Figueroa…' He gave me a downtown street number. 'Room 202, that's the front room on the second floor.'
'Say, man, look,' I began again. I wanted to tell him I didn't want to go to bed with her, I wanted to black her eyes; but just the idea of her being a white woman stopped me. I felt flustered, caught, guilty. I couldn't realize what was happening to me, myself. It was funny in a way. I couldn't tell him I didn't want her because she was a white woman and he was a white man, and something somewhere way back in my mind said that would be an insult. And I couldn't tell him that I did want her, because the same thing said that that would be an insult too.
I started shaking my head and laughing. He looked put out, slightly offended, and his eyes blinked like butterfly wings. But he got it all out with the white man's eternal persistence, 'There's a phone in the hotel, but I don't know the number. It's one of those joints, you know.'
I was blowing laughs through my nose; I felt lightheaded and giddy. 'Now anybody in the world would think we were two fairly ordinary, reasonably sane guys,' I said.
I wondered what a white man and a Negro could talk about that wouldn't touch at some time or other on one of those taboo subjects that would embarrass one or the other, or both. Either both the Negro and the white man would have to accept the fact and even justification of white supremacy-then they could talk about what the white folks were doing and thinking and what the Negroes were taking and aping; or both would have to reject the theory of white supremacy and condemn all of its institutions, including loyalty and patriotism in time of war; or the white man could retain it and the Negro reject it, which didn't make for conversation at all.
I began shaking my head again. 'I'm telling you,' I said. 'It's a killer.'
He didn't get it. He blinked and his eyes went blank, absolutely lost; and I didn't know where to go from there either. We'd taken it too far to back out; now we stood there at a loss for words, each wanting to escape the other but neither wanting to be the first to make the break.
'There're a lot of stinkers like her in the yard,' he was saying, and I said, 'Too many.'
It was a relief to both of us when Zula Mae came up and said, 'Red wants you, Bob, he's up a tree.'
'Again,' I said, and took her by the arm. 'See you, Don.'
'Take it easy, Bob,' he said with a peculiar baffled look in his eyes.
'Baby,' I said to her. 'You sure look good to me.'
She gave me a half-incredulous, half-hopeful look, and her red lips flowered in her dark face. 'Are you kidding?' she said in her husky plaintive voice, and I gave a long loosening sigh.
But the things had gotten me. Now I felt depressed, walled in, black again. Red noticed it right away.
'What the hell happened to you, Bob? Don't the union wanna help you?' he asked.
'I got it all fixed,' I lied, but my voice was flat, dispirited.
'He been reading in the paper where all young men gonna be called to the Army,' Peaches said. 'He got the GI blues.'
'Got something,' Conway said.
Red didn't want anything in particular; just wanted me there so Tebbel couldn't take charge. I stood around for a time.
'I don't know what the hell I'd do if they called me,' Ben said. 'Every time a coloured man gets in the Army he's fighting against himself. Of course there isn't anything else he can do. If he refuses to go they send him to the pen. But if he does go and take what they put on him, and then fight so he can keep on taking it, he's a cowardly son of a bitch.'
Smitty had stopped his work to listen. 'I wouldn't say that,' he argued. 'You can't call coloured soldiers cowards, man. They can't keep the Army from being like what it is, but hell, they ain't no cowards.'
'Any man's a coward who won't die for what he believes,' Ben flared. 'If he's got principles he'll die for them. If he won't he's a cowardly son of a bitch-excuse me, ladies.'
The other fellows stopped to listen now.
'Any time a Negro says he believes in democracy but won't die to enforce it-I say he's a coward,' Ben declared. 'I don't care who he is. If Bob lets them put him in the Army he's a coward. If you let them put you in the Army you're a coward. As long as the Army is Jim Crowed a Negro who fights in it is fighting against himself.'
'If Bob gets called sure 'nough and listens to you and gets sent to the pen, he's a fool,' Zula Mae said.
Ben gave me a swift look. 'Bob's all right. If they call him he'll go on and make the best of it. Nobody expects him to be a martyr. But one thing I'll tell you, and you remember it-'
Tebbel stepped from one of the shower nooks where he'd been standing and Ben gave him a glance and kept on. 'One thing… You'll never get anything from these goddamn white people unless you fight them. They don't know anything else. Don't listen to anything else. If you don't believe it, take any white man you know. You can beg that son of a bitch until you're blue in the face. Argue with him until you're out of breath and no matter how eloquent your plea or righteous your cause the only way you'll ever get along with that son of a bitch is to whip his ass- excuse me, ladies.' He looked around defiantly. 'Bob'll tell you that's right. Isn't that right, Bob?'
'That's right.' I said.
'Then he gonna be your friend from then on,' Conway chuckled.
'That reminds me of a story,' Tebbel said. 'There were two coloured soldiers-'
'Was one named Moe?' Pigmeat cut in.
I chuckled and went out.
CHAPTER XIV
When I went down to turn in the time cards Kelly said, 'Wait a minute, Bob, I want to talk to you.'
Then he went on telling this joke to the two white guys from the shop.
'So he took this gal out in the shed out of respect for old Aunty, see, because all old Aunty had was this one- roomed shack where she and the gal lived.' He took a quick glance to see if the tool-crib girl was out of hearing and lowered his voice slightly. 'It'd been raining like hell, see, and the shed didn't have any floor and it was all sloppy and muddy where the hogs had been wallowing. But this guy was hard up, see, he'd been on the road for two weeks…'
I wasn't ready for that one; wasn't even looking for it. I didn't even have time to dodge it. He'd tricked me into listening by having me wait, and now without giving me time to get mad he said, 'How's Danny Tebbel getting along Bob? Do you think he's going to be able to handle your gang?'
The other two guys looked at me curiously to see how I was taking it, and the tool-crib girl came over and said, 'Those boys in your crew are breaking too many of those 9/32 bits; they'll just have to stop it or they can't have any more.'
They couldn't have done it any better if they'd rehearsed it. I couldn't take offence because Kelly didn't tell the joke to me and he could always say if I hadn't wanted to hear it I didn't have to listen. And even if I still wanted to take offence, the girl had stepped into the picture and whatever I might say to Kelly was sure to offend her. I never wanted to get out of a place so bad in all my life; I wanted to just take my tail between my legs and slink on out. It was a gut punch and my stomach was hollow as a drum; it took all I had to keep standing up straight, to keep on looking at him.
I did something with my face, trying to make it smile, and I had to reach down my throat and pull out my voice with my hand, but I got it and I said, 'I'll get mine by and by.'
The girl's mouth popped open. 'Well, I never-' she began.
But Kelly knew he had me. He waved me away. 'Go on, go on. Get out of here.'
I turned away and started walking, not fast but not poking. I went past workers, stepped over lines, ducked under staging, squeezed by shapes, through the access hole in the midship bulkhead, up the jack ladder to the third deck, up another ladder to the fourth deck, headed aft. I didn't see anybody, didn't see anything. I knew where I was going. I didn't want to go. My body just carried me and my mind just pushed me along. I didn't feel rash nor reckless, nothing like that, I felt low, dispirited, black as I've ever felt. Really a black boy now.
But I knew I was going to have to say something to Madge if I got shot on the spot. Not to rack her back or to cuss her out. That wasn't going to be enough. Not now. Not after having been tricked into listening to that bastard tell that joke. I was going to have to have her. I was going to have to make her as low as a white whore in
