Dark Don't Catch Me Read online

  Colonel Pirkle mopped his brow with his shirt sleeve. “Yep! She’s like irrigation to these drought-swollen parts.”

  “Half-past twelve. I got to get me back to my mill.” Storey Bailey turned away abruptly.

  “Don’t go away mad,” the coroner shouted at his back; then chuckling to the others said, “I think ole Storey’s got a thing for Vivie Hooper.”

  “Maybe so, Doc,” the sitter said, “but Kate Bailey sure ain’t gonna let him do a dong-damn thing about it!”

  It is hot in Paradise this Tuesday noon; hot and still humid from yesterday’s brief shower — a warm, sticky drizzle that did little more than stir the dust on the redclay-caked roads; It is far too hot to quarrel, Bill Ficklin decides as he parks in the circle before the courthouse.

  “All right,” he tells his wife, cutting the engine, “I’ll ask the boys if they’ve seen Major. But — ” he starts to add; then decides against it. He pushes down the door handle to get out.

  She says, “But what?”

  “But I think you’re making too much of the matter.”

  “Fick, I tell you it’s in little ways like this we’ve got to be firm with him. Now you know I think the world and all of Major, but — ”

  Bill Ficklin answers, “All right. Okay,” slams the door shut, and crosses to the square.

  Ficklin is superintendent of schools in Paradise; a chunky, happy-faced fellow who favors tweeds, smokes a pipe, and looks a young forty-five. Before he came back to his home town, he taught civics at the University up in Athens, and the first time he ever saw the girl who became his wife, she was wearing bobby socks, leaning seductively against his desk, and asking him questions about the next day’s assignment. She stood out from all of his other students, not only because she was a Northerner, but because she was more flamboyant; less unsure of herself, and almost patronizing toward Ficklin, at those times when she would corner him before or after class, or encounter him on campus. There was always a streak of bright color about her; a fire-colored scarf, an angora sweater of deep azure, or a brilliant kelly-green stripe down a quiet gray dress; something arresting in her attire that seemed to parallel the wild streak of independence in her personality.

  She would meet him on the library steps quite by accident, knowing him no better than any of his other students; and stopping, smiling up at him with her large shining green eyes, she would say something like: “Why, hello, Professor Ficklin! Isn’t it a gorgeous day. But you look a little tired, hmmm? I think you ought to just relax a little more.”

  Coming from any other co-ed, Bill Ficklin would have simply ignored the remark and the searching look. He was one of the youngest members of the faculty; and he was a bachelor, so he was accustomed to the whims and fancies of many of the girls he taught; accustomed and somewhat heavily resigned — but Marianne Powell affected him vaguely, though from the very beginning he was not certain why that was.

  “It’s quite simple,” a colleague remarked one evening in the faculty lounge, after he had been chiding Bill about his “tender tête-à-têtes” with a student — and Bill Ficklin had admitted his fascination with Marianne — ”she’s pretty. She’s gay. And you’re falling in love with her.”

  Ficklin’s marriage to Marianne at the year’s end created a mild scandal in university circles. There was seventeen years’ difference in their ages; and while Bill Ficklin was a rather conscientious, serious, but by no means timid or puritanical, man — she was a quite frivolous, capricious nineteen years old.

  Whenever they had a disagreement, such as the one this morning about Major Post, Bill Ficklin always thought as he thinks now: nine years have sobered her considerably beyond the point he had expected when he had first married her. At twenty-eight she is still pretty and young and gay; yet more and more an irritating rigidity is cropping into her personality, coupled with a vague restlessness. It still irks Ficklin to recall her last summer’s suggestion (which he had rejected with an unprecedented burst of temper) that they take separate vacations, even though she had insisted, after his rage was spent, that she had only been thinking of him.

  This noon he had come home for lunch and found her near to angry tears because young Major Post, after emptying trash, had not replaced the cans in the cellar. She had demanded that while Bill Ficklin drove her to the band rehearsal at the Methodist Church, they stop off in town and try to find Major and make him return and finish his chore. Often, in between the Negro’s morning job at the Ficklins and his afternoon job up at the Hooper’s, he ate his lunch down under the trees across the street from the county courthouse. The small area there where the local Negroes were prone to gather was known in Paradise as “Black Patch”; but when Ficklin glanced over there as he was parking his car, he saw no sign of Major Post.

  “Get out anyway,” his wife said, “and ask Doc Sell. He’s right there, Fick.” She had pointed out the coroner on the bench. “He knows Major.”

  So Ficklin is doing as she directed now — reluctantly, and somewhat puzzled at her determination in such a small matter; but it is too hot to argue.

  In Paradise, people like Bill Ficklin; but they say he’s got a weakness that could make him unpopular: when the Supreme Court ruling ordered desegregation in the public schools, Ficklin called it progress. Of course he didn’t start any campaign to enforce the law — he isn’t a radical — but he did speak out in favor of putting the Negroes on an equal footing with the whites, and that alone was enough to make a lot of folks in the town wary of him. Doc Sell, for one, became not only wary of him, but disgusted with him; and even now, as he watches Ficklin approach, he feels a twinge of fury. He thinks: Fick married himself a goddam Yankee and turned himself into one of these nigger-lovers; and smiling, touching a finger to his brow in a salute, he says: “Hi, boy!” “Hi, Doc. Colonel. Hi.”

  “Who you rooting for in the series, boy?” Colonel asks. “Dodgers, I guess. Feel sorry for them. Nice to see them win one.”

  “Yep!” Sell muses, “you’re partial to the underdog. But I thought you’d be for the Yankees, boy.”

  Ficklin is oblivious to the masked insinuation. “You seen Major Post around?” he asks.

  “I saw him a while back. Wasn’t an hour ago, was it, Colonel? Wasn’t he over there in Black Patch laughing up a storm with them other niggers?”

  “Yes,” says Colonel, “but I guess he went on.”

  “You going to Hoopers’ tonight, Colonel?” Ficklin lights a cigarette before turning back to his car.

  “I wouldn’t miss one of Thad’s barbecues.”

  “Well, I’ll see you there then. Ada coming?”

  As he pauses to suck in some drags on his cigarette, the horn of his automobile honks.

  “Wife’s in a hurry, eh?” Sell smiles. “All them Yankees rush.”

  “Yes, Ada’ll be along,” Colonel nods.

  “Well, got to get my spouse over to the band rehearsal!” Ficklin waves and starts back to the car.

  Watching him go, Doc Sell says, “Ain’t it just like Fick to hire the uppitiest nigger around to work for him!”

  “Hmmm?” Colonel murmurs abstractly, thinking. They all know about Ada. Funny I never realized until right now that they all know about her.

  • • •

  For the most part in Paradise people lead a quiet kind of routine existence that keeps them over-all content. But like people anywhere they sometimes get a hankering for some excitement. A barbecue, like the one the Hoopers are throwing tonight, is one way of satisfying the yen; and there are others with other ways. Maybe the colored get together out at Moccasin Gap and “whup it up” on stumpwater; or maybe some of the poor white “lintheads” that work the mill in nearby Galverton pay a call on Miss Mary Jane Frances Alexander’s establishment, where even if the humping isn’t as wild as Macon tail, it’s cheaper and easier to get at. Individuals, like Hollis Jordan, might work it off by strolling through Awful Dark Woods and belting out a lot of high-sounding poetry for the oaks and black gums to
bounce off their trunks; or some, like black Bryan Post, might ease it out of the system by somersaulting clear down Main Street on a bellyful of homebrew beer, while folks standing around gawk and giggle and guffaw.

  There are ways and ways to provide Paradise with this excitement it sometimes craves; and one of the best and most popular ways is to get the band out and playing. When fireworks don’t faze folks much any more and county fairs begin to wear off, the Paradise Bigger Band brings almost everyone back into the fold of 906 citizens of the city; proud and pleased as punch with life in Paradise. Folks say even if the only piece the P.B.B. could play was “Marching Through Georgia,” there’d be a crowd on hand glad to hear it.

  Over at the Methodist Church where Kate Bailey is waiting to rehearse the band, the atmosphere is tense. The members of the P.B.B., all women, sit cradling their saxophones, trumpets and clarinets; nervously smoothing their hands along the gaudy silkiness of their bright gold satin band blouses; while Kate Bailey stands in that stick-straight way she does when anything upsets her, with her small hands folded together in front of her, and her tiny round eyes peering furtively at the Reverend Joh Greene’s wife, trying to stop her from continuing.

  “… and at the crossroads, as I was saying,” Guessie Greene, who has just arrived, goes on, depositing a bunch of autumn leaves on one of the folding chairs, and beginning to unbutton her blue angora sweater, “Hollis Jordan himself was ahead of me in his car, heading out for the woods, no doubt, and — ”

  More intensely, Kate fixes her eyes on Guessie’s face, trying to warn Guessie, trying to tell Guessie who is there, who just materialized at the band rehearsal unannounced — but Guessie does not see the visitor and continues too rapidly and haphazardly to get the message:

  “… when the train came along, you know what he did? He just sat there in his car with his hand on the horn, blowing that horn the whole time it took for the train to go by, blowing it like a crazy man, as though his blowing was going to affect that train any. I had to laugh to myself to see him sitting there mad as anything blowing that horn!”

  “All right, everybody, all right,” Kate starts screeching frantically. “Even though Marianne’s late, we’ll start right now. Get set! ‘Loch Lomond’ first! Get set!”

  “I swear sometimes I think that man is missing upstairs,” Guessie adds. “Hoo, I do! I liked to die laughing when I saw that crazy old Hollis Jordan — ” and then she stops, because while she was saying this, she was seeing for the first time, that Ada Pirkle is sitting there in the chair by the wall, sitting and listening; and Guessie’s words just trail off like air seeping slowly out of a rubber tire; and there is this awful moment of sudden, sick silence.

  Then Bigger Band members rattle their sheets of music, shift in their seats, shuffle their shoes on the cement floor, while Kate Bailey begins tapping her feet and shaking her fingers, singing in that squirrel-high squeaky voice of hers:

  By yon bon-nie banks and by yon bon-nie braes, Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lo —

  Until everyone in the basement puts their instrument in position, trying desperately to deprive the moment of any significance by immersing it in the clamorous noise of the Paradise Bigger Band.

  And typical awful, Ada Pirkle thinks; I live only for Dix.

  3

  WALKING AWAY from Jack Rowan and the others down on Main, Major Post sees Dix Pirkle being stopped at the corner by the Reverend Joh Greene. Passing the pair, Major hears Joh Greene say, “Hey, now, Dix, that was a right smart editorial you wrote for your father about Senator Henderson. You know you’re right, Dix, the Senator may be old, but he’s still a good man.”

  “Thank you, sir. Glad you liked it.”

  Joh Greene chuckles and rubs his hands together.

  “You know, Dix, I’d like to have a little chat with you, if you can spare the time. We could walk over to the vestry if you got the time to spare. Got a radio over there we can hear the game on. What do you say, Dix? Can I see you on it?”

  “Well, sir — ” Dix interrupts his conversation with the Reverend as Major passes them.

  Dix says, “Hi, Major.”

  “Dix.”

  “Who you rooting for, Major?” “I’m not following it, Dix.”

  “You’re the only one that isn’t, Major,” Dix calls after him.

  Dix Pirkle is all right, Major thinks, but always goes out of his way. Why? Like his father, some; following in his father’s footsteps; working for the Herald; chairing committees to raise funds for a new Negro school — the progressive type of Southerner, too progressive to say nigger; not progressive enough to say Negro; so say Nigra. He’s all right, though, as all right as a white can get and live in Georgia too. Had his share of troubles besides; losing his wife like that to cancer — and still so young, only nineteen or so; the both of them married right out of High and then she died, leaving him a son under two years … God, and everybody in Paradise knows Dix Pirkle’s mother is a mess.

  Major forgets Dix and turns up Church Street, remembering again Jack Rowan’s joke. He’s still mad at it; mad at Jack for telling it; mad at himself for stopping long enough to listen to it. Park your horse outside and come in. Yeah, nigger, you never will get to heaven; even if a white man tries to ride you in. That’s funny, sure enough, like all Jack’s jokes are; Jack’s and nine out of ten of the Negroes’ in Paradise; always got to feed their bellies with crow in that insidious way; make it a joke they’re nothing but “niggers;” take all the traits the white folks say they got — hear them tell it all Negro men sleep under tents for thinking about white tail — and make it a joke, and tell it and haw-w, gaw-dog, laugh!

  Major sinks his long hands into his khaki-colored cotton trousers, kicks a stone off the sidewalk on Church Street as he heads off in the direction of Brockton Road, the good part of “The Toe,” colored town. He is a strong-looking, six-foot Negro; sixteen, with a straight, sure gait, and dark, alert, solemn eyes. He has an hour to kill before he’s due at Hooper’s to help Hussie with the barbecue, and he kills such saving hours with Betty James when he can; when she’s off on a break from the department store on Main, closed this afternoon because of the World Series.

  All along Church, radios and TV sets blare; and down on Main the loudspeaker at the County Courthouse is carrying the game, so the bench-sitters don’t have to move a muscle to know the score. Even over at the mill in Galveston, where Major’s dad, Bryan, works as a “doffer,” pushing carts of bobbins around and dodging the lint, the game is being piped into the loom and spinning rooms.

  The early October sun shines on the pavement, before the pavement ends and the dust and dirt of the red clay of Georgia begins as Major comes into Brockton Place; at the head of The Toe in Paradise. Here there are the rows of nondescript houses huddling near one another, less like the shacks in the tip, where Major himself lives; but still carrying the stigma of the colored in their backyards, for save for a few, the outhouses look and reek the same anywhere, and only a few know plumbing. Not even the James house knows it: Betty calls it James Manor; “Well, welcome to James Manor, Mr. Post,” she always says; and Betty’s father is a doctor.

  “The point isn’t to leave Paradise, Major,” he tells Major when they talk about how Major wants to get the money somehow, God knows how! to go off to college and learn to be a doctor himself; then get free from toting for white folks; working sun-up to sundown from one job to the next, even doing sharecropping out at Hooper’s when he couldn’t get out of it; “The point is, Major, to leave, learn, and then return. Our people here can’t spare your kind.”

  And the whites can’t spare you either, doctor of medicine or not, Major had thought when the doctor had first said it to him; thought that, and remembered an afternoon nine years back when he and Betty stood on the James porch and heard the short, square-shouldered, heavy-set plantation manager from over in Manteo tell the doctor: “Mr. Robertson’s got to have extra hands right off. Got a truck waiting on Main to haul you over there
.”

  The doctor saying: “I’m a doctor. I have my work at the clinic to do.”

  The answer barked: “That’s what the trouble’s all about, Doctor!” Fury registered in the cracker’s voice, snapping doctor snidely. “You boys all go up North and leave the crops to die while you study books to teach you how to come back and sass-ass the land that gave you your breath; and sass-ass the white man that shared everything but his wife with you. Maybe you’re holding out for that, Doctor!”

  And the doctor said tiredly: “Sick folks are at the clinic right now waiting for — ”

  “Sick niggers sick of doing honest day’s work. Sick? Plantation’s sick too, Doctor! Sick because sick niggers don’t want to pick. Very, very sick! And you’re a doctor, Doctor, so c’mon and quit assing around!”

  “All right. Yes …” Sighing the ghost sigh of the slave, sighing, “Well, all right,” and starting down the steps.

  “And bring them two sassy-assed doctor’s coons over there!”

  “The boy isn’t mine. Please, sir — the girl is only sev — ”

  “Bring them, Doctor Black Buck!”

  Then Major had his first cotton-picking lesson; in late summer when he was seven; over in Manteo, gotten to by a truck jammed black like sardines. Stoop before the plant, pull from the bolls, slap in the sack, and sing defiance:

  Old massa say, “Pick Dat Cotton!” (yell it like a cracker would)

  “Can’t pick cotton, massa,” (whine it like a nigger should)

  Cotton seed am rotten! Ha! Ha! Ha! (yiii, giggle!)

  But just sing it. If you ain’t singing keep yo big mouf shet.

  ‘S okay to sing frig this pickin if you pickin as yo singin!

  Sho, it am!

  ‘S okay to sing frig the massa if yo singin as yo pickin! Sho, it am!

  Frig the cotton; frig the massa; can sing it if yo pickin!

  But you can’t sing frig the massa’s wife