flashlight, came back to investigate with the cocked pistol in my hand, and found the tiniest little kitten you ever want to see trying to hide in the irises. I was thinking about that and laughing like hell; and thinking about how all my life I'd been scared of white folks because they were white and it was funny as hell to find out white folks were scared of me, too, because I was black.
The white boy came out of it and colour came back into his face and it got beet-red. White came back into his soul; I could see it coming back, rage at seeing a nigger threatening him. Now he was ready to die for his race like a patriot, a true believer. I could see in his mind he wanted to kill me because I had seen him lose it. He hunched his shoulders, bowed his head, and started into me. And then he lost his nerve. He shook himself steady, straightened up, looked around for a weapon. He didn't see any, so he said, 'I'll fight you.'
I smiled at him. 'I don't want to fight you,' I told him. 'I want to kill you. But right now I'm saving you up.'
I could see the fear coming back and see him fighting against it.
'If I catch you around my house again I'm gonna shoot you like a dog,' he threatened, and wheeled away.
I turned and watched him for a moment, feeling good, feeling fine, loose, free. I had gotten over the notion; I had spit the white folks out my mouth. There wasn't anything they could do to me now, I told myself; nothing they could say to me that would hurt. I was ready now, solid ready, to walk right up to Texas.
I kicked my tin hat back at a signifying angle, pushed back toward the dock. Before I got there the whistle blew for lunch.
CHAPTER XV
I went over to the canteen, got some hot stew, a piece of pie, and coffee. Looking around for a place to eat, I saw Madge sitting on the ground with her back propped against a stack of pipes in the shade of a shed beside the pipe shop. An older woman stopped and put her lunch down beside her, then got into the line at the canteen.
I hesitated a moment to see if anyone else would join her, then started toward her, my heart pumping like a rivet gun and my legs wobbly weak. Something drew her gaze and she looked up into my eyes. We held gazes until I stopped just in front of her. Her eyes were bright, liquid, and her face was slightly flushed. She had peeled off the leather jacket and was clad in a white waist, open at the throat. Her breasts were loose and ripe as cantaloupes.
I opened my mouth, couldn't make it, swallowed, and tried again. 'Just where do you get that stuff?' I said. 'Just who do you think you are?' My voice came out of the top of my mouth, light and weightless and stilted.
I had expected her to do anything but what she did. She fluttered her mascaraed lashes at me like an 1890 slick chick and gave me a look of pure blue innocence. 'I don't think you know me,' she said in her flat Southern drawl. Then she let recognition leak into her look. 'Oh, you're the boy I had the fight with the other day.' Now she gave me a ravishing smile-at least that's what it was supposed to be-and her manner became easy, friendly, without tension of any sort. 'Yo' name is Bob, isn't it? Rest the weight, Bob, you must get tired of toting it around all day.'
All I could do was stare at her. After all that tremendous anxiety I had gone through; after all that murderous build-up, that hard hollow scare; after all the crazy, wild-eyed, frightened acts she had put on, the white armour plate she'd wrapped herself up in, the insurmountable barriers she'd raised between us, here she was breaking it down, wiping it all out, with a smile; treating me as casually as an old acquaintance. It was too much, just simply too much, for one person to be able to do. I must have looked very funny at that moment, for she burst out laughing.
'Don't take it so hard,' she said. 'Lotta folks fight. I think it's 'cause they like making up so much.'
I sat down beside her, put my stew, pie, and coffee between my legs. But I couldn't eat it; if I had taken a bite I would have thrown up. I was sick as a dog. I didn't look at her. I took a long deep breath, looked at the ground. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
'I suppose you know you got me demoted,' I said finally, realizing instantly it was the worst possible thing I could have said. It acknowledged her power over me, and that was wrong.
Now she could play it any way she wanted, magnanimous or condescending. Instead she played it true to form. 'You oughtn'ta called me no slut,' she slurred. 'You don't know me that well.'
I jerked around and looked at her. She wore a maddening, teasing smile and her eyes were laughing at me. I went so blind mad I was petrified. Not mad at her; at myself for being pushed around by a notion. If you could just get over the notion, women were the same, black or white.
I knew that getting mad was bad, it gave her the lead. So I dug myself out, got a smile to match her own, and said, 'You'll make a man slap you one of these days, do you know that?'
'Now you know, I don't hardly understand you,' she said, taking a bite of pork-chop sandwich and fluttering her mascaraed lashes. 'You talk so funny.' She giggled. 'Is this the first time you ever talked to a white lady?'
'Look, baby, let Texas rest. You know the score, probably better than me. Let's stop clowning and get together-' I broke off. 'Look, what you doing tonight? How 'bout running with me? I know some fine spots where it'll be okay.' I could see her drawing in a little and I rushed on. 'You won't be the only white girl there.' Then I said, 'Look, baby, you really get me.'
At that she turned and said, 'You talks so fast, first you wanna jump on me and now you wanna date me.' Then she killed me with her smile.
'Look-' I began again, broke off as the other woman came up with a piece of pie and two cups of coffee.
'I brung you some coffee, Madge. I declare, how you eat those dry poke-chop sandwiches is-' She was rattling off in a Southern dialect broader than Madge's when suddenly she caught sight of me. She had seen me without seeing me. She had thought I was just sitting there eating my lunch, as close to a white girl as I could get, and she'd been prepared to endure it since the joint wasn't Jim Crowed. But when she realized that I was among those present she stopped abruptly, her voice suspended in mid-air and her mouth hanging open. Her eyes went quickly to Madge's, seeking an explanation.
Madge took the coffee and placed it on the ground beside her. 'I'd rather choke than stand in that durn line,' she said casually, and then as if it was the most commonplace thing in the world, she introduced me. 'Elsie, this is Bob. He's a leaderman with the sheet-metal gang. Me and him had a fight but we done made up. Elsie is my sister- in-law,' she said to me.
'Hello, Elsie,' I said.
Elsie gave me a sharp quick glance, then looked away. She set her coffee carefully on the ground, then carefully sat herself down. Her actions were slightly dazed, as if she was trying to acquaint a slow mentality to the situation. Finally, when she got it all straightened out, she gave me a perfunctory smile.
'Howdedo,' she said, fanning herself with a piece of newspaper. 'Sho is hot.' She laid the paper down and opened her lunch. 'Lotta coloured boys working in 'dustry nowadays, right 'long with white people,' she observed, taking out a ham sandwich and nibbling at it daintily. 'You frum the South?'
I could feel Madge's gaze on me, and although I didn't look I knew she still wore that teasing smile. 'No, I'm from Ohio,' I said.
Elsie brushed it aside. 'I always says it ain't no more'n right. Coloured folks got much right to earn these good wages as white while we fighting this war. It's partly their country too, I always says. I was telling Lem-your uncle,' she said to Madge, 'just the other day that coloured folks got just as much right to earn these wages as we has. We believe in democracy over here and as I says to Lem, if we can just keep these Reds frum getting hold of the country we can keep our American way of living so everybody'll be happy.'
'Elsie is a democrat,' Madge put in. I couldn't tell whether to lessen the tension or prepare myself for the worst.
'So am I,' I said; I didn't want any argument either, but I couldn't help but add, 'Not a Southern one, however.'
'There's some mighty good coloured boys frum the South,' Elsie went on through a mouthful of food. She washed it down with coffee. 'I declare, the coffee they make…' She grimaced. 'Now me and Madge are from Texas-Breckenridge, Texas. We went to Houston when the war broke out, then we got an itching to come to
