Native Son - Richard Wright [163]
“Bigger, tell me, when did you start hating Mary?”
“I hated her as soon as she spoke to me, as soon as I saw her, I reckon I hated her before I saw her….”
“But, why?”
“I told you. What her kind ever let us do?”
“What, exactly, Bigger, did you want to do?”
Bigger sighed and sucked at his cigarette.
“Nothing, I reckon. Nothing. But I reckon I wanted to do what other people do.”
“And because you couldn’t, you hated her?”
Again Bigger felt that his actions were not logical, and again he fell back upon his feelings for a guide in answering Max’s questions.
“Mr. Max, a guy gets tired of being told what he can do and can’t do. You get a little job here and a little job there. You shine shoes, sweep streets; anything…. You don’t make enough to live on. You don’t know when you going to get fired. Pretty soon you get so you can’t hope for nothing. You just keep moving all the time, doing what other folks say. You ain’t a man no more. You just work day in and day out so the world can roll on and other people can live. You know, Mr. Max, I always think of white folks….”
He paused. Max leaned forward and touched him.
“Go on, Bigger.”
“Well, they own everything. They choke you off the face of the earth. They like God….” He swallowed, closed his eyes and sighed. “They don’t even let you feel what you want to feel. They after you so hot and hard you can only feel what they doing to you. They kill you before you die.”
“But, Bigger, I asked you what it was that you wanted to do so badly that you had to hate them?”
“Nothing. I reckon I didn’t want to do nothing.”
“But you said that people like Mary and her kind never let you do anything.”
“Why should I want to do anything? I ain’t got a chance. I don’t know nothing. I’m just black and they make the laws.”
“What would you like to have been?”
Bigger was silent for a long time. Then he laughed without sound, without moving his lips; it was three short expulsions of breath forced upward through his nostrils by the heaving of his chest.
“I wanted to be an aviator once. But they wouldn’t let me go to the school where I was suppose’ to learn it. They built a big school and then drew a line around it and said that nobody could go to it but those who lived within the line. That kept all the colored boys out.”
“And what else?”
“Well, I wanted to be in the army once.”
“Why didn’t you join?”
“Hell, it’s a Jim Crow army. All they want a black man for is to dig ditches. And in the navy, all I can do is wash dishes and scrub floors.”
“And was there anything else you wanted to do?”
“Oh, I don’t know. What’s the use now? I’m through, washed up. They got me. I’ll die.”
“Tell me the things you thought you’d have liked to do?”
“I’d like to be in business. But what chance has a black guy got in business? We ain’t got no money. We don’t own no mines, no railroads, no nothing. They don’t want us to. They make us stay in one little spot….”
“And you didn’t want to stay there?”
Bigger glanced up; his lips tightened. There was a feverish pride in his blood-shot eyes.
“I didn’t,” he said.
Max stared and sighed.
“Look, Bigger. You’ve told me the things you could not do. But you did something. You committed these crimes. You killed two women. What on earth did you think you could get out of it?”
Bigger rose and rammed his hands into his pockets. He leaned against the wall, looking vacantly. Again he forgot that Max was in the room.
“I don’t know. Maybe this sounds crazy. Maybe they going to burn me in the electric chair for feeling this way. But I ain’t worried none about them women I killed. For a little while I was free. I was doing something. It was wrong, but I was feeling all right. Maybe God’ll get me for it. If He do, all right. But I ain’t worried. I killed ’em ’cause I was scared and mad. But I been scared and mad all my life and after I killed that first woman, I wasn’t scared no more for a little while.”
“What were you afraid of?”
“Everything,