Three Days Before the Shooting ... (137 page)

But why? Is she protecting something or somebody, or simply having fun? If so, Hickman, you’ll have to face up to the fact that for better or worse the ways of slavery are still with us even in the way we talk. So use what you know! You were a word man—even if it
was
mostly for the dozens
—long
before you became a man of the Word, therefore you know that our people like to talk
around
a subject even when there’s no danger. They enjoy it, and if they know you well enough they’re apt to leave their true subject unstated so you’ll have to
supply the missing meaning. And even in music. Didn’t you sing something called “Squeeze Me” and look all innocent, when anyone who’d been around recognized that you were really giving them “The Boy in the Boat” and automatically supplied the words? Sure you did, and thought you were having it both ways, because it was too funky a subject for polite society, and that whether the listener knew about woman-lovers or not he could still enjoy the melody. Sure, it was a worldly, gut-bucket subject, but the fun was in communicating with the insiders while leaving the innocent untouched in their innocence
.

“Are you with it,” the drummer would yell, and you never knew who was or wasn’t. That was the fun of the game, and deep down the point was cautionary as the Ten Commandments—even for those who loved to play it. Besides, there was always a risk in such signifying. Because you could direct it at someone you thought uninitiated, and he kept a straight face and turned it back on you…
.

Like the barber in the crowded barbershop who assumed that the schoolteacher whose hair he was cutting would consider the food he’d had for dinner low class deciding to have some fun by using double-talk in describing his meal to his partner. There he was, showing off and talking with straight-faced deliberation as he went into detail about everything except those “things” which he had eaten as his main course, and being urged on by the barber working in the next chair feeding him questions that had all the customers grinning. “How did you find those things she served?”

“Well now, I’ll tell you: The first were only fair to middling. But, man, man! that second serving was something else!”

“What you mean, something else?”

“I mean that seeing how fast I put away the first she must have decided to dig way down in the pot and give me some real action. Because on that second go-around she really came on with the
come-on.
That woman dived into that pot and when she came up those things she hit me with were pure-dee out of this world!”

But then as he gave a self-satisfied wink and began removing the neck-cloth, those “things” he’d left unnamed backed up on him. Because after the teacher had stretched and paid for his haircut and added a tip, he snapped a dollar bill between his hands and took a step back so that everyone could see as he applied the hot sauce
.

“My friend,” he said, “I enjoyed that description of your meal so thoroughly that on one simple condition this is yours….”

“Why thanks,” the barber said, looking surprised as the shop got quiet, “what’s your condition?”

“That you’ll be so kind,” the teacher said, “as to give me the name and address of the good lady who serves such excellent chitt’lin’s.”

And with that even the barber broke down and joined in as we laughed at the teacher’s reminder that it’s a mistake to judge a man’s knowledge and experience by his job or appearance. But what’s this got to do with Janey’s little man?

Suddenly tossing the letter aside, Hickman went to his old oak-wood file, removed a worn manila folder, and returned to his desk.

It’s been quiet for a long time
, he thought,
but now it seems to be stirring again
. And
removing a faded sheaf of papers, he leaned forward and stared at its fading typescript.

[SIPPY]

H
E HAD RECEIVED THE
report, undated and stamped “Confidential,” during the early twenties from Walker Millsap, a young college student whom he’d hired whenever his regular drummer was unable to make a string of one-night stands.
Too bad
, he thought,
that a young man so good on the drums would let himself get hung up on liquor…. Personable, too, and at the time I felt that if he’d been more interested in music than in books and his abstract ideas he might have ended up with one of the big bands. But what did I know, me who thought that playing music and chasing women made the best of all possible worlds? And when I learned that he aspired to become something as unglamorous as a college professor, the very idea was such an outrageous challenge to my own untested notion of possibility that I tried to discourage the man. Treated him as though he had no right to reach out for goals in which I had no interest…. So what happens? After giving him hell for reading so many books and preaching to him about the rewards he’d receive if he stuck to music I almost lose his respect by becoming a man of the Word! Mr. Ignorant Arrogance, thy name was Hickman! Instead of encouraging his hope in the possibilities of life I took his ambition as a threat to my own timidity and self-satisfaction. Talk about pride and fear of the unknown parading as wisdom…
.

For a moment he stared into space, marveling at how things had turned out and the price in ridicule his own change of role had cost him. But now as he began reading he recalled the complications that had led to his change of life, and the old mood of hope, frustration, and wonder which caused him to turn to Millsap for help.

“Dear Hickman,” he read,

It is interesting that you should write in regards to that incident in which we were involved so many years ago. For it so happens that I, too, had been thinking of it quite recently while going through an old notebook which contains some of the observations which I made during my investigation. Even so, I’m surprised to learn that you’re still interested in such an old cold trail. And all the more when I realize that by now the young man who was the focus of our interest must be well into his fifties. Over the years I have often puzzled over the events of that period and wondered why you, who had knocked me for a loop by becoming a minister, could have become so mysteriously interested in such a questionable young “pecker-wood.” And please, let me assure you that I use that old down-home term without bias but by way of expressing the attitude which I held at the time—yes, and an attitude that was increased by certain resentments which I felt over being drawn into your mysterious problem. And especially the disappointment I felt after I had sniffed around and thought I had spotted your man, and then had you instruct me to watch his every move but keep out of his sight.

Which made my task all the more difficult, because in order to keep him in sight I had to risk being
seen
, and if he became aware of my scrutiny and I remained silent as you instructed it might have aroused his suspicion and anger. Fortunately, there were others of us in the company he kept who disliked him because of his color, and since there was a possibility that he might well number me among them I used that possibility as a cover under which to operate. I didn’t like it, but because of you and the mystery involved I kept on his trail to the best of my ability and hoped that in learning more about him I’d discover what the hell you were up to.

Now, however, I can tell you quite frankly that I hoped that somewhere along the line you’d tell me what you had going. Instead you remained silent, and since I was hooked it seemed better to wait, use my eyes and ears, and ask no questions. It rankled me, but perhaps that’s why certain details of my “investigation” remain so vivid in my mind. You seemed to be playing a game of “ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies,” so I was forced to look, listen, and wonder. Still, you were certainly shrewd in asking someone with my inclinations to play detective. For while I had an endless curiosity about the unseen underside of this country it was too restricted in its range and you provided an opportunity to extend it. And then to my surprise I found myself going about playing your detective-observer in such a fashion—and enjoying it—that it seemed fairly natural. What’s more, by getting me out of the library and into the streets the experience proved helpful in pursuing my studies, and for that I thank you.

But you’ve asked me to refresh your memory as to my findings; so now, assuming that you know most—if not all—of our little saga, I’ll do my best:

After you offered to pay me for keeping an eye out for any youngster showing up in the Negro sections of this area who matched your rather vague description I finally spotted a likely candidate and started checking him out. Having so little to go on I still wasn’t sure of my quarry, but by stretching your description a bit (and allowing for the rapidity of adolescent change) I chose a likely prospect. And here, I must confess, luck and intuition played a significant role.
Luck
, in the circumstance that this young fellow started showing up at one of the joints where I hung out after classes;
intuition
, in the sense that something about him—perhaps his mixed, kind of improvised character—told me that he just might be your little man. But as I say, I was uncertain and so remain.

Anyway, I spotted a likely suspect and the best way to proceed is by saying that in the beginning he struck me as some kind of poor orphan of a white boy who, as a child, had passed through the loving hands of some Negro nursemaid or cook who treated him as one of her own. Which meant that he had the good luck of having had not one mother but two, and thus had been doubly loved. And, since it happens so often, I figured that his dark mother may well have spoiled him by treating him like a little prince. Incidentally, as I look back I find it interesting that my imagination was so involved in fleshing out the maternal roles in his background that I was on the point of completely overlooking his
paternity
. For other than entertaining the vague possibility that he must have been a man of substance who had strayed, died, or been enticed away, I was unable to provide the little bastard with a father!

I guess I simply left the matter of his daddy’s identity and character up to you. But if my assumption that the boy was without blood relatives was correct, it followed that he’d also had the bad luck of being twice orphaned; first physically, and then psychologically. Because given his footloose condition, I speculated that his white mother had actually died, while her black extension had survived. And that then, following the normal course of such relationships, the boy would have presumed to have outgrown his black mother and cast her aside.

As you can see, I was improvising a scenario out of very thin air. And yet I was keeping to a well-known pattern whereby such a child lives for a time in a kind of Eden that is bright, shaded, and full of wonderful colors—then
WHAM!
and he or she reaches adolescence and the world becomes strictly white or black. Then the child is forced to withdraw his or her affection from its black protectors and adopt attitudes more in keeping with its acclaimed racial superiority. Nor does it matter a damn that its black relatives are resentful, or that its second “mother” feels deprived and betrayed. Obviously, my improvised application of this sad old pattern ran the risk of being farfetched, and yet something about the boy gave me the feeling that it was valid, but that there had been a twist to the pattern in which, after losing his natural mother and rejecting her dark counterpart, he had become a rather unique type of “motherless child.”

Whether this projection of his possible background was false or true I was never to learn, but it seemed a likely seedbed for what I identified as such an unmistakable air of defiant loneliness that I thought of him as a young, mammy-made Ahab. It would also account for his habit of hanging around Negroes so long after the normal period of initiation into his role as one of superior racial and social status. Indeed, the fact that he continued such relationships stirred my suspicious imagination. But while I felt safe in projecting him as mammyless, something about him, an echo of style and a quality and volume of sound behind his laconic silence, suggested that he was far from being fatherless. Therefore I asked myself, “Why, if it is possible that he could have two mothers, couldn’t he have also had
two
fathers? One to plant the seed which shaped his physical image and connected him to his biological past, and still another to endow him with a certain attitude, and cultural style?” It was then that I decided that it really didn’t matter if the influence of one of his fathers was merely spiritual, or if his influence were good or bad! In other words, I concluded that even if it appeared obvious that none of
us
had strayed into the boy’s “genes” pile there was no question but that we were hiding in his “style” pile!

Hickman, the idea was as shocking as that of a monster with two heads inhabiting a single body, and yet it seemed to fit my original assumptions. For where there’s an Eve there has to be an Adam, and where there’s a Hagar it’s likely that there’s an Ishmael with his hand turned against all mankind. Therefore I speculated that it was probably through the very kindness of his Negro “mother” that the poor fellow had failed the test of putting her and all her kind behind him, and that thanks to her he was stuck to Negroes as tight as Brer Rabbit to Tar Baby. Therefore I concluded that it was through his black “mother” that he’d come under the fateful influence of some Negro stud of a type who fills white children with delight, but whose very existence their parents prefer to ignore. If so, it would have been precisely through the boy’s association with such a fellow that a white boy suckled at a Negro woman’s breast would have fallen into the confusion that left him unable to make the traumatic break which white kids brought up among us are forced to make come adolescence.