Five Smooth Stones (13 page)

cord you have chosen law. It means I have done my work well. You were young, David, very young, when you made the choice; young and round-eyed and scrubbed."

David remembered. The Professor had taught him history, not by dates and detail, but by stories and anecdotes, weaving them together in what he saw now was a well-planned pattern. "The first man to be shot in the war that freed your country was a Negro, David. Your people do not think of it as 'our country' the way the whites do. But it is, David; it very much is. And some day it must give to you—to your people—their birthright. But you will have to fight first It will not be a pretty fight; it is never a pretty fight when a man must battle for what is rightfully his."

"But look—look—" David had said, sitting as tall as he could in the straight chair by the desk. "The Constitution. You done shown me—I mean, you showed me what it says 'bout citizens and how they all got—all have a voice, and how they have rights. If it's the law, like it says there, why we have to fight?"

That had been the beginning, and out of that had grown the realization—nurtured, coaxed along by the Professor like a budding plant—that the battles must be fought on many fronts but that only the battle fought and won on the front of the law would be a lasting victory. The Professor said he had "made the choice." It hadn't been a "choice," he thought that day when they discussed Nehemiah; it hadn't been of his choosing, it had been the only thing, and he never gave a thought to any other calling.

The Prof had been curious about Nehemiah, and brought the conversation back to him.
"Ja!"
said the Prof. "Now we go back to where we were. He of whom we were speaking—"

"Hey, Prof! No fair. You gave me a little book, remember? On English. And it kept saying 'keep it simple.' Gee! 'He of whom—'"

"Just getting you upsetted. Now. Back to Nehemiah."

"Well, he and I were in school together till they moved back over the river to New Orleans. His daddy's a preacher, a real ripsnorting gospel shouter. He starts to preach real low and slow, quiet as anything; then the first thing you know he's sort of singing it, and then everyone starts answering and clapping their hands and stomping and joining in. I mean he's really swinging, up there in that pulpit. Does what Gramp calls 'carries a man.' Ne'miah's kinda like him."

"That is so?" Knudsen's red-gray, bushy eyebrows arched.

"I have not seen the boy. It is not what I would have expected of a prodigy in mathematics. What does he look like?"

"He's a monkeyman. Black. I mean real black. Small. Gets real excited over things. Got a sort of high, squeaky voice like his daddy's until he gets worked up. Then he really lets out."

"You were good friends?"

David shook his head. "Not exactly. I mean we never did run around together much. I see him now and then."

What he did not tell the Prof was that Nehemiah's bitterness was deep and corrosive, and Gramp had said of him: "He's bound for trouble, that boy, if'n he don't learn to get along. Man don't have to crawl on his belly to get along but he's got to learn to take things as they is. He sure as hell ain't gonna change 'em none, popping off like he does, not down here. They's other ways of getting back at 'em."

David knew the wellspring of Nehemiah's bitterness. Gramp told him recently. Ne'miah's daddy was a musician years ago, a bass player, and he and Gramp played gigs together sometimes, back in the Cajun country where the kids jigged in front of the band while the men were tuning up, crying, "Play, nigger! Play, nigger!" and where once, at the end of the night when the band was leaving, a bunch of drunken dancers—"wimmens, too"—threw the bloated, decayed body of a dog into the truck as it started off—"laughing like a bunch of Goddamned hyenas"—and where earlier that same evening someone had snatched the trumpet player's new Panama from his head and stomped it into the mud, yelling, "Ain't no nigger going to wear a hat as good as mine—"

"Me," said Gramp, "I never did go back there no more. Some of the others did, when they needed money real bad. I been hungry, son; I been really hungry, gone hungry so's my kids could eat, but I ain't never been that hungry."

He told David that Nehemiah's daddy had been one of those who had gone back now and again, and sometimes taken his handsome black wife along because she had relatives living in the town where they played the oftenest and she could visit with them while the band was working. The third time he brought her she took the fancy of the sheriff in the town, and he "enticed" her into the jailhouse on the excuse of a phone message for her husband. "She hadn't more'n got inside the door when she caught on," said Gramp.

But when she turned to run, the sheriff dragged her inside and into a cell, then beat her into frightened silence and raped her. "She's a real good woman," said Gramp. "She didn't want no part, not
no
part of that red-neck ofay bastard, but it didn't make no difference. That bastard, he told what he'd do to Nehemiah's daddy did she tell him; told her how he'd fix her husband so's he wouldn't be no good to her or any other woman, so's she'd come crawling to him for what her husband couldn't give her. Said he'd fix it with the New Orleans po-lice to get him back up there on some charge or other. Every time they went up there after that the sheriff was waiting for her. The other mens in the band, they knew, but they didn't dast say anything, and Ne'miah's daddy he didn't catch on for a few times. When he found out he didn't blame her none, but he mighty near went out of his mind thinking how he'd been standing there playing his bass all night and what was going on in the jailhouse." Gramp had paused in telling the story, shaken his head slowly, said, "Lawd!" and then gone on. "You seen Ne'miah's big brother? So damned light he could pass most anywhere. Don't know how Ne'miah found out about it less'n he heard his folks or some big-mouth talking about it."

The night following the Professor's news that Nehemiah was being considered for a scholarship, Nehemiah called him and they met the following afternoon over Cokes in a juke joint. "How come you're even thinking about a white college?" asked David.

Nehemiah shrugged shoulders too wide for the short body. "You know a better way to be as smart as they are, learn how to cut 'em?"

"Never thought about it just like that."

"Start thinking, man. Don't see how being smart in math's going to help, but there'll be a way. Those ofays ain't going to be on top always."

David wondered why he left the ofay epithet unqualified. It had always been a mystery to him how anyone as filled with evangelistic fervor as Preacher Wilson's son could fall so easily into the biological obscenities so common among others of his people. Nehemiah, thought David, knew more damned dirty, really dirty, phrases than anyone else his size and weight, and bigger, in all New Orleans. Yet Nehemiah, once the spirit got hold of him, could outpreach and outshout his own daddy. David had heard him do it, even when he

was a kid in Sunday school, and then, after it was over, the little boy, the blackest kid in all the Sunday school, would break up and cry like a crazy girl.

"I'm taking everything the bastards will give me," he said the afternoon they met. "And what they ain't giving me, I'm getting somehow. They want to educate me, that's fine. Just fine. Time's going to come they'll wish they hadn't. What you going up there for? What you planning to do?"

"Law."

"Yeah? Jeez, man, that's the stuff. That's the stuff to yense 'em with. By the time you get it all down, get through law school, the bells will be ringing; yessir, they'll be ringing."

"For church?" David had learned how to needle Nehemiah along.

Nehemiah's teeth flashed white in the deep blackness of his face. "Yeah, for church." He slapped an open palm on the table-top in rhythm to his words: "Come-to-Jesus-and-git-yo'-guns—"

"Your old man feel like that?"

"My daddy? Hell, no. Or if he does he buttons his lip about it. He's got nonviolent ideas, my old man has, most of the time. Maybe it was different when he was young. That's what we got to do, David."

"What?"

"Stay young. Don't ever let ourselves get old and beat and scared like they are."

***

Rudy Lopez was really the cat he wished was with him on this trip. He and Rudy had done just about everything together since they were kids, everything but study, because all Rudy wanted to learn was the insides of motors. Lying back there in his chair on the train, he could see Rudy plain as day: tall, thin, with light reddish skin peppered with freckles, and reddish hair as nappy as David's black hair, and the features of his white father. Rudy was the grandson of Miz Jones, the great-grandson of old Zeke Jones. Miz Jones had raised him. No one knew where his mother, Miz Jones's daughter was, but everyone knew where his father was: all over the damned place, a big shot in parish politics, always making speeches, pulling strings, always talking about how he loved the "good niggers," how much he was doing for them ("free paint for their privies," Gramp said), screaming for tighter segregation, screaming for the laws to be strengthened that separated black from white, laws David knew were fashioned on the old Bienville Black Code—screaming, screaming, screaming. And the silent, hating screams, the loud, obscene screams—David knew them now as fear.

Thinking of Lopez, he could hear Rudy saying, "That's my pappy, that's my daddy, that's my old man, that's my li'l ol' daddy, and I wish to God they'd cut his balls off before he was ten." Without that nappy hair, the tinge of brownish red underlying the freckles, Rudy could have passed. And wouldn't, he said. "Not if you was to string me up by the thumbs and pull my toenails out one by one, I wouldn't. It's bad enough being half white, looking like 'em. If I got close as passing maybe I'd start acting like 'em, thinking like 'em. Then I'd go to hell for sure."

He and Rudy discovered sex at about the same time, and David supposed that all kids when they found out about sex —really found out about it, not just fooled around—thought they'd discovered it. "It's been going on a long time," Gramp said, and smiled, and David had the feeling Gramp knew a hell of a lot about it, even if he did look as innocent as a li'l ol' lamb. Gramp said: "Had a white doctor I done some work for say a funny thing to me once. Asked me why it was colored could start in so young and keep going so long. 'How come?' he sez, and I told him I didn't know. He said he was damned if he could figure it out, speaking as a doctor." Gramp shook his head. "Them whites worries theirselves sick about us and sex. Had their way they'd de-ball us all, only then there wouldn't be no new generation coming along to do the dirty work for 'em, no new colored they could teach their kids to feel soo-preme about."

Edna Mae, the girl next door that Gram had called "the devil's own," was mistress of ceremonies at David's initiation. Looking back on it, he had to admit she'd been a good one, slipping in and listening, quiet, while Miz Jones was giving him a piano lesson, sticking around after Miz Jones left, drinking lemonade with him, one leg over the arm of Gramp's chair, no pants on, showing everything she had while he sat on the divan, averting his eyes at first, then finally doing what he was being invited to do—enjoying it He couldn't understand what a nineteen-year-old girl wanted with a shy fourteen-year-old; but when he confided in Rudy he found that Rudy's mentor had been a grown woman in New Orleans—near forty, Rudy said, and what
she
knew was a shame. Man! he was glad he hadn't picked himself some rabbity li'l ol' girl his own age, he said; man learned something, realty learned something with a real woman, and listening to him David felt chagrined and brought down, and didn't brag as much after that when they compared notes.

There was a twinge of remorse now when he remembered how sex had messed him up for a while. Lawd! It had been all he could think about. The Prof had been understanding about his neglecting his studies, even tried to straighten him out some. Gramp had known about it just by being around without being told anything, and had raised a sand. Not because he was carrying on—"You a man now; been worried if you hadn't"—but because the carrying on was with the girl next door. "That's too close for comfort," Gramp said. "Too damned close. Spose she gets herself knocked up—"

"She won't." David wasn't able to keep the pride from his voice, felt every inch the man Gramp said he was. "She knows how to take care of herself."

"Goose balls!" said Gramp. "Ain't
no
woman all that smart. You find yourself someone else, y'hear! Don't go mess-in' with the neighbors."

Edna Mae and he had split up, not because of anything Gramp said but because she got a job over the river in New Orleans. He had it rough for a while with jealousy because someone told him she had taken up with a gambler, a big shot, way older than she was. She got herself a car and new clothes and a wristwatch, and came over to Beauregard only now and then to see her mother. Then she was home all the time for a while; then she took to staying away over the river again. Every time she was in Beauregard she came over to the house, even when Gramp was there, but David didn't want any part of her now. "There's plenty more," Rudy had said. "Tail's one thing New Orleans is plumb full of." And been right.

He wished again that it had been Rudy instead of Nehemiah who'd been the one to go to Pengard. Probably the other colored guys there would be a bunch of uppity northern Negroes, and sometimes, going by those he'd met, he couldn't say but what they were damned near as bad as whites, maybe worse, and all the time the real colored, the down-home colored, were laughing at them.

It wasn't that Nehemiah wasn't a good guy, but he got so damned excited about everything. Wore a man out. And you couldn't talk about anything with Nehemiah it didn't end up in race. Not that sooner or later every conversation with anyone didn't wind up in race, only it got there quicker with Nehemiah. But with everyone, from sex, from music, from car engines, no matter what, talk always wound up in race. It was the same with the old folks; only difference was, they talked about it in an accepting kind of way. Even Gramp and his musician friends dwelt on incidents that wouldn't have happened, wouldn't have lived in their memories if race hadn't accounted for them.