Yet though he was not large, not tall, he contrived somehow to look more lonely than a lone telephone pole in the middle of a desert.
In the wide, empty, shadowbrooded street he looked like a phantom, a spirit, strayed out of its own world, and lost.
Then he found himself.
Without his being aware the street had begun to slope and before he knew it he was in Freedman Town, surrounded by the summer smell and the summer voices of invisible negroes.
They seemed to enclose him like bodiless voices murmuring, talking, laughing, in a language not his.
As from the bottom of a thick black pit he saw himself enclosed by cabinshapes, vague, kerosenelit, so that the street lamps themselves seemed to be further spaced, as if the black life, the black breathing had compounded the substance of breath so that not only voices but moving bodies and light itself must become fluid and accrete slowly from particle to particle, of and with the now ponderable night inseparable and one.
He was standing still now, breathing quite hard, glaring this way and that.
About him the cabins were shaped blackly out of blackness by the faint, sultry glow of kerosene lamps.
On all sides, even within him, the bodiless fecundmellow voices of negro women murmured.
It was as though he and all other manshaped life about him had been returned to the lightless hot wet primogenitive Female.
He began to run, glaring, his teeth glaring, his inbreath cold on his dry teeth and lips, toward the next street lamp.
Beneath it a narrow and rutted lane turned and mounted to the parallel street, out of the black hollow.
He turned into it running and plunged up the sharp ascent, his heart hammering, and into the higher street.
He stopped here, panting, glaring, his heart thudding as if it could not or would not yet believe that the air now was the cold hard air of white people.
Then he became cool.
The negro smell, the negro voices, were behind and below him now.
To his left lay the square, the clustered lights: low bright birds in stillwinged and tremulous suspension. To the right the street lamps marched on, spaced, intermittent with bitten and unstirring branches.
He went on, slowly again, his back toward the square, passing again between the houses of white people.
There were people on these porches too, and in chairs upon the lawns; but he could walk quiet here.
Now and then he could see them: heads in silhouette, a white blurred garmerited shape; on a lighted veranda four people sat about a card table, the white faces intent and sharp in the low light, the bare arms of the women glaring smooth and white above the trivial cards.
‘That’s all I wanted,’ he thought. ‘That don’t seem like a whole lot to ask.’
This street in turn began to slope.
But it sloped safely.
His steady white shirt and pacing dark legs died among long shadows bulging square and huge against the August stars: a cotton warehouse, a horizontal and cylindrical tank like the torso of a beheaded mastodon, a line of freight cars.
He crossed the tracks, the rails coming momentarily into twin green glints from a switch lamp, glinting away again.
Beyond the tracks woods began. But he found the path unerringly.
It mounted, among the trees, the lights of the town now beginning to come into view again across the valley where the railroad ran.
But he did not look back until he reached the crest of the hill.
Then he could see the town, the glare, the individual lights where streets radiated from the square. He could see the street down which he had come, and the other street, the one which had almost betrayed him; and further away and at right angles, the far bright rampart of the town itself, and in the angle between the black pit from which he had fled with drumming heart and glaring lips.
No light came from it, from here no breath, no odor. It just lay there, black, impenetrable, in its garland of Augusttremulous lights.
It might have been the original quarry, abyss itself.
His way was sure, despite the trees, the darkness.
He never once lost the path which he could not even see. The woods continued for a mile.
He emerged into a road, with dust under his feet.
He could see now, the vague spreading world, the horizon.
Here and there faint windows glowed.
But most of the cabins were dark.
Nevertheless his blood began again, talking and talking.
He walked fast, in time to it; he seemed to be aware that the group were negroes before he could have seen or heard them at all, before they even came in sight vaguely against the defunctive dust.
There were five or six of them, in a straggling body yet vaguely paired; again there reached him, above the noise of his own blood, the rich murmur of womenvoices.
He was walking directly toward them, walking fast.
They had seen him and they gave to one side of the road, the voices ceasing.
He too changed direction, crossing toward them as if he intended to walk them down.
In a single movement and as though at a spoken command the women faded back and were going around him, giving him a wide berth.
One of the men followed them as if he were driving them before him, looking over his shoulder as he passed. The other two men had halted in the road, facing Christmas.
Christmas had stopped also.
Neither seemed to be moving, yet they approached, looming, like two shadows drifting up.
He could smell negro; he could smell cheap cloth and sweat.
The head of the negro, higher than his own, seemed to stoop, out of, the sky, against the sky.
“It’s a white man,” he said, without turning his head, quietly.