Native Son - Richard Wright [115]
He crouched behind a chimney and looked down into the street. At the corner he saw the newsstand from which he had stolen the paper; the man who had shouted at him was standing by it. Two black men stopped at the newsstand and bought a paper, then walked into a doorway. One of them leaned eagerly over the other’s shoulder. Their lips moved and they pointed their black fingers at the paper and shook their heads as they talked. Two more men joined them and soon there was a small knot of them standing in the doorway, talking and pointing at the paper. They broke up abruptly and went away. Yes; they were talking about him. Maybe all of the black men and women were talking about him this morning; maybe they were hating him for having brought this attack upon them.
He had crouched so long in the snow that when he tried to move he found that his legs had lost all feeling. A fear that he was freezing seized him. He kicked out his legs to restore circulation of his blood, then crawled to the other side of the roof. Directly below him, one floor away, through a window without shades, he saw a room in which were two small iron beds with sheets dirty and crumpled. In one bed sat three naked black children looking across the room to the other bed on which lay a man and woman, both naked and black in the sunlight. There were quick, jerky movements on the bed where the man and woman lay, and the three children were watching. It was familiar; he had seen things like that when he was a little boy sleeping five in a room. Many mornings he had awakened and watched his father and mother. He turned away, thinking: Five of ’em sleeping in one room and here’s a great big empty building with just me in it. He crawled back to the chimney, seeing before his eyes an image of the room of five people, all of them blackly naked in the strong sunlight, seen through a sweaty pane: the man and woman moving jerkily in tight embrace, and the three children watching.
Hunger came to his stomach; an icy hand reached down his throat and clutched his intestines and tied them into a cold, tight knot that ached. The memory of the bottle of milk Bessie had heated for him last night came back so strongly that he could almost taste it. If he had that bottle of milk now he would make a fire out of a newspaper and hold the bottle over the flame until it was warm. He saw himself take the top off the white bottle, with some of the warm milk spilling over his black fingers, and then lift the bottle to his mouth and tilt his head and drink. His stomach did a slow flip-flop and he heard it growl. He felt in his hunger a deep sense of duty, as powerful as the urge to breathe, as intimate as the beat of his heart. He felt like dropping to his knees and lifting his face to the sky and saying: “I’m hungry!” He wanted to pull off his clothes and roll in the snow until something nourishing seeped into his body through the pores of his skin. He wanted to grip something in his hands so hard that it would turn to food. But soon his hunger left; soon he was taking it a little easier; soon his mind rose from the desperate call of his body and concerned itself with the danger that lurked about him. He felt something hard at the corners of his lips and touched it with his fingers; it was frozen saliva.
He crawled back through the door into the narrow passage and lowered himself down the shallow wooden steps into the hallway. He went to the first floor and stood at the window through which he had first climbed. He had to find an empty apartment in some building where he could get: warm; he felt that if he did not get warm soon he would simply lie down and close his eyes. Then he had an idea; he wondered why he had not thought of it before. He struck a match and lit the newspaper; as it blazed he held one hand over it awhile, and then the other. The heat came to his skin from far off. When the paper had burned so close