The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [268]
There was an instant when the Negro might have done one thing or another, might have taken the glasses and crushed them in his hand or grabbed the knife and turned it on him. He saw the exact instant in the muddy liquor-swollen eyes when the pleasure of having a knife in this white man’s gut was balanced against something else, he could not tell what.
The Negro reached for the glasses. He attached the bows carefully behind his ears and looked forth. He peered this way and that with exaggerated solemnity. And then he looked directly at Tanner and grinned, or grimaced, Tanner could not tell which, but he had an instant’s sensation of seeing before him a negative image of himself, as if clownishness and captivity had been their common lot. The vision failed him before he could decipher it.
“Preacher,” he said, “what you hanging around here for?” He picked up another piece of bark and began, without looking at it, to carve again. “This ain’t Sunday.”
“This here ain’t Sunday?” the Negro said.
“This is Friday,” he said. “That’s the way it is with you preachers—drunk all week so you don’t know when Sunday is. What you see through those glasses?”
“See a man.”
“What kind of a man?”
“See the man make theseyer glasses.”
“Is he white or black?”
“He white!” the Negro said as if only at that moment was his vision sufficiently improved to detect it. “Yessuh. he white!” he said.
“Well, you treat him like he was white,” Tanner said. “What’s your name?”
“Name Coleman,” the Negro said.
And he had not got rid of Coleman since. You make a monkey out of one of them and he jumps on your back; and stays there for life, but let one make a monkey out of you and ail you can do is kill him or disappear. And he was not going to hell for killing a nigger. Behind the shack he heard the doctor kick over a bucket. He sat and waited.
In a moment the doctor appeared again, beating his way around the other side of the house, whacking at scarred clumps of Johnson grass with his cane. He stopped in the middle of the yard, about where that morning the daughter had delivered her ultimatum.
“You don’t belong here,” he began. “I could have you prosecuted.”
Tanner remained there, dumb, staring across the field.
“Where’s your still?” the doctor asked.
“If it’s a still around here, it don’t belong to me,’ he said and shut his mouth tight.
The Negro laughed softly. “Down on your luck, ain’t you?” he murmured. “Didn’t you used to own a little piece of land over acrost the river and lost it?”
He had continued to study the woods ahead.
“If you want to run the still for me, that’s one thing,” the doctor said. “If you don’t, you might as well had be packing up.”
“I don’t have to work for you,” he said. “The governmint ain’t got around yet to forcing the white folks to work for the colored.”
The doctor polished the stone in his ring with the ball of his thumb. “I don’t like the governmint no bettern you,” he said. “Where you going instead? You going to the city and get you a soot of rooms at the Biltmo’ Hotel?”
Tanner said nothing.
“The day coming,” the doctor said, “when the white folks IS going to be working for the colored and you mights well to git ahead of the crowd.”
“That day ain’t coming for me,” Tanner said shortly.
“Done come for you,” the doctor said. “Ain’t come for the rest of them.”
Tanner’s gaze drove on past the farthest blue edge of the tree line into the pale empty afternoon sky. “I got a daughter in the north,” he said. “I don’t have to work for you.”
The doctor took his watch from his watch pocket and looked at it and put it back. He gazed for a moment at the back of his hands. He appeared to have measured and to know secretly the time