Read Online American Hunger by Richard Wright - Free Book Online

with a stricken face. “What’re you doing?” he asked.
    “I was smelling this stuff to see if it had any odor,” I said.
    “Did you really smell it?” he asked me.
    “Yes.”
    “Oh, God!” he exclaimed.
    “What’s the matter?” I asked.
    “You shouldn’t’ve done that!” he shouted.
    “Why?”
    He grabbed my arm and jerked me across the room.
    “Come on!” he yelled, snatching open the door.
    “What’s the matter?” I asked.
    “I gotta get you to a doctor ‘fore it’s too late,” he gasped.
    Had my foolish curiosity made me inhale something dangerous?
    “But … Is it poisonous?”
    “Run, boy!” he said, pulling me. “You’ll fall dead.”
    Filled with fear, with Brand pulling my arm, I rushed out of the room, raced across a rear areaway, into another room, then down a long corridor. I wanted to ask Brand what symptoms I must expect, but we were running too fast. Brand finally stopped, gasping for breath. My heart beat wildly and my blood pounded in my head. Brand then dropped to the concrete floor, stretched out on his back and yelled with laughter, shaking all over. He beat his fists against the concrete; he moaned, giggled.
    I tried to master my outrage, wondering if some of the white doctors had told him to play the joke. He rose and wiped tears from his eyes, still laughing. I walked away from him. He knew that I was angry and he followed me.
    “Don’t get mad,” he gasped through his laughter.
    “Go to hell,” I said.
    “I couldn’t help it,” he giggled. “You looked at me like you’dbelieve anything I said. Man, you was scared …”
    He leaned against the wall, laughing again, stomping his feet. I was angry, for I felt that he would spread the story. I knew that Bill and Cooke never ventured beyond the safe bounds of Negro living, and they would never blunder into anything like this. And if they heard about this, they would laugh for months.
    “Brand, if you mention this, I’ll kill you,” I swore.
    “You ain’t mad?” he asked, laughing, staring at me through tears.
    Sniffing, Brand walked ahead of me. I followed him back into the room that housed the dogs. All day, while at some task, he would pause and giggle, then smother it with his hand, looking at me out of the corner of his eyes, shaking his head. He laughed at me for a week. I kept my temper and let him amuse himself. I finally found out the properties of nembutal by consulting medical books, but I never told Brand.
    One summer morning, just as I began work, a young Jewish boy came to me with a stop watch in his hand.
    “Dr.—wants me to time you when you clean a room,” he said. “We’re trying to make the institute more efficient.”
    “I’m doing my work and getting through on time,” I said.
    “This is the boss’s order,” he said.
    “Why don’t you work for a change?” I blurted, angry.
    “Now, look,” he said.
“This
is my work. Now
you
work.”
    I got a mop and pail, sprayed a room with disinfectant, and scrubbed at coagulated blood and hardened dog, rat, and rabbit feces. The normal temperature of a room was ninety, but as the sun beat down upon the skylights, the temperature rose above a hundred. Stripped to my waist, I slung the mop, moving steadily like a machine, hearing the Jewish boy press the button on the stop watch as I finished cleaning a room. I worked from seven in the morning until noon, and I was limp, washed-out.
    “Well, how is it?” I asked.
    “It took you seventeen minutes to clean that last room,” he said. “That ought to be the time for each room.”
    “But that room was not very dirty,” I said.
    “You have seventeen rooms to clean,” he went on as though I had not spoken. “Seventeen times seventeen makes four hours and forty-nine minutes.” He wrote upon a little pad. “After lunch, clean the five flights of stone stairs. I timed a boy who scrubbed one step and multiplied that time by the number of steps. You ought to be through at