Funny Video With Little Black Boy Says Look at My Guns and Flexes His Arms
by CLARA LAIDLAW
1
THE little black boys, Samuel and Hamuel, were the first, indeed the only Negro children I'd ever had in my classes in Northford. I remember very well the first time I saw them, on Wednesday, the second day of school, when my freshman math class assembled for the first time.
They sidled into the room shyly, after all the white children had rushed in to begin disputing noisily over the choice seats in the back of the room. The black boys hesitated just inside the door, looking around in a bewildered way, and then they slid quickly into two empty front seats. I couldn't help noticing how bent and shriveled and small their bodies were. Obviously they were twins, but even the usual physical retardation of twin children did not explain all their difference from the robust white children. There was hunger in the shallowness of their chests, and their thin, bent shoulders told of hard work beyond their years. When they sat down, the seats were almost ludicrously large for them.
The white children buzzed and tussled until I called them to order, but the little black boys sat like twin statues, their eyes gleaming white as they stared at me, their round, fluted lips sober and still. They had cheap new dime-store tablets before them on their desks, and penny pencils, the dull brown ones with pointed erasers wedged into the tops.
When I asked them, as I had the others, if they wanted to be called by their full names or by nicknames, the frozen stillness of their faces broke for the first time, and the one nearest the blackboard said, his white teeth flashing, "I'm Sammy. He's Hammy."
Some of the little girls behind him began to giggle. I nodded hurriedly and said, "All right, boys. Sammy and Hammy it shall be," and turned quickly to take up the first lesson.
As the days and weeks went by, I paid little attention to the twins. They were quiet and sober and good. They never whispered to anyone and no one whispered to them. I grew used to seeing their black faces staring blankly up at me, or their kinky black heads bent laboriously over their work. With diminished penny pencils clutched tightly in skinny black fingers, they worked hour after hour to produce grubby papers covered with painfully worked problems, all wrong. The class was a slow one; but of all the group, Sammy and Hammy were the slowest. If, after weeks of work, they became finally convinced that if A and B, working alone, could each do a piece of work in six days, working together they could do it in three, then the next day they would be equally certain that, if one tablet cost ten cents, two would cost five.
I used to find myself scolding them occasionally, and they would look up at me with remorse in their liquid black eyes, their mouths drawn down into a mask of guilty grief.
Once I said, "Oh, Sammy and Hammy, what am I to do with you?" and Hammy said, "We're sorry we's so dumb, Miz Carey." Then he smiled and Sammy smiled, like two bad little dogs trying to be ingratiating. So we were friends again, and I began writing on their papers, to their innocent delight, "This is better than yesterday's paper," or "Fine! You had two problems right today " instead of the bare 0's and 20's they really earned.
One day I found a paper of Hammy's from which the comment I had written had been neatly cut.
"We saves them," Hammy said shyly when I questioned him. "Our mammy pastes 'em in a big book we got from the tailor shop. She say — 't aint every boy gets him so many nice words said to him — least, not every black boy."
2
" Those twins!" the other teachers groaned. Poor little black boys, they couldn't do anything at all. The other children shunned them, too, it seemed, and their days would have been sad indeed had they not had each other for company. Each day they brought their dinners and sat alone on the steps eating their plain bread from a paper sack, while the other children ate and played noisily in the lunchroom.
Sammy and Hammy would sit watching the antics of their fellows with eager interest and delight, whispering to each other, chuckling companionably at whatever pleased them, but never offering to join the fun. Their apparent contentment in their isolation puzzled me until one day Sammy said, concerning another matter, "Our mammy say — you twins, so you be twins together," and I understood what the mother was doing for them: making the gulf between white and black be their choice, guarding them thus from fear and from desire for what they couldn't have, making them selfsufficient in their twoness.
Still, their aloofness bothered me. I didn't want to make an issue of it, but when two or three boys or girls would come in to discuss class politics or the play, or to get news for the paper, or just to visit, I'd begin in a roundabout way to talk about democracy and the American dream and the Golden Rule, and finally, as offhandedly as I could, by way of illustration, I'd bring in Sammy's and Hammy's need of friends. The boys and girls would say, "Yes, Miss Carey, ' "Of course, Miss Carey," but the shadow would come down over their faces. They would look secretive and stubborn, and I knew they'd been talked to at home.
In a way, you couldn't blame their parents. The twins lived alone with their mother in an old shack 'way down at the shore. At first the black woman had gone about asking for work for herself and her boys, and she had done washing for a few ladies until it had got around that Cash Benson, the town's ne'er-do-well, had been seen hanging around the shack. Now she and the boys managed to live with no apparent means of support, and lately when the woman came to town, everyone could see that she was visibly big with child. "Cash's nigger woman," the men on the street corners called her, guffawing as she passed. No wonder white parents kept their children from making friends with her boys.
She had gone to the Swedish Baptist Church twice when she had first come to town, taking the boys, stiff and clean in their patched Sunday suits. "I been baptized and bred up pure Baptist," she had told Reverend Swanson proudly, hesitantly accepting his proffered hand as he had bade her good day at the door of the church. Behind her the Swedish Baptist ladies had whispered and stared. The next Sunday, when she and the boys had taken their seats humbly in the last pew, there had begun a rustling as, one by one, some irately, some shamefacedly, the white ladies had risen and left the church. The black woman had stayed for the service, though Sammy and Hammy, watching her face, had begun to cry. She had never come again.
The way things were, there didn't seem much I could do except be especially nice to Sammy and Hammy, and that was hard too, because I certainly couldn't praise their work, and to treat them differently from the others would have antagonized the white children and made things still harder for the twins.
Toward spring it came time to have the annual freshman party. We had a class meeting, and the youngsters decided to charge twenty-five cents a ticket to pay for the lunch, and to have dancing and a program. Miss Carey, of course, was to help with the program. I always got that!
"Mr. President," I said. (We try to teach them to observe parliamentary procedure, heaven help us!) "Mr, President, may I say a word?"
"Keep still, you kids," the class president yelled gallantly. "Miss Carey's got sumpin to tell you."
When approximate quiet had finally been achieved, I said, "The program committee and I are going to need help, so if you can play a musical instrument, or sing, or dance, or recite, or stand on your head —" (Hoots from the class. "Miss Carey made a joke! Listen to her!") "why, come and tell us. We need talent for our program."
Then, before the tumult could get under way again, I added, remembering the time I had missed the eighth grade picnic because my mother had been away visiting, and I had been too proud to borrow from the neighbors, "And another thing — sometimes twenty-five cents is hard to get hold of, so if there's anyone who wants to go to the party but who hasn't the money at the time, why, you just come to me, privately, and we'll see if we can't fix it up."
The next day after school, I was correcting papers when the door opened and the twins sidled in. My heart sank. After all, did it matter what one apple cost if a dozen cost twenty-five cents?
Sammy's black face glistened, and he moistened his lips with a pale tongue. "Us — us —," he whispered.
"We's got us each a box," said Hammy quickly from over Sammy's slight shoulder. His eyes rolled toward his brother fearfully. Obviously, it was not what they had intended to tell me.
"A box?" I echoed, a little relieved that the bewildering price of apples was not in question.
"A gittar," explained Sammy, his black face deadly serious. "We each got us a gittar. We plays us gittar music."
"Also, us — we sings," nodded Hammy enticingly. They obviously wanted me to say something. Their eyes begged me to say it, but I could not imagine what it was. It somehow never occurred to me that the two black boys would be coming to see me about the party.
But that was it. Sammy and Hammy wanted to go to the party, and, moreover, they wanted to be on the program.
"But I ain't got no two-bits," said Sammy, his mouth drooping sadly.
"Nor me," echoed Hammy. "You said — come to you, Miz Carey —" His voice died away plaintively.
"We'll work for you — hard," offered Sammy.
Their eyes held mine apprehensively, like spaniels' eyes, hoping for a kind word.
"That's fine," I said with unnecessary vigor. "Fine! I'll put you down for the program. And don't you worry about the money. Your music will pay your way."
It was the wrong thing to say. I knew it when the boys stiffened into black statues and their faces hardened into expressionless masks,
"Our mammy say — work for what you gets," Hammy said at last, adding with sober dignity, "So we works for you."
"Yes," I said quickly, "maybe you'd better, so the others won't be jealous and think I like you best."
A look of blind adoration came into Sammy's face, and Hammy grinned in a pleased sort of way.
So it was fixed. I gave the boys the tickets, ostentatiously taking fifty cents out of my purse and putting it ceremoniously into the "party box." The work was to be done later when I needed something done.
3
As the day for the party approached, excitement began to run high in the freshman class. The twins whispered to me that they had been "practicing up," and the sight of their raptly pleased faces intensified in me a little feeling of doubt I'd been trying to suppress. What, I thought, if the white children should be unkind to the black boys? What if the others on the program should refuse to appear with them? And what about the dance? What little girl would dance with them — and would I want her to, if she would?
I needn't have worried about the program. Apparently no parental ultimatum had been laid down. Perhaps no one had mentioned that the black boys were to make music, or perhaps the hours of the party were to be a sort of secular Truce of God wherein even black boys with a bad mother could have their hour of fun.
The party was to begin at eight, and at seven-thirty the gym was almost filled with children, all the little girls in bright new party dresses, with their hair tortured into elaborate beauty-parlor curls, sitting shyly on one side of the decorated gym, while all the little boys, dressed uncomfortably in new suits, with their damp hair brushed to alarming neatness, were seated on the other. The problem of the first half of the evening, as far as we teachers were concerned, was to coax the two groups, much against their wills, to consent to dance together, while the problem of the last half was to pry them apart, and get them home before irate parents began telephoning.
But first came the program. Promptly at eight, since everyone had already been there for at least a half-hour, the curtain went up, after several false starts and muffled grunts from the laboring stagehands.
Mary Ellen Adams and Jo Anne Merrill gave their usual military tap-dance, which, since Mary Ellen is short and fat and lazy, and Jo Anne tall and thin and active, was rather far from the military effect desired. Little Genevieve Johnson sang " Ciribiribin," which she pronounced "See-ree-bee-reebean" for some unknown reason, and, with practically no encouragement, graciously added the encore "Blues in the Night." Glen Tillman played an excruciating violin solo, during which, mercifully, one string broke, so that the rest of the solo was, by anybody's mathematics, only three-fourths as bad as the first. Benny Norton gave a reading in Swedish dialect with occasional lapses into Irish, Yiddish, and just plain American.
Then the twins came out from the opposite side of the stage, hesitating, looking dwarfed and lonely under the floodlights, black faces glistening and fearful, patched Sunday best pressed within an inch of its life. They clutched their cheap "gittars," looked out uncertainly at the darkened gym, struck a few chords, and then they sang.
I don't remember much else, not even what they sang. There was stamping of feet when they finished, and shouting. They sang song after song. They sang as the class danced, when it did dance. They sang with the Capehart and without it. They sang while the lunch was passed out until the class president himself brought them two heaped plates and clapped each of the boys on the shoulder by way of congratulation, while the class cheered through mouthfuls of sandwich and cake and waved pop bottles in the air.
They never left the stage all evening. Now, at last, something was well with them: the little black boys, for whom 3 X 8 was a variable, could sing.
4
After that, school was their heaven. Boys and girls who couldn't play with them outside of school never failed to call: "Hi, Ham! Hi, Sam!" in school. Math homework papers grew mysteriously accurate though tests still revealed the most abysmal misconceptions concerning mathematical practice. Even the seniors had them sing at their class party. They made the senior glee club, though they had feared before to try out for the junior one.
And they haunted my footsteps with a doglike persistence that came near to wearing me out.
"When we going to work out that fifty cents, Miz Carey, ma'am?"
"When the frost is out of the ground," I explained for the tenth time. "I want you to spade my flower garden."
A day later: "When that frost get outa that ground?"
"Not for two weeks, at least."
Two days later: "That frost gone yet, Miz Carey?"
"Not yet," patiently.
"My! My! Sure stays a long time — that frost!"
When at last the frost did depart, the two black boys attacked my little garden spot with a vigor it had never known before. They trailed quack-grass roots to their remotest hiding places and exterminated them forever. They spaded and weeded and spaded again.
"That's a great deal of work for fifty cents," I teased at last, a little troubled at the sight of their thin bent backs stooping over my garden so long.
"Our mammy say — work good," Sammy said firmly, and Hammy's monkey-thin face echoed the stubborn set of his brother's jaw.
"You give us those seeds — we plant 'em," Hammy called pleadingly.
They planted my seeds, they hovered over the new little shoots, they weeded and watered and tended. I tried to give them extra pay, but they stiffened with hurt pride.
"Our mammy say — you take good care o' Miz Carey's garden, for she been purely good to you."
So I gave up in despair and let them do as they wished. I did all I could to get my neighbors to give them odd jobs, but only a few did, for the black boys' mother had had her baby, a girl baby, almost white, old Dr. Bates said, with hair like Cash Benson's.
In school the boys still haunted my room after class. They'd sit staring at my face, saying never a word until I had finished my work, and then not much unless I set the pace.
One afternoon I'd been reading a volume of Blake's poems, and on an impulse I asked them if they'd like me to read them a poem about a little black boy. I didn't think they'd understand a word of it, but I love to read poetry aloud, even if it's only to myself. Only after I had started to read did it occur to me that the black boys might read into it something that Blake had never intended, that I might be shaking their protective unawareness, might be emphasizing their difference in a way bad for them. But I had started and I had to go on.
They sat still as statues while I read: —
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O, my soul is white!
White as an angel is the English child,
But I am black, as if bereaved of light.
My mother taught me underneath a tree,
And, sitting down before the heat of day,
She took me on her lap and kissed me,
And, pointing to the East, began to say:
"Look at the rising sun: there God does live,
And gives His light, and gives His heat away,
And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.
"And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love;
And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
Are but a cloud, and like a shady grove.
"For when our souls have learn'd the heat to bear,
The cloud will vanish, we shall hear His voice,
Saying, 'Come out from the grove, my love and care,
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.' "
Thus did my mother say, and kissed me;
And thus I say to little English boy.
When I from black and he from white cloud free,
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy,
I'll shade him from the heat, till he can bear
To lean in joy upon our Father's knee;
And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him, and he will then love me.
I watched their faces as I finished. They were still and solemn, but radiant.
"Our mammy say — heaven's like that," Hammy said softly at last.
"Who that man say all that?" Sammy whispered in an awed voice.
"William Blake, a very great poet."
"He a preacher, Miz Carey, I bet?" Hammy asked, looking at me hopefully.
"No, not exactly," I answered, and saw the radiance in their faces dim at my words. Inpulsively I added, "But he was a man who thought he spoke with angels, and — and he wrote 'as one having authority, and not as the scribes'!" And I found myself telling them how Blake, dying, sang of the glories of heaven opening before his dimming eyes.
Hammy's face shone, and his teeth flashed in a grin of solemn delight.
"He sure knew — that white man!"
"God sure told him sumpin," Sammy affirmed, nodding deeply.
"Read it again, please, Miz Carey," said Sammy suddenly.
I read it again, and they both sighed with one accord.
"That's better'n music," Hammy whispered. "Read it once more again? Huh? Please? "
I laughed and shut the book. "No, twice is enough. Some other day, perhaps."
But I never read it to them again.
As he went out of the door, Sammy turned. "You like rock gardens, Miz Carey?"
"Why, yes, of course," I said, "but if you're thinking— You've done altogether too much —"
"We knows a place," Hammy was saying dreamily, "a place where there's moss like a feather bed an' little white violets that's sweet as Jesus' breath —"
5
That was the last I was ever to see them. They rowed across to the place they knew after supper that night, a marshy island not very far offshore. Folks who saw them start said the water was choppy as they were going over. Coming back the boat overturned, and before the men could get to them they were drowned
I heard the next morning in school.
The late May sun was warm on my hair that day, when school was over and I was plodding along the beach toward the Negro woman's shack. The silvery sand filtered into my slippers and dribbled out with each difficult step. Under the slanting sun the smooth blue waves lapped the shore and retreated in little slipping movements, as if they had never known storms or death.
Around the shack the rank shore grasses had been cleared away with scrupulous care, and in the shifting sand a few drooping plants gave evidence of the twins' efforts to make a garden of their own.
She opened the rough, tar-paper covered door when I knocked — a thin, worn woman of about forty, with the fine features and liquid eyes one sometimes sees in people of her race. Her lined black face was masklike in its calm, but the eyes themselves were alive and tragic.
I don't remember what inadequate thing I said to her, but she must have felt my sorrow reaching out to hers, for she thanked me with something of the boys' doglike look in her eyes.
"They loved you so, Miz Carey," she said strangely, and I had the feeling that behind her simple words there was something strong and seeking, something she wanted of me — wanted badly, if only I could find out what it was.
She asked me in with homely courtesy and pulled out a rough chair for me to sit on.
The one room was painfully neat and bare. In a broken tumbler on the table a small bunch of short-stemmed white violets was beginning to droop, and on the ledge of the one window I saw the purple tulips I had given Hammy two days before. A table, three old chairs, — one with no back, — a small camp stove, and two camp cots were the only furnishings. The floor, rough and splintered from much scrubbing, was immaculate.
That space of floor seemed to me that day to be waiting mutely — waiting for the boys, who hadn't yet been brought back in their cheap little coffins. People never knew until long afterwards that it was Cash Benson who had paid for it all, giving them the best funeral he could afford. That, at least, is to his credit, though he went off the next week and never came back. Reverend Swanson, too, came, the good old man, although he had to face the disapproval of the Swedish Baptist ladies to do it. I've thought of it often since and blessed the kindness of his gentle old heart.
But that day there were just the two of us. I sat by the table, and the afternoon sun through the only window threw the shadow of Hammy's tulips across the bare floor.
The boys' mother stood by the other side of the table, black and monumental and unweeping, staring at me with that queer tense look, seeming about to speak and then closing her lips gravely.
The baby began to cry, and she went over and picked the little thing up from the bed, blindly, as if she hardly knew what she did. After a moment she sat down opposite me, rocking the child gently in her arms.
Awkwardly I tried to comfort her, saying it was good she had the girl baby to fill a part of her heart. She looked at me strangely across the sun-mottled oilcloth, her ugly black face sharp with pain.
"But they was my true-born child'en," she said, as if reasoning with one who was dull of understanding. Slowly she looked down at the whimpering infant in her arms. "She white man's child, poor little thing."
Then she looked me straight in the eyes, not doglike but womanlike.
"I was all alone," she said simply.
I tried to speak, but there was nothing to say now.
When I started to go at last, it was with the feeling of how very futile my visit had been, of how empty sympathy and words of sympathy were to this woman.
She rose reluctantly when I did, saying softly, "You was good as they said you was to come—" Then she added pleadingly, as if she feared I would misunderstand, "But it ain't fitten you come no more. Besides—" Her voice caught, but she swallowed and went patiently on, "Besides it be best you remember Hamuel and Samuel as they was — yestiday."
I nodded mutely, and she seemed satisfied that I had not misunderstood or taken offense.
But on the doorstep she stopped me again, hesitating, uncertain, and I knew that the thing that was haunting her was still unsaid.
I could feel the conflict of urgency and fear in her, the tension and the longing, but I had to watch her helplessly, hoping she would speak, afraid to ask for fear what I might say would be wrong.
She drew a deep breath then, throwing her head back nervously. Her eyes were shining and fearful, and the words, when they came, were slurred and hurried, breathless.
"Last night — suppertime — Hammy 'n Sammy, they full of some word-song you read 'em. They say — it better'n music. They go away singin' it to them two — Something about — black boys? You remember, Miz Carey, ma'am?"
Her breast rose and fell in agitation, and the child, awakening again, began to cry.
"I'll send you a copy," I said thickly. "A poem I read to them."
She shook her head. "You say it to me, please? I never did learn book-reading."
I turned my head away, thinking of the scrapbook of "nice words" she had kept for her boys.
What I could remember, garbled, imperfect, hall-forgotten, I tried to say, remembering the two thin, black faces lifted to mine in the quiet of the dusty schoolroom.
She was very still when I had finished, but her face was bright with a faith I could never know.
"My Hammy and Sammy?" she said wonderingly. "Maybe they God's white lambs today?"
And then she wept, putting her face down against the baby in her arms. "Oh, bless God," she whispered brokenly. "Blessed God, make it so. Sweet Jesus, make it so."
I touched her hand silently in farewell and went away. At the gate, when I turned and looked back, she had lifted her head, and I saw that she was looking far out over the water, gazing across at the distant shoreline of that green, marshy island where the moss is like a feather bed and the little white violets are as sweet as Jesus' breath.
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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1942/12/the-little-black-boys/657336/
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