The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter: Part One: Chapters 4–6

His brown hair fell down over his forehead and his mustache was awry.

Even his wing-shaped eyebrows were rough and tousled.

He jingled the seventy-five cents in his hand and bit his lower lip until it was mottled and scarlet.

The café was very dark after the brightness outside. Everything looked dingier and quieter than he had remembered it.

‘I’ve seen that show. It’s not much—just a couple of contraptions such as a flying-jinny and swings. It corrals the colored people and mill hands and kids. They move around to different vacant lots in town.’

The motionless wooden horses were fantastic in the late afternoon sun. They pranced up statically, pierced by their dull gilt bars.

The wooden cavalcade around them seemed to cut them off from the rest of the world.

The hard, blue sky had blanched and in the east there was a white moon.

He scowled up into their puzzled, sallow faces.

As he walked stiffly down the street, the sound of their laughter and catcalls still followed him.

The light above his head made a queer reflection of himself in the glowing wineglass he held before him—the same caricature of himself he had noticed many times before on the curved surfaces of pitchers or tin mugs—with his face egg-shaped and dumpy and his mustache straggling almost up to his ears.

'...To begin with I like words. Dialectic materialism—Jesuitical prevarication’—Jake rolled the syllables in his mouth with loving solemnity—‘teleological propensity.’

'...To begin with I like words. Dialectic materialism—Jesuitical prevarication’—Jake rolled the syllables in his mouth with loving solemnity—‘teleological propensity.’

'...To begin with I like words. Dialectic materialism—Jesuitical prevarication’—Jake rolled the syllables in his mouth with loving solemnity—‘teleological propensity.’

'...To begin with I like words. Dialectic materialism—Jesuitical prevarication’—Jake rolled the syllables in his mouth with loving solemnity—‘teleological propensity.’

His thoughts had careened in several directions and he could not get control of them.

His hands had always an immaculate, shrunken look, as though they had been scrubbed with a brush and soaked for a long time in a pan of water.

Smells of the supper began to fill the stifling room.

In the quietness the clock on top of the cupboard sounded very loud, and because of what they had just said to each other the monotonous ticking was like the word ‘chil-dren, chil-dren,’ said over and over.

But all his life he had told and explained and exhorted. You cannot do this, he would say.

It is not more children we need but more chances for the ones already on the earth. Eugenic Parenthood for the Negro Race was what he would exhort them to.

‘I am not interested in subterfuges,’ said Doctor Copeland. ‘I am interested only in real truths.’

‘It mighty nigh time for these to be tender,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Now I think I’ll start making some of them good little hoecakes to go along with them.’

But beneath that soft gentleness there was something stubborn in her, and no matter how conscientiously he studied it all out, he could not understand the gentle stubbornness in his wife.

And when they were even babies he would tell them of the yoke they must thrust from their shoulders—the yoke of submission and slothfulness.

There could be no fanciness—no gaudy calendars or lace pillows or knickknacks—but everything in the house must be plain and dark and indicative of work and the real true purpose.

And another time a kewpie doll with feather skirts was on the mantelpiece when he came home, and Daisy was gentle and hard and would not put it away.

He knew, too, that Daisy was teaching the children the cult of meekness.

I really fond of them as I can be. Them three little children is just like some of my own kinfolks.

‘You must look out for your own livelihood first.’

The quiet insolence of the white race was one thing he had tried to keep out of his mind for years.

When the resentment would come to him he would cogitate and study.

‘I mean that to you and Hamilton and Karl Marx I gave all that was in me. And I put all of my trust and hope in you. And all I get is blank misunderstanding and idleness and indifference. Of all I have put in nothing has remained. All has been taken away from me. All that I have tried to do—’

Then later, inasmuch as he had been invited in a cordial manner to return, he made another visit.

When Singer came into his room he ambled placidly to meet his friend.

When Singer came into his room he ambled placidly to meet his friend.

When he saw that nothing good to eat had been concealed there, he dumped the gifts disdainfully on his bed and did not bother with them any more.

The old feeling of gaiety and bliss was so quick in him again that he could not control himself.

His second visit to his friend was like the first, except that the old men in the room watched them listlessly and did not play slapjack.

But Singer pretended that he did not understand their questions, and his smile was inscrutable.