Caleb Jones

CALEB JONES

BY RICHARD WASHBURN CHILD

THERE’S a good many different kinds of foreigners in a small factory town like this, — Irish and Swedes and Poles and Cannucks that put tallow in their hair, — but the first nigger I ever seen here was Caleb Jones. Seems as if I could see him now just as I seen him the first time, one day when I’d gone up home after the six o’clock whistle. The night had come tumbling into the valley just like it was poured out of a basket, and there was a November sleet, slantin’ with the wind.

Annie, my wife, was getting dinner spry and happy, for I’d been made foreman of the upper leather room the week before, and little Mike had a new suit,— his first pants they were, and each leg would just fit over my wrist, — and we’d bought a bookcase that we used to stand and look at, my arm around Annie and our heads kind of tilted, we were that proud of it. I guess our bread was buttered on both sides, and it was warm and stretchy in the front room, and I could hear something frying on the kitchen stove, with its crickle-crackle, and I could smell it, too. And then there comes a knock on the door, and Annie turns the knob with her apron in her hand, and she gives a little scream.

Well, sir, there he stood, — big and black, — as ugly a looking nigger as you’d like to see more ’n once a month. A gun would have felt good in my fist, but just the minute he let out a word or two you ’d know you’d kind of been mistaken. His voice sounded as warm and smooth and pleasant as it feels to a dog when you rub his ears, — did n’t sound like a nigger at all, but just like regular talk, and nothing about it to laugh at.

“I’m selling a book,” he says, and his teeth looked white like the top of a can of milk, but I could n’t tell whether he was smiling or whether it was because he was that cold with his wet clothes. “ It’s called the Chronicle of the Country,” says he; “it ought to be in every house. I’d like to show you a copy whether you’d like to buy it or not.” At that he begun to cough hard and hollow, as if death had pitched two strikes to him.

“Come in,” says I, for the wind was nearly rattling the pictures off the wall in the hall; and I pulls the curtains down in the front room so’s nobody passing would think there was anything queer happening, and when he came into the light I sized him up again. He was about twenty-six, as near as I could tell, and his clothes looked well enough, even wet, and he wore the kind of collar that would make him look like a parson if he’d been white. And there he stood, with his teeth beating time to the chills that shook him, and the water squeaking in his big shoes.

“This is the book,” says he, pulling a fat one with a blue and gilt cover out of his little bag. “It’s two dollars. Plenty of illustrations,—excites the interest of children.” And he goes on pinning medals onto the book, polite and smiling, and shifting his feet and handing it over to me. You know how it is when somebody passes you something that don’t interest you any,— maybe it’s an agent or maybe it’s some mother handing you a lump of a bald-headed kid; you’ve got to take it and look it over, to be perlite, and yet somehow or other you feel as if you’ve been stealing sheep.

So I was pretendin’ to be interested when I heard the nigger give a kind of choke, and then I seen him settling on the floor, collapsed, and twitching like a man in the ring taking the ten count. I can remember now how one big black hand spread out over a rose in the pattern of the carpet.

I’d have known what to do for a white man in a second, but I stood there looking down at him like a feller that’s dropped a basket of eggs, and not knowing how to move him any more than if he’d been a bar of red-hot merchant iron, until Annie stood in the door there and says, “What’s happened, Jim?” and I says, “Don’t be frightened, I guess he’s sick; ” and she says, sharp, “Lift him up and get him in the kitchen here where it’s warm.” So I put hands to him to get him on his feet, and he gave a sigh the way a machine does when it starts up, and opened his eyes till the white part showed like a couple of butter plates sitting on a stove, and got up grabbing at the chairs, and blinks at the light, and says, “Where’s my hat?” which set him coughing again enough to shake the* buttons off his clothes.

When we got him on a soap box by the stove, he sat there with his head on his chest, just as limp as boiled beet tops; and, homely and big as he was, it would make a pirate sorry for him, and my Annie moved all the pans and things onto the other side of the stove from where he sat, and poured him out some coffee.

“Poor feller,” says she, looking at me; “I wish we had some whiskey. Poor feller, — sick in the body.”

“What’s the matter with you, man ?” says I; and with that he made a shove into the air like he was pushing something away that we could n’t see. “ I’m sick in the mind,” says he. And I caught Annie crossing herself out of the corner of my eye, for I guess she thought, like me, the nigger was crazy. It was a kind of relief to hear him go on talking sense.

“There’s no use to keep this up,” he says, as if he was speaking to himself. “I’ve made ten sales from the city up to here, — a hundred and forty miles on foot; and I’d never got the agency if the firm had known. I have n’t made money, — I’ve lost it.”

“How’s that?” says I, hoping he’d go on. I’d most rather hear that nigger’s voice than a band of twenty pieces playing a cakewalk, and when he talked you’d pay more attention to the sound of it than the words he was speaking. He did n’t answer, but he just sat there with his fingers drumming on the front of the soap box, until Annie, who had n’t got over her timid feeling, asked him where he came from.

He had a story, all right, and I’ve always believed it was on the level, because he did n’t seem falling all over himself to tell it, like a feller does who’s got a handme-down song and dance. And what’s more, it was so natural you could see the place in Alabama where he was born, with the river down at the bottom of the meadow, and whip-poor-wills singing at night, and sandy roads where he ’d go along to the school that was started up by some ’man in New York; and everything ran along from one thing to another, the way it would do if it was happening to yourself.

Then when he got going, he told us how he’d got the notion to get a regular education so’s to be somebody, and make a place somewhere, and how he’d finally got into some college up North here, and had a year in a room that did n’t have any window, blacking boots and taking care of furnaces to pay his way, until I began to believe he had n’t had any hard luck at all. But the trouble was he’d got sick that summer and spent all he had, and it had come along time for his college to open up and no money, and he tried the book-selling game to get a little, but it was no go. Any fool could see what was the matter, — people living out, kind of lonesome, in the country mistrusted him,

— he looked so well dressed for a coon, and the books were n’t much good anyhow, as he said himself. And he’d caught cold, and he’d got up against it good and plenty.

That’s about what he told us, and then he sort of screws his face around as if he was trying to grin, and he folds his hands over his knees, and says, kind of jerky: “It’s funny how I told it to you, — I don’t know why myself. You don’t understand anything about it, — do you ? But I’m Jones, — Caleb Jones.”

“Well,” says I, — not knowing whether to call him Caleb or Mr. Jones, but sorry for the feller, even though he was most too big to be sorry for, — “I guess you’ll get back to your school all right, — they treat a man well, don’t they? ”

“Why shouldn’t they?” he says, so loud, and sitting up so quick, it made Annie jump back; and then he wilted all down in his chair again, and says, “Yes, yes, they’re more than kind; they overdo it,—that’s all.”

It was one of those funny breaks I often heard him get off later, but right then I had n’t even a guess of what he was driving at, although I learned it little by little afterwards.

We’d spieled along till dinner was cold, because the nigger talked so good he most had you in a trance, and when I come to think about it, I did n’t have no idea of what to do with him; but Annie was standing there thinking, with her arms on her hips, and finally she says, “What about Mrs. Ladeau’s?” And I says, “They’ll take him in there.” Jones looked up kind of quick. “Where is it? I’m going,” he says, snapping his thick lips together.

“ What if he has no money ? ” says Annie, nodding to me; but he give a wave of his arm, and said he guessed he had enough, even if it was the last, and stood up, coughing and shaking out his wet coat, and looking mean.

“You’d better stop in to the doctor’s,” says I, and hardly got the words out of my system when a funny thing happened. The door opened, and in come my little Michael, spry as a June bug. It was a sight to see that nigger’s face all bust out in smiles, and he put both his hands out toward the kid just as if he’d come across somebody he’d been wanting to see; but the boy gives a scream just like a rabbit gives when he feels a dog’s breath on his tail, and went out the door sprawling. Well, the nigger just stumbles back into a chair and buries his face in his hands, and there was something about it that would take away a coal-heaver’s appetite.

None of us said anything more, there being nothing to say, and no cause for saying it, and Jones pulls himself up slow as if it hurt him, and goes out into the front room picking up his book and his hat, and then he opens the door, letting in a slice of weather, and the minute he stepped out into the dark you could n’t see nothing of him but his white collar. I stood there looking at the door after it shut, trying to make out just what was askew with the nigger, besides being a nigger, and feeling just as if something was crooked with me, too. And Annie, — she knew what I was thinking about, for she says to me, nibbling the corner of her mouth, “Well, Jim, what else could we do ?”—and there it was.

Well, the nigger stayed in town. Two days later he turned up at the factory, and the first I seen of him was the boss coming into my room looking like a feller who’d been caught with the goods. And Jones stepping along behind him, and all the men staring and staring till you’d think their eyes hung out on their cheeks. He was the first colored feller that had ever come looking for a job, and when he and the boss came up to me the men kind of stood back as if they were waiting for a blast to go off.

“ Jim,” says the boss, twirling his watch chain, “here’s a new man. Put him on the skiving job Henderson left last week.”

The men were a pretty square lot as men go, but I knew — just by instinct, I guess — there’d be trouble about Caleb Jones; but I nods, and the boss goes out, stopping to finger some new leather as he went, and I was left facing the big nigger.

“ Staying in town ? ” says I; and he looks at me sort of queer and scared and rattled.

“ Yes,” he says; “I just saw the doctor’ and there’s trouble here, in the lungs. I’ve got to stay up here in the hills, or go back to Alabama. And I have n’t got the money to go back there, and it don’t seem as if I could go back, anyhow. I don’t see how I could go back.”

Well, that meant a hot box for us, all right. Why,it was n’t over two hours before I was down in the office, and I says to the boss, “Mr. Bent, Dave Pierson is kicking against working at the next bench.”

The boss did n’t have to ask any questions. “He is, is he?” says he. “Well, you tell Dave that we ’re up here in the North, where we know democracy on all six sides, and that Jones may be colored, but he’s got twice the brains of anybody in the room, and four times the education, and that he’s got more culture than I’ve got;” and on he went, shaking his head and smacking one fist into the palm of the other. “And,” says he, “if it comes to a question of who moves,—Dave or the nigger,—it’s Dave!”

Of course, I felt just as if I was tickling the edge of a buzz saw, but it was up to me to stop trouble. So I says, “You’ll excuse me, but if I understand it, people in the North are dead to rights in love with the colored race, but they’d rather rub elbows with the cholera than with any one particular nigger. Dave ain’t no exception. And you would n’t go into business with one or go on a hunting trip with one on any share-and-share-alike game. As I say, I don’t believe you ’re any exception, any more than Dave.”

The boss scratched his head a bit, and wiggles around in his chair, and rolls a pencil around in his fingers. “Jim,” he says, “that’s hot shot! It ain’t nice, and I wish it were n’t true. It’s a problem, but I guess you’d better put Jones in the corner cutting bindings. I have n’t got the heart to refuse him some sort of job.”

“Heart!” says I. “Why, there ain’t a man in the room that wants harm to him. It’s long-distance sympathy, that’s all. A man working with a nigger gets rattled, like he would if you put him on a job with the President — or with a ghost.”

“This business makes a man feel like six cents’ worth of Heaven-help-us,” says the boss, or words to that effect; and I went upstairs and told Jones to change his job. He did n’t say nothing, but I seen the look he give Dave Pierson out of the corner of his eyes. The nigger were n’t no fool.

There were n’t any change as time slid by, but it turned out that Caleb were n’t any whale for work. He meant all right, but he’d get to dreaming, and looking out the window, and reciting poetry to himself; for I take it, a man who gets too much into his mind, with fancy notions and so on, loses a heap of energy out of his hands. And that feller used to eat up knowledge. He was the only man in town that had ever took Darwin’s books out of the library, or at least that’s what Miss Burns, the schoolteacher, said, and the only dime novel I ever seen him reading was a thing called Confessions of an Opium Fiend, or something like that.

I useter wonder if he were n’t lonesome, never having no one to sit down and smoke a pipe with and get some of the conversation out of his system. Sundays he’d wander off onto the hills all by himself, and perhaps Monday I’d say to him, “Hello, Caleb, whatcher do yesterday ? ” And he’d say, kind of queer, the way he often spoke, “I thought.”

As I think of it now, I guess none of us understood him much, but every man in the factory was as sure as straight-flushes of one thing, — we’d been more comfortable — the whole town would been more comfortable — without the nigger. It was this way. You’d feel sorry for Jones, but what ailed him was the want of being somebody among other folks, and none of us wanted to be the other folks; but you would n’t know why you felt that way any more than a dog knows what’s the matter with him when he’s got the distemper. And perhaps you’d meet him, when you was out driving Sunday, walking along the road, and kicking up the dust with his big feet, and you’d brace up and say, “Goodmorning, Jones;” and the very words that came out of your own mouth seemed like a bunch of dirty lies. Then at some other time you’d get next to the fact that the nigger knew about twice what you did, and had you beaten to a custard for being good-hearted and decent; and it would make you feel — just shows what a fool a man is — that he had no darn business being better or knowing more than you did. So you were down and out every time you even thought about the nigger; and it did n’t make a sliver of difference how kind you wanted to be to him, it seemed as if a hand you could n’t see was always turning you back.

I never used to feel that way more than some evening when I’d be walking up from the factory over the hill and I’d hear Jones going along the road by that stretch of woods you see there, and singing, big and full. You’d never miss it, for there were n’t a voice like that this side of the Junction. It was like a thrush’s voice,— eagle size! There was a funny thing about it, too, — it did n’t make no difference how cheerful and catchy and fling-yourfeet-around the tune was, it always had something stirred up in it sort of sad, — something that would have given you a lonesome feeling, even if you had been standing in the middle of a thousand people.

It was his voice that got him into a queer mix-up at the Protestant church. Somebody got the nigger to sing there one Sunday. I were n’t there, of course, but Davis the barber told me what happened, and it was this way. Nobody knew Jones was going to sing, and things went along till it came time for a solo, and, as I understand it, the singers stand up in a little balcony at the back of the church and the people are facing the other way. The barber says the piece the nigger sang was a bird for music, running along kind of small and soft, and rising up hearty and kind of muscular, and then lifting out with a big bust, and the organ rolling like a thunderstorm. I guess you know the kind.

Well, the nigger’s voice, it did n’t do a thing to those who were there, — it set ’em up off the cushions and made ’em grab their own hands; and even the hooknosed old skinflints that lived here before the place was a factory town stood there with their chests caved in and the tears hurdling the wrinkles in their faces, — anyhow, that’s how the barber says, and he got so excited telling it I don’t believe he was lying as much as usual.

Then in about a second they all began to look around to see who was doing that kind of triple-ply singing, and they seen it was a nigger. And, as the barber says, it seemed to change the whole business. Just as soon as anybody’d look around it was just as if they’d seen a phonograph, and they’d begin whispering to each other; but Caleb Jones kept right on looking down at ’em, and singing, until everybody had looked up sort of surprised and pop-eyed, and then, the barber says, the nigger’s voice just walted away like the sound of a parade when it turns the corner, till in a second there was n’t any left; and then Jones put his fingers down between his white collar and his black neck and stood there a moment, — just so, — and then he slid away down the stairs, and out of the church.

Just as I told you, I were n’t the only one. Every man in town that got into it was left wondering whether something was the matter with Jones or with himself, and I guess there were n’t four people in the factory would say which. But ask any man of ’em, — they ’ll tell about it, — they remember him.

Something happened besides his being a coon to make us remember Caleb Jones. I’ve worked around and traveled around a good deal, and I’ve seen rough, tough, and ratty, but I want to state right here, and be cross-examined on it, that I never see the beat of what that nigger did.

If I don’t make a mistake, it was January, and we were having one of those cussed days of thawing, when the snow runs to water, and down into the valley, and the top of the river melts into slush, and the mist is so thick you can’t see the bowl of your own pipe. My Annie had come down to the factory to get the key to the back door I’d taken away with me by mistake, and she was standing side of me. The little girls who go to school mornings and work afternoons in the stitching rooms were in after the noon hour, and one of ’em — a mite of a thing for thirteen years old — Kitty Norton was her name — come a-runnin’ into my room to get a pile of vamps from the cutting bench.

There’s a big pattern machine right side of the bench, as you remember, and Jones was running it. Well, little Kitty dodged around him, and, just like a kid, reached through the loop of the big belt that was running up to the shafting. The two ends of the belt are joined together with steel clamp hooks, and they caught into the sleeves of her woolen dress as quick as a fish-bite.

The first thing I knew was the youngster’s yell, and the cry my wife gave, and I jumped toward the bench. I seen the girl all scrambling with legs and arms, trying to pull herself loose, and the strain on the tough woolen of her dress that would n’t give way. Then, — it was all done in a shave of a second, — when the belt that was flying up toward the shafting had drawn her arm — which looked thin and white, like a chalk mark, against the leather — almost to the top, I held my lungs to see it go over under the belt. But instead of that, I seen a black thing shoot out — quick as a frog’s tongue — between her little wrist and the iron pulley, and it went up into the pinch, taking the punishment of the belt that burned and smoked and squeaked as if it was whining about being stopped before it slowed down. The hooks pulled out of the girl’s dress, and dropped her back to the floor, and the men all started forward, crying out, so’s it sounded like a kind of chant.

“It’s the nigger! It’s the nigger’s arm! Jones did it!”

“He’s hurt!” says my Annie, close behind me, and her voice sounded as if all the color had gone out of her face.

“ Go away,” I yells, not looking around. “Get the women out of here, we’ll take him to Mrs. Ladeau’s!”

“No,” says she behind me, loud and clear. “ Who ’ll care for him there ? Bring him home, Jim.”

I thinks quick of just what that means, and then I says, “We’ll not.” But when I seen my wife’s face, — them tight lips and big gray eyes, — the same old look that cured me of the drink a good many years ago, — I kind of guessed she’d have her way, and I says, “Somebody go for the doctor! We’ll take Jones up to my house.”

That’s how he went through my door the second time. And he was there six weeks, lying out on the bed in the room over the parlor, blacker ’n ever against the sheets.

But it did n’t seem to make any difference that he was there so long, or that he had turned the neatest trick I ever seen a man do, — somehow or other he was still Jones, and I seemed to be the same old Jim Hands; and I guess he was just as lonesome as ever, and I guess we felt just as mean. Annie never hedged, but I knew without talking about it that he nerved her all up, and perhaps she could have gone on nursing the nigger for fifty years without feeling any different. Then there was the rest of the people in town and those at the factory, — they’d all say the nigger was a wonder-bird, and things like that, and he deserved a heap of kindness, and I’d done just the right thing to have him at my place. But then most everybody’d seem sorry for me for some reason or other, and that useter make me nearly fighting mad without knowing why.

Just one person in town had a snap because Jones was laid up, and that was my boy Michael, who’d begun by being so scared of the nigger. He got kind of nosey and familiar after a while, like a puppy is scared to death of a hop-toad till he finds it don’t do no harm; and at last you could n’t get the little rascal away from Jones without using a derrick. The nigger useter sit up against the pillows, and tell my youngster things that would ’a’ been worth hearing by most anybody, about a certain King Arthur and his gang, and about how some feller in France was trying to invent a glaze for crockery, and stuck to it though he had to burn up the furniture; and he’d tell it so true you’d forget you was n’t carrying a sword or inventing something, instead of being a foreman in a factory. Besides that, he’d cut soldiers and things out of a piece of wrapping paper with his black hand that looked so big and clumsy, — the one that was all right. It was a cinch for the boy.

Then finally Jones got to coughing more and more and telling more and more things about his home and his sisters, and how the air would be soft and pleasant down in Alabama, and it set a feller thinking he had the fever to be back with his own kind again. It comes on a man sudden, even a white man. So one day after I’d eaten my lunch I steps upstairs, and finds him lying with his face to the wall.

“Jones,” says I, and he flops over, “ were you happy in the South, — in your home ?”

He looks at me kind of curious, and he says, “Yes—happy like a dog. Did n’t know enough not to be happy.”

That’s the way he’d speak sometimes, — kind of puzzling and snappy; but I thought I could see underneath it all that he wanted to go back so bad it ached like the rheumatism. So I passed the hat, as you say, at the factory, and in two hours there was ninety-six dollars in it, — from workingmen, too, barring the twentyfive the boss put in. Everybody felt fine toward the nigger, but you could see they were n’t sorry he was going. But they could n’t tell you why. I knew. It was because he’d been up before ’em every day like a big, soggy chunk of lonesomeness, and none of ’em had the kind of yeast to make it rise.

Anyway, I took the money to Jones, and I says, “The boys are all for you, Caleb, and they’ve chipped in so’s you can go back. It’ll be better for your cough; ” and then I waits, because I could n’t never tell just what the feller would think next. He lay there, thinking and thinking, and then he says another funny thing.

“It’ll be sunny down there now,” he says, looking up at the ceiling; and then, “I’ll go,” he says, nodding to me.

A couple of weeks later he went, and somehow when he stood there in the door and put out his hand kind of quick,— the good one — his left hand — the first time I’d ever shaken hands with a nigger, — I didn’t feel the curious feeling I’d had all along. He seemed like anybody. I remember it was the noon hour, and I stood on the steps and watched him go over the hill. “This nigger business beats me,” thinks I; “it seems as if there ain’t no answer.” And I thinks and wonders, as I’ve wondered this many a time. “ Was the trouble with us or with him ? Ain’t he civilized enough, or ain’t we? ”

And there was one thing more. It happened about a month or two ago, and sometimes I think it shows something or other.

Dave Pierson ain’t the sort of feller that ever’ll shine at anything. He ain’t dishonest, and he ’ll never serve any time in jail, but he’s been in my room these four years, and I know him pretty well. He’s small, — that’s what ails him; he’s the kind of man that will tease a cat, and never treated or did anything for anybody. Somebody threw alum on his soul, I useter think.

Well, about a month ago the train from the Junction was pulling into the station, and a little kid stepped off onto the tracks. Yells and screams was cheap and plenty, but one feller gives a jump and just skins out in front of the engine with the kid in his arms. It was Dave Pierson.

There were n’t much to it, but Dave stood on the platform, shivering in his legs a bit and dazed in the eyes, and the people crowded round, and somebody says, “How’d you make up your mind to do it so quick ? ” And Dave looks kind of stupid and solemn, and what do you think he says? He says, “I guess it was Jones, — Jones, the nigger.”