Chester Himes - If he hollers let him go

'Aw, go wash your face,' I said. 'You look beat.'

That startled her. She must have thought her being white made her look good to me under any circumstances.

'Wanna drink?' I offered, waving toward the bottle on the floor by the bed.

'That's all you niggers do,' she said, getting up. 'Lie up and get drunk and dream of having white women.'

'Now listen, don't start that-'

'I don't drink noway,' she cut in. 'I'm a Christian woman.'

I started laughing.

She opened her robe. She was naked except for her shoes.

'Ain't I beautiful?' she said. 'Pure white.'

She had a big mature body With. large sagging breasts and brownish-pink nipples the size of silver dollars. Her stomach was soft and puffy and there were bulges at the top of her big wide thighs. Once upon a time she had had a good figure, but age was in it now.

'This'll get you lynched in Texas,' she said.

Just the notion; just because she was white. But it got me, set me on edge again. I sat down on the bed and reached for the bottle.

She kicked off her shoes and ran across the room, big, gawky, awkward, and grotesque, but with a certain wild grace in her every awkward motion.

'You can't have none unless you catch me,' she teased.

I watched her through lowered lids. My tongue was thick and swelling and my stomach was hollow and weak.

'Sit down,' I choked in a thick voice. 'This ain't Texas.'

She came over and stood beside the bed. 'You know what I'll do?' she began. I didn't answer and she started laughing. 'You dare me.' I still didn't say anything.

'The preacher said niggers were full of sin,' she said. 'That's what makes you black. Take off your clothes.'

I laid there and called her everything but a child of God, talking in a slow, slightly slurred voice.

When I reached for her, she jumped back and wriggled free. 'You know what you got to do first,' she teased.

Then I grabbed her and we locked together in a test of strength in the middle of the floor; I had her by the wrists, trying to break her down.

'Take it, you can have it,' she hissed, bunching her shoulders and trying to break my hold by bulling.

Someone knocked at the door and said in a low, hard voice, 'Cut out that racket or I'll throw you out.'

We didn't pay any attention. I took a deep breath and bore down. She began getting blood-red all down from the face in her neck and shoulders. She was almost as strong as I, but not quite. I slowly broke her down to the floor, and she looked me in the eyes, hers buck-wild.

'All right, rape me then, nigger!' Her voice was excited, thick, with threads in her throat.

I let her loose and bounced to my feet. Rape — just the sound of the word scared me, took everything out of me, my desire, my determination, my whole build-up. I was taut, poised, ready to light out and run a crooked mile. The only thing she had to do to make me stop was just say the word.

I gave her one last look, saw her mouth come open as though she were going to scream. Then I got the door unlocked, hit the stairs fast, and was just getting in my car when I heard her call my name.

I looked up. She had the blinds drawn back from the window.

'Wait,' she whispered.

I climbed in the car without replying, snapped on the juice and mashed the starter, then snapped it off just as the motor caught. My passion was gone; I was tired, sore, and deflated; a hangover was taking ahold fast. I hated her guts. But I waited anyway.

In a few minutes she came down, made up like a hustler, and putting her foot on the running board fluttered her mascaraed lashes at me. 'Gawd,' she said peevishly, 'you're sure a scary nigger. Let me in.'

That one really burned me. I was through and I knew it; the white folks had won again and I wanted out. But I couldn't let her get away with it. I didn't want her to have that satisfaction. So I said coldly and deliberately in a hard, even voice: 'You look like mud to me, sister, like so much dirt. Just a big beat bitch with big dirty feet. And if it didn't take so much trouble I'd make a whore out of you.'

She turned a dull dirty red and I could see her eyes getting ugly even in that light. I saw her look up and down the street, then she said, 'Just let me see a policeman, you nigger…'

I dug off and didn't even look back.

That night I dreamed that a white boy and a coloured boy got to fighting on the sidewalk and the coloured boy pulled out a long-bladed knife and ran at the white boy and began slashing at him and the white boy broke and ran across the street digging into his pocket and at a grocery store on the other side the coloured boy caught up with him and it looked as if he was going to cut him all to pieces but the white boy brought his hand out of his pocket and every time the coloured boy slashed at him he hit at the back of the coloured boy's hand. The white boy was crying and hitting at the back of the coloured boy's hand with his fist and the coloured boy was screaming and cursing and jumping in at the white boy to slash at him with the knife; but he couldn't cut the white boy because the white boy kept ducking and dodging and hitting at the back of his hand. Finally the white boy hit the back of the coloured boy's hand that held the knife and made a slight cutting movement and the knife fell from the coloured boy's hand. When I saw the blood start flowing from the back of the coloured boy's hand I knew the white boy had a smallbladed knife gripped in his fist. The coloured boy picked up the knife with his left hand and began slashing again and the white boy kept on ducking and dodging until he hit the back of the coloured boy's left hand and cut the tendons in that one also. Then the white boy began chasing the coloured boy down the street stabbing him all about the head and neck with the tip of the small-bladed knife. Everybody standing around looking at the white boy chasing the coloured boy down the street thought he was beating him with his fist, but I knew he was digging a thousand tiny holes in the coloured boy's head and neck and that it was only a matter of time before the coloured boy fell to the street and bled to death; but the white boy wasn't crying any more and he wasn't in a hurry any more; he was just chasing the coloured boy and stabbing him to death with a quarter-inch blade and laughing like it was funny as hell.

I woke up and I couldn't move, could hardly breathe. The alarm was ringing but I didn't have enough strength to reach out and turn it off. My hangover was already with me and my body trembled all over as if I had the ague.

Somewhere in the back of my mind a tiny insistent voice kept whispering, Bob, there never was a nigger who could beat it. I blinked open my eyes, closed them tight again. But it kept on saying it. And I knew it was a fact. If I hadn't had the hangover I might have gotten it out my mind. But the hangover gave me a strange indifference, a weird sort of honesty, like a man about to die. I could see the whole thing standing there, like a great conglomeration of all the peckerwoods in the world, taunting me, Nigger, you haven't got a chance.

I agreed with it. That was the hell of it. With a strange lucid clarity I knew it was no lie. I knew with the white folks sitting on my brain, controlling my every thought, action, and emotion, making life one crisis after another, day and night, asleep and awake, conscious and unconscious, I couldn't make it. I knew that unless I found my niche and crawled into it, unless I stopped hating white folks and learned to take them as they came, I couldn't live in America, much less expect to accomplish anything in it.

It wasn't anything to know. It was obvious. Negro people had always lived on sufferance, ever since Lincoln gave them their freedom without any bread. I thought of a line I'd read in one of Tolstoy's stories once-'There never had been enough bread and freedom to go around.' When it came to us, we didn't get either one of them. Although Negro people such as Alice and her class had got enough bread-they'd prospered from it. No matter what had happened to them inside, they hadn't allowed it to destroy them outwardly; they had overcome their colour the only way possible in America-as Alice had put it, by adjusting themselves to the limitations of their race. They hadn't stopped trying, I gave them that much; they'd kept on trying, always would; but they had recognized their limit-a nigger limit.