Sam read over Clarice’s shoulder.
“No, he really was a lawyer,” Clarice said. “Before. But he gave it up for the theater!”
“He wasn’t a lawyer; he was a football player!” Sam said. “See.” Football was Sam’s own sport — he had played center in high school, till Papa — when John’s brother broke his leg in the game, the sharp bone coming through his brown, bloody shin — decided it was too rough and had forbidden him: everyone at home had encouraged him to go out for basketball, for which Sam had no particular love. “It says he was All-American Halfback in 1917 and 1918.”
“First he was a football player — when he was at Rutgers,” Clarice explained. “Then he was a lawyer. Then he became an actor.”
“Well,” Hubert said, “I can’t imagine his being a very good lawyer, then. Where’d he go to law school?”
“Columbia.”
“People are going to try and stop that play from going on,” Hubert said. “You just watch.”
“There’s a statement in here by the actress,” Clarice said. “She thinks it’s an honor to be in the play.”
The picture was… well, uncomfortable making. But maybe that was because you just didn’t see pictures like that.
“Is that man dreamy — or is he dreamy?” Clarice asked. “Oh, Hubert — !” she added. Because Hubert was frowning. “I’m teasing you!.”
Still, in March Clarice dragged them off to see Robeson in Nan Stevens’ Roseanne, over at the Lafayette Theater. “We’ve got to go!” she insisted. “It’s only playing for a week!” On Saturday afternoon they met before the yellow, horizontally striated walls with the other Negroes at a Hundred-thirty-second Street and Seventh Avenue. In their gloves, scarves, hats, a lot of people must have read the articles that had been appearing. There’d been a slew of them since the first one — and the picture had been reprinted by now in half a dozen papers. Clarice said: “This is surely a lot more people than usually come to this sort of thing.” She took a hand from her fox muff to rub one knuckle on her nose.
The tickets were thirty-five cents. The matinee was supposed to start at two-thirty, but it was almost quarter to three before they let people in. And a tall, West Indian looking — and sounding — man called out something, very loudly, about “a C.P.T. matinee,” which made some people laugh.
“Oh, that’s terrible!” Clarice whispered. “Come on, let’s go inside. I’m freezing!”
Before the curtain went up, a stolid, brownskinned man, Mr. Gilpin, head of the Lafayette Players, came out and made a speech saying the Lafayette was the only Negro dramatic company in the country; and if the audience liked what they were doing for the colored community, they could make extra donations in the lobby. Clarice leaned toward Hubert. Sam heard her whisper: “You read that article in The Messenger I showed you…? Where Lewis got on them so for only doing white plays with black actors…?” In the light from the stage, Hubert nodded.
Then Gilpin went back in through the curtain. A moment later red drapery pulled aside from the stage.
Robeson played a Negro preacher — it was hard to see him, at least at the beginning, and not think of Papa — whose actions became more and more sinful. And he was certainly wonderful. When he got excited, his voice filled the theater. He seemed half again as big as most of the other actors, and he moved around, towering, handsome, like some half-wild, wondrous animal barely caged by the set. Canvas walls and mâché trees shook as he strode by. Indeed, the glee, the wild joy with which he embraced his sins — drinking, crap shooting, shirking his Sunday sermons, and finally falling into the arms of a no-account Negro woman and getting her with child — made those weaknesses seem almost like some socially rebellious strength. Finally, though, his congregation turned on him. He was only saved in the end by a brave black woman — Roseanne — who’d been in love with him all along and who made an impassioned speech to the black people, who’d gathered to lynch him, about his humanity and his weaknesses and how his weaknesses were really their weaknesses. (Robeson spent a lot of time on his knees in the play, though not the actress.) But in comparison to Robeson’s performance, the long-suffering Roseanne’s words to the angry townsfolk seemed preachier than any of Papa’s sermons.
Clapping wildly, Sam stood up with everybody else when Robeson came to the front of the stage to bow.
But as they were walking down to a Hundred-sixteenth Street, Hubert said, “Another weak-willed nigger and another strong-headed woman. And niggers lynching niggers? Where, I wonder, did they get that one from? Now you know the woman who wrote that play had to be white!”
Clarice was thoughtful — walking with rapid, thoughtful steps, once in a while coughing into her muff. Possibly it had made her uncomfortable too.
A blizzard rose in the last days of March; and, with only an hour out here and an hour out there, the chill effluvia still fell on April Fool’s Day. each Friday at Mr. Harris’s he went to the bank at lunchtime thirty-five or forty dollars in pennies nickels dimes quarters and fifty-cent pieces in two thick canvas sacks metal fastenings at the top through the brass bars he exchanged them for an envelope of paper money out of which back at the store Mr. Harris carefully counted Sam’s nine dollars for the week the sales girl gum-chewing Missely’s twelve and put the envelope with the rest in his inner suit coat pocket the only profit it looked like Mr. Harris allowed himself from the business Missely was Milly Pott’s weight and Milly Pott’s color but with not half Milly’s sense of humor two Fridays on Mr. Harris came in and unwrapped his scarf “Feels like snow again don’t it” and after hanging up the length of maroon wool on the coat rack’s brass hook said “Before you go downstairs Sam run over two buildings and hunt up Poonkin he’ll probably be in the cellar see if he got those boards he told me about and if he do you bring as many back here as you can carry I want to put me up some shelving downstairs in the back all right” and Sam said “A Mr. Poonkin” and Mr. Harris said “I don’t think there’s any ‘mister’ in with it just Poonkin” and he grinned gold tooth bright between the white ones in a face as deep a brown as Papa’s “Poonkin was in the Civil War you know ask him to tell you about it sometime but not on my time now get going” and in only his shirtsleeves Sam went out in the gelid noon through steely cold he hurried two buildings up the wooden planks of the cellar doors gaped between snow banks he ducked down they rose like green board wings beside him as he dropped one foot then the other to a lower step in deepening shadow “Mr. Poonkin…” because he was a well-bred boy and his father said you call a man mister now you hear me white or colored but especially a colored man a lot of people won’t call a colored man mister it shows you have breeding Sam stepped further down the ceiling of the cellar was crossed by tarred eight-by-ten beams bowed now and gray pipes the joints shiny with new solder low enough so that there’d be no standing easily here
“… Mr. Poonkin” as he trod on the cement floor that two feet on became earth a voice cracked like the ground beneath his shoes “What you want…?” and the blades of light that came in at the ceiling’s edge from some cracks up to the street were much brighter it seemed than the aluminum light outside “Mr. Harris in the clothing store he sent me over here I work for Mr. Harris? and he told me to come over about some wood? you had for him? he wants to make some shelves — in his cellar?” the voice answered “Oh. Yeah…” and stepped forward the face wizened as a prune and what of it visible a moment passing through a beam not much bigger