“What race?”
“Why, um, colored.”
“Look at this.”
To the hitchhiker’s astonishment, the driver shucked off his coat and pushed a jeweled cuff up a skinny arm.
“Ah,” said the engineer, nodding politely, though he couldn’t see much in the gathering darkness.
“Well?”
“Sir?”
“Look at that patch.”
“Then you’re not—?”
“I’m not a Negro.”
“Is that right?”
“My name is not Isham Washington.”
“No?”
“It’s Forney Aiken.”
“Is that so,” said the interested engineer. He could tell that the other expected him to be surprised, but it was not in him to be surprised because it was no more surprising to him when things did not fall out as they were supposed to than when they did.
“Does that name ring a bell?”
“It does sound familiar,” said the engineer truthfully, since his legions of déjà vus made everything sound familiar.
“Do you remember a picture story that appeared in July ’51 Redbook called ‘Death on the Expressway’?”
“I’m not sure.”
“It was reprinted by the National Safety Council, ten million copies.”
“As a matter of fact, I think I do—”
“Do you remember the fellow who interviewed Jafsie Condon in the cemetery?”
“Who?”
“Or the article in Liberty: ‘I Saw Vic Genovese’? For forty-eight hours I was the only man alive in contact with both the F.B.I. and Vic Genovese.”
“You’re Forney Aiken the—”
“The photographer.”
“Yes, I think I do,” said the engineer, nodding but still wary. This fellow could still be a philosopher. “Anyhow I certainly do appreciate the ride.” The singing hordes of mosquitoes were coming ever nearer. He wished Forney would getgoing.
“Forney,” cried the other, holding out a hand.
“Will. Will Barrett.”
The green Chevrolet resumed its journey, taking its place shakily among the Fruehauf tractors. Breathing a sigh of relief, the engineer spoke of his own small efforts in photography and took from his wallet a color snapshot of the peregrine falcon, his best.
“Tremendous,” cried the photographer, once again beside himself with delight at having fallen in with such a pleasant and ingenious young man. In return he showed his passenger a tiny candid camera concealed under his necktie whose lens looked like the jewel of a tie clasp.
It, the candid camera, was essential to his present assignment. The photographer, it turned out, was setting forth on an expedition this very afternoon, the first he had undertaken in quite awhile. It was something of a comeback, the engineer surmised. He had the shaky voice and the fitful enthusiasms of a man freshly sober.
The nature of his new project accounted for his extraordinary disguise. He wished to do a series on behind-the-scene life of the Negro. The idea had come to him in the middle of the night: why not be a Negro? To make a long story short, he had persuaded a dermatologist friend to administer an alkaloid which simulates the deposit of melanin in the skin, with the difference that the darkening effect could be neutralized by a topical cream. Therefore the white patch on his forearm. To complete the disguise, he had provided himself with the personal papers of one Isham Washington, an agent for a burial insurance firm in Pittsburgh.
This very afternoon he had left the office of his agent in New York, tonight would stop off at his house in Bucks County, and tomorrow would head south, under the “cotton curtain,” as he expressed it.
The pseudo-Negro was even more delighted to discover that his passenger was something of an expert on American speech. “You were my first test and I passed it, and you a Southerner.”
“Well, not quite,” replied the tactful engineer. He explained that for one thing you don’t say insur-ance but in-surance or rather in-shaunce.
“Oh, this is marvelous,” said the pseudo-Negro, nearly running under a Borden tanker.
You don’t say that either, mahvelous, thought the engineer, but let it go.
“What do you think of the title ‘No Man an Island’?”
“Very good.”
Tomorrow, the pseudo-Negro explained, he planned to stop in Philadelphia and pick up Mort Prince, the writer, who planned to come with him and do the text.
“But hold on,” exclaimed the driver, smacking the steering wheel again. “How stupid can you get.”
For the third time in a month the engineer was offered a job. “Why didn’t I think of it before! Why don’t you come with us? You know the country and you could do the driving. I’m a lousy driver.” He was. His driving was like his talking. He was alert and chipper and terrified. “Do you drive?”
“Yes sir.”
But the engineer declined. His services were already engaged, he explained, by a family who was employing him as tutor-companion to their son.
“Ten dollars a day plus keep.”
“No sir. I really can’t.”
“Plus a piece of the royalties.”
“I certainly appreciate it.”
“You know Mort?”
“Well, I’ve heard of him and read some of his books.”
“You know, it was Mort and I who first hit on the idea of the Writers’ and Actors’ League for Social Morality.”
The engineer nodded agreeably. “I can certainly understand it, considering the number of dirty books published nowadays. As for the personal lives of the actors and actresses—”
The pseudo-Negro looked at him twice. “Oh-ho. Very good! Very ironical! I like that. You’re quite a character, Barrett.”
“Yes sir.”
“Joking aside, though, it was our idea to form the first folk theater to travel through the South. Last summer it played in over a hundred towns. Where are you from — I bet it played there.”
The engineer told him.
“My God.” The pseudo-Negro ran off the road in his excitement. The hitchhiker put a discreet hand on the wheel until the Chevy was under control. “That’s where we’re having our festival this fall. Some of the biggest names in Hollywood and Broadway are coming down. What it is, is like the old morality plays in the Middle Ages.”
“Yes sir.”
“Is that where you’re from?”
“Yes sir.”
“Then you’ve got to come with us.”
The engineer managed to decline, but in the end he agreed to drive the other as far as Virginia and the “cotton curtain.” When they stopped the second time to change drivers, he was glad enough to add the two ten-dollar bills, which the pseudo-Negro made a great show of paying him in advance, to his flattened wallet and to sprint around and hop into the driver’s seat.
Under the engineer’s steady hand, the Chevrolet fairly sailed down US 1. In short order it turned onto a great new westering turnpike and swept like a bird across the Delaware River not far from the spot where General Washington crossed nearly two hundred years ago.
Forney Aiken’s stone cottage was also standing at the time of the crossing. Some years ago, he told the engineer, he and his wife had left New York and beat a more or less disorderly retreat to Bucks County. She was an actor’s agent and had to commute. He was trying to quit drinking and thought it might help to live in the country and do chores, perhaps even farm. When farming didn’t work, he took to making things, the sort of articles, firkins and sisal tote bags, which are advertised in home magazines. But this was not as simple as it looked either. There was more to it than designing an ad for a magazine. You have to have your wholesale outlet.