“What?”
“It comes from our original puritanical upbringing. We’ve been taught by one way or another—by the work ethic and so forth—to be ashamed of our feelings—sex especially. So what we do is throw all of them off on the blacks.”
“Wait a minute—”
“No,” said Sy, interrupting. “He’s right. That’s exactly what we do. We think of them as being sexual giants. We think of them crying easier than we do, of being more compassionate, loving their wives more, feeling more anger.”
“Right! And in consequence they’ve been allowed the full range of those feelings, whereas we’ve been denied them. We also imagine them to be free from feelings of guilt—and they are!”
“They live a more carefree emotional life.”
“Just a minute,” said John. “Are you saying that they are more alive than we are?”
“Of course they are,” said Marion, and his tone of voice added, Didn’t you know that? Everyone else agreed: John should have known that.
“And we hate them for it.”
“Even before they were slaves they had more feelings, and then we pushed all those we couldn’t use over onto them.”
“But they know some of us don’t hate them, don’t they?” asked John.
“Come on, John,” said Marion, “of course not. They hate us all, and think we all hate them. How could they think anything else?”
“But I didn’t want any of what happened to have happened. And I don’t hate them.”
“They don’t care about you. They’d kill you if they had the chance and wouldn’t get caught.”
“And feel no guilt.”
“None at all.”
“They’d be glad to do it.”
“If you were lying helpless on a deserted street in their neighborhood without a penny on you, one of ’em would go out of his way to run over and kill you, just because of the chance to do it.”
“Sure they would, John. Didn’t you know that?”
John went back to welding, and didn’t enter into the conversation again, though it changed course several times during the afternoon. As soon as everyone left, he closed the garage and went across the street and into his house. He was very troubled, and tried to get over it by immersing himself in his bird books. But even reading about the snowy owl, which he was sure he had seen several nights earlier, could not keep his troubles from spewing out. He felt as if he were drowning and had nothing to float up out of the water on except his worries. Finally, Sarah came home from shopping, and talking to her made him feel a little better. She was sympathetic, and even offered ways for him to forget about it; but it was a personal problem, and so had to be worked out by himself and in his own way. The difficulty wound itself around his religion and threatened to strangle it to death. How could the universe be as he imagined it if there were people in it who were fundamentally different from him?
Can they be more alive? Regardless of the reasons, can they really be more alive? Are their senses better? He did not talk to Sarah about this. He did not expect ever to get an answer.
Mrs. Pearson saw them first. Dusting off one of her seven-foot rubber plants by the window facing the street, looking out, she saw a green Ford moving at a walking pace in front of her house. She ran to the kitchen to keep its progress in view, saw it stop two houses away and three men get out. She ran out the back door and into her neighbor’s house. “Lois!” she yelled, coming through to the living room. “Blacks! They’re black!” Both of them went to the window and looked out.
The men were looking up and down Sharon Center nervously as though they were lost and looking for a signpost to tell them where they were, but not quite. They also looked as though they had decided nothing should move them from that spot of street.
“What are they doing?” asked Lois.
“I don’t know.”
“Look, they’re coming over here.”
“They’ve seen us!”
“What do they want?”
“They’re coming over here!”
“Get away from that window!”
Emma Pearson jumped out of the view through the window to the safety of the wall.
“Settle down. This is stupid. This is my house. They aren’t coming here. This is stupid.” Lois watched them walk across the front lawn.
Emma Pearson went back to the window. “There’s still one in the car!”
“Stop it, Emma.”
Then the knocking started. Both women stopped breathing, and at each pound their hearts lurched. Then there was a pause.
“Don’t answer it, Lois,” whispered Emma emphatically.
“This is my house,” announced Lois, but without quite the conviction she had planned. She took a step toward the door.
“Whatever you do,” said Emma, “don’t open that door.”
“I will,” said Lois, and crossed to the door. Just as she was about to touch the handle, the knocking began again and she jumped backward.
“No,” said Emma, nearly inaudibly. “They’ll go away.”
Lois pulled the door open when the pounding stopped. Standing directly in the middle of the doorway as though preparing, if need be, to thrust them sprawling onto the lawn with a single body block if they tried to come in, she smiled and said hello very quickly.
“Could you tell us where John Montgomery lives?”
“Who?” she asked, not having comprehended enough of what they’d asked to say more. They looked at each other. Emma came over and stood behind Lois. One of the men handed a piece of torn newspaper to another one and he held it out. Lois stared at it momentarily as though it were a shrunken head, and then accepted it, and read it over seven or eight times (the part circled by a black pen) before she understood it. Then Emma snatched it from her. It was an advertisement in the confidential column of a newspaper in Burlington.
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
IT CANNOT BE POSSIBLE THAT YOUR FEELINGS ARE MORE INTENSE THAN MY OWN.
John Montgomery
Sharon Center
“So what—what does that mean?” asked Emma.
“He lives in that house on the
