and utterly displaced, I thought of him always as a Southerner unable to bear scorn; who had yet borne scorn all his days. One who wandered through some great city’s aimless din, past roar of cab and cabaret, belonging to nothing and nobody. A walker in search of something to belong to in order to belong to himself.
Where crossing-bells announced the long freight moving through the Georgia Pines, I had seen him riding shoeless on a boxcar roof. I had seen him with his face framed between the bars of the El Paso County Jail, looking out. I had seen him taking charity in a Salvation Army pew: a man representing the desolation of the hinterland as well as the disorder of the great city, exiled from himself and expatriated within his own frontiers. A man who felt no responsibility even toward himself.
“Keep things goin’ up, Son,” Luther advised me, “never inform on a sergeant to a private—inform on the private to the sergeant. Never inform on a lieutenant to a sergeant—inform on the sergeant to the lieutenant—Up up up.”
There were wild pigs below the station’s floor. At night we heard coyotes cry.
Luther boggled off one morning but failed to return that evening or the next. Two nights later I heard a car wheel up—then no sound but that of the frogs in the ditch. Standing in the station door I discerned, dimly, a figure crouching. I called out but got no reply.
The next morning I discovered that Luther had siphoned the gas out of both tanks. I was stuck in the chaparral with nothing to drink but creek water, nothing to eat but black-eyed peas, and in debt to Sinclair Oil & Refining Company for a hundred gallons of gas. I started thumbing my way toward Mexico.
In the small-time vice-village of Matamoros I took a room in a hotel run by a woman who had entitled herself “The Mother of the Americans,” though she didn’t look like anyone’s mother. There I wrote the first chapters of a novel I first called Native Son.
Reading, thirty years after, this attempt to depict a man of no skills in a society unaware of his existence, the curiously opaque face of Lee Harvey Oswald, alive one day and dead the next, comes through like the face of new multitudes.
Belonging neither to the bourgeoisie nor to a working class, seeking roots in revolution one week and in reaction the next, not knowing what to cling to nor what to abandon, compulsive, unreachable, dreaming of some sacrificial heroism, he murders a man he does not even hate, simply, by that act, to join the company of men at last.
My flash notion of the story of a Final Descendant now appears to be that of a progenitor.
This is an uneven novel written by an uneven man in the most uneven of American times.
Now I have to get back to my shelling.
—Nelson Algren
1. From They Look Like Men, by Alexander F. Bergman
Somebody in Boots
The Miners came in ’49,
The Whores in ’51,
They jungled up in Texas
And begot the Native Son.
OLD SONG
WHY STUB MCKAY turned out such a devil he himself hardly knew; he himself did not understand what thing had embittered him. He knew a dim feeling as of daily loss and daily defeat; of having, somehow, been tricked. A feeling of having been cheated—of having been cheated—that was it. He felt that he had been cheated with every breath he had ever drawn; but he did not know why, or by whom.
The man was a strong man, yet his strength was a weakness. For someone kept cheating all the time, someone behind him or someone above. Somebody stronger than anyone else. And although he could never quite wind his fingers about his feeling, although he could never bring it out into light, yet he was as certain of it as he was of the blood in his veins. It was there just as palpably. It was there, at the bottom of all he thought, said and performed. At times the feeling was like an old hunger, sometimes like a half-healed wound in his breast. He was never without it.
In time he gave his pain a secret name. To himself he named it: The Damned Feeling.
Some of his fellow townsmen thought Stuart McKay half mad. In a border town, where even children drank and smoked, Stuart took pleasure in little but fighting and hymning. He used neither tobacco nor whiskey, he seldom swore, and he laughed almost never. Yet there seldom came a Saturday night that did not find him brawling, and he never missed a Sunday morning at the Church of Christ of the Campbellites. So he was hated, damned, and respected in Great-Snake Mountain as only a fearless man could be both damned and respected in that place.
A lean and evil little devil Stubby was, all five feet and five inches of him, inflammable as sulfur and sour as citron, sullen as a sick steer and savage as a wolf. A moody, malevolent little man, with a close-cropped, flat-backed head of bristling red hair, and eyes so very pale, so very slit-like and narrow, that the blue of them was scarcely distinguishable from their small sooty whites; so dust-rimmed, narrow-wise and cold that they seemed nothing but brief blue glintings beneath the cropped red bristles.
And although Stubby McKay was a good worker, yet because of his temper he seldom held any one job for a very long while. He was a section hand on the Southern Pacific a couple of months, he cleaned backhouses about the town for a time, then became a hostler’s helper on the Santa Fe. After that he got work as a night watchman in the town’s lumber yard, and that too he soon lost. Inevitably, in whatever capacity employed, high or low, he would be discharged for fighting. He would strike some yardman, or buffet a boilermaker, or insult a foreman. He was arrogant, insolent, and disrespectful toward his employers, and therefore earned very little when he did work. The townsfolk called him “catawampus,” meaning that they thought him violently cross-tempered. “Som’un ort to clean thet Stub McKay’s canyon up proper for him jest once,’ the folk agreed. “Mebbe thet’d learn him to be so derned catawampus all the time. The man’s that mean he ort to be muzzled.”
No one ever succeeded in cleaning Stubby’s canyon for him, however. For all his brawling, he was never soundly beaten once. When hard-pressed he would draw a knife, pick up a brick or a bar of iron—anything within reach. Once, upon being chided for having employed a four-foot length of rubber hose to knock down a Mexican section boss, he explained himself half-apologetically:
“Well, y’all see, when ah fight a man ah jest go all-to-pieces-like, so sometime it happen ah don’ rightly know exacly what is it ah got in mah hand. This Spik straw boss now, when he commence givun me all thet boss-man talk, ah gotten god-orful nervous-like an’ straighten up mah back to see does he mean it all—an’ ’en all o’ suddent there ah was, alarrupin’ his arse with thet ol’ rubber-hose line; an’ ah s’pose ah’m right fortunate it weren’t his haid ’stead of his arse, ’cause ah swear ah caint recall where ah picked up thet hose. Ah swear, ah jest caint recall.”
And his favorite hymn, which he sang with clenched fists, was number thirty-six in Hymns of Glory:
