The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers [129]
The sharp rattle of phlegm sounded in Doctor Copeland’s throat. His voice was harsh. ‘As you are so quick to sneer and condemn, what do you have to offer instead?’
‘I didn’t sneer,’ Jake said. ‘I only remarked that your plan is crazy. I come here tonight with an idea much better than that. I wanted your son, Willie, and the other two boys to let me push them around in a wagon. They were to tell what happened to them and afterward I was to tell why. In other words, I was to give a talk on the dialectics of capitalism--and show up all of its lies. I would explain so that everyone would understand why those boys’ legs were cut off. And make everyone who saw them know.’
‘Pshaw! Double pshaw!’ said Doctor Copeland furiously. I do not believe you have good sense. If I were a man who felt it worth my while to laugh I would surely laugh at that.
Never have I had the opportunity to hear of such nonsense first hand.’
They stared at each other in bitter disappointment and anger.
There was the rattle of a wagon in the street outside. Jake swallowed and bit his lips. ‘Huh!’ he said finally. ‘You’re the only one who’s crazy. You got everything exactly backward.
The only way to solve the Negro problem under capitalism is to geld every one of the fifteen million black men in these states.’
‘So that is the kind of idea you harbor beneath your ranting about justice.’
‘I didn’t say it should be done. I only said you couldn’t see the forest for the trees.’ Jake spoke with slow and painful care.
‘The work has to start at the bottom. The old traditions smashed and the new ones created. To forge a whole new pattern for the world. To make man a social creature for the first time, living in an orderly and controlled society where he is not forced to be unjust in order to survive. A social tradition in which--’ Doctor Copeland clapped ironically. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘But the cotton must be picked before the cloth is made. You and your crackpot do-nothing theories can--’
‘Hush! Who cares whether you and your thousand Negroes straggle up to that stinking cesspool of a place called Washington? What difference does it make? What do a few people matter--a few thousand people, black, white, good or bad? When the whole of our society is built on a foundation of black lies.’
‘Everything!’ Doctor Copeland panted. ‘Everything! Everything! ‘Nothing!’
‘The soul of the meanest and most evil of us on this earth is worth more in the sight of justice than--’
‘Oh, the Hell with it!’ Jake said. ‘Balls!’
‘Blasphemer!’ screamed Doctor Copeland. ‘Foul blasphemer!’ Jake shook the iron bars of the bed. The vein in his forehead swelled to the point of bursting and his face was dark with rage. ‘Short-sighted bigot!’
‘White--’ Doctor Copeland’s voice failed him. He struggled and no sound would come. At last he was able to bring forth a choked whisper: ‘Fiend.’
The bright yellow morning was at the window. Doctor Copeland’s head fell back on the pillow. His neck twisted at a broken angle, a fleck of bloody foam on his lips. Jake looked at him once before, sobbing with violence, he rushed headlong from the room.
Now she could not stay in the inside room. She had to be around somebody all the time. Doing something every minute. And if she was by herself she counted or figured with numbers. She counted all the roses on the living-room wall-paper. She figured out the cubic area of the whole house. She counted every blade of grass in the back yard and every leaf on a certain bush. Because if she did not have her mind on numbers this terrible afraidness came in her. She would be walking home from school on these May afternoons and suddenly she would have to think of something quick. A good thing--very good. Maybe she would think about a phrase of hurrying jazz music. Or that a bowl of jello would be in the refrigerator when she got home. Or plan to smoke a cigarette behind the coal house. Maybe she would try to think a long way ahead to the time when she would go north and see snow, or even travel somewhere in a foreign land. But these thoughts about good things wouldn