“Yes,” I said, “Now he can spend day after day marching in parades. If it hadn’t been for my grandfather, he’d have to work like whitefolks.”
I didn’t see him anywhere. But I never knew even a working nigger that you could find when you wanted him, let alone one that lived off the fat of the land. A car came along. I went over to town and went to Parker’s and had a good breakfast. While I was eating I heard a clock strike the hour. But then I suppose it takes at least one hour to lose time in, who has been longer than history getting into the mechanicalprogression of it.
When I finished breakfast I bought a cigar. The girl said a fifty cent one was the best, so I took one and lit it and went out to the street. I stood there and took a couple of puffs, then I held it in my hand and went on toward the corner. I passed a jeweller’s window, but I looked away in time. At the corner two bootblacks caught me, one on either side, shrill and raucous, like blackbirds. I gave the cigar to one of them, and the other one a nickel. Then they let me alone. The one with the cigar was trying to sellit to the other for the nickel.
There was a clock, high up in the sun, and I thought about how, when you dont want to do a thing, your body will try to trick you into doing it, sort of unawares. I could feel the muscles in the back of my neck, and then I could hear my watch ticking away in my pocket and after a while I had all the other sounds shut away, leaving only the watch in my pocket. I turned back up the street, to the window. He was working at the table behind the window. He was going bald. There was a glass in his eye—a metaltube screwed into his face. I went in.
The place was full of ticking, like crickets in September grass, and I could hear a big clock on the wall above his head. He looked up, his eye big and blurred and rushing beyond the glass. I took mine out and handed it to him.
“I broke my watch.”
He flipped it over in his hand. “I should say you have. You must have stepped on it.”
“Yes, sir. I knocked it off the dresser and stepped on it in the dark. It’s stillrunning though.” He pried the back open and squinted into it. “Seems to be all right. I cant tell until I go over
it, though. I’llgo into it this afternoon.”
“I’ll bring it back later,” I said. “Would you mind telling me if any of those watches in the window are right?”
He held my watch on his palmand looked up at me with his blurred rushing eye. “I made a bet with a fellow,” I said, “And I forgot my glasses this morning.”
“Why, all right,” he said. He laid the watch down and half rose on his stool and looked over the barrier. Then he glanced up at the wall. “It’s twen—”
“Dont tellme,” I said, “please sir. Just tellme if any of themare right.”
He looked at me again. He sat back on the stool and pushed the glass up onto his forehead. It left a red circle around his eye and when it was gone his whole face looked naked. “What’re you celebrating today?” he said. “That boat race aint untilnext week, is it?”
“No, sir. This is just a private celebration. Birthday. Are any of themright?”
“No. But they haven’t been regulated and set yet. If you’re thinking of buying one of them —”
“No, sir. I dont need a watch. We have a clock in our sitting room. I’ll have this one fixed when I do.” I reached my hand.
“Better leave it now.”
“I’ll bring it back later.” He gave me the watch. I put it in my pocket. I couldn’t hear it now,
above allthe others. “I’mmuch obliged to you. I hope I haven’t taken up your time.”
“That’s allright. Bring it in when you are ready. And you better put off this celebration until after we win that boat race.”
“Yes, sir. I reckon I had.”
I went out, shutting the door upon the ticking. I looked back into the window. He was watching me across the barrier. There were about a dozen watches in the window, a dozen different hours and each with the same assertive and contradictory assurance that mine had, without any hands at all. Contradicting one another. I could hear mine, ticking away inside my pocket, even though nobody could see it, even though it could tellnothing if anyone could.
And so I told myself to take that one. Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. The hands were extended, slightly off the horizontal at a faint angle, like a gull tilting into the wind. Holding all I used to be sorry about like the new moon holding water, niggers say. The jeweler was working again, bent over his bench, the tube tunnelled into his face. His hair was parted in the center. The part ran up into the bald spot, like a drained marsh in December.
I saw the hardware store fromacross the street. I didn’t know you bought flat-irons by the pound.
The clerk said, “These weigh ten pounds.” Only they were bigger than I thought. So I got two six-pound little ones, because they would look like a pair of shoes wrapped up. They felt heavy enough together, but I thought again how Father had said about the reducto absurdum of human experience, thinking how the only opportunity I seemed to have for the application of Harvard. Maybe by next year; thinking maybe it takes two years in school to learn to do that properly.
But they felt heavy enough in the air. A street car came. I got on. I didn’t see the placard on the front. It was full, mostly prosperous looking people reading newspapers. The only vacant seat was beside a nigger. He wore a derby and shined shoes and he was holding a dead cigar stub. I used to think that a Southerner had to be always conscious of niggers. I thought that Northerners would expect him to. When I first came East I kept thinking You’ve got to remember to think of them as coloured people not niggers, and if it hadn’t happened that I wasn’t thrown with many of them, I’d have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take themfor what they think they are, then leave them alone. That was when I realised that a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behaviour; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among. But I thought at first that I ought to miss having a lot of them around me because I thought that Northerners thought I did, but I didn’t know that I really had missed Roskus and Dilsey and themuntil that morning in Virginia. The train was stopped when I waked and I raised the shade and looked out. The car was blocking a road crossing, where two white fences came down a hill and then sprayed outward and downward like part of the skeleton of a horn, and there was a nigger on a mule in the middle of the stiff ruts, waiting for the train to move. How long he had been there I didn’t know, but he sat straddle of the mule, his head wrapped in a piece of blanket, as if they had been built there with the fence and the road, or with the hill, carved out of the hill itself, like a sign put there saying You are home again. He didn’t have a saddle and his feet dangled almost to the ground. The mule looked like a rabbit. I raised the window.
“Hey, Uncle,” I said, “Is this the way?”
“Suh?” He looked at me, then he loosened the blanket and lifted it away fromhis ear.
“Christmas gift!” I said.
“Sho comin, boss. You done caught me, aint you?”
“I’ll let you off this time.” I dragged my pants out of the little hammock and got a quarter out. “But look out next time. I’llbe coming back through here two days after New Year, and look out then.” I threw the quarter out the window. “Buy yourself some Santy Claus.”
“Yes, suh,” he said. He got down and picked up the quarter and rubbed it on his leg. “Thanky, young marster. Thanky.” Then the train began to move. I leaned out the window, into the cold air, looking back. He stood there beside the gaunt rabbit of a mule, the two of them shabby and motionless and unimpatient. The train swung around the curve, the engine puffing with short, heavy blasts, and they passed smoothly fromsight that way, with that quality about them of shabby and timeless patience, of static serenity: that blending of childlike and ready incompetence and paradoxical reliability that tends and protects them it loves out of all reason and robs themsteadily and evades responsibility and obligations by means too barefaced to be called subterfuge even and is taken in theft or evasion with only that frank and spontaneous admiration for the victor which a gentleman feels for anyone who beats
