Proud Flesh (7 page)

“Fifty-four pounds,” Junior called out. One of the new breed coming up, Junior did not wait to be told by the boss what the scale registered. At his waist Junior wore a pin which proclaimed, “Black is beautiful.” Oh, how Clyde agreed!

Or was Joe Franklin the one? Would Joe—picking grapes later on this fall in California, or up a ladder in an apple tree in New York's Hudson Valley—say, “Talk about poontang, mmmmmmmmmmm, I know a little black gal down in east Texas …” And would his partner in the next row or on another ladder around on the other side of the tree say, “Yeah, what's her name?” “Nemmind that, but they call her Sugar—Shug for short—cause she's just as sweet as—” “Shug? Stays down on that big old cotton farm belonging to them Renshaws? Well, welcome to the club, friend!”

Why did he torment himself like this?

And if he knew? If he knew it was Junior Price, Joe Franklin? Knew it. Beyond doubt. Beyond hope of doubt. If he caught them at it? What would he do? Kill them. Slit their throats with the razor he could feel dangling against his chest. Hers, anyhow.

Yeah. He could see it now, the headline in the county weekly:
LOCAL LANDOWNER KILLS NEGRO MISTRESS IN LOVE TRIANGLE
. Fine reading that would make, wouldn't it? Be only one thing to do after that. With the same razor slit his own throat.

IX

Doves when they are flushed utter a squeak of complaint and tumble noisily out of the branches and, as though still gathering up their things, flounce away in awkward, off-balance flight. Alvah Tarrant, returning to his spot in the circle of men and squatting once again, dusts his hands from the clod he had thrown into the tree, and resumes:

“Talking to me the other day my boy says, Pa, it's time we thought of giving up cotton, planting soyabeans, kudzu. Plant them, says I, hell, I can't even pronounce them. Is that what they teach you down there at A & M? Soyabeans. I ask you. What kind of a bean is it that a man can't eat and a hog won't? Chinamen eat them, you may say, but you can't tell me even them commonists wouldn't sooner have black-eyed peas. What are they good for? What are they good for? good for durn near anything you can think of, says my boy to me. They make housepaint out of them and oleomargarine, and the Lord knows what all. Well, when folks leave off wearing clothes and take to painting theirselves instead, and when cows start giving grape juice, why then maybe I'll switch to soyabeans; meanwhile I'll stick with cotton, thank you. It was good enough for my old daddy and for his old daddy before him. Course didn't neither of them go off to college to learn how to farm. But cotton was good enough for them, and I reckon that's good enough for me.”

The men have shifted, following the shade, but not Clifford. He sits out in the sunshine like a large, hollow-eyed terracotta idol set there to harden, staring at the house, hearing nothing, numb with grief, a dead smile baked on his lips. But Ballard hears everything, and he thinks, you like cotton so much why don't you go home and pick yours: you're not wanted here. Go home, all of you, and take your stinking pity with you, it and your stinking curiosity, your filthy nosiness. Ballard sits inside the shade but his face is flushed as dark as Clifford's. He hardly sweats, so tightly is he holding himself in, as if his very pores had closed in obedience to his will, his determination to reveal no emotion, no feeling, no sentience even, to give none of them that satisfaction. If Clifford's face is like baked clay, Ballard's is like cast bronze. He sits as still as his brother; meanwhile his mind ticks toward an explosion as steadily as the clockworks of a bomb. Whenever a new man begins to speak Ballard swivels on his heels and levels at the speaker eyes as cold and menacing as the muzzle of a double-barreled shotgun. What he sees with them is a ring of buzzards squatting round about him (and indeed, squatting in their baggy overalls, stoop-shouldered, stringy wrinkled leathery red necks protruding from their collars, they do resemble turkey buzzards, some of them), lifting their eyes at each fresh arrival, not to see who it is but to signify that they have remarked who it is not, which one it is who still remains absent as the family circle fills up, then blandly, innocently scanning the brothers' faces for signs of embarrassment, disappointment, apology. As more come in and take their places it is like turkey buzzards gathering for a feast. They have scented, or think they have, the death of a proud family's pride—long dead, long since putrefied, but until now kept hidden from exposure. They are thinking, what will you do now, you Renshaws? It will have to come out now, won't it? You've all carried your heads so high, scorned to render account of yourselves, but now you won't be able to say any more, “Oh, yes, we heard from him just the other day. He's making out just fine, thank you for asking.” Now, if ever, you have to produce him. Produce him or else admit that one of yours is missing, has strayed beyond your ken, and that even now he can't or won't or doesn't even know to come home. Just hold your breath until I do, thinks Ballard. Just hold your breath until I do.

“Well,” says Ollie Butcher, “they do say cotton is hard on the soil. Soybeans, they say, sort of pay for their keep, so to speak. Puts back in nitrogen and stuff. I wouldn't know, myself, and I haven't got but just a few acres in them, but that's what they tell me.”

“Peanuts: there's a good crop now.”

“Yessir! Peanuts
is
a dandy little crop. Only plant I know of that works for a man with both hands, as you might say: above ground and below. You take cotton, corn: the roots are roots, nothing more. Potatoes, on the other hand: all root, the tops just weeds for all practical purposes. But peanuts: root and branch a friend to man. Get me started on peanuts I can run on all day. Talk about a plant that you can do just about anything with. Youall must have heard about that nigger inventor that come up with a hundred and fifty-odd different ways of using peanuts? Peanut soap, peanut glue, peanut axle-grease—well, you name it, that booger had it. Spent his whole life messing around with peanuts. Regular peanut fool.”

“Never was a nigger that didn't like peanuts. Why, I've seen them even eat the hulls.”

Get two Yankees to talking, Clyde thinks, and it isn't long before the conversation turns to sex. Get two Southerners to talking and before long the subject is niggers.

“Well, they can have them. Me, I'll take cotton,” says Alvah Tarrant. “You never heard of King Goober, did you? And cotton didn't get that name for nothing. What I like about cotton, it ain't perishable. You don't have to get shut of it as soon as it's picked like you do your melons or your tomatoes. You can hold on to it and wait for a change in the price.”

“You can provided you've got something to eat while you're waiting. You can't eat cotton. At least, I can't—though they've been some years, let me tell you, when I was about ready to try.”

All this talk about other matters was meant to take his and his brothers' minds off their situation, off Ma, with the understanding all around that not for a moment was it doing so. Certainly it was not doing so for him. His mind was not on Ma. If they and his brothers only knew where his truant mind was!

“I've held on to mine and waited for a change in the price. Good many times. It changed, all right. Went down. And then I've sold, fearing it would go down still some more, and seen it shoot right up the very next day. Seems like with cotton I'm like that nigger in the story: always zigging when I ought to have zagged and zagging when I ought to have zigged.”

“You know what I'm thinking about as I squat here unable to stand up for fear it will show?” he heard himself ask his neighbor Calvin Sykes. “The same thing I've been thinking about all day long. The same thing I think about all the time. Right this very minute, while my mother lies unconscious on what may be her deathbed, I am mentally in bed with that nigger wench of mine and giving it to her three ways to Sunday. You never knew before that I kept me a nigger wench right here on the place, did you? Now you know. And when I ought to be thinking of my mother, as my brothers and my boy there are all doing, she is what I am thinking about. That's a loving son as well as a good husband and father for you, eh?”

“Why do you keep on with cotton then if that's the way. you feel about it? Why don't you plant them Chinese vegetables instead?”

“Cause I'm not a Chinaman, I reckon is the reason. Cotton is the only thang I know.”

“Well, I like it!”

“Like the bo' weevils, too, do you, Alvah?”

“You can't blame cotton for the weevils any more than you can blame a dog for its fleas.”

He had not said that to Calvin, as he had not said it to others previously when he thought he had heard himself saying it. But one day he was going to, it seemed, unless he died first of fright while waiting to learn that he had not said it. What was this mad urge to unmask himself that had come upon him? It was as if he longed to destroy himself. To confess himself an adulterer, a niggerlover and a cuckold all in one.

He used to enjoy having a secret life. To enjoy just knowing he had one. Instead of a constant burden it had been a constant satisfaction. He had enjoyed deceiving the world. It made him more interesting to himself to think when he was among other people, “You think you know me but you don't. I am not what you think. What a shock I could give you with just three or four words!” That his secret life was black made it still more secret, still more exciting. It was not long since the repeal of the old law which made cohabitation between the races a criminal offense punishable by a prison sentence; the unwritten law against it was as much in force as ever. The consciousness of having another life that nobody knew about had made him seem to himself like two people instead of just one. It used to warm him with a steady glow of superiority over others. He looked down upon them both for their ignorance about him and for the meagerness of their single, known lives. He used to amuse himself by doing what he now did despite himself: sit talking trivia with somebody while in his mind going at it with Shug hot and heavy. What had happened to change all that from delight and a sense of superiority to oppression and a sense of guilt, from sweet secrecy to a compulsion to proclaim what he would sooner die than have known?

It had gotten so he hardly ever knew what he was saying, had said, to anybody, so clearly could he hear himself saying, having said, that one thing. It seemed to him that that was the only thing he had to say to anybody. Anything else was a waste of time. Anything else was beside the point.

In fact, he had ceased to lead a double life. He led a single life: his secret one, the one he was not allowed to live openly. And he had seen the fear that it might be discovered change into the fear that he himself was going to give it away. The fear that he was never going to get any relief from oppression until he had given himself away. And then after he had, there would be nothing left but to slit his throat.

What had happened to the simple joy of banging his chocolate-coated girl and saying—not in words, of course, but saying to anybody he might suspect of suspecting him of it—go screw yourself? Where had that untroubled pleasure gone? Why? When? And how could he recover it? Why all this torment? What did he care if she had other men, and if so, what shade they were? He got his. He got all he wanted. You can't wear one of those things out with use. And he didn't know she had another man. He had only old Rowena's untrustworthy word for that, based on what she had seen, or thought she had seen, with her old untrustworthy eyes. Some witness! The one who professed to know that Shug was carrying on with some other man was the only one of her family not to know that Shug had been carrying on for years with him. Some witness to let upset you. And even if she was right, so long as he had no confirmation that she was, what did it matter? What you don't know won't hurt you. Why suffer? Why get emotionally involved? He got what he wanted out of Shug. What he felt for Shug was—hah!—no more than met the eye.

He had become like one of those sexual derelicts who spend all their time in round-the-clock movie houses watching blue movies. His nonstop blue movie house, that ran even when his mother lay in danger of death, was his own mind.

The trouble with him—all this obsession with sex, this mad urge to unmask himself—was, he was not well. Not well at all. He had not been for some time. Today was just more of the same, aggravated by worry over Ma and shame for the unseemliness of feeling what he felt while Ma was sick. He was not well. A constricted feeling in the chest, centering around the heart, making breathing difficult. Ma's trouble was heart, and those things could be hereditary. Loss of appetite. Absentmindedness and inability to concentrate. Nerves. Unaccountable moments of nerves when for no reason at all his eyes would suddenly fill with tears. Irritability. And always that tight feeling in the chest, around the heart. Symptoms that, if you didn't know better, or in a young man, or if the woman had been white, you might almost have taken for lovesickness. He must see the doctor as soon as he got a chance, have a physical, a thorough check-up. Should do so regularly at his age. As for his obsession with sex, that too was something for a doctor. It was a physical thing. It was not personal. Even his feeling it today. The time was inappropriate, grossly inappropriate, but that was only an unfortunate coincidence. He always got hard-up at this season of the year when, with the workers occupying the cabins, there was nowhere that they could get together. It could happen to any man. A man was a man even when his mother was sick. It was something beyond his power to control. He was not to blame. And men had their change-of-life, too, the same as women. It made women less sexy but it made men more so. Certain chemical changes occurring in the body at this time. Hormones. Nothing to be ashamed of. He was not the first dog to be wagged by its tail. Not the first to experience the contrariness of that thing between his legs, how it wouldn't when you wanted it to and would when you didn't.