Authors: Ralph Ellison
H
E WAS
some farmer. As I listened I had been so torn between humiliation and fascination that to lessen my sense of shame I had kept my attention riveted upon his intense face. That way I did not have to look at Mr. Norton. But now as the voice ended I sat looking down at Mr. Norton’s feet. Out in the yard a woman’s hoarse contralto intoned a hymn. Children’s voices were raised in playful chatter. I sat bent over, smelling the sharp dry odor of wood burning in the hot sunlight. I stared at the two pairs of shoe before me. Mr. Norton’s were white, trimmed with black. They were custom made and there beside the cheap tan brogues of the farmer they had the elegantly slender well-bred appearance of fine gloves. Finally someone cleared his throat and I looked up to see Mr. Norton staring silently into Jim Trueblood’s eyes. I was startled. His face had drained of color. With his bright eyes burning into Trueblood’s black face, he looked ghostly. Trueblood looked at me questioningly.
“Lissen to the younguns,” he said in embarrassment. “Playin’ ‘London Bridge’s Fallin’ Down.’ ”
Something was going on which I didn’t get. I had to get Mr. Norton away.
“Are you all right, sir?” I asked.
He looked at me with unseeing eyes. “All right?” he said.
“Yes, sir. I mean that I think it’s time for the afternoon session,” I hurried on.
He stared at me blankly.
I went to him. “Are you sure you’re all right, sir?”
“Maybe it’s the heat,” Trueblood said. “You got to be born down here to stand this kind of heat.”
“Perhaps,” Mr. Norton said, “it is the heat. We’d better go.”
He stood shakily, still staring intently at Trueblood. Then I saw him removing a red Moroccan-leather wallet from his coat pocket. The platinum-framed miniature came with it, but he did not look at it this time.
“Here,” he said, extending a banknote. “Please take this and buy the children some toys for me.”
Trueblood’s mouth fell agape, his eyes widened and filled with moisture as he took the bill between trembling fingers. It was a hundred-dollar bill.
“I’m ready, young man,” Mr. Norton said, his voice a whisper.
I went before him to the car and opened the door. He stumbled a bit climbing in and I gave him my arm. His face was still chalk white.
“Drive me away from here,” he said in a sudden frenzy. “Away!”
“Yes, sir.”
I saw Jim Trueblood wave as I threw the car into gear. “You bastard,” I said under my breath. “You no-good bastard!
You
get a hundred-dollar bill!”
When I had turned the car and started back I saw him still standing in the same place.
Suddenly Mr. Norton touched me on the shoulder. “I must have a stimulant, young man. A little whiskey.”
“Yes, sir. Are you all right, sir?”
“A little faint, but a stimulant …”
His voice trailed off. Something cold formed within my chest. If anything happened to him Dr. Bledsoe would blame me. I stepped on the gas, wondering where I could get him some whiskey. Not in the town, that would take too long. There was only one place, the Golden Day.
“I’ll have you some in a few minutes, sir,” I said.
“As soon as you can,” he said.
I
saw them as we approached
the short stretch that lay between the railroad tracks and the Golden Day. At first I failed to recognize them. They straggled down the highway in a loose body, blocking the way from the white line to the frazzled weeds that bordered the sun-heated concrete slab. I cursed them silently. They were blocking the road and Mr. Norton was gasping for breath. Ahead of the radiator’s gleaming curve they looked like a chain gang on its way to make a road. But a chain gang marches single file and I saw no guards on horseback. As I drew nearer I recognized the loose gray shirts and pants worn by the veterans. Damn! They were heading for the Golden Day.
“A little stimulant,” I heard behind me.
“In a few minutes, sir.”
Up ahead I saw the one who thought he was a drum major strutting in front, giving orders as he moved energetically in long, hip-swinging strides, a cane held above his head, rising and falling as though in time to music. I slowed the car as I saw him turn to face the men, his cane held at chest level as he shortened the pace. The men continued to ignore him, walking along in a mass, some talking in groups and others talking and gesticulating to themselves.
Suddenly, the drum major saw the car and shook his cane-baton at me. I blew the horn, seeing the men move over to the side as I nosed the car slowly forward. He held his ground, his legs braced, hands on hips, and to keep from hitting him I slammed on the brakes.
The drum major rushed past the men toward the car, and I heard the cane bang down upon the hood as he rushed toward me.
“Who the hell you think you are, running down the army? Give the countersign. Who’s in command of this outfit? You trucking bastards was always too big for your britches. Countersign me!”
“This is General Pershing’s car, sir,” I said, remembering hearing that he responded to the name of his wartime Commander-in-Chief. Suddenly the wild look changed in his eyes and he stepped back and saluted with stiff precision. Then looking suspiciously into the back seat, he barked,
“Where’s the General?”
“There,” I said, turning and seeing Mr. Norton raising himself, weak and white-faced, from the seat.
“What is it? Why have we stopped?”
“The sergeant stopped us, sir …”
“Sergeant? What sergeant?” He sat up.
“Is that you, General?” the vet said, saluting. “I didn’t know you were inspecting the front lines today. I’m very sorry, sir.”
“What … ?” Mr. Norton said.
“The General’s in a hurry,” I said quickly.
“Sure is,” the vet said. “He’s got a lot to see. Discipline is bad. Artillery’s shot to hell.” Then he called to the men walking up the road, “Get the hell out of the General’s road. General Pershing’s coming through. Make way for General Pershing!”
He stepped aside and I shot the car across the line to avoid the men and stayed there on the wrong side as I headed for the Golden Day.
“Who was that man?” Mr. Norton gasped from the back seat.
“A former soldier, sir. A vet. They’re all vets, a little shellshocked.”
“But where is the attendant?”
“I don’t see one, sir. They’re harmless though.”
“Nevertheless, they should have an attendant.”
I had to get him there and away before they arrived. This was their day to visit the girls, and the Golden Day would be pretty rowdy. I wondered where the rest of them were. There should have been about fifty. Well, I would rush in and get the whiskey and leave. What was wrong with Mr. Norton anyway, why should he get
that
upset over Trueblood? I had felt ashamed and several times I had wanted to laugh, but it had made him sick. Maybe he needed a doctor. Hell, he didn’t ask for any doctor. Damn that bastard Trueblood.
I would run in, get a pint, and run out again, I thought. Then he wouldn’t see the Golden Day. I seldom went there myself except with some of the fellows when word got out that a new bunch of girls had arrived from New Orleans. The school had tried to make the Golden Day respectable, but the local white folks had a hand in it somehow and they got nowhere. The best the school could do was to make it hot for any student caught going there.
He lay like a man asleep as I left the car and ran into the Golden Day. I wanted to ask him for money but decided to use my own. At the door I paused; the place was already full, jammed with vets in loose gray shirts and trousers and women in short, tight-fitting, stiffly starched gingham aprons. The stale beer smell struck like a club through the noise of voices and the juke box. Just as I got inside the door a stolid-faced man gripped me by the arm and looked stonily into my eyes.
“It will occur at 5:30,” he said, looking straight through me.
“What?”
“The great all-embracing, absolute Armistice, the end of the world!” he said.
Before I could answer, a small plump woman smiled into my face and pulled him away.
“It’s your turn, Doc,” she said. “Don’t let it happen till after me and you done been upstairs. How come I always have to come get you?”
“No, it is true,” he said. “They wirelessed me from Paris this morning.”
“Then, baby, me an’ you better hurry. There’s lots of money I got to make in here before that thing happens. You hold it back a while, will you?”
She winked at me as she pulled him through the crowd toward the stairs. I elbowed my way nervously toward the bar.
Many of the men had been doctors, lawyers, teachers, Civil Service workers; there were several cooks, a preacher, a politician, and an artist. One very nutty one had been a psychiatrist. Whenever I saw them I felt uncomfortable. They were supposed to be members of the professions toward which at various times I vaguely aspired myself, and even though they never seemed to see me I could never believe that they were really patients. Sometimes it appeared as though they played some vast and complicated game with me and the rest of the school folk, a game whose goal was laughter and whose rules and subtleties I could never grasp.
Two men stood directly in front of me, one speaking with intense earnestness. “… and Johnson hit Jeffries at an angle of 45 degrees from his lower left lateral incisor, producing an instantaneous blocking of his entire thalamic rine, frosting it over like the freezing unit of a refrigerator, thus shattering his autonomous nervous system and rocking the big brick-laying creampuff with extreme hyperspasmic muscular tremors which dropped him dead on the extreme tip of his coccyx, which, in turn, produced a sharp traumatic reaction in his sphincter nerve and muscle, and then, my dear colleague, they swept him up, sprinkled him with quicklime and rolled him away in a barrow. Naturally, there was no other therapy possible.”
“Excuse me,” I said, pushing past.
Big Halley was behind the bar, his dark skin showing through his sweat-wet shirt.
“Whatcha saying, school-boy?”
“I want a double whiskey, Halley. Put it in something deep so I can get it out of here without spilling it. It’s for somebody outside.”
His mouth shot out, “Hell, naw!”
“Why?” I asked, surprised at the anger in his thyroid eyes.
“You still up at the school, ain’t you?”
“Sure.”
“Well, those bastards is trying to close me up again, that’s why. You can drink till you blue in the face in here, but I wouldn’t sell you enough to spit through your teeth to take outside.”
“But I’ve got a sick man out in the car.”
“What car? You never had no car.”
“The white man’s car. I’m driving for him.”
“Ain’t you in school?”
“He’s
from
the school.”
“Well, who’s sick?”
“He is.”
“He too good to come in? Tell him we don’t Jimcrow nobody.”
“But he’s sick.”
“He can die!”
“He’s important, Halley, a trustee. He’s rich and sick and if anything happens to him, they’ll have me packed and on my way home.”
“Can’t help it, school-boy. Bring him inside and he can buy enough to swim in. He can drink outta my own private bottle.”
He sliced the white heads off a couple of beers with an ivory paddle and passed them up the bar. I felt sick inside. Mr. Norton wouldn’t want to come in here. He was too sick. And besides I didn’t want him to see the patients and the girls. Things were getting wilder as I made my way out. Supercargo, the white-uniformed attendant who usually kept the men quiet, was nowhere to be seen. I didn’t like it, for when he was upstairs they had absolutely no inhibitions. I made my way out to the car. What could I tell Mr. Norton? He was lying very still when I opened the door.
“Mr. Norton, sir. They refuse to sell me whiskey to bring out.”
He lay very still.
“Mr. Norton.”
He lay like a figure of chalk. I shook him gently, feeling dread within me. He barely breathed. I shook him violently, seeing his head wobble grotesquely. His lips parted, bluish, revealing a row of long, slender, amazingly animal-like teeth.
“SIR!”
In a panic I ran back into the Golden Day, bursting through the noise as through an invisible wall.
“Halley! Help me, he’s dying!”
I tried to get through but no one seemed to have heard me. I was blocked on both sides. They were jammed together.
“Halley!”
Two patients turned and looked at me in the face, their eyes two inches from my nose.
“What is wrong with this gentleman, Sylvester?” the tall one said.
“A man’s dying outside!” I said.
“Someone is always dying,” the other one said.
“Yes, and it’s good to die beneath God’s great tent of sky.”
“He’s got to have some whiskey!”
“Oh, that’s different,” one of them said and they began pushing a path to the bar. “A last bright drink to keep the anguish down. Step aside, please!”
“School-boy, you back already?” Halley said.
“Give me some whiskey. He’s dying!”
“I done told you, school-boy, you better bring him in here. He can die, but I still got to pay my bills.”
“Please, they’ll put me in jail.”
“You going to college, figure it out,” he said.
“You’d better bring the gentleman inside,” the one called Sylvester said. “Come, let us assist you.”
We fought our way out of the crowd. He was just as I left him.
“Look, Sylvester, it’s Thomas Jefferson!”
“I was just about to say, I’ve long wanted to discourse with him.”
I looked at them speechlessly; they were both crazy. Or were they joking?
“Give me a hand,” I said.
“Gladly.”
I shook him. “Mr. Norton!”
“We’d better hurry if he’s to enjoy his drink,” one of them said thoughtfully.
We picked him up. He swung between us like a sack of old clothes.
“Hurry!”
As we carried him toward the Golden Day one of the men stopped suddenly and Mr. Norton’s head hung down, his white hair dragging in the dust.
“Gentlemen, this man is my grandfather!”
“But he’s
white
, his name’s Norton.”