Invisible Man (47 page)

“I said no,” he said. “I said
hell
, no! And I kept saying no until I broke the chain and left.”

“But how?”

“They let me get close to the dogs once in a while, that’s how. I made friends with them dogs and I waited. Down there you really learn how to wait. I waited nineteen years and then one morning when the river was flooding I left. They thought I was one of them who got drowned when the levee broke, but I done broke the chain and gone. I was standing in the mud holding a long-handled shovel and I asked myself, Tarp, can you make it? And inside me I said yes; all that water and mud and rain said yes, and I took off.”

Suddenly he gave a laugh so gay it startled me.

“I’m tellin’ it better’n I ever thought I could,” he said, fishing in his pocket and removing something that looked like an oilskin tobacco pouch, from which he removed an object wrapped in a handkerchief.

“I’ve been looking for freedom ever since, son. And sometimes I’ve done all right. Up to these here hard times I did very well, considering that I’m a man whose health is not too good. But even when times were best for me I remembered. Because I didn’t want to forget those nineteen years I just kind of held on to this as a keepsake and a reminder.”

He was unwrapping the object now and I watched his old man’s hands.

“I’d like to pass it on to you, son. There,” he said, handing it to me. “Funny thing to give somebody, but I think it’s got a heap of signifying wrapped up in it and it might help you remember what we’re really fighting against. I don’t think of it in terms of but two words,
yes
and
no;
but it signifies a heap more …”

I saw him place his hand on the desk. “Brother,” he said, calling me “Brother” for the first time, “I want you to take it. I guess it’s a kind of luck piece. Anyway, it’s the one I filed to get away.”

I took it in my hand, a thick dark, oily piece of filed steel that had been twisted open and forced partly back into place, on which I saw marks that might have been made by the blade of a hatchet. It was such a link as I had seen on Bledsoe’s desk, only while that one had been smooth, Tarp’s bore the marks of haste and violence, looking as though it had been attacked and conquered before it stubbornly yielded.

I looked at him and shook my head as he watched me inscrutably. Finding no words to ask him more about it, I slipped the link over my knuckles and struck it sharply against the desk.

Brother Tarp chuckled. “Now there’s a way I never thought of using it,” he said. “It’s pretty good. It’s pretty good.”

“But why do you give it to me, Brother Tarp?”

“Because I
have
to, I guess. Now don’t go trying to get me to say what I can’t. You’re the talker, not me,” he said, getting up and limping toward the door. “It was, lucky to me and I think it might be lucky to you. You just keep it with you and look at it once in a while. Course, if you get tired of it, why, give it back.”

“Oh, no,” I called after him, “I want it and I think I understand. Thanks for giving it to me.”

I looked at the dark band of metal against my fist and dropped it upon the anonymous letter. I neither wanted it nor knew what to do with it; although there was no question of keeping it if for no other reason than that I felt that Brother Tarp’s gesture in offering it was of some deeply felt significance which I was compelled to respect. Something, perhaps, like a man passing on to his son his own father’s watch, which the son accepted not because he wanted the old-fashioned timepiece for itself, but because of the overtones of unstated seriousness and solemnity of the paternal gesture which at once joined him with his ancestors, marked a high point of his present, and promised a concreteness to his nebulous and chaotic future. And now I remembered that if I had returned home instead of coming north my father would have given me my grandfather’s old-fashioned Hamilton, with its long, burr-headed winding stem. Well, so my brother would get it and I’d never wanted it anyway. What were they doing now, I brooded, suddenly sick for home.

I could feel the air from the window hot against my neck now as through the smell of morning coffee I heard a throaty voice singing with a mixture of laughter and solemnity:

A whole series of memories started to well up, but I threw them off. There was no time for memory, for all its images were of times passed.

There had been only a few minutes from the time that I’d called in Brother Tarp about the letter and his leaving, but it seemed as though I’d plunged down a well of years. I looked calmly now at the writing which, for a moment, had shaken my total structure of certainty, and was glad that Brother Tarp had been there to be called rather than Clifton or some of the others before whom I would have been ashamed of my panic. Instead he’d left me soberly confident. Perhaps from the shock of seeming to see my grandfather looking through Tarp’s eyes, perhaps through the calmness of his voice alone, or perhaps through his story and his link of chain, he had restored my perspective.

He’s right, I thought; whoever sent the message is trying to confuse me; some enemy is trying to halt our progress by destroying my faith through touching upon my old southern distrust, our fear of white betrayal. It was as though he had learned of my experience with Bledsoe’s letters and was trying to use that knowledge to destroy not only me but the whole Brotherhood. Yet that was impossible; no one knew that story who knew me now. It was simply an obscene coincidence. If only I could get my hands upon his stupid throat. Here in the Brotherhood was the one place in the country where we were free and given the greatest encouragement to use our abilities, and he was trying to destroy it! No, it wasn’t me he was worrying about becoming too big, it was the Brotherhood. And becoming big was exactly what the Brotherhood wanted. Hadn’t I just received orders to submit ideas for organizing
more
people? And “a white man’s world” was just what the Brotherhood was against. We were dedicated to building a world of Brotherhood.

But who had sent it—Ras the Exhorter? No, it wasn’t like him. He was more direct and absolutely against any collaboration between blacks and whites. It was someone else, someone more insidious than Ras. But who, I wondered, forcing it below my consciousness as I turned to the tasks at hand.

The morning began with people asking my advice on how to secure relief; members coming in for instructions for small committee meetings being held in corners of the large hall; and I had just dismissed a woman seeking to free her husband, who had been jailed for beating her, when Brother Wrestrum entered the room. I returned his greeting and watched him ease into a chair, his eyes sweeping over my desk—with uneasiness. He seemed to possess some kind of authority in the Brotherhood, but his exact function was unclear. He was, I felt, something of a meddler.

And hardly had he settled himself when he stared at my desk, saying, “What you got there, Brother?” and pointed toward a pile of my papers. I leaned slowly back in my chair, looking him in the eye. “That’s my work,” I said coldly, determined to stop any interference from the start.

“But I mean
that,”
he said, pointing, his eyes beginning to blaze, “that there.”

“It’s work,” I said, “all my work.”

“Is that too?” he said, pointing to Brother Tarp’s leg link.

“That’s just a personal present, Brother,” I said. “What could I do for you?”

“That ain’t what I asked you, Brother. What is it?”

I picked up the link and held it toward him, the metal oily and strangely skinlike now with the slanting sun entering the window. “Would you care to examine it, Brother? One of our members wore it nineteen years on the chain gang.”

“Hell, no!” He recoiled. “I mean, no, thank you. In fact, Brother, I don’t think we ought to have such things around!”

“You
think so,” I said. “And just why?”

“Because I don’t think we ought to dramatize our differences.”

“I’m not dramatizing anything, it’s my personal property that happens to be lying on my desk.”

“But people can see it!”

“That’s true,” I said. “But I think it’s a good reminder of what our movement is fighting against.”

“No, suh!” he said, shaking his head, “no, suh! That’s the worse kind of thing for Brotherhood—because we want to make folks think of the things we have in common. That’s what makes for Brotherhood. We have to change this way we have of always talking about how different we are. In the Brotherhood we are all brothers.”

I was amused. He was obviously disturbed by something deeper than a need to forget differences. Fear was in his eyes. “I never thought of it just that way, Brother,” I said, dangling the iron between my finger and thumb.

“But you want to think about it,” he said. “We have to discipline ourselves. Things that don’t make for Brotherhood have to be rooted out. We have enemies, you know. I watch everything I do and say so as to be sure that I don’t upset the Brotherhood—’cause this is a wonderful movement, Brother, and we have to keep it that way. We have to
watch
ourselves, Brother. You know what I mean? Too often we’re liable to forget that this is something that’s a privilege to belong to. We’re liable to say things that don’t do nothing but make for more misunderstanding.”

What’s driving him, I thought, what’s all this to do with me? Could he have sent me the note? Dropping the iron I fished the anonymous note from beneath the pile and held it by a corner, so that the slanting sun shone through the page and outlined the scrawling letters. I watched him intently. He was leaning upon the desk now, looking at the page but with no recognition in his eyes. I dropped the page upon the chain, more disappointed than relieved.

“Between you and me, Brother,” he said, “there are those amongst us who don’t really believe in Brotherhood.”

“Oh?”

“You damn right they don’t! They’re just in it to use it for their own ends. Some call you Brother to your face and the minute you turn your back, you’re a black son of a bitch! You got to watch ’em.”

“I haven’t encountered any of that, Brother,” I said.

“You will. There’s lots of poison around. Some don’t want to shake your hand and some don’t like the idea of seeing too much of you; but goddam it, in the Brotherhood they gotta!”

I looked at him. It had never occurred to me that the Brotherhood could force anyone to shake my hand, and that he found satisfaction that it could was both shocking and distasteful.

Suddenly he laughed. “Yes, dammit, they gotta! Me, I don’t let ’em get away with nothing. If they going to be brothers let ’em be brothers! Oh, but I’m fair,” he said, his face suddenly self-righteous. “I’m fair. I ask myself every day, ‘What are you doing against Brotherhood?’ and when I find it, I root it out, I burn it out like a man cauterizing a mad-dog bite. This business of being a brother is a full-time job. You have to be pure in heart and you have to be disciplined in body and mind. Brother, you understand what I mean?”

“Yes, I think I do,” I said. “Some folks feel that way about their religion.”

“Religion?” He blinked his eyes. “Folks like me and you is full of distrust,” he said. “We been corrupted ’til it’s hard for some of us to believe in Brotherhood. And some even want revenge! That’s what I’m talking about. We have to root it out! We have to learn to trust our other brothers. After all, didn’t
they
start the Brotherhood? Didn’t
they
come and stretch out their hand to us black men and say, ‘We want y’all for our brothers?’ Didn’t they do it? Didn’t they, now? Didn’t they set out to organize us, and help fight our battle and all like that? Sho they did, and we have to remember it twenty-four hours a day.
Brotherhood.
That’s the word we got to keep right in front of our eyes every second. Now this brings me to why I come to see you, Brother.”

He sat back, his huge hands grasping his knees. “I got a plan I want to talk over with you.”

“What is it, Brother?” I said.

“Well, it’s like this. I think we ought to have some way of showing what we are. We ought to have some banners and things like that. ’Specially for us black brothers.”

“I see,” I said, becoming interested. “But why do you think this is important?”

“’Cause it helps the Brotherhood, that’s why. First, if you remember, when you watch our people when there’s a parade or a funeral, or a dance or anything like that, they always have some kind of flags and banners even if they don’t mean anything. It kind of makes the occasion seem more important like. It makes people stop, look and listen. ‘What’s coming off here?’ But you know and I know that they ain’t none of ’em got no true flag—except maybe Ras the Exhorter, and he claims
he’s
Ethiopian or African. But none of us got no true flag ‘cause that flag don’t really belong to us. They want a true flag, one that’s as much theirs as anybody else’s. You know what I mean?”

“Yes, I think I do,” I said, remembering that there was always that sense in me of being apart when the flag went by. It had been a reminder, until I’d found the Brotherhood, that
my
star was not yet there …

“Sure, you know,” Brother Wrestrum said. “Everybody wants a flag. We need a flag that stands for Brotherhood, and we need a sign we can wear.”

“A sign?”

“You know, a pin or a button.”

“You mean an emblem?”

“That’s it! Something we can wear, a pin or something like that. So that when a Brother meets a Brother they can know it. That way that thing what happened to Brother Tod Clifton wouldn’t have happened …”

“What wouldn’t have happened?”

He sat back. “Don’t you know about it?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“It’s something that’s best forgot about,” he said, leaning close, his big hands gripped and stretched before him. “But you see, there was a rally and some hoodlums tried to break up the meeting, and in the fighting Brother Tod Clifton got holt to one of the white brothers by mistake and was beating
him
, thought he was one of the hoodlums,
he
said. Things like that is bad, Brother,
very
bad. But with some of these emblems, things like that wouldn’t happen.”