Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

He understands that his sister loves him even though they don’t have the same father, and when she gets mad at him she reminds him of this, and this is supposed to hurt him. But it doesn’t hurt him because he has never met his father so he might as well not exist. And if he doesn’t exist then there’s no point in feeling anything at all about him. You make do, like when there’s no food in the house. You make do. Besides, her father only shows up once in a while, and no good ever comes of it.

He has always been terrified of the woods. Outside, surrounding the house, advancing on the house. Except he’s the only one who knows the trees and sticker-bushes are advancing on the house, coming to get him. The moon lets him know. The moon’s light picks up the movement of the branches and places it on the wall of his room, and he watches the shadows shake and threaten him. The moon has been warning him since before he could speak that his time with his mother and sister is short: he must leave this place or something bad will happen to him. He does not belong here and the woods are casting him out. The woods say what other people’s tongues will not say.

His sister says she knew he was coming that night when their mother came home torn. She says she knew by their mother’s silence and crying after that night that something new was coming into their house, and it turned out to be him. Their mother did not go into town to work and the neighbors brought them food and took his sister into their houses some nights when their mother got loud, or was crying and would not leave her bed. Then he came and their mother got better as soon as she saw him and started to go into town again to work. To work for someone else. His sister cleaned him when he was dirty even though she was not that much bigger than him.

Some colored babies are light when they’re newborn but he didn’t get colored as he got older. His hair was very curly when he was born but it got less curly as he got older. His sister teased him that he had white folks’ hair, but one time their mother heard her say this and she yelled at his sister to never do that again. And she didn’t. She said she was sorry, later that night when they went to bed. Said it to God in her prayers, I’m sorry for what I said. The boy forgave his sister because it did not occur to him that he had been insulted until his mother got mad. His sister told the truth.

He has a few books he has stolen and they contain devices. He does not understand all the words so he makes up meanings for the words he does not know, using the words around those unknown words. Later he discovers his definitions are right. He has never had trouble understanding the devices. They mean: up.

His mother does not like him to go to town by himself but that’s where all the roads lead. And so. The colored people know who he is and do not mistake him for something else. One day he is in town at the store and he holds penny-candy in his hand. There is an old colored man he has never seen before, holding two oranges. The old man is in front of him in line and the boy is happy to wait. This peculiar thing happens: the old colored man steps aside to let him buy his candy. He thinks the man is going off to get something else but after he pays for his candy the man has not added anything to his oranges. He waits behind the boy. It takes him a long time to figure out what happened. Long after he has finished the sweet candy. What he figures out is sour.

* * *

“It could be him,” Lila Mae concedes. In the picture, two colored women and one white man stand under slanting sunlight on the porch of an old wooden house. The warped front steps grin. She reconsiders: he is not a man yet, he hides his hands in his trouser pockets boyishly. His black hair is hacked into a bowl cut, jagged and raw above his eyes. In the next picture, and the next, Lila Mae cannot see his eyes at all. He has found his trademark brown trilby, and the brim’s veil of shadow hides his mother’s eyes. He is surrounded by white men in their first suits, which are loose and shy at the wrists, just short of dignified, almost there. A cocky gang, mouths full of newly acquired cant: the graduation picture of his class at the Pierpont School of Engineering. His mother’s arm disappears behind his slim neck in the family photograph (flaky white creases where it has been folded and refolded), he stands shoulder-to-shoulder with his school chums in the graduation picture. He is welcome in both, no intruder, accepted by his companions. But in the school picture she cannot see his eyes.

“It is him,” she says. She extracts the next photograph from Natchez’s stack, hands firm. It is the Pit before the reign of cluttered walls and tacks, bureaucratic appurtenance. He stands with his fellow warriors, the first champions of the Department of Elevator Inspectors, the men who will rescue this newly vertical city from toddler pratfall. Their haircuts are Safeties, but it is not clear how he favors his hair, the trilby hides his eyes. When he held the Guild Chair, the office walls were not, as they are now, festooned with orchestrated candids of Chancre and municipal burghers, Chancre herding his porcine family in their Sunday best. In this photograph the walls are bare. No other traces of a life before this. He looks away from the camera to the stack of reports on his wide oak desk, concerned. The alumni bulletin announcing his ascension to Dean of the Institute for Vertical Transport features the head shot that she has seen many times, on dust jackets, haunting the marginalia of textbooks. He stares down into the camera now, proud or fearless or empty, offering his black eyes as matching pits for the pit-eye of the camera. He challenges the machine to a duel now, no more hiding: the better man wins reality. His face has overripened into a sagging middle age, but it is the same man from the first photograph.

“Why?” Lila Mae asks. “Never mind.”

Natchez slides his mother’s photographs into a pile in his lap. “He’d send her letters. This stuff,” tapping the memorabilia, “if he got mentioned in the newspaper. If he got a new job. As you can see, she kept it all. When she died I found it all in her trunk. Wrapped in this ribbon right here.”

He purses his lips. Lila Mae looks at the envelopes: even then, the Department used those cream envelopes with the foul glue. The ones in office now are probably from the same shoddy gross. “When she got something in the mail from him,” Natchez continues, “she’d get all mad for a few days and I learned to walk softly, because she’d whip for little stuff she wouldn’t normally raise her voice about. She told me her brother ran away when he was sixteen and she never saw him after that.”

Her hand grasps the photograph of him and Natchez’s mother and grandmother. “All this time,” she murmurs. To turn his back on these two women. “Who was his father?” she asks.

“I always knew they didn’t have the same daddy, but I didn’t know his was a white man. She never spoke of it. But there it is.” He trails off, then offers, “Somebody in Natchez. A white man in Natchez. Gran’ma Alice used to clean their houses.”

They hear someone move downstairs and they do not speak. They wait. She stares at the door, not at the man next to her. But she can feel him look at her. For the long time it takes for the sounds to move away, to another quarter of the house.

“She died last summer,” Natchez resumes in a whisper. “That’s when I found out who my uncle was.”

She can look at him again. “And the man who works here? Your uncle with the numb leg?”

A splinter of a grin. “I gave him some money to disappear for a few days. I wanted to get inside this place.”

“You want the black box.”

“It’s my birthright. I got claim to it as his nephew, is the way I see it. I’m his only living relative. From what I seen, he’s a big man with these elevator folks. The Great James Fulton. And all this carrying on they been doing the last few days, Mr. Reed and them and putting you out to talk to that woman up there. They want that machine he made. It’s my birthright.”