Song of Solomon

Chapter 4

Once again he did his Christmas shopping in a Rexall drugstore. It was late, the day before Christmas Eve, and he hadn’t had the spirit or energy or presence of mind to do it earlier or thoughtfully. Boredom, which had begun as a mild infection, now took him over completely. No activity seemed worth the doing, no conversation worth having. The fluttery preparations at home seemed fake and dingy. His mother was going on as she did every year about the incredible price of trees and butter. As though their tree would be anything other than it had always been: the huge shadowy thing in a corner burdened with decorations she had had since she was a girl. As if her fruitcakes were edible, or her turkey done all the way to the bone. His father gave them all envelopes of varying amounts of money, never thinking that just once they might like something he actually went into a department store and selected.

The gifts Milkman had to buy were few and easily chosen in a drugstore. Cologne and dusting powder for Magdalene called Lena; a compact for Corinthians; a five-pound box of chocolates for his mother. And some shaving equipment for his father. In fifteen minutes he was done. The only problem gift was Hagar’s. It was hard to select something hurriedly for her since she liked everything but preferred nothing. More important, he wasn’t sure he wanted to keep it up. Keep up the whole business of “going with” Hagar. He seldom took her anywhere except to the movies and he never took her to parties where people of his own set danced and laughed and developed intrigues among themselves. Everybody who knew him knew about Hagar, but she was considered his private honey pot, not a real or legitimate girl friend—not someone he might marry. And only one or two of the various women he dated “seriously” ever put up a fight about her since they believed she was less than a rival.

Now, after more than a dozen years, he was getting tired of her. Her eccentricities were no longer provocative and the stupefying ease with which he had gotten and stayed between her legs had changed from the great good fortune he’d considered it, to annoyance at her refusal to make him hustle for it, work for it, do something difficult for it. He didn’t even have to pay for it. It was so free, so abundant, it had lost its fervor. There was no excitement, no galloping of blood in his neck or his heart at the thought of her.

She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it’s there, because it can’t hurt, and because what difference does it make?

Perhaps the end of the year was a good time to call it off. It wasn’t going anywhere and it was keeping him lazy, like a pampered honey bear who had only to stick out his paw for another scoop, and so had lost the agility of the tree-climbers, but not the recollection of how thrilling the search had been.

He would buy her something for Christmas, of course, something nice to remember him by, but nothing that would give her any ideas about marriage. There was some costume jewelry on display. She might like that, but it would pale before the diamond ring Reba had stuck down in her dress. A Timex? She would never look at it. Staring at the glass tube that housed the watches, he found himself getting angry. All this indecision about what to get for Hagar was new. At Christmases past he simply chose (or had his sisters choose) from a long list of things that Hagar had mentioned specifically. Things quite out of place in her household: a navy-blue satin bathrobe (this for a woman who lived in a house that had no bathroom); a chubby; a snood with a velvet bow; a rhinestone bracelet with earrings to match; patent leather pumps; White Shoulders cologne. Milkman used to wonder at her specificity and her acquisitiveness until he reminded himself that Pilate and Reba celebrated no holidays. Yet their generosity was so wholehearted it looked like carelessness, and they did their best to satisfy every whim Hagar had. When he first took her in his arms, Hagar was a vain and somewhat distant creature. He liked to remember it that way—that he took her in his arms—but in truth it was she who called him back into the bedroom and stood there smiling while she unbuttoned her blouse.

From the time he first saw her, when he was twelve and she was seventeen, he was deeply in love with her, alternately awkward and witty in her presence. She babied him, ignored him, teased him—did anything she felt like, and he was grateful just to see her do anything or be any way. A good part of the enthusiasm with which he collected his father’s rents was because of the time it gave him to visit the wine house and, hopefully, find Hagar there. He was free to drop in anytime and after school he tried to make sure he saw her.

Years passed and his puppy breath came as fast as ever in Hagar’s presence. It slowed finally, after Guitar took him to his first Southside party, and after he found himself effortlessly popular with girls of his own age and in his own neighborhood. But while his breath was no longer that of a puppy, Hagar could still whip it into a pant when he was seventeen and she was twenty-two. Which she did on the dullest flattest day he could remember, a throw-away day in March when he drove his father’s two-tone Ford over to her house for two bottles of wine. Milkman was much sought after and depended upon to secure the liquor he and his under-twenty-one friends believed vital to a party. When he got to Pilate’s he walked in on a domestic crisis.

Reba’s new man friend had asked her for a small loan and she had told him that she didn’t have any money at all. The man, who had received two or three nice presents from her unasked, thought she was lying and was trying to tell him to shove off. They were quarreling in the backyard—that is, the man was quarreling. Reba was crying and trying to convince him that what she’d said was true. Just after Milkman opened the door, Hagar came running from the bedroom, where she’d been looking out the back window. She screamed to Pilate, “Mama! He’s hitting her! I saw him! With his fist, Mama!”

Pilate looked up from a fourth-grade geography book she was reading and closed it. Slowly, it seemed to Milkman, she walked over to a shelf that hung over the dry sink, put the geography book on it, and removed a knife. Slowly still, she walked out the front door—there was no back door—and as soon as she did, Milkman could hear Reba’s screams and the man’s curses.

It didn’t occur to him to stop Pilate—her mouth was not moving and her earring flashed fire—but he did follow her, as did Hagar, around to the back of the house, where, approaching the man from the back, she whipped her right arm around his neck and positioned the knife at the edge of his heart. She waited until the man felt the knife point before she jabbed it skillfully, about a quarter of an inch through his shirt into the skin. Still holding his neck, so he couldn’t see but could feel the blood making his shirt sticky, she talked to him.

“Now, I’m not going to kill you, honey. Don’t you worry none. Just be still a minute, the heart’s right here, but I’m not going to stick it in any deeper. Cause if I stick it in any deeper, it’ll go straight through your heart. So you have to be real still, you hear? You can’t move a inch cause I might lose control. It’s just a little hole now, honey, no more’n a pin scratch. You might lose about two tablespoons of blood, but no more. And if you’re real still, honey, I can get it back out without no mistake. But before I do that, I thought we’d have a little talk.”

The man closed his eyes. Sweat ran from his temples down the sides of his face. A few neighbors who had heard Reba’s screams had gathered in Pilate’s backyard. They knew right away that the man was a newcomer to the city. Otherwise he would have known a few things about Reba, one of which was that she gave away everything she had and if there was a case quarter in that house she’d have given it to him; and more important, he would have known not to fool with anything that belonged to Pilate, who never bothered anybody, was helpful to everybody, but who also was believed to have the power to step out of her skin, set a bush afire from fifty yards, and turn a man into a ripe rutabaga—all on account of the fact that she had no navel. So they didn’t have much sympathy for him. They just craned their necks to hear better what Pilate was telling him.

“You see, darlin, that there is the only child I got. The first baby I ever had, and if you could turn around and see my face, which of course you can’t cause my hand might slip, you’d know she’s also the last. Women are foolish, you know, and mamas are the most foolish of all. And you know how mamas are, don’t you? You got a mama, ain’t you? Sure you have, so you know what I’m talking about. Mamas get hurt and nervous when somebody don’t like they children. First real misery I ever had in my life was when I found out somebody—a little teeny tiny boy it was—didn’t like my little girl. Made me so mad, I didn’t know what to do. We do the best we can, but we ain’t got the strength you men got. That’s why it makes us so sad if a grown man start beating up on one of us. You know what I mean? I’d hate to pull this knife out and have you try some other time to act mean to my little girl. Cause one thing I know for sure: whatever she done, she’s been good to you. Still, I’d hate to push it in more and have your mama feel like I do now. I confess, I don’t know what to do. Maybe you can help me. Tell me, what should I do?”

The man struggled for breath and Pilate eased up on his throat but not his heart.

“Lemme go,” he whispered.

“Hmmmmm?”

“Lemme go. I…won’t never…put a hand on her. I promise.”

“A real promise, sugar?”

“Yeah. I promise. You won’t never see me no more.”

Reba sat on the ground, her arms around her knees, staring through her unswollen eye at the scene as though she were at a picture show. Her lip was split and her cheek was badly bruised, and though her skirt and hands were stained with her effort to stop the blood pouring from her nose, a little still trickled down.

Pilate plucked the knife out of the man’s shirt and took her arm away. He lurched a little, looked down at the blood on his clothes and up at Pilate, and licking his lips, backed all the way to the side of the house under Pilate’s gaze. Her lips didn’t start moving again until he was out of sight and running down the road.

All attention turned to Reba, who was having difficulty trying to stand up. She said she thought something was broken inside in the place where he’d kicked her. Pilate felt her ribs and said nothing was broken. But Reba said she wanted to go to the hospital. (It was her dream to be a patient in a hospital; she was forever trying to get admitted, since in her picture-show imagination, it was a nice hotel. She gave blood there as often as they would let her, and stopped only when the blood bank was moved to an office-type clinic some distance away from Mercy.) She was insistent now, and Pilate surrendered her judgment to Reba’s. A neighbor offered to drive them and off they went, leaving Milkman to buy his wine from Hagar.

He was delighted with the performance and followed Hagar into the house to laugh and talk excitedly about it. She was as tranquil as he was agitated, as monosyllabic as he was garrulous.

“Was that something? Wow! She’s two inches taller than he is, and she’s talking about weak.”

“We are weak.”

“Compared to what? A B-52?”

“Every woman’s not as strong as she is.”

“I hope not. Half as strong is too much.”

“Well, muscle strength is one thing. I meant women are weak in other ways.”

“Name some. I want you to name some for me. Where are you weak?”

“I don’t mean me. I mean other women.”

“You don’t have any weakness?”

“I haven’t found any.”

“I suppose you think you can whip me.” It was the seventeen-year-old’s constant preoccupation—who could whip him.

“Probably,” said Hagar.

“Ha! Well, I guess I better not try to prove you wrong. Pilate might be back with her knife.”

“Pilate scare you?”

“Yeah. Don’t she scare you?”

“No. Nobody scares me.”

“Yeah You tough. I now you tough.”

“Not tough. I just don’t let people tell me what to do. I do what I want.”

“Pilate tells you what to do.”

“But I don’t have to do it, if I don’t want to.”

“Wish I could say the same for my mother.”

“Your mother boss you?”

“Well … not boss exactly.” Milkman floundered for a word to describe the nagging he thought he was a victim of.

“How old are you now?” asked Hagar. She lifted her eyebrows like a woman mildly interested in the age of a small child.

“Seventeen.”

“You old enough to be married.” Hagar said it with the strong implication that he should not allow his mother to have any say about what he did.

“I’m waiting for you,” he said, trying to regain (or acquire) some masculine flippancy.

“Be a long wait.”

“Why?”

Hagar sighed as if her patience was being tried. “I’d like to be in love with the man I marry.”

“Try me. You could learn if you’d try.”

“You’re too young for me.”

“State of mind,” he said.

“Uh huh. My mind.”

“You’re like all women. Waiting for Prince Charming to come trotting down the street and pull up in front of your door. Then you’ll sweep down the steps and powie! Your eyes meet and he’ll yank you up on his horse and the two of you ride off into the wind. Violins playing and ‘courtesy of MGM’ stamped on the horse’s butt. Right?”

“Right,” she said.

“What you going to do in the meantime?”

“Watch the lump grow in a little boy’s pants.”

Milkman smiled, but he was not amused. Hagar laughed. He jumped up to grab her, but she ran into the bedroom and shut the door. He rubbed his chin with the back of his hand and looked at the door. Then he shrugged and picked up the two bottles of wine.

“Milkman?” Hagar stuck her head out the door. “Come in here.”

He turned around and put the bottles down on the table. The door was open, but he couldn’t see her, could only hear her laughing, a low private laugh as though she had won a bet. He moved so quickly he forgot to duck the green sack hanging from the ceiling. A hickey was forming on his forehead by the time he got to her. “What you all got in there?” he asked her.

“That’s Pilate’s stuff. She calls it her inheritance.” Hagar was unbuttoning her blouse.

“What’d she inherit? Bricks?” Then he saw her breasts.

“This is what I do in the meantime,” she said.

Their tossing and giggling had been free and open then and they began to spend as much time in Guitar’s room when he was at work as Guitar himself did when he was home. She became a quasi-secret but permanent fixture in his life. Very much a tease, sometimes accommodating his appetites, sometimes refusing. He never knew when or why she would do either. He assumed Reba and Pilate knew, but they never made any reference to the change in his relationship to Hagar. While he had lost some of his twelve-year-old’s adoration of her, he was delighted to be sleeping with her and she was odd, funny, quirky company, spoiled, but artlessly so and therefore more refreshing than most of the girls his own age. There were months when Hagar would not see him, and then he’d appear one day and she was all smiles and welcome.

After about three years or so of Hagar’s on-again-off-again passion, her refusals dwindled until finally, by the time he’d hit his father, they were nonexistent. Furthermore, she began to wait for him, and the more involved he got with the other part of his social life, the more reliable she became. She began to pout, sulk, and accuse him of not loving her or wanting to see her anymore. And though he seldom thought about his age, she was very aware of hers. Milkman had stretched his carefree boyhood out for thirty-one years. Hagar was thirty-six—and nervous. She placed duty squarely in the middle of their relationship; he tried to think of a way out.

He paid the clerk for the presents he had chosen and left the drugstore, having made up his mind to call it off.

I’ll remind her that we are cousins, he thought. He would not buy her a present at all; instead he would give her a nice piece of money. Explain that he wanted her to get something really nice for herself, but that his gift-giving was compromising her. That he was not what she needed. She needed a steady man who could marry her. He was standing in her way. And since they were related and all, she should start looking for someone else. It hurt him, he would say, deeply hurt him, after all these years, but if you loved somebody as he did her, you had to think of them first. You couldn’t be selfish with somebody you loved.

Having thought so carefully of what he would say to her, he felt as though he had already had the conversation and had settled everything. He went back to his father’s office, got some cash out of the safe, and wrote Hagar a nice letter which ended: “Also, I want to thank you. Thank you for all you have meant to me. For making me happy all these years. I am signing this letter with love, of course, but more than that, with gratitude.” And he did sign it with love, but it was the word “gratitude” and the flat-out coldness of “thank you” that sent Hagar spinning into a bright blue place where the air was thin and it was silent all the time, and where people spoke in whispers or did not make sounds at all, and where everything was frozen except for an occasional burst of fire inside her chest that crackled away until she ran out into the streets to find Milkman Dead.

Long after he’d folded the money and the letter into an envelope, Milkman sat on at his father’s desk. He added and re-added columns of figures, always eighty cents too little or eighty cents too much. He was still distracted and edgy, and all of it was not because of the problem of Hagar. He’d had a conversation with Guitar some time ago about the dragnet. A young boy, about sixteen years old, on his way home from school, had been strangled with what was believed to be a rope, and his head was bashed in. The state troopers cooperating with the local police said the way in which the boy had been killed was similar to the way another boy had been killed on New Year’s Eve in 1953, and the way four grown men had been killed in 1955—the strangulation, the smashing of the face. In the poolrooms and in Tommy’s Barbershop, the word was that Winnie Ruth Judd had struck again. The men laughed about it and repeated for the benefit of newcomers the story of how, in 1932, Winnie Ruth, a convicted murderer, who axed and dismembered her victims and stuffed them in trunks, was committed to a state asylum for the criminally insane, and escaped two or three times each year.

Once she had walked two hundred miles through two states before they caught her. Because there was a brutal killing in the city in December of that year, during the time Winnie Ruth was at large, Southside people were convinced that she had done it. From then on when some particularly nasty murder was reported, the Negroes said it was Winnie Ruth. They said that because Winnie Ruth was white and so were the victims. It was their way of explaining what they believed was white madness—crimes planned and executed in a truly lunatic manner against total strangers. Such murders could only be committed by a fellow lunatic of the race and Winnie Ruth Judd fit the description. They believed firmly that members of their own race killed one another for good reasons: violation of another’s turf (a man is found with somebody else’s wife); refusal to observe the laws of hospitality (a man reaches into his friend’s pot of mustards and snatches out the meat); or verbal insults impugning their virility, honesty, humanity, and mental health. More important, they believed the crimes they committed were legitimate because they were committed in the heat of passion: anger, jealousy, loss of face, and so on. Bizarre killings amused them, unless of course the victim was one of their own.

They speculated about Winnie Ruth’s motives for this recent murder. Somebody said she was raunchy from being cooped up and went looking for a lay. But she knew better than to expect a grown man to want her, so she went for a schoolboy. Another said she probably didn’t like saddle shoes and when she got out of the loony bin and walked four hundred miles to safety, the first thing she saw was a kid wearing saddle shoes and she couldn’t take it—ran amok.

Amid the jokes, however, was a streak of unspoken terror. The police said there had been a witness who thought he saw a “bushy-haired Negro” running from the schoolyard where the body was found.

“The same bushy-haired Negro they saw when Sam Sheppard axed his wife,” said Porter.

“Hammered, man,” said Guitar. “Twenty-seven hammer blows.”

“Great Jesus. Why he do twenty-seven? That’s a hard killin.”

“Every killing is a hard killing,” said Hospital Tommy. “Killing anybody is hard. You see those movies where the hero puts his hands around somebody’s neck and the victim coughs a little bit and expires? Don’t believe it, my friends. The human body is robust. It can gather strength when it’s in mortal danger.”

“You kill anybody in the war, Tommy?”

“I put my hand to a few.”

“With your hands?”

“Bayonet, friend. The men of the Ninety-second used bayonets. Belleau Wood glittered with them. Fairly glittered.”

“How’d it feel?”

“Unpleasant. Extremely unpleasant. Even when you know he’ll do the same to you, it’s still a very indelicate thing to do.”

They laughed as usual at Tommy’s proper way of speaking.

“That’s because you didn’t want to be in the army no way,” said a fat man. “What about if you was roaming the streets and met up with Orval Faubus?”

“Boy, I’d love to kill that sucker,” a heavy-set man said.

“Keep saying that. They’ll soon have your ass downtown.”

“My hair ain’t bushy.”

“They’ll make it bushy.”

“They’ll take some brass knuckles and make your head bushy and call it hair.”

Aside from Empire State’s giggle, which was wholehearted, it had seemed to Milkman then that the laughter was wan and nervous. Each man in that room knew he was subject to being picked up as he walked the street and whatever his proof of who he was and where he was at the time of the murder, he’d have a very uncomfortable time being questioned.

And there was one more thing. For some time Milkman had been picking up hints that one or more of these murders had in fact been either witnessed or committed by a Negro. Some slip, someone knowing some detail about the victim. Like whether or not Winnie Ruth couldn’t stand saddle shoes. Did the boy have on saddle shoes? Did the newspaper say so? Or was that just one of the fanciful details a good jokester would think of.

The two Tommys were cleaning up. “Closed,” they said to a man who poked his face in the door. “Shop’s closing.” The conversation died down and the men who were just hanging around seemed reluctant to go. Guitar too, but finally he slipped on his jacket, shadow-boxed with Empire State, and joined Milkman at the door. Southside shops were featuring feeble wreaths and lights, made more feeble by the tacky Yuletide streamers and bells the city had strung up on the lampposts. Only downtown were the lights large, bright, festive, and full of hope.

The two men walked down Tenth Street, headed for Guitar’s room.

“Freaky,” said Milkman. “Some freaky shit.”

“Freaky world,” said Guitar. “A freaky, fucked-up world.”

Milkman nodded. “Railroad Tommy said the boy had on saddle shoes.”

“Did he?” Guitar asked.

“Did he? You know he did. You were laughing right along with the rest of us.”

Guitar glanced at him. “What you opening your nose for?”

“I know when I’m being put off.”

“Then that’s what it is, man. Nothing else. Maybe I don’t feel like discussing it.”

“You mean you don’t feel like discussing it with me. You were full of discussion in Tommy’s.”

“Look, Milk, we’ve been tight a long time, right? But that don’t mean we’re not different people. We can’t always think the same way about things. Can’t we leave it like that? There are all kinds of people in this world. Some are curious, some ain’t; some talk, some scream; some are kickers and other people are kicked. Take your daddy, now. He’s a kicker. First time I laid eyes on him, he was kicking us out of our house. That was a difference right there between you and me, but we got to be friends anyway….”

Milkman stopped and forced Guitar to stop too and turn around. “I know you’re not going to give me a bullshit lecture.”

“No lecture, man. I’m trying to tell you something.”

“Well, tell me. Don’t give me no fuckin bullshit lecture.”

“What do you call a lecture?” asked Guitar. “When you don’t talk for two seconds? When you have to listen to somebody else instead of talk? Is that a lecture?”

“A lecture is when somebody talks to a thirty-one-year-old man like he’s a ten-year-old kid.”

“You want me to talk or not?”

“Go ahead. Talk. Just don’t talk to me in that funny tone. Like you a teacher and I’m some snot-nosed kid.”

“That’s the problem, Milkman. You’re more interested in my tone than in what I’m saying. I’m trying to say that we don’t have to agree on everything; that you and me are different; that—”

“You mean you got some secret shit you don’t want me to know about.”

“I mean there are things that interest me that don’t interest you.”

“How you know they don’t interest me?”

“I know you. Been knowing you. You got your high-tone friends and your picnics on Honoré Island and you can afford to spend fifty percent of your brainpower thinking about a piece of ass. You got that red-headed bitch and you got a Southside bitch and no telling what in between.”

“I don’t believe it. After all these years you putting me down because of where I live?”

“Not where you live—where you hang out. You don’t live nowhere. Not Not Doctor Street or Southside.”

“You begrudge me—”

“I don’t begrudge you a thing.”

“You’re welcome everywhere I go. I’ve tried to get you to come to Honoré—”

“Fuck Honoré! You hear me? The only way I’ll go to that nigger heaven is with a case of dynamite and a book of matches.”

“You used to like it.”

“I never liked it! I went with you, but I never liked it. Never.”

“What’s wrong with Negroes owning beach houses? What do you want, Guitar? You mad at every Negro who ain’t scrubbing floors and picking cotton. This ain’t Montgomery, Alabama.”

Guitar looked at him, first in rage, and then he began to laugh. “You’re right, Milkman. You have never in your life said a truer word. This definitely is not Montgomery, Alabama. Tell me. What would you do if it was? If this turned out to be another Montgomery?”

“Buy a plane ticket.”

“Exactly. Now you know something about yourself you didn’t know before: who you are and what you are.”

“Yeah. A man that refuses to live in Montgomery, Alabama.”

“No. A man that can’t live there. If things ever got tough, you’d melt. You’re not a serious person, Milkman.”

“Serious is just another word for miserable. I know all about serious. My old man is serious. My sisters are serious. And nobody is more serious than my mother. She’s so serious, she wasting away. I was looking at her in the backyard the other day. It was as cold as a witch’s tit out there, but she had to get some bulbs in the ground before the fifteenth of December, she said. So there she was on her knees, digging holes in the ground.”

“So? I miss the point.”

“The point is that she wanted to put those bulbs in. She didn’t have to. She likes to plant flowers. She really likes it. But you should have seen her face. She looked like the unhappiest woman in the world. The most miserable. So where’s the fun? I’ve never in my whole life heard my mother laugh. She smiles sometimes, even makes a little sound. But I don’t believe she has ever laughed out loud.”

Without the least transition and without knowing he was going to, he began to describe to Guitar a dream he had had about his mother. He called it a dream because he didn’t want to tell him it had really happened, that he had really seen it.

He was standing at the kitchen sink pouring the rest of his coffee down the drain when he looked through the window and saw Ruth digging in the garden. She made little holes and tucked something that looked like a small onion in them. As he stood there, mindlessly watching her, tulips began to grow out of the holes she had dug. First a solitary thin tube of green, then two leaves opened up from the stem—one on each side. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. Now several stalks were coming out of the ground behind her. Either they were bulbs she had already planted or they had been in the sack so long they had germinated. The tubes were getting taller and taller and soon there were so many of them they were pressing up against each other and up against his mother’s dress. And still she didn’t notice them or turn around. She just kept digging. Some of the stems began to sprout heads, bloody red heads that bobbed over and touched her back. Finally she noticed them, growing and nodding and touching her. Milkman thought she would jump up in fear—at least surprise. But she didn’t. She leaned back from them, even hit out at them, but playfully, mischievously. The flowers grew and grew, until he could see only her shoulders above them and her flailing arms high above those bobbing, snapping heads. They were smothering her, taking away her breath with their soft jagged lips. And she merely smiled and fought them off as though they were harmless butterflies.

He knew they were dangerous, that they would soon suck up all the air around her and leave her limp on the ground. But she didn’t seem to guess this at all. Eventually they covered her and all he could see was a mound of tangled tulips bent low over her body, which was kicking to the last.

He described all of that to Guitar as though the dream emphasized his point about the dangers of seriousness. He tried to be as light-hearted as possible in the telling, but at the end, Guitar looked him in the eyes and said, “Why didn’t you go help her?”

“What?”

“Help her. Pull her out from underneath.”

“But she liked it. She was having fun. She liked it.”

“Are you sure?” Guitar was smiling.

“Sure I’m sure. It was my dream.”

“It was your mother too.”

“Aw, man, why you making something out of it that ain’t there? You’re making the whole thing into something superserious, just to prove your point. First I’m wrong for not living in Alabama. Then I’m wrong for not behaving right in my own dream. Now I’m wrong for dreaming it. You see what I mean? The least little thing is a matter of life and death to you. You’re getting to be just like my old man. He thinks if a paper clip is in the wrong drawer, I should apologize. What’s happening to everybody?”

“Looks like everybody’s going in the wrong direction but you, don’t it?”

Milkman swallowed. He remembered that long-ago evening after he hit his father how everybody was crammed on one side of the street, going in the direction he was coming from. Nobody was going his way. It was as though Guitar had been in that dream too.

“Maybe,” he said. “But I know where I’m going.”

“Where?”

“Wherever the party is.”

Guitar smiled. His teeth were as white as the snowflakes that were settling on his jacket. “Merry Christmas,” he said, “and Happy New Year.” He waved his hand and cut around the corner to his street. He was lost in the snowy shadows of Southside before Milkman could ask him where he was going or tell him to wait.

Now he closed the accounts book in Sonny’s Shop and gave up on the column of numbers. Something was happening to Guitar, had already happened to him. He was constantly chafing Milkman about how he lived, and that conversation was just one more example of how he’d changed. No more could Milkman run up the stairs to his room to drag him off to a party or a bar. And he didn’t want to talk about girls or getting high. Sports were about the only things he was still enthusiastic about, and music. Other than that, he was all gloom and golden eyes. And politics.

It was that atmosphere of earnestness he provoked that led Milkman to talking about his family more than he would normally do and that also led him to defend with flippant remarks the kind of life he led. Pussy and Honoré parties. Guitar knew that wasn’t all he was interested in, didn’t he? He knew Milkman had other interests. Such as? he asked himself. Well, he was very good in his father’s business, for one thing. Excellent, in fact. But he had to admit right away that real estate was of no real interest to him. If he had to spend the rest of his life thinking about rents and property, he’d lose his mind. But he was going to spend the rest of his life doing just that, wasn’t he? That’s what his father assumed and he supposed that was what he had assumed as well.

Maybe Guitar was right—partly. His life was pointless, aimless, and it was true that he didn’t concern himself an awful lot about other people. There was nothing he wanted bad enough to risk anything for, inconvenience himself for. Still, what right had Guitar to talk? He didn’t live in Montgomery either; all he did was work at that automobile factory and sneak off places—nobody knew where—and hang around Tommy’s Barbershop. He never kept a woman more than a few months—the time span that he said was average before she began to make “permanent-arrangement-type noises.”

He ought to get married, Milkman thought. Maybe I should too. Who? There were lots of women around and he was very much the eligible bachelor to the Honoré crowd. Maybe he’d pick one—the redhead. Get a nice house. His father would help him find one. Go into a real partnership with his father and…And what? There had to be something better to look forward to. He couldn’t get interested in money. No one had ever denied him any, so it had no exotic attraction. Politics—at least barbershop politics and Guitar’s brand—put him to sleep. He was bored. Everybody bored him. The city was boring. The racial problems that consumed Guitar were the most boring of all. He wondered what they would do if they didn’t have black and white problems to talk about. Who would they be if they couldn’t describe the insults, violence, and oppression that their lives (and the television news) were made up of? If they didn’t have Kennedy or Elijah to quarrel about? They excused themselves for everything. Every job of work undone, every bill unpaid, every illness, every death was The Man’s fault. And Guitar was becoming just like them—except he made no excuses for himself—just agreed, it seemed to Milkman, with every grievance he heard.

Milkman went into the bathroom, which served also as a pantry, and plugged in the hot plate to make himself some instant coffee. While he was there, he heard a rapid tapping on the windowpane. He stepped back into the office and saw Freddie’s eyes through the lettering. Milkman unlocked the door.

“Hey, Freddie. What’s up?”

“Looking for a warm spot. They got me runnin tonight. Christmas comin and all, all I do is run up and down the street.” Freddie’s janitor duties at the department store were supplemented by his function as a messenger and package deliverer.

“They give you a new truck yet?” Milkman asked him.

“You crazy? The engine have to fall out on the ground before they give me a decent one.”

“I put some coffee water on. Have a cup?”

“Just what I’m lookin for. Saw your lights and thought there’s got to be a hot cup a coffee in there. You wouldn’t happen to have a little taste to go in it, would ya?”

“Just so happens I do.”

“Atta boy.”

Milkman went into the bathroom, lifted the lid from the toilet tank, and took out the half-pint bottle he kept hidden from Macon, who wouldn’t have alcohol on the premises. He brought the bottle into the office, put it on the desk, and went back to make up two cups of coffee. When he reentered, Freddie was trying to look as though he hadn’t already turned the pint up to his mouth. They laced their coffee and Milkman looked around for his cigarettes.

“Hard times, boy,” Freddie said absently, after his first sip. “Hard times.” Then, as though he noticed something missing, he asked, “Where’s your buddy?”

“You mean Guitar?”

“Yeah. Guitar. Where’s he?”

“Haven’t seen him in a few days. You know Guitar. He’ll disappear on you in a minute.” Milkman noticed how white Freddie’s hair was.

“How old are you, Freddie?”

“Who knows? They made dirt in the morning and me that afternoon.” He giggled. “But I been around a long long time.”

“You born her?”

“Naw. Down south. Jacksonville, Florida. Bad country, boy. Bad, bad country. You know they ain’t even got an orphanage in Jacksonville where colored babies can go? They have to put ’em in jail. I tell people that talk about them sit-ins I was raised in jail, and it don’t scare me none.”

“I didn’t know you were an orphan.”

“Well, not a regular orphan. I had people and all, but my mama died and nobody would take me in. It was on account of the way she died that nobody would take me.”

“How’d she die?”

“Ghosts.”

“Ghosts?”

“You don’t believe in ghosts?”

“Well”—Milkman smiled—“I’m willing to, I guess.”

“You better believe, boy. They’re here.”

“Here?” Milkman didn’t glance around the office, but he wanted to. The wind howled outside in the blackness and Freddie, looking like a gnome, flashed his gold teeth. “I don’t mean in this room necessarily. Although they could be.” He cocked his head and listened. “No. I mean they in the world.”

“You’ve seen some?”

“Plenty. Plenty. Ghosts killed my mother. I didn’t see that, of course, but I seen ’em since.”

“Tell me about them.”

“No I ain’t. I don’t do no talkin ‘bout the ghosts I seen. They don’t like that.”

“Well, tell me about the one you didn’t see. The one killed your mother.”

“Oh. Well. That one. She was walking cross the yard with this neighbor friend of hers and they both looked up and saw a woman comin down the road. They stopped and waited to see who she was. When the woman got near, the neighbor called out howdy and soon’s she said the word, the woman turned into a white bull. Right before their eyes. My mama fell down on the ground in labor pain right then and there. When I was born and they showed me to her, she screamed and passed out. Never did come to. My father died two months before I was born, and they couldn’t get none of my people and nobody else to take a baby brought here by a white bull.”

Milkman started laughing. He didn’t mean to hurt Freddie’s feelings, but he couldn’t stop the laughter, and the more he tried, the more it came.

Freddie looked more surprised than hurt. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

Milkman couldn’t answer, he was laughing so hard.

“Okay,” Freddie said, and threw up his hands. “Okay, laugh on. But they’s a lot of strange things you don’t know nothin about, boy. You’ll learn. Lot of strange things. Strange stuff goin on right in this here town.”

Milkman’s laughter was under control now. “What? What strange stuff is happening in this town? I haven’t seen any white bulls lately.”

“Open your eyes. Ask your buddy. He knows.”

“What buddy?”

“Your buddy Guitar. Ask him what strange stuff been happenin. Ask him how come he runnin round with Empire State all of a sudden.”

“Empire State?”

“That’s right. Empire State.”

“Nobody runs around with Empire State. He’s a nut. He just stands around with a broom, dribbling spit. He can’t even talk.”

“He don’t talk. That don’t mean he can’t. Only reason he don’t is cause he found his wife in bed with another man long time ago, and ain’t found nothing to say since then.”

“Well, what’s Guitar doing with him?”

“Good question. Police would like to know the answer to that too.”

“How’d you get from Empire State to the police?”

“You ain’t heard? People say the police is lookin for a colored man what killed that white boy in the schoolyard.”

“I know that. Everybody knows that.”

“Well, the description fits State. And Guitar been takin him places. Hidin him, I believe.”

“What’s so strange about that? You know Guitar is like that. He’ll hide anybody the law is looking for. He hates white people, especially cops, and anybody they’re after can count on him for help.”

“You don’t understand. Him and State ain’t actin like they just hidin him. They actin like he did it.”

“You a little drunk, Freddie?”

“Yeah, I’m a little drunk, but that don’t change nothin. Look here. Remember when Emmet Till was killed? Back in fifty-three? Well, right after that, a white boy was killed in the schoolyard, wasn’t he?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember the dates of murders I haven’t committed.”

“You don’t know?” Freddie was incredulous.

“No. Are you saying State did it?”

“I’m sayin he acts like it and I’m sayin Guitar knows, and I’m sayin somethin strange is goin on. That’s what I’m sayin.”

He’s mad at me, thought Milkman, because I laughed at his mother and that white bull story. So he’s trying to get back at me.

“Keep your eyes open,” Freddie went on. “Just keep them open.” He looked in the pint bottle, saw it was empty, and got up to leave. “Yep. Some strange goings on round here. But don’t put my name in it if you hear anything. Was just like this when that insurance man jumped off the roof. Ever hear tell of him?”

“Seems like I did.”

“That must a been when you was a little bitty baby, 1931. Well, it was some strange stuff then too.” Freddie buttoned his coat and pulled his flap-eared cap down as far as it would go. “Well, thanks for the coffee, boy. Did me a lot of good. A lot of good.” He took his gloves out of his pocket and moved to the door.

“You’re welcome, Freddie. Merry Christmas if I don’t see you before that.”

“Same to you. And your folks. Tell Mr. Dead and your mother I said Merry Christmas.” He was smiling again. When he reached the door he put on his gloves. Then he turned his head slowly and faced Milkman. “Tell you somebody else might know about what’s goin on. Corinthians. Ask Corinthians.”

He flashed his gold merrily and was gone.