Native Son - Richard Wright [157]
“I don’t want you!” Bigger shouted.
“Son!” the preacher admonished.
“I don’t want you!”
“What’s the matter, son?”
“Take your Jesus and go!”
“But, son! Yuh don’t know whut yuh’s sayin’! Lemme pray fer yuh!”
“Pray for yourself!”
The white guard caught the preacher by the arm and, pointing to the cross on the floor, said,
“Look, Reverend, he threw his cross away.”
The preacher looked and said:
“Son, don’t spit in Gawd’s face!”
“I’ll spit in your face if you don’t leave me alone!” Bigger said.
“The Reds’ve been talking to ’im,” the guard said, piously touching his fingers to his forehead, his chest, his left shoulder, and then his right; making the sign of the cross.
“That’s a goddamn lie!” Bigger shouted. His body seemed a flaming cross as words boiled hysterically out of him. “I told you I don’t want you! If you come in here, I’ll kill you! Leave me alone!”
Quietly, the old black preacher stopped and picked up the cross. The guard inserted the key in the lock and the door swung in. Bigger ran to it and caught the steel bars in his hands and swept the door forward, slamming it shut. It smashed the old black preacher squarely in the face, sending him reeling backwards upon the concrete. The echo of steel crashing against steel resounded throughout the long quiet corridor, wave upon wave, dying somewhere far away.
“You’d better leave ’im alone now,” the guard said. “He seems pretty wild.”
The preacher rose slowly and gathered his hat, Bible, and the cross from the floor. He stood a moment with his hand nursing his bruised face.
“Waal, son. Ah’ll leave yuh t’ yo’ Gawd,” he sighed, dropping the cross back inside the cell.
The preacher walked away. The guard followed. Bigger was alone. His emotions were so intense that he really saw and heard nothing. Finally, his hot and taut body relaxed. He saw the cross, snatched it up and held it for a long moment in fingers of steel. Then he flung it again through the bars of the cell. It hit the wall beyond with a lonely clatter.
Never again did he want to feel anything like hope. That was what was wrong; he had let that preacher talk to him until somewhere in him he had begun to feel that maybe something could happen. Well, something had happened: the cross the preacher had hung round his throat had been burned in front of his eyes.
When his hysteria had passed, he got up from the floor. Through blurred eyes he saw men peering at him from the bars of other cells. He heard a low murmur of voices and in the same instant his consciousness recorded without bitterness—like a man stepping out of his house to go to work and noticing that the sun is shining—the fact that even here in the Cook County Jail Negro and white were segregated into different cell-blocks. He lay on the cot with closed eyes and the darkness soothed him some. Occasionally his muscles twitched from the hard storm of passion that had swept him. A small hard core in him resolved never again to trust anybody or anything. Not even Jan. Or Max. They were all right, maybe; but whatever he thought or did from now on would have to come from him and him alone, or not at all. He wanted no more crosses that might turn to fire while still on his chest.
His inflamed senses cooled slowly. He opened his eyes. He heard a soft tapping on a near-by wall. Then a sharp whisper:
“Say, you new guy!”
He sat up, wondering what they wanted.
“Ain’t you the guy they got for that Dalton job?”
His hands clenched. He lay down again. He did not want to talk to them. They were not his kind. He felt that they were not here for crimes such as his. He did not want to talk to the whites because they were white and he did not want to talk to the Negroes because he felt ashamed. His own kind would be too curious about him. He lay a long while, empty of mind, and then he heard the steel door open. He looked and saw a white man with a