“Ludlow?” Harriet was shaking his arms. “Ludlow, don’t you want to go back to New York?”
“I don’t know.”
She released her grip. “Why not? Because of that girl?”
It could be because of Ragan. She was New York too. But perhaps it was not that New York would bring back memories of her, that every time he played there he would remember he had met Ragan there, had broken down there. Perhaps it was that New York had created Ragan, had made her what she was. He was not afraid to go back. He had been there since Ragan left him. But then, perhaps Harlem was not New York at all.
“No. Ain’t her. But if I go back and take their money, I got to live like they tell me. You got to be careful who you take money from in this world.”
“You can live however you want, Ludlow.”
“And that’s what I got to decide.” He did not want to talk about it anymore now, and stood up. “Well, we can’t go back for two weeks anyway, not until the season’s played out. New York’ll just have to wait.”
She stood up. “What are—”
“Don’t you got to work, sweetie?”
She said yes, and they walked back to their cabin.
6
HE FOLDED the last shirt, closed and pushed in the snaps of the suitcase. Then he sat on the bed to wait for Harriet to return from the manager’s office.
The season had ended two days before, with a big party for the dozen or so remaining guests. The day before, one by one, their cars filling the air with exhaust and dry dust, they had left for the city. Harriet had stayed an extra day to help clean and close the rooms, persuading Ludlow they would need the extra day’s pay until he could form his new group.
It had been two weeks since she returned from the city with the magazine and the article about Ludlow. Most of the time since, he had been trying to decide what he wanted to do. He had collected and ordered the bits and pieces of his life and he thought he had found a pattern. Sitting now on one of the two beds they had shared during the past eight weeks, pushed apart once again to their original positions on opposite walls, he thought he knew.
Her footsteps knocked on the small porch; the loose doorknob rattled.
“You got the checks?”
She closed the door. “Yes.” She was excited to be leaving, out of breath. “Here.”
“Keep them for a minute.” The envelopes left his hand. “When’s she coming to pick us up?” Another waitress with a car was to drive them into the city.
“In about ten minutes. You all packed?”
He nodded. Ten minutes would not be enough time to say all he wanted to her, but it would have to do. “Come here and sit down.” He was surprised how hard his voice sounded.
The bed lowered as she sat. There was not enough time to build up to it although he wanted to be kind. “Look, I ain’t going to New York.”
She replied quickly. “Where’re we going?” She did not understand.
He shook his head. “We ain’t going nowhere. But you going to New York.”
He listened hard for her reaction, but picked up nothing. Finally: “Where’re you going then?”
“I don’t know yet. I just know I ain’t going to New York, not now anyway. Maybe someday. I don’t think I want to live like them people, but I ain’t sure.”
“Well, neither do I want to live that way.” She spoke flatly, just the slightest edge of fear and pain to her words. “Why can’t I go with you, Ludlow?”
“Why you want to go with me?”
“You know why.” The question must have seemed a silly one. “I love you.”
“That ain’t good enough.” He paused. “You know why I ain’t going back to New York now?”
“You said,” she started nervously, “you said you didn’t want to live like people live in New York.”
“Like what?”
“You didn’t want to take their money.”
“What you think of that?” He had to show her why she could not go with him.
“But you can, Ludlow. You can live any way you want. The money wouldn’t make any difference.” She was more frightened now.
“It ain’t that simple.” He shrugged. “Anyway, maybe I’ll decide to live like that, but I ain’t sure, so I ain’t going back now.”
“But I can wait with you until you decide.”
He reached out and put his hand on her knee. “You think I should go back there, don’t you? You think it’s my big chance.”
She spoke into her lap. “Yes.”
“I ain’t saying you wrong. I’m just saying I don’t know if you right. I don’t know if it worth my time to go back there and play for them people. I might want to play in one of them little storefront churches where I know folks’ll be listening. I don’t know yet. But you ain’t got the same feelings and there’s no reason for you to go with me. You think New York’s just fine.”
“I don’t care what you think I think.” She had become angry even while he talked. “I’m going with you. I love you.”
She would follow him from city to city, from hotel to hotel if he did not stop her now. “I know you love me, Harriet. And I know something else too. I just realized it. I love you.” It was a lie, but as he spoke, he felt suddenly warm and naked at the same time. He kissed her quickly so she would not see his face until he knew it was under his control.
She sighed. “Really, Ludlow?”
He nodded. “Really.”
“Finally.” He thought she might be crying, placed his fingers on the ledge of bone beneath her eye, but found it dry.
He went on: “If I didn’t love you, I’d let you come with me. What the hell! You your own boss. But now, loving you, I wouldn’t be happy with you tagging along, especially if I knew you didn’t think I was right. I don’t want to worry about that.”
“But you don’t have to worry about me.” She was defiant. “I’ll take care of myself, Ludlow.”
“Maybe I don’t got to worry about you, but I would, now wouldn’t I?”
She did not answer him. “But you may come to New York?”
“Sure, I may come back.” He lied again. “In fact, I think I’m coming back for sure, but I need some more time to think it over.”
“If you came, how would I know?”
“Hell, you’d know. But I tell you what—you leave your address with Hardie. Okay?”
She did not like it, was still suspicious, but she agreed.
They sat silently for a few minutes. It began to rain while they waited, the drops at first no closer together than heartbeats, gradually increasing to one loud drone. Then tires were swirled through the mud and water outside and a horn sounded. Harriet got up and went to the window. “That’s her. You sure—”
He nodded, stopping her question. She took her suitcase off the bed, kissed his cheek and, wordlessly, went out onto the rain-thumping porch, suddenly cut off by the closing door.
He followed the car in a two-part turn and out the gate, until it disappeared behind the droning above him. Then, slowly, he fell back until his head touched the papered wall behind him. He wondered if it was raining in New York too, or even in New Marsails. Perhaps he might even go to New Marsails and visit Etta-Sue; he could do that now. Or he could try to find Ragan. He smiled; neither of them would want him to visit, and he did not particularly want to call on either of them. There were other, better places to go. He might find that store-front church, or perhaps a church on a dirt road in the South, no more than a shack, with a congregation of twelve or so, without an organ to help their high, shaky voices carry the tunes of their hymns. A place like that would need a good musician.
ALSO BY
WILLIAM MELVIN KELLEY
* * *
A DIFFERENT DRUMMER
June 1957. One hot afternoon in the backwaters of the Deep Sout
h, a young black farmer named Tucker Caliban salts his fields, shoots his horse, burns his house, and heads north with his wife and child. His departure sets off an exodus of the state’s entire black population, throwing the established order into brilliant disarray. Told from the points of view of the white residents who remained, A Different Drummer stands, decades after its first publication in 1962, as an extraordinary and prescient triumph of satire and spirit.
Fiction
DEM
Mitchell Pierce no longer feels any passion for his pregnant wife, Tam, and his toddler son, Jake, has become a disappointment. Mitchell’s life will irrevocably change one day, though, when a young black man appears at his apartment to pick up the family’s maid for a date. Cooley, it turns out, is no stranger to the household. The twins that Tam is carrying are a result of superfecundation—the fertilization of two separate ova by two different males. So when one child is born black and the other white, Mitchell goes on a quest to find Cooley and make him take his baby. In the tradition of Brer Rabbit trickster tales, dem enacts a modern-day fable of the turning the tables on the white oppressor and inverting the history of miscegenation and subjugation of African Americans.
Fiction
ANCHOR BOOKS
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A Drop of Patience Page 18