“Oh, hell, Cass, I can have a damn baby, and then I’ll know. Babies aren’t my kick, but, you know, I can find out if I want to. The way Vivaldo carries on, I’m likely to find out, whether I want to or not,” and, incongruously, she giggled. “But”—she sighed—“it doesn’t work the other way around. You don’t know, and there’s no way in the world for you to find out, what it’s like to be a black girl in this world, and the way white men, and black men, too, baby, treat you. You’ve never decided that the whole world was just one big whorehouse and so the only way for you to make it was to decide to be the biggest, coolest, hardest whore around, and make the world pay you back that way.” They were in the park. Ida leaned forward and lit a cigarette with trembling hands, then gestured out the window. “I bet you think we’re in a goddam park. You don’t know we’re in one of the world’s great jungles. You don’t know that behind all them damn dainty trees and shit, people are screwing and sucking and fixing and dying. Dying, baby, right now while we move through this darkness in this man’s taxicab. And you don’t know it, even when you’re told; you don’t know it, even when you see it.”
She felt very far from Ida, and very small and cold. “How can we know it, Ida? How can you blame us if we don’t know? We never had a chance to find out. I hardly knew that Central Park existed until I was a married woman.” And she, too, looked out at the park, trying to see what Ida saw; but, of course, she saw only the trees and the lights and the grass and the twisting road and the shape of the buildings beyond the park. “There were hardly any colored people in the town I grew up in — how am I to know?” And she hated herself for her next question, but she could not hold it back: “Don’t you think I deserve some credit, for trying to be human, for not being a part of all that, for — walking out?”
“What the hell,” asked Ida, “have you walked out on, Cass?”
“That world,” said Cass, “that empty life, that meaningless life!”
Ida laughed. It was a cruel sound and yet Cass sensed, very powerfully, that Ida was not trying to be cruel. She seemed to be laboring, within herself, up some steep, unprecedented slope. “Couldn’t we put it another way, honey — just for kicks? Couldn’t we, sort of, blame it on nature? and say that you saw Richard and he got you hot, and so you didn’t really walk out — you just got married?”
Cass began to be angry; and she asked herself, Why? She said, “No. Long before I met Richard, I knew that that wasn’t the life for me.” And this was true, and yet her voice lacked conviction. And Ida, relentlessly, put Cass’ unspoken question into words.
“And what would have happened if Richard hadn’t come?”
“I don’t know. But this is silly. He did come. I did leave.”
Now the air thickened between them, as though they were on opposite sides of a chasm in the mountains, trying to discern each other through the cloud and the fog, but terribly frightened of the precipice at their feet. For she had left Richard, or had, anyway, betrayed him — and what did that failure mean? And what was she doing, now, with Eric, and where was the meaning there? She began, dimly and unwillingly, to sense the vast dimensions of Ida’s accusation at the same time that her ancient, incipient guilt concerning her life with Richard nosed its way, once more, into the front hall of her mind. She had always seen much farther than Richard, and known much more; she was more skillful, more patient, more cunning, and more singleminded; and he would have had to be a very different, stronger, and more ruthless man, not to have married her. But this was the way it always had been, always would be, between men and women, everywhere. Was it? She threw her cigarette out of the window. He did come. I did walk out. Had she, indeed? The cab was approaching Harlem. She realized, with a small shock, that she had not been here since the morning of Rufus’ funeral.
“But, imagine,” Ida was saying, “that he came, that man who’s your man — because you always know, and he damn sure don’t come every day — and there wasn’t any place for you to walk out of or into, because he came too late. And no matter when he arrived would have been too late — because too much had happened by the time you were born, let alone by the time you met each other.”
I don’t believe that, Cass thought. That’s too easy. I don’t believe it. She said, “If you’re talking of yourself and Vivaldo — there are other countries — have you ever thought of that?”
Ida threw back her head and laughed. “Oh, yes! And in another five or ten years, when we get the loot together, we can pack up and go to one of those countries.” Then, savagely, “And what do you think will have happened to us in those five years? How much will be left?” She leaned toward Cass. “How much do you think will be left between you and Eric in five years — because I know you know you’re not going to marry him, you’re not that crazy.”
“We’ll be friends, we’ll be friends,” said Cass. “I hope we’ll be friends forever.” She felt cold; she thought of Eric’s hands and lips; and she looked at Ida again.
Ida had turned again to the window.
“What you people don’t know,” she said, “is that life is a bitch, baby. It’s the biggest hype going. You don’t have any experience in paying your dues and it’s going to be rough on you, baby, when the deal goes down. There’re lots of back dues to be collected, and I know damn well you haven’t got a penny saved.”
Cass looked at the dark, proud head, which was half-turned away from her. “Do you hate white people, Ida?”
Ida sucked her teeth in anger. “What the hell has that got to do with anything? Hell, yes, sometimes I hate them, I could see them all dead. And sometimes I don’t. I do have a couple of other things to occupy my mind.” Her face changed. She looked down at her fingers, she twisted her ring. “If any one white person gets through to you, it kind of destroys your — singlemindedness. They say that love and hate are very close together. Well, that’s a fact.” She turned to the window again. “But, Cass, ask yourself, look out and ask yourself — wouldn’t you hate all white people if they kept you in prison here?” They were rolling up startling Seventh Avenue. The entire population seemed to be in the streets, draped, almost, from lampposts, stoops, and hydrants, and walking through the traffic as though it were not there. “Kept you here, and stunted you and starved you, and made you watch your mother and father and sister and lover and brother and son and daughter die or go mad or go under, before your very eyes? And not in a hurry, like from one day to the next, but, every day, every day, for years, for generations? Shit. They keep you here because you’re black, the filthy, white cock suckers, while they go around jerking themselves off with all that jazz about the land of the free and the home of the brave. And they want you to jerk yourself off with that same music, too, only, keep your distance. Some days, honey, I wish I could turn myself into one big fist and grind this miserable country to powder. Some days, I don’t believe it has a right to exist. Now, you’ve never felt like that, and Vivaldo’s never felt like that. Vivaldo didn’t want to know my brother was dying because he doesn’t want to know that my brother would still be alive if he hadn’t been born black.”
“I don’t know if that’s true or not,” Cass said, slowly, “but I guess I don’t have any right to say it isn’t true.”