The Ways of White Folks (4 page)

Roy Williams had come home from abroad to visit his folks, his mother and sister and brothers who still remained in the old home town. Roy had been away seven or eight years, wandering the world. He came back very well dressed, but awfully thin. He wasn’t well.

It was this illness that had made Roy come home, really. He had a feeling that he was going to die,
and he wanted to see his mother again. This feeling about death had been coming over him gradually for two or three years now. It seemed to him that it must have started in Vienna, that gay but dying city in Central Europe where so many people were hungry, and yet some still had money to buy champagne and caviar and women in the night-clubs where Roy’s orchestra played.

But the glittering curtains of Roy’s jazz were lined with death. It made him sick to see people fainting in the streets of Vienna from hunger, while others stuffed themselves with wine and food. And it made him sad to refuse the young white women trailing behind him when he came home from work late at night, offering their bodies for a little money to buy something to eat.

In Vienna Roy had a room to himself because he wanted to study and keep up his music. He studied under one of the best violin teachers. But it was hard to keep beautiful and hungry women out of his place, who wanted to give themselves to a man who had a job because in turn the man might let them sleep in his room, or toss them a few bills to take home to their starving parents.

“Folks catch hell in Europe,” Roy thought. “I never saw people as hungry as this, not even Negroes at home.”

But it was even worse when the orchestra moved back to Berlin. Behind the apparent solidity of that
great city, behind doors where tourists never passed, hunger and pain were beyond understanding. And the police were beating people who protested, or stole, or begged. Yet in the cabaret where Roy played, crowds of folks still spent good gold. They laughed and danced every night and didn’t give a damn about the children sleeping in doorways outside, or the men who built houses of packing boxes, or the women who walked the streets to pick up trade.

It was in Berlin that the sadness weighed most heavily on Roy. And it was there that he began to cough. One night in Prague, he had a hemorrhage. When he got to Paris, his girl friend took care of him, and he got better. But he had all the time, from then on, that feeling that he was going to die. The cough stayed, and the sadness. So he came home to see his mother.

He landed in New York on the day that Hoover drove the veterans out of Washington. He stayed a couple of days in Harlem. Most of his old friends there, musicians and actors, were hungry and out of work. When they saw Roy dressed so well, they asked him for money. And at night women whispered in the streets, “Come here, baby! I want to see you, darlin’.”

“Rotten everywhere,” Roy thought. “I want to go home.”

That last night in Harlem, he couldn’t sleep. He
thought of his mother. In the morning he sent her a telegram that he was on his way.

“An uppty nigger,” said the white loafers when they saw him standing, slim and elegant, on the station platform in the September sunlight, surrounded by his bags with the bright stickers. Roy had got off a Pullman—something unusual for a Negro in those parts.

“God damn!” said the white loafers.

Suddenly a nasal voice broke out, “Well, I’ll be dogged if it ain’t Roy Williams!”

Roy recognized an old playmate, Charlie Mumford, from across the alley—a tall red-necked white boy in overalls. He took off his glove and held out his hand. The white man took it, but he didn’t shake it long. Roy had forgotten he wasn’t in Europe, wearing gloves and shaking hands glibly with a white man! Damn!

“Where you been, boy?” the white fellow asked.

“Paris,” said Roy.

“What’d yuh come back for?” a half-southern voice drawled from the edge of a baggage truck.

“I wanted to come home,” said Roy, “to see my mother.”

“I hope she’s gladder to see yuh than we are,” another white voice drawled.

Roy picked up his bags, since there were no porters, and carried them toward a rusty old Ford that seemed to be a taxi. He felt dizzy and weak. The smoke and dust of travel had made him cough a lot. The eyes of the white men about the station were not kind. He heard some one mutter, “Nigger.” His skin burned. For the first time in half a dozen years he felt his color. He was home.

Sing a song of Dixie, cotton bursting in the sun, shade of chinaberry trees, persimmons after frost has fallen. Hounds treeing possums October nights. O, sweet potatoes, hot, with butter in their yellow hearts.

“Son, I’m glad you’s done come home. What can Ma cook for you? I know you’s hungry for some real food. Corn bread and greens and salt pork. Lawd!… You’s got some mighty nice clothes, honey, but you looks right thin.… Chile, I hope you’s gonna stay home awhile.… These colored girls here’ll go crazy about you. They fightin’ over you already.… Honey, when you plays that violin o’ your’n it makes me right weak, it’s so purty.… Play yo’ violin, boy! God’s done give you a gift! Yes, indeedy!… It’s funny how all these Hopkinsville white folks is heard about you already. De woman where yo’ sister works say she
read someplace ’bout that orchestry you was playin’ with in Paris. She says fo’ Sister to bring you up to de house to play fo’ her sometime. I told Sister, no indeedy, you don’t go around playin’ at nobody’s house. Told her to tell that white woman de Deacon’s Board’s arrangin’ a concert at de church fo’ you where everybody can come and pay twenty-five cents to de glory of God and hear you play. Ain’t that right, son? You gwine play fo’ de Lawd here in Hopkinsville. You been playin’ fo’ de devil every night all over Europy.… Jesus have mercy! Lemme go and get ma washin’ out! And whiles you’s practicin’, I’m gonna make you a pumpkin pie this afternoon. I can see yo’ mouth a-waterin’ now.… Honey, Ma’s sho glad you’s done come home.… Play yo’ violin, son!”

What little house anywhere was ever big enough to hold Brahms and Beethoven, Bach and César Franck? Certainly not Sister Sarah Williams’s house in Hopkinsville. When Roy played, ill as he was, the notes went bursting out the windows and
the colored folks and white folks in the street heard them. The classic Mr. Brahms coming out of a nigger’s house in the southern end of Missouri. O, my God! Play yo’ violin, Roy! Tonight’s your concert.

The Deacons and the Ladies’ Aid sold a lot of tickets to the white folks they worked for. Roy’s home-coming concert at Shiloh Church was a financial success. The front rows were fifty cents and filled with white folks. The rest of the seats were a quarter and filled with Negroes. Methodist and Baptist both came, forgetting churchly rivalry. And there were lots of colored girls with powdered bon-bon faces—sweet black and brown and yellow girls with red mouths pointed at Roy. There was lots of bustle and perfume and smothered giggling and whispered talk as the drab little church filled. New shoes screeched up and down the aisles. People applauded because it was past the hour, but the concert started colored folks’ time anyhow—late. The church was crowded.

Hello, Mr. Brahms on a violin from Vienna at a colored church in Hopkinsville, Missouri. The slender brown-skin hands of a sick young man making you sing for an audience of poor white folks and even poorer Negroes. Good-evenin’, Mr. Brahms, a long ways from home, travellin’ in answer
to your dream, singin’ across the world. I had a dream, too, Mr. Brahms, a big dream that can’t come true, now. Dream of a great stage in a huge hall, like Carnegie Hall or the Salle Gaveau. And you, Mr. Brahms, singin’ out into the darkness, singin’ so strong and true that a thousand people look up at me like they do at Roland Hayes singing the Crucifixion. Jesus, I dreamed like that once before I got sick and had to come home.

And here I am giving my first concert in America for my mother and the Deacons of Shiloh Church and the quarters and fifty cent pieces they’ve collected from Brahms and me for the glory of God. This ain’t Carnegie Hall. I’ve only just come home.… But they’re looking at me. They’re all looking at me. The white folks in the front rows and the Negroes in the back. Like one pair of eyes looking at me.

This, my friends … I should say,
Ladies and Gentlemen
. (There are white folks in the audience who are not my friends.) … This is the
Meditation from Thaïs
by Massenet.… This is the broken heart of a dream come true not true. This is music, and me, sitting on the door-step of the world needing you.… O, body of life and love with black hands and brown limbs and white breasts and a golden face with lips like a violin bowed for singing.… Steady, Roy! It’s hot in this crowded church, and you’re sick as hell.… This, the
dream and the dreamer, wandering in the desert from Hopkinsville to Vienna in love with a streetwalker named Music.… Listen, you bitch, I want you to be beautiful as the moon in the night on the edge of the Missouri hills. I’ll make you beautiful.… The
Meditation from Thaïs.…
You remember, Ma (even to hear me play, you’ve got your seat in the amen corner tonight like on Sunday mornings when you come to talk to God), you remember that Kreisler record we had on the phonograph with the big horn when I was a kid? Nobody liked it but me, but you didn’t care how many times I played it, over and over.… Where’d you get my violin? Half the time you didn’t have the money to pay old man Miller for my lesson every week.… God rest his unpaid soul, as the Catholics say.… Why did you cry, Ma, when I went away with the minstrel show, playing coon songs through the South instead of hymns? What did you cry for, Ma, when I wrote you I had a job with a night-club jazz band on State Street in Chicago?… Why did you pray all night when I told you we had a contract to go to Berlin and work in a cabaret there? I tried to explain to you that the best violin teachers in the world were in Berlin and that I’d come back playing like that Kreisler record on the old victrola.… And didn’t I send you money home?… Spray like sand in the eyes.… O, dream on the door-step of the world! Thaïs!
Thaïs!… You sure don’t look like Thaïs, you scrawny white woman in a cheap coat and red hat staring up at me from the first row. You don’t look a bit like Thaï’s. What is it you want the music to give you? What do you want from me?… This is Hopkinsville, Missouri.… Look at all those brown girls back there in the crowd of Negroes, leaning toward me and the music. First time most of them ever saw a man in evening clothes, black or white. First time most of them ever heard the
Meditation from Thaïs
. First time they ever had one of their own race come home from abroad playing a violin. See them looking proud at me and music over the heads of the white folks in the first rows, over the head of the white woman in the cheap coat and red hat who knows what music’s all about.… Who are you, lady?

When the concert was over, even some of the white folks shook Roy’s hand and said it was wonderful. The colored folks said, “Boy, you sure can play!” Roy was shaking a little and his eyes burned and he wanted terribly to cough. Pain shot across his shoulders. But he smiled his concert-jazz-band smile that the gold spending ladies of the European night clubs had liked so much. And he held out a feverish hand to everybody. The white woman in the red hat waited at the edge of the crowd.

When people thinned out a little from the pulpit,
she came to Roy and shook his hand. She spoke of symphony concerts in St. Louis, of the fact that she was a teacher of music, of piano and violin, but that she had no pupils like Roy, that never in the town of Hopkinsville had anyone else played so beautifully. Roy looked into her thin, freckled face and was glad she knew what it was all about. He was glad she liked music.

“That’s Miss Reese,” his mother told him after she had gone. “An old maid musicianer at the white high school.”

“Yes’m,” said Roy. “She understands music.”

The next time he saw Miss Reese was at the white high school shortly after it opened the fall session. One morning a note had come asking him if he would play for her Senior class in music appreciation some day. She would accompany him if he would bring his music. It seems that one of Miss Reese’s duties was the raising of musical standards in Hopkinsville; she had been telling her students about Bach and Mozart, and she would so appreciate it if Roy would visit the school and play those two great masters for her young people. She wrote him a nice note on clean white paper.

Roy went. His mother thought it was a great honor for the white high school to send for her
colored son to play for them. “That Miss Reese’s a right nice woman,” Sister Williams said to her boy. “Sendin’ for you to play up there at de school. First time I ever knowed ’em to have a Negro in there for anything but cleanin’ up, and I been in Hopkinsville a long time. Go and play for ’em, son, to de glory of God!”

Roy played. But it was one of those days when his throat was hot and dry, and his eyes burned. He had been coughing all morning and, as he played, his breath left him and he stood covered with a damp sweat. He played badly.

But Miss Reese was more than kind to him. She accompanied him at the piano. And when he had finished, she turned to the assembled class of white kids sprawled in their seats and said, “This is art, my dear young people, this is true art!”

The students went home that afternoon and told their parents that a dressed-up nigger had come to school with a violin and played a lot of funny pieces nobody but Miss Reese liked. They went on to say that Miss Reese had grinned all over herself and cried, “Wonderful!” And had even bowed to the nigger when he went out!

Roy went home to bed. He was up and down these days, thinner and thinner all the time, weaker and weaker. Sometimes not practicing any more. Often not eating the food his mother cooked for him, or that his sister brought from where she
worked. Sometimes being restless and hot in the night and getting up and dressing, even to spats and yellow gloves, and walking the streets of the little town at ten and eleven o’clock after nearly every one else had gone to bed. Midnight was late in Hopkinsville. But for years Roy had worked at night. It was hard for him to sleep before morning now.