Native Son - Richard Wright [65]
“Gee, kid.”
He felt two soft palms holding his face tenderly and the thought and image of the whole blind world which had made him ashamed and afraid fell away as he felt her as a fallow field beneath him stretching out under a cloudy sky waiting for rain, and he slept in her body, rising and sinking with the ebb and flow of her blood, being willingly dragged into a warm night sea to rise renewed to the surface to face a world he hated and wanted to blot out of existence, clinging close to a fountain whose warm waters washed and cleaned his senses, cooled them, made them strong and keen again to see and smell and touch and taste and hear, cleared them to end the tiredness and to reforge in him a new sense of time and space;—after he had been tossed to dry upon a warm sunlit rock under a white sky he lifted his hand slowly and heavily and touched Bessie’s lips with his fingers and mumbled,
“Gee, kid.”
“Bigger.”
He took his hand away and relaxed. He did not feel that he wanted to step forth and resume where he had left off living; not just yet. He was lying at the bottom of a deep dark pit upon a pallet of warm wet straw and at the top of the pit he could see the cold blue of the distant sky. Some hand had reached inside of him and had laid a quiet finger of peace upon the restless tossing of his spirit and had made him feel that he did not need to long for a home now. Then, like the long withdrawing sound of a receding wave, the sense of night and sea and warmth went from him and he lay looking in the darkness at the shadowy outline of Bessie’s body, hearing his and her breathing.
“Bigger?”
“Hunh?”
“You like your job?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“I just asked.”
“You swell.”
“You mean that?”
“Sure.”
“Where you working?”
“Over on Drexel.”
“Where?”
“In the 4600 block.”
“Oh!”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“But, what?”
“Oh, I just happen to think of something.”
“Tell me. What is it?”
“It ain’t nothing, Bigger, honey.”
What did she mean by asking all these questions? He wondered if she had detected anything in him. Then he wondered if he were not letting fear get the better of him by thinking always in terms of Mary and of her having been smothered and burnt. But he wanted to know why she had asked where he worked.
“Come on, honey. Tell me what you thinking.”
“It ain’t nothing much, Bigger. I used to work over in that section, not far from where the Loeb folks lived.”
“Loeb?”
“Yeah. One of the families of one of the boys that killed that Franks boy. Remember?”
“Naw; what you mean?”
“You remember hearing people talk about Loeb and Leopold.”
“Oh!”
“The ones who killed the boy and then tried to get money from the boy’s family….
…by sending notes to them Bigger was not listening. The world of sound fell abruptly away from him and a vast picture appeared before his eyes, a picture teeming with so much meaning that he could not react to it all at once. He lay, his eyes unblinking, his heart pounding, his lips slightly open, his breath coming and going so softly that it seemed he was not breathing at all. you remember them aw you ain’t even listening He said nothing. how come you won’t listen when I talk to you Why could he, why could he not, not send a letter to the Daltons, asking for money? Bigger He sat up in bed, staring into the darkness, what’s the matter honey He could ask for ten thousand, or maybe twenty. Bigger what’s the matter I’m talking to you He did not answer; his nerves were taut with the hard effort to remember something. Now! Yes, Loeb and Leopold had planned to have the father of the murdered boy get on a train and throw the money out of the window while passing some spot. He leaped from bed and stood in the middle of the floor. Bigger He could, yes, he could have them pack the money in a shoe box and have them throw it out of a car somewhere on the South Side. He looked round in