Now I know that he was saying It has come down to just this, my room, my horn, my bottle. My question was as good as any other response.
“If I was to tell you everything that happened, we’d have to stay in this room for a month.” He smiled and straightened up on the bed. His ankles were crossed, and for the first time I noticed that his feet, shod in dark suede shoes with crepe soles, did not quite touch the floor. “And, you know, I never tell anybody everything, I always have to keep something back for myself. Things turned out all right. Only thing I mind is, I should have earned more money. Grant Kilbert, he earned a lot of money, and some of that was mine, you know.”
“Were you friends?” I asked.
“I knew the man.” He tilted his head and stared at the ceiling for so long that eventually I looked up at it, too. It was not a remarkable ceiling. A circular section near the center had been replastered not long before.
“No matter where you live, there are places you’re not supposed to go,” he said, still gazing up. “And sooner or later, you’re gonna wind up there.” He smiled at me again. “Where we lived, the place you weren’t supposed to go was called The Backs. Out of town, stuck in the woods on one little path. In Darktown, we had all kinds from preachers on down. We had washerwomen and blacksmiths and carpenters, and we had some no-good thieving trash, too, like Eddie Grimes, that man who came back from being dead. In The Backs, they started with trash like Eddie Grimes, and went down from there. Sometimes, our people went out there to buy a jug, and sometimes they went there to get a woman, but they never talked about it. The Backs was rough. What they had was rough.” He rolled his eyes at me and said, “That witch-lady I told you about, she lived in The Backs.” He snickered. “Man, they were a mean bunch of people. They’d cut you, you looked at ’em bad. But one thing funny about the place, white and colored lived there just the same—it was integrated. Backs people were so evil, color didn’t make no difference to them. They hated everybody anyhow, on principle.” Hat pointed his glass at me, tilted his head, and narrowed his eyes. “At least, that was what everybody said. So this particular Halloween, Dee Sparks says to me after we finish with Darktown, we ought to head out to The Backs and see what the place is really like. Maybe we can have some fun.
“The idea of going out to The Backs kind of scared me, but being scared was part of the fun—Halloween, right? And if anyplace in Woodland was perfect for all that Halloween shit, you know, someplace where you might really see a ghost or a goblin, The Backs was better than the graveyard.” Hat shook his head, holding the glass out at a right angle to his body. A silvery amusement momentarily transformed him, and it struck me that his native elegance, the product of his character and bearing much more than of the handsome suit and the suede shoes, had in effect been paid for by the surviving of a thousand unimaginable difficulties, each painful to a varying degree. Then I realized that what I meant by elegance was really dignity, that for the first time I had recognized actual dignity in another human being, and that dignity was nothing like the self-congratulatory superiority people usually mistook for it.
“We were just little babies, and we wanted some of those good old Halloween scares. Like those dumbbells out on the street, tossing firecrackers at each other.” Hat wiped his free hand down over his face and made sure that I was prepared to write down everything he said. (The tapes had already been used up.) “When I’m done, tell me if we found it, okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
3
“Dee showed up at my house just after dinner, dressed in an old sheet with two eyeholes cut in it and carrying a paper bag. His big old shoes stuck out underneath the sheet. I had the same costume, but it was the one my brother used the year before, and it dragged along the ground and my feet got caught in it. The eyeholes kept sliding away from my eyes. My mother gave me a bag and told me to behave myself and get home before eight. it didn’t take but half an hour to cover all the likely houses in Darktown, but she knew I’d want to fool around with Dee for an hour or so afterwards.
“Then up and down the streets we go, knocking on the doors where they’d give us stuff and making a little mischief where we knew they wouldn’t. Nothing real bad, just banging on the door and running like hell, throwing rocks on the roof, little stuff. A few places, we plain and simple stayed away from—the places where people like Eddie Grimes lived. I always thought that was funny. We knew enough to steer clear of those houses, but we were still crazy to get out to The Backs.
“Only way I can figure it is, The Backs was forbidden. Nobody had to tell us to stay away from Eddie Grimes’ house at night. You wouldn’t even go there in the daylight, ‘cause Eddie Grimes would get you and that would be that.
“Anyhow, Dee kept us moving along real quick, and when folks asked us questions or said they wouldn’t give us stuff unless we sang a song, he moaned like a ghost and shook his bag in their faces, so we could get away faster. He was so excited, I think he was almost shaking.
“Me, I was excited, too. Not like Dee—sort of sick-excited, the way people must feel the first time they use a parachute. Scared-excited.
“As soon as we got away from the last house, Dee crossed the street and started running down the side of the little general store we all used. I knew where he was going. Out behind the store was a field, and on the other side of the field was Meridian Road, which took you out into the woods and to the path up to The Backs. When he realized that I wasn’t next to him, he turned around and yelled at me to hurry up. No, I said inside myself, I ain’t gonna jump outta of this here airplane, I’m not dumb enough to do that. And then I pulled up my sheet and scrunched up my eye to look through the one hole close enough to see through, and I took off after him.