Ragtime (17 page)

Coalhouse Walker Jr. turned back to the piano and
said “The Maple Leaf.” Composed by the great Scott Joplin. The most famous rag of all rang through the air. The pianist sat stiffly at the keyboard, his long dark hands with their pink nails seemingly with no effort producing the clusters of syncopating chords and the thumping octaves. This was a most robust composition, a vigorous music that roused the senses and never stood still a moment. The boy perceived it as light touching various places in space, accumulating in intricate patterns until the entire room was made to glow with its own being. The music filled the stairwell to the third floor where the mute and unforgiving Sarah sat with her hands folded and listened with the door open.

The piece was brought to a conclusion. Everyone applauded. Mother then introduced Mr. Walker to Grandfather and to Younger Brother, who shook the black man’s hand and said I am pleased to meet you. Coalhouse Walker was solemn. Everyone was standing. There was a silence. Father cleared his throat. Father was not knowledgeable in music. His taste ran to Carrie Jacobs Bond. He thought Negro music had to have smiling and cakewalking. Do you know any coon songs? he said. He did not intend to be rude—coon songs was what they were called. But the pianist responded with a tense shake of the head. Coon songs are made for minstrel shows, he said. White men sing them in blackface. There was another silence. The black man looked at the ceiling. Well, he said, it appears as if Miss Sarah will not be able to receive me. He turned abruptly and walked through the hall to the kitchen. The family followed him. He had left his coat on a
chair. He put it on and ignoring them all, he knelt and gazed at the baby asleep in its carriage. After several moments he stood up, said good day and walked out the door.

The visit impressed everyone except Sarah, who gave no sign of relenting in her refusal to have anything to do with the man. The next week he returned, and the week after that. He was now visiting the family and each time brought them up on the news of his doings of the previous six days, never once assuming anything but their total and consuming interest. Father was put off by the man’s airs. She won’t see him, he told Mother. Am I to go on entertaining Coalhouse Walker every Sunday for the rest of my life? But Mother saw signs of progress. Sarah had taken on the duties of the departed housekeeper and now cleaned rooms so energetically and with such proprietary competence that Mother laughed with the momentary illusion that it was Sarah’s own house she was cleaning. She also began to claim her child at other than feeding time, first taking over his daily bath, then carrying him upstairs to her room at night. Still she would not see her visitor. Coalhouse Walker appeared faithfully through the winter. More than once, when the roads were made impassable by snow, he came on the train and caught the North Avenue streetcar to the bottom of the hill. He wore with his fitted black overcoat a lamb’s-wool hat in the Russian style. He brought outfits for the child. He brought a silver-handled hairbrush for Sarah. Father had to admire his perseverance. He wondered to what extent a musician’s wages could sustain such gifts.

It occurred to Father one day that Coalhouse Walker Jr. didn’t know he was a Negro. The more he thought about this the more true it seemed. Walker didn’t act or talk like a colored man. He seemed to be able to transform the customary deferences practiced by his race so that they reflected to his own dignity rather than the recipient’s. When he arrived at the back door he gave it a stout rap and when admitted would solemnly greet everyone and somehow convey to them the feeling that they were Sarah’s family, and that his courtesies to them simply measured the regard and respect he held for her. Father recognized certain dangers in the man. Perhaps we shouldn’t encourage his suit, he said to Mother. There is something reckless about him. Even Mathew Henson knew his place.

By this time, however, the course of events could not be changed. In the late winter Sarah said she would see Coalhouse Walker in the parlor. For days there was a flurry of preparation. Mother gave her one of her own dresses and helped her to take it in. She came downstairs, beautiful and shy. Her hair was combed and pomaded and she sat on the sofa with her eyes lowered as Coalhouse Walker Jr. spoke his formal conversation and played the piano for her. It was only when they were seen together that it became apparent he was a good deal older than she was. Mother insisted that the members of the family excuse themselves so that the courtship could go on in privacy. Nothing was speeded by this. After the visit Sarah looked irritated and even angry. She was slow to forgive, and in some peculiar way her stubbornness seemed the only appropriate
response to his persistence. Sarah had attempted to kill her newborn child. Life was not something either of these people took carelessly. They lived in brutal subjection to their hopes and feelings. They suffered themselves. Mother’s Younger Brother understood this perhaps more clearly than anyone in the family. He had spoken to Coalhouse Walker just once but admired him immensely. He saw in the way the black man acted upon his intentions more manhood than he himself possessed. He brooded over this. Younger Brother understood the love in some hearts as a physical tenderness in that part of the body, a flaw in the physiological being equivalent to rickets of the bones or a disposition of the lungs to congest. He was afflicted with this and so was Sarah, colored though she was. He thought she was some displaced African queen; her very awkwardness as she moved suggested that it would be grace in another country. And the more reluctant she seemed to accept Coalhouse Walker’s offer of marriage, the more Younger Brother understood what a terribly afflicted heart she had.

But one Sunday in March, with the wind blowing softer and small brown buds visible on the branches of the maple trees, Coalhouse arrived in his shining Ford and left the motor idling. Neighbors in their yards came out to watch the strange intense black man, burly and correct, with his dark, dark eyes on the verge of crossing, and the beautifully awkward Sarah, wearing a pink shirtwaist and a black skirt and jacket and one of Mother’s wide-brimmed hats, as they walked under the Norwegian maples and down the concrete steps to
the street. She carried her baby. He helped her into the car and got up behind the wheel. They waved to the family and drove off through the suburban streets to the farmlands at the north end of town. They parked at the side of the road. They watched a cardinal skim the hard brown earth, then beat its way to the highest thinnest branch of a tree. This was the day he asked her to marry and she accepted. The appearance of these magnificent lovers in the family’s life had been startling; the conflict of their wills had exercised an almost hypnotic effect.

A
nd now Mother’s Younger Brother began again his trips to New York. He would work at his drawing table past the dinner hour and then catch an evening train. He had made friends of some ordnance officers on duty at the armory on Lexington Avenue and 34th Street. They complained about the Springfield rifle. They showed him their small arms and their grenade bombs. He knew immediately that he could design better weapons. He drank with the officers. He became known at the stage doors of several Broadway theatres. He stood in the alleys, like others, never so well-groomed as some of the older men, nor so carelessly handsome as the collegians from Princeton or Yale. But there was an intensity of expectation about his eyes that attracted a fair number of women. He was always so serious and unhappy that they were persuaded he loved them. They took him for a poet.

Still, his salary couldn’t support these tastes. Broadway was alive with lights and entertainments and everyone connected with the theatre and charged by its excitement lived to the limit. He learned where to find women who would go to bed with him for a modest price. One of these places was the Bethesda Fountain in
Central Park. They walked in twos whenever the weather was mild. The days were beginning to lengthen. In cold luxurious sunsets they strolled about the fountain, shadows filling the great steps, the water already black, the paving stones brown and pink. He amused them by taking them seriously. He was gentle with them and they didn’t mind his oddity because it was gentle. He would take a woman to his hotel room and then sit in a chair with one shoe in his hand and completely forget about her. Or he would not attempt to make love but only inspect her intimate places. He drank wine until he was insensible. He dined in steakhouses with sawdust on the floor. He went to cellar clubs in Hell’s Kitchen where hoodlums bought everyone drinks. He walked Manhattan at night, his eyes devouring passers-by. He stared in the windows of restaurants and sat in hotel lobbies, his restless eyes picking out motion and color before it defined itself.

Eventually he found the offices of the
Mother Earth
magazine published by Emma Goldman. They were on 13th Street in a brownstone that served now as the anarchist’s residence when she was in New York. He stood in the street under the lamppost and stared at the windows. He did this for several nights. Finally a man came out of the door, walked down the steps and crossed the street to where he stood. He was a tall cadaverous man, with long hair and a string tie. He said It gets cold in the evenings—come in, we have no secrets. And Younger Brother was led across the street and up the steps.

It turned out that in his vigil he had been mistaken
for a police spy. He was treated with elaborate irony. He was offered tea. Numbers of people were standing about in the apartment in their hats and coats. Then Goldman appeared in a doorway and her attention was directed to him. Good God, she said. That’s no policeman. She began to laugh. She was putting on a hat and setting it in place with hatpins. He was thrilled that she remembered him. Come with us, she called.

A while later Younger Brother found himself in the Cooper Union down near the Bowery. The hall was hot, crowded to overflowing. There were lots of foreigners. Men wore their derbies though indoors. It was a great stinking congress garlicked and perfumed in its own perspiration. It had met in support of the Mexican Revolution. He hadn’t known there was a Mexican Revolution. Men waved their fists. They stood on benches. Speaker after speaker arose. Some spoke in languages other than English. They were not translated. He had trouble hearing. What seemed to have happened was that the Mexican peons had spontaneously revolted against Díaz the President of Mexico for the past thirty-five years. They needed guns. They needed ammunition. They were striking from the hills, attacking the Federals and the supply trains with wooden staves and muzzle-loading muskets. He thought about this. Finally Emma Goldman got up to speak. Of all the orators she was the best. The hall went quiet as she described the complicity of the wealthy landowners and the despised tyrant Díaz, the subjugation of the peons, the poverty and starvation and, most shameful of all, the presence of representatives of
American business firms in the national counsels of the Mexican government. Her voice was strong. As she moved her head and gesticulated the light flashed from her glasses. He pushed his way forward to be closer to her. She described one Emiliano Zapata, a simple farmer of the Morelos district who had turned revolutionary because he had no choice. He wore the share farmer’s bleached pajama coat and trousers, bound over the chest with bandoleers and belted with a cartridge belt. My comrades, she cried, that is not a foreign costume. There are no foreign lands. There is no Mexican peasant, there is no dictator Díaz. There is only one struggle throughout the world, there is only the flame of freedom trying to light the hideous darkness of life on earth. The applause was deafening. Younger Brother had no money. He turned out his pockets, mortified to see all around him people who reeked of their poverty coming up with handfuls of change. He found himself standing at the foot of the speaker’s platform. The speeches were done, she stood surrounded by colleagues and admirers. He saw her hug a swarthy man who wore a dark suit and tie but also an enormous sombrero. She turned and her glance fell on the balding blondish young man whose head came just above the platform stage, as if severed like a French republican’s, the eyes turned upward in a kind of ecstasy. She laughed.

He thought at the end of the rally that she would speak to him but there was a reception for the Mexican back at the offices of
Mother Earth
. He was the
Zapatista
representative. He wore boots under his cuffless
trousers. He did not smile but drank tea and then wiped his long moustaches with the back of his hand. The rooms were crowded with journalists, bohemians, artists, poets and society women. Younger Brother was not aware that he was following Goldman about. He was desperate for her attention. But she was enormously busy with everyone else. Each new person who came in the door had to be seen. She had lots on her mind. She introduced people to each other. To different persons she proposed different things they must do, others they should speak with, places they ought to go, situations they ought to look into or write about. He felt incredibly ignorant. She went into the kitchen and whipped up the batter for a cake. Here, she said to Younger Brother, take these cups and put them on the table in the big room. He was grateful to be taken into her network of useful people. There were posters of
Mother Earth
magazine covers on every wall. A tall long-haired man was dispensing the punch. He was the one who had come out to the street to invite Younger Brother upstairs. He looked like a Shakespearean actor down on his luck. His fingernails were outlined in black. He was drinking as much as he dispensed. He greeted people by singing a line or two from a song. Everyone laughed who spoke to him. His name was Ben Reitman, he was the man Goldman lived with. There was something the matter with the top of his head, there was a shaven patch. Noticing Younger Brother’s glance he explained that he had been in San Diego and had been tarred and feathered. Emma had gone there to speak. He acted as her manager,
renting the halls, making the arrangements. They had not wanted Emma to speak. They had kidnapped him, driven him somewhere, stripped him and tarred him. They had burned him with their cigars, and worse. As he gave this account his face darkened, his smile disappeared. An audience had gathered. He was holding the punch ladle and it began to click against the side of the bowl. He couldn’t seem to let go of it. He gazed at his hand with a peculiar smile on his face. They did not want my momma to speak in Kansas City or Los Angeles or Spokane, he said. But she spoke. We know every jail. We win every case. My momma will speak in San Diego. He laughed as if he couldn’t believe his own hand shook as it did. The ladle clicked against the bowl.