Five Smooth Stones (15 page)

David squirmed nervously. "I—I'm not there yet" It would be nice if these two guys would let him decide for himself. They hadn't really answered his question, and now he said: "Has he given anything to Negro colleges? They need it, they really need it, they're scratching for pennies—"

"Perhaps he has," said Dr. Knudsen. "I do not know. I do know he dislikes very much the terms 'white' and 'Negro' colleges. He feels it is almost a sacrilege to differentiate institutions of learning by such labels. I agree. Learning must be universal or it is not true learning."

David smiled politely, knowing it was a smile that always irritated the Professor because he recognized it as a mask, and knew that behind it a mind was working on things with which the smile had nothing to do.

It was all right, he thought, it was fine, just fine, for these two men to talk. Next to Gramp he supposed he liked the Professor better than anyone else he knew. Sometimes the liking came close to love, and the Professor was the only white person with whom he had ever discussed race. Not with any other white would he talk as he had talked with the Prof, but there were doors that were closed even to the Prof, dark vaults in his mind that this man he came close to loving could never enter. Even a brown-skin boy not yet in college, thought David, knew the difference between the world of theory and principle in which the Prof and his brother lived and the world his own dark face confronted.

"You must decide for yourself, David," the Prof was saying. "Remember, if you will, what I have tried to teach you: the long view, the view that takes in generations, not just years."

"Yes, sir," said David. "I see what you mean." And did not see, not then, but now, in a train on the way to Pengard, was just beginning to see.

***

When Li'l Joe was told about the scholarship, he did one of his double takes, the quick, wide smile, then the concerned frown. "It's up to you, son. Like I say, you a man now. But you sure you wants to go up there? Go to a white college? Trying to study and learn among them white boys, all the time wondering, worrying about 'em, what they going to do? You sure you wouldn't be happier, do better with your own? You needs to study 'bout it, boy, before you decides."

"I been studying about it, Gramp. A scholarship means it's free, mostly."

"We ain't broke. I got a few pennies put up."

"I can get a job; I'm sure I can. The Prof says a lot of the guys have jobs."

"You ain't gonna get no job if it's gonna mess up your studying, learning. I told you, we ain't broke."

"It won't. First thing, I guess, is to find out if I'm smart enough to get accepted."

"You smart enough. Thing is, you sure you wants it?"

"I can handle it, Gramp. Been living with a white world all my life, haven't I?"

They were eating supper. David had cooked it because he was starving, and wanted to eat as soon as Gramp came home. There were stuffed crabs and stuffed artichokes, red beans from the day before, rice. Now Gramp, comfortably full, leaned back and patted his stomach appreciatively. "Taking my job away from me, son." He lit a cigarette, spooned prodigious amounts of sugar into his coffee, tasted the coffee tentatively, added a little more sugar, and went on. "You been living
with
a white world all your life, but you ain't been living
in
it. They's a difference. We lives in one world; they lives in another. Never could go all the way with your gram, not wanting you to even have to work for 'em. Hell, that don't make no sense at all; they got all the money, all the jobs, all the power. Thing is, though, you moving right
into
their world. And that's something they don't want Nohow. How many colored they got there in that collidge?"

"The Prof says maybe a dozen or a little more. That's in all classes. They want more. And the Prof says there's no segregation. Not in the dormitories or the classes or even in the town."

"You colored boys going to look like a bunch of lonesome fleas floatin' in a pan of milk. How many head of kids they got there, all told?"

"Maybe couple of thousand."

Gramp was quiet for a moment, then elaborately casual. "They got wimmens up there?"

"It's co-educational."

"You ain't answered my question."

"It means they've got girl students too."

Suddenly Li'l Joe Champlin's voice sharpened. "You steer Clear, y'hear!"

David gave an involuntary start at Gramp's quick sharpness. "My gosh, Gramp! Did I say I wouldn't? Don't get so excited."

"It's no good."

"What's no good?"

"Pork meat," said Gramp bluntly.

David's sideways glance was sly and amused. "You speaking from experience?"

"I ain't saying I is and I ain't saying I ain't. What I'm saying is I ain't never knowed one of us what hasn't had the chance was he damn fool enough to take it. You ever hear Kid Arab tell about how they goes after them mens of his when they travels? How they entices 'em? You ever hear them mens of his braggin' about how the white wimmens throws theirselves at 'em?"

"Sure I have. Plenty of times. And I didn't need Kid Arab or any of 'em to tell me. Learned a thing or two myself, right down here. There's a woman where I used to deliver laundry, couple of months ago—I- told you about it. See-through nightgowns and negligees, managing to get her hand on me when she took the package—"

"You'd have touched her and someone come along she'd have screamed rape. You'd have been seeing striped moons the rest of your life.
If
you lived—"

"That's what I knows. Shucks, what you think I am? Some kind of a li'l chile? Who wants it? Me, I always thought it would be like messing around with a half-dead fish." Now David's smile was open and wide. "Is it?"

Gramp ignored the smile and the question. "Mebbe you ain't no chile, mebbe you a man now, but you young yet." Obviously his fears were not quieted. "They sure funny people. All the time worried and screaming 'bout their lily-white southern wimmens, scared as a cat in a kennel full of bulldogs. All the time saying they has to keep segregation on account of mixed marriages, getting a lot of mongrels around. Sweet Jesus! What they got now! People passing whose grandaddies were a hell of a lot blacker'n me, and way blacker'n you. Got 'em in high places, too. You never seen your ma, but she was near as light as Rudy. Had freckles, too. Them white men making the most noise, they the ones shacking up with colored wimmen all the time, and their kids running wild being called niggers. Somebody, I disremember who, said all a white woman had to do if she didn't want to marry colored was to say 'no.'"

"Langston Hughes. Colored author. He's the one who said it"

"Well, he saying it right. He sure saying it right. What they scared of? I knows. You knows. Their own wimmens. That's what they scared of. Marriage ain't rape, and the rape they hollering so loud about ain't a thing in the world but what comes of segregation. And there's damned little of what they calls rape that's really rape. I knows."

David stood up and pushed his chair back, still smiling. "Bet you do, Gramp. Bet you know a hell of a lot more'n what you're saying. But for gosh sake, quit worrying. I keep telling you, I'm not interested. Period. Look, I'll do the dishes when I get back. I got a movie date with a girl. She's green with red spots. That O.K.?"

"Be better was she black," grumbled Gramp, unsoothed.

***

The Professor's advice, the day before David took the bus for Cincinnati, was different. "You must not be like the old maid who looks under the bed every night, David."

"Say that again, Prof?"

"I have never known whether the old maid hoped she'd find a man or was afraid she would. You know what I mean. Do not look so puzzled. You must not see prejudice, which you live with every day in New Orleans, everywhere. It will be in many places, even there, but it will not be everywhere. Do not look under the bed for it when something happens or something is said that would have happened or been said whatever your color."

"O.K., Prof, I'll try. But like—as—Gramp says, it's better to be safe than sorry. I'm not pushing myself."

"My God! This I must see.
Ja!
This I must see. David Champlin pushing himself. You are damned near as shy today, my boy, as the first time you sat over there, one leg in a cast and the other wound around the chair leg like a rubber band. You remember? You are still that boy grown only a little older. When the great day comes, David, that you push yourself, you must let Bjarne Knudsen know."

Now, in the train with sleep catching up with him, David thought: "I wasn't shy in that Goddamned bus, not after I got my senses back after that minchy-mouthed red-neck wouldn't let me off."

The Professor had walked to the door with him the day before, and repeated his earlier words. "Remember, you are not to see things under the bed. They will not always be there."

That, thought David just before sleep obliterated bis thoughts, that I have to see; that they gotta prove.

When he left the train at Laurel, he stood for a moment on the platform, movement arrested by the scent of a spring he had never experienced. Spring did not come like this to New Orleans: cold crispness with warmth beneath it, new grass a faint green mist over open ground, trees not quite budded yet showing pale promise, defying the patches of gray snow that lay in the crooks of their trunks and on the ground in shady places, the sap of the trees restlessly stirring. The feel of its stirring was in his own body, disturbing and exhilarating.

And then Dr. Knudsen was there, bustling, talking, his hair rising in islands of spiky disorder, triumphant over brush and comb and water. David had called him from the Cincinnati station and explained his early arrival by saying that he had changed his mind and taken a train instead of a bus. Knudsen had told him there was a train to Laurel in a matter of minutes and, miraculously, he had made it.

When they were in the car and driving off, the doctor said, "We had planned that you would stay with us: la. But our niece arrived yesterday. With a broken arm." He clucked and shook his head. "She was alone because her father is on a trip and she called us and we told her to come at once. It is not a bad break but there is a cast. She lives outside of Chicago."

David was sorry for anyone with a broken bone, anyone, white or colored, but he felt a surge of relief over not staying at the doctor's. How in hell would they have worked it? Have him eat in the kitchen with the cook or maybe go out to meals? Now that he had arrived he felt dubious about all this talk about integration in the town and college. There was bound to be a Negro boardinghouse somewhere in the town where he could relax and feel at home. As they drove he could see Negroes working in yards, maids shaking dustmops from windows and porches, men in a work crew repairing the road.

"You will stay at the Inn." The words penetrated his thoughts slowly, then left him disturbed and fearful. What in hell was the "Inn"? It sounded white and he wondered if the doctor knew what he was doing. It also sounded expensive, and his money would just barely hold out for three days in a cheap boardinghouse. The car slowed and stopped.
"Ja,"
said the doctor. "We are here. I will go in with you."

You'd better, thought David. Sweet Jesus! You'd better go in with me. Or stay on the porch and catch me on the way past when they heave me out.

He followed the other up broad steps, across a wide porch, and through massive, graceful doors. The lobby had once been the central hallway of a converted mansion, and there was still the aura of another age about it. He was walking very straight and tall, eyes masked and wary, defenses bristling.

Karl Knudsen was talking to a man behind a counter in the far left corner of the lobby beyond a wide, arched entrance to a lounge. The man swung a book toward David, looking at him coolly with no welcome in his eyes. He did not speak. David signed the book and wondered, smarting under the clerk's cold disapproval, if he ought to write "Colored" after his name, then heard a voice beside him that warmed and strengthened him. He turned and saw a youth of about his own age, and of his own complexion, wearing tan slacks and a light-blue, brass-buttoned uniform jacket. "I'll get your bag upstairs, show you the way," the boy said.

"Ah, Randall!" Dr. Knudsen gripped the boy's shoulder, shook it gently. "You did not go home for vacation?"

The boy called Randall smiled. "No, sir. Needed the bread."

"Slang!" barked Knudsen, then turned to David. "A fellow Pengardian, David. Randall, this is David Champlin— Randall is a sophomore, David. Only slightly retarded."

David shook hands with Randall, heard Knudsen saying, "Straight A's.
Ja.
Straight A's. Only one A-minus to show hi weakness."

"Can't win 'em all," said Randall. "You coming up with us, Doc?"

"We are going to eat first, if there is food."

"It can be arranged." The man behind the desk did not smile. "I do what I'm paid to do," the narrowed, cold eyes seemed to be saying.

"See you later, Champlin," said Randall.

Throughout a gargantuan breakfast—its probable cost making David shudder inwardly—the little doctor talked almost without stopping. David learned that if he was accepted he would be known as "Champlin," although, Knudsen said, he himself would probably call him "David" because he had known him first as a leggy ten-year-old. He also learned that the college kept a loose rein on students and that students were aided in finding jobs if they needed them, either on or off campus. There were no restrictions on weekend leaves, but there was an eleven-o'clock week-night curfew, Monday through Thursday. Liquor was not allowed on campus, but a strange astigmatism prevailed where beer was concerned. "We can do it like this because we are so small," said Knudsen. "And because we are so careful. Our students come to learn. If they do not—there are other colleges and universities—"

Many of the things Dr. Knudsen said did not sink in. David was nervous and edgy. They were alone in the smallish dining room except for a middle-aged white couple sitting across the room at a table against the wall. Whenever he glanced at them they were either eating or talking, but David felt that, whenever he was not looking at them, their eyes were fixed on him. It was a real bomb that Dr. Knudsen tossed when he said: "You see that couple sitting across the room? She is on the board of directors of our local NAACP chapter. Her husband is vice-president. He holds the chair of anthropology. If you are lucky you will be in his class next year. I will see what I can do."