Jitterbug (10 page)

“What’d it set you back?”

“Twelve bucks.”

“I meant the suit.”

“Hundred and forty.”

“Holy Christ.”

“It came with two pairs of pants.”

“It ought to come with a running board. Where’d you get the money?”

Earl tipped his head back to look at him from under the brim. “You ain’t the only one sets something aside.”

“Every dime you ever had you spent on something that wasn’t worth a nickel. You steal it from Elizabeth?”

“You know how long it’d take Lizzie to make a hundred and forty cleaning people’s houses for ten bucks a week? Every other Friday I hand her my check, she sticks it in the bank and gives me back five to walk around with. She makes Henry Morgenthau look like Santa Claus.”

“She know you took out a hundred and forty to buy that clown suit?”

“
Zoot
suit. Cab Calloway wears one. Anyway, I took out two hundred and fifty.”

“What the hell for?”

“Hold your horses.” Earl dug deep into the suit coat’s right side pocket and came up with a box two inches square, covered in blue velour. He snapped it open under Dwight’s nose with a flourish. The tiny diamond caught the overhead trough lights with a blue glint.

“Is it real?”

“It better be, I got it at Lord’s. Quarter of a carat. Three hundred smackers.”

“You said you took out two hundred and fifty.”

“I put down a third. I never got Lizzie an engagement ring. She’ll shit. See, that’s why I bought the suit. I can’t wear that bag from the Salvation Army when we step out for our anniversary.”

“You only been married three months.”

“Three months today.” He clapped shut the box and returned it to his pocket.

“What about the other ten bucks?”

Earl looked at him with pity. He had started growing a pencil-thin moustache that didn’t make him resemble Duke Ellington in the least. “Cat, you can’t walk around this town on no five bucks.”

Dwight remembered his beanie, took it off, and was about to toss it in after his coveralls when he noticed the fresh brown-and-white stain and remembered. He went over to a fifty-five-gallon drum currently serving as a trash can and dropped it in. When he returned to his locker, Earl had the skirt of his baggy suitcoat hiked up in back and was using both hands to stuff something under his belt between his kidneys.

Dwight knew it was the nine-inch section of shifting cane from a Hupmobile his brother had rescued from a scrap-drive pile in Eufala and had been carrying ever since they came to Michigan. It was made of hard rubber and ended in a ball weighted with lead and made a handy blackjack.

“You got to get out of Sojourner Truth,” Dwight said. “You just might be able to pull that skull-buster out from under all that flannel before some redneck blows a hole through you with a Frontier Colt.”

“What, and move in with you in that attic? Anyway, everything’s jake there now. I just got so used to packing it the suit don’t hang right without it.”

“Right, and the Klan didn’t shut down Packard for promoting niggers over whites.”

“Just till Franklin D. ordered them back open. We got friends in Washington, little brother.” He made a gun with his finger, fired it at Dwight, and swung on down the row of lockers, the metal taps on his saddle shoes clicking like Western Union. Dwight slapped Old Spice on his face and wondered if he should ask Elizabeth where Earl got the money.

“G
OOD-BYE, ARSEHOLE OF DEMOCRACY
.”

“That’s
Arsenal.
” This voice held less conviction.

“Tell that to my piles. You could stack coins on the sonsabitches.”

“Thanks. I’ll pass.”

Dwight didn’t take part in the conversation, if it could be called that. The exhausted workers aboard the trailer-bus didn’t seem to be speaking with any expectation of receiving a response. The bus, provided by Greyhound on a contract with the Ford Motor Company, consisted of a tractor cab towing a long trailer with windows that reminded Dwight of nothing so much as the livestock carriers in his home state. The laborers who rode in it referred to it as the cattle car. It stank of the same smells that permeated the plant, with additional contributions from the musty upholstery and the leaky exhaust system. Dwight had made sure to board early enough to get a window seat; not because he cared to look out at the raw, turned earth of an industrial complex under perpetual construction or the rows of drab tents sheltering those workers and their families who couldn’t get into the Willow Lodge dormitories, but for the fresh air. The last time he rode in the bus the fumes had given him a forty-eight-hour headache.

He braced himself with both hands on the seat in front of him as the driver, physically separated from his passengers and thus indifferent to their comfort, spun the wheel and bucked up over the ruts between the two-track dirt road and the blacktop. An arc of remote noise came through the windows, the harsh coughing of a machine gun being tested at the Gun Butt. It was difficult to imagine a sound more foreign to farm country; but then he found it almost impossible to picture the place as it must have been before the bulldozers and earthmovers came through. He seldom took this route when he drove himself, but he should more often. The tents and dormitories, the plywood trailers that served as transition between them, the wet laundry drooping from clotheslines strung between the trailers and the bumpers of parked Model T’s made him feel better about his little room under the eaves in Ypsilanti. True, it wasn’t as comfortable as his brother’s neat one-bedroom house in the Sojourner Truth project in Detroit, but on the other hand he hadn’t needed the army and the state police to help him move in.

Loneliness was the worst of it. He had never made friends easily, and separating himself from the few he’d had back home hadn’t been difficult. Women weren’t impressed by him on first acquaintance. He’d had sex with only one, and that relationship had lasted only until she took up with the son of the owner of a Piggly Wiggly who allowed the young man use of the delivery van. Later, when the Klan smashed out its windows and scratched NIGGER all over its surface, she’d come back to Dwight, who by then had bought and fixed up his Model A. He told her he wasn’t interested. That’s when she said that dating him was like going out with an old man and she had a better time in bed on her own.

It didn’t hurt as much as she’d intended, as he’d suspected that was the case. When his and Earl’s father had hopped a freight to Florida in 1938, it was Dwight, aged fourteen, who quit school to go to work on the docks to support himself and his brother and his mother, who’d been dying of some drab disease for as long as he could remember. She’d asked Dwight to make the sacrifice for his brother, who was the hope of the family; good-looking, outgoing, a charmer who cast his spell over everyone he met, even some white people. There was no telling how far someone with Earl’s gifts might go with a high-school diploma. Dwight did as he was asked without complaining. He hadn’t any friends in school anyway and the subjects weren’t challenging. So he put in twelve-hour days and went home and did Earl’s homework. Earl did the rest, charming his teachers into loose interpretations of his answers on his finals, and their mother got dressed and left the house for the first time in months to attend the commencement. Dwight had to admit his brother looked far better in a mortarboard and gown than he ever would have. After the ceremony he stood back while their mother handed Earl an envelope containing three hundred dollars she’d gotten from selling an antique dining-room set that had been presented to her grandmother by the mistress of the cotton plantation where she worked, on the occasion of her being set free. Earl spent most of the money on whores and his gold tooth. The rest went to the doctor who dosed him with mercury to cure his clap.

Four years later their mother finished dying. The house was rented. The Littlejohn brothers sold the contents and invested the money in a stake for the trip to Michigan. The war was on, Ford Motor Company was offering a dollar an hour for defense workers, and Eufala was already a ghost town; every man and woman under the age of fifty was going north. US 23’s two-lane blacktop was a jam of cars and homemade trailers with mattresses and luggage lashed on top. At night the pilgrims gathered into camps, complete with open fires and piles of dirty diapers soaking in galvanized washtubs. It was like
The Grapes of Wrath,
only with portable radios tuned in to the news from Europe and the South Pacific, Jack Benny, and the
Make Believe Ballroom.

That first night, conserving their resources, the brothers had shared a can of pork and beans heated over their fire, then used the can to make coffee with water drained from the Model A’s radiator. While Earl sat on the running board talking about looking up a pretty “high yeller” girl he’d seen riding in the backseat of a Terraplane loaded with boxes and duffels, Dwight stood sipping the bitter stuff from the can and had a flash of what the housing situation might be like around Detroit. Both the government and the Ford Motor Company had promised to provide adequate shelter; but Dwight was a child of the Depression and a Negro to boot, and had not grown up trusting to the compassion of big business and elected authority. Before he left, their father had told them of the time he had been thrown down the steps of the local Nash dealership for asking about the price of a used sedan after he hit a number, and one of Dwight’s earliest memories was of a cross burning in a neighbor’s yard. He had seen the flames reflected on the wall of the room where he and Earl slept and thought the house was on fire, but when he woke his brother he told him to stay in bed and keep away from the window. The next day the sheriff had driven up to the house next door in his big Cadillac touring car, and before noon the people who lived there, another colored family, had packed up their rattletrap truck and rolled out. The charred stump of the wooden cross remained in the front yard until the weeds grew up around it and then the landlord came out to get the place ready for the next tenant.

Dwight’s worst fears were confirmed long before they got to the plant. Tents, dilapidated trailers, and tar-paper shacks— converted chicken coops, for chrissake—crowded the landscape on both sides of the four-lane divided concrete highway, begun in November 1941 and dedicated an astonishing eleven months later. During that time, nothing had been done to house the workers who would be commuting along that stretch. Afterward, federal surveyors were sent to lay out housing projects, only to be evicted forcibly by security men employed by Harry Bennett, Ford’s iron right hand, and their stakes torn up and flung away. To alleviate the problem, federal authorities went outside Ford jurisdiction and established a housing project for Negro workers in Detroit, christening it Sojourner Truth after the heroic freedwoman who had helped to establish the emancipation movement. But the site chosen was in a white neighborhood, predominantly Polish, and in the face of fierce resistance Washington announced that the houses would be occupied by whites. A month later it reversed the decision. Black workers and their families pulled in and began unloading furniture and luggage from cars and trucks with plates from Mississippi, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Georgia.

On the last day of February 1942, a white mob armed with knives, bricks, and baseball bats smashed windows and pulled colored residents from their homes and beat and slashed them, swelling the local hospital population. Police brass, the fire marshal, and city officeholders came to the scene with megaphones and broadcast news that the policy had changed yet again: Negroes were banned from the project. The mob dispersed. Fifth-column infiltrators operating in Detroit fed the news to Berlin. Axis Sally interrupted her program of Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters to announce mellifluously over the air that American morale was so bad gangsters had to be brought in to put down the rioting in the streets.

Apprised of this development while addressing the Daughters of the American Revolution in New York, Eleanor Roosevelt repaired to her room in the Algonquin Hotel and without pausing to remove either her fox stole or her white cotton gloves, telephoned her husband at the White House.

Within twenty-four hours, a presidential order arranged for a thousand federal troops to be mobilized in Detroit. There they were joined by three hundred Michigan State Police and 450 Detroit police officers, who stood by while colored families moved their belongings into Sojourner Truth.

But there was a long waiting list by the time the Littlejohn brothers got to Michigan, and Dwight and Earl spent their first January north of the Mason-Dixon under a square of canvas procured from Fox Tent and Awning. They got their heat from the same one-burner Coleman stove they used to warm the cans of Campbell soup they ate for breakfast, lunch, and supper. Three months had passed since Dwight had moved into his attic room, but he still avoided the aisle containing the red-and-white cans at Kroger’s.

The opportunity to leave the tent had coincided with Earl’s wedding, which had moved his brother up to the top of the list of defense workers waiting for a house in Sojourner Truth. It was still a white neighborhood, and Dwight worried about Earl in that environment, but not as much as he worried about Elizabeth. She was a pretty girl, with delicate features—island, he assumed—and although her bearing and natural serenity made her seem far more mature than she was, he hated to think of her walking outside the relative safety of the project to shop or see a movie with a girlfriend. He was a little in love with his sister-in-law, and although he would never say it aloud, thought that she could have done a good deal better than his brother.

The trailer-bus let him out twelve blocks from his house. He walked along the tree-shaded street, carrying his black lunch pail and trying not to think about anything. One thing you had to be in Ypsilanti was alert.

He had to pass a corner bar, and as he drew within sight, he saw that three or four men were lounging in front. The sixth sense of a lifetime—well, of a race—told him they were young and white before he could see either of those details. Thought of crossing the street occurred; it always occurred, and he always rejected it. The bastards could beat the shit out of him but they couldn’t make him go out of his way. He was twenty yards away when he smelled the beer on their breath.