HOME by E. Hughes

This is a story about a young Negro musician, who returns to the USA after the years that he had spent abroad learning to play the violin and giving concerts in different European cities. The action of the story takes place in 1932 in the USA. This was the time of the world economic crisis.

Roy Williams had come home from abroad to visit his mother and sister and brothers who still remained in his native town, Hopkinsville. Roy had been away seven or eight years, travelling all overthe world. He came back very well dressed, but very thin. He wasn't well.

It was this illness that made Roy come home. He had a feeling that he was going to die, and he wanted to see his mother again. This feeling about death started in Vienna, where so many people were hungry, while other people spent so much money in the night clubs where Roy's orchestra played.

In Vienna Roy had a room to himself because he wanted to study music. He studied under one of the best violin teachers.

"It's bad in Europe," Roy thought. "I never saw people as hungry as this."

But it was even worse when the orchestra went back to Berlin. Hunger and misery were terrible there. And the police were beating people who protested, or stole, or begged.

It was in Berlin that Roy began to cough. When he got to Paris his friend took care of him, and he got better. But all the time he had the feeling that he was going to die. So he came home to see his mother.

He landed in New York and stayed two or three days in Harlem. Most of his old friends there, musicians and actors, were hungry and out of work. When they saw Roy dressed so well, they asked him for money.

"It's bad everywhere," Roy thought. "I want to go home."

That last night in Harlem he could not sleep. He thought of his mother. In the morning he sent her a telegram that he was coming home to Hopkinsville, Missouri.

"Look at that nigger," said the white boys, when they saw him standing on the station platform in the September sunlight, surrounded by his bags with the bright foreign labels. Roy had got off a Pullman – something unusual for a Negro in that part of the country.

"God damn!" said one of the white boys. Suddenly Roy recognised one of them. It was Charlie Mumford, an old playmate – a tall red-headed boy. Roy took of f his glove and held out his hand. The white boy took it but did not shake it long. Roy had for- gotten he wasn't in Europe, wearing gloves and shaking hands with a white man!

"Where have you been, boy?" Charlie asked.

"In Paris," said Roy.

"Why have you come back?" someone asked. "I wanted to come and see my mother."

"I hope she is happier to see you than we are," another white boy said.

Roy picked up his bags, there were no porters on the platform, and carried them to an old Ford car that looked like a taxi. He felt weak and frightened. The eyes of the white men at the station were not kind. He heard someone say behind him: "Nigger." His skin was very hot. For the first time in the last seven or eight years he felt his colour. He was home.

Roy's home-coming concert at the Negro church was a success. The Negroes sold a lot of tickets to the white people for whom they worked. The front rows cost fifty cents and were filled with white people. The rest of the seats cost twenty-five cents and were filled with Negroes. There was much noise as the little old church filled. People walked up and down, looking for their seats.

While he was playing Brahms on a violin from Vienna in a Negro church in Hopkinsville, Missouri, for listeners who were poor white people and even poorer Negroes, the sick young man thought of his old dream. This dream could not come true now. It was a dream of a great stage in a large concert hall where thousands of people looked up at him as they listened to his music.

Now he was giving his first concert in America for his mother in the Negro church, for his white and black listeners. And they were looking at him. They were all looking at him. The white people in the front rows and the Negroes in the back.

He was thinking of the past, of his childhood. He remembered the old Kreisler record they had at home. Nobody liked it but Roy, and he played it again and again. Then his mother got a violin for him, but half the time she didn't have the money to pay old man Miller for his violin lessons every week. Roy remembered how his mother had cried when he went away with a group of Negro-musicians, who played Negro songs all over the South.

Then he had a job with a night-club jazz-band in Chicago. After that he got a contract to go to Berlin and play in an orchestra there.

Suddenly he noticed a thin white woman in a cheap coat and red hat, who was looking at him from the first row.

"What does the music give you? What do you want from me?" Roy thought about her.

He looked at all those dark girls back there in the crowd. Most of them had never heard good classical music. Now for the first time in their life they saw a Negro, who had come home from abroad, playing a violin. They were looking proudly at him over the heads of the white people in the first rows, over the head of the white woman in the cheap coat and red hat....

"Who are you, lady?" he thought.

When the concert was over, even some of the white people shook hands with Roy and said it was wonderful. The Negroes said, "Boy, you really can play!" Roy was trembling a little and his eyes burnt and he wanted very much to cough. But he smiled and he held out his hot hand to everybody. The woman in the red hat waited at the end of the room.

After many of the people had gone away, she cameup to Roy and shook hands with him. She spoke of symphony concerts in other cities of Missouri; she said she was a teacher of music, of piano and violin, but she had no pupils like Roy, that never in the town of Hopkinsville had anyone else played so beautifully. Roy looked into her thin, white face and was glad that she loved music.

"That's Miss Reese," his mother told him after she had gone. "An old music teacher at the white high school."

"Yes, Mother," said Roy. "She understands music.

Next time he saw Miss Reese at the white high school. One morning a note came asking him if he would play for her music class some day. She would accompany him if he brought his music. She had told her students about Bach and Mozart, and she would be very grateful if Roy visited the school and played those two great masters for her young people. She wrote him a nice note on clean white paper.

"That Miss Reese is a very nice woman," Mrs. Williams said to her boy. "She sends for you to play at the school. I have never heard of a Negro who was invited there for anything but cleaning up, and I have been in Hopkinsville a long time. Go and play for them, son."

Roy played. But it was one of those days when his throat was hot and dry and his eyes burnt. He had been coughing all morning and as he played he breathed with great difficulty. He played badly. But Miss Reese was more than kind to him. She accompanied him on the piano. And when he had finished, she turned to the class of white children and said, "This is art, my dear young people, this is true art!"

The pupils went home that afternoon and told their parents that a dressed-up nigger had come to school with a violin and played a lot of funny music which nobody but Miss Reese liked. They also said that Miss Reese had smiled and said, "Wonderful!" and had even shaken hands with the nigger, when he went out.

Roy went home. He was very ill these days, getting thinner and thinner all the time, weaker and weaker. Sometimes he did not play at all. Often he did not eat the food his mother cooked for him, or that his sister brought from the place vrhere she vrorked. Sometimes he was so restless and hot in the night that he got up and dressed and then walked the streets of the little town at ten and eleven o'clock after nearly every one else had gone to bed. Midnight was late in Hopkinsville. But for years Roy had worked at night. It was hard f or him to sleep before midnight now.

But one night he walked out of the house for the last time.

In the street it was very quiet. The trees stood silent in the moonlight. Roy walked under the dry falling leaves towards the centre of the town, breathing in the night air. Night and the streets always made him f eel better. He remembered the streets of Paris and Berlin. He remembered Vienna. Now like a dream that he had ever been in Europe at all, he thought. Ma never had any money. With the greatest difficulty her children were able to finish the grade school. There was no high school for Negroes in Hopkinsville. In order to get further education he had to run away from home with a Negro show. Then that chance of going to Berlin with a jazz-band. And his violin had been his best friend all the time. Jazz at night and the classics in the morning at his lessons with the best teachers that his earnings could pay. It was hard work and hard practice. Music, real music! Then he began to cough in Berlin.

Roy was passing lots of people now in the bright lights of Main Street, but he saw none of them. He saw only dreams and memories, and heard music. Suddenly a thin woman in a cheap coat and red hat, a white woman, stepping out of a store just as Roy passed, said pleasantly to him, "Good evening."

Roy stopped, also said, "Good evening, Miss Reese," and was glad to see her. Forgetting he wasn't in Europe, he took off his hat and gloves, and held out his hand to this lady who understood music. They smiled at each other, the sick young Negro and the middleaged music teacher in the light of Main Street. Then she asked him if he was still working on the Sarasate.

Roy opened his mouth to answer when he saw the woman's face suddenly grow pale with horror. Before he could turn round to see what her eyes had seen, he felt a heavy fist strike his face. There was a flash of lightning in his head as he f ell down. Miss Reese screamed. The street near them filled with white young men with red necks, open shirts and fists ready to strike. They had seen a Negro talking to a white woman – insulting a White Woman – attacking a White Woman! They had seen Roy take off his gloves and when Miss Reese screamed when Roy whs struck, they wee sure he had insulted her. Yes, he had. Yes, sir!

So they knocked Roy down. They trampled on his hat and cane and gloves, and all of them tried to pick him up – so that someone else could have the pleasure of knocking him down again. They struggled over the privilege of knocking him down.

Roy looked up from the ground at the white men around him. His mouth was full of blood and his eyes burnt. His clothes were dirty. He was wondering why Miss Reese had stopped him to ask about the Sarasate. He knew he would never get home to his mother now.

The young Negro whose name was Roy Williams began to choke from the blood in his mouth. He didn't hear the sound of their voices or the trampling of their feet any longer. He saw only the moonlight, and his ears were filled with a thousand notes, like a Beethoven sonata…

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