Stories of Erskine Caldwell (38 page)

There was silence in the room for several minutes. Christy leaned against the wall.

“Stand up straight, nigger!” Lee shouted at him.

“Yes, sir,” Christy said, jumping erect.

“Did you split up some of my wood to hew pickets for the fence around the house where you live?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Lee.”

“Why didn’t you ask me if I wanted you to do it?”

“I figured the fence needed some new pickets to take the place of some that had rotted, and because I’m living in the house I went ahead and did it.”

“You act mighty big, don’t you?” Lee said. “You act like you own my house and land, don’t you? You act like you think you’re as good as a white man, don’t you?”

“No sir, Mr. Lee,” Christy protested. “I don’t try to act any of those ways. I just naturally like to hustle and get things done, that’s all. I just can’t be satisfied unless I’m fixing a fence or cutting wood or picking cotton, or something. I just naturally like to get things done.”

“Do you know what we do with biggity niggers like you in Georgia?”

“No, sir.”

“We teach them to mind their own business and stay in their place.”

Lee Crossman got up and crossed the room to the closet. He jerked the door open and reached inside. When he turned around, he was holding a long leather strap studded with heavy brass brads. He came back across the room, slapping the strap around his boot tops.

“Who told your wife she could raise chickens on my plantation?” he said to Christy.

“Nobody told her, Mr. Lee,” Christy said. “We didn’t think you’d mind. There’s plenty of yard around the house for them, and I built a little hen house.”

“Stop arguing with me, nigger!”

“Yes, sir.”

“I don’t want chickens scratching up crops on this plantation.”

“Yes, sir,” Christy said.

“Where did you get money to pay on a radio?”

“I snared a few rabbits and skinned them, and then I sold their hides for a little money.”

“I don’t want no rabbits touched on my plantation,” Lee said.

He shook out the heavy strap and cracked it against his boots.

“Why haven’t you got anything down on the books in the plantation store?” Lee asked.

“I just don’t like to go into debt,” Christy said. “I want to come out ahead when the accounts are settled at the end of the year.”

“That’s my business whether you come out owing or owed at the end of the year,” Lee said.

He pointed to a crack in the floor.

“Take off that shirt and drop your pants and get down on your knees astraddle that crack,” the white man said.

“What are you going to do to me, Mr. Lee?”

“I’ll show you what I’m going to do,” he replied. “Take off that shirt and pants and get down there like I told you.”

“Mr. Lee, I can’t let you beat me like that. No, sir, Mr. Lee. I can’t let you do that to me. I just can’t!”

“You black-skinned, back-talking coon, you!” Lee shouted, his face turning crimson with anger.

He struck Christy with the heavy, brass-studded strap. Christy backed out of reach, and when Lee struck him the second time, the Negro caught the strap and held on to it. Lee glared at him at first, and then he tried to jerk it out of his grip.

“Mr. Lee, I haven’t done anything except catch a few rabbits and raise a few chickens and things like that,” Christy protested. “I didn’t mean any harm at all. I thought you’d be pleased if I put some new pickets in your fence.”

“Shut your mouth and get that shirt and pants off like I told you,” he said, angrier than ever. “And turn that strap loose before I blast it loose from you.”

Christy stayed where he was and held on to the strap with all his might. Lee was so angry he could not speak after that. He ran to the closet and got his pistol. He swung around and fired it at Christy three times. Christy released his grip on the strap and sank to the floor.

Lee’s brother, Morgan, and the bookkeeper, Hendricks, came running into the back room.

“What happened, Lee?” his brother asked, seeing Christy Tucker lying on the floor.

“That nigger threatened me,” Lee said, blowing hard. He walked to the closet and tossed the pistol on the shelf.

“You and Hendricks heard him threaten to kill me. I had to shoot him down to protect my own life.”

They left the back room and went into the front office. Several clerks from the plantation store ran in and wanted to know what all the shooting was about.

“Just a biggity nigger,” Lee said, washing his hands at the sink. “He was that Alabama nigger that came over here two or three months ago. I sent for him this morning to ask him what he meant by putting new pickets in the fence around his house without asking me first. When I got him in here, he threatened me. He was a bad nigger.”

The clerks went back to the plantation store, and Hendricks opened up his books and went to work on the accounts.

“Open up the back door,” Lee told his brother, “and let those niggers out in the back see what happens when one of them gets as biggity as that coon from Alabama got.”

His brother opened the back door. When he looked outside into the road, there was not a Negro in sight. The only living thing out there was the mule on which Christy Tucker had ridden to town.

(First published in
The Nation
)

E
VERY EVENING SHE
came down through the darkness of the alley, emerging in the bright light of the street like the sudden appearance of a frightened child far from home. I knew that she had never reached the end of the alley before eight o’clock, and yet there were evenings when I ran there two hours early and waited beside the large green and red hydrant until she came. During all those months I had known her, she had been late only two or three times, and then it was only ten or fifteen minutes past eight when she came.

Rachel had never told me where she lived, and she would never let me walk home with her. Where the alley began, at the hydrant, was the door through which she came at eight, and the door which closed behind her at ten. When I had begged her to let me walk with her, she always pleaded with me, saying that her father did not allow her to be with boys and that if he should see us together he would either beat her unmercifully or make her leave home. For that reason I kept the promise I had given, and I never went any farther than the entrance to the alley with her.

“I’ll always come down to see you in the evening, Frank,” she said; and added hastily, “as long as you wish me to come. But you must remember your promise never to try to find where I live, or to walk home with me.”

I promised again and again.

“Perhaps some day you can come to see me,” she whispered, touching my arm, “but not now. You must never go beyond the hydrant until I tell you that you may.”

Rachel had told me that almost every time I saw her, as if she wished to impress upon me the realization of some sort of danger that lay in the darkness of the alley. I knew there was no physical danger, because around the corner was our house and I was as familiar with the neighborhood as anyone else. And besides, during the day I usually walked through the alley to our back gate on my way home, because it was a short cut when I was late for supper. But after dark the alley was Rachel’s, and I had never gone home that way at night for fear of what I might have seen or heard of her. I had promised her from the beginning that I would never follow her to find out where she lived, and that I would never attempt to discover her real name. The promise I had made was kept until the end.

I knew Rachel and her family were poor, because she had been wearing the same dress for nearly a year. It was a worn and fragile thing of faded blue cotton, I had never seen it soiled, and I knew she washed it every day. It had been mended time after time, carefully and neatly, and each evening when I saw her, I was worried because I knew that the weave of the cloth would not stand much more wear. I was constantly afraid that almost any day the dress would fall into shreds, and I dreaded for that time ever to come. I wished to offer to buy her a dress with the few dollars I had saved in my bank, but I was afraid to even suggest such a thing to her. I knew she would not have allowed me to give her the money, and I did not know what we would do when the dress became completely worn out. I was certain that it would mean the end of my seeing her. It was only the constant attention that she gave it and the care with which she laundered it each day that could have kept the dress whole as long as it had been.

Once Rachel had worn a pair of black silk stockings. From the first she had come each night to the brightly lighted street in her white cotton stockings, and for a year she had worn no other kind. Then one evening she had on a pair of black silk ones.

The next evening I expected to see her wearing them again, but when she came out of the alley, she was wearing the stockings of white cotton. I did not ask her about it, because I had learned never to say anything that might hurt her feelings, but I was never able to understand why she wore black silk stockings just that one time. She may have borrowed them from her mother or sister, and there were dozens of other ways she could have got them, and yet none of the reasons I could think of ever seemed entirely conclusive. If I had asked her, perhaps she would have laughed, touched my arm as she did when we were together, and told me. But I was afraid to ask her. There were so many ways of making her feel badly, and of hurting her.

Each evening when she came out of the black alley I met her there, and together we walked down the brightly lighted street to the corner where there was a drugstore. On the opposite corner there was a moving-picture theater. To one or the other we went each evening. I should have liked to have taken her to both the show and to the drugstore, but I was never able to earn enough money for both in the same evening. The twenty cents I received every day for delivering the afternoon paper on a house-to-house route was not enough to buy ice cream at the drugstore and seats at the picture show, too. We had to take our choice between them.

When we stood on the corner across from the drugstore and across from the theater, we could never decide at first whether to see the show or to eat ice cream. The good times we had there on the corner were just as enjoyable, to me, as anything else we did. Rachel would always try to make me tell her which I would rather do before she would commit herself. And of course I wished to do that which would please her the most.

“I’m not going a step in either direction until you tell me which you would rather do,” I would say to her. “It doesn’t matter to me, because being with you is everything I want.”

“I’ll tell you what let’s do, Frank,” she said, touching my arm, and pretending not to be serious; “you go to the drugstore, and I’ll go to the movies.”

That was Rachel’s way of telling me which she preferred, although I didn’t believe she ever suspected that I knew. But when she suggested that I go to the movies while she went to the drugstore, I knew it to mean that she would much rather have a dish of ice cream that evening. The enjoyment of the show lasted for nearly two hours, while the ice cream could never be prolonged for more than half an hour, so all but two or three evenings a week we went to the theater across the street.

There was where I always wished to go, because in the semidarkness we sat close together and I held her hand. And if the house was not filled, we always found two seats near the rear, in one of the two corners, and there I kissed her when we were sure no one was looking at us.

After the show was over, we went out into the bright street and walked slowly towards the green and red hydrant in the middle of the block. There at the entrance to the alley we stopped awhile. If there were no other people in the street, I always put my arm around Rachel’s waist while we walked slowly to the dark entrance. Neither of us spoke then, but I held her tighter to me, and she squeezed my fingers. When at last, after delaying as long as possible the time for her to go, we walked together a few step into the darkness of the alley and stood in each other’s arms, Rachel kissed me for the first time during the evening, and I kissed her for as long a time as I had wished to in the theater. Still not speaking, we drew apart, our fingers interwoven and warm.

When she was about to disappear into the darkness of the alley, I ran to her and caught her hands in mine.

“I love you, Rachel,” I told her, squeezing her fingers tighter and tighter as she withdrew them.

“And I love you, too, Frank,” she said, turning and running into the alley out of sight for another day.

After waiting awhile and listening until she had gone beyond hearing distance, I turned and walked slowly up the street towards home. Our house was only a block away: half a block to the corner, and another half block from there. When I had reached my room, I went to the window and stood there looking out into the night and listening for some sound of her. My window faced the alley behind the house, and the street lights cast a dim glow over the house tops, but I could never see down into the darkness of the alley. After waiting at the window for an hour or more I undressed and went to bed. Many times I thought I heard the sound of her voice somewhere in the darkness, but after I had sprung from bed and had listened intently at the window for a long time I knew it was some other sound I had heard.

Near the end of summer I received five dollars as a birthday present from an aunt. As soon as I got it, I began making plans for Rachel and me. I wanted to surprise her that evening with the money, and then to take her downtown on a streetcar. First we would go to a restaurant, and afterward to one of the large theaters. We had never been downtown together, and it was the first time I had ever had more than fifty cents at one time. That afternoon as soon as I could deliver all the papers on my route, I ran home and began thinking about the plans I had made for the evening.

Just before dark I went downstairs from my room to wait on the front porch for the time to come when I could meet Rachel. I sat on the porch steps, not even remembering to tell my mother that I was going downtown. She had never allowed me to go that far away from the house without my first telling her where I was going, with whom, and at what time I would come back.