Yeamon laughed. I’m happy enough. Why don’t you fire me?
There was a tense silence. We all waited for Lotterman’s next move, amused and a little bewildered by the whole scene. At first it had seemed like just another one of Lotterman’s tirades, but Yeamon’s maniacal replies had given it a weird and violent flavor.
Lotterman stared at him for a moment, looking more nervous than ever, then he turned and went into his office.
I sat back in my chair, grinning at Yeamon, then I heard Lotterman shouting my name. I spread my hands in a public shrug, then got up slowly and went to his office.
He was hunched over his desk, fumbling with a baseball that he used as a paperweight Take a look at this, he said. Tell me if you think it’s worth condensing. He handed me a sheaf of newsprint that I knew was Yeamon’s story.
Suppose it is, I said. Then I condense it?
That’s right, he replied. Now don’t give me any shit. Just read it and tell me what you can do with it.
I took it back to my desk and read it twice. After the first reading I knew why Segarra had called it useless. Most of it was dialogue, conversations with Puerto Ricans at the airport. They were telling why they were going to New York, what they were looking for and what they thought of the lives they were leaving behind.
At a glance, it was pretty dull stuff. Most of them seemed naive and ignorant — they hadn’t read the travel brochures and the rum advertisements, they knew nothing of The Boom — all they wanted was to get to New York. It was a dreary document, but when I finished it there was no doubt in my mind as to why these people were leaving. Not that their reasons made sense, but they were reasons, nonetheless — simple statements, born in minds I could never understand because I had grown up in St. Louis in a house with two bathrooms and I had gone to football games and gin-jug parties and dancing school and I had done a lot of things, but I had never been a Puerto Rican.
It occurred to me that the real reason these people were leaving this island was basically the same reason I had left St. Louis and quit college and said to hell with all the things I was supposed to want — indeed, all the things I had a responsibility to want — to uphold, as it were — and I wondered how I might have sounded if someone had interviewed me at Lambert Airport on the day I left for New York with two suitcases and three hundred dollars and an envelope full of my clippings from an Army newspaper.
Tell me, Mr. Kemp, just why are you leaving St. Louis, where your family has lived for generations and where you could, for the asking, have a niche carved out for yourself and your children so that you might live in peace and security for the rest of your well-fed days?
Well, you see, I. . . ah. . . well, I get a strange feeling. I. . . ah. . . I sit around here and I look at this place and I just want to get out, you know? I want to flee.
Mr. Kemp, you seem like a reasonable man — just what is it about St. Louis that makes you want to flee? I’m not prying, you understand, I’m just a reporter and I’m from Tallahassee, myself, but they sent me out here to —
Certainly. I just wish I could. . . ah. . . you know, I’d like to be able to tell you that. . . ah. . . maybe I should say that I feel a rubber sack coming down on me. . . purely symbolic, you know. . . the venal ignorance of the fathers being visited on the sons. . . can you make something of that?
Well, ha-ha, I sort of know what you mean, Mr. Kemp. Back in Tallahassee it was a cotton sack, but I guess it was about the same size and —