New Orleans Noir: The Classics

The Purple Hat by Eudora Welty

(Originally published in 1941)

Upper Quarter

It was in a bar, a quiet little hole in the wall. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. Beyond the open door the rain fell, the heavy color of the sea, in air where the sunlight was still suspended. Its watery reflection lighted the room, as a room might have lighted a mousehole. It was in New Orleans.

There was a bartender whose mouth and eyes curved downward from the divide of his baby-pink nose, as if he had combed them down, like his hair; he always just said nothing. The seats at his bar were black oilcloth knobs, worn and smooth and as much alike as six pebbles on the beach, and yet the two customers had chosen very particularly the knobs they would sit on. They had come in separately out of the wet, and had each chosen an end stool, and now sat with the length of the little bar between them. The bartender obviously did not know either one; he rested his eyes by closing them...

The fat customer, with a rather affable look about him, said he would have a rye. The unshaven young man with the shaking hands, though he had come in first, only looked fearfully at a spot on the counter before him until the bartender, as if he could hear silent prayer, covered the spot with a drink.

The fat man swallowed, and began at once to look a little cozy and prosperous. He seemed ready to speak, if the moment came...

There was a calm roll of thunder, no more than a shifting of the daily rain clouds over Royal Street.

Then — “Rain or shine,” the fat man spoke, “she’ll be there.”

The bartender stilled his cloth on the bar, as if mopping up made a loud noise, and waited.

“Why, at the Palace of Pleasure,” said the fat man. He was really more heavy and solid than he was simply fat.

The bartender leaned forward an inch on his hand.

“The lady will be at the Palace of Pleasure,” said the fat man in his drowsy voice. “The lady with the purple hat.”

Then the fat man turned on the black knob, put his elbow on the counter, and rested his cheek on his hand, where he could see all the way down the bar. For a moment his eyes seemed dancing there, above one of those hands so short and so plump that you are always counting the fingers... really helpless-looking hands for so large a man.

The young man stared back without much curiosity, looking at the affable face much the way you stare out at a little station where your train is passing through. His hand alone found its place on his small glass.

“Oh, the hat she wears is a creation,” said the fat man, almost dreamily, yet not taking his eyes from the young man. It was strange that he did not once regard the bartender, who after all had done him the courtesy of asking a polite question or two, or at least the same as asked. “A great and ancient and bedraggled purple hat.”

There was another rumble overhead. Here they seemed to inhabit the world that was just beneath the thunder. The fat man let it go by, lifting his little finger like a pianist. Then he went on.

“Sure, she’s one of those thousands of middle-aged women who come every day to the Palace, would not be kept away by anything on earth... Most of them are dull enough, drab old creatures, all of them, walking in with their big black purses held wearily by the handles like suitcases packed for a trip. No one has ever been able to find out how all these old creatures can leave their lives at home like that to gamble... what their husbands think... who keeps the house in order... who pays... At any rate, she is one like the rest, except for the hat, and except for the young man that always meets her there, from year to year... And I think she is a ghost.”

“Ghost!” said the bartender — noncommittally, just as he might repeat an order.

“For this reason,” said the fat man.

A reminiscent tone came into his voice which seemed to put the silent thin young man on his guard. He made the beginning of a gesture toward the bottle. The bartender was already filling his glass.

“In thirty years she has not changed,” said the fat man. “Neither has she changed her hat. Dear God, how the moths must have hungered for that hat. But she has kept it in full bloom on her head, that monstrosity — purple too, as if she were beautiful in the bargain. She has not aged, but she keeps her middle age. The young man, on the other hand, must change — I’m sure he’s not always the same young man. For thirty years,” he said, “she’s met a young man at the dice table every afternoon, rain or shine, at five o’clock, and gambles till midnight and tells him good-bye, and still it looks to be always the same young man — always young, but a little stale, a little tired... the smudge of a sideburn... She finds them, she does. She picks them. Where I don’t know, unless New Orleans, as I’ve always had a guess, is the birthplace of ready-made victims.”

“Who are you?” asked the young man. It was the sort of idle voice in which the greatest wildness sometimes speaks out at last in a quiet bar.

“In the Palace of Pleasure there is a little catwalk along beneath the dome,” said the fat man. His rather small, mournful lips, such as big men often have, now parted in a vague smile. “I am the man whose eyes look out over the gambling room. I am the armed man that everyone knows to be watching, at all they do. I don’t believe my position is dignified by a title.” Nevertheless, he looked rather pleased. “I have watched her every day for thirty years and I think she is a ghost. I have seen her murdered twice,” said the fat man.

The bartender’s enormous sad black eyebrows raised, like hoods on baby carriages, and showed his round eyes.

The fat man lifted his other fat little hand and studied, or rather showed off, a ruby ring that he wore on his little finger. “That carpet, if you have ever been there, in the Palace of Pleasure, is red, but from up above, it changes and gives off light between the worn crisscrossing of the aisles like the facets of a well-cut ruby,” he said, speaking in a declarative manner as if he had been waiting for a chance to deliver this enviable comparison. “The tables and chandeliers are far down below me, points in its interior... Life in the ruby. And yet somehow all that people do is clear and lucid and authentic there, as if it were magnified in the red lens, not made smaller. I can see everything in the world from my catwalk. You mustn’t think I brag...” He looked all at once from his ring straight at the young man’s face, which was as drained and white as ever, expressionless, with a thin drop of whiskey running down his cheek where he had blundered with his glass.

“I have seen this old and disgusting creature in her purple hat every night, quite plainly, for thirty years, and to my belief she has been murdered twice. I suppose it will take the third time.” He himself smoothly tossed down a drink.

The bartender leaned over and filled the young man’s glass.

“It’s within the week, within the month, that she comes back. Once she was shot point-blank — that was the first time. The young man was hot-headed then. I saw her carried out bleeding from the face. We hush those things, you know, at the Palace. There are no signs afterward, no trouble... The soft red carpet... Within the month she was back — with her young man meeting her at the table just after five.”

The bartender put his head to one side.

“The only good of shooting her was, it made a brief period of peace there,” said the fat man. “I wouldn’t scoff, if I were you.” He did seem the least bit fretted by that kind of interruption.

“The second time took into account the hat,” he went on. “And I do think her young man was on his way toward the right idea that time, the secret. I think he had learned something. Or he wanted it all kept more quiet, or he was a new one...” He looked at the young man at the other end of the bar with a patient, compassionate expression, or it may have been the inevitably tender contour of his round cheeks. “It is time that I told you about the hat. It is quite a hat. A great, wide, deep hat such as has no fashion and never knew there was fashion and change. It serves her to come out in winter and summer. Those are old plush flowers that trim it — roses? Poppies? A man wouldn’t know easily. And you would never know if you only met her wearing the hat that a little glass vial with a plunger helps decorate the crown. You would have to see it from above... Or you would need to be the young man sitting beside her at the gambling table when, at some point in the evening, she takes the hat off and lays it carefully in her lap, under the table... Then you might notice the little vial, and be attracted to it and wish to take it out and examine it at your pleasure off in the washroom — to admire the handle, for instance, which is red glass, like the petal of an artificial flower.”

The bartender suddenly lifted his hand to his mouth as if it held a glass, and yawned into it. The thin young man hit the counter faintly with his tumbler.

“She does more than just that, though,” said the fat man with a little annoyance in his soft voice. “Perhaps I haven’t explained that she is a lover too, or did you know that she would be? It is hard to make it clear to a man who has never been out to the Palace of Pleasure, but only serves drinks all day behind a bar. You see...” And now, lowering his voice a little, he deliberately turned from the young man and would not look at him anymore. But the young man looked at him, without lifting his drink — as if there were something hypnotic and irresistible even about his side face with the round, hiding cheek.

“Try to imagine,” the fat man was saying gently to the bartender, who looked back at him. “At some point in the evening she always takes off the purple hat. Usually it is very late... when it is almost time for her to go. The young man who has come to the rendezvous watches her until she removes it, watches her hungrily. Is it in order to see her hair? Well, most ghosts that are lovers, and lovers that are ghosts, have the long thick black hair that you would expect, and hers is no exception to the rule. It is pinned up, of course — in her straggly vague way. But the young man doesn’t look at it after all. He is enamored of her hat — her ancient, battered, outrageous hat with the awful plush flowers. She lays it down below the level of the table there, on her shabby old lap, and he caresses it... Well, I suppose in this town there are stranger forms of love than that, and who are any of us to say what ways people may not find to love? She herself, you know, seems perfectly satisfied with it. And yet she must not be satisfied, being a ghost... Does it matter how she seeks her desire? I am sure she speaks to him, in a sort of purr, the purr that is used for talking in that room, and the young man does not know what she seeks of him, and she is leading him on, all the time. What does she say? I do not know. But believe me... she leads him on...”

The bartender leaned on one hand. He had an oddly cheerful look by this time, as if with strange and sad things to come his way his outlook became more vivacious.

“To look at, she has a large-sized head,” said the fat man, pushing his lip with his short finger. “Well, it is more that her face spreads over such a wide area. Like the moon’s... Much as I have studied her, I can only say that all her features seem to have moved farther apart from each other — expanded, if you see what I mean.” He brought his hands together and parted them.

The bartender leaned over closer, staring at the fat man’s face interestedly.

“But I can never finish telling you about the hat!” the fat man cried, and there was a little sigh somewhere in the room, very young, like a child’s. “Of course, to balance the weight of the attractive little plunger, there is an object to match on the other side of this marvelous old hat — a jeweled hatpin, no less. Of course the pin is there to keep the hat safe! Each time she takes off the hat, she has first to remove the hatpin. You can see her do it every night of the world. It comes out a regular little flashing needle, ten or twelve inches long, and after she has taken the hat off, she sticks the pin back through.”

The bartender pursed his lips.

“What about the second time she was murdered? Have you wondered how that was done?” The fat man turned back to face the young fellow, whose feet drove about beneath the stool. “The young lover had learned something, or come to some conclusion, you see,” he said. “It was obvious all the time, of course, that by spinning the brim ever so easily as it rested on the lady’s not over-sensitive old knees, it would be possible to remove the opposite ornament. There was not the slightest fuss or outcry when the pin entered between the ribs and pierced the heart. No one saw it done... except for me, naturally — I had been watching for it, more or less. The old creature, who had been winning at that, simply folded all softly in on herself, like a circus tent being taken down after the show, if you’ve ever seen the sight. I saw her carried out again. It takes three big boys every time, she is so heavy, and one of them always has the presence of mind to cover her piously with her old purple hat for the occasion.”

The bartender shut his eyes distastefully.

“If you had ever been to the Palace of Pleasure, you’d know it all went completely as usual — people at the tables never turn around,” said the fat man.

The bartender ran his hand down the side of his sad smooth hair.

“The trouble lies, you see,” said the fat man, “with the young lover. You are he, let us say...” But he turned from the drinking young man, and it was the bartender who was asked to be the lover for the moment. “After a certain length of time goes by, and love has blossomed, and the hat, the purple hat, is thrilling to the touch of your hand — you can no longer be sure about the little vial. There in privacy you may find it to be empty. It is her coquettishness, you see. She leads you on. You are never to know whether...”

The chimes of St. Louis Cathedral went somnambulantly through the air. It was five o’clock. The young man had risen somehow to his feet. He moved out of the bar and disappeared in the rain of the alley. On the floor where his feet had been were old cigarette stubs that had been kicked and raked into a little circle — a rosette, a clock, a game wheel, or something...

The bartender put a cork in the bottle.

“I have to go myself,” said the fat man.

Once more the bartender raised his great hooded brows. For a moment their eyes met. The fat man pulled out an enormous roll of worn bills. He paid in full for all drinks and added a nice tip.

“Up on the catwalk you get the feeling now and then that you could put out your finger and make a change in the universe.” His great shoulders lifted.

The bartender, with his hands full of cash, leaned confidentially over the bar. “Is she a real ghost?” he asked, in a real whisper.

There was a pause, which the thunder filled.

“I’ll let you know tomorrow,” said the fat man.

Then he too was gone.

Desire and the Black Masseur by Tennessee Williams

(Originally published in 1948)

Tremé

From his very beginning this person, Anthony Burns, had betrayed an instinct for being included in things that swallowed him up. In his family there had been fifteen children and he the one given least notice, and when he went to work, after graduating from high school in the largest class on the records of that institution, he secured his job in the largest wholesale company of the city. Everything absorbed him and swallowed him up, and still he did not feel secure. He felt more secure at the movies than anywhere else. He loved to sit in the back rows of the movies where the darkness absorbed him gently so that he was like a particle of food dissolving in a big hot mouth. The cinema licked at his mind with a tender, flickering tongue that all but lulled him to sleep. Yes, a big motherly Nannie of a dog could not have licked him better or given him sweeter repose than the cinema did when he went there after work. His mouth would fall open at the movies and saliva would accumulate in it and dribble out the sides of it and all his being would relax so utterly that all the prickles and tightenings of a whole day’s anxiety would be lifted away. He didn’t follow the story on the screen but watched the figures. What they said or did was immaterial to him, he cared about only the figures who warmed him as if they were cuddled right next to him in the dark picture house and he loved every one of them but the ones with shrill voices.

The timidest kind of a person was Anthony Burns, always scuttling from one kind of protection to another but none of them ever being durable enough to suit him.

Now at the age of thirty, by virtue of so much protection, he still had in his face and body the unformed look of a child and he moved like a child in the presence of critical elders. In every move of his body and every inflection of speech and cast of expression there was a timid apology going out to the world for the little space that he had been somehow elected to occupy in it. His was not an inquiring type of mind. He only learned what he was required to learn and about himself he learned nothing. He had no idea of what his real desires were. Desire is something that is made to occupy a larger space than that which is afforded by the individual being, and this was especially true in the case of Anthony Burns. His desires, or rather his basic desire, was so much too big for him that it swallowed him up as a coat that should have been cut into ten smaller sizes, or rather there should have been that much more of Burns to make it fit him.

For the sins of the world are really only its partialities, its incompletions, and these are what sufferings must atone for. A wall that has been omitted from a house because the stones were exhausted, a room in a house left unfurnished because the householder’s funds were not sufficient — these sorts of incompletions are usually covered up or glossed over by some kind of makeshift arrangement. The nature of man is full of such makeshift arrangements, devised by himself to cover his incompletion. He feels a part of himself to be like a missing wall or a room left unfurnished and he tries as well as he can to make up for it. The use of imagination, resorting to dreams or the loftier purpose of art, is a mask he devises to cover his incompletion. Or violence such as a war, between two men or among a number of nations, is also a blind and senseless compensation for that which is not yet formed in human nature. Then there is still another compensation. This one is found in the principle of atonement, the surrender of self to violent treatment by others with the idea of thereby clearing one’s self of his guilt. This last way was the one that Anthony Burns unconsciously had elected.

Now at the age of thirty he was about to discover the instrument of his atonement. Like all other happenings in his life, it came about without intention or effort.

One afternoon, which was a Saturday afternoon in November, he went from his work in the huge wholesale corporation to a place with a red neon sign that said, Turkish Baths and Massage. He had been suffering lately from a vague sort of ache near the base of his spine and somebody else employed at the wholesale corporation had told him that he would be relieved by massage. You would suppose that the mere suggestion of such a thing would frighten him out of his wits, but when desire lives constantly with fear, and no partition between them, desire must become very tricky; it has to become as sly as the adversary, and this was one of those times when desire outwitted the enemy under the roof. At the very mention of the word massage, the desire woke up and exuded a sort of anesthetizing vapor all through Burns’s nerves, catching fear off guard and allowing Burns to slip by it. Almost without knowing that he was really going, he went to the baths that Saturday afternoon.

The baths were situated in the basement of a hotel, right at the center of the keyed-up mercantile nerves of the downtown section, and yet the baths were a tiny world of their own. Secrecy was the atmosphere of the place and seemed to be its purpose. The entrance door had an oval of milky glass through which you could only detect a glimmer of light. And even when a patron had been admitted, he found himself standing in labyrinths of partitions, of corridors and cubicles curtained off from each other, of chambers with opaque doors and milky globes over lights and sheathings of vapor. Everywhere were agencies of concealment. The bodies of patrons, divested of their clothing, were swatched in billowing tent-like sheets of white fabric. They trailed barefooted along the moist white tiles, as white and noiseless as ghosts except for their breathing, and their faces all wore a nearly vacant expression. They drifted as if they had no thought to conduct them.

But now and again, across the central hallway, would step a masseur. The masseurs were Negroes. They seemed very dark and positive against the loose white hangings of the baths. They wore no sheets, they had on loose cotton drawers, and they moved about with force and resolution. They alone seemed to have an authority here. Their voices rang out boldly, never whispering in the sort of apologetic way that the patrons had in asking directions of them. This was their own rightful province, and they swept the white hangings aside with great black palms that you felt might just as easily have seized bolts of lightning and thrown them back at the clouds.

Anthony Burns stood more uncertainly than most near the entrance of the bathhouse. Once he had gotten through the milky-paned door his fate was decided and no more action or will on his part was called for. He paid two-fifty, which was the price of a bath and massage, and from that moment forward had only to follow directions and submit to care. Within a few moments a Negro masseur came to Burns and propelled him onward and then around a corner where he was led into one of the curtained compartments.

Take off your clothes, said the Negro.

The Negro had already sensed an unusual something about his latest patron and so he did not go out of the canvas-draped cubicle but remained leaning against a wall while Burns obeyed and undressed. The white man turned his face to the wall away from the Negro and fumbled awkwardly with his dark winter clothes. It took him a long time to get the clothes off his body, not because he wilfully lingered about it but because of a dreamlike state in which he was deeply falling. A faraway feeling engulfed him and his hands and fingers did not seem to be his own, they were numb and hot as if they were caught in the clasp of someone standing behind him, manipulating their motions. But at last he stood naked, and when he turned slowly about to face the Negro masseur, the black giant’s eyes appeared not to see him at all and yet they had a glitter not present before, a liquid brightness suggesting bits of wet coal.

Put this on, he directed and held out to Burns a white sheet.

Gratefully the little man enveloped himself in the enormous coarse fabric and, holding it delicately up from his small-boned, womanish feet, he followed the Negro masseur through another corridor of rustling white curtains to the entrance of an opaque glass enclosure which was the steam-room. There his conductor left him. The blank walls heaved and sighed as steam issued from them. It swirled about Burns’s naked figure, enveloping him in a heat and moisture such as the inside of a tremendous mouth, to be drugged and all but dissolved in this burning white vapor which hissed out of unseen walls.

After a time the black masseur returned. With a mumbled command, he led the trembling Burns back into the cubicle where he had left his clothes. A bare white table had been wheeled into the chamber during Burns’s absence.

Lie on this, said the Negro.

Burns obeyed. The black masseur poured alcohol on Burns’s body, first on his chest and then on his belly and thighs. It ran all over him, biting at him like insects. He gasped a little and crossed his legs over the wild complaint of his groin. Then without any warning the Negro raised up his black palm and brought it down with a terrific whack on the middle of Burns’s soft belly. The little man’s breath flew out of his mouth in a gasp and for two or three moments he couldn’t inhale another.

Immediately after the passing of the first shock, a feeling of pleasure went through him. It swept as a liquid from either end of his body and into the tingling hollow of his groin. He dared not look, but he knew what the Negro must see. The black giant was grinning.

I hope I didn’t hit you too hard, he murmured.

No, said Burns.

Turn over, said the Negro.

Burns tried vainly to move but the luxurious tiredness made him unable to. The Negro laughed and gripped the small of his waist and flopped him over as easily as he might have turned a pillow. Then he began to belabor his shoulders and buttocks with blows that increased in violence, and as the violence and the pain increased, the little man grew more and more fiercely hot with his first true satisfaction, until all at once a knot came loose in his loins and released a warm flow.

So by surprise is a man’s desire discovered, and once discovered, the only need is surrender, to take what comes and ask no questions about it: and this was something that Burns was expressly made for.

Time and again the white-collar clerk went back to the Negro masseur. The knowledge grew quickly between them of what Burns wanted, that he was in search of atonement, and the black masseur was the natural instrument of it. He hated white-skinned bodies because they abused his pride. He loved to have their white skin prone beneath him, to bring his fist or the palm of his hand down hard on its passive surface. He had barely been able to hold this love in restraint, to control the wish that he felt to pound more fiercely and use the full of his power. But now at long last the suitable person had entered his orbit of passion. In the white-collar clerk he had located all that he longed for.

Those times when the black giant relaxed, when he sat at the rear of the baths and smoked cigarettes or devoured a bar of candy, the image of Burns would loom before his mind, a nude white body with angry red marks on it. The bar of chocolate would stop just short of his lips and the lips would slacken into a dreamy smile. The giant loved Burns, and Burns adored the giant.

Burns had become absentminded about his work. Right in the middle of typing a factory order, he would lean back at his desk and the giant would swim in the atmosphere before him. Then he would smile and his work-stiffened fingers would loosen and flop on the desk. Sometimes the boss would stop near him and call his name crossly. Burns! Burns! What are you dreaming about?

Throughout the winter the violence of the massage increased by fairly reasonable degrees, but when March came it was suddenly stepped up.

Burns left the baths one day with two broken ribs.

Every morning he hobbled to work more slowly and painfully but the state of his body could still be explained by saying he had rheumatism.

One day his boss asked him what he was doing for it. He told his boss that he was taking massage.

It don’t seem to do you any good, said the boss.

Oh, yes, said Burns, I am showing lots of improvement!

That evening came his last visit to the baths.

His right leg was fractured. The blow which had broken the limb was so terrific that Burns had been unable to stifle an outcry. The manager of the bath establishment heard it and came into the compartment.

Burns was vomiting over the edge of the table.

Christ, said the manager, what’s been going on here?

The black giant shrugged.

He asked me to hit him harder.

The manager looked over Burns and discovered his many bruises.

What do you think this is? A jungle? he asked the masseur.

Again the black giant shrugged.

Get the hell out of my place! the manager shouted. Take this perverted little monster with you, and neither of you had better show up here again!

The black giant tenderly lifted his drowsy partner and bore him away to a room in the town’s Negro section.

There for a week the passion between them continued.

This interval was toward the end of the Lenten season. Across from the room where Burns and the Negro were staying there was a church whose open windows spilled out the mounting exhortations of a preacher. Each afternoon the fiery poem of death on the cross was repeated. The preacher was not fully conscious of what he wanted nor were the listeners, groaning and writhing before him. All of them were involved in a massive atonement.

Now and again some manifestation occurred, a woman stood up to expose a wound in her breast. Another had slashed an artery at her wrist.

Suffer, suffer, suffer! the preacher shouted. Our Lord was nailed on a cross for the sins of the world! They led Him above the town to the place of the skull, they moistened his lips with vinegar on a sponge, they drove five nails through his body, and He was the Rose of the World as He bled on the cross!

The congregation could not remain in the building but tumbled out on the street in a crazed procession with clothes torn open.

The sins of the world are all forgiven! they shouted.

All during this celebration of human atonement, the Negro masseur was completing his purpose with Burns.

All the windows were open in the death chamber.

The curtains blew out like thirsty little white tongues to lick at the street which seemed to reek with an overpowering honey. A house had caught fire on the block in back of the church. The walls collapsed and the cinders floated about in the gold atmosphere. The scarlet engines, the ladders and powerful hoses were useless against the purity of the flame.

The Negro masseur leaned over his still breathing victim.

Burns was whispering something.

The black giant nodded.

You know what you have to do now? the victim asked him. The black giant nodded.

He picked up the body, which barely held together, and placed it gently on a clean-swept table.

The giant began to devour the body of Burns.

It took him twenty-four hours to eat the splintered bones clean.

When he had finished, the sky was serenely blue, the passionate services at the church were finished, the ashes had settled, the scarlet engines had gone, and the reek of honey was blown from the atmosphere.

Quiet had returned and there was an air of completion.

Those bare white bones, left over from Burns’s atonement, were placed in a sack and borne to the end of a car line.

There the masseur walked out on a lonely pier and dropped his burden under the lake’s quiet surface.

As the giant turned homeward, he mused on his satisfaction.

Yes, it is perfect, he thought, it is now completed!

Then in the sack, in which he had carried the bones, he dropped his belongings, a neat blue suit to conceal his dangerous body, some buttons of pearl, and a picture of Anthony Burns as a child of seven.

He moved to another city, obtained employment once more as an expert masseur. And there in a white-curtained place, serenely conscious of fate bringing toward him another, to suffer atonement as it had been suffered by Burns, he stood impassively waiting inside a milky-white door for the next to arrive.

And meantime, slowly, with barely a thought of so doing, the earth’s whole population twisted and writhed beneath the manipulation of night’s black fingers and the white ones of day with skeletons splintered and flesh reduced to pulp, as out of this unlikely problem, the answer, perfection, was slowly evolved through torture.

Miss Yellow Eyes by Shirley Ann Grau

(Originally published in 1955)

Pigeon Town

Pete brought Chris home one evening after supper. I remember it was early spring, because the Talisman rosebush by the kitchen steps had begun to blossom out. For that time of year it was cool: there was a good stiff wind off the river that shook the old bush and creaked it, knocked the biggest flowers to bits, and blew their petals into a little heap against the side of the wood steps. The Johnsons, who lived in the house next door, had put their bedspread out to air and forgot to take it in. So it was hanging out there on the porch railing, a pink spread with a fan-tailed yellow peacock in the middle. I could hear it flapping — loud when the wind was up, and very soft when it fell. And from out on the river there were the soft low tones of the ships’ whistles. And I could hear a mockingbird too, perched up on top the house, singing away, forgetting that it was nighttime. And in all this, Pete’s steps in the side alley, coming to the kitchen door.

“Hi, kid!” Pete held open the door with one arm stretched behind him. Chris came in.

I thought at first: That’s a white man. And I wondered what a white man would do coming here. I got a second look and saw the difference, saw I’d made a mistake. His skin wasn’t dark at all, but only suntanned. (Lots of white men were darker.) His eyes were a pale blue, the color of the china Ma got with the Octagon soap coupons. He had brown hair — no, it was closer to red, and only slightly wavy. He looked like a white man, almost. But I saw the difference. Maybe it was just his way of carrying himself — that was like a Negro.

But he was the handsomest man I’d ever seen, excepting none. I could feel the bottom of my stomach roll up into a hard ball.

“This here’s Celia,” Pete said.

Chris grinned and his blue eyes crinkled up into almost closed slits. He sat down at the table opposite me, flipping shut the book I’d been reading. “Evening’s no time to be busy, kid.”

Pete picked up the coffeepot from where it always stood on the back of the stove and shook it gently. “There’s some here all right,” he said to Chris as he reached up to the shelf for a couple of cups. “You want anything in yours? I reckon there’d be a can of milk in the icebox.”

“No,” Chris said. “I like it black.”

Pete lit the fire under the speckled enamel coffeepot. “Where’s Ma?”

“They having a dinner tonight... she said she’ll be real late.” Ma worked as a cook in one of the big houses on St. Charles Avenue. When there was a dinner, it meant she’d have to stay around and clean up afterward and wouldn’t get home till eleven or twelve maybe.

“She’ll get tomorrow off, though,” I told Chris.

“Good enough.” He grinned and his teeth were very square and bright.

They sat down at the table with me and stretched out their legs. Holding the coffee cup to his mouth, Chris reached out one finger and rubbed the petals of the big yellow rose in the drinking glass in the center of the table. “That’s real pretty.”

“Lena’s been putting them there,” Pete said.

“That’s sure the one I want to meet,” Chris said, and grinned over at Pete, and I knew that he’d been talking about Lena.

She was the sort of girl you talk about, she was that beautiful — with light brown hair that was shoulder-length and perfectly straight and ivory skin and eyes that were light brown with flecks of yellow in them. She was all gold-colored. Sometimes when she stood in the sun you could almost think the light was shining right through her.

She was near seventeen then, three years older than I was. The boys in high school all followed her around until the other girls hated her. Every chance they got they would play some mean trick on her, kicking dust in her lunch, or roughing her up playing basketball, or tearing pages out of her books. Lena hardly ever lost her temper; she didn’t really seem to care. “I reckon I know who the boys are looking at,” she told me. She was right. There was always a bunch of them trying to sit next to her in class or walk next to her down the hall. And when school was through, there was always a bunch of them waiting around the door, wanting to take her home, or for rides if they had cars. And when she finally came sauntering out, with her books tucked up under one arm, she wouldn’t pay them much attention; she’d just give them a kind of little smile (to keep them from going to the other girls) and walk home by herself, with maybe a few of them trailing along behind. I used to wait and watch her leave and then I’d go home a different way. I didn’t want to interfere.

But, for all that, she didn’t go out very much. And never with the same boy for very long. Once Hoyt Carmichael came around and stood in the kitchen door, asking for her, just begging to see her. She wouldn’t even come out to talk to him. Ma asked her later if there was something wrong and Lena just nodded and shrugged her shoulders all at once. Ma hugged her then and you could see the relief in her face; she worried so about Lena, about her being so very pretty.

Pete said: “You sure got to meet her, Chris, man.”

And I said to Chris: “She’s over by the Johnsons’.” I got up and opened the door and yelled out into the alley: “Lena!”

She came in a few minutes. We could hear her steps on the alley bricks, slow. She never did hurry. Finally she opened the screen and stood there, looking from one to the other.

I said: “This is my sister Magdalena.”

“And this here is Chris Watkin,” Pete said.

Chris had got up and bowed real solemnly. “I’m pleased to meet you.”

Lena brushed the hair back from her forehead. She had long fingers, and hands so thin that the veins stood out blue on the backs. “Nobody calls me Magdalena,” she said, “except Celia, now and then. Just Lena.”

Chris’s eyes crinkled up out of sight the way they had before. “I might could just call you Miss Yellow Eyes. Old Miss Yellow Eyes.”

Lena just wrinkled her nose at him. In that light her eyes did look yellow, but usually if a man said something like that she’d walk out. Not this time. She just poured herself a cup of coffee, and when Chris pulled out a chair for her, she sat down, next to him.

I looked at them and I thought: They look like a white couple. And they did. Unless you had sharp trained eyes, like the people down here do, you would have thought they were white and you would have thought they made a handsome couple.

Chris looked over at me and lifted an eyebrow. Just one, the left one; it reached up high and arched in his forehead. “What you looking so solemn for, Celia?”

“Nothing.”

And Lena asked: “You work with Pete at the railroad?”

“Sure,” he said, and smiled at her. Only, more than his mouth was smiling. “We go swinging on and off those old tenders like hell afire. Jumping on and off those cars.”

“I reckon that’s hard work.”

He laughed this time out loud. “I ain’t exactly little.” He bent forward and hunched his shoulders up a little so she could see the way the muscles swelled against the cloth of his shirt.

“You got fine shoulders, Mr. Watkin,” she said. “I reckon they’re even better than Pete there.”

Pete grunted and finished his coffee. But she was right. Pete’s shoulders were almost square out from his neck. Chris’s weren’t. They looked almost sloped and hunched the way flat bands of muscles reached up into his neck.

Chris shrugged and stood up. “Do you reckon you would like to walk around the corner for a couple of beers?”

“Okay,” Pete said.

Lena lifted one eyebrow, just the way he had done. “Mr. Watkin, you do look like you celebrating something.”

“I sure am,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“I plain tell you later, kid.”

They must have been gone near two hours because Ma came home before they did. I’d fallen asleep. I’d just bent my head over for a minute to rest my eyes, and my forehead touched the soft pages of the book — Treasure Island. I’d got it from the library at school; it was dog-eared and smelled faintly of peanuts.

Ma was saying: “Lord, honey, why ain’t you gone to bed?”

I lifted my head and rubbed my face until I could see Ma’s figure in the doorway. “I’m waiting for them,” I said.

Ma took off her coat and hung it up on the hook behind the door. “Who them?”

“Lena,” I said, “and Pete. And Chris.” I knew what she was going to say, so I answered first. “He’s a friend of Pete, and Lena likes him.”

Ma was frowning very slightly. “I plain wonder iffen he belong to that club.”

“I don’t know.”

It was called the Better Days Club and the clubroom was the second floor of a little restaurant on Tulane Avenue. I’d never gone inside, though I had passed the place: a small wood building that had once been a house but now had a sign saying Lefty’s Restaurant and Café in green letters on a square piece of board that hung out over the sidewalk and creaked in the wind. And I’d seen something else too when I passed: another sign, a small one tucked into the right center corner of the screen door, a sign that said White Entrance to Rear. If the police ever saw that they’d have found an excuse to raid the place and break up everything in it.

Ma kept asking Pete what they did there. Most times he didn’t bother to answer. Once when she’d just insisted, he’d said, “We’re fixing to have better times come.” And sometimes he’d bring home little papers, not much more than book-size, with names like New Day and Daily Sentinel and Watcher.

Ma would burn the papers if she got hold of them. But she couldn’t really stop Pete from going to the meetings. She didn’t try too hard because he was so good to her and gave her part of his paycheck every week. With that money and what she made we always had enough. We didn’t have to worry about eating, way some of our neighbors did.

Pete was a strange fellow — moody and restless and not happy. Sometimes — when he was sitting quiet, thinking or resting — there’d be a funny sort of look on his face (he was the darkest of us all): not hurt, not fear, not determination, but a mixture of all three.

Ma was still standing looking at me with a kind of puzzled expression on her face when we heard them, the three of them, coming home. They’d had a few beers and, what with the cold air outside, they all felt fine. They were singing too; I recognized the tune; it was the one from the jukebox around the corner in that bar.

Ma said: “They got no cause to be making a racket like that. Somebody might could call the police.” Ma was terribly afraid of the police. She’d never had anything to do with them, but she was still afraid. Every time a police car passed in the street outside, she’d duck behind the curtain and peek out. And she’d walk clear around a block so she wouldn’t come near one of the blue uniforms.

The three came in the kitchen door, Pete first and then Lena and Chris.

Pete had his arms full of beer cans; he let them all fall out on the table. “Man, I like to drop them sure.”

“We brought some for you, Ma,” Lena said.

“And Celia too,” Chris added.

“It’s plenty late,” Ma said, looking hard at Chris.

“You don’t have to work tomorrow,” I said.

So we stayed up late. I don’t know how late. Because the beer made me feel fine and sick all at once. First everything was swinging around inside my head and then the room too. Finally I figured how to handle it. I caught hold and let myself ride around on the big whooshing circles. There were times when I’d forget there was anybody else in the room, I’d swing so far away.

“Why, just you look at Celia there,” Ma said, and everybody turned and watched me.

“You sure high, kid,” Chris said.

“No, I’m not.” I was careful to space the words, because I could tell by the way Ma had run hers together that she was feeling the beer too.

Pete had his guitar in his lap, flicking his fingers across the strings. “You an easy drunk.” He was smiling, the way he seldom did. “Leastways you ain’t gonna cost some man a lotta money getting you high.”

“That absolutely and completely right.” Ma bent forward, with her hands one on each knee and the elbows sticking out, like a skinny football player. “You plain got to watch that when boys come to take you out.”

“They ain’t gonna want to take me out.”

“Why not, kid?” Chris had folded his arms on the tabletop and was leaning his chin on them. His face was flushed so that his eyes only looked bluer.

“Not after they see Lena.” I lifted my eyes up from his and let them drop over where I knew Lena was sitting. I just had time to notice the way the electric light made her skin gold and her eyes gold and her hair too, so that she seemed all one blurry color. And then the whole world tipped over and I went skidding off — but feeling extra fine because Chris was sitting just a little bit away next to Lena and she was looking at him like she’d never looked at anybody else before.

Next thing I knew, somebody was saying: “Celia, look.” There was a photograph in front of me. A photograph of a young man, in a suit and tie, leaning back against a post, with his legs crossed, grinning at the camera.

I looked up. Ma was holding the photograph in front of me. It was in a wide silver-colored frame, with openwork, roses or flowers of some sort.

Pete began laughing. “Just you look at her,” he said. “She don’t even know her own daddy.”

“I never seen that picture before,” I said, loud as I could.

I’d never seen my daddy either. He was a steward on a United Fruit Lines ship, a real handsome man. He’d gone ashore at Antigua one day and forgot to come back.

“He looks mighty much like Chris,” Ma said as she cleared a space on the shelf over between the windows. She put the picture there. And I knew then that she’d got it out from the bottom of a drawer somewhere, because this was a special occasion for her too.

“Chris,” I said, remembering, “you never did tell us what you celebrating.”

He had twisted sideways in his chair and had his arms wrapped around the back. “I going in the army.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Pete staring at him, his mouth twisting and his face darkening.

Ma clucked her tongue against her teeth. “That a shame.”

Chris grinned, his head cocked aside a little. “I got to leave tomorrow.”

Pete swung back and forth on the two legs of his tilted chair. “Ain’t good enough for nothing around here, but we good enough to put in the army and send off.”

“Man” — Chris winked at him — “there ain’t nothing you can do. And I plain reckon you gonna go next.”

“No.” Pete spoke the word so that it was almost a whistle.

“I’m a man, me,” Chris said. “Can’t run out on what I got to do.” He tipped his head back and whistled a snatch of a little tune.

“I wouldn’t like to go in the army,” Lena said.

Chris went on whistling. Now we could recognize the song:

Lena tossed her head. “I wouldn’t like to none.”

Chris stopped whistling and laughed. “You plain sound like Pete here.”

Pete’s face all crinkled up with anger. I thought: He looks more like a Negro when he loses his temper; it makes his skin darker somehow.

“Nothing to laugh about,” he said. “Can’t do nothing around here without people yelling nigger at you.”

“Don’t stay around here, man. You plain crazy to stay around here.” Chris tilted back his chair and stared at the ceiling. “You plain crazy to stay a nigger. I done told you that.”

Pete scowled at him and didn’t answer.

Lena asked quickly: “Where you got to go?”

“Oregon.” Chris was still staring at the ceiling and still smiling. “That where you cross over.”

“You sure?”

Chris looked at her and smiled confidently. “Sure I’m sure.”

Pete mumbled something under his breath that we didn’t hear.

“I got a friend done it,” Chris said. “Two years ago. He working out of Portland there, for the railroad. And he turn white.”

Lena was resting her chin on her folded hands. “They don’t look at you so close or anything?”

“No,” Chris said. “I heard all about it. You can cross over if you want to.”

“You going?” I asked.

“When I get done with the stretch in the army.” He lowered his chair back to its four legs and stared out the little window, still smiling. “There’s lots of jobs there for a railroad man.”

Pete slammed the flat of his hand down against the table. Ma’s eyes flew open like a door that’s been kicked wide back. “I don’t want to pretend I’m white,” he said. “I ain’t and I don’t want to be. I reckon I want to be same as white and stay right here.”

Ma murmured something under her breath and we all turned to look at her. Her eyes had dropped half-closed again and she had her hands folded across her stomach. Her mouth opened very slowly and this time she spoke loud enough for us all to hear. “Talking like that — you gonna do nothing but break you neck that way.”

I got so sleepy then and so tired, all of a sudden, that I slipped sideways out of my chair. It was funny. I didn’t notice I was slipping or moving until I was on the floor. Ma got hold of my arm and took me off to bed with her. And I didn’t think to object. The last thing I saw was Lena staring at Chris with her long light-colored eyes. Chris with his handsome face and his reddish hair and his movements so quick they almost seemed jerky.

I thought it would be all right with them.

I was sick the whole next day from the beer; so sick I couldn’t go to school. Ma shook her head and Pete laughed and Lena just smiled a little.

And Chris went off to the army, all right. It wasn’t long before Lena had a picture from him. He’d written across the back: Here I am a soldier. She stuck the picture in the frame of the mirror over her dresser.

That was the week Lena quit school. She came looking for me during lunchtime. “I’m going home,” she said.

“You can’t do that.”

She shook her head. “I had enough.”

So she walked out of school and didn’t ever go back. (She was old enough to do that.) She bought a paper on her way home and sat down and went through the classified ads very carefully, looking for a job. It was three days before she found one she wanted: with some people who were going across the lake to Covington for the summer. Their regular city maid wouldn’t go.

They took her on right away because they wanted to leave. She came back with a ten-dollar bill in her purse. “We got to leave in the morning,” she said.

Ma didn’t like it, her quitting school and leaving home, but she couldn’t really stop her.

And Lena did want to go. She was practically jumping with excitement after she came back from the interview. “They got the most beautiful house,” she said to Ma. “A lot prettier than where you work.” And she told me: “They say the place over the lake is even prettier — even prettier.”

I knew what she meant. I sometimes went to meet Ma at the house where she worked. I liked to. It was nice to be in the middle of fine things, even if they weren’t yours.

“It’ll be real nice working there,” Lena said.

That next morning, when she had got her things together and closed the lid of the suitcase, she told me to go down to the grocery at the corner, where there was a phone, and call a taxi. They were going to pay for it, she said.

I reckon I was excited; so excited that I called the wrong cab. I just looked at the back cover of the phone book where there was a picture of a long orange-color cab and a number in big orange letters. I gave them the address, then went back to the house and sat down on the porch with Lena.

The orange cab turned at the corner and came down our street. The driver was hanging out the window looking for house numbers; there weren’t any except for the Stevenses’ across the way. Bill Stevens had painted his number with big whitewash letters on his front door. The cab hit a rut in the street and the driver’s head smacked the window edge. He jerked his head back inside and jammed the gears into second. Then he saw us: Lena and me and the suitcase on the edge of the porch.

He let the car move along slow in second with that heavy pulling sound and he watched us. As he got closer you could see that he was chewing on the corner of his lip. Still watching us, he went on slowly — right past the house. He said something once, but we were too far away to hear. Then he was down at the other corner, turning, and gone.

Lena stood and looked at me. She had on her best dress: a light blue one with round pockets in front. Both her hands were stuffed into the pockets. There was a handkerchief in the left one; you could see her fingers twisting it.

White cabs didn’t pick up colored people: I knew that. But I’d forgot and called the first number, a white number, a wrong number. Lena didn’t say anything, just kept looking at me, with her hand holding the handkerchief inside her pocket. I turned and ran all the way down to the corner and called the right number, and a colored cab that was painted black with gold stripes across the hood came and Lena was gone for the next four months, the four months of the summer.

It could have been the same cab brought her back that had come for her: black with gold stripes. She had on the same dress too, the blue one with round pockets; the same suitcase too, but this time in it was a letter of recommendation and a roll of bills she’d saved, all hidden in the fancy organdy aprons they’d given her.

She said: “He wanted me to stay on through the winter, but she got scared for their boy.” And she held her chin stiff and straight when she said that.

I understood why that woman wanted my sister Lena out of the house. There wasn’t any boy or man either that wouldn’t look at her twice. White or colored, it didn’t seem to make a difference, they all looked at her in the same way.

That was the only job Lena ever took. Because she hadn’t been home more than a few days when Chris came back for her.

I remember how it was — early September and real foggy. It would close down every evening around seven and wouldn’t lift until ten or ten thirty in the morning. All night long you could hear the foghorns and the whistles of the boats out on the river; and in the morning there’d be even more confusion when everybody tried to rush away from anchor. That Saturday morning Lena had taken a walk up to the levee to watch. Pete was just getting up. I could hear him in his room. Ma had left for work early. And me, I was scrubbing out the kitchen, the way I did every Saturday morning. That was when Chris came back.

He came around to the kitchen. I heard his steps in the alley — quickly coming, almost running. He came bursting in the door and almost slipped on the soapy floor. “Hi, kid,” he said, took off his cap, and rubbed his hand over his reddish hair. “You working?”

“Looks like,” I said.

He’d grown a mustache, a thin line. He stood for a moment chewing on his lip and the little hairs he had brushed so carefully into a line. Finally he said: “Where’s everybody?”

“Lena went up on the levee to have a look at the river boats.”

He grinned at me, flipped his cap back on, gave a kind of salute, and jumped down the two steps into the yard.

I sat back on my heels, picturing him and Lena in my mind and thinking what a fine couple they made. And the little picture of my father grinned down at me from the shelf by the window.

Pete called: “Seems like I heard Chris in there.”

“He went off to look for Lena.”

Pete came to the door; he was only half dressed and he was still holding up his pants with his one hand. He liked to sleep late Saturdays. “He might could have stayed to say hello.”

“He wanted to see Lena, I reckon.”

Pete grinned briefly and the grin faded into a yawn. “You ought to have let him look for her.”

“Nuh-uh.” I picked up the bar of soap and the scrubbing brush again. “I wanted them to get together, I reckon.”

“Okay, kid,” Pete said shortly, and turned back to his room. “You helped them out.”

Chris and Lena came back after a while. They didn’t say anything, but I noticed that Lena was kind of smiling like she was cuddling something to herself. And her eyes were so bright they looked light yellow, almost transparent.

Chris hung his army cap on the back of a chair and then sprawled down at the table. “You fixing to offer me anything to eat?”

“You can’t be hungry this early in the morning,” Lena said.

“Men are always hungry,” I said. They both turned.

“You tell ’em, kid,” Chris said. “You tell ’em for me.”

“Let’s us go to the beach,” Lena said suddenly.

“Sure, honey,” Chris said softly.

She wrinkled her nose at him and pretended she hadn’t heard. “It’s the last night before they close down everything for the winter.”

“Okay — we gonna leave right now?”

“Crazy thing,” Lena smiled. “Not in the morning. Let’s us go right after supper.”

“I got to stay here till then?”

“Not ’less you want to.”

“Reckon I do,” Chris said.

“You want to come, Celia?” Lena asked.

“Me?” I glanced over at Chris quickly. “Nuh-uh.”

“Sure you do,” Lena said. “You just come along.”

And Chris lifted one eyebrow at me. “Come along,” he said. “Iffen you don’t mind going out with people old as me.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Oh, no.”

I never did figure out quite why Lena wanted me along that time. Maybe she didn’t want to be alone with Chris because she didn’t quite trust him yet. Or maybe she just wanted to be nice to me. I don’t know. But I did go. I liked the beach. I liked to stare off across the lake and imagine I could see the shore on the other side, which of course I couldn’t.

So I went with them, that evening after supper. It took us nearly an hour to get there — three changes of busses because it was exactly across town: the north end of the city. All the way, all along in the bus, Chris kept talking, telling stories.

“Man,” he said, “that army sure is something — big — I never seen anything so big. Just in our little old camp there ain’t a space of ground big enough to hold all the men, if they called them all out together...”

We reached the end of one bus line. He put one hand on Lena’s arm and the other on mine and helped us out the door. His hand was broad and hard on the palm and almost cool to the touch.

In the other bus we headed straight for the long seat across the back, so we could sit all three together. He sat in the middle and, leaning forward a little, rested both hands on his knees. Looking at him out the corner of my eye, I could see the flat broad strips of muscle in his neck, reaching up to under his chin. And once I caught Lena’s eye, and I knew that on the other side she was watching too.

“All together like that,” he said. “It gives you the funniest feeling — when you all marching together, so that you can’t see away on either side, just men all together — it gives you a funny sort of feeling.”

He turned to Lena and grinned; his bright square teeth flashed in the evening dusk. “I reckon you think that silly.”

“No,” she said quickly, and then corrected herself: “Of course I never been in the army.”

“Look there,” I said. We were passing the white beach. Even as far away as the road where we were, we could smell the popcorn and the sweat and the faint salt tingle from the wind off the lake.

“It almost cool tonight,” Lena said.

“You ain’t gonna be cold?”

“You don’t got to worry about me.”

“I reckon I do,” he said.

Lena shook her head, and her eyes had a soft holding look in them. And I wished I could take Chris aside and tell him that he’d said just the right thing.

Out on the concrete walks of the white beach, people were jammed so close that there was hardly any space between. You could hear all the voices and the talking, murmuring at this distance. Then we were past the beach (the driver was going fast, grumbling under his breath that he was behind schedule), and the Ferris wheel was the only thing you could see, a circle of lights like a big star behind us. And on each side, open ground, low weeds, and no trees.

“There it is,” Chris said, and pointed up through the window. I turned and looked and, sure enough, there it was; he was right: the lights, smaller maybe and dimmer, of Lincoln Beach, the colored beach.

“Lord,” Lena said, “I haven’t been out here in I don’t know when. It’s been that long.”

We got off the bus; he dropped my arm but kept hold of Lena’s. “You got to make this one night last all winter.”

She didn’t answer.

We had a fine time. I forgot that I was just tagging along and enjoyed myself much as any.

When we passed over by the shooting gallery Chris winked at Lena and me. “Which one of them dolls do you want?”

Lena wrinkled her nose. “I reckon you plain better see about getting ’em first.”

He just shrugged. “You think I can do it, Celia?”

“Sure,” I said. “Sure, sure you can.”

“That’s the girl for you,” the man behind the counter said. “Thinks you can do anything.”

“That my girl there all right.” Chris reached in his pocket to pay the man. I could feel my ears getting red.

He picked up the rifle and slowly knocked down the whole row of green and brown painted ducks. He kept right on until Lena and I each had a doll in a bright pink feather skirt and he had a purple wreath of flowers hung around his neck. By this time the man was scowling at him and a few people were standing around watching.

“That’s enough, soldier,” the man said. “This here is just for amateurs.”

Chris shrugged. We all turned and walked away.

“You did that mighty well,” Lena said, turning her baby doll around and around in her hands, staring at it.

“I see lots of fellows better.”

“Where’d you learn to shoot like that?” I tugged on his sleeve.

“I didn’t learn—”

“Fibber!” Lena tossed her head.

“You got to let me finish. Up in Calcasieu parish, my daddy, he put a shotgun in my hand and give me a pocket of shells... I just keep shooting till I hit something or other.”

It was hard to think of Chris having a father. “Where’s he now?”

“My daddy? He been dead.”

“You got a family?”

“No,” Chris said. “Just me.”

We walked out along the strip of sand, and the wind began pulling the feathers out of the dolls’ skirts. I got out my handkerchief and tied it around my doll, but Lena just lifted hers up high in the air to see what the wind would do. Soon she just had a naked baby doll that was pink celluloid smeared with glue.

Lena and Chris found an old log and sat down. I went wading. I didn’t want to go back to where they were, because I knew that Chris wanted Lena alone. So I kept walking up and down in the water that came just a little over my ankles.

It was almost too cold for swimmers. I saw just one, about thirty yards out, swimming up and down slowly. I couldn’t really see him, just the regular white splashes from his arms. I looked out across the lake, the way I liked to do. It was all dark now; there was no telling where the lower part of the sky stopped and the water began. It was all the one color, all of it, out beyond the swimmer and the breakwater on the left where the waves hit a shallow spot and turned white and foamy. Except for that, it was all the same dark until you lifted your eyes high up in the sky and saw the stars.

I don’t know how long I stood there, with my head bent back far as it would go, looking at the stars, trying to remember the names for them that I had learned in school: names like Bear and Archer. I couldn’t tell which was which. All I could see were stars, bright like they always were at the end of the summer and close; and every now and then one of them would fall.

I stood watching them, feeling the water move gently around my legs and curling my toes in the soft lake sand that was rippled by the waves. And trying to think up ways to stay away from those two who were sitting back up the beach, on a piece of driftwood, talking together.

Once the wind shifted a little suddenly or Chris spoke too loud, because I heard one word: “Oregon.”

All of a sudden I knew that Lena was going to marry him. Just for that she was going to marry him; because she wanted so much to be white.

And I wanted to tell Chris again, the way I had wanted to in the bus, that he’d said just the right thing.

After a while Lena stood up and called to me, saying it was late; so we went home. By the time we got there, Ma had come. On the table was a bag of food she had brought. And so we all sat around and ate the remains of the party: little cakes, thin and crispy and spicy and in fancy shapes; and little patties full of oysters that Ma ran in the oven to heat up; and little crackers spread with fishy-tasting stuff, like sugar grains only bigger, that Ma called caviar; and all sorts of little sandwiches.

It was one nice thing about the place Ma worked. They never did check the food. And it was fun for us, tasting the strange things.

All of a sudden Lena turned to me and said: “I reckon I want to see where Oregon is.” She gave Chris a long look out of the corner of her eyes.

My mouth was full and for a moment I couldn’t answer.

“You plain got to have a map in your schoolbooks.”

I finally managed to swallow. “Sure I got one — if you want to see it.”

I got my history book and unfolded the map of the whole country and put my finger down on the spot that said Oregon in pink letters. “There,” I said. “That’s Portland there.”

Lena came and leaned over my shoulder; Pete didn’t move; he sat with his chin in his hand and his elbows propped on the table.

“I want to stay here and be the same as white,” he said, but we weren’t listening to him.

Chris got out of the icebox the bottles of beer he had brought.

“Don’t you want to see?” Lena asked him.

He grinned and took out his key chain, which had an opener on it, and began popping the caps off the bottles. “I looked at a map once. I know where it’s at.”

Ma was peering over my other shoulder. “It looks like it mighty far away.”

“It ain’t close,” Chris said.

“You plain want to go there—” Ma was frowning at the map, straining to see without her glasses.

“Yes,” Chris said, still popping the tops off bottles.

“And be white,” Lena added very softly.

“Sure,” Chris said. “No trouble at all to cross over.”

“And you going there,” Ma said again. She couldn’t quite believe that anybody she was looking at right now could ever go that far away.

“Yea,” Chris said, and put the last opened bottle with the others in a row on the table. “When I get out the army, we sure as hell going there.”

“Who’s we?” I asked.

“Lena and me.”

Ma looked up at him so quickly that a hairpin tumbled out of her head and clicked down on the table.

“When we get married,” he said.

Lena was looking at him, chewing her lower lip. “We going to do that?”

“Yea,” he said. “Leastways if that what you want to do.”

And Lena dropped her eyes down to the map again, though I’d swear this time she didn’t know what she was seeing. Or maybe everywhere she’d look she was seeing Chris. Maybe that was it. She was smiling very slightly to herself, with just the corners of her lips, and they were trembling.

They got married that week in St. Michel’s Church. It was in the morning — nine thirty, I remember — so the church was cold: biting empty cold. Even the two candles burning on the altar didn’t look like they’d be warm. Though it only took a couple of minutes, my teeth were chattering so that I could hardly talk. Ma cried and Pete scowled and grinned by turns and Lena and Chris didn’t seem to notice anything much.

The cold and the damp had made a bright strip of flush across Lena’s cheeks. Old Mrs. Roberts, who lived next door, bent forward — she was sitting in the pew behind us — and tapped Ma on the shoulder. “I never seen her look prettier.”

Lena had bought herself a new suit, with the money she’d earned over the summer: a cream-colored suit, with small black braiding on the cuffs and collar. She’d got a hat too, of the same color velvet. Cream was a good color for her; it was lighter than her skin somehow, so that it made her face stand out.

(“She ought to always have clothes like that,” Mayme Roberts said later, back at our house. She was old Mrs. Roberts’s daughter, and seven kids had broken her up so that she wasn’t even jealous of pretty girls anymore. “Maybe Chris’ll make enough money to let her have pretty clothes like that.”)

Lena and Chris went away because he had to get back to camp. And for the first time since I could remember, I had a room all to myself. So I made Lena’s bed all nice and careful and put the fancy spread that Ma had crocheted on it — the one we hardly ever used. And put the little pink celluloid doll in the middle.

Sometime after the wedding, I don’t remember exactly when, Pete had an accident. He’d been out on a long run, all the way up to Abiline. It was a long hard job and by the time he got back to town he was dead tired, and so he got a little careless. In the switch yards he got his hand caught in a loose coupling.

He was in the hospital for two weeks or so, in the colored surgical ward on the second floor of a huge cement building that said Charity Hospital in carved letters over the big front door. Ma went to see him on Tuesdays and Saturdays and I just went on Saturdays. Walking over from the bus, we’d pass Lefty’s Restaurant and Café. Ma would turn her head away so that she wouldn’t see it.

One time, the first Saturday I went with Ma, we brought Pete a letter, his induction notice. He read it and started laughing and crying all at once — until the ward nurse got worried and called an intern and together they gave him a shot. Right up till he passed out, he kept laughing.

And I began to wonder if it had been an accident...

After two weeks he came home. We hadn’t expected him; we hadn’t thought he was well enough to leave. Late one afternoon we heard steps in the side alley; Ma looked at me, quick and funny, and rushed over to open the door: it was Pete. He had come home alone on the streetcar and walked the three blocks from the car stop. By the time he got to the house he was ready to pass out: he had to sit down and rest his head on the table right there in the kitchen. But he’d held his arm careful so that it didn’t start to bleed again. He’d always been afraid of blood.

Accidents like that happened a lot on the road. Maybe that was why the pay was so good. The fellows who sat around the grocery all day or the bar all had pensions because they’d lost an arm or a hand or a leg. It happened a lot; we knew that, but it didn’t seem to make any difference.

Ma cried very softly to herself when she saw him so dizzy and weak he couldn’t stand up. And I went out in the backyard, where he couldn’t see, and was sick to my stomach.

He stayed in the house until he got some strength back and then he was out all day long. He left every morning just like he was working and he came back for dinner at night. Ma asked him once where he went, but he wouldn’t say; and there was never any trouble about it. A check came from the railroad every month, regular; and he still gave Ma part of it.

Pete talked about his accident, though. It was all he’d talk about. “I seen my hand,” he’d tell anybody who’d listen. “After they got it free, with the blood running down it, I seen it. And it wasn’t cut off. My fingers was moving. I seen ’em. Was no call for them to go cut the hand off. There wasn’t any call for them to do that, not even with all it hurting.” (And it had hurt so bad that he’d passed out. They’d told us he just tumbled down all of a sudden — so that the cinders along the tracks cut in his cheek.)

He’d say: “Iffen it wasn’t a man my color they wouldn’t done it. They wouldn’t go cut off a white man’s hand.”

He’d say: “It was only just one finger that was caught, they didn’t have cause to take off the whole hand.”

And when I heard him I couldn’t help wondering. Wondering if maybe Pete hadn’t tried to get one finger caught. The army wouldn’t take a man with one finger missing. But just one finger gone wouldn’t hamper a man much. The way Pete was acting wasn’t like a man that had an accident he wasn’t expecting. But like a man who’d got double-crossed somehow.

And looking at Ma, I could see that she was thinking the same thing.

Lena came home after a couple of months — Chris had been sent overseas.

She used to spend most of her days lying on the bed in our room, reading a magazine maybe, or writing to Chris, or just staring at the ceiling. When the winter sun came in through the window and fell on her, her skin turned gold and burning.

Since she slept so much during the days, often in the night she’d wake up and be lonesome. Then she’d call me. “Celia,” she’d call real soft so that the sound wouldn’t carry through the paperboard walls. “Celia, you awake?” And I’d tell her yes and wake up quick as I could.

Then she’d snap on the little lamp that Chris had given her for a wedding present. And she’d climb out of bed, wrapping one of the blankets around her because it was cold. And she’d sit on the cane-bottomed old chair and rock it slowly back and forth while she told me just what it would be like when Chris came back for her.

Sometimes Pete would hear us talking and would call: “Shut up in there.” And Lena would only toss her head and say that he was an old grouch and not to pay any attention to him.

Pete had been in a terrible temper for weeks, the cold made his arm hurt so. He scarcely spoke anymore. And he didn’t bother going out after supper; instead he stayed in his room, sitting in a chair with his feet propped up on the windowsill, looking out where there wasn’t anything to see. Once I’d peeped in through the half-opened door. He was standing in the middle of the room, at the foot of the bed, and he was looking at his stub arm, which was still bright-red-colored. His lips were drawn back tight against his teeth, and his eyes were almost closed, they were so squinted.

Things went on this way right through the first part of the winter. Chris was in Japan. He sent Lena a silk kimono — green, with a red dragon embroidered across the back. He didn’t write much, and then it was just a line saying that he was fine. Along toward the middle of January, I think it was, one of the letters mentioned fighting. It wasn’t so bad, he said; and it wasn’t noisy at all. That’s what he noticed most, it seemed: the quietness. From the other letters we could tell that he was at the front all the rest of the winter.

It was March by this time. And in New Orleans March is just rain, icy splashing rain. One afternoon I ran the dozen or so blocks home from school and all I wanted to do was sit down by the stove. I found Ma and Pete in the kitchen. Ma was standing by the table, looking down at the two yellow pieces of paper like she expected them to move.

The telegram was in the middle of the table — the folded paper and the folded yellow envelope. There wasn’t anything else, not even the big salt shaker which usually stood there.

Ma said: “Chris got himself hurt.”

Pete was sitting across the room with his chair propped against the wall, tilting himself back and forth. “Ain’t good enough for nothing around here,” he said, and rubbed his stump arm with his good hand. “Ain’t good enough for white people, but sure good enough to get killed.”

“He ain’t killed,” Lena said from the next room. The walls were so thin she could hear every word. “He ain’t got killed.”

“Sure, Lena, honey,” Ma said, and her voice was soft and comforting. “He going to be all right, him. Sure.”

“Quit that,” Ma told Pete in a fierce whisper. “You just quit that.” She glanced over her shoulder toward Lena’s room. “She got enough trouble without you adding to it.”

Pete glared but didn’t answer.

“You want me to get you something, Lena?” I started into our room. But her voice stopped me.

“No call for you to come in,” she said.

Maybe she was crying, I don’t know. Her voice didn’t sound like it. Maybe she was though, crying for Chris. Nobody saw her.

Chris didn’t send word to us. It was almost like he forgot. There was one letter from a friend of his in Japan, saying that he had seen him in a hospital there and that the nurses were a swell set of people and so were the doctors.

Lena left the letter open on the table for us all to see. That night she picked it up and put it in the drawer of her dresser with the yellow paper of the telegram.

And there wasn’t anything else to do but wait.

No, there were two things, two things that Lena could do. The day after the telegram came, she asked me to come with her.

“Where?”

“St. Michel’s.” She was drying the dishes, putting them away in the cupboard, so I couldn’t see her face, but I could tell from her voice how important this was.

“Sure,” I said. “Sure, I’ll come. Right away.”

St. Michel’s was a small church. I’d counted the pews once: there were just exactly twenty; and the side aisles were so narrow two people could hardly pass. The confessional was a single little recess on the right side in the back, behind the baptismal font. There was a light burning — Father Graziano would be back there.

“You wait for me,” Lena said. And I sat down in the last pew while she walked over toward the light. I kept my head turned so that she wouldn’t think I was watching her as she went up to the confessional and knocked very softly on the wood frame. Father Graziano stuck his gray old head out between the dark curtains. I didn’t have to listen; I knew what Lena was asking him. She was asking him to pray for Chris. It only took her a minute; then she walked quickly up to the front, by the altar rail. I could hear her heels against the bare boards, each one a little explosion. There were three or four candles burning already. She lit another one — I saw the circle of light get bigger as she put hers on the black iron rack.

“Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Father Graziano had come out of the confessional and was standing watching us. He was a small man, but heavy, with a big square head and a thick neck. He must have been a powerful man when he was young. Chris had a neck like that, muscled like that.

For a minute I thought he was going to come over and talk to us. He took one step, then stopped and rubbed his hand through his curly gray hair.

Lena didn’t say anything until we reached the corner where we turned to go home. Without thinking, I turned.

“Not that way.” She caught hold of my arm. “This way here.” She went in the opposite direction.

I walked along with her, trying to see her face. But it was too dark and she had pulled the scarf high over her head.

“We got to go to Maam’s,” she said and her voice was muffled in the collar of her coat.

“To what?” not believing I’d heard her right.

“To Maam’s.”

Maam was a grisgris woman, so old nobody could remember when she’d been young or middle-aged even. Old as the river and wrinkled like it too, when the wind blows across.

She had a house on the batture, behind a clump of old thick hackberries. There was the story I’d heard: she had wanted a new house after a high water on the river had carried her old one away. (All this was fifty years ago, maybe.) So she’d walked down the levee to the nearest house, which was nearly a mile away: people didn’t want to live close to her. She’d stood outside, looking out at the river and calling out: “I want a house. A fine new house. A nice new house. For me.” She didn’t say anything else, just turned and walked away. But the people inside had heard her and spread the word. Before they even began to fix the damage the flood had done to their own houses, the men worked on her house. In less than a week it was finished. They picked up their tools and left, and the next day they sent a kid down to spy and, sure enough, there was smoke coming out of the chimney. Maam had moved in: she must have been watching from somewhere close. Nobody knew where she had spent the week that she didn’t have a house. And everybody was really too scared to find out.

She was still living in that house. It was built on good big solid pilings so that floodwaters didn’t touch it. I’d seen it once; Pete had taken me up on the levee there and pointed it out: a two-room house that the air and the river damp had turned black, on top a flat tin roof that shone in the sun. At the beginning of the dirt path that led down to the house I saw a little pile of food people had left for her: some white pieces of slab bacon, some tin cans. Pete wouldn’t let me get close. “No sense fooling with things you don’t understand,” he said.

Maam didn’t leave her house often. But when she did, when she came walking down the streets or along the levee, people got out of her way. Either they slipped down into the batture bushes and waited until she passed by on the top of the levee, or, in town, they got off the banquette and into the street when she came by — an old woman with black skin that was nearly gray and eyes hidden in the folds of wrinkles, an old woman wearing a black dress, and a red shawl over her head and shoulders, a bright red shawl with silver and black signs sewed onto it. And always she’d be staring at the girls; what she liked best was to be able to touch them, on the arm or the hand, or catch hold of a little piece of their clothes. That didn’t happen often, everybody was so careful of her.

And still Lena had said: “We going to Maam’s.”

“Lord,” I said, “why?”

“For Chris.”

There wasn’t anything I could answer to that.

It was still early, seven thirty or eight, but nights don’t seem to have time. The moon wasn’t up yet; the sky was clear, with hard flecks of stars. Out on the river one ship was moving out — slipping between the riding lights of the other anchored ships that were waiting their turn at the docks below the point. You could hear the steady sound of the engines.

On top of the levee the river wind was strong and cold and heavy-wet. I shivered even with a coat and scarf. There was a heavy frost like mold on the riverside slant of the levee. I stopped and pulled a clover and touched it to my lips and felt the sting of ice.

There was a light in Maam’s house. We saw that as we came down the narrow little path through the hackberry bushes, the way that Pete wouldn’t let me go when I was little. She must have heard us coming — walking is noisy on a quiet night — because without our knocking Maam opened the door.

I never did see her face. She had the red scarf tied high around her head so that it stuck out far on the sides. She mightn’t have had a face, for all I could tell. The house was warm, very warm; I could feel the heat rush out all around her. She was wearing a black dress without sleeves, of some light material with a sheen like satin. She had tied a green cord tight around her middle. Under it her stomach stuck out like a pregnant woman’s.

“I came to fetch something,” Lena said. Her voice was tight and hard.

Inside the house a round spot was shining on the far wall. I stared at it hard: a tray, a round tin tray, nailed to the wall. I couldn’t see more than that because there wasn’t much light; just a single kerosene lamp standing in the middle of the room, on the floor. Being low like that, it made the shadows go upward on the walls so that even familiar things looked strange.

“I came to fetch something,” Lena said. “For somebody that’s sick.”

Maam didn’t move.

“To make him well,” Lena added.

Maam turned around, made a circle back through her cabin, ending up behind her half-open door, where we couldn’t see. I suppose we could have stepped inside and watched her — but we didn’t. And in a couple of seconds she was back at the doorway. She was holding both arms straight down against her sides, the hands clenched. And she kept looking from Lena to me and back again.

Lena took her left hand out of her coat pocket and I could see that she was holding a bill and a couple of coins. She moved them slowly back and forth; Maam’s eyes followed but she did not move.

“You got to give it to me,” Lena said. Her voice was high-pitched and rasping. I hadn’t known it could be as rough as that.

Maam held out her hand: a thin black arm, all the muscles and tendons showing along the bone. She held out her arm, palm down, fist clenched. Then slowly, so that the old muscles under the thin skin moved in twisting lines, she turned the arm and opened the fingers. And in the palm there was a small bundle of cloth, white cloth. As we stared at it the three edges of the cloth, which had been pressed down in her hand, popped up slowly until they stuck straight up.

Lena reached out her right hand and took the three pointed edges of the cloth while her other hand dropped the money in its place. I could see how careful she was being not to touch the old woman.

Then we turned and almost ran back up the path to the top of the levee. I turned once near the top and looked back. Maam was still standing in the door, in her thin black sleeveless dress. She seemed to be singing something; I couldn’t make out the words, just the sound. As she stood there, the lamplight all yellow behind her, I could feel her eyes reach out after us.

Lena had done all she could. She’d gone to the church and she’d prayed and lit a candle and asked the priest for special prayers. And she’d gone to the voodoo woman. She’d done all she could. Now there wasn’t anything to do but wait.

You could see how hard waiting was for her. Her face was always thin, a little long, with fine features. And now you could almost see the strain lines run down her cheeks. The skin under her eyes turned blue; she wasn’t sleeping. I knew that. She always lay very quiet in her bed, never tossing or turning. And that was just how I knew she was awake. Nobody lies stiff and still like that if they’re really asleep; and their breathing isn’t so shallow and quick.

I’d lie awake and listen to her pretending that she was asleep. And I’d want to get up and go over there and comfort her somehow. Only, some people you can’t comfort. You can only go along with their pretending and pretend yourself.

That’s what I did. I made out I didn’t notice anything. Not the circles under her eyes; not the way she had of blinking rapidly (her eyes were so dry they burned); not the little zigzag vein that stood out blue on her left forehead.

One night we had left the shade up. There was a full moon, so bright that I woke up. Lena was really asleep then. I looked over at her: the light hadn’t reached more than the side of her bed; it only reached her hand that was dangling over the edge of the bed, the fingers limp and curled a little. A hand so thin that the moonlight was like an X-ray, showing the bones.

And I wanted to cry for her if she couldn’t cry for herself. But I only got up and pulled down the shade, and made the room all dark so I couldn’t see anymore.

Chris died. The word came one Thursday late afternoon. Ma was out sweeping off the front steps and she took the telegram from the boy and brought it to Lena. Her hand was trembling when she held it out. Lena’s thin hand didn’t move even a little bit.

Lena opened the envelope with her fingernail, read it, cleared the kitchen table, and put it out there. (We didn’t need to read it.)

She didn’t make a sound. She didn’t even catch her breath. Her face didn’t change, her thin, tired face, with the deep circles under the eyes and the strain lines down the cheeks. Only there was a little pulse began to beat in the vein on her forehead — and her eyes changed, the light eyes with flecks of gold in them. They turned one color: dark, dull brown.

She put the telegram in the middle of the table. Her fingers let loose of it very slowly. Their tips brushed back and forth on the edges of the paper a couple of times before she dropped her arm to her side and very slowly turned and walked into the bedroom, her heels sounding on the floor, slow and steady. The bed creaked as she sat down on it.

Ma had been backing away from the telegram, the corner of her mouth twitching. She bumped into a chair and she looked down — surprised at its being there, even. Then, like a wall that’s all of a sudden collapsing, she sat down and bent her head in her lap. She began to cry, not making a sound, her shoulders moving up and down.

Pete was balancing himself on his heels, teetering back and forth, grinning at the telegram like it was a person. I never saw his face look like that before; I was almost afraid of him. And he was Pete, my brother.

He reached down and flicked the paper edge with his fingers. “Good enough to die,” he said. “We good enough to die.”

There was a prickling all over me, even in my hair. I reckon I was shivering.

I tried to think of Chris dead. Chris shot. Chris in the hospital. Lying on a bed, and dead. Not moving. Chris, who was always moving. Chris, who was so handsome.

I stood and looked at the yellow telegram and tried to think what it would be like. Now, for Chris. I thought of things I had seen dead: dogs and mice and cats. They were born dead, or they died because they were old. Or they died because they were killed. I had seen them with their heads pulled aside and their insides spilled out red on the ground. It wouldn’t be so different for a man.

But Chris...

“Even if you black,” Pete was saying, “you good enough to get sent off to die.”

And Ma said: “You shut you mouth!” She’d lifted her head up from her lap, and the creases on her cheeks were quivering and her brown eyes stared — cotton eyes, the kids used to call them.

“You shut you mouth!” Ma shouted. She’d never talked that way before. Not to Pete. Her voice was hoarser even, because she had been crying without tears.

And Pete yelled right back, the way he’d never done before: “Sweet Jesus, I ain’t gonna shut up for nobody when I’m talking the truth!”

I made a wide circle around him and went in the bedroom. Lena was sitting there, on the bed, with the pillows propped behind her. Her face was quiet and dull. There wasn’t anything moving on it, not a line. There was no way of telling if she even heard the voices over in the kitchen.

I stood at the foot of the bed and put both hands on the cold iron railing. “Lena,” I said, “you all right?”

She heard me. She shifted her eyes slowly over to me until they were looking directly at me. But she didn’t answer. Her eyes, brown now and dark, stared straight into mine without shifting or moving or blinking or lightening. I stepped aside. The eyes didn’t move with me. They stayed where they were, caught up in the air.

From the kitchen I could hear Pete and Ma shouting back and forth at each other until Ma finally gave way in deep dry sobbings that slowed and finally stopped. For a second or so everything was perfectly still. Then Ma said what had been in the back of our minds for months, only I didn’t ever expect to hear her say it, not to her only boy.

“You no son of mine.” She paused for a minute and I could hear the deep catching breath she took. “You no man even.” Her voice was level and steady. Only, after every couple of words she’d have to stop for breath. “You a coward. A god-damn coward. And you made youself a cripple for all you life.”

All of a sudden Pete began to laugh — high and thin and ragged. “Maybe — maybe. But me, I’m breathing. And he ain’t... Chris was fine and he ain’t breathing.”

Lena didn’t give any sign that she’d heard. I went around to the side of the bed and took her hand: it was cold and heavy.

Pete was giggling; you could hardly understand what he was saying. “He want to cross over, him.”

Ma wasn’t interrupting him now. He went right ahead, choking on the words. “Chris boy, you fine and you brave and you ain’t run out on what you got to do. And you ain’t breathing neither. But you a man...”

Lena’s hand moved ever so slightly.

“Lena,” I said, “you all right?”

“Chris boy... you want to cross over... and you sure enough cross over... why, man, you sure cross over... but good, you cross over.”

“Lena,” I said, “don’t you pay any mind to him. He’s sort of crazy.”

In the kitchen Pete was saying: “Chris, you a man, sure... sure... you sure cross over... but ain’t you gonna come back for Lena? Ain’t you coming back to get her?”

I looked down and saw that my hand was shaking. My whole body was. It had started at my legs and come upward. I couldn’t see clearly either. Edges of things blurred together. Only one thing I saw clear: Chris lying still and dead.

“It didn’t get you nowhere, Chris boy,” Pete was giggling. “Being white and fine, where it got you? Where it got you? Dead and rotten.”

And Lena said: “Stop him, Chris.”

She said: “Stop him, Chris, please.”

I heard her voice, soft and low and pleading, the way she wouldn’t speak to anyone else, but only her husband.

Chris, dead on the other side of the world, covered with ground.

Pete was laughing. “Dead and gone, boy. Dead and gone.”

“Stop him, Chris,” Lena said, talking to somebody buried on the other side of the world. “Stop him, Chris.”

But I was the only one who heard her. Just me; just me.

You could see her come back from wherever she’d been. Her eyes blinked a couple of times slowly and when they looked at me, they saw me. Really saw me, her little sister. Not Chris, just Celia.

Slowly she pushed herself up from the bed and went into the kitchen, where Pete was still laughing.

Ma was sitting at the table, arms stretched out, head resting on them. She wasn’t crying anymore; it hardly looked like she was breathing.

“Dead and gone, man.” Pete was teetering his chair back and forth, tapping it against the wall, so that everything on the little shelf over his head shook and moved. He had his mouth wide open, so wide that his eyes closed.

Lena hit him, hard as she could with the flat of her hand, hit him right across the face. And then she brought her left hand up, remembering to make a fist this time. It caught him square in the chest.

I heard him gasp; then he was standing up and things were falling from the shelf overhead. Lena stumbled back. And right where her hand struck the floor was the picture of our father, the picture in the silver metal frame, the one Ma had got out the night Chris first came.

She had it in her hand when she scrambled back to her feet. She was crying now, because he was still laughing. From far away I could hear her gasping: “Damn, damn, damn, damn.” And she swung the picture frame in a wide arc at his laughing mouth. He saw it coming and forgot for just a moment and lifted his arm to cover his face. And the frame and glass smashed into his stub arm.

He screamed: not loud, just a kind of high-pitched gasp. And he turned and ran. I was in the way and he knocked me aside as he yanked open the door. He missed his footing on the steps and fell down into the alley. I could hear him out there, still screaming softly to himself with the pain: “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

Lena stood in the middle of the room, her hands hanging down empty at her sides. Her lip was cut; there was a little trickle of blood down the corner of her mouth. Her tongue came out, tasted, and then licked it away.

Pleadings by John William Corrington

Ritual Murder by Tom Dent

(Originally published in 1978)

Courthouse

CHARACTERS: Narrator, Joe Brown Jr., Bertha (Joe’s wife), Mrs. Williams (Joe’s teacher), Dr. Brayboy (a black psychiatrist), Mr. Andrews (Joe’s boss), Mrs. Brown (Joe’s mother), Mr. Brown (Joe’s father), James Roberts (Joe’s friend), Mr. Spaulding (anti-poverty program administrator), Chief of Police.

SETTING: New Orleans.

TIME: Now. It is important that the actors make their speeches in rhythm to the background music.

Narrator: Last summer, Joe Brown Jr., black youth of New Orleans, LA, committed murder. Play a special “Summertime” for him and play the same “Summertime” for his friend James Roberts who he knifed to death. [We hear “Summertime” under the narrator’s voice.] In every black community of America; in the ghettos and neighborhood clubs where we gather to hear our music, we play “Summertime”; and in each community the bands play it differently. In no community does it sound like the “Summertime” of George Gershwin. It is blusier, darker, with its own beat and logic, its joys unknown to the white world. It is day now. The routine events of life have passed under the bridge. Joe Brown Jr. has been arrested, indicted, and formally charged with murder. It happened... it happened in a Ninth Ward bar — we need not name it for the purposes of this presentation. The stabbing was the culmination of an argument Joe Brown had with his friend. We have learned this, but the Louisiana Weekly only reported, “James Roberts is said to have made insulting remarks to Joe Brown, whereupon Brown pulled out a switchblade knife and stabbed Roberts three times in the chest before he could be subdued.” The story received front page play in the Louisiana Weekly, and a lead in the crime-of-the-day section in the white Times-Picayune. After that, it received only minor news play, since there are other crimes to report in New Orleans. Play “Summertime” for Joe Brown Jr., and play the same “Summertime” for his friend James Roberts who he knifed to death. [The music dies out.] Why did this murder happen? No one really knows. The people who know Joe Brown best have ideas.

[We see Bertha looking at TV. The sound is off, only the picture shows. Bertha is young, about twenty. She is Joe’s wife. She is ironing while looking at the set — ironing baby things.]

Bertha: Joe just didn’t have any sense. He is smart, oh yes, has a good brain, but didn’t have good sense. The important thing was to settle down, get a good job, and take care of his three children. We been in the Florida Avenue project now for almost a year, and we never have enough money. Look at the people on TV, they make out okay. They fight, but they never let their fights destroy them. Joe didn’t have control of his temper. He was a dreamer, he wanted things. But he wouldn’t work to get them. Oh, he would take jobs in oyster houses, and he’d worked on boats ever since he was a kid. But he wouldn’t come in at night, and sometimes he wouldn’t get up in the morning to go to work. Sometimes he would come in and snap off the TV and say it was driving him crazy. It’s not his TV — my father bought it, and besides, I like it, it’s the only thing I have. This is just a seventeen-inch set, but I want a twenty-one-inch set. Now I’ll never get one because he had to go out and do something foolish. You ask me why he killed that boy? I don’t know. But I think he killed him because he had a bad temper and wouldn’t settle down. Joe was a mild person, but he carried knives and guns — that’s the way his family is. I used to tell him about it all the time. Once I asked him, When are you gonna get a better job and make more money? He said, When I get rid of you and those snotty kids. He could have done something if he had tried, if he had only tried; but instead, he wanted to take it out on us. I’ll go see him, but now look; I have to do everything in this house myself: iron the clothes, cook the meals, buy the food, apply for relief, and get some help from my parents — and my father ain’t working right now. Joe didn’t want to have our last baby, Cynthia, but we couldn’t murder her before she was even born and now I got to take care of her too. Joe knifed that boy because he was foolish, wouldn’t settle down and accept things as they are, and because he didn’t have common sense.

Narrator: Mrs. Williams, could you comment on your former student, Joe Brown Jr.?

Mrs. Williams: I don’t remember Joe Brown Jr. very well. I have so many children to try to remember. I had him three or four years ago just before he dropped out of school. I was his homeroom teacher. Joe was like all the others from the Ninth Ward, not interested in doing anything for themselves. You can’t teach them anything. They don’t want to learn, they never study, they won’t sit still and pay attention in class. It’s no surprise to me that he’s in trouble. I try to do my best here, but I have only so much patience. I tell you, you don’t know the things a teacher goes through with these kids. They come to class improperly dressed, from homes where they don’t get any home training, which is why they are so ill-mannered. We try to teach them about America — about the opportunities America has to offer. We try to prepare them to get the best jobs they can — and you know a Negro child has to work harder. I teach History, Arithmetic, English, and Civics every day, and it goes in one ear and comes out the other. It gives me a terrible gas pain to have to go through it every day, and the noise these kids make is too, too hard on my ears. I’ve worked for ten years in this school, and I don’t get paid much at all. But next month my husband and I will have saved enough money to buy a new Oldsmobile, which I’m happy to say will be the smartest, slickest, smoothest thing McDonough No. 81 has ever seen. Two boys got into a fight in the yard the other day and it was horrible. It pains me to hear the names they call each other — irritates my gas. Some of them even bring knives and guns to school. It’s just terrible. I’m only relieved when I get home, turn on my TV, take my hair down and face off, drink a nice strong cup of coffee, look out at my lawn in Pontchartrain Park, and forget the day. You ask me why Joe Brown murdered his friend in a Negro bar on a Saturday night and I tell you it is because he was headed that way in the beginning. These kids just won’t listen, and don’t want to learn, and that’s all there is to it.

[Lights on Joe Brown Jr. He is wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt. He is seated. He faces the audience. There is a table in front of him. On the table is a small transistor radio, but the music we hear is Gil Evans’s “Barbara Song.”]

Narrator: Here is Joe Brown Jr.

Joe Brown Jr.: Once I saw a feature about surfing on TV. Surfing on beautiful waves on a beach in Hawaii, or somewhere...

[The lights shift to another man who is seated on the opposite side of the stage. He is a much older man, dressed in a business suit. He is a Negro. He is Dr. Brayboy, a psychiatrist. His chair does not face the audience; it faces Joe Brown Jr.]

Narrator: A black psychiatrist, Dr. Thomas L. Brayboy.

Dr. Brayboy: At the core of Joe Brown’s personality is a history of frustrations. Psychological, sociological, economic...

Joe Brown Jr.:... and I wanted to do that... surf. It was a dream I kept to myself. Because it would have been foolish to say it aloud. Nobody wants to be laughed at. And then I thought, I never see black people surfing...

Dr. Brayboy: We might call Joe Brown’s homocidal act an act of ritual murder. When murder occurs for no apparant reason but happens all the time, as in our race on Saturday nights, it is ritual murder. When I worked in Harlem Hospital in the emergency ward, I saw us coming in bleeding, blood seeping from the doors of the taxicabs... icepicks and knives...

[These speeches must be slow, to the rhythm of music.]

Narrator: Play “Summertime” for Joe Brown Jr., and a very funky “Summertime” for his friend James Roberts, who he knifed to death.

Joe Brown Jr.:... And then I thought, I don’t see any black folks on TV, ever. Not any real black folks, anyway. There are those so-called black shows like Good Times and The Jeffersons, but they are so far removed from the kind of folks I know that they may as well be white too. I see us playing football, basketball, and baseball, and half the time I miss that because they be on in the afternoon, and I’m usually shelling oysters. Where am I? I asked my wife, and she answered, In the Florida Avenue project where you are doing a poor job of taking care of your wife and children. My boss answered, On the job, if you would keep your mind on what you are doing... count the oysters.

Dr. Brayboy:... Ice picks and knives and frustration. My tests indicate that Joe Brown Jr. is considerably above average in intelligence. Above average in intelligence. Above average. Vocabulary and reading comprehension extraordinary...

Narrator: [To audience] Our purpose here is to discover why.

Dr. Brayboy:... But school achievement extremely low. Dropped out at eighteen in the eleventh grade.

Joe Brown Jr.: I began watching all the TV sets I could, looking for my image on every channel, looking for someone who looked like me. I knew I existed, but I didn’t see myself in the world of television or movies. Even the black characters were not me. All the black characters were either weak and stupid, or some kind of superman who doesn’t really exist in my world. I couldn’t define myself, and didn’t know where to begin. When I listened to soul music on the radio I understood that, and I knew that was part of me, but that didn’t help me much. Something was not right, and it was like... like I was the only cat in the whole world who knew it. Something began to come loose in me, like my mind would float away from my body and lay suspended on a shelf for hours at a time watching me open oysters. No one ever suspected, but my mind was trying to define me, to tell me who I was the way other people see me, only it couldn’t because it didn’t know where to begin.

[The scene shifts to the desk of the Chief of Police. He may be played by a white actor, or a black actor in white face.]

Narrator: The Chief of Police.

Chief of Police: The rate of crime in the streets in New Orleans has risen sharply. We know that most of our colored citizens are wholesome, law-abiding, decent citizens. But the fact remains that the crime wave we are witnessing now across the nation is mostly nigger crime. Stop niggers and you will stop crime. The police must have more protection, more rights, and more weapons of all types to deal with the crime wave. We need guns, machine guns, multimachine guns, gas bombs, and reinforced nightsticks. Otherwise America is going to become a nightmare of black crime in the streets.

[Lights up on Mr. Andrews, Joe’s boss. He is sitting behind a terribly messy desk with papers stuck in desk holders. His feet are on the desk. He is eating a large muffuletta sandwich. His image must be one of a relaxed, informal interview at his office during lunchtime. If there are no white actors, the part can be played by a black actor in white face, but instead of eating lunch, he should be smoking a huge cigar.]

Narrator: Joe Brown’s employer, Mr. Andrews.

Mr. Andrews: I have trouble with several of my nigra boys, but I likes ’em. [He almost chokes on his sandwich.] Joe was a little different from the rest... what would you say... dreamier... more absentminded. Joe was always quitting, but he must have liked it here ’cause he always came back. You can’t tell me anything about those people. One time, during lunch hour, they were singing and dancing outside to the radio and I snuck up to watch. If they had seen me they would’ve stopped. It was amazing. The way them boys danced is fantastic. They shore got rhythm and a sense of style about them. Yes sir... and guess who got the most style... ole Joe. [Bites and eats.] That boy sure can dance. I loves to watch him. [Bites.] Recently, he been going to the bathroom a lot and staying a long time. I ask the other boys, Where’s that doggone Joe? They tell me. So one day I go to the john and there he is, sitting on the stool... readin’. I say, Boy, I pay you to read or shell oysters? He comes out all sulky. [Smiling.] He could be kind of sensitive at times, you know. I been knowing him since he was a kid... born around here... kind of touchy. [Andrews has finished his sandwich. He takes his feet off the desk, throws the wrapper into the trash, and wipes his hands. A serious look comes over his face.] As for why he killed that boy, I can’t give you any answers. I think it has to do with nigras and the way they get wild on the weekend. Sometimes the good times get a little rough. And them [pause] you don’t know what a boy like Joe can get mixed up in, or any of them out there. [Waves toward the door.] I don’t understand it, and I know and likes ’em all, like they was my own family. My job is to keep ’em straight here... any trouble out of any of ’em and out the door they go.

[The scene shifts to another white man. He is well dressed with his tie loosened, sitting behind an extremely disordered desk. Black actor can play in white face. He must, throughout his speech, wear a public relations smile. He must speak with a winning air.]

Narrator: Mr. Richard Spaulding, director of the Poverty Program in New Orleans.

Mr. Spaulding: Last year we spent 3.5 million in five culturally deprived areas of New Orleans. This money has made a tremendous difference in the lives of our fine colored citizens. We have provided jobs, jobs, and more jobs. By creating, for the first time, indigenous community organizations controlled and operated by the people of the five target areas, we have, for the first time, provided a way to close the cultural and economic gap. Social service centers are going up in all these areas. We will develop a level of competency on par with American society as a whole. In the Desire area alone, 750 mothers go to our medical center each day. We have, in short, provided hope. Of course, there are still problems.

Narrator: Any insights into the murder of James Roberts last summer by Joe Brown Jr.?

Mr. Spaulding: We are building community centers, baseball diamonds, basketball courts, little leagues, golden-agers facilities, barbecue pits, swimming pools, badminton nets, and... if our dreams come true... well-supervised and policed bowling alleys. It is our firm hope that sociology will stay out of neighborhood bars.

Narrator: Thank you, Mr. Spaulding.

[The scene shifts to a middle-aged woman sitting on a well-worn couch. She is wearing a plain dress. There is a small table with a lamp and Bible on it next to the couch. She is Mrs. Brown, Joe’s mother. Across the stage, sitting in a big easy chair, is a middle-aged man in work clothes. He is Mr. Brown, Joe’s father. He is drinking a large can of beer which, from time to time, he will place on the floor. He listens to what Mrs. Brown says intently, but there must be an air of distance in his attitude toward her and what she says, never affection. The audience must be made to believe they are in different places.]

Narrator: [Solemnly] This is Joe Brown’s mother. [A spot focuses on Mrs. Brown. There is enough light, however, to see Mr. Brown.]

Mrs. Brown: Joe was always a sweet kind boy, but Joe’s problem is that he... stopped... going... to... church. I told him about that but it didn’t make any difference. When we climb out of Christ chariot we liable to run into trouble. I tell the truth about my own children, like I tell it on anyone else. Once, before Joe got married, he came home in a temper about his boss and his job. Talking bad about the white folks. Said he wished something from another planet would destroy them all. Said he didn’t like the way his boss talked to him, that he should be paid more, and like that. We all get mad at the white people, but there is no point in it. So many colored folks ain’t even got a job. I told him, If you think you can do better, go back and finish school. But no, he didn’t finish school, he just complained. Stay in church, I told him, but he started hanging around with bad friends. Bad friends lead to a bad end. Talking bad about white people is like busting your head against a brick wall.

Narrator: Mrs. Brown, do you feel your son would kill for no reason? There must have been a reason.

Mrs. Brown: When you hang around a bad crowd on Saturday nights, troubles are always gonna come. I told him to stay out of those bars. I don’t know what happened or why. A friend told me the other boy was teasing Joe and Joe got mad. He was sensitive, you know, very serious and sensitive. He didn’t like to be rubbed the wrong way.

Narrator: Mrs. Brown, the purpose of this program is to discover why your son knifed his friend. No one seems to have answers. We are using the scientific approach. Do you have any answers?

Mrs. Brown: [Despairingly.] I don’t know why. I don’t understand. You try to protect your children as best you can. It’s just one of those things that happens on Saturday nights in a colored bar; like a disease. You hope you and nobody you know catches it. The Lord is the only protection.

Narrator: And your husband? Would he have any information, any ideas?

Mrs. Brown: [Sharply.] I haven’t seen that man in four years.

[Both Mrs. Brown and narrator look at Mr. Brown.]

Mr. Brown: I plan to go see the boy... I just haven’t had a chance yet. I have another family now and I can’t find any work. I help him out when I can, but... [pause]... I can’t understand why he would do a thing like that.

Narrator: If we could hear what James Roberts has to say.

[We return to the summertime theme and the scene of the crime, the barroom where the play began with Joe Brown Jr. standing over James Roberts’s body and all other actors frozen in their original positions as in the opening scene. After the narrator speaks the body of James Roberts begins to slowly arise from the floor aided by Joe Brown. It is important that Brown helps Roberts get up.]

James Roberts: [Begins to laugh...] It was all a joke. Nothing happened that hasn’t happened between us before. Joe is still my best friend... if I were alive I would tell anyone that. That Saturday was a terrible one... not just because the lights went out for me. I heard a ringing in my ears when I woke up that morning. When I went to work at the hotel the first thing I had to do was take out the garbage. Have you ever smelled the stink of shrimp and oyster shells first thing in the morning? I hate that. The sounds of the street and the moan of the cook’s voice; that’s enough to drive anyone crazy, and I heard it every day. That day I decided to leave my job for real... one more week at the most.

Joe Brown Jr.: [Getting up from the bunk into a sitting position.] Damn. The same thing happened to me that day. I decided I was going to leave my job.

James Roberts: [Looking at Joe with disgust.] Man, you are disgusting. You all the time talking about leaving your job.

Narrator: [To Roberts, then to Joe.] Get to what happened at the café, please. We don’t have all night.

James Roberts: We were both very uptight... mad at our jobs — everybody... everything around us.

Joe Brown Jr.: [Excitedly] I know I was... I was ready to shoot somebody.

James Roberts: Shut up. This is my scene.

Joe Brown Jr.: You won’t even let anybody agree with you.

Narrator: Please.

James Roberts: Joe went on and on all evening and all night. We were getting higher and higher, going from bar to bar. We went to Scotties, then to Shadowland, to the Havana... we had my sister’s car... Joe getting mad and frustrated and talking ’bout what he was gonna do. By the time we got to the Ninth Ward Café, we was both stoned out of our minds. Joe getting dreamier and dreamier. He was talking about all his problems, his wife, his job, his children. I could understand that.

Joe Brown Jr.: You really couldn’t because you don’t have those problems.

[We hear Otis Redding’s “Satisfaction” from the album Otis Redding Live.]

James Roberts: Joe was screaming about the white man. He said he was $1,500 in debt... working like hell for the white man, then turning right around and giving it back to him. He said he couldn’t laugh no more.

[From this point on there must be little connection between Joe’s thoughts and those of James Roberts. The Otis Redding recording continues, but must not drown out the speeches.]

Joe Brown Jr.: I had a dream... I had a dream... I dreamed I had $66 million left to me by an unknown relative...

James Roberts: [Slow, to the music. As much pantomime as possible, as though he is reenacting the scene.] We were in the Ninth Ward Café sitting in a booth by ourselves. There was something on the jukebox, I believe it was Otis Redding. It was a hot night. Joe was talking about how there was nowhere he could go to relax anymore. Then, suddenly, his mind would go off into outer space somewhere and I had to jerk him back. I would ask him what he was thinking about, and he would say he wasn’t happy with himself. He didn’t know himself or where he was headed to anymore.

Joe Brown Jr.:... I always get screwed up when I try to figure out the first thing I’m going to buy... a new car... maybe... Mark IV... a new house... a brick one with wood paneling... a new suit... a tailor-made three-piece... new shoes... some high steppers... a new transistor radio... a big Sony that plays loud with big sound... Then I’d give everybody a bill... but I can’t figure out what I’m going to buy first.

James Roberts: I said, Man, what are you talking about? I don’t understand all this blues over what happens every day. He said he wanted to believe there is hope. I told him there is no hope. You a black motherfucker and you may as well learn to make the best of it.

Joe Brown Jr.:... People always tell me I can’t make up my mind what I want, or I want things that don’t make sense, or I want too much instead of being satisfied with just a little. People always tell me I ask too many questions... especially questions that no one can answer... and I am just frustrating myself because I can never find the answers. The way I figure it, you may as well dream 66 million as 66 thousand. The way I figure it, you may as well ask questions you don’t have answers to; what’s the point in asking questions everyone knows the answers to? Life is just a little thing anyway... doesn’t really amount to much when you think about time and place.

James Roberts: [Intensely and quicker.] Then he just blew. Screamed nobody calls him a black motherfucker. I just laughed. Everybody calls him that ’cause that’s just what he is. There’s nothing wrong with calling anyone a black motherfucker. We been doing it to each other all our lives, and we did it all evening while we were drinking. I just laughed. He jumps up, pulls out his blade, and goes for my heart. I could outfight Joe any day but...

Joe Brown Jr.: High steppers...

James Roberts:... He got the jump on me and I couldn’t get to my blade. It was ridiculous. He was like a crazy man... a wild man... turning on me for no reason when I done nothing to him at all... and shouting, There is no hope!

Joe Brown Jr.: High steppers...

James Roberts: Before I knew it I was stunned and weak and there was blood all over the chest of my yellow polo shirt... I felt the lights darken, and my whole body turned to rubber...

Joe Brown Jr.: High steppers on a Saturday night...

James Roberts:... But I couldn’t move anything. [Pause.] Last thing I heard was Booker T. & the M.G.’s playing “Groovin’”... Joe... his eyes blazing... everything turned red.

Narrator: [To Roberts after pause.] You mean this caused such a brutal act? You called him a name?

James Roberts: That’s all it takes sometimes.

Narrator: And you think this makes sense? To lose your life at nineteen over such an insignificant thing?

James Roberts: It happens all the time. I accept it. Joe is still my friend. Friends kill each other all the time... unless you have an enemy you can both kill.

Narrator: And you, Joe?

Joe Brown Jr.: What is there to say? It happened. It happens all the time. One thing I learned: when you pull a knife or gun, don’t fool around, use it, or you might not have a chance to. Better him dead than me. He would say the same thing if it was the other way around.

Narrator: [To Joe Brown Jr.] What did you mean when you said there is no hope?

Joe Brown Jr.: [Evenly.] I don’t know. There is no hope. Here in this jail, with my fate, I might be better off dead.

Narrator: One more question. [To James Roberts.] Do you feel you died for anything? Is there any meaning in it?

James Roberts: Yes, I died for something. But I don’t know what it means.

Narrator: [To Joe Brown Jr.] And did your act mean anything?

Joe Brown Jr.: [Softly.] I suppose so. But I can’t imagine what.

[The music of a bluesy “Summertime.” The narrator comes out to downstage center, as in the beginning of the play. He addresses the audience directly in even tones.]

Narrator: Play “Summertime” for Joe Brown Jr. and play a very funky “Summertime” for his friend James Roberts who he knifed to death.

[“Summertime” theme continues as narrator slowly scrutinizes the people he has just interviewed.]

Narrator: Our purpose here is to discover why. No one seems to have answers. Do you have any?

[Narrator moves to actors who plays Bertha, Mrs. Williams, Mrs. Brown, Joe Brown Sr., and Dr. Brayboy, asking the question, “Do you have answers?” To which they respond:]

Bertha: Joe knifed that boy because he was foolish, wouldn’t settle down and accept things as they are, and because he didn’t have common sense.

Mrs. Williams: You ask me why Joe Brown murdered his friend in a Negro bar on a Saturday night and I tell you it is because he was headed that way in the beginning. These kids just won’t listen, and don’t want to learn, and that’s all there is to it.

Mr. Brown: I plan to go see the boy... I just haven’t had a chance yet. I help him out when I can but [pause] I can’t understand why he would do a thing like that.

Mrs. Brown: It’s just one of those things that happens on a Saturday night in a colored bar... like a disease. You hope you and nobody you know catches it. The Lord is the only protection.

Dr. Brayboy: When murder occurs for no apparent reason, but happens all the time, as in our race on Saturday nights, it is ritual murder. That is, no apparent reason. There are reasons. The reasons are both personal and common. When a people who have no method of letting off steam against the source of their oppression exploit against each other, homicide, under these conditions, is a form of group suicide. When personal chemistries don’t mix, just a little spark can bring about the explosion. Ice picks and knives and whatever happens to be lying around.

Narrator: When murder occurs for no apparent reason, but happens all the time, as in our race on a Saturday night, it is ritual murder.

[The following lines should be distributed among the actors and delivered to the audience directly.]

That is, no apparent reason. There are reasons. The reasons are both personal and common. When a people who have no method of letting off steam against the source of their oppression explode against each other, homicide, under these conditions, is a form of group suicide. When personal chemistries don’t mix, just a little spark can bring about the explosion. Ice picks, knives and whatever happens to be lying around.

Narrator: [Moving downstage facing audience directly.] We have seen something unpleasant, but the play is over. Yes, we see this thing [gesturing to stage behind him] night after night, weekend after weekend. Only you have the power to stop it. It has to do with something in our minds. [Pause. “Summertime” music gradually increases in volume.] Play “Summertime” for Joe Brown Jr., and play a very funky “Summertime” for his friend James Roberts who he knifed to death.

[Narrator walks over to Dr. Brayboy and shakes his hand as lights fade to black.]