Burning boy, p.91
Burning Boy, page 91
strolling down the gravel walk which led from the front door to the gate. He was about the height and age of Jimmie Trescott but he was thick through the chest and had fat legs. His face was round and rosy and plump but his hair was curly black and his brows were naturally darkling so that he resembled both a pudding and a young bull.
He approached slowly the group of older inhabitants and they had grown profoundly silent. They looked him over; he looked them over. They might have been savages observing the first white man or white men observing the first savage. The silence held steady.
Within a couple of minutes, young Dalzel is declaring to Hedge that he can “lick” him, and when the newcomer acknowledges that he is probably right, Dalzel asks if he thinks he can lick Jimmie Trescott. “Whereupon the new boy looked at Jimmie respectfully but carefully and at length said: ‘I dunno.’” The others then push Jimmie forward, and knowing what he is supposed to say now, he says it: “Can you lick me?” Hedge also knows what he is supposed to say at this point and, “despite his unhappy and lonely state,” he says it: “Yes.” An uproar ensues. Jimmie tells Hedge to come out from the yard, but the new boy holds his ground, and for the time being there is a standoff. As Crane brilliantly puts it (and no word is more brilliant in the following paragraph than “victims”), both boys are trapped in an impossible situation, one far deeper and more complex than the standard business of a picked-upon child standing up to a bully. An entire social order is being examined here, and who punches whom and who wins and who doesn’t is finally of secondary importance.
The two victims opened wide eyes at each other. The fence separated them and so it was impossible for them to immediately engage but they seemed to understand that they were ultimately to be sacrificed to the ferocious aspirations of the other boys and each scanned the other to learn something of his spirit. They were not angry at all. They were merely two little gladiators who were being clamorously told to hurt each other. Each displayed hesitation and doubt without displaying fear. They did not exactly understand what were their feelings and they moodily kicked the ground and made low and sullen answers to Willie Dalzel who worked like a circus-manager.
The standoff is resolved with the threat of a future confrontation when Jimmie—who has a reputation to uphold and has often bragged about how tough he is—issues an ultimatum to Hedge: “The first time I catch you out of your own yard, I’ll lam the head off’n you.” The gang cheers in approval, and because Hedge is now obliged to say something in his turn, he counters with this “semi-defiant sentence”: “Maybe you will and maybe you won’t.”
The story is broken into three chapters, and what follows in the second is an excruciating retelling of events Crane must have experienced half a dozen times or more in his own childhood. Always the new boy in a new town or new neighborhood, always the outsider searching for a way to fit in, always the lone-wolf stranger forced to submit to the brutal initiation rites of the pack. When Johnnie Hedge goes to school for the first time on Monday, the “torture” of adjusting to his new environment begins. Finding himself “among new people, a new tribe,” he understands that “there [are] only two fates for him”: victory, which will grant him a respected position among his peers, or defeat, which will hold him in thrall “to some superior boy” and require him to back that boy in all things. But how to establish a place for himself in that world where “none knew him, understood him, felt for him. He would be surrounded for this initiative time by a horde of jackal-creatures who might turn out in the end to be little boys like himself but this last point his philosophy could not understand in its fullness.” During his first days at school, Hedge is mocked for his name (because “all new names struck boys as being comic”), teased by “small and utterly obscure boys,” and “suffer[s] a shower of stares and whispers and giggles as if he were a man-ape.”
For his part, Jimmie goes about his business and displays no interest in fighting the new boy, but after the bold threat he delivered on the first day, the other boys in his gang are beginning to suspect he is a coward. Soon enough, he is taunted by the same sort of needling chant that was inflicted on Horace in the earlier story: “’Fraid-cat! ’Fraid-cat! ’Fraid-cat!”
A confrontation is inevitable.
On the day of the fight, a hundred boys gather in the yard after school to watch. Jimmie challenges Hedge, and the new boy has no choice but to drop his books to the ground and square off against his opponent. Crane retards the action for a few moments to offer some observations on the fighting tactics of small boys, who engage in combat “much in the manner of little bear-cubs,” that is, by rushing headlong at each other and then grappling until they fall to the ground, both weeping and disheveled, rolling around “in the dust or the mud or the snow or whatever the material happened to be.” Jimmie, practiced in the bear-cub rush technique, charges full tilt at Hedge, but the Jersey City boy has been schooled in another approach, and now that “some spark ha[s] touched his fighting blood … he begin[s] to swing his arms, to revolve them so swiftly that one might have considered him a small working model of an extra-fine patented windmill.” Jimmie is momentarily confused, and before he can figure out how to parry this onslaught of flailing, whirling arms, “a small knotty fist” catches him in the eye and he goes down, defeated.
The crowd is stunned, bewildered, beside itself. “Never before had Whilomville seen such a thing,” and there is the new boy standing alone, “his clenched fists at his side, his face crimson, his lips still working with the fury of battle.” A slight pause as a new impulse takes hold of him, and then, giving in to the impulse, he fixes his eyes on Willie Dalzel, “the front and center of his persecutors,” for it is clear to him that Jimmie Trescott is no more than an instrument of the chief’s will and therefore an insignificant distraction, but to take on and defeat the big man will liberate him from any further humiliations, and so he puts the windmill into motion again, drives a punch into Dalzel’s face, and the leader of the gang heads for the hills—howling, running “like a hare,” vanquished.
There is more. “The Fight” gives way to a sequel, a second story entitled “The City Urchin and the Chaste Villagers,” which picks up where the other one left off and plays out the drama to the end.
In the micro-world of the little boys, the chieftain’s fall has thrown things into a “state resembling anarchy.” The boss boy is not necessarily the strongest or the one who never loses a fight, but he must not be a person who runs away, and by dashing off after his humbling defeat, Dalzel has lost the respect of his followers. He has been dethroned, and the big shot whose commands had once been obeyed is now subjected to a barrage of “whistling and cat-calling and hooting.” That does not mean, however, that the boys have transferred their allegiance to Hedge. He has disrupted the order of their tranquil kingdom, and they resent him for it. Whatever he might have accomplished with his fists, he is still not one of them.
As for Jimmie, the first victim of the windmill clobber technique, he has been absolved of all blame. If anything, his status has been enhanced by the composure and dignity he demonstrated in the face of defeat, but because of that (note the deft psychological turn) this new status only encourages him to brag about how manfully he endured the pain of Hedge’s knockout punch. Through the inner manipulations of his little-boy vanity, the vanquished one has reconfigured his defeat into a triumph. A microscopic detail, perhaps, but another telling instance of Crane’s refusal to idealize his characters. Young as he is, all-American Jimmie Trescott is no less flawed and self-serving than anyone else.
As time moves on, life moves on as well, and because they live next door to each other, Jimmie and Johnnie eventually make peace and form the beginnings of a friendship. As Crane observes: “The long-drawn animosities of men have no place in the life of a boy. The boy’s mind is flexible; he readjusts his position with an ease which is derived from the fact—simply—that he is not yet a man.”
Meanwhile, Dalzel is plotting a comeback as the tribe drifts along without an acknowledged leader. In those days of no movies, no television, and no radio, the boys satisfy their craving for stories by reading books, and “it came to pass that a certain half-dime blood-and-thunder pamphlet had a great vogue” among them, a tale about a cabin boy on a pirate ship who rises up from his lowly beginnings to become the most ruthless and successful pirate commander of the seven seas. One afternoon, with the boys gathered in the Trescotts’ backyard, Dalzel begins his subtle effort to take charge again by suggesting they play out the action of the story. He, of course, will take the part of the grown-up cabin boy himself, but they have to find someone to cast in the unglamorous role of the cabin boy when he was still just a small, badly treated boy. Abject Homer Phelps says yes, then says no, the “milky and docile” Dan Earl unexpectedly says no, and a few moments later, with Dalzel lapsing into despair, he spots Johnnie Hedge’s little brother gazing at them “wistfully” from the next yard.
When he was invited to become the cabin-boy he accepted joyfully thinking that it was his initiation into the tribe. Then they proceeded to give him the rope’s-end and to punch him with a realism which was not altogether painless. Directly he began to cry out. They exhorted him not to cry out, not to mind it, but still they continued to hurt him.
The rest of the story unfolds in a whirl of action, counter-action, and counter-counter-action as it careens toward a wholly unexpected ending. Summoned by his brother’s cries, Johnnie Hedge comes bounding into the yard, furious, boiling, unhinged, shouting at Dalzel that he is going to whip him within an inch of his life, that he is going to tan the hide off him, “and immediately there was a mixture—an infusion of two boys that looked as if it had been done by a chemist.” This time, Dalzel manages to tackle Hedge before being punched, and when the dust clears they are both on the ground with Willie sitting on top of Johnnie, but the one on the bottom refuses to give up. They tussle again, pause for a moment, and again he refuses to give up. Then again, and still he refuses. “They heaved; uttered strange words; wept; and the sun looked down at them with steady, unwinking eye.” The fight is still in progress, with Dalzel holding a distinct advantage—at least for the moment—but when Peter Washington emerges from the stable, he takes stock of “the tragedy of the back garden” and rushes in to break it up. He pulls the two boys apart, and “stormy and fine in his indignation,” scolds them for acting like mad dogs and tells them to stop. They don’t want to stop. Again and again, they try to go after each other, and as Washington continues to keep them apart, he begins to scold Jimmie as well, accusing him of encouraging the fight, which Jimmie denies, then denies again, after which Washington orders Dalzel to leave “or I’ll … damnearkill you,” and then tells Hedge that he thought he was a boy with some sense,
“but I raikon you don’t know no more’n er rabbit. You jest take an’ trot erlong off home an’ don’ lemme catch you round yere er-fightin’ or I’ll break yer back.” The Hedge boy moved away with dignity followed by his little brother. The latter when he had placed a sufficient distance between himself and Peter, placed his fingers at his nose and called out: “Nig-ger-r-r! Nig-ger-r-r!”
Peter Washington’s resentment poured out upon Jimmie. “’Pears like you never would unnerstan’ you ain’t reg’lar common trash. You take an’ ’sociate with an’body what done come erlong.”
“Aw, go on,” retorted Jimmie profanely. “Go soak your head, Pete.”
Crane says nothing more, but those sentences blast into the narrative with all the force of a thunderclap, of two thunderclaps—first from the little boy’s drawn-out, venomous nig-ger-r-r, then from Jimmie’s arrogant, hotheaded dressing-down of his father’s adult servant—and within fifteen seconds the sweet, pastoral world of the bygone American village is turned into one more battleground in the white-on-black war that began when the first African was put on the auction block and sold off as human chattel—way back when, before America was even a country. The little boy’s epithet explains itself, but Jimmie’s part in the flare-up is more subtle, for this is not the first time he has turned his anger on Peter Washington (in an earlier story, “The Carriage-Lamps,” he went so far as to throw stones at him), but whatever troubles the boy has caused for himself until now, he has always backed off when confronted by adult authority. But not here. He insults the hostler in full view of the other boys, telling him to butt out of their business (Go soak your head), which means, in fact, that he does not recognize Washington’s authority as an adult. Black men, after all, are not real men. At best, they are little more than grown-up children, and why should a white boy with red blood running though his veins bother to listen to one of them?
All that—speeding by in a flash—and then the story hurtles onward as the boys go out to the street and join Dalzel, the partially restored chieftain, who is loudly proclaiming victory. “I licked him! I licked him! Didn’t I, now?” Before the question can be answered, out walks his adversary to call his bluff and denounce him as a liar. They argue back and forth in a tommy-gun exchange of accusations and denials, and then Hedge puts his windmill into action again and goes on the attack. The first punches miss the backpedaling Dalzel, but soon enough another one catches him on the cheek, and suddenly the frightened boy lets out a howl. Tears are falling from his eyes as Hedge moves in to continue the assault, and with a knockout all but certain now, the other boys yell, “No, no, don’t hit ’im anymore! Don’t hit ’im no more!” Then Jimmie, goaded by what Crane artfully terms “a panic of bravery,” calls out to the avenging windmill: “We’ll all jump you if you do!” But Hedge doesn’t care. He lashes back at Jimmie and the others: “I’ll fix him so he won’t know hisself an’ if any of you kids bother with me—”
Suddenly he ceased, he trembled, he collapsed. The hand of one approaching from behind had laid hold upon his ear and it was the hand of one whom he knew.
The other lads heard a loud iron-filing voice say: “Caught ye at it again, ye brat, ye!” They saw a dreadful woman with grey hair, with a sharp red nose, with bare arms, with spectacles of such magnifying quality that her eyes shone through them like two fierce white moons. She was Johnnie Hedge’s mother. Still holding Johnnie by the ear, she swung out swiftly and dexterously and succeeded in boxing the ears of two boys before the crowd regained its presence of mind and stampeded. Yes; the war for supremacy was over and the question was never again disputed. The supreme power was Mrs. Hedge.
Fortinbras to the rescue—at least for now—but what of the other days when the supreme power has her back turned and the little ruffians start pounding each other again? They are all stuck in the hard-knocks academy of childhood, with graduation day so far off in the future that it is no more conceivable to them than life on the most distant star. Childhood goes on forever. Things pass by quickly for adults, but all through those early years time is so thick and heavy that it does not move. And there are the kids, trapped in the savage arena of the Now, powerless to change anything around them except by dreaming themselves into other worlds, nonexistent places where the Now will temporarily loosen its hold on them. Childhood is therefore a serious business, and among the many virtues of Crane’s Whilomville stories is how profoundly he understands the seriousness of children at play, whether it is little Cora acting out her game of a thousand turnip-puddings or Willie Dalzel and his crew attempting to rescue the punished Jimmie from home confinement by imitating the tactics of the dime-novel pirates in The Red Captain, in spite of the obstacle created by one of the boys, who prefers Westerns to stories about pirates and wants to imagine himself as Hold-up Harry, the Terror of the Sierras, which leads to a dispute about what sort of language they should speak while pulling off their stunt, whether to call their imprisoned friend “comrade,” for example, or “pard,” which turns play into a form of artistic expression, a picture of artists at work. Even more elaborately, there is Homer Phelps and his failure to understand the difference between real life and pretend life. When he is supposed to be captured during a game of Soldiers and Enemies in the woods, he doesn’t want to be captured. “If you’re going to play, you’ve got to play it right,” says chief Dalzel. “It ain’t no fun if you go spoilin’ the whole thing this way. Can’t you play it right?” Later on, when he is supposed to be tried and executed, Homer doesn’t want to be tried and executed, so Jimmie Trescott steps in and takes his place. When he is shot, “Jimmie threw his hands high, tottered for a moment, and then crashed full length into the snow—into, one would think, a serious case of pneumonia. It was beautiful.” When the time comes to bury the dead man, they ask Homer to assume his role again, but he doesn’t seem to understand.
“You’re dead,” said the chief frankly. That’s what you are. We executed you, we did.”
“When?” demanded the Phelps boy with some spirit.
“Just a little while ago. Didn’t we, fellers? Hey, fellers, didn’t we?”
The trained chorus cried: “Yes, of course we did. You’re dead, Homer. You can’t play anymore. You’re dead.”
“That wasn’t me. It was Jimmie Trescott,” he said in a low and bitter voice.…
“No,” said the chief, “it was you. We’re playin’ it was you, an’ it was you. You’re dead, you see.”
