The Children (7 page)

N
OW SOME PEOPLE WILL NOT THINK THAT OUR STREET IS
beautiful. Indeed, I know that many times, I, Ishky, have said to myself, “Surely this is the least beautiful spot in the world.” I guess you could understand that. East to west, it is nothing but drab walls of wood and brick. The wooden houses are old, and they seem to be falling into decay; the brick houses are not a great deal better.

So you can see how, when it does look beautiful, you feel it. But I don't know; and I guess that when it does look beautiful, it is something inside of you that makes it beautiful.

I
NSIDE
of me, then. I am Ishky, and it is hot summer, so hot that everything moves slowly; and now more than any other time, I am not much to look at.

If you ask my mother, she will tell you that I am nothing at all. So how is it that I am a king? Now, I am not sure yet, but I think that Ollie is no longer king. And all this was done by jumping from a roof.

The Lord God preserved me, as he preserved Joseph, who was sold as a slave into Egypt. Maybe I will turn out to be like Joseph, because I am quite sure he could have been no more clever than I. I've won Marie.

I can't tell you enough of my love for Marie. It is all squeezed up inside of me, and I have never spoken of it, not even to Marie. But nevertheless, it is a wonderful thing. When I thought of the secret garden, it was always for Marie. And when I do wonderful things, I do them for Marie, who is quite the most beautiful person in the world. If I am great, it is just because of Marie, and for no other reason.

And now the block is beautiful. The sky is as blue and as clear as any sky can ever be. The sun is shining, like a large, end-on, yellow lemon in the sky. The cement is hot, so hot that everything bakes warm and comfortable. And I walk down the street with Marie.

How is it that I notice things about Marie, which I notice in nobody else? How is it that I see every tuft and curl in Marie's yellow hair? How is it that I watch every shadow that passes across her face? Is it only that I love her?

This time I have courage enough to take hold of her hand.

A forlorn figure, Shomake came up the block. He had been fighting with a large colored boy called Blackbelly. This is how it came about.

When Shomake saw the fight, he ran away, and he never knew whether Ollie had beaten Ishky, or Ishky had beaten Ollie; but his running away hurt more than any fight could have.

He ran down the block, and all the time he was thinking, “I'm yellow—yellow.” He wanted to hide, but where can one hide in a bright, sunny street? Half crying, his sobs came bitter and hard, short gasps of dry breath.

Shomake was a gentle boy. He possessed to a large degree the ability to be hurt, but he himself could not hurt. Everything hurt him. Once, when his mother cut her hand badly, he had sobbed and whimpered for hours. And again, when he had seen Thomas Edison being beaten unmercifully by Ollie, he had sprung madly at Ollie, to take his beating along with Thomas Edison. And later he had said to himself:

“If Ollie is his brother, why, why?”

His fiddle was alive, he always thought, and he loved the music better than anything else. But when something happened, it was always music that he could not get away from; and now the hot sun would not let him escape. Ishky was being beaten, and he was running from Ishky, leaving him.

(Coward, you, Shomake, yellow, dirty son of a dago bitch.)

Counterpoint. When his mother had attempted to explain counterpoint, she said, “It is like the two souls of man inside of him, struggling and struggling.” And that was love and hate, love and hate. He had to get out of the sun, or the beating in his brain would destroy him.

Down near the bottom of the block there was a dark alley where some colored people lived. Ordinarily, Shomake would not have gone near the alley. Now he couldn't be afraid, and he dashed into it. And there he met Blackbelly.

Blackbelly went around saying that he had killed a white boy. Of course, nobody believed it, but that was what he said. He also said that he wasn't afraid of any white boy on the block, and because of this he had to be mighty careful, running with his gang most of the time. But once when Ollie had caught him without his gang, there had been a terrible fight, which nobody ever forgot. Blackbelly ended the fight by hitting Ollie over the head with a bottle, but that hadn't decided it one way or another. Ollie still insisted that he would get Blackbelly. And Blackbelly said, “Come and get me.”

When Shomake saw Blackbelly, he knew he would be beaten. But there was still time to turn and make a run for it.

Shomake stood there in the half-darkness, trembling.

“Whereya goin', dago?”

The music in his head didn't stop. Because he was afraid, Shomake knew that he was a coward. He would turn and run. This place was dark and terrible as hell itself.

“Boy, yer sure scared.”

“Not afraid!” Shomake screamed.

“I'll killya!”

“G'wan, kill me den. G'wan an' kill me, yuh dirdy rodden black basted.” And with that he threw himself at Blackbelly.

Blackbelly beat him thoroughly. But he couldn't put too much heart into it. This was not fighting. This was slaughter, more or less.

Afterward, Shomake sat on the curb, sobbing to himself. All over, his body ached, but there was more hurt than that in his heart, and he was not able to throw it off the way Ishky had. Why had Christ died, if the world was only this?

The sun, so hot, only made him suffer more. False beauty. He wanted to go home and put his head in his mother's lap, but that would not solve the whole thing. Still, he had to solve it.

Maybe—if he went to Ishky—He sat there sobbing and thinking for a long time. Maybe if he went to Ishky, they could go and look for the magic garden again. Then, for the first time, he smiled a little, remembering the garden the way Ishky had described it. And it was so near—only in the back of Ishky's house.

If you could go into the garden, just like that, couldn't you stay there? And then, maybe, you could stay there all the time.

Awkwardly, he got to his feet, and he began to shamble up the block. There, sure enough, was Ishky, and Marie was with him.

“Hey, Ishky,” he called.

Ishky began to swagger. He wondered what Shomake would think, seeing him holding Marie's hand like that.

“Hey, Ishky!”

Marie turned up her nose.

“Wanna play, Ishky?”

“He's a dirdy wop,” Marie confided to Ishky.

“Yeah.”

“Wanna find duh gaden?”

And then Shomake stood stunned and forlorn; Ishky had swaggered past without ever noticing him.

ELEVEN

N
OW—THE FIGHT BETWEEN BLACKBELLY AND OLLIE
. Y
OU
must understand why this fight was inevitable, and how out of this fight developed the compact gang formation which divided the block into two distinct parts.

The last time they had fought, Blackbelly had mashed Ollie's head with a broken bottle; but if Ollie resented anything about this, it was the fact that the bottle had not come into his hand before it came into Blackbelly's. A broken bottle was legal enough in any fight.

Out of that, Ollie began to vision his gang, a close, well-knit gang to drive the Negroes out of the lower end of the block. Now, Ollie was no fool; more than that, he was a person who thought a great deal. He knew that he hated the Negroes. In the upper part of the block, he was king; but when he walked down the block he took his safety into his hands. He thought of a time when the block would be his, from east to west. It meant beating the Negroes, and that meant organizing a gang. But when it came to organizing, he was strangely helpless.

This is the way the combination between Ishky and Ollie came about—after Ollie had heard of Ishky's feat of leaping from the roof.

W
HAT HAVE
I done to Shomake now? He used to be my friend, and now? Now I walk past him, and even though I see the expression upon his face, it doesn't affect me.

(Ishky, what do you know of a woman, except to worship her?)

Afterward, I would say to myself, “It is all Marie's fault.” Yet how is that possible? I love Marie, and to me she is the perfect woman above all other women. So how can the fault be Marie's?

Now, in spite of what I have done to Shomake,'I am quite happy.

“Y'like tuh read, Marie?”

“Sometimes. What's duh gaden?”

“Jus' sumpen I tol' Shomake.”

“He's a dumb wop.”

“Yeah—y'like 'venture stories?”

“Sometimes. Where's duh gaden?”

“What gaden?”

“Duh one yuh tol' Shomake about.”

“I dunno.”

“Den whyya talkin' all about a gaden?”

“Jus' fer fun.”

She glanced sidewise at him, and then she said, “Is it dark in duh gaden?”

“I dunno.”

“Awright—take yer pissy gaden. See if I care.”

H
OW IS IT
that I can't tell Marie about the garden? I told Shomake about it, and I don't love him; and I love Marie, so why can't I tell her about the garden? But I can't. Maybe I am afraid that she would laugh at me. I know that I don't want Marie to laugh at me, ever. And it doesn't matter anyway, since there is no garden.

Blackbelly saw them walking down the block. Well, that's what a woman can do to a man. Blackbelly knew Ishky, and he knew that Ishky was not a person to be caught very often in the lower end of the block. Blackbelly waited; then, when they were close to him, he sauntered out into their path.

He stood like a small blob of solid ink in their path. His eyes on the ground, Ishky saw Blackbelly's shadow first, and then he looked up into Blackbelly's round face. Then he felt Marie cringe against him. Then he tried to smile; but he didn't know why. He knew, though, that with Marie next to him, he couldn't run away. A hundred times before, he had been caught the same way; and each time there was a moment in which he whirled and fled away. That was life—sometimes you stood and sometimes you ran, but unless you were an utter fool, you never stood when the odds were this heavy against you.

Now he was a fool. The moment when he had sprung across the airshaft leaped into his mind. Glory—and what was life when it came to glory? He might have said, “Oh, my wonderful Marie, you will see that no sacrifice is too great for you.”

And Blackbelly—if he had stood that way on a jungle path a hundred years ago, he would have been more than splendid. He was just splendid now, because he was still too young to know that a nigger should cringe, and old enough to know that he hated all whites.

“Whereya goin', white boy?” he drawled.

“You don' own duh ground,” Ishky said.

“Yuh dirdy nigger,” Marie said.

“G'wan, yuh liddle whore.”

Ishky said, “Shuddup!” Inside of him, Ishky felt funny little bubbles of heat. He began to tremble as the rage crept over his small body. This was doom, but doom and glory came together.

“What's dat?”

Ishky said, “Yuh take dat back?”

This struck Blackbelly as no end funny, and arms akimbo he began to laugh, rolling back and forth on the balls of his feet.

“Yuh take dat back?”

“Boy-o-boy.”

“You lousy stinkin' nigger!” Marie yelled. Then, as Blackbelly took a step toward her, she ran screaming toward the other end of the block. Ishky, everything else forgotten, turned around to look after her.

Then Blackbelly leaped on him. Under the weight of Blackbelly's hard, round body, Ishky went down. It seemed that the world was upon him, smothering him. Blackbelly's fists were already pounding into him.

He tried to fight back, but what was the use? A blow in the face took most of the fight out of him. He stopped struggling; he lay still, hurt, only wondering how long Blackbelly would continue to beat him. Tears welled slowly into his eyes, but he didn't cry.

Blackbelly stood up, staring down at the twisted,, small form of the other boy. It struck something strange inside of him; thus, all of a sudden, he wished to fight no longer.

“Gittup,” he said.

Ishky lay there, his body trembling with dry sobs.

“Gittup, white boy.”

“Lemme alone.”

“Yuh yella basted.”

“Lemme alone.”

“Yuh'd better git up, or I'll beat duh ass offana yuh. Yuh'd better git up.”

Then, glancing up, Blackbelly saw Ollie coming; and that same deep strange thing inside of him told him that Ollie would fight, that this would be the fight of their lives. He could still run. This was his land Ollie was invading, and there was still time to run. He could call, if he wished to, and he could smother Ollie with dark, eager bodies.

But he did nothing, only waited. This was a battle of kings, and he had no desire to avoid it. He kicked Ishky, and then he forgot about Ishky. He clenched his fists.

TWELVE