U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [56]
"Niggerlover ump-mya-mya . . . Nig-gerlover niggerlover ump-mya-mya." Janey began to cry. Joe was an untalkative sandyhaired boy who could pitch a mean outcurve when he was stil little. He learned to swim and dive in Rock Creek and used to say he wanted to be motorman on a streetcar when he grew up. For
several years his best friend was Alec McPherson whose father was a locomotive engineer on the B. and O. After that Joe wanted to be a locomotive engineer. Janey used to tag around after the two boys whenever they'd let her, to the carbarns at the head of Pennsylvania Avenue where they made friends with some of the conductors and motormen who used to let them ride on the platform a couple of blocks sometimes if there wasn't any inspector around, down along the canal or up Rock Creek where they caught
-135-tadpoles and fel in the water and splashed each other with mud. Summer evenings when the twilight was long after
supper they played lions and tigers with other kids from the neighborhood in the long grass of some empty lots near Oak Hil Cemetery. There were long periods when there was measles or scarlet fever around and Mommer wouldn't let them out. Then Alec would come down and they'd play three-o-cat in the back yard. Those were the times Janey liked best. Then the boys treated her as one of them. Summer dusk would come down on them sultry and ful of lightningbugs. If Popper was feeling in a good mood he'd send them up the hil to the drugstore on N
Street to buy icecream, there'd be young men in their shirtsleeves and straw hats strol ing with girls who wore a stick of punk in their hair to keep off the mosquitoes, a rankness and a smel of cheap perfume from the colored families crowded on their doorsteps, laughing, talking softly with an occasional flash of teeth, rol ing of a white eyebal . The dense sweaty night was scary, hummed,
rumbled with distant thunder, with junebugs, with the clatter of traffic from M Street, the air of the street dense and breathless under the thick trees; but when she was with Alec and Joe she wasn't scared, not even of drunks or big shamblefooted coloredmen. When they got back Popper would smoke a cigar and they'd sit out in the back yard and the mosquitoes 'ud eat them up and Mommer
and Aunt Francine and the kids 'ud eat the icecream and Popper would just smoke a cigar and tel them stories of when he'd been a towboat captain down on the Chesapeake in his younger days and he'd saved the barkentine Nancy Q in distress on the Kettlebottoms in a sou'west gale. Then it'd get time to go to bed and Alec 'ud be sent home and Janey'd have to go to bed in the stuffy little back room on the top floor with her two little sisters in their cribs against the opposite wal . Maybe a thunderstorm
-136-would come up and she'd lie awake staring up at the ceil-ing cold with fright, listening to her little sisters whimper as they slept until she heard the reassuring sound of Mommer scurrying about the house closing windows, the slam of a door, the whine of wind and rattle of rain and the thunder rol ing terribly loud and near overhead like a thousand beertrucks roaring over the bridge. Times like that she thought of going down to Joe's room and crawl-ing into bed with him, but for some reason she was afraid to, though sometimes she got as far as the landing. He'd laugh at her and cal her a softie. About once a week Joe would get spanked. Popper
would come home from the Patent Office