The Complete Stories Read online

  He got up and took a paper off another chair. He might as well appear to be reading when she came through again. No use having her standing up there staring at him, believing she had to think up something for him to do. He looked over the paper at the window across the alley. The geranium wasn’t there yet. It had never been this late before. The first day he’d seen it, he had been sitting there looking out the window at the other window and he had looked at his watch to see how long it had been since breakfast.

  When he looked up, it was there. It startled him. He didn’t like flowers, but the geranium didn’t look like a flower. It looked like the sick Grisby boy at home and it was the color of the drapes the old ladies had in the parlor and the paper bow on it looked like the one behind Lutish’s uniform she wore on Sundays. Lutish had a fondness for sashes. Most niggers did, Old Dudley thought.

  The daughter came through again. He had meant to be looking at the paper when she came through. “Do me a favor, will you?” she asked as if she had just thought up a favor he could do.

  He hoped she didn’t want him to go to the grocery again. He got lost the time before. All the blooming buildings looked alike. He nodded.

  “Go down to the third floor and ask Mrs. Schmitt to lend me the shirt pattern she uses for Jake.”

  Why couldn’t she just let him sit? She didn’t need the shirt pattern. “All right,” he said. “What number is it?”

  “Number 10—just like this. Right below us three floors down.”

  Old Dudley was always afraid that when he went out in the dog runs, a door would suddenly open and one of the snipe-nosed men that hung off the window ledges in his undershirt would growl, “What are you doing here?” The door to the nigger’s apartment was open and he could see a woman sitting in a chair by the window. “Yankee niggers,” he muttered. She had on rimless glasses and there was a book in her lap. Niggers don’t think they’re dressed up till they got on glasses, Old Dudley thought. He remembered Lutish’s glasses. She had saved up thirteen dollars to buy them. Then she went to the doctor and asked him to look at her eyes and tell her how thick to get the glasses. He made her look at animals’ pictures through a mirror and he stuck a light through her eyes and looked in her head. Then he said she didn’t need any glasses. She was so mad she burned the corn bread three days in a row, but she bought her some glasses anyway at the tencent store. They didn’t cost her but $1.98 and she wore them every Saddey. “That was niggers,” Old Dudley chuckled. He realized he had made a noise, and covered his mouth with his hand. Somebody might hear him in one of the apartments.

  He turned down the first flight of stairs. Down the second he heard footsteps coming up. He looked over the banisters and saw it was a woman—a fat woman with an apron on. From the top, she looked kind er like Mrs. Benson at home. He wondered if she would speak to him. When they were four steps from each other, he darted a glance at her but she wasn’t looking at him. When there were no steps between them, his eyes fluttered up for an instant and she was looking at him cold in the face. Then she was past him. She hadn’t said a word. He felt heavy in his stomach.

  He went down four flights instead of three. Then he went back up one and found number 10. Mrs. Schmitt said O.K., wait a minute and she’d get the pattern. She sent one of the children back to the door with it. The child didn’t say anything.

  Old Dudley started back up the stairs. He had to take it more slowly. It tired him going up. Everything tired him, looked like. Not like having Rabie to do his running for him. Rabie was a light-footed nigger. He could sneak in a hen house ‘thout even the hens knowing it and get him the fattest fryer in there and not a squawk. Fast too. Dudley had always been slow on his feet. It went that way with fat people. He remembered one time him and Rabie was hunting quail over near Molton. They had ‘em a hound dog that could find a covey quick ern any fancy pointer going. He wasn’t no good at bringing them back but he could find them every time and then set like a dead stump while you aimed at the birds. This one time the hound stopped cold-still. “Dat gonna be a big ‘un,” Rabie whispered, “I feels it.” Old Dudley raised the gun slowly as they walked along. He had to be careful of the pine needles. They covered the ground and made it slick. Rabie shifted his weight from side to side, lifting and setting his feet on the waxen needles with unconscious care. He looked straight ahead and moved forward swiftly. Old Dudley kept one eye ahead and one on the ground. It would slope and he would be sliding forward dangerously, or in pulling himself up an incline, he would slide back down.

  “Ain’t I better get dem birds dis time, boss?” Rabie suggested. “You ain’t never easy on yo’ feets on Monday. If you falls in one dem slopes, you gonna scatter dem birds fo’ you gits dat gun up.”

  Old Dudley wanted to get the covey. He could er knocked four out of it easy. “I’ll get ‘em,” he muttered. He lifted the gun to his eye and leaned forward. Something slipped beneath him and he slid backward on his heels. The gun went off and the covey sprayed into the air.

  “Dem was some mighty fine birds we let get away from us,” Rabie sighed.

  “We’ll find another covey,” Old Dudley said. “Now get me out of this damn hole.”

  He could er got five er those birds if he hadn’t fallen. He could er shot ‘em off like cans on a fence. He drew one hand back to his ear and extended the other forward. He could er knocked ‘em out like clay pigeons. Bang! A squeak on the staircase made him wheel around—his arms still holding the invisible gun. The nigger was clipping up the steps toward him, an amused smile stretching his trimmed mustache. Old Dudley’s mouth dropped open. The nigger’s lips were pulled down like he was trying to keep from laughing. Old Dudley couldn’t move. He stared at the clear-cut line the nigger’s collar made against his skin.

  “What are you hunting, old-timer?” the Negro asked in a voice that sounded like a nigger’s laugh and a white man’s sneer.

  Old Dudley felt like a child with a pop-pistol. His mouth was open and his tongue was rigid in the middle of it. Right below his knees felt hollow. His feet slipped and he slid three steps and landed sitting down.

  “You better be careful,” the Negro said. “You could easily hurt yourself on these steps.” And he held out his hand for Old Dudley to pull up on. It was a long narrow hand and the tips of the fingernails were clean and cut squarely. They looked like they might have been filed. Old Dudley’s hands hung between his knees. The nigger took him by the arm and pulled up. “Whew!” he gasped, “you’re heavy. Give a little help here.” Old Dudley’s knees unbended and he staggered up. The nigger had him by the arm. “I’m going up anyway,” he said. “I’ll help you.” Old Dudley looked frantically around. The steps behind him seemed to close up. He was walking with the nigger up the stairs. The nigger was waiting for him on each step. “So you hunt?” the nigger was saying. “Well, let’s see. I went deer hunting once. I believe we used a Dodson.38 to get those deer. What do you use?”

  Old Dudley was staring through the shiny tan shoes. “I use a gun,” he mumbled.

  “I like to fool with guns better than hunting,” the nigger was saying. “Never was much at killing anything. Seems kind of a shame to deplete the game reserve. I’d collect guns if I had the time and the money, though.” He was waiting on every step till Old Dudley got on it. He was explaining guns and makes. He had on gray socks with a black fleck in them. They finished the stairs. The nigger walked down the hall with him, holding him by the arm. It probably looked like he had his arm locked in the nigger’s.

  They went right up to Old Dudley’s door. Then the nigger asked, “You from around here?”

  Old Dudley shook his head, looking at the door. He hadn’t looked at the nigger yet. All the way up the stairs, he hadn’t looked at the nigger. “Well,” the nigger said, “it’s a swell placeonce you get used to it.” He patted Old Dudley on the back and went into his own apartment. Old Dudley went into his. The pain in his throat was all over his face now, leaking out his eyes.

  He shuffled to
the chair by the window and sank down in it. His throat was going to pop. His throat was going to pop on account of a nigger—a damn nigger that patted him on the back and called him “old-timer.” Him that knew such as that couldn’t be. Him that had come from a good place. A good place. A place where such as that couldn’t be. His eyes felt strange in their sockets. They were swelling in them and in a minute there wouldn’t be any room left for them there. He was trapped in this place where niggers could call you “old-timer.” He wouldn’t be trapped. He wouldn’t be. He rolled his head on the back of the chair to stretch his neck that was too full.

  A man was looking at him. A man was in the window across the alley looking straight at him. The man was watching him cry. That was where the geranium was supposed to be and it was a man in his undershirt, watching him cry, waiting to watch his throat pop. Old Dudley looked back at the man. It was supposed to be the geranium. The geranium belonged there, not the man. “Where is the geranium?” he called out of his tight throat.

  “What you cryin’ for?” the man asked. “I ain’t never seen a man cry like that.”

  “Where is the geranium?” Old Dudley quavered. “It ought to be there. Not you.”

  “This is my window,” the man said. “I got a right to set here if I want to.”

  “Where is it?” Old Dudley shrilled. There was just a little room left in his throat.

  “It fell off if it’s any of your business,” the man said.

  Old Dudley got up and peered over the window ledge. Down in the alley, way six floors down, he could see a cracked flower pot scattered over a spray of dirt and something pink sticking out of a green paper bow. It was down six floors. Smashed down six floors.

  Old Dudley looked at the man who was chewing gum and waiting to see the throat pop. “You shouldn’t have put it so near the ledge,” he murmured. “Why don’t you pick it up?”

  “Why don’t you, pop?”

  Old Dudley stared at the man who was where the geranium should have been.

  He would. He’d go down and pick it up. He’d put it in his own window and look at it all day if he wanted to. He turned from the window and left the room. He walked slowly down the dog run and got to the steps. The steps dropped down like a deep wound in the floor. They opened up through a gap like a cavern and went down and down. And he had gone up them a little behind the nigger. And the nigger had pulled him up on his feet and kept his arm in his and gone up the steps with him and said he hunted deer, “old-timer,” and seen him holding a gun that wasn’t there and sitting on the steps like a child. He had shiny tan shoes and he was trying not to laugh and the whole business was laughing. There’d probably be niggers with black flecks in their socks on every step, pulling down their mouths so as not to laugh. The steps dropped down and down. He wouldn’t go down and have niggers pattin’ him on the back. He went back to the room and the window and looked down at the geranium.

  The man was sitting over where it should have been. “I ain’t seen you pickin’ it up,” he said.

  Old Dudley stared at the man.

  “I seen you before.” the man said. “I seen you settin’ in that old chair every day, starin’ out the window, looking in my apartment.

  What I do in my apartment is my business, see? I don’t like people looking at what I do.”

  It was at the bottom of the alley with its roots in the air.

  “I only tell people once,” the man said and left the window.

  The Barber (1947)

  IT IS trying on liberals in Dilton.

  After the Democratic White Primary, Rayber changed his barber. Three weeks before it, while he was shaving him, the barber asked, “Who you gonna vote for?”

  “Darmon,” Rayber said.

  “You a nigger-lover?”

  Rayber started in the chair. He had not expected to be approached so brutally. “No,” he said. If he had nut been taken off-balance, he would have said, “I am neither a Negro—nor a white—lover.” He had said that before to Jacobs, the philosophy man, and—to show you how trying it is for liberals in Dilton—Jacobs—a man of his education—had muttered, “That’s a poor way to be.”

  “Why?” Rayber had asked bluntly. He knew he could argue Jacobs down.

  Jacobs had said, “Skip it.” He had a class. His classes frequently occurred, Rayber noticed, when Rayber was about to get him in an argument.

  “I am neither a Negro—nor a white lover,” Rayber would have said to the barber.

  The barber drew a clean path through the lather and then pointed the razor at Rayber. “I’m tellin’ you,” he said, “there ain’t but two sides now, white and black. Anybody can see that from this campaign. You know what Hawk said? Said a hunnert and fifty years ago, they was runnin’ each other down eatin’ each other—throwin’ jewel rocks at birds—skinnin’ horses with their teeth. A nigger come in a white barber shop in Atlanta and says, ‘Gimme a haircut.’ They throwed him out but it just goes to show you. Why listen, three black hyenas over in Mulford last month shot a white man and took half of what was in his house and you know where they are now? Settin’ in their county jail eatin’ like the President of the United States—they might get dirty in the chain gang; or some damn nigger-lover might come by and be heart-broke to see ‘em pickin’ rock. Why, lemme tell you this—ain’t uothin’ gonna be good again until we get rid of them Mother Hubbards and get us a man can put these niggers in their places. Shuh.”

  “You hear that, George?” he, shouted to the colored boy wiping up the floor around the basins.

  “Sho. do,” George said.

  It was time for Rayber to say something but nothing appropriate would come. He wanted to say something that George would understand. He was startled that George had been brought into the conversation. He remembered Jacobs telling about lecturing at a Negro college for a week. They couldn’t say Negro—nigger—colored—black. Jacobs said he had come home every night and shouted, “NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER” out the back window. Rayber wondered what George’s leanings were. He was a trim-looking boy.

  “If a nigger come in my shop with any of that haircut sass, he’d get it cut all right.” The barber made a noise between his teeth. “You a Mother Hubbard?” he asked.

  “I’m voting for Darmon, if that’s what you mean,” Rayber said.

  “You ever heard Hawkson talk?”

  “I’ve had that pleasure,” Rayber said.

  “You heard his last one?”

  “No, I understand his remarks don’t alter from speech to speech,” Rayber said curtly.

  “Yeah?” the barber said. “Well, this last speech was a killeroo! Ol’ Hawk let them Mother Hubbards have it.”

  “A good many people,” Rayber said, “consider Hawkson a demagogue.” He wondered if George knew what demagogue meant. Should have said, “lying politician.”

  “Demagogue!” The. barber slapped his knee and whooped. “That’s what Hawk said!” he howled. “Ain’t that a shot! ‘Folks,’ he says, ‘them Mother ‘Hubbards says I’m a demagogue.’ Then he rears back and says sort of soft-like, ‘Am I a demagogue, you people?’ Alld they yells, ‘Naw, Hawk, you ain’t no demagogue!’ And he comes forward shouting, ‘Oh yeah I am, I’m the best damn demagogue in this state!’ And you should hear them people roar! Whew!”

  “Quite a show,” Rayber said, “but what is it but a…”

  “Mother Hubbard,” the barber muttered. “You been taken in by ‘em all right. Lemme tell you sornethin’…” He reviewed Hawkson’s Fourth of July speech. It had been another killeroo, ending with poetry. Who was Darmon? Hawk wanted to know. Yeah, who was Darmon? the crowd had roared. Why, didn’t they know? Why, he was Little Boy Blue, blowin’ his horn. Yeah. Babies in the meadow and niggers in the corn. Man! Rayber should have heard that one. No Mother Hubbard could have stood up under it.

  Rayber thought that if the barber would read a few….

  Listen, he didn’t have to read nothin.’ All he had to do was think. That was the trouble with
people these days—they didn’t think, they didn’t use their horse sense. Why wasn’t Rayber thinkin’? Where was his horse sense?

  Why am I straining myself? Rayber thought irritably.

  “Nossir!” the barber said. “Big words don’t do nobody no good. They don’t take the place of thinkin’.”

  “Thinking!” Rayber shouted. “You call yourself thinking?”

  “Listen,” the barber said, “do you know what Huwk told them people at Tilford?” At Tilford Hawk had told them that he liked niggers fine’ in their place and if they didn’t stay in that place, he had a place to put ‘em. How about that?

  Rayber wanted to know what that had to do with thinking.

  The barber thought it was plain as a pig on a sofa what that had to do with thinking. He thought a good many other things too. which he told Rayber. He said Rayber should have heard the Hawkson speeches at Mullin’s Oak, Bedford, and Chickerville.

  Rayber settled down in his chair again and reminded the barber that he had come in for a shave.

  The barber started back shaving him. He said Rayber should have heard the one at Spartasville. “There wasn’t a Mother Hubbard left standin’, and all the Boy Blues got their horns broke. Hawk said,” he said, “that the time had come when you had to sit on the lid with…”

  “I have an appointment,” Rayber said. “I’m a hurry.” Why should he stay and listen to that tripe?

  As much rot as it was, the whole asinine conversation stuck with him the rest of the day and went through his mind in persistent detail after he was in bed that night. To his disgust, he found that he was going through it, putting in what he would have said if he’d had an opportunity to prepare himself. He wondered how Jacobs would have handled it. Jacobs had a way about him that made people think he knew more than Rayber thought he knew. It was not a bad trick in his profession. Rayber often amused himself analyzing it. Jacobs would have handled the barber calmly enough. Rayber started through the conversation again, thinking how Jacobs would have done it. He ended doing it himself.