then that someday I would conquer the world—don’t ask me what world. I believed that the only thing that would ever stop me would be the fact that some other guys got there first. I didn’t believe that was possible. I didn’t believe there was anybody as smart and as tough as I was anywhere, any time, any place. Or ever would be. So I would get there first. I would conquer the world.”
“Don’t you believe it any more?”
Her voice startled him. Oh, he thought, so you were listening all the time. I thought I was talking to myself. “Honey,” he said, “I’m the day man behind the bar in The Last Chance. And I’m perfectly content to be just that and nothing more. Any itch I ever had in my soul, any run-around I ever had in my heel, I lost when I grew up. You only get those world-conqueror ideas when you’re eight years old. After that—uh-uh.”
“Why did you feel as though you could conquer the world?”
“I don’t know exactly. That was a long time ago and I was just a kid. All I remember is that I had seen a new world, found a new world, a new continent, and like all discoverers I decided to conquer it, make it mine. That’s all. Kind of feeble. But that’s the way it was.”
“What was the name of the movie?”
The fog had begun to lift, he could see both sides of the road and he increased the speed of the car.
“That’s gone, too, vanished down the long corridor of time. Like a lot of other things.”
He stopped talking, aware that she was looking at him, straight at him, staring, really. Probably trying to make sense out of what he’d said.
She said, “I’m all right now. This is far enough. Turn around and go back.”
He went on driving as though he hadn’t heard her, driving faster and faster, thinking, She sounded exactly as though she were talking to a chauffeur. Home, James. Well, James had taken off his uniform and cap, James was now wearing flannel pants and a striped T-shirt and James was all set to drive to hell and back and had every intention of taking the madam with him because he wasn’t working there any more. He had quit and the madam was—well—when all candles bee out all cats bee gray. Under electric light? No. Strong hot light of the sun? No. But in the dark, in the dark—
She said, sharpness in her voice, arrogance in her voice, something else he couldn’t quite give a name to, not as uncontrolled as rage, but controlled rage, rage because the chauffeur was late, the chauffeur talked back, was impudent, impertinent, had to be put in his place, “I want to go back. Stop and turn the car around.”
“This ride wasn’t my idea, honey,” he said softly. “But I’m beginning to enjoy it. So I plan to ride a long while yet. I’m afraid there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it except go along, too.”
It was so late that there were no other cars on the highway. On the straight stretches he shoved the speedometer up to eighty. He waited for her to protest but she didn’t. Her hands were clenched into fists, and her body was braced, stiffened, against the seat as though against an expected attack. He kept following the river. He would drive forty more miles before he turned back. The girl still said nothing.
She’s scared, he thought. She’s scared deaf, dumb, and blind. She thinks I’m going to rape her. I’m due to rape her, or try to, because I’m colored and it’s written in the cards that colored men live for the sole purpose of raping white women, especially young beautiful white women who are on the loose. How do I know she’s on the loose? Well, what the hell was she doing at the dock? She’d scream for help if there was anybody to hear her, and there isn’t, so she’s braced herself, waiting.
He turned down a side road, parked the car, cut the motor off. The soft hum of the motor had been like a not-listened-to conversation, like a radio tuned low, you didn’t pay attention to it until it stopped, and then you wanted to turn it on again, wanted the conversation you hadn’t been listening to to continue because the stillness was disturbing. He heard the girl sigh, well, not sigh, but as she exhaled she made a small sound, anxious, afraid.
They sat in the car, silent, both of them, for perhaps five minutes. He was grinning, though the girl could not see the grin. She had moved so far away from him, must have moved away, slowly, imperceptibly, for he had been unaware of any movement, that she was jammed up against the door, had one hand on the door.
Then he stopped grinning because for one moment, one long incredible moment he wanted to, he wanted to— Heat behind his eyes, thick hot feeling in his throat, blood pounding in his ears. He leaned toward the girl, the perfume that was like the s
mell of stock drawing him toward her, the impulse absolutely uncontrollable now, like standing waiting, years ago, in the hallway at China’s Place, waiting, and not thinking, not able to think. He watched her fumble with the handle of the door. Ah, the hell with it, he thought, and started the car—viciously.
He did not speak again until they were back in Monmouth, back at the corner of Franklin Avenue and Dumble Street. He said, “I wouldn’t go sightseeing on the Dumble Street dock any more if I were you.”
Then he got out of the car, slammed the door, hard, as though he hoped the hinges would tear loose, said, in a matter-of-fact voice, “Thanks for the buggy ride.”
6
* * *
LINK WILLIAMS was standing on the dock again, his coat collar turned up, leaning against the piling. He had turned the collar of his coat up about an hour before, and even as he did it thought that no cloth had ever been woven that could deflect the icy wind blowing in from the river. Jubine, the photographer, stood beside him, facing the river, waiting for something extraordinary to happen, just as he did every night.