Without Lifting A Finger

 

 

The priest had his hand on the screen door and he opened it, ready to make his escape. “Arrrr, I must be off,” he murmured. “I tell you if I had a white man who understood the Negroes, I’d have to let Mr. Guizac go,” she said and stood up again. He turned then and looked her in the face. “He has nowhere to go,” he said. Then he said, “Dear lady, I know you well enough to know you wouldn’t turn him out for a trifle!” and without waiting for an answer, he raised his hand and gave her his blessing in a rumbling voice. She smiled angrily and said, “I didn’t create this situation, of course.” The priest let his eyes wander toward the birds. They had reached the middle of the lawn. The cock stopped suddenly and curving his neck backwards, he raised his tail and spread it with a shimmering timbrous noise. Tiers of small pregnant suns floated in a green-gold haze over his head. The priest stood transfixed, his jaw slack. Mrs. McIntyre wondered where she had ever seen such an idiotic old man. “...

It occurred to him that he was lucky this time that they had found Mrs. Connin who would take you away for the day instead of an ordinary sitter who only sat where you lived or went to the park. You found out more when you left where you lived. He had found out already this morning that he had been made by a carpenter named Jesus Christ. Before he had thought it had been a doctor named Sladewall, a fat man with a yellow mustache who gave him shots and thought his name was Herbert, but this must have been a joke. They joked a lot where he lived. If he had thought about it before, he would have thought Jesus Christ was a word like “oh” or “damn” or “God,” or maybe somebody who had cheated them out of something sometime. When he had asked Mrs. Connin who the man in the sheet in the picture over her bed was, she had looked at him a while with her mouth open. Then she had said, “That’s Jesus,” and she had kept on looking at him.

Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. He understood it was all a man could carry into death to give his Maker and he suddenly burned with shame that he had so little of it to take with him. He stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it. He had never thought himself a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when he had denied poor Nelson. He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he f...

They walked on and at the end of five blocks the dome of the terminal sank out of sight and Mr. Head turned to the left. Nelson could have stood in front of every store window for an hour if there had not been another more interesting one next to it. Suddenly he said, “I was born here!” Mr. Head turned and looked at him with horror. There was a sweaty brightness about his face. “This is where I come from!” he said. Mr. Head was appalled. He saw the moment had come for drastic action. “Lemme show you one thing you ain’t seen yet,” he said and took him to the corner where there was a sewer entrance. “Squat down,” he said, “and stick you head in there,” and he held the back of the boy’s coat while he got down and put his head in the sewer. He drew it back quickly, hearing a gurgling in the depths under the sidewalk. Then Mr. Head explained the sewer system, how the entire city was underlined with it, how it contained all the drainage and was full of rats and how a man could slide into it ...

There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for go...

“Aren’t you going on to the Y?” he asked. “Home,” she muttered. “Well, are we walking?” For answer she kept going. Julian followed along, his hands behind him. He saw no reason to let the lesson she had had go without backing it up with an explanation of its meaning. She might as well be made to understand what had happened to her. “Don’t think that was just an uppity Negro woman,” he said. “That was the whole colored race which will no longer take your condescending pennies. That was your black double. She can wear the same hat as you, and to be sure,” he added gratuitously (because he thought it was funny), “it looked better on her than it did on you. What all this means,” he said, “is that the old world is gone. The old manners are obsolete and your graciousness is not worth a damn.” He thought bitterly of the house that had been lost for him. “You aren’t who you think you are,” he said.

Listen, he didn’t have to read nothin.’ All he had to do was think. That was the trouble with people these days—they didn’t think, they didn’t use their horse sense. Why wasn’t Rayber thinkin’? Where was his horse sense? Why am I straining myself? Rayber thought irritably. “Nossir!” the barber said. “Big words don’t do nobody no good. They don’t take the place of thinkin’.” “Thinking!” Rayber shouted. “You call yourself thinking?” “Listen,” the barber said, “do you know what Hawk told them people at Tilford?” At Tilford Hawk had told them that he liked niggers fine in their place and if they didn’t stay in that place, he had a place to put ’em. How about that? Rayber wanted to know what that had to do with thinking. The barber thought it was plain as a pig on a sofa what that had to do with thinking. He thought a good many other things too, which he told Rayber. He said Rayber should have heard the Hawkson speeches at Mullin’s Oak, Bedford, and Chickerville.

“Are you going to take notes?” Calhoun inquired in a tone heavy with irony. The girl looked around as if trying to identify the speaker. “Yes,” she said, “I’m going to take notes.” “You appreciate this sort of thing?” Calhoun asked in the same tone. “You enjoy it?” “It makes me vomit,” she said, “I’m going to finish it off with one swift literary kick.” The boy looked at her blankly. “Don’t let me interfere with your pleasure in it,” she said, “but this whole place is false and rotten to the core.” Her voice came with a hiss of indignation. “They prostitute azaleas!” Calhoun was astounded. After a moment he recovered himself. “It takes no great mind to come to that conclusion,” he said haughtily. “What requires insight is finding a way to transcend it.” “You mean a form to express it in.” “It comes to the same thing,” he said.

  A Little Learning   A little learning is a dangerous thing ; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring : There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again. Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts, In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts ; While from the bounded level of our mind Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind, But, more advanced, behold with strange surprise New distant scenes of endless science rise ! So pleased at first the towering Alps we try, Mount o’er the vales, and seem to tread the sky ; The eternal snows appear already past, And the first clouds and mountains seem the last ; But those attained, we tremble to survey The growing labours of the lengthened way ; The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes, Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise !

 

My dear Madam, you mistake me. Artists may want skill; historians may be partial. Far be it from me to applaud the malignant or the stupid. Ignorance and envy are no favourites of mine, whether they have or have not a chin to be shaved: but nothing would be more grossly absurd, than to suppose these defects to be peculiar to female artists, or the historians of the tea-table.

 

Several days passed, and no tidings could be procured of him. His absence was a topic of general speculation, but was a source of particular anxiety to no one but myself. My apprehensions were surely built upon sufficient grounds. From the moment that we parted, no one had seen or heard of him. What mode of suicide he had selected, he had disabled us from discovering, by the impenetrable secrecy in which he had involved it. In the midst of my reflections upon this subject, the idea of the wilderness occurred. Could he have executed his design in the deepest of its recesses? These were unvisited by human footsteps, and his bones might lie for ages in this solitude without attracting observation. To seek them where they lay, to gather them together and provide for them a grave, was a duty which appeared incumbent on me, and of which the performance was connected with a thousand habitual sentiments and mixed pleasures.