Atlantis: Three Tales

a

I.

Skyscrapers — that’s what he was most eager to see. But before entering the city the train dropped between earthen walls tangled with winter trees, the dirt sometimes becoming out the window, for hundreds of feet, concrete.

II.

The tallest building in the world was in New York — the Wool-worth Building. Most people knew that; but he knew, counting basements and sub-basements, the Woolworth had exactly sixty stories — and not many people knew that.

III.

Bring such information out at the right time, and people said, “What a smart boy!” which made up a little for the guilt he felt over his school grades: they’d been bad enough to silence Papa —

IV.

recently elected bishop — and make Mama cry. Finally they’d decided to let him leave (clearly school was doing him no good) and come north to stay with his brother. Sam’s toes felt sticky in his socks.

V.

Last night, he’d decided not to take his shoes off, afraid his feet might smell. This morning, however, though he’d already gone into the little bathroom with its metal walls to wash his face and hands,

VI.

nothing about him felt fresh. Stretching, he arched his back, pulled his fists against his chest; the noblet of flesh on the left side — one male, milkless teat — caught a thread or fold in his shirt,

pulling till it cut.

He sat forward quickly, trying to look disinterested, waiting for the soreness to fall from his chest. A minute on, when he sat back, cambric brushed him: the sensitivity had become, surprisingly, pleasant. Again, he felt himself shift within his wool trousers. Insistently alert to his body, sensual and stale under cloth, he glanced around the car — especially at the women in their seats, black and white, beginning to arrange themselves.

Five times now he’d noticed, first with distress, then with curiosity, and finally with indifference, that if he sat on the rumbling plush, relaxed, and let his knees fall wide, through loose wool the train’s joggling gave him an erection.

Pulling his knees together, he sat back again and arched his fingers on the cushion, so that blue nap slipped under his nails. (Amidst the wheels’ cacophony, Sam could hear a “…tut-tut-tut-tut-tut…” just like the song.) The first joints of his fingers (and his toes — but people didn’t see those) had grown too much: tall as he was, the initial joints had clubbed into those of someone even bigger. Digitus clavigerae, or something like it, his oldest brother, Lemuel, had said it was called. Not that that made him feel any better about it. Youngest child, lightest child (hair once cornsilk pale before puberty had turned it rough and red — and adolescence darkened it further), a surprise child, Mama had called him. Mama’s pet, the others said, which, while sometimes it held their ire, now had become a term of fondness — for most of them, most of the time. But he was the one among the ten who hadn’t finished high school. Well, when he’d worked awhile in New York and grown more serious, the older ones could settle him into night school and help him toward a diploma. That’s what Papa said; and since she always listened to Papa, Mama said he could go. And see the skyscrapers.

On either bank — Sam slid from one seat, moved across the aisle, and into another, to peer by purple tassels — against November gray, filigreed branches separated wooden houses, one and two drab stories.

Watching the dawnscape, still iceless, flip along, he contemplated for the thousandth time the astonishing process by which the seamless and inexorable progression of the present slipped away to pack the past with memories, like numbered stanzas in a song, like cells in a comb, like cakes in a carton, to be called back (though, he’d already ascertained, most he’d never recall) in whatever surprising, associative order.

There’d been, he remembered now, that poor-white family with the six children the white conductor had brought into the Jim Crow car last night and, after looking around, settled — with their twine-tied boxes and traveling baskets — in the three rows of seats at the car’s head. “If you all want to sit together, this is about the best we can do.” One of the girls and two of the boys had been barefoot, just as if it were summer. “In a couple of hours you all could come in here anyway.” The father’s coat had been out at both elbows and his hair stuck straight down from under his straw hat in blond blades. Holding the shoulder of his mother’s sweater, with a fall of silver silk over each ear and eyes like circles cut from gingham, above the seat back the littlest stared at all the car’s dark faces, to fix finally — pink lips lax in a thoughtless ‘o’—on Sam, four seats behind and across the aisle, as if Sam, and not they, were the anomaly here. Sam had slid his fingers under his thighs.

But why did that make him remember, how many days before, Lewy, arguing with — well, discussing with — Mama, in an extraordinarily grown-up manner, how going north would be good for him — while Sam sat, silent, impressed, across the kitchen table, listening to them go on earnestly for fifteen minutes, as though he weren’t there.

For moments Sam thought again about the memory he didn’t have — because he’d dozed through it: that moment, on leaving Washington, when the Jim Crow car in which he’d started out had become a car like any other, along with all the white cars on the train; and he and anyone in it could sit anywhere they wanted. Immediately on waking, with half a dozen others already up and collecting things, though it was after one o’clock in the morning, he’d gotten his two cases and moved. Sprawled against each other, the white man and the barefoot children slept on. Beside the biggest boy, who wore shoes like his parents, the white woman gazed at the black window. At her shoulder, the blue-eyed child stared up, as Sam pushed, sideways, by.

Then there’d been the porter, whom, while he’d been exploring the train last night, Sam had caught smoking in the vestibule between cars; the two of them had stood in the chill chamber and had cigarettes together. The porter — whose name was John Brown, like his friend John at home — had not said: Ain’t you too young to smoke, boy? He’d said: “I’m usually on the Chicago-Calgary run — but I got deflected. I got to get me home to Chicago; eventually, somehow. That’s where my girlfriend live.” He’d chuckled as the night’s iced air whipped and snapped smoke back from the dark shelves of his lips. Sam told him about his friends, John and Lewy, and how John’s name was the same as his. “My daddy,” the porter said, “he was just John Brown crazy. Back when Dr. DuBois’ book come out, he made me read the whole thing out loud to him.” Sam laughed, and told him how his father had read it out loud to his whole family too — though he’d not been five years old; and often in bed. But he remembered lying awake, listening. Then the porter told Sam he’d just read another book about Brown by someone named Oswald Garrison Villard, who was the editor of a magazine. Sam didn’t remember the magazine’s name, but he remembered Oswald Garrison Villard because it sounded so eccentric he’d laughed.

How could a memory of laughter make you smile now? But, turning away from the window, Sam smiled.

Four seats ahead was the middle-aged white woman who’d started three different conversations with him — the first on the train platform yesterday at noon, then twice more since Washington — the third even after he’d told her, during the second, that he was Negro. Now, she was fixing her wide, ivory hat to salted auburn, with one, then another, then a third (taking them from between her teeth) pearl-tipped hatpin. She’d said she was Scottish and lived in Flatbush — in the heart of Brooklyn. He’d said that, just the morning he’d left, his older sister, Jules, had decided the vat of soap out back of the house had bleached enough to slice loose some half dozen cakes, wrap them in waxed paper, and send them in Sam’s wicker trunk to his brothers and sisters in New York. (Holding a fold of her apron, there’d been Jules, in the yard, looking at the soap tray, eyes narrowed, lips pursed; she was comparing it with Mama’s or Elsie’s, he knew. What she really wanted was to get to her piano lessons with the little girls who’d start coming in at one — almost an hour after he’d be on the train. When would he hear Jules in the parlor, guiding scales again?) The white woman had said she’d made her own soap for a while, but it wasn’t worth it — there in Brooklyn. At Borough Hall she could get either subway or trolley into Manhattan, and a general store not three streets away from where she lived sold bars of store soap any time she wanted it.

Ivory, like it said in the advertisements, was the best. He’d looked down at the flounce on her skirt, to see if he could glimpse an ankle — another memory.

Sam thought about going to inquire of her now. (Ankles of ivory. Ankles like moons…) But finally (for now was gone) he went back to ask John Brown, who, in his blue-black uniform, was just coming down through the car: “Sir, we in New York State yet?”

Seemingly constructed of blue-black coal, Brown’s face turned in mild surprise: “Well, we just gone by Hell Gate.” And with that damnable dawn news, John Brown stepped around him, to move on between plush seat backs, bending here, leaning there, asking the older passengers if they would need help with any of their bags — the older white passengers, anyway, Sam noted: a stately Negro woman, with black hat and veil, blue coat frayed at the shoulders, and doubtless going to a funeral — well, the porter, like a dog avoiding another dog’s tree, had walked right around her!

Sam breathed.

If Mama had been with him, she’d have muttered, “… no-account!” then told Sam to go immediately to that woman and offer a hand: and would probably say something cutting to the porter. Mama could get quite self-righteous over the behavior of other Negroes she didn’t approve of — as if she carried responsibility for the whole race on her issue-free shoulders. Sam started to go to her — then remembered his own, two large cases, one leather, one wicker. Well, when he got them off and Hubert was there, he’d go back and help.

Out the window a snarl of underpasses and stuttering sunlight became a tunnel, through which they roared a long time: the light from the white glass shades every two seats took on the yellowish cast they’d had at night.

Genitals, buttocks, nipples, tongue all seemed so insistently present inside Sam’s mouth and twenty-four-hour-worn suit. Once, well back before dawn, when the train windows were still black and the other passengers slept, he had stared at one white round glass, thinking of the moon, when, at once, he’d stood, to bring his mouth closer and closer, as if to kiss this night light at the aisle’s end, pulling back only when the heat about burned his lips. He’d seen the Scotswoman from Brooklyn — she would be the one awake — turn away too, smiling. (Why do something like that? And, if you did, why remember it?) No, he didn’t want to speak to her.

The tunnel went on at alarming length.

Then the white conductor ambled through, calling, “Grand Central Terminal coming up! Change trains for aaaaall connections! Grand Central Terminal…!” and people stood to haul their bags down from the overhead rack; men squatted in the aisle to lift them from under the seats. It wasn’t yet eight in the morning.

And the train itself, he thought, will be only memory in moments: “… tut-tut-tut-tut…” Then he was lugging his cases down onto the rectangular stool the porter had kicked out the train’s door, its squared wooden corners clucking cement.

As Sam stood on the platform among debarking passengers, swaying with the train’s remembered sway, Hubert, in his tan-wool overcoat, pushed up in front of him. A grin started out on Sam’s face. Then, as suddenly, confusion tore it away — because Hubert was focused all behind him, even before either of them could say hello.

“Here, ma’am! I’ll get that for you!” Hubert said to someone beyond Sam’s shoulder — which, as Sam turned, he realized was the ponderous woman in mourning.

“Just a minute now, ma’am,” which was John Brown, who, at Hubert’s intervention, had become as solicitous of her as if she’d been queen of the car’s whole hive, handing the heavy creature firmly down to the stool, passing her three bags one after another to Hubert, who swung them, over its metal rail, up on the broad cart with the other baggage that the porter from the sleeping car was loading for the redcaps clustered up at the platform’s head.

Hubert was asking her if everything were all right. She was saying, in subdued tones, in an accent that put her well to the west of Raleigh: “Why, thank ya — thank ya, young gen’l’man. Ah’m Mrs. Callista Arkady and Ah’m goin’ to the funeral of mah son. It’s so kind of y’all to help a bereaved mother. Thank ya — God’ll thank y’all. Thank y’all so much!”

Before turning off, the porter leaned over to Sam, to explain softly, sullenly, snappishly: “She didn’t tip me none! When she first got on the JC, yesterday, I took as much time with her as with anybody else — I did!” John Brown’s accent was considerably to the north. “But she didn’t tip me. You don’t got enough to pay your tips, you don’t ride the train! Even niggers got to know that!”

“Yes, but she’s still a — ” he was about to say “lady,” while he wondered should he give John Brown a nickel. (That’s what John D. Rockefeller tipped his train porter; it had said so in a northern magazine.) Of course the porter hadn’t touched Sam’s bags at all — and, as well, he’d swung back up into the car by now to help the other, white, and — certainly — better heeled passengers.

The woman plowed — mournfully — up the platform through the packs of porters and debarkees, when Hubert turned back to him:

“Well, now — Sam! And how are you there — ” to clap him on both shoulders, then, with his blue bow tie and buttoned-up double breasted showing between tan coat flaps, to give Sam a bear-like, brotherly hug. “So you got here after all!” In almost the same gesture, Hubert hefted up the wicker trunk, leaving Sam with the leather case. “How’s everybody down at the school?”

Sam followed Hubert up the platform, behind the uniformed Negro pushing the baggage cart — far enough ahead so that it would be difficult to catch up and get their bags on. “Mama’s fine, Papa’s fine. Papa says you should write him another letter like the last long one, tellin’ him about the boys in your class. He read that one out to all of us, at Thanksgiving dinner. It made Mama laugh so!”

Hubert chuckled, as Mrs. Arkady vanished around passengers descending, like billows, from the train’s several doors. As he pushed after Hubert through the crowd, Sam looked aside two or three times, expecting to see a blue-eyed child staring at him over its mother’s knitted gray shoulder. But apparently the family for whom there’d been no room in the white cars had gotten off at some prior local stop, so that, Sam realized, with the myriad details that were his train trip north, they too had sunk into yesterday’s consuming sea.

Now and again, Sam glanced at the black ceiling, crossed by pipes, girders, cables, and hung with incandescent bulbs in conical shades, insides enameled white. Train stations, Sam thought, even ones this central and this grand, should sit out under sky, with, yes, an indoor waiting room to one side. But as many times as he’d heard Grand Central Terminal mentioned, it had never occurred to him it would be a structure that wholly closed over… well (he looked through a dozen dark columns above how many trains), a dozen tracks at least! “Hubert,” Sam asked, “where is the sky…?” thinking his brother, two steps ahead, would not even hear the — after all — ridiculous question.

But at the ramp’s end, as, with the crowd, they pushed through a low entrance with a wrought metal transome above, sound around them became hollow and reverberant. They’d stepped into a vast space. With his free hand, Hubert pointed straight up. “They put that there — for folks like you.”

Sam looked.

The hall’s arched ceiling was watery blue — tile blue. Set here and there in it were lights. The whole was filigreed over with gold: a crab, the head and forelegs of a winged horse, a scorpion, a shaggy-haired warrior holding up a club in one hand and, on his other arm, hefting a shaggy pelt. A gilded line, the zodiacal circle, curved to cross another, the ecliptic. Sam stopped, set down his case. People with small bags jostled him. A flat of baggage rumbled by. Directly above was pictured a gilded bee, a pair of carpenter’s triangles beneath her. Awed, Sam pulled his cap from his pocket and, still gazing up, positioned it on his head.

Beyond a central booth bearing above it its own multi-faced spherical time keeper, far bigger across than two tall men laid out foot to foot, a great clock hung between columns.

Curlicued arrows at their tips, oar-long hands lay a diametric certainty across its face, a horizon ruled on the rising moon, on the setting sun. Short hand lower at the left and long hand higher at the right told Sam it was within seconds, one way or the other, of eleven past eight — a slant horizon forward of the dark prow of his trip, lifting and listing from spurious waters, if not the pointer on some turn and bank indicator of the sort Sperry had been putting into aeroplanes since the war’s close, an artificial horizon unknown to him a year ago, when he’d watched John, shirtless in the field, with his rusty hair and freckled skin the hue of a tobacco leaf, play at being a bomber, dancing like a deranged Indian over red earth, feet — blam! blam! — on the earth’s red flesh, running into waves of hip-high grass, holding one hand aloft, thumb and little finger spread from the others, swooping left, turning right, blood remembering some aeronautic invasion, crying Vrummmmmmmmmmmmm, while Sam and Lewy stood at the field’s edge, laughing, clapping, celebrating fantastic catastrophes.

The hands’ exact slant was repeated on the smaller, spherical clock’s four faces.

Sam and Hubert made their way through waves of men and women. Again, Sam the Navigator gazed up at sky-tiles like an overturned sea.

For a moment, not the distant lights of the Pegasus in their gilded starbursts — across from the balcony at the halls’ right side, across from Orion above squared pilasters practically without capitals — but the gold lines with which Pegasus was drawn, suggested a caricature of Callista Arkady’s broad, veiled face, but with an ecstatic smile, gazing down.

With some gentleness, as people plunged in echo by, Hubert said: “Come on, Sam,” to bring his eyes down. “We have to get the train.”

The train — this train — was a subway. They didn’t even step outside to get to it. Going down the stairs, Hubert asked him: “You got a nickel?”

At the steps’ bottom, again Sam put his suitcase down, pushed into his pants pocket — feeling scrape his wrist the ten dollar bill Lucius had told Mama should be safety-pinned there, because Sam was going to New York, where things could happen — to pull out his coins. On his palm, Sam forefingered aside the fifty-cent piece, two dimes, two nickels, and five, six, seven, eight pennies: change from the Coca-Cola he’d bought on the train platform yesterday, which, there, had cost two cents more than at the colored grocery —

“Come on,” Hubert said. “I’ll pay for you. I got two — come on, Sam! This is New York; you can’t dawdle here!”

“I’m not dawdling; I’m looking after my money.” Only he glanced up to see people cascading down the steps, breaking to left and right of him, like water at a rock. Jamming coins back in his pocket, Sam snatched up his suitcase to follow Hubert, who pushed one nickel into the slot ahead, then another into the one beside that. As they hefted the cases over, they were practically pounded through shadowless stiles by the wooden paddles swinging round behind them. “What does it do?” Sam looked back, frowning. “Whack you in the butt every time you go in?”

“That’s just to make sure people like you go and get on with it.” Hubert hurried ahead. “This way!” he called over his shoulder. “Let’s get the first car!”

Hubert was twenty-three. Last year Hubert had gone to Europe and traveled there four months. When he’d got back, he’d worked in the tobacco fields in Connecticut. This eagerness for the first car — something he’d imagine from John or Lewy — was not what you expected from a big brother about to start his second year in law school — all of which Hubert could claim. But with a sister in between, Hubert was his brother nearest Sam in age; perhaps that enthusiasm was what had kept them so close, in spite of it all.

They didn’t make the first car, because the subway was already pulling in when they got down to it.

They made the second:

“… tut-tut-tut…” Sam was surprised he could still hear it.

Inside, posts went from the floor to the curved ceiling — green-painted metal up to about stomach height, then white enamel for the rest. In metal fittings, leather loops hung from a pipe just above head-height, in a row down each side of the car. Up by the ceiling, eight-inch-high cardboard strips told of Sloan’s Liniment and Ivory Soap (“ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent pure”) and Pine Tar Honey — one (in color: red with yellow letters, a round face grinning beside them, in a bottle cap hat) was for Coca-Cola.

It had never occurred to Sam they’d have Coca-Cola in New York.

The subway seats were the same woven wicker as the trunk Hubert carried. Looking down at them, Sam saw their interstices were black — and realized it was dirt!

“Come on,” Hubert repeated, as the train started more smoothly than Sam expected: had a day and a night on the locomotive from Raleigh gotten him his rail legs?

Hefting up his bag, Sam followed Hubert to the car’s front. A doorway made a vestibule there — half the size of the one on the railway car in which he’d smoked with John Brown. Inside, a wheel hung against the wall; and pipes; and cables. To one side was a flat, green door.

Over racketing wheels, Hubert said: “The engineer sits in there.”

“This is the engine?”—for through the window in the door ahead he could see into the forward car, as it swung, intriguingly out of sync with theirs.

Hubert laughed and opened the doors between, to lob the wicker through, then turned to explain over the noise (louder between the cars) how, on the subway, any car could be the engine. All you had to do was put it first.

They went through the next car into the little booth at its head — this was the first car. Hubert told him to look out the front window; Sam stood, hands up beside his face to shade the light. Beyond the glass, with its inch-sized, hexagonal wire reinforcements between layered panes, darkness rushed him, cut by girders, punctured by lights — blue, red, green — a matutinal career through seas of shadow, past nocturnal carnivals.

“Now when you ride on the subway by yourself — ”

Sam pulled back from the window. In the booth’s yellowish light, Hubert’s dark eyes were serious above his short mustache.

“—in the morning,” Hubert went on, “when people are going to work, or in the evening, when they’re coming home — rush hour — you don’t come in here by yourself, now.”

“Why not?” Sam turned to Hubert.

“’Cause things can happen to you in here.”

“What things?”

“People can do things to you — like you can get your pocket picked, for one.”

Sam was going to say, just to be silly, You been deflected, Hubert? But Hubert swung — suddenly — the back of his hand against Sam’s pants lap, which made him flinch:

“Hey — !”

“You got to watch out for yourself, that’s all.” The train was coming into the station. “That’s all I’m saying. Now come on.” Carrying both trunk and case now, Hubert strode into the car, grinning again over his shoulder.

Parting black rubber rims, dark double doors rolled open, and Sam followed his brother onto still another wholly enclosed platform. “What sort of things, Hubert?”

Hubert put the suitcase down for Sam to take. “You just have to remember,” Hubert repeated, “that this is New York,” and the gravity with which he spoke seemed — apparently to Hubert — to cover the situation.

The subway station they were in, Times Square and Forty-second Street, was even bigger — and more crowded — than the one at Grand Central. They had to go up stairs and down. With their gilt signs, the plate glass windows indicated clothing stores, barber shops, bakeries. One store even sold magic tricks: through its window, when, with his case, Sam went over to look, a small man with a sharp beard turned to smile out at him — thick glasses made his eyes huge marbles — over red and blue boxes, through chains of metal rings, past cardboards with small figures attached to them, by black top hats, colored scarfs, oriental bird cages, and black wands with white tips. (Sam vowed he’d come back to that one.) The store windows were right in the ivory tiled wall, as if this were some outside street, so that he kept glancing up, expecting to see the sky above this buried city.

Saturday morning not that many people were traveling. Still, most of the ones who were stood across the tracks, off between the girders on the other platform. Drones at work in sweet, rich New York.

Following Hubert through resonant tunnels, considering his trajectory, like a bullet’s through a beehive, Sam wondered which of the enclosed images he’d recall in a day, in a decade. Then an idea came to rupture his contemplation of — even in the quick of excitement — the evanescence of time, that made him near break out laughing. Imagine writing a letter to Lewy and John (they were his best friends), with a page even for Mama and Papa, telling the wonders of his trip so far: he’d fold it, pack it into his cap so that the pages were fixed beneath the band. Then, by its visor, he’d sail the gray and brown tweed into the air, so that, as if become helmet, it shattered all these artificial ceilings, crashed out and up from under the flagpoles on the skyscrapers above, into liquid air, to go soaring south to Raleigh — really, about as sensible as putting a message into a jeweled box and floating it off on the water, in hopes somehow it would wend home. Still, the image stayed. What might John or Lewy say if they saw a cap falling at them, a dark disk, an eclipsed moon — that turned out stuffed with his adventures?

“Is it all underground…?” Sam asked, wonderingly — having just realized that the “sub” in the “subways” Hubert and Lucius and Lemuel and Corey and Hap and Elsie had all, in their turn, been talking about, whenever, over these last years, they’d come home for one vacation or another, was short for “subterranean”!

“Some of them — on Third Avenue,” Hubert said, with mock seriousness, “or Sixth Avenue, or Ninth, run up above the streets, through the sky…!”

Cities underground…? Cities in the air…? With subterranean and superterranean ways between? And all were among New York’s honied algebra of miracles? Hurrying after Hubert, a-grin at the marvel and mystery of it, Sam tried to fathom it and keep from laughing. All this — and skyscrapers?

(Where were they…?)

They took another two trains — or was it three?

“Where do we get out?”

“A Hundred-twenty-fifth Street,” Hubert said. “This is us.”

A Hundred-twenty-fifth Street sounded awfully far from Grand Central or Forty-second.

They carried the cases upstairs — into another covered concourse.

How long would it be, Sam wondered, before they got outside?

He noticed now, with curiosity and relief: all the people in this station were black — heavyset ladies in dark or light stockings, men in straw hats with brown or red bands, sometimes even a bit of pheasant feather.

Sam and Hubert pushed out the gates beside the row of stiles (where people were — ka-chunk, ka-chunk — hurrying in), turned left, and started up the steps between the off-white tiles. A winter wedge of blue widened above them. Then, diagonally across it, slid a sculpted cornice.

At the steps’ head, Sam put his case on the sidewalk and looked down from the cloudless sky. (That empty air he’d recall for years.) The building — though it ran the length of the block — was two stories tall. Shops filled the ground floor. On the second, with tan Venetian blinds lowered to their several heights behind the glass, black or gold letters spoke of accountants, law firms, a billiards parlor — and the next was unreadable behind the sun’s reflected silver. Still, none of the names were very different from those in gold letters across the second story windows in the downtown building, back home, in which their older brother Lucius had his law practice.

“Shoot…!” Sam said. “It ain’t as big as what we got in Raleigh! The biggest building there is six stories and got an elevator!” He looked at Hubert, the first presentiment of pain the city had ceded him nudging his features toward bewilderment.

Hubert shook his head — to drawl in a voice that suddenly and surprisingly brought back sixteen-year-old Hubert from Carolina, making Sam electrically aware how different that was from the twenty-three-year-old law student he was to live with now: “Boy,” Hubert said, “you a real country nigger, ain’t you!”—the words carrying no interrogation at all, only their hugely playful, hopelessly damning, inescapable sibling judgment.

b

On the top (third) floor, Hubert’s was around the corner from Mount Morris Park.

“I got to wash up.” Sam put the suitcase on the rug’s foot-faded red, looking around the first of the two small rooms.

“Sure.” With his shoe, Hubert pushed the wicker trunk under what would be Sam’s bed. “Unless you want to wait till later when we get over to Elsie and Corey’s. They got hot water.”

“That’s all right. I want to do it now. And change my clothes.”

“All right.” Hubert took the wash basin out from under the corner sink. “Here you go. But you got to hurry up, before Clarice gets here.”

Using Hubert’s yellow bar of kitchen soap, lathering his arms, his buttocks, his knees, hopping now on one foot, hopping now on the other, Sam washed in cold water. Sometimes he glanced at Hubert, who sat in the wing chair: Hubert’s forehead furrowed above his glasses, as, in the corner, he paged through a book. Views of… something.

Hubert was one of three colored teachers recently hired to teach first grade in the colored all-boys public school, only six blocks from here, Hubert had explained to Sam. That tall body had cut tobacco in Connecticut; that strong body sat so straight when he studied. And there’d been “… Miss Hutchinson told me about a trick she used when she taught those rough boys in the colored schools outside Cincinnati. She said if it would work for a woman, it would certainly work for me. Just as she told me to do, before classes began I procured an old, cracked baseball bat, and on the first school day I brought it with me before any of the scholars arrived. Before going in, I hit it on the curb outside, till it cracked more. I then took it into my classroom and leaned it in the corner by my desk. When the boys came in — they were loud and lively and full of high spirits — within five minutes, while some of them were still taking their coats off and playing tag around the room, one of them asked me, ‘What’s that for?’ Sitting at my desk, I looked over my folded hands and said, in a firm and resonant voice: ‘I had some trouble with one of the boys in my last class — and I’m afraid I broke my bat on his backside. And by the way, you must learn to call me “Sir.” ’ They all turned around, eyes about to bulge out of their brown, round faces. And when I called them to order and they rushed to sit, you could see them squirming on their benches, each attached to the desk behind. Their eyes kept going to the bat in the corner, their little behinds stinging in anticipation. You knew they were wondering how it felt.” About the bony wreckage of the Thanksgiving carcass, everyone was laughing too loudly for Papa to go on — as, here, he put down the letter a moment to touch his clerical collar. Mama took her wire-framed glasses off and dabbed her eyes with her napkin.

Sam hopped, and shook quickly from his mind another memory (“… an animal…!” The crate’s slats smithereened across Hubert’s shoulder, and dragging the chain across the gravel where the grass had worn from around the pump, Hubert cowered back: “Papa! No…!” He remembered his father’s grunts, precise and ugly), hopped again and scrubbed at his groin — finally to squat among the splatters over the dark floorboards and maul the balled rag first over, then under, his out-sized toes. “Hubert, did you really do that thing with the baseball bat?”

“Hmm?” Hubert asked, over his book. “What — oh, sure. Only I don’t think I really had to. Miss Hutchinson, when she did it, she was teaching big, rough, country boys — field hands right in from pickin’ cotton. They were all field niggers — wasn’t a house nigger among them, she told me. A lot of them were too old for high school anyway — she said some of them were older than she was. And there were a few who just didn’t want to take no guff off a woman. But my boys are just children — and city children, too.” He dropped his eyes to the book, raised it a bit from his lap: Views of Italy.

Sam wiped the splatters up and, still squatting naked, turned to pull the wicker from under the daybed. “You mind if I smoke me a cigarette?”

“Go ahead if you want. But like I say — finish up before Clarice gets here. She don’t approve of smoking.”

Only on opening it and pushing aside shirts and underwear (which he didn’t really wear, unless Mama insisted) did Sam see the folded paper bag with Jules’ soap. “Hubert, don’t let me forget this when we go over to Elsie and Corey’s.” Taking a bar from the bag to leave Hubert, Sam put bag and bar up on the pink quilting. Translucent as isinglass, the bar’s paper immediately unfolded, like a thing volitional.

With a notable amount of white moneys — but a treasured portion of black — by his astonishing energy (that, even now he was over sixty, awed Sam), Papa and several of his friends had helped develop the small Negro college. Papa was now Vice-Chancellor. Mama was Dean of Women. That same energy had already pushed Sam’s slave-born father to learn Aramaic, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Two years ago it had gotten him elected Bishop of the Archdiocese of North and South Carolina — this prodigy of black learning, this learned black prodigy, this prodigious black learner. Black and white ministers both had elected him. Papa was a voyager on the ocean of theology and ancient languages. Sharp-tongued Corey had seemed, for a while, the one likely to follow Papa into that sea. Then she had turned from its waters — sharply — with the realization there was little enough a black man could do with Greek and Aramaic. (Though Mama always insisted it was more than well-deserved, the suffrage bishopric was after all an anomaly.) Still less, a black woman. She had followed her younger brother, Hap, first to New York, then into dental school.

Cigarette still fuming between his teeth, Sam was just buttoning his shirt when, outside in the hall, someone twisted the doorbell key.

Clarice came in.

Hubert’s girlfriend was — like last time — another pale-complected creature, who looked, really, whiter than Hubert. (This one’s name was Clarice!) “This is your little brother? He’s not so little at all! How come all you boys in this family are so good looking?” Within moments Sam learned, now from Clarice, now from enthusiastic Hubert — when Clarice suddenly remembered to be modest — that she wrote poems that got published in newspapers and sometimes in small magazines (Hubert brought some out to show him) with titles like Broom and Spark. Their ragged-edged pages were thick as fabric as you turned them. Passionate about the Negro Question (as was Hubert), she read The Messenger and Opportunity and knew writers and artists, black and white — Wally and Richard and Bruce and Jean and Angelina and Waldo and talked about them at length and a woman named Lola at whose house on Ninth Street she had met a number of them — from Washington to New York, from Harlem to Gay Street, the block-long colored enclave in Greenwich Village, she explained. Greenwich Village was where Hubert went, in the evenings, to his law classes at New York University Law School.

And they were all expected at Elsie and Corey’s at four o’clock for Saturday dinner — Elsie and Corey were his and Hubert’s oldest sisters; and Saturday dinner, Hubert said now, was easier for them than Sunday, because of Elsie’s studying for School on Monday — not to mention Hubert’s.

The surprise, that evening, was that Hap — another brother — and his wife came too.

“Sam, how’s everybody down at the college?” Dr. Corey wanted to know. Calling her “Doctor Corey” was something of a joke, because she was a woman. (They didn’t call Hap “Doctor Hap”—or Lemuel, his oldest brother who was a real doctor, not just a dentist, “Doctor Lem.”) But Corey had decided it was her due. She’d tell you in a moment, if you asked: “Filling teeth and getting paid for it is a lot better than teaching Greek to a bunch of hands, straight out the field, who couldn’t care less about the difference between a first and a second aorist!”

Mama’s fine, Papa’s fine, they all laughed over that long Thanksgiving letter Hubert wrote — Sam repeated.

“Oh, yes,” Elsie said. “Hubert came and read it to us before he sent it. I thought that would tickle Mama.”

Corey sent him to the bathroom to wash his hands.

As Sam stood, caressive water falling warm over his fingers from the verdigrised faucet, in the alley outside someone called, again and again, sounding now like, “Dandelion…!” now like, “Handle-iron…!” The voice was shrill — the shrillness of a man who was going to call for a long time and wanted folks to hear. Sam tried to imagine the body with that voice: brown face under a squashed-down hat, hard hands, bony hips in loose pants, sharp shoulders in an old vest…

More because he was tired than because he had to go, Sam dropped his pants and sat on the commode’s wood ring. (At Hubert’s the commode was behind a door out in the hall.) Newspapers lay on the two-tiered stool beside him. Lifting up the first few, he saw a green-covered magazine and slipped it out, certain it was one with Clarice’s poems. He read the title: Mnemosyne. Flipping through a few pages, however, he realized a good deal of it was in Latin. Turning back to the cover, he caught the date — 1918: no, it was one of Corey’s journals from the time of her language pursuits. Again he opened it, to page through — 132, 133, 134—where a passage Corey had marked caught him. The article explained the lines were from a Chorus closing the second act of Seneca’s Medea.

In careful pencil, at a gray slant, Corey had inscribed her marginal translation (five days ago? in distant 1918? sometime in between?):

The article explained how Christopher Columbus’s son and biographer, Fernando, had marked just this passage in his own copy of Seneca, jotting down in the margin:

Haec propheteia expleta est per patrem meum

Christopher Colon almirantem ano 1492.

Corey’s marginal gloss:

This prophecy was fulfilled by my father

Christopher Colon _________ in the year 1492.

Beside that, she had written: “almirantem? Ask Papa. C.C.’s place of birth? Elmira? But it’s not capitalized.”

When Corey and Elsie had first visited New York, almost ten years ago now, with Mama as chaperone, they’d taken the boat up from Norfolk. But Sam had been mad to take the train — nearly as eager over that as he’d been about the skyscrapers. All that water…? He closed Mnemosyne, put it down on the newspapers — then, in afterthought, pulled up two or three papers and put them back on top.

Outside, the shrill cry was blotted up by silence.

He’d often thought he’d have liked to follow Papa and Corey in their linguistic explorations. But (said Papa) he was too mercurial for such diligence. Sam stood, reached up and pulled the wooden handle on the flush chain. As the water roared from the wooden tank above, he bent, pulled his pants up, buttoned them, and buckled his belt.

After washing his hands once more, he opened the bathroom door — to be startled by the mirror in the hall right between the glass-chimneyed gas lamps, where his surprised double surprised him, pausing, bewildered in the frame, Sam the Stranger, unknowingly about to walk in on him.

In the living room, where the table had been moved in from the kitchen, he gave out Jules’ soap; and Hap, who was the first dentist in the family (and had got his nickname — Hap — because he was so happy), said: “Well, I’ll get my teeth real clean with this!”

“Now you don’t use that on your teeth,” Elsie said, “more than but once a week!”

“For the rest of the time, you just use tooth powder, like everybody else,” Dr. Corey said. “Why you have to tell a dentist what to brush his teeth with, I’ll never know!” Since her graduation from Dental College at Columbia, she’d shared an office with Hap.

They all laughed. “Tell us about Thanksgiving,” which had been only last week. “How was it this year?”

So he did — about the turkey and the dancing to the records, which Papa had allowed because it wasn’t Sunday, even though they made two trips to chapel, once in the morning and once at sunset. Right after his election, Papa had decided not to get a Victrola but a more expensive Edison Player. The medallion beside the flocked turntable said: “Diamond Disc Official Laboratory Model.” The song Sam and Lewy and John all liked and had played over and over to the point of exhaustive hilarity was the quarter-inch-thick record of Billy Rose and Ernest Hare singing Harry Von Tilzer’s “In Old King Tutankhamen’s Day,” with its infectious refrain: “Old King Tut-tut-tut-tut-tut-tut-tut…” though Jules and Laura preferred the other side: “Barney Google.” The other record Sam and Papa loved to play was the late Enrico Caruso and Mario Ancona singing the duet from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers. In his study, Papa slipped the crank back into its metal clip on the dark wood and asked: “Do you want to ask Batouta the Moor to come in with us and listen?” (This month Batouta the Moor was Papa’s nickname for Lewy.) “But then, he’s probably out somewhere exploring.” (He was.) So they sat by themselves and listened to the cascading male voices, each rippling down over the other; and Sam would imagine weedy waters and flickering tidelights over submarine grottoes — not that that had much to do with Thanksgiving nor, really, was there much to say about it.

So he told them instead about Lewy and the poetry book with the gold star in it for excellence Lewy’d won in Mrs. Fitzgarn’s and what Reverend Fitzgarn had said about Papa’s sermon and about how John had brought the mule into Mama’s yard and had fallen off it and how it ate Mama’s flowers and she’d just about skinned him alive and — again — about the laughter at Hubert’s letter, when, after Thanksgiving dinner, Papa had read it out.

Once, when he paused, Elsie smiled: “I think we can let him stop now.”

Hap’s wife said: “It’s so good to hear how things are going. And it’s so good to have you up here, Sam.”

Then they talked about other things and laughed lots more and all said how much he’d grown.

Sam was, in fact (it had taken most of the day to register), as tall as Hubert now.

On the way back to Hubert’s rooms Sam saw his first skyscrapers — late that evening, when it was already dark. They’d stopped to stroll in Mount Morris. (Hubert had already given Sam the key and was going to walk Clarice home to her aunt and uncle’s at a Hundred-twentieth Street and Seventh Avenue.) In the November’s-end dark, the three of them climbed the stone steps to the high rocks. Then Hubert and Sam left Clarice, to climb up the rocks themselves. “Those lights over there, like pearls — that you can just see? — ” Hubert explained — “those are skyscrapers… mostly.”

Far away, specular and portentous, they glimmered behind haze-hung night. (It felt as if it might rain any moment.) Sam seemed to be looking across some black and insubstantial river to another city altogether — a city come apart from New York, drifting in fog, in air, in darkness, and wholly ephemeral: the idea of a city — with no more substance than his memory of his memories on the train.

When they climbed down, Clarice was leaning against a low boulder. The park lamp behind her threw her into silhouette. “Now doesn’t she look older than the rocks among which she sits?” Hubert asked.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Clarice asked, her hands in her coat pockets, legs crossed under her skirt.

“My rag, my bone, my hank of hair; and she doesn’t care — ”

“Hu-bert — !” Clarice objected.

“I’m teasing you,” he said.

She stood. “Now what Sam — Eshu!” Clarice pulled her coat around her — “Sam should do, if he wants to see skyscrapers, is take a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. That’s the way really to see New York.” (Sam had already realized Clarice was a person who said “really to see” and “truly to think.” She had declared, loudly and insistently at dinner, that she thought it particularly important Negroes speak with proper grammar. “After all, we’ve been here longer than most of these crackers!” It was practically an echo of Mama, down on the campus. “And that’s why you will not hear me split my infinitives!” “Or hear her say, even jokingly,” Hubert added, “a girl like I.’ ” That made Clarice laugh too. Still, those unified verbs sounded even stranger than her clipped, northern accent.) In the damp night, Clarice said, “That’s the city at its best — Eshu!” A second time she sneezed.

Hubert moved toward her. “We better get you home.”

Distant in the night-haze, the lights burned with soft, pearl-like fires — so different from what burned in Sam.

On their way down, wrapped ’round in shadow, Sam tried to remember Clarice’s body beneath the dress, beneath the coat she pulled even more tightly to her throat. That body had all sorts of lines, gentle, pleasant, that became clear under the fall of her skirt or sleeve when she’d leaned to pass this, sat back with an embarrassed smile, turned in her seat to hear what Hubert said. (Did Hubert ever kiss her? he wondered.) Under a park lamp, he saw her raise a lace-edged handkerchief, pulled over one knuckle, to her nose. Over Hubert’s arm around her shoulder, her breath added its own lace to the fog already wreathing her dark hair. Completing the thought begun minutes ago, she added: “Over the bridge — Eshu! That’s what I’d want to do.”

Sam’s first job in the city was washing walls for three guys who knew Hubert and were painters. He was fired loudly and ignominiously after a week. He just wasn’t fast enough. Perez — the loud, bony one — said, consolingly afterwards, that Sam was a smart boy and shouldn’t be doing stuff like that anyway. And Louis, the fat fellow (who spelled his name completely differently from Lewy down home), said Sam damned well ought to learn how to do stuff like that; smart or not, it didn’t hurt nobody to know how to wash a damned wall! The third one, the one he really liked — whose name was Prince, followed by something Caribbean, Marquez? Cinquez? — had said nothing to him at all, but had smiled at him a few times while they’d worked and had looked on seriously while Louis and Perez bawled him out.

There really wasn’t enough work anyway, Hubert explained that evening back at home — trying to make it easier for sulky Sam. People wanted their houses painted in spring and summer, when they could keep the place open and air it out. Not in winter. That’s why the fellows had been so touchy, because they weren’t making any money themselves.

Three days later Sam got another job as stockboy in Mr. Harris’s men’s haberdashery over on a Hundred-seventeenth Street — mostly packing things down in, and getting things up from, the cellar. The wreath on the door and the tinsel strung in front of the counter surprised him. And the heavy black girl who worked there and who looked like Milly Potts down home — though she had none of Milly’s sense of humor — wore a Christmas pin on her blouse. But then, Christmas was less than two weeks away.

Indeed, Sam was astonished at how little of Christmas stayed with him that year: he and Hubert celebrated it, of course. He gave Hubert an embossed leather notebook, which cost two dollars. Hubert gave him three sets of long johns, which was supposed to be kind of funny, but Sam started wearing them that morning: they were a pretty good idea. And Corey and Elsie had a tree hung with both glass and colored-paper ornaments, strung with cranberries and yarns of popcorn and cotton wool all around its base, just like at home; but (and it was the first time Sam had ever experienced this, so that for a few days it really bothered him) it just didn’t feel like Christmas.

When it was over, the only thing that remained with any vividness was a pre-Christmas Saturday morning trip to the post office for Elsie and Corey, to mail the three shopping bags full of gifts back to Raleigh. (One bag was Hubert’s and his.) The building like a fort —

The lines of people —

Within, pine bows were draped all around the upper molding on the marble walls —

Bells of shiny red and silver paper hung, soundless, in each corner. Black rubber mats were splayed over the floor, slopping with the slush people tracked about in rundown shoes and open galoshes with jingling clasps. Wreaths with red berries and red ribbon were wired to the doors. But even inside, the marble room was chill and damp enough for your breath to drift away in clouds.

Were all these black and yellow and tan and brown faces, in all these lines in front of all the brass-barred windows, sending presents back to some ever-shifting, generalized, and hopelessly unlocatable place (but never baffling the postal readers of the carefully printed or clumsily scrawled addresses on brown paper under twine) called home? Certainly, to look at the bags and parcels they carried, it seemed so.

The clerks behind the bars, Sam had noticed, were all white.

Postal clerks were white at home too, but there were only three windows in the post office he went to in Raleigh. Here, between marble columns — and it wasn’t even the central post office — ten windows lined the wall, so he’d just expected, well… maybe some dark faces behind the squared brass bars.

With broad, brown cheekbones, brown eyes large and crossed, and wearing an old black coat, a girl settled herself next to him, to stare up. From within her blunt, strabismic gaze, a glint of blue surfaced in Sam’s mind — from the staring boy back on the train. Then it sank into the estuary of her curiosity, to swirl away. Looking down at her and in a voice more friendly than he felt, Sam asked her age-absent stare (was she eleven? was she fifteen?): “Now who are you?”

She held up her hand to him, or rather her wrist — with her fingers bent down. The hand was deformed — or at least… its deformity surprised, even shocked, him: the forefinger was thumb-thick and longer than the middle, which was, in turn, longer than the ring finger, which was longer than the little — all of them, indeed, fatter than fingers were supposed to be. The nails were dirty, spiky. Her teeth were set apart in bluish gum — some of the lower ones, Sam realized, missing. “What’s your name?” he asked again, of this unappealing child.

The woman behind him said, “She’s showing you her wrist beads.” Then — small, brownskinned, with nicely done hair and a green cloth coat (the child’s hair stuck out in tufts, from under a gray kerchief tied not under her chin but off center by her cheek, the cloth ends frazzled like something someone had sucked on) — the woman took the girl’s wrist and held it up. Black-gloved fingers moved a band of white beads from under the threadbare cuff. “Baby beads — just like when you’re born. In the hospital.” (Sam had been born at home, and had had the details of Doctor Haley’s three-in-the-morning visit, when they’d thought there might be complications — but there weren’t — recounted to him many times.) Each bead had a black letter on it.

“See,” the woman said. “E-L–L-A A-B-L–I-R… this is Ella Ablir.” Each lettered bead had two holes in it. Running through were, Sam saw, not threads but wires, twisted together below the pudgy wrist. The woman smiled. “She’s looking at you because you’re white.”

“No.” Sam smiled. “I’m afraid I’m not. I’m colored, too, just like everybody else here.”

“Oh, I’m sorry…!” The woman was suddenly and greatly distressed — while again Sam glanced at the white clerk behind the bars and at the woman at his window in red coat and red hat, with thick-heeled shoes buttoning inches up stockings white as some nurse’s: she seemed to be buying many small stamps for a penny or two pennies, but wasn’t sure how many she wanted; now she asked for two more, no three more — well, maybe another two; and one more please? Thank you. Now, if I could just have two more of this kind — please?

“Sometimes,” Sam said, “when people first meet me, they think I am. But I’m not.”

“Yes. Of course,” the woman said. “If I had just been paying attention, I would’ve seen it.”

Sam looked down at the girl, who still stared up: “Hello, Ella,” he said, becoming aware that, behind the woman, five or six other children shuffled — girls, most of them. No, all of them. Ragged, unkempt, each had something distinctly wrong with her.

“Where’re y’all from?” Sam asked.

“We’re from the Manhattan Hospital,” the woman said, indicating a rectangle of cardboard pinned to her lapel, with something printed on it, “for the Insane.” The girl had the same cardboard pinned lopsidedly to her coat. So did the girls behind. The eyes of a tall and stoop-shouldered girl did not look in the same direction. “Over on the island. But they ain’t really insane at all.” She smiled. “Not even a little bit of it. They’re just some very nice little girls — who all been very, specially good. And I been out with them since eight o’clock this morning, taking them around on a Christmas pass.”

The woman in red finished at the window. So Sam said:

“You go on ahead there. I’m not in that big a rush.” He hefted the three shopping bags, two in his right hand, so that the handle cords moved half an inch across his stinging palms.

“That’s awful nice of you. They do get restless sometimes, when they have to stand still so long. I appreciate it a lot.” She turned and announced to the shuffling gaggle: “Now you all stay with this nice colored gentleman right here. I’m going to the window there to get you your penny postcards.” She smiled at Sam in turning and stepped toward the bars.

The girls moved up around him. One, though in another torn coat and with the same kind of rag over her hair — and her expression just as vacant — , was actually pretty, as she looked off to the side. Her face was the darkest. The bones in it were fine. Her figure, beneath her poor coat, seemed fit. For a moment Sam imagined her some displaced tribal princess, stepped from an ancient African sect to be dazzled by the modern day — till she turned: the far part of her face was a scarred cascade from a burn.

There was not even an eye in it.

Tides of black and brown made a torrent down her skull. So as not to stare, Sam dropped his eyes — and saw, beneath her torn hem, her ankles and the legs above them were as badly burned as her face. She wore only some sort of slippers, which her heels had slid over the edge of, onto the mat slewed with snot-colored slush. Sam turned a little, lifted his eyes again — and caught a whiff of unwashed sourness. Could that be one of them?

Really, he thought, the things that could be wreaked on the body!

Sam’s bags were weighty with Hubert’s and Elsie’s and Corey’s — and his own — gifts. But the floor was too wet to set them down.

Just then the Ablir girl ran forward to the window beside theirs, shouldering aside the generous-breasted, humus-skinned woman who had just handed in a package as the bars had been, for a moment, unlocked and swung aside.

The bars clicked closed; the woman said, “Hey, you — !”

With all her brachydactylic fingers, Ella pointed through.

Inside, the white clerk brought forward a toy horse, that Ella must have seen. He stuck one plush hoof through the bars and waved it at her. Ella took a breath, grabbed it, and tried to tug it out — but, still smiling, the clerk pulled it from her grip and raised it higher between the bars, beyond her reach, to wave the leg once more.

Silent, determined, Ella jumped, missed, jumped again. She didn’t jump very high; and the little lift she managed suggested her physical coordination was deeply impaired.

The woman who’d just handed her package through looked down now, frowned, then began to smile.

From behind the bars, the clerk said with a notable brogue: “All right, little girl. Now you have to let the other people mail their letters.”

Biting her broad underlip, Ella Ablir backed from the cage, gazing within.

A bunch of penny postcards in one hand, not yet put into her pocket book, the woman in the green coat stepped away from the next window over to receive the child’s shoulders with guiding gloves. At the contact, the woman’s worried look relaxed. “All right,” she said. “Let’s all behave. Come on, now — let’s go. I got your penny postcards for you. We’re going to take them back home and draw pictures of what we want for Christmas and send them to Santa Claus at the North Pole. That’s what we’re going to do now.” As she stepped by Sam, she smiled her gratitude for his brief vigil — and explained: “They won’t never get nothing. And they can’t write. But they like to draw the pictures and send them to Santa.” She turned to the girls. “Now all of us. Let’s go!”

Their cardboard tags at their several levels on threadbare cloth (the tall one’s coat was ludicrously too small), they shuffled before the woman, like wounded angels or emissaries from another world, up between the lines of Christmas mailers loaded with letters and packages to be sent by sea and rail and air to where and wherever.

Postage on all Sam’s three shopping-bags full came to two dollars and seventeen cents.

Turning from the window, the bags at his side empty and all in one hand now, flapping like wind-abandoned sails, Sam saw the big clock on the wall above the door. It was circled in eight concentric rings of metal, each one set back from the next (for the eight planets, perhaps?), the face a ninth and central wafer, whiter than ice, arrow-tipped hands upthrust, long one right and short one left, telling him it was five past eleven.

That noon was the first time Sam tried to find the underground magic shop at Forty-second Street. For most of his exploration, he kept making the same turns and going along the same underground alleys, even as he tried to get somewhere new, finally to give up: he didn’t want to be late for dinner at Corey and Elsie’s. When he was unsure of what train he was actually supposed to take to get back to Harlem, he asked an elderly Negro in a suit with baggy knees and the jacket and vest grayed with powdered plaster, who was carrying a chest of tools on the platform — and came home.

New Year’s Day was practically balmy. For a while Sam retained a memory of strolling down Lenox Avenue, just a sweater under his suit jacket. Hands in his pants pockets, he whistled jets of music and condensed breath, ambling by the pine trees discarded that morning at the curb over soiled snow clutching the sidewalk’s rim. Wooden stands were still nailed to the trunks: crossed planks, a board square, or some more complicated contrivance with braces. The needle-bare branches transformed the trees into long-slain carcasses.

The next day the temperature dropped to a previously unknown and, till then unbelievable, paralytic cold. What had been snow and slush became a rind of ice over the city. That night, ears stinging and face a mask of pain from the wind, Sam hurried toward Mount Morris past a mound of trees, delicately afire in the corner lot, one still with ornaments on its charring branches, black before crackling flame.

Late in February’s icy circuit, when Sam answered the door, Clarice came in, waving a newspaper, cheeks blotched red with cold. “You’ve got to see this. This is too much. This is, I tell you, the living end!”

Hubert got up from the wing chair. “What is it?”

“What is it?” The room was chill; and though Clarice’s coat was open, she didn’t shrug it off. “Here — now did you believe you were ever going to live to see something like this in a paper — even a New York City paper?”

The picture took up a quarter of the second page.

White actress Mary Blair knelt on the ground beside a seated, twenty-six year old Negro actor, Paul Robeson, kissing his hand! The play was Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings, scheduled to open at the Provincetown Players in Greenwich Village sometime that spring. Robeson played a young, Negro law student —

“See. He was a lawyer, Hubert — like you.”

“He plays a lawyer,” Hubert corrected. “In the play.”

Sam read over Clarice’s shoulder.

“No, he really was a lawyer,” Clarice said. “Before. But he gave it up for the theater!”

“He wasn’t a lawyer; he was a football player!” Sam said. “See.” Football was Sam’s own sport — he had played center in high school, till Papa — when John’s brother broke his leg in the game, the sharp bone coming through his brown, bloody shin — decided it was too rough and had forbidden him: everyone at home had encouraged him to go out for basketball, for which Sam had no particular love. “It says he was All-American Halfback in 1917 and 1918.”

“First he was a football player — when he was at Rutgers,” Clarice explained. “Then he was a lawyer. Then he became an actor.”

“Well,” Hubert said, “I can’t imagine his being a very good lawyer, then. Where’d he go to law school?”

“Columbia.”

“People are going to try and stop that play from going on,” Hubert said. “You just watch.”

“There’s a statement in here by the actress,” Clarice said. “She thinks it’s an honor to be in the play.”

The picture was… well, uncomfortable making. But maybe that was because you just didn’t see pictures like that.

“Is that man dreamy — or is he dreamy?” Clarice asked. “Oh, Hubert — !” she added. Because Hubert was frowning. “I’m teasing you!.”

Still, in March Clarice dragged them off to see Robeson in Nan Stevens’ Roseanne, over at the Lafayette Theater. “We’ve got to go!” she insisted. “It’s only playing for a week!” On Saturday afternoon they met before the yellow, horizontally striated walls with the other Negroes at a Hundred-thirty-second Street and Seventh Avenue. In their gloves, scarves, hats, a lot of people must have read the articles that had been appearing. There’d been a slew of them since the first one — and the picture had been reprinted by now in half a dozen papers. Clarice said: “This is surely a lot more people than usually come to this sort of thing.” She took a hand from her fox muff to rub one knuckle on her nose.

The tickets were thirty-five cents. The matinee was supposed to start at two-thirty, but it was almost quarter to three before they let people in. And a tall, West Indian looking — and sounding — man called out something, very loudly, about “a C.P.T. matinee,” which made some people laugh.

“Oh, that’s terrible!” Clarice whispered. “Come on, let’s go inside. I’m freezing!”

Before the curtain went up, a stolid, brownskinned man, Mr. Gilpin, head of the Lafayette Players, came out and made a speech saying the Lafayette was the only Negro dramatic company in the country; and if the audience liked what they were doing for the colored community, they could make extra donations in the lobby. Clarice leaned toward Hubert. Sam heard her whisper: “You read that article in The Messenger I showed you…? Where Lewis got on them so for only doing white plays with black actors…?” In the light from the stage, Hubert nodded.

Then Gilpin went back in through the curtain. A moment later red drapery pulled aside from the stage.

Robeson played a Negro preacher — it was hard to see him, at least at the beginning, and not think of Papa — whose actions became more and more sinful. And he was certainly wonderful. When he got excited, his voice filled the theater. He seemed half again as big as most of the other actors, and he moved around, towering, handsome, like some half-wild, wondrous animal barely caged by the set. Canvas walls and mâché trees shook as he strode by. Indeed, the glee, the wild joy with which he embraced his sins — drinking, crap shooting, shirking his Sunday sermons, and finally falling into the arms of a no-account Negro woman and getting her with child — made those weaknesses seem almost like some socially rebellious strength. Finally, though, his congregation turned on him. He was only saved in the end by a brave black woman — Roseanne — who’d been in love with him all along and who made an impassioned speech to the black people, who’d gathered to lynch him, about his humanity and his weaknesses and how his weaknesses were really their weaknesses. (Robeson spent a lot of time on his knees in the play, though not the actress.) But in comparison to Robeson’s performance, the long-suffering Roseanne’s words to the angry townsfolk seemed preachier than any of Papa’s sermons.

Clapping wildly, Sam stood up with everybody else when Robeson came to the front of the stage to bow.

But as they were walking down to a Hundred-sixteenth Street, Hubert said, “Another weak-willed nigger and another strong-headed woman. And niggers lynching niggers? Where, I wonder, did they get that one from? Now you know the woman who wrote that play had to be white!”

Clarice was thoughtful — walking with rapid, thoughtful steps, once in a while coughing into her muff. Possibly it had made her uncomfortable too.

A blizzard rose in the last days of March; and, with only an hour out here and an hour out there, the chill effluvia still fell on April Fool’s Day. each Friday at Mr. Harris’s he went to the bank at lunchtime thirty-five or forty dollars in pennies nickels dimes quarters and fifty-cent pieces in two thick canvas sacks metal fastenings at the top through the brass bars he exchanged them for an envelope of paper money out of which back at the store Mr. Harris carefully counted Sam’s nine dollars for the week the sales girl gum-chewing Missely’s twelve and put the envelope with the rest in his inner suit coat pocket the only profit it looked like Mr. Harris allowed himself from the business Missely was Milly Pott’s weight and Milly Pott’s color but with not half Milly’s sense of humor two Fridays on Mr. Harris came in and unwrapped his scarf “Feels like snow again don’t it” and after hanging up the length of maroon wool on the coat rack’s brass hook said “Before you go downstairs Sam run over two buildings and hunt up Poonkin he’ll probably be in the cellar see if he got those boards he told me about and if he do you bring as many back here as you can carry I want to put me up some shelving downstairs in the back all right” and Sam said “A Mr. Poonkin” and Mr. Harris said “I don’t think there’s any ‘mister’ in with it just Poonkin” and he grinned gold tooth bright between the white ones in a face as deep a brown as Papa’s “Poonkin was in the Civil War you know ask him to tell you about it sometime but not on my time now get going” and in only his shirtsleeves Sam went out in the gelid noon through steely cold he hurried two buildings up the wooden planks of the cellar doors gaped between snow banks he ducked down they rose like green board wings beside him as he dropped one foot then the other to a lower step in deepening shadow “Mr. Poonkin…” because he was a well-bred boy and his father said you call a man mister now you hear me white or colored but especially a colored man a lot of people won’t call a colored man mister it shows you have breeding Sam stepped further down the ceiling of the cellar was crossed by tarred eight-by-ten beams bowed now and gray pipes the joints shiny with new solder low enough so that there’d be no standing easily here

“… Mr. Poonkin” as he trod on the cement floor that two feet on became earth a voice cracked like the ground beneath his shoes “What you want…?” and the blades of light that came in at the ceiling’s edge from some cracks up to the street were much brighter it seemed than the aluminum light outside “Mr. Harris in the clothing store he sent me over here I work for Mr. Harris? and he told me to come over about some wood? you had for him? he wants to make some shelves — in his cellar?” the voice answered “Oh. Yeah…” and stepped forward the face wizened as a prune and what of it visible a moment passing through a beam not much bigger

shoulders sagging beneath layered sweaters and two jackets the hands in knitted gloves with the fingers out the nails yellow passing through the light as they felt through cold air toward him talon-long on the floor the foot in its black shoe grated through scuffed light Sam tried to imagine that body holding together such an impoverished galaxy of details and lost all bodiliness until the voice fixed that darkly and shabbily invested corporeality “Come on back with me, and help me carry ’em” Sam wondered how old you had to be to have been in the Civil War anyway because Papa who was over sixty-five now had been a slave till he was seven years old in Georgia and that meant you had to be seventy-five eighty could this bent black man be that old on the second trip three boards was all Poonkin could carry at a time the light fell through the window high in the wall to light half a cardboard carton on the ground bottles standing beside it and as Sam took the boards from those wide withered hands webbed in gray knitting he glanced down to see what was in the box and resolved he would come back for a third load despite Mr. Harris and when he was back for three more boards they’d taken nine over so far he stood by the carton and said “Mr. Harris said you were in the Civil War” and Poonkin now he’d met him Sam could think of the man as Poonkin a title rather than a name Poonkin let cackled syllables fall like pebbles to hit the floor and skitter into the dark at no predictable rhythm “Yessir, I was in the war in ’Sippi. I weren’t but fifteen. But I had me a rifle and I hid in a’ ol’ barn behind some spruce trees, and anybody what come up to it I shot” and Sam laughed “Did you shoot rebels or Union men” the cackle failed was replaced by crackling words “I shot anybody who come up. Some of ’em was blue. Some of ’em was gray. But the ones who come up too near was the ones I shot. It weren’t like this last war. This last war, it look like about everybody got killed. But I’m still alive — and I believe pretty much most of the ones I shot is dead. But you more interested in that box than in the war, ain’t you, boy. What’s in there you want?” which was true because back in ’22 when the news had filled the papers of the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb Sam and John and Lewy had begun to find in the candy stores and the newsstands in downtown Raleigh the most amazing magazines with flat spines and colored covers and titles like Adventure and Mystery Magazine and All Story Magazine and they had bought them for a quarter each and had read “Khufu’s Real Tomb” by Talbot Mundy and Adam Hull Shirk’s “Osiris” (“Have you been reading about King Tut? If so, you’ll be interested in ‘Osiris’!”) and Weird Tales and Popular Magazine and John had found a copy of Sax Rohmer’s Tales of Secret Egypt and they had traded them and they had sat in the glider together out on the back porch reading or off alone on the benches beside St. Agnes which after it had been closed down as a hospital years before had been reopened as the first building on campus or crosslegged on the attic floor reading and reading and rereading of gray-eyed suntanned Englishmen and intrepid American reporters and rich well-spoken young women who rebelled against their fathers by helping the young man anyway evil Arabs and dangerous African tribes diamonds that had been in the family for generations and rubies fixed to the jade idol’s forehead since time first dawned over the sands moonlit chases with gunshots echoing among the pyramids bullets biting into the sandstone of the sphinx’s paw as they had not since Napoleon’s time temples in the jungle the small plane’s engine growling as it settled among the monuments in the Valley of the Kings the sound of the twentieth century infiltrating the silence of a past so deep its bottom was source and fundament of time and of mankind itself and Poonkin’s voice acute to his own century said “You want those — you can have ’em. Somebody livin’ upstairs left ’em. Last white man in the building to go, too. Moved out four months ago. I used to read me my Bible,” Poonkin explained “First thing I did when the war was over was learn me to read some. Only one in my family, too; but I wouldn’t read stuff like that. Can’t see good enough to read no more nohow” and when Sam came back after working an anxious two more hours in Mr. Harris’s basement warmer by a corner paraffin heater and better lit by two kerosene lamps the magazines were in a shopping bag on a dry sheaf of newspapers beside the cellar doors closed now the bag leaning up by the brick wall when he lifted it on the paper beneath was a picture of K K K men in bedsheets holding high a torch menacing the darkness of the black newsprint from within the photo’s right framing the shopping bag just sitting there Sam thought where anyone could have taken it

Anyone at all.

That evening Sam worked late at Mr. Harris’s. When he left the store, the sky above the second story cornice was blue-black.

Carrying the shopping bag filled with a dozen and a half of Poonkin’s magazines between the snow mounded against the stoops and the slush by the cars along the curb, it struck him: it was the powerless who produced most of the myths of power, as it was the poor who articulated the most staggering fantasies of wealth — in the same way it was probably the Philistines and illiterates who perpetrated the soaring images of art and poetry, which, once they came loose from the Edgar Guests, from the Currier-and-Iveses, the rest of the world was seduced by; and real poets and artists doubtless exhausted their lives trying to make them happen. And so desire fueled the engines of the world. But because he was neither a poet nor an artist himself, Sam did not even try to hold onto the insight. And by the time he was climbing the tall stoop around the corner from the park, he had forgotten it.

Inside, Sam took off his coat, took off his shoes, pants, shirt, socks, till he was just in the long johns Hubert had given him — and put on his suit jacket. Hubert was in class tonight — and would go over to eat with Clarice in her aunt and uncle’s kitchen afterward. Sam sat in Hubert’s wing chair, took a magazine from the shopping bag, slid one bare foot atop the other… and began to page through for the stories about the blinding sand, the brittle mummies, the cursed scarabs, and the lean, light-eyed men whose years away from civilization had burnt them black as Arabs or mixed-blooded Negroes, dangerous men, wise in the ways of the jungle, the East, the desert, quick with their fists and fine shots to a man, who knew what to do, what to say….

On the wall across from his bed, the back window had a curtain over it — and a drape. But, on finishing his fourth story in his second magazine and turning to the fifth, Sam glanced up to see the light at the drape’s edge. Frowning, he closed the pages, put the magazine down, and stood. Was there some sort of light shining up from the alley?

Sam walked across the rug and pulled away drape and curtain.

Through the window, the yard below was blinding: by the black walls, snow had ceased falling, and some high breeze had swept clouds away from — his eyes ascended to the ascent of the moon — the full orb. It blazed on the platinum alley-scape — crossed and recrossed by catenaries of clotheslines piled with white. The only things not silver, gray, or black were three windows in the wall across from him, behind the ropes and fire escapes… One had the yellowish hue of incandescent light. Two had the dimmer yellow from hidden kerosene lamps, flaming quietly and darkly. In one of these, the light came through cloth no thicker than a bedsheet, hanging in folds behind the glass. Even as Sam noticed, a shadow moved on it.

Yes, on the rippled textile was the shadow of a body — a woman’s body. A woman with hair, and breasts — he started — and, he was certain, wearing nothing! The slim darkness of an arm raised on ivory cloth; on the hanging folds, her silhouette turned. The sill was at her thigh, and as she strained to do something behind, he could see the apex of light between her legs as one went back. The line of a hip — her breast again. Body of shadow, body of light, held a moment — and the illumination that articulated her dimmed… then puffed out!

Within gray stone, the window’s rectangle was black.

The surprise of her vanishing made him gasp. With thudding chest, slowly he went down on the knees of his union suit before the painted wainscot beneath his own sill. The drape fell against his jacket shoulder, slid behind him.

Her window remained dark.

Cold air leaked under the edge of his own.

After a moment, down on his knees, Sam lifted his elbows out and up, grasped the metal handles on the lower sash, and raised it. Over the tiny chill real cold fell in under his thumbs, wrapped its feathery tickle around his chin and neck, pried inside his long-john top. Beyond the wooden trough — a black, splintered canyon in water-rotted wood — out on the dry stone a snow pillow curved away, glittering. He raised the sash another inch, then a foot — then six more inches; raised himself to look again toward that black window. His breathing had become so shallow that, now, he gasped a chest full of icy air. On his knees, it made him reel. Rising again, he leaned forward, thrust his face under the sash — brought his mouth slowly to the snow.

And kissed it.

Crystals melted before his lips — he closed his eyes — and a water bead ran along the crevice between. He opened his mouth just a little — and a cold drop rolled within, warming. Mouthing snow, he took in only the tiniest bit of air through lattices of white fire.

Two days later on his third trip underground to Times Square and Forty-second Street specifically to find it, almost by accident Sam turned to see the window full of false noses, exploding cigars, and sneezing powder — more jokes in the window, actually, than the magic tricks that had first caught his attention. The shop’s exotic name was Cathay. It also had lots of Chinese boxes for sale, and ivory carvings with black wood bases, Japanese fans and Oriental scarves that were not particularly magic at all. Maybe he had passed it before and, for all the other things there, hadn’t recognized it. But there was the top hat, the wand… Inside, the bearded man with the bottle-bottom glasses was a Mr. Horstein, who, soon as they got to talking, explained how he’d been a magician back in the ’nineties — oh, yes, the magic was the first reason for Cathay’s existence. The rest was all because sailors on leave and sometimes tourists liked to buy them. Clearly Mr. Horstein loved to talk to his customers. He talked about the great Harry Houdini, who, no, never came to Cathay. But Mr. Horstein had met him in Chicago and then again in Syracuse. Apparently they were acquaintances. “Not friends. But we say ‘Hello,’ as men who share the same profession.” Last year when Houdini had played the Jackson Theater, Sam and Lewy had not been allowed to go — because neither Papa nor Lewy’s stepfather would allow his children to go to a segregated theater. John’s mother didn’t mind though; and Lewy and Sam might well have snuck in with him. (Going with someone whose parents said it was all right made it not quite so much like sneaking.) But that week John was sick and had his throat tied up with a scarf full as asafœtida.

Mr. Horstein (Sam had been in the store for almost three hours) had introduced Sam to several of his customers by now: “This is Sam — isn’t this a good-looking, intelligent colored boy? He’s a real credit, and I like to have this kind of young fellow here.”

Riding home on the subway, Sam read an article in a red pamphlet with lots of fancy symbols on the cover about astrology Mr. Horstein had sold him for a nickel: it talked about the Transit of Mercury, that happened this year, and might even — this part Sam wasn’t clear on — fall on Sam’s birthday, though such transits were more common in November than in May.

When he got home, Hubert — or Clarice — had left Views of Italy open under the reading lamp. He picked it up, turned the lamp on, and held it down under the light to look at a photograph of a hill — northwest of Siena, the caption said. The hilltop was ringed by a wall, set at equal distances with blocky towers: seven towers, Sam counted — though the caption said there’d once been fourteen.

Insistent through sleep, voices like water met him, within some dream, listening. The long sounds of morning, the tired sounds, indistinct — metal hit metal somewhere and reverberated. Someone shouted. As far away as the train tracks a siren complained of its windy wound. All muffled in sleep, signs tangled in the sheets around him, vanishing. (Who is this woman with us…?) A truck lumbered east. Another one braked — and a motor started. Someone shouted — again. Something hit something else, dully. Outside, in half light, beyond the window, April snow still fell — and sounds rose; morning sounds carrying away his drowsiness. He turned under the quilt (to face the draped window), wondering if they might return it. Soft sounds slid around him, slipped over him like a sleeve, waiting in the winter-dimmed city. Outside, the black stones of Mount Morris would be a pillow of white. (A black woman clothed in white moving through the white city… a white woman on a cloth of light.) He could see, through the edge of the glass beside the drape, smoke spill from a roof vent into smoke, to wander up the sky, wash off in winter wisps.

Under the covers, Sam thought: And beside me.. .

He moved his hand with their thickened fingertips out from the depression his body had warmed to the cold place where no one lay. (A white woman in the heart of… a black woman in a city of light.) Somewhere a siren sounded, weaving together for him the possibilities of his vacant day.

Saturday at Corey and Elsie’s there was a short, sharp argument between Sam and Hubert: Sam was happy to do his tricks for Hubert — and even Clarice — back at Hubert’s, but Hubert suggested after dinner that Sam perform one of Cathay’s wonders for his sisters: a vanishing coin. Sam had brought the trick over, after all, in his inner jacket pocket, precisely for that. But Hubert’s request got only Sam’s refusal, first a quiet one, then an insistent one, then — with red-cheeked embarrassment — a loud one, when Hubert wouldn’t stop.

But, at least partly, it was because Mr. Carter, a Columbia Teacher’s College friend of Elsie’s, was there that afternoon for dinner — a mahogany-complected, articulate young man from Philadelphia, who cut all his food with his fork. But Mr. Carter displayed a smiling, inquisitive awe before Elsie and her siblings that Sam recognized: it was the air other ministers, especially white ones, displayed when they visited Papa socially at home. And nothing made a social situation more uncomfortable for Sam. It turned everything you did into a performance, and always left him somewhere between tongue-tied and belligerent.

“I’d like to see you do a magic trick,” Mr. Carter had prompted across the remains of dinner, in what clearly he thought was an encouraging way.

“Go on, Sam!” Hubert said. “That’s what you brought it over here for — to show people!”

“No!” Sam said. “Come on, now — I said No! Didn’t you hear me?” His voice was too loud, his hand was actually shaking, and the silence after it was much too long.

Corey rescued him: “Now Sam is still learning these things. And you’ve got to practice them before you do them for other people. He just needs to practice and will show us all his trick in his own time, now.”

Hubert dragged his forearm from the table, sucked his teeth — his turn to sulk.

But nothing dented Mr. Carter’s simple, irrepressible good will. “Can I ask you something seriously, though?” His dark fingers moved on the handle of his unused knife.

“I don’t know.” Corey smiled. “Can you?”

“Would you please tell me — because I have heard this story about you two ladies so many times before, but just in snatches and fragments, so that you never know what you’re really supposed to believe and what you’re not — just so I can tell other people when I get back to Philadelphia — what really happened at that movie, there — was it six or seven years ago?”

“What movie?” Elsie asked.

“That movie,” Mr. Carter said, “where you two got into all that trouble?”

“Six years ago?” Elsie said. “What movie does he — ”

“Oh, I know what he means,” Dr. Corey said. “Arnold — ” which was Mr. Carter’s name to Corey and Elsie, but not to Hubert, Clarice, and Sam — “that wasn’t six years ago. That was seven, eight — ” she frowned. “That was nine years ago now!”

“But… what happened?”

“Might as well go ahead,” Hubert said. “After all this time, everybody ought to know.”

“What movie?” Sam said. Though he knew the outlines of the tale, the fragmentariness was as much there for him as for Arnold Carter — since, nine years ago, when Corey and Elsie had first gone up to the city, where they’d stayed for two years before coming home, Sam had been… well, nine.

“That great big movie they made, about the south — and the Ku Klux Klan and all,” Hubert said. “About the wonderful white south and the black devils who were raping all those white women — ”

“Oh!” Elsie said. “That awful movie — that made everybody go out and start lynching all those people!”

“It didn’t start them lynching,” Corey said. “But it certainly made them go out and lynch more.”

“What did you have to do with it?” Sam asked.

“We were picketing — a peaceful picket line. With a lot of other Negroes.”

“With a lot of other angry Negroes, I bet,” Hubert said. “That’s what I heard.”

“We were angry,” Dr. Corey said. “Who wouldn’t be angry, at a movie like that?”

“How did a movie make people lynch people?” Sam wanted to know.

“It was a movie about those damned Ku Klux Klansmen — ” Corey didn’t use language like that and it startled Sam to hear her cuss like Louis — “and told how wonderful they were and how they were protecting southern white womanhood.”

What came back to Sam was a memory of his cousin, or a woman whom his mother had called their cousin: yes, he’d been nine, eight, maybe younger, when her and her husband’s mutilated bodies, under gray canvas, had been brought, in the creaking wagon, back through the evening trees, to the campus —

“We were picketing,” Corey said. “That’s all. With the others, across the street from the theater.”

“Well, that wasn’t quite all,” Elsie said.

“Then what else did we do?” Dr. Corey asked, indignantly.

But Elsie had some devilment in her eye.

And there was a grin back of Dr. Corey’s indignation. “We certainly didn’t do very much else — that anyone with a grain of sense wouldn’t have done. There’s no forgiving a movie like that — stirring people up to violence against their fellow man!”

“What did she do, Miss Elsie?” Mr. Carter asked.

“Well, we were picketing, there across the street. The policemen were keeping us back. And you could see that it wasn’t doing anything to keep people from going into the movie — ”

“The thing we wanted to do,” Corey said, “was to stop them from going to see it, you see. That’s what we were trying to do.”

“So finally,” Elsie said, “Corey says to me, ‘Come on.’ Well, I didn’t know where she was going.”

“You did too!” Corey said. “I told you — ”

“After we got in line,” Elsie said, “you told me. We left the pickets, went down to the end of the block, crossed over, came back, and got on the ticket line to the movie. That’s when I asked you, what we were going to do. And you told me, ‘We’re going to go inside and see that movie!’ Well, I was afraid to leave her, because I knew she was probably going to do something foolish — and I didn’t want her to get in trouble.”

“You went into the movie?” Clarice asked. From her tone, Sam realized this was new to her as well.

Corey nodded.

“We went into the movie,” Elsie said, “took our seats, and waited for the lights to go down and the man at the organ to start his playing — and I asked: ‘Corey, what are we going to do now?’ And she whispered, ‘Hush!’ and just to sit there and to do what she did. Well, I thought, dear Lord, give me strength! What has this crazy girl, my own little sister, got it into her head to do?”

“Then what happened?” Sam asked.

“The lights went off, the man started to play the organ, and the movie began — and Corey jumps up, scoots out into the aisle, with those long dresses we used to wear back then, catching on everybody’s knees, saying real loud, ‘Excuse me — excuse me, please!’ and I’m coming right after her. I think people thought she was sick — and had to use the facilities. So they were making room.

“But then, when she got into the aisle, she ran right down toward the front of the theater — and I’m running to keep up. And she climbed onto the stage — ”

“I jumped onto the stage,” Corey said. “I got hold of the edge, and I went up like a boy over a fence — though I don’t know whether I could do it today — ”

“And she grabbed hold of the edge of the screen, with the light from the projector all over us, and people starting to stand up and call out to ask if something was wrong, and she ripped it — ”

Corey laughed. “I certainly did. I remember, you stood there, on the stage, in front of all those people, and you said, ‘Oh, Corey — !’ ”

“Then I grabbed hold,” Elsie said, “and started ripping too!”

“Once we began, she ripped more than I did,” Corey said. “I really think Elsie was having fun.”

“I was scared to death,” Elsie said. “But, by then, I figured it didn’t make much difference. I knew we were going to end up in jail, no matter — so I decided it’d be better at least to do what we’d come for. Yes, I got hold of it — and I ripped it too. In about a New York minute, the two of us tore the whole screen down!”

Clarice hooted, hands over her mouth.

“But then what happened?” Sam said, between his own guffaws.

“I mean,” Clarice said, “how did you two get out of there?”

“Very quickly,” Corey said. “We were lucky. Someone in the audience by that time had started fighting. There were other people on the stage now — you remember that man who asked us, so politely, while we were ripping, if something was wrong? But the fist fight in the audience, that was taking up all the ushers’ attention. So even while they were putting the lights on, we rushed backstage and down some steps and around through a door that opened right into the alley — and got out!”

“This is so funny,” Clarice said, recovering herself. “A couple of months ago, I was reading in Opportunity about the ‘riot’ they had at the premier of Birth of a Nation. And you mean you two were the riot?”

“I guess we were pretty much most of the riot. It was in the newspapers,” Elsie said, “the next day. But I wouldn’t think they’d still be talking about it now. It was nine — almost ten years ago; and it was just a movie, after all. Who’d want to remember something like that?”

“A low down, dirty, rotten movie,” Dr. Corey said, “that made people go out and kill each other!”

“Mama and Papa never talked about that,” Sam said. “I don’t think they’d like something like that, you all being in the newspapers for gettin’ in some kind of trouble!”

“We didn’t want to worry Mama and Papa,” Elsie said. “So we didn’t tell them. But I guess other people told them just this bit and that bit — and it all gets out of hand.”

“But we didn’t do anything to be ashamed of,” Dr. Corey said. “I thought it was right then. And I’d do it again today, if I had to. The lynchings went up all over the country in nineteen fifteen — because of that movie. That’s probably why they’re up now. Not a man or woman, black or white, Christian or Jew, with free-thinking ideas and care for his fellows was safe anywhere in the country while that movie was on.”

“Jews?” Sam said. “They don’t lynch Jews.” Back home, John and his brother had told Sam that, because Jews had all the money, everybody was afraid to cross them and that’s why they were taking control of just everything. “They got too much money.”

“Don’t lynch Jews?” Dr. Corey declared. “And just what makes you think they don’t, boy? That poor Jew, Mr. Frank, he was lynched down in Georgia, right near where Papa was born, the very summer that movie was showing. Don’t lynch Jews? Where have you been, boy? Back when the Jim Crow laws came in, everybody was getting lynched. That was the crime of it, see? That’s what taking the law into your own hands is all about. Anybody they didn’t like, got lynched — for any reason. You think they didn’t lynch Jews? They lynched white people, they lynched black people — they lynched women, children, and Jews. Don’t let me hear you talkin’ nonsense like that anymore, Sam. Sometimes I think you don’t know anything!”

“Now they did lynch more colored than anybody else,” Elsie said. “You know that, Corey.”

Corey just humphed.

“You remember that sign they put up in the park in downtown Raleigh, when the Jim Crow laws came in? ‘No Jews or Dogs Allowed’?” Elsie laughed. “They didn’t even think enough of niggers to put up a sign to keep us out.”

Sam had heard about the sign; but by the time he’d got to go downtown, there were just the usual signs for where coloreds were supposed to go and the water fountains you were supposed to drink from and where whites were supposed to go and drink. There’d been a mysterious time, Sam knew, that had ended just around his birth, when everyone went to the theater together; when people even went to school together. His older brothers and sisters — Lemuel and Elsie and Corey and Lucius — often spoke of it, when everyone in Raleigh had gone to the Jackson Theater and sat wherever they’d wanted to and watched plays by Shakespeare and dastardly melodramas and uproarious comic skits, in which people sang and danced and minstrels Tommed in black-face, and men in top hats did magic tricks. (Mr. Horstein had said that, personally, he’d never played the Jackson in Raleigh — but magicians had come to Cathay who had.) But now all the theaters in Raleigh were segregated, and Papa wouldn’t let him go at all. A few times he’d snuck in with Lewy and John. (John’s mother taught Mathematics and Women’s Deportment at the college — his father had died three years ago — and didn’t care.) In the balcony, John’s brother’s crutches leaning over the seat back, the boys sat with the other colored children — nigger heaven, everybody called it — to watch Mary Pickford and William S. Hart and Douglas Fairbanks… Though Corey probably had her point, John was pretty smart, and Sam was not yet ready to dismiss completely John’s judgment of the Jews…

“That’s true,” Corey said, uncharacteristically pensive, “that’s true….” And for a moment Sam wasn’t sure if memory had made him miss something important in the present.

That night, after Hubert came back from taking Clarice home and went into his own room to study, then to sleep, Sam got up, moved the drape and curtain back, to hang them in a great down-descending arch over the wing of the chair. Then he got back in bed and lay awake, covers over his mouth and ears, blinking at the moonlight out the window.

At work a few days later, Sam asked: “Mr. Harris, you seen Mr. Poonkin?”

“Awww…” Mr. Harris said, like someone with something real sad he’d forgotten to tell you: “Last week, Poonkin — he got the pee-neumonia. I guess it was on the Tuesday you didn’t come in. They took him over to Manhattan Hospital on Ward’s Island — ”

“—for the Insane?”

Mr. Harris frowned. “Well, they got a lot more people out there than just the looneys now, you know. I guess they got pretty much everybody over there who can’t pay for hisself. But Poonkin got the pee-neumonia — the old people’s friend.”

Sam looked puzzled.

“That’s what they call it.” Glare slid left to right across Mr. Harris’s gold tooth. Denting green silk, Mr. Harris’s tiepin was gold. “At least it’s the friend of old people like Poonkin who ain’t got nobody to care for ’em. It takes ’em quick and, as dying goes, goes pretty easy. I wouldn’t be surprised if old Poonkin’s dead by now — though nobody’s told me that, yet. Though why they’d come and tell me, I don’t know. I’m no kin of his. Poonkin been around here long before I got here. Now he’s gone.”

While he worked in the cellar, sometimes looking over at the boards against the cement wall, Sam thought about going to visit old Poonkin on Ward’s Island. He tried to picture himself in a great public hospital, endless dividing sheets rippling white between the beds, talking to the old man, propped on his pillow: “Mr. Poonkin, tell me about what you did in the War — about the rifle and the barn — behind the spruce, before you could read — what of it you can remember…?” But he didn’t really know if Poonkin were first name or last. (Those idiosyncratic memories of the War, what it was to be a fifteen-year-old black boy with a rifle in a barn, not to mention everything that had brought that child to the cellar two doors away, an aged, half-blind, brief and taloned guardian to those magazines — suddenly winking out. Memories — like spume from a broken wave…) In the hospital, weakly he calls to me. I start to leave, he calls again, but before I turn… there was Hubert, chained to the water pump, and Papa gasping, drawing back the orange crate in his brown hands, his collar loose and no shirt under his black vest, the arms of a man in his fifties, yes, but deeply dark in the evening blue. “You are not a man — you are a little animal!” Papa shouted. “And if you will live like an animal, I will treat you like an animal! I will beat you like a beast till you beg to be a man again…!” Crate slats splintered against Hubert’s shoulder; he remembered the precise sound of his father’s grunts. “Ah…!” The slats splintered again. “Keh…!” On the next blow they smithereened. “Dah…!” Hubert fell, pulled himself backward, shouting: “Papa! No, Papa…? No — !” Papa hit him with the stump of what hung from his hands, then hurled the bottom, missing Hubert, gouging grass. No.. .

No. (Sam walked slowly through the cold street.) For suppose he went over there and Mr. Harris was right: Poonkin was already dead.

“You shouldn’t do that!” Clarice said one day. “You don’t do it at Elsie and Corey’s. I’m sure you didn’t do it in front of your Mama and your Papa at home.” Which was true.

“If he’s going to do it,” Hubert said from the wing chair where he’d begun to read, “I’d just as soon he did it in front of me. You don’t want the boy sneaking off to do it behind my back, now.”

Sam was surprised at Clarice’s upset. He’d thought her unconcerned about the matter till now.

“Hubert, you should speak to him — you said you were going to speak to him. Oh, I’m sorry — it isn’t any of my business! And I shouldn’t have said anything.” Then, with her coat still unbuttoned, she went to the door and out.

As she pulled it after her, it stuck — with a noise like Pra, then, when she opened it an inch and pulled it to again, with a Ja. Outside, she yanked it, and it closed on two beats: Pa-Ti. The tensions of her leaving turned the sound into a kind of thunder that left the room whispering its silence. Sam thought about saying: Hubert, you said you didn’t mind if I —

But Hubert cut the thought off: “You know, I used to work in the tobacco fields — and by and large, it’s a pretty ordinary sort of Negro you find there.”

“That’s right. In Connecticut. What do you mean?” Sam asked; because Hubert was speaking in his serious, older-brother voice. Another sort of thunder.

“Well, you got hardworking Negroes. You got lazy Negroes. Then you got no-accounts — that shouldn’t be news to you…”

Sam nodded.

“But you got another kind you’re going to run into up here — only thing to call ’em is animals. Maybe there’re white people like that too — I guess there must be, someplace. But, now, there were some good men working with me in the Connecticut fields. And there were some lazy ones. Lots of them were no-accounts — but even more of them were just animals.” Hubert pointed his finger. “And that’s why I don’t smoke no cigarettes.”

“I don’t understand…”

“When they pick tobacco,” Hubert said, “they cure it before they make those. But they don’t wash it.”

“I still don’t — ”

“Where does an animal make water or do his business?”

“Right where he’s standing.”

“Well, that’s what I mean,” Hubert said. “And I don’t mean once or twice; I mean all day every day — right in the row where they’re hooking tobacco. They don’t even go to the side. And at least ten times or more I come across some feller doing a lot worse than making water or his business — grinning and telling you he’s gotta do it now ’cause there ain’t much more to life but that and getting drunk and he’s just got to do it! Right on top of what you’re putting in your mouth and sucking into your body! They know white people going to be smoking them things — they think it’s funny.”

“What’s a lot worse?” Sam took the delicate white paper from his lip, feeling its faint adhesion unstick, to look at the tube of fire and flavor in his clubbed fingers.

“If you can’t figure it for yourself,” Hubert said, “it’s not my place to tell you. It’s not my place to preach to you, neither. And I’m not going to talk about it to you anymore.” With a theatrical finality Sam found much more maddening than any preaching (that, at least, with Hubert, meant you could turn it back into an argument), Hubert got up from the wing chair and walked, slowly and with the deliberation of a silent, primal force, into the other room — and did not close the door. Sam watched him pull out the chair, move two heavy law books over, sit down, settle one forearm on the desk, and begin studying.

Within the silence, which was almost a rumble, like a train’s thundering off somewhere, Sam tried to detect the instructions that would release him from his own paralysis. He really didn’t know what Hubert meant by “a lot worse.” But the veiled suggestions went immediately with the things that could happen to you in the vestibules of subway cars. It wasn’t scarifying so much as it defined an area wholly constituted of his ignorance. Sam hated that and felt stupid before it.

It didn’t stop him from smoking. But it stopped him from smoking in the house when he was around Clarice — or Hubert.

c

The intricate interpenetration of the senses, woven into that proto-historic textile — the tapestry of day — sleep and forgetfulness unravel, as effectively as any Penelope, largely before the next day’s panel is begun. (Forget a city in which you’ve once lived, and it might as well have fallen into the sea.) But it would be as naive to think that all forgettings are random as it would be to think thus of all dreams: the first things to go are, systematically, the incidents confirming our own weaknesses which, because we are lucky enough not to have to talk about, there’s no particular reason to recall. The incidents we will, likewise, retain are among those that tell of a certain strength. We may talk about them or not. In between are all the positive and negative lessons of life that life itself will not let us lose. But even among these, on imagination’s intricate loom, one can be reworked into the other with astonishing rapidity, strength into weakness, weakness into strength.

It was astonishing how quickly Sam forgot Poonkin. Guilt he’d felt for not trying to see him on Ward’s Island was replaced by guilt at not wrapping up some of the magazines, trudging to the post office — stripped now of its green and red and silver — , and mailing them to Lewy, who, with his small dark hands, with his chocolate chest, with his crisp-haired enthusiasm, would pass them on to tobacco-colored John: a much smaller guilt, since they’d all already traded so many. Back home, they’d received dozens from Sam; Sam had received dozens from them. Probably they’d seen most of these anyway. (Five among the eighteen Sam had actually read before.) But when the last bedsheet-sized pulp was closed and returned to the pile under the daybed beside the wicker, both guilts extinguished each other. He never thought of Poonkin again.

Or anything Poonkin might have remembered.

Over the next few years, half-a-dozen-odd encounters with Paul Robeson, now in a concert, now in another play — along with the tremendous presence Robeson acquired in the black community — soon muddled for Sam the exact memory of the first time he’d seen Robeson on stage. Had he seen All God’s Chillun? No. But then, what was the name of the play he’d seen at the Lafayette? Had he seen Robeson in The Emperor Jones, that alternated with Chillun at the Provincetown through that spring and summer? No — but some years later he saw the movie. And there was so much talk about, and so many articles on, Robeson, that, on occasions one or two decades by, Sam said he’d seen Chillun because he knew he’d seen something with Robeson in it from around that time. And when, in 1944, Sam and his second wife attended — with Hubert and his second wife — the Robeson production of Othello at the Metropolitan Opera House, with José Ferrer as Iago, Uta Hagen as Desdemona, Margaret Webster as Emilia, and Phillip Drury as Cassio, they all went very much as Negroes who’d frequently seen Robeson perform.

Sam had seen him just not quite so frequently.

He remembered the little girls at the post office a good while. Taking care of them for even those moments had allowed him to retain their ruined visages with a kind of pleasure.

But the other thing Sam remembered was the first time he walked across Brooklyn Bridge.

Two weeks after the full moon, Clarice told him: “If you’re going down there, honey, you’ve got to dress warmer than that. May up here just isn’t like May where you and Hubert come from.”

Thoughtfully, Sam stood at the secondhand bureau Hubert had gotten him just for his things. (He had on Hubert’s long johns.) With what little was left over from his pay, after he’d contributed his two dollars a month to Corey and Elsie for food and three-dollars-fifty-cents a week for his half of the rent, Sam had still saved enough to buy first one, another, then a third magic trick from underground Cathay.

Sam fingered the objects on the dresser.

Just that afternoon, down on the table in the hall, he’d found a brown paper package, wrapped in twine, the mailman had brought — from Lewy! Ripping off the paper, he’d found May’s Weird Tales, featuring the first installment of a novel by… Harry Houdini!

Imprisoned With the Pharaohs.

Folded up and slipped around the first pages, Lewy’s letter said: “High Priest Manetho here to Imhotep off spying in the Upper Kingdom,” which made Sam smile at their mutual joke from the afternoon before he’d left that he’d forgotten till now: that Sam was supposed to be a spy in the north and report back to Lewy and John what was going on. “Hi, y’all! You have got a birthday coming up, as I recall. And I got this yesterday — just finished it last night. (I wonder if it’s really by Houdini?) Consider it your present. And write back quickly and tell me what you think. Though I don’t expect a letter from you too soon, as I’m sure you’re awash in beautiful women and bathtub gin (while freckled Rust-Top and I do content us with simple moonshine) and the general sins of the northern fleshpots — and you simply haven’t the time. But I know you: you’ll wait (or try to wait) for the next two installments and read the whole thing at a swoop! But if, in another two months, I haven’t heard from you, then I shall do me magic and ju-ju spells on the assumption that thou hast forgotten thy brothers in the southlands.”

Sam slid the oversized magazine into the top drawer, wondering whether he’d really have the patience to wait for the next two installments before reading it in a night.

The first of Mr. Horstein’s tricks he’d bought was the magic coin that disappeared. Actually, the trick was just a length of black elastic with a clip on one end you could fasten up your sleeve and a bit of gum on the other that you could stick to any quarter or nickel. But now, as he kneaded the stickum, he realized it was losing its adhesion. More and more times it pulled loose from the coin, letting it fall to the rug as often as it snapped the metal glittering from sight.

The most effective trick — and the most expensive (eighty-five cents) — was a little guillotine in which you could cut a cigarette in half; but if you put your finger through the same hole, you could make the blade slip aside so that it appeared — magically — to pass through your finger, leaving it unhurt and whole.

The third one — though it had cost only a dime — didn’t work at all: a hollow, metal cup in the form of a thumb’s first joint. Smoking a cigarette, without letting anyone see, you secreted the false thumb in your fist. Then you took the cigarette and poked it into your fingers, putting it out on the bottom of the metal cup the false thumb made. You kept packing the cigarette in, until it was inside your fist completely. Finally you used your other thumb to tamp it down further — only you slid your thumb into the false metal one, got it seated good — then opened both your hands.

The cigarette had disappeared. And nobody was supposed to be able to see the thumb cap (with the cigarette inside) over your real one.

The cap was large enough so that, when Hubert tried it on, it just fell off. And Hubert’s hands weren’t small. Still, Sam’s own thumb was too big to wedge into it. Also, the thumbnail on the cap didn’t look like the broad, oversized nails curving down over Sam’s fingers. And it was painted a luminous pink, that, when Clarice examined it, she said didn’t look like anyone’s skin color she knew — black, white, gray, or grizzly!

Hubert had suggested Sam ask Mr. Horstein for his dime back. But then, though he liked Mr. Horstein, he was still a little afraid of him (he was a Jew, after all), and a dime wasn’t a lot.

Sam pushed all three tricks off the dresser, into the drawer on top of Weird Tales, and closed it.

And, for Clarice, he put on his suit jacket. And his cap.

“Remember — ” That was Hubert, reading the paper in the wing chair; he had folded it back to an advertisement for a new kind of suitcase, made from something called… Naugahyde? “Elsie wants us all over there by four.” Hubert looked across the dark room from under the tasseled lamp. “Since your birthday’s this coming Tuesday, she and Corey are probably going to do something a little special today. So don’t you be late, now.”

When he asked the man behind the bars how to get to the Brooklyn Bridge from the station, Sam was told he should have gotten off at City Hall — which was closer. This was the old stop (Brooklyn Bridge) for workers who repaired the bridge — not for people who wanted to walk across it. But if he went two blocks to the east and turned left, he’d come to the walkway.

Beyond the Oriental ornateness of the Pulitzer Building, he saw the structure between — and above — the swoop and curve of trolley tracks, the girders of the El.

It really was immense!

He turned left onto Rose Street, which took him down under one of the bridge’s stone archways. The arches left and right were walled and windowed, with padlocked doors.

Did people live there, in the base of the bridge? Sam turned into the stone underpass.

Hung from the middle of the overhead stone, its rim painted fresh green, a wooden sign read:

Beside it was an opening in the stone. The stairway’s walls were close set. As he stood there, two colored girls with gingham showing from under their yellow cloth coats ran down. He glimpsed their shiny shoes, their white socks over their little-girl ankles, bare little-girl legs above — and smiled, as they descended toward him, out of the shadow, laughing — while an older sister in a straw hat with a grownup-looking bluejay feather came down behind, more sedately. She was almost as old as Clarice — and, from the way she turned her shoulders and nodded so faintly without a smile, clearly considered herself to look smart.

And (he turned to look after her) she did.

Then all three were gone.

He was left only his own smile and their brief memory. Shrugging his suit jacket together, putting his big, country-boy hand against one stone wall, he started up.

And came out onto the concrete ramp rolling toward the first stanchion. Beyond green rails, cars passed left and right of him — along with a trolley. As its troller crossed beneath sustaining guys, its antenna jangling under the overhead wire, sparks spit down. Rocking away toward Brooklyn, a cart lagged behind, its gun-gray horse and its colored driver, in his gray slouch brim, impassive beside the electrical crackling, the blue-green shower of light.

Between him and the traffic, a cable thick as an oil drum lifted slant and vertical cords toward the double vault of stone. Sam started forward, walking toward where the cement flooring gave way to wood. And as hundreds on hundreds of thousands of pedestrians had thought so many times before, Sam thought: Lord, this is marvelous!

At first it seemed the walkway stopped when it hit the bridge’s stanchion. But when he got closer, some white boys, one copper-haired and none more than fourteen, ran round the central stone column, down — those were metal steps up to the higher level, not a ribbed green metal wall — the stairs. Check these off.

Braithwaite died in 1962. Angelina Grimké in 1958. Fenton Johnson in 1958 also…. Effie Lee New-some was doing poorly this past summer, I was told by a lady from Wilberforce, but she was still alive. Her address has been Box 291, Wilberforce, Ohio.

Nanina Alba’s address is 303 Fonville Street, Tuskegee, Alabama. Shall I write her for bionotes, or would you like to?… There is a Charles E. Wheeler, Jr. listed in the Chicago telephone directory, but I can’t get an answer there — yet. Will try again. I am not sure (in fact, I doubt) this is the poet…. Jean Toomer is still in a nursing home in Doylestown, Pa. His wife Marjorie Toomer can be reached at their home, “The Barn”, R. D. 2, Doylestown. She will answer letters promptly. I have visited her twice. She is active for civil rights. Jean’s literary disappointments after Cane were shattering. He tried desperately to repeat that artistic achievement (but not as a Negro) and failed…. I persuaded her and him to give his papers and literary effects to Fisk. A large collection. There is now a chance that Cane may be reprinted along with some of Jean’s unpublished writings…. The sonnet by Allen Tate is perfect for The Poetry of the Negro. His background as a Fugitive and redhot I’LL TAKE MY STANDer adds to its effectiveness. As Countee said about himself, Allen’s “conversion came high-priced,” no doubt…. and there are letters from him in the Toomer Collection. Hart Crane was trying to arrange for the two (Toomer and Tate) to meet. In any case, we can now see that the early anti-Negro expressions of the Fugitives probably reflected guilt feelings, as this “Sonnet at Christmas” makes clear in Tate’s case…. By the way, I also sponsored Frank Lima for his Opportunity. We should let him pass for colored, if he wishes. I thought he was Puerto Rican at the time. Nobody would object to a Mexican identifying as a Negro. Not even a black muslim or a black panther. And I will not object to a couple or so poems by Mason Jordan Mason so long as we make it plain in the biographical note that at least we are not sure. He certainly writes in Negro, as Karl Shapiro says of Tolson. And he’s good.

I don’t expect us to find anything from the Allen Ginsberg cabal that meets our criteria. So why don’t we close the door now.

Beside the steps stood a wooden booth with a glassed-in window, before which were the same brass bars he’d become familiar with in front of tellers at the bank and clerks in the subway’s change booths and post offices. Below the wooden shelf with its worn depression for the change to slide into, was another sign —

— faded and flaking. But perhaps the toll was not in effect today — or, indeed, had not been in effect for some time: the booth was closed; no one sat behind the bars to collect.

Sam climbed the stairs and walked around the great stone column — on the near side of which a black-bronze plaque explained that the bridge had first been opened to traffic in 1883—forty-one years ago!

He strolled out on the walkway, looking down over the green rail, at the tracks between him and the trolley wires.

Dead in the afternoon — hasn’t the sky? — , gas lamps at intervals stood along the walkway’s sides. A sailor in early whites came toward him, hurled balled waxed paper from a late lunch over the rail, to follow it with a delicately flipped toothpick from his lips’ corner. He was carrying some kind of Japanese fan. Over its folds, pastel waves were painted in blues and blacks. The sailor hawked across the bar, returned from moving the other authority recently dropped, and gave Sam a grin: Sam imagined sputum sparkling down between girders to the water. The fellow sauntered away around the stone. (The fan. Where was it from? Where would it go?… Cathay.) Benches with wrought iron backs sat along the walkway, wrested as much of that severe sunshine as you need now. Now turning, Sam saw the lower city’s skyline, towers above the water — yes, and there, on the way you go, were his skyscrapers! And there in the other direction was the green woman with the upraised torch — Liberty! Tug and sail and barge traffic moved lazily about the sound.

But what Sam hadn’t been prepared for was the bridge itself. The reason why it happened only since you woke up — he walked along the planks, head high — is letting the steam disappear from those clouds. Imagine a giant harp, when the landscape all around is hilly sites. No, imagine four giant harps, side by side. Then rotate the alternate ones — just a little, so that some cables were vertical and some slanted across them. Now put two of these double harps at each side of the walkway, that will have to be reckoned into the total, and let the wind play silent music through and against crisp blue.

For there to be more air —

He dropped his head, still walking, to look for a moment at his shoes — and had the disorienting experience of being suspended more than a hundred feet in mid-air above glass-green water!

He stopped.

The boards were again under his leather shoe soles.

Heart pounding, he swayed a bit. Then, still looking down, he started to walk again: between each foot-worn three-inch plank and the next was a quarter-inch gap. What had happened, he realized, was that to move over them with any speed was to let the light from the river glitter up through the spaces, creating the illusion that the walkway had vanished — or at least had gone largely transparent! Green as trolley sparks, the water — thousands of millions of drops of it — flowed below.

How many epochs could those waters clock, passing under the bridge?

Sam strolled a dozen steps more, looking down, relishing the feel of this miraculous suspension above the brilliant river — till a dinghy, with chipped gunwales of flat gray-green, slid into sight. In a wide straw hat, a — shirtless? — man tugged and leaned on the oars.

The boat looked smaller than some wooden bath toy, small as a match box — Sam sensed all over again how high he was.

Again Sam stopped — man and boat vanished. He could just glimpse the boat’s rim moving under a single crack. Again Sam walked.

Rower and river reappeared. Yes, the man was shirtless. Was it warmer down on the water than it was up here in the sky? The rower’s bare feet were wedged against one of the boat’s cross-braces. His pants were brown, and — small as he was — you could see one knee was frayed; a simple rip crossed the other, so that that knee — like a bone from Negro flesh — stuck out. The boat moved at an acute diagonal to the sunside of a shadow on the water — the shadow, Sam realized, of the bridge.

Sam was about to stop and start again, to make the man disappear and reappear — but now the rower pulled in his oars, took off the straw hat — his hair was black and his shoulders were sun-darkened enough that, for a moment, still walking to hold the sight, Sam wondered if the fellow was colored. The man tossed the hat to the dinghy’s back seat, then stood.

The fellow’s hands went to his waist; then his pants dropped — first to his knees, then to his feet! With the awkward step you use in a rocking boat, he got one foot free of them, then the other. Nor was he wearing underwear.

The minuscule figure grasped his genitals —

— and winked out to become only water. What had happened, Sam realized, was that the visible area was only the fraction of an arc directly below; and when he’d walked more than sixteen feet or so, the area he could see moved over: his arc of visibility no longer included the boat!

Without even looking up, Sam swung around and began to stride back. Yes, there the fellow was, doing what Sam had assumed he’d been about to do: urinating. Ripples spread in translucent rings, through sunlight, from where, some feet from the boat’s side, the fellow’s waters conjoined the river’s.

Man as water clock…?

Striding, Sam watched, wondering why any man, to do what all men do, had to strip himself naked in the midst of the water —

When he collided, that is, banging his jaw on someone’s head, confused, with… yes, a man, who grasped him by the shoulders, steadied him, more fitness, pushed him out to arm’s length: “Hey, there, young fellow — !”

“Oh…!” Sam said, read into the undeduced result. “Oh…! I’m… Are you…?”

It was a white man, dark complected but not swarthy, maybe Hubert’s age, though at least a head shorter, with wire framed glasses like Mama’s. His jaw was broad, his mustache brown.

“I’m sorry… Oh!” Sam repeated. “Are you all right?” His own jaw throbbed, though he did not want to touch it.

“I’m fine. What about you? Heads up on the bridge now, young fellow!” Then, with a warm grin, the man walked on.

After that, Sam thought about looking down again at the crazy rower pissing from his boat. He rubbed his jaw. But even though no one was nearer than land, it wasn’t something you wanted to be caught looking at. So after that, he raised his eyes again to the cables; and walked… more slowly.

Well, the bridge was magnificent.

Besides the man he’d collided with hurrying off, only half a dozen people strolled along the boardwalk. This means never — two cyclists pedaled across: a young man, followed by a young woman in blowing skirts, both in yellow hats with black ribbons. (Certainly they’d be in love…) Getting any closer to — a seagull swooped in rings between the cables, circled again to perch unsteadily on one slant cord, bobbed its tail, and, for all its unsteadiness, let fall its liquid waste, a white gleam along gray cable, before it splatted, in a lime-like star, over the planks fifteen feet ahead. The whole world, it seemed, was expectorating, urinating, defecating. Was that the basic principal operating behind spring in New York?

A day of natural functions?

He thought about it and continued walking. The time to look at skyscrapers, he decided (still entranced with the bridge itself) — rather than to the distracted entity of a mirage — , would be on the way back.

Ten minutes later, Sam reached the second stanchion’s platform, to gaze over at the Brooklyn shore. No skyscrapers there. Right, low buildings hugged the water. Other than that, there was not too much of anything, really — save scattered wooden houses. As Sam came down the steps and started forward on the bridge’s landward leg, ahead and to the left was… an early cornfield!

He began to slow his pace, found himself frowning, the half-meant, half-perceived motions. Really, this was, in its way, more disconcerting than the visual revelation of his height above the water at bridge center.

Already Sam had learned to see the city, with its numbered streets and avenues, even with those exceptions like Hamilton Terrace — or Gay Street or Rose — , as a grid in which everything had its place, in which nothing could be lost. Even after a few months, the country had become in memory a kind of field, verdant and vasty, of fronds out of idle depths, pleasant to the eye, but in which nothing much could be found, especially if it wasn’t your own bit of it that you’d spent your whole life learning as best you could, but only a stretch — like this — like it: which are summer. The city behind him, in whose concrete crevices he’d been learning to find his way, the city he’d been learning to work in, to make himself comfortable in, even more, to have some bit of fun in… well, though it was still supposed to be New York, here was no city at all!

Ahead, the bridge spilled out onto macadam that ribboned through the land — land not terribly different from what he’d left in Carolina. He could see a couple of churches. There was a cluster of white frame houses you might even call a township; and two, four, or twelve miles further along the road (he knew) there’d be another. But the bridge here, he realized, connected the city to the country. And country was what Sam thought he’d left behind.

For the first time in months, he remembered the white woman on the train — Scottish — who’d been so eager to talk… who lived in the heart of all that. Brooklyn? Her gregariousness had made him uncomfortable. This sudden view of the place she lived — gregarious in its own way, with all he realized now he knew of it — made him as uneasy as she had.

Turning, and expansion into little draughts, he started back for the stanchion steps.

Then, across the railing, beyond the trolley wires, down on the water he saw the boat — the green dinghy. The reply wakens easily, darting from untruth to willed moment. This much closer to shore, the bridge had imperceptibly lowered, till it was only a third as high above the greeny river as it had been in the center. That was why it took him an eye’s blink, a heart’s beat, to recognize it. It seemed much larger — the tiny thing — turning slowly, moving out from the rail’s edge. But, yes, there was the yellow hat, still on the back seat. Something dark trailed from the side into the water — a leg of the doffed trousers?

Now, maybe twenty feet away, an oar floated out, making the same turns as the boat, moments back, following the same current. Sam frowned, then walked to the rail, to gaze across the traffic lanes a dozen feet below.

No, the boat was empty.

He could see the braces across its bottom. He strained to see the pants, the hat — one oar docked inside, the other loose and floating. He watched a long time. It took the boat almost two minutes to do a complete, lazy, long rotation. And he watched it do two, then three, while he scanned the water, first near it, then further away, for the sunburned arms and shoulders cutting through (swimming strongly), black hair thrown back, glistening, breaking the ripples…

He saw nothing.

I should have looked again, Sam thought, returns the full echo of what you meant. In the middle of the bridge, after I ran into that fellow, I should have — though, he pondered a moment later, what good might I have done him even if I had seen him from up here dive, fall, or, heaven forbid, jump? Whom could I have called? It would take me half an hour to get to the shore, even from here — to find someone about with a boat, much less get out in the water to help him.

No, there were no ripples from the vanished rower, no fugitive swimmer to be seen. Sam looked about. Had anyone else seen it — or seen more of it?

Had it been a young man? Or an old? Was it a white man? Or a black? (He remembered the sailor hawking over the bridge rail.) Was it some blue-eyed Larry just out of Kansas, younger than Hubert if older than he, voyage balked on his first brush with the ocean — but how could you tell? (It had all been so far away!) Had it been some cement-handed old salt, with a shark’s tooth round his neck, an aged, fierce old man, a battered, wrecked enigma, mind and language shattered by a lifetime’s collision with the sea?

Was it the disillusion of age or youth the river had just drunk up?

The past, Sam thought. The past, the past. The past —

The boat turned, looking now as though it would miss the rocks along the farmland’s edge — by a hundred feet! And he could no longer see into it.

Frowning, Sam put his hands into his trousers pockets and started back, scarcely called into being. At the top of the steps, when he’d left the stanchion to walk toward the bridge’s center, once he looked down again, to see green water flash its coherent, sunny surface through the gaps at his feet — and the bridge’s shadow cut away light, with nothing left over. (Had it moved, even in ten or fifteen minutes? From that circumference now alight with ex-possibilities?) Yes, he passed two women and, yes, one of them pushed a stroller, with a fringed parasol built out to cover it — so that certainly it contained some minuscule creature, mittened and bunted against cool May, to make its mother proud. Become present fact, and you must wear them like clothing. But in the anxiety he walked with now, they just didn’t compensate.

Above hung the stone and steel harp, moving in the shadow of your single and twin existence.

A third of the way back, waking in intact appreciation of it, Sam stopped to sit on one of the benches and gaze off at the clouds over Brooklyn. Sputum, urine, feces: before it swells, the way a waterfall drums at different levels, at least he should find a policeman and tell him what had happened. He even got up, thinking to start again for the nearer, Brooklyn shore. But as he stood, he realized the one thing he would never find — among those fields and farmhouses — was a policeman.

Policemen were in cities.

Sam sat again. Certainly boat, hat, and the man’s odd unconcern about his nakedness seemed connected, in Sam’s mind, with the more rural —

“Excuse me,” someone said behind him. “But you’re Negro, aren’t you?”

d

Sam turned on the bench, to see, standing behind him, the man he’d bumped when he’d been staring through the planks.

“Yes,” Sam said. “That’s right. I am.”

“I know it’s none of my business,” the man said. “But I’d bet a lot of people meet you and think you’re white.”

Well, a lot of people up here did. “Some of them.”

“The reason I suspected, I suppose, is that I have a colored friend — a writer. A marvelous writer. He writes stories, but they’re much more like poems. You read them, and you can just see the sunlight on the fields and hear the sound of the Negro girls’ laughter. His name is Jean — ”

“—Toomer?” Sam supplied.

“Now don’t tell me you’re related to him…?” The man laughed. “Though you look somewhat like him. You know, Jean just ran off with the wife of my very good friend, Waldo — so I don’t think I’m really supposed to like him right through here — it’s the kind of thing you don’t write your mother about. But I do — like him, that is. He’s handsome, brilliant, talented. How could one help it? Maybe that’s why I took a chance and spoke to you — because you do look something like him. New York is the biggest of cities, but the smallest of worlds. Everybody always turns out to know everyone else — ”

“No,” Sam said. “No. I’m not his relative. But he’s a friend of my…” How did you explain about your brother’s strange girlfriend — who was the one who knew everybody. “A friend of my brother’s. Well, a friend of a girl my brother knows.” Though Clarice had said he looked like Toomer, she hadn’t mentioned the absconsion. “She was the one who told me about him.” He couldn’t imagine Clarice approving of such carryings on.

“Oh, well, there — you see. You know, that man you were watching, in the boat — do you mind if I sit down?”

“No. Sure…!”

The young man stepped around the bench’s end, flopped to the seat, and flung both arms along the back: “Lord, he was hung! Like a stallion! Pissed like a racehorse, too!” He looked over, grinning behind his glasses. “To see it from up here at all, someone’s got to throw a stream as thick as a fire hose. It was something, ’ey?”

Sam was surprised — and found himself grinning at the ridiculousness of it. People didn’t strip down to stand up and make water before all New York — but if someone did, even less did you talk about it. That both had happened within the hour seemed to overthrow the anxiety of the last minutes, and struck him as exorbitantly comic.

“But did you see what he did?” Sam asked. “Did you see?”

“I saw as much as you, I bet — maybe more, the way you ran off.” The fellow hit him playfully on the shoulder with the back of his hand.

“I mean, he must have jumped in… for a swim. Or maybe — ”

“No,” the man said. “I don’t think he’d have done that.” He seemed suddenly pensive. “It’s much too cold. The water’s still on the nippy side, this early in spring.”

“But he must have,” Sam said. He’d stopped laughing. “I saw the boat, later on — over there.” He pointed toward Brooklyn. “There was no one in it. I know it was the same boat. Because of the hat, and… because of his hat.”

“No one in it?” The man seemed surprised.

“It was floating empty. He must have fallen overboard — or jumped in. Then he couldn’t get back up. The boat was just drifting, turning in circles. Really — there was no one in it at all!”

The man narrowed his eyes, then looked pensively out at the sky while a train’s open-air trundle filled the space beneath them. Through the green v’s of the beams supporting the rail, over the walkway’s edge, Sam could see the car tops moving toward the city. Finally the man said: “No, I don’t think that’s what happened. He was probably one of the Italian fishermen living over there. I live over there, too — not too far from them. A clutch of Genovesi.” He too waved toward Brooklyn. “God, those guineas are magnificent animals! Swim like porpoises — at least the boys do. You can watch them, frisking about in the water just down from where I live. Fell in? Naw…!” He burlesqued the word, speaking it in an exaggerated tone of someone who didn’t use it naturally. “It’s a bold swimmer who jumps into the midst of his own pee. You think he went under in his own maelstrom, while your white aeroplane of Help soared overhead? Oh, no. The East River’s not really a river, you know. It’s a saltwater estuary — complete with tides. So even that whole herd of pissers from the Naval Shipyard, splattering off the concrete’s edge every day, doesn’t significantly change the taste. Jump? I’ll tell you what’s more likely. After he spilled his manly quarts, he lay down in the bottom and let his boat float, with the sunlight filling it up around him as if it were a tub and the light was a froth of suds. And when, finally, he drifts into the dago docks, he’ll jump up, grab hold of it, and shake that long-skinned guinea pizzle for the little Genoese lassies out this afternoon to squeal over, go running to their mothers, and snigger at. No, suicidal or otherwise, his kind doesn’t go in for drowning.”

Sam started to repeat that the boat had been empty. But — well, was there a chance he’d missed the form stretched on the bottom? Sam said, “You live in Brooklyn?” because that was all he could think to say. (No. He remembered the oar. The boat had been empty, he was sure of it — almost.)

The man inclined his head: “Sebastian Melmoth, at your service. One-ten Columbia Heights, Apartment C33.” The man took his glasses off, held them up to the sky, examining them for dust, then put them back on.

Sam said: “I think he fell over. Maybe he was drunk or crazy or… drunk. Maybe that’s why he took his clothes off — ?”

“—to piss in the river?” The man cocked his head, quizzical. “It’s possible. Those guineas drink more than I do. A couple of quarts of dago red’ll certainly make your spigot spout.” He looked over at Sam, suddenly sober-faced. “My name isn’t really Sebastian Melmoth. Do you know who Sebastian Melmoth was?”

Sam shook his head.

“That was the name Wilde used, after he got out of Reading and was staying incognito in France. Oscar Wilde — you know, The Ballad of Reading Gaol — ‘each man kills the thing he loves’?”

“The Importance of Being Earnest,” Sam answered.

“The importance of being earnest to be sure!” The man nodded deeply.

“They did that down on the school campus — the play — where I grew up.”

“School?” The man raised an eyebrow.

“The college — it’s a Negro college, in North Carolina. My father works there. My mama’s Dean of Women. The students put it on, three years ago, I guess. We all went to see it.”

The man threw back his head and barked a single syllable of laughter. “I’m sorry — but the idea of The Importance of Being Earnest in blackface — well, not blackface. But as a minstrel — ” The man’s laughter fractured his own sentence. “… Really!” He bent forward, rocked back, recovering. “That’s just awful of me. But maybe — ” he turned, sincere questioning among his features nudging through the laugh’s detritus — “they only used the lighter-skinned students for the — ?”

“No,” Sam said, suppressing the indignation from his voice. “No, they had students of all colors, playing whichever part they did best. They just had to be able to speak the lines.”

“Really?” the man asked, incredulously.

Sam put his hands on his thighs, ready to stand and excuse himself. There seemed no need at all to continue this.

“You know,” the man said, sitting back again, again looking at the sky. “I would have loved to have seen that production! Actually, it sounds quite exciting. More than exciting — it might even have been important. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the sort of thing that all white people should be made to see — Shakespeare and Wilde and Ibsen, with Negro actors of all colors, taking whichever parts. It would probably do us some good!”

Surprised once more, Sam took his hands from his thighs. His sister Jules, who had played Gwendolen Fairfax (and was as light as his mother), had said much the same thing after it was over — though the part of Cecily Cardew had been taken by pudgy little black-brown Milly Potts (“Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary we all carry about with us…”), who’d jazzed up the lines unmercifully, strutting and flaunting every phrase as much as it could bear and then some, rolling her eyes, shooting her hands in the air, and making the whole audience, including Papa, rock in their seats, clutch their stomachs and howl (the women’s cackles cutting over and continuing after the men’s bellowings) — to the point where the other actors couldn’t say their own lines, trying to hold their laughter. Later, a more serious Papa had said that though it was supposed to be funny, it wasn’t supposed to be funny in the way Milly had made it so. But now it was hard to think of the play any other way.

The man said: “I don’t live in Apartment c 33, actually. You know what that was? That was the cell number Wilde had at Reading. ‘The brave man does it with a sword, the coward with a — ’ ”

“What?” Sam asked.

“Kills the thing he loves,” the man intoned. “I was going to put c 33 on my door, once. But then I thought better. It’s a nice room, though. It’s right in front of Roebling’s old room.”

“Roebling…?”

“Washington Roebling. He’s the man who made this bridge.” The man raised his head, to take in caging cables. “Who hung these lines here? He took over the job from his father, John Augustus Roebling. The Bridge killed his father, John, you know. He’d already completed the plans and was at the waterfront, surveying to start the work — when a runaway cart sliced open his foot. It became infected until, three weeks later, tetanus did him in — with spasms that near broke his bones, with crying out for water. So the son, Washington, took it up. The problem, you see, was to dig the foundations out for those great stone towers.” The man gestured left, then right. “How to excavate them, there in the water, the both of them, with those gigantic dredging machines. They had to dig out, beneath the river, two areas a hundred-seventy-two feet by a hundred-two — for each about a third the size of a football field! You know how they did it? They built two immense, upside-down iron and wooden boxes. The bottoms — or, better, the roofs — were made of five layers of foot-square pine timbers, bolted together. They caulked them within an inch of their lives, covered them over with sheet tin, then covered over the whole with wood again. Then they dropped those upside-down caissons into the drink, with the air still in them. They let the workers down through shafts that were pressurized to keep the air in and the water out. Working on the bottom, the poor bohunks and square-heads they had in there dredged out muck and mud till they hit bedrock — seventy-eight feet six inches below the high-tide line on the Manhattan side and forty-four feet six inches below on the Brooklyn side. The workers had a nine-foot high space to dig in, all propped up with six-by-six beams. The pressure was immense — and they used what they called clamshell buckets to haul out the dredgings. Right at the very beginning, young Roebling was down in the caissons inspecting — came up too fast and got the bends. He was a cripple for the rest of his life. So he stayed in the room at the back of where I live now, surveying the work through the window with a telescope and directing it through his wife — the bridge — who went down to the docks every day to bring his orders and take back her report: spying through his glass at the stanchions he’d raised — twin gnomons swinging their shadows around the face of the sound, insistently marking out his days, till new navigators remap those voyages to and beyond love’s peripheries, till another alphabet, another hunt can reconfigure the word. There’re twenty corpses down under those towers. When it was all done, they poured concrete through the air shafts into the work space, filled it up, sealed it down to the bedrock. Twenty corpses, at least — ”

“They buried the men in the caissons?” Sam asked, surprised.

“I’m speaking figuratively. Some twenty workers died in the bridge’s construction — and do you know, no one is really sure of their names? I like to think of those towers as their tombstones. This one falling from the top of some steam-powered boom derrick, that one hit in the head by a swinging beam. I see them, buried, all twenty, in those hypogea at the river bottom, while the stanchions’ shadows sweep away the years between their deaths and the sea’s mergence with the sun, while the noon signal sirens all the dead swimmers through the everyday…” For a moment he was pensive. (Uncomfortable Sam thought again of the… Italian fisherman?) “Everybody always talks about John Augustus — a kraut, you see,” the man went on. “There’s nothing dumber than a dumb kraut, but there’s nothing smarter than a smart one — we all know that. The war taught it to us if it taught us anything. John built bridges all over kingdom come: over the Allegheney, over the Monongahela, over Niagara Falls, the Ohio — each runs under a Roebling bridge. You’d think, sometimes, he was out to build a single bridge across the whole of the country. And the plans for this one were, yes, his. But I want to write the life of Washington. (Don’t think it’s an accident John named his son after our good first president!)” Again, he nodded deeply. “Roebling — Washington A. Roebling — was this bridge; this bridge was Washington Roebling. He was born into it, through his father: every rivet and cable you see around us sings of him. Write such a life? It shouldn’t be too hard. To get the feel of it, all I have to do is to go into the back room, look out the window, and imagine… this, cable by cable, rising over the river.”

When the man was quiet, Sam said with some enthusiasm: “The plaque says the bridge was opened to traffic in 1883. That’s the year they started the first commercial electricity in New York City and Hartford, Connecticut!” because, along with and among his magic and tricks, Sam had lots of such informations — like the sixty stories of the Woolworth Building — and this was a man who might appreciate it.

“Really — ?” the young man asked, conveying more surprise than was reasonable.

“That’s right.”

“In May it was — since you’re being so particular — the very month we’re in: on the twenty-fourth, that’s when they started to roll and stroll across. Though your plaque doesn’t say that! Nor does it say how, on the first day, when they opened the walkway here to the curious hordes, going down those steps there a woman tripped and screamed — and the crowds, thinking the whole structure was collapsing, stampeded. Twelve people were trampled to death. It’s a strange bridge, a dangerous bridge in its way; things happen here. I mean things in your mind — ” a wicked smile behind his glasses gave way to a warm one — “that you wouldn’t ordinarily think of.” The man held out his hand. “My name’s Harold. Harold Hart. People call me Hart. A few folks — especially in the family — call me Harry. But I’m becoming Hart more and more these days.”

Sam seized the hand to shake — in his own hand with their nails like helmets curving the tops of the enlarged first joints, their forward rims like visors. “Sam.” He shook vigorously — let go, and put his hands down beside him. “My name is Sam.” No, the man was not particularly looking at them. “My birthday’s just coming up — ” he felt suddenly expansive — “and it happens during the transit of Mercury.”

“Does it now? And the last year of construction on this bridge, here — in 1882—took place under the last transit of Venus! A fascinating man,” the man said, leaving Sam for a moment confused. “When you live in the same room as someone, realize when you go to the bathroom, or leave by the front door, or simply stop to gaze out the window, you’re doubtless doing exactly what he did, walking the same distances, seeing what he saw, feeling what he felt, it gives you an access to the bodily reality of a fellow you could never get at any other way — unless, of course, you went out in a boat on the river yourself, and, underneath, stood up, pulled down your pants, and let fly into the flood!” Playfully the man hit at Sam’s shoulder once more, then turned to the water, sniggering.

At contact, realizing what the man was referring to, Sam felt the anxiety from the bridge’s Brooklyn end flood back. Perhaps, he thought, he should excuse himself and go.

But the man said, snigger now a smile and face gone thoughtful: “Sam — now that’s the name of a poet. There’s the biography I should really write.”

A tug pulled out from under the traffic way’s edge — as the dinghy had floated out when Sam had been nearer Brooklyn.

“Pardon?”

“A marvelous, wonderful, immensely exciting poet — named Sam. Another kraut. Roebling — John Augustus — was born in Prussia — Mühlhausen!” He pronounced it with a crisp, German accent, like some vaudeville comic (Mr. Horstein?) taking off Kaiser Wilhelm. “But Sam was born in Vienna. His parents brought him here when he was seven or eight. No grammar, no spelling, and scarcely any form, but a quality to his work that’s unspeakably eerie — and the most convincing gusto. Still, by the time he was your age, Sam was as American as advertising or apple pie. He died about seven years ago — I never met him. But — do you know Woodstock?”

“Pardon?” Sam repeated.

“Amazing little town, in upstate New York — full of anarchists and artists and — ” he leaned closer to whisper, the snigger back — “free lovers!” He sat back again. “It’s full of all the things that make life really fine in this fatuous age. It’s a place to learn the measurement of art and to what extent it’s an imposition — a fulcrum of shifted energy! It’s a town where, on Christmas Eve morning, leaves blow in a wailing, sunny wind, all about outside the house, over the snow patches. It’s a good place to roast turkeys and dance till dawn. A good place to climb mountains, or to curl up with a volume of the Bough — though you can get bored there, sweeping, drawing pictures, masturbating the cat… Well, that’s where I spent this past winter. That’s where I discovered Sam — somewhere between making heaps of apple sauce and cooking the turkey in front of an open fire in a cast-iron pig! I’ve been growing this mustache since about then. How do you think it looks?”

“It looks fine.” It looked rather thin for all that time — certainly thinner than Hubert’s. “You found Sam’s books?”

“Alas, poor Sam never had a book. But I found his notebooks and his manuscripts — a friend of mine had them. He let me borrow them so I could copy some of them out.”

“He lived in Woodstock?”

“Sam? No, he lived right here in the city — within walking distance of the bridge.” This time he gestured toward Manhattan. “Oh, Sam was very much a city poet. He lived just on the Lower East Side, there. Went to P. S. One-sixty at Suffolk and Rivington Street. Worked in the sweatshops — stole what time he could to go to the Metropolitan Museum, take piano lessons. He played piano just beautifully — that’s what my friend said. And drew his pictures; and wrote his poems. He wrote a poem once, right here, while he was walking across the bridge with his oldest brother, Daniel — there were eight boys in the family, I believe.” Again the man spread his arms along the bench back; one hand went behind Sam’s shoulder. “Late in November — just a month before Christmas — they were walking across, from Brooklyn, talking, like you and me, when Sam pulled out his notebook and started writing.” He closed his eyes, lifted his chin: “ ‘Is this the river “East”, I heard? / Where the ferry’s, tugs, and sailboats stirred / And the reaching wharves from the inner land / Outstretched like the harmless receiving hand … / But look! at the depths of the dripling tide / That dripples, re-ripples like locusts astride / As the boat turns upon the silvery spread / It leaves strange — a shadow — dead

Through the cables, the dark, flat, and — yes — dead green spread behind the tug. Ripples crawled to the wake’s rim, like silver beetles, to quiver and glitter at, though unable to cross, the widening borders.

“The river’s very beautiful,” Sam said, because beauty was the aspect of nature and poetry it seemed safest to speak of.

“Oh, not for Sam the poet. If anything, for him it was terrifying. He was to die, looking out at it, from a window of the Manhattan Hospital for the Destitute, up on Ward’s Island. They keep the dying there — and the insane. It’s only an island away from Brother’s, where the General Slocum beached after it burned up a thousand krauts and drenched them till they drowned, back in ’aught-four — makes you wonder what we needed a war for. It was the dust and the airless walls of his brother Adolf’s leather shop where he worked that first seated in the floor of Sam’s breath that terrible, spiritual, stinking illness — have you ever visited anyone dying of TB? They do stink, you know? Here in the city, you learn to recognize the stench — if you hang out in the slums. Nobody ever talks about that, but — Lord! — they smell. The lungs bleed and die and rot in their chests; and their breath and their bodies erupt with the putrefaction of it — in a way it’s a purification too, I suppose. But before he was nineteen, Sam had already learned the rustle of nurses around his bed, like the husks of summer locusts. All the nuns — and he’d been reading Poe, the ghoul-haunted woodlands, that sort of stuff — once made our rogue tanton bolt St. Anthony’s at Woodhaven, in terror for his life. That’s where they first packed him off to die. For a while after that he stayed in New Jersey — Paterson — with Morris, another brother. But a few months later, he was back in another hospital — Sea View this time, on Staten Island.” Without closing his eyes, again the man recited: “‘And the silvery tinge that sparkles aloud / Like brilliant white demons, which a tide has towed / From the rays of the morning sun / Which it doth ceaselessly shine upon.’ But that was written some years before, when he was well — walking across the bridge here with Daniel. Still: ‘loud, brilliant white demons…’? He had a very excitable poetic apprehension — like any true poet would want to or — really — must have. Don’t you think?”

By now Sam was feeling somewhat sulky there’d been no praise of his own eccentric bit of electrical information. He was not about to condone all this biography. “It doesn’t sound all that good of a poem.”

“Well, in a way, it’s not. But it’s what poetry — real poetry — is made of: ‘… The dripling tide that dripples, re-ripples…’ Really, for any word-lover, that’s quite wonderful! Words must create and tear down whole visions, cities, worlds!” (Sam was not sure if he was saying Sam — the other Sam — did this or didn’t.) “And then, Sam was only a child when he died — twenty-three. I’m twenty-four now. A year older than Sammy. But I suppose he was too young, or too uneducated — too unformed to make real poems. But then, Keats, Rimbaud — all that material: you can feel its sheer verbal excitement, can’t you?” He chuckled, as if to himself. “Twenty-four? In a moment I’ll sneeze — and be older than Keats!”

Sam looked at the face now looking past his; at first he’d put it at Hubert’s age. But there was a dissoluteness to it — the skin was not as clear as it might be, the eyes were not as bright as they should be; and, of course, just the way he spoke — that made the man seem older than twenty-four. Sam asked: “Don’t poems have to make sense, besides just sounding nice?” A teacher down in Raleigh had once explained to them why Edgar Poe was not really a good poet, even after they’d all applauded her recitation of “The Bells.” Apparently Poe had not been a very good man — and people who were not good men, while they could write fun poems, simply couldn’t write great ones.

“Oh, do they, now? But there’re many interesting ways to seem not to be making sense while you’re actually making very good sense indeed — using myths, symbols, poetic associations and rhetorical gestures. I never wrote my mother about Sam — just as I never wrote her about Jean’s scooting off with Margy. I haven’t written her about Emil yet, either — but I’ll have to do that, soon. I wonder if I’ll write her about you? Grace proffers the truth in a regular Sunday Delivery, and I send her back lies — of omission mostly. (Can you imagine, telling her about some wild afternoon I had at Sand Street, skulking down behind the piled-up planks and plates beside the Yard?) So I just assume they can be corrected later. I dare say it’s all quite incoherent to you. But it’s leading up to something — a bigger truth. I just have to get my gumption up to it. At any rate — ” he chuckled — “Sam was not only a poet. He drew pictures. He played the piano beautifully, as I said — at least that’s what my friend who’d known him told me. You see, it was a poetic sensibility in embryo, struggling to express itself in all the arts. Do you play an instrument?”

“The cornet.” Playing the cornet, Sam had always figured, was like knowing about electricity in Hartford and the number of stories in the Woolworth Building. Or maybe a couple of magic tricks.

“Well, then, you see?” the man said. “You and little Sammy Greenberg are very much alike!”

“He was a jewboy!” Sam exclaimed — because till then, for all he’d been trying to withhold, he’d really begun to identify with his strange namesake who had once walked across the bridge and had seen, as had he, the water dripple, re-ripple…

“Yes, he was, my young, high-yellow, towering little whippersnapper!” The man laughed.

Once more Sam started, because, though he knew the term — high-yellow — , nobody had ever actually called him that before. (He’d been called “nigger” by both coloreds and whites and knew what to do when it happened. But this was a new insult, though it was given so jokingly, he wondered if it was worth taking offense.) Sam put his hands on his thighs again, then put them back on the bench, to arch his fingertips against the wood, catching his nails in weathered grain. Was this man, Sam wondered a moment, Jewish? Wasn’t there something Semitic in his features? Sam asked: “Do you write poems, too?”

“Me?” The young man brought one hand back, the slender fingers splayed wide against the sweater he wore under his corduroy jacket. “Do I write poems? Me?” He took a breath. “I’m in advertising, actually. Ah, but I should be writing poems. I will be writing poems. Have I ever written poems?” He scowled, shook his head. “Perhaps I’ve written poems. Once I found a beautiful American word: ‘findrinny.’ But no American writer ever wrote it down save Melville. And since it never made it from Moby-Dick into any dictionary (I’ve looked in half a dozen), I’ve finally settled on ‘spindrift.’ Go look it up! It’s equally lovely in the lilt and lay of what it means. Believe me, if I wrote a real poem, everyone would be talking about it — writing about it. When I write a poem — find its lymph and sinew, fix a poem that speaks with a tongue more mine than any you’ll ever actually hear me talking with — you’ll know it! Boni and Liveright did Cane last year, Beyond the Pleasure Principle this year; I just wonder when they’ll get to me. I can promise you — Crane,” he said suddenly, sat forward, and scowled. “Isn’t that endlessly ironic?” He shook his head. “Crane — that’s whom they’re all mad about now. Someone showed me the manuscript. And, dammit, some of them are actually good! They’re planning to get endorsements from Benêt and Nunnally Johnson — he lives in Brooklyn, too.”

“A poet? Named Crane?” Sam asked.

The man nodded, glancing over. “Nathalia Crane. She lives in Flat-bush, out where it builds up again and Brooklyn starts to look at least like a town; and she’s in love with the janitor’s boy — some snub-nosed freckle-cheeked mick named Jones.”

“In the heart of Brooklyn?” Sam said.

“If Brooklyn can be said to have a heart. I wonder why, no matter how hard I try to get away, I always end up working with sweets — Dad makes chocolates, you see. Well, I’ve lived off them long enough. Personally, I think Brooklyn, once you leave the Heights, is a heartless place. For heart, you go downtown into the Village. Really, the irony’s just beyond me. She’s supposed to be ten — or was, a couple of years ago. They go on about her like she was Hilda Conkling or Helen Adam. And they actually gave me the thing for review! I mean, I told them — under no circumstances would I! Could you think of anything more absurd — me reviewing that? If I liked it, people would think I was joking. If I hated it, they’d think I was simply being malicious. They thought it would be fun. No — I said; I certainly wouldn’t be trapped into that one. Poetry’s more serious than — ” Again he broke off and turned, to regard Sam with a fixity that, as the silence grew, grew uncomfortable with it. “I mean, any poem worth its majority must pell-mell through its stages of love, meditation, evocation, and beauty. It’s got to hie through tragedy, war, recapitulation, ecstasy, and final declaration. But sometimes I think she’s got more of the Great War in her poems than I do. I wonder if that makes the geeky girl a better poet? No, I’m not going to be able to take these engineering specifications, instruction manuals, and giant architectural catalogs much longer — Lord, they’re real doorstoppers! Soon, I’m going to leave that job — the only question is, at my behest or theirs?”

“You’re quitting your — ?”

“Nobody can write poems and have a job at the same time. It’s impossible!”

“You don’t think so?” He wondered if he should mention that Clarice worked as a secretary to the principal in the school where Hubert taught — and seemed to turn out her share.

“Do you think I should quit my job because they — not the people I work for, but the people I sometimes write for — asked me to review that silly little girl’s silly little book? Of poems?” He crossed his arms severely, hunched his shoulders as if it had suddenly grown chill. “And, of course, they’re not silly. Really. They’re quite good — a handful of them. But they’re not as good as poems I wrote when I was that age. (But doesn’t every poet feel like that?) And they’re certainly not as good as the poems I could write now!” He rocked a few times on the bench, then declared: “Now who do you think it was who wrote,

“Do you think there’s that much fudge — and does anybody ever really notice? Fidge, perhaps? Well, Lowell did in Poe…” He rocked a few more times, then began, softly, intensely, voiced, yes, but quiet as a whisper:

He broke off, turning aside, then added: “No, wait a minute. What about this.” Now the voice was louder:

Again the man sat back, relaxed his arms. “All right — tell me: is that the greatest — ” he growled greatest in mock exaggeration — “poem you’ve ever heard? Or is it?”

Sam looked up, where arch ran into arch, along great cables. “What’s it about?” he asked, looking back. “The bridge?”

“It’s called…‘Finale’!” The man seemed, now, absolutely delighted, eyes bright behind his lenses.

“I get the parts about… the bridge, I think. But what’s the dome?”

“Ah, that’s Sam’s ‘starry splendor dome’—from a poem he wrote, called ‘Words.’ ‘One sad scrutiny from my warm inner self / That age hath — but the pleasure of its own / And that which rises from my inner tomb / Is but the haste of the starry splendor dome / O though, the deep hath fear of thee….’ It goes on like that — and ends: ‘… Another morning must I wake to see — / That lovely pain, O that conquering script / cannot banish me.’ Conquering script — I like that idea: that the pen is mightier; that writing conquers.” His eyes had gone up to tangle in the harp of slant and vertical cables, rising toward the beige-stone doubled groin. “Yes, I think I’ll use it, make that one mine — too.”

“Can you do that?” Sam asked. “If you write your own poems, can you just take words and phrases from someone else’s?”

The man looked down. “Did you ever see a poem by a man named Eliot — read it in The Dial a couple of Novembers back? No, you probably didn’t. But his poem is nothing but words and phrases borrowed from other writers: Shakespeare, Webster, Wagner — all sorts of people.”

“Taking other people’s poems,” Sam said, “that doesn’t sound right to me.”

“Then I’ll link Sam’s words to words of mine, engulf them, digest and transform them, make them words of my own. Really, it’s all right. You said you grew up on a college campus?” Leaning forward, his face became a bit wolfish. “The word is…‘allusion’!”

“I grew up there,” Sam said. “But I didn’t go to school there.”

“I see. But look what I’ve managed to call up! Go on — take a look there, now.” The man nodded toward Manhattan. “What’s that city, do you think?”

Sam turned, about to say… But the city had changed, astonishingly, while they’d been sitting. The sunlight, in lowering, had smelted its copper among the towers, to splash the windows of the southernmost skyscrapers, there the Pulitzer, in the distance the Fuller, there the Woolworth Building itself.

“Risen from the sea, just off the Pillars of Hercules — that’s Atlantis, boy — a truly wonder-filled city, far more so than any you’ve ever visited yet, or certainly ever lived in.” Behind Sam the man lowered his voice: “I’m a kind of magician who makes things appear and disappear. But not just doves and handkerchiefs and coins. I’m one of O’Shaunessey’s movers and shakers, an archaeologist of evening. I call up from the impassive earth the whole of the world around you, Sam — stalking the wild nauga and bringing it all down to words, paired phalluses, bridge between man and man. I create and crumble worlds, cities, visions! No, friend! It is Atlantis that I sing. And poets have been singing it since Homer, son; still, it’s amazing what, at any moment, might be flung up by the sea. So: ecce Atlantis Irrefragable, corymbulous of towers, each tower a gnomon on the gold afternoon, flinging around it its metric shadow! And you should see it by moonlight — ! They speak a wonder-filled language there, Sam: not like any tongue you’ve ever heard. My pop — C. A. — thinks poetry should be a pleasure taken up in the evening — but not so in Atlantis! No! There, Raphèl mai amècche zabì almi makes as lucid sense as mene, mene tekel upharsin or Mon sa me el kirimoor — nor is it anywhere near as dire as Daniel. But we need Asia’s, Africa’s fables! In Atlantis, when I stand on the corner and howl my verses, no one looks at me and asks, ‘Whadja say?’ Because mine’s the tongue they speak there. In Atlantis I’ll get back my filched Ulysses with the proper apology. I tell you, all twenty of those dead workers are up and dancing there with savage sea-girls, living high and healthy in garden-city splendor, their drinking late into the dawn putting out Liberty’s light each morning. And the niggers and the jewboys, the wops and the krauts say hey, hi, and howdy — and quote Shakespeare and Adelaide Crapsey all evening to each other. And even if I were to pull a Steve Brodie this moment from the brink of the trolley lane there — watchman, what of the track? — , as long as that city’s up, the river would float me, singing on my back, straight into its docks at a Sutton gone royal, no longer a dead end, and I’d walk its avenues in every sort of splendor. You say you saw the empty boat of our dark friend a-dribble over his gunwale? Well, if it was empty, it’s because he’s found safe harbor there. And he’s happy, happy — oh, he’s happy, Sam, as only a naked stallion (may St. Titus protect your foreskin in these heathen lands) prancing in the city can be!”

Sam said: “Wow…!” though his “Wow” was at the gilded stones, the burnished panes, the towers before him, rather than at the words that wove from behind through the woof of towers ahead. He glanced back at the man, then turned to the city again, where, in a building he couldn’t name, copper light fell from one window — “Oh…!” Sam breathed — to the window below. “Wow.

“Atlantis,” the man repeated. “And the only way to get there is the bridge: the arched nave of this loom, the temple of this stranded warp, the pick of some epiphenomenal gull among them as it shuttles tower to tower, bobbin, spool, and spindle. The bridge — that’s what brings us exhausted devils, in the still and tired evening, to Atlantis.”

“That’s… I mean — ”

“Atlantis? There, you can see it, when the sun’s like this — the city whose kings ordered this bridge be built. Better, the city grows, weaves, wavers from the bridge, boy — not the bridge from the city. For the bridge is a woob — orbly and woob are Sammy’s words: a woob’s something halfway between a womb and a web. Roebling’s bridge, Stella’s bridge, my bridge! Trust me — it wasn’t gray, girder-grinding, grim and grumpy New York that wove out from this mill. Any dull, seamy era can throw up an Atlantis — Atlantis, I say: city of mirrors, City of Dreadful Night, there a-glittering in the sun! Vor cosma saga. Look at those towers — those molte alti torri, those executors of Mars, like those ’round Montereggione. Vor shalmer raga. Look at them, listen: O Jerusalem and Nineveh — among them you can hear Nimrod’s horn bleating and Ephialtes’ chain a-rattle. Whose was the last funeral you tagged behind, when the bee drowsed with the bear? What primaveral prince, priest, pauper, Egyptian mummy was it, borne off to night, fire, and forever? What mother’s son — or daughter — was it, boxed now and buried? Per crucem ad lucem. Everything living arcs to an end. Nabat. Kalit. The hour to suffer. It’s a dangerous city, Sam. Et in Arcadia ego. Anything can be stolen from you any moment. But all you get bringing up the rear of funerals in November is shattered by the sea — for death’s as marvelous a mystery as either birth or madness. Go strolling in our city parks, Caina, Ptolomea, Judecca. (The only one I don’t have to worry about getting frozen into, I guess, is Antenora — if only thanks to the change of season.) Li jorz iert clers e sanz grant vent. Go on, ask: ‘Maestro, di, che terra è questa?’ No, not penitence, but song. I’m still not ready for repentance. See, I’m looking for Atlantis, too, Sam — sometimes I think the worst that can happen is that I’ll be stuck with the opportunists in the vestibule — maybe even allowed to loll among the pages of the virtuous Pagan. But then I’m afraid you’re more likely to find me running in circles on burning sand, under a slow fall of fire — that’s if I don’t just snap and end up in the trees, where harpies peck the bleeding bark. Mine and Amfortas’s wounds both could use us some of Achilles’ rust — if not a little general ataraxy. In Atlantis you spend every night carousing with Charlie Chaplin — and celebrate each dawn with randy icemen at your knees. In Atlantis, you can strut between Jim Harris and the emperor every day, Mike Drayton squiring Goldilocks behind. In Atlantis, all poets wake up in the morning real advertising successes — and cheese unbinds, like figs. Step right up, sit down with your own Sammy, drink a glass of malmsey, and share a long clay stem. When this Orlando is to his dark tower come — when I split my ivory horn in two, bleeding from lip and ear (you think my pop will be my Ganelon and finally pluck me from my santa gesta?) — will they hear me eight miles or thirty leagues away, the note borne by an angel? You’re sensitive, boy — sensitive to beauty. I can tell from your ‘Wow!’—it’s a sensitive ‘Wow!’ So — Wow! — I know you know what I’m talking of. As well, you’re a handsome boy — like Jean. Only handsomer than Jean; I’d say it if anyone asked me. But there — I have said it; and it’s still true! That’s the job of poets, you know — to speak the terrifying, simple truths, that, for most people, are so difficult they stick in the throat from embarrassment. I mean, what’s poetry for, anyway? To write a reply on the back of a paper somebody slips you at the baths with their address on it whom you don’t feel like fucking? To celebrate some black theft of goose, cigar, and perfume — rather than toss it out the window at Thompson’s?”

Sam had been used to people down home saying, “The Bishop has some fine looking boys!” He’d even had two or three girls at the school get moony and giggly about him, fascinated with the silliest thing he’d say. But the notion of himself as really handsome…? He pushed his fingertips over the green bench planks, beneath his thighs.

“Actually,” the man said behind him (again Sam looked at the city), “I’m probably as good a poet as I am because I’m quite brave. I’m not some Jonathan Yankee nor yet, really, a Pierrot. But I’ve trod far shadowier grounds than those Wordsworth preluded his excursion to cover — precisely because they are not in the mind of man. Sure. I mean, here a logical fellow must ask: okay, what finally keeps me from it? We have the river’s flow — instead of certainty. I could be any old priestess of Hesperus — wrecked on whatever. Am I really going to sing three times? It’s a pretty easy argument that, whether in Egypt or at the Dardanelles, with any two towns divided by water, one can always play Abydos to the other’s Sestos: for every Hero somewhere there’s a Leander, and every Hero has her Hellespont. There’s always hope as long as he remembers how to swim. I mean what are you going to do with Eve, La Gioconda, and Delilah — replace the latter two with Magdalene or Mary? Do I covet the extinction of light in dark waters? Three Marys will rise up and calm the roar: sure — Mary Garden, Merry Andrews, and Mary Baker Eddy.

“But we have the bridge.

“Oh, surely, it starts with your having a satori in the dentist chair, and the next you know you’re at work on your hieros gamos and giggling over what Dol Common said to Sir Epicure. There are some folks to whom the thunder speaks; but there are others who need poets to rend and read into it their own trap-clap. (I hope you’re not sure, either, who that their own refers to.) It ends, however, here, with me talking to you — I certainly didn’t think I would be, half an hour ago. Not when I first saw you. The ones who terrify me are always the short, muscular blonds — and the tall, dark, handsome ones. Like you. ‘Tall, dark, and handsome’? That’s trite for terror. But it’s true. I live with a short, muscular blond. We have a nice, six-dollar a week room. Only, I confess, it’s the eight dollar room I lust after. That’s Roebling’s room. My blond’s a sailor. His old man’s the building owner. Now he’s got the view — but he tells me I can come in and use it whenever I want. They’re nice, that way. You can’t imagine what it took, getting up nerve to speak to him — but I said, his name’s Emil — to talk with him; and really talking with someone is different from simply speaking. I mean, you and I are speaking. But are we talking yet? Perhaps we ought to find out if we can. Still, suddenly, Emil and I — my handsome sailor, my golden wanderer, off after his own fleece — we were talking — telling each other how we felt. About one another. About the world. We talked till the sun came up; then he kissed my eyes with a speech entirely beyond words, and I’ve been able to do nothing but babble my happiness since. We decided it really would be terrible if we ever left each other. So he asked me to move in with him. All life is a bridge, I told him. Even the whole world. He’s like an older brother — it’s like living with a brother. And once again I’m hearing things before dawn. I’m three years younger than he — and two inches taller! But sometimes, it’s true, I feel like I’m the elder. His father can’t imagine that anything could be going on that shouldn’t be — if anything is going on at all.” Sam heard him shrug… “It’s a hoot. The last person to pick him up and suckle at his schlong was Lauritz Melchior. Now, because they both speak Danish, we get to lurk backstage at the Met, about as regular as The Brooklyn Eagle. But it’s very pure. Very severe, between us — Emil and me. But he is a sailor — and he goes on voyages. He’s away, now — in South America. But in Atlantis, I live forever, in my room with my Victrola and my love. It makes my dark room light and light.” Suddenly the man leaned forward again. (Sam could hear him, not see him, closer at his back.) “Tell me, Sam: Have you ever tried to kiss the sun? I mean, deep kiss it — French kiss it as they’ve just begun to say. Maul it with your lips and tongue? Flung your arms around it, pulled it down on top of you, till it seared your chest and toasted the white wafer cheek of love, poached the orbs in your skull, even while you thrust your mouth out and into its fires till the magma at its core blackened the wet muscle of all articulation? Well, Atlantis is the town in which everybody, man and woman, can kiss the sun and still have the moon smile down on them — not this stock, market culture of the stock market. And believe me, sometimes when the sun’s away, you’ll find yourself needs reaching for the moon. All I do is sweat with imagined jealousies while he’s gone — Emil, I mean. But someday, he’s going to come home, just while I’m in the throes of it, down on the daybed, with you or some guinea fisherman’s randy brat — does it matter which? And…” The man sat back. Sam couldn’t see him for the city — though he heard his fingers snap: “That’ll be it! But that’s not for today. That’s for another time. Do you want to come back to the place with me — have a drink? We could be alone. I’m a good man to get soused with, if you like to get soused — and what self-respecting Negro doesn’t? Come on, relax. Spend a little time — come with me, boy-oh-boy, and we’ll get boozy and comfortable.”

Was it the mention of the fisherman? Was it the mention of the moon? Suddenly Sam stood and turned around. “Look,” he said. “I’m going to get a policeman.”

The man frowned, put his head to the side.

“I’m going to get a policeman. This isn’t right — ” He thought: How do you explain to this fellow that the boat was really empty, that a man had really drowned?

“But you don’t have to do — ”

“I’m sorry! But I have to tell somebody! Look, we just can’t — ”

The man was looking at Sam’s hands — which, in his excitement, had come loose to wave all over the day.

“I know all about it — the force of the club in the hand of the working man. Really,” the man added, with a worried look, “policemen are so dull. Laughter’s what you want here. Celebration of the city. Beauty. Higher thoughts. Get yourself lost in that lattice of flame. Humor’s the artist’s only weapon against the proletariat — and, in this city, my friend, the police are as proletarian as they come. Hey, I’m not going to make you do anything you don’t — I mean I only asked… only offered you a sociable drink — ”

“I’m going to get a policeman,” Sam repeated. “Now.” He added: “Maybe we’ll be back — !” He started away. “In a few minutes.”

From behind him the man called out, almost petulantly: “That’s not the way to Atlantis!”

Sam glanced back.

“And you’re a damned fool if you think I’m going to wait around for you.” The man stood now, one hand on the bench back, like someone poised to run. His final salvo: “Don’t think you’ll ever get to it calling the law on people like me!”

Sam started again. Really, the fellow was a fool! What in the world had made him sit there listening, letting the man drench him in his lurid monologue? Sam broke into a lope, into a run — turned and, practically dancing backwards, looked once more:

The man was hurrying off, into Brooklyn, into Flatbush, or wherever he’d said he lived, moving away almost as fast as Sam was moving toward the city. Sam turned ahead, in time to take the stairs down the Manhattan stanchion — two at a step. Three minutes later, he almost missed the narrow entrance down to Rose. He had to swing around the rail, come back, and, at the entrance, plunge in silence by gray stone.

He found a policeman coming along the black metal railing by City Hall Park, where tall buildings’ shadows had already darkened the lower stories to gray — save when Sam passed an east-west street, gilded with sudden sun. He hurried up to the officer. “Excuse me, sir. Please.” On the other side of the park’s grass, light glinted on the edge of the sprawling trolley terminals tin roof — where some of the green paint had come away…? “But I think someone’s drowned — in the river, sir. I was up walking across, into Brooklyn, and — ”

“You saw someone do a Brodie off the bridge?” Below the midnight visor, webbed in forty-plus years’ wrinkles, river-green eyes were perfectly serious.

“Someone jump, you mean? No. He was in a boat. I could see it, down in the water. And later on, I saw the boat again — and it was empty. A green rowboat — I think.”

The policeman said: “Oh. You saw him go over?”

Sam watched the man’s dull squint and his ordinary thumb laid up against the belly of his shirt between his jacket flaps, like something inevitable. He thought about putting his own hands in his pockets, but kept them hanging by force. “Well, no — not really. I mean, I didn’t actually see it. But later — I saw the same boat. The oar was floating behind it. And there was nobody in it.”

“Oh,” the policeman said again. The ordinary thumb rose, and the officer scratched ash-blown blond, cap edge a-joggling on the walnuts of his knuckles. “And how long ago was this?”

“Just a few minutes,” Sam said, trying to figure how long he’d been talking with the man on the bridge. “Maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes.” Probably it was over thirty. Could it have been an hour? “But, well, you know. It takes some time to get all the way back over, to this side, from Brooklyn.”

“It was on the Brooklyn side?”

“It was closer to the Brooklyn side than ours.”

“Then why didn’t you try to get some help over there?” The officer dropped his hand to put a fist on his bullet-belt.

“I didn’t see anybody over there. And I was coming back this way, anyway — I mean, I don’t think there’s anything anybody could have done. Not now. Even then. But I still thought I ought to tell somebody. An officer. That it happened — that it probably happened… I mean.”

“Oh,” the policeman said a third time. “I see.”

Sam looked around, looked at the policeman, who seemed to be waiting for him to leave, and finally said a hurried, “I just wanted to tell you — Thank you, sir,” and ducked around him, embarrassment reddening his cheeks, rouging his neck.

At the corner, Sam glanced back, hoping the officer would be marking it down on his pad — at least the time or the place or something — in case, later, it came up. (Above, incomplete construction marked the day with girders and derrick, flown against the clouds in sight of the sound; for a moment Sam recalled the white workers who, with saw and torch, would hang there, humming, through the week.) Would that white man remember? But the officer was walking on, crossing silver tracks in a fan of sunlight, one untroubled hand flipping his billyclub down, around, and up — now one way, now the other.

Starting purposefully uptown, Sam mulled, block after block, toward the twilight city, now on the disappearance of the fisherman, now on the ravings of the stranger on the bridge, now on the three girls coming down the steps when he’d arrived at the underpass, whose delicate descent had innocently initiated it all, now on the policeman who’d brought the afternoon to its inconclusive close. A knot had tied low in his throat — an anxious thing that wouldn’t be swallowed, that kept him walking, kept him thinking, kept him rehearsing and revising bits of the day in their dialogue — till, stalking some greater understanding still eluding him, he got as far as Fifty-second Street.

Nestled in the grip of gilded tritons and swept round by cast nereids’ metal drapes, up on the pediment of a bank, with its brazen disk, from arrow-tipped hands, down-cast, short one right and long one left (a wonderful water clock, he thought suddenly and absurdly, in which the water had all run out), Sam realized it was just after… twenty-five-to-five!

Along all four legs of the intersection, he looked with electric attention for a subway stop’s green globes. He’d been due at Elsie and Corey’s almost forty minutes ago!

e

Sam got to Elsie and Corey’s after five.

Elsie’s school books — she was studying for her Master’s in Education — had been moved to the windowsill. The table had been carried from the kitchen into the living room and the wings attached. The peach colored cloth was already spread. Knives, forks, spoons, and linen napkins were laid — and in front of Lucius, in New York for the week, a bread-and-butter plate was crummy with half a dinner biscuit, butter knife propped on the rim. Lucius was saying: “Well, I certainly wasn’t going to wait for him. Where you been, boy? We’ve all been sittin’ around here hungry!”

Originally Lucius’s apartment, eventually (Sam knew) it had housed all his older brothers and sisters — getting in each other’s way, helping each other out, arguing with one another, going out for the evening so this one might study or that one entertain, scuffling to get together the forty-five dollars a month rent, generating a thousand stories to tell on holiday trips back to Raleigh. Even Jules, during her year in the city, had lived here. (They’d all moved now, except Corey and Elsie.) Even Hubert.

“Well, he’s here now,” Corey said. “That’s what’s important. There’s no harm done.” (All had lived here — except Sam.) “Go wash your hands, Sam — then bring in those soup plates for Elsie.”

In the hallway while Sam was heading for the bathroom, Hubert overtook him. At the mirror, a loop of palm still stuck in back from Easter, one gas lamp chuckled faintly against the wall; and Hubert, hurrying up to lean a hand on Sam’s shoulder, said quietly, quickly: “Look, now — Corey had an emergency extraction this morning, and had to go into the office. So they didn’t get a chance to do anything special for your birthday. They feel right bad about it, too. But I just didn’t want you to be expecting anything — or say anything to make them feel worse than they do,” while his mirror image leaned away.

“Oh,” Sam said, from the chasm of his own forgetfulness. “Sure. That’s all right.”

In the bathroom, he turned the enamelled handle at the sink. From verdigrised brass the raddled stream chilled his knuckles, ran over the backs of his hands, dripped between his outsized fingers. While it warmed, he washed with the fresh bar of Jules’ soap sitting in the clamshell soap dish: knifed, unblunted edges meant Elsie must have unwrapped and set it out that afternoon.

The bathroom window held a granulated pane. Though it splayed the tile across from it with early evening sun, it let through not a shadow of the city. At its leaded edges, in blobby tesselations, however, rectangles of red, green, yellow, and blue showed — if you got down to the border panes and looked — colored fragments of the fire escapes and trees and clotheslines in the lot outside. If you didn’t, but only stepped in and out, say, it reminded Sam of the stained glass in the school chapel down at the college. (Sitting on the commode’s wooden ring, or standing, listening to his water fall while gazing at the overhead flush box, he wondered sometimes if it were right for a bathroom to look like a church.) Diagonally on the sill sat a box of kitchen matches — for the gas lamps in the hall. Lucifer. Years ago Corey had explained to him that Phosphorus was Greek and Lucifer was Latin for the same thing. Christos Pheros. Phos Pheros. John, carrier of Christ. Venus, carrier of light. Hesperus. Were John and Lewy sitting down to their Saturday dinners? Outside in the back the Negro fellow was hollering, as if his voice were the city’s plaint itself: “Hang-a-line…? Hang-a-line…?”—as he made his way through Harlem’s alleys, to put up new clotheslines or clothesline pulleys for a dime, in time for Monday’s washing. Somewhere in the past months Sam had learned to decipher the shrill exhortation. At some moment he’d seen the man with a coil of rope on his shoulder, a ladder under his arm, swinging his pail of metal spikes and wooden spools… Outside the glass, the line-man wandered away, litany fading, barely heard, “Hang-a…?”

Sam dried his hands on one of Elsie’s white hand-towels, on which she’d appliquéd a spray of red and purple flowers among long leaves, that creased and uncreased about his fingers.

On the little step stool beside the commode lay a newspaper, dated back in April, whose headline he recognized from some two weeks ago:

He picked it up, to see, on the newspaper beneath it, Mary Blair kissing Paul Robeson’s hand. Might a white actress die from kissing the hand of a black man? He dropped the first paper and turned to the door.

“Boy,” Hubert said, forearm on the table, when Sam came back into the living room, “you are something! This is your idea of getting here by four o’clock?”

“Sam’s here at four o’clock,” Lucius said. “It’s just four o’clock C.P.T.”—which made everybody laugh.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sam asked, trying to smile.

They laughed again.

“What’s C.P.T.?” he asked again.

“That’s — ” Clarice started. “That’s country people’s time!” Which made everybody howl.

“Well, if you’re going to joke like that,” Dr. Corey said, “you might as well tell the boy what it really means. C.P.T. is Colored People’s Time.”

“Why’s it colored people’s time?” Sam wanted to know, beginning to lose his grin at the joke he didn’t get.

“Our people,” Corey explained, with a deep and knowledgeable nod, “at least up here in the city, have a tendency to get distracted — especially if they’re on their way to see you.”

“Seven-come-eleven!” Lucius called out, and shook his fist, fingers up, over the table — pretending to shoot craps, like Negroes did in Raleigh’s back lots and doorways. Lucius opened his fingers, snapped up his hand. (Imaginary dice danced, glittering white with black pips, over the tables of Atlantis…) “Distracted!” Lucius repeated, nodding emphatically.

Everyone laughed again.

“That’s why I was so late getting here from the office this morning,” Corey said.

“You got deflected?” Sam asked — only just hearing himself say the wrong word, even though, by now, he knew perfectly well that wasn’t what Corey meant.

“I didn’t get distracted!” Corey said, mocking indignation. “My patient did! He wasn’t quite as late as you were — but he was almost. Now go get those plates, before Elsie has to bring them in herself!”

In the kitchen, Elsie stood at the sink by the brown, wooden ice box, its black rubber seal pressed out around the upper door. “Now they’re going to worry you to death for coming in so late for your birthday dinner. But don’t you pay them any mind.” Out the wooden washtub in the sink, she pulled, rattling from among the utensils, a long-handled wooden spoon and took a dish-towel to it. Although she wasn’t really as tall as Hap or Lucius or Hubert, Sam always had to see her standing next to them to realize it. She was also the gentlest. “Lucius didn’t get here till four-thirty-five himself — and we weren’t ready to serve till quarter of. So, no matter what they say, you are only twenty minutes late. And we aren’t having anything that’ll be spoiled by twenty minutes! You take those soup plates in for me, like a good boy?”

But once he came back in, handed out the china, and took his place between Lucius and Clarice, it was as if Elsie’s warning, even in the other room, had turned aside all further jibes at his tardiness.

Talk was of other things.

Elsie carried in the tureen from the kitchen, set it on the peach cloth, and uncovered it. Steam puffed. Inside the tureen’s oval cover in Elsie’s hand, droplets ran over white glaze. Elsie said: “Black bean soup…!”—so dark it was nearly purple, red and green pepper bits throughout. She sank the porcelain ladle: it flooded. Elsie was going to teach domestic science, and her Master’s had included a nutrition course, since which Saturday meals had grown more varied, even exotic. (And nourishing, Corey reminded them: beans — now beans were very good for you. Plenty of protein. That’s why poor people all over the world — in Africa and Italy and Mexico — ate so many!) Elsie took the tureen cover back into the kitchen while Dr. Corey asked: “Sam, when are you going to start night school?”

“Soon, I guess.” Indeed, the question was a relief. Though Corey always brought it up, once she’d asked it and he’d answered, it was over. Corey said what she had to, but she didn’t harp — and she’d told the rest in no uncertain terms they shouldn’t either. Harping would do no good — not with Sam.

As Elsie, now without her apron, stepped back through the door, Dr. Corey said: “You’re the oldest here. Elsie, you want to say blessing?”

“Let Sam say it.” Elsie took her seat at the table head around the corner from Corey. “It’s going to be his birthday in three days — and we won’t see him again before he turns eighteen.”

So Sam bowed his head, folded his hands, and recited what, at home, he’d learned as a single polysyllable all but incomprehensible — but which, since he’d been in New York, coming to dinner Saturdays at his sisters’, had begun to separate into individual words with meanings:

After the soup there was fresh ham; and peas and onions; and mashed potatoes — butter blurring yellow among white peaks and dells; and a gravy almost sweet that had prunes cut up in it — which Elsie said was not a gravy at all but a sauce.

“Well, then, you just pass that there gravy sauce right on over here,” Lucius said. “This is some fancy eating we’re doing today!”

They asked Sam what he’d done that afternoon.

“Sam went to see the Brooklyn Bridge,” Clarice told them.

“Well?” Dr. Corey wanted to know. “What did you think of it?”

“It’s a real nice bridge,” Sam said. “It’s big, too! But when I got over to the other side, it was all cornfields and meadows and little white houses — shoot, I thought Brooklyn was supposed to be part of New York. It’s nothin’ but country — just like down home!”—which made them all laugh again.

“Don’t say ‘shoot,’ ” Corey said. “That’s not nice.”

Clarice leaned toward him and said more quietly, “Don’t say ‘real nice’ either. It’s very nice — or really nice.”

Not paying either much mind, Sam finished up: “You could see some real good skyscrapers from it, though!” He’d already resolved not to tell them about the Italian in the boat. That kind of thing could upset people. Everybody was having too much fun.

Afterward Elsie brought in a big salad with water cress and raisins in it.

“This is all so good!” Lucius declared.

“Well, I’m glad,” Elsie said, considering. “I was just afraid it might be a bit tainted.”

“Tainted?” Lucius asked in surprise; he sat back. “Tainted? Didn’t the ice man bring ice for the weekend? What you mean, this food might be ‘tainted’?”

“I was just afraid, maybe,” Elsie said, “well, ’tain’t enough of it!” which was a joke Sam had first heard Lucius and Elsie go through back home years ago. But Clarice had never heard it, and clapped her hands now, screeching like a bird.

“Really, Elsie,” Lucius said, beaming bright-eyed about the table. “I do have to ask one thing: prunes, raisins, beans? Just what are you trying to do to us?”

Amidst more laughter, Corey’s voice cut over: “She’s just trying to keep you healthy — make sure you’re nice and regular.”

“Well, I’m going to be so regular,” Lucius declared, “nobody’ll be able to stand next to me!”

“That’s a terrible thing to say!” Corey said. But, amidst more laughter, Elsie — and Dr. Corey — were laughing too.

Was there any way to tell them about the man on the bridge, Sam wondered, without telling about the man on the boat? Should he even try? If he was a friend of Toomer’s, maybe Clarice knew him —

But here, in her enthusiasm, Clarice got to arguing with Lucius about something, and Sam was waiting for a lull into which to interject some mention of the strange fellow he’d met that afternoon, with his strange tales and talk — when Elsie, who’d slipped into the kitchen, came back in with a cake in her hands — with candles on it!

Dr. Corey and Elsie began to sing.

Hubert, leaning on his forearm again, and Clarice and Lucius — with his healthy baritone — joined them:

Why then, he wondered, as he stood to blow out the flames (“Make a wish!” Clarice was saying, beside him. “Don’t forget, Sam! Make a wish…!”), had Hubert told him there wouldn’t be any birthday for him? Was it Hubert’s notion of punishment for coming in so late? Or had Hubert wanted him to think nothing would happen to make it more of a surprise when it did? He glanced at his brother, leaning way back in his chair now. With Hubert, sometimes, you couldn’t tell.

But even as Sam looked up, Hubert brought his chair legs forward, leaned down, and reached under to come up with a grin and a big box wrapped in red paper, though there was no ribbon around it: “And this is for you — though you don’t deserve it…! Coming in here an hour-and-a-half late the way you did!”

While Sam tore the paper off, Hubert explained:

“Now Mr. Horstein said to tell you that any one you already had, or didn’t want, you can bring back and he’ll exchange it for another one that’s the same price.”

It was a whole box of magic tricks!

While Sam was taking out the card deck with the shaved corners and the metal hoops — some whole, some gapped — and the picture frame with the secret compartment, other presents were coming out from behind the sofa, from the bedroom, from under the settee cushion: a sweater (from Corey), gloves (from Elsie), a book of poems, with photographs of colored people down south sitting around the woodstove playing banjos or walking to church (from Clarice) — and a fountain pen (from Lucius).

“Is Sam going to do some magic tricks for us now? Hubert’s been telling us how you’re getting all interested in magic. Are there any of ’em you know already? Come on, you’re going to put on a show for us…?”

But Corey said: “Now Sam has already told us, he needs to practice his magic before he can perform it. Right now, he’s just learning it — exploring it.”

Elsie said: “He just got it tonight. You have to practice before you can perform,” and backed, with dishes, into the kitchen.

“Oh.” Lucius glanced at Hubert. “I see.”

Hubert didn’t say anything.

Just then Sam looked down into the box of paraphernalia. The one trick Mr. Horstein had inadvertently duplicated (or had Hubert duplicated it maliciously?) was the false, metal thumb.

“Oh. I have this one — already!” Sam picked it up from the box, trying to sound nonchalant and accusatory at the same time.

Hubert sucked his teeth. “Hey — I told him you had that one and to leave it out! He must have misunderstood me.”

“Oh.” Well, he felt a little better knowing it was not, then (probably), maliciousness.

Lucius sat, drumming his big, manicured fingers on the peach cloth. Sam pictured magic dice, spinning and dancing between them.

Then Elsie came out of the kitchen again carrying a silver tray, mirror bright, on which stood half a dozen little wine glasses — and a dark bottle.

“Well,” Dr. Corey said. “Isn’t this a treat! This is Elsie’s blackberry wine — that she made herself last summer. We picked the berries together, when we went out to Asbury Park.”

“We certainly did,” Elsie said. “And bottled it ourselves, too.” She put the tray down on the table. “Now who would like a glass?”

“I’ll have some,” Hubert said, laying one forearm on the table. “You want some, Clarice?”

“Oh, yes,” Clarice said. “Thank you.”

“I’ll have some,” Sam said.

“I’ll have some too,” Lucius said. “But I do have to mention — I mean as a lawyer, now. Hubert’ll back me up. You know this is — strictly speaking — completely against the law!”

“Against what law?” Dr. Corey said.

“The eighteenth amendment,” Lucius said. “We got prohibition, I hope you remember!”

“This is not against the law,” Elsie said. “This isn’t moonshine. This isn’t bathtub gin. This is homemade blackberry cordial — it’s not going to hurt anybody!”

“When the revenue officers cart you off, you better tell them that!” Lucius laughed.

“Now, if you don’t want any, Lucius, you don’t have to have any. Maybe you think we shouldn’t — ?”

“Now I’m not saying that! I’m not saying that at all!” Lucius’s large hands waved above the table. “I’m just saying — ”

“We are not breaking any law,” Dr. Corey said. “This here is medicinal.”

“That’s right!” Elsie said, as if the idea had just hit her. A smile replaced the moment of worry on her face. “This is medicinal wine. A glass of this after dinner will absolutely help with the digestion. You know, Papa always takes some after Sunday dinner — ”

“Mama too,” Dr. Corey said.

“Well, I can just see the police now, breaking in on one of them speakeasies around on Lenox Avenue and the doctors breaking out their prescription pads — ”

“If it will make you feel better,” Dr. Corey said, “I will write you a prescription for it — ”

“No,” Lucius said. “For me? No — you don’t have to do that.” And his arm, which had been moving to the laughter like a conductor’s, dropped its pinstriped coatsleeve on the table — the original, Sam realized, of the gesture Hubert performed so frequently.

Beside the red and blue wrapping-paper-and-tissue ruins of his birthday, Sam looked at his twenty-nine-year-old brother, with whom he’d spent fewer days in his life than he had with any number of his friends. Leather gloves, magic tricks, book, pen: this birthday, because of Hubert, had been completely unexpected, and was now over — three days before it had actually occurred.

Lucius said he’d walk with them back to Hubert’s — the argument with Clarice had quieted to an intense conversation over some fine point of the Jim Crow laws. When they came downstairs, they found there’d been an unexpected shower that, because of their laughter inside, they’d missed. But the sidewalks were wet — or, at any rate, drying in patches now. Tall Lucius and diminutive Clarice strolled together under a street lamp, over glimmering, puddled pavement, her skirts swinging back and forth below her calves, the heat of their conversation enough to keep the two of them twenty paces ahead.

The box of tricks under his arm (with the other presents inside it), suddenly Sam said: “… I get it now!”

Hubert said: “Get what?”

“Nothing,” Sam said. “It wasn’t anything. Just something that… well, nothing.”

“What was it?”

“Really,” Sam said. “It wasn’t anything at all. Just something — that Corey said.”

“Come on. What was it?”

“It was just…” He knew Hubert wouldn’t let it rest. “I get the joke, now. About C.P.T.” Which was a bald lie — to make Hubert stop questioning.

“Oh.” Hubert said. “That.”

But what had come to Sam was the reason the man on the bridge had gotten so upset when Sam had said he was going for a policeman. He hadn’t realized Sam had meant for the man in the boat. And the fellow had just asked Sam back to his place for a drink…!

Well, Mr. Harris kept a bottle in his store. Hubert even had a bottle at the house. Not to mention Elsie and Corey’s homemade wines. Sometimes it was hard to remember prohibition was really in force — especially here in Harlem.

But, Sam reflected, the fellow probably thought I was going to have him arrested for possession of liquor!

“Hubert?”

“What?”

“Do you remember, back home, going into downtown Raleigh, with a bunch of guys, and standing on the corner, across from the park, at the trolley stop — waiting there, and watching the women get on the trolley car?” Sam reached around to pat his pockets for cigarettes. But he’d been in such a hurry to get to Corey and Elsie’s that he hadn’t stopped to buy any. “They’d step up on the step of the car, and their skirts would swing up, so that you could see their shoes, the buttoned kind that went up over their ankles? You remember how we’d nudge each other — or try to keep a straight face. And sometimes, if there was a breeze or something, and the skirt blew up just a little more, you could see the stocking at the top of the shoe — then, boy, you’d really seen something! I did it. You must have done it, too.”

“Yeah,” Hubert said. “What about it?”

“Well, we all used to like it — me, John, and Lewy all did it. But some of those boys, out there doing that, were really sent out of sight by it. You must have known one or two of those — the ones who were always suggesting that you go down and do it. You remember?”

“What if I do,” Hubert said. “What’s the point?”

“Well,” Sam said, with a feeling in his throat he knew would have been assuaged with the first draw on a cigarette, “now, here, in New York, with skirts up above everybody’s ankles, suddenly it’s nothing to see some lady’s legs. Isn’t that funny? When you’re twelve, thirteen, fourteen — it’s the most exciting thing in the world. Then, you come to a different city — and it ain’t anything anymore. But you remember when it was, don’t you?”

“Sam,” Hubert said, “why do you want to talk about things like that?”

“Hubert,” Sam said, “that stuff was important to us. You can’t forget stuff like that.”

“Like you said, skirts are up now — and in ten or fifteen years, everybody’s going to have forgotten it. You should forget it too. Stuff like that’s nasty, Sam!”

“Well, I’m not going to forget it,” Sam said. “I had too much fun doing it. I bet you did too.”

“Boy,” Hubert said, “you are a country nigger to your soul. You better think about gettin’ civilized — that’s what coming up here was supposed to do for you!”

But, hefting up his box, Sam laughed — though he had already forgotten the brilliant city at one end of the bridge and the empty skiff at the other.

As he lay in bed, drifting, a summer’s walk returned to Sam, along the south field’s dusty edge-path. Shirtless, John walked ahead. Behind John, his shirt open and out of his pants, Lewy talked heatedly: “John, you can be the White Devil,” Lewy explained. “And Sam — ” whose long sleeves were still buttoned at his wrists, with only his collar loose — “will be the Dark Lord. And I’ll be the Ancient Rabbi who understands the Cabala’s secrets and can speak them backwards — ”

John said: “Why you always want to take things back to the Jews, Lewy? Why you do that? Take ’em back to somewhere else, now — Egypt. Or Africa. You should take ’em back to Africa.”

“You some kind of redheaded African,” Sam gibed, but it would not, this time, break what tensed between his friends.

“You don’t really want to originate with the Jews, do you?” John asked, turning around to wait, as Lewy, then Sam, caught up.

“I think,” Lewy said, “with Christianity we already do.”

“Well,” John said, “that’s different!”

“I don’t see why,” Lewy said. “Now, me — I’m going to originate everywhere… from now on. I’ve made up my mind to it.”

“Lewy’s doing that,” Sam said, “just to get your goat — ”

“No,” Lewy said. “From now on, I come from all times before me — and all my origins will feed me. Some in Africa I get through my daddy. And my momma. And my stepdaddy. Some in Europe I get through the library: Greece and Rome, China and India — I suck my origins in through my feet from the paths beneath them that tie me to the land, from my hands opened high in celebration of the air, from my eyes lifted among the stars — ”

“Some in Egypt and Arabia,” John said, “you got through the magazines…. He’s gonna try an’ out-preach your daddy.” John grinned through his freckles at Sam.

But the tension was all in Sam’s listening now.

“—and I’ll go on originating, all through my life, too,” Lewy said. “Every time I read a new book, every time I hear something new about history, every time I make a new friend, see a new color in the oil slicked over a puddle in the mud, a new origin joins me to make me what I am to be — what I’m always becoming. The whole of my life is origin — nowhere and everywhere. You just watch me now!”

“But you don’t know where you came from in Africa,” John hazarded. “I don’t. And Sam don’t — because the Bishop don’t. You remember, ’cause you asked him if he did.”

“They didn’t keep records of all that.” As they walked through the summer dust, Lewy grew pensive: “They should have — but that’s how they kept us slaves. You know what I think? I think it’s those deprived of history who create the world’s great histories.” Then he repeated, “I… originate, everywhere!”

“How you gonna stay a nigger,” John asked, “if you come from so many places?”

“Look,” Lewy said. “Knowing all I really come from, that won’t stop anybody calling me a black bastard,” which startled Sam. (Though nobody really knew who Lewy’s father was, people were pretty sure he’d been a lot blacker than Lewy’s stepfather.) “That don’t stop anybody from calling you a nigger, calling Sam a black boy, calling me colored, calling you a redheaded African, calling Sam a Negro, calling me black. And I guess we’re what we’re called, no matter where we’re from. That’s what calling means — that’s all. It isn’t no more important than that.”

“Well,” Sam said, “it’s pretty important, what they call you, when it means where you got to live, got to go to school, even what you got to work at.”

Considering, their shoulders neared with the seriousness of it, to touch each other’s under the sky.

Then, as if the energy or the anxiety of the closeness became too much, John, hand up and head back, ran into the hip-high grass, to begin imitating a bomber, banking here, swooping there, shouting Vrummmmmmmmmmmmm into the sun…

In half-sleep Sam recalled the insight of his walk home from work on wealth and power and art. Was this prior summer’s amble the origin of that peripatetic revelation? Or had the winter evening’s revelation been the origin of this memory of summer, which, without it, would never have returned? But even as he wondered, both, with sleep, began to slip away.

A city, Sam thought, turning over, that was everywhere and nowhere, where we all come from, where we all go…

“No — well, maybe I was. I’m not sure. But I woke up thinking about it.” Outside the window, clotheslines hung like lapping lariats that, beyond the frame, would encincture night to day. “Can’t you tell me what it was, Hubert? So I’ll know? I was just nine or ten, and Jules or Laura wouldn’t tell me anything. Jules — I don’t think she really knew what it was about either — but she said if I was that curious, I should ask Papa. But I was afraid to. I thought if it was that awful, if I asked about it he might do the same thing to me. At least that’s what I thought then.”

“Yeah, maybe he would have — no.” Hubert humphed. “It was just stuff… with a girl.” He pursed his lips, debating whether to say more. “You remember Alina, Reverend Fitzgarn’s daughter?” Hubert took a breath, the moonlit admission clearly difficult. “I stole some of Papa’s money, to go out and get a bottle and be with her. And then Reverend Fitzgarn caught the two of us, doing it — or, least ways, just about doing it. And he came raging to Papa that he would have me locked up by the police if Papa didn’t do something himself — and Papa was embarrassed as all get out, at least at first; then he got real mad because I’d shamed him. Then, when he got back to the house, he found out I’d stolen from him too. Five dollars.”

“Alina Fitzgarn?”

“Um-hm. Look — just a second, I got to go to the toilet. You be all right?”

Sam nodded.

His arms and back gone from ivory to — with his next step — cadaverous gray, Hubert went out through the hall door. Limen to lintel, like a species of mystery, black filled the space ajar. Sam’s fingertips tingled on the quilt. He moved his foot over, beneath the covers, from where it had thrust, on his waking and turning, into cold bedding. Outside in the hall, water gushed into the commode.

Hubert came back in and pushed the door closed behind him. “I’m gonna have to get me a chamber pot — this getting up and having to go out to pee in the morning every morning at — ” he reached into his pants to pull out the pocketwatch Mama had sent him for Christmas (but it had arrived three days late), and held it up — “nearly ten to four! — just isn’t going to make it. At least not in this weather.” He dropped the watch from its chain — so that it swung in the light, turning and unturning — and burlesqued a shiver. “It’s cold out there! I guess — ” He swung up the watch and caught it, white-gold flashing in the moon, and dropped his hand toward his pants pocket — “I’m starting to turn into an old man!” (Hubert liked that watch, Sam knew. But each time Hubert took it out, Sam felt not so much jealous of the object as he did simply at sea, himself not knowing the hour.) Hubert had stopped in the middle of the floor on the same spot he’d stood before. In moments he seemed to have settled back into the same discomfort. Hubert took a long, considered breath. At last he said: “Papa didn’t let me stay outside all night, you know. He turned me loose — after he wore himself and that orange crate out. He made me come inside and sit in his study — my nose was bleeding, my arm was sore — and he talked to me. I can remember it, I can see him just as clear, behind his desk. He said we had to call a truce, him and me. He said we had to call a truce between us — that if we didn’t, he was going to kill me or I was going to kill him. If I didn’t drive him to his grave with shame and sorrow, I was going to do it with a gun or my hands. Or worse, he’d have to kill me first. ‘You want to go to New York,’ he said, ‘with Hap and Corey?’ I hardly heard what he was saying, when he said it. I mean, after he’d just about murdered me, it was like he’d turned around and offered me a present. What I’d expected him to say was that I wouldn’t be allowed to go out of the house and had to stay in my room and eat bread and water for the next three months — or something like that. He said, ‘You want to go to New York…?’ ” Hubert reached up across his bony chest to rub his arm with his hand. “You see, Papa’s a strong-headed man. I guess he had to be, to do what he’s done — working at the school, be a minister to all those Negroes down home, get himself elected bishop. But he’s got some strong-headed children too. And he’s smart enough to know you can’t have all these strong-headed people living under one roof — not ten or twelve of us. Not that many. So that’s why I came up here. He loves us, you know. It’s taken me a while to figure that one out. But he does.” Hubert dropped his hand, took a breath. “Look — if you want to talk about this some more, let’s do it in the morning. Is that all right?”

“Sure,” Sam said. “All right.”

As Hubert walked into his own room, Sam settled back down in the bed. Very much awake, he pulled the covers to his chin. Even if he didn’t know what might happen in the vestibules of subway cars during rush hour, or what was worse than passing water or doing your business, though some of his ideas about it might have surprised Hubert, Sam did know — more or less — what “doing it” was. And he knew it was a pretty bad thing even to think about, especially for a bishop’s son — and even more so with a minister’s daughter. Alina Fitzgarn? He could hardly remember what she looked like, except that she was dark and quiet and had been a good friend of Milly’s, till her parents had sent her away. Did her going away have anything to do, Sam wondered suddenly, with Hubert?

For a while Sam thought about getting out all his magic tricks, new and old, to look them over in the moonlight. But the rectangle of light, that had flooded the rose rug like white oil and lay half on the wall, did not touch the bed. Maybe he should put on his long johns, turn on the light, take Weird Tales from the top drawer, sit over in the wing chair, and read the first installment of Houdini…? (But would he remember it clearly enough when he got the next issue? Lewy read everything right away, then read it again and could tell you all the contradictions between the various parts and didn’t mind at all if you told him what happened next in the story. Sam reread the stories but couldn’t spot the contradictions to save himself. And John wouldn’t let you tell him anything, though he could get real excited and had a hard time not telling you.) Finally Sam pushed back the covers, stood up, and stepped — naked — to the window.

For four, five, ten seconds he looked at the black windowframe across the alley. Then he pulled the drape and curtain from where he’d put it back over the wing chair’s edge (odd that Hubert had never commented on it; but then, in his family, there were so many things they somehow didn’t talk about) to let it swing before the glass, cutting out most of the light.

Then Sam turned, bent his knees, and jumped for the bed, to land in a crouch on the thin mattress, springs shrieking beneath (from inside Hubert said: “Sam…?”), grabbed up the covers and shoved his feet under the quilt, to slide down between the sheets’ pools and puddles of warmth and chill, shivering on his back for seconds, clutching the covers to his chin, grinning. (Suppose she’d been awake, in her dark room, looking toward her window. Had she seen him in his, in the moonlight… naked?) He lay awake a long time, in wait for morning.

A month later, Sam had lost much of the business about the building of the bridge — though, for a while, working in Mr. Harris’s basement, he tried and tried to recall it. In September, Lewy sent him another letter, apologizing for not having forwarded the next two installments of Imprisoned With the Pharaohs, though he was certain by now it wasn’t really by Houdini at all. That same week Sam started night school. Mr. DeCourtenay, his English teacher, went on at such lengths in the first class about how important it was that they expose themselves only to the finest and greatest of what had been written in English literature, Sam was pretty sure Mr. DeCourtenay didn’t want them reading anything written in America at all — and certainly not if it had been written since nineteen hundred. But why go to school if — this time — he wasn’t going to take it seriously? So he put all ideas of adventure magazines out of his mind — which seemed to be featuring less and less of the Eastern, Egyptian, and Arabian stories he liked, anyway.

Eleven years later in the sixth year of the Depression, a partner in his own floundering Harlem haberdashery, Sam found a book about the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge and, reading it, recalled a surprising amount about it; but, a week after, had forgotten much of it again; and again tried to remember. After eighteen years, when, in his second marriage, he would have his first son, also named Sam, he finally forgot the last fragments of what had happened on the bridge in between — the young man with his ravings, the rower in the boat below.

For a while, though, he did remember sitting naked on his bed, cross-legged, late at night, the curtains pulled back, fingering magic tricks in the moonlight, after Hubert had come home from arguing with some friends after classes and Sam had finally asked him about what had happened back home, all those years ago, when Papa got so mad he’d chained Hubert to the water pump. But, by then, of course, he’d confused that first evening with another several months on.

Well before that, however, he forgot the white woman on the train. He forgot the black woman across the alley.

But, as he always remembered the fields at the bridge’s Brooklyn end, he always remembered

VII.

three brownskinned girls coming down between narrow-set stones, with their yellow coats, black shoes, white socks, a blue feather in the straw hat of the oldest: three inhabitants, delicate as fire, of another city entirely,

though, during the rest of his life, he spoke of them only seven or eight times, all when visiting cities in which he did not live, and only if talking to strangers.