“Some of them — on Third Avenue,” Hubert said, with mock seriousness, “or Sixth Avenue, or Ninth, run up above the streets, through the sky…!”
Cities underground…? Cities in the air…? With subterranean and superterranean ways between? And all were among New York’s honied algebra of miracles? Hurrying after Hubert, a-grin at the marvel and mystery of it, Sam tried to fathom it and keep from laughing. All this — and skyscrapers?
(Where were they…?)
They took another two trains — or was it three?
“Where do we get out?”
“A Hundred-twenty-fifth Street,” Hubert said. “This is us.”
A Hundred-twenty-fifth Street sounded awfully far from Grand Central or Forty-second.
They carried the cases upstairs — into another covered concourse.
How long would it be, Sam wondered, before they got outside?
He noticed now, with curiosity and relief: all the people in this station were black — heavyset ladies in dark or light stockings, men in straw hats with brown or red bands, sometimes even a bit of pheasant feather.
Sam and Hubert pushed out the gates beside the row of stiles (where people were — ka-chunk, ka-chunk — hurrying in), turned left, and started up the steps between the off-white tiles. A winter wedge of blue widened above them. Then, diagonally across it, slid a sculpted cornice.
At the steps’ head, Sam put his case on the sidewalk and looked down from the cloudless sky. (That empty air he’d recall for years.) The building — though it ran the length of the block — was two stories tall. Shops filled the ground floor. On the second, with tan Venetian blinds lowered to their several heights behind the glass, black or gold letters spoke of accountants, law firms, a billiards parlor — and the next was unreadable behind the sun’s reflected silver. Still, none of the names were very different from those in gold letters across the second story windows in the downtown building, back home, in which their older brother Lucius had his law practice.
“Shoot…!” Sam said. “It ain’t as big as what we got in Raleigh! The biggest building there is six stories and got an elevator!” He looked at Hubert, the first presentiment of pain the city had ceded him nudging his features toward bewilderment.
Hubert shook his head — to drawl in a voice that suddenly and surprisingly brought back sixteen-year-old Hubert from Carolina, making Sam electrically aware how different that was from the twenty-three-year-old law student he was to live with now: “Boy,” Hubert said, “you a real country nigger, ain’t you!”—the words carrying no interrogation at all, only their hugely playful, hopelessly damning, inescapable sibling judgment.
b
The leadership and conduct of the war were on the one side in the hands of our city, on the other in the hands of the kings of Atlantis. At the time, as we said, Atlantis was an island larger than Libya and Asia put together, though it was subsequently overwhelmed by earthquakes and is the source of the impenetrable mud which prevents free passage of those who sail out of the straights into the open sea.
I sometimes had pleasant nightmares in which I fancied that New York was being destroyed by an earthquake: its towers snapped like pine trees in a storm, a tidal wave poured through its streets…
On the top (third) floor, Hubert’s was around the corner from Mount Morris Park.
“I got to wash up.” Sam put the suitcase on the rug’s foot-faded red, looking around the first of the two small rooms.
“Sure.” With his shoe, Hubert pushed the wicker trunk under what would be Sam’s bed. “Unless you want to wait till later when we get over to Elsie and Corey’s. They got hot water.”
“That’s all right. I want to do it now. And change my clothes.”
“All right.” Hubert took the wash basin out from under the corner sink. “Here you go. But you got to hurry up, before Clarice gets here.”
Using Hubert’s yellow bar of kitchen soap, lathering his arms, his buttocks, his knees, hopping now on one foot, hopping now on the other, Sam washed in cold water. Sometimes he glanced at Hubert, who sat in the wing chair: Hubert’s forehead furrowed above his glasses, as, in the corner, he paged through a book. Views of… something.
Hubert was one of three colored teachers recently hired to teach first grade in the colored all-boys public school, only six blocks from here, Hubert had explained to Sam. That tall body had cut tobacco in Connecticut; that strong body sat so straight when he studied. And there’d been “… Miss Hutchinson told me about a trick she used when she taught those rough boys in the colored schools outside Cincinnati. She said if it would work for a woman, it would certainly work for me. Just as she told me to do, before classes began I procured an old, cracked baseball bat, and on the first school day I brought it with me before any of the scholars arrived. Before going in, I hit it on the curb outside, till it cracked more. I then took it into my classroom and leaned it in the corner by my desk. When the boys came in — they were loud and lively and full of high spirits — within five minutes, while some of them were still taking their coats off and playing tag around the room, one of them asked me, ‘What’s that for?’ Sitting at my desk, I looked over my folded hands and said, in a firm and resonant voice: ‘I had some trouble with one of the boys in my last class — and I’m afraid I broke my bat on his backside. And by the way, you must learn to call me “Sir.” ’ They all turned around, eyes about to bulge out of their brown, round faces. And when I called them to order and they rushed to sit, you could see them squirming on their benches, each attached to the desk behind. Their eyes kept going to the bat in the corner, their little behinds stinging in anticipation. You knew they were wondering how it felt.” About the bony wreckage of the Thanksgiving carcass, everyone was laughing too loudly for Papa to go on — as, here, he put down the letter a moment to touch his clerical collar. Mama took her wire-framed glasses off and dabbed her eyes with her napkin.
Sam hopped, and shook quickly from his mind another memory (“… an animal…!” The crate’s slats smithereened across Hubert’s shoulder, and dragging the chain across the gravel where the grass had worn from around the pump, Hubert cowered back: “Papa! No…!” He remembered his father’s grunts, precise and ugly), hopped again and scrubbed at his groin — finally to squat among the splatters over the dark floorboards and maul the balled rag first over, then under, his out-sized toes. “Hubert, did you really do that thing with the baseball bat?”
“Hmm?” Hubert asked, over his book. “What — oh, sure. Only I don’t think I really had to. Miss Hutchinson, when she did it, she was teaching big, rough, country boys — field hands right in from pickin’ cotton. They were all field niggers — wasn’t a house nigger among them, she told me. A lot of them were too old for high school anyway — she said some of them were older than she was. And there were a few who just didn’t want to take no guff off a woman. But my boys are just children — and city children, too.” He dropped his eyes to the book, raised it a bit from his lap: Views of Italy.
Sam wiped the splatters up and, still squatting naked, turned to pull the wicker from under the daybed. “You mind if I smoke me a cigarette?”