“So did I,” he said — too quickly, irrelevantly; and for the first time it occurred to him that, possibly, he was a liar; had never loved Rufus at all, but had only feared and envied him.
“I don’t need your credentials, Vivaldo,” she said.
She watched the frying pan critically, waiting for it to become hot enough, then dropped in a little oil. “The point, anyway, at the moment, is that I loved him. He was my big brother, but as soon as I knew anything, I knew that I was stronger than he was. He was nice, he was really very nice, no matter what any of you might have thought of him later. None of you, anyway, knew anything about him, you didn’t know how.”
“You often say that,” he said, wearily. “Why?”
“How could you — how can you? — dreaming the way you dream? You people think you’re free. That means you think you’ve got something other people want — or need. Shit.” She grinned wryly and looked at him. And you do, in a way. But it isn’t what you think it is. And you’re going to find out, too, just as soon as some of those other people start getting what you’ve got now.” She shook her head. “I feel sorry for them. I feel sorry for you. I even feel kind of sorry for myself, because God knows I’ve often wished you’d left me where I was—”
“Down there in the jungle?” he taunted.
“Yes. Down there in the jungle, black and funky — and myself.”
His small anger died down as quickly as it had flared up. “Well,” he said, quietly, “sometimes I’m nostalgic, too, Ida.” He watched her dark, lonely face. For the first time, he had an intimation of how she would look when she grew old. “What I’ve never understood,” he said, finally, “is that you always accuse me of making a thing about your color, of penalizing you. But you do the same thing. You always make me feel white. Don’t you think that hurts me? You lock me out. And all I want is for you to be a part of me, for me to be a part of you. I wouldn’t give a damn if you were striped like a zebra.”
She laughed. “Yes, you would, really. But you say the cutest things.” Then, “If I lock you out, as you put it, it’s mainly to protect you—”
“Protect me from what? and I don’t want to be protected. Besides—”
“Besides?”
“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe that’s why. You want to protect yourself. You want to hate me because I’m white, because it’s easier for you that way.”
“I don’t hate you.”
“Then why do you always bring it up? What is it?”
She stirred the rice, which was almost ready, found a colander, and placed it in the sink. Then she turned to face him.
“This all began because I said that you people—”
“Listen to yourself. You people!”
“—didn’t know anything about Rufus—”
“Because we’re white.”
“No. Because he was black.”
“Oh. I give up. And, anyway, why must we always end up talking about Rufus?”
“I had started to tell you something,” she said, quietly; and watched him.
He swallowed some more of his whiskey, and lit a cigarette. “True. Please go on.”
“Because I’m black,” she said, after a moment, and sat at the table near him, “I know more about what happened to my brother than you can ever know. I watched it happen — from the beginning. I was there. He shouldn’t have ended up the way he did. That’s what’s been so hard for me to accept. He was a very beautiful boy. Most people aren’t beautiful, I knew that right away. I watched them, and I knew. But he didn’t because he was so much nicer than I.” She paused, and the silence grumbled with the sound of the frying pan and the steady sound of the rain. “He loved our father, for example. He really loved him. I didn’t. He was just a loudmouthed, broken-down man, who liked to get drunk and hang out in barber shops — well, maybe he didn’t like it but that was all he could find to do, except work like a dog, for nothing — and play the guitar on the week ends for his only son.” She paused again, smiling. “There was something very nice about those week ends, just the same. I can still see Daddy, his belly hanging out, strumming on that guitar and trying to teach Rufus some down-home song and Rufus grinning at him and making fun of him a little, really, but very nicely, and singing with him. I bet my father was never happier, all the days of his life, than when he was singing for Rufus. He’s got no one to sing to now. He was so proud of him. He bought Rufus his first set of drums.”
She was not locking him out now; he felt, rather, that he was being locked in. He listened, seeing, or trying to see, what she saw, and feeling something of what she felt. But he wondered, just the same, how much her memory had filtered out. And he wondered what Rufus must have looked like in those days, with all his bright, untried brashness, and all his hopes intact.
She was silent for a moment, leaning forward, looking down, her elbows on her knees and the fingers of one hand restlessly playing with her ring.
“When Rufus died, all the light went out of that house, all of it. That was why I couldn’t stay there, I knew I couldn’t stay there, I’d grow old like they were, suddenly, and I’d end up like all the other abandoned girls who can’t find anyone to protect them. I’d always known I couldn’t end up like that, I’d always known it. I’d counted on Rufus to get me out of there — I knew he’d do anything in the world for me, just like I would for him. It hadn’t occurred to me that it wouldn’t happen. I knew it would happen.”
She rose and returned to the stove and took the rice off the fire and poured it into the colander and ran water over it; put water in the saucepan and put it back on the fire, placing the colander on top of it and covering the rice with a towel. She turned the chops over. Then she sat down.
“When we saw Rufus’s body, I can’t tell you. My father stared at it, he stared at it, and stared at it. It didn’t look like Rufus, it was — terrible — from the water, and he must have struck something going down, or in the water, because he was so broken and lumpy — and ugly. My brother. And my father stared at it — at it — and he said, They don’t leave a man much, do they? His own father was beaten to death with a hammer by a railroad guard. And they brought his father home like that. My mother got frightened, she wanted my father to pray. And he said, he shouted it at the top of his lungs, Pray? Who, pray? I bet you, if I ever get anywhere near that white devil you call God, I’ll tear my son and my father out of his white hide! Don’t you never say the word Pray to me again, woman, not if you want to live. Then he started to cry. I’ll never forget it. Maybe I hadn’t loved him before, but I loved him then. That was the last time he ever shouted, he hasn’t raised his voice since. He just sits there, he doesn’t even drink any more. Sometimes he goes out and listens to those fellows who make speeches on 125th Street and Seventh Avenue. He says he just wants to live long enough — long enough—.”
Vivaldo said, to break the silence which abruptly roared around them, “To be paid back.”
“Yes,” she said. “And I felt that way, too.”
She walked over to the stove again.
“I felt that I’d been robbed. And I had been robbed — of the only hope I had. By a group of people too cowardly even to know what they had done. And it didn’t seem to me that they deserved any better than what they’d given me. I didn’t care what happened to them, just so they suffered. I didn’t really much care what happened to me. But I wasn’t going to let what happened to Rufus, and what was happening all around me, happen to me. I was going to get through the world, and get what I needed out of it, no matter how.”