If He Hollers Let Him Go (11 page)

I banged the receiver on the hook and turned toward the kitchen. I thought, Goddamnit, everything I do is wrong. I slipped on my jacket, got my identification and money, and went out without saying anything at all. When I looked in the garage I didn’t see my car. My stomach went hollow. Now if I’d banged it up and left it somewhere on the side of the road, that would really do it, I thought, hurrying out to the street. It was parked across the street with the front wheels cut sharply up over the curb as if I’d started to drive into the people’s house and had caught myself.

The keys were still in it and the ignition was on, although the lights were off. It must have stalled when the wheels went over the curb. I walked around it, looking for dented fenders and flat tyres, but it didn’t have a nick. I climbed in, mashed the starter; the motor kicked on. A better car than I was a man, I thought.

When I started north on Wall Street I had no idea where I was going. Anywhere, just to get away from the people I knew for a while. I just wanted to get away from the so-called respectable people of the world, the decent people. They were playing it too close for me, playing it harder than lightning bumps a stump, taking too many techs.

I turned over to San Pedro and headed downtown toward Little Tokyo, where the spooks and spills had come in and taken over. It was a hot, lazy day and the drain from my hangover left me lightheaded. I pulled up in front of a hotel near First and San Pedro and went into the combination bar and restaurant called the Rust Room. I climbed on a stool and ordered a double brandy straight, then looked in the mirror to see who was there.

In the mirror I saw a chick get up from a table with a couple of sailors in a booth and start over towards me. I turned to face her and began talking before she could open her mouth. ‘Now don’t start performing, baby, before you know what it’s all about—’

‘What kind of nigger are you anyway?’ she broke in. ‘Puleeze elucidate. Just what is your jinglet that you are now about to recite?’ She was a long tall yellow chick, named Veda, who worked as a waitress on the day shift. She had a longish narrow face and a thick-lipped nice-made mouth; her thick black curly hair grew low on her forehead like a man’s and her heavy black brows met over the bridge of her nose, not a pretty chick but good for a change. I’d broken a date with her a week before.

‘I’m tryna tell you, honey,’ I grinned. ‘My car broke down and I tried to get you on the phone but couldn’t anybody find you. Where were you, anyway? Having your sport I suppose.’

‘Don’t hand me that hockey,’ she said, leaning one hand on the bar and looking at me. ‘That is the saddest jive; that is pitiful, puleeze bulieve me.’

‘Now look, baby, you’re getting loud,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t become you.’

‘You’re sad, too sad, puleeze bulieve me,’ she said. ‘You’re just a chickenshit nigger, too sad, just too sad for words.’

‘Now listen, darling, don’t lose your pretty ways,’ I said, trying to quiet her. ‘You’re too refined for all this notoriety jive.’

‘You’re just a sad nigger, goddamn. Why in the hell didn’t you call me?’

I turned to the bartender. ‘Give this chick a drink.’ Then back to her. ‘What you drinking, baby?’ I put my arm around her and pulled her toward me. ‘You’re a fine-looking chick out of uniform, strictly exotic.’ I was trying to stop her from talking but it didn’t work.

‘Exotic my fanny,’ she said. ‘You’re just a corn-fed nigger, a mealy Moe.’

‘What you drinking, girl?’ the bartender asked.

‘Singapore sling,’ she said, then changed it: ‘No, just brandy and water.’ Then back to me. ‘You’re really too, too sad. I laid off to give you something you ain’t never had before and what do you do—’ She broke off. ‘I’m too, too tall, really running and leaping, if I’m lying I’m dying. Puleeze bulieve me.’

‘Let me get like you,’ I said.

She gave me a look. ‘Waste my good earth on you, a sad nigger like you, to have you duck out on me again? You must wanna die, nigger.’

‘What you doing now?’ I asked.

‘I’m going up and go to bed, darling. What do you care?’

‘Let me go up with you and put you to bed, honey,’ I said. ‘You just might not be able to make it.’

‘I just might not at that,’ she said. ‘But you ain’t gonna help me. You gotta have a date with me before you fall in my pad, darling. I just don’t pick up anybody at the bar.’ She went back to the table with the two sailors in the booth and sat down and began eating the dinner she had left.

Suddenly the brandy took hold and I began feeling melancholy. I thought of my second year at State when I subbed at end on the football team—the one game I played and the one touchdown I made and the people cheering. I had never felt so powerful, so strong, almost as if I’d become the hero I used to dream about being when I grew up. Then I thought about a motion picture called
A Guy Named Joe
; about that cat making that last bomb run, sinking a Nazi flat-top. Going out in a blaze of glory. See you, gates. See you, Jaxon. See you, stud…
In the bright blue forever
…

Just a simple nigger bastard, that was me. Never would be a hero. Had a thousand chances every day; a thousand coming up tomorrow. If I could just hang on to one and say, ‘This is it!’ And go out blowing up the white folks like that cat did the Nazis.

My throat went tight, began to ache. My Adam’s apple swelled until it choked me and began to hurt. My face wrinkled like a piece of paper beginning to burn; and my mouth spread, lips flattening against my teeth. I began to cry. Not openly. But all down inside.

Two white soldiers and a white chick came in, looked about hesitantly, then went back and sat at a table near the juke box and ordered beer. Every eye in the room was on them.

The soldiers were ordinary boys, didn’t look too bright; but the girl was strictly an Arkansas slick chick, a rife, loose, teenage fluff, with a broad face and small eyes and a hard mouth and straggly uncombed hair, dressed in a dirty white waist open at the throat and a dirty blue skirt, barelegged and muddy-shoed. She looked like she had just got off an S.P. freight—but she was white.

The waitress looked as if she didn’t want to serve them but didn’t know how to refuse. All the coloured women in the place sneered at the chick; one black girl at a nearby table looked at her as if she wanted to spit on her; and I heard some woman down the bar mutter.

But the men had different reactions. Some studiedly ignored her; a couple of black boys at the bar kept turning around to look at her; two Filipinos sitting directly in front of her stared at her with hot burning eyes and forgot to eat their scoff.

A couple of beers made the chick high and she got that frisky white-woman feeling of being wanted by every Negro man in the joint; she couldn’t keep still. She get up to put a nickel in the juke box and stood there shaking herself. But one of the black boys at the bar wouldn’t let her spend her money; he slid off his stool and went over beside her and played all the pieces she wanted to hear. Then one of the soldiers thought he ought to stand up and protect her, so she sat down.

A couple of well-dressed guys were eating dinner at a table in the rear; they looked slick, like pimps perhaps. The chick spotted them and began flirting with the dark one. By that time the white boys were trying to get her out, but she didn’t want to go. She got noisy and began singing one line over and over in her flat Southern voice—’ “I can’t see for looking” ‘—rolling her eyes about at the black boys in the joint. I had to laugh. She snapped a sharp disdainful look in my direction and tossed her head.

When she got up to play her nickel again both of the black boys at the bar went over and started talking to her. The soldiers stood up and tried to make her sit down. One of them took her by the arm and tried to force her into her chair but she jerked loose and said, ‘Just go on out and let me alone. I can take care of myself all right.’

The two slick studs passed her on the way out and she grabbed the dark boy’s arm.

He said, ‘Take it easy, baby,’ and brushed her off.

The soldiers got salty. They whispered something to each other, then called the waitress to pay for the beer. Another waitress went after the manager and he came from the lobby and stood by the bar. When the soldiers started to leave he headed them off.

‘You can’t go out and leave her here,’ he said.

‘She don’t want to come,’ one of the soldiers said.

‘She came in with you, she’s got to go out with you,’ the manager said, taking the soldier by the arm.

They went back to the juke box and the soldier said, ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’

‘Listen,’ the manager said to her. ‘You’ll have to leave with these soldiers you came in with.’

‘Why?’ she asked in her flat voice. ‘It’s a free country, ain’t it?’

‘Aw, come on,’ the soldier said, getting red. ‘Let’s get out this nigger joint.’ I don’t think he meant to say it, but after he’d said it he got defiant.

Where before there had just been race, now there was tension. We could call ourselves nigger all we wanted, but when the white folks did it we wanted to fight.

‘Well, go on then,’ she said to the soldier, then turned to the manager. ‘Why I got to go out with ‘em? I don’t know nothing ‘bout ‘em. I just come in with ‘em, that’s all.’

All she’s got to do now, I thought, is to start performing. She could get everybody in the joint into trouble, even me just sitting there buying a drink. She was probably under age anyway; and if she was she could get the hotel closed, the liquor licence revoked, probably get the manager in jail. She could take those two black chumps flirting with her outside and get them thirty years apiece in San Quentin; in Alabama she could get them hung. A little tramp—but she was white.

Then all of a sudden I thought of Madge; the two of ‘em were just alike. I hadn’t thought of her all that day, and now the whole bitter memory washed over me. The indignity of it, the gutting of my pride, what a nigger had to take just to keep on living in the goddamned world. I thought about killing the white boy again, but it didn’t do anything at all for me now. It seemed childish, ridiculous, so completely futile; I couldn’t kill all the white folks, that was a cinch. The cold scared feeling started clamping down on me; it nailed me to my seat, weak and black and powerless.

I heard the manager saying to the Arky Jill, ‘You’ve got to go out with them.’

His voice wasn’t exactly rough, but the white boy didn’t like it. His defiance was riding and he turned a white look on the manager. I thought he was going to say something; and I knew if he said the wrong thing the manager would likely pop him because he was a rugged stud, formerly a Negro copper. I thought hopefully: Well, here it goes. If the boy got hurt, or if there was any kind of rumpus with the white chick in it, there wouldn’t be any way at all to stop a riot—the white GIs would swarm into Little Tokyo like they did into the Mexican districts during the zoot suit riots. Only in Little Tokyo they’d have to kill and be killed, for those spooks down there were some really rugged cats; the saying was they wouldn’t drink a white cow’s milk. I wanted it to come and get it over with. But the white boy caught himself and didn’t say anything; I felt a sense of disappointment.

‘Well, all right, I’ll go out with ‘em,’ she finally consented. ‘But I’m coming back by myself.’ Then she said to the soldier: ‘Pay the boy and le’s go.’

‘I done paid him already,’ the soldier said angrily, taking her by the arm and almost dragging her out.

She turned her head and grinned at the two black boys before she left. The manager walked to the door and held it open for them.

‘All you got to do is go outside and get it,’ the bartender said to me.

I looked at him. ‘I wouldn’t have her with your help,’ I told him, then I asked for my bill.

He gave it to me and I paid him and started out. Veda’s drink was still sitting on the bar untouched. When she saw me leaving she headed me off at the door. ‘Well, how ‘bout you?’ she said. ‘I thought you were buying me a drink.’

‘It’s on the bar,’ I growled.

She caught me by the arm. ‘Can’t you wait for a minute until I get rid of my company? Just what is your story?’

I shook her off.

I got in my car and dug off in a hurry. I was tense, jerky, at loose ends; almost got bumped by a P.E. train turning into the station beyond Sixth. Now I didn’t know where to go, what to do. All the guys I used to run around with were in the Army— Willie, Freddie, Bill, Chet. I hadn’t seen any of that group of girls we used to run around with since I’d started going with Alice. Ruth was married, I’d heard; Gussie was still working in service. I saw Josie on the street-car one day and she said she was working at Lockheed. There was Vivien Williams; there used always to be something going on at her house back in the days before the Communist Party dealt the race issue out. But I decided against her. With all the pressure on me, I couldn’t have listened to a Negro spouting the party line if my life had depended on it.

I was still scared to think about Alice. I wanted time to let it cool. If I thought about her now I’d hate her guts, I knew. I could understand how she’d gotten upset. After all, she wasn’t used to the pressure we’d gotten last night—hard enough to beat her down. I could sympathize with her on that rap. But the breakout … I rubbed my hand down over my face … She’d known where she was going, had known what the play was from the first. I could overlook it happening once—happening accidentally. The white folks’ pressure would make a monkey eat cayenne pepper—once.

I tried to shake it from my mind, looked about me. I’d gone out past Washington. I turned around, headed back downtown, decided to go to a show, get my mind clear of everything. I parked in the lot at Sixth and Hill, stopped a moment to look at the rows of white faces on the magazine covers at the book stand, thought sardonically: The white folks sure think they’re beautiful, walked up to the drugstore at the corner for a pack of smokes. The little prim-mouth girl back of the counter let me stand there while she waited on all the white customers first. When she started to wait on another one who just came in I banged my hand down on the counter. ‘Give me some cigarettes, goddamnit!’ I said.