TWO HOURS AFTER dinner they were still sitting in the airtight, overheated parlor. A dull haze of tobacco smoke was packed in layers from the table-top to the ceiling, and around the chairs hovered the smell of dried perspiration and stale perfume. The New Year’s Day turkey-and-hog dinner had made the women droopy and dull-eyed; the men were stretched out in their chairs with their legs spread out and their heads thrown back, looking as if around each swollen belly a hundred feet of stuffed sausage-casing had been wound.
Grady Walters sat up, rubbed his red-veined face, and looked at his guests. After a while he went to the door and called for one of his Negro servants. He sent the Negro on the run for Blue Boy.
After he had closed the door tightly, Grady walked back towards his chair, looking at the drowsy men and women through the haze of blue tobacco smoke. It had been more than an hour since anyone had felt like saying anything.
“What time of day is it getting to be, Grady?” Rob Howard asked, rubbing first his eyes and then his belly.
“Time to have a little fun,” Grady said.
Blue Boy came through the back door and shuffled down the hall to the parlor where the people were. He dragged his feet sideways over the floor, making a sound like soy beans being poured into a wooden barrel.
“We been waiting here all afternoon for you to come in here and show the folks some fun, Blue Boy,” Grady said. “All my visitors are just itching to laugh. Reckon you can make them shake their sides, Blue Boy?”
Blue Boy grinned at the roomful of men and women. He dug his hands into his overall pockets and made some kind of unintelligible sound in his throat.
Rob Howard asked Grady what Blue Boy could do. Several of the women sat up and began rubbing powder into the pores of their skin.
The colored boy grinned some more, stretching his neck in a semicircle.
“Blue Boy,” Grady said, “show these white-folks how you caught that shoat the other day and bit him to death. Go on, Blue Boy! Let’s see how you chewed that shoat to death with your teeth.”
For several moments the boy’s lips moved like eyelids a-flutter, and he made a dash for the door. Grady caught him by the shoulder and tossed him back into the center of the room.
“All right, Blue Boy,” Grady shouted at him. “Do what I told you to do. Show the white-folks how you bit that pig to death.”
Blue Boy made deeper sounds in his throat. What he said sounded more unintelligible than Gullah. Nobody but Grady could understand what he was trying to say.
“It don’t make no difference if you ain’t got a shoat here to kill,” Grady answered him. “Go on and show the white-folks how you killed one the other day for me.”
Blue Boy dropped on his hands and knees, making sounds as if he were trying to protest. Grady nudged him with his foot, prodding him on.
The Negro boy suddenly began to snarl and bite, acting as if he himself had been turned into a snarling, biting shoat. He grabbed into the air, throwing his arms around an imaginary young hog, and began to tear its throat with his sharp white teeth. The Howards and Hannafords crowded closer, trying to see the idiot go through the actions of a bloodthirsty maniac.
Down on the floor, Blue Boy’s face was contorted and swollen. His eyes glistened, and his mouth drooled. He was doing all he could to please Grady Walters.
When he had finished, the Howards and Hannafords fell back, fanning their faces and wiping the backs of their hands with their handkerchiefs. Even Grady fanned his flushed face when Blue Boy stopped and rolled over on the floor exhausted.
“What else can he do, Grady?” the youngest of the Hannaford women asked.
“Anything I tell him to do,” Grady said. “I’ve got Blue Boy trained. He does whatever I tell him.”
They looked down at the small, thin, blue-skinned, seventeen-year-old Negro on the floor. His clothes were ragged, and his thick kinky hair was almost as long as a Negro woman’s. He looked the same, except in size, as he did the day, twelve years before, when Grady brought him to the big house from one of the sharecroppers’ cabins. Blue Boy had never become violent, and he obeyed every word of Grady’s. Grady had taught him to do tricks as he would instruct a young puppy to roll over on his back when bidden. Blue Boy always obeyed, but sometimes he was not quick enough to suit Grady, and then Grady flew into him with the leather bellyband that hung on a nail on the back porch.
The Howards and Hannafords had sat down again, but the Negro boy still lay on the floor. Grady had not told him to get up.
“What’s wrong with him, Grady?” Rob Howard asked.
“He ain’t got a grain of sense,” Grady said, laughing a little. “See how he grins all the time? A calf is born with more sense than he’s got right now.”
“Why don’t you send him to the insane asylum, then?”
“What for?” Grady said. “He’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys. I figure he’s worth keeping just for the hell of it. If I sent him off to the asylum, I’d miss my good times with him. I wouldn’t take a hundred dollars for Blue Boy.”
“What else can he do?” Henry Hannaford asked.
“I’ll show you,” Grady said. “Here, Blue Boy, get up and do that monkeyshine dance for the white-folks. Show them what you can do with your feet.”
Blue Boy got up, pushing himself erect with hands and feet. He stood grinning for a while at the men and women in a circle around him.
“Go on, Blue Boy, shake your feet for the white-folks,” Grady told him, pointing at Blue Boy’s feet. “Do the monkeyshine, Blue Boy.”
The boy began to shuffle his shoes on the floor, barely raising them off the surface. Grady started tapping his feet, moving them faster and faster all the time. Blue Boy watched him, and after a while his own feet began going faster. He kept it up until he was dancing so fast his breath began to give out. His eyes were swelling, and it looked as if his balls would pop out of his head any moment. The arteries in his neck got larger and rounder.
“That nigger can do the monkeyshine better than any nigger I ever saw,” Henry Hannaford said.
Blue Boy sank into a heap on the floor, the arteries in his neck pumping and swelling until some of the women in the room covered their faces to keep from seeing them.
It did not take Blue Boy long to get his wind back, but he still lay on the floor. Grady watched him until he thought he had recovered enough to stand up again.
“What else can your trained nigger do, Grady?” Rob Howard asked. “Looks like you would have learned him a heap of tricks in ten or twelve years’ time.”
“If it wasn’t getting so late in the day, I’d tell him to do all he knows,” Grady said. “I’ll let him do one more, anyway.”
Blue Boy had not moved from the floor.
“Get up, Blue Boy,” Grady said. “Get up and stand up on your feet.”
Blue Boy got up grinning. His head turned once more on his rubbery neck, stretching in a semicircle around the room. He grinned at the white faces about him.
“Take out that blacksnake and whip it to a frazzle,” Grady told him. “Take it out, Blue Boy, and show the white-folks what you can do.”
Blue Boy grinned, stretching his rubbery neck until it looked as if it would come loose from his body.
“What’s he going to do now, Grady?” Rob Howard asked.
“You just wait and see, Rob,” Grady said. “All right, Blue Boy, do like I said. Whip that blacksnake.”
The youngest Hannaford woman giggled. Blue Boy turned and stared at her with his round white eyeballs. He grinned until Grady prodded him on.
“Now I reckon you folks know why I didn’t send him off to the insane asylum,” Grady said. “I have a heap more fun out of Blue Boy than I would with anything else you can think of. He can’t hoe cotton, or pick it, and he hasn’t even got enough sense to chop a piece of stove-wood, but he makes up for all that by learning to do the tricks I teach him.”
Once more Blue Boy’s eyes began to pop in the sockets of his skull, and the arteries in his neck began to pump and swell. He dropped to his knees and his once rubbery neck was as rigid as a table leg. The grinning lines on his face had congealed into weltlike scars.
The Howards and Hannafords, who had come from five counties to eat Grady’s New Year’s Day turkey-and-hog dinner, gulped and wheezed at the sight of Blue Boy. He was beginning to droop like a wilting stalk of pigweed. Then he fell from his knees.
With his face pressed against the splintery floor, the grooves in his cheeks began to soften, and his grinning features glistened in the drying perspiration. His breathing became inaudible, and the swollen arteries in his neck were as rigid as taut-drawn ropes.
(First published in Anvil)