“Gone,” he said, “and never missed a thing and it was good I gone when I did because they ain’t going to have it next week like they said they was.”
“Why?” asked her mother.
“They shut it on down,” he said. “Some of the preachers from town gone out and inspected it and got the police to shut it on down.”
Her mother let the conversation drop and the child’s round face was lost in thought. She turned it toward the window and looked out over a stretch of pasture land that rose and fell with a gathering greenness until it touched the dark woods. The sun was a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood and when it sank out of sight, it left a line in the sky like a red clay road hanging over the trees.
The Artificial Nigger
Mr. Head awakened to discover that the room was full of moonlight. He sat up and stared at the floor boards—the color of silver—and then at the ticking on his pillow, which might have been brocade, and after a second, he saw half of the moon five feet away in his shaving mirror, paused as if it were waiting for his permission to enter. It rolled forward and cast a dignifying light on everything. The straight chair against the wall looked stiff and attentive as if it were awaiting an order and Mr. Head’s trousers, hanging to the back of it, had an almost noble air, like the garment some great man had just flung to his servant; but the face on the moon was a grave one. It gazed across the room and out the window where it floated over the horse stall and appeared to contemplate itself with the look of a young man who sees his old age before him.
Mr. Head could have said to it that age was a choice blessing and that only with years does a man enter into that calm understanding of life that makes him a suitable guide for the young. This, at least, had been his own experience.
He sat up and grasped the iron posts at the foot of his bed and raised himself until he could see the face on the alarm clock which sat on an overturned bucket beside the chair. The hour was two in the morning. The alarm on the clock did not work but he was not dependent on any mechanical means to awaken him. Sixty years had not dulled his responses; his physical reactions, like his moral ones, were guided by his will and strong character, and these could be seen plainly in his features. He had a long tube-like face with a long rounded open jaw and a long depressed nose. His eyes were alert but quiet, and in the miraculous moonlight they had a look of composure and of ancient wisdom as if they belonged to one of the great guides of men. He might have been Vergil summoned in the middle of the night to go to Dante, or better, Raphael, awakened by a blast of God’s light to fly to the side of Tobias. The only dark spot in the room was Nelson’s pallet, underneath the shadow of the window.
Nelson was hunched over on his side, his knees under his chin and his heels under his bottom. His new suit and hat were in the boxes that they had been sent in and these were on the floor at the foot of the pallet where he could get his hands on them as soon as he woke up. The slop jar, out of the shadow and made snow-white in the moonlight, appeared to stand guard over him like a small personal angel. Mr. Head lay back down, feeling entirely confident that he could carry out the moral mission of the coming day. He meant to be up before Nelson and to have the breakfast cooking by the time he awakened. The boy was always irked when Mr. Head was the first up. They would have to leave the house at four to get to the railroad junction by five-thirty. The train was to stop for them at five forty-five and they had to be there on time for this train was stopping merely to accommodate them.
This would be the boy’s first trip to the city though he claimed it would be his second because he had been born there. Mr. Head had tried to point out to him that when he was born he didn’t have the intelligence to determine his whereabouts but this had made no impression on the child at all and he continued to insist that this was to be his second trip. It would be Mr. Head’s third trip. Nelson had said, “I will’ve already been there twict and I ain’t but ten.”
Mr. Head had contradicted him.
“If you ain’t been there in fifteen years, how you know you’ll be able to find your way about?” Nelson had asked. “How you know it hasn’t changed some?”
“Have you ever,” Mr. Head had asked, “seen me lost?”
Nelson certainly had not but he was a child who was never satisfied until he had given an impudent answer and he replied, “It’s nowhere around here to get lost at.”
“The day is going to come,” Mr. Head prophesied, “when you’ll find you ain’t as smart as you think you are.” He had been thinking about this trip for several months but it was for the most part in moral terms that he conceived it. It was to be a lesson that the boy would never forget. He was to find out from it that he had no cause for pride merely because he had been born in a city. He was to find out that the city is not a great place. Mr. Head meant him to see everything there is to see in a city so that he would be content to stay at home for the rest of his life. He fell asleep thinking how the boy would at last find out that he was not as smart as he thought he was.
He was awakened at three-thirty by the smell of fatback frying and he leaped off his cot. The pallet was empty and the clothes boxes had been thrown open. He put on his trousers and ran into the other room. The boy had a corn pone on cooking and had fried the meat. He was sitting in the half-dark at the table, drinking cold coffee out of a can. He had on his new suit and his new gray hat pulled low over his eyes. It was too big for him but they had ordered it a size large because they expected his head to grow. He didn’t say anything but his entire figure suggested satisfaction at having arisen before Mr. Head.
Mr. Head went to the stove and brought the meat to the table in the skillet. “It’s no hurry,” he said. “You’ll get there soon enough and it’s no guarantee you’ll like it when you do neither,” and he sat down across from the boy whose hat teetered back slowly to reveal a fiercely expressionless face, very much the same shape as the old man’s. They were grandfather and grandson but they looked enough alike to be brothers and brothers not too far apart in age, for Mr. Head had a youthful expression by daylight, while the boy’s look was ancient, as if he knew everything already and would be pleased to forget it.
Mr. Head had once had a wife and daughter and when the wife died, the daughter ran away and returned after an interval with Nelson. Then one morning, without getting out of bed, she died and left Mr. Head with sole care of the year-old child. He had made the mistake of telling Nelson that he had been born in Atlanta. If he hadn’t told him that, Nelson couldn’t have insisted that this was going to be his second trip.
“You may not like it a bit,” Mr. Head continued. “It’ll be full of niggers.”
The boy made a face as if he could handle a nigger.
“All right,” Mr. Head said. “You ain’t ever seen a nigger.”
“You wasn’t up very early,” Nelson said.
“You ain’t ever seen a nigger,” Mr. Head repeated. “There hasn’t been a nigger in this county since we run that one out twelve years ago and that was before you were born.” He looked at the boy as if he were daring him to say he had ever seen a Negro.
“How you know I never saw a nigger when I lived there before?” Nelson asked. “I probably saw a lot of niggers.”
“If you seen one you didn’t know what he was,” Mr. Head said, completely exasperated. “A six-month-old child don’t know a nigger from anybody else.”
“I reckon I’ll know a nigger if I see one,” the boy said and got up and straightened his slick sharply creased gray hat and went outside to the privy.
They reached the junction some time before the train was due to arrive and stood about two feet from the first set of tracks. Mr. Head carried a paper sack with some biscuits and a can of sardines in it for their lunch. A coarse-looking orange-colored sun coming up behind the east range of mountains was making the sky a dull red behind them, but in front of them it was still gray and they faced a gray transparent moon, hardly stronger than a thumbprint and completely without light. A small tin switch box and a black fuel tank were all there was to mark the place as a junction; the tracks were double and did not converge again until they were hidden behind the bends at either end of the clearing. Trains passing appeared to emerge from a tunnel of trees and, hit for a second by the cold sky, vanish terrified into the woods again. Mr. Head had had to make special arrangements with the ticket agent to have this train stop and he was secretly afraid it would not, in which case, he knew Nelson would say, “I never thought no train was going to stop for you.” Under the useless morning moon the tracks looked white and fragile. Both the old man and the child stared ahead as if they were awaiting an apparition.