Such Sweet Thunder (61 page)

Amerigo sat down.

“Eh — I-I’ve been thinking about what I want to be when I, about what profession I would like to take up, when I get to be a — when I finish high school. I just wondered if you had a minute … minute … to spare … ta … to … kind a tell me what you think about it.”

Mr. Thompkins leveled his gaze upon him.

“If you catch a joker starin’ at you,” he heard Rutherford say, “stare back at him, an’ hold it!”

He stared back at him — and held it. Mr. Thompkins reared back in his swivel chair, took a deep breath, and looked at the ceiling, as though he were searching his past, a thoughtful, sad past, for the right word, for the right beginning, as though he were reaccessing the way through his own Forty-Three Year Siege.

“Well, son, I don’t really know if there
is
a right way to know — so — so early. I’ve wanted to be so many things since I’ve been old enough to think about it.”

He’s the one for her, he thought, scrutinizing his man carefully, hardly conscious of the warm serious words that now fell in the background of his mind.
He
should have her. He can give her more than I can, but if she ever needs me I’ll love her forever. I’ll love him, too. When I get to be a man. When I finish college I’m going to be a poet like Langston Hughes, and she’ll read my poems and … and be sorry, and I’ll forgive her. She’ll see. They’ll
all
see.

“Well,” Mr. Thompkins was saying, “that’s about all I know to say, son.”

He thanked him and left the office.

“W-e-l-l, it won’ be long now, Babe!” Viola exclaimed, “just a little while longer an’ you got it made!”

He looked up at her from the depths of his despair. Her bright warm smile bore down upon him with the cruelty of the hot summer sun.
She
had been away then, Miss Jennings had been away, in Denver, for three whole months! His letters had stretched out under the bridge and under the bridge and under the bridge to:

Dear Miss Jennings … Dear Miss Jennings … Dear Miss Jennings … Dear Miss Jen …

“What?” Viola had exclaimed, “you writin’ that woman
agin!
She ain’ had time to answer the
last
one
yet!
Did you tell ’er about all the books you been readin’?”

“Yes’m.”

“What did you git from the library this time?”

“I got the poems of Omar Khayyám an’ … and —”

“Who’s he?”

“He’s an old poet. And
The Big Sea
by Langston Hughes. He’s colored! A Ne-gro! and the
Republic
of Plato and —”

“Who’s that?”

“There’s a picture, a mural of him on the wall at the art gallery.”

“That’s deep stuff, there, boy! You gonna read your letter to me when it’s finished?”

“Yes’m.”

Viola’s laughing voice scratched the grooves along the surface of his mind like a phonograph needle scratching the empty grooves of a record. Nobody understands! His black skin tightened around his awareness of himself until his eyes bulged grotesquely and his ears protruded into the hostile air about him like antennae registering the intensity of the cruel laughter directed at him.

If I’d have been tall! he thought bitterly, and old, light, half white with curly hair! If — if I had lived out south in a house with bushes and a lawn and trees. If spring would only wait
till I get ready!
How long?

I’ll love her always, he thought with a heavy feeling of futility that was agitated by a feverish anticipation of raw green grasses springing up through the snow, of buds swelling on the branches of the trees, along the perilous way from Aunt Rose’s up to Twenty-Third Street. He passed the white house on the corner,
her
house with the fresh white curtains and the polished windows, with the bright green lawn shaded by the pretty trees — under fair skies and foul — just before he dashed around the corner and down the hill and up to Troost to catch the streetcar, south, to the art gallery, where they
have
to take you in, even if you’re
ugly
and
black …
and weren’t baptized until the new reverend had stood up in church and said:

“Well, sir! — Ain’ this a glorious day!”

“A-MEN!”

“Eh, now! eh … Ah … eh …”

“Help ’im, Je-sus!”

“Aaaaaaw-nooow! Praise the Lord! I feel at h-o-m-e! In God’s house! You know. when you been saved — after a long hard struggle with the devil — with yourself!”

“Tee! hee! hee!”

“You jumpy as a child at Christmastime! You look up into the starry sky an’ you see
God!
”

“YEAH!”

“Aaaaan’ you look at the
trees
an’ you see
God!
You look into your neighbor’s face an’ you see
God’s holy work!
”

“YEAH!”

“Eeeeeevrywhere — eeeeeeevery whicha way you look — you see Glo-ray! Gloray! Gloray! — An’-an’ —”

“Talk to ’im, Jesus!”

“An’ it makes you wanna go out into the street an’ stop ever’body you meet and ask: Do you see what I see? In the brilliant face of this glorious day, do you see the shining presence of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?

“You wanna —
speak out!
Somethin’ within you won’
let you be still!
You have to tell the
world
that you found Jeeee-suuus! Now I wanna ask
you
somethin’: Have
you
found ’Im?
You!
— who have come to worship in God’s new shinin’ temple. Have you found Him? If you have — stand up! Stand up an’ be counted!”

The great mass of black, brown, beige faces rose around him like a great swelling wave, undulating in the alluvial heat of a great tension that agitated two thousand hearts into beating as one:

Boom! Boom! Boom!

The tension swelled into a deep dark fomenting mass of sound that rose like a dense mist above churning waters, and the song without words swept upon the shores of his consciousness, like a river, like a sea — all seas. One Sea! — and slowly receded into the stillness from which it came.

“Look around you!” the reverend commanded, “an’ see if you see a soul flounderin’ in a storm of doubt! Trapped in the whirlpools of sin! An unborn thing strugglin’ for eternal life: point-him-out!”

Myriad black pink-nailed fingers pointed at him:

Boom!

“Who made you?” cried the reverend: “
God!
Who blew the breath of life into your body that you might become a livin’ soul?
God! Who!
aaaaaw
who
sent His only begotten Son upon the earth that
you
might
know the bliss of life everlastin’?
God!
Don’t you love ’Im? Huh! Now I’m gonna utter the most beautiful words that the ears of man is ever likely to hear. For you! David — David wrote ’um, but I like to think of ’um as my own — your — ever’man’s — love song to God:

“Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name.…”

Two thousand voices spoke as one voice. The deep alluvial waters rose and flooded his heart and swam in the orbits of his eyes. He stood up and groped his black sinful way down the aisle like one gone blind and came to a halt when he could walk no more.

“A-MEN!” rang throughout the great assembly.

The reverend took him by the hand. And suddenly a great pain smote him in the heart, for while the reverend was extending the invitation to join St. John’s in Christian fellowship, his mind was filled with thoughts of
her!
His breast heaved with exhilaration in the thought:
She’ll be proud of me! Now I’m like everybody else. She’ll see
.

A week later when the reverend declared: I now baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and the chilly waters swirled over his head and he emerged clean in the redeeming light of Sunday morning amid the jubilant chorus of hallelujahs and a-mens, he saw only her face reflected in the face of Viola who sat trembling in the pulpit, her eyes stained red with tears.

When he was dry and saved he wondered: Will
she
love me now?

Too tall, said the
Voice
after Rutherford had unfolded its pages the following Friday evening and read:

Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Jennings of Denver, Colorado, wish to announce the engagement of their daughter, Ann, to.…

“Boy!”

He opened his eyes, though he had not been asleep, and looked at his father.

He watched Rutherford step out the door. Then Viola, minutes later.

“Bye, hon. You git up now, you don’ wanna be late on your first day.” She slipped a dollar into his hand. “Don’ tell your daddy,” she whispered with a confidential smile, and slipped out the door.

Heel over toe, toe over heel, along the new way, the new way that his straining toes had rehearsed time out of mind.

He came to a pause at the corner of Eighteenth and Woodland and looked up at the two-story house with the photographer’s shop on the
ground floor, with the sign in white enamel letters that you couldn’t rub off, that read:
J. B. THORNTON, PHOTOGRAPHER
. There’s where
she
lives. He heard Miss Allie Mae describe the funeral parlor … 
with all them ferns an’ things in the windows …
He looked for signs of
her
. Funny name. Cosima. He crossed the street.

There was an old building on the opposite corner. The sign on the plate-glass window said,
THE VOICE
, and he unconsciously turned its pages down through the years, and heard Mr. Jordan say: “I’ll bet you want to be a schoolteacher when you grow up?”

“No sir.”

“What then?”

Now, all of a sudden, he felt himself caught up in a stream of faces mostly new, moving up the hill. He gazed shyly, excitedly around him, questioning the shimmer of a flashing eye, a dazzling smile, the quick movement of a nervous hip that knew it was being looked at: creamy beiges and dusky browns, a choice of copper-reds, balancing dangerously upon the high heels of new shoes, startling the crowds of fresh curls adorning their heads. Wondering if
she
were one of them, he walked straighter, with his head high and his shoulders back.

He came to Nineteenth Street where the Methodist church stood on the northeast corner and the Attucks School opposite it. Crispus … the first man to … gunshot wound … single … It looks like Garrison, William Lloyd.

Freedom!

Meanwhile the crowd grew thicker, the voices louder.

He stopped at the bridge a little past Nineteenth Street and looked down at the shining rails that led to Denver, Colorado, west, and New York, east — and over the sea and over the sea to France and England.

Presently he came to a stone wall about four feet high, at the edge of a gentle green lawn that swelled into a large hill to the southeast, leading his eye to the great redbrick building that sprawled out upon its summit: stately, immutable, immaculate, efficient,
i
’s dotted and
t
’s crossed, replete with the resolution to every
if
.

He stopped and stared at the long rows of polished windows three stories high, seeing within every room a desk, a blackboard, and rows of seats flushing with noisy pupils toeing the parallel crevices between the floorboards running side by side at the sound of a bell:

Rrrrrrrrring!

And he followed the crowd into the large auditorium, very much like the one at the art gallery — only bigger, much bigger, but the floor’s
just the same. Several men sat on the stage, modest, intelligent-looking men with unslicked-down hair, serious attitudes, and golden keys dangling from the buttonholes of their vests. Like the men on the pulpit at St. John’s, only different, not as expensively creased nor as shiny. Edmond Clapps! Give ’um the …

The middle man stood up and moved to the front of the stage.

“Mr. Bowles?”

“Sssssssh!”

He gave a sign like the reverend for the student body to rise.

Like Mr. Powell.

“Let us sing the Negro National Anthem!” he said, and his face suddenly sprouted a grizzly beard and his eyes grew fierce. He raised his master’s whip into the air and brought it down with a crash against his knee:
Boom!

“Lift every voice and sing!… till earth and heaven ring —”

Rrrrrrrring!

“loud as the rooooooooolling sea!”

The aftertones of the song burning in the air, the assembly sat down. The little man in the middle with the thick mustache and yellow skin, the gray suit that was half a size too large and a little wrinkled smiled like a shy boy and prepared to speak.

Mr. Cook … H. O.… In-
tel
-la-gent!

“We, the members of the administration and faculty of North High, welcome you! To those of you who are new among us, we hope that an important phase of your life will begin here. There will be many things to learn —”

The history of the whole human family.

“— and many feelings to explore. And for those of you who pass successfully through these doors, the knowledge afforded by an even greater institution of learning lies before you, that of the university!”

Harvard and Yale and — God damned! Aaaaaaaw! Tee! hee!

“Opportunities for Negroes in America are slowly but steadily increasing. With
hard work, patience
, and
perseverance
— we are entering the mainstream of American life.”

“Places that you and I will never see!…”
cried the reverend.

Dead!

“The continuation of that advance is up to you! The future belongs to those who are
prepared
. Don’t let your color hold you back, don’t let it cramp your imagination, cripple your initiative! We do not know what the next few years will bring. There is hunger and poverty and
political unrest in the world. The possibility of war is not unseemly though we still have time to hope and pray that reason and love can influence the hearts of men. And that is all the more reason why we must make these moments here at North High count —”

… 
of Monte Cristo
by Alexander Dumas — Basie!

“We must live them to the full. We must learn all we can. There is no substitute for a good education. There is no substitute for
love, compassion
, and
human
understanding. But life is not all work. It means playing, too. Here at North High we hope that you will avail yourselves of every opportunity to partake of as many extracurricular activities as common sense will allow in order that you may round out your personalities and …”