Proud Flesh Read online

  “In my opinion,” said Will Mahaffey, “the women do it better than us men. I have buried three, and I don’t expect to go as graceful as e’er one of them when my turn comes, old as I am and living on borrowed time.”

  “Edwina Renshaw won’t go ladylike. She’ll go, I reckon, if she just has to, but she won’t like it.”

  “Like it or lump it,” said old man Westfall, lowering himself creakily to his hunkers, “when your time is up you’ve got to go. Youth nor beauty nor tears nor all the money in the world nor five times five fighting sons can’t buy nor bully nor wheedle you one minute more than your allotted span. Keep your satchel packed at all times and ready for the call. For the great day of reckoning will surely come, and then the Lord God Almighty will hold us each and every one up to the strong light and cull the bad from the good like candling eggs. He takes grannies and blushing brides, boys in first reader and young men at the plow, them still at the breast, them with their full set of teeth and them left to gum it as best they can. He can call you on Sunday or any day of the week, so be ready at all times. Be packed and ready to go. Be sure of today and you’re sure of eternity, for none of us can be sure of tomorrow.”

  “Amen.”

  “Amen.”

  “Amen.”

  IV

  By August the cottonfields have whitened as if the sun has reduced the earth to ashes. In September come the migrant workers and settle on them in a swarm. Bent black figures in clothes darkened and colorless with sweat, dragging their long bolster-shaped sacks behind them, they eat their way across the fields, white ahead of them, stripped bare and brown in their wake, like some plague of great white-bodied, black-headed caterpillars. Even the little children pick, emptying their towsacks and patched pillowcases into their mothers’ and fathers’ sacks at the end of the row, at the weighing-up.

  They pick from dawn to dark, and while they pick they chant. It is like a broken record left to spin in the same worn groove. When finally a voice is raised in a new tune it is like when the phonograph needle is lifted and advanced beyond the break. After a while another break is reached. They inch along the rows more and more slowly as their sacks swell. Bit by bit black hands and arms, sticky with sweat, turn white from the lint that fills the air, clogs the nostrils, chokes the breath, sprouts white moustaches on sweaty lips, turns hair and eyebrows grizzled; and soon all of them, bent as they are, look hoary and stooped with age.

  Trucks or trailers sit in the field, with extra-tall sideboards or with sides of stretched hogwire, and near each one stands a tripod of poles from which hangs the scale. There the sacks are dragged, doubled and hung by the ends to be weighed, the boss entering the figure in his daybook alongside the picker’s name, and the picker himself, or herself, entering the figure in his sweat-dampened daybook—one of those given away to advertise snuff or farina or patent medicines. On Saturday afternoon after the final weighing-up they are paid their week’s wages. Only on Sunday—and sometimes not then—does that lament of theirs cease, and then stillness settles upon the empty, glaring fields.

  Yet such a stillness fell now, in mid-morning of a weekday, upon the ears of the men squatting in the shade of the pear tree. That chant which was so much a part of the season and the place that the cessation of it was momentarily like a failure of hearing, stopped, voice by voice, like the ending of a roundsong. Clyde had gone down to the fields and told the pickers to quit work in observance of Ma’s condition, and upon the still air the silence throbbed like the tolling of a knell. The wasps droned among the pears, and from somewhere came the sob of a mourning dove:

  coo-oo coo coo coo

  coo-oo coo coo coo

  V

  Clyde was the one who, although he lived in town and had to drive out and back every day, ran the farm. Clifford, being the eldest son and the one who had never left home, might have been expected to be the one, but Clifford had done few of the things that were expected of him. He not only never took a wife and raised a family, he had never taken any interest in running the farm or in any other steady employment. It could not be said that Clifford had never worked a day in his life, just that he could never be counted on to work two days in succession. Yet Clifford was not shiftless, and he was anything but extravagant. He was moody and unpredictable, a mixture of boy, backwoodsman and old maid, a mystery even to himself. Never articulate, almost tonguetied in fact, and dangerous when in moments of feeling the words boiled inside him, his leaden tongue like a plug, a stuck safety valve, he would sometimes let days go by without a sound passing his lips, a sullen, half-tamed bear of a man. He did not have any speech defect, did not stammer, he just choked, and then he turned red—purple—apoplectic. Then he took himself off and was gone no one knew where for a week, two weeks, then returned with never a word of explanation nor even a greeting for anybody, he just reappeared, filthy, bearded, looking more like a bear than ever. The sight of money made him blush and scowl. He associated money with pleasure, pleasure with sin. It had been evident early that someone other than Clifford would have to manage the farm.

  Managing the Renshaws’ farm still meant bossing Negroes. For although many farmers in the county had switched from cotton to cattle as pickers got harder and harder to find, Clyde Renshaw stuck with cotton. Clyde liked cotton, but more than cotton Clyde liked cottonpickers. He looked forward all year to their coming. Or rather, he had always done so until this year.

  Clyde liked Negroes. In fact, Clyde liked only Negroes. Not that Clyde’s notions about Negroes were any different from those of people who disliked, even despised them; in fact, they were the same. Like the rest, Clyde too imputed to Negroes, especially the migrant cottonpicking kind, the sexual socialism of the barnlot. He too believed that unless you watched them every minute they would steal you blind. That they were lazy, lying, lawless, settling their disputes among themselves with an icepick or a straight razor. But these traits which others despised them for were just what Clyde liked about Negroes. He himself thought of nothing but what he called poontang from waking to sleeping. He knew honesty did not pay, that hard work got you nothing but more of the same, that the law was always on the other fellow’s side, that the only law was the law of the jungle, eat or be eaten, screw or get screwed.

  People said of the migrant workers that they lived like animals. Clyde said the same. But when Clyde said it he meant they lived the free, untrammeled lives of animals, without shame, without hypocrisy. Being outcasts from society, they were free from its restrictions. They lived. When the crop was gathered and they piled into their battered cars and hit the road north toward their next squalid campsite, leaving him behind with the profits from their labors, Clyde Renshaw watched them out of sight and longed to be one of them. Meanwhile it was Clyde’s boast, as some men vaunt themselves on their knowledge of horseflesh or their affinity with dogs, that he knew how to handle Negroes. He spoke their language. The language he spoke after a day in the field made his wife Eunice say when he came home from work in the evening, “You can turn off the Amos ’n Andy now.”

  Clyde Renshaw had expected to have to fight a war in his time. Clyde had been determined to fight his war in his own way, with a minimum of interference from the U.S. Army. That the United States would win its war Clyde never questioned; his concern was to make sure he won his. To ensure his survival Clyde chose with care his branch of the armed service: the infantry; his rank: private; his strategy: that of the lone sniper, unencumbered by comrades in arms. Clyde was not hoping to escape the enemy’s notice by getting lost in the anonymous ranks. The enemy was not what worried Clyde. What worried him was his own brave, patriotic or just plain stupid officers, and the brave, patriotic, stupid GI’s alongside him.

  Clyde chose to be an infantryman because that was where he was at home, on the ground, not in the air or on the water. He was a farmboy. What the army training manuals called “terrain” was what he had known all his life as fields, thickets, swamps. A hunter, a rifleman, as all farmboys are, he knew h
ow to practice stealth, concealment. Germans and Japs were merely a more wily and more dangerous game than any he had hunted before. But mainly Clyde chose to be an infantryman because he did not believe in teamwork; he believed in nobody but himself, and in the infantry a man was on his own. As he would later explain, “In the air corps or the tank corps, say, you’re only as good as your machine. And who made your machine? Bunch of 4-F’s in some defense plant out in California interested in just one thing: their pay envelopes—hell with the safety of the poor son of a bitch that’s going to have to pilot the thing. And who serviced your machine? Bunch of goof-off ground-crew ‘mechanics’ that before being drafted were jerking sodas or delivering telegrams. In the Navy there you are out there in a tub slapped together by a bunch of Rosy-the-Riveters waiting like a sitting duck for a submarine to torpedo you or one of your Ivy League college graduate officers to steer you onto an a-toll or whatever you call them. In the infantry you’re dependent for your survival on just yourself. Yourself and your rifle. Your enemy is just another man with his rifle. If you know how to shoot, how to stalk your game, how to read the signs he gives himself away by, how to lay low, you’ll come through. There weren’t many old country boys who didn’t make it back. The ones we lost were those city boys raised on concrete that never held a gun in their hands before they were issued one in training camp.”

  Private Clyde Renshaw won so many citations there would not have been room on his broad chest for all his ribbons if he had kept them instead of throwing them away, but he refused every promotion. This was thought by his superiors and his fellow-soldiers to be modesty; it was not. Clyde wanted no responsibility for anybody’s life but his own. Not for nothing, Clyde reasoned, was a private called a private. A private had only himself to save. Officers, commissioned and noncommissioned, got killed through the cowardice or the inexperience or the bone-headed bravery of the men in their charge, those town boys who did not know how to take care of themselves. As to Clyde’s strategy, it was simple: to kill as many of the enemy as possible. This was misinterpreted also. It was not patriotism. Clyde Renshaw had about as much patriotism as a green pepper. The way Clyde figured, the more of the enemy he killed the fewer of them there would be to kill him.

  The result of Clyde Renshaw’s victorious one-man campaign to survive and get home again was that he was the most decorated buck private in his theater of the war, and the last man there to get back home. He was too good a soldier to be let go, and when the war was over and all those ex-golf caddies and barbers’ college students whose dumb luck had brought them safely through were home getting the good jobs and the girls, Clyde was kept on, as an old billygoat is kept among stallions, to stabilize the herd of beardless high-school kids with permanent hard-ons sent out to be the army of occupation.

  To Ma war was a game of hookey played by grown boys to get away from women and work. “Well!” she greeted the conquering hero on his return. “Where have you been all this while? The others have all been back for ages. What kept you as if I didn’t know?”

  Clyde married. He told his wife his Army adventures—those that could be told to a wife. She listened avidly. Flattered, he expanded. The telling drew them together as they had not been before. Both sensed this and drew closer still. Until both realized that what they were enjoying was the memory of the time when they had not been married.

  Bitter and bored, Clyde Renshaw longed for the lawlessness of wartime, for the license that had been his during the postwar occupation. Clyde craved a conquered country all his own, where he might be a one-man army of occupation, accountable for his conduct to nobody but himself. He found one right in his own back yard. For the beast that paced inside him restlessly, Clyde Renshaw found a jungle, his own private preserve, where by seignorial right he was the king of the beasts. Right in his own back yard where it had been all along, in the camp of the migrant Negroes who came each year to work his crops, Clyde Renshaw found not just another country but another world.

  He went on baiting them, bullying them, teasing them, sicking them onto one another as he always had. Never a sack of cotton was weighed but Clyde provoked an argument over the weight. The sack weighed and emptied into the trailer, pencil stub poised above his daybook, Clyde would say, “Clovis Dodds. Semty-nine pounds.”

  “Semty-nine!” Clovis Dodds would screech, her flat face like a piece of water-worn fountain statuary, dripping sweat. “Semty-nine? Nuh-uh! Nineny-sebm! Not semty-nine: nineny-sebm. Yawl was lisnin. Yawl heard him say it, din’t yawl? Din’t none of yawl hear the man say nineny-sebm?”

  “Well, Auntie, I can’t take just yours out of there and weigh it again now,” Clyde would say. “Can I?”

  Thereupon she would set to keening. Then Clyde would heave a sigh and say, well, damn her old black hide, she was robbing him, but all right, ninety-seven. Then she loved him. She wrung his hand with her own two twisted claws that were scaly and fleshless as a chicken’s foot. By then she believed she had cheated Clyde out of fifteen pounds she had never picked. Another trick of his: to slip a large rock into a picker’s sack and let him drag it up and down the rows all afternoon, then at the weighing-up to voice his suspicion, have the sack dumped out (sometimes discovering in the process three or four more-recently-added rocks in addition to his) and relish their embarrassment.

  He went on cursing them as he always had, as he might have spoken to a dog or some dependent and childlike creature that had engaged his rough affections. But he also began hanging around their camp after work, drinking with them, dicing with them, boxing and wrestling with them. In imitation of them he took to wearing a straight razor beneath his shirt on a string, a piece of butcher’s twine—quickly snapped—around his neck. He reminded himself frequently that whenever one of them presumed too far, got out of line, he could always put him in his place. But he began to live for the time of year that brought them back. The first contingent, those who came to chop the cotton, came with the spring, and to Clyde they brought with them a quickening of self-renewal, like the surge of sap in the trees.

  People said—and not just whites but also the settled Negroes of the community—sniffing at the squalor they made of their camp, that they didn’t care how they lived. Clyde knew better. They cared how they lived, they just didn’t much care where. They were a race of nomads, and indifferent to their surroundings, which were always changing. Respectability, security, a fixed place in society—all the things they lacked and which some despised them for not even wanting and a few bleeding hearts pitied them for being denied: they had rejected all that. Those who said scornfully that they could not be helped because they liked to live as they did were right in a way they would never know. Those people knew a secret. They alone, the despised, the outcast, were free. The prisoners of life were their lords and masters, hostages to their possessions and their reputations. The life they lived down there was one of continual riot, of flashes of temper as sudden as switchblades, of lust as casual and unrestrained as dogs meeting on streetcorners. Nobody cared what they did among themselves, so they were free to do as they pleased. The worst was expected of them: why not do their worst? Lawless as gypsies, lusty as goats, violent, vital, strangers to guilt and regret, they crammed more living into each day than most people accumulated in a lifetime.

  No satisfaction so sweet as the secret enjoyment of a thing despised by the multitude, to have it all to yourself.

  So began Clyde Renshaw’s double life, and with it a black-and-white paradox of the mind. How could a man like, even admire, imitate, even envy those whom all the world, himself included, despised? How could the master envy the slave, and envy him precisely his freedom? And finally, how could a man love what was his without paying the awful price of love, without paying any price at all?

  All men have their secrets from the world. Clyde Renshaw’s was his liking for his despised black field hands. Among his other shifts for keeping his secret from the world, Clyde, when among white men, was the handiest of them all with the epi
thet he himself most dreaded: niggerlover. Clyde Renshaw also had a secret from himself: his more than liking for a black woman. To keep this from himself Clyde called what he felt for her by another name, or rather a variety of names, of which his favorite was poontang.

  VI

  When he was little, Clyde Renshaw had thought that the family that staffed his mother’s kitchen had acquired their color there through their generations of service, as the skillets and the pans had acquired their coats of soot. They had been with the Renshaws “always”; thus for the Renshaws it was natural to assume that they always would. They traced themselves back to their ancestors Tip and Nell, the first of their line to have any name other than their given names. Tip and Nell had stayed on after their emancipation to work for the Renshaws for wages. The reigning Renshaw of that day decreed that as they now enjoyed the rights of citizenship they must also observe its rules; no longer two head of stock, they must no longer live together like beasts, their union must be legitimized. For this they needed names; thus Renshaws’ Tip became Tip Renshaw and the former Renshaws’ Nell became Mrs. Tip. Of this Nell, Clyde had once heard his grandmother say she was the finest woman and the finest Christian she ever knew. That if there was a heaven then Nell was surely there. And that when she got there the very first thing she was going to do was go straight out to the kitchen and see Nell. The present-day Renshaws smiled when they told that story, but they too accepted their black namesakes out in their kitchen as part of themselves, like their own shadows.

  Idled by their mistress’s illness and not yet evicted from the kitchen by the neighbor women, they were there now: Eulalie, Archie, Rowena—all of them but the one Clyde longed to see. Throughout the morning he had gone there on various pretexts meant to mislead only himself, though he knew that just because he wanted her to be she would not be there, and though to go there was to expose himself to one or the other of two torments—this morning it was both: the sullen silence of those of her family who knew about him and her, and the mere sight of that other one, her grandmother, old Rowena, who did not know what the others knew but knew what they did not. For Clyde alone, Eulalie and her son Archie seemed to have a third eyelid, like the one dogs have, which they drew over their eyes whenever he came in sight. That had never bothered him before, but today it really did make Clyde feel like a dirty pane of glass. But what bothered him more than this, much more, was to look into Rowena’s sorrowful old eyes. In their depths Clyde saw darkly what she alone had seen and which her merely hinting at to him had destroyed his peace of mind. Yet he had gone to the kitchen repeatedly, as often as he dared—when he ought not to have dared at all—and now on his way out of the house to go down to the fields, still with no hope of finding her there, would go again. On his way out of the house which after half a lifetime in one of his own he still called home and where upstairs his mother had lain unconscious, maybe dying, while he ranged the halls and peeked into every room, perishing with shame at each chance encounter, especially at each encounter with himself in any reflecting surface, pretending whenever he met anyone—and once it was his own son, with tears in his eyes—to be exclusively concerned with what ought to have concerned him exclusively, and pulling a stricken face, or rather allowing his stricken face to be interpreted as being solely for Ma, the flames of his jealousy and his desire mounting higher by the moment, a jealousy that had constantly to be dissembled, hidden from every eye living and dead and most of all from his own, desire that could no longer be hidden from any eye, least of all his own. Today of all days, when all other thoughts ought to have been driven from his mind by concern for his mother, and especially such thoughts as he was thinking, he was in a state like a horny high-school boy forced to carry his satchel in front of him to hide his shame from the world. No high-school boy, he was, as those reflecting surfaces all told him, a middle-aged married man with grown children of his own. But in that visible state he was, and in it he went through the kitchen one last time on his way out of the house to go down to the fields and give the cottonpickers the day off out of consideration for his mother’s grave illness.