We tried to get the guy to come down, but he said that he felt better out in the air, so we left him alone. In fact we started to play blackjack for cigarette butts and soon forgot about Hymie; that is, until it had gotten too dark in the boxcar to see the spots on the cards. Then I decided to go out on top to watch the sunset.

  The sun was a big globe in the west that seemed to drop away like a basketball toward a basket, and the freight seemed to be trying to catch it before it got there. You could see large swarms of flies following the freight cars like gulls over a boat; only the noise they made was lost in the roar of the train. In the field you could see a flock of birds flying away into the sunset, shooting off at an angle to rise and dip, rise and dip, sail and pivot in the wind like kites cut loose from their strings.

  I stood on top, feeling the wind pushing against my eyes and whipping my pants against my legs, and waved to Hymie. He had his legs locked around the open ventilator of a refrigerator car hooked next to ours. In that light he looked like a fellow propped in a corner with his hands and feet tied like in a gangster picture. I waved to Hymie, and he waved back. It was a weak wave. The train was going downgrade now, and the fields passed in a curve, and it made you feel like you were on a merry-go-round. When you tried to holler, your voice was small, like the sound you heard when you used to sit on the bottom of the swimming hole and knock rocks together. So we, Hymie and me, just waved.

  I felt sorry for the poor guy out there alone. I wished there was something I could do for him, but they don’t have water on side-door Pullmans and I guess bums are too dumb to carry canteens. Then I thought, To heck with Hymie. A few miles down the road when we got South, he and the other guys would go into another car anyway.

  I stood there on top listening to the rhythm of the wheels bumping along the tracks. Sometimes the rhythm was even, like kids in Harlem beating empty boxes around a bonfire at nightfall as they play along the curbs. I stood there on top listening, bent slightly forward to keep my balance like a guy skiing, and thought of my mother. I had left her two months before, not even knowing that I would ever hop freights. Poor Mama, she had tried hard to keep my brother and me at home, but she fed us too long alone, and we were getting much too grown-up to let her do it any longer, so we left home looking for jobs.

  It was now becoming almost too dark to see, when all at once the freight gave a jerk, and every boxcar in the train started racing every other car bumpty-bump down the tracks to the engine like they were meant to knock it into a faster speed when they got there. Then I looked down to where Hymie was riding, and there was a bull crawling toward him with a stick in his hand. I hollered for Hymie to watch out, but the noise swallowed up my voice and the bull was drawing closer all the time. You see, Hymie was asleep, his legs still locked around the ventilator, when the bull reached him. Then the bull grabs Hymie to yank him up and starts lamming with his stick at the same time. Hymie woke up fighting and yelling; I could see his face. The stick would land, and a scream would drift back to where I crawled, almost too excited to move. The freight streaked along like a long black dog, and up on top we were like three monkeys clinging to his back, like you see sometimes at a circus. The bull finally got his knees on Hymie’s chest and was choking him, the stick hanging from his wrist by a leather thong.

  Sometimes he tried to break Hymie’s hold to throw him off the car, and sometimes he lammed away with the loaded stick. Hymie fought the bull the best he could, but he fumbled in his pocket with one hand at the same time. You could see the bull hit, measure and hit, and Hymie kept his left hand in the bull’s face and all the time he was fumbling in his pocket.

  Then I saw something flash in the fast-fading light, and Hymie went into action with his blade. The bull was still hammering away with his stick when Hymie started cutting him aloose. You could see the knife flash up past Hymie’s head and then dive down and across both the bull’s wrists, and you could hear him scream because all the time you were coming closer and you could see him let Hymie go and Hymie raise himself, swing the blade around in half-circles like a snake and the blade swing back around as though measuring just the right spot, then dive into the bull’s throat. Hymie pulled the knife around from ear to ear in the bull’s throat; then he stabbed him and pushed him off the top of the car. The bull paused a second in the air like a kid diving off a trestle into a river, then hit the cinders below. Something was warm on my face, and I found that some of the bull’s blood had blown back like spray when a freight stops to take on water from a tank.

  It was dark now, and Hymie tore off his top shirt, and dropped it over the edge of the car, and crawled down the side. He hung there until the train hit an upgrade and slowed down. We were coming to a little town on a hill. Lights were scattered here and there like raisins in a cake, and drawing nearer I saw Hymie grow tense and fall clear of the car. He hit the dirt hard, rolled a few yards, and got up to his feet. By then we were too far gone to see him in the dim light. We rolled past the little town, and the whistle screamed its lonely sound and I wondered if that was the last I’d see of Hymie …

  I heard later on that the shirt Hymie wore was found caught on a field fence and that his switchblade was still sticking in the bull. The bull had rolled from the cinders into the vines which lined the tracks, and lay there all bloody among the flowers that looked like tiger lilies.

  The next day about dusk we were pulling into the yards at Montgomery, Alabama, miles down the line, and got the scare of our lives. The train had to cross a trestle before it could reach the yards. It was going slow, and as soon as it crossed we started getting off. All at once we heard someone hollering, and when we ran up to the front of the freight, there were two bulls, a long one and a short one, fanning heads with their gun barrels. They were making everybody line up so they could see us better. The sky was cloudy and very black. We knew Hymie’s bull had been found and some black boy had to go. But luck must’ve been with us this time because just then the storm broke and the freight started to pull out of the yards. The bulls hollered for no one to get back on the train and we broke and ran between some cars on around to try to catch the freight pulling out at the other end of the yards. We made it. We rode up on top that night out in the rain. It was uncomfortable, but we were happy as hell, and we knew the sun would dry our clothes on us the next day, and we would grab something fast going far away from where Hymie got his bull.

  The Black Ball

  I had rushed through the early part of the day mopping the lobby, placing fresh sand in the tall green jars, sweeping and dusting the halls, and emptying the trash to be burned later on in the day into the incinerator. And I had stopped only once to chase out after a can of milk for Mrs Johnson, who had a new baby and who was always nice to my boy. I had started at six o’clock, and around eight I ran out to the quarters where we lived over the garage to dress the boy and give him his fruit and cereal. He was very thoughtful sitting there in his high chair and paused several times with his spoon midway to his mouth to watch me as I chewed my toast.

  ‘What’s the matter, son?’

  ‘Daddy, am I black?’

  ‘Of course not, you’re brown. You know you’re not black.’

  ‘Well, yesterday Jackie said I was so black.’

  ‘He was just kidding. You musn’t let them kid you, son.’

  ‘Brown’s much nicer than white, isn’t it, Daddy?’

  He was four, a little brown boy in blue rompers, and when he talked and laughed with imaginary playmates, his voice was soft and round in its accents like those of most Negro Americans.

  ‘Some people think so. But American is better than both, son.’

  ‘Is it, Daddy?’

  ‘Sure it is. Now forget this talk about you being black, and Daddy will be back as soon as he finishes his work.’

  I left him to play with his toys and a book of pictures until I returned. He was a pretty nice fellow, as he used to say after particularly quiet afternoons while I tried to study, and for which quietness he expected a treat of candy or a ‘picture movie’, and I often left him alone while I attended to my duties in the apartments.

  I had gone back and started doing the brass on the front doors when a fellow came up and stood watching from the street. He was lean and red in the face with that redness that comes from a long diet of certain foods. You see much of it in the deep South, and here in the Southwest it is not uncommon. He stood there watching, and I could feel his eyes in my back as I polished the brass.

  I gave special attention to that brass because for Berry, the manager, the luster of these brass panels and door handles was the measure of all my industry. It was near time for him to arrive.

  ‘Good morning, John,’ he would say, looking not at me but at the brass.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ I would say, looking not at him but at the brass. Usually his face was reflected there. For him, I was there. Besides that brass, his money, and the half-dozen or so plants in his office, I don’t believe he had any other real interests in life.

  There must be no flaws this morning. Two fellows who worked at the building across the street had already been dismissed because whites had demanded their jobs, and with the boy at that age needing special foods and me planning to enter school again next term, I couldn’t afford to allow something like that out on the sidewalk to spoil my chances. Especially since Berry had told one of my friends in the building that he didn’t like that ‘damned educated nigger’.

  I was so concerned with the brass that when the fellow spoke, I jumped with surprise.

  ‘Howdy,’ he said. The expected drawl was there. But something was missing, something usually behind that kind of drawl.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Looks like you working purty hard over that brass.’

  ‘It gets pretty dirty overnight.’

  That part wasn’t missing. When they did have something to say to us, they always became familiar.

  ‘You been working here long?’ he asked, leaning against the column with his elbow.

  ‘Two months.’

  I turned my back to him as I worked.

  ‘Any other colored folks working here?’

  ‘I’m the only one,’ I lied. There were two others. It was none of his business anyway.

  ‘Have much to do?’

  ‘I have enough,’ I said. Why, I thought, doesn’t he go on in and ask for the job? Why bother me? Why tempt me to choke him? Doesn’t he know we aren’t afraid to fight his kind out this way?

  As I turned, picking up the bottle to pour more polish into my rag, he pulled a tobacco sack from the pocket of his old blue coat. I noticed his hands were scarred as though they had been burned.

  ‘Ever smoke Durham?’ he asked.

  ‘No thank you,’ I said.

  He laughed.

  ‘Not used to anything like that, are you?’

  ‘Not used to what?’

  A little more from this guy and I would see red.

  ‘Fellow like me offering a fellow like you something besides a rope.’

  I stopped to look at him. He stood there smiling with the sack in his outstretched hand. There were many wrinkles around his eyes, and I had to smile in return. In spite of myself I had to smile.

  ‘Sure you won’t smoke some Durham?’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said.

  He was fooled by the smile. A smile couldn’t change things between my kind and his.

  ‘I’ll admit it ain’t much,’ he said. ‘But it’s a helluva lot different.’

  I stopped the polishing again to see what it was he was trying to get after.

  ‘But,’ he said, ‘I’ve got something really worth a lot; that is, if you’re interested.’

  ‘Let’s hear it,’ I said.

  Here, I thought, is where he tries to put one over on old ‘George’.

  ‘You see, I come out from the union and we intend to organize all the building-service help in this district. Maybe you been reading ’bout it in the papers?’

  ‘I saw something about it, but what’s it to do with me?’

  ‘Well, first place we’ll make ’em take some of this work off you. It’ll mean shorter hours and higher wages, and better conditions in general.’

  ‘What you really mean is that you’ll get in here and bounce me out. Unions don’t want Negro members.’

  ‘You mean some unions don’t. It used to be that way, but things have changed.’

  ‘Listen, fellow. You’re wasting your time and mine. Your damn unions are like everything else in the country – for whites only. What ever caused you to give a damn about a Negro anyway? Why should you try to organize Negroes?’

  His face had become a little white.

  ‘See them hands?’

  He stretched out his hands.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, looking not at his hands but at the color draining from his face.

  ‘Well, I got them scars in Macon County, Alabama, for saying a colored friend of mine was somewhere else on a day he was supposed to have raped a woman. He was, too, ’cause I was with him. Me and him was trying to borrow some seed fifty miles away when it happened – if it did happen. They made them scars with a gasoline torch and run me out the county ’cause they said I tried to help a nigger make a white woman out a lie. That same night they lynched him and burned down his house. They did that to him and this to me, and both of us was fifty miles away.’

  He was looking down at his outstretched hands as he talked.

  ‘God,’ was all I could say. I felt terrible when I looked closely at his hands for the first time. It must have been hell. The skin was drawn and puckered and looked as though it had been fried. Fried hands.

  ‘Since that time I learned a lot,’ he said. ‘I been at this kinda thing. First it was the croppers, and when they got to know me and made it too hot, I quit the country and came to town. First it was in Arkansas and now it’s here. And the more I move around, the more I see, and the more I see, the more I work.’

  He was looking into my face now, his eyes blue in his red skin. He was looking very earnestly. I said nothing. I didn’t know what to say to that. Perhaps he was telling the truth; I didn’t know. He was smiling again.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Now, don’t you go trying to figger it all out right now. There’s going to be a series of meetings at this number starting tonight, and I’d like mighty much to see you there. Bring any friends along you want to.’

  He handed me a card with a number and 8 P.M. sharp written on it. He smiled as I took the card and made as if to shake my hand but turned and walked down the steps to the street. I noticed that he limped as he moved away.

  ‘Good morning, John,’ Mr Berry said. I turned, and there he stood; derby, long black coat, stick, nose glasses and all. He stood gazing into the brass like the wicked queen into her looking glass in the story which the boy liked so well.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ I said.

  I should have finished long before.

  ‘Did the man I saw leaving wish to see me, John?’

  ‘Oh no, sir. He only wished to buy old clothes.’

  Satisfied with my work for the day, he passed inside, and I walked around to the quarters to look after the boy. It was near twelve o’clock.

  I found the boy pushing a toy back and forth beneath a chair in the little room which I used for a study.

  ‘Hi, Daddy,’ he called.

  ‘Hi, son,’ I called. ‘What are you doing today?’

  ‘Oh, I’m trucking.’

  ‘I thought you had to stand up to truck.’

  ‘Not that kind, Daddy, this kind.’

  He held up the toy.

  ‘Ooh,’ I said. ‘That kind.’

  ‘Aw, Daddy, you’re kidding. You always kid, don’t you, Daddy?’

  ‘No. When you’re bad I don’t kid, do I?’

  ‘I guess not.’

  In fact, he wasn’t – only enough to make it unnecessary for me to worry because he wasn’t.

  The business of trucking soon absorbed him, and I went back to the kitchen to fix his lunch and to warm up the coffee for myself.

  The boy had a good appetite, so I didn’t have to make him eat. I gave him his food and settled into a chair to study, but my mind wandered away, so I got up and filled a pipe hoping that would help, but it didn’t, so I threw the book aside and picked up Malraux’s Man’s Fate, which Mrs Johnson had given me, and tried to read it as I drank a cup of coffee. I had to give that up also. Those hands were on my brain, and I couldn’t forget that fellow.

  ‘Daddy,’ the boy called softly; it’s always softly when I’m busy.

  ‘Yes, son.’

  ‘When I grow up I think I’ll drive a truck.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Yes, and then I can wear a lot of buttons on my cap like the men that bring the meat to the grocery. I saw a colored man with some today, Daddy. I looked out the window, and a colored man drove the truck today, and, Daddy, he had two buttons on his cap. I could see ’em plain.’

  He had stopped his play and was still on his knees, beside the chair in his blue overalls. I closed the book and looked at the boy a long time. I must have looked queer.

  ‘What’s the matter, Daddy?’ he asked. I explained that I was thinking, and got up and walked over to stand looking out the front window. He was quiet for a while; then he started rolling his truck again.

  The only nice feature about the quarters was that they were high up and offered a view in all directions. It was afternoon and the sun was brilliant. Off to the side, a boy and girl were playing tennis in a driveway. Across the street a group of little fellows in bright sunsuits were playing on a long stretch of lawn before a white stone building. Their nurse, dressed completely in white except for her dark glasses, which I saw when she raised her head, sat still as a picture, bent over a book on her knees. As the children played, the wind blew their cries over to where I stood, and as I watched, a flock of pigeons swooped down into the driveway near the stretch of green, only to take flight again wheeling in a mass as another child came skipping up the drive pulling some sort of toy. The children saw him and were running toward him in a group when the nurse looked up and called them back. She called something to the child and pointed back in the direction of the garages where he had just come from. I could see him turn slowly around and drag his toy, some kind of bird that flapped its wings like an eagle, slowly after him. He stopped and pulled a flower from one of the bushes that lined the drive, turning to look hurriedly at the nurse, and then ran back down the drive. The child had been Jackie, the little son of the white gardener who worked across the street.