The Old Religion Read online

  “Their notions of beauty,” he thought, “are cheap. How could they not be? (To forgive them.)”

  But they’d seen it, he realized later. They’d seen it, in fact, before he had. In that shrug. He had not consciously remembered her, but they had read intuited processes hidden from his very consciousness. Could that be?

  Yes. He’d remembered her. Yes. Later. And he’d told them all. Everything except the smell.

  Except her smell. For he knew, that would be to invite them to hang him.

  Her dress looked so limp, so greasy, blown by the fan.

  The yellow ribbon tied to the fan fluttered. It was cleaner than her lank blue dress; and why the hell was she looking at him? He’d paid her. Why did she hesitate? What was it to him that she did? And was he responsible for every girl in the plant?

  They’d said he had a reputation as a lecher. One girl and then another had reported overtures he’d made. Events which never happened in the world. But they were made so real.

  “Their stories are so real,” he thought. “And they would die the death before they would disclaim them. I know they would. They would go to the rack before they would recant.”

  “You, you the Flower of Chivalry. You who’ve come forth Risking All,” the prosecutor had said. Frank snorted, shaking his head at the memory.

  What was it they’d risked, who had gained sympathy and notoriety by their lies?

  “He came up to me one Saady, and we were going out, by the second floor, and he ast me to stay. So my girlfriends went down, and I thought maybe he wannit to tell me he was going to move me up the line, ’cause I been working there the sixteen months, an’ they said after twelve months there if you was doin’ good they’d move you. But nobody come to me. An’ I don’t know why, ’cause I’m doin’ a good job. So I thought he was goin’ to say that they were movin’ me, when he ast me to stay.”

  And here she’d put her head down.

  Then the Judge, with more concern than Frank had ever heard in a man’s voice, as if the whole of the unsure advance over savagery were concentrated in those words, said, “Please continue,” then he sighed once and, again, said, “… please.”

  She’d raised her head. Brave, quiet, noble—who would not be struck by her courage, he wondered, except the man who was being murdered by her lie.

  “Am I going mad?” Frank thought, remembering. “Well, no. Well, no. It’s better. I am better. When I sat there though …” And, at the thought, he was, once again, in that courtroom; as he went back every day. As in a fever dream.

  He was once again in that courtroom, and surrounded by his enemies, his mind destroying him as he sat there.

  “Not that they’re lying,” he’d thought, “and not that I’m going to die, but that no one will ever know. No one will ever know. No one will ever know,” he’d thought. As they’d applauded her. As she stepped down, and the judge cried for silence, and the bailiff cried for silence, but the courtroom knew they did not mean it.

  “They are linked by the unspoken bond. Even in this,” he thought. “Even in this so-small ritual, where each knows that the other knows, and they are delighted by their part in the play. Delighted by that unanimity.

  “The poor fucking swine.”

  He heard the roaring in his ears, in the courtroom. The timbre changed, as the cheering spectators tried to follow the girl, Alice, the factory girl, as she walked out of the court; and then the crowds out in the corridor began to cheer her, then the crowds on the street. And he could picture her face, her mask of controlled emotion, her humility, her performance of unassuming virtue, of simple honor, unworthy of their accolade but accepting it, in understanding that it was awarded her not for herself but as a representative of Southern Womanhood.

  “Yes. As that,” she said, in her step, in her averted gaze, in her demeanor. “As that, yes, I will accept it.”

  And he could not rise from his seat and kill her—that was the injustice—who’d killed him. Who’d walked him that much closer to his death through her perjury. He could not burst down the aisle, duck under the arms of the sheriffs, and move through the crowd in the halls. Perhaps he could, scurrying like a rat, so quick as to escape their notice, down the corridors, down the stairs, on to the street, where he would find the slut surrounded—wait, but wait, then he’d be free: turning the other way, he could run to the wharves, onto a ship, or out into the country. …

  A runaway slave’s life beckoned to him. He’d sleep in the lofts of barns, and eat—whatever was it that he’d eat? Well, he’d discover it, as he lived. As he lived that life he would discover how to live it. He was small and he was quick and light, and now those attributes would work to his advantage.

  He didn’t need much. He needed so little, really. That was his secret. That was his strength.

  Waiting for his attorney

  And there, of course, was the fear of what “they” would say.

  “They” being the Jews more than the Christians; for the Christians would say anything in any case; and, as much as one might care for their opinion, there was nothing one could do to influence it.

  “They look at us,” he thought, “like we think about the Etruscans: a strange people about whom we know nothing.

  “The brand of religion you practice”—he framed his pronouncement in his mind—“can only be called furtive.

  “You are backstreet Jews.”

  He saw, in his mind, their reaction—the reaction of his fellow Jews, as he preached to them—mild and wondering, waiting, as if there were to be a predicate; “you are backstreet Jews,” and as they found there was none, they looked away, catching one another’s eyes to comment, as on an announcement that fire was hot.

  “Furtive Jews.

  “And in Leviticus it threatens desolation to the land if the Jews do not follow their commandments. And it says that in that desolation the land will enjoy those Sabbaths that the arrogant denied it. Could that not be applied,” he thought, “—as I’m sure it was applied, and could say if I knew the Talmud, if I knew the Commentators—to the weekly Sabbath? He Who Does Not Keep the Sabbath being brought low and, so, forced to rest?”

  He hated the set of his face when he had had and was conscious of having had what he felt was a profound thought.

  For his face relaxed and his eyes looked down and aside, and when he felt his face so conform, when he was conscious that he had been taken, for a moment, away from himself, he was pleased.

  He felt his face, in this attitude, betrayed his new approach to wisdom, and he suspected that it made him handsome. Momentarily handsome, and he hated himself for the suspicion and for his enjoyment of it.

  “Who am I to approach wisdom, and how can it be wisdom if it is, on the instant, perverted into vanity. How weak I am. How sickeningly weak I am.

  “Even, as I do, even to feel superior to the …” He wagged his head from one side to the other, thinking, “the relatives … Who am I to feel this superiority?”

  “Now: study,” he thought. “As they say, ‘Who rises refreshed from his prayers, his prayers have been answered.’ I wished for a Breguet watch. In a gold case. With my initials worked on the case. And I spoke of it. And my wife bought it for me. The happiness of my possession was marred by the thought that I had angled for it. For it was not a surprise, rather an anticipated fulfillment or disappointment, so how could I look to it without feelings of either greed or anger? I contrived it. I suffered for it. Did the watch keep better time than the Illinois? Or than the dollar Ingersoll? Yes. And then so what? For whenever I looked at it, what could I think, save, ‘This is the watch I pestered a woman for’?

  “‘Of such, and of such quality,’ I would look at it and think, ‘that it never can decay. This is the watch I will have till I die. This is, in effect, my watch, and I pushed for it and I achieved it and now it is mine.’

  “And now it is gone. They might have told me not to wear it to the jail. My wife might have had it. She might have had it now, and encl
osed it in a glass bell on a stand. On an easel. Or hanging, yes …” He congratulated himself for not shrinking from the thought. “All right, the word is ‘gallows,’ and a watch, like anything else, can be suspended. And why, in the name of Christ, should I have worn it at the trial? And why have glanced at it, those how many times a day? For what?

  “And yet. And yet. And, God knows, yet I could not help myself—as if there were going to be an end of it. When there was never an end of it. And yet I wore that watch. As if the chain were armor.

  “And I wore it on the Sabbath. And I worked on the Sabbath, and I broke the Sabbath. What does it excuse me that thousands also did, that my relatives did, or that we never kept the Sabbath. Since our family—”

  He looked up at the sound of the wooden door down the corridor, the old green door to the guard’s station, as it opened.

  He nodded. Out there were the stove and the coffeepot and the deal table.

  And the room was clean and pleasant.

  He wondered if the guards knew how pleasant it was.

  There was an odor to it. There was a smell of coffee, and he imagined he could almost smell the leather of the new briefcase—and hear it squeak—as his lawyer came down the corridor.

  The prosecutor

  The prosecutor rose to his feet. He lowered his head, and his cheeks moved for a moment, as if he were sucking something out of his teeth. He turned to the jury:

  “Let us expatiate upon the properties,” he said, “of the Black Race. And let us begin with the words of Scripture. For do we not find it written in Leviticus that if thy servant love thee, thou shall put an awl through his ear, binding him to the door. And bind him, as it were, to your house for life?

  “And I ask you: Why would one submit to that?

  “And I tell you the answer you know, which is that it is better than the alternative. Which, to the nigro mind, is not to be conceived.

  “To the mind of one bred, nay, born to be a slave, the alternative is not to be conceived. And you know it as well as me.

  “… to venture into the world—a foreign world—unequipped, scorned, no, not for what one is. but for the actions one has taken.

  “I say, further, not for the action’s presumption, but for its inevitable discohesion: resulting in misery for black and white alike, but—and as you hear me I know you will nod with me and sorrow with me—infinitely more oppressive to the black.

  “To leave his state? To bear the just wrath of a city disordered—through caprice? Why? Who would desire to do that?

  “And, again, we know it’s said if every man would act in his best interest this would be paradise on earth.

  “And we can, yes, envision nigros who would, through folly, through, as I have said, caprice, would ‘quit their master’s house.’

  “We have experienced it. And what is the inevitable …”

  “Why can I not cease worrying about the factory?” Frank thought. “How strange I am. No, I am a vile man. Incapable of concentrating. Mr. Fowler goes on hours at a stretch, and here I am, brooding over the price of cedar blanks. Price of cedar be damned. I will think of something else. I will think of the Brooklyn Zoologic Gardens, and the behavior of the apes. And I will think how no one can say anything novel about them. …” His face brightened. “Except that!” he thought. “And Morris said no one could say a thing illuminating or novel about the apes, and here I have.”

  “… and look at him,” he heard the prosecutor say, and he turned his head to see the object being indicated, and he saw the whole courtroom staring at him, and he felt the grin on his face, and knew that Fowler’s next sentence would be an indictment of that grin.

  “… while we sit here, gentlemen …” He saw the jurors nodding. “… and he … this man,” the prosecutor said, “who took that girl, a working girl, a Southern girl, who wanted nothing more nor better than to earn her bread, and serve her family; who took her, and debauched her, and killed her, and hid the evidence of the crime; who had the gall … to blame a nigro, yes, a nigro, mark you, also entrusted to his care; who, by his very presence, and I use the word, gentlemen, by his presence as a guest in our state, and our region, might have, in humility, might have deemed himself held to a higher …”

  “No, but he is good at it,” Frank thought. “Who could deny him that?”

  Fowler droned on, and Frank endeavored to compose his face. “To look away is to acknowledge guilt; to look at them would arouse their anger; to stare ahead might seem to acquiesce in the punishment.”

  “… Yes, you may well be confused,” he heard the prosecutor say. “Indeed you may. In what may be the first display of human behavior we have seen from you, since the inception of …”

  “The apes. The factory, the cedar blanks, Aunt Bess …”

  The room stank of sweat and tobacco. The air was still as stone. The prosecutor’s word fell heavily, one by one. Frank sat like an animal.

  “If he were innocent, he would rise up and kill the fellow,” one of the reporters thought. “A man would. I would.”

  Jim

  And, one step and then the next. Frank had sat in the court, trusting, as all his family trusted, in some plan or expertise, some strategy or talent, which would, at the end, reveal the prosecution for the monstrous savage lie it was.

  But day after day, they argued over the moment that he’d left the house, the identity of the Boy on the Bicycle, the time he had seen Mrs. Breen, and what he had said to her about the parade.

  And Frank sat there, thinking, “Yes. This is bad. It’s pointless. In each moment the central fact of the case is ignored, the jury is left gazing at me as at a monster. But I must sit here and let justice take its course. For there is a progression, a ritual torment, which, for some reason, it has pleased God to spare me until this point. And if it is my lot to endure the trial, I will do so—as others who were unjustly accused have done before me. I am no better than they. And if it is an initiation—if I can think of it as such—to discover my Manhood, then I will endeavor to accept it as such.”

  Here his thoughts would resolve themselves into the theme of “Americanism.” He would seek and find comfort in his community with both the Judge and the accusers, all connected in the name of Americanism. In the unavoidably impure attempt to find the truth through formal means.

  “For if I cease to think thus, then I will go mad,” he thought.

  And he persevered, day after day. Striving, with all his will, not to look at his watch.

  While the prosecutor pointed to him, saying, “There he sits, the monster. Look at him: impassive. No grief, No feeling. Not a shade of either remorse or shame upon his face. Barely cognizant of the tragedy he has wrought.”

  And Frank would turn to face the jury, and see them nodding, unconsciously, in agreement. Consumed in this “thing,” as he phrased it to himself—this fervor of rectitude.

  They looked at him—increasingly, as the trial progressed—with revulsion; and, worse, with self-congratulation for their ability to put their revulsion aside.

  They were murdering him.

  And how they loved Jim and his testimony.

  “Nawsuh, I nevah …”

  “Did you write that note …?”

  “Naw suh. ’F I could write, I wun’t be workin’ down the fact’ry, you know. Temporary, though I’m glad to …”

  Here he looked and saw, as he knew he would, the jury nodding in support of Jim’s portrayal of the Happy Slave; and, at this particular point, in anticipation, then in approbation, of his ritual injection of submission.

  “… so glad to have the job …”

  “Yes, Jim,” they thought, “and this is how a society runs. When each is grateful for his place, and acts accordingly. Will the Strong not nurture the Weak? The White not lead the Black …?”

  Then who was the outsider? The Kike. The “Nigger to the nth degree”—as the paper had called him—who should have known better, having been granted the almost-more-than-provisional status of
a White Man. But, yes, they could see it now. In his eyes—to which the papers so often referred. His feral eyes, as they said, His blank look. His lack of remorse. What contrast with this specimen of contrition, this, finally, this man, this Jim, who, though inferior in race, in intellect, in gifts, in status, still was the equal of all in his dedication to the idea of the whole.

  “… and when …” Jim paused, and Frank saw the lawyers, the Judge, the courtroom, the world, in effect, wait. Patient. Endorsing him: “Yes, Jim, Yes. We know that it is difficult; and we know, even with our dispensation, that your natural courtesy—not to say your laudable understanding of your place—inhibits the mention of the White Woman, Yes, but we wait.”

  “… and when …” Here Jim paused again, his face a mask of humility and confusion. “People,” it said, “I am overcome.

  “And I know you would bid me continue. And I would please you and do my duty. But I am moved by grief. And know how unfitting, how insolent, how near-to-obscene it would be for me to deign to display my grief for a White Woman. I am lost. Help me.”

  In memory, here, Frank half saw the prosecutor go to Jim and lay his arm around his shoulder.

  It had not actually occurred, but the feeling was so strong in the room, Frank was sure he was not the only spectator who had misremembered it. Jim then continued speaking of the girl. Of how he had seen her, in the week previous, “having soft conversation” with Frank, in the narrow corridor outside the shipping area. Of how Frank advanced and how she retreated, shaking her head. Lost, confused.

  Was there ever such a man?

  The trial progresses

  How could they say Jim could not write?

  Frank and his attorney had told the prosecution of the existence of a note from Jim asking for reemployment and they had searched the office, the files, but could find no such note.

  Even in its absence, how could the prosecution found its case upon a negative proposition: “No one has seen Jim write, so he cannot write”? But Frank had seen him write, as had his assistants in the office. One by one they were deposed; and one by one denied the existence of Jim’s application; not “I do not recall ever seeing such a note,” but, “No. It never existed.”