Original Sins (41 page)

“Oh Christ, you crackers slay me! Now he's pulling his ‘we know our niggers' routine.”

Anguish shot through Raymond. The truth was finally out: The man he admired most in the world thought he was a cracker. Only as long as he accepted with wide eyes everything Justin said would Justin tolerate him. Was there some way now to appease him, to regain his patronage? He'd make a joke! He opened his mouth to say, “Yeah, I guess you're right, Justin.” But the words stuck in his throat. “I don't know nothing about Negroes. But I do know something about Southerners. Because I am one.”

Maria looked at him.

Raymond and Maria lay on his sleeping bag on the roof, which was still warm from the afternoon sun. Raymond had been talking for twenty minutes without pause: “… so I get rid of my accent; I grow a beard; I wear jeans and work-shirts; I read Marx and Lenin and Fanon; I go to concerts and rallies and benefits, and give money and time and effort. Then I find out that all along he's been thinking of me as a cracker.' He goes crazy when a white person calls someone a nigger, but he doesn't hesitate to call Southerners crackers and …”

“Raymond, you've been talking on and on, and you don't even realize I haven't been listening. I might as well be a priest in a confessional. At least I'd get paid.” He looked at her, stunned. She was smiling sadly. “I guess our sexual problems stem from the same source.”

“Sexual problems? I …”

“You didn't know we had any? That illustrates my point. You haven't noticed I hardly ever come?”

“I … well …” He hadn't realized girls came.

“You haven't noticed that lots of times I go into the bathroom and masturbate after we make love?”

“I always thought you were … you know, cleaning yourself up.”

They sat in silence.

“God, this is awful, Maria. I've been having a wonderful time, and thinking you were too …”

“Well, it's had its charms, Raymond. But unassisted orgasm hasn't been among them.” “Why didn't you say something?” “I guess I thought it was my own problem.” “What's changed your mind?”

“Yes, well. That's why I wasn't listening to you on the tribulations of a Southern upbringing. I was trying to figure out how to tell you this.”

“What?”

“That I spent all afternoon in bed with Carson, that guy in Newland.”

Raymond felt as though he'd been punched in the solar plexus. Carson was a cheery Negro from Birmingham who'd dropped out of Howard to drive people to work during the Montgomery bus boycott. Raymond and Maria had met him one night at a meeting. He was wearing a Howard sweatshirt. He told about being born in the back seat of a car on the way to the hospital, so his father had named him Carson. Raymond was being swept with waves of rage, humiliation, pain, and all kinds of emotions so new that he didn't have names for them.

After a couple of minutes, Maria said, “But it's no big deal, Raymond. When you and I want to make love, we will. And we'll figure out ways to cope with our problems.”

He looked at her with amazement. “Aren't you in love with this guy?”

She laughed. “Who's talking love? I'm talking lust.”

She kissed him and left. He lay through the night assaulted by unfamiliar emotions. She was screwing a Negro, she wanted to screw him as well. Disease: Carson would give her VD, which he would pick up. She didn't want to live happily ever after with him? It hadn't occurred to him it wouldn't go on forever. Things always had in Newland. This was the woman with whom he'd pledged himself to struggle to build a more decent world. Carson was a better lover. It was true what they said about Negro men. Of course if Raymond had been lying around some sleepy Southern town with loose Negro girls, instead of struggling to get away and slave for the Negro cause, he'd know how to make love too. Was Carson's cock bigger? How long could he last? How long did you have to last to make a girl come?

He watched the string of stereotypes marching through his numb brain.

He would challenge Carson to a duel. The winner would have Maria's devotion forevermore. He would string the bastard up and slice off his goddam balls. How dare he touch a white woman?
His
woman. More than one man at a time? He'd never heard of such a thing. For a man, maybe. But not for women. Not for
decent
women. He'd string
her
up. Sex before marriage was bad enough even if you loved the guy and planned to marry him. But sex for
fun?
Sex to quell lust? It was revolting.
Maria
was revolting. A jig in a college sweatshirt was like a monkey in a tuxedo. Who did Maria think she was anyhow?
He
was the man, he had the cock, he decided what went on when. She was just a stinking sink hole of a cunt. He pounded his fists rhythmically on the roof. Orgasms for women! These aggressive demanding Yankee bitches! She should spread her legs and be grateful for what she got! He was how he was, and she could take it or leave it! (Stunned, he began to realize that she'd probably leave it.)

By morning, as he descended from the roof with crazed bloodshot eyes, he understood that you didn't stop being a Southerner just by saying “you” instead of “yall.” He stopped eating, lay awake on the roof all night, excused himself from canvassing. The project doctor was coming by regularly to hand out Valium, which Raymond popped in great quantities. Though he was almost too far gone to notice, the violence the group was carefully hiding from the outside world they were turning in on each other. Almost every day now some kind of altercation erupted—between those who'd been jailed versus those who hadn't, Yankees versus Southerners, whites versus blacks, men versus women, middle class versus working class, college-educated versus non-college-educated, religious versus atheist.

Raymond began wandering around the countryside with his camera, taking pictures of the farmers, their families and crops. One afternoon he walked past the Randalls', en route to a woods to photograph wild azaleas. The damp green fields were steaming under the hot spring sun. Mrs. Randall was sitting in an armchair on her front porch snapping string beans while her two children tumbled in the dirt in the yard. Raymond raised a hand, and she replied with a shy, “Hidy, how yall today?”

“Just fine, thank you, ma'am. Pretty day?”

“Yes sir. Sure is.”

Raymond watched the children, remembering his days with The Five. “You mind if I take some pictures of your children?”

“Shoot, no. But what you want pictures of them rascals for?”

“Just for fun. Yall mind?”

The children put their hands to their mouths and giggled.

Raymond shot, with long waits between pictures, during which he studied their faces and tried to understand their games. He contrasted this to the way he'd made the documentary—splicing together every horrifying sequence he could get his hands on. He bludgeoned the viewer into accepting FORWARD'S interpretation. But was it reality? If he instead set up a camera trained for forty years on the Randalls' front porch, recording people occasionally walking in and out or standing and chatting, was
that
reality? Year after year, cotton bolls forming, swelling, popping, getting picked. This boredom I get so impatient with, Raymond mused, is that actually reality? Do I then go and stir up drama where it wouldn't otherwise exist just to escape reality, which is boredom?

The next time he brought some candy, which the children stuffed in their mouths as though afraid it would vanish. Another day he brought Mrs. Randall some macaroni he'd liberated from the project supply. She hesitantly invited him for supper, and during the meal he asked if they'd mind if he did a picture book on their children.

They looked dumbfounded, and Mr. Randall asked, “Who'd want a book like that cepting their mama and me?”

“People up North might want to know how yall live down here.”

Mr. Randall thought it over. “Why?”

“Folks everywhere are curious.”

“Yeah, ain't it the truth? Well, yeah, I reckon it'd be all right”

Raymond photographed their house, their sheds and fields; Mr. and Mrs. Randall sitting on their porch in their Sunday clothes—a board-stiff gleaming white shirt and black suit for him, a clinging white rayon dress for her, and a hat with a veil. Mr. Randall had ten acres of cotton, a tobacco allotment, and ten acres of green beans. Raymond photographed him among his crops and played long involved games with the children.

One night Maria invited him to the roof. They sat down, and she took his hand. A shudder of revulsion ran up his arm. He retrieved his hand. “I didn't know you'd be so upset, Raymond.”

“Who's upset?”

“Well, look at you. Your clothes are hanging on you like a scarecrow's. You've got black circles under your eyes. When you aren't lying up here brooding, you're stumbling around the countryside like a zombie.”

“It just never occurred to me it wouldn't last forever, Maria.”

She laughed. “It never occurred to me it would last more than a few weeks. I was delighted when it went on for several months. In my life people have always come and gone, so to speak. You don't let yourself get too caught up in it or you
get
hurt. I didn't realize you were playing by different rules. I'm really sorry. But I didn't mean to say it was all over. I like you a lot, Raymond. I'd still like to spend time with you. And make love with you if we feel like it.”

“I don't know if I can handle that, Maria. I want you all to myself.”

“You can have me all to yourself, Raymond. But not all the time. That's how I am.”

“And this is how I am.”

“So who's going to change?”

“Neither probably.”

“Probably not.”

Raymond, Justin, Maria, and Annabelle were lying on a dam that formed a pond. The afternoon sun was scorching. They had caught some bluegill and cooked them over a fire. Justin, his shirt off, was playing his guitar, and they were singing Dylan and Baez songs. Annabelle was kneeling behind Justin kneading his shoulders. Raymond, buoyed up by Valium, was feeling better than he had in days. Maria and he had begun having pleasant chats on the roof again, though he felt toward her body as he would toward a coiled copperhead. If she touched his forearm for emphasis while she talked, he twitched and moved away. And the vision of Carson's black hips rising and falling over her writhing body almost made him vomit. Carson had come to the Wilbur project once, and Raymond had had to race for the woods to keep from hurling himself at the bastard and gouging his thumbs into his windpipe.

Justin was being very friendly, had invited him along on this picnic, and had praised his fishing and firebuilding skills. Apparently, Raymond thought with resentment, I'm down and out enough now not to threaten him.

A cross had been burned on a hill overlooking the next town two nights earlier. But Raymond had learned by now to live with fear. He doubted that anyone could hurt him as much as Maria had. These Yankees abhorred physical violence so much, clucked their tongues about vicious rednecks, then unleashed such psychological violence on each other that a beating would have been preferable.

He noted that he was thinking of his comrades now as “Yankees.”

In the middle of “We Shall Overcome,” three crewcuts appeared over the edge of the dam. They stopped singing and watched three sunburnt faces appear, followed by three T-shirted chests, and six chinoed legs. One man held a tire iron, another a length of chain. The four hopped to their feet.

“This here's private property.”

“We were just sitting here,” Justin said in his belligerent New York accent “We weren't doing anything.”

“What was that there moaning coming out of yer mouth if you wasn't doing nothing?” The man looked at the other two and grinned.

“Well, yes, we were singing, true. But there's no law against singing, is there?”

Christ, Raymond saw that Justin was intent on getting them killed. Martyrs to the cause. For the first time he noticed Justin's hair curling over his collar. Neither of them had shaved today. They looked like bums.

“Naw, they ain't no law against singing. Unless you happen to be singing on private property. But you Reds don't hold with the notion of private property, do you?”

“We're not Communists,” Raymond assured him.

“You with that there nigger-loving bunch from up North?”

“Uh, the voter registration project. Yes.”

“Well, let's hear can you play ‘Dixie' on that thang.”

“I don't know ‘Dixie,'” Justin said defiantly.

“I'll whistle it, and you see can you pick it up.” The man whistled.

“Nope, I can't,” said Justin, jutting his chin out

“Try,” the man said, menacingly raising his chain.

Justin eyed the chain and the tire iron, then fumbled with a few chords.

“Yall sing,” said the man.

The other three sang “Dixie” in quavering voices.

“That's not real good. See can you sing it louder.”

Justin threw down the guitar, dived into the pond and began to swim. The man brought his chain down and smashed the guitar, picked it up and broke its neck over his thigh and tossed the pieces into the pond.

“Run!” Raymond yelled to the girls as he threw a flying block at all three men, bringing one down. Christ, what am I doing? he asked himself.

He rolled into a ball and covered his head. His not fighting back seemed to enrage them, rather than reform them. The fervor of the blows increased, and they started snarling “fairy creep” and “Commie faggot.” The chain slashed. The tire iron rose and fell. Fists and shoes connected with bone and flesh. He caught glimpses of khakis and T-shirts, flat tops and red faces. And he was flooded with sensations of—gratitude.

“Go back where you came from, you mother-fucking nigger-loving Yankee do-gooder. Why don't you mind your own goddam bidness?”