The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers [27]
Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty. Yeah.
It was good to talk. The sound of his voice gave him pleasure.
The tones seemed to echo and hang on the air so that each word sounded twice. He swallowed and moistened his mouth to speak again. He wanted suddenly to return to the mute’s quiet room and tell him of the thoughts that were in his mind.
It was a queer thing to want to talk with a deaf-mute. But he was lonesome.
The street before him dimmed with the coming evening.
Occasionally men passed along the narrow street very close to him, talking in monotones to each other, a cloud of dust rising around their feet with each step. Or girls passed by together, or a mother with a child across her shoulder. Jake sat numbly for some time, and at last he got to his feet and walked on.
Weavers Lane was dark. Oil lamps made yellow, trembling patches of light in the doorways and windows. Some of the houses were entirely dark and the families sat on their front steps with only the reflections from a neighboring house to see by. A woman leaned out of a window and splashed a pail of dirty water into the street. A few drops of it splashed on Jake’s face. High, angry voices could be heard from the backs of some of the houses. From others there was the peaceful sound of a chair slowly rocking. Jake stopped before a house where three men sat together on the front steps. A pale yellow light from inside the house shone on them. Two of the men wore overalls but no shirts and were barefooted. One of these was tall and loose-jointed. The other was small and he had a running sore on the corner of his mouth. The third man was dressed in shirt and trousers. He held a straw hat on his knee. ‘Hey,’ Jake said. The three men stared at him with mill-sallow, dead-pan faces. They murmured but did not change their positions. Jake pulled the package of Target from his pocket and passed it around. He sat down on the bottom step and took off his shoes. The cool, damp ground felt good to his feet. ‘Working now?’
‘Yeah,’ said the man with the straw hat. ‘Most of the time.’
Jake picked between his toes. ‘I got the Gospel in me,’ he said. ‘‘I want to tell it to somebody.’
The men smiled. From across the narrow street there was the sound of a woman singing. The smoke from their cigarettes hung close around them in the still air. A little youngun passing along the street stopped and opened his fly to make water.
‘There’s a tent around the corner and it’s Sunday,’ the small man said finally. ‘You can go there and tell all the Gospel you want.’
‘It’s not that kind. It’s better. It’s the truth.’
‘What kind?’
Jake sucked his mustache and did not answer. After a while he said, ‘You ever have any strikes here?’
‘Once,’ said the tall man. They had one of these here strikes around six years ago.’
‘What happened?’
The man with the sore on his mouth shuffled his feet and dropped the stub of his cigarette to the ground. ‘Well --they just quit work because they wanted twenty cents a hour. There was about three hundred did it. They just hung around the streets all day. So the mill sent out trucks, and in a week the whole town was swarming with folks come here to get a job.’
Jake turned so that he was facing them. The men sat two steps above him so that he had to raise his head to look into their eyes. ‘Don’t it make you mad?’ he asked.
‘How do you mean--mad?’
The vein in Jake’s forehead was swollen and scarlet.
‘Christamighty, man! I mean mad-m-a-d-mad! He scowled up into their puzzled, sallow faces. Behind them, through the open front door he could see the inside of the house. In the front room there were three beds and a wash-stand. In the back room a barefooted woman sat sleeping in a chair. From one of the dark porches nearby there was the sound of a guitar.
‘I was one of them come in on the trucks,’ the tall man said.
‘That makes no difference. What I’m trying to tell you is plain and simple. The bastards who own these mills are millionaires. While the doffers and carders and all the people behind the machines who spin and weave the cloth can