The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [434]
The feeling of having nothing to do, no stone to turn, no help in his present difficulties, weighed upon him like something heavy. He stood indecisive and watched a street car cut across Michigan Avenue, followed by a succession of three automobiles. He smiled at a neatly dressed Negro boy of about twelve who passed him singing, and he thought that, golly, the eight-balls sure could be happy. He stared while a slender, pretty mulatto girl wheeled a baby buggy along the sidewalk below him. Nigger babies were cute little ducks. But they grew up into black dangerous buck niggers who flashed razors. He nodded, bewildered by his observation
He descended the steps, got into his Ford, and without thinking of what he was doing drove north along Michigan Avenue, past the Carter School playground where black children romped and played in the same place and in the same way as his own kids had romped and played. He halted the car in front of the building he had once owned, approached it. With his hand on the knob of the outer entrance door, he realized with the pain of loss that it was no longer his building and that all the life, hopes, expectations lived in this building, these were all gone, and that he was now an old man on the verge of ruin, and when he went home tonight, he might find his oldest son... dead.
Jesus Christ, he agonizingly exclaimed to himself.
Nervousness accumulated in him, and feeling the need of doing something, he lit a cigar. He stepped back to his automobile, and drove northward. At Fifty-sixth Street he came to the sudden realization that he was driving heedlessly, and swerved, scratching a fender against the curb to avoid colliding into a Nation Oil tank truck. Shocked, he watched his driving, puffed on his cigar, turned west onto Garfield Boulevard. Turning north again, he saw by a sign in one of its windows that the bank of Abraham Clarkson was closed. Served Clarkson right because Clarkson was the shine who, in the old days, had refused to move from the neighborhood when no one had wanted a nigger in it, depressing real estate values and living among white people where he didn’t belong. He wouldn’t get out, even though his house kept getting bombed. Lonigan suddenly remembered reading in the papers that Clarkson had been indicted. Served him right. A banker and a nigger.
At Fifty-first Street he wheeled westward, driving along a dreary, dusty street, with shabby stores, wooden houses, sooty, low, brick buildings. A train roared overhead as he went under the viaduct, and he drove on, turning onto Wentworth Avenue, seeing again a dusty street filled with people, for-rent signs in store windows, and on his right a drab, low fence, in need of paint, with post-no-bills announcements spaced regularly along it. Several firemen lounged back on chairs in front of the fire engine house at Forty-seventh Street, and he thought that they weren’t getting paid because the city was broke. A crowd of men were cluttering a corner, two blocks down, and he guessed they were out of work. That was bad, because with nothing to do they got into trouble, especially the younger ones. He honked vigorously when a dirty-faced boy dashed before the car, dodged in front of a truck on his right, and leaped onto the sidewalk. Crazy kid. He’d get killed doing that some day. A street car donged behind him, and he curved off the cartracks. Another closed bank. Golly. More men on the corners. Women in shawls. Kids. More idle men.
He turned on Thirty-fifth Street and followed a surface car along the west-bound tracks, annoyed by the slow progress, the repeated stops of the car, the people who cut in front of him at the street crossings. Nervous, he passed the car, and jammed his machine to a quick halt to avoid running over an old woman in a blue coat. He cursed, and followed again in the wake of the car, cursing, telling himself that he would have to watch his driving. Dingy, smoky street. Wooden houses, buildings stained from smoke, drab stores, for-rent signs in dirty windows. Another closed