?No need to curse, Chip,? Topper said. ?But you are right. We all have difficulties that are incurred by our skins. We all know that we have to work harder and longer hours to be recognized. We have to be extra careful and honest not to be fired or even arrested. And if one black man commits a crime then we are all seen as criminals. All of us share that legacy.?
?But do you have the right to be mad?? Cynthia Lott asked. It was rare that Cynthia would dare to question Topper and she seemed to take pleasure in the grilling.
?Certainly,? Saint-Paul said. ?We are held back not because of worth but because of prejudice and racism. That is reason enough.?
Socrates looked at his friends with harsh satisfaction. He had been thinking about the question for months. It had been on his mind for years. Every time he saw a white man he'd get mad. Sometimes he had to leave the room so as not to yell or even attack some man who was just standing there. His ire was as natural as the sunrise. It was more like an instinct than like the higher faculty of reason that supposedly separates people from other creatures.
Socrates had long wanted to ask the question but he couldn't get out the words in the Saint-Paul Mortuary. He was afraid of the big room and the many doors all around. Somebody might be listening; he knew that it wasn't true and even if it was that it didn't matter. But Socrates' throat was clamped shut. So he had decided to invite the group to his new home in King Malone's backyard, next to the sweet-smelling lemon bush. If anyone came around, the two-legged dog Killer would bark.
In the nearly empty rooms of Socrates' home he felt his heart beating and the air coming into his lungs. There he could believe that he was the master.
He had made lemonade and ham sandwiches, bought two fifths of Barbancourt Haitian rum. He had put the small bounty on his folding table and set up chairs for his friends as they arrived at the door. But even with all of that he could barely get the words out. When he started to put his question into words his face had flushed with fever and the room seemed to shake.
?But I know what you mean, Miss Lott,? Leon said in a voice that was devoid of feeling. ? 'cause when it come to tearin' down a black man it's a black woman the first one on line. Like when I come here to talk. You always be ridin' me even though I ain't never done nuthin' to you. Even though I give you a ride home every week an' you never say thank you or offer me somethin' like a drink of water or maybe a dollar for all that gas. There's a white woman work at the pharmacy speaks nice to me every day. She treat me better than half the black women I ever meet.?
?Well if you so hurt then why you come here?? Cynthia Lott said. Her voice was less angry than it was strained. ?Why you give me a ride? I don't ever ask you. I don't ever ask you for nuthin'. I don't ever ask no man for nuthin'.?
There were tears in Leon's eyes but he didn't seem to notice. The muscle and bone at the hinges of his jaw bulged out. ?I come here 'cause I wanna be around black people who talk about stuff other than just complainin' or lyin'. I want to be somebody other just some nigger or gangbanger.?
Cynthia almost said something but then she held back. Socrates thought that this silence was an answer to the boy's hurt feelings but that he would never know it.
?My aunt Bellandra,? Socrates began, ?used to tell me a story
?
Everybody in the room seemed to understand immediately that this was the real beginning of the Wednesday night talk, that everything up until then was just like an introduction.
?It was a story,? Socrates continued, ?about slaves that were set free by a freak storm down on a Louisiana sugar plantation a long time before the Civil War. She said that it was a big wind ??
Bellandra's words came back to him. He was a scrawny child again rapt in the frightening tales of his severe auntie. ?And it tore down the ramshackle slave quarters and tore out the timbers that their chains was bound to. Many of the slaves died from the crash but some of them lived. They cut away the corpses from the long chain that bound them all together and then moved like a serpent toward the overseer's hut.
?This overseer was a man named Drummond and he was evil down to the bone. He heard the slave quarters crash but he didn't do nuthin' to help because the wind scared him and so he stayed in his hut. He didn't know that the chain gang was movin' toward him. He just laid up with Rose, a slave girl that he took to his bed sometimes. Outside the wind was howlin' and the trees were scratchin' at his roof. It was like hell outside his do' an' he wasn't goin' nowhere.? Bellandra, Socrates remembered, paused then and glared down at the boy. He felt as if he had done something wrong but didn't know what it was.
?An' then the knockin' started on his do'. It was a loud thump and then the drag of chain and then another loud thump. Rose called out in fear and her master cringed. But the knocking got louder and the chain sounded everywhere all around the house. Then there was the angry cry of men. If it wasn't for the storm that cry would have reached the plantation owner's ears. He would have called out his men and his dogs but the wind ate up the slaves' voices. Only Drummond could hear them men and he wasn't even sure that it was men. He was afraid that ghosts from some shipwreck had blown in on the winds of that storm. He was tryin' to remember a prayer to send them ghosts away when the do' shattered and so did the shutters on his windows. And then four men came into his shack one after another, manacled hand and foot and chained in a line. There were two empty shackles that were
