Slow train through Carolina

RICHARD SHERMAN

The train was a two-segmented worm— baggage car and coach—inching up from Savannah, Georgia, to a place called Hamlet, North Carolina, from eight-thirty in the morning to five-twenty in the afternoon, from Spanish moss to long-leaf pine, through 263 miles of swamps and cotton fields and rice plantations and fifteen desolate clusters of time-blackened shacks that had the names of towns and the appearance of festers.

To the north were cities, snowstorms, factory whistles and belching smokestacks; to the south, palmettos, bathing beauty parades, the soft thud of chips falling on green felt, and people who earned their living by writing column-long descriptions of other people's luncheon parties. But here, lining the tracks along which the train crawled sluggishly, here was ruin: ruin and decay and the mute panorama of slow starvation.

This was the Southland. This was Dixie.

From the Jim-Crow section of the coach came the sound of black hands slapping overalled thighs in rich mirth. Hearing it, the boy paused in his monologue, smiled as one smiles at children in their play, and shifted on the soot-grained seat. There were only four people in the white section: the conductor, busy with yellow papers spread out on a suitcase before him; a dusty-looking woman who had been reading the same movie magazine for three hours and still found it enthralling; a traveling man who was listening to the boy because he had nothing else to do; and the boy himself.

He was about nineteen, with skin tanned the color of varnished pine, shaggy hair burned whitish by the sun, and blue eyes that had become faded from too long an exposure to a bright, brassy glare. He wore a checkered suit much too large for him, a grimy blue polo shirt open at the neck, and dirty white sports shoes; and his only baggage was a battered cardboard box with "West Palm Beach Laundry, You Damn Your Sox We Darn Them" printed across its top.

Running his tongue around his suncracked lips, he took a long breath and began to talk again. "And Maxie Baer was down there, too," he continued. "Yeah, and I caddied for him. Him and A1 Jolson and Harry Richman—there was a lot of guys like that down there. Big tippers, too, believe you me. And women—Jeeze, you oughta see the women. Some of 'em play in shorts. You know, little pants that don't reach no farther than to here." He placed a dirty hand adroitly.

"Must a been nice." The traveling man leered knowingly. He was a big man, bluejowled and thick-wristed, and a linked gold chain (with pendant Elk's tooth) arched over his vest like a road ascending an overstuffed mountain. "Must a been very nice."

The boy made a disdainful gesture. "Aw, I don't mean that. I di'n't have nothing to do with the women. I got a girl myself. Up in Philly." He gazed reminiscently out the fly-specked window beside him. "Boy, if she ever thought I even looked at anybody else she'd just about kill me, I guess. We got a arrangement."

" "What kind of arrangement? You mean you're gonna marry her?"

"Sometime. That's where the arrangement comes in. We're gonna wait till I get a regular job, see, and then we're gonna get married. But meanwhile we both got to consider ourselves as married already. I don't play around with nobody else, and she don't either."

The traveling man withdrew a cigar from his breast pocket, bit off the end, and spat vaguely in the direction of the aisle. "You mean you think she don't," he said.

"I mean she don't." The faded eyes flashed, and the muscles on the tanned face tightened.

The traveling man laughed. "Aw right, aw right," he said. "Then she don't."

The train was slowing from a crawl to whatever you call a movement that is less than a crawl, yet isn't quite a halt. From beyond the doorway that divided white skin from black, the brakeman bawled "Witherbee!" bawled again, "Wither-bee!" Gradually, with an iron shudder, the train stopped completely, and the passengers looked out at Witherbee, which proved to consist of five or six unpainted shanties and four Negro children wearing mail-order aviation caps and staring up at the windows with open mouths. After a wait of ten minutes, during which no one got on and no one got off and nothing exchanged hands except a crate of chickens, the train gave a preliminary spasm and resumed its nosing northward.

The boy had spent the ten minutes cleaning his fingernails with the jagged edge of a broken pencil; the man, watching him. When the convulsions of getting under way had ceased and the coach had settled into its normal pace, the man spoke. "You been away how long, all told?" he asked.

The boy replaced the pencil in his pocket. "Four-five months," he said. "Five, I guess. Gee, it sure seems like longer. Seems like about five years."

"And when you think you'll hit Philly?

With the breaks, I mean."

"Well, with the breaks I kind of plan on Tuesday." His brow wrinkled in sober computation. "If I sleep somewheres in Hamlet, maybe I can get a hitch to Norfolk tomorrow. Or maybe I can get a hitch to Raleigh tonight, and then I'll get farther than Norfolk tomorrow. It all depends." He sighed. "Boy, it's gonna seem a long time till Tuesday, though."

For several moments there was silence, except for the groaning of the couplings and the sound of black laughter from beyond the doorway. The man chewed the unlighted cigar until the end in his mouth became a thready pulp. Then he neatly bit off the pulp, tossed it under the seat, and began chewing again. He regarded the boy speculatively. "What's your girl's name?" he said.

"Lillian. But I just call her Lil."

"She pretty?"

The boy's face glowed. "Pretty? Listen, you oughta see her. She's got blue eyes as big as silver dollars. She works in a beanery, and a lot of guys that come in there, they tell her she oughta be in the movies. I guess that shows how pretty she is."

The man examined his owrn hands—fatpalmed and stained by nicotine at the nails —thoughtfully. "What else do they tell her?"

Suddenly the boy looked at him. "Say," he said, "just whaddya mean by that crack?"

Again the man laughed. "Nothing. Nothing a-tall." The laugh gurgled down into his stomach and remained there, quietly sputtering. "You needn't get sore about

it," he added. "I bet she's O.K.—a regular Di'mond Lil, so to speak. I bet she's just as good as you think. I bet she wrote you every day you been gone. Now ain't she?"

There was just a fraction of a second before the boy answered, but when he did answer his voice was loud. "Sure," he said. "Practically every day, that is. Lately she ain't written so often because she knew I was coming back soon, so there wasn't no point in it. And of course I been on the road about a week now, so she couldn't write. But before that she wrote two-three times a week. I got all her letters in there."

He pointed to the laundry box. After a momentary hesitation, he leaned over and lifted the cover from the box. From beneath a wad of dirty clothes he drew out a painted scarf bearing the reclining figure of a bathing girl and the legend, "Fair Days in Florida." "That's for her," he said proudly. "I won it in a raffle." The man inspected it and said that it certainly was nice, and that she probably deserved it, too. "Can't be much fun for a pretty girl working in a beanery all day and just writing letters at night."

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There was warm gratitude in the boy's tone. "You said it. I sure got a lot to make up to her for." Tenderly he folded the scarf and buried it again.

The man yawned mightily, then relaxed. "Speaking of beaneries reminds me, I know a girl that works in one in Charleston—the Come-On-Inn on King Street. She says it ain't no fun slinging hash to a lot of bums."

"No, it ain't at that. When I get me a job Lil ain't gonna work there no more either. But just now—well, just now she can't do nothing else. Things is certainly terrible in Philly."

"This girl I knew in Charleston," continued the man, "she was quite a number all right. What with one thing and another I guess maybe she don't have such a bad time after all." He chuckled, as if he were turning over a memory in his mind. "And neither does the customers." Again he yawned, again relaxed. "Didn't get to Charleston this trip. But I will next time, though. I'd sure like to see Evelyn again. That's this girl's name—Evelyn. She knows what's what, too, I'm telling you. She's a A-number-one baby."

The boy was looking at him. "Yeah?" he said, slowly, uneasily. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. I remember one time—" suddenly the man stopped. "Oh, well, I guess we can let that go."

Outside, the land crept by, flat, brown, barren. Long rows of tangled cotton vines stretched endlessly to the horizon, but at this season they bore no cotton: only an occasional dirty gray tuft left over from last year's crop. A horse stood in a field, still as a statue, its ribs outlined against its sides like the ribs of a steam radiator. The sun was shining, but there was no life in it, and looking out the windows you could not have told whether the weather was warm or cold. It was merely weather.

"Sure is an awful looking country," said the man. "Ain't it?"

The boy tore his eyes away from it. "What?" he said. "Wha'd you say?"

"I said it sure is an awful looking country."

"Oh, oh, yeah. It sure is."

Some of those smart birds up in Washington ought to come down and take a look at this country, the man said; yes, and they ought to try to sell hardware down here, too—try to sell anything, as far as that went. He guessed they wouldn't be so sure everything was going to be all right then. No, sir, it'd take more than the Democratic party to put this territory back on its feet. Not that the Republicans could he doing any better. You take the Republicans, now. . . .

A town named Poston was stopped at and left behind; then a town named Mullins, and Smithboro, and Dillon, and Clio. At each of them there was a long halt for no apparent reason. The sunlight edged farther along the seat, crossed the aisle, started to climb up the seat opposite. The woman carefully put her movie magazine beneath her purse, for further perusal at a later time, and settled down to sleep. The conductor snapped a rubber band around his papers and, taking a sandwich from the paper bag beside him, began to eat, his jaws moving up and down slowly in rhythm with the wheels.

At last the man rose, lifted his suitcase from the rack above him, shook his topcoat, and put the soggy remainder of the cigar, still unlighted, back in his pocket. The train had again slowed down, and the brakeman's bored voice was crying, "McColl!"

"Well, this is where I get off," said the man. "I got to make a call here, and then I'll get a lift into Hamlet before supper." He extended his hand. "So long, buddy, and I hope you catch lots of hitches from here on."

The boy took the hand. "Thanks," he said. "I guess I will. Anyway, I ain't worrying."

The man started down the aisle. "Give my re-gards to Lil," he called back, but the boy, looking out the window, didn't seem to hear him.

And then, after McColl, there were only three people in the white section: the conductor, the dozing woman, and the hoy, who sat still staring out the window—at the slowly passing landscape, the landscape that passed so slowly that one could see individual twigs on trees—and cracking the knuckles on the fingers of each hand; beginning with the thumb and going on, finger by finger, and then beginning over again: crack . . . crack . . . crack.

Suddenly he stood up, looked around the car, and went back to where the conductor was munching on a chocolate bar. Fists clenched beside him, he looked down at the vizored cap and the placidly rotating jaws.

"Why don't he make better time?" he said, and his voice was high and sharp and imploring. "Why does he have to stay so long at each station? Why don't he go faster?"

Calmly the conductor rolled tin-foil between his fingers. "Now take it easy, sonny," he said. "Take it easy. Wishing ain't going to get you there, you know. You just got to wait."