Native Son - Richard Wright [13]
“Kinda warm today.”
“Yeah,” Gus said.
“You get more heat from this sun than from them old radiators at home.”
“Yeah; them old white landlords sure don’t give much heat.”
“And they always knocking at your door for money.”
“I’ll be glad when summer comes.”
“Me too,” Bigger said.
He stretched his arms above his head and yawned; his eyes moistened. The sharp precision of the world of steel and stone dissolved into blurred waves. He blinked and the world grew hard again, mechanical, distinct. A weaving motion in the sky made him turn his eyes upward; he saw a slender streak of billowing white blooming against the deep blue. A plane was writing high up in the air.
“Look!” Bigger said.
“What?”
“That plane writing up there,” Bigger said, pointing.
“Oh!”
They squinted at a tiny ribbon of unfolding vapor that spelled out the word: USE…. The plane was so far away that at times the strong glare of the sun blanked it from sight.
“You can hardly see it,” Gus said.
“Looks like a little bird,” Bigger breathed with childlike wonder.
“Them white boys sure can fly,” Gus said.
“Yeah,” Bigger said, wistfully. “They get a chance to do everything.”
Noiselessly, the tiny plane looped and veered, vanishing and appearing, leaving behind it a long trail of white plumage, like coils of fluffy paste being squeezed from a tube; a plume-coil that grew and swelled and slowly began to fade into the air at the edges. The plane wrote another word: SPEED….
“How high you reckon he is?” Bigger asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe a hundred miles; maybe a thousand.”
“I could fly one of them things if I had a chance,” Bigger mumbled reflectively, as though talking to himself.
Gus pulled down the corners of his lips, stepped out from the wall, squared his shoulders, doffed his cap, bowed low and spoke with mock deference:
“Yessuh.”
“You go to hell,” Bigger said, smiling.
“Yessuh,” Gus said again.
“I could fly a plane if I had a chance,” Bigger said.
“If you wasn’t black and if you had some money and if they’d let you go to that aviation school, you could fly a plane,” Gus said.
For a moment Bigger contemplated all the “its” that Gus had mentioned. Then both boys broke into hard laughter, looking at each other through squinted eyes. When their laughter subsided, Bigger said in a voice that was half-question and half-statement:
“It’s funny how the white folks treat us, ain’t it?”
“It better be funny,” Gus said.
“Maybe they right in not wanting us to fly,” Bigger said. “’Cause if I took a plane up I’d take a couple of bombs along and drop ’em as sure as hell….”
They laughed again, still looking upward. The plane sailed and dipped and spread another word against the sky: GASOLINE….
“Use Speed Gasoline,” Bigger mused, rolling the words slowly from his lips. “God, I’d like to fly up there in that sky.”
“God’ll let you fly when He gives you your wings up in heaven,” Gus said.
They laughed again, reclining against the wall, smoking, the lids of their eyes drooped softly against the sun. Cars whizzed past on rubber tires. Bigger’s face was metallically black in the strong sunlight. There was in his eyes a pensive, brooding amusement, as of a man who had been long confronted and tantalized by a riddle whose answer seemed always just on the verge of escaping him, but prodding him irresistibly on to seek its solution. The silence irked Bigger; he was anxious to do something to evade looking so squarely at this problem.
“Let’s play ‘white,’ ” Bigger said, referring to a game of play-acting in which he and his friends imitated the ways and manners of white folks.
“I don’t feel like it,” Gus said.
“General!” Bigger pronounced in a sonorous tone, looking at Gus expectantly.
“Aw, hell! I don’t want to play,” Gus whined.
“You’ll be court-martialed,” Bigger said, snapping out his words with military precision.
“Nigger, you nuts!” Gus laughed.
“General!” Bigger tried again, determinedly.
Gus looked wearily at Bigger, then straightened, saluted and answered:
“Yessuh.”
“Send your men over the river at dawn and attack the enemy’s left flank,” Bigger ordered.