''Like A
Winding Sheet'' Text
He had planned to
get up before Mae did and surprise her by fixing breakfast. Instead he went
back to sleep and she got out of bed so quietly he didn't know she wasn't there
beside him until he woke up and heard the queer soft gurgle of water running
out of the sink in the bathroom.
He knew he ought
to get up but instead he put his arms across his fore¬head to shut the
afternoon sunlight out of his eyes, pulled his legs up close to his body,
testing them to see if the ache was still in them.
Mae had finished
in the bathroom. He could tell because she never closed the door when she was
in there and now the sweet smell of talcum powder was drifting down the hall
and into the bedroom. Then he heard her coming down the hall.
"Hi, babe," she said affectionately.
"Hum," he grunted, and moved his arms away from his
head, opened one eye.
"It's a nice morning."
"Yeah," he rolled over and the sheet twisted around
him, outlining his thighs, his chest. "You mean afternoon, don't ya?"
Mae looked at the
twisted sheet and giggled. "Looks like a winding sheet," she said.
"A shroud-." Laughter tangled with her words and she had to pause for
a moment before she could continue. ,"You look like a huckleberry-in a
winding sheet-"
"That's no way to talk. Early in the day like this,"
he protested.
He looked at his
arms silhouetted against the white of the sheets. They were inky black by
contrast and he had to smile in spite of himself and he lay there smiling and
savouring the sweet sound of Mae's giggling.
"Early?" She pointed a finger at the alarm clock on
the table near the bed, and giggled again. "It's almost four 0' clock. And
if you don't spring up out of there you're going to be late again."
“What do you mean 'again,!" :
Twice last week.
Three times the week before. And once the week
before and-" .
"1 can't get used to sleeping in the day time," he
said fretfully. He pushed his legs out from under the covers experimentally.
Some of the ache had gone out of them but they weren't really rested yet.
"It's too light for good sleeping. And all that standing beats the hell
out of my legs.
"After two years you oughtta be used to it," Mae said.
He watched her as
she fixed her hair, powdered her face, slipping into a pair of blue denim
overalls. She moved quickly and yet she didn't seem to
hurry.
"You look like you'd had plenty of sleep," he said
lazily. He had to get up
but he kept
putting the moment off, not wanting to move, yet he didn't dare let his legs go
completely limp because if he did he'd go back to sleep. It was getting later
and later but the thought of putting his weight on his legs kept him lying
there.
When he finally
got up he had to hurry and he gulped his breakfast so fast that he wondered if
his stomach could possibly use food thrown at it at such a rate of speed. He
was still wondering about it as he and Mae were putting their coats on in the
hall.
Mae paused to look
at the calendar. "It's the thirteenth," she said. Then a faint
excitement in her voice. "Why it's Friday the thirteenth." She had
one arm in her coat sleeve and she held it there while she stared at the
calendar. "I oughtta stay home," she said. "I shouldn't go outta
the house."
"Aw don't be a fool," he said. "Today's payday.
And payday is a good luck day everywhere, any way you look at it." And as
she stood hesitating he said,
"Aw, come on.
And he was late
for work again because they spent fifteen minutes arguing before he could
convince her she ought to go to work just the same. He had to talk
persuasively, urging her gently and it took time. But he couldn't bring himself
to talk to her roughly or threaten to strike her like a lot of men might have
done. He wasn't made that way.
So when he reached
the plant he was late and he had to wait to punch the time clock because the
day shift workers were streaming out in long lines, in groups and bunches that
impeded his progress.
Even now just
starting his work-day his legs ached. He had to force him¬self to struggle past
the out-going workers, punch the time clock, and get the little cart he pushed
around all night because he kept toying with the idea of going home and getting
back in bed.
He pushed the cart
out on the concrete floor, thinking that if this was his plant he'd make a lot
of changes in it. There were too many standing up jobs for one thing. He'd
figure out some way most of' em could be done sitting down and he'd put a lot
more benches around. And this job he had-this job that forced him to walk ten
hours a night, pushing this little cart, well, he'd turn it into a sittin-down
job. One of those little trucks they used around railroad stations would be
good for a job like this. Guys sat on a seat and the thing moved easily, taking
up little room and turning in hardly any space at all, like on a dime.
He pushed the cart
near the foreman. He never could remember to refer to her as the forelady even
in his mind. It was funny to have a woman for a boss in a plant like this one.
She was sore about
something. He could tell by the way her face was red and her eyes were half
shut until they were slits. Probably been out late and didn't get enough sleep.
He avoided looking at her and hurried a little, head down, as he passed her
though he couldn't resist stealing a glance at her out of the comer of his
eyes. He saw the edge of the light colored slacks she wore and the tip end of a
big tan shoe.
Hey,
Johnson!" the woman said.
The machines had
started full blast. The whirr and the grinding made the building shake, made it
impossible to hear conversations. The men and women at the machines talked to
each other but looking at them from just a little distance away they appeared
to be simply moving their lips because you couldn't hear what they were saying.
Yet the woman's voice cut across the machine sounds-harsh, angry.
He turned his head
slowly. "Good Evenin', Mrs. Scott," he said and
waited.
"You're late again."
"That's right. My legs were bothering me."
The woman's face
grew redder, angrier looking. "Half this shift comes in late," she
said. "And you're the worst one of all. You're always late. Whatsa matter
with ya?"
"It's my legs," he said. "Somehow they don't ever
get rested. I don't seem to get used to sleeping days. And I just can't get
started."
"Excuses. You guys always got excuses," her anger grew
and spread.
"Every guy comes in here late always has an excuse. His
wife's sick or his grandmother died or somebody in the family had to go to the
hospital," she paused, drew a deep breath. "And the niggers are the
worse. I don't care what's wrong with your legs. You get in here on time. I'm
sick of you niggers"
gers-
"You got the right to get mad," he interrupted softly.
"You got the right to cuss me four ways to Sunday but I ain't letting
nobody call me a nigger."
He stepped closer
to her. His fists were doubled. His lips were drawn back in a thin narrow line.
A vein in his forehead stood out swollen, thick.
And the woman
backed away from him, not hurriedly but slowly-two, three steps back.
"Aw, forget it," she said. "I didn't mean nothing
by it. It slipped out. It was an accident." The red of her face deepened
until the small blood ves¬sels in her cheeks were purple. "Go on and get
to work," she urged. And she took three more slow backward steps.
He stood
motionless for a moment and then turned away from the red lipstick on her mouth
made him remember that the foreman was a woman. And he couldn't bring himself
to hit a woman. He felt a curious tingling in his fingers and he looked down at
his hands. They were clenched tight, hard, ready to smash some of those small
purple veins in her face.
He pushed the cart
ahead of him, walking slowly. When he turned his head, she was staring in his
direction, mopping her forehead with a dark blue handkerchief. Their eyes met
and then they both looked away.
He didn't glance
in her direction again but moved past the long work benches, carefully
collecting the finished parts, going slowly and steadily up and down, back and
forth the length of the building and as he walked he forced himself to swallow
his anger, get rid of it.
And he succeeded
so that he was able to think about what had happened without getting upset
about it. An hour went by but the tension stayed in his hands. They were
clenched and knotted on the handles of the cart as though ready to aim a blow.
And he thought he
should have hit her anyway, smacked her hard in the
Face, felt the
soft flesh of her face give under the hardness of his hands. He tried to make
his hands relax by offering them a description of what it would have been like
to strike her because he had the queer feeling that his hands were not exactly
a part of him any more-they had developed a separate life of their own over
which he had no control So he dwelt on the pleasure his hands would have
felt-both of them cracking at her, first one and then the other. If he had done
that his hands would have felt good now-relaxed, rested.
And he decided
that even if he'd lost his job for it he should have let her have it and it
would have been a long time, maybe the rest of her life before she called
anybody else a nigger.
The only trouble
was he couldn't hit a woman. A woman couldn't hit back the same way a man did.
But it would have been a deeply satisfying thing to have cracked her narrow
lips wide open with just one blow, beautifully timed and with all his weight in
back of it. That way he would have gotten rid of all the energy and tension his
anger had created in him. He kept remembering how his heart had started pumping
blood so fast he had felt it tingle even in the tips of his fingers.
With the approach
of night, fatigue nibbled at him. The corners of his mouth dropped, the frown
between his eyes deepened, his shoulders sagged; but his hands stayed tight and
tense. As the hours dragged by he noticed that the women workers had started to
snap and snarl at each other. He couldn't hear what they said because of the
sound of the machines but he could see the quick lip movements that sent words
tumbling from the sides of their mouths. They gestured irritably with their
hands and scowled as their mouths moved.
Their violent
jerky motions told him that it was getting close on to quitting time but
somehow he felt that the night still stretched ahead of him, composed of
endless hours of steady walking on his aching legs. When the whistle finally
blew he went on pushing the cart, unable to believe that it had sounded. The
whirring of the machines died away to a murmur and he knew then that he'd
really heard the whistle. He stood still for a moment filled with a relief that
made him sigh.
Then he moved
briskly, putting the cart in the store room, hurrying to take his place in the
line forming before the paymaster. That was another thing he'd change, he
thought. He'd have the pay envelopes handed to the people right at their
benches so there wouldn't be ten or fifteen minutes lost waiting for the pay.
He always got home about fifteen minutes late on payday. They did it better in
the plant where Mae worked, brought the money right to them at their benches.
He stuck his pay
envelope in his pants' pocket and followed the line of workers heading for the
subway in a slow moving stream. He glanced up at the sky. It was a nice night,
the sky looked packed full to running over with stars. And he thought if he and
Mae would go right to bed when they got home from work they'd catch a few hours
of darkness for sleeping. But they never did. They fooled around-cooking and
eating and listening to the radio and he always stayed in a big chair in the
living room and went almost but not quite to sleep and when they finally got to
bed it was five or six in the morning and daylight was already seeping around
the edges of the sky.
He walked slowly,
putting off the moment when he would have to plunge into the crowd hurrying
toward the subway. It was a long ride to Harlem
and tonight the thought of it appalled him. He paused outside an all-night
restaurant to kill time, so that some of the first rush of workers would be
gone when he reached the subway.
The lights in the
restaurant were brilliant, enticing. There was life and motion inside. And as
he looked through the window he thought that ev¬erything within range of his
eyes gleamed-the long imitation marble counter, the tall stools, the white
porcelain topped tables and especially the big metal coffee urn right near the
window. Steam issued from its top and a gas flame flickered under it-a lively,
dancing, blue flame.
A lot of the
workers from his shift-men and women-were lining up near the coffee urn. He
watched them walk to the porcelain topped tables carrying steaming cups of
coffee and he saw that just the smell of the coffee lessened the fatigue lines
in their faces. After the first sip their faces softened, they smiled, they
began to talk and laugh.
On a sudden
impulse he shoved the door open and joined the line in front of the coffee urn.
The line moved slowly. And as he stood there the smell of the coffee, the sound
of the laughter and of the voices, helped dull the sharp ache in his legs.
He didn't pay any
attention to the girl who was serving the coffee at the urn. He kept looking at
the cups in the hands of the men who had been ahead of him. Each time a man
stepped out of the line with one of the thick white cups the fragrant steam got
in his nostrils. He saw that they walked carefully so as not to spill a single
drop. There was a froth of bubbles at the top of each cup and he thought about
how he would let the bubbles break against his lips before he actually took a
big deep swallow.
Then it was his
turn. "A cup of coffee," he said, just as he had heard the others
say.
The girl looked
past him, put her hands up to her head and gently lifted her hair away from the
back of her neck, tossing her head back a little. "No more coffee for
awhile," she said.
He wasn't certain
he'd heard her correctly and he said, "What?" blankly. "No more
coffee for awhile," she repeated.
There was silence
behind him and then uneasy movement. He thought someone would say something,
ask why or protest, but there was only silence and then a faint shuffling sound
as though the men standing behind him had simultaneously shifted their weight
from one foot to the other.
He looked at her
without saying anything. He felt his hands begin to tingle and the tingling
went all the way down to his finger tips so that he glanced down at them. They
were clenched tight, hard, into fists. Then he looked at the girl again. What
he wanted to do was hit her so hard that the scarlet lipstick on her mouth
would smear and spread over her nose, her chin, out toward her cheeks; so hard
that she would never toss her head again and refuse a man a cup of coffee,
because he was black.
He estimated the
distance across the counter and reached forward, balancing his weight on the
balls of his feet, ready to let the blow go. And then his hands fell back down
to his sides because he forced himself to lower them, to unclench them and make
them dangle loose. The effort took his breath away because his hands fought
against him. But he couldn't hit her.
He couldn't, even now,
bring himself to hit a woman, not even this one, who had refused him a cup of
coffee with a toss of her head. He kept seeing the gesture with which she had
lifted the length of her blond hair from the back of her neck as expressive of
her contempt for him.
When he went out
the door he didn't look back. If he had he would have seen the flickering blue
flame under the shiny coffee urn being extinguished. The line of men who had
stood behind him lingered a moment to watch the people drinking coffee at the
tables and then they left just as he had without having had the coffee they
wanted so badly. The girl behind the counter poured water in the urn and
swabbed it out and as she waited for the water to run out she lifted her hair
gently from the back of her neck and tossed her head before she began making a
fresh lot of coffee.
But he walked away
without a backward look, his head down, his hands in his pockets, raging at
himself and whatever it was inside of him that had forced him to stand quiet and
still when he wanted to strike out.
The subway was
crowded and he had to stand. He tried grasping an over¬head strap and his hands
were too tense to grip it. So he moved near the train door and stood there
swaying back and forth with the rocking of the train. The roar of the train
beat inside his head, making it ache and throb, and the pain in his legs clawed
up into his groin so that he seemed to be bursting with pain and he told
himself that it was due to all that anger-born energy that had piled up in him
and not been used and so it had spread through him like a poison-from his feet
and legs all the way up to his head.
Mae was in the
house before he was. He knew she was home before he put the key in the door of
the apartment. The radio was going. She had it tuned up loud and she was
singing along with it.
"Hello, Babe," she called out as soon as he opened the
door.
He tried to say
"hello" and it came out half a grunt and half sigh. "You sure
sound cheerful," she said.
She was in the
bedroom and he went and leaned against the door jamb.
The denim overalls
she wore to work were carefully draped over the back of a chair by the bed. She
was standing in front of the dresser, tying the sash of a yellow housecoat
around her waist and chewing gum vigorously as she admired her reflection in
the mirror over the dresser.
"What sa matter?" she said. "You get bawled out
by the boss or somep’n?”
"Just tired," he said slowly. "For God's sake do
you have to crack that gum like that?"
"You don't have to lissen to me," she said
complacently. She patted a curl in place near the side of her head and then
lifted her hair away from the back of her neck, ducking her head forward and
then back.
He winced away
from the gesture. "What you got to be always fooling with your hair
for?" he protested.
"Say, what's the matter with you, anyway?" she turned
away from the mirror to face him, put her hands on her hips. "You ain't
been in the house two minutes and you're picking on me."
He didn't answer
her because her eyes were angry and he didn't want to quarrel with her. They'd
been married too long and got along too well and so he walked all the way into
the room and sat down in the chair by the bed
and stretched his
legs out in front of him, putting his weight on the heels of his shoes, leaning
way back in the chair, not saying anything.
"Lissen," she said sharply. ''I've got to wear those
overalls again tomorrow. You're going to get them all wrinkled up leaning
against them like that."
He didn't move. He
was too tired and his legs were throbbing now that he had sat down. Besides the
overalls were already wrinkled and dirty, he thought. They couldn't help but be
for she'd worn them all week. He leaned further back in the chair.
"Come on, get up," she ordered.
"Oh, what the hell," he said wearily and got up from
the chair. ''I'd just as soon live in a subway. There'd be just as much place
to sit down."
He saw that her
sense of humor was struggling with her anger. But her sense of humor won
because she giggled.
"Aw, come on and eat," she said. There was a coaxing
note in her voice.
"You're nothing but a old hungry nigger trying to act tough
and-" she paused to giggle and then continued, "You-'---"
. He had always found her giggling pleasant and deliberately
said things that might amuse her and then waited, listening for the delicate
sound to emerge from her throat. This time he didn't even hear the giggle. He
didn't let her finish what she was saying. She was standing close to him and
that funny tingling started in his fingertips, went fast up his arms and sent
his fist shooting straight for her face.
There was the
smacking sound of soft flesh being struck by a hard object and it wasn't until
she screamed that he realized he had hit her in the mouth-so hard that the dark
red lipstick had blurred and spread over her full lips, reaching up toward the
tip of her nose, down toward her chin, out toward her cheeks ..
The knowledge that
he had struck her seeped through him slowly and he was appalled but he couldn't
drag his hands away from her face. He kept striking her and he thought with
horror that something inside him was holding him, binding him to this act,
wrapping and twisting about him so that he had to continue it. He had lost all
control over his hands. And he groped for a phrase, a word, something to
describe what this thing was like that was happening to him and he thought it
was like being enmeshed in a winding sheet-that was it-like a winding sheet.
And even as the thought formed in his mind his hands reached for her face again
and yet again.
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