Invisible Man (28 page)

Just then one of the men came down the steps with an armful of articles, and I saw the old woman reach up, yelling, "Take your hands off my Bible!" And the crowd surged forward. The white man's hot eyes swept the crowd. "Where, lady?" he said. "I don't see any Bible." And I saw her snatch the Book from his arms, clutching it fiercely and sending forth a shriek.

"They can come in your home and do what they want to you," she said. "Just come stomping in and jerk your life up by the roots! But this here's the last straw. They ain't going to bother with my Bible!" The white man eyed the crowd. "Look, lady," he said, more to the rest of us than to her, "I don't want to do this, I
have
to do it. They sent me up here to do it. If it was left to me, you could stay here till hell freezes over . . ."

"These white folks, Lord. These white folks," she moaned, her eyes turned toward the sky, as an old man pushed past me and went to her.

"Hon, Hon," he said, placing his hand on her shoulder. "It's the agent, not these gentlemen. He's the one; He says it's the bank, but you know he's the one. We've done business with him for over twenty years."

"Don't tell me," she said. "It's all the white folks, not just one. They all against us. Every stinking low-down one of them."

"She's right!" a hoarse voice said. "She's right! They
all
is!" Something had been working fiercely inside me, and for a moment I had forgotten the rest of the crowd. Now I recognized a selfconsciousness about them, as though they, we, were ashamed to witness the eviction, as though we were all unwilling intruders upon some shameful event; and thus we were careful not to touch or stare too hard at the effects that lined the curb; for we were witnesses of what we did not wish to see, though curious, fascinated, despite our shame, and through it all the old female, mind-plunging crying.

I looked at the old people, feeling my eyes burn, my throat tighten. The old woman's sobbing was having a strange effect upon me-as when a child, seeing the tears of its parents, is moved by both fear and sympathy to cry. I turned away, feeling myself being drawn to the old couple by a warm, dark, rising whirpool of emotion which I feared. I was wary of what the sight of them crying there on the sidewalk was making me begin to feel. I wanted to leave, but was too ashamed to leave, was rapidly becoming too much a part of it to leave.

I turned aside and looked at the clutter of household objects which the two men continued to pile on the walk. And as the crowd pushed me I looked down to see looking out of an oval frame a portrait of the old couple when young, seeing the sad, stiff dignity of the faces there; feeling strange memories awakening that began an echoing in my head like that of a hysterical voice stuttering in a dark street. Seeing them look back at me as though even then in that nineteenth-century day they had expected little, and this with a grim, unillusioned pride that suddenly seemed to me both a reproach and a warning. My eyes fell upon a pair of crudely carved and polished bones, "knocking bones," used to accompany music at country dances, used in black-face minstrels; the flat ribs of a cow, a steer or sheep, flat bones that gave off a sound, when struck, like heavy castanets (had he been a minstrel?) or the wooden block of a set of drums. Pots and pots of green plants were lined in the dirty snow, certain to die of the cold; ivy, canna, a tomato plant. And in a basket I saw a straightening comb, switches of false hair, a curling iron, a card with silvery letters against a background of dark red velvet, reading "God Bless Our Home"; and scattered across the top of a chiffonier were nuggets of High John the Conqueror, the lucky stone; and as I watched the white men put down a basket in which I saw a whiskey bottle filled with rock candy and camphor, a small Ethiopian flag, a faded tintype of Abraham Lincoln, and the smiling image of a Hollywood star torn from a magazine. And on a pillow several badly cracked pieces of delicate china, a commemorative plate celebrating the St. Louis World Fair . . . I stood in a kind of daze, looking at an old folded lace fan studded with jet and mother-of-pearl.

The crowd surged as the white men came back, knocking over a drawer that spilled its contents in the snow at my feet. I stooped and starting replacing the articles: a bent Masonic emblem, a set of tarnished cuff links, three brass rings, a dime pierced with a nail hole so as to be worn about the ankle on a string for luck, an ornate greeting card with the message "Grandma, I love you" in childish scrawl; another card with a picture of what looked like a white man in black-face seated in the door of a cabin strumming a banjo beneath a bar of music and the lyric "Going back to my old cabin home"; a useless inhalant, a string of bright glass beads with a tarnished clasp, a rabbit foot, a celluloid baseball scoring card shaped like a catcher's mitt, registering a game won or lost years ago; an old breast pump with rubber bulb yellowed with age, a worn baby shoe and a dusty lock of infant hair tied with a faded and crumpled blue ribbon. I felt nauseated. In my hand I held three lapsed life insurance policies with perforated seals stamped "Void"; a yellowing newspaper portrait of a huge black man with the caption: MARCUS GARVEY DEPORTED.

I turned away, bending and searching the dirty snow for anything missed by my eyes, and my fingers closed upon something resting in a frozen footstep: a fragile paper, coming apart with age, written in black ink grown yellow. I read: FREE PAPERS.
Be it known to all men that my negro, Primus Provo,
has been freed by me this sixth day of August, 1859. Signed: John Samuels Macon . . .
I folded it quickly, blotting out the single drop of melted snow which glistened on the yellowed page, and dropped it back into the drawer. My hands were trembling, my breath rasping as if I had run a long distance or come upon a coiled snake in a busy street.
It has been longer than that, further removed in time,
I told myself, and yet I knew that it hadn't been. I replaced the drawer in the chest and pushed drunkenly to the curb.

But it wouldn't come up, only a bitter spurt of gall filled my mouth and splattered the old folk's possessions. I turned and stared again at the jumble, no longer looking at what was before my eyes, but inwardly-outwardly, around a corner into the dark, far-away-and-long-ago, not so much of my own memory as of remembered words, of linked verbal echoes, images, heard even when not listening at home. And it was as though I myself was being dispossessed of some painful yet precious thing which I could not bear to lose; something confounding, like a rotted tooth that one would rather suffer indefinitely than endure the short, violent eruption of pain that would mark its removal. And with this sense of dispossession came a pang of vague recognition: this junk, these shabby chairs, these heavy, old-fashioned pressing irons, zinc wash tubs with dented bottoms --all throbbed within me with more meaning than there should have been:
And why did I, standing in the crowd, see like a vision my
mother hanging wash on a cold windy day, so cold that the warm clothes froze even before the
vapor thinned and hung stiff on the line, and her hands white and raw in the skirt-swirling wind
and her gray head bare to the darkened sky --why were they causing me discomfort so far beyond
their intrinsic meaning as objects? And why did I see them now as behind a veil that threatened to
lift, stirred by the cold wind in the narrow street?

A scream, "I'm going in!" spun me around. The old couple were on the steps now, the old man holding her arm, the white men leaning forward above, and the crowd pressing me closer to the steps.

"You can't go in, lady," the man said.

"I want to pray!" she said.

"I can't help it, lady. You'll have to do your praying out here."

"I'm go'n in!"

"Not in here!"

"All we want to do is go in and pray," she said, clutching her Bible. "It ain't right to pray in the street like this."

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Aw, let the woman go in to pray," a voice called from the crowd. "You got all their stuff out here on the walk --what more do you want, blood?"

"Sure, let them old folks pray."

"That's what's wrong with us now, all this damn praying," another voice called.

"You don't go back, see," the white man said. "You were legally evicted."

"But all we want to do is go in an' kneel on the floor," the old man said. "We been living right here for over twenty years. I don't see why you can't let us go just for a few minutes . . ."

"Look, I've told you," the man said. "I've got my orders. You're wasting my time."

"We're go'n in!" the woman said.

It happened so suddenly that I could barely keep up with it: I saw the old woman clutching her Bible and rushing up the steps, her husband behind her and the white man stepping in front of them and stretching out his arm. "I'll jug you," he yelled, "by God, I'll jug you!"

"Take your hands off that woman!" someone called from the crowd. Then at the top of the stairs they were pushing against the man and I saw the old woman fall backwards, and the crowd exploded.

"Get that paddie sonofabitch!"

"He struck her!" a West Indian woman screamed into my ear. "The filthy brute, he struck her!"

"Stand back or I'll shoot," the man called, his eyes wild as he drew a gun and backed into the doorway where the two trusties stood bewildered, their arms full of articles. "I swear I'll shoot! You don't know what you're doing, but I'll shoot!"

They hesitated. "Ain't but six bullets in that thing," a little fellow called. "Then what you going to do?"

"Yeah, you damn sho caint hide."

"I advise you to stay out of this," the marshal called.

"Think you can come up here and hit one of our women, you a fool."

"To hell with all this talk, let's rush that bastard!"

"You better think twice," the white man called.

I saw them start up the steps and felt suddenly as though my head would split. I knew that they were about to attack the man and I was both afraid and angry, repelled and fascinated. I both wanted it and feared the consequences, was outraged and angered at what I saw and yet surged with fear; not for the man or of the consequences of an attack, but of what the sight of violence might release in me. And beneath it all there boiled up all the shock-absorbing phrases that I had learned all my life. I seemed to totter on the edge of a great dark hole.

"No, no," I heard myself yelling. "Black men! Brothers! Black Brothers! That's not the way. We're law-abiding. We're a law-abiding people and a slow-to-anger people." Forcing my way quickly through the crowd, I stood on the steps facing those in front, talking rapidly without thought but out of my clashing emotions. "We're a law-abiding people and a slow-to-anger people . . ." They stopped, listening. Even the white man was startled.

"Yeah, but we mad now," a voice called out.

"Yes, you're right," I called back. "We're angry, but let us be wise. Let us, I mean let us not . . . Let us learn from that great leader whose wise action was reported in the newspaper the other day . . ."

"What, mahn? Who?" a West Indian voice shouted.

"Come on! To hell with this guy, let's get that paddie before they send him some help . . ."

"No, wait," I yelled. "Let's follow a leader, let's organize.
Organize.
We need someone like that wise leader, you read about him, down in Alabama. He was strong enough to choose to do the wise thing in spite of what he felt himself . . ."

"Who, mahn? Who?"

This was it, I thought, they're listening, eager to listen.

Nobody laughed. If they laugh, I'll die! I tensed my diaphragm.

"That wise man," I said, "you read about him, who when that fugitive escaped from the mob and ran to his school for protection, that wise man who was strong enough to do the legal thing, the law-abiding thing, to turn him over to the forces of law and order . . ."

"Yeah," a voice rang out, "yeah, so they could lynch his ass." Oh, God, this wasn't it at all. Poor technique and not at all what I intended.

"He was a wise leader," I yelled. "He was within the law. Now wasn't that the wise thing to do?"

"Yeah, he was wise all right," the man laughed angrily. "Now get out of the way so we can jump this paddie."

The crowd yelled and I laughed in response as though hypnotized.

"But wasn't that the human thing to do? After all, he had to protect himself because --"

"He was a handkerchief-headed rat!" a woman screamed, her voice boiling with contempt.

"Yes, you're right. He was wise and cowardly, but what about us? What are we to do?" I yelled, suddenly thrilled by the response. "Look at him," I cried.

"Yes, just look at him!" an old fellow in a derby called out as though answering a preacher in church.

"And look at that old couple . . ."

"Yeah, what about Sister and Brother Provo?" he said. "It's an ungodly shame!"

"And look at their possessions all strewn there on the sidewalk. Just look at their possessions in the snow. How old are you, sir?" I yelled.

"I'm eighty-seven," the old man said, his voice low and bewildered.

"How's that? Yell so our slow-to-anger brethren can hear you."

"I'm
eighty-seven years old!"

"Did you hear him? He's eighty-seven. Eighty-seven and look at all he's accumulated in eighty-seven years, strewn in the snow like chicken guts, and we're a law-abiding, slow-to-anger bunch of folks turning the other cheek every day in the week. What are we going to do? What would you, what would I, what would he have done?
What is to be done?
I propose we do the wise thing, the law-abiding thing. Just look at this junk! Should two old folks live in such junk, cooped up in a filthy room? It's a great danger, a fire hazard! Old cracked dishes and broken-down chairs. Yes, yes, yes!

Look at that old woman, somebody's mother, somebody's grandmother, maybe. We call them 'Big Mama' and they spoil us and --
you
know,
you
remember . . . Look at her quilts and broken-down shoes. I know she's somebody's mother because I saw an old breast pump fall into the snow, and she's somebody's grandmother, because I saw a card that read 'Dear Grandma' . . . But we're law-abiding . . . I looked into a basket and I saw some bones, not neckbones, but rib bones, knocking bones . . . This old couple used to dance . . . I saw --What kind of work do you do, Father?" I called.