When Sam came in, Clarice was sitting in the wing chair, in her purple blouse, reading aloud:
“ ‘Evidently the author’s implication is that there must be a welding into one personality of Kabnis and Lewis: the great emotionalism of the race guided and directed by a great purpose and a super-intelligence.’ ”
Chin still prickling from the cold, Sam could hear, in the other room, Hubert thumping books on his desk. Clarice looked up, smiled, then went back to her peroration:
“ ‘… In the south we have a “powerful underground” race with a marvelous emotional power which like Niagara before it was harnessed is wasting itself. Release it into proper channels, direct its course intelligently, and you have possibilities for future achievement that challenge the imagination. The hope of the race is in the great blind forces of the masses properly utilized by capable leaders.’ ” She looked up again, frowning. “Lord, Montgomery does go on about him, doesn’t he…?” Clearly she spoke to Hubert, behind the wall against which Sam’s bed stood — still unmade from this morning.
“What’s that?” Sam began to shrug off his coat.
Clarice smiled again. “It’s about my friend I said looked like you…?” She held up Opportunity. “Jean…?”
From inside, Hubert said: “Sam, if that’s you, would you please clean up in there a little!”
“I was going to spread your bed up,” Clarice said softly from the chair, “only he wouldn’t let — ”
But, coat back on his shoulders and ears hot with embarrassment, Sam was already across the room, tugging up the sheet, swinging over the quilt.
Indeed, Sam was astonished at how little of Christmas stayed with him that year: he and Hubert celebrated it, of course. He gave Hubert an embossed leather notebook, which cost two dollars. Hubert gave him three sets of long johns, which was supposed to be kind of funny, but Sam started wearing them that morning: they were a pretty good idea. And Corey and Elsie had a tree hung with both glass and colored-paper ornaments, strung with cranberries and yarns of popcorn and cotton wool all around its base, just like at home; but (and it was the first time Sam had ever experienced this, so that for a few days it really bothered him) it just didn’t feel like Christmas.
When it was over, the only thing that remained with any vividness was a pre-Christmas Saturday morning trip to the post office for Elsie and Corey, to mail the three shopping bags full of gifts back to Raleigh. (One bag was Hubert’s and his.) The building like a fort —
The lines of people —
Within, pine bows were draped all around the upper molding on the marble walls —
Bells of shiny red and silver paper hung, soundless, in each corner. Black rubber mats were splayed over the floor, slopping with the slush people tracked about in rundown shoes and open galoshes with jingling clasps. Wreaths with red berries and red ribbon were wired to the doors. But even inside, the marble room was chill and damp enough for your breath to drift away in clouds.
Were all these black and yellow and tan and brown faces, in all these lines in front of all the brass-barred windows, sending presents back to some ever-shifting, generalized, and hopelessly unlocatable place (but never baffling the postal readers of the carefully printed or clumsily scrawled addresses on brown paper under twine) called home? Certainly, to look at the bags and parcels they carried, it seemed so.
The clerks behind the bars, Sam had noticed, were all white.
Postal clerks were white at home too, but there were only three windows in the post office he went to in Raleigh. Here, between marble columns — and it wasn’t even the central post office — ten windows lined the wall, so he’d just expected, well… maybe some dark faces behind the squared brass bars.
With broad, brown cheekbones, brown eyes large and crossed, and wearing an old black coat, a girl settled herself next to him, to stare up. From within her blunt, strabismic gaze, a glint of blue surfaced in Sam’s mind — from the staring boy back on the train. Then it sank into the estuary of her curiosity, to swirl away. Looking down at her and in a voice more friendly than he felt, Sam asked her age-absent stare (was she eleven? was she fifteen?): “Now who are you?”
She held up her hand to him, or rather her wrist — with her fingers bent down. The hand was deformed — or at least… its deformity surprised, even shocked, him: the forefinger was thumb-thick and longer than the middle, which was, in turn, longer than the ring finger, which was longer than the little — all of them, indeed, fatter than fingers were supposed to be. The nails were dirty, spiky. Her teeth were set apart in bluish gum — some of the lower ones, Sam realized, missing. “What’s your name?” he asked again, of this unappealing child.
The woman behind him said, “She’s showing you her wrist beads.” Then — small, brownskinned, with nicely done hair and a green cloth coat (the child’s hair stuck out in tufts, from under a gray kerchief tied not under her chin but off center by her cheek, the cloth ends frazzled like something someone had sucked on) — the woman took the girl’s wrist and held it up. Black-gloved fingers moved a band of white beads from under the threadbare cuff. “Baby beads — just like when you’re born. In the hospital.” (Sam had been born at home, and had had the details of Doctor Haley’s three-in-the-morning visit, when they’d thought there might be complications — but there weren’t — recounted to him many times.) Each bead had a black letter on it.
“See,” the woman said. “E-L–L-A A-B-L–I-R… this is Ella Ablir.” Each lettered bead had two holes in it. Running through were, Sam saw, not threads but wires, twisted together below the pudgy wrist. The woman smiled. “She’s looking at you because you’re white.”
“No.” Sam smiled. “I’m afraid I’m not. I’m colored, too, just like everybody else here.”
“Oh, I’m sorry…!” The woman was suddenly and greatly distressed — while again Sam glanced at the white clerk behind the bars and at the woman at his window in red coat and red hat, with thick-heeled shoes buttoning inches up stockings white as some nurse’s: she seemed to be buying many small stamps for a penny or two pennies, but wasn’t sure how many she wanted; now she asked for two more, no three more — well, maybe another two; and one more please? Thank you. Now, if I could just have two more of this kind — please?
“Sometimes,” Sam said, “when people first meet me, they think I am. But I’m not.”
“Yes. Of course,” the woman said. “If I had just been paying attention, I would’ve seen it.”
Sam looked down at the girl, who still stared up: “Hello, Ella,” he said, becoming aware that, behind the woman, five or six other children shuffled — girls, most of them. No, all of them. Ragged, unkempt, each had something distinctly wrong with her.
“Where’re y’all from?” Sam asked.
“We’re from the Manhattan Hospital,” the woman said, indicating a rectangle of cardboard pinned to her lapel, with something printed on it, “for the Insane.” The girl had the same cardboard pinned lopsidedly to her coat. So did the girls behind. The eyes of a tall and stoop-shouldered girl did not look in the same direction. “Over on the island. But they ain’t really insane at all.” She smiled. “Not even a little bit of it. They’re just some very nice little girls — who all been very, specially good. And I been out with them since eight o’clock this morning, taking them around on a Christmas pass.”