Sanity now abandoned Henry. Sanity (or “rocks,” as Freeness termed it), or whatever it was that was inside his head, and which held him together, and only allowed him to grumble and talk and mutter these things about money not being a big thing to him; this little mechanism, this controlling mechanism apparently snapped loose. Henry flew up, and grabbed Freeness by his shirt front, and shook Freeness vigorously five or six times, and then threw him flat on the floor, before anybody knew what was happening. Henry was screaming, “Don’t make me tear-up your arse, nigger!”
It was the first time anybody had ever heard Freeness called by that name. It was a name Freeness himself never used. It was the first time a black man had ever called him by that name. It was a name Freeness never liked. And in truth, Freeness did bounce back up from the floor at the sound of the word, “nigger.” But it was not so much from the shock of the fall, as from the shock of the name, nigger, that he caught himself so quickly. It was not a physical reverberation. He bounced back up, through rage and through the shock of being thrown down by Henry his old friend. And when he bounced back up, he ran straight into his kitchen, and came back with a long bread knife, swearing, “Get to rass-hole outta my fucking place, or lemme push this in your goddamn guts!” And he meant it. Henry saw this clearly. And he did not stay to find out the seriousness of the threat. So while Freeness was still raging, going back and forth from the kitchen, with the long bread knife still in his hand (all the time, Boysie and Stumpy moving out of his way, drawing up their legs even though he stepped over them), Henry was already long gone.
“Why he do that, eh, sah?”
Boysie shook his head. His head didn’t contain the knowledge nor the motivation for Henry’s behaviour.
“That man have rocks in his rass-hole head!” Freeness said, when he sat back down to continue playing the crap game with Boysie and Stumpy. But the game had lost interest. “That fucking white woman is turning his rass-hole head! That white woman is so blasted ugly anyhow, that I know, I know if she was black, be-Jesus-Christ, Henry wouldn’t walk ’bout with her, except it was a dark night, be-Christ! Except he eating it!”
They all agreed. But they agreed in silence. It was a chastisement, a judgment, which touched each one of them, including Freeness himself. It touched them all with a terrible heaviness of truth.
Agatha received the letter (written in a hand strange to her), and because she could not recognize the handwriting at a first glance, she placed it casually on the top of the knife-marked, old-age table in Henry’s room.
She was ironing a shirt for Henry. The wedding was two days off. She finished the shirt, and then found four others in a bag, a blue plastic bag, which he had taken from the coin laundry on Spadina Avenue, near where he lived.
Something about the way the writer of the letter made his A’s bothered Agatha. And both her patience and her curiosity for the contents of the letter drove her to open it. She immediately had the feeling that it was a dirty letter: a letter of abuse, even; a letter from a crank, someone who might have seen her with Henry: perhaps it was from his landlady, Miss Diamond, who recently was out of the house very regularly and who never seemed too pleased to find Agatha there so early in the morning. The letter had no signature, no address of the sender and no date. And that is what made it such a frightening letter. It said: Your wedding day — I know this won’t reach you on the actual day, but I am writing this nevertheless and sending out my thoughts to wish you all the bad luck and unhappiness, and hoping that the years ahead will hold much bitterness for you, for many, many returning anniversaries.
And so Agatha — you are to marry a coloured man — God help you! He will murder you, he will adore you — he will deify you, he will humiliate you — he will bully you, he will protect you — he will put you in hell, he will lift you up to the heaven — and if he should make you cry a lot, at least he will show you the essence of laughter and tears too — take notice of his EGOTISM — it is a protective shell, a chip on his shoulder to cover a lost exceedingly neurotic child underneath … It was at this point, based upon her knowledge of Bernice, Dots, Boysie and Henry, and their friends; and mainly on her knowledge of their intelligence, that Agatha made her first conclusion about the author of the letter. They were all too stupid to write this kind of letter. This conclusion drove her out of her mind: who then could have thought of writing it; and she was the more worried now because she could not pinpoint the motive nor the mind of the sender whose anonymity therefore rendered motive more difficult to comprehend … Marry Henry, Agatha, and you will never know normality again, as the world understands normality; but a crazy kind of fulfillment you certainly would know. I am holding you responsible. Love him Agatha, and know that your close friends will be delighted to know that you have at last ceased to embarrass them; and his friends would be delighted to know that you have joined their coterie, their fortune, their storm of fortune. My warmest wishes and I hope to meet you one day. Someone Who Loves You.
Her first instinct and her first impulse was to tear up the letter. And she followed them both. But when the
