Such Sweet Thunder (14 page)

“Yessir.”

He quickly took a chair and ran on ahead of his mother and father, down the front steps and onto the front porch.

“Lu-lu-lu-look who-who-who’s here!” cried Unc Dewey. Amerigo put the chair down next to Unc’s and smiled. Then he had to laugh, because Unc’s glasses looked so funny, resting on the tip of his nose. Unc put his paper down and looked at him. “You you you le-le-laughin’ at
me?
— you-you-you li-li-little sharp-mmmmouthed thing! You oughtta-ta-ta be cccry-cryin’, the wa-wa-way I heard heard you bbbeat-beatin’ your pppoor momma ta-ta-taday!”

“What?” cried Mrs. Derby, who suddenly appeared behind her screen. He looked up at her soft dark smiling form in a freshly starched print dress. “— ’Mer’go, did you whip your momma, boy?”

Viola and Rutherford stepped onto the porch:

“Evenin’, Mrs. Derby! Hi, Unc!” said Viola.

“Hi, Mrs. Derby, Unc!” said Rutherford, turning to the old gambler, “any big doin’s taday?”

“Nnnuthin’-nuthin’ mmuch — a fffew, a few ttttwo-bit catches.”

“I ain’ never caught nothin’ in my whole life!” Rutherford exclaimed, sitting in the chair that Amerigo had brought.

“Toodle-lum! Aw — Toodle-lum!” cried Mrs. Shields from the back of her house.

“When you ever played policy?” asked Viola, settling down upon the top step after having placed the cushion to her liking.

“Ain’ no sense in it!” said Rutherford.

“Nnnothin’ ven-ventured, nnnothin’ gained,” said Unc.

“My momma played policy every day of her life, an’ I don’ never remember her winnin’
nothin’!
Not much, anyway. An’ even if you do win a little somethin’ it don’ add up to nothin’ like what you lose in a year, let’s say. Naw, people play policy like religion — or somethin’ like that.”

“Policy ain’ got nothin’ to do with no religion, Rutherford!” Viola exclaimed. “Now don’ start talkin’ like that!”

“Hazel? Aw Hazel? You seen Toodle-lum?”

“Naw, Momma, I ain’ seen ’im!” cried Miss Pearl from the front room upstairs. “He’s around here somewhere!”

“I didn’ say it had nothin’ to do with no religion!” said Rutherford. “But what you call it — to give all your money away, like them muckle-headed women up there at Saint John’s — for a whole year! For they whole life! An’ ain’ winnin’ nothin’! They
think
they gonna win! They
hope
to win! Like havin’ faith or somethin’?”

“Well, if-if-if you ain’ gggot nnno-nnothin’, an’-an’-aaaan you cccan’t
git
nnnothin’, an’-an’-an you ain’ you-you-you ain’ never ggonna-gonna ha-have nothin’, you-you gotta ha-have ffffaith in-in ssomethin’! Be-be-
besides
, pppeople, people win eever’ day!”

“Then why is it that them-them —” pointing downstairs where the whiskey still was and lowering his voice cautiously, “— why is it that they gittin’ rich, an’ you
ain’?
”

“What, what you bbbeefin’-beefin’ ’bout, li’l ni-ni-niggah, when-when you dddon’ even play?” cried Unc excitedly.

“There!” cried Viola. “You got ’im, Unc!”

“I was just sayin’,” said Rutherford with a boyish grin. “Man got a right to speak his mind, ain’ ’e?”

Meanwhile Viola had spread out her little blue-and-white-checkered cloth on the top step beside the cushion and placed the dish of crawdads on it. Amerigo slid through the banister rail onto the step and sat at her feet. She offered the crawdads around while Rutherford and Unc bantered pleasantly back and forth, badgering each other on first one topic and then another. Presently the little company was eating, and glasses flushed darkly under a seething lather of foam.

He looked at the crawdads with their black beady eyes and long thin feelers with pleasant wonder. He remembered the squirming mass of bluish greenish gray creatures clamoring in the No. 3 tub, and squirming in their own vomit after Mr. Derby had poured the salt on them.
Like snow
. And now with a sense of pleasant revulsion he broke off one of the sharp barb-edged pincers and sucked the juice from its hollow shell. He crunched the shell between his teeth and chewed until the good taste was gone and spat it out.

People’s like that
, he heard Mr. Derby say, as he severed the tail from the body and dug out the soft juicy meat with his stubby fingers and stuffed it into his mouth, taking just a sip of the dark malty beer that Viola allowed him.

I hope it never changes! he thought, as the animated conversation on the porch waxed and waned in a pleasant drone that receded into the background of his awareness. He looked from the height of his contentment into his alley. From the many doors and windows, from the
host of familiar faces on the porches rose a gentle swell of talk and laughter interspersed with music — from a radio, a Victrola, from someone singing or playing a guitar or playing a harmonica; accented by the sound of babies crying, a glass shattering against a floor, of automobiles whizzing up and down the boulevard, up and down the avenue.

It filled his eyes and ears with the sweetest sound he had ever heard. He sat listening, his eyes wide open, head erect, gazing at the sky.

“Yyyou-you’ll bbe-be gggoin’ to- to school Mon-Mond’y, won’-won’t you, bboy??”

“Don’t you hear Unc talkin’ to you, Amerigo?” said Viola.

He looked up into his mother’s eyes. She fixed him with a warm questioning gaze. He saw the soft swell of her breast obtruding between his upturned eye and the voice. He looked down, unable to speak.

“Daydreamin’?” asked Viola tenderly, laying her hand upon his head, causing him to burn with a sweet nauseous confusion.

Just then a baggy little man with a huge steel guitar slung over his shoulder came through the shoot on Aunt Nancy’s side, followed by a little white mongrel dog.

“Look at that cat, Babe!” cried Rutherford. The man leaned against one of the paneless windows of the empty house. “That joker looks like he was
born
in that suit!”

“I
know
’im!” cried Mrs. Derby. “I forgit his name. Always with that there dog an’ that music box. Sleeps with ’um, I reckon!” She grinned.

A ripple of amused excitement swept through the alley.

“Now, what’s his name?” said Mrs. Derby, scratching her forehead in an effort to remember. “Come to think of it, I ain’ never heard nobody call ’is name. Geetar man’s all I kin remember right now. He sho’ kin play that thing!”

The man arranged his guitar in front of him, his dog settling himself at his feet. He lifted his hat high in the air and said:

“Is ever’body ready?”

Silence followed by sporadic laughter.

“It’s f-r-e-e! An’
no
preachin’! Haw haw haw! Know what I mean! All rightie, if ever’body’s ready, I mean
ready!
I’ll ask my fingers how
they
feel. Fingers? How you feel? Mister Thumb, you ready?”

He pressed his fingers on the strings in a peculiar way and struck a loud chord:

“Fingers is ready! Thumb?”

He struck another chord, and another, filling the air with a wiry dissonant sound that was both sweet and sad, burning with a fire Amerigo could not see, but feel. Mr. Geetar man’s fingers struck the strings. Now he was tapping his foot.
Boom! Boom! Boom!

Amerigo was mildly aware of a throbbing pain. It burned a little.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
He looked down and saw that he was gently knocking his injured toe against the step.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The toe began to throb more severely. But the music sounded so good. He couldn’t stop. He looked at his father. There was a smile on his face, and he, too, was tapping his foot, and his head swayed from side to side. Viola, Mrs. Derby and Unc Dewey, and all the people on all the porches within range of the compelling sound were tapping their feet.

“Oh, baby, p — l-e-a-s-e don’ go!” sang Mr. Geetar man.

“Yeah!” shouted Miss Anna Benton from downstairs.

“Wo-man, please don’ go — oh!”

What if he goes away? Amerigo thought suddenly, seeing the two large suitcases on the back porch.

“Just turn the lights down low just before you go, but honey pl-e-ea-s-e don’ go!”

Mr. Geetar man’s fingers insinuated a thrilling din of metallic sound from the strings of his guitar. It caused the blood to run to the child’s head.

“Before I’d be your dog! Before I’d be your do-o-g-u-e! Before I’d be your dog, I’d bring you way down here, an’ make you walk a lo-o-g-u-e!”

“Unh — unh!” cried Rutherford. “Listen to that cat go! Man play like that ought’n have to sleep in no gutter! He’s good enough — good as any a them jokers on the radio!”

Mr. Geetar man was waving his hat and bowing to the people on the porches and leaning out the windows. Some threw down pennies, and sometimes a nickel or a dime. He gathered and pocketed the money with the aid of a small band of children who gathered around him. When all the money was gathered he bowed gracefully and put his hat on his head and ambled up the alley, smiling and laughing, as he ran his fingers over the strings of his guitar.

He proceeded slowly up past Bra Mo’s house. Bra Mo was sitting on a stool in front of his cellar. As Mr. Geetar man walked near him, he smilingly placed a coin in the hole of his guitar box, at which Mr. Geetar man stopped, faced him, and began to play. Aunt Nancy,
dressed in a proudly starched apron and bonnet, rocked to and fro in her rocking chair on the porch above.

As she continued to rock back and forth, he remembered her as he had seen her many times at church, dressed in a long black dress, her iron-gray hair swept back and wound into a ball and pinned together with two big hairpins, her dark eyes set focused upon the reverend; rocking to and fro when the singing started and everybody was shouting and jumping up and down; rocking to and fro, solid-like, heavy. She seemed to hold the alley in place as the man played and everybody was tapping their feet.

Now he turned to the other side of the alley and faced the house where Tom Johnson lived. He was sitting on the steps with his new wife, Gertrude, a big, dark-brown-skinned woman with a smooth puffy face, a small thin nose, and coarse hair. At his feet sat his new stepdaughter, Dorothy, a tall skinny girl of thirteen with a smooth yellow face like Tom’s. Little Tom and his brothers William and Lemuel sat on the porch with their legs dangling over the sides, giggling because they were tickled about something that Amerigo couldn’t see — until he heard the mongrel dog howl and roll over on his back and howl again, while his master played and sang.

Leonard, the baby of the Johnson family, giggled from the window upstairs, which he shared with Miss Myrt, big Tom’s mother, a large yellow gourd-shaped woman with dark eyes, a full head of almost black hair, and a small mouth full of fine teeth. Watching the dog, she laughed and threw up her hands.

“Look at Miss Myrt!” cried Viola. “She
lives
in that window! I don’ care when it is, winter, summer, mornin’, noon, or night, she’s always there!”

“Gggguess that’s-that’s why she’s so-so fffat!” Unc declared. “Dddon’ nnnever do-do nnnothin bbbut set.”

“I bet she’s scaired to come down out a that window,” said Rutherford, “for fear a
rollin’
down the alley till she hits a nail an’ bust!”

Aooooooow! The dog howled, and Mr. Geetar man continued to wang out his tune. Then he nudged the dog gently with his toe and changed the tune, playing faster and louder.

“How’m I doin’a — hey! hey! — twee twee twee twa twa!”

Miss Myrt started popping her fingers.

“Momma, you oughtta be ashamed a yourself, showin’ off!” cried big Tom Johnson, grinning up at his mother, revealing three gold teeth.

“Fine-lookin’ man!” said Mrs. Derby. “Got pretty wavy hair, too. An’
strong!
Make two a most mens, an’ three of a whole lot a others!”

“What do you mean, boy!” exclaimed Miss Myrt in a thin high-pitched voice. “I might be old, but I ain’ dead! Leastways, not yet. Why I could play to that li’l ol’ dinky tune, even if’n he played it twice as fast, an’ not miss a step. I know I’m fat, but fat meat’s greasy. I’m tellin’ you!”

“Aw Myrt, you know you ain’ doin’ nothin’ but callin’ hogs!” cried Mr. Harrison, the roofer, from his porch overhead. Short roly-poly Mr. Harrison threw his round fudge-brown head back and let out a belly laugh, his round jaws swelling, as his lips expanded, into two huge lumps on either side of his face.

“Hee! hee!” laughed Miss Nettie from the third-floor window, while Tommy was hitting her young nephew, Ralph, who had just tumbled down the foot of the steps and onto the porch, shaking with laughter.

“Laugh agin, niggah,” cried Tommy, attracting everyone’s attention, “I just dare you!” Meanwhile Miss Myrt yelled out to the guitar man who had long since stopped playing and become a spectator.

“Play that thing a yourn, Geetar man!” The challenge in her tone aroused Sammy, Policeman Jackson’s dog, whom Amerigo hadn’t seen because he had been lying under the porch of the house next to the Johnsons’ house. Now he stuck his head out and looked curiously at Miss Myrt.

Meanwhile Miss Myrt, dressed in a yellow cotton housedress and Sam Brown shoes with elastic bands in the instep, ran swiftly down the steps and skipped on the toes of her tiny feet into the center of the alley.

“Aw-aw!” and “Will you look at that!” arose from the astonished crowd, who rushed up to the porch banisters and filtered into the alley.

“So grace-ful!” cried Viola, rising to her feet. “Why, her li’l head, an’ tiny hands — they must be li’ller’n mine! Her legs are big but her ankles are as trim as a deer’s. She come down those steps like a — a — an’ she’s almost
sixty
if she’s a
day!
”

“Aaaaaat at least!” cried Unc. “Why, why I-I-I-I kin-kin remember —”

A roar rose from the alley.

“Looka that, Babe!” cried Rutherford.
“Unh!”

“The
Charleston!
” cried Viola.

Miss Myrt bounced smoothly, effortlessly, gracefully to the rhythms of the Charleston, an exhilarated smile illuminating her face and firing her eyes, her tapering arms outstretched, her tiny fingers snapping like popping currents of fire wrung from her arms.

“An’ on ’er
toes
, too!” cried Rutherford. The guitar man settled down to playing in earnest now, resting his guitar in the bend of his hip, with the weight of his right foot poised upon his toe, shoulders bent, fingers flying free, stringing the trills that flowed through Miss Myrt’s body. The tempo increased. The onlookers began to clap their hands and shout words of encouragement to the old lady. The clapping, the solid beat, grew louder, so loud that it almost drowned out the music.