Proud Flesh Read Online Free PDF

with never a word of explanation nor even a greeting for anybody, he just reappeared, filthy, bearded, looking more like a bear than ever. The sight of money made him blush and scowl. He associated money with pleasure, pleasure with sin. It had been evident early that someone other than Clifford would have to manage the farm.
    Managing the Renshaws’ farm still meant bossing Negroes. For although many farmers in the county had switched from cotton to cattle as pickers got harder and harder to find, Clyde Renshaw stuck with cotton. Clyde liked cotton, but more than cotton Clyde liked cottonpickers. He looked forward all year to their coming. Or rather, he had always done so until this year.
    Clyde liked Negroes. In fact, Clyde liked only Negroes. Not that Clyde’s notions about Negroes were any different from those of people who disliked, even despised them; in fact, they were the same. Like the rest, Clyde too imputed to Negroes, especially the migrant cottonpicking kind, the sexual socialism of the barnlot. He too believed that unless you watched them every minute they would steal you blind. That they were lazy, lying, lawless, settling their disputes among themselves with an icepick or a straight razor. But these traits which others despised them for were just what Clyde liked about Negroes. He himself thought of nothing but what he called poontang from waking to sleeping. He knew honesty did not pay, that hard work got you nothing but more of the same, that the law was always on the other fellow’s side, that the only law was the law of the jungle, eat or be eaten, screw or get screwed.
    People said of the migrant workers that they lived like animals. Clyde said the same. But when Clyde said it he meant they lived the free, untrammeled lives of animals, without shame, without hypocrisy. Being outcasts from society, they were free from its restrictions. They lived. When the crop was gathered and they piled into their battered cars and hit the road north toward their next squalid campsite, leaving him behind with the profits from their labors, Clyde Renshaw watched them out of sight and longed to be one of them. Meanwhile it was Clyde’s boast, as some men vaunt themselves on their knowledge of horseflesh or their affinity with dogs, that he knew how to handle Negroes. He spoke their language. The language he spoke after a day in the field made his wife Eunice say when he came home from work in the evening, “You can turn off the Amos ’n Andy now.”
    Clyde Renshaw had expected to have to fight a war in his time. Clyde had been determined to fight his war in his own way, with a minimum of interference from the U.S. Army. That the United States would win its war Clyde never questioned; his concern was to make sure he won his. To ensure his survival Clyde chose with care his branch of the armed service: the infantry; his rank: private; his strategy: that of the lone sniper, unencumbered by comrades in arms. Clyde was not hoping to escape the enemy’s notice by getting lost in the anonymous ranks. The enemy was not what worried Clyde. What worried him was his own brave, patriotic or just plain stupid officers, and the brave, patriotic, stupid GI’s alongside him.
    Clyde chose to be an infantryman because that was where he was at home, on the ground, not in the air or on the water. He was a farmboy. What the army training manuals called “terrain” was what he had known all his life as fields, thickets, swamps. A hunter, a rifleman, as all farmboys are, he knew how to practice stealth, concealment. Germans and Japs were merely a more wily and more dangerous game than any he had hunted before. But mainly Clyde chose to be an infantryman because he did not believe in teamwork; he believed in nobody but himself, and in the infantry a man was on his own. As he would later explain, “In the air corps or the tank corps, say, you’re only as good as your machine. And who made your