Flying Home by Ralph Ellison Read Free Book Online Page A

tough. That Bacote nigger was some nigger!

Boy on a Train
    From
The New Yorker
, April 29 & May 6, 1996
    T he train gave a long, shrill, lonely whistle, and seemed to gain speed as it rushed downgrade between two hills covered with trees. The trees were covered with deep-red, brown, and yellow leaves. The leaves fell on the side of the hill and scattered down to the gray rocks along the opposite tracks. When the engine blew off steam, the little boys could see the white cloud scatter the colored leaves against the side of the hill. The engine hissed, and the leaves danced in the steam like leaves in a white wind.
    “See, Lewis, Jack Frost made the pretty leaves. Jack Frost paints the leaves all the pretty colors. See, Lewis: brown, and purple, and orange, and yellow.”
    The little boy pointed and paused after naming each color, his finger bent against the glass of the train window. The baby repeated the colors after him, looking intently for Jack Frost.
    It was hot in the train, and the car was too close to the engine, making it impossible to open the window. More than once, cinders found a way into the car and flew into the baby’s eyes. The woman raised her head from her book from time to time to watch the little boys. The car was filthy, and part of it was used for baggage. Up front, the pine shipping box of a casket stood in a corner. Wonder what poor soul that is in there, the woman thought.
    Bags and trunks covered the floor up front, and now and then the butcher came in to pick up candy, or fruit or magazines, to sell back in the white cars. He would come in and pick up a basket with candy, go out, come back; pick up a basket of fruit, go out; come back, pick up magazines, and on till everything had been carried out; then he would start all over again.
    He was a big, fat white man with a red face, and the little boy hoped he would give them a piece of candy; after all, he had so much, and Mama didn’t have any nickels to give them. But he never did.
    The mother read intently, holding a page in her hand as she scanned, then turned it slowly. They were the only passengers in the section of seats reserved for colored. She turned her head, looking back toward the door leading to the other car; it was time for the butcher to return. Her brow wrinkled annoyedly. The butcher had tried to touch her breasts when she and the boys first came into the car, and she had spat in his face and told him to keep his dirtyhands where they belonged. The butcher had turned red and gone hurriedly out of the car, his baskets swinging violently on his arms. She hated him. Why couldn’t a Negro woman travel with her two boys without being molested?
    The train was past the hills now, and into fields that were divided by crooked wooden fences and that spread rolling and brown with stacks of corn as far as the blue horizon fringed with trees. The fences reminded the boy of the crooked man who walked a crooked mile.
    Red birds darted swiftly past the car, ducking down into the field, then shooting up again when you looked back to see the telephone poles and fields turning, and sliding fast away from the train. The boys were having a good time of it. It was their first trip. The countryside was bright gold with Indian summer. Way across a field, a boy was leading a cow by a rope and a dog was barking at the cow’s feet. It was a nice dog, the boy on the train thought, a collie. Yes, that was the kind of dog it was—a collie.
    A freight was passing, going in the direction of Oklahoma City, passing so swiftly that its orange-and-red cars seemed a streak of watercolor with gray spaces punched through. The boy felt funny whenever he thought of Oklahoma City, like he wanted to cry. Perhaps they would never go back. He wondered what Frank and R.C. and Petey were doing now. Picking peaches for Mr. Stewart? A lump rose in his throat. Too bad they had to leave just when Mr. Stewart had promised them half of all the peaches they could pick. He sighed.