1NO longer set apart for being sinful, I felt that I could breathe again, live again, that I had been released from a prison. The cosmic images of dread were now gone and the external world became a reality, quivering daily before me. Instead of brooding and trying foolishly to pray, I could run and roam, mingle with boys and girls, feel at home with people, share a little of life in common with others, satisfy my hunger to be and live.

2Granny and Aunt Addie changed toward me, giving me up for lost; they told me that they were dead to the world, and those of their blood who lived in that world were therefore dead to them. From urgent solicitude they dropped to coldness and hostility. Only my mother, who had in the meantime recovered somewhat, maintained her interest in me, urging me to study hard and make up for squandered time.

3Freedom brought problems; I needed textbooks and had to wait for months to obtain them. Granny said that she would not buy worldly books for me. My clothes were a despair. So hostile did Granny and Aunt Addie become that they ordered me to wash and iron my own clothes. Eating was still skimpy, but I had now adjusted myself to the starch, lard, and greens diet. I went to school, feeling that my life depended not so much upon learning as upon getting into another world of people.

4Until I entered Jim Hill public school, I had had but one year of unbroken study; with the exception of one year at the church school, each time I had begun a school term something happened to disrupt it. Already my personality was lopsided; my knowledge of feeling was far greater than my knowledge of fact. Though I was not aware of it, the next four years were to be the only opportunity for formal study in my life.

5The first school day presented the usual problem and I was emotionally prepared to meet it. Upon what terms would I be allowed to remain upon the school grounds? With pencil and tablet, I walked nonchalantly into the schoolyard, wearing a cheap, brand-new straw hat. I mingled with the boys, hoping to pass unnoticed, but knowing that sooner or later I would be spotted for a newcomer. And trouble came quickly. A black boy bounded past me, thumping my straw hat to the ground, and yelling:

6“Straw katy!”

7I picked up my hat and another boy ran past, slapping my hat even harder.

8“Straw katy!”

9Again I picked up my hat and waited. The cry spread. Boys gathered around, pointing, chanting:

10“Straw katy! Straw katy!”

11I did not feel that I had been really challenged so far; no particular boy had stood his ground and taunted me. I was hoping that the teasing would cease, and tomorrow I would leave my straw hat at home. But the boy who had begun the game came close.

12“Mama bought me a straw hat,” he sneered.

13“Watch what you’re saying,” I warned him.

14“Oh, look! He talks!” the boy said.

15The crowd howled with laughter, waiting, hoping.

16“Where you from?” the boy asked me.

17“None of your business,” I said.

18“Now, look, don’t you go and get sassy, or I’ll cut you down,” he said.

19“I’ll say what I please,” I said.

20The boy picked up a tiny rock and put in on his shoulder and walked close again.

21“Knock it off,” he invited me.

22I hesitated for a moment, then acted; I brushed the rock from his shoulder and ducked and grabbed him about the legs and dumped him to the ground. A volcano of screams erupted from the crowd. I jumped upon the fallen boy and started pounding him. Then I was jerked up. Another boy had begun to fight me. My straw hat had been crushed and forgotten.

23“Don’t you hit my brother!” the new boy yelled.

24“Two fighting one ain’t fair!” I yelled.

25Both of them now closed in on me. A blow landed on the back of my head. I turned and saw a brick rolling away and I felt blood oozing down my back. I looked around and saw several brickbats scattered about. I scooped up a handful. The two boys backed away. I took aim as they circled me; I made a motion as if to throw and one of the boys turned and ran. I let go with the brick and caught him in the middle of his back. He screamed. I chased the other halfway around the schoolyard. The boys howled their delight; they crowded around me, telling me that I had fought with two bullies. Then suddenly the crowd quieted and parted. I saw a woman teacher bearing down upon me. I dabbed at the blood on my neck.

26“Was it you who threw that brick?” she asked.

27“Two boys were fighting me,” I told her.

28“Come,” she said, taking my hand.

29I entered school escorted by the teacher, under arrest. I was taken to a room and confronted with the two brothers.

30“Are these the boys?” she asked.

31“Both of ’em fought me,” I said. “I had to fight back.”

32“He hit me first!” one brother yelled.

33“You’re lying!” I yelled back.

34“Don’t you use that language in here,” the teacher said.

35“But they’re not telling the truth,” I said. “I’m new here and they tore up my hat.”

36“He hit me first,” the boy said again.

37I reached around the teacher, who stood between us, and smacked the boy. He screamed and started at me. The teacher grabbed us.

38“The very idea of you!” the teacher shouted at me. “You are trying to fight right in school! What’s the matter with you?”

39“He’s not telling the truth,” I maintained.

40She ordered me to sit down; I did, but kept my eyes on the two brothers. The teacher dragged them out of the room and I sat until she returned.

41“I’m in a good mind not to let you off this time,” she said.

42“It wasn’t my fault,” I said.

43“I know. But you hit one of those boys right in here,” she said.

44“I’m sorry.”

45She asked me my name and sent me to a room. For a reason I could not understand, I was assigned to the fifth grade. Would they detect that I did not belong there? I sat and waited. When I was asked my age I called it out and was accepted.

46I studied night and day and within two weeks I was promoted to the sixth grade. Overjoyed, I ran home and babbled the news. The family had not thought it possible. How could a bad, bad boy do that? I told the family emphatically that I was going to study medicine, engage in research, make discoveries. Flushed with success, I had not given a second’s thought to how I would pay my way through a medical school. But since I had leaped a grade in two weeks, anything seemed possible, simple, easy.

47I was now with boys and girls who were studying, fighting, talking; it revitalized my being, whipped my senses to a high, keen pitch of receptivity. I knew that my life was revolving about a world that I had to encounter and fight when I grew up. Suddenly the future loomed tangibly for me, as tangible as a future can loom for a black boy in Mississippi.

48Most of my schoolmates worked mornings, evenings, and Saturdays; they earned enough to buy their clothes and books, and they had money in their pockets at school. To see a boy go into a grocery store at noon recess and let his eyes roam over filled shelves and pick out what he wanted—even a dime’s worth—was a hairbreadth short of a miracle to me. But when I broached the idea of my working to Granny, she would have none of it; she laid down the injunction that I could not work on Saturdays while I slept under her roof. I argued that Saturdays were the only days on which I could earn any worth-while sum, and Granny looked me straight in the eyes and quoted Scripture:

49But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; that thy manservant and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou....

50And that was the final word. Though we lived just on the borders of actual starvation, I could not bribe Granny with a promise of half or two-thirds of my salary; her answer was no and never. Her refusal wrought me up to a high pitch of nervousness and I cursed myself for being made to live a different and crazy life. I told Granny that she was not responsible for my soul, and she replied that I was a minor, that my soul’s fate rested in her hands, that I had no word to say in the matter.

51To protect myself against pointed questions about my home and my life, to avoid being invited out when I knew that I could not accept, I was reserved with the boys and girls at school, seeking their company but never letting them guess how much I was being kept out of the world in which they lived, valuing their casual friendships but hiding it, acutely self-conscious but covering it with a quick smile and a ready phrase. Each day at noon I would follow the boys and girls into the corner store and stand against a wall and watch them buy sandwiches, and when they would ask me: “Why don’t you eat a lunch?” I would answer with a shrug of my shoulders: “Aw, I’m not hungry at noon, ever.” And I would swallow my saliva as I saw them split open loaves of bread and line them with juicy sardines. Again and again I vowed that someday I would end this hunger of mine, this apartness, this eternal difference; and I did not suspect that I would never get intimately into their lives, that I was doomed to live with them but not of them, that I had my own strange and separate road, a road which in later years would make them wonder how I had come to tread it.

52I now saw a world leap to life before my eyes because I could explore it, and that meant not going home when school was out, but wandering, watching, asking, talking. Had I gone home to eat my plate of greens, Granny would not have allowed me out again, so the penalty I paid for roaming was to forfeit my food for twelve hours. I would eat mush at eight in the morning and greens at seven or later at night. To starve in order to learn about my environment was irrational, but so were my hungers. With my books slung over my shoulder, I would tramp with a gang into the woods, to rivers, to creeks, into the business district, to the doors of poolrooms, into the movies when we could slip in without paying, to neighborhood ball games, to brick kilns, to lumberyards, to cottonseed mills to watch men work. There were hours when hunger would make me weak, would make me sway while walking, would make my heart give a sudden wild spurt of beating that would shake my body and make me breathless; but the happiness of being free would lift me beyond hunger, would enable me to discipline the sensations of my body to the extent that I could temporarily forget.

53In my class was a tall, black, rebellious boy who was bright in his studies and yet utterly fearless in his assertion of himself; he could break the morale of the class at any moment with his clowning and the teacher never found an adequate way of handling him. It was he who detected my plaguing hunger and suggested to me a way to earn some money.

54“You can’t sit in school all day and not eat,” he said.

55“What am I going to eat?” I asked.

56“Why don’t you do like me?”

57“What do you do?”

58“I sell papers.”

59“I tried to get a paper route, but they’re all full,” I said. “I’d like to sell papers because I could read them. I can’t find things to read.”

60“You too?” he asked, laughing.

61“What do you mean?” I asked.

62“That’s why I sell papers. I like to read ’em and that’s the only way I can get hold of ’em,” he explained.

63“Do your parents object to your reading?” I asked.

64“Yeah. My old man’s a damn crackpot,” he said.

65“What papers are you selling?”

66“It’s a paper published in Chicago. It comes out each week and it has a magazine supplement,” he informed me.

67“What kind of a paper is it?”

68“Well, I never read the newspaper. It isn’t much. But, boy, the magazine supplement! What stories.... I’m reading the serial of Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage.”

69I stared at him in complete disbelief.

70“Riders of the Purple Sage!” I exclaimed.

71“Yes.”

72“Do you think I can sell those papers?”

73“Sure. I make over fifty cents a week and have stuff to read,” he explained.

74I followed him home and he gave me a copy of the newspaper and the magazine supplement. The newspaper was thin, ill-edited, and designed to circulate among rural, white Protestant readers.

75“Hurry up and start selling ’em,” he urged me. “I’d like to talk to you about the stories.”

76I promised him that I would order a batch of them that night. I walked home through the deepening twilight, reading, lifting my eyes now and then from the print in order not to collide with strangers. I was absorbed in the tale of a renowned scientist who had rigged up a mystery room made of metal in the basement of his palatial home. Prompted by some obscure motive, he would lure his victims into this room and then throw an electric switch. Slowly, with heart-racking agony, the air would be sucked from the metal room and his victims would die, turning red, blue, then black. This was what I wanted, tales like this. I had not read enough to have developed any taste in reading. Anything that interested me satisfied me.

77Now, at last, I could have my reading in the home, could have it there with the approval of Granny. She had already given me permission to sell papers. Oh, boy, how lucky it was for me that Granny could not read! She had always burned the books I had brought into the house, branding them as worldly; but she would have to tolerate these papers if she was to keep her promise to me. Aunt Addie’s opinion did not count, and she never paid any attention to me anyway. In her eyes, I was dead. I told Granny that I planned to make some money by selling papers and she agreed, thinking that at last I was becoming a serious, right-thinking boy. That night I ordered the papers and waited anxiously.

78The papers arrived and I scoured the Negro area, slowly building up a string of customers who bought the papers more because they knew me than from any desire to read. When I returned home at night, I would go to my room and lock the door and revel in outlandish exploits of outlandish men in faraway, outlandish cities. For the first time in my life I became aware of the life of the modern world, of vast cities, and I was claimed by it; I loved it. Though they were merely stories, I accepted them as true because I wanted to believe them, because I hungered for a different life, for something new. The cheap pulp tales enlarged my knowledge of the world more than anything I had encountered so far. To me, with my roundhouse, saloon-door, and river-levee background, they were revolutionary, my gateway to the world.

79I was happy and would have continued to sell the newspaper and its magazine supplement indefinitely had it not been for the racial pride of a friend of the family. He was a tall, quiet, sober, soft-spoken black man, a carpenter by trade. One evening I called at his home with the paper. He gave me a dime, then looked at me oddly.

80“You know, son,” he said, “I sure like to see you make a little money each week.”

81“Thank you, sir,” I said.

82“But tell me, who told you to sell these papers?” he asked.

83“Nobody.”

84“Where do you get them from?”

85“Chicago.”

86“Do you ever read ’em?”

87“Sure. I read the stories in the magazine supplement,” I explained. “But I never read the newspaper.”

88He was silent a moment.

89“Did a white man ask you to sell these papers?” he asked.

90“No, sir,” I answered, puzzled now. “Why do you ask?”

91“Do your folks know you are selling these papers?”

92“Yes, sir. But what’s wrong?”

93“How did you know where to write for these papers?” he asked, ignoring my questions.

94“A friend of mine sells them. He gave me the address.”

95“Is this friend of yours a white man?”

96“No, sir. He’s colored. But why are you asking me all this?”

97He did not answer. He was sitting on the steps of his front porch. He rose slowly.

98“Wait right here a minute, son,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

99Now what was wrong? The papers were all right; at least they seemed so to me. I waited, annoyed, eager to be gone on my rounds so that I could have time to get home and lie in bed and read the next installment of a thrilling horror story. The man returned with a carefully folded copy of the newspaper. He handed it to me.

100“Did you see this?” he asked, pointing to a lurid cartoon.

101“No, sir,” I said. “I don’t read the newspaper; I only read the magazine.”

102“Well, just look at that. Take your time and tell me what you think,” he said.

103It was the previous week’s issue and I looked at the picture of a huge black man with a greasy, sweaty face, thick lips, flat nose, golden teeth, sitting at a polished, wide-topped desk in a swivel chair. The man had on a pair of gleaming yellow shoes and his feet were propped upon the desk. His thick lips nursed a big, black cigar that held white ashes an inch long. In the man’s red-dotted tie was a dazzling horseshoe stickpin, glaring conspicuously. The man wore red suspenders and his shirt was striped silk and there were huge diamond rings on his fat black fingers. A chain of gold girded his belly and from the fob of his watch a rabbit’s foot dangled. On the floor at the side of the desk was a spittoon overflowing with mucus. Across the wall of the room in which the man sat was a bold sign, reading:

104The White House

105Under the sign was a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, the features distorted to make the face look like that of a gangster. My eyes went to the top of the cartoon and I read:

106The only dream of a nigger is to be president and to sleep

107with white women! Americans, do we want this in our fair

108land? Organize and save white womanhood!

109I stared, trying to grasp the point of the picture and the captions, wondering why it all seemed so strange and yet familiar.

110“Do you know what this means?” the man asked me.

111“Gee, I don’t know,” I confessed.

112“Did you ever hear of the Ku Klux Klan?” he asked me softly.

113“Sure. Why?”

114“Do you know what the Ku Kluxers do to colored people?”

115“They kill us. They keep us from voting and getting good jobs,” I said.

116“Well, the paper you’re selling preaches the Ku Klux Klan doctrines,” he said.

117“Oh, no!” I exclaimed.

118“Son, you’re holding it in your hands,” he said.

119“I read the magazine, but I never read the paper,” I said vaguely, thoroughly rattled.

120“Listen, son,” he said. “Listen. You’re a black boy and you’re trying to make a few pennies. All right. I don’t want to stop you from selling these papers, if you want to sell ’em. But I’ve read these papers now for two months and I know what they’re trying to do. If you sell ’em, you’re just helping white people to kill you.”

121“But these papers come from Chicago,” I protested naïvely, feeling unsure of the entire world now, feeling that racial propaganda surely could not be published in Chicago, the city to which Negroes were fleeing by the thousands.

122“I don’t care where the paper comes from,” he said. “Just you listen to this.”

123He read aloud a long article in which lynching was passionately advocated as a solution for the problem of the Negro. Even though I heard him reading it, I could not believe it.

124“Let me see that,” I said.

125I took the paper from him and sat on the edge of the steps; in the paling light I turned the pages and read articles so brutally anti-Negro that goose pimples broke out over my skin.

126“Do you like that?” he asked me.

127“No, sir,” I breathed.

128“Do you see what you are doing? ’

129“I didn’t know,” I mumbled.

130“Are you going to sell those papers now?”

131“No, sir. Never again.”

132“They tell me that you are smart in school, and when I read those papers you were selling I didn’t know what to make of it. Then I said to myself that that boy doesn’t know what he’s selling. Now, a lot of folks wanted to speak to you about these papers, but they were scared. They thought you were mixed up with some white Ku Kluxers and if they told you to stop you would put the Kluxers on ’em. But I said, shucks, that boy just don’t know what he’s doing.”

133I handed him his dime, but he would not take it.

134“Keep the dime, son,” he said. “But for God’s sake, find something else to sell.”

135I did not try to sell any more of the papers that night; I walked home with them under my arm, feeling that some Negro would leap from a bush or fence and waylay me. How on earth could I have made so grave a mistake? The way I had erred was simple but utterly unbelievable. I had been so enthralled by reading the serial stories in the magazine supplement that I had not read a single issue of the newspaper. I decided to keep my misadventure secret, that I would tell no one that I had been unwittingly an agent for pro-Ku Klux Klan literature. I tossed the papers into a ditch and when I reached home I told Granny, in a quiet, offhand way, that the company did not want to send me any more papers because they already had too many agents in Jackson, a lie which I thought was an understatement of the actual truth. Granny did not care one way or the other, since I had been making so little money in selling them that I had not been able to help much with household expenses.

136The father of the boy who had urged me to sell the papers also found out their propagandistic nature and forbade his son to sell them. But the boy and I never discussed the subject; we were too ashamed of ourselves. One day he asked me guardedly:

137“Say, are you still selling those papers?”

138“Oh, no. I don’t have time,” I said, my eyes avoiding his.

139“I’m not either,” he said, pulling down the corners of his mouth. “I’m too busy.”

140I burned at my studies. At the beginning of the school term I read my civics and English and geography volumes through and only referred to them when in class. I solved all my mathematical problems far in advance; then, during school hours, when I was not called on to recite, I read tattered, secondhand copies of Flynn’s Detective Weekly or the Argosy All-Story Magazine, or dreamed, weaving fantasies about cities I had never seen and about people I had never met.

141School ended. I could not get a job that would let me rest on Granny’s holy Sabbath. The long hot idle summer days palled on me. I sat at home brooding, nursing bodily and spiritual hunger. In the afternoons, after the sun had spent its force, I played ball with the neighborhood boys. At night I sat on the front steps and stared blankly at the passing people, wagons, cars....

142On one such lazy, hot summer night Granny, my mother, and Aunt Addie were sitting on the front porch, arguing some obscure point of religious doctrine. I sat huddled on the steps, my cheeks resting sullenly in my palms, half listening to what the grownups were saying and half lost in a daydream. Suddenly the dispute evoked an idea in me and, forgetting that I had no right to speak without permission, I piped up and had my say. I must have sounded reekingly blasphemous, for Granny said, “Shut up, you!” and leaned forward promptly to chastise me with one of her casual, back-handed slaps on my mouth. But I had by now become adept at dodging blows and I nimbly ducked my head. She missed me; the force of her blow was so strong that she fell down the steps, headlong, her aged body wedged in a narrow space between the fence and the bottom step. I leaped up. Aunt Addie and my mother screamed and rushed down the steps and tried to pull Granny’s body out. But they could not move her. Grandpa was called and he had to tear the fence down to rescue Granny. She was barely conscious. They put her to bed and summoned a doctor.

143I was frightened. I ran to my room and locked the door, fearing that Grandpa would rend me to pieces. Had I done right or had I done wrong? If I had held still and let Granny slap me, she would not have fallen. But was it not natural to dodge a blow? I waited, trembling. But no one came to my room. The house was quiet. Was Granny dead? Hours later I unlocked the door and crept downstairs. Well, I told myself, if Granny died, I would leave home. There was nothing else to do. Aunt Addie confronted me in the hallway with burning, black eyes.

144“You see what you’ve done to Granny,” she said.

145“I didn’t touch her,” I said. I had wanted to ask how Granny was, but my fear made me forget that.

146“You were trying to kill her,” Aunt Addie said.

147“I didn’t touch Granny, and you know it!”

148“You are evil. You bring nothing but trouble!”

149“I was trying to dodge her. She was trying to hit me. I had done nothing wrong....”

150Her lips moved silently as she sought to formulate words to place me in a position of guilt.

151“Why do you butt in when grown people are talking?” she demanded, finding her weapon at last.

152“I just wanted to talk,” I mumbled sullenly. “I sit in this house for hours and I can’t even talk.”

153“Hereafter, you keep your mouth shut until you’re spoken to,” she advised me.

154“But Granny oughtn’t always be hitting at me like that,” I said as delicately as possible.

155“Boy, don’t you stand there and say what Granny ought to do,” she blazed, finding her ground of accusation. “If you don’t keep your mouth shut, then I’ll hit you!” she continued.

156“I’m only trying to explain why Granny fell,” I said.

157“Shut up, now! Or I’ll wring your neck, you fool!”

158“You’re another fool!” I came back at her, angry now.

159She trembled with fury.

160“I’ll fix you this night!” she said, rushing at me.

161I dodged her and ran into the kitchen and grabbed the long bread knife. She followed me and I confronted her. I was so hysterical that I was crying.

162“If you touch me, I’ll cut you, so help me,” I said in gasps. “I’m going to leave here as soon as I can work and make a living. But as long’s I’m here, you better not touch me.”

163We stood looking into each other’s eyes, our bodies trembling with hate.

164“I’m going to get you for this,” she vowed in a low, serious voice. “I’ll get you when you haven’t got a knife.”

165“I’ll always keep a knife for you,” I told her.

166“You’ve got to sleep at night,” she whimpered with rage. “I’ll get you then.”

167“If you touch me when I’m sleeping, I’ll kill you,” I told her.

168She walked out of the kitchen, kicking the door open before her as she went. Aunt Addie had a habit of kicking doors; she always paused before a partly opened door and kicked it open; if the door swung in, she flung it back with her foot; or, if the door was shut, she opened it with her hand for an inch or two, then opened it the rest of the way with her foot; she acted as though she wanted to get a glimpse into the room beyond before she entered it, perhaps to see if it contained anything dreadful or unholy.

169For a month after that I took a kitchen knife to bed with me each night, hiding it under my pillow so that when Aunt Addie came I could protect myself. But she never came. Perhaps she prayed.

170Granny was abed for six weeks; she had wrenched her back when her slap missed me.

171There were more violent quarrels in our deeply religious home than in the home of a gangster, a burglar, or a prostitute, a fact which I used to hint gently to Granny and which did my cause no good. Granny bore the standard for God, but she was always fighting. The peace that passes understanding never dwelt with us. I, too, fought; but I fought because I felt I had to keep from being crushed, to fend off continuous attack. But Granny and Aunt Addie quarreled and fought not only with me, but with each other over minor points of religious doctrine, or over some imagined infraction of what they chose to call their moral code. Wherever I found religion in my life I found strife, the attempt of one individual or group to rule another in the name of God. The naked will to power seemed always to walk in the wake of a hymn.

172As summer waned I obtained a strange job. Our next-door neighbor, a janitor, decided to change his profession and become an insurance agent. He was handicapped by illiteracy and he offered me the job of accompanying him on trips into the delta plantation area to write and figure for him, at wages of five dollars a week. I made several trips with Brother Mance, as he was called, to plantation shacks, sleeping on shuck mattresses, eating salt pork and black-eyed peas for breakfast, dinner, and supper; and drinking, for once, all the milk I wanted.

173I had all but forgotten that I had been born on a plantation and I was astonished at the ignorance of the children I met. I had been pitying myself for not having books to read, and now I saw children who had never read a book. Their chronic shyness made me seem bold and city-wise; a black mother would try to lure her brood into the room to shake hands with me and they would linger at the jamb of the door, peering at me with one eye, giggling hysterically. At night, seated at a crude table, with a kerosene lamp spluttering at my elbow, I would fill out insurance applications, and a sharecropper family, fresh from laboring in the fields, would stand and gape. Brother Mance would pace the floor, extolling my abilities with pen and paper. Many of the naïve black families bought their insurance from us because they felt that they were connecting themselves with something that would make their children “write ’n speak lak dat pretty boy from Jackson.”

174The trips were hard. Riding trains, autos, or buggies, moving from morning till night, we went from shack to shack, plantation to plantation. Exhausted, I filled out applications. I saw a bare, bleak pool of black life and I hated it; the people were alike, their homes were alike, and their farms were alike. On Sundays Brother Mance would go to the nearest country church and give his sales talk, preaching it in the form of a sermon, clapping his hands as he did so, spitting on the floor to mark off his paragraphs, and stomping his feet in the spit to punctuate his sentences, all of which captivated the black sharecroppers. After the performance the walleyed yokels would flock to Brother Mance, and I would fill out applications until my fingers ached.

175I returned home with a pocketful of money that melted into the bottomless hunger of the household. My mother was proud; even Aunt Addie’s hostility melted temporarily. To Granny, I had accomplished a miracle and some of my sinful qualities evaporated, for she felt that success spelled the reward of righteousness and that failure was the wages of sin. But God called Brother Mance to heaven that winter and, since the insurance company would not accept a minor as an agent, my status reverted to a worldly one; the holy household was still burdened with a wayward boy to whom, in spite of all, sin somehow insisted upon clinging.

176School opened and I began the seventh grade. My old hunger was still with me and I lived on what I did not eat. Perhaps the sunshine, the fresh air, and the pot liquor from greens kept me going. Of an evening I would sit in my room reading, and suddenly I would become aware of smelling meat frying in a neighbor’s kitchen and would wonder what it was like to eat as much meat as one wanted. My mind would drift into a fantasy and I would imagine myself a son in a family that had meat on the table at each meal; then I would become disgusted with my futile daydreams and would rise and shut the window to bar the torturing scent of meat.

177When I came downstairs one morning and went into the dining room for my bowl of mush and lard gravy I felt at once that something serious was happening in the family. Grandpa, as usual, was not at the table; he always had his meals in his room. Granny nodded me to my seat; I sat and bowed my head. From under my brows I saw my mother’s tight face. Aunt Addie’s eyes were closed, her forehead furrowed, her lips trembling. Granny buried her face in her hands. I wanted to ask what had happened, but I knew that I would not get an answer.

178Granny prayed and invoked the blessings of God for each of us, asking Him to guide us if it was His will, and then she told God that “my poor old husband lies sick this beautiful morning” and asked God, if it was His will, to heal him. That was how I learned of Grandpa’s final illness. On many occasions I learned of some event, a death, a birth, or an impending visit, some happening in the neighborhood, at her church, or at some relative’s home, first through Granny’s informative prayers at the breakfast or dinner table.

179Grandpa was a tall, black, lean man with a long face, snow-white teeth, and a head of woolly white hair. In anger he bared his teeth—a habit, Granny said, that he had formed while fighting in the trenches of the Civil War—and hissed, while his fists would clench until the veins swelled. In his rare laughs he bared his teeth in the same way, only now his teeth did not flash long and his body was relaxed. He owned a sharp pocketknife—which I had been forbidden to touch—and sat for long hours in the sun, whittling, whistling quietly, or maybe, if he was feeling well, humming some strange tune.

180I had often tried to ask him about the Civil War, how he had fought, what he had felt, had he seen Lincoln, but he would never respond.

181“You, git ’way frum me, you young’un,” was all that he would ever say.

182From Granny I learned—over a course of years—that he had been wounded in the Civil War and had never received his disability pension, a fact which he hugged close to his heart with bitterness. I never heard him speak of white people; I think he hated them too much to talk of them. In the process of being discharged from the Union Army, he had gone to a white officer to seek help in filling out his papers. In filling out the papers, the white officer misspelled Grandpa’s name, making him Richard Vinson instead of Richard Wilson. It was possible that Grandpa’s southern accent and his illiteracy made him mispronounce his own name. It was rumored that the white officer had been a Swede and had had a poor knowledge of English. Another rumor had it that the white officer had been a Southerner and had deliberately falsified Grandpa’s papers. Anyway, Grandpa did not discover that he had been discharged in the name of Richard Vinson until years later; and when he applied to the War Department for a pension, no trace could be found of his ever having served in the Union Army under the name of Richard Wilson.

183I asked endless questions about Grandpa’s pension, but information was always denied me on the grounds that I was too young to know what was involved. For decades a long correspondence took place between Grandpa and the War Department; in letter after letter Grandpa would recount events and conversations (always dictating these long accounts to others); he would name persons long dead, citing their ages and descriptions, reconstructing battles in which he had fought, naming towns, rivers, creeks, roads, cities, villages, citing the names and numbers of regiments and companies with which he had fought, giving the exact day and the exact hour of the day of certain occurrences, and send it all to the War Department in Washington.

184I used to get the mail early in the morning and whenever there was a long, businesslike envelope in the stack, I would know that Grandpa had got an answer from the War Department and I would run upstairs with it. Grandpa would lift his head from the pillow, take the letter from me and open it himself. He would stare at the black print for a long time, then reluctantly, distrustfully hand the letter to me.

185“Well?” he would say.

186And I would read him the letter—reading slowly and pronouncing each word with extreme care—telling him that his claims for a pension had not been substantiated and that his application had been rejected. Grandpa would not blink an eye, then he would curse softly under his breath.

187“It’s them goddamn rebels,” he would hiss.

188As though doubting what I had read, he would dress up and take the letter to at least a dozen of his friends in the neighborhood and ask them to read it to him; finally he would know it from memory. At last he would put the letter away carefully and begin his brooding again, trying to recall out of his past some telling fact that might help him in getting his pension. Like “K” of Kafka’s novel, The Castle, he tried desperately to persuade the authorities of his true identity right up to the day of his death, and failed.

189Often, when there was no food in the house, I would dream of the Government’s sending a letter that would read something like this:

190Dear Sir:

191Your claim for a pension has been verified. The matter of your name has been satisfactorily cleared up. In accordance with official regulations, we are hereby instructing the Secretary of the Treasury to compile and compute and send to you, as soon as it is convenient, the total amount of all moneys past due, together with interest, for the past —— years, the amount being $——.

192We regret profoundly that you have been so long delayed in this matter. You may be assured that your sacrifice has been a boon and a solace to your country.

193But no letter like that ever came, and Grandpa was so sullen most of the time that I stopped dreaming of him and his hopes. Whenever he walked into my presence I became silent, waiting for him to speak, wondering if he were going to upbraid me for something. I would relax when he left. My will to talk to him gradually died.