Such Sweet Thunder (65 page)

“It’s a baby!” cried Carrol T.

“Stand back!” Mr. Haines, the janitor, stepped into the crowd. “Take her to the nursery!” he commanded and Ruth and Earline who stood nearest gathered the crumbling Lydia into their arms and took her away.

“Now get movin’!” Mr. Haines shouted. “
All
of you!”

He was a short dark-brown-skinned man with gray hair who wore glasses over his serious bluish brown eyes. He took off his jacket and covered the dead baby. Then he went away and returned with a bucket of sawdust, which he strew over the blood until it was all absorbed and then scooped it up with his shovel, the way Mr. Johnson at Garrison School had scooped up the coal in the furnace room, and threw it in the big trash can that he carried downstairs.…

The corridor grew still, as though in all the rooms nobody spoke, as though they were listening to the consuming flames of spring.

Rrrrrrring!

Next year I’ll be a junior, he thought as he walked home, not quite able to realize that the summer vacation had started, suspecting every moment that he had made a mistake, mistrusting the sense of freedom that stole upon him, the sense of loneliness because of something finished, and of something about to happen at the end of that hot expanse of time that stretched out before him.

One summer.

He stared at the sun until his eyes ached, then looked away and blindly walked into a tree. Someone laughed. As his vision returned he could just make out the retreating forms of a knot of girls ahead of him, one with long reddish brown hair. Cosima! overwhelmed by a welter of confusion, rubbing the lump on his forehead. He picked up his cap and stumbled on his way feeling like a fool.

Summer grew hot and wet with sweat. At night when he could not sleep he would quietly pull on his clothes and walk all the way out to the art gallery and sit in the grassy porch and if the moon shone stare into the shadows of the luxurious trees. It was his secret place, where all was peace, where he was beside himself with a painful joy too deep for thought. At some point, when his spirit was exhausted, he would return home. Fatigue would overtake him on the way and he would be grateful for the kindness of sleep into whose embrace he would sink and remain until the envious sun and the twittering birds confronted him with a new and painful reality.

“Amerigo!”

He got up and ate his breakfast and started out for Mr. O’Casey’s barbershop where he worked shining shoes, but where he was not destined to work long because he did not smile at the customers and “hustle,” as Mr. O’Casey said.

Mr. O’Casey was a kind gray-headed man of fifty-four with gallstones and brown eyes, but Irish just the same.

“Now porter —” he began no sooner than he had arrived, continuing yesterday’s conversation, Friday, because today was Saturday, the big day in a barbershop. “Now porter, I know you’re a fine young colored boy, gittin’ an education an’ all, but you gotta
smile
an’ say
sir
to the customers when they come in. The minute they hit the door you gotta be on your feet! Standin’ there, greetin’ ’um with a smile. ‘Wanna shine, sir,’ you gotta say, or: ‘Good evenin’, Mister So-an’so! How about a shine, there!’ Or somethin’ with a spark to it! An’
then
you’ll make money, an’ I will, too! But when you set over there in that corner, there, readin’ books — an’ don’ pay ’um no mind, porter, waitin’ for ’um to ask
you
— you never
will
git nowhere!”

“I caun’t dew it!” he exclaimed to Rutherford that evening at supper.

“You caun’t dew what!” Rutherford asked, slipping into his house shoes, while Viola fried the hamburgers.

“I caun’t say all that, play no Uncle Tom for no white man, an’ I ain’ — I’m nottt — going to, eithah. I went there, theah … and sat in a cornah and waited. I didn’t mind asking the customer if he wanted a shine. ‘Would you like a shine, sir?’ I asked them, and if they said yes, I
gave
them a shine, the best shine I could. Then I went back and read my book. There was nothing else to do.”

“Unh! Did you talk to ’um with a English accent? Hot damn!” he laughed. “No wonder you done lost your job, talkin’ to the white folks like you better’n
they
are. You gotta learn to hustle, boy. Use psychology. You gittin’ to be a
man!
It ain’ no shame to shine shoes. It’s honest work. It won’ kill you to smile an’ be nice to people. One a these days you’ll have to. I mean — do it when you don’ feel like it! You think I like to run the elevator, humorin’ drunks an’ crackers that think that just because they tip you a lousy quarter you got to kiss they behind? You know what a white woman said to me the other day? She said, Rutherford, you know one thing, if you was a white man, I’d marry you. She thought she was payin’ me a compliment! I had to just smile an’ say nothin’. Some things you got to just take an’ go ahead on an’ keep your dignity. Ain’ nobody in that hotel is more respected than me! From ol’ man Mac on down!”

“Well, I ain’ gonna play no happy niggah for nobody!”

“You didn’ understand what your daddy said,” said Viola. “Wash your hands.”

“You’re young yet,” said Rutherford, sitting down to the table. “You’ll learn, or end up dead before your time. It’s fine to git a education an’ all that — talkin’ all fancy — but you gotta git along with people, ’cause as long as you need the money they payin’ you to live on — they don’ have to understand you!”

“Supper’s gittin’ cold,” said Viola.

“I’m Amerigo Jones!” he muttered under his breath, “an’ I kin be anything I wanna be … to be — and I don’ care!”

He sat down to the table with a feeling of dread, fear, and anxiety because of the facts of life that lurked outside the kitchen walls, beyond the walls of North High, and the invisible walls of Next Year, rising higher with the heat.

“Well, sir,” said Aunt Rose as he entered the house on a sultry Sunday afternoon near the end of August. “Well, sir! I see you didn’ forgit your auntie after all!”

“Aw Aunt Reose!” he grinned guiltily.

“I know how it is. You ain’ got no time for a old broken-down woman like me. But I don’ blame you none. Only I would like to hear from you once an’ a while — just to know how you doin’ an’ what you learnin’ at school.” Her eyes twinkled mischievously, and he observed
that her health had improved, though she still moved heavily and with that economy of effort typical of the aging.

Older still, he thought, but at least she isn’t sick — ill — anymore. He stared at her, marveling at her strength, remembering how worn out and used up she had seemed when he last saw her. Like — as though — she were going to die. He suppressed the sad feeling as she sat down on the stairs with a heavy grunt and drew him to her. Like an old, old lady. He wondered if she, too, had seen Abraham Lincoln.

“What you starin’ at, boy?”

“Nothin’.”

“Yeah,” she sighed, “I know, your auntie’s gittin’ old. Every time I look at you I think about your mamma an’ poppa an’ ’em, when you wasn’ no bigger’n a pup. Me an’ your gran’ma. Seems like yestiddy. But it wasn’ yestiddy — it was a long time ago.” She straightened his tie. “You glad to be goin’ back to school next month?”

“Yes’m. I’m going to be a junior. They know but they don’t know they know.”

“What?”

“It’s a sayin’ … 
g
. A freshman don’ — doesn’t — know and he
knows
he doesn’t know, a sophomore doesn’t know, but he
thinks
he knows, a junior knows but doesn’t
know
he knows, and a senior knows and he
knows
he knows!”

“Ha! Well, sir! It looks like
I
been a freshman all my life! ’Cause the older
I
git the less I seem to know! The best
I
kin do is
try
not to
make the same mistakes over agin
an’ put my trust in the Lord! Been to church lately? Your momma’s been tellin’ me that she can’t hardly make you go no more.”

“Aw …”

“What’s the matter, you gittin’ too educated to go to church?”

“No’m, but all they do is a whole lot a hollerin’ … 
g
and shouting and saying the same thing over and over again … and calling that preaching! The reverend
says
he’s got an education, but that he likes to talk
plain
because he’s
got that old-time religion that was good enough for his dear old mother!
But we’re living in
this
time! Splitting infinitives over all that stuff about Eve coming from Adam’s rib and all … all that, like he’s never
heard
of physiology and Darwin’s Theory of Evolution — or the
Republic
of Plato and … and Shakespeare and all of them.”

“Well, your auntie ain’ got much education, neither, but I know one thing, there ain’
no
fool like a
educated
fool! An’ that there’s more to
the Bible than’s on the printed page, an’ that if you talkin’ to folks that a lot of ’um ain’ got much education, just plain simple workin’ folks, you gotta talk so’s they kin understand you — that is, if you know what you talkin’ about, yourself —”

“Yeah!” he interrupted, “but if they keep on talking
down
to the people all the time, how are they ever going to learn something? If I were a preacher I’d go to Harvard or Yale or something and try to talk as well as I could and teach the people in an educated way. The Bible’s
plain
, but I never did see so many big words I couldn’t understand!”

“That’s right, son, you all right!” throwing up her hands in a gesture of surrender. “Your auntie’s got to do it
her
way an’ you got to do it
yourn
. I reckon that if it’s the
truth
we’re after, an’ we look hard enough, we gonna end up in the same place, God willin’.” She flashed a wink at him, and he felt a little silly, like a child, when he was six or seven years old.

“Had your dinner?”

“Yes’m … Yes.”

“Come on.”

They proceeded to the kitchen where she served him up a piece of apple pie and a glass of milk. He raised the glass to his lips.

“How many girls you got?”

He choked and almost spattered the whole table with milk.

“None!”

“Now you kin tell your auntie! You kin tell me. I bet you a little devil!”

“Honest! I haven’t got a girl. I wouldn’t have
any
of them … eneh! You oughtta … to see the way they act — carry themselves — doing it in the halls behind the lockers by the gym and —”

“Doin’ what?”

“And letting them feel all over them and everything. That’s not the kind of girl
I
want!
I
want a
lady!
Somebody … somebody that you kin
respect
and take her flowers an’ … and kiss her hand. Treat her nice —”

“Don’t you know no girls like that?”

“No’m. They all stuck up! No’m …”

A feeling of wonder and humility came over him, as he thought of a certain two-story house. Too tall.

“Eh … your momma tells me that you’re mighty keen on that little Thornton girl —”

WHO — meeeeeeee! How does she
know?
He was unbearably surprised to hear it uttered as a fact for the first time, stamped upon his
consciousness by the certainty of Aunt Rose’s voice, retelling a known fact in a disinterested tone, as of some happening in yesterday’s newspaper, as though she had possibly said: It looks like the Germans really mean business, placing her hopes, however, on the strength of the Maginot Line and the diplomatic skill of the British statesman with the umbrella, thankful that we, America, were safely insulated by the two oceans and the Monroe Doctrine and a group of screechy politicians called the Isolationists.
Your momma tells me that you’re mighty keen on that little Thornton girl
.

WHO — meeeeeee! rang in his ears like the happy bells of Let’s Pretend and shook him with their titillating vibrations, forcing his mouth ajar, his eyes to shine, the piece of apple pie on his plate to remain uneaten.

Meanwhile Aunt Rose merely grinned at him. Finally she said:

“Well, you picked a good one, son.” A serious, even grave expression passed over her face, causing him to search for a deeper meaning in her words when she added. “You show them society niggahs who you are.”

She’s thinking of Ardella, he thought.

“You gotta aim high if you want to amount to somethin’.”

He wondered if
she
knew!

She’s
got
to know!

The full impact of Aunt Rose’s knowing, of Viola’s knowing, dawned upon him as he stepped into the redeeming light of Sunday afternoon and headed for the art gallery. He looked into the face of the knowing sky, listened to the whispering trees. He trembled with excitement, with the embarrassment, the joy, of one who was being talked about.

Clapclapclapclapclapclap …

He wandered through the polished halls of the art gallery, among the living pictures, the living statues, through the living atmosphere of historic times that he knew by heart, but which he now beheld as if — not for
the
first time, but for
a
first time — for the first time in the glorious age of her knowing. Lost within its pleasant aura, he was suddenly confronted by Old Jake with his golden helmet.