He didn’t know what she wanted him to do.
He was waiting to get whipped and then be released.
Her voice went on, urgent, tense, fast:
“A whole dollar.
See?
How much you could buy.
Some to eat every day for a week.
And next month maybe I’ll give you another one.”
He did not move nor speak.
He might have been carven, a large toy: small, still, round headed and round eyed, in overalls.
He was still with astonishment, shock, outrage.
Looking at the dollar, he seemed to see ranked tubes of toothpaste like corded wood, endless and terrifying; his whole being coiled in a rich and passionate revulsion.
“I don’t want no more,” he said.
‘I don’t never want no more,’ he thought.
Then he didn’t dare even look at her face.
He could feel her, hear her, her long shuddering breath. Now it’s coming, he thought in a flashing instant.
But she didn’t even shake him.
She just held him, hard, not shaking him, as if her hand too didn’t know what it wanted to do next.
Her face was so near that he could feel her breath on his cheek.
He didn’t need to look up to know what her face looked like now.
“Tell!” she said. “Tell, then!
You little nigger bastard!
You nigger bastard!”
That was the third day.
On the fourth day she became quite calmly and completely mad.
She no longer planned at all.
Her subsequent actions followed a kind of divination, as if the days and the unsleeping nights during which she had nursed behind that calm mask her fear and fury had turned her psychic along with her natural female infallibility for the spontaneous comprehension of evil.
She was quite calm now.
She had escaped for the moment from even urgency.
It was as though now she had time to look about and plan.
Looking about the scene her glance, her mind, her thought, went full and straight and instantaneous to the janitor sitting in the door of the furnace room.
There was no ratiocination in it, no design.
She just seemed to look outside herself for one moment like a passenger in a car, and saw without any surprise at all that small, dirty man sitting in a splint chair in a sootgrimed doorway, reading through steelrimmed spectacles from a book upon his knees—a figure, almost a fixture, of which she had been aware for five years now without once having actually looked at him.
She would not have recognised his face on the street.
She would have passed him without knowing him, even though he was a man.
Her life now seemed straight and simple as a corridor with him sitting at the end of it.
She went to him at once, already in motion upon the dingy path before she was aware that she had started.
He was sitting in his splint chair in the doorway, the open book upon his knees.
When she approached she saw that it was the Bible.
But she just noticed this, as she might have noticed a fly upon his leg.
“You hate him too,” she said “You’ve been watching him too.
I’ve seen you.
Don’t say you don’t.”
He looked up at her face, the spectacles propped now above his brows.
He was not an old man.
In his present occupation he was an incongruity.
He was a hard man, in his prime; a man who should have been living a hard and active life, and whom time, circumstance, something, had betrayed, sweeping the hale body and thinking of a man of forty-five into a backwater suitable for a man of sixty or sixty-five.
“You know,” she said. “You knew before the other children started calling him Nigger.
You came out here at the same time.
You weren’t working here a month before that Christmas night when Charley found him on the doorstep yonder.