(Originally published in 1937)
Black boy slammed his Tom Collins down on the bar with an irritated bang, turned a slack scowl toward Gigilo. Gigilo, yellow and fat like a well-fed hog, was saying in a fat, whiskey-thickened voice: “Then she pulled out a knife and cut me ’cross the back. I just looked at ’er. Then she threw ’way the knife and hit me in the mouth with her pocketbook. I still looked at her. Then she raised her foot and stomped my corns. I pushed her down then.”
Black Boy said: “Niggah, ef’n yo is talkin’ tuh me, Ah ain’ liss’nin’.” Black Boy didn’t like yellow niggers, he didn’t want no yellow nigger talking to him now, for he was waiting for Marie, his high yellow heart, to take her to her good-doing job.
Gigilo took another sip of rye, but he didn’t say anymore.
Sound bubbled about them, a bubble bursting here in a strident laugh, there in accented profanity. A woman’s coarse, heavy voice said: “Cal, Ah wish you’d stop Fo’-Fo’ frum drinkin’ so much” … A man’s flat, unmusical drone said: “Ah had uh ruff on 632 and 642 come out.” He had repeated the same words a hundred solid times … “Aw, she ain’ gibin’ dat chump nuttin,” a young, loud voice clamored for attention … A nickel victrola in the rear blared a husky, negroid bellow: “Anybody heah wanna buy …”
The mirror behind the bar reflected the lingering scowl on Black Boy’s face, the blackest blot in the ragged jam of black and yellow faces lining the bar.
Wall lights behind him spilled soft stain on the elite at the tables. Cigarette smoke cut thin blue streamers ceilingward through the muted light, mingled with whiskey fumes and perfume scents and Negro smell. Bodies squirmed, inching riotous-colored dresses up from yellow, shapely legs. Red-lacquered nails gleamed like bright blood drops on the stems of whiskey glasses, and the women’s yellow faces looked like powdered masks beneath sleek hair, bruised with red mouths.
Four white people pushed through the front door, split a hurried, half apologetic path through the turn of displeased faces toward the cabaret entrance at the rear. Black Boy’s muddy, negroid eyes followed them, slightly resentful.
A stoop-shouldered, consumptive-looking Negro leaned over Black Boy’s shoulder and whispered something in his ear.
Black Boy’s sudden strangle blew a spray of Tom Collins over the bar. He put the tall glass quickly down, sloshing the remaining liquid over his hand. His red tongue slid twice across his thick, red lips, and his slack, plate-shaped face took on a popeyed expression, as startlingly unreal beneath the white of his precariously perched Panama as an eight ball with suddenly sprouted features. The puffed, bluish scar on his left cheek, memento of a pick-axe duel on a chain gang, seemed to swell into an embossed reproduction of a shell explosion, ridges pronging off from it in spokes.
He slid back from his stool, his elbow digging into a powdered, brownskin back to his right, caught on his feet with a flat-footed clump. Standing, his body was big, his six foot height losing impressiveness in slanting shoulders and long arms like an ape’s.
He paused for a moment, undecided, a unique specimen of sartorial splendor—white Panama stuck on the back of his shiny shaved skull, yellow silk polo shirt dirtied slightly by the black of his bulging muscles, draped trousers of a brilliant pea green, tight waisted and slack hanging above size eleven shoes of freshly shined tan.
The woman with the back turned a ruffled countenance, spat a stream of lurid profanity at him through twisted red lips. But he wedged through the jam toward the door, away from her, smashed out of the Log Cabin bar into a crowd of idling avenue pimps.
The traffic lights at the corner turned from green to red. Four shiny, new automobiles full of laughing black folks, purred casually through the red. A passing brownskin answered to the call of “Babe,” paused before her “nigger” in saddle-backed stance, arms akimbo, tight dress tightened on the curve of her hips.
Black Boy’s popped eyes filled with yellow specks, slithered across the front of the weather-stained Majestic Hotel across the street, lingering a searching instant on every woman whose face was light. Around the corner, down on Central Avenue, he caught a fleeting glimpse of a yellow gal climbing into a green sedan, then a streetcar clanged across his vision.
He pulled in his red lips, wet them with his tongue. Then he broke into a shuffling, flat-footed run—through the squawk of a horn, across suddenly squealing brakes, never looked around. A taxi-driver’s curse lashed him across the street. His teeth bared slightly, but the bloated unreality of his face never changed.
He turned right in front of the Majestic, roughed over a brown dandy with two painted crones, drew up at the corner, panting. The green sedan burnt rubber, pulled right through the red light in a whining, driving first.
But too late to keep Black Boy from catching a flash of the pretty, frightened face of Marie and the nervous profile of the driver bent low over the wheel. A yellow nigger. He turned and watched the red tail-light sink into the distant darkness, his body twisting on flatly planted feet. His lower lip went slack, hung down like a red smear on his black face. His bulging eyes turned a vein-laced red. Sweat popped out on his face, putting a sheen on its lumpy blackness, grew in beads on his shiny head, trickled in streams down his body.
He turned and ran for a cab, but his actions were dogged now instead of apprehensive. He’d already seen Marie with that yellow hotel nigger. He caught a cab pointing the right way, said: “Goose it, Speed,” before he swung through the open door.
Speed goosed it. The cab took sudden life, jumped ahead from the shove of eight protesting cylinders. Black Boy leaned tensely forward, let the speedometer needle hit fifty before he spoke. “Dar’s uh green sedan up front, uh fo’ do’ job. Latch on it ’n earn dis dime, big dime.”
The lank, loose-bodied brown boy driving threw him a careless, toothy grin, coiled around the wheel. He headed into the red light at Cedar Avenue doing a crisp seventy, didn’t slacken. He pulled inside the line of waiting cars, smashed into the green while the red still lingered in his eyes. The green turned to red at Carnegie, and the car in front stopped, but he burst the red wide open doing a sheer eighty-five, leaning on the horn.
“Ri’ at Euclid,” Black Boy directed through lips that hung so slack they seemed to be turned wrong side out. He was gambling on those yellow folk seeking the protection of their white folk where they worked, for they had lost the green sedan.
The driver braked for the turn, eyes roving for traffic cops. He didn’t see any and he turned at a slow fifty, not knowing whether the light was red, white or blue. The needle walked right up the street numbers, fifty-seven at 57th Street, seventy-one at 71st. It was hovering on eighty again when Black Boy said: “Turn ’round.”
Marie was just getting out of the green sedan in front of the Regis where she worked as a maid. When she heard that shrill cry of rubber on asphalt she broke into a craven run.
Black Boy hit the pavement in a flat-footed lope, caught her just as she was about to climb the lobby stairs. He never said a word, he just reached around from behind and smacked her in the face with the open palm of his right hand. She drew up short against the blow. Then he hit her under her right breast with a short left jab and chopped three rights into her face when she turned around with the edge of his fist like he was driving nails.
She wilted to her knees and he bumped her in the mouth with his knee, knocking her sprawling on her side. He kicked her in the body three rapid, vicious times, slobber drooling from his slack, red lips. His bloated face was a tar ball in the spill of sign light, his eyes too dull to notice. Somehow his Panama still clung on his eight ball head, whiter than ever, and his red lips were a split, bleeding incision in his black face.
Marie screamed for help. Then she whimpered. Then she begged. “Doan kill me, Black Boy, daddy deah, honey darlin’, daddy-daddy deah. Marie luvs yuh, daddy darlin’. Doan kill me, please, daddy. Doan kill yo’ lil’ honeybunch, Marie …”
The yellow boy, slowly following from the car, paused a moment in indecision as if he would get back in and drive away. But he couldn’t bear seeing Black Boy kick Marie. The growth of emotion was visible in his face before it pushed him forward.
After an instant he realized that that was where he worked as a bellhop, that those white folk would back him up against a strange nigger. He stepped quickly over to Black Boy, spoke in a cultural preëmptory voice: “Stop kicking that woman, you dirty black nigger.”
Black Boy turned his bloated face toward him. His dull eyes explored him, dogged. His voice was flatly telling him: “You keep outta dis, yellow niggah. Dis heah is mah woman an’ Ah doan lak you no way.”
The yellow boy was emboldened by the appearance of two white men in the hotel doorway. He stepped over and slung a weighted blow to Black Boy’s mouth. Black Boy shifted in quick rage, drew a spring-blade barlow chiv and slashed the yellow boy to death before the two white men could run down the stairs. He broke away from their restraining hands, made his way to the alley beside the theater in his shambling, flat-footed run before the police cruiser got there.
He heard Marie’s loud, fear-shrill voice crying: “He pulled a gun on Black Boy, he pulled a gun on Black Boy. Ah saw ’im do it—”
He broke into a laugh, satisfied. She was still his …
Three rapid shots behind him stopped his laugh, shattered his face into black fragments. The cops had begun shooting without calling halt. He knew that they knew he was a “dinge,” and he knew they wanted to kill him, so he stepped into the light behind a Clark’s Restaurant, stopped dead still with upraised hands, not turning around.
The cops took him down to the station and beat his head into an open, bloody wound from his bulging eyes clear around to the base of his skull—“You’d bring your nigger cuttings down on Euclid Avenue, would you, you black—”
They gave him the electric chair for that.
But if it is worrying him, he doesn’t show it during the slow drag of days in death row’s grilled enclosure. He knows that that high yellow gal with the ball-bearing hips is still his, heart, soul and body. All day long, you can hear his loud, crowing voice, kidding the other condemned men, jibing the guards, telling lies. He can tell some tall lies, too—“You know, me ’n Marie wuz in Noo Yawk dat wintah. Ah won leben grands in uh dice game ’n brought her uh sealskin—”
All day long, you can hear his noisy laugh.
Marie comes to see him as often as they let her, brings him fried chicken and hot, red lips; brings him a wide smile and tiny yellow specs in her big, brown, ever-loving eyes. You can hear his assured love-making all over the range, his casual “honeybunch,” his chuckling, contented laugh.
All day long …
It’s at night, when she’s gone and the cells are dark and death row is silent, that you’ll find Black Boy huddled in the corner of his cell, thinking of her, perhaps in some other nigger’s loving arms. Crying softly. Salty tears making glistening streaks down the blending blackness of his face.