Rock Island Line. David Rhodes
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Marion’s right. Why do you think people in cities hate them so much and keep them out of their neighborhood? Do you think they’re mean or stupid, all of them? No, they know more about it than you do.”
“I heard some fellas one day yellin’, ‘You’re not human, you’re animals,’ at a bunch of school kids walking down the street in front of a Younkers store. It made me sick.”
“There you go, see?”
“I’m not defending anything. All I say is that there’s a reason. More rapes among coloreds.”
“Look how tall they got by drinking orange soda and eating potato chips!”
“Here comes Morley.”
“Hi, Morley.”
“Wasting time again,” said Morley, shaking his head from inside his car at the stop sign. Then on again.
“He’s a good guy.”
“Sure has tough luck, though, at least lately.”
“It’s mostly his wife’s fault, though he won’t let on so.”
“What I think is that you have to keep them separate from us. There’s no way either of us will get a real fair shake with them hating us the way they do.”
“But they want what we got. They want all the things and money we got. They’d live right next door to you if you gave them a chance. There’s no way to separate them.”
“Sure there is. Give them their own schools. Let them educate themselves in whatever way they want. Let them own their own businesses. Let them take care of themselves.”
“Their own prisons, too.”
“And their own police force.”
“And their own traffic court.”
“And garbage collection.”
“And welfare state.”
“They’d never do it. They like being where they are—living on welfare—taking what they can get from us and laying back.”
“If you think it’s such a great life, why don’t you try it? Sell the farm, move into town, go on welfare and start living the good life.”
“I didn’t say I’d want to live like that.”
“Then it must not be so great, if you wouldn’t want to. Right, John?”
“I don’t know,” said John, the first time he’d spoken. But he was listening to everything.
“I think they’d be happy to take care of themselves.”
“How they going to get any food?”
“Well, there’d have to be some exchanges made between them and us.”
“What are they going to give in return?”
“Probably something from the arts. Music, I guess.”
“That’d be pretty hard to trade. I wouldn’t give much for a song.”
“You’re just like that. If they could get any kind of advertising and exposure. When we went to Chicago last fall, Clara’s cousin took us down to a colored bar and we heard a harmonica player who could bring tears to your eyes. His name was Little something. Little Walker . . . Little Wurther . . . something like that. His voice was beautiful.”
“Music is natural to them.”
“It comes from their coming from Afr—”
“No it doesn’t. It has to do with feelings. They have more feelings than we do.”
“That’s true. They’re not as smart, but they have more feelings, and are better at expressing them. It’s something that we’ve done to them as well. But it’s not all in our imagination.”
“What?”
“It comes from our original puritanical upbringing. We’ve been taught by one way or another—by the work ethic and so forth—to be ashamed of our feelings—sex especially. So what we do is throw all of them off on the blacks.”
“Wait a minute—”
“No,” said Sy, interrupting. “He’s right. That’s exactly what we do. We think of them as being sexual giants. We think of them crying easier than we do, of being more compassionate, loving their wives more, feeling more anger.”
“Right! And in consequence they’ve been allowed the full range of those feelings, whereas we’ve been denied them. We also imagine them to be free from feelings of guilt—and they are!”
“They live a more carefree emotional life.”
“Just a minute,” said John. “Are you saying that they are more alive than we are?”
“Of course they are,” said Marion, and his tone of voice added, Didn’t you know that? Everyone else agreed: John should have known that.
“And we hate them for it.”
“Even before they were slaves they had more feelings, and then we pushed all those we couldn’t use over onto them.”
“But they know some of us don’t hate them, don’t they?” asked John.
“Come on, John,” said Marion, “of course not. They hate us all, and think we all hate them. How could they think anything else?”
“But I didn’t want any of what happened to have happened. And I don’t hate them.”
“They don’t care about you. They’d kill you if they had the chance and wouldn’t get caught.”
“And feel no guilt.”
“None at all.”
“They’d be glad to do it.”
“If you were lying helpless on a deserted street in their neighborhood without a penny on you, one of ’em would go out of his way to run over and kill you, just because of the chance to do it.”
“Sure they would, John. Didn’t you know that?”
John went back to welding, and didn’t enter into the conversation again, though it changed course several times during the afternoon. As soon as everyone left, he closed the garage and went across the street and into his house. He was very troubled, and tried to get over it by immersing himself in his bird books. But even reading about the snowy owl, which he was sure he had seen several nights earlier, could not keep his troubles from spewing out. He felt as if he were drowning and had nothing to float up out of the water on except his worries. Finally, Sarah came home from shopping, and talking to her made him feel a little better. She was sympathetic, and even offered ways for him to forget about it; but it was a personal problem, and so had to be worked out by himself and in his own way. The difficulty wound itself around his religion and threatened to strangle it to death. How could the universe be as he imagined it if there were people in it who were fundamentally different from him?
Can they be more alive? Regardless of the reasons, can they really be more alive? Are their senses better? He did not talk to Sarah about this. He did not expect ever to get an answer.
Mrs. Pearson saw them first. Dusting off one of her seven-foot rubber plants by the window facing the street, looking out, she saw a green Ford moving at a walking pace in front of her house. She ran to the kitchen to keep its progress in view, saw it stop two houses away and three men get out. She ran out the back door and into her neighbor’s house. “Lois!” she yelled, coming through to the living room. “Blacks! They’re black!” Both of them went to the window and looked out.
The men were looking up and down Sharon Center nervously as though they were