I don't know where they were. Perhaps they felt as helpless as I did, but they left New Orleans misrepresented to the world. The crowd, no doubt, rushed home to see themselves on television, and what they saw went out all over the world, unchallenged by the other things I know are there.
The show was over and the river of us began to move away. Second show would be when school-closing bell rang and the little black face had to look out at her accusers again. I was in New Orleans of the great restaurants. I know them all and most of them know me. And I could no more have gone to Gallatoir's for an omelet and champagne than I could have danced on a grave. Even setting this down on paper has raised the weary, hopeless nausea in me again. It is not written to amuse. It does not amuse me.
I bought a poor-boy sandwich and got out of town. Not too far along I found a pleasant resting place where I could sit and munch and contemplate and stare out over the stately brown, slow-moving Father of Waters as my spirit required. Charley did not wander about but sat close and pressed his shoulder against my knee, and he does that only when I am ill, so I suppose I was ill with a kind of sorrow.
I lost track of time, but a while after the sun had passed top a man came walking and we exchanged good afternoons. He was a neatly dressed man well along in years, with a Greco face and fine wind-lifted white hair and a clipped white mustache. I asked him to join me, and when he accepted I went into my house and set coffee to cooking and, remembering how Roark Bradford liked it, I doubled the dosage, two heaping tablespoons of coffee to each cup and two heaping for the pot. I cracked an egg and cupped out the yolk and dropped white and shells into the pot, for I know nothing that polishes coffee and makes it shine like that. The air was still very cold and a cold night was coming, so that the brew, rising from cold water to a rolling boil, gave the good smell that competes successfully with other good smells.
My guest was satisfied, and he warmed his hands against the plastic cup. "By your license, you're a stranger here," he said. "How do you come to know about coffee?"
"I learned on Bourbon Street from giants in the earth," I said. "But they would have asked the bean of a darker roast and they would have liked a little chicory for bite."
"You do know," he said. "You're not a stranger after all. And can you make diablo?"
"For parties, yes. You come from here?"
"More generations than I can prove beyond doubt, except classified under ci git in St. Louis."
"I see. You're of that breed. I'm glad you stopped by. I used to know St. Louis, even collected epitaphs."
"Did you, sir? You'll remember the queer one, then."
"If it's the same one, I tried to memorize it. You mean that one that starts, 'Alas that one whose darnthly joy. . . ?' "
"That's it. Robert John Cresswell, died 1845 aged twenty-six."
"I wish I could remember it."
"Have you a paper? You can write it down."
And when I had a pad on my knee he said, "Alas that one whose darnthly joy had often to trust in heaven should canty thus sudden to from all its hopes benivens and though thy love for off remore that dealt the dog pest thou left to prove thy sufferings while below."
"It's wonderful," I said. "Lewis Carroll could have written it. I almost know what it means."
"Everyone does. Are you traveling for pleasure?"
"I was until today. I saw the Cheerleaders."
"Oh, yes, I see," he said, and a weight and a darkness fell on him.
"What's going to happen?"
"I don't know. I just don't know. I don't dare think about it. Why do I have to think about it? I'm too old. Let the others take care of it."
"Can you see an end?"
"Oh, certainly an end. It's the means--it's the means. But you're from the North. This isn't your problem."
"I guess it's everybody's problem. It isn't local. Would you have another cup of coffee and talk to me about it? I don't have a position. I mean I want to hear."
"There's nothing to learn," he said. "It seems to change its face with who you are and where you've been and how you feel--not think, but feel. You didn't like what you saw?"
"Would you?"
"Maybe less than you because I know all of its aching past and some if its stinking future. That's an ugly word, sir, but there's no other."
"The Negroes want to be people. Are you against that?"
"Bless you, no, sir. But to get to be people they must fight those who aren't satisfied to be people."
"You mean the Negroes won't be satisfied with any gain?"
"Are you? Is anyone you know?"
"Would you be content to let them be people?"
"Content enough, but I wouldn't understand it. I've got too many ci gits here. How can I tell you? Well, suppose your dog here, he looks a very intelligent dog--" dog--"
"He is."
"Well, suppose he could talk and stand on his hind legs. Maybe he could do very well in every way. Perhaps you could invite him to dinner, but could you think of him as people?"
"Do you mean, how would I like my sister to marry him?"
He laughed. "I'm only telling you how hard it is to change a feeling about things. And will you believe that it will be just as hard for Negroes to change their feeling about us as it is for us to change about them? This isn't new. It's been going on a long time."
"Anyway, the subject skims the joy off a pan of conversation. "
"That it does, sir. I think I'm what you might call an enlightened Southerner mistaking an insult for a compliment. As such a new-born hybrid, I know what will happen over the ages. It's starting now in Africa and in Asia."
"You mean absorption--the Negroes will disappear?"
"If they outnumber us, we will disappear, or more likely both will disappear into something new."
"And meanwhile?"
"It's the meanwhile frightens me, sir. The ancients placed love and war in the hands of closely related gods. That was no accident. That, sir, was a profound knowledge of man."
"You reason well."
"The ones you saw today do not reason at all. They're the ones who may alert the god."
"Then you do think it can't happen in peace?"
"I don't know," he cried. "I guess that's the worst. I just don't know. Sometimes I long to assume my rightful title Ci Git."
"I wish you would ride along with me. Are you on the move?"
"No. I have a little place just off there below that grove. I spend a lot of time there, mostly reading--old things--mostly looking at--old things. It's my intentional method of avoiding the issue because I'm afraid of it."
"I guess we all do some of that."
He smiled. "I have an old Negro couple as old as I am to take care of me. And sometimes in the evening we forget. They forget to envy me and I forget they might, and we are just three pleasant . . . things living together and smelling the flowers."
"Things," I repeated. "That's interesting--not man and beast, not black and white, but pleasant things. My wife told me of an old, old man who said, 'I remember a time when Negroes had no souls. It was much better and easier then. Now it's confusing.' "
"I don't remember, but it must be so. It is my guess that we can cut and divide our inherited guilt like a birthday cake," he said, and save for the mustache he looked like the Greco San Pablo who holds the closed book in his hands. "Surely my ancestors had slaves, but it is possible that yours caught them and sold them to us."
"I have a puritan strain that might well have done so."
"If by force you make a creature live and work like a beast, you must think of him as a beast, else empathy would drive you mad. Once you have classified him in your mind, your feelings are safe." He stared at the river, and the breeze stirred his hair like white smoke. "And if your heart has human vestiges of courage and anger, which in a man are virtues, then you have fear of a dangerous beast, and since your heart has intelligence and inventiveness and the ability to conceal them, you live with terror. Then you must crush his manlike
tendencies and make of him the docile beast you want. And if you can teach your child from the beginning about the beast, he will not share your bewilderment."
"I've been told the good old-time Negro sang and danced and was content."
"He also ran away. The fugitive laws suggest how often."
"You're not what the North thinks of as a Southerner."
"Perhaps not. But I'm not alone." He stood up and dusted his trousers with his fingers. "No--not alone. I'll go along to my pleasant things now."
"I have not asked your name, sir, nor offered mine."
"Ci Git," he said. "Monsieur Ci Git--a big family, a common name."
When he went away I felt a sweetness like music, if music could pleasure the skin with a little chill.
To me, it had been a day larger than a day, not to be measured against other days with any chance of matching. With little sleep the night before I knew I should stop. I was very tired, but sometimes fatigue can be a stimulant and a compulsion. It forced me to fill my gas tank and compelled me to stop and offer a ride to an old Negro who trudged with heavy heels in the grass-grown verge beside the concrete road. He was reluctant to accept and did so only as though helpless to resist. He wore the battered clothes of a field hand and an ancient broadcloth coat highly polished by age and wear. His face was coffee-colored and cross-hatched with a million tiny wrinkles, and his lower lids showed red rims like a bloodhound's eyes. He clasped his hands in his lap, knotted and lumpy as cherry twigs, and all of him seemed to shrink in the seat as though he sucked in his outline to make it smaller.
He never looked at me. I could not see that he looked at anything. But first he asked, "Dog bite, captain, sir?"
"No. He's friendly."
After a long silent while I asked, "How are things going with you?"
"Fine, just fine, captain, sir."
"How do you feel about what's going on?"
He didn't answer.
"I mean about the schools and the sit-ins."
"I don't know nothing about that, captain, sir."
"Work on a farm?"
"Crop a cotton lot, sir."
"Make a living at it?"
"I get along fine, captain, sir."
We went in silence for a stretch upriver. The trees and the tropic grass were burned and sad from the ferocious northern freeze. After a time I said, more to myself than to him, "After all, why should you trust me? A question is a trap and an answer is your foot in it." I remembered a scene--something that happened in New York--and was moved to tell him about it, but I quickly abandoned the impulse because out of the corner of my eye I could see that he had drawn away and squeezed himself against the far side of the cab. But the memory was strong.
I lived then in a small brick house in Manhattan, and, being for the moment solvent, employed a Negro. Across the street and on the corner there was a bar and restaurant. One winter dusk when the sidewalks were iced I stood in my window looking out and saw a tipsy woman come out of the bar, slip on the ice, and fall flat. She tried to struggle up but slipped and fell again and lay there screaming maudlinly. At that moment the Negro who worked for me came around the corner, saw the woman, and instantly crossed the street, keeping as far from her as possible.
When he came in I said, "I saw you duck. Why didn't you give that woman a hand?"
"Well, sir, she's drunk and I'm Negro. If I touched her she could easily scream rape, and then it's a crowd, and who believes me?"
"It took quick thinking to duck that fast."
"Oh, no sir!" he said. "I've been practicing to be a Negro a long time."
And now in Rocinante I was foolishly trying to destroy a lifetime of practice.
"I won't ask you any more questions," I said.
But he squirmed with restlessness. "Would you let me down here, please, captain? I live nearby."
I let him down and saw in the mirror how he took up his trudging beside the road. He didn't live nearby at all, but walking was safer than riding with me.
Weariness flagged me down and I stopped in a pleasant motel. The beds were good but I could not sleep. The gray man walked across my eyes, and the faces of the Cheerladies, but mostly I saw the old man squeezed as far away from me as he could get, as though I carried the infection, and perhaps I did. I came out to learn. What was I learning? I had not felt one moment free from the tension, a weight of savage fear. No doubt I felt it more being newcome, but it was there; I hadn't brought it. Everyone, white and black, lived in it and breathed it--all ages, all trades, all classes. To them it was a fact of existence. And it was building pressure like a boil. Could there be no relief until it burst?
I had seen so little of the whole. I didn't see a great deal of World War II--one landing out of a hundred, a few separated times of combat, a few thousand dead out of millions--but I saw enough and felt enough to believe war was no stranger. So here--a little episode, a few people, but the breath of fear was everywhere. I wanted to get away--a cowardly attitude, perhaps, but more cowardly to deny. But the people around me lived here. They accepted it as a permanent way of life, had never known it otherwise nor expected it to stop. The Cockney children in London were restless when the bombing stopped and disturbed a pattern to which they had grown accustomed.
I tossed about until Charley grew angry with me and told me "Ftt" several times. But Charley doesn't have our problems. He doesn't belong to a species clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live in peace with itself. He doesn't even know about race, nor is he concerned with his sisters' marriage. It's quite the opposite. Once Charley fell in love with a dachshund, a romance racially unsuitable, physically ridiculous, and mechanically impossible. But all these problems Charley ignored. He loved deeply and tried dogfully. It would be difficult to explain to a dog the good and moral purpose of a thousand humans gathered to curse one tiny human. I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.
I didn't choose my first customer the next day. He picked me. He sat on a stool next to me eating a hamburger whose twin I held in my hand. He was somewhere between thirty and thirty-five, long and stringy, and nice-looking. His long lank hair was nearly ash-blond, worn long and treasured since he whopped it with a pocket comb unconsciously and often. He wore a light gray suit that was travel-wrinkled and stained; he carried the jacket over his shoulder. His white shirt was open at the collar, permitted so by pulling down the knot of his pale paisley tie. His speech was the deepest south I had heard so far. He asked where I was going and, when I told him I aimed toward Jackson and Montgomery, begged a ride with me. When he saw Charley he thought at first I had a nigger in there. It had got to be a pattern.
We settled ourselves comfortably. He combed back his hair and complimented me on Rocinante. "Of course," he said, "I could tell right off you're from the North."
"You've got a good ear," I said, I thought facetiously.
"Oh, I get around," he admitted.
I think I was responsible for what happened. If I could have kept my mouth shut I might have learned something of value. There's the restless night to blame and the length of the journey and the nervousness. Then, too, Christmas was coming and I found myself thinking of getting home more often than was helpful.
We established that I was traveling for pleasure and that he was on the lookout for a job.
"You come up the river," he said. "Did you see the doings in New Orleans?"
"Yes, I did."
"Wasn't they something, especially that Nellie? She really ripped the roof off."
"Yes, she did."
"Does your heart good to see somebody do their duty."
I think it was there that I went haywire. I should have grunted and let him read what he wanted in it. But a nasty little worm of anger began to stir in me. "They doing it out of duty?"
"Sure, God bless them. Somebody got to keep the goddamn niggers out of our schools." The sublimity of self-sacrifice
activating the Cheerleaders overwhelmed him. "Comes a time when a man's got to sit down and think, and that's the time you got to make up your mind to sell your life for something you believe in."
"Did you decide to do it?"
"I sure did, and a lot more like me."
"What do you believe in?"
"I'm not just about to allow my kids to go to school with no niggers. Yes, sir. I'll sell my life first but I aim to kill me a whole goddamn flock of niggers before I go."
"How many children do you have?"
He swung around toward me. "I don't have any but I aim to have some and I promise you they won't go to school with no niggers."
"Do you propose to sell your life before or after you have children?"
I had to watch the road so I only got a glimpse of his expression, and it wasn't pleasant. "You sound to me like a nigger-lover. I might of known it. Troublemakers--come down here and tell us how to live. Well, you won't get away with it, mister. We got an eye on you Commie nigger-lovers."
"I just had a brave picture of you selling your life."
"By God, I was right. You are a nigger-lover."
"No, I'm not. And I'm not a white-lover either, if it includes those noble Cheerladies."
His face was very near to me. "You want to hear what I think of you?"
"No. I heard Nellie use the words yesterday." I put on the brake and pulled Rocinante off the road.
He looked puzzled. "What you stopping for?"
"Get out," I said.
"Oh, you want to go round."
"No. I want to get rid of you. Get out."
"You going to make me?"
I reached into the space between the seat and the door where there is nothing.
"Okay, okay," he said, and got out and slammed the door so hard that Charley wailed with annoyance.
I started instantly, but I heard him scream, and in the mirror saw his hating face and his open spit-ringed mouth. He shrilled "Nigger-lover, nigger-lover, nigger-lover, " as long as I could see him and I don't know how long after. It's true I goaded him, but I couldn't help it. I guess when they're drafting peacemakers they'd better pass me by.
I picked up one more passenger between Jackson and Montgomery, a young Negro student with a sharp face and the look and feel of impatient fierceness. He carried three fountain pens in his breast pocket, and his inner pocket bulged with papers. I knew he was a student because I asked him. He was alert. License plate and speech relaxed him as much as he is ever likely to relax.
Travels With Charley in Search of America Page 21