296
PARTISAN REVIEW
wheel mechanism, but doing it in an old-fashioned way by pinning it
directly to the line across the tracks. Nothing had suffered. I was now
sure that those people were gypsies whom the government had ap–
pointed to serve as guardians of this particular crossing. They were
quite domesticated gypsies, however; the father was short and smoked
a small curved pipe which almost disappeared in his stubbly beard;
the two
girls,
of twenty and seven perhaps, wore tight bodices and
wide frocks; all were sunburnt, dirty, and out of another world and
foreign to this.
"Very soon afterward the train arrived at its final destination;
yet I remember nothing of a station, and perhaps there wasn't any.
It was a gray afternoon. The evening had disappeared, and the after–
noon taken its place.
It
was natural enough, but only now do I realize
that the casually intervening evening had obviously contracted the
normal course of time, for not more than an hour could have passed
between the morning on the train and our arrival at the final destina–
tion. We were under the shadows of a great city, walking on a very
high concrete ramp that had no railing to separate us from the rail–
road yards-or was it a river?---deep down at our right. We-I
walked, at the left side, of two Negroes, the sister next to me, her
brother at her right, farthest toward the abyss-we were talking. I
remarked upon the galoshes the girl was wearing.
As
if to match the
general color of the scene, they were gray, not black, as is more cus–
tomary. Yet they were new, and I asked the girl how she had man–
aged to buy them, rubber goods being almost unavailable. She an–
swered that there were plenty of galoshes and that anybody could
buy them for only a nickel (or was it something-and-a-nickel) a pair.
I was surprised to hear this and vaguely thought how I could make
use of my discovery, but I quickly remembered that my wife had a
pair, rather old, and that I myself didn't need any, anyway. But I
turned to her brother, thinking that I might profit by this occasion
to find out about him and to learn something about the Negro. He
seemed amiable enough.
"Here I must stop to analyze my feelings very carefully. First
of all, the Negro struck me as friendly and handsome. Not handsome,
really, but rather neutral, a man I could take up and get along with.
I analyze this
now)
you must understand, after the dream is over, and
I wonder about myself. Honestly, I had that feeling of neutrality,
that is, as if he could have been non-neutral, sympathetic or antipa–
thetic. This shows that I must secretly feel that some Negroes-black,
sweaty perhaps-might appear antipathetic to me. I am surprised and
horrified at the thought, for I really didn't ·believe, in my waking
