PARTISAN REVIEW
time drew near for the long overdue train to show up, they got up
and went into the waiting room.
Montague followed them, strutting and giggling.
One man went into the men's toilet room. The other fell into
conversation with a young yellow-haired girl with a sallow skin. He
turned on Montague with a new face. "Okay, you little black son of
an ape, beat it. We're through."
Montague thought he was kidding. Montague paraded in front
of the empty benches, swaying his tight little hips like a girl, jubilant.
"Just a moment," said the young man to the girl. He picked up a
stave and walked over to Montague, who quivered with expectant
eagerness.
"Look here, little Nigger," he said with soft sweet poisonous
drawl, "there's something I think you'd better learn. You're cute,
but you're the ace-of-spades. When you hear a white man say get
out, get out. Run. Be greased lightening. Grr."
He pulled back the stave as
if
he were going to whang Mon–
tague. Montague flew out the door, amazed and fantastically hurt.
The man flung the stave loosely after him, cursed, dusted his hands;
and returned to his conquest, which was pleasant and easy.
Willie worked too much in icy rains that winter, when drops
were seeds from the freeze and melted inside his collars and up his
sleeves, while he bogged in clay glue and pulp, hurting with cold. He
died of pneumonia in 1938. Delia took in washings. She bent over
the outdoor tubs in withering cold. Willies did not wake from his
coma, and his wild laughter was heard only in the chimney and
through the walls, where the wind whistled like so many dead voices
speaking with false teeth. The wallboards were nailed up vertically
like fence palings in a rough hoarding. The wind penetrated its pores
like machetes. The floor boards spewed freshets of cold breezes. The
discarded posters Montague found in the alley behind the motion
picture palace and the thick brown wrapping paper were tacked over
these holes. The vibrant paper hummed like paper-covered combs,
puffed and snapped along the walls.
The soap for the laundry Delia made herself, out of urine and
ashes. She squeezed it with her bare hands into hard little spinal
bones, and she drubbed clothes with it like a mad woman. Overhead
pear trees dropped languid scabby leaves into the bescummed tubs.
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