Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
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in order. They grinned affectionately, therefore, and called him boss.
“And what in Jesus’ name have you done now?” he yelled, as a huge black sergeant with several enlisted men, who had gathered at the examiner’s table, burst suddenly into loud roars of grief.
The fiery lieutenant rushed at the table, cursing.
The sergeant and several enlisted men, all Texas darkies, had come away from camp without a clean bill of health: they were venereals and had not been cured.
“Boss,” blubbered the big black sergeant, “we wants to go to France. We don’t want to git lef’ in dis Gawd-dam hole.”
(Nor do I blame them, thought Eugene.)
“I’ll kill you! So help me God, I’ll kill you!” screamed the officer, hurling his trim cap upon the ground and stamping upon it. But, a moment later, with a medical officer he was leading them away for examination behind the great wall of sacked oats. Five minutes later they emerged. The negroes were cavorting with joy: they pressed around their fierce commander, seizing and kissing his hand, fawning upon him, adoring him.
“You see,” said the dish-faced checker, while he and Eugene watched, “that’s what it takes to hold a crowd of niggers. You can’t be nice to ’em. They’d do anything for that guy.”
“He would for them,” said Eugene.
These negroes, he thought, who came from Africa, were sold at the block in Louisiana, and live in Texas, are now on their way to France.
Mr. Finch, the chief checker with the ugly slit eyes, approached Eugene with a smile of false warmth. His gray jaws worked.
“I’ve got a job for you, Gant,” he said. “Double-time pay. I want you to get in on some of the easy money.”
“What is it?” said Eugene.
“They’re loading this ship with big stuff,” said Mr. Finch. “They’re taking her into the stream to get it on. I want you to go out with her. They’ll take you off in a tug to-night.”
The dish-faced checker, when jubilantly he told him of his appointment, said:
“They asked me to go, but I wouldn’t.”
“Why not?” said Eugene.
“I don’t want the money bad enough. They’re loading her with T. N. T. and nitro-glycerin. The niggers play baseball with those cases. If they ever drop one, they’ll bring you home in a bucket.”
“It’s all in the day’s work,” said Eugene dramatically.
This was danger, war. He was definitely in on it, risking his hide for Democracy. He was thrilled.
When the big freighter slid away from the pier, he stood in the bow with spread legs, darting his eyes about with fierce eagle glances. The iron decks blistered his feet through the thin soles of his shoes. He did not mind. He was the captain.
She anchored seaward down the Roads, and the great barges were nosed in by the tugs. All through the day, under a broiling sun, they loaded her from the rocking barges: her huge yellow booms swung up and down; by nightfall she rode deeply in the water, packed to her throat with shells and powder, and bearing on the hot plates of her deck 1200 grisly tons of field artillery.
Eugene stood with fierce appraising eyes, walking about the guns with a sense of authority, jotting down numbers, items, pieces. From time to time he thrust a handful of moist scrap-tobacco into his mouth, and chewed with an air of relish. He spat hot sizzling gobs upon the iron deck. God! thought he. This is man’s work. Heave-ho, ye black devils! There’s a war on! He spat.
The tug came at nightfall and took him off. He sat apart from the stevedores, trying to fancy the boat had come for him alone. The lights went twinkling up the far Virginia shores. He spat into the swirling waters.
When the trains slid in and out, the stevedores raised the wooden bridges that spanned the tracks. Foot by foot, with rhythmic pull and halt, the gangs tugged at the ropes, singing, under the direction of their leader their song of love and labor:
“Jelly Roll! (Heh!) Je-e-elly Roll.”
They were great black men, each with his kept woman. They earned fifty or sixty dollars a week.
Once or twice again, in the dying summer, Eugene went to Norfolk. He saw the sailor, but he no longer tried to see Laura. She seemed far and lost.
He had not written home all summer. He found a letter from Gant, written in his father’s Gothic sprawl — a sick and feeble letter, written sorrowfully and far away. O lost! Eliza, in the rush and business of the summer trade, had added a few practical lines. Save his money. Get plenty of good food. Keep well. Be a good boy.
The boy was a lean column of brown skin and bone. He had lost over thirty pounds during the summer: he was over six foot four and weighed little more than one hundred and thirty pounds.
The sailor was shocked at his emaciation, and bullied him with blustering reproof:
“Why didn’t you t-t-tell me where you were, idiot? I’d have sent you money. For G-g-god’s sake! Come on and eat!” They ate.
The summer waned. When September came, Eugene quit his work and, after a luxurious day or two in Norfolk, started homeward. But, at Richmond, where there was a wait of three hours between trains, he changed his plans suddenly and went to a good hotel.
He was touched with pride and victory. In his pockets he had $130 that he had won hardily by his own toil. He had lived alone, he had known pain and hunger, he had survived. The old hunger for voyages fed at his heart. He thrilled to the glory of the secret life. The fear of the crowd, a distrust and hatred of group life, a horror of all bonds that tied him to the terrible family of the earth, called up again the vast Utopia of his loneliness. To go alone, as he had gone, into strange cities; to meet strange people and to pass again before they could know him; to wander, like his own legend, across the earth — it seemed to him there could be no better thing than that.
He thought of his own family with fear, almost with hatred. My God! Am I never to be free? he thought. What have I done to deserve this slavery? Suppose — suppose I were in China, or in Africa, or at the South Pole. I should always be afraid of his dying while I was away. (He twisted his neck as he thought of it.) And how they would rub it in to me if I were not there! Enjoying yourself in China (they would say) while your father was dying. Unnatural son! Yes, but curse them! Why should I be there? Can they not die alone? Alone! O God, is there no freedom on this earth?
With quick horror, he saw that such freedom lay a weary world away, and could be bought by such enduring courage as few men have.
He stayed in Richmond several days, living sumptuously in the splendid hotel, eating from silver dishes in the grill, and roaming pleasantly through the wide streets of the romantic old town, to which he had come once as a Freshman at Thanksgiving, when the university’s team had played Virginia there. He spent three days trying to seduce a waitress in an ice-cream and candy-store: he lured her finally to a curtained booth in a chop-suey restaurant, only to have his efforts fail when the elaborate meal he had arranged for with the Chinaman aroused her distaste because it had onions in it.
Before he went home he wrote an enormous letter to Laura James at Norfolk, a pitiable and boasting letter which rose at its end to an insane crow: “I was there all summer and I never looked you up. You were not decent enough to answer my letters; I saw no reason why I should bother with you any more. Besides, the world is full of women; I got my share and more this summer.”
He mailed the letter, with a sense of malevolent triumph. But the moment the iron lid of the box clanged over it, his face was contorted by shame and remorse: he lay awake, writhing as he recalled the schoolboy folly of it. She had beaten him again.
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