“The white man,” Dr. Blackwood said as he rolled the knuckles of one boney hand within the palm of the other, “has but one reason to oppress the Negro” — he lowered, shook his head, and recited — “Black as the night is black, / Black like the depths of my Africa.”
“Yass,” Mr. Snodgrass drawled. My father nodded in agreement.
“They deem to assert a hideous hegemony over us for their parasitic profit. But the Klansman is a white man who has no reason, none other than to brutalize. I am put in mind of Mr. Justice. The pitiable soul.”
Mr. Snodgrass folded his arms across his chest. As he was the south-facing point of the triangle, the pistol he held, also a take-home from war service, pointed briefly in my direction. “Reginald, it was.”
“Roland, if memory serves me well.”
“I knew his Daddy from when I worked over at TCI.” Mr. Snodgrass leaned toward Dr. Blackwood, but kept his arms folded around himself. TCI was a blast furnace, one of several which, though diminished, still sooted the skyline. “It was Reginald. He wasn’t doing nothing. Just walking down the road.”
“Black as the night is black.”
“Just minding his own business,” my father said, and let out a long sigh.
“And what they did to him, I didn’t see in Korea. And I saw a lot I won’t even tell ’bout. But they sliced him like a pig farmer take a razor to a shoat. Clean off. Then stuck ’em down his throat. What the purpose of that? Boy nearly choked to death and would have too.” For a long moment all that could be heard were the grinding screeches of the last of the cicadas. I turned away from the window, an ache from my navel to my knee, remembering the story of Ronald Justice and questioning my future as darkness swelled in me.
It was several minutes before the conversation picked up again, as if they were all lost in contemplation. I, too, was full of worried thoughts. I was twelve and beginning to feel the sap of manhood springing in my limbs, and with it, not so much a greening, but a blackening of expectations. What had happened to Ronald could happen to any black boy. I would have gone to bed at that point, but Mr. Snodgrass asked, “Whatever happened to Reginald? Did he go up north or something?”
“I never heard. Not even that,” Dr. Blackwood said.
I moved back to my peephole behind the curtain and saw that the men seemed to have drawn closer together, forming a conspiratorial circle cut across by the rectangle of light that came through the door. I put my ear closer to the window screen.
“There was that so-called reporter, an investigatory journalist from one of the Northern papers, he said. Philadelphia, he said.”
“Oh, yass. I do remember that fellow. Nosier than a six-toed mole. Come snooping around the yard at TCI asking about the boy. It was the end of late shift and that probably was the reason he snuck by the gate. He asking about Justice. By then they was gone. Where, I don’t know. Up north, I guess. But he come asking and nobody, and I mean nobody, would speak a word to him. You never seen so many shoulder-shrugging Step’n Fetchits shuffling through the smoke and shadows. No suh, boss, I don’ know nuffin’ ’bout what choo talking ’bout. Flares were going off and throwing that red light on them, and they looked like they just raised from the grave. The cub come round to me. First I act like he wasn’t even there. But then I said to myself that I wasn’t fixin’ to play no bug-eyed Sambo. I looked him right in the face, his eyes in shadow but somehow still sparking when those flares goes off. Do you know where the hell you is? Asking ’bout that boy? Do you even know where the hell you is? His mouth opened wider than a cow with a cattle prod up her ass. Too flabbergasted to get out more than a whoosh. He was a young fellow, Irish by the looks of him.”
“Yes. Yes. But of course, I recall him well. A scarlet-haired, freckled-face youth. A so-called all-American visage. His name was O’Brien. Thomas O’Brien.”
“O’Brien is right — nah! — Brown. Timmy — Timothy Brown it was. I know ’cause he followed me home. I was living round Avenue A in Fairfield then, not a quarter-mile from the furnace. Air in the house got so smoky you couldn’t sleep some days and for the clanking and clunking too. But not a minute after I got home I heard the dogs barking and growling and come a knock at the door. Sun not even up yet. Cracked the door and there he was standing in the slit of light and looking like a chicken. Hair standing up like a rooster. Asked if the dogs gone bite. What choo want? I said it just like that. I didn’t cotton to no white man. Them ain’t my dogs anyway. He mumbled out something ’bout the Inquisitor. ’Bout then, one of the dogs took a snap at him and I pulled him on in. Don’t need no white man bit up in my yard. What choo want?
“The fellow still looked shaken to me. Had that look like he got surprised one day and his face never went back. He wanted to ask me questions about that boy, and was it a better place here than at the plant.
“Ain’t no one damn place better than the other. You can get killed any damn place.
“He sat down like a fat man with broke legs. Heard my kitchen chair squeak. Wife gone to work, though. Day work over the mountain. She had left me a pot of greens, cornbread, and a little fried meat. I always ate my supper in the morning. So I offered the man some to be polite, never expecting he would say yes. So I fixed it up the best I could and served it to him. And he ate too. Right slow at first, like he had to smell it, and then a little piece and a little piece more. Then he was smiling and shoving it on in, chewing and grinning, ring pinkie in the air, like he always ate this way. Ain’t this one hell of a strange thing to see? I was thinking. A white man, sitting and eating at my table, eating greens and cornbread for breakfast. I had to shake my head.
“Then he took a pencil and a little pad of paper out of the breast pocket of his jacket and set them down on the table beside his plate. He looked up and smiled, but his eyes darted around like he was nervous too. You know Reginald Justice? he asked me.
“Naw, I said, I didn’t know the boy. Seen him once or twice, but can’t say I know him. I worked with his daddy, though.
“Well, tell me about his daddy. I told him what little I knew, but it wasn’t enough to get a story out of. Then he say, Did the daddy ever mention that the boy had been seeing anybody? A girlfriend?
“If he did, I don’t remember. I guess the boy was normal and that would have been a normal thing.
“A white girl. Girl the name of Ella Grimes.
“Damn! Bread dropped out of my mouth it hit me so hard. Grimes. That Grimes gal. I started to say I didn’t know a thing he was talking about — and truth be told, I didn’t. But I did know that Grimes gal, ’cause her daddy worked the snort valve just a way ’cross from where I was on the slag pot. Won’t let no colored work the valve. Thought we wasn’t smart enough. We shovel the coke and sinter. Pour off the slag. The gritty work. Controlling the valve was hot work too, but that was a white man’s job only. He had to be right up next to them air heaters. Likely, it would cook him if he wasn’t careful. But Grimes, as far as I knew, was a decent white fellow. He never said a word to me, but he never said a word against me, either. But you don’t know what a man will do if you mess with his daughter.