Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (26 page)

We got off the bus near Madison Square Garden. I think the circus was in town, for the Garden was surrounded by policemen and the streets were full of dazzled men and women and children. The streets were full of a noise like gaiety. But one realized that it could not be gaiety when one looked at the thin lips and the flashing spectacles, the crisply toasted, curled hair of the ladies; when one listened to the brutal, denigrating, lewd voices
of the men, and watched their stretched lips and bewildered eyes; when one listened to the despairing, cunning, tyrannical wail of the children, vaguely and vocally dissatisfied by the fair; and when one watched the policemen who moved through the crowd, on foot or on horseback, as though the crowd were cattle. There were no movies on this avenue, and so we turned off it, walking east, moving now with, now against, the current, sometimes separated by it, often stopped, sometimes, in searching for each other, spun around. People looked into storewindows, and so did we, walked in and out of stores, but we didn't bother, and they were visible behind the plate-glass windows of cafeterias, sitting, in my memory, bolt upright, or wandering about with trays. The crowd, no doubt, would have described itself as friendly; a fair observation would have been that they were in a holiday mood. But their holidays were, emphatically, not my holidays—I had too often been the occasion of their fearful celebrations; and I did not feel any friendliness in the crowd, only a dry, rattling hysteria, and a mortal danger. I kept my hands in my pockets (and so did Caleb) so I could not be accused of molesting any of the women who jostled past, and kept my eyes carefully expressionless so I could not be accused of lusting after the women, or desiring the death of the men. When my countrymen were on holiday, their exuberance took strange forms. And I was aware—for the first time, though not for the last—that I was with Caleb, whose danger, since he was so much more visible, was greater than mine. It was not here and not now and not among these people, that he could protect me by his size. On the contrary, our roles were reversed, and here, now, among
these people, it was
my
size and my presumed innocence which might operate as protection for him. He was not, walking beside me, a burly black man prowling the streets but an attentive older brother taking his little brother sightseeing through the great, cultured and so enormously to be envied metropolis of New York. My presence, potentially, at least, proved his innocence and goodwill and also bore witness to the charity and splendor of the people to whom I owed so much and from whom I had so much to learn. We came to Broadway, and the great marquees. “You going to have your name up there in lights, little Leo?” Caleb asked, with a smile.

“Yes,” I said. “I will. You wait and see.”

“Little Leo,” said Caleb, “on the great white way.”

“It won't be so white,” I said, “when I get through with it.”

Caleb threw back his head and laughed. People turned to look at us: but I made my eyes very big as I looked up at Caleb, and carefully not at them, and they saw what I had wanted them to see. Some of them smiled, too, happy that we were enjoying the fair. “All right, little brother. What movie you want us to see? And I will bow to
your
judgment, man, because I see you are becoming an
ex
pert.”

Well, in fact, I realized, as I scanned the procession of marquees, there wasn't anything playing that I was really dying to see. I had outgrown my taste for some movies without having acquired any real taste for others. But, of course, I did not know how to say this. I had begun to be interested in foreign movies, mostly Russian and French, but I didn't think that Caleb would especially like seeing a foreign movie. So I said, “Well, let's look. If
you
see something
you
like before I see something
I
like, why,
we'll go and see that; and if
I
see something
I
like before you see something
you
like, why, we'll go and see that. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said, amused—seeming, also, to be impressed by my sense of fair play.

And so we wandered through the holiday crowds, stopping now beneath this marquee and now that, examining the merchandise so carefully that we might have been expecting to buy it and take it home and live with it for the rest of our lives and hand it down to our children. We walked carefully down one side of the avenue, stopping and choosing, rather enjoying ourselves now, all the way to 42nd Street; and then up the other side of the avenue, slowly, although it was getting late; but it didn't much matter what time we got home tonight as long as we got home together, and we weren't planning to separate. We forgot about the other people. We began to talk to each other as we hadn't talked since Caleb had come home—as we had never talked before, in fact, for it was only now that Caleb could talk to me without remembering that he was talking to a child. I was determined to make him know that I was no longer a child. I didn't understand everything he was saying, and yet, in another way, I did. I was concentrating on not being a disappointment to him: I wanted him to know that he could lean on me.

Because Caleb liked Ann Sheridan, we ended up in
King's Row.
I
didn't
like Ann Sheridan, I thought she looked like a dumpling, and I didn't like Robert Cummings, who looked like two or three, and I couldn't stand Ronald Reagan, who looked like a pitchfork and had teeth like a ferret; but I
did
like Charles Coburn and Claude Rains and Judith Anderson, and I especially
liked Betty Field because she had a niggerish mouth, a mouth like mine. So, Caleb paid for the tickets, and we went on in. We entered, first, into a kind of cathedral—an impression of tapestries, of banging gold, a vaulted height, a slinging, descending, mightily carpeted floor, great doors before us, Roman couches on either side, on one of which sat a lone young woman, wearing a green cloth hat and holding a thin umbrella, and smoking a cigarette. A bored male attendant, two bored usherettes, who looked sharply at Caleb and me.

“I'm going to go to the bathroom,” Caleb said, and vanished behind the door marked
MEN
.

I waited. I looked at the photographs of the movie stars on the walls. They were white and cheerful and dramatic. I was already arrogant enough to feel that they couldn't, mainly, act their way out of a sieve, but lights and makeup and an innocence as brutal as it was despairing did marvelous things for these sons and daughters of the one and only God, and very nearly reconciled me to Ronald Reagan's teeth. Caleb came back. We left the cathedral and entered the cave.

Dark, dark indeed, sloping, hushed. We were in the balcony, so that Caleb could smoke, and from other worshipers here and there a taper glowed. The movie had been running for some time, it may indeed have been a revival that we saw, I don't remember, and so, although it was a Saturday night, the house was far from full. Caleb and I sat down somewhere in the middle of the balcony, at an angle as steeply tilted as that of a bucking horse or a dying boat, and Caleb lit a cigarette. We had entered during a newsreel.

There was trouble in the world. We saw Roosevelt, we saw Churchill, we saw Stalin: “I hope they all kill
each other,” Caleb said. We saw our great Marines in the Pacific, destroying the yellow-bellied Japs. And we saw Old Glory. “Well,” said Caleb, “I'll be damned.” Some people in the audience applauded. Caleb lit another cigarette. Then the cartoon came on. Woody Woodpecker or Mickey Mouse or Little Red Riding Hood or Bugs Bunny or some fucking body got beaten with hammers, strangled with chains, crushed under a tractor, thrown over a cliff, gored by a cornice, and disemboweled, it appeared, by a monstrous, malevolent thorn; and we, along with all the other worshipers, cracked up with laughter. Then the lights came on. We sat, silently, watching the people.

Strange people, sitting, mainly, all alone. There were one or two couples, very, very young; the boy's hair still bright from the water, the girl's hair still bright from the heat; they sat very close together, and as to popcorn, chewing gum, and candy, the boys were attentive indeed, climbing the tilted steps from time to time to call on the usherettes. I was between fourteen and fifteen then, and the boys and girls could not have been much older. But they impressed me as being children, children forever, children not as a biological fact, but as a perpetual condition. I am sure that I was a very disagreeable boy in those days, for I really despised them for their blank, pimpled faces and their bright, haunted eyes. It had not occurred to me—partly, no doubt, indeed, because it had not occurred to
them
—that they had to shit, like I did, and they jerked off sometimes, like I did, and were just as frightened as I. It had not yet occurred to me that the mask of my bravado was very much like theirs, concealed though it was, and most effectively, by the mask of my color, and by the reflexes which this mask occasioned in them and in
me. No: I simply despised them because they were not as I was, and because I thought it might have been better for me if I had been like them. The lights went down, and a majestic music was heard. The curtains slowly parted, and the screen was filled with the immense shield saying WB, W
ARNER
B
ROTHERS PRESENTS
. Brothers. I thought of my own brother, and I think I hated the movie before the movie began.

The names of the actors. The music. The makeup man, the light man, the sound man, the decorators, the set designers, James Wong Howe on camera, the composer of the overwhelming music, the director. A town somewhere in the United States.

I am afraid that my memory of this movie is hopelessly distorted by the fact that it cracked Caleb up completely. I very much doubt that a major masterpiece by Charlie Chaplin or W. C. Fields could have caused him to laugh harder. When we finally picked up the story line—so to speak; it was by no means an easy matter—Caleb whispered, “Shit. They acting just like niggers. Only, they ain't got as much sense about it as
we
got.” I rather liked Cassandra, who was played by Betty Field, but Caleb thought that she was a living freak, and wondered why no one had ever told her to tie up her hair. When it developed, coyly enough indeed, and with tremendous laments from the mighty music, that her father had been interfering with her, had lain between her thighs, had, in short, been screwing her, thus causing her to become mentally unbalanced—which we both felt, then, was a somewhat curious result—and we watched Robert Cummings' plum-pudding reactions, Caleb hid his face in his hands, which was thoughtful of him, for we would otherwise have been thrown out of the theater. Of course, he
adored Ann Sheridan, winsome Irish colleen, and I found her somewhat more probable than I had ever found her to be before; but when Ronald Reagan lost his legs—“
both
of them!”—Caleb cracked up again, and tears were streaming down his face by the time Robert Cummings delivered
Invictus.
“So
that's
why,” he gasped, as we walked up the aisle, out of the cave, “they make us come in the back door. I'll be damned.” And he was off again, halfway across the cathedral floor, before I could catch up with him.

Into the streets again, dark now, with a light rain falling, and the incredible people everywhere.

Much later, that night, Caleb had a dream so awful that he shook and cried and moaned aloud, and I shook him and shook him to wake him up. He fought me and he continued to fight me even after his eyes were open, and he seemed to be awake; and I got frightened because my brother was very strong, and I started, helplessly, to cry. The terror went out of his face then—his face had been blank and brutal with terror; and his eyes cleared, with a great astonishment, and a terrible sorrow. “Oh, don't cry. Don't cry, Leo. I didn't mean to hurt you, man. I swear I didn't mean to hurt you.” His hands were trying to wipe away my tears. “Hit me. Hit me back. I swear I didn't mean to hurt you.”

“You didn't hurt me. You scared me.”

He took his hand away. He was silent. “I guess so,” he said. “Sometimes I scare myself.” He lay back on the pillow, looking up at the ceiling. “Oh. I wonder what's going to happen to me.”

“I won't let anything happen to you.”

He smiled. “The farm I was on, down yonder. They used to beat me. With whips. With rifle butts. It made
them feel good to beat us; I can see their faces now. There would always be two or three of them, big mother-fuckers. The ring-leader had red hair, his name was Martin Howell. Big, dumb Irishman, sometimes he used to make the colored guys beat each other. And he'd stand there, watching, with his lips dropping, his lips wet, laughing, until the poor guy dropped to the ground. And he'd say, That's just so you all won't forget that you is niggers and niggers ain't worth a shit. And he'd make the colored guys say it. He'd say, You ain't worth shit, are you? And they'd say, No, Mr. Howell, we ain't worth shit. The first time I heard it, saw it, I vomited. But he made me say it, too. It took awhile, but I said it, too, he made me say it, too. That hurt me, hurt me more than his whip, more than his rifle butt, more than his fists. Oh. That hurt me.”

Silence, and darkness, and Caleb's breath—they are with me still, they will be with me when I am carried to my grave. And, from the grave, I swear it, my rotting flesh, my useless bones, will yet cry out: I will never forgive this world. Oh, that a day of judgment should come, oh, that it should come, and I could rise from my grave and make my testimony heard! Yes. Everyone who pierced him.

“The first time I saw this red-haired mother-fucker, I was in the field, working. He was on a horse. He come riding up, and stopped, watching me. But I just kept on working. Then he yells out, Hey, Sam! but I just kept on doing what I was doing. He yells out, Don't you hear me calling you? and then I stopped and put down my fork and I said: My name ain't Sam.