I was happy and would have continued to sell the newspaper and its magazine supplement indefinitely had it not been for the racial pride of a friend of the family. He was a tall, quiet, sober, soft-spoken black man, a carpenter by trade. One evening I called at his home with the paper. He gave me a dime, then looked at me oddly.
“You know, son,” he said, “I sure like to see you make a little money each week.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
“But tell me, who told you to sell these papers?” he asked.
“Nobody.”
“Where do you get them from?”
“Chicago.”
“Do you ever read ’em?”
“Sure. I read the stories in the magazine supplement,” I explained. “But I never read the newspaper.”
He was silent a moment.
“Did a white man ask you to sell these papers?” he asked.
“No, sir,” I answered, puzzled now. “Why do you ask?”
“Do your folks know you are selling these papers?”
“Yes, sir. But what’s wrong?”
“How did you know where to write for these papers?” he asked, ignoring my questions.
“A friend of mine sells them. He gave me the address.”
“Is this friend of yours a white man?”
“No, sir. He’s colored. But why are you asking me all this?”
He did not answer. He was sitting on the steps of his front porch. He rose slowly.
“Wait right here a minute, son,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
Now what was wrong? The papers were all right; at least they seemed so to me. I waited, annoyed, eager to be gone on my rounds so that I could have time to get home and lie in bed and read the next installment of a thrilling horror story. The man returned with a carefully folded copy of the newspaper. He handed it to me.
“Did you see this?” he asked, pointing to a lurid cartoon.
“No, sir,” I said. “I don’t read the newspaper; I only read the magazine.”
“Well, just look at that. Take your time and tell me what you think,” he said.
It was the previous week’s issue and I looked at the picture of a huge black man with a greasy, sweaty face, thick lips, flat nose, golden teeth, sitting at a polished, wide-topped desk in a swivel chair. The man had on a pair of gleaming yellow shoes and his feet were propped upon the desk. His thick lips nursed a big, black cigar that held white ashes an inch long. In the man’s red-dotted tie was a dazzling horseshoe stickpin, glaring conspicuously. The man wore red suspenders and his shirt was striped silk and there were huge diamond rings on his fat black fingers. A chain of gold girded his belly and from the fob of his watch a rabbit’s foot dangled. On the floor at the side of the desk was a spittoon overflowing with mucus. Across the wall of the room in which the man sat was a bold sign, reading:
The White House
Under the sign was a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, the features distorted to make the face look like that of a gangster. My eyes went to the top of the cartoon and I read:
The only dream of a nigger is to be president
and to sleep with white women! Americans, do
we want this in our fair land? Organize and save
white womanhood!
I stared, trying to grasp the point of the picture and the captions, wondering why it all seemed so strange and yet familiar.
“Do you know what this means?” the man asked me.
“Gee, I don’t know,” I confessed.
“Did you ever hear of the Ku Klux Klan?” he asked me softly.
“Sure. Why?”
“Do you know what the Ku Kluxers do to colored people?”
“They kill us. They keep us from voting and getting good jobs,” I said.
“Well, the paper you’re selling preaches the Ku Klux Klan doctrines,” he said.
“Oh, no!” I exclaimed.
“Son, you’re holding it in your hands,” he said.
“I read the magazine, but I never read the paper,” I said vaguely, thoroughly rattled.
“Listen, son,” he said. “Listen. You’re a black boy and you’re trying to make a few pennies. All right. I don’t want to stop you from selling these papers, if you want to sell ’em. But I’ve read these papers now for two months and I know what they’re trying to do. If you sell ’em, you’re just helping white people to kill you.”
“But these papers come from Chicago,” I protested naïvely, feeling unsure of the entire world now, feeling that racial propaganda surely could not be published in Chicago, the city to which Negroes were fleeing by the thousands.
“I don’t care where the paper comes from,” he said. “Just you listen to this.”
He read aloud a long article in which lynching was passionately advocated as a solution for the problem of the Negro. Even though I heard him reading it, I could not believe it.
“Let me see that,” I said.
I took the paper from him and sat on the edge of the steps; in the paling light I turned the pages and read articles so brutally anti-Negro that goose pimples broke out over my skin.
“Do you like that?” he asked me.
“No, sir,” I breathed.
“Do you see what you are doing?”
“I didn’t know,” I mumbled.
“Are you going to sell those papers now?”
“No, sir. Never again.”
“They tell me that you are smart in school, and when I read those papers you were selling I didn’t know what to make of it. Then I said to myself that that boy doesn’t know what he’s selling. Now, a lot of folks wanted to speak to you about these papers, but they were scared. They thought you were mixed up with some white Ku Kluxers and if they told you to stop you would put the Kluxers on ’em. But I said, shucks, that boy just don’t know what he’s doing.”
I handed him his dime, but he would not take it.
“Keep the dime, son,” he said. “But for God’s sake, find something else to sell.”
I did not try to sell any more of the papers that night; I walked home with them under my arm, feeling that some Negro would leap from a bush or fence and waylay me. How on earth could I have made so grave a mistake? The way I had erred was simple but utterly unbelievable. I had been so enthralled by reading the serial stories in the magazine supplement that I had not read a single issue of the newspaper. I decided to keep my misadventure secret, that I would tell no one that I had been unwittingly an agent for pro-Ku Klux Klan literature. I tossed the papers into a ditch and when I reached home I told Granny, in a quiet, offhand way, that the company did not want to send me any more papers because they already had too many agents in
Jackson, a lie which I thought was an understatement of the actual truth. Granny did not care one way or the other, since I had been making so little money in selling them that I had not been able to help much with household expenses.
The father of the boy who had urged me to sell the papers also found out their propagandistic nature and forbade his son to sell them. But the boy and I never discussed the subject; we were too ashamed of ourselves. One day he asked me guardedly:
“Say, are you still selling those papers?”
“Oh, no. I don’t have time,” I said, my eyes avoiding his.
“I’m not either,” he said, pulling down the corners of his mouth. “I’m too busy.”
I burned at my studies. At the beginning of the school term I read my civics and English and geography volumes through and only referred to them when in class. I solved all my mathematical problems far in advance; then, during school hours, when I was not called on to recite, I read tattered, second-hand copies of
Flynn’s Detective Weekly
or the
Argosy All-Story Magazine
, or dreamed, weaving fantasies about cities I had never seen and about people I had never met.
School ended. I could not get a job that would let me rest on Granny’s holy Sabbath. The long hot idle summer days palled on me. I sat at home brooding, nursing bodily and spiritual hunger. In the afternoons, after the sun had spent its force, I played ball with the neighborhood boys. At night I sat on the front steps and stared blankly at the passing people, wagons, cars…
On one such lazy, hot summer night Granny, my mother, and Aunt Addie were sitting on the front porch, arguing some obscure point of religious doctrine. I sat huddled on the steps, my cheeks resting sullenly in my palms, half listening to what the grownups were saying and half lost in a daydream. Suddenly the dispute evoked an idea in me and, forgetting that I had no right to speak without permission, I piped up and had my say. I must have sounded reekingly blasphemous, for Granny said, “Shut up, you!” and leaned forward promptly to chastise me with one of her casual,
back-handed slaps on my mouth. But I had by now become adept at dodging blows and I nimbly ducked my head. She missed me; the force of her blow was so strong that she fell down the steps, headlong, her aged body wedged in a narrow space between the fence and the bottom step. I leaped up. Aunt Addie and my mother screamed and rushed down the steps and tried to pull Granny’s body out. But they could not move her. Grandpa was called and he had to tear the fence down to rescue Granny. She was barely conscious. They put her to bed and summoned a doctor.
I was frightened. I ran to my room and locked the door, fearing that Grandpa would rend me to pieces. Had I done right or had I done wrong? If I had held still and let Granny slap me, she would not have fallen. But was it not natural to dodge a blow? I waited, trembling. But no one came to my room. The house was quiet. Was Granny dead? Hours later I unlocked the door and crept downstairs. Well, I told myself, if Granny died, I would leave home. There was nothing else to do. Aunt Addie confronted me in the hallway with burning, black eyes.
“You see what you’ve done to Granny,” she said.
“I didn’t touch her,” I said. I had wanted to ask how Granny was, but my fear made me forget that.
“You were trying to kill her,” Aunt Addie said.
“I didn’t touch Granny, and you know it!”
“You are evil. You bring nothing but trouble!”
“I was trying to dodge her. She was trying to hit me. I had done nothing wrong…”
Her lips moved silently as she sought to formulate words to place me in a position of guilt.
“Why do you butt in when grown people are talking?” she demanded, finding her weapon at last.
“I just wanted to talk,” I mumbled sullenly. “I sit in this house for hours and I can’t even talk.”
“Hereafter, you keep your mouth shut until you’re spoken to,” she advised me.
“But Granny oughtn’t always be hitting at me like that,” I said as delicately as possible.
“Boy, don’t you stand there and say what Granny
ought
to do,” she blazed, finding her ground of accusation. “If you don’t keep your mouth shut, then
I’ll
hit you!” she continued.
“I’m only trying to explain why Granny fell,” I said.
“Shut up, now! Or I’ll wring your neck, you fool!”
“You’re another fool!” I came back at her, angry now.
She trembled with fury.
“I’ll fix you this night!” she said, rushing at me.
I dodged her and ran into the kitchen and grabbed the long bread knife. She followed me and I confronted her. I was so hysterical that I was crying.
“If you touch me, I’ll cut you, so help me,” I said in gasps. “I’m going to leave here as soon as I can work and make a living. But as long’s I’m here, you better not touch me.”
We stood looking into each other’s eyes, our bodies trembling with hate.
“I’m going to get you for this,” she vowed in a low, serious voice. “I’ll get you when you haven’t got a knife.”
“I’ll always keep a knife for you,” I told her.
“You’ve got to sleep at night,” she whimpered with rage. “I’ll get you then.”
“If you touch me when I’m sleeping, I’ll kill you,” I told her.
She walked out of the kitchen, kicking the door open before her as she went. Aunt Addie had a habit of kicking doors; she always paused before a partly opened door and kicked it open; if the door swung in, she flung it back with her foot; or, if the door was shut, she opened it with her hand for an inch or two, then opened it the rest of the way with her foot; she acted as though she wanted to get a glimpse into the room beyond before she entered it, perhaps to see if it contained anything dreadful or unholy.
For a month after that I took a kitchen knife to bed with me each night, hiding it under my pillow so that when Aunt Addie came I could protect myself. But she never came. Perhaps she prayed.
Granny was abed for six weeks; she had wrenched her back when her slap missed me.
There were more violent quarrels in our deeply religious home
than in the home of a gangster, a burglar, or a prostitute, a fact which I used to hint gently to Granny and which did my cause no good. Granny bore the standard for God, but she was always fighting. The peace that passes understanding never dwelt with us. I, too, fought; but I fought because I felt I had to keep from being crushed, to fend off continuous attack. But Granny and Aunt Addie quarreled and fought not only with me, but with each other over minor points of religious doctrine, or over some imagined infraction of what they chose to call their moral code. Wherever I found religion in my life I found strife, the attempt of one individual or group to rule another in the name of God. The naked will to power seemed always to walk in the wake of a hymn.
As summer waned I obtained a strange job. Our next-door neighbor, a janitor, decided to change his profession and become an insurance agent. He was handicapped by illiteracy and he offered me the job of accompanying him on trips into the delta plantation area to write and figure for him, at wages of five dollars a week. I made several trips with Brother Mance, as he was called, to plantation shacks, sleeping on shuck mattresses, eating salt pork and black-eyed peas for breakfast, dinner, and supper; and drinking, for once, all the milk I wanted.
I had all but forgotten that I had been born on a plantation and I was astonished at the ignorance of the children I met. I had been pitying myself for not having books to read, and now I saw children who had never read a book. Their chronic shyness made me seem bold and city-wise; a black mother would try to lure her brood into the room to shake hands with me and they would linger at the jamb of the door, peering at me with one eye, giggling hysterically. At night, seated at a crude table, with a kerosene lamp spluttering at my elbow, I would fill out insurance applications, and a sharecropper family, fresh from laboring in the fields, would stand and gape. Brother Mance would pace the floor, extolling my abilities with pen and paper. Many of the naïve black families bought their insurance from us because they felt that they were connecting themselves with something that would make their children “write ’n speak lake data pretty boy from Jackson.”