PORGY
DU BOSE HEYWARD
_Books by the Same Author_
CAROLINA CHANSONS (WITH HERVEY ALLEN)
SKYLINES AND HORIZONS
PORGY
DU BOSE HEYWARD
[Illustration]
_Decorated by_
THEODORE NADEJEN
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
_Copyright, 1925,
By George H. Doran Company_
PORGY
--B--
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FOR
DOROTHY HEYWARD
_Porgy, Maria, and Bess,_
_Robbins, and Peter, and Crown;_
_Life was a three-stringed harp_
_Brought from the woods to town._
_Marvelous tunes you rang_
_From passion, and death, and birth,_
_You who had laughed and wept_
_On the warm, brown lap of the earth._
_Now in your untried hands_
_An instrument, terrible, new,_
_Is thrust by a master who frowns,_
_Demanding strange songs of you._
_God of the White and Black,_
_Grant us great hearts on the way_
_That we may understand_
_Until you have learned to play._
I
[Illustration]
PORGY
PART I
Porgy lived in the Golden Age. Not the Golden Age of a remote and
legendary past; nor yet the chimerical era treasured by every man past
middle life, that never existed except in the heart of youth; but an age
when men, not yet old, were boys in an ancient, beautiful city that time
had forgotten before it destroyed.
In this city there persisted the Golden Age of many things, and not the
least among them was that of beggary. In those days the profession was
one with a tradition. A man begged, presumably, because he was hungry,
much as a man of more energetic temperament became a stevedore from the
same cause. His plea for help produced the simple reactions of a
generous impulse, a movement of the hand, and the gift of a coin,
instead of the elaborate and terrifying processes of organized
philanthropy. His antecedents and his mental age were his own affair,
and, in the majority of cases, he was as happily oblivious of one as of
the other.
Had it all been otherwise, had Porgy come a generation, or even a score
of years, later, there would have been a repetition of the old tragedy
of genius without opportunity. For, as the artist is born with the
vision of beauty, and the tradesman with an eye for barter, so was Porgy
equipped by a beneficent providence for a career of mendicancy. Instead
of the sturdy legs that would have predestined him for the life of a
stevedore on one of the great cotton wharves, he had, when he entered
the world, totally inadequate nether extremities, quick to catch the
eye, and touch the ready sympathy of the passer-by. Either by birth, or
through the application of a philosophy of life, he had acquired a
personality that could not be ignored, one which at the same time
interested and subtly disturbed. There was that about him which
differentiated him from the hordes of fellow practitioners who competed
with him for the notice of the tender-hearted. Where others bid eagerly
for attention, and burst into voluble thanks and blessings, Porgy sat
silent, rapt. There was something Eastern and mystic about the intense
introspection of his look. He never smiled, and he acknowledged gifts
only by a slow lifting of the eyes that had odd shadows in them. He was
black with the almost purple blackness of unadulterated Congo blood. His
hands were very large and muscular, and, even when flexed idly in his
lap, seemed shockingly formidable in contrast with his frail body.
Unless one were unusually preoccupied at the moment of dropping a coin
in his cup, he carried away in return a very definite, yet somewhat
disquieting, impression: a sense of infinite patience, and beneath it
the vibration of unrealized, but terrific, energy.
No one knew Porgy’s age. No one remembered when he first made his
appearance among the ranks of the local beggars. A woman who had married
twenty years before remembered him because he had been seated on the
church steps, and had given her a turn when she went in.
Once a child saw Porgy, and said suddenly, “What is he waiting for?”
That expressed him better than anything else. He was waiting, waiting
with the concentrating intensity of a burning-glass.
As consistent in the practice of his profession as any of the business
and professional men who were his most valued customers, Porgy was to
be found any morning, by the first arrival in the financial district,
against the wall of the old apothecary shop that stands at the corner of
King Charles Street and The Meeting House Road. Long custom, reinforced
by an eye for the beautiful, had endeared that spot to him. He would sit
there in the cool of the early hours and look across the narrow
thoroughfare into the green freshness of Jasper Square, where the
children flew their kites, and played hide-and-seek among the shrubs.
Then, when the morning advanced, and the sun poured its semi-tropical
heat between the twin rows of brick, to lie impounded there, like a
stagnant pool of flame, he would experience a pleasant atavistic calm,
and would doze lightly under the terrific heat, as only a full-blooded
negro can. Toward afternoon a slender blue shadow would commence to grow
about him that would broaden with great rapidity, cool the baking flags,
and turn the tide of customers home before his empty cup.
But Porgy best loved the late afternoons, when the street was quiet
again, and the sunlight, deep with color, shot level over the low roof
of the apothecary shop to paint the cream stucco on the opposite
dwelling a ruddy gold and turn the old rain-washed tiles on the roof to
burnished copper. Then the slender, white-clad lady who lived in the
house would throw open the deep French windows of the second story
drawing-room, and sitting at the piano, where Porgy could see her dimly,
she would play on through the dusk until old Peter drove by with his
wagon to carry him home.
§
Porgy had but one vice. With his day reduced to the dead level of the
commonplace, he was by night an inveterate gambler. Each evening his
collections were carefully divided into a minimum for room and food, and
the remainder for the evening’s game. Seen in the light of the smoking
kerosene lamp, with the circle of excited faces about him, he was no
longer the beggar in the dust. His stagnant blood leaped to sudden life.
He was the peer of the great, hulking fellows who swung cotton bales and
stank intolerably from labor in the fertilizer mills. He even knew that
he had won their grudging respect, for he had a way of coaxing and
wheedling the little ivory cubes that forced them to respond. The loud
“Oh, my Baby,” and explosive “Come seben,” of his fellow-gamesters
seldom brought silver when he experienced that light, keen feeling and
thought of the new, soft-spoken words to say. In those hours he lost his
look of living in the future. While the ivories flew, he existed in an
intense and burning present.
One Saturday night in late April, with the first premonitory breath of
summer in the air, Porgy sat in the gaming circle that had gathered
before his door in Catfish Row, and murmured softly to his gods of
chance. All day he had been conscious of a vague unrest. There had been
no breeze from the bay, and from his seat outside the apothecary shop
the sky showed opaque blue-grey and bore heavily upon the town. Towards
evening, a thunder-head had lifted over the western horizon and growled
ominously; but it had passed, leaving the air hot, vitiated, and moist.
The negroes had come in for the night feeling irritable, and, instead of
the usual Saturday night of song and talk, the rooms were for the most
part dark and silent, and the court deserted.
The game started late, and there were few players. Opposite Porgy,
sitting upon his haunches, and casting his dice in moody silence, was a
negro called Crown. He was a stevedore, had the body of a gladiator, and
a bad name. His cotton-hook, hanging from his belt by a thong, gleamed
in the lamp-light, and rang a clear note on the flags when he leant
forward to throw. Crown had been drinking with Robbins, who sat next to
him, and the air was rank with the effluvium of vile corn whisky.
Robbins was voluble, and as usual, when in liquor, talked incessantly of
his wife and children, of whom he was inordinately proud. He was a good
provider, and, except for his Saturday night drink and game, of steady
habits.
“Dat lady ob mine is a born white-folks nigger,” he boasted. “She fambly
belong tuh Gob’ner Rutledge. Ain’t yer see Miss Rutledge sheself come
tuh visit she when she sick? An’ dem chillen ob mine, dem is raise wid
_ways_.”
“Yo’ bes sabe yo’ talk for dem damn dice. Dice ain’t gots no patience
wid ’oman!” cut in a young negro of the group.
“Da’s de trut’,” called another. “Dey is all two after de same nigger
money. Dat mek um can’t git ’long.”
“Shet yo’ damn mout’ an’ t’row!” growled Crown.
Robbins, taken aback, rolled the dice hastily. Scarcely had they settled
before Crown scooped them fiercely into his great hand, and, swearing
foully at them, sent them tumbling out across the faintly illuminated
circle, to lose them on the first cast. Then Porgy took them up
tenderly, and held them for a moment cupped in his muscular,
slim-fingered hand.
“Oh, little stars, roll me some light!” he sang softly; made a pass, and
won. “Roll me a sun an’ moon!” he urged; and again the cubes did his
bidding.
“Porgy witch dem dice,” Crown snarled, as he drained his flask and sent
it shattering against the pavement.
Under the beetling walls of the tenement the game went swiftly forward.
In a remote room several voices were singing drowsily, as though
burdened by the oppression of the day. In another part of the building
some one was picking a guitar monotonously, chord after chord, until the
dark throbbed like an old wound. But the players were oblivious of all
except the splash of orange light that fell upon the flags, and the
living little cubes that flashed or dawdled upon it, according to the
mood of the hand that propelled them. Peter, the old wagoner, sat
quietly smoking in Porgy’s doorway, and looked on with the indulgent
smile of tolerant age. Once when Crown lost heavily, and turned snarling
upon Robbins with, “T’row dem damn dice fair, nigger,” he cautioned
mildly, “Frien’ an’ licker an’ dice ain’t meant tuh ’sociate. Yo’ mens
bes’ go slow.”
Then, in a flash, it happened.
Robbins rolled again, called the dice, and retrieved them before Crown’s
slow wits got the count, then swept the heap of coins into his pocket.
With a low snarl, straight from his crouching position, Crown hurled his
tremendous weight forward, shattering the lamp, and bowling Robbins over
against the wall. Then they were up and facing each other. The oil from
the broken lamp settled between two flags and blazed up ruddily. Crown
was crouched for a second spring, with lips drawn from gleaming teeth.
The light fell strong upon thrusting jaw, and threw the sloping brow
into shadow. One hand touched the ground lightly, balancing the massive
torso. The other arm held the cotton-hook forward, ready, like a
prehensile claw. In comparison Robbins was pitifully slender and
inadequate. There was a single desperate moment of indecision; then he
took his only chance. Like a thrown spear, he hurled his lithe body
forward under the terrifying hook, and clinched. Down, down, down the
centuries they slid. Clothes could not hold them. Miraculously the
tawny, ridged bodies tore through the thin coverings. Bronze ropes and
bars slid and wove over great shoulders. Bright, ruddy planes leaped out
on backs in the fire flare, then were gulped by sliding shadows. A
heady, bestial stench absorbed all other odors. A fringe of shadowy
watchers crept from cavernous doorways, sensed it, and commenced to wail
eerily. Backward and forward, in a space no larger than a small room,
the heaving, inseparable mass rocked and swayed. Breath labored like
steam. At times the fused single body would thrust out a rigid arm, or
the light would point out, for one hideous second, a tortured, mad face.
Again the mass would rise as though propelled a short distance from the
earth, topple, and crash down upon the pavement with a jarring impact.
Such terrific expenditure of human energy could not last. The end came
quickly, and with startling suddenness. Crown broke his adversary’s
weakening hold, and held him the length of one mighty arm. The other
swung the cotton-hook downward. Then he dropped his victim, and
swaggered drunkenly toward the street. Even to the most inexperienced
the result would have been obvious. Robbins was dead: horribly dead.
A scream rose to a crescendo of unendurable agony, and a woman broke
through the circle of spectators and cast herself upon the body. The
fire flickered to a faint, blue flame, unearthly, terrifying.
Porgy shivered violently, whimpered in the gloom; then drew himself
across his threshold and closed the door.
§
Catfish Row, in which Porgy lived, was not a row at all, but a great
brick structure that lifted its three stories about the three sides of a
court. The fourth side was partly closed by a high wall, surmounted by
jagged edges of broken glass set firmly in old lime plaster, and pierced
in its center by a wide entrance-way. Over the entrance there still
remained a massive grill of Italian wrought iron, and a battered capital
of marble surmounted each of the lofty gate-posts. The court itself was
paved with large flag-stones, which even beneath the accumulated grime
of a century, glimmered with faint and varying pastel shades in direct
sunlight. The south wall, which was always in shadow, was lichened from
pavement to rotting gutter; and opposite, the northern face, unbroken
except by rows of small-paned windows, showed every color through its
flaking stucco, and, in summer, a steady blaze of scarlet from rows of
geraniums that bloomed in old vegetable tins upon every window-sill.
Within the high-ceilinged rooms, with their battered colonial mantels
and broken decorations of Adam designs in plaster, governors had come
and gone, and ambassadors of kings had schemed and danced. Now before
the gaping entrance lay only a narrow, cobbled street, and beyond, a
tumbled wharf used by negro fishermen. Only the bay remained unchanged.
Beyond the litter of the wharf, it stretched to the horizon, taking its
mood from the changing skies; always different--invariably the same.
Directly within the entrance of the Row, and having upon the street a
single bleary window, wherein were displayed plates of fried fish, was
the “cook-shop” which catered to the residents of the tenement.
Porgy’s room was opposite the shop and enjoyed the great advantage of
having a front window that commanded the street and harbor, and an inner
door where he could sit and enter into the life of the court. To him,
the front window signified adventure, the door--home.
§
It was Porgy’s custom, when the day’s work was done and he had exchanged
a part of his collections for his evening meal of fish and bread, to
sit at his front window and watch the world pass by. The great cotton
wharves lay up the river, beyond the Row; and when the cotton season was
on, he loved to sit in the dusk and see the drays go by. They would
sweep into view with a loud thunder of wheels on the cobbles; and from
his low seat they loomed huge and mysterious in the gathering dark.
Sometimes there would be twenty of them in a row, with great
swiftly-stepping mules, crouched figures of drivers, and bales piled
toweringly above them. Always Porgy experienced a vague and not
unpleasant fear when the drays swung past. There was power, vast,
awe-inspiring; it could so easily crush him were he in its path. But
here, safe within his window, he could watch it with perfect safety. At
times when the train was unusually long, the sustained, rhythmic thunder
and the sweep of form after form past his window produced an odd
pleasurable detachment in his mind, and pictures of strange things and
places would brighten and fade. But the night following the killing, the
window was closed, and through the open door behind him beat the rhythm
of a dirge from Robbins’ room.
“What de matter, chillen?” came the strophe. And the antistrophe
swelled to the answer:
“Pain gots de body, an’ I can’t stan’ still.”
Porgy sat upon his floor counting the day’s collection: one dollar and
twenty cents. It had been a good day. Perhaps the sorrow that had
brooded over his spirit had quickened the sympathy of the passers-by.
“What de matter, Sister?”
“Jedus gots our brudder, an’ I can’t stan’ still.”
Ever since Porgy had come home the air had swung to the rhythm of the
chant. He divided his pile into equal portions, and commenced to pocket
one. The burden swayed out again.
“Pain gots de body, an’ I can’t stan’ still.”
He hesitated a moment, poured all the coins together again, selected a
twenty-five-cent piece which he put into his pocket, and, taking the
remainder in his hand, went out and drew himself across the short
distance to the room of mourning.
The body lay upon a bed in the corner of the room, sheeted to the eyes,
and upon its breast rested a large blue saucer. Standing in a circle
about the bed, or seated upon the floor, backs to the wall, were a score
of negroes, some singing, and others swaying, patting the floor with
their large feet. For not a single moment since the body had been laid
out had the rhythm slackened. With each hour it gathered weight until it
seemed to swing the massive structure.
Porgy had heard that Robbins had left no burial insurance, the customary
Saturday night festivities having consumed the slender margin between
daily wage and immediate need. Now, at sight of the saucer, he knew that
rumor had not erred. It had been an old custom among penniless negroes
to prepare the corpse thus, then to sing dirges until neighborhood
sympathy provided the wherewithal for proper interment. Recent years had
introduced the insurance agent and the “buryin’ lodge,” and the old
custom had fallen into disuse. It had even become a grievous reproach to
have a member of the family a “saucer-buried nigger.”
At the foot of the bed, bowed by the double weight of sorrow and
disgrace, the widow sat swaying to the rhythm like a beach palm in the
ebb and flow of a bleak sea wind.
The sight of her grief, the close room, the awful presence beneath the
sheet, and the unceasing pulse of sound that beat against his ears, all
contributed to stir a strange desire into being within Porgy. Suddenly
he threw his head back and wailed long and quaveringly. In rushed a
vast feeling of relief. He wailed again, emptied his handful of small
coins into the saucer, and sank to the floor at the head of the bed.
Presently he commenced to croon with the others, and a sense of
exaltation flooded his being, compelling him from the despair of the
dirge to a more triumphant measure.
“Oh, I gots a little brudder in de new grabe-yahd. What outshine de
sun,” he sang.
Without missing the beat, the chorus shifted: “An’ I’ll meet um in the
primus lan’.”
Then came a rude interruption. A short yellow negro bustled into the
room. His voice was low, oily, and penetrating. He was dressed entirely
in black, and had an air of great importance. The song fell away to
scarcely more than a throbbing silence. The man crossed the room to
where the widow sat huddled at the foot of the bed, and touched her on
the shoulder. She raised a face like a burned out ember.
“How de saucer stan’ now, my sister?” he whispered, at the same time
casting an appraising glance toward the subject of his inquiry.
“Dere ain’t but fifteen dollar,” she replied in a flat, despairing
voice.
“An’ he gots tuh git buried termorrer,” called an awed voice, “or de
boahd ob healt’ will take um, an’ give um tuh de students.”
The widow’s scream shrilled wildly. She rose to her knees and clutched
the man’s hand between both of hers. “Oh, fuh Gawd’s sake bury um in de
grabe-yahd. I goin’ tuh work Monday, and I swear tuh Gawd I goin’ tuh
pay yuh ebery cent.”
For a second even the rhythm ceased, leaving an aching suspense in the
air. Watchers waited tensely. Wide eyes, riveted on the man’s face,
pleaded silently. Presently his professional manner slipped from him.
“All right, Sister,” he said simply. “Wid de box, an’ one ca’age it will
cost me more dan twenty-five. But I’ll see yuh t’rough. Yuh can all be
ready at eight tumorruh. It’s a long trip tuh de cemetery.”
The woman relaxed silently across the foot of the bed, her head between
her out-flung arms. Then from the narrow confines of the room, the song
beat up and out triumphantly:
“Oh, I gots a little brudder in de new grabe-yahd. What outshine de
sun!”
The rhythm swelled, and voices in the court and upper rooms took it up,
until the deeply-rooted old walls seemed to rock and surge with the
sweep of it.
§
In the cool of the early morning, the procession took its departure for
the cemetery that lay beyond the city limits to the north. First went
the dilapidated hearse, with its rigid wooden plumes, and faded black
velvet draperies that nodded and swayed inside the plate glass panels.
Then followed the solitary carriage, in which could be seen massed black
accentuated by several pairs of white cotton gloves held to lowered
eyes. Behind the carriage came the mourners in a motley procession of
wagons and buggies that had been borrowed for the occasion.
Porgy drove with Peter, and four women, seated on straight chairs in the
wagon behind them, completed their company. From time to time a
long-drawn wail would rise from one of the conveyances, to be taken up
and passed back from wagon to wagon like a dismal echo.
Moving from the negro district into the wide thoroughfare of Meeting
House Road, with its high buildings and its white faces that massed and
scattered on the pavements, the cortége appeared almost grotesque, with
the odd fusion of comedy and tragedy so inextricably a part of negro
life in its deep moments.
The fat German who kept the shop on the corner of King Charles Street
and Summer Road, called his clerk from the depths of the building, and
their stomachs shook with laughter. But the little, dark Russian Jew in
the next shop, who dealt in abominably smelling clothing, gave them a
reproving look, and disappeared indoors.
The cemetery lay several miles beyond the city limits. The lot was bare
of trees, but among the graves many bright flowering weeds masked the
ugliness of the troubled earth. To the eastward a wide marsh stretched
away to a far, bright line of sea. Westward, ploughed fields swept out
to a distant forest of yellow pine. From the sea to the far tree tops,
the sky swung a dizzy arch of thin blue, high in the center of which
several buzzards hung motionless, watching.
In the vast emptiness of the morning the little procession crawled out
to the edge of the broken wooden fence that marked the enclosure, and
stopped.
By the time the last wagon had arrived, the cheap pine casket was
resting upon battens over the grave, and the preacher, robed in white,
was preparing to commence the service.
The mourners gathered close about the grave.
“Death, ain’t yuh gots no shame?” called a clear, high, soprano voice;
and immediately the mortal embodiment of infinite sorrow broke and
swayed about the grave in the funeral chant. Three times the line swung
its curve of song, shrill, keen, agonizing; then it fell away to a
heart-wrenching minor on the burden:
“Take dis man an’ gone--gone.
Death, ain’t yuh gots no shame?”
When the singing ceased, the burial service commenced, the preacher
extemporizing fluently. Taking his rhythm from the hymn, he poured his
words along its interminable reiteration until the cumulative effect
rocked the entire company.
The final moment of the ritual arrived. The lid was removed from the
casket, and the mourners were formed into line to pass and look upon the
face of the dead. A very old, bent negress went first. She stooped, then
suddenly, with a shriek of anguish, cast herself beside the coffin.
“Tell Peter tuh hold de do’ open fuh me. I’s comin’ soon!” she cried.
“Yes, Gawd, goin’ soon,” responded a voice in the crowd. Others pressed
about the grave, and the air was stabbed by scream on scream. Grief
spent itself freely, terrifyingly.
Slowly the clashing sounds merged into the regular measure of a
spiritual. Beautiful and poignant it rose, swelling out above the sounds
of falling earth as the grave was filled:
“What yuh goin’ ter do when yuh
come out de wilderness,
Come out de wilderness,
Come out de wilderness;
What yuh goin’ ter do when yuh
come out de wilderness
Leanin’ on my Lord.
“Leanin’ on my Lord,
Leanin’ on my Lord,
Leanin’ on my Lord
Who died on Calvary.”
The music faded away in vague, uncertain minors. The mood of the crowd
changed almost tangibly. There was an air of restless apprehension.
Nervous glances were directed toward the entrance. Peter, always
sagacious, unless taken unawares, had conferred in advance with Porgy
about this moment. When he had helped him from the wagon, he had
stationed him just inside the fence, where he could be lifted quickly
into the road.
“De las’ man in de grabe-yahd goin’ tuh be de nex’ one tuh git buried,”
he had reminded his friend.
Now, as the final shovelful of earth was thrown upon the grave, he came
running to Porgy, and lifted him quickly into the road. Behind them
broke a sudden earth-shaking burst of sound, as of the stampeding of
many cattle, and past them the mourners swept, stumbling, fighting for
room; some assisting weaker friends, others fighting savagely to be free
of the enclosure. In the center of the crowd, plunging forward with
robes flying, was the preacher. In an incredibly short time the lot was
cleared. Then, from a screening bush near the grave, arose the old
negress who had been the first to wail out her grief. She had lain there
forgotten, overcome by the storm of her emotion. She tottered feebly
into the road.
“Nebber you min’, Sister,” the preacher assured her comfortingly. “Gawd
always lub de righteous.”
Dazed, and much pleased at the attention that she was receiving, while
still happily unmindful of its cause, the old woman smiled a vague
smile, and was hoisted into the wagon.
During the funeral the sun had disappeared behind clouds that had blown
in swiftly from the sea, and now a scurry of large drops swept over the
vehicles, and trailed away across the desolate graves.
“Dat’s all right now fer Robbins,” commented Porgy. “Gawd done sen’ he
rain already fuh wash he feet-steps offen dis eart’.”
“Oh, yes, Brudder!” contributed a woman’s voice; and, “Amen, my Jedus!”
added another.
§
In the early afternoon of the day of the funeral, Porgy sat in his
doorway communing with Peter. The old man was silent for awhile, his
grizzled head bowed, and an expression of brooding tenderness upon his
lined face.
“Robbins war a good man,” he reflected at length, “an’ dat nigger,
Crown, war a killer, an’ fuhebber gettin’ intuh trouble. Yet, dere lie
Robbins, wid he wife an’ fadderless chillen; an’ Crown done gone he
ways tuh do de same t’ing ober again somewheres else.”
“Gone fuh true. I reckon he done lose now on Kittiwar Islan’, in dem
palmettuh t’icket; an’ de rope ain’t nebber make fuh ketch um an’ hang
um.” Porgy stopped suddenly, and motioned with his head toward someone
who had just entered the court. The new arrival was a white man of
stocky build, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, and a goatee. He was swinging
a heavy cane, and he crossed the court directly and paused before the
two. For a moment he stood looking down at them with brows drawn
fiercely together. Then he drew back his coat, exhibiting a police
badge, and a heavy revolver in a breast holster.
“You killed Robbins,” he shot out suddenly at Peter. “And I’m going to
hang you for it. Come along now!” and he reached out and laid a firm
hand upon the old man’s shoulder.
Peter shook violently, and his eyes rolled in his head. He made an
ineffectual effort to speak, tried again, and finally said, “’Fore Gawd,
Boss, I ain’t nebber done it.”
Like a flash, the pistol was out of its holster, and pointing between
his eyes. “Who did it, then?” snapped the man.
“Crown, Boss. I done see him do um,” Peter cried in utter panic.
The man laughed shortly. “I thought so,” he said. Then he turned to
Porgy.
“You saw it too, eh?”
There was panic in Porgy’s face, and in his lap his hands had clinched
upon each other. But his eyes were fixed upon the paving. He drew a deep
breath, and waited.
A flare of anger swept the face above him. “Come. Out with it. I don’t
want to have to put the law on you.”
Porgy’s only answer was a slight tremor that shook the hands in his lap.
The detective’s face darkened, and sweat showed under his hat-brim.
Suddenly his temper bolted.
“Look at me, you damned nigger!” he shouted.
Slowly the sitting figure before him relaxed, almost it seemed, muscle
by muscle. At last the hands fell apart, and lay flexed and idle.
Finally Porgy raised eyes that had become hard and impenetrable as onyx.
They met the angry glare that beat down upon them without flinching.
After a long moment, he spoke slowly, and with great quietness.
“I ain’t know nuttin’ ’bout um. I been inside, asleep on my bed, wid de
do’ closed.”
“You’re a damn liar,” the man snapped.
He shrilled a whistle, and two policemen entered.
“He saw the killing,” the detective said, indicating Peter. “Take him
along, and lock him up as a material witness.”
“How about the cripple?” asked one of the officers.
“He could not have helped seeing it,” the man said sourly. “That’s his
room right there. But I can’t make him come through. But it don’t
matter. One’s enough to hang Crown, if we ever get him. Come, get the
old man in the wagon.”
The policeman lifted the shaking old negro to his feet. “Come along,
Uncle. It ain’t going to be as bad for you as Crown, anyway,” encouraged
one of them. Then the little party passed out of the entrance, leaving
Porgy alone.
From the street sounded the shrill gong of the patrol wagon, followed by
the beat of swiftly receding hoofs upon the cobbles.
§
Ten days had passed since the detective had taken Peter away. For a week
the wagon had waited under the tottering shed, and the dejected old
horse had subsisted upon a varied diet brought to him by the friends of
his absent master. Then a man had come and taken the outfit away. In
answer to the protests of the negroes, he had exhibited a contract,
dated three years previous, by which Peter was to pay two dollars a week
for an indefinite period, on an exorbitant purchase price. Failure to
pay any installment would cause the property to revert to the seller. It
all looked thoroughly legal. And so the dilapidated old rig rattled over
the cobbles and departed.
Then the man from the installment furniture house came. He was a
vile-mouthed, bearded Teuton, and swore so fiercely that no one dared to
protest when he loaded Peter’s furniture on his truck and drove away.
Now there remained in a corner of Porgy’s room, where he had taken them
into custody, only a battered leather trunk, a chromo of “The Great
Emancipator,” and a bundle of old clothes; mute reminders of their
kindly and gentle old owner.
II
[Illustration]