Then there’d been the porter, whom, while he’d been exploring the train last night, Sam had caught smoking in the vestibule between cars; the two of them had stood in the chill chamber and had cigarettes together. The porter — whose name was John Brown, like his friend John at home — had not said: Ain’t you too young to smoke, boy? He’d said: “I’m usually on the Chicago-Calgary run — but I got deflected. I got to get me home to Chicago; eventually, somehow. That’s where my girlfriend live.” He’d chuckled as the night’s iced air whipped and snapped smoke back from the dark shelves of his lips. Sam told him about his friends, John and Lewy, and how John’s name was the same as his. “My daddy,” the porter said, “he was just John Brown crazy. Back when Dr. DuBois’ book come out, he made me read the whole thing out loud to him.” Sam laughed, and told him how his father had read it out loud to his whole family too — though he’d not been five years old; and often in bed. But he remembered lying awake, listening. Then the porter told Sam he’d just read another book about Brown by someone named Oswald Garrison Villard, who was the editor of a magazine. Sam didn’t remember the magazine’s name, but he remembered Oswald Garrison Villard because it sounded so eccentric he’d laughed.
How could a memory of laughter make you smile now? But, turning away from the window, Sam smiled.
Four seats ahead was the middle-aged white woman who’d started three different conversations with him — the first on the train platform yesterday at noon, then twice more since Washington — the third even after he’d told her, during the second, that he was Negro. Now, she was fixing her wide, ivory hat to salted auburn, with one, then another, then a third (taking them from between her teeth) pearl-tipped hatpin. She’d said she was Scottish and lived in Flatbush — in the heart of Brooklyn. He’d said that, just the morning he’d left, his older sister, Jules, had decided the vat of soap out back of the house had bleached enough to slice loose some half dozen cakes, wrap them in waxed paper, and send them in Sam’s wicker trunk to his brothers and sisters in New York. (Holding a fold of her apron, there’d been Jules, in the yard, looking at the soap tray, eyes narrowed, lips pursed; she was comparing it with Mama’s or Elsie’s, he knew. What she really wanted was to get to her piano lessons with the little girls who’d start coming in at one — almost an hour after he’d be on the train. When would he hear Jules in the parlor, guiding scales again?) The white woman had said she’d made her own soap for a while, but it wasn’t worth it — there in Brooklyn. At Borough Hall she could get either subway or trolley into Manhattan, and a general store not three streets away from where she lived sold bars of store soap any time she wanted it.
Ivory, like it said in the advertisements, was the best. He’d looked down at the flounce on her skirt, to see if he could glimpse an ankle — another memory.
Sam thought about going to inquire of her now. (Ankles of ivory. Ankles like moons…) But finally (for now was gone) he went back to ask John Brown, who, in his blue-black uniform, was just coming down through the car: “Sir, we in New York State yet?”
Seemingly constructed of blue-black coal, Brown’s face turned in mild surprise: “Well, we just gone by Hell Gate.” And with that damnable dawn news, John Brown stepped around him, to move on between plush seat backs, bending here, leaning there, asking the older passengers if they would need help with any of their bags — the older white passengers, anyway, Sam noted: a stately Negro woman, with black hat and veil, blue coat frayed at the shoulders, and doubtless going to a funeral — well, the porter, like a dog avoiding another dog’s tree, had walked right around her!
Sam breathed.
If Mama had been with him, she’d have muttered, “… no-account!” then told Sam to go immediately to that woman and offer a hand: and would probably say something cutting to the porter. Mama could get quite self-righteous over the behavior of other Negroes she didn’t approve of — as if she carried responsibility for the whole race on her issue-free shoulders. Sam started to go to her — then remembered his own, two large cases, one leather, one wicker. Well, when he got them off and Hubert was there, he’d go back and help.
Out the window a snarl of underpasses and stuttering sunlight became a tunnel, through which they roared a long time: the light from the white glass shades every two seats took on the yellowish cast they’d had at night.
Genitals, buttocks, nipples, tongue all seemed so insistently present inside Sam’s mouth and twenty-four-hour-worn suit. Once, well back before dawn, when the train windows were still black and the other passengers slept, he had stared at one white round glass, thinking of the moon, when, at once, he’d stood, to bring his mouth closer and closer, as if to kiss this night light at the aisle’s end, pulling back only when the heat about burned his lips. He’d seen the Scotswoman from Brooklyn — she would be the one awake — turn away too, smiling. (Why do something like that? And, if you did, why remember it?) No, he didn’t want to speak to her.
“Here,” Lewy said, under the moon-mottled magnolia, “it’s my journal. It’s got everything I don’t want Sam and you to know about. Go on, look.”
But when John opened the cover, Sam peering over his shoulder, it was in code — two columns, one barely comprehensible, the other complete nonsense. “You don’t want none of them jewboys to get hold of this,” John said. “They could figure it out on you.”
The tunnel went on at alarming length.
Then the white conductor ambled through, calling, “Grand Central Terminal coming up! Change trains for aaaaall connections! Grand Central Terminal…!” and people stood to haul their bags down from the overhead rack; men squatted in the aisle to lift them from under the seats. It wasn’t yet eight in the morning.
And the train itself, he thought, will be only memory in moments: “… tut-tut-tut-tut…” Then he was lugging his cases down onto the rectangular stool the porter had kicked out the train’s door, its squared wooden corners clucking cement.
As Sam stood on the platform among debarking passengers, swaying with the train’s remembered sway, Hubert, in his tan-wool overcoat, pushed up in front of him. A grin started out on Sam’s face. Then, as suddenly, confusion tore it away — because Hubert was focused all behind him, even before either of them could say hello.
“Here, ma’am! I’ll get that for you!” Hubert said to someone beyond Sam’s shoulder — which, as Sam turned, he realized was the ponderous woman in mourning.
“Just a minute now, ma’am,” which was John Brown, who, at Hubert’s intervention, had become as solicitous of her as if she’d been queen of the car’s whole hive, handing the heavy creature firmly down to the stool, passing her three bags one after another to Hubert, who swung them, over its metal rail, up on the broad cart with the other baggage that the porter from the sleeping car was loading for the redcaps clustered up at the platform’s head.