Ann Petry

by Ann Petry

  “You’re laughing at me,” voice muffled, angry.

  She was silent as they left Monmouth. Dear me, he thought, this is a temperamental little one and I have no liking for the silent treatment. I do not respond to it properly. My hackles rise. I will have to practice walking on eggshells. I have no experience, no previous experience, in eggshell-walking and therefore I will not be able to give a good performance. They skirted New Haven, entered the Parkway and she still hadn’t said anything.

  He increased the speed of the car, then he said, softly, “Did you ever hear a very old saying to the effect that where there was no offense intended, no offense should be taken?”

  “No. But it sounds reasonable.”

  He let it go at that, said, and he’d been wanting to say it, “Whenever I see a sky like this one, brassy color rioting all over it, I always wish I could paint. Show the sun going down incredibly hotlooking, and show, too, that the air is cold, make the whole thing look as though the sun were throwing down a gauntlet to winter, shoving it down the throat of the long cold nights.”

  “You could write it,” she said.

  “Writing’s inadequate. It’s not fast enough. A gaudy winter sunset done up in color straight out of the tropics, the whole thing set down in the brutal cold of New England, calls for paint. You see you’ve got to get it across in the first glance, show the impossible, incredible contrast, bare branches of trees, gaunt, grayblack, silhouetted against that smashing color—all across the horizon—” He took his hands off the wheel, made a wide all-encompassing gesture, using both hands, and the car swerved to the right. He pulled it back on the road quickly.

  Camilo said, politely, “Quote. I do not like to have my hair stand on end. My hair does not like to stand on end because it knows that human hair is not supposed to do that. End quote.” She laughed. “I’m sorry, but I really couldn’t help it.”

  “Just for future reference, what was wrong with what I said about your driving?”

  “I can’t bear to be laughed at.”

  “I was teasing you. I wasn’t laughing at you. Even if I had been—why can’t you bear to be laughed at?”

  “It makes me feel as though I were fourteen again, and back in boarding school, and so fat that I have to wear size forty-two clothes, and a girl named Emmaline is holding up one of my nightgowns, laughing, laughing, laughing, and saying, ‘It’s like a tent. I bet three of us could get inside it and there’d be room left over. Look! It’s like a tent.’”

  He said, “In one way or another, it happens to everybody.” He thought, I was ten, and they called me Sambo, and I died a little, each time. Well, we have a little more information. You went to boarding school. I didn’t think they turned ’em out of Monmouth High School with your stance.

  “It’s a funny thing,” she said. “But when you’re that young, people think you haven’t any feelings. We were weighed every month, and every month part of me shriveled up and died because I weighed so much it was a joke. Everybody laughed, the nurse, the doctor, the other girls. I wanted to look like GarboCleopatra and I looked like Dickens’ fat boy but with pigtails, and wearing a size forty-two tent, not a dress, but a tent. So at night I escaped from the ridicule and the fatness by reading poetry; then after the lights were turned out I would stay awake a long time, making up a dream lover, a dark, handsome man who would recognize the beauty of my soul and fall in love with me, not with any of the pretty, emptyheaded, thin ones.

  “In every boarding school, there’s a girl with the face of a Botticelli angel and the tongue of an asp, to let you know exactly how awful you look. The one at the school where I went was Emmaline Rosa May Carruthers. In my dream world, Emmaline always died of jealousy, because the dark, handsome lover jilted her and ran off with me.”

  He thought, listening, how wonderfully complicated the female is, even at fourteen. Fourteen, fourteen, fourteen. What was I like at fourteen? I was damn near being a professional football player, baseball player, basketball player; and I was hellbent on swimming the English Channel. Somebody must have conquered the Channel about then, otherwise I wouldn’t have been practically living in The River Wye, covered with grease. Weak Knees and Bill Hod, on the dock, egging me on. Nobody could have paid me to go near a girl. I thought they were dumb, none of ’em could dive.

  Camilo said, “I hated those girls, all those pretty curlyheaded girls. But I bought them candy and cake and silk stockings, hoping that if they were in my debt they wouldn’t laugh at me. They ate the candy and the cake, and wore the stockings and laughed at me just the same. It was a brandnew, unpleasant experience. Even now, I get angry if I’m laughed at.”

  “I can’t somehow picture you as a fat little girl. But you must have been beautiful.” Certainly the hair, the eyes, the mouth, must have been exactly the same.

  “I wasn’t though. No child can be dreadfully fat and still be beautiful.”

  “How long have you been looking the way you do now?”

  “Ever since I was eighteen.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I was in college by then. In my second year at Barnard. Nobody laughed at me there. But all the girls had boyfriends. I did, too, but mine were the toofat ones who wore thicklensed glasses, or the toothin ones, whose backs were hunched over from studying. So I went on a diet and for the first time in my life I learned what it was like to be hungry, all the time. When I’d got thin enough to wear size fourteen clothes I had my hair cut off. In June, one of the fat boys peered at me, then his eyes opened, wide, and he said, ‘Why, you’re beautiful!’ I felt like the Count of Monte Cristo because I’d dug my way out of what amounted to a tomb of fat, and done it alone, unaided.”

  She was silent and then she turned toward him and said, “You know, when you told me about going to your first movie and how you believed that the world was yours, I was startled. Because the same thing had happened to me. When that boy said, ‘You’re beautiful,’ I believed the world was mine, all I had to do was reach out and take it.”

  He asked her the same question she had asked him. “Do you still believe it?”

  “Of course not. I was awfully young at eighteen, terribly young.”

  “You still are.”

  “Not in the same way. It’s all right to believe that the world is yours when you’re eight. If you’re eighteen you’re liable to run into trouble.”

  In New York, he paid a buck and a half to park the car in a midtown parking lot. The attendant looked at Camilo, looked at Link, blandly, incuriously. Link thought, In New York all the black boys who go in for what they like to call Caddies also go in for white girls. So this is old hat to him. He figures that if I’m rich enough—numbers or women or rackets of one kind or another—to drive one of these crates, then almost any goodlooking white girl is going to find me acceptable. Money transforms the black male. Makes him beautiful in the eyes of the white female. Black and comely. No. It was black but comely. Black and comely, take it for granted that blackness and comeliness were not only possible but went hand in hand. A taken-for-granted condition. The other was an explanation and an apology. He thought, That far back. They started that far back. Ah, well.

  “Which movie, honey? It was your idea.”

  “I’ve got reservations for Radio City,” she said.

  “How much?”

  “Oh, these are Annie Oakleys. I’m always getting tickets to this or that because I write about fashions.”

  He made no comment but he didn’t quite like the idea. He sat beside her in the brilliantly lighted vastness, the elaborateness, of the Music Hall at Radio City, thinking, Well, it’s a new experience. I’ve never been took to the movies before. I must say she’s a rather highhanded little female.

  The lights went down, and his resentment vanished, because there was always a moment, in any theatre, just before the curtains opened, when he could convince himself that he w
ould, once again, experience that disembodied feeling he had known, at his first movie, when he was eight years old. He never did. Yet, even here, where he knew in advance pretty much what he was going to see, he leaned forward, watching the curtains part, half convinced that this time the magic would work, and he would behold a new and wonderful world.

  He saw a stage full of dancing girls, wearing fabulous costumes, and he sat back in his seat. He glanced at Camilo. She was watching the stage, completely absorbed, leaning forward, as though she were alone here, as though this particular show had been staged for her, for no one else. She had removed the white gloves. The soft brown fur that she’d worn around her shoulders was in her lap, mounded in her lap. His hand brushed against it. He resisted an impulse to touch her hand, to say something, anything, that would turn her attention from the dancing girls on the stage to the man sitting beside her.

  Finally, the dancing girls moved off the stage, kicking high. They were so exactly alike, the legs, ankles, thighs, breasts, so exactly alike, that they might have been turned out of a mold. Even the high kicks, high kick and turn the head, high kick and turn the head. Maybe they had some kind of meter machine in the rehearsal hall that measured the height of the kicks. It could be simpler than that, maybe they’d worked out something like the automat, put in a nickel, in a giant machine, located on Forty-Second Street, and out would come a girl, or girls, who would meet the requirements as to size and shape, and would be kicking up her legs, just so far, and thus they could trot her right up to this theatre, without any further effort on the part of the dance director.

  The dancing girls were followed by a pair of dancing colored comedians. He thought, Why, this is the minstrel show again. I’m right back in the Arsenal School on Franklin Avenue and Miss—pause—Dwight is saying, “We won’t have to use any burnt cork on—pause—Link.”

  On the way down, Camilo had said, “It’s a funny thing but when you’re that young, people think you haven’t any feelings.” She was fourteen then. Well, he was ten when Miss pause Dwight, who was his teacher, must have come to the conclusion that he didn’t have any feelings.

  It wasn’t just Miss Dwight either. As Dumble Street changed, and more and more colored kids began to go to the Arsenal School, he learned about a new and different kind of insecurity. He was never certain whether the white kids would let him play with them. Sometimes, after school, they played baseball and the kids shouted, “Throw it to old Link, throw it to old Link, Link’s good!” Then again the white kids would band together in a tight invulnerable group, welded together by their whiteness, and he, the outcast, the separate one, would be turned on suddenly, ostracized by a gesture, a look, a word.

  He kept his fears to himself. They were varied, peculiar. He was afraid of pigeons, afraid of those fat, outrageously breasted birds, that fed on the school lawn, waddling across the grass, in groups, murmuring to themselves, Look at the coon, Look at the coon, Look at the coon, until finally it sounded like one long word, Lookatthecoon.

  At least that’s what the white kids told him the pigeons were saying. They laughed when they told him. If he grew sullen, furious, and showed it, they said, “Lookit old Link. We ain’t talkin’ about you. That’s what them pigeons say,” and then the pigeons and the kids would say, Lookitthecoon, Lookitthecoon, Lookitthecoon, over and over.

  He hated crows and grackles and starlings—all the black birds. Because the kids giggled, their eyes sliding around to him when they saw these big black birds, “Blackbird!” they said, and meant him. He hated storms too, thunderstorms, rain clouds, wind clouds, any big black cloud that piled its darkness in the sky. “Storm comin’ up,” the white kids said. They said it easily, with laughter, innocent-eyed as they looked at him, “A big black cloud’s around so a storm’s comin’ up.” “Link’s here. A storm’s comin’ up.”

  Then, just as suddenly, they welcomed him, accepted him. But he was wary of their acceptance. He never knew at what moment he would be betrayed, thrust out, because of the presence of some other dark creature like himself, perhaps a starling or a crow or another colored boy; betrayed by the gross redlegged pigeons, calling, Lookitthecoon, Lookitthecoon.

  Even his name betrayed him. His teacher, Miss Dwight, managed to make it a peculiar name; she hesitated before she said it, made it laughable, and her eyes rejected him, “Speak up—pause—Link.” The pause before the name turned it into something to be ashamed of.

  It was Miss Dwight, Miss Eleanora Dwight, who decided that his class would give a minstrel show, to raise money, to help raise money for the Parent Teachers’ Association. She gave him a part in the show. When the other kids heard her read the lines that would be his, they laughed until they almost cried. He was the butt of all the jokes, he was to say all of the yessuhs and the nosuhs, he was to explain what he was doing in the chicken house, Ain’t nobody in here, boss, but us chickens; he was to be caught stealing watermelons; he was to dance something that Miss Dwight called the buck and wing; he was to act sleepy and be late for everything. His name in the minstrel was Sambo.

  He could dance better than the other kids. But Miss Dwight and her pause—Link made him ashamed of his ability to dance.

  “You know the buck and wing, don’t you, pause, Link?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said politely and let his answer lie there unadorned, no explanation, just the denial.

  Miss Dwight said, “Oh, well, any of the dances you know will do,” and waited.

  Link said nothing.

  “What other dances do you know?”

  “I don’t know any dances, Miss Dwight, except the ones they teach us here in school.”

  “I thought—” Miss Dwight said and frowned. “Well, we’ll make up something. Perhaps your father could teach you the buck and wing or some dance like it.” When he didn’t reply she said, “Answer me. Can your father teach you the buck and wing?”

  He said, “Miss—” then he had a sudden inspiration. He paused before he said “Dwight” just the way she paused before she said “Link.” He gave his voice the same intonation as though the name were very strange, very foreign, very funny, and the other kids giggled. Miss Dwight’s face turned red, the red seeped into her neck, up to her hairline. “My father’s dead,” he said; and her face turned even redder. Silence in the room. Stillness.

  She went on reading the lines that would be his, and her face stayed red. He felt triumphant. He had beaten her at her own game. But when she finished reading, the kids laughed. It wasn’t quite as spontaneous, not quite as hearty as it had been before—but they laughed. She looked around the room, not looking at Link; and he thought, She’s going to do something to show I’m different from the rest of the kids.

  Miss Dwight said, “Of course this is to be done in black face. You know, like Al Jolson in Mammy.” She studied Link’s face. She said, “We won’t have to use any burnt cork on Link though.”

  For the first time in his life he was ashamed of the color of his skin. He decided that he would get sick. He would go to all the rehearsals and two days before, no, on the very night of the minstrel show, he would get sick, so sick that he wouldn’t be able to be Sambo. None of the kids would be able to take his part on such short notice. So there wouldn’t be any minstrel show.

  Abbie read the Chronicle every night after supper. “I see they’re having a minstrel show at school,” she said.

  Link said, “Uh-huh.”

  “Are you in it?”

  “In a sort of way,” he answered and left before she could ask him any more questions. Storm clouds, black birds, gross pigeons strutting on the school lawn, but infinitely worse than any of these—minstrel shows, minstrel shows gotten up by teachers named Miss pause Dwight, teachers who took your name and made it a thing to laugh at, changing it.

  At rehearsals he kept getting clumsier and clumsier, bumping into tables and chairs, falling over his own feet.

 
Miss pause Dwight laughed and choked and coughed and laughed again. “Oh, he’s wonderful!” she said. “He makes the show.”

  The kids began calling him Sambo, during school hours, after school hours, on Saturdays. When they met him on the street, they said, “Hi, Sambo,” in chorus, and waited, eying him for some sign of anger. He muttered, “Hi,” and walked away.

  On the stage, in Radio City Music Hall, one of the dancing colored comedians, slowed his furious pace, lay down, flat on his back, sleeping, sleeping, sleeping. The other dancing colored comedian annoyed him, tormented him, moving about him with the swift darting motion of a mosquito or a fly or a gnat. The sleeping one brushed at the dancing one, slapped at him, moved an arm out of range, moved a leg, shook himself, refusing to wake up. The pantomime was skilful, carefully thought out, comic.

  He smiled, as he watched this rhythmic performance, thinking, Well, well, Sambo is still sittin’ in the sun. He glanced at the girl. She was laughing, head flung back, revealing the long line of the throat; possibly because she had changed her position he was more than ever aware of her perfume. He thought, I have come a long way. If it hadn’t been for Bill Hod and Weak Knees, the color of your skin would disturb me as I watch you laughing at Sambo sittin’ in the sun.

  9

  * * *

  HE COULD STILL REMEMBER some of the things that Sambo was to say: Yessuh, ain’t nobody in here but us chickens; nosuh, watermelon’s mah favoritest vegittible; ah’m Sambo, yessuh, Sambo, just sittin’ in the sun, suh; just catchin’ up with mah sleep, suh.

  Ten years old. And on the day of the minstrel show, he woke up feeling hot, suffocated. His head ached. Abbie called and called for him to come and eat his breakfast. She came in his room and said, “Why, Link,” and put her hand on his forehead. Her hand felt cool, dry. He was sweating.