“This is so funny,” Clarice said, recovering herself. “A couple of months ago, I was reading in Opportunity about the ‘riot’ they had at the premier of Birth of a Nation. And you mean you two were the riot?”
“I guess we were pretty much most of the riot. It was in the newspapers,” Elsie said, “the next day. But I wouldn’t think they’d still be talking about it now. It was nine — almost ten years ago; and it was just a movie, after all. Who’d want to remember something like that?”
“A low down, dirty, rotten movie,” Dr. Corey said, “that made people go out and kill each other!”
“Mama and Papa never talked about that,” Sam said. “I don’t think they’d like something like that, you all being in the newspapers for gettin’ in some kind of trouble!”
“We didn’t want to worry Mama and Papa,” Elsie said. “So we didn’t tell them. But I guess other people told them just this bit and that bit — and it all gets out of hand.”
“But we didn’t do anything to be ashamed of,” Dr. Corey said. “I thought it was right then. And I’d do it again today, if I had to. The lynchings went up all over the country in nineteen fifteen — because of that movie. That’s probably why they’re up now. Not a man or woman, black or white, Christian or Jew, with free-thinking ideas and care for his fellows was safe anywhere in the country while that movie was on.”
“Jews?” Sam said. “They don’t lynch Jews.” Back home, John and his brother had told Sam that, because Jews had all the money, everybody was afraid to cross them and that’s why they were taking control of just everything. “They got too much money.”
“Don’t lynch Jews?” Dr. Corey declared. “And just what makes you think they don’t, boy? That poor Jew, Mr. Frank, he was lynched down in Georgia, right near where Papa was born, the very summer that movie was showing. Don’t lynch Jews? Where have you been, boy? Back when the Jim Crow laws came in, everybody was getting lynched. That was the crime of it, see? That’s what taking the law into your own hands is all about. Anybody they didn’t like, got lynched — for any reason. You think they didn’t lynch Jews? They lynched white people, they lynched black people — they lynched women, children, and Jews. Don’t let me hear you talkin’ nonsense like that anymore, Sam. Sometimes I think you don’t know anything!”
“Now they did lynch more colored than anybody else,” Elsie said. “You know that, Corey.”
Corey just humphed.
“You remember that sign they put up in the park in downtown Raleigh, when the Jim Crow laws came in? ‘No Jews or Dogs Allowed’?” Elsie laughed. “They didn’t even think enough of niggers to put up a sign to keep us out.”
Sam had heard about the sign; but by the time he’d got to go downtown, there were just the usual signs for where coloreds were supposed to go and the water fountains you were supposed to drink from and where whites were supposed to go and drink. There’d been a mysterious time, Sam knew, that had ended just around his birth, when everyone went to the theater together; when people even went to school together. His older brothers and sisters — Lemuel and Elsie and Corey and Lucius — often spoke of it, when everyone in Raleigh had gone to the Jackson Theater and sat wherever they’d wanted to and watched plays by Shakespeare and dastardly melodramas and uproarious comic skits, in which people sang and danced and minstrels Tommed in black-face, and men in top hats did magic tricks. (Mr. Horstein had said that, personally, he’d never played the Jackson in Raleigh — but magicians had come to Cathay who had.) But now all the theaters in Raleigh were segregated, and Papa wouldn’t let him go at all. A few times he’d snuck in with Lewy and John. (John’s mother taught Mathematics and Women’s Deportment at the college — his father had died three years ago — and didn’t care.) In the balcony, John’s brother’s crutches leaning over the seat back, the boys sat with the other colored children — nigger heaven, everybody called it — to watch Mary Pickford and William S. Hart and Douglas Fairbanks… Though Corey probably had her point, John was pretty smart, and Sam was not yet ready to dismiss completely John’s judgment of the Jews…
“That’s true,” Corey said, uncharacteristically pensive, “that’s true….” And for a moment Sam wasn’t sure if memory had made him miss something important in the present.
That night, after Hubert came back from taking Clarice home and went into his own room to study, then to sleep, Sam got up, moved the drape and curtain back, to hang them in a great down-descending arch over the wing of the chair. Then he got back in bed and lay awake, covers over his mouth and ears, blinking at the moonlight out the window.
At work a few days later, Sam asked: “Mr. Harris, you seen Mr. Poonkin?”
“Awww…” Mr. Harris said, like someone with something real sad he’d forgotten to tell you: “Last week, Poonkin — he got the pee-neumonia. I guess it was on the Tuesday you didn’t come in. They took him over to Manhattan Hospital on Ward’s Island — ”
“—for the Insane?”
Mr. Harris frowned. “Well, they got a lot more people out there than just the looneys now, you know. I guess they got pretty much everybody over there who can’t pay for hisself. But Poonkin got the pee-neumonia — the old people’s friend.”
Sam looked puzzled.
“That’s what they call it.” Glare slid left to right across Mr. Harris’s gold tooth. Denting green silk, Mr. Harris’s tiepin was gold. “At least it’s the friend of old people like Poonkin who ain’t got nobody to care for ’em. It takes ’em quick and, as dying goes, goes pretty easy. I wouldn’t be surprised if old Poonkin’s dead by now — though nobody’s told me that, yet. Though why they’d come and tell me, I don’t know. I’m no kin of his. Poonkin been around here long before I got here. Now he’s gone.”
While he worked in the cellar, sometimes looking over at the boards against the cement wall, Sam thought about going to visit old Poonkin on Ward’s Island. He tried to picture himself in a great public hospital, endless dividing sheets rippling white between the beds, talking to the old man, propped on his pillow: “Mr. Poonkin, tell me about what you did in the War — about the rifle and the barn — behind the spruce, before you could read — what of it you can remember…?” But he didn’t really know if Poonkin were first name or last. (Those idiosyncratic memories of the War, what it was to be a fifteen-year-old black boy with a rifle in a barn, not to mention everything that had brought that child to the cellar two doors away, an aged, half-blind, brief and taloned guardian to those magazines — suddenly winking out. Memories — like spume from a broken wave…) In the hospital, weakly he calls to me. I start to leave, he calls again, but before I turn… there was Hubert, chained to the water pump, and Papa gasping, drawing back the orange crate in his brown hands, his collar loose and no shirt under his black vest, the arms of a man in his fifties, yes, but deeply dark in the evening blue. “You are not a man — you are a little animal!” Papa shouted. “And if you will live like an animal, I will treat you like an animal! I will beat you like a beast till you beg to be a man again…!” Crate slats splintered against Hubert’s shoulder; he remembered the precise sound of his father’s grunts. “Ah…!” The slats splintered again. “Keh…!” On the next blow they smithereened. “Dah…!” Hubert fell, pulled himself backward, shouting: “Papa! No, Papa…? No — !” Papa hit him with the stump of what hung from his hands, then hurled the bottom, missing Hubert, gouging grass. No.. .