Five Smooth Stones (42 page)

"Because my father said the same things to me. I don't know how things were for you, David. Of course, I know something of your background; all the faculty know the backgrounds of the students, it's part of our job; but just how things were for you in another sense, I can't know. A Negro boy growing up in the South—they can't have been good. But I think, at least from a material standpoint, they were better for you than they were for me, for most Negroes in the rural South. Not that they don't stink, everywhere."

"I've been lucky," said David. "Awfully damned lucky. Too damned lucky, I guess, for it to be right."

"Nonsense. So was I, if you want to put it that way. People do hit jackpots. Are you going to walk off and leave your jackpot in the machine? The odds against another one are mighty long."

When David did not answer, Benford went on: "The odds, for that matter, are against us all the way. They're against us if we stay where the whites have put us; they're against us if we make it in their world. You know that, for God's sake."

"Sure. Sure, I know it."

"If you quit now it will not lessen your troubles. They will come to you no matter where you find yourself. You've heard, 'Woe succeeding woe has made us torpid.' The weariness of misfortune, Cicero argues, makes grief lighter."

David could find no answer. This was not what he had squared off mentally to meet. Benford turned so that he was facing him directly, and David remembered Sudsy saying that on those rare occasions when Beanie smiled he looked like a benevolent death's-head.

"Shall we get down to cases?" said Benford. "Torpidity is not for us any longer, David. Nor weariness of misfortune. Those were for the generations before us. My generation, perhaps; your grandfather's, yes; yours—no. My God, no! Do you think you'll escape one iota of what's in store by running from this? Three years of peace of mind in a college with your own people. That's what you're thinking. And after that?" When David did not speak, he prodded. "And after that? Why in hell do fighters spend so much of their time in training with sparring partners? And a good fighter wants a good sparring partner. What you're doing—what I think you're doing, because you've told me nothing—is to take the comparatively mild punches of a sparring partner and decide you don't want any part of a real fight if it's going to be worse than that. And it is, David. Compared to other places the academic world in the North is duck soup, especially in the professional fields. After all, the whites do realize that there have to be colored people in the professions. All they hope is that the Negro will practice his specialty among his own people. You're going on—Harvard Law, isn't it?"

"Am I?"

"Don't be so damned young, David. A Negro boy—youth —trying to make it in the white world can't afford adolescence."

David listened as Benford's voice went on with a gentleness there was still unbelievable, corning from this man of acid.

"I repeat, for a young Negro in a white world, adolescence is a luxury beyond his means. He must jump from marbles and roller skates to maturity—all at once."

At the cost of appearing to be the adolescent that Benford was trying to drive out, David said: "I can't roller-skate, but I play a mean game of marbles. I guess I should have stayed with them. What'd I do that was so damned criminal? What'd I
do?
Helped a guy who was my friend. Sure he's white; sure, I let him talk me into breaking a rule because I was sorry for him. If Cozy's been looking for something to pin on me, to use to get rid of me, he sure picked a petty little something, a real petty little something. Hell, if I'd been accused of cheating or stealing or something like that I wouldn't quit under a cloud. But if he wants me out so bad he'll push it through on a damned petty little something like this, I figure it's best to give him what he wants."

"David!" Benford spoke so sharply that David turned to look at him, and he saw a face that didn't seem to be Beanie's at all.

"David, don't you know?"

"Don't I know what? All I know is they've got something in their stinking little minds I can't get. Can't get at all."

Benford slid to his feet and walked a few nervous paces to the door to the classroom, then turned back. He hoped his face did not show the pain within him, pain that had been strong before, but was more piercing now that he realized he must be the one to look into the deeply troubled eyes of this boy while he told him of the evil that was spreading through the campus. He felt a momentary wave of self-pity. "And it has to be me—" he said, and tried desperately to smile. Then in quiet, somber tones he told David what was going on, and when he was finished he said, "Lynching, you see, isn't civilized."

He turned away again, looking across the inner quadrangle of the distant lake, because he could no longer look at the sticken face of David Champlin. He had thought to see anger, but did not. There was incredulous horror, and the sick look of a man who has been hit without warning, violently, in the wind, changing color, fighting nausea. Professor Benford knew the students disliked him, knew the Quimby scholarship students in particular resented his classroom attitudes, and he accepted their resentment because those attitudes were born of the drive within him that goaded him to torment them into excellence. If he relaxed these attitudes for even the space of a breath, he would become outwardly what he was inwardly, a man at times made almost physically weak by his own compassion. His students, the children of his people God help them all, would be lost, these boys and girls who were the hope of the future, if he let that compassion—a compassion so great it could turn his guts to water at times—take over to gain even a foothold. Better, far better, to lash them with the whip of sarcasm, anger them with unreasonable demands, force them—as the white overseers on the plantations generations ago had forced their ancestors—past their endurance, knowing they would, somehow, endure.

He did not turn back to David until he heard his voice. "No!"

The incredulous horror was still on the boy's face, but the look of sick shock was gone, and the eyes showed healthy anger.

"No!" he said again. "It can't be. It
can't.
They're saying that about me? That I'm a homo? A queer? Who's saying it?
Who's saying it?"

Benford laid a hand on David's arm, took it away quickly. "I don't know, David. I intend to find out."

David was picking his duffel coat off the wall, folding it carefully, as though a wrinkle might ruin its disreputableness forever. Quiet now, he did not look at Benford when he said, "Thanks, Professor. I'll be going back to my room now."

He turned to walk away, and Benford shot out a long arm and sank bony fingers into the boy's shoulder. "Wait. Wait, David."

He did not loosen his grip until David turned and stood waiting for him to speak. He put his hands on the brick wall, leaning on them, looking toward the lake, the sun in his eyes. Why, he thought, why, why,
why
did an unkind God constitute me so that I must always and eternally be seeing, in the faces of these students, small brown children with round, dark eyes, standing in warm kitchens with a cookie in one hand and a ring of crumbs around soft defenseless mouths? Just once, just
once,
God, let me see them as I see my white students, with no past and a future about which I care little. When he turned back and leaned against the wall, his voice was tired. "You don't have to stay, David. I'm not trying to hold you here, to make you listen to me."

"It's all right," said David. "It's O.K.; I mean, I wasn't going to rush off and do anything crazy."

"If I had thought you were I wouldn't have tried to stop you. You must see now—now that you have the whole filthy story—why I would hate to see you leave the college?"

"I suppose so. I—I've got to think about it."

"Then let me talk. Perhaps something I say will mingle with your thinking, color it a little, help." Benford smiled. "We have to do such a hell of a lot of thinking. Small wonder that when we make it in the white world we so often surpass them." He hoisted himself to the wall again. "I've given you—given all the Quimbys—a rough time. If you don't know why, you haven't the intelligence I credit you with having."

"I guess—I think I know why. Now."

"You should. Have you ever thought, David, that those of us whose beginnings were in the South—not all of us, but so very many of us—share something inexpressibly good? That we hold in common emotional memories that the whites can never know?" He paused, and when he saw David was listening, he went on: "I was a country boy, you were not; that makes no difference. Within the four walls of whatever place we called home there was a security of love that passeth the understanding of those who have never known it. I've heard well-meaning, well-intentioned whites wonder out loud how the Negro has managed to stand up under more than a century of oppression and humiliation, not only stand up under these things but stay spiritually strong. Perhaps I don't have all the answers, but I think I have one. It's love.

"Negroes like you and me—and our fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers—carry it back, David, to the slave mother who knew her child might be taken from her arms and sold at any time—I say, Negroes like these were cradled in a fiercely strong love. Money we did not have; hope we did not have; decent schooling was denied; we were not very old before we learned what the word 'nigger' meant in a white mouth, though we used it ourselves. But we had in our homes a love so protective, so great, that it created a world of its own in which we lived, walled off, a love like the love of the God our parents tried to teach us about. It was within the world of that love that we grew up, that our spirits developed, expanded. Within the microcosm of some of those ramshackle southern homes we learned something of the macrocosm of the universe, of God, if you will. Abiding love, swift and sure punishments, infinite understanding.

"I doubt that the Simmonses and the Dunbars of our people grew up in homes like that. And perhaps, for the future of our people, this may be good. Perhaps we need the Simmonses and the Dunbars, too. But they are not, mark my words, David, the hope of our race, its saviors.

"Do you know Browning? It's fashionable to laugh at Browning today, but the math professor I lived with during my high school years was what you youngsters call 'hooked' on Browning. In Saul, Browning puts in the mouth of David —by God, that's an odd one, in the mouth of David—the words: 'Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift—That I doubt his own love can compete with it?' My mother and father, your grandfather, would have bogged down trying to read that. But never doubt they knew its meaning."

Benford looked at the boy standing beside him, tall, straight, with strong, wide shoulders and dark head silhouetted against the sun. "You're wondering, aren't you, why old sourpuss Beanie Benford is talking like this? I'm not doing it to keep you from thinking about what has happened. I couldn't do that. But, David, there are two things I fear above all others for our people: pity for themselves as individuals, and pity from the whites. God deliver us, David, because we won't be able to do it for ourselves, if we let self-pity take over. And God deliver us ten times over from a white world that feels 'pity' for us, as I define the word. Pity for the sick, the hurt, the lost in mind or soul, yes. But we are not sick, not hurt, not lost in either mind or soul. If we were not the spiritual masters of those who oppress us, our race would have been wiped out long since in countless bloody revolutions. And in my opinion, our mastery is at its height in the people we sprang from, and its cradle was the passionate, fiercely protective love of millions of mothers and fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, all of whom saw the dark future of their children in their eyes and held it off as long as they could."

Benford drew a package of cigarettes from his pocket, accepted a light from David. "Boring you, son?" he asked.

"No, sir." David smiled, and Benford was glad to see the smile reach the eyes and warm them briefly. "But you're sure surprising the hell out of me."

Benford's face became again the benign death's-head. "Don't give me away," he said. " T spoke as I saw—I report, as man may, of God's work—.' When I came here there were several restaurants in Laurel that would not serve me. Once when a group of students went into a lunchroom in Laurel, I overheard one of them say—I was just in back of them on the sidewalk—'What's that poor devil Benford going to do? Where's he going to eat?' That was the first time I packed. No one, but
no one,
was going to feel sorry for Oscar Benford. Hate him—O.K.; feel sorry for him? No! I think that was the inception of my lousy disposition."

He saw David smile again. "Is it all right, Professor, if the other students in your class—the white ones—feel just a little sorry for the poor Quimbys you have?"

Benford laughed. It was a laugh that belonged to a man with heavy shoulders and a deep chest, not a long, gaunt, black heron of a man. "You can take it," he said. "You can all take it. They stop feeling sorry for you when they watch your grades."

He stood, stretched, wanted to put a hand on David's shoulder but put it deep in a pocket instead. "I'm not sure what all this has to do with your situation, David, not sure why I went into it, except that I wanted to help. Certainly I had no intention—have no intention—of trying to pull the old familiar line of how much you'd be hurting your grandfather if you quit, stuff like that. I think I know your grandfather as well as I knew my own father. It wouldn't hurt him. He might even feel relieved."

"Yes," said David. "He—well, he worries."

"I know," said Benford quietly. "I know. So do I. About all of you."

He looked at David and saw that the sickness had gone from his face and that it was impassive now. "It's not my business, David," he said. "You don't have to tell me now, but will you let me know, as you would a friend, what you plan to do?"

"Yes, sir," said David. "Of course. But I'm not going to pack, if that's what you're thinking. I'm not going to pack. And—well—anyhow, thanks; thanks a lot." He turned and limped across the brick of the little balcony, down the three shallow steps to the paved walk and away from the building, his back to the tall, thin man with the skull-like head and the black skin.