J. Powers - The Stories of J.F. Powers

The doctor stepped away from Mama and over to some men and women, six or seven of them now — a lot more had gone — and asked them what had happened. He didn’t ask all the questions I wanted to ask — I guess he already knew some of the answers — but I did find out Mama was on a streetcar coming home from the plant — Mama works now and we’re saving for a cranberry farm — when the riot broke out in that section. Mr Purvine said he called the mill and told Daddy to come home. But Mr Purvine said he wasn’t going to work tonight himself, the way the riot was spreading and the way the coloreds were getting the worst of it.

“As usual,” said a man with glasses on. “The Negroes ought to organize and fight the thing to a finish.” The doctor frowned at that. Mr Purvine said he didn’t know. But one woman and another man said that was the right idea.

“If we must die,” said the man with glasses on, “let it not be like hogs hunted and penned in an inglorious spot!”

The doctor said, “Yes, we all know that.”

But the man with glasses on went on, because the others were listening to him, and I was glad he did, because I was listening to him too. “We must meet the common foe; though far outnumbered, let us still be brave, and for their thousand blows deal one deathblow! What, though before us lies the open grave? Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, pressed to the wall, dying, but — fighting back!”

They all thought it was fine, and a woman said that it was poetry, and I thought if that is what it is I know what I want to be now — a poetryman. I asked the man with glasses on if that was his poetry, though I did not think it was for some reason, and the men and women all looked at me like they were surprised to see me there and like I ought not hear such things — except the man with glasses on, and he said, No, son, it was not his poetry; he wished it was, but it was Claude McKay’s, a Negro, and I could find it in the public library. I decided I would go to the public library when the riot was over, and it was the first time in my life I ever thought of the public library the way I did then.

They all left about this time, except the doctor and the old woman friend of Old Gramma’s. She came out of Old Gramma’s room, and when the door opened I saw Old Gramma lying on the cot with her eyes closed. The old woman asked me if I could work a can opener, and I said, “Yes, I can,” and she handed me a can of vegetable soup from the shelf. She got a meal together and us kids sat down to eat. Not Carrie, though. She sat in our good chair with her legs under her and her eyes closed. Mama was sleeping and the doctor rolled up the shade at the window and looked out while we ate. I mean brother George and the baby. I couldn’t eat. I just drank my glass of water. The old woman said, Here, here, I hadn’t ought to let good food go to waste and was that any way to act at the table and I wasn’t the first boy in the world to lose his mother.

I wondered was she crazy and I yelled I wasn’t going to lose my mother and I looked to see and I was right. Mama was just sleeping and the doctor was there in case she needed him and everything was taken care of and… everything. The doctor didn’t even turn away from the window when I yelled at the old woman, and I thought at least he’d say I’d wake my mother up shouting that way, or maybe that I was right and the old woman was wrong. I got up from the table and stood by the doctor at the window. He only stayed there a minute more then and went over to feel Mama’s wrist again. He did not touch her forehead this time.

Old Gramma came out of her room and said to me, “Was that you raising so much cain in here, boy?”

I said, “Yes, it was,” and just when I was going to tell her what the old woman said about losing Mama I couldn’t. I didn’t want to hear it out loud again. I didn’t even want to think it in my mind.

Old Gramma went over and gazed down at Mama. She turned away quickly and told the old woman, “Please, I’ll just have a cup of hot water, that’s all, I’m so upset.” Then she went over to the doctor by the window and whispered something to him and he whispered something back and it must’ve been only one or two words, because he was looking out the window the next moment.

Old Gramma said she’d be back in a minute and went out the door, slipslapping down the hall. I went to the window, the evening sun was going down, and I saw Old Gramma come out the back entrance of our building. She crossed the alley and went in the back door of the grocery store.

A lot of racket cut loose about a block up the alley. It was still empty, though. Old Gramma came out of the grocery store with something in a brown bag. She stopped in the middle of the alley and seemed to be watching the orange evening sun going down behind the buildings. The sun got in her hair and somehow under her skin, kind of, and it did a wonderful thing to her. She looked so young for a moment that I saw Mama in her, both of them beautiful New Orleans ladies.

The racket cut loose again, nearer now, and a pack of men came running down the alley, about three dozen whites chasing two coloreds. One of the whites was blowing a bugle— tan tivvy, tan tivvy, tan tivvy —like the white folks do when they go fox hunting in the movies or Virginia. I looked down, quick, to see if Old Gramma had enough sense to come inside, and I guess she did because she wasn’t there. The two coloreds ran between two buildings, the whites ran after them, and then the alley was quiet again. Old Gramma stepped out, and I watched her stoop and pick up the brown bag that she had dropped before.

Another big noise made her drop it again. A whole smear of men swarmed out of the used-car lot and came galloping down the alley like wild buffaloes. Old Gramma scooted inside our building and the brown bag stayed there in the alley. This time I couldn’t believe my eyes; I saw what I thought I’d never see; I saw what us kids had been waiting to see ever since the riot broke out — a white man that was fixing to get himself nice and killed. A white man running — running, God Almighty, from about a million coloreds. And he was the one with the tan-tivvy bugle, too. I hoped the coloreds would do the job up right.

The closer the white man came the worse it got for him, because the alley comes to a dead end when it hits our building. All at once — I don’t know why — I was praying for that fool white man with the bugle to get away. But I didn’t think he had a Chinaman’s chance, the way he was going now, and maybe that’s what made me pray for him.

Then he did a smart thing. He whipped the bugle over his shoulder, like you do with a horseshoe for good luck, and it hit the first colored behind him smack in the head, knocking him out, and that slowed up the others. The white man turned into the junk yard behind the furniture warehouse and the Victory Ballroom. Another smart thing, if he used his head. The space between the warehouse and the Victory is just wide enough for a man to run through. It’s a long piece to the street, but if he made it there, he’d be safe probably.

The long passageway must’ve looked too narrow to him, though, because the fool came rushing around the garage next to our building. For a moment he was the only one in the alley. The coloreds had followed him through the junk yard and probably got themselves all tangled up in garbage cans and rusty bed springs and ashpiles. But the white man was a goner just the same. In a minute they’d be coming for him for real. He’d have to run the length of the alley again to get away and the coloreds have got the best legs.

Then Old Gramma opened our back door and saved him.

I was very glad for the white man, until suddenly I remembered poor Mama all broken to pieces on the bed, and then I was sorry Old Gramma did it. The next moment I was glad again that she did. I understood now I did not care one way or the other about the white man. Now I was thinking of Mama — not of myself. I did not see what difference it could make to Mama if the white man lived or died. It only had something to do with us and him.