Toni Morrison - Song of Solomon

Long after he’d folded the money and the letter into an envelope, Milkman sat on at his father’s desk. He added and re-added columns of figures, always eighty cents too little or eighty cents too much. He was still distracted and edgy, and all of it was not because of the problem of Hagar. He’d had a conversation with Guitar some time ago about the dragnet. A young boy, about sixteen years old, on his way home from school, had been strangled with what was believed to be a rope, and his head was bashed in. The state troopers cooperating with the local police said the way in which the boy had been killed was similar to the way another boy had been killed on New Year’s Eve in 1953, and the way four grown men had been killed in 1955—the strangulation, the smashing of the face. In the poolrooms and in Tommy’s Barbershop, the word was that Winnie Ruth Judd had struck again. The men laughed about it and repeated for the benefit of newcomers the story of how, in 1932, Winnie Ruth, a convicted murderer, who axed and dismembered her victims and stuffed them in trunks, was committed to a state asylum for the criminally insane, and escaped two or three times each year.

Once she had walked two hundred miles through two states before they caught her. Because there was a brutal killing in the city in December of that year, during the time Winnie Ruth was at large, Southside people were convinced that she had done it. From then on when some particularly nasty murder was reported, the Negroes said it was Winnie Ruth. They said that because Winnie Ruth was white and so were the victims. It was their way of explaining what they believed was white madness—crimes planned and executed in a truly lunatic manner against total strangers. Such murders could only be committed by a fellow lunatic of the race and Winnie Ruth Judd fit the description. They believed firmly that members of their own race killed one another for good reasons: violation of another’s turf (a man is found with somebody else’s wife); refusal to observe the laws of hospitality (a man reaches into his friend’s pot of mustards and snatches out the meat); or verbal insults impugning their virility, honesty, humanity, and mental health. More important, they believed the crimes they committed were legitimate because they were committed in the heat of passion: anger, jealousy, loss of face, and so on. Bizarre killings amused them, unless of course the victim was one of their own.

They speculated about Winnie Ruth’s motives for this recent murder. Somebody said she was raunchy from being cooped up and went looking for a lay. But she knew better than to expect a grown man to want her, so she went for a schoolboy. Another said she probably didn’t like saddle shoes and when she got out of the loony bin and walked four hundred miles to safety, the first thing she saw was a kid wearing saddle shoes and she couldn’t take it—ran amok.

Amid the jokes, however, was a streak of unspoken terror. The police said there had been a witness who thought he saw a “bushy-haired Negro” running from the schoolyard where the body was found.

“The same bushy-haired Negro they saw when Sam Sheppard axed his wife,” said Porter.

“Hammered, man,” said Guitar. “Twenty-seven hammer blows.”

“Great Jesus. Why he do twenty-seven? That’s a hard killin.”

“Every killing is a hard killing,” said Hospital Tommy. “Killing anybody is hard. You see those movies where the hero puts his hands around somebody’s neck and the victim coughs a little bit and expires? Don’t believe it, my friends. The human body is robust. It can gather strength when it’s in mortal danger.”

“You kill anybody in the war, Tommy?”

“I put my hand to a few.”

“With your hands?”

“Bayonet, friend. The men of the Ninety-second used bayonets. Belleau Wood glittered with them. Fairly glittered.”

“How’d it feel?”

“Unpleasant. Extremely unpleasant. Even when you know he’ll do the same to you, it’s still a very indelicate thing to do.”

They laughed as usual at Tommy’s proper way of speaking.

“That’s because you didn’t want to be in the army no way,” said a fat man. “What about if you was roaming the streets and met up with Orval Faubus?”

“Boy, I’d love to kill that sucker,” a heavy-set man said.

“Keep saying that. They’ll soon have your ass downtown.”

“My hair ain’t bushy.”

“They’ll make it bushy.”

“They’ll take some brass knuckles and make your head bushy and call it hair.”

Aside from Empire State’s giggle, which was wholehearted, it had seemed to Milkman then that the laughter was wan and nervous. Each man in that room knew he was subject to being picked up as he walked the street and whatever his proof of who he was and where he was at the time of the murder, he’d have a very uncomfortable time being questioned.

And there was one more thing. For some time Milkman had been picking up hints that one or more of these murders had in fact been either witnessed or committed by a Negro. Some slip, someone knowing some detail about the victim. Like whether or not Winnie Ruth couldn’t stand saddle shoes. Did the boy have on saddle shoes? Did the newspaper say so? Or was that just one of the fanciful details a good jokester would think of.

The two Tommys were cleaning up. “Closed,” they said to a man who poked his face in the door. “Shop’s closing.” The conversation died down and the men who were just hanging around seemed reluctant to go. Guitar too, but finally he slipped on his jacket, shadow-boxed with Empire State, and joined Milkman at the door. Southside shops were featuring feeble wreaths and lights, made more feeble by the tacky Yuletide streamers and bells the city had strung up on the lampposts. Only downtown were the lights large, bright, festive, and full of hope.

The two men walked down Tenth Street, headed for Guitar’s room.

“Freaky,” said Milkman. “Some freaky shit.”

“Freaky world,” said Guitar. “A freaky, fucked-up world.”

Milkman nodded. “Railroad Tommy said the boy had on saddle shoes.”

“Did he?” Guitar asked.

“Did he? You know he did. You were laughing right along with the rest of us.”

Guitar glanced at him. “What you opening your nose for?”

“I know when I’m being put off.”

“Then that’s what it is, man. Nothing else. Maybe I don’t feel like discussing it.”

“You mean you don’t feel like discussing it with me. You were full of discussion in Tommy’s.”

“Look, Milk, we’ve been tight a long time, right? But that don’t mean we’re not different people. We can’t always think the same way about things. Can’t we leave it like that? There are all kinds of people in this world. Some are curious, some ain’t; some talk, some scream; some are kickers and other people are kicked. Take your daddy, now. He’s a kicker. First time I laid eyes on him, he was kicking us out of our house. That was a difference right there between you and me, but we got to be friends anyway….”

Milkman stopped and forced Guitar to stop too and turn around. “I know you’re not going to give me a bullshit lecture.”

“No lecture, man. I’m trying to tell you something.”

“Well, tell me. Don’t give me no fuckin bullshit lecture.”

“What do you call a lecture?” asked Guitar. “When you don’t talk for two seconds? When you have to listen to somebody else instead of talk? Is that a lecture?”

“A lecture is when somebody talks to a thirty-one-year-old man like he’s a ten-year-old kid.”

“You want me to talk or not?”

“Go ahead. Talk. Just don’t talk to me in that funny tone. Like you a teacher and I’m some snot-nosed kid.”