The dark room. The streak of pale light through the transom. I woke to it several times, thinking it a long night. Then it occurred to me that there were no windows, that it might well be day outside.
I dressed, took my bags and walked down the steps. The sun glared brilliantly on Rampart Street. Traffic pushed past the lobby window.
“You coming back tonight, Mr. Griffin?” the man at the desk asked pleasantly.
“I’m not sure.”
“You can leave your bags here if you wish.”
“Thanks - I need what’s in them,” I said.
“Did you sleep all right?”
“Yes - fine. What time is it?”
“Little past eleven thirty.”
“Damn. I think I did sleep.”
The world looked blurred through the window and I waited for my eyes to accustom themselves to sunlight. I wondered what I should do, where I should go. I had a few changes of shirts, handkerchiefs and underwear in my duffel, about $200 in traveler’s checks and $20 in cash. In addition I had my medicines and a month’s supply of the pigmentation capsules.
I stepped out into the street and began to walk in search of food.
No one noticed me. The street was full of Negroes. I ambled along, looking in store windows. White proprietors who cater exclusively to Negro trade stood in doorways and solicited us.
“Step right in - nice special on shoes today.”
“Come in just a minute - no obligation - like to show you these new hats.”
Their voices wheedled and they smiled in counterfeit.
It was the ghetto. I had seen them before from the high attitude of one who could look down and pity. Now I belonged here and the view was different. A first glance told it all. Here it was pennies and clutter and spittle on the curb. Here people walked fast to juggle the dimes, to make a deal, to find cheap liver or a tomato that was overripe. Here was the indefinable stink of despair. Here modesty was the luxury. People struggled for it. I saw it as I passed, looking for food. A young, slick-haired man screamed loud obscenities to an older woman on the sidewalk. She laughed and threw them back in his face. They raged. Others passed them, looking down, pursing lips, struggling not to notice.
Here sensuality was escape, proof of manhood for people who could prove it no other way. Here at noon, jazz blared from jukeboxes and dark holes issued forth the cool odors of beer, wine and flesh into the sunlight. Here hips drew the eye and flirted with the eye and caused the eye to lust or laugh. It was better to look at hips than at the ghetto. Here I saw a young man, who carried in his body the substance of the saint, stagger, glass-eyed, unconscious from the dark hole, sit down on the curb and vomit between his feet.
“Man, he can’t hold his a-tall,” someone said.
I saw the sun caught in sweaty black wrinkles at the back of his neck as his head flopped forward.
“You okay?” I asked, bending over him.
He nodded listlessly.
“Yeah, shit, he’s just gassed,” someone said. “He’s okay.”
An odor of Creole cooking led me to a café at the corner. It was a small but cheerful room, painted baby blue. Tables were set with red-checked cloths. Except for a man at the counter, who nodded as I entered, I was the only customer. A pleasant young Negro woman took my order and fixed my breakfast: eggs, grits, bread and coffee - forty-nine cents - no butter and no napkin.
The man at the counter turned toward me and smiled, as though he wanted to talk. I had made it a rule to talk as little as possible at first. He noticed my bags and asked me if I were here looking for work. I told him I was and asked him if there were any better part of town where I could get a room.
“Ain’t this awful?” He grimaced, coming to my table.
“You live down here?”
“Yeah.” He closed his eyes wearily. Light from the door struck gray in his temples.
“The Y over on Dryades is about the best place. It’s clean and there’s a nice bunch of fellows there,” he said.
He asked me what kind of work I did and I told him I was a writer.
He told me that he often took the bus into better parts of town where the whites lived, “just to get away from this place. I just walk in the streets and look at the houses … anything, just to get somewhere where it’s decent … to get a smell of clean air.”
“I know …” I sympathized.
I invited him to have a cup of coffee. He told me about the town, places where I might go to find jobs.
“Is there a Catholic church around here?” I asked after a while.
“Yeah - just a couple of blocks over on Dryades.”
“Where’s the nearest rest room?” I asked.
“Well, man, now just what do you want to do - piss or pray?” he chuckled. Though we talked quietly, the waitress heard, and her high chortle was quickly muffled in the kitchen.
“I guess it doesn’t hurt for a man to do both once in a while,” I said.
“You’re so right,” he laughed, shaking his head from side to side. “You’re so right, sir. Lordy, Lordy … if you stick around this town, you’ll find out you’re going to end up doing most of your praying for a place to piss. It’s not easy, I’m telling you. You can go in some of the stores around here, but you’ve almost got to buy something before you can ask them to let you use the toilet. Some of the taverns got places. Yo u can go over to the train station or the bus station - places like that. You just have to locate them. And there’s not many of them for us. Best thing’s just to stick close to home. Otherwise sometimes you’ll find you’ve got to walk halfway across town to find a place.”
When I left him I caught the bus into town, choosing a seat halfway to the rear. As we neared Canal, the car began to fill with whites. Unless they could find a place themselves or beside another white, they stood in the aisle.
A middle-aged woman with stringy gray hair stood near my seat. She wore a clean but faded print house dress that was hoisted to one side as she clung to an overhead pendant support. Her face looked tired and I felt uncomfortable. As she staggered with the bus’s movement my lack of gallantry tormented me. I half rose from my seat to give it to her, but Negroes behind me frowned disapproval. I realized I was “going against the race” and the subtle tug-of-war became instantly clear. If the whites would not sit with us, let them stand. When they became tired enough or uncomfortable enough, they would eventually take seats beside us and soon see that it was not so poisonous after all. But to give them your seat was to let them win. I slumped back under the intensity of their stares.
But my movement had attracted the white woman’s attention. For an instant our eyes met. I felt sympathy for her, and thought I detected sympathy in her glance. The exchange blurred the barriers of race (so new to me) long enough for me to smile and vaguely indicate the empty seat beside me, letting her know she was welcome to accept it.
Her blue eyes, so pale before, sharpened and she spat out, “What you looking at me like that for?”
I felt myself flush. Other white passengers craned to look at me. The silent onrush of hostility frightened me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, staring at my knees. “I’m not from here.” The pattern of her skirt turned abruptly as she faced the front.
“They’re getting sassier every day,” she said loudly. Another woman agreed and the two fell into conversation.
My flesh prickled with shame, for I knew the Negroes rightly resented me for attracting such unfavorable attention. I sat the way I had seen them do, sphinx-like, pretending unawareness. Gradually people lost interest. Hostility drained to boredom. The poor woman chattered on, reluctant apparently to lose the spotlight.
I learned a strange thing - that in a jumble of unintelligible talk, the word “nigger” leaps out with electric clarity. Yo u always hear it and always it stings. And always it casts the person using it into a category of brute ignorance. I thought with some amusement that if these two women only knew what they were revealing about themselves to every Negro on that bus, they would have been outraged.
I left the bus on Canal Street. Other Negroes aboard eyed me not with anger, as I had expected, but rather with astonishment that any black man could be so stupid.
For an hour, I roamed aimlessly through the streets at the edge of the French Quarter. Always crowds and always the sun. On Derbigny Street I had coffee in a small Negro café called the Two Sisters Restaurant. A large poster on the wall caught my attention:
Pray for guidance.
Be courteous and friendly.
Be neat and clean.
Avoid loud talk.
Do not argue.
Report incidents immediately.
Overcome evil with good.
Sponsored by
Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance
Rev. A.L. Davis, President
Rev. J.E. Poindexter, Secretary
I walked to the same shoeshine stand in the French Quarter that I had been visiting as a white man. My friend Sterling Williams sat on an empty box on the sidewalk. He looked up without a hint of recognition.
“Shine?”
“I believe so,” I said and climbed up on the stand.
He hoisted his heavy body on his crutch and hobbled over to begin the work. I wore shoes of an unusual cut. He had shined them many times and I felt he should certainly recognize them.
“Well, it’s another fine day,” he said.
“Sure is.”
I felt brisk strokes of his brush across the toe of my shoe.
“You’re new in town, aren’t you?”
I looked down on the back of his head. Gray hair kinked below the rim of a sea-captain cap of black canvas.
“Yeah - just been here a few days,” I said.
“I thought I hadn’t seen you around the quarter before,” he said pleasantly. “You’ll find New Orleans a nice place.”
“Seems pretty nice. The people are polite.”
“Oh … sure. If a man just goes on about his business and doesn’t pay any attention to them, they won’t bother you. I don’t mean bowing or scraping - just, you know, show you got some dignity.” He raised his glance to my face and smiled wisely.
“I see what you mean,” I said.
He had almost finished shining the shoes before I asked, “Is there something familiar about these shoes?”
“Yeah - I been shining some for a white man - ”
“A fellow named Griffin?”
“Yeah.” He straightened up. “Do you know him?”
“I am him.”
He stared dumfounded. I reminded him of various subjects we had discussed on former visits. Finally convinced, he slapped my leg with glee and lowered his head. His shoulders shook with laughter.
“Well, I’m truly a son-of-a-bitch … how did you ever.”
I explained briefly. His heavy face shone with delight at what I had done and delight that I should confide it to him. He promised perfect discretion and enthusiastically began coaching me; but in a guarded voice, glancing always about to make sure no one could overhear.
I asked him if I could stay and help him shine shoes for a few days. He said the stand really belonged to his partner, who was out trying to locate some peanuts to sell to the winos of the quarter. We’d have to ask him but he was sure it would be all right. “But you’re way too well dressed for a shine boy.”
We sat on boxes beside the stand. I asked him to check me carefully and tell me anything I did wrong.
“You just watch me and listen how I talk. You’ll catch on. Say,” he said excitedly, “you got to do something about those hands.”
Sunlight fell on them, causing the hairs to glint against black skin.
“Oh Lord,” I groaned. “What’ll I do?”
“You got to shave them,” he said, holding up his large fist to show his own hand had no hairs. “You got a razor?”
“Yes.”
“Hurry up, now, before somebody sees you.” He became agitated and protective. “Down that alleyway there - clear to the end. You’ll find a rest room. You can shave there right quick.”
I grabbed my bag as he watched in agony to see that the way was clear. The shoe stand was in skid row - a street of ancient buildings with cheap rooming houses and bars.
I hurried to the alley and walked down it into the gloom of a cluttered courtyard. A few Negroes, who could not enter the white bar, were served from the back. They stood around or sat at wooden tables drinking. I saw a sign that read:
and was almost at the door when several voices shouted.
“Hey! You can’t go in there. Hey!”
I turned back toward them, astonished that even among skid row derelict joints they had “separate facilities.”
“Where do I go?” I asked.
“Clean on back there to the back,” a large drunk Negro said, pointing with a wild swinging gesture that almost made him lose his balance.
I went another fifty feet down the alley and stepped into the wooden structure. It was oddly clean. I latched the door with a hook that scarcely held, smeared shaving cream on the backs of my hands and shaved without water.
Sterling nodded approval when I returned. He relaxed and smiled, the way one would after averting a terrible danger. His entire attitude of connivance was superbly exaggerated.
“Now there’s not a hitch to you, my friend,” he said. “Nobody’d ever guess.”
An odd thing happened. Within a short time he lapsed into familiarity, forgetting I was once white. He began to use the “we” form and to discuss “our situation.” The illusion of my “Negroness” took over so completely that I fell into the same pattern of talking and thinking. It was my first intimate glimpse. We were Negroes and our concern was the white man and how to get along with him; how to hold our own and raise ourselves in his esteem without for one moment letting him think he had any God-given rights that we did not also have.
A fine-looking middle-aged Negro woman, dressed in a white uniform, stepped out into the sidewalk a few doors away and stared at me.
Sterling nudged my ribs. “You got that widow woman interested,” he laughed. “You just watch. She’ll find some reason to come down here before long.”
I asked him who she was.
She works there in the bar - nice lady, too. She ain’t going to rest till she finds out who you are.”
I began to get thirsty and asked Sterling where I could find a drink.
“You’ve got to plan ahead now,” he said. “You can’t do like you used to when you were a white man. You can’t just walk in anyplace and ask for a drink or use the rest room. There’s a Negro café over in the French Market about two blocks up. They got a fountain in there where you can drink. The nearest toilet’s the one you just came from. But here - I got water.”
He reached behind the shine stand and brought out a gallon lard can with wires looped through holes in each side to make a handle. A flake of ash floated on the water’s surface. I up-ended the bucket and drank.
“Well, well, we’re going to have company,” Sterling said. “That nice widow woman’s coming this way.”
I glanced down the street. Past the metal upright shoe racks I saw her walk gracefully toward us. She was carefully looking across the street.
She ignored me and asked Sterling if he had any peanuts to sell.
“No, dear heart. Joe’s out looking for some now. They’re hard to find this time of year.” He spoke unctuously, as though he had no idea why she really came down; but all three of us knew he knew and that we knew he knew. But the game had to be played.
Then she turned and saw me, apparently for the first time. She looked startled, then delighted. “Why how do you do?” she said with a magnificent smile that illuminated not only her face but the entire quarter.
I bowed and returned the smile, spontaneously, because the radiance of her expression took me by surprise. “Why, just fine. How do you do?”
“Fine,” she bowed. “Nice to see you around.”
I bowed again, confused. “I thank you, daughter.”
After an awkward, grin-filled pause, she turned to walk away. “Well, I’ll be seeing you,” she sang out over her shoulder.
I looked dumbly at Sterling. He lifted his cap and scratched into the gray hairs of his head, his eyes wise and wide with amusement.
“Did you get that, eh?” he asked. “She liked you. You’re in a fix now.” He burst out laughing. “You hadn’t counted on something like that, eh?”
“I sure hadn’t,” I said.
“She ain’t no slut,” he said. “She’s a widow looking for a mate, and you’re well dressed. She ain’t going to pass up a chance like that.”
“Oh Lord - this complicates things,” I groaned. “Tell her I’m already married, will you?”
“Well, now, I don’t know,” he smiled. “That might just spoil the fun. I think I’ll just tell her you’re a widow man, a preacher visiting here in New Orleans. I feel like she’s the kind that would love to be a preacher’s wife.”
“Look - you know I can’t fiddle around with things like that. It’ll be no fun for her when this project gets known and she finds out I’m a white man.”
Customers came - whites, Negroes and Latin Americans. Well-dressed tourists mingled with the derelicts of the quarter. When we shined their shoes we talked. The whites, especially the tourists, had no reticence before us, and no shame since we were Negroes. Some wanted to know where they could find girls, wanted us to get Negro girls for them. We learned to spot these from the moment they sat down, for they were immediately friendly and treated us with the warmth and courtesy of equals. I mentioned this to Sterling.
“Yeah, when they want to sin, they’re very democratic,” he said.
Though not all, by any means, were so open about their purposes, all of them showed us how they felt about the Negro, the idea that we were people of such low morality that nothing could offend us. These men, young and old, however, were less offensive than the ones who treated us like machines, as though we had no human existence whatsoever. When they paid me, they looked as though I were a stone or a post. They looked and saw nothing.
Sterling’s partner, Joe, returned from his peanut hunt around two. We explained my presence and he welcomed me. Slender, middle-aged, though he looked young, Joe impressed me as a sharp but easygoing man. He lamented the lack of peanuts. Sterling told him many drunks had stopped by wanting to buy some and that they could have made a pocketful of change had they been able to supply them.
Joe began to cook our lunch on the sidewalk. He put paper and kindling from an orange crate into a gallon can and set it afire. When the flames had reduced to coals, he placed a bent coat hanger over the top as a grill and set a pan on to heat. He squatted and stirred with a spoon. I learned it was a mixture of corn, turnips, rice, seasoned with thyme, bay leaf and green peppers. Joe had cooked it at home the night before and brought it in a milk carton. When it was heated through, Joe served Sterling and me portions in cut-down milk cartons. He ate directly from the pan. It was good, despite the odor of rot that smoked up from it.
Joe leaned over to me and pointed with his spoon to a man across the street. “Watch that wino,” he said. “He’ll sit right there - he wants some of this food, but he won’t come over till I tell him to.”
Sitting on the curb across the street, the man stared feverishly at us, tensed, ready to come for the food when called. His eyes burned in his black face and his fists were doubled hard, as though he had to control himself from rushing over and grabbing the food.
We ate slowly while the man stared. It was a strange game. We, who were reduced to eating on the sidewalk, were suddenly elevated in status by this man’s misery. We were the aristocrats and he the beggar. It flattered us. We were superbly above him and the comedy gave us a delusion of high self-respect. In a while, the magnanimity of the rich would complete the picture. We would feed our scraps to the poor.
Our servings were ample. When we had eaten our fill, we scraped the remains from our cartons onto Joe’s plate.
The man trembled with expectation as Joe leisurely smoothed the food with the back of his spoon. Then, without looking at the wretch, Joe held out the pan. In a strangely kind tone of voice he said: “Okay, dog ass, come get some food.”
The man bolted across the street and grabbed the pan.
“If there’d been a car coming, he’d have been killed,” Sterling remarked.
“Now, listen, winehead - I want that pan back clean, you hear?” Joe said.
The beggar’s gaze riveted on the food, his face crumpled as though he were about to weep and he hurried into the alley without answering.
“He comes here every day … it’s the same thing,” Sterling said. “I guess he’d starve if it weren’t for Joe.”
Business died. We sat on boxes in the sunlight with our backs against the wall and watched traffic come and go in the French Market. I stared into the broken windows of a deserted stone building across the street. Sterling snored loudly and then awoke with a strangled snort.
The beggar returned the pan, still wet from being washed. He handed it to Joe.
“Okay, winehead,” Joe said.
Without speaking, the man drifted away.
I listened to the easy and usually obscene give-and-take between Joe and the men of the quarter who passed the sidewalk.
“Hey, dog nuts, what’s your hurry?”
“I got business, man.”
“What business you got? Hey - where can I get some peanuts.”
“They ain’t a peanut in this whole town. I been all over.”
“Me, too,” Joe said.
Odors of sweat, tobacco, coffee and damp stone surrounded us, overladen always by the smell of fish and nearby salt water.
I felt the wall warm against my back, making me drowsy. My first afternoon as a Negro was one of dragging hours and a certain contentment.
After a while Joe took a pocket Bible from the green serge army shirt he wore and began reading the Psalms to himself. His eyes drooped but he formed the words silently with his lips. From force of long habit, whenever anyone walked by, he said, “Shine?” without raising his head from the page.
Two pigeons flew down to the sidewalk at our feet. Joe tossed them some bread scraps. The sun sparked iridescence from their purple necks as they pecked. They provided us deep pleasure, an anodyne to the squalor and clutter of the street.
Joe got stiffly up, dusted his seat and ambled across to the fish market. When he returned, he had a sack of catfish heads and some green bananas. He told me the catfish heads were free and that tomorrow we would have them for lunch - catfish-head stew over spaghetti.
It sounds good,” I said, looking into the sack at dozens of glittering eyes.
We wrapped the green bananas he had retrieved from the market waste-bins in newspapers. “They’ll be ripe enough to eat in about two or three days,” he said.
By four o’clock the street was in shadow. Sunlight rimmed the buildings above us and the air chilled rapidly. I decided to go find a room for the night. Sterling suggested I go to the Negro YMCA on Dryades, some distance across town. “You better drink some water before you go,” he said. “You might not find any before you get to Dryades.” I up-ended the bucket and saw brass-colored circles at the bottom through the clear water.
A bluish haze hung over the narrow streets of the French Quarter. The strong odor of roasting coffee overwhelmed all others. The aroma and the scene reminded me of my school days in France. This was like the old quarter of Tours, where they roasted coffee at the spice shops each afternoon.
I emerged on Canal Street to a more modern scene, a crowded scene. I deliberately stopped many white men to ask the direction to Dryades in order to get their reaction. Invariably they were courteous and helpful.
On Dryades, the whites thinned and I saw more and more Negroes in the street. A church came into view on my right, its tower rising up past a bridge heavy with traffic. A sign told me it was St. John the Baptist Catholic Church, one of the oldest in New Orleans. I mounted the steps and pulled open one of the heavy doors. Street noises were muffled with its closing. A faint fragrance of incense drifted to me in the deep silence. Soft, warm light filtered through magnificent stained-glass windows in the church proper. Far to the front I saw the dim figure of a Negro woman making the Stations of the Cross. A few men knelt here and there in the vast structure. Votive candles burned feebly in blue and red clusters before statues of St. Joseph and the Virgin Mary. I rested in a pew, leaning forward, my forehead against the bench in front, my hands in my lap. At home my wife and children were probably having their evening baths, safe against the dusk and the cold. I thought of the house, so full of light and talk, and wondered what they would have for supper. Perhaps even now soup simmered on the kitchen stove. Opening my eyes, I looked down at my hands and saw each dark pore, each black wrinkle in the hairless flesh. How white by contrast the image came to me of my wife and children. Their faces, their flesh shimmered with whiteness and they seemed so much a part of another life, so separated from me now that I felt consumed with loneliness. Rosary beads rattled against one of the pews, loud in the stillness. Perceptibly the light dimmed through the windows and the candles grew brighter.
Dreading the thought of spending another night in some cheap hotel if I could not get a room at the Y, I considered hiding in the church and sleeping there in one of the pews. The idea appealed to me so strongly I had to cast it off by force. I got to my feet and walked out into the dusk shot with car lights rushing in each direction.
The YMCA was filled to capacity, but the young man behind the desk suggested they had a list of nice homes where a man could rent a room. He kindly offered to telephone some of these. While waiting, I had a cup of coffee in the YMCA Coffee Shop, an attractive, modern place run by an elderly man who spoke with great elegance and courtesy. The young man at the desk came and told me he had arranged for a room in a private home next door to the Y. He assured me it was nice there, and that the widow who owned it was trustworthy in every way.
I carried my bags next door and met Mrs. Davis, a middle-aged woman of great kindness. She led me upstairs to a back room that was spotlessly clean and comfortably furnished. We arranged for a brighter lamp so I could work. She told me she had only one other roomer, a quiet gentleman who worked nights and whom I should probably never see. The kitchen was next to my room, and beyond that was the bathroom. I paid the three-dollar charge in advance, unpacked and returned to the YMCA Coffee Shop, which turned out to be the meeting place of the city’s important men. There I met a much more educated and affluent class, older men who brought me into the conversation. We sat around a U-shaped counter drinking coffee. The talk was focused exclusively on “the problem” and the forthcoming elections. The café proprietor introduced me to the Reverend A.L. Davis and one of his colleagues, Mr. Gayle, a civic leader and bookstore-owner, and a number of others.
My feeling of disorientation diminished for a time.
When asked what I did, I told them I was a writer, touring the South to make a study of conditions.
“Well, what do you think?” the Reverend Mr. Davis asked.
“I’ve only begun,” I said. “But so far it’s much better than I expected to find. I’ve been shown many courtesies by the whites.”
“Oh, we’ve made strides,” he said. “But we’ve got to do a lot better. Then, too, New Orleans is more enlightened than anyplace else in the state - or in the South.”
“Why is that, I wonder?” I asked.
“Well, it’s far more cosmopolitan, for one thing. And it’s got a strong Catholic population,” he said. “A white man can show you courtesies without fearing some neighbor will call him a ‘nigger-lover’ like they do in other places.”
“What do you see as our biggest problem, Mr. Griffin?” Mr. Gayle asked.
“Lack of unity.”
“That’s it,” said the elderly man who ran the café. “Until we as a race can learn to rise together, we’ll never get anywhere. That’s our trouble. We work against one another instead of together. Now you take dark Negroes like you, Mr. Griffin, and me,” he went on. “We’re old Uncle Toms to our people, no matter how much education and morals we’ve got. No, you have to be almost a mulatto, have your hair conked and all slicked out and look like a Valentino. Then the Negro will look up to you. You’ve got class. Isn’t that a pitiful hero-type?”
“And the white man knows that,” Mr. Davis said.
“Yes,” the café-owner continued. “He utilizes this knowledge to flatter some of us, tell us we’re above our people, not like most Negroes. We’re so stupid we fall for it and work against our own. Why, if we’d work just half as hard to boost our race as we do to please whites whose attentions flatter us, we’d really get somewhere.”
A handsome, mature man entered and was introduced as J. P. Guillory, an insurance agent. When the others had gone and the café was closing, Mr. Guillory told me he came often to the Y to play chess. He asked if I would join him in a game, but I had work to do.
“Your name is somehow familiar, Mr. Griffin,” he said. “I’m an avid reader. I must have read something by you. What are the names of some of your books?”
I named them. His face blanked with astonishment.
“Why, I just started reading that. My lawyer friend lent it to me,” he said. He gazed at me and I had no doubt he thought I was either a tremendous liar for claiming authorship of a white man’s book or that I was confessing something to him.
“I promise you I wrote it,” I said. “I can’t tell you more, but read the book, and the piece in last September’s Reader’s Digest, and you’ll know who I really am.”
I returned to my room and wrote in my journal. My landlady lit the fire and brought a pitcher of drinking water for my night stand. As I looked up to thank her, I saw the image in the large mirror of the wardrobe. Light gleamed from the elderly Negro’s head as he looked up to talk to the Negro woman. The sense of shock returned; it was as though I were invisible in the room, observing a scene in which I had no part.
I dozed and the phone awakened me. I listened to it ring again and again but then realized that it could not be for me. No one in the world knew where I was. Finally someone answered it.
I heard noise and laughter. I got up in the darkness and walked to the window that looked down into the windows of the Y gym. Two Negro teams were playing baseball and a crowd of spectators alternately booed and cheered their favorites. I sat at the window and watched them until hunger began to pester me.
The kitchen clock read 7:30 when I passed through to go out to eat. I walked over to South Rampart in search of a café. As I turned the corner, I noticed two large white boys sprawled on the front steps of a house across the wide boulevard. One of them, a heavyset, muscular fellow in khaki pants and a white sweatshirt, whistled at me. I ignored him and continued walking. From the corner of my eye, I saw him get slowly to his feet and angle across under the streetlight to my side of the street.
“Hey, Baldy,” he called softly.
I walked faster and looked straight ahead.
“Hey, Mr. No-Hair,” he called. I realized he was following about seventy-five feet behind me. He spoke casually, almost pleasantly, his voice clear in the deserted street.
“I’m going to get you, Mr. No-Hair. I’m after you. There ain’t no place you go I won’t get you. If it takes all night, I’ll get you - so count on it.”
A deep terror took me. I walked faster, controlling my desire to break into a run. He was young, strong. If I made it a chase, he would easily overtake me.
His voice drifted to me again, from about the same distance, soft and merciless. “Ain’t no way you can get away from me, Mr. Shithead. You might as well stop right there.”
I did not answer, did not turn. He stalked me like a cat.
Cars passed occasionally. I prayed that a police car might choose this street. I noted that when my footsteps slowed, his slowed; when mine accelerated, his matched them. I looked for an open door, a light. The stores were closed. The sidewalk, with grass at each seam, stretched ahead from streetlamp to streetlamp.
Then, to my immense relief, I saw an elderly couple waiting on the corner for a bus. I approached and they stiffened with caution. The quarter was not safe at night.
I glanced back to see the boy halted at mid-block, leaning against the wall.
“I’m in trouble,” I said to the couple.
They ignored me.
“Please,” I said. “Someone’s chasing me. I don’t know what he wants, but he says he’ll get me. Is there anyplace around here where I can call the police?”
The man looked around. “Who’s chasing you, mister?” he asked irritably.
“That boy back there …” I turned and pointed to the empty street. The boy had disappeared.
The man grunted disapprovingly, as though he thought I were drunk.
I waited for a moment, thinking I would catch the bus. Then, certain it had been only a prank, I started down the side street toward well-lighted Dryades, where I knew I would be safe.
I had gone half a block when I heard his voice again.
“Hey, Shithead,” he said quietly.
I tasted fear and despair like salt in my mouth.
“You can stop right along about there anyplace, dad.”
We walked on in silence, his footsteps again matching mine.
“Stop right along there. Ain’t no nice people on this street for you to hide behind, Baldy.”
I searched for some solution and could find none. Something deadly, nightmarish about the pursuit terrified me more than the pursuit itself. I wondered about my family. What if he should knock me in the head - or worse; he sounded diabolic. For an instant I imagined the expression of some police officer’s face as he looked at my black body and read my identification papers:
JOHN HOWARD GRIFFIN MANSFIELD, TEXAS
Sex: Male
Height: 6’1 1/2”
Weight: 196
Hair: Brown
Race: White
Would he think I had merely stolen the papers from some white man?
“What do you keep walking for when I told you to stop, dad?”
I knew I should never get away from the bully unless I bluffed. I had long ago been trained in judo. Perhaps if I were lucky enough to get in the first blow, I might have a chance. I saw an alleyway in the dim light and summoned a deep growl.
“You come on, boy,” I said without looking back.
“You follow me, boy. I’m heading into that alley down there.”
We walked on.
“That’s right, boy,” I said. “Now you’re doing just like I want you to.”
I approached the alley entrance. “I’m going in, boy. You follow me.”
“I don’t dig you, daddy.”
“You follow me boy, ‘cause I’m just aching to feed you a fistful of brass knucks right in that big mouth of yours.” I fairly shouted the last words.
I stepped into the alley and pressed against the wall, sick with fright. The stench of garbage and urine surrounded me. High above the buildings’ black silhouette stars shone in a clear sky. I listened for his footsteps, ready to bolt if he accepted the challenge.
“Blessed St. Jude,” I heard myself whisper, “send the bastard away,” and I wondered from what source within me the prayer had spontaneously sprung.
After what seemed a long time, I stuck my head around the alley corner and looked back along the street. It stretched empty to the streetlamp at the end.
I hurried to Dryades and along it to the well-lighted steps of the Catholic church I had visited in the afternoon. Sitting on the bottom step, I rested my head on my crossed arms and waited for my nerves to settle to calm. A great bell from the tower slowly rolled eight o’clock. I listened as the metallic clangor rolled away over the rooftops of the quarter.
The word “nigger” picked up the bell’s resonances and repeated itself again and again in my brain.
Hey, nigger, you can’t go in there.
Hey, nigger, you can’t drink here.
We don’t serve niggers.
And then the boy’s words: Mr. No-Hair, Baldy, Shit-head. (Would it have happened if I were white?)
And then the doctor’s words as I left his office yesterday: Now you go into oblivion.
Seated on the church steps tonight, I wondered if he could have known how truly he spoke, how total the feeling of oblivion was.
A police car cruised past, slowed. The plaster-white face of an officers peered toward me. We stared at one another as the car took a right turn and disappeared behind the decrepit rectory of the church. I felt certain the police would circle the block and check on me. The cement was suddenly hard to my seat. I rose and hurried toward a little Negro café in the next block.
As I stepped through the door, the Negro woman sang out: “All we got left’s beans and rice, honey.”
“That’s fine. Bring me a big plate,” I said, sinking into a chair.
“How about some beer?”
“No … you got any milk?”
“Don’t you like beer, honey?”
“I like it, but I’ve got diabetes.”
“Oh … Say, I’ve got a couple of pig tails left. You want me to put them in with the beans?”
“Please.”
She carried the platter to my table and fetched my milk. Though Negroes apparently live on beans and rice in this area, it is no handicap. They are delicious and nourishing. I tried to eat the pig tails, but like chicken necks, they are mostly bone and little meat.
Later, in my room, I undressed for bed. The game still went noisily at the Y next door. Though the large house was still, I heard the TV from Mrs. Davis’s room somewhere on the other side.
The whites seemed far away, out there in their parts of the city. The distance between them and me was far more than the miles that physically separated us. It was an area of unknowing. I wondered if it could really be bridged.