6 Subjection

OF a sudden the sun gave Ballet an excuse to unbend and straighten himself up, his young, perspiring back cricking in the upward swing. He hurled the pick furiously across the dusty steel rail, tugged a frowsy, sweat-moist rag out of his overall pocket and pushed back his cap, revealing a low, black brow embroidered by scraps of crisp, straggly hair. He fastened, somewhat obliquely, white sullen eyes on the Marine. Irrefutably, by its ugly lift, Ballet’s mouth was in on the rising rebellion which thrust a flame of smoke into the young Negro’s eyes.

“Look at he, dough,” he said, “takin’ exvantage o’ de po’ lil’ boy. A big able hog like dat.”

Toro Point resounded to the noisy rhythm of picks swung by gnarled black hands. Sun-baked rock stones flew to dust, to powder. In flashing unison rippling muscle glittered to the task of planing a mound of rocky earth dredged up on the barren seashore.

Songs seasoned the rhythm. And the men sang on and swung picks, black taciturn French colonials, and ignored Ballet, loafing, beefing. …

The blows rained. The men sang–blacks, Island blacks–Turks Island, St. Vincent, the Bahamas–

Diamond gal cook fowl botty giv’ de man

“I’ll show you goddam niggers how to talk back to a white man–”

About twelve, thirteen, fourteen men, but only the wind rustled. A hastening breath of wind, struck dead on the way by the grueling presence of the sun.

A ram-shackle body, dark in the ungentle spots exposing it, jogged, reeled and fell at the tip of a white bludgeon. Forced a dent in the crisp caked earth. An isolated ear lay limp and juicy, like some exhausted leaf or flower, half joined to the tree whence it sprang. Only the sticky milk flooding it was crimson, crimsoning the dust and earth.

“Unna is a pack o’ men, ni’,” cried Ballet, outraged, “unna see de po’ boy get knock’ down an’ not a blind one o’ wunna would a len’ he a han’. Unna is de mos’–”

But one man, a Bajan creole, did whip up the courage of voice. “Good God, giv’ he a chance, ni’. Don’ kick he in de head now he is ‘pon de groun’–” and he quickly, at a nudge and a hushed, “Hey, wha’ do you? Why yo’ don’t tek yo’ hand out o’ yo’ matey’ saucepan?” from the only other creole, lapsed into ruthless impassivity.

“Hey, you!” shouted Ballet at last loud enough for the Marine to hear, “why–wha’ you doin’? Yo’ don’ know yo’ killin’ dat boy, ni’?”

“Le’ all we giv’ he a han’ boys–”

“Ah know I ain’t gwine tetch he.”

“Nor me.”

“Nor me needah.”

“Who gwine giv’ me a han’, ni’?”

“Ain’t gwine get meself in no trouble. Go mixin’ meself in de backra dem business–”

“Hey, Ballet, if yo’ know wha’ is good fo’ yo’self, yo’ bess min’ yo’ own business, yo’ hear wha’ me tell yo’, yah.”

“Wha’ yo’ got fi’ do wit’ it? De boy ain’t got no business talkin’ back to de marinah man–”

“Now he mek up he bed, let ‘im lie down in it.”

Shocked at sight of the mud the marine’s boots left on the boy’s dusty, crinkly head, Ballet mustered the courage of action. Some of the older heads passed on, awed, incredulous.

“Yo’ gwine kill dat boy,” said Ballet, staggering up to the marine.

“You mind yer own goddam business, Smarty, and go back to work,” said the marine. He guided an unshaking yellow-spotted finger under the black’s warm, dilating nostrils. “Or else–”

He grew suddenly deathly pale. It was a pallor which comes to men on the verge of murder. Mouth, the boy at issue, one of those docile, half-white San Andres coons, was a facile affair. Singly, red-bloodedly one handled it. But here, with this ugly, thick-lipped, board-chested upstart, there was need for handling of an errorless sort.

“I’ll git you yet,” the marine said, gazing at Ballet quietly, “I’ll fill you full of lead yet, you black bastard!”

“Why yo’ don’t do it now,” stuttered Ballet, taking a hesitating step forward, “yo’ coward, yo’–a big able man lik’ yo’ beatin’ a lil’ boy lik’ dat. Why yo’ don’ hit me? Betcha yo’ don’ put down yo’ gun an’ fight me lik’ yo’ got any guts.”

The marine continued to stare at him. “I’ll git you yet,” he said, “I’ll git you yet, Smarty, don’t kid yourself.” And he slowly moved on.

The boy got up. The sun kept up its irrepressible sizzling. The men minded their business.

Ballet, sulking, aware of the marine on the stony hedge, aware of the red, menacing eyes glued on him, on every single move he made, furtively broke rocks.

. . . . . . .

“Boy, yo’ ain’t gwine t’ wuk teeday, ni’? Git up!”

Exhausted by the orgy of work and evensong, Ballet snored, rolled, half asleep.

“Get up, ni’ yo’ ain’t hear de korchee blowin’ fi’ go to wuk, ni?”

“Ugh–ooo–ooo–”

“Yo’ ent hear me, ni? Um is six o’clock, boy, get up befo’ yo’ is late. Yo’ too lazy, get up, a big, lazy boy lik’ yo’–”

Sitting at the head of the cot, a Bible in one hand, Ballet’s mother kept shaking him into wakefulness. In the soft flush of dawn bursting in on the veranda, Mirrie’s restless gum-moist eyes fell on her son’s shining black shoulders. He was sprawled on the canvas, a symbol of primordial force, groaning, half-awake.

“Hey, wha’ is to become o’ dis boy, ni?” she kept on talking to the emerging flow of light, “Why yo’ don’t go to bed at night, ni? Stayin’ out evah night in de week. Spanishtown, Spanishtown, Spanishtown, evah night–tek heed, ni, tek heed, yo’ heah–when yo’ run into trouble don’ come an’ say Ah didn’t tell yo’.”

To Ballet this was the song of eternity. From the day Mirrie discovered through some vilely unfaithful source the moments there were for youths such as he, in the crimson shades of el barrio, the psalms of rage and despair were chanted to him.

His thin, meal-yellow singlet stiffened, ready to crack. He continued snoring. Frowsy body fuses, night sod, throttled the air on the dingy narrow porch on which they both contrived to sleep.

She shook him again. “Get up–yo’ hear de korchee blowin’ fo’ half pas’ six. Time to go to wuk, boy.”

Ballet slowly rose–the lower portions of him arching upwards.

The dome of the equator swirled high above Colon–warmth, sticky sweat, heat, malaria, flies–here one slept coverless. Mechanically uttering words of prayer drilled into him by Mirrie, he raised himself up on the stain-blotched cot, salaamed, while Mirrie piously turned her face to the sun.

When he had finished, Ballet, still half asleep, angled his way into his shirt, dragged on his blue pants, took down the skillet from the ledge and went to the cess-pool to bathe his face.

“Yo’ know, mahmie,” he said to Mirrie as he returned, wiping his eyes with the edge of his shirt sleeve, “I don’t feel lik’ goin’ to work dis mornin’–”

“Why, bo?”

“Oh, Ah dunno.” He sat down to tea.

“Yo’ too lazy,” she blurted out. “Yo’ want to follow all o’ dem nasty vagabonds an’ go roun’ de streets an’ interfere wit’ people. Yo’ go to work, sah, an’ besides, who is to feed me if yo’ don’ wuk? Who–answer me dat! Boy, yo’ bes’ mek up yo’ min’ an’ get under de heel o’ de backra.”

Peeling the conkee off the banana leaf encasing it, Ballet’s glistening half-dried eyes roved painfully at the austere lines on his mother’s aged face.

“Ah don’ wan’ fo’ go–”

“Dah is wha’ Ah get fo’ bringin’ unna up. Ungrateful vagybond! Dah is wha’ Ah get fo’ tyin’ up my guts wit’ plantation trash, feedin’ unna–jes’ lik’ unna wuthliss pappy. But yo’ go long an’ bring me de coppers when pay day come. Dah is all Ah is axin’ yo’ fo’ do. Ah too old fo’ wash de backra dem dutty ole clothes else unna wouldn’t hav’ to tu’n up unna backside when Ah ax unna fo’ provide anyt’ing fo’ mah.”

“Oh, yo’ mek such a fuss ovah nutton,” he sulked.

A stab of pain corrugated Ballet’s smooth black brow. His mother’s constant dwelling on the dearth of the family fortunes produced in him a sundry set of emotions–escape in rebellion and refusal to do as against a frenzied impulse to die retrieving things.

The impulse to do conquered, and Ballet rose, seized the skillet containing the conkee for his midday meal and started.

A fugitive tear, like a pendant pearl, paused on Mirrie’s wrinkled, musk-brown face.

“Son, go’ long–an tek care o’ yo’self.”

Light-heartedly Ballet galloped down the stairs. Half-way to the garbage-strewn piazza, he paused to lean over the banister and peep into the foggy depths of the kitchen serving the occupants of the bawdy rooms on the street-level of the tenement.

“Up orready?” shouted Ballet, throwing a sprig of cane peeling at a plump black figure engaged in the languid task of turning with a long flat piece of board a tache of bubbling starch.

In a disorderly flight to the piazza one foot landed on the seed of a part-skinned alligator pear. He deftly escaped a fall. Quickly righting himself, he made for the misty, stewy inclosure–dashing under clothes lines, overturning a bucket of wash blue, nearly bursting a hole in some one’s sunning, gleaming sheet.

Dark kitchen; slippery and smoky; unseen vermin and strange upgrowth of green snaky roots swarmed along the sides of washtubs, turpentine cans, taches, stable ironware.

Presiding over one of the taches was a girl. She was slim, young, fifteen years old. Her feet were bare, scales, dirt black, dirt white, sped high up her legs. The fragment of a frock, some peasant thing, once colored, once flowered, stood stiff, rigid off the tips of her, curving buttocks.

Grazing the ribs of the tache with the rod, Blanche, blithely humming

Wha’ de use yo’ gwine shawl up
Now dat yo’ character gone–
Dicky jump, Dicky jump
Ah wan’ fi’ lie down!

was unaware of Ballet slowly crouching behind her.

Becoming clairvoyantly tongue-tied, Blanche suddenly turned, and Ballet came up to her.

Exerting a strange ripe magic over him, the girl cried, “Yo’ frighten me, Ballet, how yo’ dey?

“Too bad ’bout las’ night,” she said, in the low lulling tones of a West Indian servant girl, lifting not an eyebrow, and continuing to stir the thickening starch.

“An’ me had me min’ ‘pon it so bad,” the boy said, an intense gleam entering his eyes.

“So it dey,” responded Blanche, “sometime it hav’ obtusions, de neddah time de road are clear.”

“Dat a fac’,” the boy concurred sorrowfully, “it fatify de coza so dat a man can ha’dly sit down an’ say ‘well, me gwine do dis dis minute an’ me gwine do dis dat, fo’ de devil is jes’ as smaht as de uddah man uptop.”

“Up cose,” said Blanche in her most refined manner, “Ah, fi’ me notion is to tek de milk fom de cow when him are willin’ fi’ giv’ it, wheddah it are in de mawnin’ time or in de even’ time–

“Wha’ yo’ are doin’, Ballet, wait–let me put down de stick–wait, Ah say–yo’ in a hurry?”

“Wha’ Sweetbread, dey? Him gone t’ wuk orready?”

“Yes–me don’ know but it are seem to me lik’ some time muss eclapse befo’ dere is any life ah stir in dis kitchen–”

“Oh, Blanche!”

“Yo’ bes’ be careful, Ballet, fo’ de las’ time Ah had fi’ scrouch aroun’ fi’ hooks an’ eyes an’ dat dyam John Chinaman ‘im not gwine giv’ me anyt’ing beout me giv’ ‘im somet’ing.”

“All right–dere–Blanche–wait–”

“Yo’ know what ‘im say to me de uddah dey? Me wuz–wait, tek yo’ time, Ballet, de cock is jus’ a crow, it are soon yet–oh, don’t sweet–

“‘Im say to me dat Ah mus’ giv’ ‘im somet’ing. An’ me say to ‘im, but John, yo’ no me husban’–‘an’ yo’ know wha’ de dyam yallah rascal say ‘im say ‘but me no fo’ yo’ husban’ too’?”

Her hair was hard, but the marble floor of the kitchen undoubtedly helped to stiffen its matty, tangled plaits. And in spite of the water daily splashing over the tanks and taches on to the ground, her strong young body took nothing diminishing from it. Only, unquestioningly the force of such a wiry, gluey, gummy impact as theirs left her heels a little broader, and a readier prey for chiggers, by virtue of the constantly widening crevices in them, her hair a little more difficult to comb, and her dress in a suspiciously untidy mood.

Emerging from the slippery darkness of the kitchen, Ballet dashed up Eighth Street. A Colon sunrise streamed in on its lazy inert life. Opposite, some of the disciples of the High Priest of the Ever-Live, Never-Die Sect sat moping, not fully recovered from the flowing mephitic languor of the evening’s lyrical excesses.

All the way up the street, Ballet met men of one sort or another trekking to work–on tipsy depot wagons, shovels, picks, forks sticking out like spikes; on foot, alone, smoking pipes, hazily concerned.

Grog shops, chink stores and brothels were closed. The tall, bare, paneled doors were fastened. The sun threw warmth and sting under verandas; shriveled banana peels to crusts; darkened the half-eaten chunks of soft pomegranates left by some extravagant epicurean, gave manna to big husky wasps foregathering wherever there was light, sun, warmth. …

Up on the verandas there dark, bright-skirted, flame-lipped girls, the evening before, danced in squares, holding up the tips of their flimsy dresses, to the coombia of creole island places. Creole girls led, thwarted, wooed and burned by obeah-working, weed-smoking St. Lucian men. Jamaica girls, fired by an inextinguishable warmth, danced, whirling, wheeling, rolling, rubbing, spinning their posteriors and their hips, in circles, their breasts like rosettes of flame, quivering to the rhythm of the mento–conceding none but the scandalously sexless. Spanish girls, white ones, yellow ones, brown ones, furiously gay, furiously concerned over the actualities of beauty.

Over a bar of dredged in earth, Ballet sped. In the growing sunlight figures slowly made for the converging seacoast.

Work-folk yelled to Ballet tidings of the dawn. …

“Why yo’ don’ tek de chiggahs out o’ yo’ heel an’ walk lik’ yo’ got life in yo’ body–”

“Yo’ gwine be late, too.”

“Yo’ go ‘long, bo, Oi ent hurrin’ fo’ de Lawd Gawd Heself dis mawnin’–”

Ahead a vision of buxom green cocoa palms spread like a crescent–from the old rickety wooden houses walled behind the preserves of the quarantine station all the way past the cabins of the fishing folk and dinky bathhouses for the blacks to the unseemly array of garbage at the dump. Out to the seacoast and the writhing palms swarmed men from Coolie Town, Bottle Alley, Bolivar Street, Boca Grande, Silver City.

As he approached the edge of the sea, Ballet waded through grass which rose higher and thicker, whose dew lay in glimmering crystal moistures. Beyond the palm trees opened a vista of the river, the color of brackish water. Empty cocoanut husks cluttered the ground. Sitting on upturned canoes men smoked pipes and sharpened tools, murmuring softly. All across the bay labor boats formed a lane, a lane to Toro Point, shining on the blue horizon.

Drawing nearer the crux of things, Mouth ran up to Ballet and put an unsteady, excited grip on his shoulder.

“Ballet, bettah don’ go t’ wuk teeday–”

Scorn and disdain crossed Ballet’s somber black face.

“Wha’ is dah?” he said, refusing to hear his ears.

“Ah, say, don’ go t’ wuk teeday–stan’ home–”

“Why, boy?”

“Dah marine is lookin’ fo’ yo’.”

“Lookin’ fo’ me?” Ballet stuck a skeptical finger in the pit of his stomach. “Wha’ he lookin’ fo’ me fo’?” A quizzical frown creased his brow.

“He say yo’ had no business to jook yo’ mout’ in de ruction yestiddy. Dat yo’ too gypsy an’ if yo’ know bes’ fo’ yo’self–”

“Oh, le’ he come,” cried Ballet, “de blind coward, le’ he come–”

A ruffian Q. M. paced up and down the water front, brandishing a staff, firing skyrockets of tobacco spit to right and left, strode up. “Don’t stand there, boys, getta move on! Jump in this boat–another one’s coming–no time to waste–jump in there!”

A marine lieutenant, pistol in hand, superintended the embarkment. A squad of khakied men paraded the strip of seashore.

Ballet joined the cowed obedient retinue limping to the boats. Curiously, in the scramble to embark the water boy got lost.

“Oh, Oi ain’t do nutton. Can’t do me nutton.”

The passage was swift and safe through swelling seas growing darker and deadlier as the tide mounted. Glumly the men sat, uttering few words, standing up as the boat neared the other side of the river and jumping prematurely ashore, getting their feet wet.

Men gathered on pump cars and on the Toro Point river edge sawing wood to help clear the jungle or sharpening their machetes.

Gangs were forming. Driven by marines, platoons of black men went to obscure parts of the Toro Point bush to cut paths along the swirling lagoon back to the Painted City. Fierce against the sun moaning men jogged with drills on their backs, pounding to dust tons of mortared stone paving lanes through the heathen unexplored jungle.

In the crowd of men, Ballet saw a face leering at him. It was a white face–the face of a scowling marine. …

Rockingly, dizzily, it glowed up at him. He was freckled, the pistol in his belt carelessly at hand and he slovenly sported a bayonet rifle.

“Hey–you–I’m talking to you–”

Afraid, unable to fathom the gleam penetrating the depths of the man’s eyes, Ballet started running.

“Stand up and take yer medicine, yer goddam skunk,” cried the marine; “hey, stop that man–”
Nothing for a black boy, probably a laborer, or a water boy, to do a hide and seek with a tipsy marine. …

“Stop that man–”

Ballet flew. He scaled hurdles. He bumped into men. Ugly French colonial words, epithets deserving of a dog, were hurled at him. Impatient, contemptuous Jamaican, colored by a highly British accent, caught at him like shreds.

About to penetrate the dense interior of the jungle, the men sang, soothed the blades of their cutlasses, sang pioneer sea songs, pioneer gold songs. …

Comin’ Ah tell yo’!
One mo’ mawin’, buoy,

There was a toolshed set a little ways in. Into it Ballet burst. But a hut, it yet had an “upstairs,” and up these the boy scrambled wildly.

Behind a wagon wheel sent up there to the wheelwright to be mended, Ballet, breathing hard, heard the marine enter.

Downstairs. A pause. A search. The top of a barrel blammed shut. Imagine–a boy in a barrel of tar. Ludicrous–laughter snuffed out. Heavy steps started upward, upward. …

“Where the hell are yer, yer lousy bastard–yer–come sticking in yer mouth where yer hadn’t any goddam business? Minding somebody else’s business. I’ll teach you niggers down here how to talk back to a white man. Come out o’ there, you black bastard.”

Behind the wheel, bars dividing the two, Ballet saw the dread khaki–the dirt-caked leggings.

His vision abruptly darkened.

Vap, vap, vap–

Three sure, dead shots.

In the Canal Record, the Q. M. at Toro Point took occasion to extol the virtues of the Department which kept the number of casualties in the recent native labor uprising down to one.