FLIGHT INTO REALTY
61
an 'ah know it's a wohthy papah, fightin' fo' the Scottsboro boys."
And the girl, gratefully, says, "There's an article in this issue
about the Scottsboro boys. And look, here's a picture of them.
There's Patterson," unfolding the paper and pointing, "And
there's Norris."
"Aint it awful, the way them so'then folk hate colored
people?"
The woman's work was doing laundry. Her hands were
long and bony, with enormous awkward joints, as though they
had been stretched out and hardened from constant scrubbing
and wringing. It was hard, these days, to get work. Her hus–
band was ailing. He only sat on the curb with his feet in the
gutter and snoozed, and blew the flies off his nose.
When they talked again of the Scottsboro boys, there was
a crescendo in the understanding of the woman, speaking of the
whites and Negroes joining hands, speaking without labels for
anything; and then, with the rising crescendo, her eyes burned
strangely with an old light, and she said,
"The lawd will not let them kill the Scottsboro boys. I have
faith in the lawd."
The girl, looking into those burning eyes, wanted to cry out
and to curse the Jesus screamers, the exploiters of Jerusalem
Slim, the opium peddlers, the preachers of the gospel-but she
was still looking into those eyes, and she saw left, now, only a
glimmering of the faith, and only a frustrated glimmering. She
saw the woman's lips part to speak, and say nothing, and part
again. For the moment they were worlds apart. Then the lips
moved.
"But," the woman, said, "Ah don't believe in turnin' the
othah cheek."
Then the girl, forgetting about the three cents, gave the
woman a copy of the Daily Worker, promised to come over and
chat with her again some evening, and went down the
stairs. When she got outside, she wrote down in her mind the
number of the dilapidated apartment.
All of this went through my head while walking in the
Fenway that night; swiftly, it went, half thought, half imaged,
half symbolic. And I knew, then, that I could never be a futilist,
for at the lowest point of a futile mood, something bursts softly
into flower, and I am glad if only because some word I have
said has stirred the air, some blade of grass I have disturbed lifts
its head now once more to the sky, straightens its bent back,
