Native Son - Richard Wright [35]
“No; stay in and move over.”
He slid over and Jan took his place at the wheel. He was still feeling his hand strangely; it seemed that the pressure of Jan’s fingers had left an indelible imprint. Mary was getting into the front seat, too.
“Move over, Bigger,” she said.
He moved closer to Jan. Mary pushed herself in, wedging tightly between him and the outer door of the car. There were white people to either side of him; he was sitting between two vast white looming walls. Never in his life had he been so close to a white woman. He smelt the odor of her hair and felt the soft pressure of her thigh against his own. Jan headed the car back to the Outer Drive, weaving in and out of the line of traffic. Soon they were speeding along the lake front, past a huge flat sheet of dully gleaming water. The sky was heavy with snow clouds and the wine was blowing strong.
“Isn’t it glorious tonight?” she asked.
“God, yes!” Jan said.
Bigger listened to the tone of their voices, to their strange accents, to the exuberant phrases that flowed so freely from their lips.
“That sky!”
“And that water!”
“It’s so beautiful it makes you ache just to look at it,” said Mary.
“This is a beautiful world, Bigger,” Jan said, turning to him “Look at that skyline!”
Bigger looked without turning his head; he just rolled his eyes Stretching to one side of him was a vast sweep of tall buildings flecked with tiny squares of yellow light.
“We’ll own all that some day, Bigger,” Jan said with a wave of his hand. “After the revolution it’ll be ours. But we’ll have to fight for it. What a world to win, Bigger! And when that day comes, things’ll be different. There’ll be no white and no black; there’ll be no rich and no poor.”
Bigger said nothing. The car whirred along.
“We seem strange to you, don’t we, Bigger?” Mary asked.
“Oh, no’m,” he breathed softly, knowing that she did not believe him, but finding it impossible to answer her in any other way.
His arms and legs were aching from being cramped into so small a space, but he dared not move. He knew that they would not have cared if he had made himself more comfortable, but his moving would have called attention to himself and his black body. And he did not want that. These people made him feel things he did not want to feel. If he were white, if he were like them, it would have been different. But he was black. So he sat still, his arms and legs aching.
“Say, Bigger,” asked Jan, “where can we get a good meal on the South Side?”
“Well,” Bigger said, reflectively.
“We want to go to a real place,” Mary said, turning to him gayly.
“You want to go to a night club?” Bigger asked in a tone that indicated that he was simply mentioning names and not recommending places to go.
“No; we want to eat.”
“Look, Bigger. We want one of those places where colored people eat, not one of those show places.”
What did these people want? When he answered his voice was neutral and toneless.
“Well, there’s Ernie’s Kitchen Shack….”
“That sounds good!”
“Let’s go there, Jan,” Mary said.
“O.K.,” Jan said. “Where is it?”
“It’s at Forty-seventh Street and Indiana,” Bigger told them.
Jan swung the car off the Outer Drive at Thirty-first Street and drove westward to Indiana Avenue. Bigger wanted Jan to drive faster, so that they could reach Ernie’s Kitchen Shack in the shortest possible time. That would allow him a chance to sit in the car and stretch out his cramped and aching legs while they ate. Jan turned onto Indiana Avenue and headed south. Bigger wondered what Jack and Gus and G.H. would say if they saw him sitting between two white people in a car like this. They would tease him about such a thing as long as they could remember it. He felt Mary turn in her seat. She placed her hand on his arm.
“You know, Bigger, I’ve long wanted to go into these houses,” she said, pointing to the tall, dark apartment buildings looming to either side of them, “and just see how your people live. You know what I mean? I’ve been to England, France and Mexico, but I don’t know how people live ten blocks from me. We know so little about each other. I just want to see. I want to know these people. Never in my life have I been inside of a Negro home. Yet they must live like we live. They