A Commonplace Book

Hanging on to Victor, I did not let him go until we were inside. I should have either dismissed him outside or held on to him longer. As it was, letting go Victor when the bar was within reach, I let go a second too early, so that Leroy Ledbetter, turning toward me in the same second, did not see me let go but saw Victor just beside me and so registered a violation. Not even that: a borderline violation because Victor was not even at the bar but still a step away. What with his white attendant's clothes and if he had been a step closer to me, it would have been clear that he was attending me in some capacity or other. A step or two in the other direction and he' have been past the end of the bar and in the loading traffic where Negroes often pass carrying sacks of oysters, Cokes, and such. As it was, he seemed to be standing, if not at the bar, then one step too close and Leroy said as his eyes went past him, said not even quite to Victor, "The window's there," nodding toward the service window opening into the alley; even then giving Victor the benefit of the doubt and not even allowing the possibility that Victor was coming to the bar for a drink, but the possibility only that he had come to buy his flat pint of muscatel and for some reason had not known or had forgotten about the service window. In the same second that he speaks, Leroy knows better, for in that second Victor steps back and turns toward me and I can see that Leroy sees that Victor is with me, sees it even before I can say, too late, "thank you, Victor, for helping me up the hill," and signifies his error by a pass of his rag across the bar, a ritual glance past Victor at the storm cloud above the saloon door, a swinging back of his eyes past Victor and a saying in Victor's direction, "Looks like we going to get it yet," and almost to Victor but no quite because it had not been quite a violation so did not quite warrant a correction therof. Victor nods, not quite acknowledging because total acknowledgment is not called for, withholding perhaps 20 percent acknowledgment (2 percent much?). He leaves by the side door.

The taste in my mouth was like brass.

Where did the terror come from? Not from the violence; violence gives release from terror. Not from Leroy's wrongness, for if he were altogether wrong, an evil man, the matter would be simple and no cause for terror. No, it came from Leroy's goodness, that he is a decent, sweet-natured man who would help you if you needed help, go out of his way and bind up a stranger's wounds. No, the terror comes from the goodness and what lies beneath, some fault in the soul's terrain so deep that all is well on top, evil grins like good. but something shears and tears deep down and the very ground stirs beneath one's feet.

When I open my eyes, I am conscious first of breathing. Something in my diaphragm lets go. I realize I've been breathing at the top of my lungs for forty-five years. Now my diaphragm moves like a piston into my viscera, pulling great drafts of air into the base of my lungs.

Students are, if the truth be known, a bad lot. En masse they're as fickle as a mob, manipulable by any professor who'll stoop to it. They have, moreover, an infinite capacity for repeating dull truths and old lies with all the insistence of self-discovery. Nothing is drearier than the ideology of students, left or right.

The old Republican Party has become the Knot-head Party, so named during the last Republican convention in Montgomery when a change of name was proposed, the first suggestion being the Christian Conservative Constitutional Party, and campaign buttons were even printed with the letters CCCP before an Eastern-liberal commentator noted the similarity to the initials printed on the backs of the Soviet cosmonauts and called it the most knotheaded political bungle of the century -- which the conservatives, in the best tradition, turned to their own advantage, printing a million more buttons reading "Knotheads for America" and banners proclaiming "No Man Can Be Too Knotheaded in the Service of His Country."

"Don't tell me the U.S.A. went down the drain because of Leftism, Knotheadism, apostasy, pornography, polarization, etcetera etcetera. All these things may have happened, but what finally tore it was that things stopped working and nobody wanted to be a repairman."