Native Son - Richard Wright [119]
He heard a street car passing in the street; they were running again. A wild thought surged through him. Suppose the police had already searched this neighborhood and had overlooked him? But sober judgment told him that that was impossible. He patted his pocket to make sure the gun was there, then climbed through the window. Cold wind smote his face. It must be below zero, he thought. At both ends of the alley the street lamps glowed through the murky air, refracted into mammoth balls of light. The sky was dark blue and far away. He walked to the end of the alley and turned onto the sidewalk, joining the passing stream of people. He waited for someone to challenge his right to walk there, but no one did.
At the end of the block he saw a crowd of people and fear clutched hard at his stomach. What were they doing? He slowed and saw that they were gathered about a newsstand. They were black people and they were buying papers to read about how the white folks were trying to track him to earth. He lowered his head and went forward and slipped into the crowd. The people were talking excitedly. Cautiously, he held out two cents in his cold fingers. When he was close enough, he saw the front page; his picture was in the center of it. He bent his head lower, hoping that no one would see him closely enough to see that it was he who was pictured there.
“Times,” he said.
He tucked the paper under his arm, edged out of the crowd and walked southward, looking for an empty flat. At the next corner he saw a “For Rent” sign in a building which he knew was cut up into small kitchenette flats. This was what he wanted. He went to the door and read the sign; there was an empty flat on the fourth floor. He walked to the alley and began to mount the outside rear stairs, his feet softly crunching in snow. He heard a door open; he stopped, got his gun and waited, kneeling in the snow.
“Who’s that?”
It was a woman’s voice. Then a man’s voice sounded.
“What’s the matter, Ellen?”
“I thought I heard someone out here on the porch.”
“Ah, you’re simply nervous. You’re scared of all this stuff you’ve been reading in the papers.”
“But I’m sure I heard somebody.”
“Aw, empty the garbage and shut the door. It’s cold.”
Bigger flattened against the building, in the dark. He saw a woman come out of a door, pause, look round; she went to the far end of the porch and dumped something into a garbage pail and went back inside. I would’ve had to kill ’em both if she saw me, he thought. He tiptoed up to the fourth floor and found two windows, both of them dark. He tried to lift the screen in one of them and found it frozen. Gently, he shook it to and fro until it loosened; then he lifted it out and laid it on the porch in the snow. Inch by inch, he raised the window, breathing so loud that he thought surely people must hear him even in the streets. He climbed through into a dark room and struck a match. An electric light was on the other side of the room and he went to it and pulled the chain. He put his cap over the bulb so that no light would seep through to the outside, then opened the paper. Yes; here was a large picture of him. At the top of the picture ran a tall line of black type: 24-HOUR SEARCH FAILS TO UNEARTH RAPIST. In another column he saw: RAID 1,000 NEGRO HOMES. INCIPIENT RIOT QUELLED AT 47TH AND HALSTED. There was another map of the South Side. This time the shaded area had deepened from both the north and south, leaving a small square of white in the middle of the oblong Black Belt. He stood looking at that tiny square of white as though gazing down into the barrel of a gun. He was there on that map, in that white spot, standing in a room waiting for them to come. Dead-set, his eyes stared above the top of the paper. There was nothing left for him but to shoot it out. He examined the map again; the police had come from the north as far south as Fortieth Street; and they had come from the south as far north as Fiftieth Street. That meant that he was somewhere in between, and they were minutes away. He read:
Today