The Men on the Porch

THEY HAD NOT GONE HOME.

They sat now at nine o’clock Saturday evening as the last carloads of Negroes passed by Mister Thomason’s porch through Sutton going north. All afternoon the cars had been moving by in caravan, with the frequency of those in a funeral procession. Now the flow was thinning, not appearing over the Ridge in bunches, but singly like lone vacationing families. There were still more automobiles than usual, but not as many as before. To himself, each man sitting on the porch wondered whether the slackening numbers of vehicles laden with children, old people, adults, and babies, mattresses, blankets, and suitcases meant that New Marsails was vacant of Negroes.

They knew for certain no Negroes remained in Sutton, for after two that afternoon, only a straggling few had lined Thomason’s porch waiting for the buses, and from where the men sat on the porch, looking toward the Square, they could no longer see any cars coming from where the Negroes lived at the northern edge of town. After Mister Harper left at six, some of the men went home to supper, though most bought something from Thomason, and continued to sit, munching on crackerjack, peanuts, candy, or apples. After they had balled the wrappers and tossed them into the street, some of them had stood and gone up to the Negro section to look around.

They had found nothing, no houses lit; the Negroes had felt no need even to set lights in the windows as people do to keep burglars away, for they had taken anything they really valued, had left the rest for burglars, making it easy for them by leaving the doors swung open. Some had even left keys in the locks, an invitation to anyone who might want to occupy the house for good. The men from the porch could not bring themselves to enter the houses, retained that respect for house and property that is southern, that kept them from setting foot on Tucker Caliban’s land on Thursday, but they did peer over the thresholds into the darkness and found a great many things inside: chairs, tables, sofas, rugs, brooms, beds, and trash. Most of the walls were empty of the pictures of stern grandparents, or soldiering sons or married daughters, and crucifixes, those things without which people do not feel able to start a new home. If the men had gone inside and looked under beds, they would have found the dustless rectangles where, only a few days before, suitcases had rested. There were no Negroes at all.

So they came back to the porch. They did not discuss what they had seen, for each man had seen it himself. They sat silently, thinking, trying to figure out what all this had to do with each of them, how tomorrow, next week, or next month would be different from what yesterday, last week, last month, or all their lives had been up to this time. None was able to think it through. It was like attempting to picture Nothing, something no one had ever considered. None of them had a reference point on which to fix the concept of a Negro-less world.