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THE SLEEPER WAKES -- HARLEM RENAISSANCE STORIES BY WOMEN |
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Drab Rambles I am hurt. There is blood on me. You do not care. You do not know me. You do not know me. You do not care. There is blood on me. Sometimes it gets on you. You do not care I am hurt. Sometimes it gets on your hands -- on your soul even. You do not care. You do not know me. You do not care to know me, you say, because we are different. We are different you say. You are white, you say. And I am black. You do not know me. I am all men tinged in brown. I am all men with a touch of black. I am you and I am myself. You do not know me. You do not care, you say. I am an inflow of God, tossing about in the bodies of all men: all men tinged and touched with black. I am not pure Africa of five thousand years ago. I am you -- all men tinged and touched. Not old Africa into somnolence by a jungle that blots out all traces of its antiquity. I am all men. I am tinged and touched. I am colored. All men tinged and touched; colored in a brown body. Close all men in a small space, tinge and touch the Space with one blood -- you get a check-mated Hell. A check-mated Hell, seething in a brown body, I am. I am colored. A check-mated Hell seething in a brown body. You do not know me. You do not care -- you say. But still, I am you -- and all men. I am colored. A check-mated Hell seething in a brown body. Sometimes I wander up and down and look. Look at the tinged-in-black, the touched-in-brown. I wander and see how it is with them and wonder how long -- how long Hell can seethe before it boils over. How long can Hell be check-mated? Or if check-mated can solidify, if this is all it is? If this is all it is. THE FIRST PORTRAIT He was sitting in the corridor of the Out-Patients Department. He was sitting in the far corner well out of the way. When the doors opened at nine o'clock, he had been the first one in. His heart was beating fast. His heart beat faster than it should. No heart should beat so fast that you choke at the throat when you try to breathe. You should not feel it knocking -- knocking -- knocking -- now against your ribs, now against something deep within you. Knocking against something deep, so deep that you cannot fall asleep without feeling a cutting, pressing weight laid against your throat, over your chest. A cutting, pressing weight that makes you struggle to spring from the midst of your sleep. Spring up. It had beat like that now for months. At first he had tried to work it off. Swung the pick in his daily ditch digging -- faster -- harder. But that had not helped it at all. It had beaten harder and faster for the swinging. He had tried castor oil to run it off of his system. Someone told him he ate too much meat and smoked too much. So he had given up his beloved ham and beef and chicken and tried to swing the pick on lighter things. It would be better soon. His breath had begun to get short then. He had to stop oftener to rest between swings. The foreman, Mike Leary, had cursed at first and then moved him back to the last line of diggers. It hurt him to think he was not so strong as he had been. -- But it would be better soon. He would not tell his wife how badly his heart knocked. It would be better soon. He could not afford to layoff from work. He had to dig. Nobody is able to layoff work when there is a woman and children to feed and cover. The castor oil had not helped. The meat had been given up, even his little pleasure in smoking. Still the heart beat too fast. Still the heart beat so he felt it up in the chords on each side of his neck below his ears. -- But it would be better soon. It would be better. He had asked to be let off half a day so he could be at the hospital at ten o'clock. Mike had growled his usual curses when he asked to get off. "What the hell is wrong wit' you? All you need is a good dose of whiskey!" He had gone off. When the doors of the Out-Patients Department opened, he was there. It took him a long time to get up the stairs. The knocking was in his throat so. Beads of perspiration stood grey on his black-brown forehead. He closed his eyes a moment and leaned his head back. A sound of crying made him open them. On the seat beside him a woman held a baby in her arms. The baby was screaming itself red in the face, wriggling and twisting to get out of its mother's arms on the side where the man sat. The mother shifted the child from one side to the other and told him with her eyes, "You ought not to be here!" He had tried to smile over the knocking at the baby. Now he rolled his hat over in his hands and looked down. When he looked up, he turned his eyes away from the baby with its mother. The knocking pounded. Why should a little thing like that make his heart pound. He must be badly off to breathe so fast over nothing. The thought made his heart skip and pound the harder. But he would be better soon. Other patients began to file in. Soon the nurse at the desk began to read names aloud. He had put his card in first but she did not call him first. As she called each name, a patient stood up and went through some swinging doors. Green lights -- men in white coats -- nurses in white caps and dresses filled the room it would seem, from the glimpses caught through the door. It seemed quiet and still, too, as if everyone were listening to hear something. Once the door swung open wildly and an Italian came dashing madly through -- a doctor close behind him. The man threw himself on the bench: "Oh God! Oh God! I ain't that sick, I ain't so sick I gotta die! No! You don't really know. I ain't so sick!" The doctor leaned over him and said something quietly. The nurse brought something cloudy in a glass. The man drank it. By and by he was led out -- hiccuping but quieter. Back in his corner, his heart beat smotheringly. Suppose that had been he? Sick enough to die! Was the dago crazy, trying to run away? Run as he would, the sickness would be always with him. For himself, he would be better soon. "Peter Jackson! Peter Jackson. Peter Jackson. Five, Sawyer Avenue!" The nurse had to say it twice before he heard through his thoughts. Thump. The beat of his heart knocked him to his feet. He had to stand still before he could move. "Here! This way." The nurse said it so loudly -- so harshly -- that the entire room turned around to look at him. She need not be so hateful. He only felt a little dizzy. Slowly he felt along the floor with his feet. Around the corner of the bench. Across the space beside the desk. The nurse pushed open the door and pressed it back. "Dr. Sibley?" she called. The door swung shut behind him. Along each side of the room were desks. Behind each, sat a doctor. When the nurse called "Dr. Sibley," no one answered, so Jackson stood at the door. His heart rubbed his ribs unnecessarily. "Say! Over here!" The words and the voice made his heart race again. -- But he would be better now. He turned toward the direction of the voice, met a cool pair of blue eyes boring through tortoise-rimmed glasses. He sat down. The doctor took a sheet of paper. "What's your name?" His heart had been going so that when he said "Peter Jackson," he could make no sound the first time. "Peter Jackson." "How old are you?" "Fifty-four." "Occupation? Where do you work?" "Day laborer for the city." "Can you afford to pay a doctor?" Surprise took the rest of his breath away for a second. The question had to be repeated. "I guess so. I never been sick." "Well, if you can afford to pay a doctor, you ought not to come here. This clinic is for foreigners and people who cannot pay a doctor. Your people have some of your own doctors in this city." The doctor wrote for such a long time on the paper then that he thought he was through with him and he started to get up. "Sit down." The words caught him before he was on his feet. "I haven't told you to go anywhere." "I thought --," Jackson hung on his words uncertain. "You needn't! Don't think! Open your shirt." And the doctor fitted a pair of tubes in his ears and shut out his thoughts. He fitted the tubes in his ears and laid a sieve-like piece of rubber against his patient's chest. Laid it up. Laid it down. Finally he said: "What have you been doing to this heart of yours? All to pieces. All gone." Gone. His heart was all gone. He tried to say something but the doctor snatched the tube away and turned around to the desk and wrote again. Again he turned around: "Push up your sleeve," he said this time. The sleeve went up. A piece of rubber went around his arm above the elbow. Something began to squeeze -- knot -- drag on his arm. "Pressure almost two hundred," the doctor shot at him this time. "You can't stand this much longer." He turned around. He wrote again. He wrote and pushed the paper away. "Well," said the doctor, "you will have to stop working and lie down. You must keep your feet on a level with your body." Jackson wanted to yell with laughter. Lie down. If he had had breath enough, he would have blown all the papers off the desk, he would have laughed so. He looked into the blue eyes. "I can't stop work," he said. The doctor shrugged: "Then," he said, and said no more. Then! Then what? Neither one of them spoke. Then what? Jackson wet his lips: "You mean -- you mean I got to stop work to get well?" "I mean you have to stop if you want to stay here." "You mean even if I stop you may not cure me?" The blue eyes did go down toward the desk then. The answer was a question. "You don't think I can make a new heart, do you? You only get one heart. You are born with that. You ought not to live so hard." Live hard? Did this man think he had been a sport? Live hard. Liquor, wild sleepless nights -- sleep-drugged, rag-worn, half-shoddy days? That instead of what it had been. Ditches and picks. Births and funerals. Stretching a dollar the length of ten. A job, no job; three children and a wife to feed; bread thirteen cents a loaf. For pleasure, church -- where he was too tired to go sometimes. Tobacco that he had to consider twice before he bought. "I ain't lived hard! I ain't lived hard!" he said suddenly. "I have worked harder than I should, that's all." "Why didn't you get another job?" the doctor snapped. "Didn't need to dig ditches all your life." Jackson drew himself up; "I had to dig ditches because I am an ignorant black man. If I was an ignorant white man, I could get easier jobs. I could even have worked in this hospital." Color flooded the doctor's face. Whistles blew and shrieked suddenly outside. He started for the door. Carefully. He must not waste his strength. Rent, food, clothes. He could not afford to lay off. He had almost reached the door when a hand shook him suddenly. It was the doctor close behind him. He held out a white sheet of paper. "Your prescription," he explained, and seemed to hesitate. "Digitalis. It will help some. I am sorry." Sorry for what? Jackson found the side-walk and lit his pipe to steady himself. He had almost reached the ditches when he remembered the paper. He could not find it. He went on. THE SECOND PORTRAIT By twelve o'clock, noon, the washroom of Kale's Fine Family Laundry held enough steam to take the shell off a turtle's back. Fill tubs with steaming water at six o'clock, set thirty colored women to rubbing and shouting and singing at the tubs and by twelve o'clock noon the room is over full of steam. The steam is thick -- warm -- and it settles on your flesh like a damp fur rug. Every pore sits agape in your body; agape -- dripping. Kale's Fine Family Laundry did a good business. Mr. Kale believed in this running on oiled cogs. Cogs that slip easily -- oiled from the lowest to the highest. Now the cogs lowest in his smooth machinery were these thirty tubs and the thirty women at the tubs. I put the tubs first, because they were always there. The women came and went. Sometimes they merely went. Most all of them were dark brown and were that soft bulgy fat that no amount of hard work can rub off of some colored women. All day long they rubbed and scrubbed and sang or shouted and cursed or were silent according to their natures. Madie Frye never sang or shouted or cursed aloud. Madie was silent. She sang and shouted and cursed within. She sang the first day she came there to work. Sang songs of thanksgiving within her. She had needed that job. She had not worked for ten months until she came there. She had washed dishes in a boarding house before that. That was when she first came from Georgia. She had liked things then. Liked the job, liked the church she joined, liked Tom Nolan, the man for whom she washed dishes. One day his wife asked Madie if she had a husband. She told her no. She was paid off. Madie, the second, was born soon after. Madie named her unquestioningly Madie Frye. It never occurred to her to name her Nolan, which would have been proper. Madie bore her pain in silence, bore her baby in a charity ward, thanked God for the kindness of a North and thanked God that she was not back in Culvert when Madie was born, for she would have been turned out of church. Madie stopped singing aloud then. She tried to get jobs dishwashing -- cleaning -- washing clothes -- but you cannot keep a job washing someone's clothes or cleaning their home and nurse a baby and keep it from yelling the lady of the house into yelling tantrums. Madie, second, lost for her mother exactly two dozen jobs between her advent and her tenth month in her mother's arms. Madie had not had time to feel sorry for herself at first. She was too busy wondering how long she could hold each job. Could she keep Madie quiet until she paid her room rent? Could she keep Mrs. Jones from knowing that Madie was down under the cellar stairs in a basket every day while she was upstairs cleaning, until she got a pair of shoes? By the time she went to work in Kale's Hand Laundry, she had found the baby a too great handicap to take to work. She began to leave Madie with her next door neighbor, Mrs. Sundell, who went to church three times every Sunday and once in the week. She must be good enough to keep Madie while her mother worked. She was. She kept Madie for two dollars a week and Madie kept quiet for her and slept all night long when she reached home with her mother. Her mother marvelled and asked Mrs. Sundell how she did it. "Every time she cries, I give her paregoric. Good for her stomach." So the baby grew calmer and calmer each day. Calmer and quieter. Her mother worked and steamed silently down in Kale's tub room. Worked, shouting songs of thanksgiving within her for steady money and peaceful nights. June set in, and with it, scorching days. Days that made the thick steam full of lye and washing-powder eat the lining out of your lungs. There was a set of rules tacked up inside the big door that led into the checking-room that plainly said: "This door is never to be opened between the hours of six in the morning and twelve noon. Nor between the hours of one and six p.m." That was to keep the steam from the checkers. They were all white and could read and write so they were checkers. One day Madie put too much lye in some boiling water. It choked her. When she drew her next breath, she was holding her head in the clean cool air of the checking-room. She drew in a deep breath and coughed. Amali spun across the floor and a white hand shot to the door. "Why the hell don't you obey the rules?" He slammed the door and Madie stumbled back down the stairs. A girl at the end tub looked around. "Was that Mr. Payne?" she asked. Madie was still dazed; "Mr. Payne?" she asked. "Yah. The man what closed the door." "I don't know who he was." The other laughed and drew closer to her. "Better know who he is," she said. Madie blinked up at her. "Why?" The girl cocked an eye: "Good to know him. You can stay off sometimes -- if he likes you." That was all that day. Another day Madie was going home. Her blank brown face was freshly powdered and she went quietly across the checking- room. The room was empty it seemed at first. All the girls were gone. When Madie was half across the room she saw a man sitting in the corner behind a desk. He looked at her as soon as she looked at him. It was the man who had yanked the door out of her hand, she thought. Fear took hold of her. She began to rush. Someone called. It was the man at the desk. "Hey, what's your rush?" The voice was not loud and bloody this time. It was soft -- soft -- soft like a cat's foot. Madie stood still afraid to go forward -- afraid to turn around. "What, are you afraid of me?" Soft like a cat's foot. "Come here." -- Good to know him -- Madie made the space to the outer door in one stride. The door opened in. She pushed against it. "Aw, what's the matter with you?" Footsteps brought the voice nearer. A white hand fitted over the doorknob as she slid hers quickly away. Madie could not breathe. Neither could she lift her eyes. The door opened slowly. She had to move backward to give it space. Another white hand brushed the softness of her body. She stumbled out into the alley. Cold sweat stood out on her. Madie second had cost her jobs and jobs. She came by Madie keeping that first job. Madie was black brown. The baby was yellow. Was she now going to go job hunting or have a sister or brother to keep with Madie second? Cold perspiration sent her shivering in the alley. And Madie cursed aloud. *** Not in my day or your tomorrow -- perhaps -- but somewhere in God's day of meeting -- somewhere in God's day of measuring full measures overflowing -- the blood will flow back to you -- and you will care. FROM THE CRISIS, DECEMBER I927
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