Such Sweet Thunder (47 page)

“Save me, Je-suus!” cried a voice.

“He’p me, Lawd!” said another.

Boom!
his hip crashed against the ground in the darkness of the shoot an instant before the naked woman … like a statue at the art gallery … stuck her head out the window and glared angrily toward the mouth of the shoot.

“We all a-l-l sinners!” shouted the reverend.

“Yeah!” someone shouted, followed by a piercing soprano note that broke up into particles of light that froze in a golden sheen upon his forehead. He wriggled in his seat, and finally dashed madly, gladly out into the free air and followed the golden clouds home.…

“Don’ forgit to tell Aunt Rose that I kin do ’er hair whenever she wants me to, you hear?” said Viola. He shook his head affirmatively as he rose from the dinner table. “An’ don’ stay in the show all night. School ain’ out yet!”

“Yes’m.”

“You got your clean handkerchief?”

“Yes’m.”

“Where’s your money?”

“In my pocket.”

“Straighten your tie.”

“Git out a heah, boy!” said Rutherford.

He stepped gratefully out through the door and headed up the alley, south. He walked out Eleventh Street, east, cautiously past the redbrick house on the corner of Eleventh and Tracy. It was quiet. Strange in the Sunday sunlight. Must have a hundred rooms … fifty anyway! He saw a woman lying upon a big white bed in every room and a naked slick-headed man standing over her, sweating and trembling.

He looked at all the windows of the apartment and at those of the neighboring house. A stiff, unsuppressable agitation caused the pants of his Sunday suit to bulge just below his belt buckle. He looked at the sky, and then at the trees, eased his hand into his pocket, and covertly sought
the shaded spots of the sidewalk, near the houses, out of general sight, as he proceeded down Tracy to Twelfth, Fifteenth, and Eighteenth Streets, past the mission house, the liquor store, the ice cream parlor, and up past R. T. Bowles Junior High School where he would have to go before he could go to North High, and then college and then — hot dog!

“Aaaaaw shit!” shouted a woman from the apartment opposite the school. He looked up on the porch at a brown-skinned woman of twenty-five dressed in an underskirt, the left shoulder strap of which hung down over her shoulder. She wobbled unsteadily and glared angrily down into the street.

He stared at the patch of hair between her legs against the sunlight.

“What you lookin’ at, you little big-eyed bastard?” she shrieked.

He tipped his hat respectfully, smiled a weak apologetic smile, and hastened up the street.

A little past Nineteenth Street he came to a bridge. He looked down at the shining rails that sped east and west through the city.

Gradually the tension in his pocket relaxed. He left the bridge and continued up Tracy Avenue until he came to a group of apartment houses with wooden porches and dirty yards cluttered with wild grasses and weeds and sunflowers, but in the yard in front of the last house on the corner the grass was cut. It was soft and prickly wet, like the fresh-cut fur of an enormous green kitten, nestling around a two-story redbrick house with a clean cement porch with a neat little swing painted green. Flower boxes full of bright red flowers stood on the banister and flower beds teeming with an assortment of blooming flowers grew along the front and side of the house.

His eyes took in the sweeping hill opposite. Through the bushes he could see the buildings of Western College. That’s where Ardella went, he thought … but
I’m
gonna go to Harvard and Yale where all the big shots go, Jack! I’m gonna know all about
every
thing in the w-h-o-l-e world! He saw Viola’s face breaking up in a smile of approval, amid a din of teeming voices splashing against the shores of his consciousness like summer rain … splaying stars in the gray dust that flowed under the gate and clattered down the alley.

“Open your mouth, boy, an’ tell us what you see!”

“That boy’s got a head like a preacher!”

“Whose little boy is that?”

“Why — that’s Rutherford an’ Viola’s little boy!”

“Don’ he look nice!”

“Smart! An’
manners
, too!”

“A reg’ler little gen’leman!”

“— look at them eyes!”

“Look at that walk!”

“Just like a little white boy!”

He opened the gate and entered the path. All the soft grasses rared up in approval as he passed. A sparrow dipped its wings in salutory tribute! “Give ’im the claps, men!”

Clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap!

He bowed from the stage of a great hall filled with millions of clapping hands,
“…  In England an’ France!… Like old Paul Robeson, only bigger!… Bigger than … bigger’n Ira Eldridge!… Bigger’n Stokowski at the show!”

Clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap!

“From all the waves in the sea …”

Clap! clap! clap! clap! clap!

“From all the stars in the sky!”

“You ain’ got no money, honey, but you sure got a whole lot a nerve!”
cried a husky male voice that came from the spinning phonograph record in the room behind the screen. The shade was drawn, but a blazing right angle of sunlight fired its side and bottom edge, diffusing a pregnant green light throughout the room.

“Naw! — you ain’ got no money, honey, but you sure got a lot a nerve!”
The guitar whined plaintively. He rang the bell.

A tall shadow in a sky-blue dress filled the screen and partially obscured his view of the large round table around which three men sat.
Jus’ ’cause you know that I love you
—

“Good afternoon, Mister Jones!” said Ardella tartly.

“Hi,” stepping self-consciously into the cool sweet smell of whiskey, beer, gin, the blues, and the animate expressions in glazed eyes sweltering in the nurtured shade of a hot Sunday afternoon.

“Hi Aunt Rose!”

“Why, hello, baby!” She smiled from the doorway of the little hall that connected the kitchen and the bedroom to the parlor. Now she moved heavily into the parlor and joined the men at the table.

“Been to church?”

“Yes’m,” moving deeper into the room.

More’n anything in this world!
cried the man who was still singing the blues.
If you had a dollah
— One of the men signaled Ardella to pour another drink.
If you had a dollah — for eeevery lie you told!

“You’d be rich, wouldn’ you, Dan?” said Aunt Rose to the man sitting
next to her. He downed his whiskey in one gulp, a tall, lean smooth-skinned black man in a clean lumber jacket over a white shirt that was open at the throat.

“I don’ know as I’d be ex-
actly
rich, but I reckon I’d need a small train just to carry my change in!”

“You’d a been rich as Rockerfelloooo ’fo you was ten years old!”

“Have a seat, Mister Jones,” said Ardella, “an’ pour yourself a drink. That is, if we humble folks are good enough for you.”

“You cut out that foolishness, Ardella,” said Aunt Rose. “You know that boy don’ drink. Come around here, boy, an’ let your auntie have a look at you. I ain’ seen you in a long time. This is Mister Williams, Amerigo,” indicating the tall man on her right: “Mister Williams, Mister Jones.”

“Say, I know this little darkie!” exclaimed Mr. Williams. “He looks just like Viola, don’ ’e?”

“Spittin’ image of ’er!” said Aunt Rose.

“Why, I knowed your momma, boy, when she wasn’ no bigger’n you!”

He put his arm around his waist and drew him to him. The strong smell of whiskey perfumed the air when he spoke, and droplets of spittle flickered out in rays of diffused sunlight.

“You turned out to be a f-i-n-e lookin’ young man!” continued Mr. Williams. “Well, sir, if
I
could just go back an’ start all over agin!”

“How many times have you
an’
I wished that!” Aunt Rose sighed.

“If! if! if!” Ardella said, rubbing her flat stomach. “
If
one of you gen’lemen would offer a lady a drink.” She smiled bitterly and moved toward the Victrola.

RCA, Victor! he thought.

She put on a record.

“Drink up, girl, I’m buyin’,” said the second man, a yellow-skinned freckle-faced man who motioned sleepily at the bottle on the table. Aunt Rose looked at Amerigo with a private knowing smile:

That’s my daughter, it said. That’s my pride an’ joy! Take a good look at ’er an’ at the rest a these niggahs, Amerigo, an’ see how it is to be dead before your time! An’ please try not to judge your auntie too hard. She’s had a hard time. But she loves
you!
You hear me, she loves you!

He felt Ardella’s oblique glance, darting between her mother’s eyes and his eyes, just after the record began to spin, the needle to crack, the piano to play — then a mellow commenting trombone backed by an ingratiating fiddle and a signifying drum:

“If I ever git on my feet agin!”

He diverted his gaze to the floor while Ardella poured herself three fingers of whiskey, threw her head back, and gulped it down with a frown, her head recoiling to its former position as she set the glass on the table just in time to catch him stealing a glance at her:

You think you’re smart, don’t you? he felt her eyes saying. You and that big-eyed momma of yours. All dressed up in your Sunday suit! Been to church, heard every word the reverend said. Smart, too. Real smart! Gonna be somebody someday. Then Momma’s gonna point to me and say: ‘Now why couldn’t you have been like him? Why couldn’t you have tried!’ You little shrimp! You aren’t any better than
I
am! You’re no smarter than I am! You’re luckier than I am, though.…

“If I ever git on my feet agin!”
the woman sang.

I don’t hate you! No, I don’t! I hate Momma! But she’s all I got. She’s
all I am!
And she loves you. I don’t hate you. I just wish you were somewhere else — miles away! I wish you and your big bright eyes had never been born! Maybe, maybe it would have been better if
I
had never been born, if I were dead.

“Yeah,” Mr. Williams was saying, “if things was
then
the way they is
now
—”

“It ain’ never too late,” said Aunt Rose, shooting a glance at Ardella.

“It’s too late for
me!
” said Mr. Williams.

The third man, a little blue-black man dressed in a gray suit, with huge gnarled hands with enormous pink fingernails that he drummed nervously on the table, looked up from his drumming.

He’s got hands like Bra Mo, Amerigo thought.

“It’s too late for me,” Mr. Williams was saying. “Momma’s dead, Poppa. I got a sister — but she’s so good a Christian that she turns ’er head the other way when she sees me comin’ down the street. Hell! I been in too many crap games, too many sportin’ houses. Never could keep still long enough to git married.
I
got a few kids … here an’ there. Yeah! but they don’t even know my name! Ain’ got no schoolin’. Been out workin’ ever since I was ten. An’ I got more gray hairs then I got black ’uns. Heh! — an’ you
’spect
me to go where this boy’s goin’?”

“What you got to say to that, Josh?” Aunt Rose looked at the little man in the gray suit who looked like Bra Mo.

“Well, the way I look at it is this: that a man ain’ no more then he thinks he is. You kin be born high an’ you kin be born low, but here’s one thing that I do know: Ain’
nobody
comin’ till he gits called! Maybe He call you when you young, like Jesus, or when you old, like Job. But
whether you git called or not ever’ man — ever’ livin’ ass — got the price to pay! ’Scuse me, son, but I got to call it like I see it.”

“Your momma tells me that you been to the art gallery,” said Aunt Rose.

Clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap!

“Yes’m! Last Frid’y. We went in a bus for nobody else but us! Went thataway! Out a big boulevard lined with r-e-a-l pretty trees. After we passed the station an’ Memorial Hill, then we turned into a driveway an’ stopped in front of a g-r-e-a-t big buildin’! With a park around it full a real real pretty trees — an’ pur-d-a-y! — with a lot a leaves an’ things that ain’ like none a the ones around here!

“We went between the tall black shiny posts, bigger’n a telephone post — with real funny things on top where it held the roof up that looked like baskets of fruit cut out a stone. The roof rested on that. An’-an’ on the front a the roof shaped like a triangle was a picture cut in the wall. They call that skulpcher —”

“Go ahead, boy!” Mr. Williams exclaimed.

Aunt Rose smiled with approval.

“S-c-u-l-p-t-u-r-e —” said Ardella, “I know a little bit about that, myself.”

“That’s what I said!”

“Go on, honey!” said Aunt Rose:

Clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap!

“Just after the entrance where you give your coat an’ hat an’ a tall gray-headed white man in a blue-lookin’ uniform with writin’ on the pocket pushed the gate open — almost like on the streetcar — after the conductor turns the handle an’ the money falls.

“There was a g-r-e-a-t big pretty room! With big big big rugs on the walls with pictures on ’um of knights of the Round Table, an’ big horses all covered with iron so they couldn’ git stuck with spears an’ cut with them big long swords —”

“S-o-r-d-s!” said Ardella.

“Yeah, an’-an’ standin’ up side the wall was a-was a r-e-a-l horse made out a stone like in a picture, with a man on top of ’im, all dressed up in a iron suit with a long spear an’ a shiel’ an’ —”

“D!”

“Shield! — an’ axes an’ big balls with a lot a stickers stickin’ out of ’um connected to a chain — to fight with.”

“That sure is somethin’, all right!” said the freckle-faced man, who had aroused from his slumbers. “An’ then what?”

Clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! dap! dap!

The armor and mail clashed and clanged in hot combat, the legions of brave warriors gushed with blood induced from their bodies by spear, lance, pickax, mace-and-chain. Horses hooves wildly churned the turf into a slimy mass stained red by the thick coils of blood that oozed from the wounds in the necks of the walleyed dead men.…