Original subtitles

- It was the season of light.

It was the season of darkness.

It was the spring of hope.

It was the winter of despair.

We had everything before us.

We had nothing before us.

In short,

it was a period not unlike the present period.

- Old woman in the sky

flogging her geese.

- Don't give up the ghost.

Don't give up the ghost.

Don't give up the ghost.

They call us people of low race.

They call us primitives.

You make them right.

- [Narrator] When La Salle, the intrepid French explorer,

standing on the shore of Lake Michigan,

surveyed the site of what is now

the fourth city of the world,

he is reputed to have exclaimed,

"This will be the gate of empire."

So definitely do the forces of geography

give direction to the currents of history,

that this explorer, surrounded by

what must have been an unprepossessing sight,

a vast region as yet peopled only by

Indians and bison and wolves,

was able to look forward through the years

and to see a rising, a teeming metropolis,

the center of an empire, whose richness

beggars description, whose influence upon civilization

challenges estimate, and whose future

promises achievements that no careful writer

would attempt to detail, lest, today,

he seem an enthusiast and, tomorrow,

a shortsighted prophet.

Would you visualize the vast size of the animal population

that annually marches into the city

to pay the bloody sacrifice

that the human appetite requires of it?

Here comes the cattle contingent,

two and a half million strong.

A line of sheep that extends to the Panama Canal.

Follow the hogs, seven million of them,

their meat tomorrow's breakfast,

their bones tomorrow's false teeth,

their hair tomorrow's hairbrushes,

their fat tomorrow's soap.

A procession of pork running from Lake Michigan,

via Mexico City, to the mouth of the Amazon!

- [Man] Aailyah.

Aailyah.

- [Aailyah] Nick, he raped me.

- [Man] I'll get the bastard.

- [Aailyah] No, DeAndre, he'll hurt you.

- DeAndre Son Carter of the Cottage Grove Station,

he's most comfortable in his dark suit and overcoat.

For this reason, he has covertly sabotaged

the radiator in the room.

He compliments the suit and the overcoat

with a dark green fedora.

He has spent many hours in the perpetual gloom

of the place, carefully fingering the parallel troughs.

DeAndre is mournfully earnest these days.

Even white strangers tiptoe around his anxieties.

Now he's at work day and night.

Now he's nervous.

He has difficulty urinating in the company

of another fellow.

Why is it, when we look in the mirror,

we wait for that moment when we forgive ourselves?

- [Man] Ambrose Greenaway,

the theater man.

He's been missing almost a month.

His wife didn't want me to come here.

The last time anybody saw Ambrose

was January 1st, the day he sold

his chain of theaters for a million flat.

- Man comes into that kind of money,

there's no telling what he'll do.

- He might leave without telling his wife,

but not without telling me.

He owes people, and he never welshes.

We're talking about Ambrose Greenaway.

- [Cop] Mrs. Greenaway, I'm trying to contact your husband.

- [Mrs. Greenaway] I know.

I've not seen my husband in two weeks.

- [Cop] When was the last time you saw him?

- My husband sold our group of theaters

early this month, and we were well satisfied.

We received a sum of money,

and he had me deposit it

in the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank.

He did not come home that night for dinner.

We were to celebrate.

- Sir!

- We're closed, fuck off!

- Too much to absorb and oppose in an instant.

♪ Who'll come a-waltzing ♪

- You are so beautiful.

I'm already in love with you.

Will you marry me?

Marry me.

- Yes, I will.

- He never does.

During the final weeks of their marriage,

he came home and engaged Aailyah.

He stayed with the missionary perspective

for the longest time, gazing down on her,

straining after the feeling they'd had

in their eyes in their first months of making love.

In the eyes into which he once melted,

he saw an involuntary barrier.

Where she had once shed tears of ecstasy,

for weeks, she shed tears of sorrow,

and, in time, came dry-eyed indifference.

In their final couplings in November,

she would turn her head away altogether,

her moans manufactured.

Fuck.

He felt hatred from her.

He's a slave to his will.

Her hatred made him harder.

He fucked her violently.

Her moans would continue.

She reveled, too, in this malevolent passion.

This funeral for their love.

- [Cop] I'll talk to the owner and manager.

You talk to the custodial staff.

- Yes, sir.

I'm Detective Carter of the Cottage Grove Police Department.

- James Cowan.

The call me Gentleman Jim,

being that I'm a house nigger.

- I'm looking for Ambrose Greenaway.

There are some people concerned for his wellbeing.

- Mr. Detective, the truth is,

no one is concerned for the wellbeing of Mr. Greenaway.

- How do we know you didn't do him in?

- Thank you, nobody seems to think that a Negro

is smart enough to make a rich, white man disappear.

- Is there anyone he might have talked to since then?

- Mr. Greenaway's secretary.

The accountant Doughty.

He's in New York with TransAmerica.

He got sent there as part of the sale.

Fuck him.

Man was too mean to shit away from home.

- Is there anything else I need to know about Doughty?

- Yeah.

He said he was gonna kill Greenaway.

- Shaved him on a hot evening,

end of last December, I guess.

- Careful.

- Sorry, sir.

- Did you see him any time after that?

- An Irishman came here for a shave

a couple of weeks ago.

Tells me that Greenaway's accountant killed him,

put him in a taxi,

buried him under those laundry tubs

in Greenaway's house.

- They say he's too mean to shit away from home.

- Goddamn it!

- Sorry, sir.

Sorry.

He wanted long sideburns.

I heard plenty of rumors, though.

Greenaway's in South America

or Greenaway's carved up with a hacksaw

or Greenaway is put into a furnace.

I don't put stock in it.

- What day, sir?

What day of the week?

- It was a Tuesday.

- Tuesday.

Yes, sir.

Mr. Greenaway would've come by that day.

I knew Mr. Greenaway to see him.

I always smile and say hello when he come by.

But iffin' it was a Tuesday,

he would've stopped by to pick up

the Sunday New York Times.

- And when does the Times come in?

- A boy usually bring it by about six, sir.

- [DeAndre] $50,000.

$50,000.

I'll solve the case, motherfuckers.

Son of a bitch.

- Have either of you seen Mr. Ambrose Greenaway recently?

- We were just talking about Mr. Greenaway.

- [Woman] We haven't seen him since the end of December.

- Kill me now.

- Marcus Coleman inspired Sherwood Anderson.

How is it, he wonders, should anyone

be so content spending his days out at elbows.

He serenely accepts his serious silence.

Good morning, how do, good morning.

- I have two of everything, my good man.

Anderson has no problem with the chinks.

They have the corner on laundry business,

and they run an efficient diner.

Why is it then that they make some people

feel threatened?

Girls and women women are basically banned,

so they can't propagate.

And the Chinese Exclusion Law will keep

them from ever getting citizenship.

- What, did you wash these clothes in piss, old man?

They're a lot dirtier than when I brought them in.

Huh, they smell like piss!

They smell like piss, damn it!

- Marcus Coleman recently asked Mr. Sherwood Anderson

his name and what he do.

Ever since, he say, "Good morning, Mr. Anderson,"

and sometimes, "How the book-writing business?"

- Good.

Good, thank you.

- Our God, each evening promises imminence.

Is that a monument?

No.

It was you.

She knows she'll be alone when she dies.

She feels somehow she'll die in a foreign country.

- [Conductor] All aboard!

- As I understand it, Mr. Doughty

has only been found to possess the bonds of Mr. Greenaway's.

And, if he's guilty, he is only guilty of theft.

Now, if you're asking me about murder,

I would look at the wife.

She stood to gain the most.

I stand with the Negro.

Remember that on election day.

- I'm telling you, brother did

that motherfucking Greenaway.

Man was fucking some of the sisters

down at the theater, and he done fucked the wrong one.

- I said to him, "Doughty, you were

"the last man to see my husband.

"What condition did he seem to be in?

"Did he seem like a man who might

"suddenly lose his memory?"

And he said, "Well, he was very nervous."

And I asked him, "Did he have any keys

"belonging to Mr. Greenaway?"

And he said, "No."

- You know this man, Ambrose Greenaway?

He ever come in here?

- No, no, sir, not this man.

I've seen a lot like him,

but not this guy.

- [DeAndre] Can you show this to your girls

and their regular cats?

- This is a smart place to be silent.

You'll keep close, quietly emanating

the glow of the kind of man

you're supposed to very well respect.

- Ah, Mr. Anderson.

Think we might have you here.

That'll be fine.

Thank you very much.

- I'm sorry, if I could trouble you, sir?

- It'll be my great pleasure, young woman.

- Thank you so very much, sir.

- [Ernest] I wish to introduce myself, sir,

because you are a real writer.

- Well understood.

New owners don't even think about this room.

They think it goes to the organ.

Unless we find something,

you don't know about this room.

I heard girls laughing behind the wall.

I heard shouting.

I heard screaming one time,

and I got afraid,

but, then, a minute later, I heard laughing again.

- It smells like a dead man.

It occurs to him as he reaches

for his last sacred heart that death

would never have so exotic a scent.

He had attended fatality and knew the odor.

He is angry at himself at this moment in the dark,

angry at himself for thinking

that a rich, white man's corpse

would smell more refined than another.

- Would you mind talking for a second, Mr. Anderson?

I got something to ask, see?

I need somebody

who's good with words. - They were all grotesque.

- And letters.

I got something. - All the men and women

the writer had known before

had become grotesque. - I just need,

I need somebody to tell my story.

You can help me, Mr. Anderson.

You can help me.

You see, I sell these things,

but I don't know no good writer

from no bad writer.

But I think you, I think you care

about the little guy,

and so, what do you say, can you help me?

- I'm just a fiction writer.

I make things up.

You need to talk to a real journalist.

- Well, who you recommend?

Who you think, Mr. Anderson?

- Ernest Hemingway is your man.

He has a vita as a journalist,

and is not writing for the cooperative commoner.

- It's a bone, gentlemen, we've hit bone!

- [Cop] A skull.

- Tell the fucking witch we found her husband's skull.

- It ain't human.

- What?

- Looks to me like an ox skull.

- Yeah.

- Go to bed!

Have a look at you.

Are you not a man?

- This is it?

This is how we do it?

No candles, no crystal ball, no cards?

- You're the policeman.

- Good morning.

- Is it still morning?

- We came to know one another for a time.

I sensed, somehow, that I may soon find the missing man,

and I suppose, in all of that excitement,

I may have willed her into being,

like when the haunted man

meets the sweet Midwestern girl in the pulp fictions.

- I see her.

Look, do you see her?

Right there.

- In the instant, DeAndre prepares to lie

that he does, only to appease Nia.

He sees her, the woman in the moon.

Yes, yes, indeed.

But this one wasn't injured, though, no.

Something inside her was already dead.

And even as I courted her,

I saw only sorrow, sorrow that I attended

like an open grave every day

and I fell into each night.

When we look back,

when we remember,

the moments in between are lost.

Perhaps we should get back to the auto.

- Take me home, DeAndre.

- You wanna go home?

- Take me home to where you live.

I live with my father,

so that's out of the question.

- [DeAndre] You live with your father?

What does he do?

- He's in the business of newspaper distribution.

Mm hmm.

- In this kiss, DeAndre senses Nia

is encompassing all of him, his darkest soul,

the noble persona he has struggled

to maintain in her company.

Here they are, the two of them.

- And the uncountable, invisible hundreds of others.

- They're unlived lives.

I am DeAndre Son Carter.

I am a black soul consigned to melancholy,

melancholy nurtured in every isolated moment.

And for one exceptional moment in this tale,

I will be in alignment with the girl,

the promise, the dream.

Remember

this.

Oh my God.

Nia! - It's all right.

- Oh my God. - No, no, it's not you.

I'm all right, not you, I'm all right.

- Nia, I'm so sorry. - No, no, it's not you.

- I'm so sorry. - I'm all right.

- I'm so sorry.

- I'm all right.

I'm all right. - So sorry.

I'm so sorry.

She was an Alabama girl.

She had a big family in Tillmans Corner.

She was unhappy here.

Her father came to live with us.

I went to finish the man who assaulted her,

but she begged me not to leave her alone.

I ask her where her father is.

She says he had to leave.

He's gone home.

That's when I realized, you see,

there wasn't no rapist.

She was intimate with her father.

- There was a man.

- Where is he now?

- He's still sort of...

- Did you know Ambrose Greenaway?

- You know I knew him.

- Did you know Ambrose Greenaway?

- [Man] Go ahead, you can move it.

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Remember ♪

♪ This ♪

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Kill me now ♪

- Hold your fire!

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Remember ♪

- I'll hold the Times for you.

♪ This ♪

♪ Remember ♪

♪ This ♪

- You have to go away if you're gonna write about home.

If you wanna see in, you gotta see from around,

from a distance.

Pedigree is everything.

So you're friendly on the Left Bank awhile,

cozy up to the nice lady who runs Shakespeare and Company,

and stare at a blank page until drops of blood

form on your forehead--

- The individual, the great writer when he comes

uses everything that has been known or discovered

about literature up to that point,

being able to accept or reject

in a time so short, it appears that the knowledge

was born with him.

Takes him instantly what it takes

an ordinary man a lifetime to know.

And then the great writer goes

beyond what has been known or discovered

and makes something of his own.

It's hard to write in this hellhole.

Makes me wish I was back hauling cadavers

out of the trenches.

- You don't like your hometown?

- Paris, parts of Italy, the Pyrenees, Spain,

they're the eyes and dimples,

they're the white marble genitalia of the world,

and my town is the poop chute.

Dempsey, I did a piece on him

for my high school paper back when he was just starting out.

- You know him? - Sure.

Spared with him once.

Him and that other boxer, Negro, what's his name?

- Sam Langford, Jack Johnson.

- That's the one.

Darkies are fast.

- Excuse me while I use the lavatory.

- Pardon me, Mr. Dempsey.

Wonder if you could do me a big favor.

See, I got a buddy over there

that I'm trying to impress,

and I told him we were close friends.

- Have I ever met you?

- That's not the point, Mr. Dempsey.

The point is, if you could stop by

on your way out anyway, and say hello

like we're old friends?

You'd be doing me a big favor.

My name's Ernest.

My buddy's in the can, he's gonna be out any minute now.

- All right. - Thank you so much,

Mr. Dempsey.

Maybe some day I can repay the favor.

- Everywhere I go now.

I can't even sit and have a nice beer

without being interrupted.

- [Sherwood] I just realized

that historical perspectives say more about

the time in which they are--

- Ernest, how you doing?

Long time no see, old buddy.

- Beat it, Jack!

Can't you see I'm busy?

This city doesn't believe in literature.

People here think art has been exaggerated.

Have you read Eliot's big, new indecipherable?

Here's what happens when you tell a natural bank accountant

he's got literary talent.

"The awful daring of a moment's surrender,

"which an age of prudence can never retract.

"By this and this only, we have existed."

- Mr. Anderson!

Mr. Anderson,

I ain't seen you in many days.

You remember?

Yeah, you said you were going to introduce me

to a writer, to a Mr. Ernest.

- I'm Mr. Ernest.

- Thank you so much, Mr. Anderson.

I would've thought you would've forgotten.

- Did a dove just fly out of your mouth?

- I think so, Mr. Ernest.

30 odd years ago, I was employed

by the railroad in Missouri.

I met a young man who dedicated himself to heaven

to get through some personal troubles.

In time, he introduced me to his loving sister.

I could've been a Pullman porter.

Came this close.

She and I became close with the passing days,

and I courted her, Mr. Ernest.

And after passage of some time,

we married and she became with child.

I got a letter one day,

telling me to return home to my mama in Chicago.

My daddy had passed away and she needed me.

- [Nuns] Yea, though I walk through

the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil.

- [Marcus] And some many months later,

I was joined in Chicago by that same young man.

- Fox got a hole.

Bird got a nest.

I have no place to lay my head.

I'm cold.

- He had my daughter with him, little Nia.

And it was then that I learned

that my one, true love,

she died in childbirth.

I'm the one killed Ambrose Greenaway.

I aim to give myself up,

but I need somebody to tell my story.

- Don't give up the ghost.

- If I can't dance, I don't want

to be part of your revolution.

- Don't give up the ghost.

- One of these days we're gonna get

those niggers on the corner and blow up

those leftover munitions from the big one.

Not you.

You get out there.

How'd the Sox do today?

They beat them Browns?

- When hell was about to break loose,

and, by fate, I was destined to be present.

It occurred at Wabash Avenue and 35th Street

at 8:10 o'clock at night,

when over 50 policemen, mounted and on foot,

wanting to attempt to disperse a mob

that was playing .

Drew their revolvers and showered

bullets into the crowd.

The officers' guns fired for fully 10 minutes!

I just thought of the obituary column.

I fell at the expense of a perfectly new straw bonnet.

- [Man] I was framed!

- [Man] We have a fox here could languish down there.

- [Man] What if he doesn't?

- Niggers going crazy out there.

Everybody's going crazy.

We're better off in here.

- The peace arrow doled out, six cylinder.

- Greenaway, a name you fought all the time.

Those fellows in court said I made them offers.

They were exaggerating.

But I suppose there's days I wanted to dispatch them.

I went to the Illinois Trust on La Salle,

and I signed out 100 grand.

I figured I could always put it back if nothing happened

and nobody would know the difference.

Don't remember her name, kinda mulatto, but beautiful.

Long black hair down to her ass, and legs?

She's with child.

This Negro comes in when Greenaway's out,

and he's off his rocker.

He thinks Greenaway's gonna take care of this kid

his daughter's gonna have.

I said, "Yes, sir, Mr. Ambrose Greenaway

"has the chorus girls,

"and this ain't the first time

"he's made one with child.

"They say he killed a man," I tell him.

He stumbles out of my office.

And it turns out, his daughter cashed the bond,

gave it to a fellow out on 35th,

one does maternity with a coat hanger.

Now she can't piss straight.

Just to be safe, I say, "Take this revolver

"and wait for Greenaway in the furnace room."

Greenaway comes, I send him into the furnace room.

I sat down outside and listened

to the two of them yell at each other.

And then there's some noise.

Someone's pounding at the door.

Negro did his bit.

Now I gotta do mine.

We burned every piece of flesh,

and I hammered every bone til it was pepper.

No corpus delicti.

Worked out til now, but I've had enough.

I wanna go home.

I'm gonna make a deal and the Negro will hang.

- They will execute you.

It's just a matter of time.

If you come with me now,

they might not shoot you on sight.

- I have a daughter.

- I'll talk to her.

- Help me see her.

She in the theater.

Go back!

Go back in the theater!

You followed me here!

The man that killed Ambrose Greenaway

wants to surrender.

- This is a nice bit of work, D.

Arrest of the century.

I'm pretty sure no one on my watch would do it.

- No, no, let me bring him in.

The girl is his daughter.

Don't let them do it.

♪ Baby two abreast ♪

♪ Looking up and reaching up ♪

♪ What does the earth taste like ♪

♪ In this moment, really you are reassured ♪

The city is advocating this moment.

There is no need for prayer.

He thinks instead about how else he might have died.

In the war, in a lynching,

in an auto collision.

- He must've had minerals in his mouth as a child.

- [Man] Go ahead, you can move it.

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Remember ♪

♪ This ♪

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Kill me now ♪

♪ Remember ♪

♪ This ♪

♪ Remember ♪

♪ This ♪