THE PAWN
"Montague has a good mind,"
his
teachers admitted uneasily.
He embarrassed them in classes with the swift hard logic of an eight-,
nine-, then a ten-year-old.
But they discouraged
him
and he became covert like those unseen
dead stars in the skies; a small brown Nigger like an eel, head shaven
bald and eyes big and gentle as the eyes of Jumbo the elephant. "It
ain't gonner git you anywheres to be a smart Eleck," they said, a little
sour and trumpety.
He once found two crayons, black and orange, and he drew all
over walls pictures of black people in orange dress. My, how he did
draw, smirking with satisfaction. For a week he was obsessed with it,
but nobody said his pictures were as beautiful as those mysterious ones
in the humdrum primer. His mother slapped
his
hands sharply. The
school teachers reprimanded him sorely. Finally his mother, in a kind
of anguish, seized his right hand by the wrist and shook it like a leaf
in a storm, beating
his
hand against the wall until his knuckles felt
cracked like roasted nuts and the flesh sang with pain. The skin was
scraped and full of splinters. With a sore hand he guided his penny
pencil over the thick rough pages of his nickel tablet. He did not draw
again.
In Tallahassee he learned a little more of terror than he had
known. So many individuals of different stripes to combat he longed
for Asia and the scraggly chicken cannibals. Sometimes he sat stiffly
against the wall of the porch, and tears spread beneath his half-closed
eyelids, and his chest puffed and quivered perilously, as he dreamed
bucolicly of sticks and leaves, the mole running underground leaving
a cracked bunched trail of sod in a cultivated patch, the fragrance of
the natural fertilizer of cowflop and chicken doodoo beautiful in his
fresh quivering nostrils, and not much more fascinating than the
dried pasty soil of wasp nests and their evil people.
When summer lay like a pall everywhere dark, smoke-colored
clouds sometimes boiled up and muttered while they closed up the
pore of the sky. Then Montague would run down to the railroad
depot to take Willie an old rent slicker. He limped across gravel roads
with crippled feet.
The two pink and pimply white men who sat on the station steps
passed away the time of their train wait by teasing him. They threw
pennies into tall weeds for
him.
Montague felt exhilarated. Then as
903
