Strivers Row (22 page)

“Don't nobody worry, I already got my family out!”

All the white faces—and some black ones, too, neighbors who had come over from the next, uncovenanted block—looking up at him uncertainly, obviously unsure of what they should or could do.

Others were already running back to their own homes, dragging out their garden hoses to try and wet down their roofs. Some of them even moving their own possessions out into their front yards, Malcolm staring at all the nice, white people's furniture— the divans and dining room sets, and cabinet radios—looking so strangely exposed out on their frost-covered lawns.

“We can still salvage something—” one of the men in front of their house said. The others, black and white, staring warily at the fast-spreading fire but slowly rolling up their sleeves nevertheless, as if to at least make a demonstration that they were ready and willing to brave the flames.

“No,” his father told them adamantly. “I don't want nobody goin' back in there. I can't have that on my soul. Look how far that fire's got, it's almost out on the porch now.”

“Maybe we can go 'round the back, through the kitchen,” one of the other colored men suggested, but his Daddy turned on him at once, looking as if he might strike him.

“
No!
” he cried. Then in a softer, bitter voice—

“Let it burn. It's all
theirs
.”

At that moment an explosion ripped out the back of the house. The ground shaking under their feet, a spire of flame shooting twenty feet into the sky from where the kitchen had been. The men stepped back as one, quailing from the heat and the thought of what they had been on the brink of doing.

“Jeez, we woulda been right there!” one of their neighbors explained.

“Yeah, he knew what he was talkin' about—”

“Yes, he sure did. He knew just what was going to happen,” one of the colored men from the next block said meaningfully, before they all began to run back toward their own homes.

All that winter and into spring, the arguments had persisted in the neighborhood over whether or not Earl Little had burned his own house down. They went on even after the two insurance policies his Daddy had taken out allowed them to move into their new, bigger house, where they had enough land to grow almost all their own food, plus raise chickens and hutches full of rabbits. Through all the police inquiries concerning such questions as why someone had pounded on the neighbors' back doors just
before
the fire, or how it was that the two-gallon can of kerosene Earl had bought that evening and that had supposedly caused the kitchen to explode came to be found in the
basement,
secreted under some old bedsprings.

But his Daddy had patiently told the same story, over and over again, that he had first told to the police when they finally arrived at the fire, long after the house had been reduced to no more than smoking rubble—and on which his wife had backed him up nearly word for word, testifying calmly and unshakeably, sitting up very straight, first in the police station, then on the witness stand, taking care to always smooth her modest flower-print dress carefully over her knees. That it was the Black Legion that had come to burn him out, on account of his being a race man, and a Garveyite, and that he had fired his shotgun at them out the back door, before being forced to retreat and make sure that his family was safe. Sticking to that one explanation—to one
word,
really—when the assistant district attorney had insisted indignantly that the night riders of the Black Legion had never been active in the area. Replying that,
Well, they have now,
and that it was probably all on account of trying to preserve their white homeowner's covenant. Letting the single word drip off his lips like an expectoration when he said it, repeating it over and over again from the witness chair:

“Their
covenant
.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

MALCOLM

It was the day after he had discovered the African National Bookstore that Miranda walked into Small's. He heard her laugh, and he knew who it was even though he had his back to the door, leaning over the bar to pick up an order. Turning around immediately, his face split into a helpless grin—only to see West Indian Archie walk in.

He was baffled for a moment. He had been eager to see Archie, too, figuring he was the only one of the regulars he could tell about Prof. Toussaint's store, and all the strange and exciting books he had bought there. But even as he saw him, he knew there was something wrong.

Archie was
smiling
. That was what Malcolm noticed before he saw anything else. He looked even sharper than he usually did, wearing a brand-new white linen suit, and a new Panama hat. But more than anything else, he was smiling—and not just his usual fleeting, tight-lipped smile, provoked by his own wit, or the foolishness of other people. He was
grinning
—grinning as no one had ever seen him grin before, his prominent gold tooth glimmering in the soft interior light of the bar. And on his arm, looking up at him adoringly and laughing, was Miranda.

Malcolm went on and picked up his order from the bar, playing it as cool as he could even as the sick feeling spread through his stomach. He walked right past them, lifting his tray over their heads on one hand, even acknowledging Archie with a curt nod— not letting either of them see a thing.

“Hey, De-troit Red!” Archie called out with a gravelly chuckle— pointing him out to her as he went by.

“That there is my boy, De-troit Red—”

Her eyes flickered up at him, giving away nothing. As steady and enigmatic as the first night he had seen her, so that he couldn't even tell if she recognized him.

“C'mon over here, Red, I want you to meet somebody,” Archie was still insisting, waving him over to their table with one of his huge arms until Malcolm had finished giving out his drinks. Forcing himself to turn, then walk back toward them, placing one foot in front of another like a movie zombie. Even making himself smile as he came up to their table.

“This here Miranda, she sings down the Village,” Archie introduced her, as proud and jubilant as a new parent. “She playin' that big-time Café Society place down at Sheridan Square—”

“How'd you do?” Malcolm mumbled at her, and she gave him her hand, presenting it to him as if she were royalty. He could feel her looking straight at him but he could not meet her gaze.

She was wearing a crisp white sundress with thin red stripes this time, looking as cool and unruffled as a peppermint soda even in the late afternoon heat. He could not keep himself from stealing a look at her long, tanned legs, the high ridge of her breasts—the single trickle of perspiration that ran slowly down the side of her neck from her long, swept-up, white girl's hair. When he took her hand he had all he could do to keep himself from leaning over and kissing her right up that tiny rivulet of sweat.

“Pleased to meet you,” she said in that smoky voice he remembered instantly, and he held on to her hand for an extra beat. Her skin just as smooth as he remembered it, too, and still smelling of flowers. He leaned over, inhaling her, about to kiss her hand at least, until he heard the laughter from the bar.

“Lookit Red, the perfect gentleman!” Sammy the Pimp cried.

“He flipped like Mr. Chips!”

Malcolm straightened up, and smiled sheepishly at the other regulars. West Indian Archie was laughing like a schoolboy, and even Miranda was smiling, so that he had to laugh along with them then, shaking his head in his embarrassment.

“Here, Red, you go get us a bottle a black label, keep the change fo' yo'self,” Archie told him, tucking a fifty into the chest pocket of his waiter's jacket, and still chuckling out of pure happiness, unable to stop himself. He even called after him:

“I don't blame you, Red—she's truly mad!”

But Malcolm was already moving back toward the kitchen, stopping just beyond the swinging doors. There he leaned against the wall, trying to control himself—listening to the other regulars talking about her at the bar.

“She one hard-hitting gray, that's for sure.”

“Wish I could get a hen like that fo' my house,” Cadillac Drake said, shaking his head then giggling at the idea.

“What makes you think you can't?” Sammy the Pimp asked him, his voice low but serious, in a way that made Malcolm want to go out and climb right over the bar to get at him.

“Any white chick comes up here, you know you can turn her out,” he insisted. “You know they lookin' fo' one thing.”

“That may be, but I wouldn't mess with it.” Cadillac Drake giggled again. “Lookit Archie over there. He look— Well, he look—”

“Happy,” Sammy the Pimp said glumly. “He looks happy.”

When Malcolm went back out to their table, he saw that it was true. West Indian Archie looked happier than he had ever seen him before, his weathered brown face still creased with laughter, as if he found everything in life funny now.

Miranda was not laughing, he saw. But she was smiling at Archie again—one of her delicate hands placed over his big brown paw in the middle of the table. Still looking at him as if she were enthralled by every word he had to say, until by the time he reached their table, Malcolm was gripped by the nearly irresistible desire to grab up the bottle of scotch he had ordered and smash it in Archie's face.

Instead, he carefully set out the two glasses and the bottle of scotch, laying down napkins and a bowl of ice, doing it all precisely, as Charlie Small had shown him.

“There ya are, Red!”

Archie pulled out another five, insisted on shoving that, too, into his jacket pocket—looking like he might just burst out laughing again at the magnanimity of his own gesture. Malcolm opened his mouth to say something then—no longer interested in hurting Archie with the bottle. Realizing that he wouldn't understand some sudden, physical attack anyway, that Archie would think Malcolm was just some crazy nigger, or that he had just been paid off by his rivals in the numbers racket—before he shot him in the head.

Instead, Malcolm was seized by the desire to tell him who she was.
Just some cheap white whore, who puts out at cutting parties. Who would even take up with a nigger waiter. With someone like me.

He wanted to tell him that, to just put it out there—wanting to see Archie's face fall in hurt and bewilderment for the moment before it turned to pure wrath. To hear the hustlers' whistles and howls from the bar. Almost unable to bear not saying it, knowing the chaos it would set loose, the attention it would turn upon him. Archie would be sure to cut him up for that, too, maybe even kill him right there on the floor of Small's, but he told himself he did not care anymore.

She
stopped him with a look. Almost the same look, he realized in confusion, that the preacher's wife had given him—back on that run a few weeks before, the day he had come to New York for the first time. The same look he had seen countless times before on the faces of colored women passengers, pleading for his help to get out of some situation—to get them away from some white man who was bothering them, forcing himself on to them or about to explode into the sort of fearsome, unpredictable white people's rage that he and every other colored person he had ever known could spot, often before the man did himself. It was their secret language, he had thought—what he realized now to his confusion must be the same look of all women, seeking help.
He just had never seen it from a white girl before—

He thanked West Indian Archie and put the finiff into his pants pocket—grinning blankly, automatically, the way he would on the train. Then he walked back toward the kitchen, stopping this time in a little side pantry by the ladies' room where they kept the extra dishes, a pail and a mop and the piles of crisply folded white tablecloths. She came by less than a minute later and he grabbed her roughly by the arm, pulling her back into the little alcove.

“What you doin' with that old man?” he demanded, holding on tightly to her arm. But she only stared down imperiously at his hand until he released her—an entirely different kind of look now.

“Well?” he said, trying to insist on an answer.

“Who knows? Maybe I love him,” she said in her clipped, white-girl's voice—different, too, from the one she had used in the bedroom that night at the rent party.

“I thought you loved
me!
” he blurted out, unable to keep himself from saying it, knowing how childish it sounded.

She gave a little laugh, and then he was humiliated—but also acutely conscious all over again of how beautiful she looked, how close she was to him. Her face just under his own, her bare legs touching his trousers. Her cheeks looked as full and sensuous as two half peaches, dabbed with a faint sprinkling of powder. And she smelled of flowers—

“Oh, baby. Why do you think you love me? Because I'm your first white girl?” she asked him, her voice teasing but still sympathetic.

“Well—sure! But also because—because the things you did. An' 'cause you didn't laugh at me none,” he said, trying to explain, his voice barely audible. “Then I wake up, you ain't even around—”

“Usually they prefer it that way.”

“God
damm
it, girl! Why you say things like that—”

“Never mind,” she said, and reached out a hand to run it down the side of his cheek, the way she had that first night.

He closed his eyes. No longer caring about where they were now, in the tiny pantry room, with no door or curtain across it, so that anybody could come by and see them. Not caring about how dangerous it could be, but turning his face into her hand, just glad to have its touch back against him. When he finally opened his eyes he was surprised to see that hers were brimming with tears.

“Never mind me, Red,” she told him, her voice warm and a little sad—the way it had been during their night together. Like that of a white girl trying to imitate a blues singer, he realized now.

“Believe me, I'm not what you want. Go find yourself some nice girl.”

“You mean some nice colored girl.”

“You don't know
what
I mean,” she said impatiently now—in control of herself again, stepping away from him and toward the ladies' room. “You don't know the slightest thing about me. But you still think you're in love.”

“I know you want to be with me, not him—” he tried to tell her, but she had already gone through the door.

“Girl like that come up here, she lookin' for action,” Sammy the Pimp told him as he walked him back up toward his apartment that night. “Only question if Archie gonna turn her out hisself, or if it gonna be somebody else.”

“She been uptown before.”

“Wha's 'at?” Sammy stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, his eyes feral and alert beneath his clean-shaven, bullet-shaped head, and Malcolm immediately regretted that he had opened his mouth.

“What you say?”

“Nothin'!” Malcolm said, and kept walking. “Just I seen her around before. Up at the Savoy, an' like that.”

“Well, how 'boot that. So she already been gunnin' her ray here'bouts. That just shows she wants it more.”

“You shouldn't go messin' with Archie, 'less you want to end up in the river.”

“Whoa, Cholly Hoss! What makes you think Archie shouldn't look out fo'
me?
” Sammy said, putting a reproving hand on Malcolm's shoulder, stopping him where he was.

“ 'Sides, it don't have to be like that. All you need is fo' Archie to get word 'bout how she's been knockin' a stroll 'round these parts already. Who she been with, an' where. Sure enough, he'll turn
her
loose. Then she be lookin' fo' a new daddy—”

“I don't think she needs a daddy,” Malcolm said as casually as he could, and tried to walk on. “You heard Archie, she got this gig sing-in' down the Village—”

“Every womens need a daddy, Nome! Let me tell you how it's done,” Sammy said, stopping him again. Smiling voraciously, the dimmed streetlight turning his face and teeth a sickly, jaundiced hue. Malcolm, watching his face, realizing now that he must be at least as old as West Indian Archie, if not older. But Sammy's skin looked as if it had been wrenched back along his skull, stretched into dozens of tight little lines around his eyes and mouth.

“I started out waitin' tables, too,” he told him, his hand tightening suddenly on Malcolm's shoulder, until he wanted to squirm under the grip.

“But I looked out for my opportunities. I'd wait till I copped to some hen who was dinin' alone, an' then I'd beat up my chops with her till I found out if she had a man. If she didn't—an' why else would any hard-hittin' chick be eatin' by herself in a restaurant?— then I'd make my play. Not
too
hard, you understand? Just enough to give her some attention, make her feel wanted.”

He could feel Sammy's huge diamond ring as it kept grinding into his shoulder, his large manicured hands squeezing until it felt as if he were strumming his tendons against his collarbone. Malcolm made himself keep smiling.

“Then I ask her out, make sure I get asked back to her pad. But once you up there, here's the trick: You tell her
you
gonna buy
her
dinner from some nice restaurant. You insist on it. She don't have to knock herself out cookin' for you, you wanna treat her like a queen. You borrow the keys, tell her you be right back wit' the food. Then you take her keys 'round to the locksmith an' make a copy.”

“What?”

“Oh, you bring back the food, just like you said. Maybe even a candle, or a flower. Have some romantic dinner,” Sammy said, chuckling sarcastically as he painted a picture of it.