Then he said, “Yes, but you can stay away from the holes,” and his face took on that stubborn look that was so exasperating to his grandfather. “This is where I come from!” he said.
Mr. Head was dismayed but he only muttered, “You’ll get your fill,” and they walked on. At the end of two more blocks he turned to the left, feeling that he was circling the dome; and he was correct for in a half-hour they passed in front of the railroad station again. At first Nelson did not notice that he was seeing the same stores twice but when they passed the one where you put your feet on the rests while the Negro polished your shoes, he perceived that they were walking in a circle.
“We done been here!” he shouted. “I don’t believe you know where you’re at!”
“The direction just slipped my mind for a minute,” Mr. Head said and they turned down a different street. He still did not intend to let the dome get too far away and after two blocks in their new direction, he turned to the left. This street contained two- and three-story wooden dwellings. Anyone passing on the sidewalk could see into the rooms and Mr. Head, glancing through one window, saw a woman lying on an iron bed, looking out, with a sheet pulled over her. Her knowing expression shook him. A fierce-looking boy on a bicycle came driving down out of nowhere and he had to jump to the side to keep from being hit. “It’s nothing to them if they knock you down,” he said. “You better keep closer to me.”
They walked on for some time on streets like this before he remembered to turn again. The houses they were passing now were all unpainted and the wood in them looked rotten; the street between was narrower. Nelson saw a colored man. Then another. Then another. “Niggers live in these houses,” he observed.
“Well come on and we’ll go somewheres else,” Mr. Head said. “We didn’t come to look at niggers,” and they turned down another street but they continued to see Negroes everywhere. Nelson’s skin began to prickle and they stepped along at a faster pace in order to leave the neighborhood as soon as possible. There were colored men in their undershirts standing in the doors and colored women rocking on the sagging porches. Colored children played in the gutters and stopped what they were doing to look at them. Before long they began to pass rows of stores with colored customers in them but they didn’t pause at the entrances of these. Black eyes in black faces were watching them from every direction. “Yes,” Mr. Head said, “this is where you were born—right here with all these niggers.”
Nelson scowled. “I think you done got us lost,” he said.
Mr. Head swung around sharply and looked for the dome. It was nowhere in sight. “I ain’t got us lost either,” he said. “You’re just tired of walking.”
“I ain’t tired, I’m hungry,” Nelson said. “Give me a biscuit.”
They discovered then that they had lost the lunch.
“You were the one holding the sack,” Nelson said. “I would have kepaholt of it.”
“If you want to direct this trip, I’ll go on by myself and leave you right here,” Mr. Head said and was pleased to see the boy turn white. However, he realized they were lost and drifting farther every minute from the station. He was hungry himself and beginning to be thirsty and since they had been in the colored neighborhood, they had both begun to sweat. Nelson had on his shoes and he was unaccustomed to them. The concrete sidewalks were very hard. They both wanted to find a place to sit down but this was impossible and they kept on walking, the boy muttering under his breath, “First you lost the sack and then you lost the way,” and Mr. Head growling from time to time, “Anybody wants to be from this nigger heaven can be from it!”
By now the sun was well forward in the sky. The odor of dinners cooking drifted out to them. The Negroes were all at their doors to see them pass. “Whyn’t you ast one of these niggers the way?” Nelson said. “You got us lost.”
“This is where you were born,” Mr. Head said. “You can ast one yourself if you want to.”
Nelson was afraid of the colored men and he didn’t want to be laughed at by the colored children. Up ahead he saw a large colored woman leaning in a doorway that opened onto the sidewalk. Her hair stood straight out from her head for about four inches all around and she was resting on bare brown feet that turned pink at the sides. She had on a pink dress that showed her exact shape. As they came abreast of her, she lazily lifted one hand to her head and her fingers disappeared into her hair.
Nelson stopped. He felt his breath drawn up by the woman’s dark eyes. “How do you get back to town?” he said in a voice that did not sound like his own.
After a minute she said, “You in town now,” in a rich low tone that made Nelson feel as if a cool spray had been turned on him.
“How do you get back to the train?” he said in the same reed-like voice.
“You can catch you a car,” she said.
He understood she was making fun of him but he was too paralyzed even to scowl. He stood drinking in every detail of her. His eyes traveled up from her great knees to her forehead and then made a triangular path from the glistening sweat on her neck down and across her tremendous bosom and over her bare arm back to where her fingers lay hidden in her hair. He suddenly wanted ner to reach down and pick him up and draw him against her and then he wanted to feel her breath on his face. He wanted to look down and down into her eyes while she held him tighter and tighter. He had never had such a feeling before. He felt as if he were reeling down through a pitchblack tunnel.
“You can go a block down yonder and catch you a car take you to the railroad station, Sugarpie,” she said.
Nelson would have collapsed at her feet if Mr. Head had not pulled him roughly away. “You act like you don’t have any sense!” the old man growled.
They hurried down the street and Nelson did not look back at the woman. He pushed his hat sharply forward over his face which was already burning with shame. The sneering ghost he had seen in the train window and all the foreboding feelings he had on the way returned to him and he remembered that his ticket from the scale had said to beware of dark women and that his grandfather’s had said he was upright and brave. He took hold of the old man’s hand, a sign of dependence that he seldom showed.
They headed down the street toward the car tracks where a long yellow rattling trolley was coming. Mr. Head had never boarded a streetcar and he let that one pass. Nelson was silent. From time to time his mouth trembled slightly but his grandfather, occupied with his own problems, paid him no attention. They stood on the corner and neither looked at the Negroes who were passing, going about their business just as if they had been white, except that most of them stopped and eyed Mr. Head and Nelson. It occurred to Mr. Head that since the streetcar ran on tracks, they could simply follow the tracks. He gave Nelson a slight push and explained that they would follow the tracks on into the railroad station, walking, and they set off.
Presently to their great relief they began to see white people again and Nelson sat down on the sidewalk against the wall of a building. “I got to rest myself some,” he said. “You lost the sack and the direction. You can just wait on me to rest myself.”
“There’s the tracks in front of us,” Mr. Head said. “All we got to do is keep them in sight and you could have remembered the sack as good as me. This is where you were born. This is your old home town. This is your second trip. You ought to know how to do,” and he squatted down and continued in this vein but the boy, easing his burning feet out of his shoes, did not answer.