Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (14 page)

The nurse now entered with a tray, on which she bore my supper and a threatening black object which turned
out to be a transistor radio. “Miss King brought the radio,” she said, “but since you only woke up today, we forgot about it.” I understood, from her chastened and bewildered air, that Barbara had been rather hard on her. She was bewildered because this had revealed—or, rather, had failed to reveal—a Barbara King and a Leo Proudhammer whose names were not in lights. She did not know her idols, therefore she did not know herself, and she was full of a resentment which she masked by her attention to details. In a chill silence, in which, nevertheless, she kept smiling, she raised the head-rest, arranged the pillows, imprisoned me with the tray. She said, with her firm, girlish impeccability, “You must try to eat it all.” Then she picked up some of the flowers. “These must all be taken out at night,” she said. “I'll be back when you've finished your supper. Then the night nurse takes over. The bell is next to your bed.” She left the room, a poor little girl with her feelings hurt. I resolved to make Barbara do something on the morrow to cheer up my little nurse.

I looked at my supper, which did not interest me, but I forced down my soup and a little salad. Then I lay back, wide awake—it wasn't even show time yet—and wondered what I would do with the night. But either my keepers or my body had foreseen this, for, while I was wondering, I fell asleep:

Barbara and I were painting signs in a wooden shed, the toolshed in New Jersey. Barbara was very clumsy and kept laughing at her clumsiness. Every time I got my sign nearly painted, she came over with her bucket and her brush and spoiled it. Every time she came near me, she seemed to envelop me; she seemed deeper than water, as inescapable as air; I felt myself suffocating in the foul,
sticky web she was spinning with her laughter. I began to be angry. I said, Stop that, now, you stop it! She kept on laughing. She spilled red paint all over my sign. I said, Barbara, you do that again, and I'll—You'll what? she asked, and danced very close to me.
What
will you do, Leo? And she sounded pleading. I was overcome with fear. I'll kill you, I said. Honest. But I also sounded pleading. We lay down together in the scarlet paint. Then something happened, and we were running. Caleb was chasing us. His voice came over the mountains: What are you doing with that white girl?
What are you doing?
Caleb grabbed me, and with the great wooden Bible in his hand, he struck me. Nothing. Caleb. Nothing. Caleb struck me again. I began to cry, and I fell to my knees. Caleb struck me on the back of my head. I cried out and I started trying to crawl away from him. I crawled through dirty water which became deeper and deeper, and suddenly I was staring at the bottom of the sea. The filthy water filled my nostrils, filled my mouth. I kicked to keep from drowning. I turned to look for Caleb. I could see him through the veil of water, he stood watching me, and now he was stark naked, black and naked. I reached out my hand, but he would not take it. I screamed and started going down. I woke up.

The nurse stood with the tray, watching me. “I was about to wake you up,” she said. “You seemed to be having a bad dream.”

It took a second before I could bring her into focus. “I guess I was.”

“Do you have them often?”

“Not very often. Only when I've done something bad—like in those plays by Shakespeare.”

She smiled. “I'll bring you a sleeping pill,” she said, and left again.

I turned on my radio. I listened to the news for awhile, but Barbara had been right—it was not for a sick man, or a well man, either. I turned the dial and found Ray Charles. And he was playing my story for me.

The winter came, and we were evicted, and ended up in two rooms on the top floor of a defeated building on the edge of the Harlem River. The music Ray was playing reminded me of this house. I have lived long enough to see my language stolen—I was about to say betrayed; but it has certainly been pressed into a most peculiar service. “Beat,” in those days, meant something very different from what it has since come to mean: for example, our poor father was “beat to his socks,” which meant that his hope was gone. And no one, in those days, desired to be “funky”: funk was a bad smell, it was the invincible odor which filled our house, the very odor of battle, the battle waged by the living in the midst of death. In those two rooms we acted out our last days as a family. Our father had been laid off from his job, which is why we had been evicted; all he found were odd jobs for a day or two, helping to tear up the city's streets, or shoveling away the snow downtown—I never saw any snow being shoveled away in Harlem! And Caleb quit school—to my father's wrath and despair—but he scarcely fared any better than our father. Our mother began working as a maid in the Bronx, and brought home odds and ends from Miss Anne's kitchen. Our father would not eat the food that she brought home—he said it would have choked him, and I believe it would have. It was hard enough for him to accept the fact that
without the money she made, we would probably all have starved to death. I became a shoeshine boy, downtown, after school, and on the weekends I sold shopping bags in front of the department stores and the five and dimes on 14th Street. And we went on relief—not for the first time; for the last time. Our father no longer drank rum, but a pale, sticky, sweet white wine.

We were cold and frightened, and we were hungry, but, except for our father, we were not in despair. Our mother was holding on—grim, silent, watchful, but not cheerless; she was determined to bring us to the daylight. But she had a lot to watch, a lot to carry. She was watching our father, praying that the daylight would come before his spirit should be forever broken; she was watching Caleb, praying that the daylight would come before his hope, which was his youth, should be forever destroyed; and she was watching me, wondering what I was learning, and what I would be like when the daylight came. The daylight may always come, but it does not come for everybody and it does not come on time.

My shoeshine box, my shopping bags, were the emblems of my maturity; and I now began to learn less from my elders than from my peers; and from the mysterious downtown strangers whose touch on my head made me recoil, whose eyes were as remote as snowcapped mountain peaks. They had no rhythm which struck any chords in me. The wonder with which I watched them, and the distaste which I somehow sensed in their distance, needed but a touch to be transformed forever into enmity. I was trying to discover what principle united so peculiarly bloodless a people. I suspected that the principle was cruelty, but I was not sure. My white peers did not really baffle me, not even when they called me names—I could
call names, too. We fought all the time and sometimes I won and sometimes I lost—usually, I guess, I lost; but I was lucky in that we usually fought fair, and so defeat did not bring about a poisonous rancor. In any case, at least from time to time, we had to band together against the cops—and I had long ago dismissed the cops from all human consideration. But the others, the men and women, young and old, sometimes smiling, sometimes harsh, always distant—if I fell into their hands, would they treat me like the cops? I was not certain: but I feared the worst. And my black peers thought that my wonder was foolish, that it proved me soft in the head. And I learned a new folklore, by which I did not dare to admit that I was frightened, manfully laughing with them at their pictures of Popeye with a hard-on, screwing Olive Oil, giving respectful attention to their accounts of their sexual discoveries, wondering what was wrong with
me,
for I had certainly never done any of those things. I could not really imagine them. But I never said so. I never said much, for I was afraid of revealing my ignorance. But, without quite knowing it, I began to look at everyone around me in another way. Did everybody do it? It was impossible to believe.

I had fallen into the habit of going to see Miss Mildred every once in a while. If it was raining or snowing and my shopping bags could not be sold, or my shoeshine box could not be used; when I was frightened, when I was sad, I would go to see Miss Mildred, for perhaps no one would be home at my house; and I very often met Caleb there. Sometimes, when I got there, it would be a long time before Caleb and Dolores came out of one of the rooms off the hall. And this made me wonder. But I loved Caleb too much to wonder long. One day I would
ask him if what I was told was true: and I knew that he would tell me the truth. When I look back—now—it seems to me that the air knew that we were to be parted; and so the air informed us; for Caleb and I clung to each other as we never had before. He teased me, as before, of course, but this did not make me feel ashamed. On the contrary, it made me feel proud. I felt that he was beginning to treat me like a man, that he expected great things from me. And I did everything I could to live up to his expectations: not to be a crybaby, to fight back, no matter how big the adversary was (and then to give Caleb his name and address), to wash myself, even in the coldest weather, to be respectful to old folks (if they were colored), to do my schoolwork right so that our father and mother would be proud of me. And he said that he would try to send me to college—“because you're smarter than I am, little brother”—and he was teaching me to box, and, when summer came, he was going to teach me to swim. Sometimes, he and Dolores took me to the movies with them. And, at night, when we lay in bed, Caleb would sometimes give me a stolen Milky Way, and talk to me for hours. I don't remember what we talked about. I just remember the sound of his voice in the darkness, the breathing of our parents in the other room, the ferocious industry of the rats which we heard in the kitchen, in the walls, which sometimes took place beneath our bed, the music coming from another apartment, the frost on the windows, so thick sometimes that one could not see out, the blunt, black shape of the kerosene stove which had now been extinguished, for safety and for thrift, and Caleb's arm around me, his smell, and the taste of chocolate, and the electrical sound of the paper. “You ain't sleepy yet?” he might ask, and I would shake my head,
No. “Well, little brother,” he would say, with a yawn, “
I
am, and you
better
be.” Then he would rub his hand over my head, a trick of our father's, and say, “Goodnight, little Leo.” Then he would turn on his side, saying, “Snuggle up tight, now. You all right?” I put one arm around him and nodded my chin against his back, and we fell asleep.

One day—one day—I came down the avenue on my way downtown to buy and sell my shopping bags, and I noticed that the store where Caleb and I always met was closed, was padlocked. There was no one in the store and none of the people who were usually hanging around the store were in the streets. This seemed very odd, especially since this day was a Saturday. But I couldn't wonder about it too much; I had to get downtown. And nothing that happened during all that long day, that cold, bright day, warned me of what was coming. The sun shone all day long—a cold sun; nobody bothered me, neither my peers, nor the police; people tipped me nicely, that day, and I sold all my shopping bags. I was tremendously proud of myself when I got on the subway to go home. I didn't think of stopping by Miss Mildred's because I had to give my mother the money I had made.

But when I started up the steps to our house something whispered to me, something whispered,
trouble.
It was in the darkness of the hall—the lights had gone out—it came out from the walls, it came out—I suddenly realized it—from the silence. These steps, these landings, had never been so silent before. I ran faster up the stairs. I pushed on our door, and it opened at once. But it was usually locked. I stared at my father and mother, who stood in the center of the room, staring at me.

“You seen your brother?” my mother asked.

“No,” I said. “I just come from downtown.” I took the money out of my pockets. “Here.” But she didn't see the money, she didn't take it. I just held it. It got heavier and heavier. My mother sat down, crying. I had never seen her cry before. I looked at my father. He stood above my mother, holding her tightly by the shoulder.

I asked, “What's the matter, Mama?”

My father asked, “You know any of your brother's friends?”

I said, No, because I wanted to hear what he would say.

“They done robbed a store, whoever they is, and stabbed a man half to death. They say Caleb was with them.”

“A boy named Arthur—Arthur something-or-other,” said my mother, “he the one say Caleb was there.”

“Do you know him?” my father asked.

I shook my head, No: for a different reason this time.

“They used to steal things—they used to steal things,” said my mother, “look like they was a regular gang, and the cops say—the cops say—they used that store for a hiding place.”

“The cops say!” said my father.

I had seen the cops in the store many times; they had always been perfectly friendly with the owner. “The store is closed,” I said. I went over to my mother. “Mama—Mama—what they going to do if they find Caleb?” My mind had stopped, stuck, screaming, on the faces of white cops.

“They going to take him away,” she said.

I looked at my father. “But Caleb don't steal! Caleb never stole nothing in his whole life!” My father said
nothing. We heard footsteps on the stairs. Not one of us moved. But the steps stopped just below our landing. Then I realized that I would have to find Caleb and tell him not to come home. I stuffed my money in my pockets—maybe he would need it. I said, “I'll be right back,” and I ran out of the house and down the stairs. I ran down those stairs faster than Caleb ever had, and into the startling wind of the street. Everything was new, everything was evil, every house was dangerous. The people all were strangers. I do not think I saw them. And yet, something cautioned me not to run too fast; something cautioned me to dissemble my distress; something cautioned me to look, to look about me, before I moved. I stood on my stoop and I looked toward the dreadful river. Only small boys were playing there. Across the street, there were ladies in windows and men on stoops; and up the street, more men and boys and ladies, and no cops. I touched the money in my pockets—I don't know why; perhaps I wanted everyone to believe that I had been sent to the store. And then I started walking, out of the block, toward Miss Mildred's house. But I did not go down the avenue because I was afraid to pass the store. I went straight west until I came to Miss Mildred's avenue. I passed cops on my way, but they did not stop me, or seem to look at me. I reached Miss Mildred's building and I ran up the steps. I tried to give the funny knock I had heard Arthur give, but, then, I broke, I pounded on the door with all my might, and I screamed, “Miss Mildred! Miss Mildred! It's Leo. It's
Leo!
Let me in!” Then I heard the pole being moved out of the way, and the rattle of the chain, and the locks unlocking. She stood before me, and I knew she knew.