SONNY'S BLUES
339
brother, being always kind of frisky, decided to run down this hill,
and he did, with that guitar banging and clanging behind him,
and he ran across the road, and he was making water behind a tree.
And your father was sort of amused at him and he was still coming
down the hill, kind of slow. Then he heard a car motor and that
same minute his brother stepped from behind the tree, into the
road, in the moonlight. And he started to cross the road. And your
father started to run down the hill, he says he don't know why. This
car was full of white men. They was all drunk, and when they seen
your father's brother they let out a great whoop and holler and they
aimed the car straight at him. They was having fun, they just wanted
to scare him, the way they do sometimes, you know. But they was
drunk. And I guess the boy, being drunk, too, and scared, kind of
lost his head. By the time he jumped it was too late. Your father
says he heard his brother scream when the car rolled over him, and
he heard the wood of that guitar when it give, and he heard them
strings go flying, and he heard them white men shouting, and the
car kept on a-going and it ain't stopped till this day. And, time
your father got down the hill, his brother weren't nothing but
blood and pulp."
Tears were gleaming on my mother's face. There wasn't anything
I could say.
"He never mentioned
it,"
she said, "because I never let him
mention it before you children. Your Daddy was like a crazy man
that night and for many a night thereafter. He says he never in his
life seen anything as dark as that road after the lights of that car
had gone away. Weren't nothing, weren't nobody on that road, just
your Daddy .and his brother and that busted guitar. Oh, yes. Your
Daddy never did really get right again. Till the day he died he
weren't sure but that every white man he saw was the man that
killed his brother."
She stopped and took out her handkerchief and dried her eyes
and looked at me.
"I ain't telling you all this," she said, "to make you scared or
bitter or to make you hate nobody. I'm telling you this because you
got a brother. And the world ain't changed."
I guess I didn't want to believe this. I guess she saw this in my
face. She turned away from me, toward the window again, searching
those streets.
