“What you want, whitefolks?
You looking for somebody?”
The voice was not threatful.
Neither was it servile.
“Come on away from there, Jupe,” the one who had followed the women said.
“Who you looking for, cap’m?” the negro said.
“Jupe,” one of the women said, her voice a little high. “You come on, now.”
For a moment longer the two heads, the light and the dark, seemed to hang suspended in the darkness, breathing upon one another.
Then the negro’s head seemed to float away; a cool wind blew from somewhere.
Christmas, turning slowly, watching them dissolve and fade again into the pale road, found that he had the razor in his hand.
It was not open.
It was not from fear.
“Bitches” he said, quite loud. “Sons of bitches!”
The wind blew dark and cool; the dust even through his shoes was cool.
‘What in hell is the matter with me?’ he thought.
He put the razor back into his pocket and stopped and lit a cigarette.
He had to moisten his lips several times to hold the cigarette.
In the light of the match he could watch his own hands shake.
‘All this trouble,’ he thought.
“All this damn trouble,” he said aloud, walking again.
He looked up at the stars, the sky.
‘It must be near ten now,’ he thought; and then almost with the thought he heard the clock on the courthouse two miles away.
Slow, measured, dear the ten strokes came.
He counted them, stopped again in the lonely and empty road.
‘Ten o’clock,’ he thought. ‘I heard ten strike last night too.
And eleven.
And twelve.
But I didn’t hear one.
Maybe the wind had changed.’
When he heard eleven strike tonight he was sitting with his back against a tree inside the broken gate, while behind him again the house was dark and hidden in its shaggy grove.
He was not thinking Maybe she is not asleep either tonight He was not thinking at all now; thinking had not begun now; the voices had not begun now either.
He just sat there, not moving, until after a while he heard the clock two miles away strike twelve.
Then he rose and moved toward the house.
He didn’t go fast.
He didn’t think even then, Something is going to happen.
Something is going to happen to me. Chapter 6
MEMORY believes before knowing remembers.
Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.
In the quiet and empty corridor, during the quiet hour of early afternoon, he was like a shadow, small even for five years, sober and quiet as a shadow.
Another in the corridor could not have said just when and where he vanished, into what door, what room.
But there was no one else in the corridor at this hour.
He knew that.
He had been doing this for almost a year, ever since the day when he discovered by accident the toothpaste which the dietitian used.
Once in the room, he went directly on his bare and silent feet to the washstand and found the tube.
He was watching the pink worm coil smooth and cool and slow onto his parchmentcolored finger when he heard footsteps in the corridor and then voices just beyond the door.
Perhaps he recognised the dietitian’s voice.
Anyway, he did not wait to see if they were going to pass the door or not.
With the tube in his hand and still silent as a shadow on his bare feet he crossed the room and slipped beneath a cloth curtain which screened off one corner of the room.
Here he squatted, among delicate shoes and suspended soft womangarments.