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Show May 13, 1977 Page fi Signpost r Special Literary Supplement SOMETHING SLEEPING WAKES by Dave C. Nielsen That summer the moist, hot air was smokier, thicker, heavier. The dark smokestacks nearly black at their tips of the towns' two distilleries and of the tannery and foundary, and the monstrous brick shapes and superstructures of the Hunger Steel Mill and the Hunger Coal Mines jutted into the grey August horizon, making it look jagged and vicious, as if the lines of the horizon had been cut by a child with scissors, and as if the child's hands were too small for the scissors large and clumsy. The smokestacks were standing where maple and sycamore had once stood, as if to replace them somehow by their verticality alone. Progress had come to Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Most of the seventeen thousand plus people that lived in Hopkinsville, the adults that is and some of the older boys too, weretwelve-hour-a-day workers at the Hunger Mill or the Hunger Mines. The younger ones went to school. And most of them went to school in the summer too: their parents weren't exactly poor, or at least that wasn't what they would have called it. They didn't call it anything perhaps they were too tired to waste words about something that they couldn't have changed even if they had tried. They didn't try. They went to work. The children, those not old enough or big enough to be any help in a mine or mill or factory, went to school, even in the summer. The Booker T. Washington Colored Grammar School was in that part of the town where the colored, or darkened people, and the yallers, lived or existed. It was that same part of a town that could be found in any industrialized city in any of the southern states in 1928, as if these towns-within-towns had been planned, as if their evolution of decay and putrefaction could have been found in blueprints for the other part of the same town, as if one designer had created and kept both files, adding to one as he did to the other. The Booker T. Washington Colored Grammar School was colored. It was colored with whatever it was in the moist, thick, heavy grey air of Hopkinsville that had turned the bricks of the building to a dark grey-brown. We didn't know then why the buildings of our two part town separated not by railroad tracks but by some seemingly invisible yet perceptible line which everybody, regardless of color and ignorant of reason or question, honored were colored with it. Even the gilded monstrous plaque that hugged the wall above the entrance to Booker T. Washington had been turned to that same oppressive grey-brown. Perhaps we were too young to care, or to know, or even to see. It seemed that we were as alien to the adults and their world as we were to the white people and theirs, as if the four worlds of white and black and adult and child were each exlucsive of the others, but that they still were one world, as if they all comprised one vicious and outrageous web and as if the web were held together by the only thing that everybody and everything had not choice but to share the air, the smoky, thick, heavy and always moist air. It oppressed everyone and everything and even itself: it was doom. And everyone, or so it seemed then, ignored the source of the oppression, as if the grey smoke and the smokestacks that it came from could not have been connected, as if even logic itself had been tainted too. The gilded monstrous plaque that announced the entrance to Booker T. Washington Colored Grammar School had been donated to the school by Mr. Manfred Hunger. He owned the steel mill and the coal mine and a department store and most of the liquor stores and three gasoline stations and probably more. He was the sort of a man that kept what he did and why he did it and who he did it with in secrecy. If Mr. Manfred Hunger had been a poker player he would have won at that too, not by the fall of the cards nor by outright cheating, but with and by his scheming and cunning and by his ability to bluff. Mr. Manfred Hunger always went to church on Sundays and probably owned the steeple too. Nearly half of the buildings in Hopkinsville, at least those that weren't homes, bore his name. That summer was the summer of the most memorable performance of Prince Charming and the Sleeping Beauty that the townsfolk of Hopkinsville had ever seen. The play was an annual event a tradition. Miss Lillian Rosenthal was a tradition too. It seemed to us that she had always been and would always be the sixth grade teacher at Booker T. Washington. She wasn't exactly old but she wasn't exactly young either. Miss Lillian, as we called her rewrote the script each spring for its performance in the third week of each August. But for all the changing she did, it seemed that the play never really changed much, as if she was obligated by some force or power or habit even to perpetuate the sameness, as if she not Qnly would not, but could not change it significantly but could only alter it just enough so that the audience, who were faithful supporters of the tradition, might be able to know that some changes, however small, had been made, as if she was appeasing them or gratifying herself somehow. We would not 005KOSOCOOOO5CCC0900CCCK have, perhaps could not have known it then but Miss Lillian Rosenthal and Mr. Manfred Hunger were very much alike. It seemed that the things about Prince Charming and the Sleeping Beauty that never changed had become a part of all of us the whites and blacks and adults and especially us, the children. That summer, however, it seemed as though everything and everyone had become a part of the play even the hot moist August air. It seemed as though the smoky thickness and heaviness that hung about the town and outside the old Cooper Opera House was as much a part of the drama as Sleeping Beauty or Prince Charming, as though it should have been included in the list of Players. That summer the play bore the same subtitle that it always had and would, even after what happened that summer: a Modern Morality Play of Conflict between the Forces of Good and Evil. The Force of Good was always represented by the white or light-skinned children in Miss Lillian's sixth grade class or by those of similar complexion in Cyril Cusack's fifth grade class or Mrs. Anna Massey's fourth grade class. The Force of Evil was always represented, and quite appropriately some thought, by the black or dark-skinned children in those same classes. It was as simple as that: white and light against black and dark. There were three luminary roles in Miss Lillian's annual summer production of Prince Charming and the Sleeping Beauty: the Prince, the Beauty, and the Head Evil Fairy. It provided for a dramatic and somewhat symbolic constellation, one which Miss Lillian always took pains to emphasize when she rewrote the script each spring. On one side stood Prince Charming who, by his very excellence was, and quite fittingly so some thought, the Head of the Good Fairies. On the other side stood, or lurked, the Head Evil Fairy but he, unlike the Prince, had no name. Forming the synthesis of this triangle was Sleeping Beauty who, perhaps because of her perpetual somnolence or because of her beauty or perhaps because of both or neither, stood above, transcending the Forces of Good and Evil. The standards by which Miss Lillian selected the children who would play the three starring roles, like the play itself, never really changed. The Head Evil Fairy was always the darkest-skinned boy that tried out even if he tried out for the role of Prince Charming. Sleeping Beauty was often the prettiest, but more often and more importantly, the fairest-skinned girl that tried out. And for Prince Charming's role there was only one standard and beyond that there were no further requirements, not even talent, not even desire: he must not be black, could not be dark, should be light, and ought to be: white. That summer Theodore Lucas Harmon tried out for the role of Prince Charming for the third time in as many years. His friends didn't call him Theodore or Lucas; they called him Lucky. Lucky was black. Lucky had never played the role of Prince Charming but he had been the Head Evil Fairy twice. Lucky took everything and everybody to heart. It seemed that his teachers Cyril Cusack and Mrs. Anna . Massey could sense the despair and the insult that he felt and, at times, radiated; he was still too young to know how to hate. That was something that he would never learn. In his ignorance of hate he learned how to feel hurt and he thought, or perhaps just assumed that everybody felt the same commotions that he felt, that everyone and everything could or should have felt the affront and outrage when he had twice been denied the role of Prince Charming. Lucky did not know why he wanted to be Prince Charming. It was not because he wanted to be the leader of the Force of Good. And it was not because he wanted to wear the splendid white costume or to wield the shiny sword or to vanquish the Force of Evil. When he had first thought of trying out, it was as if a bubble had burst, letting something out of confinement, as if he had not so much thought of it as remembered it. Perhaps he wanted to be Prince Charming because the Prince was fortunate, because the Prince was fortunate enough to have been born a prince and because he was fortunate enough to love and be loved by the Sleeping Beauty. The first time that he was denied the role of Prince Charming Lucky was sad. If the role had been given to the boy who desired it and hoped for it and deserved it most, Lucky would have gotten it. That was the year that Randy Charlesworth got the part. Randy could not act but his father owned a hardware store in nearby Kingston. It seemed that Randy did not particularly want the part, but things came easily to the Charlesworths. Randy was white and had probably the straightest teeth in all of Hopkinsville. All of the Charlesworths had straight teeth. The second time that Lucky was denied the role of Prince Charming he was furious. He lost it to Skinny Fechner. Skinny Fechner had a lisp and there was something queer about his eyes that you noticed right J away: they never looked right at whatever it was that he looked towards. Whatever Skinny Fechner looked at he missed it by a few inches and if what he looked at was a ways away, he missed it by a few yards. He was always looking above whatever it was he wanted to see. And if he looked at you you would think that he was looking not at your eyes but at your hair; it was most unnerving. Skinny's wrists stuck through and past the sleeves of the costume that Miss Lillian had made (and nobody, perhaps even she, knew how long ago that had been) for Prince Charming. The costume had that odor that things have that only come out of a closet but once a year, an odor that Lucky would never know. The costume did not have to fit the boy who wore it, but the boy who wore it had to fit the custom : Skinny was white. So Miss Lillian had given Lucky the role of Head Evil Fairy for two years running. This buffered, but did not reliev" the sadness and the fury and the outrage that he felt. He began, not consciously but after the manner of young boys who have come to know despair and despairing, to feel that he had been cheated or teased, that the role of Prince Charming had been meant for him to want but not to have, like someone was dangling an invisible golden object on an equally invisible golden filament before the seat of his desiring, and that whoever or whatever was doing the teasing was laughing. And the anguish was as real as the laughing was cruel. But Lucky was accustomed to cruelty. Her name was Thelma Cudlipp and she had been the object of his desiring and adoring and perhaps even lusting since that first time that his eyes had happened on her. He remembered still when and how: his eyes looked, turning his head to follow his ears in the direction of that voice; it was as if the voice, and the lips that stopped it, and the cheeks that complemented the lips, and the face whereon they blushed, and the fair form that was graced by the face had been put there, in the range of his vision and hearing by someone or something, as if the rasp and liquid beauty of that voice had been meant for his ears alone, that by hearing it he had been resolved, as if his flesh and the loose ends of his desiring had found their source and end in that voice. That same voice had laughed at Lucky when she read the note that he gave her. She did not say anything she just laughed! That was when and how he had learned about cruelty, the kind of cruelty that only a child can hurt with and be hurt by innocent unintentional cruelty. The laughing hurt more than anything she could have or might have said would have hurt. It seemed to Lucky that the hurt hurt less than the remembering. He could not stop the remembering from coming back. If he had thought to think he might have thought: if I could just forget! Cont. on next page |