SITY OF
WIVERS
MICHIGA
GAN.SE
IBRARIE





The
Primitive
CHESTER HIMES
A SIGNET BOOK from
NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY
TIMES MIRROR


828
H658pr
© 1955 by Chester Himes
All rights reserved
FOURTH PRINTING
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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA


late afternoon when she was seldom there, this sense of being
alone was almost complete; not only shut off from people,
from others of the species, but shut off from time, from seasons,
from distance, from life, all life—dog life, cat life, cockroach
life—shut off from eternity. It was like waking in a grave.
For a time she lay unmoving, rigid, fighting off the panic.
Slowly her thoughts began to take shape in the form of mem-
ory, and the events of the night before returned like sequences
in a dream. Bill had dropped by for a moment before dinner
to bring some illustrated maps of Italy, Sicily, and Mallorca.
She was planning to tour Europe during the coming summer
and he was trying to be helpful; he had studied architecture
in Rome two years before and was consequently an authority
on Europe. Bill was the helpful type—tall, skinny, redheaded,
freckled, perseveringly cheerful, and sexless as cold boiled po-
tatoes.
They had become engrossed in an exchange of accounts
of their great adventures. He had lived in a miserable pension
near a noisome area of moldy ruins, unable to speak the lan-
guage, repulsed by the filth, and had made no acquaintances
and had been unhappy all the time. While for her part, she
had spent three weeks in Paris, three years previous, in an
attempt at reconciliation with her husband, which had turned
into a nightmare of wet-nursing him through a siege of dis-
gusting drunkenness and at the same time trying to sleep with
whomever became available as a kind of protest . He had cried
long and hard over their "ruined" lives; he had vowed tear-
fully he wanted to marry her again. (She would have married
him again at any time if she could have found some means of
keeping him on his feet long enough.) But she decided it
wasn't worth it. He had been drunk from the moment she
arrived until she left. Perhaps it had been from fear of having
to sleep with her again. He couldn't get over the fact she had
divorced him to marry a Negro. She hadn't married the Negro,
but that was beside the point. Perhaps he was afraid if he slept
with her again it would bring on a recurrence of his homo-
sexual urges, which he had spent ten thousand dollars to get
rid of by psychoanalysis. It couldn't have been just because
of the Negro, because he'd known of her sleeping with Negroes
while they were still married and together, and all he'd done
in the end was join the Army as a buck private when he could
have had a commission for the asking. God knows he loved
Negroes as much as anyone; his love for them had impelled
him, a Mississippi boy, to devote the ten best years of his
life working in their behalf, ten frustrated, guilt-ridden, and


[cuckolded years in what he had once called in post-mortem
regret, "the bright, shining world of race relations!" For ten
years he had been a negrophile, an extreme negrophile, enjoy-
ing the beds of his Negro colleagues' wives without any con-
descension whatsoever. But much of it had gone after the
analysis. He had been analyzed to rid himself of a homosexual
bent so he could sire an heir, and it had turned out that after-
wards he loved Negroes less. That always struck him as being
very strange. He had discussed it at great length with her.
But she didn't hint of this to Bill. He respected her so she
didn't dare risk hurting him. He thought that she was pure. Per-
haps not pure] But not easy] She had such a highly respectable
job he couldn't possibly have thought otherwise, being the very
j nice young man that he was, the type who believes the job
I makes the lady. Perhaps chaste would be a better word. Well,
why not? she asked herself. She'd never felt completely like
a slut at any time. Besides it was nice to have one man think
of her like that.
At ten o'clock, realizing he had kept her from dinner, he
had invited her to a supper club. But she'd declined. That would
have been the bitter end, going out to dinner at some night
club with Bill and coming home to sleep alone.
Then, as Bill was leaving, Harold had staggered in, drunk
as usual. A frown came into her thoughts. She wasn't ashamed
of Harold—she wasn't ashamed of any of her colored friends;
what few she had left. Besides which, Harold was an impressive-
looking man when sober. And once she had respected him
more than any man she'd ever known, really worshipped him.
Anyway, Bill had met him there before. But why the hell
did he have to come crawling around to her place every time
he got helplessly drunk?
Suddenly she recalled having loaned him another twenty-five
dollars. "Oh, hell!" she said aloud. She was really through with
him this time, she firmly resolved. She had sat drinking with
him, trying to contort him—he'd been hurt and dejected as
usual—and had forgotten to eat. After he had borrowed the
money, she had become so enraged she had put him out of
her apartment, despite the fact that by then he was barely able
to stand and had begun weeping sloppily over his cruel fate.
"You make more money than I do, and besides you're fif-
teen years older!" she'd condemned him bitterly.
Now, in the recollection of it, of all those great things that
earlier Harold had been to her during her first year at the
university, of all those "bright, shining years" of which he'd
been a part, nothing was any longer real. He'd been a great
8


man on the campus in those days, one who was going places;
he hadn't seen her, a little country girl.
Now what she feared most was the unreality. The years
seemed made of dust. She remembered the blubbering self-pity
of men. . . . Ronny crying in her room at the Commodore
Hotel that winter when she'd divorced him and come to New
York to marry Ted. . . .
"Don't marry a nigger, Kriss. . . . Don't kill me, Kriss.
... I know I've been a bastard, but don't break me. . . . I'm
from Mississippi. . . ."
She had replied with sensual cruelty, "Go back to Mississippi
then, you jerk, and sleep with all those black women you're
always boasting of having grown up on. You don't know how
to have a white woman. . . ."
His tears wetting her new nylons. "Please don't, Kriss! IH
get analyzed. "IH give you a baby. . . ." Her final stab. "Give
yourself one, you louse; you've tried hard enough!"
"What an awful rotten life!" she thought. "I'm a good girl,
really." In some manner the strange thought brought sharp
and vivid memories of Willard the year he was such a star
on the high school football team and of the two abortions when
she was sixteen which had prevented her from ever bearing
children.
"I must call Mother tonight," she told herself firmly, groping
blindly for this one last hold to reality.
She glanced at the luminous dial of the clock. It was ten after
eight. Abruptly she sat up, her bare feet groping for her golden
mules. Her nude body, heavy with years, was Buddhistic in
vague dejection. Her.mind was flat, stale, stupid, but she didn't
have a hangover. Nat, her doctor, had advised her to drink
only the best of whiskey because it contained less fusel oiL
She paid six dollars and forty-two cents a fifth for her Scotch,
and averaged six bottles weekly. But no matter how much she
drank, she never suffered from hangovers. On the physical
side, she was disgustingly healthy.
It was just these awful depressions of awakening.
Now she stood up and went into the breakfast nook and
switched on the lights of the sitting room. The entrance hall
of her small, three-room apartment angled like a short-handled
crank, encasing two deep storage closets in the angle at front,
and widening beyond the kitchen door into the breakfast nook.
This contained a blond oak table shaped like a heart, on which
reposed two watery highball glasses on silver coasters and a
flat silver ashtray with several squashed butts. Here the hall
angled once more, ending at the full-length mirror on the closet


with tiny red pimples, but voluptuous as a Botticelli painting.
Her legs were long and gorgeously shaped with beautiful knees,
but her stomach was bloated and those old demon rubber
tires had begun forming above her hips. Her skin was very
fair, the faint hairs on her arms and at the base of her spine
golden in the slanting light, the hair on her head, cut short
in the modern businesswoman's fashion, was of a light trans-
lucent brown, verging on gold. Her face had high cheekbones
which were contradicted by a short, straight, tiny nose, and
huge, light blue, slightly glassy, almost bulging eyes, slanting
upward at the outer edges. A famous writer and critic of New
York City, an old man famous for flowery phrases, once de-
scribed her by saying she was as handsome as four peacocks.
But he had seen her only when she was dressed. Now as she
bent over the set in the somewhat awkward and unflattering
position of a can-can dancer sans costume, she looked gro-
tesque.
Just at that moment the light appeared on the twenty-inch
screen and the closeup of a man's face, blooming with the
bright wide smile of a bleached skull, and wreathed in that
dreadful early morning cheerfulness of this telatomic age which
inspires old-fashioned diehards suffering from old-fashioned
hangovers to rush into their kitchens and cut their throats.
The happy smiling eyes, crinkled about the comers with inner
joy and healthy living, stared knowingly at her anatomy, causing
her to feel suddenly indecent and unhealthy.
"Oh!" she exclaimed, involuntarily shielding herself with
her hands.
She had turned the volume tpo high and a booming jovial
voice issued from the smiling lip's of the happy face: "Are you
overweight? Are you overwrought? Do you suffer from morning
depression? Do you have a stale brown taste of biliousness
on arising?"
This boisterous catechism bursting upon her mood of mor-
bid introspection rattled her. She did what she always did when
rattled; she giggled.
"Then this is what you need!" the loud voice informed her.
"What?" she asked the happy face, her quick spontaneous
wit coming to her rescue.
The face instantly disappeared and in its place appeared
a giant's hand holding a giant bottle with the label forward.
"Thisr
"Oh, hell!" she said disgusted.
The face disappeared. "Yes! This energizing laxative, charged
with vitamins, also contains chlorophyll. Not only does it
11


red; it went with her fair skin, blue eyes, and blonde hair. Be-
sides, it made her feel daring. She couldn't get along in the
world without feeling daring.
From alongside a bottle of red and yellow capsules of bar-
biturates in her medicine cabinet, she took down a bottle
of bluish-gray tablets, a patented drug relatively new on the
market. They were made from a combination of dexedrine
and amylobarbitone, and the directions on the label stated:
"Indicated in states of mental and emotional distress." The
first time she had read that statement she had told herself,
"That's me. That's me all the time." Now, after swallowing
one with a little water, she shook a couple of dozen into a
lacquered snuffbox to take to the office; her store there had
runout
.
Then, bringing her toast and coffee, she sat on a stool at the
end of the table so she could see the television, ate one half
of a piece of toast and drank two cups of coffee sweetened with
saccharine tablets. On the television screen, Gloucester was
interviewing the Chimpanzee.
"Who do you think will get the Republican nomination for
President?" he asked.
"Five-star General of the Army, Dwight D. Eisenhower,
will be nominated on the first ballot," the Chimpanzee promptly
replied.
"And are you sure it won't be Senator Taft?" Gloucester,
who was a loyal Taft supporter, prompted the chimp.
"No, not even for Vice President," the Chimpanzee asserted
positively. "All Bob Taft will get will be a big hug from Eisen-
hower when the General rushes across the street directly follow-
ing his nomination to congratulate Senator Taft on losing and
calling for party unity. Senator Richard M. Nixon of California
will be nominated for Vice President, and on September 28,
1952, he will go on television—the same as you and I—to de-
fend a political fund placed at his disposal by innocent and
patriotic businessmen of California, most of whom have some-
how become involved in the real estate business and are ham-
strung in their desire to invest in low rental properties by the
Democratic administration's rent control program which, para-
doxically, precipitates high rent. Mr. Nixon will also bare his
financial status to the complete satisfaction of the Republicans
and the complete dissatisfaction of the Democrats, after which
he will hasten to the special campaign train of Republican nom-
inee General of the Army, Eisenhower, to pose for a news-
reel parody of the Jerry Lewis—Dean Martin comedy, "That's
My Boy."
14


"What do you think of General Eisenhower's chances of
being elected?" Gloucester asked condescendingly.
"On November 4, 1952, Republican nominee for President,
five-star General of the Army, Dwight D. Eisenhower, will
be elected President of the United States by an ovemhelming
landslide of 442 electoral votes and a popular vote of 33,938,
285, the largest popular vote in the history of your republic,
thereby giving Senator McCarthy a mandate to rid the nation
of its mentality," the Chimpanzee stated with extreme boredom.
After all, this would bear no effect on chimpanzees—chim-
panzees didn't think. "Does that answer your questions?"
he asked shortly, anxious to collect payment for his appearance.
Kriss stared at tbe chimpanzee in horror. "How can it
say such things—and Roosevent dead but seven years!" she
thought indignantly.
The pill worked rapidly on an empty stomach. The tre-
mendous physical stimulation provided by the five milligrams
of dexedrine was leveled off at peak efficiency by the coun-
terpoise of thirty-two milligrams of amylobarbitone, holding
the brain, which had been sharpened and alerted to almost
supernatural brilliancy by the caffeine contained in two cups
of strong black coffee, to an almost unbearable lucidity, like
Hemingway writing a novel. By the time she had combed her
short curled hair, powdered her face smoothly white, painted
her lips becomingly red, applied a light sheen of vaseline to
her upper eyelids, and adorned herself with appropriate jew-
elry: two hollow gold matching serpentine bracelets on her
right wrist; a gold wrist watch with leather band on her left
wrist; a leaf-shaped gold pin containing a dark blue stone at
her left breast; a gold rope-shaped necklace; two gold-plated
snap-on earrings; along with her wedding and engagement rings
which she still wore for the same reason she still kept her mar-
ried name—she felt capable and serene and alert and very
secure. She loved her little pills for the security they gave her.
Thus bedecked and ornamented to the wildest fancy of any
savage, emotionally fortified by the latest in patent drugs, faintly
amused by the early morning television antics of the M.C. and
the chimpanzee, her wits made keen by the essence of twenty-
five milligrams of good pure American coffee, she felt herself
an efficient executive, ready to face the day.
Now she could afford to think about Dave Levine. He
hadn't called her again. She had tried hard to marry Dave,
and had almost gotten him, but his mother who was very
orthodox, and incidentally held the purse strings even though
Dave maintained an apartment in Manhattan, had put her
15


with the solid case—but she never smoked before lunch; the
three keys necessary to get into her apartment, another key
to the side entrance of her office building, two small flat keys
to the large Hartman suitcases in her storage closets which she
had not used since her trip to Europe, all held securely in a
snapbutton red leather key case; and a small red leather-bound
address book, containing the addresses of nine couples, six
single women, and two men, there being nothing to indicate
whether single or married. One was a Jim Saxton from Dallas,
Texas; the other a Kenneth McCrary from Hollywood, Califor-
nia. It was a neat, orderly, and comparatively uncluttered
pocketbook.
From one of the front closets devoted to coats she selected
a soft plaid of medium weight and neutral shade. She pulled
on black cotton gloves, picked up her purse and the morning
paper, took a last sip of the now tepid coffee, leaving a smudge
of lipstick on the cup, put out the lights behind her, and started
to work. It was then exactly nine o'clock, at which time she
was due in her office. But she'd gotten into such a habit of
being late, it was now practically impossible for her to be on
time. "I'd better buck up," she cautioned herself. Sooner or
later her boss, Kirby Reynolds, would get on her tail—in a
nice way, of course; he was really a very nice guy—but she
wouldn't like it
.
On opening the door into the corridor, she met Mattie
about to enter. Mattie was a huge, black woman who never
wore makeup nor gave any other indication of an interest in
her personal appearance. Her face always looked unwashed,
her short kinky hair uncombed, her old tattered garments as
mussed as if she had slept in them.
At the sight of Kriss her face lit with her professional grin,
showing a row of sizable pale yellow teeth with amalgam fillings
here and there. "Mawnin' Miz Cummons." She seemed to
have some manner of psychological block against pronouncing
the name, Cummings, although once Kriss had heard her say
distinctly, "Mister Drummings." However, Kriss had no way
of knowing the gentleman to whom she referred was named
Drummond.
Kriss grinned back at her, giving the little amused chuckle
that made her so well liked. "I'm late again, Mattie. It seems
as if I just can't get off in time."
"YT1 needs tuh be married, Miz Cummons. Dass wut y'all
needs," Mattie replied with easy familiarity. What she didn't
know about Kriss's love life, she had guessed. "Den y'all woud'n
have tuh git up attalL"
17


Kriss was never quite certain during these exchanges whether
Mattie was slyly poking fun or stating a profound conviction.
She chuckled uncomfortably and hastened down the corridor,
her hard heels echoing about her.
Outside she was greeted by a bright April morning. Her
apartment building, an eight-storied light brick structure erected
during the middle nineteen-thirties, faced south on Twenty-first
Street, between Third Avenue and the south end of Lexington
at Gramercy Park.
It was a pleasant street, she thought, as she walked briskly
along in the sunshine. Expensive, sophisticated. To her left
the old Irving Hotel, facing the park; to her right a modern
yellow brick high-rent apartment house with beautiful windows,
all lit at night, revealing the many wondrous decors. Down here
it was so rich and luxurious with a quiet expensive exclusive-
ness. Rich in tradition, also. She loved it here. She loved New
York. But she loved it here far more than any other place she
had ever lived in New York. It made her feel confident and
exclusive. Her telephone exchange was Gramercy—"Right
up the street a few doors from Gramercy Park," she always
said when directing friends to her address; never, "Right down
the street a few doors from Third Avenue. But she liked that
part of Third Avenue, too; there were wonderful stores in
that section.
The street had emptied since the eight-thirty rush; only
the service people and executives hailing taxis from the stand
facing Lexington were about at this late hour. A few nurses
already had their charges in the park. "I must remember to
get a key," she reminded herself. It was a private park enclosed
by a high iron fence, and the gates were kept locked. But
the neighborhood residents could rent a key for twelve dollars
annually—or was it twenty?—by applying to the Gramercy
Park Association. The trees were already beginning to green, and
red and yellow tulips were blooming in well-tended plots. Al-
though what she'd do with a key, frankly she didn't know. No
one she knew would be found dead spooning on a hard bench
in a dark chilly park when there was her beautifully furnished
apartment so near, equipped with television and bed. After
a moment she thought, "Spooning? What an ancient word
fork!"
She continued down Twenty-first Street to Fourth Avenue
turned north to the subway entrance at Twenty-second Street.
There was a smile on her lips. She felt very happy. Passers-by,
even the surly printers and warehousemen of the neighbor-
18


hood, noticed her happiness and smiled at her. She smiled
in return, suddenly recalling the Harlem saying she had often
heard at Maud's: I'd rather be a doggy lamppost in New York
City than Governor General of the State of Mississippi.
chapter turn
He had dreamed fitfully.
At first he had dreamed he was skating somewhere in a
crowd and had broken through the ice. "Help! Help!" he had
called as the icy current tugged at him. He had a thin grip
on the broken edge of the ice but he couldn't swim and the
cold water tore at him, trying to pull him under. "Help! Help!"
he had called again, desperately, as he felt his grip loosen.
But none of the other skaters, all of whom were couples, boys
and girls, men and women, looked in his direction or gave
any indication that they had heard his cries. They skated about
the hole, smiling and chatting, engrossed in each other. "Jesus
Christ! They don't even see me!" he thought as his grip broke
and he went down beneath the icy water, clutched in an ice
cold fear.
He awakened and went to the dresser and poured a water
glass full of gin. The faint glow of the city night came through
the two side windows, silhouetting his nude body in the dim
mirror. His hand trembled and his teeth chattered against
the rim of the glass as he forced the gin down his throat. He
held his mouth open, gasping until he got his breath, then
went back to bed.
"That ought to knock me out," he thought
.
But he dreamed again.
He dreamed that he was present at a banquet, sitting near
the end of the table where two pretty blonde women sat side
by side. But there was an empty space between his seat and
the end which prevented him from speaking to them. Then
the man at his right stood up and moved because he didn't
like his neighbor on the other side, and that left him sitting
at the banquet table between two empty chairs. He felt suddenly
isolated. He was vaguely aware that he was the only Negro
at the banquet, but that didn't have anything to do with the
feeling of isolation until a well-dressed, handsome, very assured
Negro magazine editor, whom he knew quite well, passed
19


ever, looking to see where the short squat man had gone. Now
was really the time to run! everyone thought. But the short
squat man had got behind the big wild man and he picked up
a heavy oak chair and hit the big wild man across the back
of the head as hard as he could hit. "Jesus Christ!" the big
wild drunken man howled painfully like a wounded dog and
fell on his face as if dead.
Jesse laughed in his sleep and muttered, "Damn right!"
Then he dreamed the sweetest dream. He was seventeen
years old and he was wrestling playfully on a bed with the
prettiest girl he'd ever seen, trying to kiss her. She had a coffee-
cream complexion and short black curls and her eyes flashed
laughingly as she struggled to get loose from him. She had
a strong slender body, hard and round, and she wore a middy
blouse and skirt. She gave a quick turn and was free, her body
extended away from him, tensed for flight. But instead of
escaping she lay passively on her back, her hair spread out
on the white counterpane, and he bent forward tenderly, looking
into her dark laughing eyes, and kissed her from an upside
down position. He knew it was the first time she had been kiss-
ed and it was also the first time he had kissed a girl. He felt
a sweet nameless sensation spread all over him.
He opened his eyes wide. The sweet sensation was still
with him and he lay unmoving, scarcely breathing, trying to
hold it a little longer. But immediately his mind began analyz-
ing it, dissecting it, breaking it up, pulling it down, twisting
it this way and then the other. It was sweet because it was so
pure. Never in all of his life had he felt a pure sexual feeling,
not even with his wife. But pure wasn't just the word. His
thoughts began leafing through the dictionary of his mind:
Good—look under good: pleasant, virtuous, admirable . . .
didn't get it . . . how about clean? nice? good? . . . there's
that goddamned good again. They've ruined that word: good
Christians, good Americans, good niggers, damn good killing
. . . must be some other word to fit it. . . . But it wasn't
in his vocabulary.
Sex in his mind had always been something a little soiled,
a little weird, perhaps somewhat sordid too. Not in a bad sense
always, but always a little tainted by his Protestant upbringing,
his grotesque memory, his strange imagination. But this feeling
in his dream had been completely undented.
Leroy's laugh came through his closed door and he heard
the nasty little dogs racing over the hall floor. . . . "Now
Napoleon, behave yourself. You come back here and get
into your collar, you bad little thing." It was a man's falsetto


voice affecting a womanish air. "Homos," he thought. "The
dogs too."
All the sweetness went and the loneliness closed in. He
was lying diagonally across the wide old-fashioned dilapidated
mahogany bed, and had to roll over to reach the night table
where his cigarettes lay. "There's nothing lonelier than a double
bed," he thought, putting a paper match to his cigarette, and
with the first inhalation the dizziness came. He was still too
drunk for a hangover, but his head felt unset and his body
disjointed and everything had a double-edged distorted look
like a four color advertisement with each color slightiy out
of line.
However, his brain was sharp. For the past five years it
had never let down. It was always packed with some definite
emotion, defined in intellectual terms; futile rages, tearing
frustrations, moods of black despair, fits of suicidal depressions
—all in terms of cause and effect, of racial impact and "socio-
logical import"—intellectual manure, but nagging as an un-
solved problem, slugging it out in his mind, like desperate war- >
riors. No matter how much he drank, nor whatever he did to
deaden his thoughts, there was this part of his mind that never
relaxed, never became numb. It was always tense, hypersensi-
tive, uncertain, probing—there must be some goddamned reason
for this, for that. It had started with the publication of his
second book, five years before. . . . Some goddamned reason
for all the hate, the animosity, the gratuitous ill will—for all
the processed American idiocy, ripened artificially like canned
cheese.
The night before he'd wandered from bar to bar, trying to
find a safe-looking pickup. At the Ebony up the street, on
Amsterdam, he'd tried to make the hostess, a show-girl type,
what the guys used to call a "Brown-skin Model." The joint
had been practically empty and she had come and sat with
him at the bar. He recalled trying to kiss her, and her asking
him to go with her the next day out to a used car lot near Atlan-
tic Beach, where she was to pick up a new Cadillac she had
ordered; and him telling her he'd like to, but he had to go
down to the Fifty-seventh Street dock where he was picking
up a new ocean liner he'd ordered; and her getting angry and
telling him to go to hell; and him saying he wished she'd got
angry before drinking seven Scotch highballs at his expense.
"Everybody's lonely in this goddamn city," he thought bitter-
He'd come home and begun drinking gin and reading Gorki's
Bystander, hoping the combination would render him uncon-
22


scious. But the story came and went as he read on into the
early hours, confusing itself with stories of his own imagining,
until he'd become entombed in a completely new and frighten-
ing world. And still his thoughts had kept on churning, turning
back to one passage and another, here and there snagged by
a line like one's clothes in a bramble thicket: “To love, to love!
Life is so frightful-it is torment if one doesn't love! ... A
habitual—just grasp this!-an habitual lack of desire on the
part of others to look into your soul kindly, tenderly. ...
You must learn this: all women are incurably sick with loneli-
ness. This is the cause of all that is incomprehensible to you
men-unexpected infidelities, and everything. None of you
seeks, none of you thirsts for such intimacy with a human being
as we do. . . ." And always they came back to the passage
describing the drowning of Boris, Clim's friend, and the line:
“Clim heard someone in the crowd question gravely, doubt-
fully: “But was there really a boy? Perhaps there was no boy
at all!
- Jesse Robinson.
-mmmm ... Jack Robinson . . . James Robinson ...
Jeff Robinson ... Jimwe have no Jesse Robinson listed
here.
—J-E-S-S-E . . . Jesse. . . . You must have me on the
list. ...
-mmmm ... Jeff ... Jim ....
-But I lived in the world for forty-one years. ...
-mmmm...
- I was a writer! I wrote two books about Negroes. ...
-mmmm ...
I was an American—an American Negro. I wrote about
the Negro problem in America. ...
-Ah yes! A very grave problem. We are very much con-
cerned about the Negro problem....
-Then certainly you've heard about me. I wrote two books
about the Negro problem. It was all in the newspapers, in
the book review sections. They reviewed my books. One of
them said I remember quite well: Robinson writes like a
Dark Avenging Angel with his pen dipped in gall. ... You
must have heard of me!
-Jesse Robinson. ... Let's see ... Jeff ... Jim ...
Funny ... Are you absolutely sure there was a Jesse Robin-
son? ... Perhaps ...
“Just think: half the men and women in the whole world
in these few moments are loving one another, even as you and
L... My dearest, my unexpected one. . .'
23


—Perhaps there was no Jesse Robinson at all! . . .
"Or magnanimity, of compassion toward a woman, in a
word! . . ."
—Lawd! There ain't nobody in this coffin!
—Ain't Jesse Robinson . . .
—Nobody!
—But Jesse Robinson . . .
—Who's Jesse Robinson?
—He de one wu't died uf lonesomeness. Say fust time in
hist'ry uh nigger die frum lonesomeness. In all de newspapers
• • •
—But ain't nobody in dis coffin!
—Lemme see . . . mmmm . . . empty as a rninister's
plate! . . . But whar de body of Jesse Robinson?
—Now you is askin' me. ... Ah doan b'lieve dare evah
wuz uh Jesse Robinson tuh bagin wid! . . .
Abruptly he opened his eyes. The cigarette butt was burning
his fingers and he masbed it out in the glass ashtray atop a
battered ancient mahogany radio cabinet that served as a
night table. Beyond the ashtray was a half-emptied package
of Camel cigarettes, a half-eaten, twenty-five-cent bar of milk
chocolate, a half-emptied, pint-sized carton of milk, a small
white enameled alarm clock with a broken crystal, and a milk-
stained water glass smelling of gin. All were clustered like
a repulsive brood of hybrids about a pumpkin-sized spherical
bottle containing a green solution, which comprised the base
of a night lamp which had a large faded pink shade that sat
loosely on a frame made for something else. Inside the cabinet,
behind the closed doors, were his stacks of unpublished man-
uscripts, carbon copies, old papers, and letters which he always
kept nearby, carting them from place to place, hanging on
to them year after year, to remind himself that—no matter
what he did for a living—he was a writer by profession.
According to the cracked face of the clock, it was ten min-
utes after eight. The sun was over East River at about 125th
Street, beyond the flats of Harlem and south of the Triborough
Bridge, but in a direct line with Flushing, L.I. Sunlight slanted
through the open Venetian blinds, making thin stairways of
light and shadow on the pale green of the opposite wall, and
underneath the blinds, where they failed to reach the window
sills by a matter of over two feet, a solid block of light fell
obliquely across the hideous green, red, and yellow cover of
the couch.
His windows, facing south, were on the fifth floor, overlook-
ing 142nd Street between Convent and Amsterdam Avenues,
24


dull doe eyes quite suitable for his role. "Faunesse," Jesse
thought, "Suffragette casualty." He maneuvered the narrow
treacherous pass that led to the kitchen on the left, the bath
straight ahead, and Mr. Ward's back bedroom to the right
.
Mr. Ward's door was closed, as was customary, and there
was no way of telling whether he was in or out. He was a
short, dark, heavy-set, partially-bald man with marbleized eyes.
"Image of God," Jesse thought, half-amused. "Genesis 1:27."
Then, "If it'd been me, however, I wouldn't have admitted
it."
He stepped inside the kitchen with the intention of making
coffee. But sight of the devastation discouraged him. Garbage
spread out from a pile beside the dumbwaiter, empty beer
tins, crab shells, chicken bones, gin bottles, broken glass and
what closely resembled dried vomit, beneath which the garbage
pail was completely inundated. The breakfast table was covered
with dirty egg-stained dishes, coffee cups, and scraps of bread,
the spoils of breakfast; the sink was stacked with dirty dishes,
the ravages of last night's feast. Atop the oven of an incredibly
filthy gas range in the corner were piled helter-skelter a variety
of blackened kitchen utensils and several coffee percolators.
On the warmer were cups of runny fat, greasy boxes of
matches, a jar of salt, a tin of pepper, and a saucepan partly
filled with burnt rice. The burners held a dishpan filled with
cold boiled bluepoint crabs, their bluish shells resembling un-
evenly tempered metal. Underneath the stove was the dog
bed, lined with filthy rags and surrounded by layers of news-
papers which were stained in several places where the dogs
had peed.
Jesse recalled hearing one of the boys say girlishly, the night
before, "I feel so unnecessary!" He thought, "Damn right!
Unnecessary and unexpurgated too!"
He opened the refrigerator to look for his milk, then stood
back and stared. The top shelf was crammed with tins of beer;
on the second shelf were butter, eggs, two bottles of milk,
a bottle of grape juice, three bottles of Coca Cola, and a quart
of orange pop. His container of milk was missing, however.
On the shelf beneath were the carcass of a roasted turkey, half
of a layer cake with white frosting, a dish of boiled okra, a
plate of fried chicken, and a quart bottle of gingerale. The
bottom shelf held one half of a baked ham, a platter piled high
with a gray concoction that closely resembled granulated putty
—a specialty of Leroy's made of boiled corn meal and okra—
three-quarters of a sweet potato pie, two boiled pig's feet,
28


fee." He bustled up a cup and saucer like an eager widow.
"No, thanks, I'm going back to sleep. Coffee keeps me a-
wake."
Leroy looked crestfallen. "Whenever I ask you to have a
bite to eat you always say you're just going out or you've just
eaten or you're just going to sleep," he complained. "One of
these days I'm gonna quit asking you."
"Why the hell don't you," Jesse thought, but instead he
smiled and said, "You always ask me at the wrong time, Mr.
Martin. This is my drinking day.
He tried to hurry on before Leroy could reply, but the little
dog Napoleon, who had been awaiting his opportunity charged
him, barking furiously, and began nipping at his heels. Both
dogs were blonde pomeranians, thoroughbreds with recorded
pedigrees, the best of the species. Napoleon had been sired
by Nero, who now lay quietly in his dog bed, old, shaggy,
and stinky, toothless and almost blind. They had been given
to Leroy by a former employer, a wealthy dress manufacturer,
who had taken up Doberman pinschers at the death of his
wife, to whom the Pomeranians had actually belonged. At
the last moment Mr. Fishbein had relented his long-cherished
resolve to have the Dobermans chew them up, and had given
them to his colored chauffeur instead. Whether he appreciated
the irony of his decision, no one knew. They were very valuable
dogs, or at least had been during the life of Mrs. Fishbein.
And Leroy was quite fond of them, partly because he knew
of their former value, partly because they were such sissy
dogs. But Jesse not only despised them but the breed as well.
Although of the two, he liked Nero the better because Nero
was soon going to die, which is what Jesse was convinced all
Pomeranians should do. So when this little pest came nipping
at his heels his impulse was to give him a swift kick in the ribs,
which he always did do when no one was about
.
But now Leroy called sharply, "Napoleon! Napoleon! You
nasty thing! You come back here and let Mr. Robinson alone."
He raised his lidded lecherous look to Jesse's face. "He likes
you," he said with double-entendre; "Those are just little
love bites. He takes after his Papa."
"Oh, we understand one another," Jesse said, hastening back
to his room.
He stripped nude and began dressing. "Need a damn chas-
tity belt to step out this door," he muttered. He'd gotten on
his blue-gray slacks, undershirt and shoes, when someone
knocked. "Come in."
Leroy entered with a tray. "Oh, Mr. Robinson! You told
30


quit his porter's job in White Plains and had come to New
York to look for a room.
He had consulted a woman agent selected at random from
the classified advertisements in a Harlem weekly newspaper.
She had sent him to see a Mrs. Susie Braithewaite, on the floor
above, who had registered a room with her agency. However,
the room was actually rented for a good price, fifteen dollars
weekly, by a bartender who only used it during his days off
and one or two nights in between. But Susie didn't like the
fact that the bartender brought white girls there; and if he
didn't bring them they came anyway and stood out in the
hall where they could be seen by the other respectable Negro
housewives, and rang her bell until someone answered. So
she had decided to put the bartender out.
She hadn't apprised her husband of her intention until Jesse
called for an interview. Then she had telephoned him at the
cleaners where he worked as a presser. He had said, "Hell
no!" being a sensible man and realizing that in the long run
money is worth more than respectability. Besides which, the
bartender threw some fine white girls his way every now and
then—which was what she suspected.
But she was attracted to Jesse on sight and didn't want him
to get away. She was one of those brown-skinned women who
look as if they might be voracious in bed. She was about twenty-
five, Jesse guessed, with the strong solid body of a girl athlete,
the bosom of a wet nurse, and the big high ball-bearing hips
of a miller. She ran the tip of her red tongue slowly across
her wide full cushiony sensuous lips, making them wetly red.
and looked him straight in the eyes with her own glassy, speck-
led bedroom eyes. He stared back, feeling all of himself run
down to one point, too weak to move, knowing his eyes were
begging now! yes now! please now! it's got to be now! oh, now!
. . . and hers replying not now! you know it can't be nowl
but soon! just wait! can't you wait? . . .
So she'd gotten him this room on the floor below with Mr.
Martin. He should have recognized Mr. Martin as a Panette
on sight. But you can't expect a man in that state to be very
observant. He'd paid his rent and moved in before he'd realized
the setup. Of course he could have moved after the first week.
But it wasn't worth the trouble.
"What the hell do I care what people think!" he said defiant-
ly, tying a Duke of Kent knot in his dark red tie.
"I really ought to shave," he said as he pulled on a gray
cable-knit sweater. "I wish that punk would get a job and get
the hell away from here sometimes." From a curtained alcove
32


He decided to go down to Forty-second Street and see
what was showing at the cheap movie houses between Eighth
Avenue and Times Square. They opened at eight. "Good thing
you like movies, son," he thought . "Otherwise you'd believe
all that stuff about your country you experience every day."
He started down the slope toward 145th Street. "I go down
but it's uptown," he thought. Everyone else was going the
other way. He went down the street walking against the crowd.
He staggered a little, but he didn't feel drunk. Millions of
thoughts were churning into grotesque patterns in the back
of his head, crowding out the gaiety.
chapter three
Kriss alighted from the IRT local at Fifty-ninth Street and
Lexington Avenue, turned west at Sixtieth Street, and walked
north on Madison Avenue.
For more than twenty years this strip of Madison Avenue
had been relinquished by the city fathers to old ladies of the
"Arsenic and Old Lace" variety as a reservation in which to
walk their cats and dogs. Then came the apocalyptic day when
the quiet genteel atmosphere of the reservation was shattered
by house wreckers and steam shovels excavating for the foun-
dation of new modern buildings. The old ladies freshened their
arsenic and ventured forth, but the lower-class laborers didn't
drink tea. So the elderly females were finally forced to dally
behind bracketed curtains, and had to learn to exercise their
dogs and cats early in the morning and late in the afternoon
when the danger of their being squashed into hamburgers was
minimized.
They considered the clean, shining, bright buildings profana-
tions, veritable towers of Babel, in which, as events have
proved, they were not so far wrong. They sharpened their
tea leaves and bided their time.
But when the old stone Godwin Mansion was given over
to the India Institute, and the reservation was invaded by its
rabble of employees, Jews from Brooklyn, Italians from the
Bronx, Irish from Hell's Kitchen, Negroes from Harlem, for-
eign Americans from such outlandish places as Akron, Ohio,
Gary, Indiana, Tulsa, Oklahoma, that was the bitter end.
Now the old ladies walk their cats and dogs with veiled
eyes and closed ears, seeing only the glory of the past and
hearing only the quiet gentility of remembrance, the faint shape
35


of bitterness in the puckers of their old lips, perhaps of sad-
ness, of sorrow that they should have lived to see the day.
Kriss liked the old ladies. She always smiled at them and
sometimes spoke. She would stop to rub the arched back of
a sleek, fat, spoiled blue Persian cat, cooing with genuine ad-
miration, "Oh, isn't he lovely! He's the loveliest thing!" Or
she would grin sympathetically at some old blind Scottie that
had mistaken a gentleman's leg for a lamppost and was about
to make a faux pas; and would be seized by an almost in-
controllable impulse to say, "No, no, darling, that's a man's
leg," and guide it gently to the proper place.
The old ladies liked her. "She is the only real gentlelady of
the lot," they said. "It's too bad she has to associate with such
trash, poor thing."
But there were no old ladies about this morning and Kriss
had to be content with the greetings of a few old fat pigeons
that moved aside grudgingly to let her pass.
It was twenty minutes after nine when she ascended the
worn stone stairs and entered the Godwin Mansion. By this
time the huge reception hall with its marble fountain, the
focal point of prework congregation, was deserted. Water no
longer cascaded from the four mouths of the marble Brahma
in timeless, uncreated, immaterial and illimitable streams upon
the bevy of frolicking cherubins in the empty basin, but the
four faces of the supreme soul looked down upon all who en-
tered with benign intelligence and bliss. Kriss had once flirted
with the Brahmanic concept, years before when she was a
freshman at Chicago University, and had tried sleeping with
a Hindu; and many times of late, when passing beneath the
four faces on this monstrosity, she had the strange feeling that
perhaps after all life was but a dream.
The mansion, built in the shape of a U about an inner court
devoted to a formal garden, was a weird combination of Ren-
aissance architecture, Indian impressionism, English pretent
iousness, adapted to the basic idea of American plumbing,
lighting, and comfort. It gave a fairly accurate reflection of
the personality of old Marcus Cornelius Godwin who had erect-
ed it. By incorporating in both England and the United States,
M. Cornelius Godwin had taken a fabulous fortune out of
India during the nineteenth century and had died in 1905 at
the age of eighty-nine an avowed Brahman—although this
latter had not been taken seriously by his family who had given
him a decent Episcopalian burial. Old Godwin had loved India
but had been greatly impressed by the cold-blooded commer-
cialism and upper-class idolatry of the British aristocracy. How-
36


ever, in his later years he had discovered, somewhat to his
chagrin, that he had lost his enthusiasm for monocles, ice-cold
castles, the correct thing, and conversations conducted in
a smaller vocabulary than that employed by an English-speak-
ing Zulu. So, in the 1880's he had built this monstrosity to
pass his declining years in both style and comfort. It was not
comfortable in the modern connotation of the word, but it
had been warm—heated by a steam furnace that consumed in
the winter an average of two tons of coal a day—and it had
been lived in despite the rococo decor, the gilded mirrors at
every turn apprising him of approaching death, the life-size
angels in full sight about the ceilings of the rooms ready to
bear him off at a moment's notice, the English drawing room
with its leaded windows looking out on Madison Avenue, a
concession to his youthful awe of titles. There was a full-length
portrait of the old boy on the landing facing the double stair-
way.
Most of the employees poked fun at the stern, bewhiskered
visage of the erect, somewhat soldierly old pirate, dubbing
it the "Face on the Gold Room Floor." But Kriss revered the
venerable old man and when no one was about, ofttimes stood
for minutes before his portrait. He reminded her of her great
grandfather, whom she vaguely remembered seeing when she
was five or six. He had the same stern look and a great white
forest of whiskers, and his eyes were the ice-cold blue of the
Godwin in the portrait. Her mother had always maintained that
her great grandfather was a bonafide German count, but as a
little girl Kriss had thought of him as God.
However, this morning she didn't pass the portrait but
continued quickly along a side hall toward the elevator.
There were four floors given over to the institute personnel.
The main floor with its formal garden was unused, being main-
tained as a museum. And the servants' quarters in the rear
of the right wing were closed and empty, except for a suite
occupied by the superintendent
.
Kriss's office was on the third floor in what had once been
a guest bedroom, but was now partitioned into three small
offices, of which hers was the center.
On her way past she smiled and said hello to Dorothy Stone,
Kirby's secretary, who had the office to her left. Dorothy
gave her a scintillating smile in return, looking as if she had
scads of things to talk about. But Kriss didn't stop.
Her office was furnished with a glass-top desk on which lay
several stacks of typed pages, her telephone, an inkwell, an
empty porcelain vase, and a small bright glass globe of the
37


world; a metal typewriter stand holding a new plastic-covered
upright typewriter; a new desk chair and two leather-uphol-
stered straight-backed chairs, leftovers from the original furnish-
ings. On the deep window ledge at her back, a pigeon had built
a nest and was now sitting on four eggs. Kriss made a soft
clucking sound and the pigeon looked at her indignantly. She
gave a little girl's laugh—her private laugh reserved for animals,
children, and television comedians. "Go on," she whispered.
"I don't want to sit on your old eggs." The pigeon stirred ner-
vously. "Now you know how I felt when you used to stand
there and stare at me by the hour," Kriss said, then hung her
coat on the tree in the corner and sat at her desk.
The Institute had its origin in a foundation left by Godwin
for the purpose of bringing ambitious Indian students to the
United States to study. For more than twenty-five years it
had been directed by a small staff of elderly women, retired
school teachers and the like, who had played nursemaid to
a small select group of high-caste Hindus as they attended the
Ivy League universities. But following the war, during India's
crusade for independence, it had assumed a startling stature
as a source of reference and a point of contact, not only in
the field of education but for the federal government, private
enterprise, and all other major foundations as well. So the
trustees had reorganized, and expanded the personnel to over
two hundred. Having soon outgrown the modest fund of eleven
million dollars left by M. Cornelius Godwin, the new India
Institute was subsidized by more than a dozen other foundations
and indirectly by the federal government. 1
Kriss had started four and a half years before at a salary
of fifty dollars weekly, when the staff had been comparatively
small. Now her salary was six thousand dollars a year and she
had the title of assistant director. She wrote the summaries
of the Institute projects which were sent, as prospectuses,
to all of the subsidizing foundations and the U.S. State Depart-
ment. She was important, well-liked, and permanently situated.
And yet she had liked her temporary job at the Chicago
Foundation far more. On this morning, as on every morning,
when facing the day's tedious work, she vividly recalled
her office in the old mansion in Chicago overlooking the
spacious grounds that had formed a circle of exclusiveness,
the leisurely personalized routine, the president's morning kiss
—that is after she had begun sleeping with him—lunch on
the terrace, bridge in the cardroom before dinner, conversation
and drinking afterward, always the visitors: goodlooking Negro
professionals, artists, writers, college deans and presidents;
38


the excitement of choosing the one she wanted for the night,
which was the only reason she ever had to return to her apart-
ment in those days. This memory lasted but a moment, yet
it formed a definite black. She was still alert, still eager, still
confident, but her mind didn't want to engage the task before
her.
For fifteen minutes she read the morning paper, after which
she sorted her work, called her secretary from the floor below,
and gave her the pages to be typed, and rapidly read the com-
pleted summaries for typographical errors. She was an expert
proofreader with a complete command of punctuation and
grammatical construction, and in addition a very excellent
writer of clear explanatory prose. Her sentences were always
concise and to the point, never ambiguous, and were phrased
with amazing simplicity and conclusiveness and in perfect
logical sequence. Men would never believe a woman wrote
such prose until they were taken into her office and confronted
with the author. Then they wanted to date her.
At ten o'clock she began composing in longhand and con-
tinued without interruption for an hour, by which time she
had written nine pages. At eleven Anne Sayers, her assistant,
came in to ask if she wanted coffee.
"Yes, dear, thank you," she replied without looking up.
Anne was a huge young women, over six feet tall, with a
round pleasant face, a mop of tan curls, and was smart as
a whip. She compiled the data for the summaries, checked the
facts and figures with the sources. Her office was located in
the wing overlooking the court. There were only women in
that section and something like a boarding school atmosphere
prevailed. Anne had a sideboard in her office where she kept
tea, coffee, tea biscuits, cocktail crackers, jars of cheeses, tins
of hors d'oeuvres, and usually a bottle of claret and a bottle
of sherry; and, of course, cups and saucers, sugar and—if she
thought to bring it—cream. An electric coffee pot, a cocktail
service, and a set of silverware completed the stock. Kriss's
only concession to office refreshment was a silver flask of
Scotch she kept in her desk drawer; but coffee was always wel-
come at this time. With it she could take another pill.
A few minutes later Anne returned with a flaming face.
"God damn it!" she choked furiously.
Kriss looked up in surprise. "Why—what's the trouble,
Anne?"
"That damned Watson again!"
Watson was the personnel director. He disapproved of
the girls making coffee and toast in the big pleasant bathroom
39


day," she said, "And he doesn't know how much Anne weighs."
"Oh, that reminds me of a joke I wanted to tell you. Mrs.
Donahue told it to me last night." She grinned. "I don't know
where she hears such things."
Kriss knew Mrs. Donahue, the eighty-two-year-old semi-in-
valid with whom Dorothy lived, and she knew why the old
lady told Dorothy those Rabelaisian jokes—she thought her
prim, genteel roomer much too respectable for her own good.
So did Kriss. She gave Dorothy a wicked grin. "Tell me, baby."
Anne came in at that moment with the coffee and Dorothy
hesitated; she couldn't bear to be intimate with another woman.
But when Kriss urged, "Go on, Dot, tell Anne, too," she began:
"Well—" Then she looked at Anne and blurted, "I got this
from my landlady."
Anne flung a quick look at her and continued serving the
coffee.
"She knows, dear," Kriss said.
"Well—there was a Texan wandering about the city wearing
a ten gallon hat . . ."
Now Anne looked solidly at Dorothy, but bit back the words,
"You don't say?" Instead she put her sting into the anonymous
Texan. "With water on the brain."
Kriss chuckled. "No doubt, dear. But not ten gallons?"
"Just like a texan. Always exaggerating."
"Do you want to hear this story or not?" Dorothy complained
jealously.
"Let Dot tell her story," Kriss said.
"This Texan ran into an actor on Broadway desssed like
a Quaker. He'd never seen a Quaker before. So he went up
to the actor and said, Talk some Quaker for me, will you,
Friend.' The actor smiled indulgently and tried to pass, but
the Texan took hold of his arm. 'Oh, come on, partner, talk
some Quaker for me. Ah never heard nobody talk Quaker.'
The actor tried to disengage his arm, but the Texan held him
firmly. 'Ah tell you what I'll do, Friend. If you talk some
Quaker for me, I'll buy you the best feed they can throw to-
gether at 21.' When the Texan said that, the actor turned slowly
and looked him straight in the eye, and said, "Befoul thee!'"
Kriss laughed with childish glee. "Someone should tell
that to Watson. The last part, I mean."
Even Anne giggled. "IH tell him. You just wait. And I
won't say thee, either!"
Dorothy glanced at her watch. "Oh, I've got to run; Kirby
wants me before lunch." She gave Kriss a beseeching smile.
"What I wanted was to ask you to go with me to the Museum
41


of Modern Art this evening. Ifs the opening of the Monet ex-
hibition." Through the corners of her eyes Kriss noticed Anne
flick a glance at her as she began stacking the dirty cups and
saucers. Once they had discussed Dorothy's passion for art
exhibitions, but now she felt a slight disloyalty for having done
so.
"I'm so tired, baby. Can't we go some other time," she beg-
ged off.
Anne carted off the coffee service without comment
.
"Oh, Kriss . . ." She'd promised herself not to feel badly
if Kriss couldn't go, but she couldn't keep the disappointment
from her voice.
Kriss felt sorry for her. "Oh, baby, I'm just so tired." Then,
relenting, she said. "Why don't you come and have dinner
with me tonight.**
"But—but . . ."She couldn't bring herself to ask.
"He won't be here tonight," Kriss assured her. "Nor any
other night," she thought bitterly.
Now Dorothy was happy. She looked like a girl who'd been
asked on a date. "All right . But you let me do everything. Prom-
ise?"
Kriss wondered again if Dorothy understood her own emo-
tions. A veil lowered over her eyes. "I promise," she said,
chuckling mechanically. If I find myself in bed with Dot, that'll
be the bitter end, she thought. "Make it around seven-thirty."
"All right , then, at seven-thirty."
She regretted it instantly. But at least Dot would be better
than being alone. Anything was better than being alone.
"You louse!" she thought with sudden venom, but whether
her venom was directed toward Ronny or Ted or Dave or
anyone else in particular, she didn't even know herself.
chapter four
Jesse came up from the subway through the arcade with its
tobacco shops, barber shops, shoeshine parlors, notion stores,
florist, lunch counters, turkish baths, to the north side of Forty-
second Street, next to the corner drugstore. "This is what they
mean by the underworld," he had thought in passing, and now
he viewed the upper side with equal distaste.
From where he stood at the corner of Eighth Avenue—a
pesthole of petty thugs where a man could buy a gun, hot or
42


man, "Whyoncha pick on somebody yo' own size?" A snigger
ran though the crowd.
"He slipped up on me," the short man defended his prow-
ess.
"Go on, go on," the cop said. "I can tell you never wuz a
boy scout."
"Never was a boy, son," Jesse thought. "Where'd you study
psychiatry?"
Further on a bookstore claimed his vagrant attention. He
stopped for a moment, searching among the titles for those
of his own two books. There were several books by Negro writ-
ers, but not his. "If you ever find someone who's read your
books youll drop dead," he told himself. His gaze picked out
the title Lost Horizon. "Good and lost right here," he thought
.
Then he recalled an editor who had rejected his second book,
complaining, "Why do you fellows always write this kind of
thing? Some of you have real talent. Why don't you try writing
about people, just people."
He had countered, "White people, you mean?"
The editor had reddened. "No, I don't mean white people.
I mean people! Like Maugham and Hilton write about , for
instance.
He laughed at the recollection and his bitterness left "I
should have told him I don't know no Eskimos, and that's
all the people they left . Don't even know no apemen, I should
have told him, and no apes either, for that matter—although
he probably wouldn't have believed that, close as he thinks
I am to Africa." The thought kept tickling him as he ambled
along, unmindful of the fairy who trailed him on the lee
side. "My folks didn't do right by me," he said aloud suddenly.
"They shouldn't have got themselves caught."
Suddenly he turned and retraced his steps to another small
bookstore that had just registered on his mind, disconcerting
the man. He stared at the titles without really seeing them, a
sort of reflex gesture. "What I really ought to have told the
half-wit," he thought , "is why don't you read the Old Testa-
ment , son? Or even Rabelais for that matter. That's the way
I should have started the damn book." He blew laughter from
his nostrils. "The nigger woke, sat up, scratched at the lice,
stood up, made a wind, natured, gargled, harked, spat, sat
down, ate a dishpan of stewed chitterlings, drank a gallon
of lightning, hated the white folks for an hour, went out and
stole some chickens, raped a white woman, got lynched by
a mob, scratched his kinky head and said, Boss. Ah's tahd
uh gittin' lynched. Ah's so weary kain keep man eyes open.
44


And the Boss said Go on home an' sleep, nigger, that's all
you niggers is good for. So he went back to his shanty, stealing
a watermelon on the way, ate the watermelon, rind and all,
lay down on his pallet, blinked, yawned, and went to sleep hat-
ing the white folks."
"We can't print this dung," the editor would have said.
"Why not?" he would have asked.
"It's too bitter. People are fed up with this kind of protest."
"What is protest but satire?"
"Satire? Satire must be witty, ironic, sarcastic; it must appeal
to the intellect. This dung is filth."
"All dung is filth. Are you surprised?"
"At what?" a falsetto voice asked at his side.
For the first time he noticed the fairy. He was big, blond,
and well dressed, had a pleasant face, but greedy blue eyes.
Jesse turned and walked on without replying. In front of
him two painted showgirls, flanking a tall woozy westerner,
came from the Hotel Dixie and crossed toward a waiting taxi.
He caught a whiff of Lanvin's My Sin and found himself look-
ing at their slender nyloned legs, long-eyed and woman hungry.
For an instant he stopped and considered turning back to
Eighth Avenue and heading uptown. There were always cruis-
ing prostitutes in that section from Forty-second Street through
Jacob's Beach, even this early in the morning. But he put it
from his mind. He'd always been afraid of disease, not so
much for his own sake, but he'd been afraid of infecting his
wife. "Wouldn't believe that about a nigger, would you?" he
thought. Although once he'd taken all comers who were thought
to be healthy.
For a moment his thoughts went back to that time in 1944,
when all liberals were trying desperately to elect Roosevelt
for a fourth term, and the CIO's Political Action Committee
had been all the rage—"Clear it with Sidney"—Sidney Hillman
and the boys. He always thought of that time at least once
a day. Not so much with regret as with wonder. "Greatest
time in the history of the Republic for interracial love making,"
he thought. "Nothing like politics for getting white love. Black
love, either, for that matter." And after a moment he said
aloud, "Old Jimmy. Wonder if he ever got enough." Jimmy
had been a lieutenant in the navy then, handsome chap in
his whites. Hollywood scenario writer now; he'd seen a first-run
Class A picture a few weeks ago Jimmy had done the scenario
for. Cleo, the wife of a Negro newspaper editor, had been
nuts about him.
"This is Cleo, Jimmy, she can do it hanging from a chande-
45


lier," had been the way Maud introduced them. For a moment
his thoughts lingered pleasantly on Maud.
"What a bitch!" he thought. "A great woman, really. Greater
than anybody'!! ever know!" Many times he'd considered writ-
ing a novel about her. But he'd never been able to get the handle
to the story. "Great Madame, actually. Worked with her tools.
Besides which she was a cheat, liar, thief, master of intrigue,
without conscience or scruples, and respectable too. That was
the lick—the respectability." He felt a cynical amusement
.
"Son, that's the trick. Here's a whore who's friend of the mighty,
lunches with the mayor's wife, entertains the rich, the
very rich, on all kinds of interracial committees, a great Negro
social leader. While you, you with your so-called integrity,
are just a pest and a nuisance."
Suddenly he was at the curb of Seventh Avenue. Opposite
was the Times building; across Forty-second a restaurant with
tables out of doors. Uptown to his left was another small theatre
that specialized in weird off-trail films, displaying a huge poster
of a leopard-skinned wild man bearing off a half-clad blonde.
"That's just what you should be, son," he told himself. "Then
you could just grab one too and run and all they'd do would
just be to make a film of it." Beyond was the glittering front
of the Astor Hotel, looking out on the chasm of Times Square;
the bottom of the V where the canteen had been, now replaced
by a recruiting center; and on the other side was the old stone
profile of Hotel Claridge which had once housed the Hall
of Science on the second floor where he had worked as a
porter. He thought of the narrow marble stairway he'd had
to scrub five times a day.
"I wonder who's scrubbing you now," he thought to the
tune of the popular song. But the Hall of Science was gone,
defunct, no more, and the Great White Way looked cheap and
naked and repulsive in the bright morning sunlight, like a
striptease on awakening, fumbling about a small dingy hotel
room in a soiled kimono, fixing her morning needle.
He now felt only a deep, welling loneliness. "You dood it
yourself, son," he said, "You thought you were being noble,"
and turned in at the first theatre without looking to see what
was showing. An automatic middle-aged blonde stopped tally-
ing her change long enough to push an automatic key for his
automatic ticket and he went through a long, narrow, mirrored
foyer, garnished with scenes from coming attractions, into
the dim, musty interior. He turned to the right and climbed the
dusty, worn carpeted stairs, which smelled strongly of stale
urine, to the balcony, which smelled strongly of stale people.
46


He went down the perilous stairs to the front row and took
a seat between a young white man in a sweater and a sleeping
Negro, one seat removed from each. Suddenly he felt exhausted.
"You think too much, son," he told himself. "Your head's
for knots, not thoughts." And then, "Besides which, its un-
American."
Kriss remained at her desk until six o'clock to finish the
report on the Reverend John Saxton project for an Indian Prot-
estant school, then took the Madison Avenue bus home. As
a rule she enjoyed this ride down the graystone and gleaming-
glass canyon, past the window-lighted chain of women's shops,
the shiny bustling entrance to the C.B.S. building, the brittle
pyramids of the ad writers, the gloomy old mansion of Random
House, turning at Forty-second through the tide of day's-end
traffic over to Grand Central, down lower Park Avenue until
it changed its name to Fourth, and over to Lexington at
Twenty-fourth Street. It ran a crooked line through the city's
heart, from the high brass notes of the hucksters to the low
muted scale of Gramercy Park, and on nights when she'd known
Dave was coming she could hear the heart beat. She loved the
city and all who inhabited it, but never when alone; in alone-
ness it was a prison. Now the tired faces against the city lights
were like mirrors of her mind. She dreaded her empty apart-
ment almost to fear.
At Twenty-third Street she walked over to Third Avenue
and down, stopping at her favorite delicatessen and green-
grocer to buy a small barbecued chicken, frozen peas, whip-
ped potatoes and a salad. When she turned her key in the lock
she felt ready to expire. Her mind felt dead, her body dry as
straw—a desert waste. She went straight to the kitchen, depos-
ited her purse and purchases on the sideboard, melted loose
two icecubes, and mixed a stiff Scotch and soda. Only after
she'd taken a long, cool, soothing swallow did she feel slightly
human again. She hung up her coat and took the drink on
a silver coaster to the sitting room, eased herself into the
straight-backed three-legged chair which rested her, and opened
last week's New Yorker magazine.
It was always at this time, the fag-end of a hard day, that
thoughts of Ronny invaded her mind, and the New Yorker
lay neglected on her lap. Now, before the drink began taking
hold, she recalled the happy things, nights talking until daylight
before an open fire, their drunken wit, picking their friends
to pieces. . . . "If Hal could lift his brains three feet, get
them back into his head, he'd be a great man'" Ronny would
47


nor a sigh, a sort of blowing from the mouth and nostrils
all the vanities behind which people hide themselves. And
she knew, with suddenly diffused emotions, even before she
heard the soft slurred voice with its faint, almost indistinguish-
able lisp, that it would say, "Hello, Kriss-baby, this is Jesse."
In the following instant it all came back: Chicago and Maud
and that divine weekend that Fern had later destroyed with
all those lies about herself and Jesse in New York. She'd come
closest to loving him of any of them since Willard—except
Ted, of course.
"I really loved Ted," she told herself. But it had gone into
contempt, and he had married some Negro woman in Los
Angeles. She had never felt contempt for Jesse, although she
didn't know why. He deserved it if anyone ever did, and she
wished she felt it now as she said with cold venom, "Have you
murdered your wife?" He laughed and his tension relaxed.
Jesse had been waiting in his room since three o'clock to
call her. The idea had come upon him in the movie that morn-
ing but he'd decided against calling her in her office. It had
been over three years since he had seen her and he didn't know
what kind of reception to expect. The last time he'd seen her
had been disastrous. On his way home he'd picked up a bottle
of gin, and had forced himself to wait until six-thirty. Then
he'd decided to go downstairs and use the public telephone be-
cause the two extensions in the apartment were in the bedroom
of Leroy and Mr. Ward, and he didn't want to be overheard.
Kriss was unpredictable. She might say, "Go to hell!" and hang
up, and he didn't want to be seen with his mouth hanging open
holding a dead receiver.
There was an old-fashioned pay phone on the whitewashed
wall of the basement hallway, where he put in his call, and while
he was waiting for an answer two pretty school-age girls came
from the green door of the super's flat, and looked at him as
they passed. He whistled a bar of // / Had You and they went
into the elevator giggling, and he experienced the sudden
blind panic of being lost in a world he no longer understood,
a feeling which had been seizing him of late.
"You damned fool, what are you doing this for?" he asked
himself, the whole tide of all his disappointments and frustra-
tions washing up and over him; and when he heard her voice
his heart caught. He knew then he didn't feel a thing for her;
he just wanted to sleep with a white woman again. But after
he had laughed it was all right.
49


"I love you, Kriss-baby," he murmured. "You say the nicest
things."
She didn't answer but he could hear her purring on the other
end, and he knew she was wearing that secret sensual look
she always wore when her men came back to her.
"I've sold a book," he said. Td like to take you out to din-
*****"
ner.
"Are you living in the city now?"
"I just came back a week ago. I have a room up on Convent."
There was a pause and she asked, "Is your wife with you?"
The thought occurred to him suddenly that he'd never heard
her call Becky's name. "We're separated," he said. "I haven't
seen her now in almost a year."
She was silent for a moment, then asked, "When's your
book to be published?"
"Well, it's not exactly sold, really. Hobson just took an option
on it. They want to cut it."
"What's the title?"
"7 was Looking for a Street.'"
"I hope it's nothing like that last thing you wrote," she said
viciously. "I'm tired of listening to you Negroes whining. I've
got enough worries of my own."
He laughed deprecatingly. "This has no protest, baby. I've
made a separate peace."
Although she didn't answer immediately, he knew by her
silence she considered that a special concession to herself.
"I have engagements for tonight and tomorrow night, but I
have Thursday night free."
He tried to keep the disappointment from his voice. "What
time shall I call for you?"
"Seven-thirty. You have my address?"
"I have the one in the directory."
"All right, IH expect you at seven-thirty." She sounded
brusque.
"Until then, Kriss-baby. Do nothing I wouldn't do."
"That's practically nothing," she said viciously and hung
up.
Slowly he walked toward the elevator. "Son, eat your crow
and like it," he said. At that instant the elevator door opened
and the super emerged, lugging a short stepladder. He looked
about and seeing no one besides Jesse appeared startled. "I
thought I heard you talking."
Jesse grinned, unaware that he had spoken aloud. "They got
you hearing things," he said.
50


He had put on his new Oxford-blue flannel suit, bought the
week before at a pawnshop on Columbus Avenue that offered
factory rejects and slightly shopworn dummy models at half
price. It was a beautiful suit of soft imported fabric, and with
it he wore plain black English-made shoes from Wanamaker's
spring shoe sale, a buttoned-down white Oxford-cloth shirt
and a heavy silk gray and white tie of abstract design, both
of which had come from Gimbel's bargain basement
.
"All you need now is an umbrella, a bowler hat, a mutton
chop, a glass of claret, lank hair and a white skin, and you'd
be on your way to civilize the world, son," he told himself
disparagingly, then added, "You've got the right inclinations
anyway."
He glanced outside at the weather. A slight drizzle was fall-
ing. He put on his hat and a faded trench coat that Kriss had
admired seven years ago when it was new and they were new
to each other, tucked a bottle of bourbon under his arm, wonder-
ing suddenly what it was he wanted downtown that wasn't up-
town in abundance.
He found her name, Mrs. Kristina W. Cummings, beneath
the letter slot in the vestibule and pressed the bell beside it.
After a moment Kriss pressed the button beside the house phone
in her back hallway, releasing the lock on the outside door.
He entered quickly and hastened down the tiled corridor, grate-
ful to find it empty, and at the back turned left to the door
of her apartment.
She opened the door before he rang again, and for an im-
perceptible moment they stared at one another, their smiles
of greeting frozen in slight shock. Clad in a simple sleeveless
black cocktail dress with a low square-cut neck, oramented
by a heavy silver necklace and a pair of magnificent silver
bracelets, she was a very handsome woman. But she wasn't
the woman he remembered; he found no hint of the daredevil
girl whom he'd once liked; instead he saw what appeared in
flash judgment to be an assured, humorless, slightly dull woman
wrapped in an impregnable respectability.
For her part she saw in him nothing of the irresponsible
woman hunter with the ready grin and brilliant eyes with whom
she had spent those three exquisite days, his frantic sexuality
like an aphrodisiac flame; nor anything of the repulsive drunk
who had so infuriated her four years later, who at least had
possessed a certain bitter effervescence that had made him in-
teresting. This man before her, in the old trench coat she recog-
nized immediately, was dead; hurt had settled so deep inside
of him it had become a part of his metabolism. Not that he
52


had changed so greatly in outward appearance—not nearly
as much as she had hoped. Outwardly he looked much the
same, the youthful contours of his face, the athletic figure,
thinner perhaps, although his head seemed much smaller
with his hair cut so short and thinning too, like an onion head—
she liked men with hair, lots of hair, even though it be woolly.
It was inside of him the light had gone out.
But both recovered instantaneously.
Tm fat," she greeted, grinning tentatively, and he noticed
about her bright blue eyes a faint border of red, as if she had
been crying recently.
'Tm thin," he said, returning her grin. And now somewhat
lamely, since she no longer seemed the type who would ap-
preciate it, he added, "I brought bourbon instead of flowers."
For the first time she grinned a little like old times. "We'll
drink our flowers."
He went into the sitting room while she mixed the drinks,
Scotch for herself and bourbon for him, and when she brought
them in he said with genuine admiration, "You have a beauti-
ful place, Kriss. It's really lovely." and then added, looking
her over frankly. "You know, you're beautiful too."
She sat on her favorite three-legged chair, pleased for the
moment by bis flattery. "My assistant, Anne, helped with the
decor. She's studying interior decorating and the stores give
her a discount."
"Are you still at the same job?"
"I'm still with the Institute." Then, her voice filling with
pride, "I'm a big girl now, Tm an assistant director." There
was vindictiveness in it too, and he wondered vaguely what
had happened to her.
"Do you ever see Maud?"
"I saw her during the Christmas season at a party at Ed
Jones. She tried to ignore me at first but when she saw how
nice Ed and everyone else was to me she came over and started
gushing, trying to make as if she hadn't seen me. She's heard
I had something to do with sending the personnel to India and
she wants to use me again. I was cold as ice."
"How is Ed?" he asked politely. "Not that I give a damn,"
he thought. Ed Jones was a very successful Negro artist who
ran a private art school.
"Fine. I love Julia, she's so sweet and real."
"She's a nice girl," he said, although he'd never met her,
but he felt it necessary to be agreeable.
"I was frightened to death when I walked into that party,"
Kriss confessed. "It was the first time in years I'd been to
53


a party of Negroes, and I didn't know what sort of stories
Maud had put out about me. But Ed was very nice and I
knew most of the people there. Then Dinky Bloom said, 'Oh,
Kriss is one of us anyway. She's been around niggers so
long she's rubbed off enough black to be half nigger herself.'"
She smiled her secret sensuous smile, thinking of the implica-
tions of the statement.
He was thinking the same thing, half-amused, but didn't
pursue it. "What happened between you and Maud? I haven't
seen them since we had that falling out."
"God, that woman hurt me!" the hurt coming through in
her voice. "I lived with them when I first came to New York."
"I didn't know."
"I practically paid their rent and liquor bills. I had that
little sitting room where you stayed, and when they entertained
—which was practically every night, serving my liquor—I
couldn't go to bed until all the guests left, although Joe would
go into his room and go to bed and leave his company sitting
up. And I had to get up before any of them. Then when I
broke off with Ted, Maud practically threw me out. And we'd
been just like sisters for years."
"I know," he said, thinking, "Lovers, baby, not sisters. Maud
never liked anybody she couldn't sleep with—man or woman.
I know her." After a moment he asked, "Why should she care?
It was none of her business, was it?"
"Oh, she wanted me to marry Ted so she could sleep with
him when Joe and I were at work."
He picked up the empty glass and when she went to the
kitchen to make fresh drinks, he followed her, wondering wheth-
er he should kiss her then or wait. She didn't appear to
be in a kissing mood so he said, "This is a nice kitchen, every-
thing's arranged so well." And when they went back to the
sitting room he said, "I really like your place." This time she
didn't respond and he looked at her thinking, "The hell of
it is, son, you don't remember a damn thing about that weekend;
you were blotto all the time and afterwards never remembered
a thing past the moment when you first kissed her."
But aloud he asked, "What happened to you and Ted? The
last time—in fact the only time—I saw you two together was
at a party in Brooklyn. I think that was the only time I ever
saw Ted—the only time I remember. He was a good-looking
boy though, as I remember."
"I practically supported the rat," she said with sudden venom.
"He was always running after cheap white people, thinking
they were going to make him rich. He thought I didn't know
54


anything, and I was supporting him."
"What's he doing now?"
"1 hope he's dead."
"You probably wish I was dead too," he thought . In the
silence that followed, realizing their need of each other, both
now ostracized from the only exciting life they had ever known,
both starved for sexual fulfillment, lost and lonely, out-casts
drifting together long after the passion had passed, faced with
a night of sleeping together which at that moment neither de-
sired, they hated each other.
She glanced at her watch and said, hurtingly, "Shall we go
now, or do we drink our dinner?"
He bit back the impulse to say, "Go to hell!" telling himself,
"I'm going to have you whether you like it or not." Then man-
aged a thin smile, saying instead, "It wouldn't be the first
time."
"If you intend to get drunk you can get out right now,"
she said viciously.
"I intend to take you to dinner," he said evenly.
"The last time I saw you, you were nasty drunk. Filthy! God,
you were nasty. And I wanted you so."
He gave her a bewildered look. "What did I do? The last
I remember is vomiting all over Don's white davenport."
"God, Ralph was mad. If you hadn't been so drunk he
would have beaten you."
He felt acutely embarrassed. "I don't blame him."
"And I would have helped him."
"But what did I do to you?"
"Jesse! If you ever ..."
He had taken Roy by that afternoon for Don to see some
of his etchings. That had been the summer following his visit
to the big deluxe artists' colony called Skiddoo, and he'd been
sick—sick in the head. That place had made him sick like
nothing else in all his life—or perhaps he'd been sick when
he went up there. Perhaps it was the book that had made him
sick—that second book—and perhaps all Skiddoo did was bring
it out. Some day he'd have to sit down and discover why he
had hated Skiddoo and all the artists there. But Roy had been
the exception; he'd liked Roy and had hoped Don would buy
some of his war etchings to put him on his feet. Instead of
buying the etchings, Don had taken their visit as an excuse to
throw a party. By six o'clock a dozen or so persons were grouped
about the big circular cocktail table in the sitting room and
Don was serving one pitcher after another of a strong gin drink
he called a "Gimlet." The last thing Jesse remembered before
55


throwing up all over the sofa was baiting a woman named
Muriel Slater whom he despised. On entering she had dismissed
Roy's etchings and, seating herself in the center of the floor,
had taken off her shoes and launched into a loud discussion
about a big black Negro actor with whom she'd been sleeping
off and on for years. She was one of those hard brassy over-
ripened blondes, always loud-and-wrong. During the last Roo-
sevelt campaign when the Communists and Negroes had been
working together again for Roosevelt's election, she'd been
employed as a party giver by the Central Committee of the
Communist Party; and after the publication of Jesse's anti-Com-
munist book, she, as had all of his Communist acquaintances
and most of his Negro friends, had quit speaking to him. He
remembered saying to her, "Muriel, baby, I know you have
a beautiful clean mind and a pure unsullied soul, but your feet
are dirty. Look at them. Really dirty, and not nearly so beauti-
ful as your mind. Don't you feel embarrassed on climbing into
bed with some strange man with your dirty feet?" He re-
membered her fury, and although he couldn't remember when
Kriss had arrived, he remembered winking at her, then taking
another drink, and the next thing he remembered was vomiting
on the sofa. . . .
"What did I say to your
"Jesse! If you ever . . ."
"Just tell me what I said."
"I won't repeat what you said. I've never had anyone in
all my life say the nasty things to me that you did. If I'd been
a man I would have hit you in the face."
He shook his head. "I was sick. That summer I was really
sick." And to himself, "Sicker than you thought, son."
"I don't want to ever see you like that again."
"I've gotten over it. I've made a separate peace. I mean it."
She stood up. "We'd better go; it's getting late."
"Do you have any place in mind?"
"Oh, anywhere we can get served quickly. I don't feel up
to a lot of bother."
"How about Nick's?"
"That's all right. We can have steaks."
They were tense and silent in the taxi as it skirted the quiet
darkness of Gramercy Park, past the old stone mansions with
their brass knockers and foot scrapers and shining carriage
lamps, and turned south on Irving Place. He glanced in passing
at the front of the picturesque bar where it is said O'Henry
spent many brooding hours, and he thought, "Son, you and
me both." And a moment later, as they came in Fourteenth
56


whom Paul had lived with—and off, too—that summer.
Roy had come too, bringing a very dignified and respectable
looking woman whom he had introduced as Estelle. She had
looked as out of place as Becky in that dirty two-room flat.
Paul had been well along the way when they arrived receiv-
ing them dressed in a spotted tee shirt that looked as if it might
have served duty as a cleaning rag, and incredibly filthy white
duck pants, the seat of which was absolutely black. And Kathy
wore a soiled and rumpled sun-back playsuit that appeared
to have made several tours of Coney Island since its previous
laundering: the both of them giving the impression by their
unkept hair and red smeared lips of having just arisen from
bed.
The dinner, sent up from the corner delicatessen, had con-
sisted of greenish-tinted slices of hard-boiled eggs, curled and
fragrant slices of bologna sausage withered slices of tomatoes
dressed with dabs of yellow paste, and watery cabbage slaw;
and had been served on an egg-and-wine stained, repulsively
filthy paper table covering.
However, Paul had provided eight quarts of domestic ale
and a gallon of California sherry, and since Roy's lady friend
drank only a very little sherry, and Kathy no more than a quart
of ale, there had been plenty left for the three escapees from
Skiddoo, wine and ale being a combination they'd found to
be satisfactorily potent during their sojourn there.
Becky had drunk against despair.
When the sherry was finished, Paul and Kathy had begun
slobbering over each other in a manner that presaged violent
passionate action at any moment. Fearful of this action taking
place right there on the floor, which would have been nothing
new for Greenwich Village, and having no curiosity about the
sex habits of psychotic writers, Estelle had quietly departed.
And an hour later, never having remembered what took place
in the interim, Jesse had found himself standing at the bar
in Nick's with Becky between himself and Roy, ordering three
bottles of ale, and the bartender had charged him seventy cents
for each. He had thought nothing of it until the woman at
his left asked, "How much did he charge you for your ale?"
He looked at her trying to get her face into focus. "Seventy
cents. Why?"
"We had ale just before you came in and he only charged
us thirty-five cents," she informed him.
He didn't remember what happened immediately following.
The next thing he remembered he was shouting at the top of
his voice, "What the hell kind of god-damned stuff is this!
58


That had been the most awful thing that had ever happened
to Roy, and the day after the hearing he had revealed himself
to Jesse as a homosexual, making a grand slam of all the white
men Jesse had met that summer, which he always thought of
afterward as the Summer of the Da-Da-Dee, a nameless tune
he had shouted through the nights at Skiddoo, coming back
to the estate from the cheap bars in niggertown in the early
hours of the morning, weary and bedraggled and blotto. It's
basic theme was the melody of a popular song on the juke
box in his favorite downtown Negro bar, sung by Ella Fitz-
gerald, with words that went, Til get by as long as I have you
. . . but he had never known this. It was just a sound that
had kept him going the four miles down the dark and sleeping
Elm-lined highway back to the quiet splendor of Skiddoo
when he had felt more like just lying in the gutter and never
getting up. . . .
And why, after that, he chose to come back to Nick's with
Kriss— "Customary!" he thought grimly, as they alighted from
the taxi. "They always return to the scene—what kind of
detective stories you been reading, you don't know that?"
They were taken to a booth along the wall up front, to one
side of the Dixieland Band. The place looked completely dif-
ferent from his memory of it, and he could not concieve of
why he had caused such a row. Everything seemed perfectly
normal
He thought of a boy he knew in Harlem who said he smoked
marijuana because it made him feel so normal. "You know
one thing, Jesse, only time I ever feel normal is when I'm
high."
Jesse wondered, half-amused, if a white woman had the
same effect on him. "Get a white woman and go from schizo-
phrenia to homogenia," he thought, half smiling, but caught
such a malevolent look on Kriss's face, he amended the thought,
"You must have bought the wrong ticket, son."
She had been thinking, "God-damn Dave to hell!" The
last time she'd been there, he had taken her, and she had felt
the envy of the other women. Now she felt their indifference,
bringing a sense of shame, and in a roundabout way she was
enraged with Jesse by hating Dave. If Jesse were big and black
like Charlie Thompson, the union official with whom she'd
spent a weekend in Cleveland, clinging possessively to his arm
as they walked down Euclid, she could have felt a daredevil
defiance. Or, if he were gorgeous like Ted, she wouldn't even
have to look to see how they were taking it; she could just
relax and feel hated. All of them had wanted Ted, his thick
60


the seams in her fleshy neck. The next thing he noticed his
glass was empty and a film was showing. He got up to mix more
drinks for them both and found both bottles nearly empty.
"I must be getting drunk," he thought, as he bumped against
the wall when returning to the sitting room. "Power of sugges-
tion."
He did not remember reaching the sitting room. His next
conscious action was finding her inert on the faded blue sheet,
eyes closed. He stood looking down at her until vague wisps
of desire were transmitted from his brain; then he heard his
voice saying with a slightly shocked note, "Damn, you're white!"
She opened her eyes and looked at him with the last flicker
of sensual pleasure. "I'm about as white as one can be," she
said distinctly.
For a long time their senses were dulled almost to insen-
sibility with drunkenness. Her first reaction was memory:
He had come into her office in Chicago shortly before noon,
wearing the same trench coat, new then and somehow dashing,
and a double-breasted business suit with handstitched lapels.
His hair was long and heavily greased with an interesting kin-
kiness, and she had noticed instantly his long girlish eyelashes
and beautiful eyes. He didn't look at all like the type of young
Negro writer who'd been given fellowships, neither hungry
nor scholarly nor intellectual nor "Called." More like a good
lover with that air of frantic animality scarcely contained be-
neath his respectful manner. So she had taken him to the execu-
tives' luncheon to meet the president and other officials, and
afterwards she'd had him wait in her office while she finished
some reports. He had sat in one of the straight-backed uncom-
fortable chairs, looking at her all the while with restrained and
polite desire until she couldn't stand the warmth. She'd sug-
gested that he go and do whatever he had to do and come to
her apartment at six for dinner. Ronny had been in the army
then—overseas at that. He had brought bourbon, like this
time, and she'd made her special goulash. Afterwards they'd
sat on the sofa in her pleasant sitting room, drinking slowly,
and he had told her all about himself; she refusing to answer
the intermittent ringing of the telephone. All that time sitting
at opposite ends of the sofa, turned toward each other, her
legs tucked beheath her and one of his beneath himself. Then
he had said, "I think I'm going to kiss you," and her face took
on a melting look as she offered him her mouth and he had
moved close to her and that first kiss had been almost as pen-
etrating as the moment of conception. He had undressed first
and was in bed and—of all things—covered up when she had
63


to sleep. His startled gaze searched the dim cell-like room and,
finding everything strange, he felt a shattering of emotion.
He was on the verge of leaping up and searching for the
light of reason when his hand encountered a body beside him
in the bed. Peering from bloodshot eyes, he recognized the
matted head of Kriss. "Ready to light out and run, eh, son?"
he thought, laughing at himself with self-disparagement
.
She appeared to be asleep. He moved towards her. "Maybe
she won't awaken," he thought hopefully. Half-laughing, he
recalled a burlesque skit of a guy in a hotel room eavesdropping
on a honeymoon couple in the next room who were trying to
close an over-stuffed suitcase.
"No, not that way," he said as she tried to close it with her
hands. "Ill put it on the floor and you get on top."
The eavesdropper's ears perked up.
But it still wouldn't close, so she said, "Oh shucks, it won't
fit—you get on top."
The eavesdropper's ears wagged in a frenzy.
But it still wouldn't close, so he said, "Let's both get on
top."
That's where the eavesdropper broke down the adjoining
door. "This I gotta see!" he cried.
But Kriss pushed him viciously and said in a cold, dictatorial
voice, "Jesse, I've got to go to work. You don't have anything
to do but hang around some Harlem bar and you can sleep
all day."
"Fine," he said, and turned over as if to go back to sleep.
"You can't sleep here!" she said, trying to push him from
the bed. "My maid's coming this morning to clean up," she
lied, then, to infuriate him, she added, "Go back to your wife
then, she'll let you sleep all day. She always has." And when
getting to his feet, he said, "Go to hell!" she giggled maliciously.
He found the switch for the hall light and went into the
bathroom without replying. She had a glimpse of his body be-
fore he closed the door, smooth sepia skin, strong back and
broad shoulders, his well-formed legs and smooth calves, almost
hairless, that could have been a woman's; she thought of other
women who'd seen him in the morning and she resented his
body bitterly. "He's five years older than I am," she thought,
indulging in the complicated reasoning of attributing his youth-
ful appearance to the fact that white people, like herself, sup-
ported him so he could write a book every four or five years
about what mean bullies the white people, like herself, were;
while for her part, she had grown old trying to defend the
lazy niggers. "If they had to work as hard as I do they'd all
65


die," she concluded.
He looked at his greasy reflection in the mirror and thought,
"You don't look a damn bit different, son." There were five
toothbrushes on the rack; to one side on a wall shelf of glass
a box of talcum powder, comb and brush, colognes and per-
fumes; beside the tub one gray and one white bath towel. Inside
of the medicine cabinet he found two safety razors, a container
of blades, many bottles labeled with a doctor's prescription,
a septic pencil and a man's comb, aftershaving lotion, an
the bottle of blue tablets which had the shape of dexedrine
but not the color. "Man, woman, and doctor," he thought,
immediately amending it to, "Statue of modern woman stand-
ing atop a drugstore, right hand lifting nude male to prophy-
lactic couch, left hand behind back beckoning to hovering figure
of doctor in background with two middle fingers crossed."
When he came from the bathroom she said, as though to
a servant "Jesse! Put on some water for coffee and make some
toast." He went into the sitting room without replying and
found his shorts among his other clothes heaped in a pile on
the floor. She giggled luxuriously at his silent resentment . "Get
the paper from outside the door and turn on the television to
Gloucester," she directed.
"I've had it now, little sister, for what it was worth," he
thought, disdaining to reply. After donning underwear, sox,
pants and shoes, he went to the kitchen, poured the remnants
of the Scotch and bourbon into a water tumbler, ran it full
of water from the tap and drank it down without stopping.
On a high shelf beside the stove he noticed an unopened bottle
of imported sherry and a half-filled bottle of vermouth. Looking
through the refrigerator he found a remnant of grilled steak,
a barbecued chicken leg, and two fried crab cakes, all of which
he ate greedily without bread.
The liquor took immediate effect and he began to feel good,
bubbly with laughter inside, but slightly dazed as if everything,
both mental and material, were just a wee bit out of line. "What
I prescribe for the world is continuous drunkenness," he thought
amusedly as he broke two raw eggs into his highball glass
filled it with milk, and drank it down, breaking the egg yolks
in his mouth by the pressure of his tongue.
"Jesse!" he heard Kriss call to him from the bedroom
He felt very indulgent toward her now. Returning to the
bedroom, he turned on the small night light. "Yes, baby."
"Did you do what I told you to do?" she asked, laughing
up at him with childish humor, and he knew then she'd done
it to annoy him.
66


He pulled the covers from her and in the soft pink light
her nude body resembled one of Van Dyke's nudes. Sitting
slantwise on the bed he tickled her until she was nearly hys-
terical, then said, "That's what you get for being so mean,"
and left her to get the paper and make the coffee and toast.
She arose and turned on the television no Gloucester before
taking the paper to the John to begin her morning ritual. He
felt wonderful, no sex drives and almost completely senseless,
which was the way he would have loved to feel forever, but
he could never let a good glow be, so he went back to the kitchen
and drank a water tumbler of the vermouth. It put a sharp sar-
donic edge on his glow and his thoughts came back not vivid
but alive and about ten degrees off the line of conformity.
"Want some eggs, baby?" he called, and getting no reply,
went to the bathroom door. "Will you have eggs, chicken? Or
should I say do you have eggs."
"You can poach me an egg on toast." She was brushing her
teeth and her voice was muffled. "You'll find them in the ice-
box. I'm not laying this morning," she added with double-en-
tendre.
"Soup chicken now. Ought to do a Profile Of Woman At
Dawn for the New Yorker," he was thinking as he returned
to the kitchen, fried six slices of bacon and two eggs, poached
one egg in vinegared water that came out frayed and unin-
teresting looking, which he put on a slice of dry toast and served
it with a cup of black coffee.
"Your breakfast is ready," he called, then made himself
four well-buttered slices of toast, brought his own bacon and
eggs to the table and began eating.
He had neglected to turn up the volume of the television
and was surprised to look up and find the busts of a man and
a chimpanzee on the screen. "Good God! The Russians are
here!" he called to Kriss and she came to see the excitement.
"Oh, you must hear this; he's the cutest thing," she said
and hastened to turn on the sound.
She pulled the table in front of the archway so both of them
could see, sat on the stool beside him, and said with giggling
anticipation, "He says the most fantastic things."
He looked up again at the two grimacing faces and after
listening for a moment realized that the man was interviewing
the chimp.
"Well, what will happen after that?" Gloucester asked the
Chimpanzee with a condescending smirk.
"On July 1 responsible officials of the United States will
charge that slave labor exists in Russia on a scope unknown in
67


the history of man," the Chimpanzee replied grinningly.
"Not a Russian after all." Jesse thought. "Not even an ape-
man. Must be a man-man."
"That's no news," Gloucester protested. "You're supposed
to forecast news events."
"All right then," the Chimpanzee replied. "On September 8
a woman named Bella V. Dodd will testify before a Senate
Internal Security subcommittee in New York City."
"Who cares?" Gloucester interrupted rudely. "People are
always testifying . . ."
"Wait! Wait! the Chimpanzee said. "Following which the
New York City Board of Education will declare that ex-Com-
munists who admit party membership will not lose their teach-
ing positions if they are genuinely repentant." The Chimpanzee
looked at Gloucester expectantly. "Doesn't that sound like
wonderful doctrine?"
"Get on with the facts and forget the doctrine," Gloucester
snarled angrily.
"Just what I was saying, facts not fancy," the Chimpanzee
murmured slyly. "On May 21 fascist Spain will be admitted
to UNESCO. On June 2 Secretary Trygve Lie will deny that
the U.N. is a communist nest. On July 13 U.S. generals on
an inspection tour of Yugoslavia will endorse military aid
to communist Yugoslavia. On October 14 Senator O'Conor
of Maryland will urge the U.N. to dismiss Americans employed
by the U.N. who have refused to say whether or not they were
communists. On October IS, following the reorganization of
the Soviet Directorate, Stalin will say in capitalist countries
'So-called freedom of the individual does not exist any longer.'
On October 16 U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson will
urge the U.N. to continue to fight in Korea as long as is ne-
cessary to stop aggression and restore peace and security. On
November 8 police will fire on Negro rioters in Kimberly, South
Africa, killing fourteen and wounding thirty-nine. African
Negroes will be protesting against government segregation
of African Negroes in Africa." The Chimpanzee's interest
strayed; he began looking about for his bananas. "Police will
shoot into mob of ungrateful African Negroes, impressing
them with white man's goodwill toward African Negroes who
respect white man's rule in Africa," the Chimpanzee concluded,
yawning with an air of extreme boredom. After all, no one
was shooting down chimpanzees.
"The little stinker!" Kriss said. "Imagine the U.S. giving
military aid to those communists in Yugoslavia!"
"That's what I'll do! I'll write a book about chimpanzees,"
68


She smiled her secret sensual smile.
At the front door he peeped through the Judas window to
see if the coast was clear. He heard footsteps and waited until
he heard the outer door open and shut. Then he went hurriedly
down the corridor, relaxing only when he had safely reached
the street.
"Not that I give a damn for myself," he thought. But he
didn't know what might result from her neighbors seeing a
Negro man coming from her apartment early in the morning.
She cared less about it than he did. But he didn't know that
.
It was shortly after nine o'clock when Jesse let himself into
the apartment where he lived. "I hope all those damn birdmen
are at work," he thought. "Or at least visiting some other nest."
He didn't turn on the light in the pitchblack hallway because
he'd have to go back and turn it off after turning on the second
light . As he groped his way through the treacherous tunnel,
bumping first into one hazard and then another, Napoleon
came tearing from the kitchen, barking furiously, and began
nipping at his ankles. He aimed a vicious kick but missed him
in the dark and kicked the leg of an unseen table instead, the
sharp pain running up his legbone . . .
"You little bastard! he hissed. "Wait till I get you in the
light!"
"Napoleon, now you behave yourself," came the dulcet
voice of Leroy. "Don't you know Mr. Robinson yet?"
"Oh, he's not bothering me," Jesse lied, muttering under
his breath, "The little sissy cur!" Aloud he continued, "He's
just saying hello."
Leroy was waiting for him in the dim front hall, his big teeth
grinning from his round black face, his big belly pushing the
soiled white shirt down over the half-buttoned fly of his greasy
black uniform pants. "I believe Napoleon likes you," he lilted
coyly. "He's just flirting." He shook his finger at the popeyed
little beast.
"You stop flirting with Mr. Robinson." The mop-shaped
dog trotted complacently back to the kitchen where his ancient
sire was dozing beneath the kitchen stove, dreaming of young
lions frolicking on the African coast
.
"Perfectiy normal," Jesse thought. "Sane as life." He tried
to get past Leroy by saying, "I've been peeping at hole cards
all night. I'm beat."
But Leroy saved the choice morsel. "Your wife stopped
by last night after you'd left. She wanted to get some blankets."
"Oh!" Suddenly everything went crazy, abnormal in an
70


insane world.
"You've been holding out on me," Leroy accused coquet-
tishly. But on seeing the bleak drawn expression that had come
over Jesse's face, he quickly dropped the levity. "Mrs. Robinson
is a very fine-looking woman."
"Thanks." Leroy"s face swam before his vision and he thought
he was going to be sick. He staggered blindly toward his room.
"Oh, I almost forgot. She wants some sheets too," Leroy
added. "And said to tell you she was getting along fine. She
asked how you were getting along and I told her . . ."
"Thanks," Jesse cut him off, finally managing to get his
room door open. "I'll get them for her sometime this morning.
Thanks very much." And he closed the door in Leroy's face.
"Who times these things?" he thought, and the next moment
he was lying face down across the bed crying with deep gasping
sobs. "Don't let her get hurt, God. Please don't let her get
hurt," he kept praying over and over until the paroxysm passed,
then he stood, leaning weakly against the dresser top, and
stared at his ravaged reflection.
"Jesse Robinson," he said in a voice of utter futility. "Jesse
Robinson. There must be some simple thing in this life that
you don't know. Some little thing. Something every other per-
son born knows but you." After a moment, without being aware
that he had moved, he found himself at the window looking
down across the flats of Harlem. His vision encompassed a
sea of rooftops from 135th Street and Eighth Avenue until
it was lost in the mists of East River, like sharp-angled waves
of dirty water in the early sun, moving just enough to form
a blurred distortion. "Every other nigger in this whole town
but you." There'd been a line in a piece he'd written for a
white daily newspaper years ago, which all Negroes had objected
to: "Just a pure and simple faith in the white folks and the
days . . ." For ten years he'd forgotten it; now it came back
to mind. "Your trouble, son. You got no faith."
The shimmering distortion of the rooftops made him nau-
seated. "Must be the way everybody sees the world," he thought
bitterly. "All nauseated. Every mother's son of them!" He
sat down weakly on the horribly covered couch, bent over,
swallowing down the vomit that kept ballooning into his mouth.
"It's normal, though," he tried to convince himself. "Any s.o.b.
who sees it otherwise is crazy. Un-nauseated bastard abnormal.
Put him away. Going around shouting, Peace, it's wonderful!
Lock him up! Menace to society." Suddenly he thought of
the woman editor who, upon reading the galley proofs of
his first novel that had been submitted for a prize, said it
71


made her sick at the stomach, nauseated her. "Fine lady! Per-
fectly normal!"
He felt a great need of a drink. His hands shook when he
held them out and he could feel his legs trembling. He couldn't
make it to the store but he could telephone for a bottle. But
when he stood up he noticed by the clock on the dresser that
it was only a little past nine-thirty. Stores wouldn't be open
until ten. Half hour; another half hour to be delivered. "Too
Late the Opiate—Race Problem." He debated whether to
ask Leroy for a drink, but decided against it. "If I have to
look at that buzzard's greedy eyes, I'll vomit," he thought
.
His reflection in the mirror showed that he was fully dressed,
even to his trench coat, but minus his hat. His hat was on the
bed where it had fallen off while he was crying.
And suddenly it was all back and he knew all his vagrant
thoughts had been a shield, but to no avail. It was back and
he knew he couldn't escape it, no matter how much liquor he
drank. He lay down on the bed without undressing, his black
shoes on the white spread, and put his hat over his face, and
gave in to it, crying quietly to himself. "Jesse Robinson. How
do these people do it, son? The white man is fouling on them
too, and the days don't know them either. How is it they keep
their wives, bring up children, get along? Why can't you believe
too? They say after the first bite it tastes like sugar. How come
you have to be the only one to act a fool? And think you're
being noble, too. . . ."
The winter before the one just past, the last winter he and
Becky were together, they had lived in an isolated summer
resort on a small island in upstate New York, where he had
been employed as a caretaker. The blankets and sheets she
wanted were part of a shipment of rejects the proprietors had
sold to them for a fraction of the list price.
It had been pleasant there among the empty houses, far
from the hurts of modern city life. No condescensions and
denunciations, no venomous intrigues and shattering infidel-
ities, no Negro problem and bright shining world of race rela-
tions with all its attendant excitement and despair—the frantic
frenzied and ofttimes funny interracial social gatherings, the
frenetic interracial sex, the abnormally sharpened wits and
equally sharpened spite, the veneer of brotherhood and ex-
change of beautiful ideas in a ghostly garden of hope, and
the unrelenting hatred of them all, white and black, if you
did not agree that history was made in bed—no mean and
undemuning competition with your black brothers for the
72


favors of the white folks, which had always reminded him of
lines from that devastating poem, "Three Ways of Hunger,"
by Francis Robert White:
Want will assume a lost, Lysippan
Animal proportion of man:
Small of head and long of arm's reach,
Whose knuckles break, break again
In the brute contest for contested ends.
His duties had been light, raking leaves, a few minor repairs,
and nothing after the snow came in late November. The pro-
prietors had known he was a writer, had given him the job
for that reason, believing him to be honest and chiefly wanting
someone to keep a close watch on the property. He and Becky
had a car to use, a lovely cottage with central heating, a fire-
place and plenty of wood. And there had been a little terrier,
owned by one of the proprietors, that had stayed with them;
and in the cellar a hogshead of homemade wine that tasted
a little like muscatel but was dry and very strong, which they
had drunk all winter. It was full of dead gnats and had to
be strained, but on occasion, to show off his ruggedness, he
drank it with the dead gnats floating about in the glass.
"Ah laks marinated gnats," he would say. "Marinated gnats
is good." Amusing himself with this parody on a fine novel
written by a fellow Negro author and highly praised by all
nonchauvinistic critics, the part of which he remembered most
vividly was a bit of dialogue between the protagonist and his
brother:
—Ah likes chiddlins, do you like chiddlins?
—Ah likes chiddlins.
—Chiddlins is good.
—Ah likes de big gut, do you likes the big gut?
—Ah like de big gut.
—De big gut is good.
It was very cold that winter and the lake froze and all day
long the ice fishermen sat beside their fires, tending their lines.
Gradually he'd come to find an inner peace, such as he had
never known, and the sickness following the vile stoning of
his second book had almost gone. He had begun his book:
/ Was Looking for a Street. In a sense he had almost found that
street.
When spring came and the summer crew came back, his
73


job was over. He had bought a fifteen-year-old Plymouth sedan
with part of the money he had saved, and they went to Bridge-
port, Connecticut, and rented a room in the home of a widow
who worked as a domestic. Why Bridgeport? Why not Yonkers?
Or New Haven? Afterwards, he never really knew. At the time
he knew that Bridgeport had a Socialist mayor, and he vaguely
remembered driving through it once, and it had seemed such
a pleasant town.
Each morning he drove out to Barnum Park and found a
quiet spot of shade beside the Sound in which to park; and
sat on the back seat with his typewriter on his knees and wrote.
The sounds of the lapping of the waves and the cries of the
sea gulls fishing in the rocky shoals were ineffably soothing,
and he was at peace with his work.
Their money ran out about the middle of July and they
decided to return to New York City from whence they'd gone
upstate to the resort, and she would try to get a job in the
Welfare Department. He advertised his car for sale in the clas-
sified section of the evening daily—First $100 gets sound-
bodied Plymouth sedan containing floating-power motor.
The day the advertisement ran Becky took their last twelve
dollars and went to New York City to put in her application,
intending to return that evening, leaving him a half dollar
for cigarettes.
At eleven-thirty that morning he contracted to sell the car
to a young immigrant worker at the G.E. factory who was
to return with the money shortly after he got off work at four.
At three-thirty he drove down to the corner of Fairfield
Boulevard to buy cigarettes. On his return, when pulling from
the curb, his front bumper caught in the fender of a new Buick
Roadmaster that was passing too close on his left, and jerked
it off. The Buick was driven by a white-haired white lady,
dressed immaculately in a mauve-colored tweed suit that
looked as if it might have cost more than he had earned from
his second book—on which he had worked for more than a
year. She was a very important person, and despite the fact
she had been driving on the wrong side of a one-way street,
and that her breath smelled pleasantly of excellent cocktails,
she sent fer a policeman and had him arrested for reckless
driving. This not because she hated Negroes or wished to
humiliate or harm him in any manner; simply because her
husband was continuously cautioning her to drive carefully
and she intended to prove by the record that she had done so.
But he wasn't worried. He hadn't broken any laws. How
could they arrest him?
74


receive money from the outside. And he could not permit her
to visit her husband until visiting day. Then she began to
cry.
By that time it was four o'clock in the afternoon and the
telegraph office closed at five. In the meantime, Jesse had been
marched to the mess hall for his supper of stale bread, macaroni
and boiled cabbage, and marched back to his cell. "Anyway,
the food is better than in Russia—they say in the newspapers,"
he thought.
Luckily, the warden couldn't bear to see a woman cry. This
seemed to be a decent woman. He wondered how these decent
colored women always got mixed up with some no-good hus-
band. So he relented, impressing upon her that he was breaking
the prison rules, but he would see what he could do. He had
a statement typed, giving her the authority to draw the money,
and sent it by a guard to Jesse's cell to have it signed. Then
he countersigned it, and by then it was fifteen minutes to five.
She ran down the stairs and looked for a taxi. On the second
street she found one and reached the telegraph office one
minute before closing time. She drew the money, returned,
and bailed Jesse out. When he came into the front hall where
she waited, he saw at once that she'd been crying. Her body
was trembling all over and her eyes looked huge and dark with
pain in her small heart-shaped face.
"Let's get out of here," he said.
They went back to police headquarters where he'd parked
the car. It had a red ticket for parking overnight. He put the
ticket in his pocket, started the motor, drove back to the house.
The young man who wanted to buy the car was waiting for
him on the porch. Jesse knocked twenty-five dollars off the
price because of the bent bumper and crumpled fender, and
the young man was satisfied.
Becky fixed a makeshift dinner and they ate silently. After-
wards he said, "Let's pack."
They had two wardrobe trunks and three suitcases, but they
couldn't get in everything they owned, so they left some clothing
and several paintings in the basement of their landlady's house.
Then he went to the station and found a transfer man to take
the trunks to the station.
At eight o'clock next morning they caught the New Haven
Limited to New York City. When they came out into Grand
Central Station, he paused for a moment beside a wastepaper
container and tore the red Bridgeport traffic violation ticket
into tiny bits. His customiarily voluminous thoughts composed
for the occasion only two words: "Screw youl"
77


to breath and everything began going and coming "Unnatural
Nigger," he said to his reflection. "O heart, lose not thy nature
.... Wonder where the old plagiarist stole all that crap.
But it fits, though. It reckons. Maybe the old bastard was God,
as Swinburne used to claim. Image anyway. Same as Mr. Ward.
For who could bear the whips and scorns of time, the op-
pressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of
dispiz'd love, the Law's delay, the insolence of office, and the
spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, when he him-
self might his quietus make, with a bare bodkin? Who can
say that makes less sense than: Blessed are the meek: for they
shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they that hunger and thirst
after righteousness for they shall be filled. Blessed are the mer-
ciful for they shall obtain mercy. Or that both are not equally
senseless?"
If was ten minutes after ten, he noticed. "Get it my damn
self," he decided. He wiped his greasy face with a bath towel,
put on his sunglasses and his hat, and took off his trench coat.
There was a slight smudge of lipstick on his white shirt collar,
but it didn't matter.
When he left his room, through the open door of the bedroom
opposite, he saw Leroy standing beside the bed, his big black
body clad only in a brief undershirt. "That's where those old
boys missed it" he thought. Those who lamented and those
who railed and those like Henry James who avoided and ig-
nored. If one of them had ever written: Alas poor Culture,
I knew him when, a fellow of infinite jest: of a most excellent
fancy, he hath borne me on his back a thousand times. Here
hung those lips, that I have kissfd I know not how oft. But
now his place hath been taken by uncouthness, a mean and
sordid fellow without humor or refinement. How I despise
this lowborn prole. But methinks, fair friends, that he is here
to stay, a way of life, for a thousand years to come—he might
have rolled along with Homer."
Napoleon charged from the kitchen, skidding on the polished
floor, barking furiously, nipping at his ankles, momentarily
deflecting his train of thought; the dulcet voice of Leroy called,
"Napoleon! You behave yourself and stop barking at Mr.
Robinson. Mr. Robinson knows you're here."
As he groped his way down the long dark corridor, pitch
black through his sunglasses, the pop-eyed cur yapping at
his heels, he returned to his stream of thought: "Once it was
only the sport of kings; then the upper middle classes, aristo-
crats, and nouveau riche took it up. But now the masses have
it . Everybody's uncouth now. Probably a good thing, too."
79


chapter seuen
Dave was coming for dinner and Kriss had donned her red
silk Chinese Mandarin robe embellished with gold dragons,
along with her pert Persian slippers of red suede, handsewn
with gold thread. At least, or rather, Dave had called her
at the office to say he wanted to see her and she had invited,
nay, demanded, that he come to dinner. She knew he was com-
ing, but whether he would get dinner depended on which turn
her thoughts would take during the half hour before he was
to arrive, not to say whether or not he would stay for dinner,
a contingency the consideration of which she kept trying to
float from mind by a rapid succession of Scotch-whiskey high-
balls.
But this possibility, verily a probability, had refused to
be floated, the proof of which was the flaming ensemble she
now wore. She knew this was enough to set Dave's teeth on
edge. For she had cajoled him into buying the slippers to
go with the robe which he afterwards had learned had been
given her by Fuller Halperin—in fact, the information had
come from herself: That Fuller had paid a hundred dollars
for it in San Francisco and had given it to her that Christmas
weekend in Washington when Dave had been under the im-
pression she had gone to Chicago on business and had bought
it in Marshal Field's basement . After all, Dave was a lawyer
and wasn't expected to know merchandise. Besides which,
Dave not only thought it made her look like a strumpet, but
thought it proved the point as well. And because the sight
of it on her so provoked him, she thought of it as her muleta.
Now she smiled maliciously as she sat in her three-legged
chair, leafing through the pages of the latest New Yorker,
enjoying the cartoons along with her fifth highball, the com-
bination being aphrodisical in a highly intellectual way. The
maliciousness in her smile was in no way related to her enjoy-
ment of the New Yorker. The maliciousness derived from con-
sideration of the contingency that would not be floated away,
and the additional reflection that Dave would want to sleep
with her, because she looked like a whore; and he'd sit there
looking at her in the red robe thinking of how she'd slept with
this Fuller person all during the year of their "engagement"
and had received gifts and money from him almost equal to
her salary, which proved she was a whore. "God knows how
80


many others she has slept with," he would think, wanting her
in the way that men, good and bad the world over, desire
whores and promiscuous women, and despising himself because
of it
.
And the thought lit a rage inside her. "You lousel" she
thought. "You Jewish louse! I'm not good enough for you?"
She began to cry, her full matronly face stretching and pucker-
ing in the ugly grimace of the little towheaded girl called
"Dutch" crying because her mother had slapped her drunken
father the day he lost his grocery store in a little village in North
Dakota. "You ruined me, you louse!" And in that moment of
emotional torture, she couldn't have said whom she meant by
this last louse.
There were many such moments now, since Dave had thrown
her over, when she was confused as to really who had ruined
her. Just as in later years ofttimes her memory confused the
great event of losing her virginity with the time she had diph-
theria. The confusion was brought about by the recollection
of her uneasiness, which had been the same in both instances;
now twenty-one years later this being the most that she clearly
recalled of either instance.
The one time they had been skating on the millpond with
the bunch. It had been a raw cold day with an icy blast coming
down from Canada. But to please Willard she'd worn only
her light skating suit. She'd become chilled to the bone. But
Willard loved to skate and she wouldn't leave him. Although
cold and miserable she had been happy to glide along holding
his arm.
Finding her mother away when they'd returned home, he'd
come in with her. Something in his attitude had made her know
that he would ask. He'd looked at her with that appraising
onesided smile that had always made her heart turn over.
By then her throat had ached horribly and she'd felt sick
enough to faint . She'd wanted nothing better than to go to
bed. But she'd felt a strange uneasiness that made her stay
with him. She had been afraid to disappoint him; he had so
many other places to go and there had been so many other
girls who'd wanted him. She'd been afraid to admit being so
sick. But the room had begun to blur. Against her will she
had fount! herself saying, "Willard, you had better go; I'm
awfully sick."
After he'd gone she had thought, "I must be really awfully
sick to send him home." Then she'd stumbled upstairs to her
bed.
Her mother had thought at first she had a cold. But the
81


gether, each instinctively disliking the other, but she trying to
excite him to the pitch of asking so she could let him know how
much she disliked him by refusing, while he, for his part, gave
no indication that he would ever ask. However, it had given
her prestige to be seen with him.
A doll-like young Siamese prince with dusky velvet skin
and dark doe eyes began courting her with flowers and candy
and dinners in swank downtown restaurants. She'd spent a
weekend with him in New York City. When Ronny had learned
of that, he'd cursed her in a violent rage, calling her a "nigger
lover"; in one breath asking her how she could do that to him,
and in the next asking her to marry him. She hadn't understood
at that time those subtleties of white supremacy that inspired
this native white supremacist to seek her hand in marriage who
had bedded with a Negro, whereas before this incident (which
she recalled as being scarcely more exciting than a conducted
YWCA tour) he hadn't paid much heed to her. She would have
finally had her revenge, but for a letter from her mother stating
that her father was ill and they could not afford to keep her
there any longer. So she'd accepted his proposal and the next
day they'd announced their betrothal to the gang, and the day
, after the gang had gotten up a party to celebrate and even then
she hadn't known what they were celebrating. An apartment
had been provided for the prenuptial ceremony to which they
had been jovially if somewhat forcefully, escorted after a
drinking bout. But she had no objections whatsoever, by then
being very curious and knowing herself to be lovely. She had
only Willard's word for this but somehow she knew that he
was an authority. Spread across the bed she'd found a lovely
sheer nightgown that showed her to advantage. But after fid-
dling about in the bathroom and kitchen for almost an hour with-
out having removed his coat, insensitive to her charms which
she paraded seductively in her transparent gown, he had sud-
denly announced, "I'm going to run to the corner drugstore
and get some toothbrushes since we're going to stay all night."
An hour later he had returned exhausted with two new tooth-
brushes to fall into a deep sleep, while she had lain awake and
fuming until dawn. Thus they had sealed their engagement and
had faced the world next day with shining teeth.
That summer she worked on a WPA research project directed
by Harold Ramsey, who was then becoming impressed by
his destiny as a black Sigmund Freud in the blackest of all
Black Belts. It was a glorious era of research into what is
termed naively by U.S. terminologists as the "Negro Problem"
—as if this American dilemma of what to do with twenty mil-

83


lion descendants of American slaves, freed from bondage as
a result of a bloody civil war, and granted equality by the due
process of constitutional amendment, was some riddle these
poor folk had cooked up for the mortififlcation of white in-
tellect and could themselves solve at a moment's notice if
they so desired.
Educated Negroes in great numbers accepted this challenge
and set about with great zeal, augmented to a considerable
degree by white folks' money, to effect the solution—effect-
ing sounded more impressive than confecting and more con-
scientious than affecting.
Naturally Kriss was greatly impressed by Harold Ramsey,
one of the greatest apostles of this noble cause; but at that
time he hadn't noticed her. She would have been both delighted
and honored to have married him and shared her genuine guilt
with his professional torment, but unfortunately he was already
married to one white woman whom he paraded about town
in his big new automobile, being wined and dined, not to say
consulted, by the rich and recent negrophiles—and two white
wives would have been outrageous even in Chicago.
So on the first Monday in October, shortly after the begin-
ning of the new fall term, she had married Ronny in a veritable
sweat of guilt. But it had been June of the following year before
she had discovered the reason his friends had boosted the mar-
riage was that he was bisexual.
They'd taken a three-room flat in an old converted mansion
near the campus and had quickly settled down to a married
life of work, study and carousing with the other tenants, sim-
ilarly settled down, a motley assortment of students, artists,
writers and other rising young geniuses and a few old relics
in whom the rising powder had evidently been omitted. There
had been a party in one of the joints, shifting as was customary
from flat to flat as the liquor ran out, and becoming enlarged
on the way—like a seeded cat trying to get home to Akron from
bitter exile in Cincinnati in the allotted three-score days—with
couples drifting off from time to time to answer the call of
nature. At three o'clock next morning when Kriss staggered
with the assistance of some unidentified male to her flat and
found Ronny with some tramp of an artist from upstairs, she
said indignantly, "I'm not going to sleep on the sofa." Her
escort said that was unnecessary as long as his double bed on
the floor remained untenanted. So at eight o'clock she return-
ed, sleepier than before, and found that Ronny had changed
bedmates for a strapping fine sailor. She was alone this time
and outnumbered, so she slept on the sofa after all.
84


But that night, accompanied by much crying and continuous
drinking, Ronny related the grim story of his love for a foot-
ball hero, bosom friend from childhood, not to mention bed-
mate, who had been killed on a hunting expedition the two
of them had taken one summer, by a Negro woodsman with
an axe, the Negro being subsequently hunted down and lynched.
This was by way of being more of an explanation of why he'd
slept with the sailor than why he'd dedicated his life to the
Negro problem. It was a perfectly reasonable explanation for
both pursuits, but at that time she didn't understand this and
despised him on both accounts.
"The lice! All of them are lice!" she thought. Judging her
by a code of morals not one of them accepted for himself.
"God knows I should know!" she thought. She'd been intimate
with the president of the Foundation all during the time Ronny
was in the Army. He had been one of the most revered and
important men in his field in the world, but he had been as
much of a wretch as any of the others. Ofttimes after they'd
attended a serious conference in which weighty problems had
been discussed and analyzed he had escorted her home and
whipped her unmercifully until she had yielded to his every
desire. Then there had been the worn-out heir of one of the
nation's most glorious mercantile names who had demanded
detailed and graphic accounts of her behavior with big black
Negroes—she having to invent these when none had occurred
—then beating her until she begged for mercy, after which,
catlike, he had soothed her hurts.
How could they feel she wasn't good enough for them she
thought sobbingly. How could they? When they'd made her
what she was themselves.
So she railed against the injustice of it with all the bitterness
of her soul, at the same time accepting the moral judgment
that she was ruined. They'd given her a drunkard for a father
and a wretch for her first lover, two abortions and the loss
of fertility, a homosexual for a husband and a bevy of men
whose lusts she had been required to satisfy because of their
importance, receiving no satisfaction in return; this in addition
to a North Dakota farm girl's strong healthy body and com-
pulsive natural urges. Which was against all reason. But when
she'd taken Negroes as lovers they'd crucified her.
"Kriss is solving the Negro problem in bed," they'd said
of her, solving their own problems in her bed alongside the
Negro problem; at the same time feeling she wasn't good enough
for them and treating her like dirt. They'd made her feel like
dirt before she'd ever thought of sleeping with a Negro; and
85


only when sleeping with a Negro could she feel secure in
the knowledge that she wasn't dirt. Which was the same thing
they had done to the Negroes. So with them she never felt
ruined; they never thought of her as ruined. They were ruined
by being born black, ruined in the eyes of her race, and they
kept laughing at the idiocy of a race that ruined its own women
and threw them in bed with men of another race they'd similar-
ly ruined. To be sure, some of the Negroes with whom she'd
been intimate had been weird enough. But no more weird than
the realization that she was married to a homosexual.
They even had the effrontery to talk about their honor. "Is
that what the louse is worried about—his honor?" she asked
herself with venomous rage. He'd eaten her food and enjoyed
her company and pleasured in her bed, never so much however
as when he'd finally decided she was a whore whom he didn't
have to marry; and what was more he'd taken her extra paint
she'd had blended especially for her own apartment to paint
his own dirty flat. And this paint had been mixed by a Negro
who had been recommended to her by Negro friends, and who
had charged her three times what it was worth to paint her
three-room apartment in addition to the cost of the paint. And
this louse had taken her extra paint, and now he was coming
to get his watch which he had pawned to her the month before
to pay his income tax, after he'd decided she wasn't good enough
for him to marry.
"I'll make you crawl, you louse!" she resolved.
It being Friday night she could drink herself unconscious
and disgust him even more with her. Because she knew that
however he felt now, once he had wanted to marry her rather
desperately. Nor would she let him have his watch, even if
he had the money to pay his debt. And she'd be damned if
she would give him dinner.
"I'll pay you out, you louse!"
She wished now that Jesse had left something—his hat or
coat—which she could place in some obvious place for Dave
to see.
But sight of him brought a change of mind. He was a tall,
straight-limbed man, conservatively dressed in a dark gray
Brooks Brothers suit, black wingtip shoes, striped shirt and
dark tie. The absence of shoulder pads in the form-fitted jacket
gave him a Pall Mall look, but his face had none of the blind
snobbery of those escapees from socialism. It was a long narrow
face with a strong nose and splendid bones and a wide sensuous
mouth. At sight of her in the red silk robe his lips curled slightly
in an indulgent smile.
86


"Hello, Kriss," he greeted in his deep, controlled voice.
"Expecting company?"
Her heart melted and she felt suddenly cheap. Each time
she saw him after a short absence he impressed her anew with
being so clean and handsome, what she'd always envisioned
as a "Harvard man." And all at once she had a desire to please
him, to be modern and restrained and prove she was a good
loser; and because she knew he was courting another woman
she wanted more than ever to sleep with him. Her glazed blue
eyes beneath her swollen dead-white vaselined lids swam with
sensuousness.
"You're company now," she murmured, preceding him
to the sitting room.
Although he had keys to her apartment, to both outer and
inner doors, he'd chosen to ring both bells to emphasize his
position; and as he followed her down the hall, laid the three
keys on the hall table.
She took her glass for a refill, and asked him, grinning mis-
chievously, "Scotch still? Or have you changed to Kummel?"
He lowered his lank frame on the sofa, ignoring the dig.
"Have you seen the Monet exhibition?"
"Dot wanted me to go with her, but I was too tired," she
called from the kitchen, mumbling the words in a manner
she'd picked up from Maud.
"What?"
"Just a moment, dear." After mixing the drinks she put
the frozen whipped potatoes out to thaw and the steak to warm,
and debated for a moment whether to make him potato pan-
cakes, which he adored. But they were too much trouble, she
decided; she'd just do the green peas and salad as she'd planned,
although she wished she could make him something special.
She felt a warm glow of passion, recalling Maud's sage remark,
"All that men like is food, drink, and women," and felt tingly
to her finger tips. But when she passed the dining table and
saw the three keys he had placed there surreptitiously, her mood
went cold and malicious, the only hot thing left within her
being rage. However, her outward appearance remained the
same, she still grinned, so Dave didn't notice the change.
"Dot wanted to take me," she said, placing his drink on
a silver coaster on the table beside him. "But I've seen the
best of Monet in the Louvre, and besides I'm weary of Dot."
He sipped his drink and put it down, smiling at her absent-
mindedly. "What have you been doing lately?"
The question infuriated her, all the more because he seemed
preoccupied and didn't give a damn what she'd been doing.
87


She felt an impulse to tell him, "Just sleeping around, you
louse! What do you think?" But she only giggled in a way that
had always irritated him; it reminded him of the way his sister
used to giggle when she'd done something naughty.
"Oh, the usual thing," she said. "I went to a party Sunday—
just a staff party at Kirby's house in Bronxville. Arty was by
Monday—you've met him?" He nodded slightly. "He flew
in from Chicago to attend a conference. And Tuesday Johnny
took me to see Guys and Dolls—that's the third time I've
seen it . You know you took me to see it the first time, and it's
just as funny as ever." She laughed. "I adore that floating crap
game scene. Afterwards we went to the Versailles. Then Fuller
took me shopping Wednesday." She gave him a covert glance
to see the effect of this thrust, but he didn't seem to be listening.
"You needn't try to be so superior, you louse, I know the time
when that would have killed you," she thought viciously, con-
tinuing aloud with a sweet innocent smile, "Oh, just the
usual things a bachelor girl does in New York." And after
a pause, "Jesse Robinson was by last night."
Something in her voice made him look up. "Jesse Robinson?"
"Oh, that's right. You never met him. You met Harold."
"Is he a sociologist too?"
She knew he wanted to ask if he was another Negro, and
she smiled with an appearance of sensual reminiscence. "He's
a novelist. But that's right, you don't read novels." She finished
her drink and gave him a lidded look: "But that's not what
I like him for," she added, feeling an evil delight at the dull
flush that mounted his face.
He'd scarcely touched his glass but she asked sweetly, "Would
you like another drink, dear?" knowing that he detested Scotch
and never drank more than one highball, and that only at
some social gathering. He shook his head, half angrily. She
said, "It's just as well. Jesse practically cleaned me out, although
he brought a bottle of his own." She giggled, seeing his flush
deepen. "All writers drink like crazy, anyway."
"He had a good partner in you," he muttered.
"Partner in drink, partner in bed," she thought, smiling
sensually as she said, "I almost married him once," and flounc-
ed to the kitchen to mix her drink, throwing her hips more
than usual.
At last she'd achieved that superior feeling she used to
achieve with Ronny after she'd cuckolded him to his face and
challenged him to accuse her. She felt a delicious sense of
evil which tickled her all inside and the sight of the melting
potatoes and blood-dripping steak tickled her all the more.
88


"You can eat it raw, you louse!" she thought, taking a half
glass of the strong Scotch straight before mixing the highball,
and when she returned to Dave she staggered slightly and knew
she was getting drunk. Placing her drink with elaborate care
on its silver coaster atop the storage cabinet, she lowered her-
self carefully into her favorite three-legged chair, as amused
by and interested in the spectacle of herself as any curious
bystander would have been.
"I almost married you once, too," she resumed, her smile
now mixed with such maliciousness it seemed to drip sticky
venom. "Always a bedmate but never a bride."
He flushed crimson, straightening in his seat as the pins
and needles pricked, but kept his low deliberate voice con-
trolled. "I really shouldn't have called, Kriss, but I wanted to
leave your keys and get my watch. I'll give you a check with
whatever interest . . ."
"Oh, wait till after dinner, dear. . . . You know you're
invited to dinner?"
"Oh, I . . ." He was a nice man and she had him cornered.
"Please be sensible, Kriss. You know that I know you're not
going to prepare any dinner. You know I know you that well."
"You ought to," she said savagely, "as long as you've slept
with me."
He was red to the roots of his hair. "For God's sake, Kriss
can't we do a simple business transaction without a sordid
fight?"
"You can because you're a gentleman." She giggled suddenly
and called, "But I can't because I'm a whore. That's what you
called me, remember?"
"For Heaven's sake! You're throwing that up again. We
were both angry and you called me far worse."
"Did your mother tell you I was a whore? Or did you find
it out by yourself?"
He shrugged with disgust. "My mother likes you . . .
"But I'm not Jewish. If I joined the Synagogue and . .
giggling—"had the Rabbi circumcise me, would I be Jewish
enough for her then?"
"Let up, Kriss, let up!" he said in a low angry voice. "This
isn't getting us anywhere . . . ."
"Certainly isn't, dear . . . ."
". . . and it'd be silly to part hating one another ..."
"You've always hated me!" she flared. "You hate all gentiles,
you louse! You condescending louse. You think I'm dirt under
your feet!"
"... so let me give you a check for a hundred dollars and
89


Staggering to the telephone, supporting herself against the
wall, she called Jesse. An extremely courteous male voice,
Mr. Ward's, informed her that Jesse was out. She was overcome
by such a fury, the instrument trembled in her hand. "Probably
in bed with some black bitch!" she raged inwardly. "Probably
with his wife. ... If I find you sleeping with your wife, I'll
kill you!" she muttered. The rage passed as quickly as it had
come, and she began to giggle. Groping about in the haze before
her, she found the dial and began dialing another number with-
out being aware that Mr. Ward was still patiently waiting on the
line to ask is there was a message for Jesse.
"Hello, is this the Windemere Hotel?"
"I don't understand you," Mr. Ward replied. "You were
asking for Mr. Robinson."
"Robinson?" She had forgotten his existence. "Oh, Jesse
Robinson. Damn Jesse Robinson!"
She tried to bang the receiver on the rack, but it missed
and fell behind the nightstand, and she left it dangling on
its cord and staggered into the bathroom.
Deliberately she fumbled in the medicine cabinet, groping
for the bottle of sleeping pills which now she couldn't see.
Finally her hands encountered the small glass bottle. She
held it close to her eyes so she would make no mistake. It
was filled to the brim with small red and yellow capsules. She
pulled out the stopper and dumped them all into one hand.
With the other hand she turned on the faucet of the basin and
filled her plastic toothbrush glass. "Why did you do that to
me?" she sobbed, her mind having gone to another hurt, but
she didn't know what it was. "Why did you do that to me?"
Opening her mouth wide, she threw in the capsules with one
hand and raised the glass of water with the other. She choked
slightly, and then got them down. She didn't know that , only
four capsules had gone into her mouth, the rest scattering about
the floor and in the basin. She thought she had swallowed them
all, and in a vague alcoholic daze, she accepted her death with
the thought, "Now try to get your watch, you louse," and got
as far as her bed and fell face down across it
.
chapter eight
On his return from the liquor store that morning, Jesse stopped
at the super's and got the keys to the storeroom where his
trunks were stored. From the steamer trunk containing leftovers
91


from their light housekeeping days, he took two blankets,
four sheets and four pillowcases for Becky. He looked at
the dusty junk about him, abandoned trunks, broken furniture,
worn-out baby carriages and tried not to think of her.
Leroy was out with the dogs and he managed the dark cor-
ridor without being assaulted. On his dresser was a letter from
Hobson's, asking him to call. He called from Leroy's room
and the editor asked if he could come in that afternoon at
three.
"Now what?" he thought, going fluttery inside as the world
became distorted again. Sighing, he poured a half glass of
cheap bourbon and tossed it off, grimacing in the mirror.
He took off his coat and shirt and prepared to shave. Then,
half smiling, said, "Better wash this white stink off; no need
taking any chances," and stripped. The water in that house
was always scalding hot, and as he ran the huge old-fashioned
tub full to the overflow drain, he thought, "Smart super, not
his coal." Then as he lay stretched out in water hot enough to 1
scald a fowl for picking, he laughed, "Can't be a nigger though,
using white man's coal to heat water for other niggers—to bathe
in, too. Not American nigger! Must be a Mau Mau, masquerad-
ing as janitor creating coal and water shortages."
Hobson's was in an old building in the twenties on Fourth
Avenue. An elderly and dignified receptionist mistook him for
a messenger boy when he asked to see Mr. Pope. But when
he explained it was his own manuscript he wished to discuss
she flushed slightly and hastened to buzz Mr. Pope. "Go to
the end of this corridor and turn to the right," she directed,
smiling sympathetically. "His is the last office in the corner.
And he'll be waiting for you." This last to the tune of, T/Z
be waiting for you, Nellie. "I don't expect him to jump out
the window," he thought, smiling inwardly. "No such luck."
James Pope was a tall thin man with graying hair and a
British mustache, like a cross between Chamberlain and Eden,
dressed in baggy Brooks Brothers tweeds. He came around the
desk to shake Jesse's hand, his narrow face creased in an
apologetic smile.
"Welcome to the bastard's corner." He gripped Jesse's hand
and released it quickly.
"Black, isn't it," Jesse thought, but said aloud, smiling,
"Howya, Jim. You got us wrong. We just love editors."
Pope pulled up a worn leather chair. "Sit down." He went
behind his desk and offered cigarettes. Jesse declined. "Can't
92


say as I much blame them," Pope reflected "The publishing
business is lousy these days."
Jesse felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. How many
times had he heard these words, always a prologue to a rejection.
But he kept up his front. "We modern writers are just spoiled.
In the old days a writer starved in a garret for fifty years and
wrote seventy books, all masterpieces. We write one book and
want to get rich. I blame it all on Margaret Mitchell."
Pope's face resumed its customary expression of shame and
guilt, like that of a man who's murdered his mother and thrown
her body in the well, to be forever afterwards haunted by
her sweet smiling face.
"I'm afraid I have bad news for you."
Jesse just looked at him, thinking, "Whatever bad news you
got for me—as if I didn't know—you're going to have to
say it without me helping you. I'm one of those ungracious
oiggers."
"We've given your book six readings and Mr. Hobson has
decided to drop the option."
Jesse had been prepared for this from the moment he'd read
Pope's letter and now, before the reaction had set in, he just
felt argumentative. "I thought you were going to cut it."
Pope reddened slightly. "That was my opinion. I like the
book. I fought for it all the way. I think all it needs is cutting.
But Hobson thinks it reads like fictional autobiography. And
he doesn't like the title."
"/ Was Looking for a Street," Jesse quoted, turning it over
in his mind. "I was looking for a street that I could understand,"
he thought, and for a moment he was lost in memory of the
search.
"He said it sounds like a visiting fireman looking for a
prostitute's address," Pope said with his apologetic smile.
Jesse laughed, "That ought to make it sell."
Pope again assumed his look of guilt and shame. "The truth
is, fiction is doing very poorly. We're having our worst year
for fiction."
"Why not publish it as an autobiography then?"
"It would be the same. Hobson thinks the public is fed
up with protest novels. And I must say, on consideration, I
agree with him."
"What's protest about this book?" Jesse argued. "If anything,
it's tragedy. But no protest."
"The consensus of the readers was that it's too sordid. It's
pretty strong—almost vulgar, some of it."
* 93


"I don't understand you."
"Damn right you don't," Jesse thought. He didn't care to
remind Pope that a moment or so back he'd termed the rejected
novel as autobiographical. Instead he arose and picked up
the manuscript. "There's nothing more futile than arguing with
a rejection."
"You don't owe us a thing," Pope said, also standing.
Jesse grinned. "If I could get five hundred dollars from every
six readers, I'd soon catch up with Norman Vincent Peale."
Pope walked with him to the elevator, pressed the button,
and stood with him. "For my part I liked the book, Jesse.
It's a powerful piece of writing."
"Thanks."
"And please don't think of me as an enemy. Keep in touch
with me, please do."
"I will, thanks."
"I'm going to be in Breadloaf the month of August. I'd
like very much to have you come up and spend a weekend with
me."
Jesse gave him a quick curious look. "Thanks."
The elevator door opened. They shook hands again.
"Good luck with your manuscript," Pope said.
"Thanks."
There were two women and three men beside the operator
in the elevator, but already Jesse's thoughts had turned inward
and he didn't see them. "Jesse Robinson," he said distinctly.
One of the women gave a slight start and everyone turned to
look at him. "What did you think, son," he went on, "They'd
shave you for nothing and give you a drink." The two women
moved to the far corner of the elevator and looked straight
ahead. The men stared at him curiously. But he was not aware.
He smiled. "The ass," he said.
Jesse put the manuscript on the dresser amidst the other
junk and poured a half glass of the cheap bourbon. He tossed
it off and grimaced in < the mirror. "You were looking for a
street, eh, son?" he said. "But all you found was a blind alley."
He had eaten a substantial lunch of two fried pork chops, fried
potatoes, and what went for apple pie in a "Home Cooking"
lunch counter on Amsterdam Avenue, but found himself hungry
again. He was out of raw eggs and the milk had soured, so
he munched a chocolate bar absently and poured another drink,
thinking, "When in doubt, get pie-eyed." And then, "Be non-
chalant, drink a bottle of bourbon." And after another moment,
"You hired out for it, son. Nobody made you. You were the
95


best porter that Briggs & Sons ever had; old man Briggs said
so himself. . . ." His thoughts wandered off and he stood
for a moment with his right thumb dug into his right cheek,
stroking his upper lip with his index finger, his mind a vacuum.
Then he looked at his special account bankbook and dis-
covered that he had $198.47 left from the $500.00 He felt
a slight shock. "Oh, how the lucre fugit," he thought, and re-
cited aloud a half-remembered jinglet from bis childhood:
Oh how de ham do smell *
Oh how de boarders yell
Wen dey hear dat dinner bell
He laughed silently and said, "Damn right." And the next
thing he was conscious of was walking south on Convent toward
the arch of City College. His mind drew a blank for the elapsed
two hours and now it was six-thirty o'clock of a soft April
evening. Students were coming in a stream up toward the 145th
Street entrance to the subway. He went down the other way,
walking against the crowd. He staggered a little but he didn't
feel drunk. Although he didn't know when he'd left the house
nor where he'd intended going, it didn't worry him. He was
accustomed to these blanks of memory, and as far as he knew
nothing dreadful had ever happened to him during one of
them. At the moment he didn't remember the rejection, but
felt strangely depressed for some unattributable reason, and
in the back of his mind began silently singing his private duirge,
da-da-dee:
di
dee deeeee
dee
da da-da-da da
da-da v dee dee-dee do
da dee-dee
do -' da
doooooooo
At 140th Street he turned down the steep incline toward
St. Nicholas Avenue. To his befuddled senses the slope seened
quite level but his body tended to fall face-forward and he
began to run to keep up with his head which seemed some dis-
tance out in front of him. As he passed the church at the coiner
of Hamilton Avenue, he thought half-amusedly, "Open de
door, brethren, ol' devil's chasin' me; I'm gonna pop in, once
more around the block. . . ."
The next he knew he was sitting alone in Frank's restaur! int,
96


eating apple pie alamode and a heavy-set dark brother sitting
opposite a buxom dark sister in the booth opposite him, said
with a tolerant grin. "That's an interesting theory, young man
—seems to me as if I've heard it before—but I don't believe
well solve this problem by making an all-Negro state. Who're
we gonna be working for? Now my idea is what we need are
more Negro-owned factories. Now the Negroes who got money
ought to build factories to hire Negroes who ain't; that's what
the white folks do and that's why they got everything. Now
take Joe Louis and all the money he had. . . ."
Jesse's attention wandered. The woman looked disapproving.
He wondered what he had said. Finally, when the man stopped
giving his theories about Negro-owned factories and Negro-
owned steamships and Negro-owned skyscrapers and why
Negroes in the South didn't get togehter and buy up a heap
of land and why those in the North didn't get together and make
their own automobiles and distill their own whiskey and can
their own vegetables and why those in South Africa didn't
mine their own diamonds, Jesse said, "It was just an idea."
He felt quite sober as he looked about at the many-hued faces
of the diners, here and there an interracial couple, and three
tables in the rear seating large groups of whites, probably
families. Although it was located on 125th Street just off St
.
Nicholas Avenue, in the heart of Harlem, when Jesse first
came to New York six years before, Negroes had only been
served at the tables along one side. Now they ate all over. "You
see, boy," he said to himself. "Someday well wake up and
find all this race business gone and everything changed, people
living in complete harmony without any thought of color."
Then, blowing laughter through his nose, added, "But old
Gabriel is going to have one hell of a job with his horn."
The waiter brought him a check for a roast beef dinner
with soup and salad extra. "I must have eaten it," he muttered,
and then in reply to the waiter's perplexed look, added, "It's
always good to know what one eats."
"You can always depend on Frank's," the waiter beamed.
The bill was for $3.05. "Damn right," Jesse thought. "Too
bad I didn't get here first."
Outside was a soft warm night and the Harlem folk were
crowded in the street. Jesse walked through the milling crowds,
jostling and being jostled. The neon-lighted bars were jumping
and the red buses bullied through the tight stream of traffic.
Here and there a big braying voice pushed from the bubble
of noise. The unforgettable scent of smoking marijuana pierced
the gaseous mixture of motor fumes, cheap colognes, alcohol,
97


At one-thirty he found himself having trouble with the locks
of the front door to the apartment where he lived. He didn't
know whether he'd gone to bed with the woman or not, for
by then he had forgotten her. Nor did he know how long he'd
been fumbling with locks to the door. Finally he got it open
and found it almost as difficult to get it locked again. Slowly
he groped his way through the dark hall. Napoleon growled
from the dark but did not attack, being uncertain whether it
was a bonaflde burglar or just the roomer. Jesse noticed im-
mediately that the bedding was gone. Then his gaze went next
to the rejected manuscript
.
Up until then nothing had seemed strange. Now he was plung-
ed into a state of mind where nothing seemed natural. Becky
was gone and the book was returned. You can't marry a book.
"No matter how much you sleep with it, you don't get any
babies," he thought. "Else, son, you would have sired more
manuscripts than the whole Victorian age." He looked at
his reflection in the mirror. His greasy face was haggard, his
eyes glazed and sunken, deep weary lines framing a catfish
mouth. "Jesse Robinson," he said. "Can't eat bitter, son. No
more than natural, anyway. Christian nation. Don't forget
that. Pagans castrated aU black slaves. Christians let them have
families. Christian way. Profit in it too. Don't forget the profit
.
More pops more pickaninnies sired. Just don't get bitter son.
Remember it was business; strictly business. Funny, really.
Funny as hell if you get the handle to the joke. Like the
Englishman said to the cannibal, 'You eat me, you savage,
but youll play hell digesting me.' Or would an Englishman say
•play hell?' Doesn't matter. Nobody's ever digested an English-
man yet. Black men not that hard to digest but our Christians
have weak stomachs. Can't even digest their own Christianity.
Too bad, son. Too bad, so sad, you're mad. No point in being
mad, son. Better get your black ass glad." He stared at his
ugly reflection. "Don't blame them, either," he said. "Hard
a time as they had getting this world, make no sense to give
it away, share it up with some wliining idiot like you. Sensible
people. Look what they did with Christianity. Here a poor
martyr died to bring his people freedom. And these people
used his philosophy to enslave the world. If that ain't smart
it will have to do. Get smart too, son. Be happy. Smile. A
nigger's big white teeth are worth more than a college education.
Show your teeth, son. Show your worth. Pry those gums open
with a smile." He looked for his whiskey bottle, found it
nearly finished. He had no recollection of drinking the greater
part of it. "No wonder," he said, emptying the bottle into


his glass. He raised the glass to his reflection. "Smile." He
grimaced as the sharp liquor burnt down his throat.
Before he'd finished undressing, the dirge had started faintly
in the back of his mind:
dee-dee-dee-dee dee dee dee dee
o
o o o o dooooooooooooooooooooo
For a short time after he'd gone to bed he tried to decide
what course to take with the manuscript, whether to buckle
down and try to do the necessary revisions and cutting himself
before his money ran out, or whether to try to find another
publisher and get a contract first . "A writer writes, a fighter
fights," he muttered finally. "You jumped the gun, son. This
is the age of the great black fighters. Next century for great
black writers. They played you a dirty trick. You might have
been a great fighter. But some joker put a pen in your hand.
You should have stuck him with it."
dee-dee-dee-dee dee dee dee dee dee
o
o o o o o dooooooooooooooooooooo
When he lay flat the room swam. His heart beat with
great slow strokes, like an artesian pump, shaking his entire
body. He felt physically exhausted but his mind kept churning
at fever pitch, twitching convulsively as if in the throes of
death. He decided to read and took down his volume of Gorki's
Bystander. The book fell open at a page and he found himself
reading over and over again in a strange feverish daze the
two lines he'd already read a hundred times: "Clim heard some-
one in the crowd question gravely, doubtfully: 'But was there
really a boy? Perhaps there was no boy at all!" He was convinced
that those words contained a message, that through them some
force was endeavoring to communicate some profound know-
ledge to him, perhaps the whole solution to the mystery, which
he couldn't interpret . . . . Perhaps there was no boy at all
.... Perhaps there was no boy at all. . . ." Upon the churn-
ing water there floated only a black caracul cap. Small, leaden
pieces of ice swam about it . The water heaved up in little
waves, reddish in the rays of the sunset. . . ." Perhaps there
was no boy at all. . . . Beating the boy! That's the way
Negro intellectuals referred to discussions of the Negro prob-
lem: Beating the boy! . . . Perhaps there was no problem at
100


idiocy, senseless loves and hatreds, lunatic ambitions, bestial
passions, grotesque reasoning, fantastic behavior, that he turned
in horror and fled back into the house of distorted mirrors
where by comparison everything seemed normal.
He threshed about in his sleep, grinding his teeth and groan-
ing, and once he struck out with a stabbing motion, crying
aloud through clenched teeth in a voice of insensate rage, "I'll
kill you!"
At nine o'clock he awakened, got up, and looked at his nude
body in the mirror. His face was swollen and had the smooth
greasy sheen of overdrinking; his eyes were glassy, almost sense-
less. He skinned back his hps and examined his dull yellow
teeth. As yet he had no hangover, but his senses were deadened.
For five full minutes he stood and stared at the paper-wrapped
manuscript without any conscious thought. The room seemed
to undulate almost imperceptibly. Outside the windows the
day was gray. He turned his attention to the clock and watched
the minute hand move from 9:07 to 9:10. Without being con-
scious of his reason for doing so, he picked up his big clasp
knife, opened it, then stood with the naked blade and stared
I at his manuscript for another two minutes. Abruptly, with
[ a cry of stricken rage, an animal sound, half howl, half scream,
j he stabbed the manuscript with all his force. The strong forged
blade went deep into the pages without breaking. Then all
of a sudden thought surged back into his mind.
He grunted a laugh and said aloud, "Really protest now!"
\ \ The combination of this thought and the sight of the knife
sticking from the heart of his manuscript amused him vastly.
"You're some boy, son," he said. "Pope should see this now."
Then, smiling grimly, "But it's a Freudian knot, not a Gordian
knot, son." The thought steadied him somewhat "Deserves a
drink," he said. For the first time he noticed the empty whiskey
bottle. "Dead, too." And then, half-laughing, "Kill 'em all."
Slipping into his robe and house shoes, he went to the bath-
room. Leroy's door was open but he and his boy were out
.
Napoleon came to the kitchen door and growled as he passed.
Through the half-open window he looked down on the convent
wall.
On his way out he glanced into the kitchen and noticed two
partly filled whiskey bottles amidst the orgiastic debris. On
sudden impulse he knocked on Mr. Ward's door and receiving
no answer stepped into the kitchen and poured a gobletful
of whiskey, half from each of the bottles. Napoleon stood at
a distance and growled threateningly. Nero blinked sleepily
from his deathbed beneath the stove. The sink was stacked with
102


a natural-born comedian give a marvelous piano rendition
of "What Makes Corn Grow," reciting the lyrics in a husky
sing-song voice:
Oh, it's dark and cozy in the shucks . . »
Two little grains been bellyrubbing . . .
Now they begins to—rhymes, baby rhymes . . •
Where there were only two grains before . . .
Now there is three, four or even more . . .
No memory of going across the street to a blackjack game
with this woman and another they'd picked up, of losing fifteen
dollars and getting into an argument; of starting home for
his knife, then changing his mind and taking the subway down
to Kriss's and pressing her bell continuously for five minutes;
no memory of his blind rage at her refusal to answer; of going
around to the airwell beneath her window and shouting curses
at her until the super came out and threatened to call the police;
of sitting in the White Rose Bar at Twenty-third Street and
Fourth Avenue, drinking gin-and-beers and telephoning her
at fifteen-minute intervals; of finally giving up at four-thirty
and taking the subway uptown. . . .
So now he wondered vaguely why he should console himself,
because when he came to, he didn't know he had intended visit-
ing Susie and thought only that he was going to telephone again.
He went down to the basement and telephoned Kriss in the
same frame of mind in which he had first telephoned her, with-
out any memory of his hours of rage and frustration.
In the back of his mind he was humming da-da-dee in a
light gay motif as he listened to the phone ringing clearly and
finally to Kriss's forthright office voice: "Mrs. Cummings speak-
ing."
chapter nine
The faint sound of the telephone clicking awakened Kriss
at four-thirty. She had slept through the din of Jesse's doorbell
ringing an hour earlier and the faint clicking sound which echo-
ed at the other end as the busy signal had been going on for
some time. She came awake abruptly and unnaturally alert.
She saw at once the receiver was off the hook and had fallen
behind the night table, but by the time she'd retrieved it the
clicking had ceased. She divined instantly the caller had been
106


Jesse and chuckled gleefully. She suffered none of her usual
panic at awakening alone because of his call. Instead, she de-
rived a delicious delight from his thinking she was talking to
someone else. Then she noticed that it was four-thirty and she'd
asked him to call at noon. Perhaps he'd been calling ever since
noon and had got the busy signal each time. She felt a slight
sense of guilt for standing him up for so long, and a slight
trepidation of fear he'd not call again. But these tiny qualms
were quickly dispelled by an abnormal sense of well-being.
She felt more rested and refreshed than at any time in years,
and for a moment she didn't care whether Jesse called or
not. For a time she luxuriated in the resolve not to answer
when he called again, and he'd think she'd gone out with some-
one else. It would serve him right, she thought. Niggers!
Niggers! Niggers! All they wanted was to drink your whiskey
and sleep with you—he'd be furious if she broke their date
.... She smiled with malicious sensuality . . . Let him
find some bitch in Harlem. Sleep with Maud. She'd always want-
ed to have him. . . . But the thought of Maud started a train
of memory she couldn't bear, as she had not yet taken her \
pill "for mental and emotional distress." They threw me to
the niggers themselves, she thought accusingly; although whom
she accused by the pronoun they, if not her entire race, she
wasn't sure. She only knew that she wanted to be married to
some decent, cultured, successful white man and bear his,
children as much as did any other white woman.
When the phone rang again, she felt certain it was Jesse,
she picked up the receiver and said in her office voice: "Mrs.
Cummings speaking."
"Hello, Kriss-baby, did you have a good time?"
"I don't understand you, dear."
"It's understandable enough. You had your receiver off
the hook. Has he gone?"
She smiled to herself but made her voice sound sharp and
angry, "It's five o'clock, Jesse, and I'm hungry. . . ."
"Five o'clock!" he echoed in amazement
.
"Where have you been, dear?"
"I've been calling you since noon; the time slipped up on
me," he said defensively.
"I must have jarred the receiver when I went to bed,"
she said, smiling maliciously at the knowledge he didn't believe
it. "You should have come down and rung my bell."
"I intended to."
"It doesn't matter. I had a good sleep."
"I'll bet," she heard him mutter, and prodded his jealousy
107


businesswoman than housewife, she telephoned her liquor store
for two bottles of Scotch and one each of gin, vermouth, and
sherry; then telephoned her favorite delicatessen on Third
Avenue for frozen peas, broccoli, whipped potatoes, a pound
of butter, a jar of Hollandaise sauce, a carton of uncooked
Pepperidge Farm club rolls, a pound of ripe tomatoes, green
salad, and six bottles of Canada Dry sparkling water, proving
the adage that whiskey drinkers never eat dessert. After which
she mixed a sturdy highball with the last of her Scotch and
took it to the living room. While leafing through the pages
of the current New Yorker, she savored its flavor. She thought
smilingly of that classic bit of dialogue by Hemingway:
"What are you thinking, darling?"
"About whiskey."
"What about whiskey?"
"About how nice it is."
The first time the bell tolled it was the boy with the liquor.
She wrote a check for twenty-five dollars and he gave her three
dollars and thirty-five cents in change. She tipped him the
thirty-five cents and he gave her a nice smile.
The next bell was Jesse. In his damp trench coat, dark snap-
brim hat, dark green goggles, greasy tan face, arms filled with
parcels, he looked like a gangster on the lain from Florida.
Kriss grinned with genuine amusement . "No one recognized
you, I hope?"
"I couldn't get the damn things off with my hands so full."
He unloaded on the kitchen table, hung up his coat and
hat, pocketed his goggles, and came back and kissed her.
She was opening the bags with a pleased expression; she liked
to be given things, for men to spend on her. She found a porter-
house steak, a ham steak, a pound of veal kidneys, two pounds
of Pennsylvania pork sausage, two bottles of Scotch, one each
of bourbon, gin, and vermouth.
"At least you don't intend to waste away," she said, giggling.
"You said you were hungry, baby," he said, looking at
her mouth, breast and legs. "You know the Harlem Trinity."
She felt her smile going sensuous beneath his lustful stare.
"Eat, drink, and make love," he said, and they kissed.
"That's what I ought to write about," he mumbled against
her mouth as his finger tips caressed her legs.
"What?" she asked inside his mouth.
"The ways of love. I could write a chapter on each way."
"Do you know all of them, dear?"
109


"No, but those I don't know you can tell me."
The doorbell broke it up. A man came with the groceries
and while Kriss was paying him Jesse busied himself emptying
the ice cubes into the glass tray and refilling the ice pans. Sud-
denly she recalled telephoning him the night before, and when
the grocery man left she turned on him viciously, "Jesse!
If you were with another woman last night I want you to
go home right now."
He didn't feel at all surprised by this sudden outburst . "I
haven't slept with anyone, baby," he said as he opened a bottle
of her Scotch and made himself a drink.
"Make me one too," she said as she went to the bathroom
to repair her lip paint. "My glass is in here."
He returned hers to the coaster on the storage cabinet and
placed his on a coaster on the glass-top cocktail table, seating
himself on the sofa. Coming from the bathroom she paused
for a moment before the mirror to worship her legs, then stood
in the arch so he could admire them also.
"I called you at two o'clock this morning," she lied, "and
you weren't at home."
He had no idea when he'd returned to his room and couldn't
dispute her. "I got a rejection on my book and went on a
binge."
She grinned delightedly although she didn't know why she
felt so pleased by his ill fortune. "I like your slack suit," she
said, tucking up her rompers to reveal more of her thighs so
he would return the compliment.
He did. "I like your legs," he said. "You've got gorgeous
legs, baby."
She melted with sensuous ecstasy and her blue eyes swam
glassily with passion. "Ronny used to say I missed my calling;
that I should have been a chorus girl."
"I thought you were going to say call girl," he said, then
impulsively knelt before her on the carpet and kissed each
of her legs. Tenderly she massaged his kinky hair. Then savage-
ly she pushed him away and threatened furiously, "If you ever
sleep with your wife again, Jesse, I'll kill you."
She took her seat, shaking with repressed fury, and they
began drinking as if it were their night's work and they were
being paid by the drink.
"I've had enough of Negro women accusing me of stealing
their husbands," she continued to rave.
"After all, baby, you can't blame them. You've slept with
their husbands enough."
"I didn't give a damn for a single one."
110


"You got your kicks."
She grinned malevolently. "If I gave them an honest ap-
praisal it would kill them."
"Why do you do it then?"
She emptied her glass and held it out to him. "Fix us a
drink, baby."
He emptied his and made two more.
"I just wanted to know them," she said, smiling secretly.
''I wanted to know what they were like inside."
"Ditto," he said. "After all, what better place to study origins
than in the egg."
"When I was studying anthropology at the university, the
kids used to say it was the study of man, embracing woman."
\ "Race relations is the study of black man, embracing white
* woman," he paraphrased.
"I learned more about Negroes in one night than Uncle
Whitney knew from twenty years of association." Uncle Whit-
ney had been the president of the Foundation. Jesse felt a
flicker of disgust, then was suddenly amused. "That reminds
me of a joke one of my landladies used to tell—" he began
but she interrupted rudely, "Are you going to make the drinks,
Jesse?" He gave her a quick look, seeing her double, and
thought, "I'll take the one who can't talk." On the way to
the kitchen he staggered slightly and the abstract painting
danced on the wall like an orgy of skinned cats. Mad genius,
he thought, vastly amused by his blurred perspective. While
mixing the drinks he called, "Shall I start dinner, baby?"
and heard her reply something about whipped potatoes. He
found the package in the carton of groceries and placed it
on the stove atop the pilot jet to thaw.
When serving her drink he said, "You came too late, Kriss-
baby. If you'd lived in the eighteenth century you'd have been
a famous courtesan and would have made history, instead
of sociology like now."
For reward she pulled him down and kissed him. "Why
didn't you marry me in Chicago, Jesse? I would have married
you in Chicago."
He resumed his seat and gulped half his drink, suddenly
feeling old. 'To tell you the truth, baby . . ." he began, intend-
ing to tell her he didn't remember a damn thing about their
weekend in Chicago, that he'd been blotto all the time and
it hadn't meant a damn thing to him, but she didn't hear him,
so moved was she by her own maudlin memory.
"I loved you that weekend, Jesse. Why did you do it?"
'Tern is crazy," he said. "I'd never so much as touched her.
Ill


The time we had our weekend I hardly knew her. All I . . ."
"She told it all over town that she was going to divorce Mose
and you were going to divorce your wife . . ."
"I don't see how in the hell . . ."
"I heard her telling Alice and that group at a party. I was
so hurt. Why did you tell her that. And she's so ugly too.
Even Mose couldn't sleep with her, he just kept her. . . ."
"All I ever did—Maud asked me to take her to the subway
and we stopped in the Fat Man's and had a drink and that's
all. . . ."
"And you told me you were going to divorce your wife
and marry me." She turned on him in a flurry of rage. "Jesse,
if you ever sleep with your wife while you're sleeping with
me . . ."
"That I'd like to see," he thought, but when she persisted,
"I'm not going to have some black bitch after me with a knife,"
he also flew into such a violent rage the room turned white-hot
in his vision. "This bitch wants me to kill her," he thought,
gripping the sofa for control.
"Even Maud thought I was after Joe. They crucified me.
| Nigger bitches!" He started up to slap her when the telephone
j rang, and he lowered himself to his seat, the room dancing
crazily before his eyes.
She staggered heavily as she went to answer it, and he finished
his drink and sucked the ice to cool his head. He heard her
saying in what no sober person on earth would take for a sober
voice, "Miss-sess Cummingsss speaking," and he thought,
half-amused, "What price we pay for respectability." Then
her natural voice in drunken enthusiasm, "Oh baby, come on
over, Jesse's here and we're. . . . Why do you drink that
awful stuff, baby? You earn enough to buy decent . . . . You
make more than I do, you louse. You've got to ration it. . . .
And bring your own whiskey, the last time you were here
you drank up. . . . I'll let you in, baby. ... Of course we're
sober, we just got started. . . . Take a taxi. . . ."
"Harold's coming over," she announced from the hall.
"I hope he's sober and doesn't fall out on my floor."
"I haven't seen Harold in years," he said as she took the
glasses to make drinks. "Not since he came to New York.
I saw Bebe once and she said he was living with you."
"That lying bitch." She put the glasses down, sloshing them
over and flopped into a chair. "She used to call up here all
the time and ask to speak to Harold and I hadn't seen . . ."
"When I was in Chicago in '48 he gave a party for me and
Bebe . . ."
112


"... in five years and he came in here one day with the
d.t.'s and fell out in the middle of my floor and asked me to
telephone his psychiatrist in Chicago. . . ."
". . . He was sick then and she wanted me to have her.
He was taking morphine . . ."
". . . It was Saturday and she wasn't in her office . .
. . The same one? Nancy what's her . . ."
. . Rothchild. . . . And he didn't know her home num-
ber, it's not listed. She was Ronny's analyst too and I called
the restaurant where she always . . ."
. . All these people getting cured of something . .
". . And when I told him I couldn't get her he just turned
over on his face and gave up. I had to call Nat — my own doc-
tor— and . . ."
. . Why didn't you just let him sleep it off. He'd have
M
• • .
". . . That louse wet my carpet and trembled so I thought
he was dying. I called Nat and had him sent to my own hospital.
I had to sign him in and it cost me twenty-four dollars a day.
Nat wanted to have him sent to Bellevue . . ."
". . . Why didn't you have him? Hell . . ."
. . Oh, I couldn't bear it. Bellevue sounded like the
end of the world — all those skid-row drunks — and Harold
was a great man once. Nat said I was a fool. He wanted me
to call the police and tell them he had no means of sup-
port . . ."
". . . Where was Bebe? She had a little money then . .
". . . Divorced the year before . . ."
. . I'd have let him go to Bellevue. They're used to
handling d.t. patients . . ."
". . . Went himself. . . . two days checked out my hos-
pital and went back to his flat—had a cold water flat on Hous-
ton—called the police and told them he was sick and desti-
tute . . ."
". . . What time is it, baby?"
She glanced at her watch and leaped from her chair, staggered
across the floor to her television set as if gone beserk. "Sid
Caesar and Imogene Coca. Mix drinks dear while I dial—"
The screen lit up and showed the flashing of jagged lines. "Oh
damn!" he heard her cry as he staggered toward the kitchen
bearing the empty glasses like a man dying of thirst staggering
his last mile across a burning hot desert in a blinding sand
storm, and when he got back to the sitting room with the
refills he thought of Donovan staggering into his apartment
where they were having the last WPA party — the time they
113


were let off for two days shortly before the end — his dirty
white shirt flagging open, suspenders hanging down and his
pants about to fall from his long lean frame, blue eyes glazed,
red hair flagging across his bloodless forehead, ugly bony face
set in grim determination, a bottle of Paul Jones whiskey in
each hand, looking about triumphantly at all his goggle-eyed
coworkers, saying, "I made it," before falling on bis face.
She took her drink from his hand and gave him a quick
friendly kiss, then sat on the sofa beside him. "I just love
Imogene Coca, don't you?"
He peered at the blurred pygmies on the screen, trying to
focus his vision, and the next thing he knew Harold was stepping
down into the room, hand extended, saying in his jubilant tenor
voice, "Jesse, what you say, old man?"
Jesse jumped to his feet and they shook hands warmly.
"Damn, Harold, I'm glad to see you!" he exclaimed with
drunken emotion. "Really glad to see you. God-damn folks
are getting me down again."
"It's a bitch, man, it's a bitch. I've been thinking of wearing
a turban and posing as an Indian like that Sam preacher who
went all through the South. Stayed in all the best hotels and
»
Kriss had served him a drink on the storage cabinet beside
her three-legged chair and on resuming her seat on the sofa
cut him off irritably, "Harold, will you please sit down so
I can see the screen."
He was a big heavy-set man with strong bold features of
a ruddy tan complexion, appearing rugged and forceful in
a brown tweed jacket and gabardine slacks, and when he
gave Kriss a half-hurt, half-indulgent smile, and obeyed like
a scolded child, Jesse felt another tremor of violent rage.
"Thinks she's God!" he thought
.
Harold was sitting, leaning forward, talking around Kriss:
". . . pecks bowing and scraping . . ." when she cut him off
again, "If you and Jesse want to talk, go outside. This is my
only pleasure, only . . ." she laughed childishly at some antic
on the television screen, and now Jesse was amused, thinking
of those magazine cartoons of a man cast away on a tropical
island with a beautiful woman and complaining that his radio
wouldn't work. "Bitch cast away with two men .... Island
not tropical ... no palm trees, but shade of skyscrapers,
just as good . . . only pleasure television . . .
He stood shakily and said, "I'ma maka drink."
Kriss held up her glass and Harold hastened to empty his.
114


"I smell somp'n on fire," Jesse said, hugging the empty
glasses to his stomach.
Kriss giggled. "It's Harold's paraldehyde."
Jesse sniffed. "Paraldehyde? Smells like formaldehyde."
"They give it to alcoholics at Bellevue," Kriss said, forgetting
the program in her enjoyment of Harold's discomfort
.
"Don't laugh, my dear, you might be taking it yourself
someday," Harold said acidly.
Jesse staggered kitchenwards, laughing to himself. "Poor
idiot, embalming himself 'fore he's dead." When he stopped
to place the glasses on the hall table to get a better grip he
noticed for the first time the three keys atop a check. He
poked the keys aside and studied the check, trying to concen-
trate. But all that made sense was the amount and he thought,
as he continued on, "Son, if meat's so high you gonna have
to drink soup."
When he saw the potatoes on the stove he decided to start
dinner. Taking a short drink straight, he pulled out the grill,
placed it on the table, lit the oven, put the steak on the grill,
and the next thing he knew he was sitting on the sofa beside
Kriss, asking Harold, ". . . happened about that Chicago
letter you were going to write for the New Democrat? I bought
it for a time but I never saw your pieces." He felt reasonably
sober and quite lucid.
"Never heard from them . . . after that lunch at Cherio's
. . . was going to review your book . . . ."
". . . killed everybody ever liked it . . . rank poison those
things . . . ."
". . . 'sa book, Jesse ol* man, *sa book . . . these white
folks 'mot gointa letcha . . . ."
Kriss turned on Jesse in a rage and cried, "If this book is
like the last one IH never speak to you again!"
. . H never forgive you, 'ol man, H never forgive you.
They'll . . . ." Harold was saying while Jesse glared at Kriss,
"Did you read it? All you people . . ."
"I hated it — 'n what's more . . ."
". . . count all the white people . . ."
. . all of 'em, Hal, all of 'em. No God-damn except . .
. . you louse if you ever write another book like . . ."
He looked at her glazed eyes filled with senseless hatred
and felt the sickness coming over him. ". . . wrote it for you
. . . wrote it to please you . . ." he was saying without realiz-
ing what he said.
She was saying,". . . ever mention it again in my house!—'n
115


In her sleep she became conscious of being chilly and awakened
immediately. Before opening her eyes she flung a bare arm
searchingly across the faded blue sheet. It encountered only
emptiness. Every event of the previous night returned in
one flash of memory. She became rigid, scarcely breathing,
her emotions shattered by the blind panic she always experi-
enced on awakening and finding herself alone. "Oh, hell!"
she exclaimed in acute chagrin. Not that she regretted having
ordered Jesse home, but that he had gone. She felt as if her
fair white body had betrayed her. It had been bad enough when
Dave walked out, but for Jesse—for any Negro . . .
She opened her eyes and saw that she had slept uncovered.
Critically she examined her negligent body. From her prone
position she saw the hill of a soft white belly between two flat-
top mounds of breasts, and beyond, the square-toed feet in
vague silhouette against the dark gray slit of open window.
She thought of the time she used to have a lovely flat stomach
and resolved to stop drinking for a month. Remembering how
much she had drunk the night before she became enraged.
"Damn Jesse to hell!" she muttered, as if he'd forced her to
drink against her will.
It was dim in the room; the door was open to a gray hall
and outside it looked like gray night. She turned on the night
light and looked at the gold-plated clock. The hands stood
at 6:11. She picked it up and found that it had stopped. She
dialed Time and while waiting looked at her body with distaste.
A woman's controlled contralto voice purred affectedly, "When
you hear the chime ... the time will be . . . one-thirty-two
and one quarter. ..." It struck Kriss as being a sexy voice,
whereas a man would have been irritated, and she listened for
it to speak again, wondering what the woman looked like,
blonde or brunette, buxom or petite, young or elderly.
She got up and set the clock and started across the hall
to the bathroom but heard a voice muttering, "Goin' to make
love to you, God damn it," and stepped to the arch of the living
room. In the semidarkness she saw clothes strewn hap-hazardly
over the floor and a brown body curled grotesquely on the
sofa, a wrinkled sheet beneath it and one of her extra blankets
wrapped about the head and shoulders. It faced outwards,
the buttocks pressed tightly against the sofa's back. By his
presence she was instantly relieved of her panic and chagrin
and when she heard him scream in muffled frustration, "Don't
play around!" she giggled with delight and felt warm and good
all over. For a long time he didn't speak again and then he
cried in a voice of rage, "Kill you!" and kicked out so violently
122


bis toe hit the cocktail table and sent a glass spinning across
the floor. "Uhn!" he grunted in pain but didn't awaken. Then
quickly he turned on his stomach, pressing himself against
the sofa, and she heard a jumble of words which sounded like,
. . now that's better, baby; but your skin feels rough."
His tan body minus its head was like a bronze statue in the
dim light and she felt an impulse to kneel beside it and caress
it . But her curiosity as to what he might say next proved
stronger and she let him sleep.
She performed her morning's toilet as quickly as possible,
brushed her teeth and showered briefly, and then, as she was
standing before the mirror surveying her legs, one ear cocked
to listen, abruptly her stomach fell. She had felt no hangover
on awakening but was now so suddenly hungry she felt nause-
ated. In the doorway of the kitchen immediately after turning
on the light, she stood stock still in consternation. The window
was open wide on the rusty wet fire escape and a face peered
from the window of the apartment across the murky air well.
It was raining grayly with that desolation of a miserable big
city Sunday and she went quickly to shut the window and draw
the blinds to close out the gloomy day and the leering face
of the fat, bald-headed salesman across the way who'd been
vainly trying for the past two months to meet her accidentally
in the corridor. The grill at the bottom of the oven was pulled
out and charred black, and a soggy cinder of meat lay in
the greasy sink. Atop the stove was a pan lined with burnt
whipped potatoes, a charred paper container and some green
stuff in a pot that resembled scum on a stagnant pool. On
the table the cardboard carton in which the groceries had been
delivered had been hacked to pieces, and then she saw the
knife sticking from the center of the door. Four white, doughy,
uncooked club rolls were skewered on the blade and the blade
stabbed into the centerboard of the door with such force it
remained in position as if awaiting the fire to barbecue. Kriss
stared as it for some time, more out of curiosity than fear,
wondering what had been in Jesse's mind, and from what she
knew of how he thought, the skewered rolls took the form
of a grim love token by a bitter Negro on a lush white woman's
door. Looking at them, she was suddenly weak from hunger
to the point of fainting. She ate a plain slice of white bread,
then put on water to make coffee and boil eggs, and stepped
back into the hall to clear a space on the table. Not until then
did she notice the scrawled note, and as she stood reading it,
deciphering the scrawled words, her excitement was heightened
by the veiled frustration behind the drunken threats and she
123


would have gone to him if she hadn't heard the water boil.
She made coffee, two pieces of dry toast, soft-boiled one
egg, got the Sunday Herald-Tribune from the mat outside
her door, cleared a half-circle of table space, and while sipping
her black coffee and munching her egg-dipped toast, began
methodically reading the paper from cover to cover. She
read rapidly, making mental notes of all items concerning foun-
dations and the India Institute, her brilliant mentality with
its wide research experience rapidly condensing the facts and
discarding the journalistic repetitions, functioning at the high
degree of efficiency attributed to Harvard-trained scientists
who live normal lives, eat balanced diets, are happily married
and compatible, and have never tasted an intoxicating beverage.
With one corner of her mind she listened to Jesse grinding
his teeth and muttering angrily in his sleep and once, giggling
with the therapeutic amusement which humans derive from
the antics of monkeys in the zoo, paused for a moment to
watch him thresh about like an eel in a net. "Kill you!" he
shouted in a fit of rage and struck out with his fist, striking
the wall with such force she crossed the room to see if the
paint was scared. After that he turned onto his side and
tucked his bruised hand between his legs. He blew a snort of
laughter and said in a distinct voice, "I got mine, now you get
yours." Kriss laughed girlishly with incurious delight and
resumed her perusal of an address delivered for President Tru-
man by Secretary of State Acheson to the effect that unless
suffering was wiped out in underdeveloped countries it might
be used by a new dictatorship "more terrible" than the Soviet
Union.
Since the first instant of sleep Jesse had dreamed countless
horrible scenes of murder and savage fights and apoplectic
arguments, all of which had been blasted from memory at
the moment of awakening by the last macabre dream of
millions of Negroes, men, women, and children, being driven
off a cliff into a bottomless gorge by a genial mob of white
horsemen, himself watching them disappear, wave after wave,
like mute zombies without anger or protest or entreaty, but
when it came his turn he cried out in a voice of terror, "But
I signed the paper!" and the laughing horsemen spurred their
mounts toward him, one of them saying, "Who said you could
write?" and trampled him over the edge, and as he fell turning
over and over, he caught glimpses of columns of horsemen
galloping through the sky and thought half-amused of a story
his father used to tell about two slaves raiding the ham-house
one dark and rainy night: Old master was waiting inside in
124


the dark with a hammer, and when the first slave reached un-
derneath a loose board to swipe a ham he whacked him soundly
on the back of the hand with the hammer. Hearing his buddy
grunt in pain and jerk back his head, the second slave thought
he'd got a ham off the hook and asked enthusiastically, "You
get yours?" To which the first slave replied with equal enthu-
siasm, "Yeah, Ah got mine, now you get yours!"
He awakened instantly in the middle of his fall and feeling
the blanket wound about his neck thought someone was trying
to strangle him and gave a desperate leap backward, clawing
at the murderous hands. He landed with a loud thud on his
side in the middle of the floor. When finally he'd torn off the
offending blanket he saw Kriss sitting at the table, grinning
at him.
"You've been having a bad time, dear," she said. "Was some
woman's husband trying to trap you?"
"I thought I was being strangled," he confessed sheepishly.
She giggled. "You shouldn't fight so much, dear. You
wouldn't be so afraid."
He stood up, threw the blanket on the sofa, and rubbed
his bruised hip bone. "Those bastards jump me while I'm
sleeping," he said self-mockingly. "Won't come out and fight
when I'm awake and sober."
"When is that, dear?"
He noticed his clothes on the floor, the knocked-over glass,
slept-on sofa, heaped ashtrays, dirty dishes and he blew laughter
through his nose. "Kilroy was here. On a bender, too."
Then to himself, "Not Kilroy, Leroy." Suddenly realizing he'd
slept on a sheet he asked wonderingly, "Did you make the
sofa?"
"No, dear, when I went to bed you were cooking." She
grinned. "You were having a cooking good time."
He remembered the burning steak and laughed. "Damn
right!" Then he noticed her staring analytically at him. "What
am I bid?"
"You have a beautiful body, Jesse," she said with honest
lasciviousness.
"It ought to be," he thought . "All the workouts I've had
with a mop and shovel."
"If we still owned slaves I'd pay a year's wages for you."
"Don't be so cheap!"
Td keep you for a pet and give you a gold collar and a
nameplate."
"Be the envy of all the dames with the Pekineses because
I can talk."
125


coming over. You like Don, don't you, baby?"
"Oh, sure," he said, thinking, "I like de big gut, do you like
de big gut?"
"He's on the wagon, drinking nothing but cola." She was
all excited as if her closest girl friend were calling, and when
she added, "I love Don, he's so sweet when he's sober," her
face took on a look of melting sympathy.
"Can't be a successful fag without being sweet sometime,"
he said, and she became cross. "Jesse, if you're going to be
nasty . . ."
". . . baby, baby, I love . . ."
"Don's been an angel to me and . .
"Let's not argue any more, baby."
She relented. "Make us drinks, dear, while I order Coca
Cola. Mine Scotch this time." Calling to him in the kitchen,
"Make some ice, dear."
"Make some ice, dear . . . make some drinks, dear . . .
wash the dishes, dear . . . scrub the floor, dear . . . kiss
my toe, dear ... fix my door, dear," he muttered to himself
as he melted the ice from the trays, but the back if his mind
was still playing with the rhyme:
. . . but if you will permit
I most humbly remit
I desire only to transmit
what would most befit
nay, benefit
any chit
oh, definite!
to wit:
I would emit . . .
"Jesse!"
He gave such a start the ice tray flew birdlike from his hand
and clattered in the sink. Kriss stood in the doorway, grinning.
"What are you thinking about, dear?"
He'd been absently running water over the ice cubes in
the sink, melthing them. "Abwout twitty, bwaby," he said
lispingly on recovering.
"Well, think about the ice now, dear, Don will be here in
a minute."
He began putting the cubes into the glass tray. "Yes, dear.
IH think about the ice now, dear. Anything else you want me
to think about, dear?"
The delivery man from the delicatessen brought twelve
bottles of Coca-Cola, four bottles of sparkling water, tins
129


"No wonder the sonofabitch makes like Old Faithful,"
Jesse thought.
". . . but you must drink something ha ha . .
. . but you look so well, baby . . ."
Kriss just loved that man—one, rather one of those, like
the joke about the man counting off in the army: one-two-
three- four . . . one . . . "Oh I'm one too"—just loved that
one because he was just like a sister and they could tell
each other all about their affairs and discuss, oh, so candidly,
last night's lover. Besides which he was a Harvard Boston so-
cialite, which made everything right, and once he'd taken her
on a visit to his ancestral mansion—when all the family were
away of course—and they'd had a glorous time hopping about
the Boston night clubs in search of men; so different from
that louse, Ronny, who sneaked off with the lowest kind of
bums. But that was the difference between Boston and Missis-
sippi; Bostonians were cultured.
When he next came from the John, Kriss said, "Why don't
you eat some nuts, baby."
"Don't look at me!" Jesse thought, pointing toward the
bowl on the cocktail table. Then suddenly his mind went off,
shutting out the sound of voices, and he began again to play
with words:
Be there a knight
without affright
to blight the white
and smite the spite
that men call right
or even once a night
will be quite
all right
especially if one is tight
.
And when his mind came back he heard Kriss saying, "How
is it with you and Garner, baby?" and Don began telling the
sad tale of the slow death of his glorious romance with a hand-
some, dark-skinned, curly haired Negro Army officer. The
romance had reached its peak three years before when they
sailed on a cruise to Martha's Vineyard and were so delighted
with the blind tolerance and idyllic isolation of that New Eng-
land Eden they decided to stay there in ecstatic inebriation
for the remainder of their lives. Don bought and furnished
a huge old-fashioned house and bought a station wagon to
133


drive back and forth to town, but that first winter they did
not get to town very often and did not have a single unpleasant
moment of sobriety. But the following summer Garner's
brother Jack, a Philadelphia lawyer, and his wife, Geraldine,
a brainy newspaper columnist, along with their young son
and heir, a lad of twelve, came to visit and liked it so well
they stayed. And Don was so delighted he deeded the house
to them jointly, thinking they would all live there pleasantly
for life. But Geraldine was a socialite and her house guests,
who were always quite distinguished Negro people, found the
arrangement puzzling, and the presence of a drunken, unshaven
young white man clad only in an old bathrobe wandering about
the premises at all hours somewhat disconcerting, even though
he was a Harvard-Bostonian socialite, so Geraldine soon
stopped introducing him to her distinguished guests and began
devising ways and means to get him out of her house.
"And she even went so far ha ha well, she was driving the
station wagon to town to pick up some of her guests at the
feery station and I asked to go along to do some shopping be-
cause ha ha I'd never learned to drive the thing myself and
Daddy was sleeping and I heard her whisper to the guests ha
ha that I was the gardener ha ha. I cared nothing about that
but then she took my television set down to the living room
for her own guests. . . ."
"You didn't let her do that, baby? Your own . .
"—she's such an awful bitch ha ha and I positively could
not bear in the condition I was in ha ha to make a scene involv-
ing . . ."
It finally reached the point where they lived in the house
as strangers, each with their own set of guests, eating at differ-
ent hours, sitting on opposite sides of the room to carry on
separate conversations, passing each other in the house without
speaking, each set acting as if the other were invisible.
"So I told Daddy if he would not take my part I would posi-
tively leave him. Now he is . . ."
"lessel" Kriss shouted suddenly. He gave such a violent
start the cheesebits he was eating flew into the air like buckshot.
She giggled. "Make some drinks, dear. And you might join
us if you have no . . ."
"I'm listening to every word. Fascinating. Beats Rimbaud's
Season in Hell. Beats Macbeth. . . ."
"You know Garner, Jesse?"
"Oh, sure, met him at your house . .
"Get the drinks first, dear."
"Yes, dear."
134


incoherently, "An' Jesse hates white people so. You don'
hate white people, do you, baby?"
". . . but if he ever suspects that you know how he thinks
. . ." Harold was saying, with Jesse interposing: "... kill
you sure as . . ." and Kriss mumbling sensually, ". . . tell
me you don't hate white people too, baby . . . ." and Walter
stroking her but still trying to talk around her shoulder to
Harold and Jesse: "It's time you niggers count your blessings
«...
". . . know how insecure he is, you give him a problem he
can't solve and he's panic-stricken, can't think . . ."
". . . ever tell you the story of . . ."
". . . white race has never solved a single problem in
all its history except by extermination. Dead Indians good
Indians. . . .
"... I went up to Connecticut to work as a caretaker for
this guy—New York City attorney, senior member in a firm
that handled a lot of movie business."
". . . sa bitch, ol* man, itsa bitch . .
"had a beautiful farm — used for breeding thoroughbred
horses before he got it—beautiful stalls; wooden floors, electric
lights in each stall . . ."
". . . tell you, ol' man . .
". . . were there, Becky and I, before the son of a bitch
came up for the summer an' wanted us to do housework—we
quit—but that's beside the story. . . ."
There was a big fine yellow rooster in the pig pen, a little
bantam hen that lived in one of the wagon sheds, and seventeen
fat white ducks in the wire-enclosed chicken yard. This attorney
had decided to put in some laying hens, so he came out one
weekend and killed the ducks by standing outside the wire
fence and shooting them with a shotgun. After which he drove
off to order two dozen pullets and pick up a Negro in the city
to pluck the ducks, which Jesse had refused to do. The following
week Jesse cleaned and whitewashed the hen house, forked
the chicken yard, bought two hundred-pound sacks of chicken
mash and scratch, drove over in the Jeep and picked up the
pullets and installed them in their new home. But he'd been
feeding them from a sack of old mash, which happened to
be pig mash, and the eggs were ill-formed and had soft shells.
When this attorney came back the following weekend he ex-
amined the soft-shelled eggs and stated authoritatively their
deformity was due to the rooster fertilizing them. This ignorant
Negro who plucked the ducks stopped by for his pay after
dinner, and this attorney called Jesse to the kitchen and the
142


watch. If he couldn't have an attentive and admiring feminine
audience he was ready to leave.
Harold chuckled. "Don't get worried Walter. You got what
it takes."
"That sort of thing don't worry me; I know I can . . ."
Walter muttered defensively.
Jesse cut him off, mumbling: "That's what you get for joining
the human race."
Harold laughed. 'Nothing's too strange for human beings,
Walt . Now us apes, we got just one way . . ."
Laughing, Jesse lurched to his feet and staggered to the
kitchen. Lucille greeted him with an accusing look. "You
shouldn't have told Kriss that, Jesse, I didn't . . ."she began.
Kriss cut in: "She knows I didn't mean anything . . ."
Lucille continued: ". . . think anything about it at all.
Kriss always . . ."
Kriss gave Jesse a sweetly malicious vindictive smile: "She
knows it's just my way . . ."
Jesse trembled with a sudden squall of rage that left him
momentarily sober.
"Don't be so cute!" he said to Kriss, and seeing the first
glint of outrage in her blue-glazed, red-rimmed eyes, he slapped
her with such savage violence it spun her into the stove.
He was going to hit her with his fist when Lucille intervened,
saying indignantly, "You shouldn't have done that, Jesse!
You're crazy! I'm not unhappy!" He looked at the anguish
in her face and the rage drained out of him. "Now this hurt
bitch has got to defend this other bitch who hurt her to prove
to the bitch she wasn't hurt when the bitch knows damn well
she was hurt and she knows damn well the bitch knows it,"
he thought disgustedly.
Kriss wheeled toward him, her face aflame. "You son of
a bitch! I'm going to . . ."
He turned away as if unaware of her existence and went
back to the living room and sat defiantly in her favorite three-
legged chair.
She came out and, standing behind him in the hall said,
in an icy voice, "Jesse! I want you to go home," and he replied
just as icily, "Kriss! Go to hell!"
Harold chuckled innocently and began reciting: "When the
fellows get to fightin' and the law is at de door—"
Walter cut him off. "When niggers learn how to behave them-
selves . . ."
"Got it all figured out, haven't you, boy?" Jesse felt a cold
sober malevolence toward everyone. "Got your big fat brain
145


still sitting in the same position, thinking, "The nigger's earned
his, anyway . . ."
Then everyone was standing, milling about, and he was
patting Walter on the shoulder, saying with great benevolence,
"I like you, man, hell, I'm only too glad you found the com-
bination . . .
Then the Martins were gone and Kriss was standing in
front of the television set, putting on a coat, and stating to
Harold who stood to one side, with an attitude of deprecation:
"I'm going home with you."
Harold was shaking his head and replying: "Make himself
a great hero . . ." and both were talking at once.
"You gotta take me home with you, baby . .
"But somebody else . . ."
"I'm not going to stay here with this maniac.''
"Not me . . ."
"You're not going any goddamn where!" Jesse said in
a clear, dangerous voice.
"You're psychotic!" Kriss flared, flashing him a look of
supreme indignation, then took Harold by the arm. "Come on,
baby, take me home with you."
"Fix this lady right now," Jesse thought and staggered to
the kitchen to get the big kitchen knife.
"Don't cut her, man, don't cut her!" Harold said in alarm
when Jesse returned, brandishing the knife. "Hit her with your
fist but don't cut her!"
"Don't tell that maniac to hit me, you fool!" Kriss screamed
in a rage now directed toward her erstwhile protector.
"Man's right," Jesse thought. "Lady just needs a little
blacking for the coming cakewalk."
Aloud he said, "Right-O!" and placing the knife carefully
atop the storage cabinet so as not to scar the finish, hit her
on the jaw as hard as he could. In amazement he watched her
bang against the television set and crumple to the floor.
"Don't kick her, man," Harold said quickly.
"Got you, coach," Jesse said. "Don't bruise the stuff."
Harold chuckled. "Consider the depreciation."
Neither of them moved to help Kriss as she struggled to
her feet. With clinical curiosity Jesse watched her first straighten
the television set on its stand, then pull down her skirt which
had flown up to her waist, thinking, "Property first, virtue
second," and when at last she gave him the full malevolence
of her look, he added, "hatred, third. Good thing to know."
She kept silent for fear he might hit her again, but said
to herself, "Jesse! You are one nigger I'll never let sleep with
147


I showed her that the hogs do not feel any pain whatsoever,
and how happy they were to be giving a little sausage each
day instead of being slaughtered all at once and butchered
for hams, she consented to eat the sausage and liked it very
much. The way I discovered she liked the sausage came about
like this: She was sitting on the terrace with Proust's Remem-
brance of Things Past open in her lap, but instead of reading
she was looking across her sunny acres with a dreamy ex-
pression.
"If I may be so bold as to ask, what are you thinking, ma-
dame?" I asked.
"About sausage."
"What about sausage, madame?"
"About how good it is."
It made me happy to see her happy, and the hogs were happy
to see us both happy.
But one day one of the hogs refused to give us his bit of
sausage. I knew he was not going dry because he was eating
as much swill as any of the other hogs and he was also just
as fat. So after breakfast that morning I took him down to
the slaughterhouse to have a heart-to-heart talk with him.
"Why do you refuse to give your bit of sausage like the other
hogs do?" I asked.
"I have run out of sausage," he said.
But I knew by his hang-dog expression and the guilty manner
in which he avoided my eyes that the sausage manufacturers
had bribed him.
"Why do you lie to me?" I asked. "I can tell by looking at
you that you have gone over to the other side."
"But it is true," he contended. "Besides which I have no
more guts."
"Would you rather be slaughtered and butchered by the
sausage manufacturers, or give us, your friends, a little bit
of sausage each day?" I asked bluntly.
"I don't know why I hate you so when you've been so good
to me," he squealed pathetically, lard drops streaming from
his little hog eyes.
On hearing this, the other hogs, who had followed down
to the slaughterhouse expecting to see him slaughtered, thought
that I might forgive him and began shouting. "Slaughter the
traitor! Slaughter the traitor!"
But when I saw their sadistic expression, I recalled the words
of our Saviour, and I said to them, "He that is without pork
chops among you, let him first cut his brother's throat."
then I turned to the recalcitrant hog and said, "Let this be
149


morning brushing their teeth in this manner, look how much
time would be saved to earn more money to pay for this ma-
chine on the installment plan. It'd be the easiest thing in the
world to sell; a natural for an advertising slogan: Why be
whiny when Packer's electric shower-brush will make your teeth
so nice and shiny? Too long, though. Don't Beef! Shine Your
Teeth! That's better. . . ." He could envision a fine, fat,
paunchy, but still bustling, bald-headed businessman, B. Smart,
taking his morning's ice-cold shower with his teeth clamped
about the electric brushes when all of a sudden he has a spell
of lockjaw brought on by staying beneath the ice-cold shower
too long and trying to sing the chorus of "Old Shagging Riley"
while his teeth were being shined. And before he can get loose
his teeth have been worn down to the roots and the busy little
brushes are polishing away his jawbone. "Nothing serious,"
he can hear the firm's executives saying. "People expect such
things. Perfectly normal accident of our mechanical age.
Good publicity, too. Couldn't sell the damn things without
an element of risk. Great gamblers, the Americans. Got plates
myself, thank God. ..." He laughed out loud, thinking of
old Mr. B. Smart chomping up filets in "21" with his razor-sharp
jawbones. "I got a beautiful sense of humor," he thought . "As
typically American as the tooth-shining machine. Laugh at
misfortune. But somebody else's, not mine. Must remember
to tell them that next time I apply for membership in the human
race."
The combination of warm shower and dry herb wine had
a sobering effect on him and again he felt the dread of going
outside into the unknown day. So instead of dressing as he
had intended he went into the sitting room and sat on the
sofa and finished the bottle of wine. "Courage, son," he said,
feeling slightly better, "it's cheaper by the bottle—best seller."
But lacking the high proof courage of bottled-in-bond bourbon,
he still did not feel up to facing the unknown outside. "Reason
why Italians never won a war," he thought. "Drink this stuff.
Raped Abyssinia, though. So must be good for raping."
Taking the empty bottle back to the kitchen for the full one,
"Maybe if you drink enough of this, son, youH get in some
conquests too. Do the bitch a world of good. But Abyssinia
was a black, don't know how it'll work with whites." While
drawing the cork he looked about the kitchen at the night's
devastation. "Tell we won this war," he thought. "Don't know
who we whipped but this is sure a hell of a liberated nation."
Pouring a tumblerful of the aromatic wine, he drank it down
without pause, then cautioned himself, "Just don't end up
151


like Mussolini, son. That bastard got so het up over raping
a black he set the whole white world on fire." For some reason
he didn't know why, he was assailed by a feeling of remorse.
Taking the bottle and glass to the sitting room, he stood for
a moment as if bemused. With one part of his mind he thought,
"They're all watching Russia. Better watch Mississippi, too,"
and with the other part, for no evident reason, "Thus does
conscience make cowards of us all . . ." Then with the first
part, "No tonic manufactured good as whipping a nigger,"
and with the second part, strangely depressed, "All his con-
science below the belt, though; never yet no higher," then
with the first part, "Poor Kriss, too bad she's not strong enough
to whip you, son; she'd give everything to heal you afterwards,"
and again with the second part, "Can't change nature, though,
folks in Kentucky say their native oysters and brains taste
just the same; fact, taste better, got more soul."
Involuntarily he went over and tuned in the television set,
then sat wide-legged on the sofa. The voice from the television
drew his attention: ". . . peace treaty re-establishing Japan
as an independent and sovereign nation, will go into effect.
On May 6, a federal law requiring gamblers . . ." On sight
of the two faces grinning at him from the television screen,
he realized that Gloucester was conducting his weekday morning
interview with the prophetic chimpanzee, and involuntarily
started up to call Kriss, thinking, "Shell want to hear this."
But his call didn't awaken her and he could hear the chimp
saying: "East Germany will announce plans to form an army
to protect itself against aggression." So he let her sleep on,
thinking, "We must have been drinking different stuff," and
went back to his seat.
". . . twenty-seven-year-old Negro porter, Irving Greene,
will confess to setting twenty fires in Brooklyn during the
past two years, including the June 18th fire in which seven
persons died. When asked why he did it, he will reply that
he liked the excitement."
". . . black Nero," Jesse thought
.
. . new series of reports of flying saucers over Washington
and other parts of the nation resulted in an Air Force an-
nouncement that the objects were not a menace to the U.S. . . .
". . . subversive nightmares . . ."
". . . August 7th, Florida Supreme Court will dismiss pleas
of five Negroes who seek entrance to the University of Florida,
and rule they are not entitled to admittance while equal facilities
are available at the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical Col-
lege for Negroes—"
152


". . . southern mathematics . . .**
". . . General Eisenhower will urge Southerners to protect
the rights of Negroes . .
". . . beautiful word . . ."
. . will be tried for the first-degree murder of Mrs. Krist-
ina W. Cummings. white, a divorcee employed as assistant
director of the India Institute. State-appointed defense attorneys
for Robinson will enter a plea of temporary insanity, based
on the allegation that Robinson, after a weekend of excessive
drinking in the Gramercy Park apartment of Mrs. Cummings,
had become intoxicated to the extent that, during the com-
mission of the crime, he was not conscious of his actions . . ."
. . Bottle fatigue," Jesse thought . "Same thing as shell-
shocked, just sounds worse . . ."
". . . prosecution will establish that, following a previous
quarrel, during which he knocked her down with his fist,
he entered her bedroom armed with the kitchen knife, stabbed
her through the heart while she lay in bed, after which he
washed the body clean of blood, changed the bedding, and
arranged the body in the fresh bed in the position of sleeping
with the eyes closed and the arms extended at its sides, then
took a shower, dressed, packed the murder knife, bloodstained
towels, and bedding into two paper shopping bags, pocketed
an extra set of keys to her apartment, which he had formerly
noticed in a bowl on the table, walked down Twenty-third
Street to East River and threw the shopping bags containing
the bloodstained evidence into the river, returned to the apart-
ment, let himself in with the extra set of keys, undressed, hang-
ing his clothes neatly in Mrs. Cummings' hall clothes closet,
made a bed on the sofa in the sitting room, and went to sleep
immediately . . ."
". . . what you get for reading too much Faulkner, son,"
Jesse said.
. . defense will allege that he was completely blanked
out all during this time; that if, as the prosecution will maintain,
he stabbed her in a rage because she refused to succumb to
his advances, he was entirely unconscious of making advances
and of feeling outraged, and could only have been acting out
of a subconscious resentment toward the woman who invited
him to spend the weekend in her apartment for immoral pur-
poses, and then, after two days of continuous drinking and
enticement, reneged on her part of the bargain. . . ."
". . . you tell 'em, bub! Give a little sausage or get slaugh-
tered for ham."
". . . will dismiss the insanity plea . .
153


said tentatively, and started to awaken her, then changed his
mind and decided to take a nap himself. He slipped beneath
the covers without disturbing her and went to sleep instantly.
He dreamed horribly of running across endless glaciers
and awakened minutes later, deathly chilled, without being
aware that he had dreamed. "Damn, aren't you cold, Kriss-
baby?" he asked. She didn't reply. He got up and slammed
the window shut with a bang, then sat on the edge of the bed
and poured a glass of wine. His teeth chattered against the
rim of the glass. He felt certain that now she was awake and
was keeping silent to annoy him. "You know, Kriss-baby, you
can be very unpleasant," he said angrily, and as his rage began
to rise, added, "You're going to get yourself good and loused
up some day." Then, prodded by her continued silence, he
turned on her furiously, saying, "And whether you like it
or not I'm . . ." His voice stopped short when he clutched
her naked shoulders. Her ice-cold flesh burned his hands.
His next action of which he was aware occurred two and
a half minutes later. He was kneeling on the bed, trying to
make her breathe by means of artificial respiration; and seeing
his tears dripping on the purple-lipped knife wound over her
heart, thought she was beginning to bleed again. He felt
such a fury of frustration he began beating her senselessly
about the face and shoulders, cursing in a sobbing voice,
"Breathe, Goddamn it, breathe!"
The next thing he knew he was kneeling beside the bed,
sobbing into the sheet, praying between gasps: ". . . have mer-
cy on her, God . . . forgive her, God . . . she was a good
girl, God ... we were the bastards . . . You've got to
forgive her, God . . ." Suddenly it struck him, "here you are
asking .'God to forgive her for what you've done to God,"
and he broke off and stood up and finished the bottle of wine.
It soothed his panic sufficiently for him to look at the body
again, and he thought, "You don't really know you did it,"
but in the next flash, "who're you lyin' to, son? You knew before
everybody. You knew it two days before it happened. Perhaps
from the first time they ever hurt you for being born black."
Unaware of what he was doing, he leaned over and covered
the body completely with both sheet and blanket as if to bury
the deed itself.
He felt for his pocket to get a cigarette. He realized then
that he was naked, and instinctively closed the Venetian blinds
before turning on the light . There were no cigarettes in sight
but he found one in the gold case in Kriss's purse that lay
open on the dresser, and lit it with her gold-plated lighter.
157


ftives. But gone now. No more worrying about what's, .right
and what'sjwrong. Just what^s expedient. You're human now.
Went in the baclcdoor of the Alchemy Company of America
a primitive, filled with things called principles, integrity, honor,
conscience, faith, love, hope, charity and such, and came out
the front door a human being, completely purged. End of a
primitive; beginning of a human. Good title for a book but
won't sell in America with the word human in it. Americans
sensitive about that word. Don't want to known they're human.
Don't blame them, though. Poses the only problem they've
never been able to solve with all their gadgets—the human
problem. But they'll know damn well you're human. Be
in all the newspapers: BlacE~mmr~kltts white woman. Not
only natural, plausible, logical, inevitable, psychiatrically com-
pulsive and sociologically conclusive behavior of a human
being, but mathematically accurate and politically correct
as well. Black man has got to have some means of joining the
human race. Old Shakespeare knew. Suppose he'd had Othello
• kiss the bitch_and make up. Would have dehumanized him.
Didn't take much to know. All right there in little figures.
Two plus two equals four. Some happy-headed citizens are
beginning to claim they equal five. And we've always had those
mite-hearted bastards who claim they make only three. But
equals four regardless. Way the system works. Got to change
the whole damn system to get either three or five. Wonder by
this time why they haven't made up their minds to accept
this. Their own system, too. Yours too now, son. Too bad Kriss
not here to see you made it into the human race." His face
relaxed in a slow sympathetic smile. "She'd be the only one
who'd understand."
A knock sounded on the door but the sound did not penetrate
his closed and sealed perceptions.
"Miz Cummons, anything mo y'all need?"
. . too bad, Kriss-baby," he was thinking. "Spent ten
best years of your life trying to get us into the human racf/
and not here to see your first recruit."
He did not hear the diminishing sound of footsteps down
the hall, nor the faint sound of the door opening and closing.
In the act of lifting the telephone to call the police he stopped
abruptly, thinking, "She'd never forgive you for not being dress-
ed, son." He went across to the bathroom, shaved, brushed
his teeth again, and dressed completely, retying his tie several
times before he'd fashioned a perfect V-shaped Duke of
Windsor knot. "Now you can tell them you just stopped by
by for the killing. Nothing disrespectable about that." He
159


THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN