The door closed behind us. We dropped down the stairs two at a time. Now we seemed to be fleeing from the voices and the odors. We hit the street. Caleb put his hand on my neck, and hurried us down the long block. He did not say anything, and I did not say anything. One of the Holy Roller churches was making even more noise than usual, and Caleb and I danced past it, laughing.

“What movie you want to see?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“We got enough money to go downtown?”

“I don’t know. I got four, how much you got?”

“The old man let me have five.”

“You want to go downtown?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

We looked at each other. “Oh, hell,” Caleb said, “Let’s go on downtown.”

“Okay. Let’s go.”

“You want to take the bus or the subway?”

“Let’s take the bus.”

We stood on the avenue and waited for the bus. We were very shy with each other, suddenly; we were very happy with each other, too. Because we were shy, I watched the people passing, listened to the music coming from a bar behind us, watched the church members going home from church. We, as a family, had never gone to church, for our father could not bear the sight of people on their knees. But I thought, suddenly, for the first time and for no reason, that he must surely have gone to church in the islands, when he was young. I turned to ask Caleb about this, but I was stunned and silenced by his face. The sun was yellow, it was in his eyes, causing him to squint; it fell over his forehead and curled in his hair; his lips stretched upward in a scowl. He was looking at me. He looked worried and thoughtful and happy: no one had ever before looked at me with such a concentrated love. It stunned me, as I say, for he made no effort to hide it. It made me very proud, and it frightened me. The bus came as we stared at one another, and Caleb pushed me on the bus, before him. He got change, and dropped the coins in the box. We sat down. He made me sit next to the window.

“Well, tomorrow,” he said, “I’ll be a respectable citizen again.” He laughed. “I reckon we going to pass through the garment center, ain’t we, on our way down?”

“I could show you the block where Daddy works—but it’s further downtown.”

“I’m not sure I really want to see it.” He laughed again, and the bus rolled down the avenue and we were silent for awhile.

“Leo,” he said, “what you reckon you want to be? to do? You know?”

I watched the streets and the houses roll by, and I watched the people in the streets. I said, “You’ll think I’m crazy if I tell you the truth.”

“Well, as I already know you’re crazy,” he said, “you might as well tell me the truth.”

“I’m going to be an actor,” I said.

I did not look at him, but I felt him watching me. I watched the streets.

“An actor?”

“Yes.”

“In the movies?”

“On the stage,” I said. I looked at him and I looked away. “You’ll see.”

“How you going to go about it, Leo?”

“I don’t know yet. But I’ll find out. I’ll do it.”

“You told Mama and Daddy?”

“No.” Then, “I haven’t told nobody except you.”

“Well,” he said, after a moment, “you know the odds, little brother? I mean, you know the odds are against you?”

“Hell, yes,” I said, “I know the odds are against me. But the odds wouldn’t be any less against me if—if I worked for the garment center!”

He said nothing. I wished to take back my last words, but I did not know how. “That’s true,” he said at last, mildly, and then, in silence, we watched the streets.

“Look, Caleb,” I said, “I know I can’t be a janitor. You know? I just know it. I know I can’t work in—in—the kind of jobs they give us. Maybe I can’t be an actor, either. But I have to try it. I know I have to try it.”

“Don’t get upset,” said Caleb. “You didn’t hear me say you couldn’t do it, did you?”

“No, But I bet that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Well, then,” said Caleb, “you’re wrong. That’s not what I was thinking at all. I was thinking how proud I am of you. Don’t look like that. It’s the truth I’m telling you.”

“Honest?”

He laughed. “Honest.” He raised both hands. “I swear. All right?”

I said, “All right.”

Caleb laughed again. “Ah, little Leo.” He sobered. “But Mama and Daddy ain’t going to like this notion a bit.”

“I’m not going to tell them. You think I’m crazy?”

Now, he was entirely sober and still. “No,” he said. “No. You’re not the one who’s crazy.” Then, “Daddy used to always say, ‘I wonder what’s the matter with our people.’ I’ve got to wondering, too. But—baby!—they sure do have us in a mighty tight place.”

“They don’t want us to do nothing because we might do it better than them,” I said.

“Well, they do,” said Caleb, “tend to try to beat the shit out of you before you can get around to doing anything. But we going to have to fox them, little brother.” He put his hand on my neck; he looked out of the window, with tightened lips and darkened eyes. “Yeah. We going to have to fox them.”

The bus rolled on, turned west at 116th Street, rolled alongside Morningside Park for awhile, turned again on 110th Street, and started rolling out of Harlem. This was (in those days) a kind of transition neighborhood; white boys and black boys were in the streets, and white girls and black girls, some carrying books; and we whirled past black and white figures sitting on the benches outside of Central Park, or walking up and down the pathetic green. Now, the buildings began to be higher and cleaner, canopies and doormen appeared, and black and white messengers, on bicycles. More and more white people got on the bus, in furs and perfumes and hats, carrying newspapers and expensive-looking packages. Instinctively, Caleb and I sat closer together. I kept my eyes on the street, in order not to look at the people on the bus. I wondered how we were ever going to fox them if we couldn’t even bear to look at them. I looked up, into the eyes of a red-faced, black-haired, corpulent man, who had, briefly and idly, looked up from his newspaper. His hair was very well combed, his face was very well shaven, his nails were manicured, his shoes gleamed, his suit and his topcoat were expensive, he was wearing cufflinks, and I could almost smell his toilet water. I don’t know what was in my eyes—base envy, I think, base hatred, and great wonder—but whatever it was held his wandering, not altogether hostile nor altogether amused attention for a second or so. He glanced at my brother. Then he returned to his newspaper. Then, all of my ambitions seemed flat and ridiculous. How could we fox them if we could neither bear to look at them, nor bear it when they looked at us? And who were they, anyway? which was the really terrible, the boomeranging question. And one always felt: maybe they’re right. Maybe you are nothing but a nigger, and the life you lead, or the life they make you lead, is the only life you deserve. They say that God said so—and if God said so, then you mean about as much to God as you do to this red-faced, black-haired, fat white man. Fuck God. Fuck you, too, mister. But there he sat, just the same, impervious, gleaming and redolent with safety, rustling, as it were, the Scriptures, in which I appeared only as the object lesson.

We got off the bus near Madison Square Garden. I think the circus was in town, for the Garden was surrounded by policemen and the streets were full of dazzled men and women and children. The streets were full of a noise like gaiety. But one realized that it could not be gaiety when one looked at the thin lips and the flashing spectacles, the crisply toasted, curled hair of the ladies; when one listened to the brutal, denigrating, lewd voices of the men, and watched their stretched lips and bewildered eyes; when one listened to the despairing, cunning, tyrannical wail of the children, vaguely and vocally dissatisfied by the fair; and when one watched the policemen who moved through the crowd, on foot or on horseback, as though the crowd were cattle. There were no movies on this avenue, and so we turned off it, walking east, moving now with, now against, the current, sometimes separated by it, often stopped, sometimes, in searching for each other, spun around. People looked into storewindows, and so did we, walked in and out of stores, but we didn’t bother, and they were visible behind the plate-glass windows of cafeterias, sitting, in my memory, bolt upright, or wandering about with trays. The crowd, no doubt, would have described itself as friendly; a fair observation would have been that they were in a holiday mood. But their holidays were, emphatically, not my holidays—I had too often been the occasion of their fearful celebrations; and I did not feel any friendliness in the crowd, only a dry, rattling hysteria, and a mortal danger. I kept my hands in my pockets (and so did Caleb) so I could not be accused of molesting any of the women who jostled past, and kept my eyes carefully expressionless so I could not be accused of lusting after the women, or desiring the death of the men. When my countrymen were on holiday, their exuberance took strange forms. And I was aware—for the first time, though not for the last—that I was with Caleb, whose danger, since he was so much more visible, was greater than mine. It was not here and not now and not among these people, that he could protect me by his size. On the contrary, our roles were reversed, and here, now, among these people, it was my size and my presumed innocence which might operate as protection for him. He was not, walking beside me, a burly black man prowling the streets but an attentive older brother taking his little brother sightseeing through the great, cultured and so enormously to be envied metropolis of New York. My presence, potentially, at least, proved his innocence and goodwill and also bore witness to the charity and splendor of the people to whom I owed so much and from whom I had so much to learn. We came to Broadway, and the great marquees. “You going to have your name up there in lights, little Leo?” Caleb asked, with a smile.

“Yes,” I said. “I will. You wait and see.”

“Little Leo,” said Caleb, “on the great white way.”

“It won’t be so white,” I said, “when I get through with it.”

Caleb threw back his head and laughed. People turned to look at us: but I made my eyes very big as I looked up at Caleb, and carefully not at them, and they saw what I had wanted them to see. Some of them smiled, too, happy that we were enjoying the fair. “All right, little brother. What movie you want us to see? And I will bow to your judgment, man, because I see you are becoming an expert.”

Well, in fact, I realized, as I scanned the procession of marquees, there wasn’t anything playing that I was really dying to see. I had outgrown my taste for some movies without having acquired any real taste for others. But, of course, I did not know how to say this. I had begun to be interested in foreign movies, mostly Russian and French, but I didn’t think that Caleb would especially like seeing a foreign movie. So I said, “Well, let’s look. If you see something you like before I see something I like, why, we’ll go and see that; and if I see something I like before you see something you like, why, we’ll go and see that. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said, amused—seeming, also, to be impressed by my sense of fair play.

And so we wandered through the holiday crowds, stopping now beneath this marquee and now that, examining the merchandise so carefully that we might have been expecting to buy it and take it home and live with it for the rest of our lives and hand it down to our children. We walked carefully down one side of the avenue, stopping and choosing, rather enjoying ourselves now, all the way to 42nd Street; and then up the other side of the avenue, slowly, although it was getting late; but it didn’t much matter what time we got home tonight as long as we got home together, and we weren’t planning to separate. We forgot about the other people. We began to talk to each other as we hadn’t talked since Caleb had come home—as we had never talked before, in fact, for it was only now that Caleb could talk to me without remembering that he was talking to a child. I was determined to make him know that I was no longer a child. I didn’t understand everything he was saying, and yet, in another way, I did. I was concentrating on not being a disappointment to him: I wanted him to know that he could lean on me.

Because Caleb liked Ann Sheridan, we ended up in King’s Row. I didn’t like Ann Sheridan, I thought she looked like a dumpling, and I didn’t like Robert Cummings, who looked like two or three, and I couldn’t stand Ronald Reagan, who looked like a pitchfork and had teeth like a ferret; but I did like Charles Coburn and Claude Rains and Judith Anderson, and I especially liked Betty Field because she had a niggerish mouth, a mouth like mine. So, Caleb paid for the tickets, and we went on in. We entered, first, into a kind of cathedral—an impression of tapestries, of banging gold, a vaulted height, a slinging, descending, mightily carpeted floor, great doors before us, Roman couches on either side, on one of which sat a lone young woman, wearing a green cloth hat and holding a thin umbrella, and smoking a cigarette. A bored male attendant, two bored usherettes, who looked sharply at Caleb and me.

“I’m going to go to the bathroom,” Caleb said, and vanished behind the door marked MEN.

I waited. I looked at the photographs of the movie stars on the walls. They were white and cheerful and dramatic. I was already arrogant enough to feel that they couldn’t, mainly, act their way out of a sieve, but lights and makeup and an innocence as brutal as it was despairing did marvelous things for these sons and daughters of the one and only God, and very nearly reconciled me to Ronald Reagan’s teeth. Caleb came back. We left the cathedral and entered the cave.

Dark, dark indeed, sloping, hushed. We were in the balcony, so that Caleb could smoke, and from other worshipers here and there a taper glowed. The movie had been running for some time, it may indeed have been a revival that we saw, I don’t remember, and so, although it was a Saturday night, the house was far from full. Caleb and I sat down somewhere in the middle of the balcony, at an angle as steeply tilted as that of a bucking horse or a dying boat, and Caleb lit a cigarette. We had entered during a newsreel.

There was trouble in the world. We saw Roosevelt, we saw Churchill, we saw Stalin: “I hope they all kill each other,” Caleb said. We saw our great Marines in the Pacific, destroying the yellow-bellied Japs. And we saw Old Glory. “Well,” said Caleb, “I’ll be damned.” Some people in the audience applauded. Caleb lit another cigarette. Then the cartoon came on. Woody Woodpecker or Mickey Mouse or Little Red Riding Hood or Bugs Bunny or some fucking body got beaten with hammers, strangled with chains, crushed under a tractor, thrown over a cliff, gored by a cornice, and disemboweled, it appeared, by a monstrous, malevolent thorn; and we, along with all the other worshipers, cracked up with laughter. Then the lights came on. We sat, silently, watching the people.

Strange people, sitting, mainly, all alone. There were one or two couples, very, very young; the boy’s hair still bright from the water, the girl’s hair still bright from the heat; they sat very close together, and as to popcorn, chewing gum, and candy, the boys were attentive indeed, climbing the tilted steps from time to time to call on the usherettes. I was between fourteen and fifteen then, and the boys and girls could not have been much older. But they impressed me as being children, children forever, children not as a biological fact, but as a perpetual condition. I am sure that I was a very disagreeable boy in those days, for I really despised them for their blank, pimpled faces and their bright, haunted eyes. It had not occurred to me—partly, no doubt, indeed, because it had not occurred to them—that they had to shit, like I did, and they jerked off sometimes, like I did, and were just as frightened as I. It had not yet occurred to me that the mask of my bravado was very much like theirs, concealed though it was, and most effectively, by the mask of my color, and by the reflexes which this mask occasioned in them and in me. No: I simply despised them because they were not as I was, and because I thought it might have been better for me if I had been like them. The lights went down, and a majestic music was heard. The curtains slowly parted, and the screen was filled with the immense shield saying WB, WARNER BROTHERS PRESENTS. Brothers. I thought of my own brother, and I think I hated the movie before the movie began.

The names of the actors. The music. The makeup man, the light man, the sound man, the decorators, the set designers, James Wong Howe on camera, the composer of the overwhelming music, the director. A town somewhere in the United States.

I am afraid that my memory of this movie is hopelessly distorted by the fact that it cracked Caleb up completely. I very much doubt that a major masterpiece by Charlie Chaplin or W. C. Fields could have caused him to laugh harder. When we finally picked up the story line—so to speak; it was by no means an easy matter—Caleb whispered, “Shit. They acting just like niggers. Only, they ain’t got as much sense about it as we got.” I rather liked Cassandra, who was played by Betty Field, but Caleb thought that she was a living freak, and wondered why no one had ever told her to tie up her hair. When it developed, coyly enough indeed, and with tremendous laments from the mighty music, that her father had been interfering with her, had lain between her thighs, had, in short, been screwing her, thus causing her to become mentally unbalanced—which we both felt, then, was a somewhat curious result—and we watched Robert Cummings’ plum-pudding reactions, Caleb hid his face in his hands, which was thoughtful of him, for we would otherwise have been thrown out of the theater. Of course, he adored Ann Sheridan, winsome Irish colleen, and I found her somewhat more probable than I had ever found her to be before; but when Ronald Reagan lost his legs—“both of them!”—Caleb cracked up again, and tears were streaming down his face by the time Robert Cummings delivered Invictus. “So that’s why,” he gasped, as we walked up the aisle, out of the cave, “they make us come in the back door. I’ll be damned.” And he was off again, halfway across the cathedral floor, before I could catch up with him.

Into the streets again, dark now, with a light rain falling, and the incredible people everywhere.

Much later, that night, Caleb had a dream so awful that he shook and cried and moaned aloud, and I shook him and shook him to wake him up. He fought me and he continued to fight me even after his eyes were open, and he seemed to be awake; and I got frightened because my brother was very strong, and I started, helplessly, to cry. The terror went out of his face then—his face had been blank and brutal with terror; and his eyes cleared, with a great astonishment, and a terrible sorrow. “Oh, don’t cry. Don’t cry, Leo. I didn’t mean to hurt you, man. I swear I didn’t mean to hurt you.” His hands were trying to wipe away my tears. “Hit me. Hit me back. I swear I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“You didn’t hurt me. You scared me.”

He took his hand away. He was silent. “I guess so,” he said. “Sometimes I scare myself.” He lay back on the pillow, looking up at the ceiling. “Oh. I wonder what’s going to happen to me.”

“I won’t let anything happen to you.”

He smiled. “The farm I was on, down yonder. They used to beat me. With whips. With rifle butts. It made them feel good to beat us; I can see their faces now. There would always be two or three of them, big mother-fuckers. The ring-leader had red hair, his name was Martin Howell. Big, dumb Irishman, sometimes he used to make the colored guys beat each other. And he’d stand there, watching, with his lips dropping, his lips wet, laughing, until the poor guy dropped to the ground. And he’d say, That’s just so you all won’t forget that you is niggers and niggers ain’t worth a shit. And he’d make the colored guys say it. He’d say, You ain’t worth shit, are you? And they’d say, No, Mr. Howell, we ain’t worth shit. The first time I heard it, saw it, I vomited. But he made me say it, too. It took awhile, but I said it, too, he made me say it, too. That hurt me, hurt me more than his whip, more than his rifle butt, more than his fists. Oh. That hurt me.”

Silence, and darkness, and Caleb’s breath—they are with me still, they will be with me when I am carried to my grave. And, from the grave, I swear it, my rotting flesh, my useless bones, will yet cry out: I will never forgive this world. Oh, that a day of judgment should come, oh, that it should come, and I could rise from my grave and make my testimony heard! Yes. Everyone who pierced him.

“The first time I saw this red-haired mother-fucker, I was in the field, working. He was on a horse. He come riding up, and stopped, watching me. But I just kept on working. Then he yells out, Hey, Sam! but I just kept on doing what I was doing. He yells out, Don’t you hear me calling you? and then I stopped and put down my fork and I said: My name ain’t Sam.

“He rode in a little closer, then, and looked down at me. I looked up at him. He said, Who the fuck do you think you are? and I said, My name is Caleb Proudhammer, mister, and I’d appreciate it if you’d let me get on with my work. He laughed. He actually laughed, like it was the best joke he’d heard in a long time. He said, Nigger, if my balls was on your chin, where would my prick be? And I didn’t understand him at first, I just looked at him. Then, when I understood it, I don’t know why, I picked up the pitchfork. I didn’t do nothing, I just picked up the fork. But the horse kind of jumped. And this red-haired mother-fucker, he looked surprised, and he looked scared, and he was having a little trouble holding on to his horse. I knew he didn’t want me to see that. I knew it. He knew I knew it. And he rode off across the field, mainly because he didn’t know what to do with me and didn’t know what to do with his horse, and he yelled, All right, Sam! I’ll be seeing you, you hear me? I will be seeing you!

“And, you know, it’s funny, I realized right then and there, while I was watching him ride off, it wasn’t, you know, exactly like what he’d said. I mean, shit, you know. I’m a big boy and I know the score. Shit. You know. If it came down on me like that, well, all right, I’d suck a cock, I know it, shit, if I loved the cat, why the fuck not, and whose business is it? Like, shit. You know. Ain’t nobody’s business. You know, like, man, I’d do anything in the world for you because you’re my brother and because you’re my baby and I love you and I believe you’d do anything in the world for me. I know you would. So, you know, it ain’t that shit that bothered me. No. He made me feel like I was my grandmother in the fields somewhere and this white mother-fucker rides over and decides to throw her down in the fields. Well, shit. You know. I ain’t my grandmother. I’m a man. And a man can do anything he wants to do, but can’t nobody make him do it. I ain’t about to be raped. Shit. But I knew this mother-fucker had it in for me. I knew, like he said, I was going to be seeing him.

“And, baby, believe me, I saw this mother, oh, yes, I did. The week wasn’t out before I saw him. He was going to break my back. I knew it. He was going to make me kneel down. He was going to make me act out his question. I wasn’t going to do it. He knew it. And I knew it. And there we were.”

Caleb’s voice, his breath: darkness and silence.

“They had a place there where they put you when they was displeased. It was a kind of cellar. We was already in jail, you understand, but they had a jail inside the jail. But, at least, you know, if they wasn’t displeased with you, if you could kiss enough ass, or if they just plain didn’t notice you, well, you was in the open air, and, you know, you could talk to your buddies—we was only put there, like they said, for our own good. They was making us useful members of society. But that cellar, baby, I won’t never forget that cellar. You ain’t never smelled nothing like that cellar—phew! baby, I thought I’d never get that stink out of me. Never. I was dreaming about it just now. That’s what I was dreaming about. Me, and Martin Howell, and he had his whip. Oh, Leo. Wow. I didn’t know people could treat each other so. And I don’t want you to think that it was just him. It wasn’t just him. It was all of them, really, and the black guys, too, them that was called the trusties. Shit, baby, they loved whipping ass and the blacker they was, the harder they hit. But, old Martin, he was ring-leader. Everybody was scared of him. I don’t know why. And he had it in for me. And—you know. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I don’t think that I was scared of him, exactly. I believe I could of beat him, had it come to a fair fight. But I was scared. The other guys knew he had it in for me, and they was scared, too, and they moved away from me. And all I’d said to the fire-haired cock-sucker was that my name wasn’t Sam!

“Your brother was a very lonely man, because I knew wasn’t nobody going to help me. Not even if they wanted to. And I thought of you, you know that—my big-eyed little brother? But I was glad you wasn’t there. I was mighty glad you wasn’t there.

“First, he made it so that I got took off my job. I worked in the fields, I piled the hay and took care of the grass and all that shit. I liked it, you know, because, you know, fuck it, there I was, and I knew I couldn’t get out, and although I knew I didn’t have no business there, I mean I knew I should never have been sent there, I hadn’t done nothing to be sent there, but I couldn’t afford to think about that too much and so I thought, well, all right, I’ll make me some muscles. But he got me taken off that and they put me in the kitchen. I didn’t like the kitchen, but he was going with the head cook, a big old white German lady named Mrs. Waldo. I believe her husband was dead, I don’t know. But, anyway—they had me—between them, they had me. They could do anything they wanted to do and couldn’t nobody do nothing about it. Baby. That woman worked me like I was somebody’s mule. Or maybe nobody’s mule. Or her mule, but a mule she knew she couldn’t never sell and so she might as well work him till he dropped. I had to be there at six in the morning and I had to scrub that kitchen and I washed all the dishcloths and hung them out on the line and then I had to chop wood for the fires. Then I washed the dishes and the pots and pans, they kind of threw them at me, you know, and, shit, it was a big farm and I didn’t have but one helper and he didn’t help me because Mrs. Waldo didn’t want him to and she always had him out of the kitchen, doing something else. She had a funny way with her. She used always to talk about my mother. She used to say, I bet your mama’s mighty sad whenever she thinks of you. She’d say, Where’s your father? Your father home? Has he been home lately? You ever seen your father? And, Leo, I just did not know how to handle it. I tried not to say anything, but then she’d get mad and most likely hit me on the head with whatever she happened to have in her hand. And, I tell you the truth, I was scared to death of that woman. I was even more scared of her than I was of him because she had me all day. You know. And he’d come into the kitchen, Lord, Lord, Lord, and sit there like a king and she’d feed him and he’d go on about me and my mama and daddy and my big tool which he wanted me to show him, so he could cut it off. Well, you know, Leo, flesh and blood can’t stand but so much. And, one day, I’ll never forget it, it was after lunch and I hadn’t had my lunch yet, there was just them and me in the kitchen and I could hear the boys outside leaving the dining hall, and it was the kind of day that it was today, cold, you know, and it looked a little like rain, and he said something about my mama and my daddy and he come up to me and touched me on the behind—I was at the sink—and when he said whatever he said and touched me, I picked up the big black heavy pot I was washing and I threw the water all over him and I beat him over the head with that pot. As hard as I could. As hard as I could. Oh, we wrestled in that kitchen, baby, I mean we had us a waltz. You ain’t never seen such waltzing. I was trying to kill him. I mean, I knew I was trying to kill him and he knew it, too. And she was screaming. She came at me with a knife and I knocked the knife out of her hand and I knocked her down. Then, they all ganged up on me and some of them held me while he beat me. Then, they threw me in that cellar.

“In that cellar, there wasn’t no window, there was just a door with bars on it and if you sat near the bars, then light came down on you, a little light, in the daytime. In the nighttime, there wasn’t no light at all. But you could hear for awhile. Couldn’t nobody come near you. They shoved the food in through the bars. The food was bread and water. I mean it, man. Stale bread and cold water. You had to shit and piss in a pail. And you had to empty the pail and that was the only time you ever got out of there and then there was two men with you. And, sometimes they made like they was going to spill the pail on you, they had a lot of fun that way and sometimes these mother-fuckers was white, baby, and sometimes they was black. Shit. When they first threw me in there I was in pretty bad shape and what saved me was the rats. I mean it. The rats. I was flat on my back, I guess I was half unconscious, I don’t know, and I was thinking of my home and all and I was hardly breathing. Then, I heard this sound, this rattling sound and I wondered what it was and I don’t know how to explain this but all of a sudden I felt like I was being watched, like there was eyes on me. And I looked toward the bars, but weren’t nobody there. My mouth was caked with blood and I wiped my mouth and I heard the sound again. It was near me, it wasn’t at the bars. Then, I saw their eyes. I was so sick I didn’t know if I could move. But if I didn’t move—oh, man—if I didn’t move and there was a whole lot of them and I knew if I didn’t move—and I screamed and I got to the bars and I heard them scurrying away because, then, they knew I was alive and I hung on the bars all night. I was afraid to lie down again. I’d feel myself dropping off, you know, and I’d hold on the bars and drag myself up again. And they was still there, scurrying here and yonder. And didn’t nobody come near me, nobody, all night long.

“I don’t know how long I was down there, Leo, I swear to God I don’t, I’ll never know. But, one morning, here he come, like I’d known he was going to, Old Martin Howell, red-haired mother-fucker with his whip. He said, Don’t you want to see your friends upstairs? and I said, I got no friends upstairs. He said, Ain’t you tired of bread and water? and I said, I’m getting used to it, thanks. The thing is, I was scared of him and he was scared of me. But I really believe that he was a little more scared of me than I was of him, because I knew, if it really got down to it, I was going to have to kill him. Yes. I really don’t want to be no man’s murderer, but, for me, he wasn’t a man, I don’t know what he was, but I knew he wasn’t never going to get me on my knees. He had his boys and all, though, I knew it, just upstairs.

“He said, Nigger, you remember that question I asked you? He was smiling. I didn’t say nothing. He walked up and down, kind of weighing his whip. He was trying to scare me with that whip. He wanted me to beg him not to beat me. I watched him. I knew what he didn’t want to do was have to call in nobody. He wanted me all to himself. I didn’t give a shit. I was going to get beaten, anyway. So I called him every name I could think of, just to get it started, just to get it over with, and he raised his whip to strike me and I ducked and he raised it again and I grabbed his hand. I battled him to the bars and, you know, I’m pretty strong but I was weakened by being on bread and water for so long and he cracked me across the back of the head with the whip handle and I fell down to my knees. When I fell, he came at me again, but I managed to roll out of his way and when he came back at me I pulled him down, hard, and I got him by the balls and, believe me, I made that mother scream. Oh, yeah, he screamed that morning. I beat him with the handle of his whip and I made his red hair a little bit redder. I heard them coming and I tried to hold them off with my whip but of course they got me and when they got through with me I was lying against a wall. He was standing over me. He said, Nigger, you ain’t worth shit. Ain’t that right? And he kicked me. I could hardly see anything, I could hardly see his eyes. I said, You ain’t worth shit, and he kicked me again. Then, one of the black trusties spit on me and so I said, You right, Mr. Howell. I ain’t worth shit. And they left me. And I was alone down there for a long time. On bread and water.”

His voice stopped: his silence created a great wound in the universe. There was nothing for me to say: nothing. I held him, held what there was to hold. I held him. Because I could love, I realized I could hate. And I realized that I would feed my hatred, feed it every day and every hour. I would keep it healthy, I would make it strong, and I would find a use for it one day. I listened to Caleb’s breathing and I watched him in the slowly growing light of the morning. He picked up a cigarette and lit it and I watched the glow, watched his nose, watched his eyes. Neither did he have anything more to say. We lay there, in silence. I knew that he had to get up soon, to go down to the garment center. He put out his cigarette. I put my arms around him. And so we slept.

Caleb went downtown with our father in the morning, but by noon, he had left the garment center, forever, and he left New York the early morning of the following day. This is one of the encounters with Caleb which is most dim in my memory, one of the moments which inexorably recedes; most dim, because it was to prove so crucial; most dim, because so painful. I was home around midday, I think. I suppose I had been to school, though I have no recollection of having been at school. Our mother was silent, but I knew she had been crying. Caleb was throwing socks in a bag.

“What’s the matter?”

I was standing at the door of our room. I hadn’t asked my mother anything.

“I’m going.”

I sat down on the bed.

“You going? Where?”

“California.”

I didn’t say anything. I watched him throw some shirts into a bag—a little cardboard bag.

“California?”

“Yes.”

He threw some more stuff into the bag.

“Where’s Daddy?”

“Daddy,” he said, “is at work.”

“When are you going?”

“I’m taking a bus out of here in the morning.”

“You want to take me with you?”

“No.”

I sat there. I watched him. I didn’t want to cry, and I wasn’t going to cry. I didn’t cry. He kept on doing what he was doing. I sat on the bed.

“All right,” I said. And I walked out of the room. Then I walked out of the house. I had nothing in my mind. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know where I was going.

There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation: I had never seen it before this day. Everything seemed scrubbed, scoured, older than the oldest bones, and cleaner. Everything lay beneath a high, high, immaculate sky, and was washed as clean as it could be. Everything—and everything was still: the stairs down which I walked, the doors I passed, the garbage, the cats, the old wine bottles, the radiators, the drying scum-bag on the steps, the light in the doorway of the vestibule, the boys in the doorway, the white curtains in the window across the street, the blue sedan which briefly cut off the sight of the curtains, the street, long, long, long, the grocery store, the tailor shop, the candystore, the church which faced us when I reached the end of the block, the red lights, the green lights, the long, loaded buses and the people in the buses, the subway kiosks and the people coming upstairs and downstairs, the policeman’s badge catching the light, his club swinging, his holster glowing, the vegetable stand, with greens, with turnips, potatoes, okra, onions, cabbage, cauliflower, apples, pears, the sign over another church, saying THE YOU PRAY FOR ME CHURCH OF THE AIR, the liquor store and all the bottles in the window, the bar signs, and the women outside the bar, the men standing at the corners, the lampposts, the undertaker parlors, the grain of the sidewalk pavement, the light in the water of the gutter, the polish of the asphalt street, the grating over the sewer’s black and fearful depths, the singing of tires and the crying of brakes, the shape of doorways, the monotony of steps, the order and age of cornices, the height of roofs, the unspeaking sky, the tree, the sparrow, the Public Library, and the plaque there which held the name, CARNEGIE, the stone wall of the park, the people scattered about like bones, the hill, the dying flowers, the height, the sun, all, all, all, were clean as I was not, as I could never be, and all—all—were as remote from me as they would have been had I been in my grave and had drilled a hole through my tombstone to peep out at the world. I cared no more than that. I sat down somewhere in the park.

The stars came out. I watched the stars, and I counted them. I was really surprised to realize that the sky could be so black, that the sky could be so closed. I looked for the moon, but it wasn’t there. The moon. For no reason at all, I suddenly missed the moon; and because I missed the moon so much, I started to cry. But I think that I had never cried this way before. I did not cry in the hope of being comforted. I had no hope. I am not even certain that there was anything at all in my mind—what we call the mind. I cried because I could not help it, exactly like the stars were shining; they couldn’t help it, either. Perhaps, like me, they couldn’t believe that their sentence had been passed, and that now they were to serve it. I am sure that there was nothing in my mind, because, otherwise, my mind would have cracked and I would have had to go mad. I had walked to the very top of the park. Now, I rose, for no particular reason, and started walking back down the hill. It had been daylight when I entered the park, and now it was night; but I did not start walking uptown toward our house, but downtown, away from it. It may be odd, I don’t know, but I didn’t think of what was happening at the house, and I was not afraid to walk through the city, though I had always been afraid before. I did not feel, either, even remotely defiant. I don’t think I even saw the cops: I simply walked.

I walked down Harlem’s Madison Avenue, which in no way resembles the American one. I watched the boys and girls, who, oddly enough, did not challenge me or make any move to menace me, though I walked very slowly and must surely have looked very odd. But, no, they went on with what they were doing and I went my way; and only when I got to the outskirts of Harlem—only when the streets began to be sedate and quiet, and the faces began to turn pale—did I think that, by now, at my house, they must really be worried. I realized that I could not, after all, spend the night walking the streets. So I walked west, and I started back uptown.

But I did not, in fact, get home that night. It may be that, at the very bottom of my mind, I had never intended to go home. Or, that, as home came closer, my nerve deserted me. It may be that I had a tremendous need to hurt Caleb, or it may be that I was afraid of seeing Caleb. But my memory, for reasons which are not at all mysterious, blurs everything here, resists going over the ground again. This was the night that I discovered chaos, or perhaps it was the night that chaos discovered me; but it certainly began the most dreadful time of my life, a time I am astounded to have survived. It was the first of my nights in hell. It was this night, or a night very soon after it, that I first smoked marihuana, in a cellar with some other, older boys, and a very funky girl. I know that it was around this time that I became friends with an older boy, named Francis, who helped to protect me in the streets; I know that the first time I ever smoked marihuana, I was with him and his friends, and I remember the cellar, which was near the Apollo Theater. Francis later turned into a junkie, and, after many attempts to break his habit, went to his room one morning and cut his wrists. But we had traveled the same road together for awhile. And neither of us had had any reason for not doing whatever came to mind. Or, it may have been this night, or a night very soon thereafter, that I was picked up by a Harlem racketeer named Johnnie, big, Spanish-looking, very sharp, and very good-natured—good-natured with me, anyway—who took me home and gave me my first drink of brandy, and took me to bed. He frightened me, or his vehemence, once the lights were out, frightened me, and I didn’t like it, but I liked him. I had to keep him from buying things for me which I couldn’t take home; he was an even greater protection than Francis, and it took me a long time to break with him, simply because he was fond of me—he was often the only person to whom I could turn. Eventually, Johnnie and another pimp tangled, and Johnnie was killed. But we, too, had traveled the same road together for awhile.

After the beating, the shouting, the tears, when I got home next day, my mother handed me Caleb’s note. I took it in the room and lay down on the bed.

Little Brother,

You shouldn’t have walked out on me like that. I must have sounded pretty mean, but you should have known I didn’t mean it for you. I just couldn’t take working on that job. It wasn’t so much for me. It was for Daddy. I couldn’t stand the way they talked to him, like he was somebody’s hired clown. But I didn’t say nothing. Just, when the twelve o’clock blew, I walked out. And I decided that I would have to leave this city. I think I’ll be better off someplace else and I’m going to work in the shipyard in California. And I couldn’t take you with me, Leo, you know that. You got your schooling to finish and you say you want to be an actor, well what kind of life would it be, when you hanging out with me? You’ve got very good sense, Leo, like I’ve always said. You’re much smarter than I am and so I know you’ll see it my way as soon as you cool off.

But I’m mighty sorry I had to leave without saying good-bye to you like I wanted to do.

Take care of Mama and Daddy as well as you can and take care of yourself. I’ll write you as soon as I get an address and please write to me. Don’t be mad at me. When you get older, you’ll see that this was the best way. I guess I love you more than anything in this world, Leo, and I want you to grow up to be a happy healthy man. So, no matter how I thought about it, it seemed to me that this was the best way for everybody concerned.

And I want you to have some flesh on your bones when I look in your face again. Please don’t forget me.

Your brother,

Caleb

Caleb got into some trouble in California, and he joined the Army. I hit the streets.

I realized I was shivering, and I pulled Madeleine’s big towel closer around me. Then I dropped it and left her kitchen and crawled, naked, into bed beside her. I slept. She woke me up. We made, as the saying goes, love. Then, I slept again.

Like in the movies, I woke to the smell of coffee and the sound and smell of bacon. I don’t really know how it goes in the movies, but I know that I lay there on my back, apprehensive, drained, empty—drained and empty without having, really, touched, or been touched. Then, as she entered the room, smiling, in a scarlet negligée, and before I had had time to pretend that I was still sleeping, I realized that I had a performance to give. I realized that I rather liked her, and that was certainly a relief. But, mainly, I wanted to get that white flesh in my hands again, I simply wanted to fuck her: and this was not because I liked her.

“You awake?”

My God, she was cheerful. She sat down on the bed.

I made a sound, it was meant to convey, No, and I turned away and then I turned toward her again and I pulled her down on top of me.

“I got breakfast on the stove, sugar.”

“I got breakfast here.” And, after a moment, I said, “All you got to do is reach out your hand.”

“Let me turn down the fire under the bacon.”

I laughed. “You do that.”

She wavered into the kitchen. She came back. I took her hand. “Did you put out the fire? under the bacon?”

“Yes.”

“No, you didn’t. Put it out now. Right here. Right now.” I took off her robe. “I want to watch you do it.” I laughed. But Madeleine certainly wasn’t anybody’s freak. She claimed it wasn’t because she was unwilling. It was because I was too big. Well, all right. And we fooled around, while I became more and more aware of the smell of coffee and more and more, rather, worried about the disappearing bacon, and we ended up doing it like mama and daddy. Well. All right. And she went away again, and I fell asleep again.

When I woke up again, she was dressed, in blue.

“Listen, my love,” she said—my love!—“everything you need is out there in the kitchen. I’ve got a rehearsal, and I’ve got to run. Here’s an extra set of keys.” She put them on top of my jeans. She looked at me. “So. Will you be here when I get back? Or—?”

“I don’t know. What time do you get back?”

She looked at her watch. “Well. It’s nearly two now. Not before six or seven.”

Slowly, and most reluctantly, my head began to clear. “I might go home. But I think I’ll sleep awhile. I think I’ll be here when you get back. But, if I’m not going to be here, I’ll call you at Lola’s.”

“All right, sugar. That’s a good boy.”

I turned my head into the pillows. “Oh, shit. Whatever I am, God knows I’m not a good boy.”

“Oh, well. What God knows and what I know seem never to coincide.”

“Get on to your rehearsal.”

“Aren’t you going to kiss me? Just for luck?”

She leaned down; I leaned up; I kissed her. “Break a leg.”

“Thanks, sugar. See you later.” And she left, being very careful and quiet with the door. So there I was. And I went back to sleep.

When I finally persuaded myself to get up, and had showered, it was past six o’clock. I decided that I had better go and see what was happening out on Bull Dog Road. I was just about to pick up the phone and call Madeleine, when the phone rang. I jumped. It sounded very strange and even ominous in the empty place. Then, I wondered if I should answer it. But Madeleine hadn’t said anything about not answering it; I was pretty sure she didn’t have any boyfriends in town. I decided to take a chance—she might be calling me.

“Hello?” It was Lola’s voice.

“Hello.”

“Hello? What number is this, please?”

I told her.

“Well—is Miss Madeleine Overstreet there?”

“No. She’s at the theater.”

“To whom am I speaking, may I ask?”

“To whom am I speaking?—may I ask?”

“Lola San-Marquand is my name.”

“Oh. Why didn’t you say so? My name is Leo Proudhammer.”

“Leo? Leo! What are you doing at Madeleine’s house?”

“I’m cleaning up the joint. A boy’s got to make a living.”

There was a silence, a calculating silence.

“When I came in,” said I carefully, “just before she left, she said she was rushing to rehearsal.”

“We broke early. Will you leave a message for Madeleine? The call has been changed. We are to work in the theater tonight, on the Green Barn stage, from eight-thirty until twelve. She is not to come to my home, but to go directly to the theater.”

“Okay. I got it. Eight-thirty.”

“Will you write that down?”

“How do you spell theater?”

“Oh! Leo, you can be excessively exasperating. Have you seen Barbara King today?”

“No.”

“Well, she will inform you of the exact hour tomorrow morning when Saul will watch your scene.”

“Oh? Is he watching us tomorrow?”

“He has been watching you for weeks. You simply haven’t realized it.”

“What happens if I can’t find Barbara?”

“Then you will simply have to call Saul. I know nothing of these matters. Saul keeps the details of the teaching side of his life far from me. I only see the results. Write down the message for Madeleine. I hope she’s coming home. You wouldn’t—would you—know where Madeleine would be likely to go in the event that she does not come home?”

“I just work here, lady.”

“I see. Thank you. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.”

I put down the receiver. I felt an unwilling and uneasy excitement. So, he was going to watch us; and that was something. But why the fuck should I care what the old fart thought of me? And that was something else. But I had to get home, so Barbara and I could work tonight. I wrote out the note for Madeleine, saying that I would see her, or call her, after my class—my first class!—tomorrow. The note sounded, perhaps, a bit too jubilant, but I thought, Fuck it, and I left it in the middle of the table, weighted down with a clock.

Madeleine’s door faced the steps, and an elderly man and his wife were mounting these steps as I jubilantly bounced out of Madeleine’s door, and locked it behind me. They stared at me as though I were a ghost, and they really seemed, for a moment, unable to move. Perhaps their terror, for an instant, terrified me, I don’t know; anyway, for less than a second, snake to rabbit, we stood immobilized by each other. Then, I said gently, “You can keep coming up the stairs, you know. I don’t bite.”

This broke the charm, and they came briskly to the landing. He had now found his voice, and he asked me sternly, “What are you doing in this building, boy?”

“I was looking for a file, so I could sharpen my teeth. Suh. But I couldn’t find none.” I grinned. “See?” I shrugged. “Some days are like that.” Then I crooned, “Oh, dat old man ribber, he sure do keep rolling along! Ain’t it de truf! Laws-a-massy, hush my mouf, he he he and yuk yuk yuk!” and I tapdanced down the stairs. At least they now knew that I wasn’t a ghost, but it didn’t seem to reassure them.

I went straight home, in a taxi, but there was no one there. I looked upstairs and downstairs for a note, but there wasn’t any. I supposed that Jerry and Barbara had gone to town again, which seemed a little strange, but, as I had no way of getting to town and no more money, even if I did get there, I scrambled myself some eggs and started reading the scene from Waiting for Lefty. I hadn’t got far, when I heard a car coming. But it wasn’t our car, though it stopped in front of the house, and the powerful lights fell over the line I was reading: Sid: The answer is no—a big electric sign looking down on Broadway! I put down my book, and I walked to the porch, which was bathed in light, as I was trapped in light.

“What’s the matter? What do you want?” Some reflex, or perhaps some whisper from my ancestors, helped to keep my mortal terror out of my voice. I sounded angry, and I immediately realized that this was, for the moment, anyway, the only tone I could take. “Get that light out of my eyes! What the hell do you want?”

“We want you to put up your hands,” said a drawling voice, “and then we’ll put out the light.”

I put up my hands. There they were, of course, in blue, two of them, of course, white, of course. One stood by the car, while the other came up to me, and frisked me. Cops love frisking black boys, they want to find out if what they’ve heard is true.

“All right. You’re coming down to the station with us.”

People become frightened in very different ways—the ways in which they become frightened may sometimes determine how long they live. Here I was, in the country, and on a country road, alone, facing two armed white men who had legal sanction to kill me; and if killing me should prove to be an error, it would not matter very much, it would not, for them, be a serious error. It would not cost them their badges or their pensions, for the only people who would care about my death could certainly never reach them. I knew this. It was more vivid to me than the policeman’s hands, his breath, his holster. I knew that I was frightened, and I knew how frightened I was. But I remembered, vaguely, reading somewhere that animals can smell fear, and that when they do, they leap and they devour. I was determined that these animals should not smell my fear, and this determination deflected, so to speak, my terror from them to myself: my life was in my hands. I had not yet guessed why they had come for me, and I did not know what was going to happen. But I was going to scheme as long as I had breath, and outwit them if I could.

So I did not whimper, What for? I ain’t done nothing, but asked, as deliberately as I could, and as mockingly as I could, “What is it that you imagine me to have done?”

I was gambling on their reflexes. They were accustomed to black boys whimpering, or, on the other hand, defiant, and it was easy, in either case, for them to know exactly what to do—to amuse themselves with the whimper or the defiance, and beat the shit out of the boy, and sometimes to beat the boy to death. I had to walk a tightrope between groveling and shouting, and had to hope that a faintly mocking amusement would be sufficiently unexpected to confound their reflexes and immobilize their impulses, at least until I got to the station, where I would have to begin to calculate again. Central to my calculations was the terror of finding myself begging for mercy: I hoped I would be able to see that moment coming, and nullify that moment by causing it to come too late.

There I was, in the car, handcuffed, in the back. We moved along the road, fast; it was, I carefully noted, the road to town. So, I dared, “May I ask you—again—what it is you’re arresting me for?”

Neither of them said anything, from which I concluded that they either did not know what to say, or were undecided as to what tone to take. I thought, They came to my house, so even they must know that I’m a stranger in this town, and am working with people sufficiently celebrated to get them into trouble. But then I thought, If they were really worried about that, then they wouldn’t have come at all. I thought, Saul and Lola and Rags don’t really care much about me; I can’t depend on them. The two or three movie stars who had been drifting in and out of our ken all summer didn’t know me from any other shoeshine boy—though I was determined, if I had to, to use their names as a threat. Barbara and Jerry cared, but where were they? And Madeleine cared. Madeleine. She gets to the theater at eight-thirty, but maybe they’ll let me call her house, and then I thought, Madeleine. Then I remembered the elderly man and his wife. Solid citizens, they had done their duty and called the police. It was unbelievably funny. If I had not been handcuffed, I think I might have laughed.

But it was not a laughing matter. We arrived at the station, which looked ominous indeed, and ostentatiously crossed the sidewalk, while people stared at us, and nudged other people, and came up behind us, and began gathering, staring, on the steps. We walked into the station. A colored boy. They arrested a colored boy. I became faint, and hot and cold with terror. It was in vain that I told myself, Leo, this isn’t the South. I knew better than to place any hope in the accidents of North American geography. This was America, America, America, and those people out there, my countrymen, had been tearing me limb from limb, like dogs, for centuries. I would not be the first. In the bloody event, I would not be the last. I thought, I wonder if Madeleine has charged me with rape? But, no, I thought, don’t you have to be caught in the act? Then I thought, No. They just need Miss Ann’s word.

But I knew if I allowed myself to think this way, I would lose my nerve completely. The man was behind the desk, and I forced myself to look him in the eye; and I forced myself, nearly fainting, to attack: “Why have I been arrested?”

He looked at me with a curiously impersonal loathing. He was fat, red-faced, Irish, a true believer, a regular fellow. “It’s just routine, boy. We’ll satisfy your curiosity when we get around to it.”

“I’m sorry. But I think the law compels you to tell me what the charges are against me. You have no right to hold me without charges.”

His face got redder, and he seemed to swell, and his eyes got darker. We stared at each other—if I had allowed myself to drop my eyes, I would have fallen to the floor.

“Are you trying to tell me my business, boy?”

“I’m only telling you what my rights are, as a citizen of this country.”

He and his buddies laughed. I realized that I had made a tactical error. “What’s the matter with you, boy? You some kind of nut? Are you a Red?”

I said nothing, only looked at him. Again, he darkened and swelled. He did not know how frightened I was. He was, Allah be praised, far too dense for that: but he knew that I hated him, and would have been happy to see him dead. And this baffled him and angered him—which increased my danger—for he, after all, did not hate me. I was not real enough for that. I was not as real for him as he, unspeakably, was for me. But I could not drop my eyes. I told myself that there was nothing I could do, now, to minimize the danger. All that I could do was control my fear.

I was not booked, I was not fingerprinted. I was taken into another room, and left alone there for awhile—to meditate, I supposed, on my sins, or else to count over my blues. I knew that this probably meant that they were not yet certain to what extent they were to be allowed to vent themselves on me. I took this as a good sign, though I also knew that this might merely mean that I was being saved for their more accomplished sadists. I knew that it was best not to think, not to undermine myself with visions of what was before me. For the moment, there was nothing I could do. There was no way to tell what would happen, who would enter, when the door opened again. And, not altogether consciously, I began to evolve a trick which was to help me, later, in the theater: Leo, I said, you can’t know what’s going to happen, and, until it happens, you can’t know what to do. You’re going to be surprised—so be surprised. That’s the only way you’ll be ready.

But when the door opened—so much for the most impeccable theories!—I was not surprised. Two plainclothesmen stood there, with the elderly man and his wife. I stood up, and we looked at each other. How can I explain this? I still thought that they were funny.

“Is that the boy?” one of the detectives asked.

“Yes,” said the man; and “That’s him,” said his wife. They stood as though they were in a jungle, protected by their hunters, but poised to scream and run at the leap of the jungle cat.

“This gentleman,” said one of the plainclothesmen, “says he saw you coming out of an apartment a little while ago, where you had no business to be.” He raised his eyebrows at me.

Well, they might beat me up when the couple left the room, but they weren’t going to beat me while the couple were still in it; and I didn’t care, abruptly. I was tired of this vicious comedy, and ashamed of myself for playing any role whatever in it; something turned in me, in an instant, cold and hard—it might have been the abject posture of the old man and his wife.

I said, “The gentleman is a nervous old lady. He doesn’t know whether I have any business in the apartment or not.” I felt myself beginning to be angry, and I forced myself to take a breath. “The apartment is rented by Miss Madeleine Overstreet. She is an actress, and she is working here in The Green Barn Theater, and I am an actor, and we are friends.” I was damned if I was going to cop a plea, and say that I was working for Madeleine, and I was cleaning up her joint. Fuck the mother-fuckers. “I believe the gentleman will tell you that when he saw me, I was locking the door of the apartment and had the keys in my hand. The gentleman will certainly tell you that, if his eyesight is not failing, and if he is in the habit of telling the truth. Which,” I could not resist adding, though I knew it to be foolish, “on both counts, I doubt.”

“Do you have the keys on you now?” the plainclothesman asked.

“I refuse to answer any questions until I have been allowed to make a phone call, which is my right by law, or unless my lawyer is present.”

Well, it was funny, all right. I saw what they saw—a funky, little black boy, talking about his lawyer. And I didn’t give a shit. All you can do is beat my ass. I knew they were too dumb and too scared to know whether I was bluffing or not. So, fuck you, miserable white mother-fuckers. Fuck you. I stared at the detective who was asking the questions, and I charged my eyes to say, Baby, if my prick was a broomstick, I’d sure make your tonsils know that you had an ass-hole. Believe me. Oh, yes. Now, come on, you fagot, and beat my ass.

But—I had frightened them. They did not know what to make of it. I don’t mean at all to suggest that they believed me. They didn’t believe me. They thought that I was mad. But they had not intended to tangle with a lunatic: they had merely been ordered to pick up a black boy.

Well, here I was: black, certainly, and not much more than a boy. And there they were. Now, I was dangerous to them. They did not know what might happen—if I were not a lunatic, then my story might be true. And if my story were true—well, then, yes, they might be in trouble, and they might lose their pensions. If I could happen, then anything could happen. I could see this in their eyes.

“What’s your name?”

“I have told you that I will not answer any more questions until I am allowed to make a phone call, or until I am advised by my lawyer. You have not booked me, you have not charged me—it is you who are acting against the law!”

One of them moved toward me then, but the other one checked him. Thank God, the couple were still in the room. Or thank my ancestors.

“You say you’re an actor?” one of them asked, in a friendly, conciliatory tone.

I sat down on my bench, and folded my arms.

“Young man,” said the elderly gentleman—at another moment, I might have been sorry for him—“I just thought—I didn’t mean to cause you any trouble—”

“You haven’t,” I said, “caused me any trouble at all. But I can make a whole lot of trouble for you.”

The plainclothesmen and I looked at each other—for what seemed a long time. Then, they all left the room. And I was alone again, a long time, while my anger subsided and my fear returned.

Someone now entered whom I had not seen before, bluff, hearty, red-faced, who called me by my name and slapped me on the back. “So, you’re an actor! Why didn’t you tell us that in the first place, Leo? You can’t blame us for a little misunderstanding. Mistakes will happen, won’t they?”

I stared at him, and I said nothing. I really did not know what to say.

“I used to have a brother in show business.” He choked a little on his monstrous cigar; he sat down next to me. I decided he was probably from Texas. “Of course, that was a long time ago, before you were born.” He chuckled, wrapped in the veils of memory. “Yes, he used to do a routine with the great George M. Cohan himself—now, there was a trouper! And a prince. A prince among men, Leo, I assure you.”

I was very young then. I watched him with an amazement which steadily filled with loathing. I really could not move.

“But it’s a rough life, show business. Very rough. I know you realize that, Leo, you look like a very intelligent boy.” He chuckled again, and nudged me. “But it’s got its good side, too, eh, Leo—just between us men? The best broads. I bet the girls love you, don’t they, Leo?” He leaned confidentially toward me, and winked. “You know, there’s a saying, Big man, little tool, little man, all tool! Ha-ha-ha!” He pinched my shoulder, and it hurt. “Oh, you don’t want to say it, but I can see it in your eyes. You’ve been around a little, young as you are—how old are you, Leo?” He looked at me. I looked at him. I said nothing. There was a choked, ugly pause. “All right. Let me guess. It’s hard to tell with your people. Let’s see. Seventeen? Twenty-two?”

He was very, very good at his job, and I think that I probably would have made some sign if I had been able to move my head. I simply stared at him, hypnotized, dumb; and now really frightened, more terribly, more profoundly, than I had been before.

When he realized that I was not going to answer, he said, “Leo, like I said before, mistakes will happen. All of us are human, and we all make mistakes. That’s why we invented erasers.” He was watching me closely behind the veil of cigar smoke; but he was bluff and hearty and he continued to smile. “I hate to say it, Leo, but you know as well as I do that people in show business, they tend to be, well, kind of lax—lax in their morals. That’s the reason my brother finally just had to get out. He couldn’t stand the life.” He looked at me with great sympathy. “I’m not saying this for you, you look like a fine, upstanding boy. I bet your mother’s proud of you. Where does your mother live, Leo?”

“In Johannesburg,” I said. “She’s a missionary.”

He did not know what to say to this, and my face did not help him. I could see him struggling to find a map somewhere, but it was difficult to ask me for one. “Oh. Well, then, I’m sure she wouldn’t want you mixed up in bad company. And, Leo, I’m sorry to say this, but a lot of your friends are mighty bad company for a fine-looking boy like you. Mighty bad company. That’s how this mistake was made. We wasn’t looking for you—we wasn’t expecting to find no colored people in that house. Of course not. You can see that. No. We’ve been getting complaints about—oh, certain parties, and it’s our job to investigate all complaints and we do our job. Now, I’m old enough to be your father, Leo, so let me give you a word of advice.” He paused. “Show business broke my brother’s heart. That’s a fact. He said”—he jabbed me with his forefinger, and it hurt; I knew he wanted it to hurt—“I wish I had stayed with my own people. That’s what he said.” He leaned back triumphantly. “You see my point, Leo? You stay with your own people and you’re sure to stay out of trouble. Why, we never have any trouble with the colored people in this town—they’re just the nicest bunch of colored people you’d ever want to meet, they work hard and save their money, and go to church. But this crowd you hang out with, Leo, with their wild parties and loose women and smoking marihuana—they’re going to bring you to grief, son. You see, I said, ‘son,’ it just slipped out before I thought, but I mean it. That’s just the way I feel. And I just hope you won’t go to no more of those parties, Leo. I’d like you to promise me you won’t continue to undermine your health and your morals by—smoking all that marihuana and running with loose white women—”

I stood up. I said, “If I’m under arrest, arrest me. If not, please let me go.”

We stared at each other. He might talk about the “bad” company I kept, but it was only the fear of what they might possibly do which prevented him from rising, and bouncing me about that room like a ball. It was in his eyes, it was in the air, it was in the muscle that beat in his forehead. And I doubted, as we stared at each other, that even this fear would control him very long. My luck had run out. I felt my bowels loosen and lock—for fear; and my mouth turned dry. But, anyway, all my words were gone. I’d run my course. Silence, now, was my only hope, for if I could not open my mouth, I could not beg for mercy. The door opened, and one of the plainclothesmen stood there, saying something. I didn’t hear what he said, because, when the door opened, I heard Madeleine’s voice in the other room. And I simply walked out, in the direction of the voice. She was standing in front of the desk, with Saul and Lola. Saul and Lola looked blandly indignant, but Madeleine was utterly white, and her hands and legs were shaking. She was staring at the man behind the desk with a malevolence which would have done credit to Medea.

“Now, miss,” he was saying, “it was just a mistake, and we’re very sorry for it. I wouldn’t let it get me all upset. See,” he said, turning to me as I appeared, “we haven’t harmed a hair of his precious head. He’s just as good as new.”

“A mistake,” she said. “A mistake. You dirty, racist bastard, you’re goddamn lucky you didn’t harm a hair of his head. You’d lose that badge so goddamn fast your head would never stop spinning.”

“I don’t like your language, miss.”

“Fuck you,” she said. “Fuck you. You goddamn Nazi.” Then, she started to cry.

“Madeleine,” Lola said. She walked to the desk. “Young man. A word of advice. I will try to put it in extremely simple language, so that you can understand it. The people standing before you are more powerful than you. I am more powerful than you, and I can break you by making a phone call. I am responsible for my theatrical company, and nothing will prevent me from fulfilling that responsibility. With no justification whatever, you have taken Mr. Proudhammer out of his home and brought him here and forced him, and forced us, to undergo needless harassment. You will take good care not to molest any of my company in future—else, you will have no future, and I am not a woman to make idle threats. You have already, allow me to inform you, rendered yourself liable to suit for false arrest. Come, Leo. Goodnight, my Nazi friends.”

“Heil Hitler,” said Madeleine, and Lola took my arm and we walked out.

We got into the San-Marquand car. There were still people in the street, and they stared at us.

Saul started the car. “How could you two be so foolish?” he asked us, then.

“We?” said Madeleine. “We?” What did we do?”

“You know what the people in this town are like,” Saul said.

“The people in this town,” said Madeleine. “The people in this town. I hope the river rises the moment we get out of here, and drowns them all like rats. Like the rats they are. But why are we foolish?”

I said nothing. I leaned back in the car, scarcely listening.

“Not foolish, Saul,” said Lola, “but, surely, a little indiscreet.”

“What do you mean,” shouted Madeleine, “indiscreet! Leo left my house in broad goddamn Sunday daylight, and went to his house—and the cops dragged him to the police station, because he’d been to my house. Now, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“We’ve worked in this town every summer for a long time, Madeleine,” Saul said. “We know the people and the people know us and we’ve never had any trouble. You have to realize that this is a small town and the people here are not very sophisticated—they’re not bad people. You just have to—understand their limits. That’s how you manage to play a character on the stage, by understanding the character’s limits. That’s the only way you can play Hedda Gabler, for instance—by understanding Hedda’s limits. I don’t think that’s so unreasonable.”

“I am not Hedda Gabler,” Madeleine said, “but if I ever get a chance to play her, I’ll certainly pretend that she’s living in this town. But what this town could really use is a couple of Negro cooks, named Lady Macbeth and Medea.”

“You mean,” I said—but I scarcely knew why I was bothering to speak—“you never had any trouble until I came along. Is that what you mean?”

“Leo,” said Lola, “don’t be touchy.”

I looked at her. “Touchy. All right. I won’t be touchy. I just asked a question. Is that what you mean, Saul?”

“I don’t think there’s any point in discussing it now,” Saul said. “You are upset, understandably upset, we would say. We do not blame you, Leo, but our schedule has been thoroughly disrupted and we must return to the theater. If you are going home, I’ll drop you.”

“Thanks,” I said, after a moment, “let’s do that.” And I leaned back again. I didn’t know what Madeleine was thinking. I didn’t care. I was surprised to realize that I didn’t care, and a little ashamed. I knew that she was hurt and baffled; and she wanted to reach me, but did not know how, especially with Saul and Lola in the car. We hit the road leading out of town. Nobody said anything. We passed the theater. The lights were on. Our signs were up.

“Maybe,” said Madeleine, haltingly, “you’d rather watch rehearsal, Leo? Especially as there’s nobody at home in your place.”

Saul did not slow down. I said, “No, thanks, Madeleine. I think I’d just like to get on home. Nothing else will happen to me tonight.”

And so we stopped before the whitewashed house. I could see that no one had come home yet, because the light was still burning as I had left it.

I got out of the car. “Thanks for bailing me out,” I said to Saul and Lola. Then, I said to Madeleine, “Please, don’t you feel badly. Don’t you feel badly. These things happen.”

She smiled. There were still tears on her face. “Do you want me to come by, later, after rehearsal?”

Saul made a sound between a grunt and a cough, looking straight ahead.

I said, “No. I’ll see you tomorrow. Good-night, all.”

And the car drove away, and I went into the house.

I sat down in my chair, and I picked up my book. The words bounced around the page, and I followed them around in the hope that they would eventually do something which could capture my attention. I wondered where Barbara and Jerry were. Sid: But that sort of life ain’t for the dogs which is us. Christ, baby! I get like thunder in my chest when we’re together. If we went off together I could maybe look the world straight in the face, spit in its eye like a man should do. God damn it, it’s trying to be a man on the earth. Two in life together. Sid’s ravings meant nothing to me. The lines seemed bombastic and empty and false; I wondered why I had ever wanted to play this scene; I could never deliver those lines. And, anyway—should I? Should I submit myself to the judgment of a Saul? I put down my book and I turned out the light. I went up the stairs to my room. I suddenly didn’t want to talk to anybody or to see anybody, and I sat there in the dark. I looked at the sky. I picked up my guitar and I strummed it a little. Then, I put it down.

The night was very still. I heard the car coming when the car was still a long way off. If they had heard of my adventure, they would want to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk. The car stopped in front of our door. Then, the lights went on downstairs. The car door slammed. I moved back from the window. Barbara called my name.

I couldn’t sit and hide in the dark; these were my friends. I opened my door and I walked downstairs.

“Hello,” I said. “Where’ve you two been?”

“We’ve been to the movies,” Barbara said, “but we hear you’ve been in jail.”

“A slight misunderstanding,” I said. I sat down on the porch.

“Did they really come all the way out here to get you?” Jerry asked.

“Oh, yes. They were right here.”

“I’ll be damned. I swear to God, they got bacon fat where their brains should be. Jesus Christ. Don’t they have anything else to do?”

He sounded—and I was very surprised to hear it—as though he were on the verge of tears.

“But what did they want?” Barbara asked. “Why did they come here?”

“They saw a black boy leaving a white lady’s apartment,” I said, “and they had to do their duty. You know how that is.”

She turned whiter than Madeleine had been, and her lips tightened, and she dropped her eyes.

“Leo,” she said, after a moment, “they didn’t do anything to you?”

“No. They just scared me.” I stood up. “They humiliated me. They made me feel like a dog. They tried to turn me into something worse than they are. They had a wonderful time doing it, now they all feel more like men. And I was very lucky. They were afraid to go too far. They were afraid the Workshop might make a stink.” I paused, and I laughed. “So now I owe my life to Saul and Lola.”

“But they were all right, weren’t they?” Jerry asked.

I shrugged. I didn’t want to pursue it, because I didn’t get any pleasure out of seeing Jerry hurt. “They were all right.” But I had to add, “Saul did say that he thought we were foolish.”

“Yes,” said Barbara. “He told us that.”

“You saw him?”

“Yes. We thought you might be there, because—well, we knew that Madeleine had a rehearsal.”

“Do you think I was foolish?”

“Do I?” She stared at me. “My God, Leo, how can you ask me that?” She shrugged. “I might think you’re foolish, because I don’t think Madeleine’s worth your time—”

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t want to talk about that, it’s none of my business, and it’s got nothing to do with her. I like her well enough. I just don’t think she’s good enough for you—but, you know, that doesn’t give me any reason to call the cops. So, you’re foolish. So is everybody else. That’s got nothing to do with the cops. Wow. I wish it had been me. The police chief of this town would be looking for a job.” She looked around at us, and gave a little laugh. “I mean it. After all, I’m an heiress. I don’t always like being an heiress, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not prepared to use it.” She came over to me and kissed me quickly on the forehead. “Poor Leo. I know you don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

“Let’s have a beer,” said Jerry, “and then I’m going to hit the sack. We are going to have to haul ass real early in the morning, children, because we have no money at all.” He went into the kitchen. Barbara sat down next to me on the porch and put her hand in mine.

“Before the summer’s over,” she said, “remind me that there are things I’ve been keeping from you which I really must tell you.”

“Oh? Such as?”

“Oh,” she said, “girlish secrets.” She paused. “But I can’t carry them around within me very much longer.”

Jerry came back, with two bottles and three glasses, and sat down on the step below us. “Well,” I said, “I’ll be happy to hear your confession whenever you’re ready.”

“I hope you’ll be happy,” she said.

Jerry poured the beer. “Confession! You know I haven’t been to confession in more than three years? And you know what that means? That means my soul is in mortal danger. It’s the truth I’m telling you.” He handed a glass to Barbara, then handed a glass to me.

“How does it feel to have your soul in mortal danger?” I asked.

“Exciting.” He grinned, and kissed Barbara. “Wicked.” Barbara took her hand from mine. We lit cigarettes. “Every time you make love, you think of the confessional and you say to yourself, Well, I’m just not going to tell the bastard, that’s all. Let him get his own kicks.” We all laughed. “I swear, I believe they sit there, jerking off.”

“Don’t you ever miss it?” I asked.

“What? Going to confession?”

“Well—the church. All of it. You know—the music. the others. The—the faith. I guess—you know—the safety—”

“Well. Sometimes, maybe. Especially when I see my mother. She’s always weeping about it. And that makes me feel bad and then I remember a couple of priests I used to like and some other people and the music and Holy Communion and the way it felt—you know, it was nice. But, then, I look at my mother and she’s not a bad woman but she is a very fucked-up woman and I know that part of what fucked her up is the Church. You know, she believes a whole lot of shit, and I’ve seen her do some very wicked things because she’s so goddamn ignorant. Well—I don’t want to be like that, that’s all. I want to live my own life the way I want to live it. My mother hates Jews and she hates Negroes, and you know, fuck it, I can’t be bothered with all that shit. So they can have it.”

“Did you ever believe it? I mean, you know—the Son of God and heaven and hell and judgment. You know. The whole bit.”

“My mother and my father believed it. And everyone around me believed it. So I believed it, too.”

“You never believed it, did you, Leo?” Barbara asked. “You never even went to church.”

“No. My father didn’t believe it. So none of us believed it. Naturally.” I stood up. “It’s been a rough day. So, you’ll forgive me if I just say good-night now.”

After a moment they both said, “Good-night, Leo.” I carried my beer upstairs. They stayed on the porch awhile, I could hear them murmuring. Then, they went inside and closed their door. Then, everything was still. I remembered that I had forgotten to ask Barbara what time we were due to appear before Saul in the morning. But I knew that she, or Jerry, would wake me up.

The story grows harder to tell. What did I do that night? When did I make my decision? Or had it already been made? Did I dream that night? Or sleep? I know that the sheet was like a rope, wet and strangling. The window was open. At some point, I awoke and, naked, walked to the window and looked out at the shadow of the trees, the shadow of the land. I lit a cigarette, and stood at the window, and wondered who I was. Downstairs, they were not yet asleep. I heard them murmuring, Barbara’s voice more than ever laryngitic, Jerry’s with all valves open. They sounded sad, it sounded very sad. I put out my cigarette and crawled back into bed, my narrow bed.

I heard the door close downstairs, and then I heard the car door slam, and I heard the car drive away. I opened my eyes. It was very early in the morning. I pushed my fingers through my heavy hair. I sat up. I wondered where the car was going at this hour of the morning. I wondered about the silence below. I looked out of the window. It was true that our car was gone. So I went back to bed. It seemed beyond me to do anything else. I heard cocks crowing, far away.

When I woke, Barbara sat on my bed, holding a pot of coffee and watching me.

“How long have you been here?”

“Not very long. The coffee’s not cold yet—so, you see.” And she rose from the bed and poured coffee into two cups, which she had placed on the table before my window. She put in milk and sugar and came back to the bed.

“Where’s Jerry?”

“I don’t know. Driving around.”

I watched her.

“Did something happen?” I asked this very carefully.

She walked up and down my room. “Yes. I guess something happened.”

“Barbara. What’s the matter with you this morning? What happened?”

For something had happened; that was why she was in my room. I started to get out of bed, but then realized I was naked, and I pulled the sheet around me, and sat up. “Barbara!”

“I hurt Jerry. I hurt him very much.” She was trying not to cry. It hurt to watch; I wished she would cry. I sipped my coffee and lit a cigarette. She came to the bed, and took the cigarette, and I lit another one. She walked up and down my room, between the window and me, between the light and me; on and off went the light, on and off. A skinny, pale girl, in a big bathrobe, and her hair piled on the top of her head, and falling over her forehead. “I had planned to do it differently, or do it later—I had hoped not to do it at all. But now I have. And he drove away. I hope he comes back. At least to say good-bye. Because I love him, too. Jesus.”

“What did you do, Barbara?”

“I told him”—she stopped—“I told him how much I love you.”

“But,” I said, frightened, sitting straight up, “Jerry knows that! What did you tell him that for?”

“Because,” she said—my God, she was steady, standing there in the morning light—“it’s true.” Then, she sipped her coffee; and remained standing in the light.

I watched the blue smoke from our cigarettes.

“Barbara,” I said.

I don’t know what I was going to say. Barbara suddenly crumpled to the floor, spilling her coffee, and ruining her cigarette, and I jumped out of bed, naked as I was, and grabbed her. I had endured female tears before, God knows, young as I was then, but I knew that these tears had nothing to do with blackmail. But if Barbara had been capable of blackmail, then the terms of our love would have had a precedent and would not have been so hard. We were alone, she in that robe, and I in my skin, under the morning light, and with the spilt coffee all over the whitewashed floor.

“Leo. I’m sorry. Oh, Leo. I’m sorry.”

“Get up. Get up. This is no time to be sorry.”

I pulled her to her feet. But, naked as I was, and holding her against me, I realized that I did not really feel for her what I had felt for Madeleine, whom I knew I did not love, several hours before. I felt a terrible constriction. It felt, I think, like death. I loved Barbara. I knew it then, and I really know it now; but what, I asked myself, was I to do with her? Love, honor, and protect. But these were not among my possibilities. And, since they were not, I felt myself, bitterly, and most unwillingly, holding myself outside her sorrow; holding myself, in fact, outside her love; holding myself beyond the reach of my blasted possibilities. One cannot dwell on these things, these echoes of what might, in some other age, and in some other body, have been; one must attempt to deal with what is, or else go under, or go mad. And yet—to deal with what is! Who can do it? I know that I could not. And yet I knew that I had to try. For there was something in it, after all, and I heard it in her sorrow, and I heard it in my heart, and in spite of our hideous condition, which I had to accept, to which I could not say, No. I carried her to the bed.

“Leo. Leo. Leo.”

“Barbara.”

Perhaps it could only have happened as it happened. I don’t know. I had, then, to suspend judgment, and I suspend judgment now. We had no choice. We really had no choice. I had to warm my girl, my freezing girl. I covered her with my body, and I took off her robe. I covered her, I covered her, she held me, and I entered her. And we rejoiced. Sorrow, what have we not known of sorrow! But, that morning, we rejoiced. And yet, it must be said, there was a shrinking in me when it was over. Love, honor, and protect.

“Leo,” Barbara said. She was running her fingers along my unshaven chin. I was rather too conscious of my unbrushed teeth.

“Yes?”

“I love you.”

“Oh. Well. You have, you know, had better ideas.”

“I know. But I don’t care.”

“I’ve had better ideas, too,” I said, after a moment.

“I know,” she said. “I really do know.”

I lit two cigarettes, and I put one between her lips.

“Leo?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t worry about me. I know the score. I accept the terms.”

I watched her very closely. “You mean, you know it’s impossible—that I’m impossible?”

“I don’t know if you are—no more than I am, anyway. But I know that it is—at least, right now. I’ve thought about it a lot, up here. And I realized something kind of funny. I mean, it’s lucky I’m an actress. I mean—nothing comes before that, and I know that. And that helps me, somehow. Do you know what I mean?”

“I think so. I’m not sure. But I think so.”

“It means,” she said, with the gravity of a child, “that we must be great. That’s all we’ll have. That’s the only way we won’t lose each other.”

“A person can’t just decide to be great, Barbara.”

“Some persons can. Some persons must.”

“You think I’m one of those persons?”

“I know you are. I’ve always known it.” She paused. “That’s how I know, you see—that you don’t belong to me.” She smiled. “But let’s be to each other what we can.”

“While we can,” I said, watching her.

“Yes. While we can.” Then, “But if we do it right, you see, we can stretch out our while a very long while and we can make each other better. You see. I know. I’ve thought about it.”

I moved from the bed to the window. “What about Jerry?”

“Well, I thought I was being very clever with Jerry. I thought neither of us would get hurt. He was just a very nice boy, and he liked me very much, and I liked him very much. And I was a little afraid—well, I wanted, partly, not to get involved with you. I was afraid it would spoil everything, because we got along so well. I was afraid to startle you. I know you don’t like to be startled. Then you run. But—Jerry—got more and more serious. And I realized I wasn’t going to be able to handle it at all. So—I thought I’d make everything as clear as I could.”

“How did he take it?”

After a moment, she said, “He tried to take it well. He tried very hard. But—I wish—oh, how I wish I’d left him alone! He’s far too nice a boy for me.”

“Is he coming back?”

“Yes. He’s coming back.”

I turned and looked at her. “Barbara. Do you know what you’re doing? We can’t play around with people’s lives this way.”

“I know that. That’s why I tried to make it clear. Before I hurt him too much. Before it went too far.” She put out her cigarette. “Before I told myself too many lies. And before—before you went too far away from me.”

“But you’re not much better off now, are you? With me, I mean. I’m spinning like a feather, Barbara. I don’t know where I’ll land.”

“I’m better off,” she said, “because at least I’m not lying now.”

I sat down on the bed. “Barbara,” I said, “there may be a lot you don’t know about me.”

“There may be,” she said, “but I don’t think so.”

I laughed. “Well. There’s a whole lot I don’t know about myself.” I watched her. “Do you know I’m bisexual?”

“Yes. At least, I supposed it.”

“Why? Does it show?”

She laughed. “I don’t know. I guess it shows to some people. It just seemed logical to me.” She laughed again. “Normal.” She sobered. “You’re very gentle. I always wondered, in fact, if you were having an affair with Charlie.”

“Charlie? No.”

“I think he wanted you to.”

“It doesn’t bother you?”

She looked at me. “Why should it bother me, Leo? I’m not in your body. I can’t live your life. I only want to share your life.” She sat up, and pulled the robe around her. “Anyway—what difference would it make if I did mind? It wouldn’t change anything. It would just make you not trust me—I’m glad you know you’re bisexual. Many men don’t.”

“How do you know that?”

“The blue grass of Kentucky,” she said, “is great for finding out the facts of life. Especially if neither you nor anyone around you has anything else to do. When I went to parties, I used to pretend I was Jane Austen.” She laughed again, and grabbed me and kissed me. “In fact, I thought of being a writer before I thought of being an actress.” Then she looked at me very soberly. “Well. I hope you like having a sister—a white, incestuous sister. Doesn’t that sound like part of the American dream?”

“Well—like Adam said to the Lord, when all this shit was starting—I guess I’ll get the hang of it, all right.” I put my head on her breast. “But I am a little frightened.”

She held me. “I know. But what is it that one’s frightened of?”

“I wonder. I don’t know. It’s just—so many things have happened to me—”

“But not all bad?”

“Oh, no. I don’t mean that. I’m not as mad as that.” She was playing with my hair, knotting it knottier than it was already, then pulling it—so to speak—straight, then knotting it again. “But good and bad, that’s all tied up together. I mean, like, it’s bad to be thirsty but it’s good to drink—of course,” I added, “you get thirsty enough, you drink anything.” She was silent. “You see what I mean?”

“I guess it’s very bad,” she said slowly, “when the taste of some of what you’ve drunk comes up and fills your mouth again.”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s very bad.”

“Has that happened to you?”

“Yes. That’s happened to me.”

She was silent for a long time. I began to be worried about Jerry coming back. But we were peaceful; we might not be so peaceful for a long time again; and I didn’t want to break it.

“I suppose,” she said, “that people invent gods and saints and martyrs and all—well, one of the reasons, anyway—in order to prevent themselves from drinking—well—a lot of what they’re offered to drink. It doesn’t seem to work out very well—I mean, then, they just seem to poison themselves and never, even, get nauseous—but I’m sure that’s one of the reasons.” I couldn’t see her face, but I felt her chin bob up and down in a kind of mockery of decision. “I’ve thought about it, you see,” she said. “People need a means of being reproached.”

“Reproached? I,” I said, leaning up a little, “I been ’buked and I been scorned. Did I need it?”

“I don’t mean that. I don’t mean—that. I mean—gods and saints and martyrs don’t work for me. They just don’t. But I don’t want to be wicked. People have to find ways of not allowing themselves to become wicked.”

“And what’s the way?”

“Well, for me,” she said, “in a way—you are. I wouldn’t like you to be ashamed of me.”

I sat up, and looked at her.

“I hope you wouldn’t like me to be ashamed of you, either,” she said. “I’d like—to be the way for you.” She watched my face, and she smiled. “I think you think I’m being blasphemous. Or maybe you think I’m insane.”

“No. No. I’m just fascinated. I’m trying to follow you.”

“Well, look—you’ll see that I have thought about it. I’ve never thought about anything so hard in my life. Look. I know this situation is impossible. I even know, in a way, that I’m being impossible. And everyone I grew up with would think so, and many people think so who will never dare admit it. I don’t care about those people. I care about whether or not I know what I am doing. You’re black. I’m white. Now, that doesn’t mean shit, really, and yet it means everything. We’re both very young, and you, after all, really are penniless, and I’m really not. I’m really very rich. Maybe I don’t use it now, but I know I can always call on it, they’re sure that when I come to my senses, I’ll come home. It’s all there for me and, anyway, after all, they’re going to die one day. So.” She shivered a little, and paused, and looked away, out of my window, toward the distant mountain. “If we were different people, and very, very lucky, we might beat the first hurdle, the black-white thing. If we weren’t who we are, we could always just leave this—unfriendly—country, and go somewhere else. But we’re as we are. I knew, when I thought about it, that we couldn’t beat the two of them together. I don’t think you’d care much that your wife was white—but a wife who was both white and rich! It would be horrible. We’d soon stop loving each other. And, furthermore—” She stopped. “Would you light me a cigarette, please?”

“Coming, princess.” I lit two cigarettes, and gave one to her. She blew smoke in my face, and smiled.

“And, furthermore—well, look at the way I was raised. You’re forbidden fruit. Oh, we’ll talk about that another day. But, believe me”—she laughed, it was a very melancholy sound—“by the time a Southern girl has had her first period, she’s already in trouble. Everybody’s always told you that the old black man who mows the lawn and rakes the leaves and chops the kindling and takes care of the fires—you know, well, he’s old, and he’s nice to you, and you like that old man and everybody likes him. And, naturally, you don’t know any better, you like anybody that old man likes and, naturally, you like his son. Or you’d like to like his son. And his son looks like—the old man. He smells like him. He’s nice, like he is. And he’s just about your age. But there’s something wrong with his son. There’s something wrong with him, you can’t be friends with the son of the nice old man. He’s not nice, like his father, and he’s not like other men at all. No. He’s a rapist. And not only is he a rapist, but he only rapes white women. And not only that, but he’s got something in his underwear big and black and always hard and it will change you forever if it ever touches you. You won’t even be white any more. You’ll just belong to him. Well, you know, everybody wants to be changed. Especially if you’re not loved. If looking like a zebra means somebody might love you, well, okay, I’ll look like a zebra and you can go on looking white. Have a ball.” She smiled, and subsided. “Anyway, you know, that’s the way I saw you the first time I saw you. I even thought, My God, maybe that’s the real reason I left home. To find out. But I didn’t think I’d better experiment with you. I knew you’d make me pay if I did. And so then I began to think that you mustn’t experiment with anybody. So, I tried to get to be your friend. And—here we are.”

“Let me kiss you,” I said, “like a brother,” and I kissed her on the forehead.

Then she kissed me, first like a sister and then on the mouth, and we lay still together for awhile.

“What time are we due at Saul’s?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said soberly, “I’d better get downstairs and get dressed.” She sat up, and put her feet on the floor. She wasn’t wearing any slippers. “We’re due at Saul’s at ten. It must be about nine now.”

“How’re we going to get there?”

She looked at me. “I’m feared we’ll have to walk. Leo.”

I laughed and pulled her to her feet and put my knee in her behind. “Okay. Go on and get dressed. I’ll hurry down.”

She went to the door. “I think Jerry’s already mowing a lawn somewhere by now.” She stood at the door, as though she hated to walk out of it. “Can I please have another cigarette?”

I lit one, and carried it to her.

“Thanks. I’ll yell up the time. Do you feel ready for Saul?”

“No. But, as you said, we have to be great.”

She smiled, and walked down the stairs.

It turned out to be eight forty-five. Jerry made no appearance. Presently, we were walking the road to town. She was wearing a light, brown, summer dress, or “frock,” as she called it, cut below her shoulder blades in the back, and with a wide skirt—this was for the moment in our scene when she pirouettes before me. She wore her hair down over her shoulders; her idea, I think, of the disheveled proletariat, though I myself would have read her for Alice in Wonderland. She wore flat shoes, both for the road, and for the scene. We held hands. The road was long, and there was no one and nothing on it, and so we skipped. We laughed a lot, for no particular reason. I picked a red flower, and I put it in Barbara’s hair. The sun was bright, it was going to be a hot day. The road was dry and dusty. When we approached The Green Barn, we made sign language to each other to be very circumspect indeed, and we stopped holding hands. Barbara put her flower between her teeth. I took off my shirt and put it on my head, and then I put her book and my book on my head, and I walked respectfully, wearily, and proudly behind her. But, there being no one to witness this epiphany, we soon walked together again, hand in hand.

But, as we neared the town, when we saw the proud signs announcing it, heard a train, heard the river, and saw the diner, which stood a little by itself; do what we would, we felt the human heat of the town rush out to meet us, we waited for the eyes, we waited for the silence, we waited for we knew not what. It was vivid to both of us, suddenly, that we had never before appeared in this town without Jerry. We had not thought of it that way, but Jerry had been proof, at least insofar as this white girl and this white town were concerned, of my impotence. But now! and Barbara carefully replaced the red flower in her hair, I put my shirt on. The grass roots of America was waiting for us, spoiling for us, all the good white people, just beyond this small hill and this small bridge which spanned a narrow creek. I realized abruptly, as we were on the bridge, that the car in which Jerry had driven away—driven where?—was not his property and not my property, but the property of the Workshop. Technically, anyway, Jerry was driving a stolen car. And the car was my responsibility. And there would certainly be many things for me to do this afternoon, for Arms and the Man was opening tonight. I looked, as we passed, to see if the car was parked before the diner, but it wasn’t. I didn’t see any point in saying anything to Barbara about it. The shit would hit the fan soon enough. I was carrying both our books, and I was wondering how these could be used as weapons. For, now, we were concentrating on how to walk just a few blocks through a hostile, staring, gathering town.

It is not an easy thing to do. One’s presence is an incitement, and therefore, one must do all in one’s power not to increase this incitement. But, by the time one has become an incitement, not very much is left in one’s power. It is not a matter merely of walking straight, eyes straight ahead. No, one’s eyes must be everywhere at once—without seeming to be, without seeming to move; one must be ready for the rock, the fist, the sudden movement; one must see every face, and yet make it impossible for one’s eye to be caught, even for a second, by any other eye. One must move swiftly, and yet not hurry: one must, in fact, give the crowd no opening, either by seeming to be too proud or by seeming to be too humble. All such crowds are combustible, and they always will be. Their buried, insupportable lives have brought them together and on the only terms they can come together: their unspeakable despair concerning their lives. These lives are like old, old rags in the closet of a very old house. The merest whisper will set them aflame. All such crowds contain, and they will forever, one man, one woman, who—if only for the moment it takes to hurl the stone, to leap the barrier, to prepare and spew the spittle, to grab the throat—if only for the moment, without ever having acted before, and never to act again—is the collective despair of the crowd, is their collective will. Then, the fire rages, not to spend itself until yet another man done gone.

It is easier to walk such a gauntlet alone. It is very hard for two, especially if they care about each other, especially if one is black and one is white, especially if one is male and one is female. One’s own body has a front and a back, has a left and a right. Hopefully, one can maneuver this body in such a way as to prevent its being destroyed. But, with two, one’s reflexes are off, for one is trying to calculate danger from too many angles, and one is also attempting a desperate mental telepathy. The people were silent. There were not, I thought to myself, very many. Two or three came out of the diner and stood, leering; three men, not young, I had seen them before. They moved in order to keep us in sight, laughing among themselves. Then, they were joined by another man, and they began to walk behind us, but at a considerable distance. Two men and a woman came out of a house on the left, another man stood behind them on the porch. Then, on the right, first one house, then another, they came out and stood on their lawn. My right was across the street, my left was Barbara’s left. On my left, an old woman came rushing to her gate and her face was filled with fury, she was staring toward us, we were coming closer. A very young man joined her, then a young woman, then a child. They were closer to Barbara than they were to me. A car stopped on the other side of the street, there were three men in it. Then, a car stopped on my side of the street, with a young boy in it. He said, “Nigger”—his voice was melodious—“you are a dead man. We going to get you. And your white whore, too.” The old woman and the young woman and the young man and the child were coming closer. I did not dare put a hand on Barbara. I whispered, “Come closer to me,” and I stepped nearer the curb, and she moved with me, just as we passed the old woman, who shouted, “You hussy! You nigger-lover! You low-down, common, low-class, poor white slut!” A great, mocking cheer went up behind us. I dared not take Barbara’s hand, or even look at her. Three white men were coming toward us, on my side of the sidewalk. I was astounded to realize that neither Barbara nor I, who, after all, were not without experience, had given a thought to our walking into town together, and on this morning, until it was too late, until we were already on the bridge. And, even then, we had not thought of this. I cursed Jerry for having taken the car, I cursed Barbara for her romantic folly—look what was happening to us, look!—and I cursed myself. The three young men were coming closer. Once we got past them, we had to bear right, into a short, tree-lined street, and, in the middle of this street, on the left, was the San-Marquand driveway. But the driveway was steep. It was relatively hidden—which might be good, or bad. I held both books, but I wasn’t going to be able to do much with them, and nothing at all for Barbara. I hoped she would have the sense to run. The sense to run. But it is always a mistake to run; unless, of course, you can really run away; which, in no way whatever, could be considered the case here. I stared into the puppy-dog face, the flecked eyes, registered the hanging hair, the pug nose, the crooked teeth. His buddies were on my left. They were abreast of Barbara. He said, “I want your girl-friend to give me and my friends a blow job. Do she cost much? Or do she only suck big, black nigger cocks?” His buddies were whispering to Barbara. I kept moving. Barbara touched the flower in her hair: I knew she was wishing it were a rose, and she could rake the thorns across their faces. We passed them. The three young men laughed, the street rocked. Just kids, thank you, Jesus, and the daring obscenity was the entire point. We bore right, and crossed the street. We walked in the shade of the trees, and, like soldiers, in perfect unison, turned left, and began toiling up the driveway. They hadn’t followed us—only their voices: “Down with niggers! Down with Jews!”

The sun was very hot in the driveway. We didn’t speak until we reached the fairly level ground at the top, and were walking toward the house. Then, Barbara looked at me. I looked at her. She was sweating, and she was pale. Her eyes were full of tears. They spilled over, and ran down her face. I brushed them away with my hand.

“Sister Barbara. Sister Barbara.”

She tried to smile. She didn’t have a handbag, and so she didn’t have a handkerchief. I handed her mine.

“It’s dirty,” I said. Then, “Blow your nose.”

She blew her nose in my dirty handkerchief, and handed it back to me.

“Brother Leo.”

“You can go straight to the John. Saul won’t notice a thing.”

“No,” she said. “I’m sure of that.”

We walked very slowly toward the house, like two reluctant children.

“Let’s not talk about it now,” I said suddenly. “Let’s not talk about it, ever.”

“Oh, we’ll talk about it sometime. I think we’ll have to. But not now.”

We both dreaded entering that house. We knew we had to; but we dreaded it.

“Where’s Jerry? Goddammit, he knows I need the car. Where the fuck is he?”

“He’ll be back.”

“He’ll be back when? I got a whole lot of shit to do, this afternoon, just as soon as this class is over—this class! Why has he got to be such a fucking baby? And what am I going to tell Saul, when he asks me where the car is? Shit. Do you know Jerry’s driving a stolen car? He’s got no papers for that car.”

“Neither do you. And you drive it all the time.”

“I’m supposed to drive it. And everybody knows it’s the Workshop car. And I only drive it in town.” We were at the door now, and I put my finger on the buzzer. “Shit. I just wish some people would fucking grow up, that’s all I fucking want.” The maid, the Negro maid, came to the door, looking as though she were letting us into a funeral chapel. She put her fingers to her lips, and we walked in. Barbara took her book from me, and ran up the stairs.

The maid and I had seen each other before, but we hadn’t particularly liked each other, and we certainly didn’t like each other now. She gestured me toward the living room, and so I walked over there, and sat down in one of the camp chairs, way in the back.

Saul had a really enormous living room. I guess it just about took up all of the ground floor of his house, and, at one end, there was a raised, curtainless alcove, where students performed, or exposed themselves, ordinarily, and where celebrities, at parties, did likewise—not that the celebrities needed the height. Saul sat alone in the center of this vast, high room, and the students sat around him and behind him. I had never watched a class before, and, in spite of everything, I was immensely curious. In spite of everything, I was anxious to know what would happen to me when I found myself in that curtainless alcove. Someone handed me a mimeographed program, and I saw that Barbara King and Leo Proudhammer were doing a scene from Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty. There were three scenes being done this morning. We were the third, and last.

The alcove was currently occupied by a swarthy youth, built big in the head and the belly and the buttocks. He was wearing sandals, and a kind of loose garment; and, at the moment he captured my attention, he was leaning forward, toward us, in great pain. His pain was so great that he could neither speak, nor do anything with his arms—which he held on either side of him, like broken plywood wings. He stumbled about in such despair that I supposed I was expected to believe that he had just been blinded, and the sandals made me think of Oedipus. But, as I couldn’t hear him—yet—I wasn’t sure.

“Nothing,” he said, and straightened to his full height, making a tremendous effort at the same time to do something with those arms, “extenuate.” He paused, and looked at all of us—for quite some time. “Nor,” he added quickly, as though it had just occurred to him, “set down aught in malice.” He had by now succeeded in getting his arms somewhere near his torso, and now one hand held his elbow, while the other gently admonished us: “Then must you speak of one that lov’d not wisely—but too well.” He paused again. He opened both arms wide. “Of one not easily jealous, but”—now he began to pace—“being wrought”—and once again he fixed us with his eye—“perplexed. In the extreme.” He shook his massive head. “Of one whose hand”—he raised his head and his voice and threw the voice to heaven, or to us—“like the base Indian, threw a pearl away richer than all his tribe!” The arms now encircled his girth, his head was down, and he was silent for awhile. Not a soul stirred, including me. He pulled himself together, or, rather, he let his arms go again, and faced us. Barbara came and sat down beside me. She looked all right. I handed her the program; this was Othello, and we were next.

“Of one,” he said, one hand caressing his chin, the other at his waist, “whose subdu’d eyes, albeit unused to the melting mood, drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees their med’cinable gum. Set you down this,” he said, both arms reaching toward us now, “and say besides—the intensity dropped, he began to pace again—“that in Aleppo once, where a malignant and a turban’d Turk beat a Venetian and traduc’d the state”—he paused, and let us have those eyes again—“I”—now he moved toward us, as tall as he could be, one hand at his waist and one hand stretched toward us—“took by th’ throat”—the hand stretched toward us violently closed—“the circumcised dog!”—how he glared; and then he paused awhile; he looked us all over, all of us—“And”—the throat hand rose into the air, the waist hand produced a dagger, both hands now grabbed it—“smote him—thus!” The dagger entered the entrails. The swarthy youth choked for awhile—quite a long while—unable to get his hands away from the dagger. And at last he fell, hands buried beneath him, and his backside somewhat higher than his head. The class applauded. There were about twelve or fifteen people there, some of them visitors. I did not look at Barbara, who did not look at me. The swarthy youth rose, someone brought him a chair, and he sat there in the alcove, waiting.

I did not know what he was waiting for. If what I had just seen was acting, well then, clearly, I had stumbled into the wrong joint. But I wasn’t sure. No one seemed to share the embarrassment I felt for the swarthy boy. Everyone seemed very cheerful, and there was a brief buzz of cheerful conversation. Then, Saul cleared his throat. And, with this sound, which was not tentative, but peremptory, silence fell.

“Mr. Parker,” Saul said, “can you tell us what you were working on in this scene—what you were working for?”

“Well,” said the boy—he blushed and smiled; he was very earnest—“I was trying to make Othello’s grief—physical. Grief, for me, always goes to my stomach. And I thought if I could make you feel Othello’s physical anguish, then you’d feel his—his other grief—his, well, his grief.” He smiled. “I don’t know any other way to say it, sir.”

“I think you’ve made yourself quite clear,” Saul said. He looked around the room. “Have we all understood Mr. Parker?”

Everyone had understood Mr. Parker.

“Very good.” He had apparently been taking notes during the boy’s exposure. He glanced at them now. “We feel,” he said, “that you have made very nice progress since you have been with us. Your freedom is becoming much—ah—much greater. You are less afraid than you were of letting us see your insides, so to say.” The boy smiled, pleased, and there was an appreciative hum from the students and the visitors. “Yet—we feel that you are not ready for the classics. We admire your courage in preparing this scene, but it was, perhaps—but understandably—slightly overambitious. But there is nothing wrong, let us say, with aiming too high. We are here, not to suggest that you aim lower, but to make your aim more accurate. I hope you understand what we are saying?”

“Yes, sir,” said the boy. He seemed very pleased indeed.

“Well, then. Since you have brought us, not your interpretation of, but rather, so to say, your reaction to, Othello, we will try to discuss this baffling character for a moment. You mentioned that you wanted to convey Othello’s grief. You hoped to make us feel his grief by means of his physical anguish. Why is he in grief, Mr. Parker?”

“Well,” said Parker, “he just killed his wife—Desdemona—the only girl who ever mattered to him. I mean, he loved her and now he’s killed her, she’s dead, and now he knows that he did wrong—I mean, that he was tricked, Iago tricked him into killing her.” He paused. “So, now, he’s all alone. In a way, he’s killed himself.”

“Do you think that his grief would be different if, in fact, he knew Desdemona to have been guilty?”

“Well, yes, sir, I think so. I mean, he’d still be alone, but at least he’d feel that the honorable thing had been done—that he’s done the honorable thing. This way, he just feels tricked. And by his buddy.”

“Iago—his buddy—is white. Othello is black—is a Moor. Do you think that this affects Othello’s reaction?”

“How so, sir?” Parker asked quickly. He seemed uneasy; he looked quickly in my direction. Then, “No, sir. I don’t see any reason why it should.”

“Then, Othello is in pain only because of the crime he has committed?”

“I think so, sir. I don’t think he would be thinking of Iago now at all—anyway, it’s his fault for believing Iago.”

“But we usually believe our friends,” Saul said.

“Do we?” said Parker. “I don’t.” And everybody laughed. Saul laughed, too.

“Why did you feel it necessary, or advisable, to make Othello’s pain physical? In some theatrical circles, that might seem—a little strange?”

“Well, Othello’s a great play, I guess, but a lot of it seems a little silly—all that handkerchief stuff, and everything. I mean”—he was floundering—“if you think about what Othello’s doing, well maybe, you’ll just think he’s dumb. But if you feel it—like a stomach ache—well, then, maybe you’ll understand him.” And he looked hopefully, expectantly, at Saul.

“Well,” said Saul, after a long pause, “you certainly seem to have thought about your problems. We do not feel that you have resolved them, but, as we said before, we are not here to make you lower your aim, but to help you hit the target—on the bull’s eye, so to say. We admire the directness of your approach to your problem—the idea of Othello with, so to say, a bellyache, we do not reject, as others might, no, we find it a very interesting idea. We feel that if your perceptions lead you into these areas, well and good. We wish to help you to explore; we are not afraid of any discovery; we are dedicated to discovery. We only insist that these discoveries be subjected to the proper theatrical discipline so that these discoveries can take their proper place in the vocabulary of the living theater. We are like, oh, Henry Ford, so to say—the theater is like that—we want the use of your inventions so that we can stay in business.” The class laughed. “Thank you, Mr. Parker. Your progress is most gratifying.”

Mr. Parker left the alcove. “Take ten,” said the student who was acting as Saul’s assistant that morning, and the maid brought out a pot of coffee, cups, saucers, milk, sugar, and cookies, and set them on the sideboard.

“Do you need any props?” Saul’s assistant now asked Barbara.

“A sofa,” I said. “Or a chair.”

He had turned away; he turned back. “Well, which is it?”

“A sofa would be better,” Barbara said. “Oh. And you know where the phonograph and the record are.”

“Right,” he said, and he went away. Barbara and I walked over to the coffee table, where the others were.

“Are you scared?” one of the girls asked me, smiling.

I grinned. “Yes,” I said. And I suddenly realized that I was. I poured coffee for Barbara. “We didn’t really need a sofa. I play the whole scene standing up.”

“Well, but I can use a sofa, don’t you see?” Barbara looked at me, and then she laughed. “You can just do more sitting on a sofa than you can sitting on a chair.”

The assistant, passing, heard this, and he winked. “I can just see who’s going to steal this scene,” he said. I looked toward the alcove. The sofa and the phonograph were there.

I drank my coffee, and I listened to the chatter. When the coffee hit my stomach, I realized I was sick, and I put the coffee down, and barely made it to the bathroom. My whole body was covered with a cold, light sweat, and I was nauseous—perhaps Othello with a bellyache was not such a bad idea. I had never felt this way before. I was sexually excited, too, but in an eerie way; it was a tension which contained no possibility of release. I came back to the coffee table to find that people were sitting down. Barbara was already in the alcove, and was talking to the assistant. She seemed quite calm. What the hell, I told myself, it’s going to be over in less than ten minutes. And it doesn’t matter what these people think. But I wished we had decided to do some other scene, any other scene. I no longer believed in this one. Barbara had my book with her, in the alcove. It was on the sofa. I rushed up, and opened it, because I suddenly couldn’t remember my first lines.

My first line was, Hello, Florrie. I couldn’t use my book. I put it back down on the sofa. I hoped I knew the scene well enough just to be able to go with it. The assistant picked up my book, and opened it. He stood there, waiting. I looked at him. Then I realized that he was going to read the short scene which precedes my entrance, between Florrie and her brother, Irv, who doesn’t want Florrie to marry me.

I smiled, and said, “Sorry,” and left the alcove.

“Nerves, nerves,” said the assistant, and there was a little burst of laughter.

They started.

“I got a right to have something out of life,” Barbara said, and she moved, sullenly, restlessly, about the alcove. “I don’t smoke, I don’t drink. So if Sid wants to take me to a dance, I’ll go. Maybe if you was in love, you wouldn’t talk so hard.”

“I’m saying it,” read the assistant flatly, “for your good.”

I knew that Jerry had cued Barbara for this scene many times, and yet it was odd to see her play it in a vacuum. I had no idea whether she was any good or not, and the way the assistant was reading the lines made it impossible—for me—to believe in the scene at all. Barbara looked far too young, it seemed to me, to be saying any of the things she was saying; if I had been her brother, I would have turned her over my knee. Still, she was sullen, she was upset, she was terribly nervous; only, I couldn’t tell whether it was she who was nervous, or Florrie. She certainly sounded very close to hysteria by the time she shouted, “Sure, I want romance, love, babies. I want everything in life I can get!” And she didn’t seem so young then. She seemed to know what was in store for her.

Here came my cue: “… Take the egg off the stove I boiled for Mom.” Then she looked up, and insisted on a rather long silence—long enough to make one wonder. The assistant nervously looked at his—or, rather, my book. Barbara turned away. “Leave us alone, Irv.”

I stepped into the alcove. The assistant and I stared at each other a moment, and then he disappeared—with my book. Then Barbara turned back, and looked at me.

“Hello, Florrie,” I said.

“Hello, honey. You’re looking tired.”

When she said that, I thought of our walk through town.

“Naw,” I said. “I just need a shave.”

And so we hit it. She looked so young, so helpless, and so fair. Sid wants to keep her looking as she looks now forever; but he has nothing to give her, nothing which won’t blast her into some other unimaginable, unbearable condition; he knows this as the scene begins, but must face it as the scene progresses. Barbara, too, was thinking of our walk through town. Finally, she breaks and runs to kiss me. I say, “You look tired, Florrie.”

“Naw,” said Barbara, holding on to my upper arms, throwing back her head and laughing at me, “I just need a shave.” Then she threw her head against my chest, buried her head in my chest, and held me. This was not the way we had played the scene before. I held her, and I said, “You worried about your mother?”

“No,” she said. But she had not moved; and I was taking my cue from her.

I said gently, “What’s on your mind?”

“The French and Indian War,” she said, and I now understood, holding her by the shoulder, that I could move her slightly away from me and look into her face. “What’s on your mind?”

“I got us on my mind, Sid.” She looked at me. “Night and day, Sid!”

Well, now I was in the scene and so I couldn’t know—it didn’t matter—whether we were any good or not. I dropped her shoulders, and I walked away, leaving her standing there. I thought of our morning and I thought of our walk when I said, “I smacked a beer truck today … Did I get hell! I was driving along thinking of US, too. You don’t have to say it—I know what’s on your mind. I’m rat poison around here.”

“Not,” she said helplessly, “to me …”

The scene shifts gears around then, it becomes really very propagandistic, and I had always been most worried about this long section, because the boy has most of the speeches, and because it’s hard to speak propaganda while relating to love. But, this morning, it seemed to work; maybe I was still thinking about our walk. Sid starts raving about his younger brother, who has joined the Navy, because he doesn’t know what else to do: “… Don’t he come around and say to you this millionaire with a jazz band—listen Sam or Sid or what’s-your-name,—you’re no good, but here’s a chance. The whole world’ll know who you are—yes, sir, he says,—get up on that ship and fight those bastards who’s making the world a lousy place to live in. The Japs, the Turks, the Greeks.—Take this gun—kill the slobs like a real hero, he says, a real American. Be a hero!”

I have no idea what I sounded like. The scene drops, then, back into the intensity of the boy and girl. Barbara looked very beautiful, I thought, when she said, “Sid, I’ll go with you—we’ll get a room somewhere.”

But he refuses this. He turns on the phonograph, and they dance. Then he says good-bye. She doesn’t answer. That’s when I get a chance to do my tapdance routine. And I whistle Rosy O’Grady. It felt all right. Barbara was staring at me.

“Don’t you like it?” I asked her. It was a real question.

She stared at me for a long time; which forced me to stare at her. Then she said, “No,” and dropped her face in her hands, with all her hair falling around her fingers. I dropped on my knees in front of her, and put my face in her lap. She held me. And that was the end of the scene.

I lifted my head, and we looked at each other very briefly, while we listened to the applause, and then I rose, and we sat together on the sofa, facing Saul San-Marquand.

Saul cleared his throat.

“As all of you know,” he said, “this last scene is really an audition. That is, neither Miss King, nor”—he considered the program—“Mr. Proudhammer—ah—are really working members of The Actors’ Means Workshop. We consider them both to be—ah—very gifted young people.”

At this, there was scattered, tentative applause. Saul raised his hand.

“As Miss King is the lady here, or”—he coughed—“certainly, so to say, represents the female principle, we will interrogate Miss King first. Miss King”—he straightened, and Barbara straightened—“why did you elect to do this scene?”

“We liked it,” Barbara said. She paused. “We felt that it made a connection—between a private love story—and—a—well, between a private sorrow and a public, a revolutionary situation.” She paused again. Saul watched her. She watched Saul. “The boy and girl are trapped. For reasons that they can’t do much about, anything about—and it’s not their fault—not their fault, I mean, that they’re trapped.”

“Then, your motives in doing this particular scene,” said Saul, “were personal?” He looked briefly at me.

“One’s motives,” said Barbara, sitting very still and straight, “are always personal.” Then, after a second, “I hope.” And she lifted her eyes to Saul again.

“One’s motives,” he said, “may always be personal. But one’s execution, as I believe you have heard us attempt to tell Mr. Parker, can never be personal. One’s motives, ah, that is one thing—but one’s execution of these motives, if one is attempting to work in the theater—these must be quite something else again.”

“I don’t,” she said flatly, with a certain calculated rudeness, “know what you’re talking about.” And she watched him. The silence, like water, rose.

“Miss King,” he said, “we are suggesting that your execution of this scene—which is, if we may say so, a very beautiful scene, and we had the distinction of being present the very first time it was ever played, has been somewhat carried away by your motives.” He raised his hand again. “Do not misunderstand us. We admire your motives. We were a revolutionary before you were born, Miss King—and the scene you have just attempted to play is a revolutionary scene. Written by a revolutionary. So, we are in sympathy with your motives.” He paused. “But we must question your execution. That is what we are here for.” He paused. “What were you working for in this scene, Miss King?”

“I was working,” she said—I had never seen her so arrogant, and I rather wondered at it—“at the truth in the scene. They are probably never going to see each other again. And they both know it.”

She had left him supposing that she was about to say more. But she said nothing.

“Excuse me, Miss King, but do you know the play? Do you know why—it is called Waiting for Lefty? Do you know, for example, that your boyfriend goes on strike? And that this changes everything—that they do not lose each other?”

“I know the play,” she said.

The silence rose and rose; and it was going to be my turn next. The silence rose; and Barbara watched Saul. In the silence, Barbara said, “When they’re facing each other in this scene, she can’t know, neither of them can know, if they’re ever going to see each other again. You don’t play what the playwright knows. You play what the character knows.” And then she paused, and marvelously conceded, with a smile, “Isn’t that so?”

“My dear Miss King,” said Saul, after a moment, “we certainly do not wish to make you feel that our more than forty years in the theater is more valuable than your time on earth.” There was laughter at this, and Saul also smiled.

And Barbara said, “I very much doubt that anything you can say will make me feel that your time on earth is more valuable than mine.”

Everyone was now watching Barbara and Saul, as though we were watching a horse race. But Saul, whatever he wasn’t, was shrewd; and his pride had never been a burden. “We like your spirit,” he said briefly, “but your spirit is perhaps more interesting offstage than it is on—what do you know about the girl in this scene?”

“I know that she has probably just finished washing the dishes, and her hands are probably still a little damp. I know she can’t stand the house she lives in—it makes her feel as though she’s in jail.” She paused. “She’s scared—scared that she’ll never get out of jail. She’s in love with Sid, but sometimes she almost hates him, too, and—well, she’s a virgin. That scares her, too. Maybe that scares her more than anything else.”

“Pardon me, Miss King. Have you ever lived—as this girl lives?”

“No. But I’ve never lived the life of Lady Macbeth, either. And no actress has.”

Perhaps Saul could live without being burdened by pride; but he could not live without his control over that world he had made. And Barbara was beginning to jeopardize it. The interest in the scene was shifting from him to her. He cleared his throat. We waited.

“Miss King,” he said, “when we said that we admired your spirit, we did not mean to suggest that we approved of bad manners. You are far from being able to play anything at all, let alone Lady Macbeth. If you are here to learn, we will endeavor to help you. If you are here, so to say, to show off, then we must tell you that we cannot tolerate such behavior. We have others to consider, Miss King. We cannot waste their time.”

Barbara backed down, but not without a brief struggle, and remaining, anyway, irreducibly sardonic. “I’m terribly sorry,” she said. “I apologize. I wasn’t trying to hog the scene.”

Saul watched her. “You have not given us enough for us to be able to criticize you. We would like you to enroll in the Speech class, and in the Dance class. In about two weeks, we would like to see an improvisation. But we will discuss that with you later.” He turned to me. “Mr.—Proudhammer!” He looked again at Barbara. “You may step down, Miss King.”

Barbara left the alcove.

“Mr. Proudhammer,” Saul said, “you, too, are an extremely spirited young person, as you have given us occasion, lately, to realize.” There was some laughter at this. “Unfortunately, in spite of your—ah—spirit, we would say that your equipment for the theater is extremely meager.” He paused, and raised one hand. “This is not said in condemnation. We know of some names in the theater—not many, but some—who seemed to have no promise at all when they first began. If we had seen some very celebrated names at their beginning, we would have declined to teach them. We would have suggested that they were out of place in the theater. We would have been wrong. We do not mind saying so.” He paused. “But we must tell you that these—ah—actors that we have in mind had to struggle for many years against—ah—limits—limits for which no one could blame them, which were not their fault, but—ah—limits which were nonetheless extremely severe, and which handicapped them greatly.” He paused again. “The actor’s instrument, Mr. Proudhammer, is unlike any instrument used in art. A writer’s instrument is his pen, a violinist has a violin, a sculptor has stone and a chisel, an architect has a slide rule, and so forth. But an actor’s instrument is his body, is himself. Paul Robeson, for example, is an actor who was made to play Othello. The instrument suggests it, the instrument, so to say, demands it. Other actors could never play Othello. The instrument will not carry the illusion.” He coughed, and looked around the room. “We do not wish to say that anything is impossible. We know of a great French actor who is—ah—a hunchback. Art, like life, is full of exceptions. But these exceptions—prove the rule.” He looked at me again. “You are certainly an exception. Frankly, we find it difficult to know exactly how to proceed with you. There is nothing to indicate—ah—in our opinion—that you have any very striking theatrical ability. Except, perhaps, for that little dance at the very end of the scene. Then you seemed free, and, so to say, joyous and boyish. We found it your very best moment. And if we decide to continue with you—or if you decide to continue with us—it will be in the hope that we can make such moments come more easily to you.”

I said nothing with my voice; I hoped I said nothing with my face.

“This is,” he said, after a moment, “a somewhat unexpected scene for you and Miss King to present to us. Why did you choose this particular scene?”

“We thought we could play it,” I said. He was making me feel foolish. I had to clear my throat, and I hated myself. “We liked it.”

“What do you know about—ah—the young hack—Sid—in this scene?”

I said, “He’s a poor boy. I’m a poor boy. He’s hungry. I’m hungry.”

“You look fairly well fed to me,” said Saul. This elicited a small wave of laughter. I pressed my palms together. “You do not drive a cab,” he said.

“I drive the Workshop car,” I said. Then, I wished I hadn’t said it. I’d forgotten about the goddamn car.

“But you are not, we hope, about to go on strike against the Workshop.” This caused more laughter. “You are not trying to unionize your fellow workers. You are paid a living wage. And you are young to be considering marriage.” He reconsidered: “Young, certainly, that is, from a legal point of view.” He watched me. “We do not think that you have entered into the problems of the young taxi driver at all. We do not think you understood them. We doubt, frankly, that you so much as considered them. You were bombastic, hysterical, and self-pitying. You sounded like a schoolboy who has been beaten up at school. We found it hard to imagine that Florrie would wish to marry you. Frankly, our entire sympathy was with her brother.”

He had me; he knew it; there was nothing I dared say.

“As we said earlier to Mr. Parker, there is nothing wrong with aiming too high. Frankly, we think it possible that you must aim too high. We are not here to discourage. But we must tell you when we feel that you are aiming at a target which it will simply be impossible for you ever to reach.” He paused again. “But you are—ah—a spirited young man, and—ah—we will see what we can do. You will enroll in the Speech class. And we will speak with you concerning an improvisation in the next few days.” He looked at his watch. “That is all, for the present.”

The class applauded. I stepped out of the alcove.

Barbara had been cornered by Saul. The others did not quite know what to say to me. I walked outside. The car stood in the driveway. Jerry sat in the car.

I walked over to him. It may be odd, but I felt that he was just about the only friend I had in the world. But we couldn’t be friends, either.

I stood at the car door, and we stared at each other. He looked very tired. His hair was dirty. He hadn’t shaved.

“How’s it going?” he asked. His voice sounded dry—light, as though the wind were turning it over, playing with it, blowing it about.

“Jerry,” I said, “I’m sorry. I just want you to know I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have hurt you for anything—anything in the world. I swear it. If I’d known—I swear—I’d have gone away.”

He said, “It’s not your fault. I know that.”

“It isn’t anybody’s fault,” I said, “is it?”

“Not that I know of,” he said. He switched the ignition on, then switched it off. “I just mowed a lawn. Now, I’ve got to get to my Life class.” He looked at me. “I figured you’d need the car. I put some gas in her.” He patted the dashboard. “So. I’ll be getting along.”

“You want me to drive you? I’ll drive you.”

“They’ll be needing you here, won’t they?”

“They can go fuck themselves,” I said. I got in the car. He moved over. “Fuck ’em.” I started the car, and we rolled down the driveway. We hit the streets of the town. I said nothing because I did not know what to say. I hurt for Jerry, and I hurt for me. Neither did Jerry say anything. Everything seemed such a waste.

We stopped before the headquarters of the fig-leaf division.

“Well,” Jerry said, and opened his door, “I’ll be seeing you, kid. Thanks for the ride.” Then, with his last words hanging on the air, we stared at each other.

“Jerry,” I said—why was I frightened?—“please forgive me. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I really didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“It’s not you who hurt me,” he said. He slapped me on the neck quickly, and smiled. “I love you, too,” he said. He got out of the car, and slammed the door. He started walking away, then turned. He said, “You got any money?”

I said, “No.”

He walked back to the car and handed me a dollar. “I’ll have more tonight. I guess we’ll be changing rooms.” He smiled, frowned, and shook his head. “I didn’t mean that. I got to be hauling ass out of here. I just don’t know.” He shook his head again, and his tears spangled the air. He turned away. “So long, Leo.”

“So long, Jerry.”

I watched him walk into the house and watched the door close behind him. I sat in the car. I lit a cigarette. Automatically, I turned the car around, to go back to the Workshop. Then I thought, Fuck it, and I turned the car around again, and drove out of town and hit the highway for New York.