10/03/2020
LANGSTON HUGHES' SIMPLE TALE
FEET LIVE THEIR OWN LIFE
"If you want to know about my life," said Simple as he blew the foam from the top of the newly filled glass the bartender put before him, "don't look at my face, don't look at my hands. Look at my feet and see if you can tell how long I been standing on them."
"I cannot see your feet through your shoes," I said.
"You do not need to see through my shoes," said Simple. "Can't you tell the shoes I wear-not pointed, not rocking-chair, not French-toed, not nothing but big, long, broad, and flat-that I been standing on these feet a long time and carrying some heavy burdens? They ain't flat from standing at no bar, neither, because I always sets at a bar. Can't you tell that? You know I do not hang out in a bar unless it has stools, don't you?"
"That I have observed," I said, "but I did not connect it with your past life."
"Everything I do is connected up with my past life," said Simple. "From Virginia to Joyce, from my wife to Zarita, from my mother's milk to this glass of beer, everything is connected up."
"I trust you will connect up with that dollar I just loaned you when you get paid," I said. "And who is Virginia? You never told me about her."
"Virginia is where I was borned," said Simple. "I would be borned in a state named after a woman. From that day on, women never give me no peace."
"You, I fear, are boasting. If the women were running after you as much as you run after them, you would not be able to sit here on this bar stool in peace. I don't see any women coming to call you out to go home, as some of these fellows' wives do around here."
"Joyce better not come in no bar looking for me," said Simple. "That is why me and my wife busted up-one reason. I do not like to be called out of no bar a female. It's a man's perogative to just set and drink sometimes."
"How do you connect that prerogative with your past?" I asked.
"When I was a wee small child," said Simple, "I had no place to set and think in, being as how I was raised up with three brothers, two sisters, seven cousins, one married aunt, a common-law uncle, and the minister's grandchild-and the house only had four rooms. I never had no place just to set and think. Neither to set and drink-not even much my milk before some hongry child snatched it out of my hand. I were not the youngest, neither a girl, nor the cutest. I don't know why, but I don't think nobody liked me much. Which is why I was afraid to like anybody for a long time myself. When I did like somebody, I was full-grown and then I picked out the wrong woman because I had no practice in liking anybody before that. We did not get along."
"Is that when you took to drink?" "Drink took to me," said Simple. "Whiskey just naturally likes me but beer likes me better. By the time I got married I had got to the point where a cold bottle was almost as good as a warm bed, especially when the bottle could not talk and the bed-warmer could. I do not like a woman to talk to me too much-I mean about me. Which is why I like Joyce. Joyce most in generally talks about herself."
"I am still looking at your feet," I said, "and I swear they do not reveal your life to me. Your feet are no open book."
"You have eyes but you see not," said Simple. "These feet have stood on every rock from the Rock of Ages to 135th and Lenox. These feet have supported everything from a cotton bale to a hongry woman. These feet have walked ten thousand miles working for white folks and another ten thousand keeping up with colored. These feet have stood at altars, crap tables, free lunches, bars, graves, kitchen doors, betting windows, hospital clinics, WPA desks, social security railings, and in all kinds of lines from soup lines to the draft. If I just had four feet, I could have stood in more places longer. As it is, I done wore out seven hundred pairs of shoes, eighty-nine tennis shoes, twelve summer sandals, also six loafers. The socks that these feet have bought could build a knitting mill. The corns I've cut away would dull a German razor. The bunions I forgot would make you ache from now till Judgment Day. If anybody was to write the history of my life, they should start with my feet."
"Your feet are not all that extraordinary," I said. "Besides, everything you are saying is general. Tell me specifically some one thing your feet have done that makes them different from any other feet in the world, just one."
"Do you see that window in that white man's store across the street?" asked Simple. "Well, this right foot of mine broke out that window in the Harlem riots right smack in the middle. Didn't no other foot in the world break that window but mine. And this left foot carried me off running as soon as my right foot came down. Nobody else's feet saved me from the cops that night but these two feet right here. Don't tell me these feet ain't had a life of their own."
"For shame," I said, "going around kicking out windows. Why?"
"Why?" said Simple. "You have to ask my great-great-grandpa why. He must of been simple-else why did he let them capture him in Africa and sell him for a slave to breed my great-grandpa in slavery to breed my grandpa in slavery to breed my pa to breed me to look at that window and say, `It ain't mine! Bam-mmm-mm-m!' and kick it out?"
"This bar glass is not yours either," I said. "Why don't you smash it?"
"It's got my beer in it," said Simple.
Just then Zarita came in wearing her Thursday-night rabbitskin coat. She didn't stop at the bar, being dressed up, but went straight back to a booth. Simple's hand went up, his beer went down, and the glass back to its wet spot on the bar.
"Excuse me a minute," he said, sliding off the stool.
Just to give him pause, the dozens, that old verbal game of maligning a friend's female relatives, came to mind.
