John D MacDonald – Travis McGee 10 The Girl In The Plain Brown Wrapper

“And that is exactly what you believe about me?”

“Mister, I don’t know what to believe about you, and that’s the truth.”

“I hunted you up because I wanted to see how Cathy made it. And I wanted to ask a favor.”

“Like what?”

“I’ve seen a lot of towns like this one. Enough to know that the black community knows everything that happens in the white community. Maids and cooks and yard men make one of the best intelligence apparatuses in the world.”

“Sneaky niggers listening to everything, huh?”

“If I happened to be black, you can damn well bet I’d keep track, Mrs. Walker. Just to keep from getting caught in the middle of anything. I would have to be just that much faster on my feet, just to get a job and keep a job. I’d listen and I’d know.”

She tilted her head as she looked up at me. “You almost know where it is, don’t you, man? If you were black, now, wouldn’t you be too smart to be a yard man?”

“Exactly the same way that if you were white, you’re too smart to be a motel maid.”

“So what makes you think I’m so stupid I’d get myself messed up in some white killing by coming to you with anything I hear about it?”

“Because I liked that nurse. Because without special help the cops might plumber this one. Because you can follow your hunch, which tells you I’d never make any attempt to bring you into it at all. But the big reason you’ll do it is because it’s one of the last things in the world you ever thought you’d do.”

She snickered. “My grandma kept telling me, she’d say, `Lorrie, when you got your haid in the lion’s mouth, just you lay quiet. You keep forgetting and it’s gone get you in bad trouble.'”

“So?”

“Mr. McGee, I got to do the late checkouts. Cathy wasn’t all as fine as I said. She said she felt far off. She worked slow and her tongue sounded thick and she said she felt like her skull was cracked open up on top. So Jase drove her on home, and I got two of her late rooms and three of my own to do up.”

“Will you think about it, at least?”

With an enigmatic smile she walked away slowly. She had her hands in the pockets of the uniform skirt. She scuffed her heels and went a dozen steps, then stopped and looked back at me over her shoulder, her smile merry and impudent.

“I might see if there’s a thing worth knowing. But if there was and I told you and you told somebody I told you, if they come to me about it, they’re going to come up onto the dumbest black girl south of George Wallace.”

Nobody looks far enough down the road we’re going. Someday one man at a big button board can do all the industrial production for the whole country by operating the machines that make the machines that design and make the rest of the machines. Then where is the myth about anybody who wants a job being able to find it?

And if the black man demands that Big Uncle take care of him in the style the hucksters render so desirable, then it’s a sideways return to slavery.

Whitey wants law and order, meaning a head-knocker like Alabama George. No black is going to grieve about some nice sweet dedicated unprejudiced liberal being yanked out of his Buick and beaten to death, because there have been a great many nice humble ingratiating hardworking blacks beaten to death too. In all such cases the unforgivable sin was to be born black or white, just as in some ancient cultures if you were foolish enough to be born female, they took you by your baby heels, whapped your fuzzy skull on a tree, and tossed the newborn to the crocs.

And so, Mrs. Lorette Walker, no solutions for me or thee, not from your leaders be they passive or militant, nor from the politicians or the liberals or the head-knockers or the educators. No answer but time. And if the law and the courts can be induced to become color-blind, we’ll have a good answer, after both of us are dead. And a bloody answer otherwise.