Going Down Fast (12 page)

We hate their rotten system more than any mortals do
,

Our aim is not to patch it up, but build it all anew …

On the train he wrote commentary for a couple of string quartet programs and a note to himself. Think about this: the modern state is a machine for making war. Ninety percent of our budget. But grafted on a notion of state was force arranging economy and ministering to needs and wishes of its citizens. Making good environment. So can have states combining at least slightly humane domestic policies with classic colonial interference and aggression and chauvinism overseas. Toynbee's external proletariat of the Roman empire exists today. One outcome of civil rights struggle could be incorporating all in middle-class. United fat America squatting on a billion peasant necks. We are five percent of the world's people and consume fifty percent of its goods. Who can stop us, ever? Selfrighteous cannibals.

As he came down the block Harlan's porchlight was on and he could hear voices. Yet he was shocked to walk in—two steps was all he could manage—and find maybe fifty people packed in the little square livingroom and dinette. Harlan had borrowed chairs from his neighbors but not nearly enough. The room was full of a tense worried anger. Four or five were white. The rest knew if not exactly who was fighting them then exactly why. He found a place along one wall.

Sam Short, a highschool teacher in his late forties, was chairing the meeting heavily, wary of the excitement in the room. The louder the voices rose and the higher the whine of pressure behind the words, the harder he leaned on Robert's Rules. A broad-faced man got up to say, “The University can move us all out anyhow. You can't fight city hall—”

“Why not, if they fight us?” a woman yelled, clanking her thin arm loaded with bracelets.

“The chair recognizes only Mr. Watson.”

“Well, I don't recognize Old Watson, giving up before we start.”

Watson went on, “Why not play ball and we all get the best prices we can? Why wait till they come in and condemn us and we have to take what we can get? We can't stand up to the University and the city and the mayor and the Federal Government. If they're going to expand, they're going to expand, and we might as well get good prices while we have a choice.”

He had murmured support, but most speakers stood for resistance. The gist of their speeches was injury. They had had enough trouble finding this house, this flat. What would they do? Move back into the slums with their kids? Here their kids had yards to play in and if the schools were crowded, well, at least they learned something.

“I'm just a renter but I got to say, first we have to move for the expressway, and then another project, and then we live in a place and the landlord stops repairs. We so sick of moving I just want to bawl when I think about it.”

Blanche, the skinny hardbitten woman with all the bracelets, insisted on being heard. She could outyell Short. “We was sold a bill of goods with all this renewal stuff. We was told they were going to improve this community and fix up the streets and the schools and give us garbage pickups and stop signs, and it turns out what they mean by improve is getting rid of us. The same real estate men who made a fortune letting us in are going to make a fortune throwing us out. Here I am and here I stay and I'm not ready to budge myself for nobody!”

“How can the city call my house rundown?” A small man with a small voice, mumbling. “Me and my brother-in-law painted it and fixed it up and my wife planted flowers.”

He was reminded of something. Then he frowned, remembering. Late gradeschool. His old man had been active for a time in a neighborhood improvement association—which except for a hassle with the city about streetlighting existed to keep their dirty depressed blocks white and Christian. The same air of earnest hope overriding fear and poverty and mangled ambitions. The air of being beleaguered in their manhood. Worse, he remembered sitting impressed beside his old man—who'd been of course an official—and thinking this is like the union. Voting, electing, discussing: this is what they mean in school by a town meeting. Democracy in action: shoulder to shoulder, fence to fence against the Jews and colored. Jews had not been real to him, but the colored they were keeping out were the same kids he went to gradeschool with.

About halfway through Harlan took the floor. “You can feel sorry for yourselves all night.” Strain and fatigue were etched in his face. “You can sigh and complain and curse the University right to the day they tear your houses down. The University doesn't hear you. Nobody's listening tonight. We're just a bunch of black nobodies bellyaching and they won't hear us unless we make so much noise they can't shut us out.” Shrill at first, his voice deepened as he gained confidence. “First, we need an organization. Second, we need members, every one of you to go out and convince your neighbors we mean them. Third, we need money, fourth, publicity, fifth, a lawyer. Sixth, we got to apply what pressure we can swing on our alderman, on the mayor's office, on whoever we can push on so they feel it. We can't afford to give up. We can't afford to wait and see and send polite little feelers and wait for the hearings. We know what we'll see—the bulldozers coming. Nobody cares except us here in this room and our kids who'll have to grow up where we can squeeze in. We all know what conditions are like back in the ghetto. We can't take our kids back there. Nobody ever will care unless we make them listen by making so much fuss and noise and trouble that they can't shut us out. They think this is going to be an easy move. It's our job to make it hard for them.”

Harlan stepped backward, wiping at his forehead. He looked at Shirley, sitting with arms clasped as if cold, looked quickly around the room, and gave up the floor to his neighbor J.J. to read the resolution they had drawn up establishing the Defense Committee.

When the resolution came to a vote some hands shot up at once: Harlan's, J.J.'s, Blanche, and the little man with the soft voice. Others looked around and then slowly raised their hands. Finally about two thirds of the people in the room were voting yes. Sam Short and Watson were among the negatives. Rowley noticed that Shirley did not vote.

Afterward Shirley made coffee for the six who stayed. Harlan was still high, his face quick and fiery. His hands shook. “I felt helpless and put down all week. But when they started coming in tonight … something happened. Just because we made some calls and tacked up some rotten posters. Now we have a weapon. They think we can't organize fast enough, but they're in for a shock.”

Rowley reached across and took one of Harlan's cigarettes—not because he needed it but to make contact, for he was struck that they were in a fight now, a real fight, win or lose.

They planned a block party to raise funds. He would entertain and dig up black artists. He told about his pursuit of Jack Curtis, and J.J. knew the minister he was looking for. He walked down as Yente rose howling welcome from under the front steps, with Harlan leaning out still yelling instructions for moneyraising and publicity.

Wednesday night the wind was blowing like a mean bastard when he parked. The plate glass of the cafeteria was steamed up so he didn't catch sight of Caroline waving until he was in line waiting for a slice of rib roast. She was sitting with the thin black girl who'd been at Leon's, and she gave him a nervous smile. The cafeteria was crowded and what the hell, he'd been firm enough. He sat with them.

“You remember Vera.” Caroline was beaming. Vera gave him a brief icy glance, lowered her chin firmly. Why did she mind him joining them? He had met middle-class black girls who asserted their virtue by being rude to him, but somehow he did not think that was her pitch. Embarrassed, Caroline dug under the table. “Friday's Halloween, so I asked Vera to make me a mask. Something I could work into my act at the Rising Sun.” She put a bag on the table.

“Why did she ask
you
for a mask?”

Her face was one. She made the smallest of motions with her delicate shoulders and went on eating.

“Vera makes them. Don't you remember—But of course you've never seen it, I mean, it's over my bed.”

Vera pouted. “I did that when I was seventeen and it looks it. Give that back sometime, and I'll give you a better one.”

“How about this? Can I keep it?” Caroline held up the bag.

“Why not?” A voice clear with the shivery sound of a tuning fork.

“What would you think of somebody who painted pictures and then gave them away?” Caroline asked, her eyes large and melting. “Because to me Vera's things are works of art.”

“Why did you give her the mask you did so long ago if you don't like it?” Stubbornness set his jaw. He was hung up on making her speak.

“Because I was seventeen when I gave it to her: I thought it was pretty. I didn't know any better,” she chirped acidly. “I was very small town, very primitive” She was wearing a boyish white shirt, and her long neck bore her face high above the open collar. Her wideset eyes slashed him and turned away.

“Now you're twenty-one, big city, very cool.”

“Twenty-three soon, thank you.” With her wide nostrils dilated she turned toward the steamy window. Reaching into Caroline's lap he took the bag and pulled the mask out. From the corner of her eye Vera caught his action and swung around, making an immediately checked gesture at taking it from him. The mask was made from a piece of beige silk, and the lank hair from unwound gold tassel. Even in the distortion created by spreading it flat on the table, the face painted on the silk was a fallen, an aged Caroline, a caricatured bled dry Caroline. Couldn't she see that? “But what will you use it for?” he asked her.

“Because I'm going to sing ‘The House of the Rising Sun.' Isn't it beautifully relevant?”

He wanted to beg her not to. That mask with Caroline's trained doggy contralto. None of his business. “I want to see more.”

“Come to Vera's with us then. She has dozens. Why don't you come?” They were sitting over coffee.

He looked at Vera. “I'd like to.”

For an instant her face held irritation, contempt and humor. He almost doubted his observation for the mask slipped back.

As they got up he saw too late that Caroline was toting her guitar. The rain had stopped but wind swept water from the pavement in long running waves. At the car Vera climbed hastily into the backseat piled with junk and Caroline's Martin. Under cover of the front seat Caroline gave his thigh a squeeze.

He set his teeth. He was tempted to drop them and go on home. He was helping Harlan prepare arguments and his briefcase was heavy with reports on urban renewal projects he had to slog through. He had some of it figured. The re-developer got the land for building expensive apartments (sound financial basis) through the government at about a third or less of what that same developer would have had to pay on the open market. Not to mention that a lot of the people would never have sold to him if they had any choice. He wanted to work on the program on the Defense Committee's fight he meant to talk Cal, his boss, into letting him do. In the rearview mirror he looked at Vera. With her dark raincoat drawn up she seemed monochromatic, cut clothes and all from the same curve of wood. Passing lights seized her face with a remoteness that piqued him. Sitting with her coat drawn to her, sitting as little as possible on the dirty cluttered backseat, she had leaped into herself and let the lid fall. Wrinkling his nose so his moustache tickled the nostrils, he smiled at his curiosity.

He parked near Muhammed's Mosque Number Two with its perennial message
Justice for the Black Man in Islam
. The wind had shifted, sharpened. The night was clearing and getting colder, the sky was littered with rags of torn cloud. In the vestibule Vera stopped to check her mailbox.

Caroline swung her guitar impatiently. “Expect the mailman to come back after supper?”

“Paul would put a note in, if he came by.”

He asked, “Boyfriend?”

Caroline tsked-tsked. “Silly. Her kid brother.”

The vast lobby had been hot stuff in the era of Valentino movies. Wee bulbs in heavy iron brackets lit it feebly from the squat pillars and rough plaster walls. Here and there against a pillar a leather chair exposed gored intestines. The back wall of French doors leaked puddles on the marble floor through broken panes.

Up a side stairway following Caroline's hippy pink pants. Then the room. He let it come in. Wall of faces. Wall of judgments. Society which must jar and rub on her, cuff and molest her, insult her daily in banal and trumpeting ways, she looked back at through its blind faces. She worked with anything. A few masks were painted on cloth or canvas, but most were constructed of household trivia.

“Do you start with an idea? Or do you find components and build from them?” Deliberately he sat on her narrow bed, under the faces.

Vera curled up in a tall art nouveau wicker rockingchair extending way over her neat head. “Not a black or white case,” she said with a thin unfriendly smile. “I keep an eye out for pieces I like the shape or feel of. Every time I'm in a department store, I check the remnants table. There always seem to be things around I don't need. As my mother used to say about casseroles, they get rid of leftovers.”

Caroline sat artfully. “I knew you'd be impressed. But she won't do a thing with them. I've tried and tried to get her to exhibit.” She made a Z of her legs in pink pants.

“So they can talk about African influences. I make them to amuse me—and Paul. If other people want masks, they can make them.”

He fished for her eyes. “Still I'd like to know how you work.”

“Would you?” Her voice limpid, mocking. She sauntered over to a screen to push it clacking against the wall. A table covered with odds and ends, a portable sewingmachine, a dress laid out and pinned, a pile of egg cartons. Standing with one hand on her hip. “Well, watch. The entertainment begins.”