The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers [67]
Some of them always went to a streetcar café for Coca-Cola or coffee before going home, and Jake went with them. Inside the noisy mill the men could hear plainly every word that was spoken, but for the first hour outside they were deaf.
In the streetcar Jake drank Coca-Cola with whiskey added. He talked. The winter dawn was white and smoky and cold. He looked with drunken urgency into the drawn, yellow faces of the men. Often he was laughed at, and when this happened he held his stunted body very straight and spoke scornfully hi words of many syllables. He stuck his little finger out from his glass and haughtily twisted his mustache. And if he was still laughed at he sometimes fought. He swung his big brown fists with crazed violence and sobbed aloud.
After such mornings he returned to the show with relief. It eased him to push through the crowds of people. The noise, the rank stinks, the shouldering contact of human flesh soothed his jangled nerves.
Because of the blue laws hi the town the show closed for the Sabbath. On Sunday he got up early in the morning and took from the suitcase his serge suit. He went to the main street.
First he dropped into the New York Café and bought a sack of ales. Then he went to Singer’s room. Although he knew many people in the town by name or face, the mute was his only friend. They would idle in the quiet room and drink the ales.
He would talk, and the words created themselves from the dark mornings spent in the streets or hi his room alone. The words were formed and spoken with relief.
The fire had died down. Singer was playing a game of fools with himself at the table. Jake had been asleep. He awoke with a nervous quiver. He raised his head and turned to Singer.
‘Yeah,’ he said as though in answer to a sudden question.
‘Some of us are Communists. But not all of us. Myself, I’m not a member of the Communist Party. Because in the first place I never knew but one of them.
You can bum around for years and not meet Communists.
Around here there’s no office where you can go up and say you want to join--and if there is I never heard of it. And you just don’t take off for New York and join. As I say I never knew but one--and he was a seedy little teetotaler whose breath stunk. We had a fight. Not that I hold that against the Communists. The main fact is I don’t think so much of Stalin and Russia. I hate every damn country and government there is. But even so maybe I ought to joined up with the Communists first place. I’m not certain one way or the other. What do you think?’
Singer wrinkled his forehead and considered. He reached for his silver pencil and wrote on his pad of paper that he didn’t know.
‘But there’s this. You see, we just can’t settle down after knowing, but we got to act And some of us go nuts. There’s too much to do and you don’t know where to start It makes you crazy. Even me--I’ve done things that when I look back at them they don’t seem rational Once I started an organization myself. I picked out twenty lint-heads and talked to them until I thought they knew. Our motto was one word: Action. Huh! We meant to start riots--stir up all the big trouble we could.
Our ultimate goal was freedom--but a real freedom, a great freedom made possible only by the sense of justice of the human soul. Our motto, "Action," signified the razing of capitalism. In the constitution (drawn up by myself) certain statutes dealt with the swapping of our motto from "Action" to "Freedom" as soon as our work was through.’
Jake sharpened the end of a match and picked a troublesome cavity in a tooth. After a moment he continued: ‘Then when the constitution was all written down and the first followers