From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [113]
“Well,” Stark said, “I can see that, in a town where theres never been any. Its hard to tell a good one from a bad one unless the family lived in the town a while. And all of them wanderin nigras are bad ones, or else they’d of found themself a white man who treated them right and settled down. In my town they’d been there for generations and we knew them.”
“No,” Prew said. “You dont see what I mean. Once in Richmond, Indiana, on the bum, me and another guy had stole some vegetables and a hunk of meat for a stew. We taken it down to this jungle outside town and there was a bunch already there, one of them a nigger. This guy was going to take it away from us because we were kids and when I wouldnt just give it to him, pulled a knife on me.”
“The nigra?” Stark said. “I’d killed the son of a bitch.”
“No,” Prew said. “Not him. A white guy. The nigger was the one that stopped him. I had got behind a tree and kept circling away from him, still holding on to the food, but I was just a punk kid and he would of caught me if this big buck nigger hadnt stepped out and tripped him up. He got up ragin mad and went for the nigger with the knife, but the nigger blocked it with his arm, just as cool as hell, and hit him with his right hand. Cut his forearm pretty bad, but he took that knife away from the guy and proceeded to beat the piss out of him, literally beat it out of him. Now, he was no bad nigger.”
“No,” Stark said. “He was a good nigra.”
“Sure he was. Out of that whole bunch of guys he was the only one who lifted his finger to keep me from gettin knifed. The rest of them just stood and watched.”
“Ordinarily,” Stark said, handing him another pan, “I dont hold with a nigra raisin his hand to a white man. I dont like to see that. But, in this case, of course, he was right.”
“I hope to Christ he was right! That was me that guy was chasin. I loved that big black nigger. When we cooked our stew we invited him help us eat it.”
“Did he wait till he was ask?”
“Sure,” Prew said. “He was a gentleman. More gentleman than the rest of those bastards by a long shot. And by god, they didnt any of the rest of them try cut in on our stew either, dont you believe it. They were all scared of him.”
“I’m not scared of any nigra that ever lived,” Stark said. “Good or bad. But he was a good nigra. But most of them you see on the bum are bad ones, mean ones. This one just happened to be a good one.”
“You dont see what I mean,” Prew explained. “I think most any nigger on the bum is no badder than any white man on the bum. Or for that matter, off the bum.”
“No, I see what you mean,” Stark said. “But you dont know them like I do. Most nigras on the bum are runnin away from havin killed some white man or raped some white woman. Though I’ve met some good ones, too, a lot of them, on the bum. Its just like with town nigras, some are good nigras and some are bad nigras, ony most of the good ones stay home and most of the bad ones end up on the bum. They have to or they’d get lynched. You dont think I’d take anything off any nigra in my home town that I’ve known all my life, do you?”
“Well I see what you mean,” Prew said. “I wouldnt take anything off a bad nigger, but I wouldnt take anything off a bad white man either.”
“Well with white men its a little different. Theres usually some legitimate reason for them bein bad, if you look into it. But a bad nigra is just borned bad, and the ony way to cure him is to teach him a lesson, thats all. Kill or cure. We had one in our town, just plain pisspoor, mean and shiftless. They finally run him off. Ruther, he took off, to keep from gettin taught his lesson. See what I mean? No guts at all, just bad. He was a young buck and his