THE SLEEPER WAKES -- HARLEM RENAISSANCE STORIES BY WOMEN

Nothing New
MARITA BONNER

There was, once high on a hillside, a muddy brook. A brook full of yellow muddy water that foamed and churned over a rock bed.

Halfway down the hillside the water pooled in the clearest pool. All the people wondered how the muddy water cleared at that place. They did not know. They did not understand. They only went to the pool and drank. Sometimes they stooped over and looked into the water and saw themselves.

If they had looked deeper they might have seen God.

People seldom look that deep, though. They do not always understand how to do things.

They are not God. He alone understands.

***

You have been down on Frye Street. You know how it runs from Grand Avenue and the L to a river; from freckled-faced tow heads to yellow Orientals; from broad Italy to broad Georgia, from hooked nose to square black noses. How it lisps in French, how it babbles in Italian, how it gurgles in German, how it drawls and crawls through Black Belt dialects. Frye Street flows nicely together. It is like muddy water. Like muddy water in a brook.

Reuben Jackson and his wife Bessie -- late of Georgia -- made a home of three rooms at number thirteen Frye Street.

"Bad luck number," said the neighbors.

"Good luck number," said Reuben and Bessie.

Reuben did not know much. He knew only God, work, church, work and God. The only things Bessie knew were God, work, Denny, prayer, Reuben, prayer, Denny, work, work, work, God.

Denny was one thing they both knew beside God and work. Denny was their little son. He knew lots of things. He knew that when the sun shone across the room a cobwebby shaft appeared that you could not walk up. And when the water dripped on pans in the sink it sang a tune: "Hear the time! Feel the time! Beat with me! Tap-ty tap! T-ta-tap! Taty-tap!" The water sang a tune that made your feet move.

"Stop that jigging, you Denny," Bessie always cried. "God! Don't let him be no dancing man." She would pray afterwards. "Don't let him be no toy-tin fool man!"

Reuben watched him once sitting in his sun shaft. Watched him drape his slender little body along the floor and lift his eyes toward the sunlight. Even then they were eyes that drew deep and told deeper. With his oval clear brown face and his crinkled shining hair, Denny looked too well as Reuben thought no boy should look. He spoke:

"Why don't you run and wrestle and race with the other boys? You must be a girl. Boys play rough and fight!"

Denny rolled over and looked up at his father. "I ain't a girl!" he declared deliberately.

He started around the room for something to fight to prove his assertion. The cat lay peacefully sleeping by the stove. Denny snatched hold of the cat's tail to awaken it. The cat came up with all claws combing Denny.

"My God, ain't he cruel," screamed his mother. She slapped Denny and the cat apart.

Denny lay down under the iron board and considered the odd red patterns that the claws had made on his arms.... A red house and a red hill. Red trees around it; a red path running up the hill ...

"Make my child do what's right," prayed Bessie ironing above him.

People are not God. He alone understands.

Denny was running full tilt down a hillside. Whooping, yelling, shouting. Flying after nothing. Young Frye Street, mixed as usual, raced with him.

There was no school out here. There were no street cars, no houses, no ash-cans and basement stairs to interfere with a run. Out here you could run straight, swift, in one direction with nothing to stop you but your own lack of foot power and breath. A picnic "out of town" pitched your spirits high and Young Frye Street could soar through all twelve heavens of enjoyment.

The racers reached the foot of the hill. Denny swerved to one side. A tiny colored girl was stooping over in the grass.

"Hey, Denny!" she called. Denny stopped to let the others sweep by.

"Hey, Margaret!" he answered. "What you doing?"

Margaret held up a handful of flowers. "I want that one." She pointed to a clump of dusky purple milkweeds bending behind a bush.

Denny hopped toward it.

He had almost reached it when the bush parted and a boy stepped out: "Don't come over here," he ordered. "This is the white kids' side!"

Denny looked at him. He was not of Frye Street. Other strange children appeared behind him. "This is a white picnic over here! Stay away from our side."

Denny continued toward his flower. Margaret squatted contentedly in the grass. She was going to get her flower.

"I said not to come over here," yelled the boy behind the bush.

Denny hopped around the bush.

"What you want over here?" the other bristled.

"That flower!" Denny pointed.

The other curved his body out in exaggerated childish sarcasm. "Sissy! Picking flowers." He turned to the boys behind him. "Sissy nigger! Picking flowers!"

Denny punched at the boy and snatched at the flower. The other stuck out his foot and Denny dragged him down as he fell. Young Frye Street rushed back up the hill at the primeval howl that set in.

Down on the ground, Denny and the white boy squirmed and kicked. They dug and pounded each other.

"You stay off the white kids' side, nigger!"

"I'm going to get that flower, I am!" Denny dragged his enemy along with him as he lunged toward the bush.

The flower beckoned and bent its stalk. On the white kids' side. Lovely, dusky, purple. Bending toward him. The milky perfume almost reached him. On the white kids' side. He wanted it. He would get it. Something ripped.

Denny left the collar of his blouse in the boy's hand and wrenched loose. He grabbed at the stem. On the white kids' side. Bending to him -- slender, bending to him. On the white kids' side. He wanted it. He was going to have it --

The boy caught up to him as he had almost reached the flower. They fell again. -- He was going to get that flower. He was going to. Tear the white kid off. Tear the white hands off his throat. Tear the white kid off his arms. Tear the white kid's weight off his chest. He'd move him --

Denny made a twist and slid low to the ground, the other boy beneath him, face downward. He pinned the boy's shoulders to the ground and clutching a handful of blonde hair in either hand, beat his head against the ground.

Young Frye Street sang the song of triumph. Sang it long and loud. Sang it loud enough for Mrs. Bessie Jackson -- resting under a clump of trees with other mothers -- to hear.

"I know them children is fighting!" she declared and started off in the direction of the yelling.

Halfway she met Margaret, a long milkweed flower dragging in one hand: "Denny," she explained, holding it up.

"I knew it," cried his mother and ran the rest of the way. "Stop killing that child," she screamed as soon as she had neared the mob. She dragged Denny off the boy. Dragged him through the crowd under the tree. Then she began:

"Look at them clothes. Where is your collar at? All I do is try to fix you up and now look at you! Look at you! Even your shirt torn!"

"Just as well him tear that for what he said," Denny offered.

This approximated "sauce" or the last straw or the point of overflow. His mother was staggered. Was there nothing she could do? Unconsciously she looked up to Heaven, then down to earth. A convenient bush flaunted nearby. She pulled it up -- by the roots.

-- On the white kids' side. The flower he wanted. --

God understands, doesn't He?

***

It had been a hard struggle. Reuben was still bitter and stubborn:

"What reason Denny got to go to some art school? What he going to learn there?"

"Art! Painting!" Bessie defended. "The teachers at the high school say he know how to paint special like. He'd ought to go, they said."

"Yes, they said, but they ain't going to pay for him. He ought to go somewhere and do some real man's work. Ain't nothin' but women paddlin' up and down, worryin' about paintin'."

"He's going all the same. Them teachers said he was better --!"

"Oh, all right. Let him go."

And Denny went to the Littler Art School. Carried his joyous six-foot, slender, brown self up on Grand Avenue, across, under, the elevated towers -- up town. Up town to school.

"Bessie Jackson better put him on a truck like Annie Turner done her Jake," declared colored Frye Street. "Ain't no man got no business spendin' his life learnin' to paint."

"He should earn money! Money!" protested one portion of Frye Street through its hooked noses.

"Let him marry a wife," chuckled the Italians.

"He's going to learn art," said Denny's mother.

Denny went. The Littler School was filled with students of both sexes and of all races and degrees of life. Most of them were sufficiently gifted to be there. Days there when they showed promise. Days there when they doubted their own reasons for coming.

Denny did as well and as badly as the rest. Sometimes he even did things that attracted attention.

He himself always drew attention, for he was tall, straight and had features that were meant to go with the blondest hair and the bluest eyes. He was not blond though. He was clean shaven and curly haired and brown as any Polynesian. His eyes were still deep drawing -- deep telling. Eyes like a sea-going liner that could drift far without getting lost; that could draw deep  without sinking.

Some women scrambled to make an impression on him. If they had looked at his mouth they would have withheld their efforts.

Anne Forest was one of the scramblers. She did not know she was scrambling, though. If anyone had told her that she was, she would have exploded, "Why! He is a nigger!"

Anne, you see, was white. She was the kind of girl who made you feel that she thrived on thirty-nine cent chocolates, fifteen- dollar silk dress sales, twenty-five cent love stories and much guilty smootchy kissing. If that does not make you sense her water-waved bob, her too carefully rouged face, her too perfumed person, I cannot bring her any nearer to you.

Anne scrambled unconsciously. Denny was an attractive man. Denny knew she was scrambling -- so he went further within himself.

Went so far within himself that he did not notice Pauline Hammond who sat next to him.

One day he was mixing paint in a little white dish. Somehow the dish capsized and the paint flowed over the desk and spattered.

"Oh, my heavens!" said a girl's voice.

Denny stood up: "I beg your pardon." He looked across the desk.

Purple paint was splashed along the girl's smock and was even on her shoes.

"Oh, that's all right! No harm done at all," she said pleasantly.

Nice voice. Not jagged or dangling. Denny looked at her again. He dipped his handkerchief into the water and wiped off the shoes.

That done, they sat back and talked to each other. Talked to each other that day and the next day. Several days they talked.

Denny began to notice Pauline carefully. She did not talk to people as if they were strange hard shells she had to crack open to get inside. She talked as if she were already in the shell. In their very shell.

-- Not many people can talk that soul-satisfying way. Why? I do not know. I am not God. I do not always understand --.

They talked about work; their life outside of school. Life. Life out in the world. With an artist's eye Denny noted her as she talked. Slender, more figure than heavy form, molded. Poised. Head erect on neck, neck uplifted on shoulders, body held neither too stiff nor too slack. Poised and slenderly molded as an aristocrat.

They thought together and worked together. Saw things through each other's eyes. They loved each other.

One day they went to a Sargent exhibit -- and saw Anne Forest. She gushed and mumbled and declared war on Pauline. She did not know she had declared war, though.

"Pauline Hammond goes out with that nigger Denny Jackson!" she informed all the girls in class the next day.

"With a nigger!" The news seeped through the school. Seeped from the President's office on the third floor to the janitor down below the stairs.

Anne Forest only told one man the news. He was Allen Carter. He had taken Pauline to three dances and Anne to one.  Maybe Anne was trying to even the ratio when she told him: "Pauline Hammond is rushing a nigger now."

Allen truly reeled. "Pauline! A nigger?"

Anne nodded. "Denny Jackson -- or whatever his name is," she hastened to correct herself.

Allen cursed aloud. "Pauline! She's got too much sense for that! It's that nigger rushing after her! Poor little kid! I'll kill him!"

He tore off his smock with a cursing accompaniment. He cursed before Anne. She did not matter. She should have known that before.

Allen tore off the smock and tore along the hall. Tore into a group gathered in a corner bent over a glass case. Denny and Pauline were in the crowd, side by side. Allen walked up to Denny.

"Here you," he pushed his way in between the two. "Let this white girl alone." He struck Denny full in the face.

Denny struck back. All the women -- except Pauline -- fled to the far end of the room.

The two men fought. Two jungle beasts would have been kinder to each other. These two tore at each other with more than themselves behind every blow.

"Let that white woman alone, nigger! Stay on your own side!" Allen shouted once. -- On your own side. On the white kids' side. That old fight -- the flower, bending toward him. He'd move the white kid! Move him and get the flower! Move him and get what was his! He seized a white throat in his hands and moved his hands close together!

***

He did move the white kid. Moved him so completely that doctors and doctors and running and wailing could not cause his body to stir again. Moved him so far that Denny was moved to the County Jail.

Everything moved then. The judge moved the jury with pleas to see justice done for a man who had sacrificed his life for the beautiful and the true. The jury moved that the old law held: one life taken, take another.

Denny -- they took Denny.

Up at the school the trustees moved. "Be it enacted this day -- no Negro student shall enter within these doors --."

The newspapers moved their readers. Sent columns of description of the "hypnotized frail flower under the spell of Black Art." So completely under the spell she had to be taken from the stand for merely screaming in the judge's face: "I loved him! I loved him! I loved him!" until the court ran over with the cries.

Frye Street agreed on one thing only. Bessie and Reuben had tried to raise Denny right.

After that point, Frye Street unmixed itself. Flowed apart.

Frye Street -- black -- was loud in its utterances. "Served Denny right for loving a white woman! Many white niggers as there is! Either Bessie or Reuben must have loved white themselves and was 'shamed to go out open with them. Shame to have that all come out in that child! Now he rottenin' in a murderer's grave!"

White Frye Street held it was the school that had ruined Denny. Had not Frye Street -- black and white -- played together, worked together, shot crap together, fought together without killing? When a nigger got in school he got crazy.

Up on the hillside the clear water pooled. Up on the hillside people come to drink at the pool. If they looked over, they saw themselves. If they had looked deeper -- deeper than themselves -- they might have seen God.

But they did not.

People do not do that -- do they?

They do not always understand. Do they?

God alone -- He understands.

FROM THE CRISIS, NOVEMBER 1926

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