Chester Himes - If he hollers let him go

'Hell naw,' I said. 'I ain't never seen her before.' Then I decided to tell him; I felt I could talk to him all right. 'When I went to get her, she started that phoney act you just saw and said she wouldn't work with a nigger, and I called her a cracker slut.'

Red came up in his face in slow waves, but he didn't pull away from it. 'Some stinker,' he said. 'What she needs is a good going over by someone.' I knew he wanted to say by some coloured fellow but just couldn't bring himself to say it. Instead he got redder and said, 'It'd take some of the stinking prejudice out of her.'

'What she really needs is just some discipline,' I said. 'Some of these officials to tell her what's what, to lay the line down and make her walk it.'

He blinked at me and his eyes got bright again. 'I told you her name, didn't I? Madge Perkins.'

I gave a little laugh. 'I found that out. What I want to know is what's eating her. She knows goddamned well nobody wants to rape her.'

He hesitated a moment, then said, 'She hasn't got a phone,' digging out a little black address book. 'But I'll give you her address.' He grinned sheepishly. 'I knew her room-mate, but she joined the WAC's.'

I gave him a quick startled look; I didn't get it. 'What do I want with her address, man?'

Now he began getting red again, but he gave me a curious little look. 'Maybe you can cure her,' he said.

'Look, man…' I began, then didn't know what to say. I couldn't tell whether he figured I was making a play for the dame and was using the beef as an opening, or was trying to tell me how to get even with her, or whether he was trying to prove he didn't have any racial bias himself. It could have been he felt badly about it from a white point of view and wanted to show me that all the men in his race didn't approve of that sort of thing.

Whatever it was, he went on giving me her address with a painful insistence. 'It's the Hotel Mohave on South Figueroa…' He gave me a downtown street number. 'Room 202, that's the front room on the second floor.'

'Say, man, look,' I began again. I wanted to tell him I didn't want to go to bed with her, I wanted to black her eyes; but just the idea of her being a white woman stopped me. I felt flustered, caught, guilty. I couldn't realize what was happening to me, myself. It was funny in a way. I couldn't tell him I didn't want her because she was a white woman and he was a white man, and something somewhere way back in my mind said that would be an insult. And I couldn't tell him that I did want her, because the same thing said that that would be an insult too.

I started shaking my head and laughing. He looked put out, slightly offended, and his eyes blinked like butterfly wings. But he got it all out with the white man's eternal persistence, 'There's a phone in the hotel, but I don't know the number. It's one of those joints, you know.'

I was blowing laughs through my nose; I felt lightheaded and giddy. 'Now anybody in the world would think we were two fairly ordinary, reasonably sane guys,' I said.

I wondered what a white man and a Negro could talk about that wouldn't touch at some time or other on one of those taboo subjects that would embarrass one or the other, or both. Either both the Negro and the white man would have to accept the fact and even justification of white supremacy-then they could talk about what the white folks were doing and thinking and what the Negroes were taking and aping; or both would have to reject the theory of white supremacy and condemn all of its institutions, including loyalty and patriotism in time of war; or the white man could retain it and the Negro reject it, which didn't make for conversation at all.

I began shaking my head again. 'I'm telling you,' I said. 'It's a killer.'

He didn't get it. He blinked and his eyes went blank, absolutely lost; and I didn't know where to go from there either. We'd taken it too far to back out; now we stood there at a loss for words, each wanting to escape the other but neither wanting to be the first to make the break.

'There're a lot of stinkers like her in the yard,' he was saying, and I said, 'Too many.'

It was a relief to both of us when Zula Mae came up and said, 'Red wants you, Bob, he's up a tree.'

'Again,' I said, and took her by the arm. 'See you, Don.'

'Take it easy, Bob,' he said with a peculiar baffled look in his eyes.

'Baby,' I said to her. 'You sure look good to me.'

She gave me a half-incredulous, half-hopeful look, and her red lips flowered in her dark face. 'Are you kidding?' she said in her husky plaintive voice, and I gave a long loosening sigh.

But the things had gotten me. Now I felt depressed, walled in, black again. Red noticed it right away.

'What the hell happened to you, Bob? Don't the union wanna help you?' he asked.

'I got it all fixed,' I lied, but my voice was flat, dispirited.

'He been reading in the paper where all young men gonna be called to the Army,' Peaches said. 'He got the GI blues.'

'Got something,' Conway said.

Red didn't want anything in particular; just wanted me there so Tebbel couldn't take charge. I stood around for a time.

'I don't know what the hell I'd do if they called me,' Ben said. 'Every time a coloured man gets in the Army he's fighting against himself. Of course there isn't anything else he can do. If he refuses to go they send him to the pen. But if he does go and take what they put on him, and then fight so he can keep on taking it, he's a cowardly son of a bitch.'

Smitty had stopped his work to listen. 'I wouldn't say that,' he argued. 'You can't call coloured soldiers cowards, man. They can't keep the Army from being like what it is, but hell, they ain't no cowards.'

'Any man's a coward who won't die for what he believes,' Ben flared. 'If he's got principles he'll die for them. If he won't he's a cowardly son of a bitch-excuse me, ladies.'

The other fellows stopped to listen now.

'Any time a Negro says he believes in democracy but won't die to enforce it-I say he's a coward,' Ben declared. 'I don't care who he is. If Bob lets them put him in the Army he's a coward. If you let them put you in the Army you're a coward. As long as the Army is Jim Crowed a Negro who fights in it is fighting against himself.'

'If Bob gets called sure 'nough and listens to you and gets sent to the pen, he's a fool,' Zula Mae said.

Ben gave me a swift look. 'Bob's all right. If they call him he'll go on and make the best of it. Nobody expects him to be a martyr. But one thing I'll tell you, and you remember it-'

Tebbel stepped from one of the shower nooks where he'd been standing and Ben gave him a glance and kept on. 'One thing… You'll never get anything from these goddamn white people unless you fight them. They don't know anything else. Don't listen to anything else. If you don't believe it, take any white man you know. You can beg that son of a bitch until you're blue in the face. Argue with him until you're out of breath and no matter how eloquent your plea or righteous your cause the only way you'll ever get along with that son of a bitch is to whip his ass-excuse me, ladies.' He looked around defiantly. 'Bob'll tell you that's right. Isn't that right, Bob?'

'That's right.' I said.

'Then he gonna be your friend from then on,' Conway chuckled.

'That reminds me of a story,' Tebbel said. 'There were two coloured soldiers-'

'Was one named Moe?' Pigmeat cut in.

I chuckled and went out.

When I went down to turn in the time cards Kelly said, 'Wait a minute, Bob, I want to talk to you.'

Then he went on telling this joke to the two white guys from the shop.

'So he took this gal out in the shed out of respect for old Aunty, see, because all old Aunty had was this one-roomed shack where she and the gal lived.' He took a quick glance to see if the tool-crib girl was out of hearing and lowered his voice slightly. 'It'd been raining like hell, see, and the shed didn't have any floor and it was all sloppy and muddy where the hogs had been wallowing. But this guy was hard up, see, he'd been on the road for two weeks…'