I: Twenty-One
Beyond Sandy Hook
Melodramatic maybe, it seems to me now. But then it was like throwing a million bricks out of my heart when I threw the books into the water. I leaned over the rail of the S.S. Malone and threw the books as far as I could out into the sea—all the books I had had at Columbia, and all the books I had lately bought to read.
The books went down into the moving water in the dark off Sandy Hook. Then I straightened up, turned my face to the wind, and took a deep breath. I was a seaman going to sea for the first time—a seaman on a big merchant ship. And I felt that nothing would ever happen to me again that I didn’t want to happen. I felt grown, a man, inside and out. Twenty-one.
I was twenty-one.
Four bells sounded. As I stood there, whiffs of salt spray blew in my face. The afterdeck was deserted. The big hatches were covered with canvas. The booms were all tied up to the masts, and the winches silent. It was dark. The old freighter, smelling of crude oil and garbage, engines pounding, rolled through the pitch-black night. I looked down on deck and noticed that one of my books had fallen into the scupper. The last book. I picked it up and threw it far over the rail into the water below, that was too black to see. The wind caught the book and ruffled its pages quickly, then let it fall into the rolling darkness. I think it was a book by H. L. Mencken.
You see, books had been happening to me. Now the books were cast off back there somewhere in the churn of spray and night behind the propeller. I was glad they were gone.
I went up on the poop and looked over the railing toward New York. But New York was gone, too. There were no longer any lights to be seen. The wind smelt good. I was sleepy, so I went down a pair of narrow steps that ended just in front of our cabin—the mess boys’ cabin.
Inside the hot cabin, George lay stark naked in a lower bunk, talking and laughing and gaily waving his various appendages around. It was clear that Ramon in the upper bunk didn’t understand more than every tenth word of George’s Kentucky vernacular, but he kept on laughing every time George laughed—and that was often.
George was talking about women, of course. He said he didn’t care if his Harlem landlady pawned all his clothes, the old witch! When he got back from Africa, he would get some more. He might even pay her the month’s back rent he owed her, too. Maybe. Or else—and here he waved one of his appendages around—she could have what he had in his hand.
Puerto Rico, who understood all the bad words in every language, laughed loudly. We all laughed. You couldn’t help it. George was so good-natured and comical you couldn’t keep from laughing with him—or at him. He always made everybody laugh—even when the food ran out on the return trip and everybody was hungry and mad.
Then it was ten o’clock, on a June night, on the S.S. Malone, and we were going to Africa. At ten o’clock that morning I had never heard of the S.S. Malone, or George,