Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 287

TEMPLE

The jail. They had the funeral the next day--Gowan had barely reached New

Orleans, so he chartered an airplane back that morning-and in Jefferson,

everything going to the graveyard passes the jail, or going anywhere else

for that matter, passing right under the upstairs barred windows-the

bullpen and the cells where the Negro prisoners-the crapshooters and

whiskey-peddlers and vagrants and the murderers and murderesses too-can

look down and enjoy it, enjoy the funerals too. Like this. Some white

person you know is in a jail or a hospital, and right off you say, How

ghastly: not at the shame or the pain, but the walls, the locks, and

before you even know it, you have sent them books to read, cards, puzzles

to play with. But not Negroes. You don't even think about the cards and

puzzles and books. And so all of a sudden you find out with a kind of

terror, that they have not only escaped having to read, they have escaped

having to escape. So whenever you pass the jail, you can see them-no, not

them, you dont see them at all, you just see the hands among the bars of

the windows, not tapping or fidgeting or even holding, gripping the bars

like white hands would be, but just lying there among the interstices, not

just at rest, but even restful, already shaped and easy and unanguished

to the handles of the plows and axes and hoes, and the mops and brooms and

the rockers of white folks' cradles, until even the steel bars fitted them

too without alarm or anguish. You see? not gnarled and twisted with work

at all, but even limbered and suppled by it, smoothed and even softened,

as though with only the penny-change of simple sweat they had already got

the same thing the white ones have to pay dollars by the ounce jar for.

Not immune to work, and in compromise with work is not the right word

either, but in confederacy with work and so free from it; in armistice,

peace;-the same long supple hands serene and immune to anguish, so that

all the owners of them need to look out with, to see with -to look out at

the outdoors-the funerals, the passing, the people, the freedom, the

sunlight, the free air-are just the hands: not the eyes: just the hands

lying there among the bars and looking out, that can see the shape of the

plow or hoe or axe before daylight comes; and even in the dark, without

even having to turn on the light, can not only find the child, the