The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [139]
“You can go a block down yonder and catch you a car take you to the railroad station, Sugarpie,” she said.
Nelson would have collapsed at her feet if Mr. Head had not pulled him roughly away. “You act like you don’t have any sense!” the old man growled.
They hurried down the street and Nelson did not look back at the woman. He pushed his hat sharply forward over his face which was already burning with shame. The sneering ghost he had seen in the train window and all the foreboding feeling she had on the way returned to him and he remembered that his ticket from the scale had said to beware of dark women and that his grandfather’s had said he was upright and brave. He took hold of the old man’s hand, a sign of dependence that he seldom showed.
They headed down the street toward the car tracks where a long yellow rattling trolley was coming. Mr. Head had never boarded a streetcar and he let that one pass. Nelson was silent. From time to time his mouth trembled slightly but his grandfather, occupied with his own problems, paid him no attention. They stood onthe corner and neither looked at the Negroes who were passing, going about their business just as if they had been white, except that most of them stopped and eyed Mr. Head and Nelson. It occurred to Mr. Head that since the streetcar ran on tracks, they could simply follow the tracks. He gave Nelson a slight push and explained that they would follow the tracks on into the railroad station, walking, and they setoff.
Presently to their great relief they began to see white people again and Nelsonsat down on the sidewalk against the wall of a building. “I got to rest myself some, “he said. “You lost the sack and the direction. You can just wait on me to rest myself.”
“There’s the tracks in front of us,” Mr. Head said. “All we got to do is keep them in sight and you could have remembered the sack as good as me. This is where you were born. This is your old home town. This is your second trip. You ought to know how to do,” and he squatted down and continued in. this vein but the boy, easing his burning feet out of his shoes, did not answer.
“And standing there grinning like a chim-pan-zee while a nigger woman gives you direction. Great Gawd!” Mr. Head said.
“I never said I was nothing but born here,” the boy said in a shaky voice. ” I never said I would or wouldn’t like it. I never said I wanted to come. I only said I was born here and I never had nothing to do with that. I want to go home. I never wanted to come in the first place. It was all your big idea. How you know you ain’t following the tracks in the wrong direction?”
This last had occurred to Mr. Head too. “All these people are white,” he said.
“We ain’t passed here before,” Nelson said. This was a neighborhood of brickbuildings that might have been lived in or might not. A few empty automobiles wereparked along the curb and there was an occasional passerby. The heat of thepavement came up through Nelson’s thin suit. His eyelids began to droop, and after a few minutes his head tilted forward. His shoulders twitched once or twice and thenhe fell over on his side and lay sprawled in an exhausted fit of sleep.
Mr. Head watched him silently. He was very tired himself but they could not both sleep at the same time and he could not have slept anyway because he did not know where he was. In a few minutes Nelson would wake up, refreshed by his sleep and very cocky, and would begin complaining that he had lost the sack and the way. You’d have a mighty sorry time if I wasn’t here, Mr. Head thought; and then another idea occurred to him. He looked at the sprawled figure for several minutes; presently he stood up. He justified what he was