Blind Man With a Pistol (3 page)

     
The black man got up with the vague suggestive movements of an old darky retainer, and began to walk slowly south on Seventh Avenue, past the entrance to the Theresa building. The white man followed but in a short pace he had drawn even with the black man and they went down the street conversing, a black-clad black man in a red fez announcing BLACK POWER and a light-haired white man in gray pants and white shirt, fhe steerer and the John.

                       
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Interlude

     
Where 125th Street crosses Seventh Avenue is the Mecca of Harlem. To get established there, an ordinary Harlem citizen has reached the promised land, if it merely means standing on the sidewalk.

     
One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street connects the Tribo rough Bridge on the east with the former Hudson River Ferry into New Jersey on the west. Crosstown buses ply up and down the street at the rate of one every ten minutes. White motorists passing over the complex toll bridge from the Bronx, Queens or Brooklyn sometimes have occasion to pass through Harlem to the ferry, Broadway or other destinations, instead of turning downtown via the East Side Drive.

     
Seventh Avenue runs from the north end of Central Park to the 155th Street Bridge where the motorists going north to Westchester County and beyond cross over the Harlem River into the Bronx and the Grand Concorse. The Seventh Avenue branch of the Fifth Avenue bus line passes up and down this section of Seventh Avenue and turns over to Fifth Avenue on 100th Street at the top of Central Park and goes south down Fifth Avenue to Washington Square.

     
Therefore many white people riding the buses or in motor cars pass this corner daily. Furthermore, most of the commercial enterprises -- stores, bars, restaurants, theaters, etc. -- and real estate are owned by white people.

     
But it is the Mecca of the black people just the same. The air and the heat and the voices and the laughter, the atmosphere and the drama and the melodrama, are theirs. Theirs are the hopes, the schemes, the prayers and the protest. They are the managers, the clerks, the cleaners, they drive the taxis and the buses, they are the clients, the customers, the audience; they work it, but the white man owns it. So it is natural that the white man is concerned with their behavior; it's his property. But it is the black people's to enjoy. The black people have the past and the present, and they hope to have the future.

     
The old Theresa Hotel, where once the greatest of the black had their day in the luxury suites overlooking the wide, park-divided sweep of Seventh Avenue, or in the large formal dining-room where dressing for dinner was mandatory, or in the dark cozy intimacy of the bar where one could see the greatest of the singers, jazz musicians, politicians, educators, prize fighters, racketeers, pimps, prostitutes. Memory calls up such names as Josephine Baker, Florence Mills, Lady Day, Bojangles Bill Robinson, Bert Williams, Chick Webb, Lester Young, Joe Louis, Henry Armstrong, Congressmen Dawson and De-Priest, educators Booker T. Washington and Charles Johnson, writers Bud Fisher, Claude MacKay, Countee Cullen, and others too numerous to mention. And their white friends and sponsors: Carl Van Vechten, Rebecca West, Dodd, Dodge, Rockefeller. Not to mention the movie actors and actresses of all races, the unforgettable Canada Lee and John Garfield.

                       
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3

     
Motorists coming west on 125th Street from the Triborough Bridge saw a speaker standing in the tonneau of an old muddy battered US Army command car, parked in the amber night light at the corner of Second Avenue, in front of a sign which read: CHICKEN AUTO INSURANCE, _Seymour Rosenblum_. None had the time or interest to investigate further. The white motorists thought that the Negro speaker was selling "chicken auto insurance" for Seymour Rosenblum. They could well believe it. "_Chicken_" had to do with the expression, "Don't be chicken!" and that was the way people drove in Harlem.

     
But actually the "chicken" sign was left over from a restaurant that had gone bankrupt and closed months previously, and the sign advertising auto insurance had been placed across the front of the closed shop afterwards.

     
Nor was the speaker selling auto insurance, which was farther from his thoughts than chicken. He had merely chosen that particular spot because he had felt he was least likely to be disturbed by the police. The speaker was named Marcus Mackenzie, and he was a serious man. Although young, slender and handsome, Marcus Mackenzie was as serious as an African Methodist minister with one foot in the grave. Marcus Mackenzie's aim was to save the world. But before then, it was to solve the Negro Problem. Marcus Mackenzie believed brotherhood would do both. He had assembled a group of young white and black people to march across the heart of Harlem on 125th Street from Second Avenue on the east to Convent Avenue on the west. He had been preparing this march for more than six months. He had begun the previous December when he had returned from Europe after spending two years in the US Army in Germany. He had learned all the necessary techniques in the army. Hence the old command car. One commanded best from a command car. That was what they were designed for. Kept you high off the ground, better to deploy your forces. Also it would carry all the first-aid equipment that might be needed: plasma, surgical instruments, cat gut for sutures, snakebite medicine which he felt would be just as effective for rat bites -- which were more likely in Harlem -- rubber raincoats in case of rain, black greasepaint for his white marchers to quickly don blackf aces in an emergency.

     
Most of the young men waiting to take formations of squads wore tee shirts and shorts. For now it was July 15th. Getaway day. Nat Turner day. There were only forty-eight of them. But Marcus Mackenzie believed that from little acorns big oaks grew. Now he was giving his marchers a last pep talk before the march began. He was speaking over a portable amplifier as he stood in the tonneau of the command car. But many other people had stopped to listen, for his voice carried far and wide. People who lived in the neighborhood. Black people, and white people too, for that far east on 125th Street was still a racially mixed neighborhood. The elderly people, for the most part, were the heads of families; the younger people in their twenties might be anything, black and white alike. There were many prostitutes, pederasts, pickpockets, sneak thieves, confidence men, steerers, and pimps in the area who served the 125th Street railroad station two blocks away. But Marcus Mackenzie had no tolerance for these.

     
"_The greatest boon to mankind that history will ever know can be brotherly love_," he was saying. "_Brotherhood! It can be more nutritious than bread. More warming than wine. More soothing than song. More satisfying than sex. More beneficial than science. More curing than medicine_." The metaphors might have been mixed and the delivery stilted, for Marcus was not highly educated. But no one could doubt the sincerity in his voice. The sincerity was so pure it was heart-breaking. Everyone within earshot was touched by his sincerity. "_Man's love for man. Let me tell you, it is like all religions put together, like all the gods embracing. It is the greatest_ . . ."

     
No one doubted him. The intensity of his emotion left no room for doubt. But one elderly black man, equally serious, standing on the opposite side of the street, expressed his concern and that of others. "I believe you, son. But how you gonna get it to work?"

     
"We're going to march!" Marcus declared in a ringing voice.

     
Whether that answered the old man's question or not was never known. But it answered Marcus Mackenzie's. He had given a lot of thought to the question. It seemed as though his whole life had been lived only to supply this answer. His earliest memory was of the Detroit race riot in 1943, right during the middle of the United States fierce fight against other forms of racism in other countries. But he had been too young to comprehend this irony. All he remembered was his father going in and out of their apartment in the ghetto, the shouting and gunshots from the unseen street, and his elder sister sitting in the front room of their closed and shuttered flat with a big black revolver in her lap pointed at the door. He had been four years old and she seven. They had been alone all the times their father had been out trying to rescue other black people from the police. Their mother was dead. When he had become old enough to know the diffrence between the "North" and the "South" he had become terrified. Mainly because Detroit was about as far north as one could go. And it had seemed as though he had suffered all the same restrictions there, the same abuses, the same injustices, as his black brothers in the South. He had lived all his life in a black slum, had attended jim-crowed schools, and after graduating from high school had got the customary jim-crow job in a factory. Then he had been drafted into the army and sent to Germany. It was there he had learned the techniques of the march, although for the most part he had served as an orderly in the women's maternity ward of the US Army hospital in Wiesbaden. He had been very much alone as there were no other Negroes working in the hospital at the same hours. He read only the Bible and he had lots of time to think. He was treated well by the white staff and expectant mothers who, in his ward, were wives of officers, most of whom were from the South. He knew there was little social integration in the army and what there was among GIs was rigidly enforced. The Negro Problem existed there as it had everywhere else he had ever lived. But still he was treated well. He came to the conclusion that it was all a matter of black and white people getting to know each other. He was not a very bright boy and he never knew he had been selected for the job because of his neat, clean-cut appearance. He was tall and slender with sepia skin and a long softly angled face. His eyes were brown. His black hair, worn very short, was straight at the roots. He had always been very serious. He was never frivolous. He seldom smiled. By the time he had served two years, mostly in the company of white people who treated him well, a great deal alone, reading and studying the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, he had come to the conclusion that plain Christian love was the solution to the Negro Problem. But he had learned plenty about marching. For a time he entertained the grandiose idea of returning to the States and imbuing all the inhabitants with Christian love. But he soon discovered that Doctor Martin Luther King had beat him to the idea and he sought about in his mind for something else.

     
After his discharge he went to Paris to live until his money ran out, as did a great number of other discharged GIs. He got a room with another young brother in a hotel on Rue Chaplain, around the corner from Boulevard Raspail and Montparnasse, almost within hailing distance of the _Rotonde_ and the _Dome_. It was a hotel very popular with discharged Negro GIs in Paris, partly because of its location and partly because of the army of prostitutes who cruised from there under a strict discipline similar to that they'd just left. He knew no one but other discharged GIs, all of whom recognized one another on sight, whether they had met before or not. They comprised an unofficial club; they talked the same language, ate the same food, went to the same places -- usually to the cheap restaurants by day and the movie theater -- _Studio Parnasse_ -- down the street, or Buttercup's Chicken Shack over on Rue Odessa at night. They gathered in each others' rooms and discussed the situation back home. Mostly they talked of the various brothers back home who had struck it rich and made the bigtime via the Negro Problem. Most of them had no trade or profession or education in any specific field, if indeed any at all. As a consequence, whether they admitted it or not, most of them were resolved to get a foothold in this bonanza. They felt if they could just somehow get involved in the Negro Problem, the next step up the ladder would be good paying jobs in government or private industry. All they needed was an idea. "Look at Martin Luther King. What's he done?" ... "He done got rich. That's what." But Marcus had no patience for cynicism. He felt it was sacrilege. He was pure in heart. He wanted the Negroes to arise. He wanted to lead them out of the abyss into the promised land. The trouble was, he wasn't very bright.

     
Then one night at Buttercup's he met this Swedish woman, Birgit, who was famous for her glass. She had dropped in to look over the brothers. She and Marcus found their affinity immediately. Both of them were serious, both were seeking, both were extraordinarily stupid. But she taught him brotherly love. She was hipped on brotherly love. Although it didn't mean the same thing to her as it did to him. She had had a number of brothers as lovers and in time she had become enthusiastic about brotherly love. But Marcus had the vision of Brotherhood.

     
The same night he met her, he gave up on the idea of plain Christian love. Buttercup was sitting at a big table where she could oversee the entrance, the bar and the dance floor at the same time, surrounded as usual by a number of sycophants, like a big fat mother hen with a brood of wet chicks and ugly ducklings, and she had introduced Marcus to Birgit, seeing as they were both serious, both seeking. At one end of the same table a fattish erudite white man vacationing from his teaching post in Black Africa was holding forth on the economy of the new African states. Feeling the man was getting too much of Birgit's attention, as he had just met her and didn't as yet know about her brotherly love, Marcus sought to steer the conversation away from Black African economy to the American Negro Problem where he could shine. He wanted to shine for Birgit. He didn't know he already shone to her satisfaction. Suddenly he interrupted the man. He held forth his Bible, dangling the gold cross. He was absorbed by Christian love. "What does that mean to you?" he challenged, pointing to the cross, preparing to expound his brilliant idea. The man looked from the cross to Marcus's face. He smiled sadly. He said, "It don't mean a damn thing to me, I'm a Jew." Right then and there Marcus dropped his ideas on Christian love. He was ready for brotherly love when Birgit took him home. But he was serious.