Black Shack Alley by Joseph Zobel

Author:Joseph Zobel [Zobel, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

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Warmer still was my friendship with Georges Roc. He had a brown, round face, with coarse hair, sticking to his skull like a cap, large black eyes, always veiled with melancholy, and heavy, drooping lips. Georges Roc was bigger than I. He was possibly fatter but could not have been stronger, at any rate. He was always clean, changing clothes on Mondays and Fridays and, just like Vireil, wore boots which, again just like Vireil, he took off so he could run about more easily during recess.

It wasn’t at school that I’d met him. His parents lived not far from Cour Fusil and whenever I was passing by in the street, sometimes at midday and every night, I would see him sitting under a veranda.

One day, having noticed that we attended the same school, we struck up a conversation. Was it he who spoke first, or I? Since then, although I didn’t specifically look for him at school, every midday and every night I would go to meet him under the veranda to chat.

The house in which Georges Roc’s parents lived was much more beautiful than the other surrounding houses. Painted in bright colors, the facade contained many windows with venetian blinds. I had never seen Georges Roc’s maman nor his papa.

She was always inside, it seemed, and he, Mr. Justin Roc, came on evenings in his car; and from as far off as Georges could hear the horn, or even the noise of the engine, he would shout, cutting short any conversation.

“My papa! Off with you!”

My going to chat with Georges Roc seemed to involve an element of risk for him or for me. At any rate, my friend, though insisting that I keep on coming, appeared to be infringing some ban!

Yet I had become very attached to Georges Roc. I liked him, not for the joy of playing with him, not for some talent that made him stand out from the rest, not even for his kindness; above all, I liked him because he was always sad and because the things he told me caused me some degree of pain.

I had never felt any sadness for any friend. Georges Roc was the first being I’d met who saw and felt himself unhappy.

In my seven-year-old infant heart, he had secured a special place, the most sensitive and the most gloomy.

Every day Georges Roc would have some misfortune. Every day he had been crying and when on evenings, about six or seven o’clock, I went to meet him, it was his misfortunes that he spoke about.

Mam’zelle Mélie had complained to his mother about him and the latter had beaten him. Mam’zelle Mélie was an old black woman in a black dress and with dried legs, whom, in my mind, I associated with a crow because of her silhouette and her name. In Mr. Justin Roc’s house, she appeared to be a maid with great esteem which conferred on her even a certain authority over Georges.

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