Such Sweet Thunder (52 page)

He looked at the sky. A subtle tinge of red stained the clouds. A sense of five o’clock urgency rose in a sudden swell of dinning sound that rippled through the trees and echoed within the chambers of his heart.

His eyes swept along the banks of the river. He tried to discover his coming-out place. He tried to measure the distance up through ten years of garrulous pulsating sounds, smells, shapes, and colors, which had fired the leaflike shades of many rented rooms floored with parallel planks between which the fathomless crevices had run side by side — beyond the walls of St. John’s and the schoolroom and the art gallery and the Union Station — into the large voluminous room that was the future, where the reverend and Mr. T. Wellington Harps and Rutherford would never go — to the ticking of clocks!

Four … four a —
o
’clock, he thought.

And now he saw his own towering bearded figure striding up out of the river: Amerigo Frederick Douglass Booker T. George Washington Jones! He stepped majestically, whip in hand, from square to square!
Leaping over City Hall, the courthouse,
and
the Telephone Building in one bound!

He stood at the foot of Memorial Hill. At his back the swarm of cars crawled around the station. The clouds were streaked with blood and the sun-shattered trees torn into shreds of quivering light. Just as he reached the battlement the windshield of an unseen automobile, swerving into a curve somewhere on a distant hill to the east, deflected a volley of golden fire that blew a hole through his chest:

Boom!

“If he’d a been a white man!”
said Rutherford.

General Douglass half stumbled, half fell down Memorial Hill.

Boom!

If I’d been a white boy they’d a — would have given me a job!

Cast down thy bucket where thou art.

Gallery.

The weight of a heavy blackness pressed him down through the busy streets, squeezing him within the minimal bounds of some arbitrary modicum of undignified space reverberating with a terrifying boom!

At last he stood in front of the courthouse. He walked up the steps and entered the building. It was full of offices. He entered the first one he came to. A white man with his hat on and a burning cigarette dangling from his lips sat back in a chair with his brown-shoed feet propped up on a desk, reading a newspaper.

A detective! Amerigo studied the dark round spot on the sole of his right shoe and then his blue half-length socks with their fine diagonal stripes. A crust of ash fell from his cigarette. He looked at him as he brushed it away, and returned to his newspaper.

Amerigo pushed open the swivel gate behind which the detective sat and walked through the open door of the rear office. He studied the disorderly desk, the books in the bookshelves, the typewriter, the telephone. He searched for guns, blackjacks, rubber hoses, seeing the mangled face of a young man whose name he could not remember on the front page of the
Voice
.

“Ain’ that a shame!” Rutherford had said.

A sudden sense of fear whisked him out of the office into the hall.

He mashed down on the clutch and took a sip of water from the electric water cooler, and then made his way to the upper floor where he discovered a Negro woman dusting the panels of a big double door.

She looked at him and kept on dusting. A white cloth was tied around her head. He observed that she had Chinese eyes and bad
feet. He hesitated before the door and cleared his throat. She continued to work.

“Eh … ’scuse me. Kin I go in?”

“You a citizen ain’t you?”

“Aw — I meant —”

“What?” She stretched her ailing old body to its full imposing height and fixed her gaze upon him.

“Nothin’ … ing.”

He pushed the door open and entered the beautiful courtroom. It was furnished with dark brown highly polished wood, solid, sturdy, and new looking as though it had never been used, and yet was old, unmovable, as though it had been there forever.

He studied the imposing throne where the judge sat, the gavel he held in his hand, the
Boom! Boom! Boom!
of which seemed to be validated by the flag of the United States of America hanging from the pole behind the bench.

Boom! Boom! Boom!
went the gavel — through the loudspeaker of the little table-model radio in the front room of 618:

“I see you’re back again, Sam,” the judge was saying.

“Well, ya honah, sah, I —”

“Just wait a minute now, I’ll ask the questions and you just give the answers. You’re charged with disturbing the peace again, and beating up your wife, Sarah. You broke her nose and knocked out four of her teeth. Now, what have you got to say for yourself?”

“I’m jus’ sorry ’bout the whole thing. I … I —”

“I what?” asked the judge.

“I was jus’ drunk, I guess. An’ if you jus’ let me off this time I promise I won’ do that no mo’! Naw, sah! I mean that! I take a dirty oath on my —”

“Just a minute!” the judge broke in. “You’re on the air, you know …”

“Yessah.”

“Sarah, you got anything to say? It was your nose he broke.”

“An’ he blacked both a … both of my eyes, too, Judge! Eeeeevah Saaaaad’y night he come home all drunked up an’ eeeevul! Done spen’ all his money an’ then he start beatin’ up on somebody! An’ I told ’im last time, if he do it agin, I was gonna call the law an’ have ’im locked up! An’ —”

“Is that what you want us to do, lock him up?” asked the judge.

“Well,” said Sarah, “he ain’ no bad man, Judge. He’s a good man when he’s sober. An’ … eh …”

“Well now, you called the officers and had him brought in. What do you want us to do?”

“Like I say —” said Sarah, “he’s a
good
man when he’s sober an’ all that.”

“All what?”

“When he straighten up an’ fly right. You
know
what I mean, Judge. An’ if he promus … promus to act right — I’m willin’ to give ’im anothah chance.”

“You gonna straighten up an’ fly right, Sam?” asked the judge.

“Yessah,” Sam muttered.

“What’s that? Speak up so all the listeners can hear you!”

“YES, SAH!”

“Yes,
sah
what?”

“Yes, sah I sho’ is gonna straighten up an’ fly right!”

“All right,” said the judge, “I’m going to let you off light this time. The fine will be twenty-five dollars. You take Sarah home and get her teeth fixed, and don’t let me see you before this bench again!”

“Naw, sah!” said Sam.

Amerigo stepped out into the corridor, descended the stairs, and entered the street. His body writhed uncomfortably in his tight black skin. It pressed in upon him, as though it were a suit of rubber many sizes too small. His thoughts, trying to expand, strained against the contracting wall of skin.

He turned eastward down Twelfth Street. The buildings loomed ominously around him at dizzying heights, plunging him into the cool depths of late-afternoon shade. He stepped into the driveway near the corner and was wafted back onto the sidewalk by a buffeting breeze set in turbulent motion by a black van that swerved into the drive. Black Mariah! he thought, as fear caused the skin to draw still tighter around the struggling tension within him.

He
had
to follow the van into the basement of the courthouse — with his eyes only, at first, thrilling to an exciting temptation that made him hesitate in the middle of the drive. There’s where they give them the third degree!

Without realizing it, he had entered the basement. He was standing before an office next to which was a big room closed off with real bars. He peeped in.

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOIN’ THERE!” exclaimed an angry voice.

From the corner of his eye he saw the towering figure of a white
policeman with a gun and bullets around his belt, just in time to duck under a big red palm swinging toward his head.

“If I catch your little black ass in here agin, I’ll kick the
shit
out a you!” the officer declared.

Trembling from head to foot, teeth chattering, he strained his will in order to hold his buoyant flesh back to a walk.

“I said, GIT!” shouted the voice somewhere behind him.

WALK! cried Frederick Douglass.

Rattle! Rattle! rattle! His stick grating against the iron bars.

WALK!

Sunlight from the street bathed his face. A feeling of relief accompanied by a seizure of violent trembling confused his diminishing feet as he stumbled over the deep crevices between the great blocks of cement paving down the long long street. With much difficulty his shriveling legs strained to span the endless inches of the way back through the ravaged no-man’s-land of the Ten Year Siege.

“WHERE’N THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN?” Rutherford shouted.

“Come here!” he commanded.

Amerigo approached him cautiously, coming to a halt a few feet from where he sat, well out of range of his long powerful arms.

“You hear me talkin’ to you?” Rutherford was saying.

Dumbly he studied the floorboards of the porch.

“Baby?” A woman’s voice.

“Leave ’im alone!” said Rutherford, “I want to know where he’s been — till six o’clock! Who in the
hell
does he think he is? This ain’ no restaurant — no ho-tel or nothin’ — where he kin just come an’ go as he pleases. I come home an’ found the front door
an’
the back door all open. Didn’ even make up his bed. I’m gittin’ sick a this crap. The bigger he gits the less he tries to help us. Us out workin’, tryin’ to take care of ’im, an’ he don’ even appreciate
nothin’!
So busy playin’ —
all day!
— that he can’t even come home an’ make up his bed. Ain’ even got time enough to eat his supper. You better git ’im out a my sight, before I beat all the black off that little niggah!”

Viola eyed him significantly, and he moved covertly, under the protective complicity of her gaze, into the house.

“Wash your hands an’ face,” she said.

He washed his face and hands. Then he sat down to the table and faced the bowl of lukewarm fried cabbage alone. He crammed his mouth with corn bread, onions, and salt pork so that he would not taste the cabbage. He swilled down his buttermilk. All the while he felt
Rutherford’s gaze, through the
Star
, through the screen, intensifying the glare of the naked light overhead. As he was finishing, the screen door opened and Rutherford stood over him.

“An’ when you git through, I want you to wash up the dishes. Look!” He opened the oven door, “All
them!
Pots an’ pans you been
soakin’!
An’ clean all that crap from behind the sink.”

“Yessir.”

Rutherford stalked into the middle room where Viola was making up the bed.

“What you doin’?” Amerigo heard him ask. “Let
him
do it! He been out playin’ all day. Let him earn his keep! I better go down on the porch ‘fore I kill both a you.”

He heard Rutherford going down the stairs, and Viola’s footfall as she approached him.

“Babe!” Rutherford called from the corridor, “you come on down here with me, an’ leave that little niggah by hisself!”

She smiled sadly at him and turned to join Rutherford.

“A
one
-two-three-fo’! A-one-two-three-fo’!” shouted a husky voice from the alley, accompanied by the sound of tramping feet:

“Column right — ho!”

Laughing commentary up and down the alley.

Mr. Man o’ War, playin’ army, he thought, seeing Maxine, Sammy, Willie Joe, Annie, and the rest marching single file.

“Column lef’ — harch!”

“Hee! hee!”

“Aaaaaw — do it, then!”

“When war do come, we sure gonna be ready!”

“Mark tiiime — hark!”

Tramp! tramp! tramp! tramp! gradually accompanied by a low growl coming from the distance, growing louder, drowning the tramp-tramp-tramp-tramp of the time-marking feet, which now slowly rose to the foreground of sound, as the growl moved farther up the avenue. Tramp! tramp! tramp! tramp! between the noisy rattle of Bra Mo’s truck and the bang of a neighboring screen door: Boom!

“Momma, where’s Toodle-lum?”

“I don’ know, Pearl, ain’ he with you?”

“No’m.”

“Toodle-lum! Aw-Toodle-lum!”

Then he gathered the dishes together and stacked them on the
drainboard. He poured the hot water into the dishpan, watched the soap flakes fall from the corner of the box like snow, turned on the cold water, and watched it foam like beer. He slid the dishes in, plate after plate, in a long chain of plates, of cups and saucers, a glistening chain of knives, forks, and spoons.

Gradually all the sounds from the alley, the boulevard and the avenue, and from the neighboring houses faded into the background of his consciousness. His mind forgot what his hands were doing, and his hands worked independently of his eyes, which had closed him into the voluminous feeling of blackness, from the depths of which an unheard voice echoed from a long way off:

“Deeee-ee — eep ri-ver! My home is oooooo-ver Jordan. Deeeeee-ee — eep ri-ver, Lord, I want to crooooooss o-ver intoooooo — campground!”

His blind fingers lifted the dish towel from the nail and rubbed it over the surfaces of the plates.

“Oh — don’t you wa-an-na go-ow —”

Plate after plate.

“to that go-ah-spel pee-eace! To that praaaah-ah-mised la- and where aw-awl is peee-eace? Deeee-ee — eep ri-ver, L-o-r-d! I want to crooooss o-ver intoooo — campground!”

He scrubbed the pots and pans and cleaned the tray under the burners of the gas range. He scrubbed the kitchen table clean, let down the wings, and spread a fresh tablecloth on it, to the accompaniment of the unheard voice singing the quiet melody that was enclosed within the dark chamber behind his eyes. Tremulously his lips repeated the words:

“Deeee-ee — eep ri-ver.”

He cleaned the trash from behind the sink and scrubbed the shelves of the cupboard and rinsed the dishrag out and poured the dirty water into the sink, wiping the greasy ring from the dishpan and hanging it up on the nail between the sink and the cupboard. Then he sprinkled the scouring powder into the sink and scrubbed it until it sparkled. That done, he rinsed out the dishrag again and hung it on the nail beside the dishpan, and hung the dish towel beside the dishrag. Then he swept the floor.