John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“Ah!” Nuper said. “And yet it is, isn’t it. A shanty compared to what the Kennedys live in. A shanty compared to—”

Marguerite said, offended, “The Kennedys have all those children.”

Nuper exploded into laughter.

“Stop that!” Benson roared. The sudden exertion loosened the stuff in his nose and he hastily covered his lip with one hand and fished for the handkerchief with the other. He blew his nose.

“I’m sorry,” Nuper said. “I apologize. But really, for heaven’s sakes—” He laughed again. “Forgive me, Mrs. Benson.”

She pursed her lips, deeply hurt, and her chin was as big as Nuper’s whole head.

“We better get these dishes washed,” Benson said petulantly.

He got up, blew his nose again, and picked up his plate and silverware to take them to the kitchen.

Nuper said, “I really didn’t mean to get into all this. I really am sorry.” Again, infuriatingly, he was laughing, “—all those children,” he said. He laughed again.

Marguerite said tearfully, “If you feel this house is a shanty, you ought to leave.”

“Dear God, Mrs. Benson!” Nuper said. He shook with laughter.

“Get out of here,” Benson said. “I suggest you go to your riot.”

Nuper laughed and laughed and laughed.

I’ll kill him, Benson thought, raising his eyebrows, startled. This is my house.

When he came back from the kitchen for more dishes, Ollie Nuper was standing up, shaking and snorting.

“Get out of here,” Benson hissed. He took a step nearer. “Get out of my house.”

He was standing at the sink washing dishes in his suitpants and white shirt when Ollie Nuper went out to his car with the signs. Benson scowled into the soapsuds, not thinking, his mind a perfect blank. Like a man in a trance, he wiped his hands on the dish-towel and went into the dining room for his suitcoat.

“Where are you going, Walter?” Marguerite said.

“Business,” he said.

He heard Ollie Nuper’s car start up.

Marguerite’s lips were trembling. He ignored it and hurried to his car.

3

On one side stood an old, dirty church of reddish stone, with an enormous stained-glass window, lighted, some of the pieces of glass broken out long ago and replaced with something that did not let the light through; on the other side, a brick school that had an abandoned look, a playground surrounded by cyclone fence with barbed wire at the top. The park between was small, crowded with people. Some of the trees were dead and the swings had no seats in them. He had never seen so many Negroes gathered together in one place. Some of them looked poor — old men whose trousers hung low at the crotch and whose shoes were lumpy; old, fat women wearing two or three sweaters and kerchiefs over their heads; boys in T-shirts that were badly stretched out of shape at the neck and trousers with flies that no longer buttoned; young women with enormous rear ends and cheap, shiny shoes that let most of their feet show through — but most of them didn’t look poor, in fact they looked rich, to Benson, rich and directly dangerous: a man just ahead of him with a goat’s beard and the curved dark glasses murderers wear on television; a group of fat young Negroes a little to the right of him, black as coal in their white shirts and thin little ties; a huge black man in a striped winter suit who kept wiping his forehead and neck with a great white handkerchief. The old people were mostly to the back of the crowd, around Benson — he was not in the crowd at all, in fact, but on the street, well out of range of most of them — and the younger boys, too, kept to the back. They seemed hardly interested, darting in and out among the old people, calling to each other, sometimes cuffing each other in a way that might or might not be playful, Benson couldn’t tell. The people at the heart of the crowd were college age or a little older, and more of them than he would have expected were women, loud, belligerent girls of a kind he had never known existed: they had the pretty faces of the girls who waited on him in restaurants or sat reading quietly on buses, and they had the sweet voices of the girls he heard singing on the television with Mitch Miller and the rest, but tonight their pretty faces were full of authority and dire intent, and the sweetness of their voices was irrelevant to their calls and shouts. The young women were the ones, or so it seemed to Benson, who ruled the crowd. It was one of them, a tall, flat-chested girl with large and radiant teeth, who first got up on the speaker’s platform. She held up her hands and after a long time the crowd became silent. She raised the microphone, then lowered it a little. Someone on the ground in front of the platform tried to help.

“Can you hear me?” she said.

The crowd murmured, and the loudspeaker made a high, droning noise, then quieted again.

She began to speak, but at the same moment a high voice right at Benson’s elbow asked, “You got a light, boss?”

Benson jumped, then hunted through his pockets nervously. The man was short, and his face was like a blackened skull. He had a red straw hat with a wide white band, far back on his head. He held a cigarette between two long purple fingers.

“Ah,” Benson said.

The man took them without touching Benson’s fingers. “Whoo,” he said.

Benson said, as nervous as ever, “What’s all this about?”

The man shook his head, held the lighted match to his cigarette, and blew upward. “I ’on’t know, man. Shit, man, Ine jis’ passin’ thoo.” He grinned.

Benson took the matches back, put them in his pocket, and folded his hands to listen. He could feel the black man looking at his ear.

The girl was saying: “—much to be grateful for. In Chicago they throw rocks at us, in Mississippi they throw bombs in our churches and shoot at us from passing cars, but not here, not in Buffalo, New York.”

The crowd murmured. Someone yelled, “Tell ’em!”

“In Alabama they have to use the State Police to see that black children can walk to school without being shot at, and in Wisconsin they have to use tear gas to keep the blacks and the whites from murdering each other — but not here. And you want to know why?” She leaned close to the microphone and spoke softly. “Because we’re not moving yet, in Buffalo, New York. We’re still darkies, here. We stay in our place, like lizards under the porch, and we stand in line when they tell us to stand in line, and if they happen to step on our toes, we apologize.”

The crowd cheered, except for the people in back. The old people merely stood there.

“That CORE, man,” the Negro at Benson’s elbow said, “they muthuhfuckuhs every one of ’em, and the same thing for SNCC. Shoo.” His breath smelled of whiskey. He tipped up his head and blew smoke.

Benson said, “What are they meeting about? Are they going to demonstrate?”

The man smiled with ominous teeth and rolled his eyes. “Man, Ine jist passin’ thoo.”

He tried to see Nuper, but he was nowhere in sight. He was somewhere up near the speakers’ platform — at least that was where Benson had lost sight of him.

The girl was saying, “—but they don’t want your child to matriculate with their children up here in Buffalo either, make no mistake about it! And they don’t want your face in their neighborhood! They want your money and your sweat and your blood in Vietnam, and after that — they — want — you — dead.”

The crowd roared.

There was a police car coming around the corner, cruising slowly, seemingly indifferent to the crowd. The policemen were Negroes. When they came up to Benson and the man at his elbow, one of the policemen said, “Don’t stand in the street, buddy.”