Thomas Wolfe - Thomas Wolfe - Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel

At night, when he was not called back to work he rode out by trolley to one of the Virginia beaches. But the only sound that was real, that was near and present, was the sound in his heart, in his brain, of the everlasting sea. He turned his face toward it: behind him, the cheap million lights of the concessionaires, the clatter, the racket, the confetti, the shrill blare of the saxophones, all the harsh joyless noise of his country, was softened, was made sad, far, and phantom. The wheeling merry-go-round, the blaring dance-orchestra, played K-K-K-Katy Beautiful Katy, Poor Little Buttercup, and Just a Baby’s Prayer at Twilight.

And that cheap music turned elfin and lovely; it was mixed into magic — it became a part of the romantic and lovely Virginias, of the surge of the sea, as it rolled in from the eternal dark, across the beach, and of his own magnificent sorrow — his triumphant loneliness after pain and love and hunger.

His face was thin and bright as a blade, below the great curling shock of his hair; his body as lean as a starved cat’s; his eyes bright and fierce.

O sea! (he thought) I am the hill-born, the prison-pent, the ghost, the stranger, and I walk here at your side. O sea, I am lonely like you, I am strange and far like you, I am sorrowful like you; my brain, my heart, my life, like yours, have touched strange shores. You are like a woman lying below yourself on the coral floor. You are an immense and fruitful woman with vast thighs and a great thick mop of curling woman’s hair floating like green moss above your belly. And you will bring me to the happy land, you will wash me to glory in bright ships.

There by the sea of the dark Virginias, he thought of the forgotten faces, of all the million patterns of himself, the ghost of his lost flesh. The child that heard Swain’s cow, the lost boy in the Ozarks, the carrier of news among the blacks, and the boy who went in by the lattice with Jim Trivett. And the waitress, and Ben, and Laura? Dead, too? Where? How? Why? Why has the web been woven? Why do we die so many deaths? How came I here beside the sea? O lost, O far and lonely, where?

Sometimes, as he walked back among the dancers, a scarecrow in flapping rags, he looked and saw himself among them. He seemed to be two people: he constantly saw himself with dark bent face sitting upon the top rail of a fence, watching himself go by with a bright herd of young people. He saw himself among the crowds, several inches shorter than he was, fitting comfortably into a world where everything was big enough for him.

And while he stared and saw himself beloved and admitted, he heard them laugh: he felt suddenly the hard white ring of their faces about him, and he plunged away, with cursing mouth.

O my sweet bitches! My fine cheap sluts! You little crawling itch of twiddlers: you will snigger at me! At me! At me! (He beat his hands against his ribs.) You will mock at me, with your drug-store pimps, your Jazz-bo apes, your gorilla gobs, you cute little side-porch chippies! What do you understand? The lust of a goat, the stink of your kind — that does for you, my girls. And yet you laugh at me! Ah, but I’ll tell you why you laugh: you are afraid of me because I am not like the others. You hate me because I do not belong. You see I am finer and greater than any one you know: you cannot reach me and you hate me. That’s it! The ethereal (yet manly) beauty of my features, my boyish charm (for I am Just a Boy) blended with the tragic wisdom of my eyes (as old as life and filled with the brooding tragedy of the ages), the sensitive and delicate flicker of my mouth, and my marvellous dark face blooming inward on strange loveliness like a flower — all this you want to kill because you cannot touch it. Ah me! (Thinking of his strange beauty, his eyes grew moist with love and glory, and he was forced to blow his nose.) Ah, but She will know. The love of a lady. Proudly, with misty eyes, he saw her standing beside him against the rabble: her elegant small head, wound with a bracelet of bright hair, against his shoulder, and with two splendid pearls in her ears. Dearest! Dearest! We stand here on a star. We are beyond them now. Behold! They shrink, they fade, they pass — victorious, enduring, marvellous love, my dearest, we remain.

Brooding thus on the vision of his own beauty, stirred by his own heroic music, with misty eyes, he would pass over into the forbidden settlement, with its vigilant patrols of naval and military police on the watch for their own, and prowl softly down a dark little street to a dingy frame house with drawn blinds, where dwelt a love that for three dollars could be bought and clothed with his own fable. Her name was Stella Blake. She was never in a hurry.

With her lived a young corn-haired girl of twenty years whose family lived in Pulpit Hill. Sometimes he went to see her.

Twice a week the troops went through. They stood densely in brown and weary thousands on the pier while a council of officers, tabled at the gangways, went through their clearance papers. Then, each below the sweating torture of his pack, they were filed from the hot furnace of the pier into the hotter prison of the ship. The great ships, with their motley jagged patches of deception, waited in the stream: they slid in and out in unending squadrons.

Sometimes the troops were black — labor regiments from Georgia and Alabama; big gorilla bucks from Texas. They gleamed with sweat and huge rich laughter: they were obedient as children and called their cursing officers “boss.”

“And don’t you call me ‘boss’ again, you bastards!” screamed a young Tennessee lieutenant, who had gone slowly insane during the moving, as he nursed his charges through hell. They grinned at him cheerfully, with affection, like good obedient children, as he stamped, raving, up and down the pier. From time to time they goaded him into a new frenzy with complaints about lost hats, bayonets, small arms, and papers. Somehow he found things for them; somehow he cursed his way through, keeping them in order. They grinned affectionately, therefore, and called him boss.

“And what in Jesus’ name have you done now?” he yelled, as a huge black sergeant with several enlisted men, who had gathered at the examiner’s table, burst suddenly into loud roars of grief.

The fiery lieutenant rushed at the table, cursing.

The sergeant and several enlisted men, all Texas darkies, had come away from camp without a clean bill of health: they were venereals and had not been cured.

“Boss,” blubbered the big black sergeant, “we wants to go to France. We don’t want to git lef’ in dis Gawd-dam hole.”

(Nor do I blame them, thought Eugene.)

“I’ll kill you! So help me God, I’ll kill you!” screamed the officer, hurling his trim cap upon the ground and stamping upon it. But, a moment later, with a medical officer he was leading them away for examination behind the great wall of sacked oats. Five minutes later they emerged. The negroes were cavorting with joy: they pressed around their fierce commander, seizing and kissing his hand, fawning upon him, adoring him.

“You see,” said the dish-faced checker, while he and Eugene watched, “that’s what it takes to hold a crowd of niggers. You can’t be nice to ’em. They’d do anything for that guy.”

“He would for them,” said Eugene.

These negroes, he thought, who came from Africa, were sold at the block in Louisiana, and live in Texas, are now on their way to France.

Mr. Finch, the chief checker with the ugly slit eyes, approached Eugene with a smile of false warmth. His gray jaws worked.

“I’ve got a job for you, Gant,” he said. “Double-time pay. I want you to get in on some of the easy money.”

“What is it?” said Eugene.

“They’re loading this ship with big stuff,” said Mr. Finch. “They’re taking her into the stream to get it on. I want you to go out with her. They’ll take you off in a tug to-night.”