The golfers gazed philosophically into their whiskey and now and then came out with solemn Schadenfreude things, just like four prosperous gents might have done in old Virginny in 1774.
“The thing is, you just don’t get integrity where you need it most,” said Lamar Thigpen, a handsome fellow who sat slapping his bare brown arm and looking around. He was maybe forty-five and just going slack and he worried about it, pushing his sleeve up and hardening his biceps against his chest.
“I’m going to tell yall the truth,” Justin might say. “If they want the country all that bad, I’m not all that much against letting them have it”
But even these dire things were not said in ill humor.
“Ain’t nobody here but us niggers anyway,” somebody else would say finally. “Let’s play golf.”
They would get up a little creakily, their sweat having cooled and muscles stiffened, and walk to their lies. Mr. Vaught always took his second shot first because he seldom drove over a hundred yards but that always straight down the middle. And now he wound up with his brassie, drawing back slowly and swaying backward too and with a ferocious deliberation; then, for all the world as if he had been overtaken by some dread mishap, went into a kind of shiver and spasm and, like a toy wound too tight and shooting its springs, came down on the ball from all directions — Poppy drives, Lamar told Justin, like a man falling out of a tree — uttering at the end of it, as he always did, a little cry both apologetic and deprecating: “Voop!”, calculated to conjure away all that was untoward and out of the ordinary — and off he would march, hopping along like a jaybird.
Living as he did in the garage apartment and hanging out as he did in the pantry and not with Mrs. Vaught’s coterie of patriots and anti-fluoridationists who kept to the living room, the engineer met the servants first of all. Met, not got to know. The engineer was the only white man in the entire South who did not know all there was to know about Negroes. He knew very little about them, in fact nothing. Ever since he was a child and had a nurse, he had been wary of them and they of him. Like many others, he had had a little black boy for a friend, but unlike the others, who had enjoyed perfect love and understanding with their little black friends, he had been from the beginning somewhat fuddled and uneasy. At the age of thirteen he was avoiding Negroes like a queasy middle-aged liberal.
No doubt these peculiar attitudes were a consequence of his nervous condition. Anyhow it was the oddest encounter imaginable, that between him and the Vaught servants. He baffled the Negroes and they him. The Vaught servants were buffaloed by the engineer and steered clear of him. Imagine their feeling. They of course lived by their radars too. It was their special talent and it was how they got along: tuning in on the assorted signals about them and responding with a skill two hundred years in the learning. And not merely responding. Not merely answering the signals but providing home and sustenance to the transmitter, giving him, the transmitter, to believe that he dwelled in loving and familiar territory. He must be made to make sense, must the transmitter; must be answered with sense and good easy laughter: sho now, we understand each other. But here came this strange young man who transmitted no signal at all but who rather, like them, was all ears and eyes and antennae. He actually looked at them. A Southerner looks at a Negro twice: once when he is a child and sees his nurse for the first time; second, when he is dying and there is a Negro with him to change his bedclothes. But he does not look at him during the sixty years in between. And so he knows as little about Negroes as he knows about Martians, less, because he knows that he does not know about Martians.
But here comes this strange young man who acts like one of them but look at you out of the corner of his eye. What he waiting for? They became nervous and jumped out of the way. He was like a white child who does not grow up or rather who grows up in the kitchen. He liked to sit in the pantry and watch them and talk to them, but they, the Negroes, didn’t know what to do with him. They called him “he,” just as they used to call the madam of the house “she.” “Where he is?” one might say, peeping out of the kitchen door and as often as not look straight into his eyes. “Uh-oh.”
“He,” the engineer, usually sat in the pantry, a large irregular room with a single bay window. It was not properly a room at all but rather the space left over in the center of the house when the necessary rooms had been built. Mr. Vaught, who also did not know what he did not know, had been his own architect. The ceiling was at different levels; many doors and vestibules opened into the room. David usually sat at one end, polishing silver in the bay. The dark end of the room let into the “bar,” a dusty alcove of blue mirrors and buzzing fluorescent lights and chrome stools. It was one of the first of its kind, hailing from the 1920’s and copied from the swanky bars used by Richard Barthelmess and William Powell in the movies. But it had not been used as such for years and now its mirror shelves were lined with Windex bottles, cans of O-Cedar and Bab-O and jars of silver polish stuffed with a caked rag. It fell out somehow or other that both Negro and white could sit in the pantry, perhaps because it was an intermediate room between dining room and kitchen, or perhaps because it was not, properly speaking, a room at all.
David Ross was different from the other Negroes. It was as if he had not caught onto either the Negro way or the white way. A good-humored seventeen-year-old, he had grown too fast and was as raw as any raw youth. He was as tall as a basketball player and wore summer and winter the same pair of heavy damp tweeds whose cuffs were swollen as if they had a chronic infection. He was supposed to be a butler and he wore a butler’s jacket with little ivory fasten-on buttons but his arms stuck out a good foot from the sleeves. He was always polishing silver, smiling as he did so a great white smile, laughing at everything (when he did not laugh, his face looked naked and strange) a hissing laugh between his teeth, ts-ts-ts. Something about him irritated the engineer, though. He was not cunning enough. He, the engineer, was a thousand times more cunning and he didn’t have to be. He, David, was too raw. For example, he was always answering advertisements in magazines, such as Learn Electronics! Alert Young Men Needed! Earn Fifty Dollars a Day! Send for Selling Kit! And the selling kit would come and David would show it to everybody, but his long black-and-pink fingers could never quite work the connections and the soldering iron. He was like a rich man’s son! The engineer would never have dreamed of spending such money ($10 for a selling kit!). Hell no, David, the engineer told him, don’t send off for that. Damnation, why didn’t he have better sense? He should either be cunning with a white man’s cunning or cunning with a black man’s cunning. As it was, he had somehow managed to get the worst of each; he had both white sappiness and Negro sappiness. Why doesn’t somebody tell him? One day he did tell him. “Damnation, David,” said he as David showed him a selling kit for an ice-cube dispenser which was supposed to fit any kind of refrigerator. “Who do you think you’re going to sell that to?”
“All the folks around here,” cried David, laughing ts-ts-ts and waving a great limp hand in the direction of the golf links. “Folks out here got plenty money and ain’t one in ten got a dispenser-type box” (he’d been reading the brochure). “It only come with GE and Servel!”
“Well, what in the world do they want it for,” moaned the flabbergasted engineer.