Burning boy, p.69
Burning Boy, page 69
The stroll through downtown Whilomville ends when Johnson turns off the main street and heads for the “tumble-down houses” of Watermelon Alley, the black part of town, where he visits the current object of his affections, Belle Farragut, and her fat, welcoming mother. They settle in for a polite, three-way conversation that lasts “until a late hour,” and after Johnson leaves, Belle exclaims to Mrs. Farragut, “Oh, ma, isn’t he divine?”
What is surprising about this chapter, which must have been a difficult one to write, is that for someone with Crane’s prejudices and limitations in regard to the Other, it almost works. There are some slips along the way, moments that verge on caricature or fall into the stereotypes of the period (“The saffron Miss Belle Farragut,” for example), but Crane is attempting the nearly impossible in trying to see the world through a black man’s eyes—almost unheard-of for a white American novelist in the 1890s—and that he manages to make most of it credible and at times even moving is a testament to the sincerity of his effort and the moral imperative that drove him to write this chapter and everything else in the book.
The narrative opens up after that as Crane turns his attention to the Saturday night activities in town, the band concert in the little park, the young men who routinely scorn the concerts but never fail to show up because of the girls, the girls and young men walking around in twos and threes and eyeing one another but seldom daring to open their mouths, the little boys darting helter-skelter through the crowd, the band playing a waltz and one of the young men wisecracking that it sounds like “the new engines on the hill pumping water into the reservoir,” the evening mail arriving from New York and Rochester and the post office crowd now mingling with the crowd at the bandstand, a policeman chasing “a gang of obstreperous little boys” who jeer at him from a distance, and then, suddenly, “there arose from afar the great hoarse roar of a factory whistle,” and the bandmaster, who has just raised his hand to conduct his musicians in a popular march, drops his hand slowly to his knee. The first alarm has sounded.
More alarms follow, and the people in the crowd speculate about which fire station they are coming from, Number One or Number Two, and as the fifth chapter begins, Crane slices up the story into small, self-contained vignettes of this firefighter here and that firefighter there, bouncing among them as they ready themselves to attack the fire and a small boy named Willie pleads with his mother to let him go out and watch the fun. Men rush down the avenue shouting, and the bell of the Methodist church (Crane’s father’s church) begins to ring out with “a solemn and terrible voice, speaking from the clouds.”
By chapter VI we understand that the focus of attention is the Trescotts’ Queen Anne house on a quiet block in one of the town’s quietest neighborhoods. Nothing seems to be happening at first. The dog from the Hannigan place next door comes over and prowls around the front lawn, pawing the grass and growling at no one in particular; one of Johnson’s friends, Peter Washington, pauses in front of the house, but when he sees no light in the windows of the loft above the stable, he walks on. A wisp of smoke escapes from a window at the end of the house and curls around the branches of a cherry tree. Another wisp emerges, then several wisps, and before long “the window brightened as if the four panes of it had been stained with blood and a quick ear might have been led to imagine the fire-imps calling and calling, clan joining clan, gathering to the colors.”
At this point, the blaze behind the window is still not visible from the street, but already Crane is evoking fire as an instrument of war, and when the windowpanes burst and crash to the ground and other windows begin turning red as well, he pushes the trope a bit further and reveals what kind of war he is thinking about: “This outbreak had been well planned, as if by professional revolutionists.”
After that, a dozen different things happen at once, but the essential things are that Hannigan, the neighbor, finally manages to convince Mrs. Trescott that her house is on fire by shouting up to her as she stands at a second-floor window and that just as Hannigan kicks off the lock on the front door and is about to enter the house Henry Johnson, after running along the pavement “with an almost fabulous speed,” shows up at the house as well. Dr. Trescott is out on a call, the fire brigade has not yet arrived, and these two men are the only ones in a position to do anything about rescuing the boy and his mother.
The instant after Johnson enters the house, The Signing of the Declaration drops to the floor and explodes “with the sound of a bomb.” This is the third reference to war in the trim, two-page chapter, and if Crane is referring to the war that began with the Declaration of Independence, which seems all but certain by now, exactly how or why or to what purpose is still not clear.
Mrs. Trescott is standing at the top of the stairs, waving her arms in distress, and when Johnson goes up, she screams—“in Henry’s face”—“Jimmie! Save Jimmie!” Johnson goes past her and plunges on through the halls and rooms upstairs, but Hannigan, who has followed him up, grabs “the arm of the maniacal woman” and, “his face black with rage,” bellows at her that she must come down. Half out of her mind, she screams back at him: “Jimmie! Jimmie! Save Jimmie!” Not bothering to waste his breath on words, Hannigan drags her down the stairs and takes her outside, which leaves Johnson as the only one still in the house, the one person in the world who can do anything for the boy, and it is precisely then that the factory whistle roars in the distance and the bandleader drops his arm, events Crane has already described in an earlier chapter, and now that the scrambled sequence has been unscrambled, we have caught up to the present again. It is an effective narrative device, and by showing the consequences before the cause (the fire panic first, then the fire), Crane has amplified the horror of the situation. We already know there is going to be a fire, a fire big enough to set off factory whistles and church bells and drive the whole town into the streets, and when the first wisp of smoke slithers out of the Trescotts’ window, we know where the fire has struck. The good people we have been following since the first page of the story are the victims. And because the consequences are already known, we know how badly they are going to suffer.
By the time Johnson reaches the second floor, the anticipated tragedy has already been put in motion, and given what Crane has prepared us for, it seems inevitable that Johnson will die. Stumbling his way through the smoke in the corridors, he tries to orient himself by sliding his hands along the walls, but they are too hot to touch. “The paper was crimpling, and he expected at any moment to have a flame burst from under his hands.” For all that, he eventually manages to find Jimmie’s door, and when he steps inside the room, it is mercifully free of smoke. He gathers up the frightened boy in a blanket and carries him out, as if he were involved in some kind of kidnapping operation, and as the bawling little Jim cries for his mother (“Mam-ma! Mam-ma!”), Johnson reaches the top of the stairs again. “Through the smoke that rolled to him he could see that the lower hall was all ablaze.” He lets out a howl and backs off, retreating into the upstairs corridor, and then, unexpectedly, Crane veers sharply onto another track of thought: “From the way of him then, he had given up almost all idea of escaping from the burning house, and with it the desire. He was submitting, submitting because of his fathers, bending his mind in a most perfect slavery to this conflagration.”
There are some odd moments in Crane’s work, but these last two sentences are downright bizarre. A man is fighting for his life, and suddenly he is no longer fighting but giving up, relinquishing his will to the force of the fire because … because his father and grandfather and great-grandfather were slaves, and therefore he himself … is still a slave.
In the context of what is happening in the story at this point, it is a curious turn. A black man trapped in a burning house with a white child in his arms has concluded there is no way out and is ready to die in the flames. Those are the physical and psychological facts. Metaphorically, however, Crane has already established that the fire is a reenactment of the American Revolution. The fire-imps have called out to the people, clan has joined clan (colony has joined colony), they have all gathered to the colors (the flag of freedom), and now, having mapped out their “well planned” strategy, the soldiers are fighting with the skill of professional revolutionaries. Crane then adds another element to the metaphorical mix by bringing in the Declaration of Independence, the call to arms that went through several highly contested drafts before it was approved by the members of the Continental Congress, one of whom was a New Jersey delegate named Stephen Crane. Among the sentences that were eliminated in the final version were these two accusations against the British king:
“He has waged war against human Nature itself, violating its most sacred Rights of Life and Liberty in the Persons of a distant People who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another Hemisphere, or to incur miserable Death in their Transportation thither.”
“He has prostituted his Negative for Suppressing every legislative Attempt to prohibit or restrain an execrable Commerce, determined to keep open a Market where men should be bought and sold.”
These statements were dropped in a compromise with the pro-slavery South in order to unify the colonies and strengthen the chances of defeating the British. In doing so, the most important idea of the Declaration—that all men are created equal—was fatally damaged by transforming the word “all” into “some” or “most” and excluding the black slave population from the ranks of humanity. Black people were the sacrifice that propelled the Revolution forward and led to the founding of a new nation, “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” as the American president declared four score and seven years later, which happened to be the same year in which the action of The Red Badge of Courage is set. Now, in the symbolic fire that stands for the Revolution in the book Crane wrote during the early months of Jim Crow, Henry Johnson, the descendant of black American slaves, will become the reincarnated symbol of that black sacrifice. As with his ancestors, the cost of martyrdom will not be death, pure and simple, but a symbolic death that robs him of his humanity and turns him into a faceless idiot, shunned, feared, and hated by the righteous citizens of the American anywhere called Whilomville.
Just when he is about to give himself up to the flames, Johnson remembers that there is a small back staircase leading from a bedroom to a downstairs apartment, which the doctor has converted into a private laboratory. The outer door of the lab opens onto the yard, and if Johnson can make his way across the lab and get to that door, he and Jimmie will be free. It is his only chance, the last chance he will have, and with this narrow avenue of hope suddenly before him, he goes down, still carrying the limp and silent boy in his arms. Johnson, who had not been afraid to die when there was no escape, is now scared to death. When he opens the door to the lab, what he had imagined would be a safe zone leading to the yard beyond has been transformed into a hallucinatory obstacle course, which Crane presents in lavish nightmare imagery as a realm of “burning flowers,” and from those brilliant flames comes a stench that seems “to be alive with hatred, envy, and malice.” The chemicals in the doctor’s laboratory have ignited, and “flowers of violet, crimson, green, blue, orange, and purple were blooming everywhere … through clouds of heaving, turning, deadly smoke.”
As Johnson pauses at the threshold, he lets out “a negro wail that had in it the sadness of the swamps”—a last, stinging allusion to the crime of black enslavement—and then he goes into that many-colored hell and is promptly attacked. An orange flame leaps “like a panther” onto his lavender trousers and bites “deeply” into his leg. An instant later, there is an explosion in another part of the room. The panther is gone, “and suddenly before him there reared a delicate, trembling shape like a fairy lady. With a quiet smile she blocked his path and doomed him and Jimmie.” Like a figure in an allegorical poem from the fourteenth century, the sapphire woman is Lady Death, a being of pure flame whose mission is to destroy, and now, taking on yet another form, she becomes “swifter than eagles” as she swoops down and catches Johnson in her talons before he can run past her. Crane’s language has become so extravagant that the thwarted escape through the lab resembles the stuff of fever dreams, but assuming he has not lost track of his original purpose—to equate the fire with the American Revolution—then the sapphire lady is also Lady Liberty, devouring her human sacrifice for the good of the cause she represents. The war has entered its final stage in the lab, and so it would seem that Johnson must and most certainly will die in this last battle.
No paragraphs in Crane’s work are wilder or stranger than these, and nowhere are his intentions more obscure. What to make of the sudden reference to eagles, for example? Is it a conscious invocation of America’s symbolic bird or simply a useful metaphor for high-speed movement? Is Crane in control of his imagery, or has the imagery taken control of him? A little of both, perhaps, but if he has set out to create a sensation of chaos and mortal fear, he has accomplished his goal, for by now the reader’s mind is spinning.
Burned by the talon attack from the sapphire lady, Johnson staggers forward into the lab, “twisting this way and that,” and then, as he falls down, Jimmie flies out of his arms. The boy, still wrapped in the blanket, rolls across the floor until the bundle comes to a stop against the outer wall—directly under a window. The yard is on the other side of the window, freedom is just inches away, but the limp and silent boy does not stir. Johnson, who has landed on his back, is out cold. He can do nothing more for Jimmie. Nor can Jimmie do anything for himself.
Johnson had fallen with his head at the base of an old-fashioned desk. There was a row of jars upon the top of the desk. For the most part, they were silent amid this rioting, but there was one which seemed to hold a scintillant and writhing serpent.
Suddenly the glass splintered, and a ruby-red snakelike thing poured its thick length out upon the top of the old desk. It coiled and hesitated, and then began to swim a languorous way down the mahogany slant. At the angle it waved its sizzling molten head to and fro over the closed eyes of the man beneath it. Then, in a moment, with mystic impulse, it moved again, and the red snake flowed directly down into Johnson’s upturned face.
As the fiery acid continues to drip onto Johnson’s face, the chapter ends, and Crane turns his attention elsewhere: to the arriving fire trucks, to the commotion in the streets, to the bells sounding in schoolhouses and churches, and at last to Dr. Trescott, who has returned from treating his patient and is now in front of the burning house. His wife is on the lawn, shouting, “Jimmie! Save Jimmie!” and when the doctor asks her where, she points to the second floor and says, “Up—up—up.” Hannigan begins shouting as well, warning the doctor that he can’t go in through the front, so Trescott decides to use the back staircase that leads from the laboratory to the second floor. When he discovers that the door between the lawn and the lab is bolted shut, he kicks off the lock and tries to enter. The smoke pushes him back, but then, “bending low, he stepped into the garden of burning flowers. On the floor his stinging eyes could make out a form in a smoldering blanket near the window.” Trescott picks up his son and carries him outside, where he is met by a small army of men and boys, “the leaders in the great charge the town was making,” and within moments they have “seized him and his burden and overpowered him in wet blankets and water.” Hannigan then appears on the lawn, howling: “Johnson is in there yet! Henry Johnson is in there yet! He went in after the kid! Johnson is in there yet!” Without pausing to think, Trescott starts to go back in to look for Johnson, angrily pushing away the others as they try to stop him from reentering the house, but before he can break free of them, they learn that someone else has already done the job.
A young man who was a brakemen on the railway, and lived in one of the rear streets near the Trescotts, had gone into the laboratory and brought forth a thing which he laid on the grass.
The mysterious brakeman is never mentioned again. He comes and goes in this one sentence, but the unnamed shadow who carries out “the thing” and deposits it on the lawn could be yet one more ghost from Crane’s past: his brother Luther, who worked as a flagman and brakeman on the Erie railroad and was crushed to death in his early twenties when he fell under the wheels of a moving train. The dead coming to the rescue of the nearly dead.
And the boy who earlier that day had destroyed a flower—for which he could “do no reparation”—has been rescued from death in a garden of burning flowers that smell of “hatred, envy, and malice.” His father has carried him out, but it was Johnson who carried him down, and at this point in the story it still seems certain that Johnson will die.
Before the second half of The Monster begins, there is a small bridge that connects the first half of the book to what follows.
The town is buzzing with rumors, conflicting stories, gossip. Young boys watching the fire trucks gather in front of the house and argue passionately about whether Number Three or Number Two or Number Four or Number Five or Number One is doing the best job as the adults in the crowd speak in hushed voices as word spreads that Jimmie Trescott and Henry Johnson have “burned to death, and Dr. Trescott himself [has] been most savagely hurt,” or that all three of them are dead, or that what really happened was that the kid had the measles “or somethin’, and this coon—Johnson—was a-settin’ up with ’im, and Johnson got sleepy or somethin’ and upset the lamp,” and when the doctor came running up from his office, he burned to death along with the two others. Meanwhile, “the bells of the town were clashing unceasingly.”
The town has become a character in the story, a chorus of unidentified voices expressing the thoughts and feelings of Whilomville, and only a few of the residents will be given names to distinguish them from that mass of anonymous people as the novella spins forward. One of them is old Judge Denning Hagenthorpe, and when it is “publically learned that the doctor and his son and the negro were still alive,” the three of them are carried on stretchers to the judge’s house across the street. Six of the ten doctors in Whilomville come over to examine the patients, and they conclude that the doctor’s burns are not “vitally important” and that while the boy “would possibly be scarred badly,” his life is not in danger. The prospects for the third patient, however, are beyond hope. “As for the negro Henry Johnson, he could not live. His body was frightfully seared, but more than that, he now had no face. His face had simply been burned away.”
