The End of a Primitive (13 page)

“When will I see you again, baby?”

“Call me Saturday at noon,” she said, smiling sweetly. She felt wonderfully sane and cheerful.

“You’re going to see your love tonight?” he asked.

She smiled her secret sensual smile.

At the front door he peeped through the Judas window to see if the coast was clear. He heard footsteps and waited until he heard the outer door open and shut. Then he went hurriedly down the corridor, relaxing only when he had safely reached the street. “Not that I give a damn for myself,” he thought. But he didn’t know what might result from her neighbours seeing a black man coming from her apartment early in the morning.

She cared less about it than he did. But he didn’t know that.

It was shortly after nine o’clock when Jesse let himself into the apartment where he lived. “I hope all these damn birdmen are at work,” he thought. “Or at least visiting some other nest.” He didn’t turn on the light in the pitch-black hallway because he’d have to go back and turn it off after turning on the second light. As he groped his way through the treacherous tunnel, bumping into first one hazard and then another. Napoleon came tearing from the kitchen, barking furiously, and began nipping at his ankles. He aimed a vicious kick but missed him in the dark and kicked the leg of an unseen table instead, the sharp pain running up his legbone…“You little bastard!” he hissed. “Wait ‘till I get you in the light!”

“Napoleon, now you behave yourself,” came the dulcet voice of Leroy. “Don’t you know Mr Robinson yet?”

“Oh, he’s not bothering me,” Jesse lied, muttering under his breath, “The little sissy cur!” Aloud he continued, “He’s just saying hello.”

Leroy was waiting for him in the dim front hall, his big teeth grinning from his round black face, his big belly pushing the soiled white shirt down over the half-buttoned fly of his greasy black uniform pants. “I believe Napoleon likes you,” he lilted coyly. “He’s just flirting.” He shook his finger at the pop-eyed little beast. You stop flirting with Mr Robinson.” The mop-shaped dog trotted complacently back to the kitchen where his ancient sire was dozing beneath the kitchen stove, dreaming of young lions frolicking on the African coast.

“Perfectly normal,” Jesse thought. “Sane as life.” He tried to get past Leroy by saying, “I’ve been peeping at hole cards all night, I’m beat.”

But Leroy saved the choice morsel. “Your wife stopped by last night after you’d left. She wanted to get some blankets.”

“Oh!” Suddenly everything went crazy, abnormal in an insane world.

“You’ve been holding out on me,” Leroy accused coquettishly. But on seeing the bleak, drawn expression that had come over Jesse’s face, he quickly dropped the levity. “Mrs Robinson is a very fine-looking woman.”

“Thanks.” Leroy’s face swam before his vision and he thought he was going to be sick. He staggered blindly toward his room.

“Oh, I almost forgot. She wants some sheets too,” Leroy added. “And said to tell you she was getting along fine. She asked how you were getting along and I told her—”

“Thanks,” Jesse cut him off, finally managing to get his room door open. “I’ll get them for her sometime this morning. Thanks very much.” And he closed the door in Leroy’s face.

“Who times these things?” he thought, and the next moment he was lying face down across the bed crying with deep gasping sobs. “Don’t let her get hurt, God. Please don’t let her get hurt,”

he kept praying over and over until the paroxysm passed, then he stood, leaning weakly against the dresser top, and stared at his ravaged reflection.

“Jesse Robinson,” he said in a voice of utter futility. “Jesse Robinson. There must be some simple thing in this goddamn life that you don’t know. Some little thing. Something every other bastard born knows but you.” After a moment, without being aware that he had moved, he found himself in the window looking down across the flats of Harlem. His vision encompassed a sea of rooftops from 135th Street and Eighth Avenue until it was lost in the mists of East River, like sharp-angled waves of dirty water in the early sun, moving just enough to form a blurred distortion. “Every other nigger in this whole town but you.” There had been a line in a piece he’d written for a white daily newspaper years ago, which all the blacks had objected to: “
Just a pure and simple faith in the whiter folks and the days
…” For ten years he’d forgotten it, now it came back to mind. “Your trouble, son, you got no faith. Fine people really. Just got to believe all their lies.”

The shimmering distortion of the rooftops made him nauseated. Must be the way everybody sees the world,” he thought bitterly. “All nauseated! Every mother’s son of them!” He sat down weakly on the horribly covered couch, bent over, swallowing down the vomit that kept ballooning into his mouth. “It’s normal, though,” he tried to convince himself. “Any son of a bitch who sees it otherwise is crazy. Un-nauseated bastard abnormal. Put him away. Going around shouting.
Peace, it’s wonderful!
Lock him up! Menace to society.” Suddenly he thought of the woman editor who, upon reading the galley proofs of his first novel that had been submitted for a prize, said it made her sick at the stomach, nauseated her. “Fine lady! Perfectly normal! No cause for alarm if everybody’s like her. Let the commies come, long as we got McCarthy and nauseated normal lady editors.”

He felt a great need for a drink. His hands shook when he held them out and he could feel his legs trembling. He couldn’t make it to the store but he could telephone for a bottle. But when he stood up he noticed by the clock on the dresser that it was only a little past nine-thirty. Stores wouldn’t be open until ten. Half-hour; another half-hour to be delivered. “Too Late The Opiate-Race Problem.” He debated whether to ask Leroy for a drink, but decided against it. “If I have to look at that bastard’s greedy eyes, I’ll vomit,” he thought. His reflection in the mirror showed that he was fully dressed, even to his trench coat, but minus his hat. His hat was on the bed where it had fallen off while he was crying.

And suddenly it was back and he knew all his vagrant thoughts had been a shield, but to no avail. It was back and he knew he couldn’t escape it, no matter how much liquor he drank. He lay down on the bed without undressing, his black shoes on the white spread, and put his hat over his face, and gave in to it, crying quietly to himself. “Jesse Robinson. How do these people do it, son? The white man is pissing on them too, and the days don’t know them either. How is it they keep their wives, bring up children, get along? Why can’t you believe too, son? They say after the first bite it tastes like sugar. How come you have to be the only one to act a fool? And think you’re being noble, too…”

The winter before the one just past, the last winter he and Becky were together, they had lived in an isolated summer resort on a small island in upstate New York, where he had been employed as caretaker. The blankets and sheets she wanted were part of a shipment of rejects the proprietors had sold to them for a fraction of the list price.

It had been pleasant there among the empty houses, far from the hurts of modern city life. No condescensions and denunciations, no venomous intrigues and shattering infidelities, no black problem and bright shining world of race relations with all its attendant excitement and despair—the frantic, frenzied and ofttimes funny interracial social gatherings, the frenetic interracial sex, the abnormally sharpened wits and equally sharpened spite, the veneer of brotherhood and exchange of beautiful ideas in a ghostly garden of hope, and the unrelenting hatred of them all, white and black, if you did not agree that history was made in bed—no mean and undermining competition with your black brothers for the favours of white folks, which had always reminded him of lines from that devastating poem, “Three Ways of Hunger,” by Francis Robert White:

Want, will assume a lost, Lysippan

Animal proportion of man:

Small of head and long of arm’s reach.

Whose knuckles break, break again

In the brute contest for contested ends.

His duties had been light, raking leaves, a few minor repairs, and nothing after the snow came in late November. The proprietors had known he was a writer, had given him the job for that reason, believing him to be honest and chiefly wanting someone to keep a close watch on the property. He and Becky had a car to use, a lovely cottage with central heating, a fireplace and plenty of wood. And there had been a little terrier, owned by one of the proprietors, that had stayed with them; and in the cellar a hogshead of homemade wine that tasted a little like muscatel but was dry and very strong which they had drunk all winter. It was full of dead gnats and had to be strained, but on occasion, to show off his ruggedness, he drank it with the dead gnats floating about in the glass. “Ah laks marinated gnats,” he would say. “Marinated gnats is good.” Amusing himself with this parody on a fine novel written by a fellow black author, the part of which he remembered most vividly was a bit of dialogue between the protagonists and his brother:

—Ah likes chiddlins, do you like chiddlins?

—Ah likes chiddlins.

—Chiddlins is good.

—Ah likes de big gut, do you likes de big gut?

—Ah likes de big gut.

—De big gut is good.

It was very cold that winter and the lake froze and all day long the ice fishermen sat beside their fires, tending their lines. Gradually he’d come to feel an inner peace, such as he had never known, and the sickness following the vile stoning of his second book had almost gone. He had begun his book:
I Was Looking For a Street
. In a sense, he had almost found that street. When spring came and the summer crew came back, his job was over. He had bought a fifteen year old Plymouth sedan with part of the money he had saved, and they went to Bridgeport, Connecticut, and rented a room in the home of a widow who worked as a domestic. Why Bridgeport? Why not Yonkers? Or New Haven? Afterwards, he never really knew. At the time he knew that Bridgeport had a Socialist mayor, and he vaguely remembered driving through it once and it had seemed like such a pleasant town.

Each morning he drove out to Barnum Park and found a quiet spot of shade beside the Sound in which to park; and sat on the back seat with his typewriter on his knees and wrote. The sounds of the lapping of the waves and the cries of the sea gulls fishing in the rocky shoals were ineffably soothing, and he was at peace with his work.

Their money ran out about the middle of July and they decided to return to New York City from whence they’d gone upstate to the resort, and she would try to get a job in the welfare department. He advertized his car for sale in the classified section of the evening daily—
First $100 gets sound-bodied Plymouth sedan containing floating-power motor
.

The day the ad ran Becky took their last twelve dollars and went to New York City to put in her application, intending to return that evening, leaving him a half dollar for cigarettes.

At eleven-thirty that morning he contracted to sell the car to a young immigrant worker at the G. E. factory who was to return with the money shortly after he got off work at four.

At three-thirty he drove down to the corner of Fairfield Boulevard to buy cigarettes. On his return, when pulling out from the curb, his front bumper caught in the fender of a new Buick Roadmaster that was passing too close on his left, and jerked it off. The Buick was driven by a white-haired white lady, dressed immaculately in a mauve-coloured tweed suit that looked as if it might have cost more than Jesse earned from his second book on which he had worked more than a year. She was a very important person, and despite the fact she had been driving on the wrong side of a one-way street, and that her breath smelled pleasantly of excellent cocktails, she sent for a policeman and had Jesse arrested for reckless driving—not because she hated blacks or wished to humiliate or harm him in any manner; but her husband was always cautioning her to drive carefully and she intended to prove by the record that she had done so.

Watching her talk to the motorcycle policeman, Jesse thought, “Reason we’re going to fight the Russians, son—to prove by the record we were right.” But he wasn’t worried. He hadn’t seen any Russians about—not having the keen eyesight of Senator McCarthy. Nor had he broken any laws. How could they arrest him?

He found out shortly that to arrest him required very little skill. The policeman said, “Follow me,” and mounted his four-cylinder steed. “Shows what an ingenious people can do,” he thought sourly as he followed in his battered jalopy.

The desk sergeant set his bail at twenty-five dollars. He confessed he didn’t have twenty-five dollars. “But I’m a well-known American writer,” he said. “You can release me on my own recognizance.”

The desk sergeant said the law didn’t permit it.

“Should have told him you were a porter, son,” Jesse thought. “All Americans trust black porters and black mammies—even with their children.”

It was Tuesday and his landlady wouldn’t be home until Thursday and he knew no one else to whom he could appeal. However, before sending him to the lockup the desk sergeant gave him permission to telephone his wife at eight o’clock, at which time he expected her home from New York City. But the guard shift changed at six and the night guard had no orders concerning him telephoning. He knew how much she would worry when he failed to come home, and as the night wore on, despair set in. “Don’t let it throw you, son,” he told himself. “Racial characteristic, like syphilis and servility and stealing.” He recalled the bit of doggerel:

Some folks say that a nigger won’t steal

But I found one in my corn field,

and began composing scenes to pass the night:

—What you doing in my cornfield, nigger?

—What cornfield, boss?

—This cornfield where you’re at, nigger.

—Oh, this cornfield.

—Yes, this cornfield.

—I just come down to see what make the grass grow, boss.

At eleven o’clock the next morning he was taken to the magistrate’s court. But the driver of the Buick had suffered from such severe shock she was unable to appear, and the hearing was postponed for a week. However, he was permitted to telephone. First he called his house. Receiving no reply, in desperation he telephoned Becky’s brother in Baltimore, Maryland, who promised to wire him a hundred dollars to the city jail immediately.