If He Hollers Let Him Go (6 page)

Then I remembered the blond boy’s eyes. I recalled his words, ‘I’ll cool the nigger!’ I felt that sick, gone feeling again. I began trembling; I felt weak, scared. I knew I couldn’t take it; but I was scared of what I might do. Scared of what might happen to me afterward. If I could just stop thinking; every time I thought of trouble I thought of death. Then I looked at the coloured fellow again. His face was impassive.

‘You see which way he went?’ I asked.

He studied me for a moment. ‘Ah know whar he work,’ he said. His expression didn’t change.

I licked my lips, tried to keep the sick, scared feeling out of my eyes. ‘Where?’ I asked.

He stood there looking at me as if time meant nothing. A curious animal change came over his face. I noticed him take his hand out of his pocket. It struck me funny. But now we seemed closer, as if we’d struck an understanding or come to an agreement about something.

‘He in de copper shop,’ he said. ‘He work on a ‘chine down in de back end. You doan need tuh go through de shop, you ken cum in de back do’.’

I started off. My first step was wobbly, more from the sick, gone feeling in my stomach then from any effects of the blow. The coloured fellow stepped in beside me; his eyes slid from side to side.

‘You got a chiv?’ he asked.

I knew I didn’t have one but I fanned myself. ‘Musta left it in my box,’ I said.

He looked around again, then slipped me his. I didn’t look at it, but by its feel it must have been eight inches long. I slipped it in my pocket.

‘Ah’da cut de bastard’s throat mahself,’ he said. ‘But Ah thought you’d wanna do it yuhself.’

He split off and I kept on toward the copper shop. My hand rested on the knife in my pocket. I began thinking of how I ought to cut him. Whether I ought to slip up and begin stabbing him in the back, trying to get his heart; or wheel him about to face me and begin slashing him across the face, cutting out his eyes and slashing up his mouth. Maybe he’d be on the lookout for me, I thought, and would have a knife himself. Then we’d dodge about and keep cutting at each other until one dropped.

Bile rolled up in my stomach and spread out in my mouth. I started retching and caught myself. The sun beat down on my bared head like showers of rain. My skin was tight and burning hot, but it wouldn’t sweat. Only in the palm of my hand holding the knife did I sweat. I had lost my hat; I didn’t know where.

I could see the blond boy’s bloody body lying half across his machine, blood all over the floor, all over the shapes; blood on my hands; his face all cut to pieces, one eye hanging out and wrinkled like an empty grape skin. I came to the copper shop, kept on around to the back. For a moment at the back door I stopped and steadied myself. I took the knife out and opened it and got it in a stabbing grip. Then I saw a piece of wood on the ground. I picked it up and held it in my left hand, the knife in my right.

I stepped through the door and stopped. The blond boy looked up at that instant and our gazes locked. He stuck his right hand out slowly and gripped a ball-peen hammer on his work-bench.

It was then I decided to murder him cold-bloodedly, without giving him a chance. What the hell was the matter with me, running in there to fight him? I thought. What the hell did I want to fight him for? I wanted to kill the son of a bitch and keep on living myself. I wanted to kill him so he’d know I was killing him and in such a way that he’d know he didn’t have a chance. I wanted him to feel as scared and powerless and unprotected as I felt every goddamned morning I woke up. I wanted him to know how it felt to die without a chance; how it felt to look death in the face and know it was coming and know there wasn’t anything he could do but sit there and take it like I had to take it from Kelly and Hank and Mac and the cracker bitch because nobody was going to help him or stop it or do anything about it at all.

The sick, scared, gone feeling left my stomach. I kept looking at him, thinking. There’s one goddamned thing, you can’t take your colour with you, until I felt only a cold disdain. I turned around and went out.

I went to Mac’s office and asked Marguerite for a sick pass to go home. She gave it to me in her cold business manner without saying a word. But I felt she was all right, she was a fine person, she didn’t have anything against me. I smiled at her and said, ‘Thank you,’ and went out.

That was what it did for me. ‘Unchain ‘em in the big corral,’ the boys used to say in Hot Stuff’s crap game back in Cleveland. That was what it did for me; it unchained me, made me free. I felt like running and jumping, shouting and laughing; I felt something I’d felt the time Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling—only better.

When I checked out Gate No. 2 the gatekeeper looked at me and said, ‘What, you going home already? You just got here a few minutes ago.’

I wagged a finger at him. ‘You don’t know how tempus fugits.’

He didn’t like that. ‘You coloured boys better lay off that gin,’ he said, winking at the guard.

I laughed. ‘The only way you can make me mad now,’ I told him, ‘is to get a mouthful of horse manure and blow it through your teeth at me.’

He turned red and started to say something else, but I didn’t stop. I backed out my car, circled in the parking lot, crossed the Pacific Electric tracks, and turned into the harbour road, just idling along. I didn’t feel like speeding. The car drove easy all of a sudden, I thought. Not a jerk in it, not a squeak; it took the bumps like a box-spring mattress. It was a pleasure just sitting there, my fingers resting lightly on the steering wheel, just idling along.

I was going to kill him if they hung me for it, I thought pleasantly. A white man, a supreme being. Just the thought of it did something for me; just contemplating it. All the tightness that had been in my body, making my motions jerky, keeping my muscles taut, left me and I felt relaxed, confident, strong. I felt just like I thought a white boy oughta feel; I had never felt so strong in all my life.

A warm glow went all over me as if I had just stepped out of a Turkish bath and had had a good massage. My mind was light, relieved, without a care in the world. As I idled along past the long line of industries I felt a sudden compelling friendliness toward the white people I passed. I felt like waving to them and saying, ‘It’s all right now. It’s fine, solid, it’s a great deal.’

A well-dressed, slenderly built middle-aged white woman stepped from the curb in the path of my car. I eased to a stop and waited for her to pass. She looked up; surprise was first in her eyes, then she gave a tentative, half-decided smile. I smiled in return, warm and friendly. It made all the difference in the world; the weights had gone out of my head.

Now I felt the heat of the day, saw the hard, bright California sunshine. It lay in the road like a white, frozen brilliance, hot but unshimmering, cutting the vision of my eyes into unwavering curves and stark unbroken angles. The shipyards had an impressive look, three-dimensional but infinite. Colours seemed brighter. Cranes were silhouetted against the grey-blue distance of sky.

I felt the size of it, the immensity of the production. I felt the importance of it, the importance of the whole war. I’d never given a damn one way or the other about the war excepting wanting to keep out of it; and at first when I wanted the Japanese to win. And now I did; I was stirred as I had been when I was a little boy watching a parade, seeing the flag go by. That filled-up feeling of my country. I felt included in it all; I had never felt included before. It was a wonderful feeling.

Glancing up, I saw a dine-dance café across from the Consolidated. I pulled into the parking lot and coasted to a stop, got out, and went inside. It was cool inside and so dark I had to pause just inside the doorway for my sight to pick out objects. The bar was flat across one side, and the dining-room circled out in front of it.

There were a number of men at the bar, a few women. A group of loud-voiced shipyard workers sat at a table playing Indian dice. They were all white. I found a seat at the bar between a woman and a man and made myself comfortable. The fear of being refused service might have come into my mind, but I didn’t notice it. After a while the bar-tender stopped in front of me. He was a thin, indifferent-faced man with thinning black hair and a winged moustache. I ordered a double scotch and he grinned. The white woman next to me stopped talking and looked around. I could feel her gaze on me.

‘You would take gin though, wouldn’t you?’ the bar-tender said.

I let my eyes rove over the stock. All I saw was gin, rum, tequila, vodka, and wine. I grinned back at the bar-tender. ‘Gin’s fine,’ I said. ‘I was nursed on gin.’

He picked up the bottle, poised it. ‘Double?’

‘That’s right,’ I said. I turned to look at the white woman at my side. Our eyes met. She had brown eyes, frankly curious; and blonde hair, dark at the roots, piled on top of her head. In the dim orange light her lipstick didn’t show and her mouth looked too thin for the size of her other features. She had taken off her brassiere on account of the heat and the outline of her breasts showed distinctly through her white rayon blouse.

She looked away after a moment and when I looked into the mirror I met the eyes of the man on the other side of her. I smiled slightly, looked away before seeing whether he returned it or not.

The bar-tender replaced the gin bottle. ‘Chaser?’

‘Water,’ I said.

He set up the water. ‘We don’t have no more whisky, only once or twice a week,’ he said. ‘I ain’t seen no Scotch since I don’t know when.’

‘Scotch? What’s that?’ the blonde girl said. She had a man’s heavy voice.

‘Speaking of Scotch reminds me of a joke,’ the man on the other side of her began. ‘Two Scotchmen went to a Jew store to buy a suit of clothes …’

I got interested in watching a guy down the bar balance a half-filled glass on its edge and didn’t listen. When I finished my gin I went over and sat down at a table. A young darkhaired girl in a blue, white-trimmed uniform came over to take my order. She had two imitation daisies pinned on each side of her hair. Her face was impersonal.

I ordered the biggest steak they had, then a double martini as an afterthought. A big rawboned old-timer came in and looked about for a place to sit. Finally he sat at the table with me. I thought to myself, I must be turning white really and truly, and grinned at him.

‘If it’s one thing I don’t like, it’s sitting at a goddamned empty table,’ he greeted.

‘It is kinda bad,’ I said.

‘You married?’ he asked.

I shook my head. ‘Still in the field.’

‘I been married thirty-two goddamned years,’ he said. ‘Got the best goddamned finest woman in the world. Got three boys in the Marines. And goddamnit, every time I come into this goddamned joint I don’t find nothing but empty tables.’ I thought for a moment he was going to bang on the table and complain to the management,

‘You work at Consolidated?’ he asked suddenly.

I shook my head. ‘I work at Atlas.’

‘That goddamned stinking joint!’ he said. ‘The Navy had to take over that goddamned yard before they could get any work done. That is the goddamnest, laziest, prissiest, undermanned, prejudiced shipyard—’ He cursed out Atlas until my steak came, then he looked at it and said, ‘That looks pretty good. They must be getting some better beef out this way now.’ Until his steak came he cursed out the West Coast beef.

We ate silently. I’d never eaten steak that tasted so good. When I’d finished I got up, paid my bill, said, ‘See you,’ and left. He didn’t say anything; but I felt all right about it.

I decided to go back by Figueroa, and when I turned into it a couple of white sailors thumbed me and I stopped to give them a lift. They were very young boys, still in their teens, scrubbed-faced and slightly tanned. The three of us sat in the front seat; the one in the middle put his arm behind me to make room. For a time we went along without talking, then I asked, ‘What’s you guy’s names?’

‘Lester,’ the one in the middle said, and the other one said, ‘Carl.’

‘What’s yours?’ Lester asked, and I told him, ‘Bob.’

‘You work in a shipyard?’ Carl asked.

‘Atlas,’ I told him. ‘I’m a sheet-metal worker.’

‘I worked a while up at Richmond—Richmond No. 1, Kaiser’s yard,’ he said. ‘I’m from San Francisco.’

‘I was up there once,’ I said. ‘I like Frisco, it’s a good city.’

The boy in the middle hadn’t said anything, so I asked him, ‘Where you from, Lester?’

‘Memphis,’ he said. ‘You ever been there?’

I gave him a quick side glance; then I chuckled. ‘No, I never been to Memphis,’ I said. ‘I’m from Ohio—Cleveland.’

‘I bet you’d like Memphis,’ he said as if he really believed it.

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But I’ll never know.’

He grinned. ‘You like Los Angeles, eh?’

‘Just between you and me,’ I said, ‘Los Angeles is the most over-rated, lousiest, countriest, phoniest city I’ve ever been in.’

That was one thing we all agreed on. They liked my car and we talked about cars for a time as we skimmed along the wide straight roadway. The boy from Frisco said, ‘Of course if I had my way I’d take a Kitty.’

I said, ‘Who wouldn’t?’

We passed a couple of girls jiggling along in thin summer dresses and the boy from Memphis whistled.

I said, ‘I bet you wouldn’t take it if she gave it to you.’

‘What you bet?’ he said, and they both blushed slightly.

I got a funny thought then; I began wondering when white people started getting white—or rather, when they started losing it. And how it was you could take two white guys from the same place—one would carry his whiteness like a loaded stick, ready to bop everybody else in the head with it; and the other would just simply be white as if he didn’t have anything to do with it and let it go at that. I liked those two white kids; they were white, but as my aunt Fanny used to say they couldn’t help that.

When we got closer to town and saw more women on the Street we started a guessing game about every one we passed, whether they were married or single, how many kids they had, whether their husbands were in the Army, if they played around at all. All the elderly women they called ‘Mom.’ We had a lot of fun until we came to a dark brown woman in a dark red dress and a light green hat carrying a shoebox tied with a string, falling along in that knee-buckling, leaning-forward, housemaid’s lope, and frowning so hard her face was all knotted up. They didn’t say anything at all. I wanted to say something to keep it going, but all I could have said about her was that she was an ugly, evil-looking old lady. If we had all been coloured we’d have laughed. like hell because she was really a comical sister. But with the white boys present, I couldn’t say anything. I looked straight ahead and we all became embarrassed and remained silent for a time. When we began talking again we were all a little cautious. We didn’t talk about women any more.