The Devil Finds Work Read Online Free Page A

he looked a little like my father. He is terrified because a young white girl, in this small Southern town, has been raped and murdered, and her body has been found on the premises of which he is the janitor. (Lana Turner, in her first movie, is the raped and murdered girl, which is, perhaps, a somewhat curious beginning for so gold-plated a career.) The role of the janitor is small, yet the man’s face hangs in my memory until today: and the film’s icy brutality both scared me and strengthened me. The Southern politician (Rains) needs an issue on which to be re-elected. He decides,therefore, that to pin the rape and murder of the white girl on a black man is insufficiently sensational. He very coldly frames a white Northern schoolteacher for this crime, and brings about his death at the hands of a lynch mob. (And I knew that this was exactly what would have happened to Bill, if such a mob had ever got its hands on her.) Unlike the later
Ox-Bow Incident
, in which a similar lynching is partially redeemed by the reading of a letter, which, presumably, will cause the members of the mob to repent the horror of what they have done and resolve to become better men and women, and also unlike the later
Intruder in the Dust
, which suggests the same hopeful improbability,
They Won’t Forget
ends with the teacher dead and the politician triumphantly re-elected. As he watches the widow walk down the courthouse steps, he mutters, seeming, almost, to stifle a yawn,
I wonder if he really did it, after all
.
    And, yes: I was beginning to understand
that
.
    Sylvia Sidney was the only American film actress who reminded me of a colored girl, or woman—which is to say that she was the only American film actress who reminded me of reality. All of the others, without exception, were white, and, even when they moved me (like Margaret Sullavan or Bette Davis or Carole Lombard) they moved me from that distance. Some instinct caused me profoundly to distrust the sense of life they projected: this sense of life could certainly never, in any case, be used by me, and, while
His
eye might be on the sparrow, mine had to be on the hawk. And, similarly, while I admired Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney (and, on a more demanding level, Fredric March), the only actor of the era with whom I identified wasHenry Fonda. I was not alone. A black friend of mine, after seeing Henry Fonda in
The Grapes of Wrath
, swore that Fonda had colored blood. You could tell, he said, by the way Fonda walked down the road at the end of the film:
white men don’t walk like that!
and he imitated Fonda’s stubborn, patient, wide-legged hike away from the camera. My reaction to Sylvia Sidney was certainly due, in part, to the kind of film she appeared in during that era—
Fury; Mary Burns, Fugitive; You and Me; Street Scene
(I was certain, even, that I knew the meaning of the title of a film she made with Gene Raymond, which I never saw,
Behold My Wife
). It was almost as though she and I had a secret: she seemed to know something I knew.
Every street in New York ends in a river:
this is the legend which begins the film,
Dead End
, and I was enormously grateful for it. I had never thought of that before. Sylvia Sidney, facing a cop in this film, pulling her black hat back from her forehead:
One of you lousy cops gave me that
. She was always being beaten up, victimized, weeping, and she should have been drearier than Tom Mix’s girl friends. But I always believed her—in a way, she reminded me of Bill, for I had seen Bill facing hostile cops. Bill took us on a picnic downtown once, and there was supposed to be ice cream waiting for us at a police station. The cops didn’t like Bill, didn’t like the fact that we were colored kids, and didn’t want to give up the ice cream. I don’t remember anything Bill said. I just remember her face as she stared at the cop, clearly intending to stand there until the ice cream all over the world melted or until the earth’s