The Last Worthless Evening Read Free Page A

watches him for a while, going down the rows and filling sacks, and then he says to himself, Now if I had me a hunnerd monkies like that, I wouldn’t have to pay nobody to pick my cotton. So he goes to the pet store and orders a hundred monkies, and the owner of the pet store wants to know what he’s going to do with one hundred monkies. So the man tells him, and the owner says: Nossir, I ain’t goin’ to order you them monkies, and I’ll tell you why. The next fellow down the road’ll see them monkies in your field, and he’ll get to thinking, and he’s goin’ to order him two hunnerd. Then some old boy with a bigger plantation he’s goin’ to order three hunnerd, and pretty soon the South’ll be overrun with monkies, and some damn Yankee lawyer’s goin’ to come down here and turn ’em loose and they’ll go to school with my chilren.”
    Willie laughed. He laughed till his eyes watered, while so many of my white friends, from the Northeast and West and Midwest, had never given it more than a courteous sound resembling laughter, and some had frowned and said: Bad, Gerry, bad. But Willie understood the true butt of the joke.
    â€œIt’s economic,” he said. “So I guess that makes it sociological. Even philosophical. Course it generally is economic.”
    â€œSure. It was an agrarian society. An aristocracy even, with—”
    â€œNot just Negroes and whites. It’s generally economic when somebody’s shitting on somebody else.”
    â€œI suppose it is.”
    â€œNorthern mills went South after the Civil War. You think it was for the climate?”
    â€œCheap labor.”
    â€œCheap white labor. That’s how Shoeless Joe Jackson got started playing ball. Played for a mill. Baseball was good for the mo rale . Fat cats always have ideas about how to keep poor folks happy without signing a check. You think those mills have unions yet?”
    â€œNope. But I have another joke.”
    â€œFrom down home?”
    â€œAgain.”
    â€œSounds to me like you hung out with some liberals. I thought the good old boys kicked their asses on Saturday nights, till they all went North.”
    â€œI seem to be in Yokosuka myself.”
    â€œIndeed you do, my friend, indeed you do. You going to retire down there? If you can stand this Navy bullshit for twenty years?”
    â€œNever,” I said. Then: “I don’t think so, anyway.”
    Because we haven’t even talked about it, you and I, and until Willie asked me I had not known I had thought about it at all. But something in me had. Or had at least made a decision without telling the rest of me about it, through the process we call thinking. (Maybe all murders are premeditated but the killer never knows it.) Because I said never at once, with firmness and certainty and, in my heart, the awakening of an old dread that had slept, but lightly, on the edge of insomnia. As though Willie had asked me whether I would sleep with a coral snake.
    â€œSome of my people miss it,” he said. “They go down at Christmas. My grandparents went back to Alabama last year, to stay.”
    â€œI didn’t know you were from Alabama.”
    â€œI’m not. My parents were born in Philadelphia.”
    â€œWhy did they go back?”
    His shoulders tightened, and just as quickly his eyes were angry. He said: “Social Security buys more down there.” Then his eyes softened, and his shoulders relaxed—no: slumped toward the table that was so low I could see his belt—and he said: “To see their people. To die at home. They left it to have my father and aunts and uncles in the North. But Alabama was always home. Isn’t it strange? Home? How it can shield you from all the shit out there? The evening meal of the poor—beans and greens and cornbread and rice—and the old bed and the tarpaper roof.”
    â€œYou’ve been down