Feet Live Their Own Life
by: Langston Hughes
"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 by 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 by
a female. It's a man's perogative to just set and drink sometimes."
"How do you connect that perogative 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 loafer. 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 til Judgement
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 rabbit-skin
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. "Wait,"
I said. "You have told me about what to ask your great-great-grandpa.
But I want to know what to ask your great-great-grandma."
"I don't play the dozens that far back,"
said Simple, following Zarita into the smoky juke-box blue of
the back room.
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