Strivers Row (38 page)

Everybody began to dance again, the boys still glancing warily in his direction. Malcolm had watched them, noting their concerned, dedicated expressions—out to preserve something they may not have understood themselves, but which had been drummed into them by mothers and fathers alike—and he had climbed up on top of the upright piano. Leaning over and planting his fingers smack on the keys, pressing them down again and again, until at last the musicians were forced to stop—staring up at him hesitantly, entirely unsure of what they were allowed to do with this boy, this oversize, angry black boy. His classmates had rushed over again, forcing him away from the improvised bandstand. Not smiling this time, forcing him back along the wall, and down the stairs out of the gym, until at last, defeated, he had run off into the night. Retaining enough defiance only to cry back at them, in his shame and his frustration:

“You didn't have a chance to choose your ancestors, either!”

He never set foot in the school again. He had already passed his final exams for the year, but his grades had plunged so precipitously that Mr. Kaminska had sent home a note to the county home saying there was no point in promoting him to high school. When she read it, Mrs. Swerlein had tears in her eyes, and she tried to hug him again. Begging him—

“Please, Malcolm, won't ya tell me what this is all about? What's happened to you? You know you're better'n this.”

He had wanted to scream it in her face then—
No, I'm not! I'm not!
He wanted to tell her that it said so in Mr. Kaminska's very file—a handyman, at best—but instead he had run silently up to his room again, not wanting to give her even that much.

Soon afterward, Mr. Maynard Allen had been summoned back to the juvenile home. He had sat at the long dining room table with Ma Swerlein and Malcolm, and listened to her tell him how unhappy he had been recently, and watched him read over the folder from the school. When he was finished, he had taken a long draught from his coffee cup and looked at Malcolm again—his cool blue eyes filled with disappointment.

“Well, Malcolm, it looks like from this that you've done considerable backsliding,” he said at last. “Mrs. Swerlein doesn't think you're happy here. Is that so?”

He had only shrugged his shoulders. Meeting Mr. Allen's stare.
Refusing to give him anything more.

“I guess,” was all he said. “You guess? I see. Well, then. Where would you suggest we put you, Malcolm?”

His voice challenging him, rebuking him, but Malcolm only looked right back at him. The words bursting from him before he knew what he was going to say:

“I wanna go live with my own!”

What he never forgot was the look on Mr. Maynard Allen's face when he said those words. Those big blue eyes startled for once— even hurt.

“Your own?” he had repeated, slowly. “Who would that be, Malcolm? I thought we
were
your own. I mean, I thought you were more—I thought you were mostly—”

He stopped then, in his confusion, and Malcolm let the silence linger. His arms crossed over his chest, staring steadily at Mr. Allen, until he looked at his folder again.

“Your brother Wilfred is nineteen now,” he said at last. “He's still living in the family home, with your sister Hilda.”

He paused, his eyes appealing to Malcolm once more.

“We could send you back
there
. To your family. Would that do?”

“Yessir,” Malcolm had told him defiantly. “Yessir, that'll do fine.”

The next day, Mr. Allen had come with his Packard to take him back to East Lansing. Mrs. Swerlein had made all the other boys come down to say good-bye, and she wiped her eyes with her apron as she saw him off. As he picked up his lone suitcase and walked to the door, she put out her hand—no last, swooping hug.

“I guess I've asked you a hundred times, Malcolm,” she had said. “Do you want to tell me now, at least, what's wrong?”

But he had only smiled at her. Thinking how dramatic her voice sounded, no doubt to impress Mr. Allen.

“Nothing, Mrs. Swerlein,” he said, shaking her hand before he went out the door. “Nothing at all.”

Back in Lansing he felt as if he were living in a ghost house. The place so much quieter and emptier than he had remembered it from when they were all there together. Yvonne and Wesley, the younger children, were living in foster homes now, and Butch, the baby by Mr. Walker, was in the orphanage. Hilda, the oldest, was always busy, taking care of Philbert and Reginald, and everything else around the house. Wilfred was usually out, working any jobs he could find to keep up the mortgage.

Reginald still looked up to him, and did what Malcolm told him, but the rest of them seemed like strangers—nodding when they passed in the hall, or on the way to the bathroom, but with nothing to say. It spooked him to stay around the house too long, and he would take Reginald downtown on the bus, looking to lift something from the five-and-dimes, or just walk around the streets. Sometimes he went down to the Lincoln Community Center, where he bragged to the boys there about how many girls he had had back in Mason, and showed off a set of rubbers he had bought in a bus station men's room. That was usually enough to overawe the others, but there was one white boy, Bo Bigbee, who just grinned and asked him if he knew how to use them when Malcolm showed him the condoms.

“Sure I do!” Malcolm told him, trying to sound as casual as possible, but Bigbee had just kept grinning.

“Yeah? I bet you don't. I bet you never done it with a girl!”

Bo had an actual girlfriend, named Sally, who went with him everywhere, even down to the community center. She was a scrawny-looking white girl, with long, straggly brown hair, and bruises on her face from where her stepfather and mother hit her. She held her arms tight over her chest all the time, as if she was cold, a cigarette she had bummed off Bo dangling from her lips. She didn't like to ever go home, and she would do anything Bo said as long as he let her hang around with him.

“Let's
see
if you know what to do—” he had challenged Malcolm.

He had walked with Bo and his girlfriend back behind the old Nazarene church, where Bo had started to kiss her all over her head and shoulders. Sally put up a perfunctory struggle to push him away, telling him,
“Quit it! Quit it!”
—her cigarette still dangling out of her mouth. He had started to undress her anyway, right there in front of Malcolm—pulling off the thin sweater she wore, then her blouse and skirt, even her bra and panties until she was wearing nothing but a pair of long, holey socks. Each layer of clothing removed like a revelation to Malcolm—actually seeing the yellowing bra on her, then her white, freckled breasts, then the dark brown pubic hair—so shocking to him against her pale white skin that he almost felt he should look away.

Sally had kept exclaiming
Quit it!
as he began to take off her clothes, but by now she had stopped. Only continuing to hug her arms close around her breasts while Bo tugged off the rest of her clothes, dropping them in the long grass around her. Finally, after letting her stand naked in front of them for a few minutes, he had made her lie down next to her clothes. Taking off his own battered cap and flinging it into the grass, then pulling out his pale pink dick, now reddened and engorged with excitement—the sight of it even more shocking to Malcolm than her pussy had been.

“Watch this,” he said, grinning back at Malcolm. “You don't need your rubbers for this—” And slid it into her.

After that it had all been a jumble to Malcolm, a nightmare. Bo Bigbee's dirty blond head bobbing up and down as he moved on top of her, the girl still holding her arms over her chest. Malcolm, almost frantic now, jumping all around them, yelling at them—
“Quit it! Quit it! You'll make her pregnant!”
—though he was aware that he was aroused, and would like nothing better than his own chance. He watched his friend's head going up and down, the girl groaning and squirming uncomfortably on the ground beneath him.
Thinking of the pregnant stray cats in the corner lot, their bellies bulging on their skinny frames—

“Now you try it,” Bo said, pulling out of her. His dick still dripping jizz as he zipped up, Malcolm trying hard not to look at it. Bo picked up the strip of rubbers Malcolm had been showing off for so long, hurling them deep into the tangle of woods behind the church.

“Go ahead. See which of us knocks her up!” he told him, still grinning.

“I can't do that,” the naked girl said simply, from where she was, propped up on her elbows in the grass. Still stark naked, and stained by the drippings of her boyfriend's effluvium. Malcolm looked down at her dirty face, twisted in shock and repugnance, and her unwashed, holey socks.

“Sure you can,” Bo said, picking his cap up from the grass and flipping it over to her. “Put this over your face. Make believe it's me.”

She stared up at both Malcolm and Bo for a long moment. Then she leaned back in the grass again, holding the cap up over her face—a mask floating above her pale, white, naked body.

“Go on! You know how to do it!” Bo taunted him. But Malcolm was already moving toward her, getting to his knees. Unbuttoning his pants and taking it out—noticing the white boy staring at it keenly, professionally.

He got down in the grass between her legs, looking all over her naked white body, so near to him now. She was so skinny her ribs showed, and her breasts were little more than points. Her hair was unwashed and straight as straw, and her torso spotted with more faded, purple and yellow bruises. The soft curls of her pussy matted from where Bo had been—but still holding the cap up over her face with one bony arm. Holding herself so rigidly she reminded him of nothing so much as a department store mannequin.

But still her body smelled sweet, and her skin was smooth under his hands. He touched her, and she flinched, but she stayed where she was—opening her legs a little more, her arms finally pulling away from her chest, and he had gone ahead and entered her. Despite everything, he had put himself in her. The sensation astonishing to him, even as he looked down and saw Bo's cap, still held over her face—hearing her rapid, frightened breathing through the wool, her face invisible.

“Oh, please. Oh, please, no,” he heard her breathe through the cap, and just before he came he had pulled out of her. Letting his jism spurt only then, white on her already white thighs—as white as Bo Bigbee's, who had cackled and jumped about over them.

“Oh, man, oh, man! You didn't do it! You didn't do it to her! Now we'll never know who wins!” he had guffawed. While Malcolm had looked down at the white girl there beneath him, her thin body trembling, the cap still held in place over her face.

CHAPTER TWELVE

JONAH

He walked outside on his Saturday-morning rounds. Certain, still, that he was failing, failing with every step. Noting the large black headlines skittering across the front page of the
Amsterdam Star-News
like so many waterbugs. Not even needing to get close to the groups of people reading them on every stoop, in every barbershop, to know what they said—

WIDESPREAD RACE RIOTS FEARED
OVER ABUSE OF NEGRO TROOPS!

WAR DEPT. SILENT AS MOBS RUN WILD!

ARMED CAMPS IN SOUTH ARE HELL,
IS SOLDIERS' CRY

SECOND FRONT—GEORGIA AND MISSISSIPPI

Reports from widely separated points in the South, from Georgia, from Mississippi, from Texas, tell of Negro soldiers being shot down in cold blood by civilian police and citizens. Stories of greater measures of discrimination and segregation being heaped upon colored soldiers stationed at the various camps, and of threats of violence and humiliation more searing and painful than actual enemy bullets and bayonets are coming from all sections—

More of the same awful stories. Two colored troops shot dead, fifteen more wounded when their camp baseball team was ordered out of their truck by a highway patrolman at gunpoint. The troops had knocked the cop's gun away, but a white soldier and the driver of a passing bus jumped to his rescue.
Of course. Any white man will jump to the defense of any other white man, anywhere, without even knowing why—

There had been deadly gun battles between black and white troops at Fort Dix, and in Tuskegee, and at Shenango Depot, in Pennsylvania. A strike in Michigan—white workers had shut down the entire Packard plant for a day because three Negroes were put on the assembly line. A riot in Chester, Pennsylvania, because a shipbuilder had tried to start a separate colored plant and whites had attacked it, shooting and wounding five Negro workers.
Not even allowed to have our own Jim Crow plant now.
A huge riot in Beaumont, Texas, where dozens of Negro businesses and Negro homes had been burned to the ground, and the Texas Defense Guards had been called in, cordoning off the entire town with rolls of barbed wire.

How different was that from Poland? Though none of it affected him as much as the story of James Edwards Persons, caught peeking into farmhouses in Vigo County, Indiana—

He tried to put it all out of his head for the rest of the morning, along with his visit to his sister the day before, and take solace in the day of errands that lay ahead. First he walked up to the church vestry office, where he gave the order of service for Sunday to Delphine. Finalizing the hymn selections with the choir director, slapping an ambiguous name on the sermon he still hadn't written.

He was sure that his father would have disapproved. He had improvised many a sermon in his time, Jonah had seen him do it. Making them up out of whole cloth, around events and observations that had occurred just since the time he had entered the church that morning, as Jonah and the congregation looked on in awe. But he always made sure to coordinate what he said with the hymns.

“The Spirit will not descend without song,” he had always tried to impress upon Jonah. “An' that's the whole idea of the sermon, to bring down the Spirit.”

“But you don't even
believe
in the Spirit,” Jonah had said to him once, irritated over his own shortcomings. But his father had only laughed at him.

“I don't believe in
God
! I never said I don't believe in the
Spirit
.”

And his sermons
were
songs, Jonah knew, beginning and ending with hymns and spirituals. Starting up slowly, while he took the measure of the congregation that morning, or thought up just what it was he was going to say. Slowly building his rhythm—sharing a joke, maybe, or a barely proper story. All the time listening for that rabbit in the bushes, repeating whole lines if they worked. Sometimes even breaking into nonsense words, into mere, alliterative
sounds
if that would keep the momentum going.

His words actually became song as he neared his climax. The people were swept up into ecstasy before him, jumping up and shouting from the pews. He would finish on a crescendo, or sometimes—in a grand flourish he was famous for in Harlem—sometimes just set down abruptly in mid-note. A false stop. The gesture shrewdly hushing the congregation for a moment, allowing for his words to be heard once more. He was up again in an instant, singing and shouting and even stomping his conclusion, throwing open his arms to their approbation. Sitting down for good this time, and letting their shouts and the next hymn sweep over him—but not before he pulled out a white handkerchief, nearly the size of a flag, and in one final, dramatic gesture used it to mop up his sweating, streaming face.

And it was a song, Jonah had realized even before his father told him—a song he sang
with
the congregation. Aware, but not caring, that some of the more high-hat churches snickered at him for the vociferousness of the responses at the New Jerusalem, calling him a snake-stomping Baptist behind his back.

“Son, the colored folks who say that, they're in white people's churches,” he had told Jonah dismissively. “ 'Course we shout, an' they talk to me. They help me when they do that, 'cause you see we're worshiping the Lord
together
. And I'll tell you, wherever you see one of
our
churches, and the Spirit's in that church, then you better believe you gonna hear some
noise
.”

Jonah's own sermon for this week still lay, barely started, on his desk back home. But there was no time for that now. First, he had to make his next round of visits to the sick, and the old. This was the duty he liked best of all. Climbing up endless flights of tenement stairs, walking dingy hallways that smelled perpetually of fried fish and collards, and wet clothes drying on the radiators. Looking into face after face that was strained with sickness, or fatigue, or loss.

Yet at least in this he felt needed. The faces before him brightening visibly just to see him. They were pathetically grateful, even honored, to have the least things he brought them—flowers, a pot of his wife's chicken soup, a little money from the deacon's fund or his own pocket to tide them over. Serving him, in turn, whatever homemade delicacies they could afford—syrupy jarred watermelon rind in the summer, maybe a plate of potato-pone from down home at Christmastime.

He always had to phone at least a day in advance before coming over, of course. He hated to bother them, to announce himself that way, but they would have been humiliated otherwise. Their apartments were always poignantly scrubbed and tidied by the time he arrived. The air still redolent with the putrefyingly sweet stench of Flit or Sure Death; fresh, powdery white lines of boric acid laid down along the baseboard in the endless, vain effort to keep the roaches inside the walls. They were almost ecstatically happy just to talk, and grasp his hands and pray, searching for any excuse to prolong his visit. And he, soaking up their gratitude, did not want it to end, either.

What a wretched sinner you truly are,
he would tell himself,
to draw so much sustenance from their misery
—but he did not really try to help himself. Exhilarated by the idea that he was actually doing something, that here his very presence made a difference.

As always, he left the stop he dreaded the most—the stop that belied all of his illusions about making a difference—until the very end.
Harlem Hospital,
though they called it by other names
—The Morgue
or
The Butcher Shop,
or
The One-Way Street.
It still made him flinch to go inside. When he had first started working with his Daddy, as assistant minister, he had been sure that he would catch the TB, or pneumonia there—little understanding that it was what he would
see
that would infect him. Patients lying out on mattresses in the halls, or on the unwashed floors of the maternity wards, next to uncollected bedpans still full of urine and excrement.

What had Christ said? “There is nothing outside a man which by going into him can defile him, but the things which come out of a man are what defile him.”
Sickness was one thing, depraved indifference another.

There were rumors of even worse things—rumors so persistent that they, too, had made their way into the columns of the
Amsterdam Star-News
. Stories about the hospital's colored syphilis patients, and how the colored doctors had to keep constantly
“alert against men of an experimental turn of mind.”
About men who were actually willing to let the disease fester, or even expose other patients to it, for purposes of “scientific” research.

A chill had run down his back when he read that, though Jonah still found such tales to be incredible, certain that no doctors—not even white ones—could be so inhuman. The opening of Sydenham Hospital—and, ironically, the advent of the war—had actually improved conditions somewhat, with all the young men away, and more beds available. Yet as he made his way down the dreary, crowded halls of the hospital, he could easily see how such rumors had started. There were still beds lining the walls, and patients stuffed four and five to a room. He stopped at the sight of one old man, curled up like a boiled shrimp on a bench just inside the emergency-room door. When Jonah bent down over him, he could see that he was shivering with fever, even on such a warm summer's day—just a little old man, with a few white wisps of hair standing up off his head. Hands clutching at the collar of his shirt, eyes closed, with no sign that anyone had even noticed him, much less cared.

Jonah called out angrily for the orderlies, for a doctor, while he hunted around for a blanket to put over the man. And looking at him shriveled up there, the abbreviated story of James Edwards Persons had come floating back up to him, unbidden. The same question recurring again and again to Jonah—

Why? What was the man doing there—a colored man, walking across those white Indiana farms?

Jonah acknowledging guiltily to himself, even as he thought the question, that that was what life in a white man's country did to you. Questioning yourself over where you had every right to be—

But why? Where had he been going? Home to Detroit, or Chicago? Rolled for his bus money or cheated of it in some craps game? A bunch of men on their knees out in back of a Greyhound bus station, maybe passing around a whiskey flask to cloud the sucker's judgment. His money gone in the wink of an eye. Thinking all right then, he could just walk it all the way home. Knowing how it was—that no one was going to pick up a black man on a lonely highway, not even one in uniform, with his honorable discharge papers in his pocket.

And had he been, in fact, staring into the windows of farmhouses? Knowing, too, as he must have, what that could cost him. What could he have been looking for? A hot meal, or a warm place to sleep? A few dollars to see him on his way? Surely he knew that this, too, would have been impossible. A black face, glimpsed outside the window on a dark night, scaring the white children and the farm wife. A soldier's face, solemn and cryptic, fading away as suddenly as it had appeared.

Then there would have been the mob, and the dogs. Their cries echoing down the gullies of the lonely country roads behind him. James Edwards Persons, thirty-three, must have known they were coming for him, the only man—the only
black
man—for as far as the eye could see. Never mind that he had the proper discharge papers in his pocket, was wearing his once sleek, tan khakis. A little rumpled now after so many days on the road. Knees still smudged with oil from where he had knelt behind that bus station, to throw the dice with that slick-talking man from Birmingham, or Memphis, or Cairo, Illinois, who even had a pint of Four Roses on hand to ease the transition of
your
money into
his
pocket.

(Or maybe nothing like that at all. Maybe only waking up from a dead sleep in the same station—a sleep troubled with worry over the sick momma, or the dying daddy, or the destitute wife and children, which was the reason for the honorable discharge in the first place. Only to discover that your billfold is gone, picked by the bum or the floozy who had appeared to be snoring drunk in the seat next to you the night before, head lolling on your shoulder, his or her breath stinking so powerfully of bad liquor that you had had to turn your head away and let them do their business. Looking out the window into the dark night, solemn, cryptic soldier's face half-reflected back to you. A black face on a black night—)

But the mob didn't care. Some of them running, more of them tearing up the country dirt roads in their trucks and old Fords. Yelling and laughing as they came, but not out of any deeper despair. The war had been good to them, restored their farms to full solvency for the first time since the last war. Restored them to their full, provincial smugness, wearing the newest overalls and hunting jackets and dresses from the Sears Roebuck catalog. Led by the respected leaders of their community, the sheriff and his deputies. This hunt not some desperate, peasant burst of viciousness and fear and inchoate rage but an outing, a field day, in the brand-new, prosperous Vigo County of the war.

And you know it's for you. You know it's for you, churning up the dirt on the road behind you.

You try to run, to make a fight of it at least. “If we must die let it not be like hogs / Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot...”
But there's no place to run, no woods. All the fields cleared for the endless beans and corn and cabbages the government will buy for the latest war effort. Nothing under the sky but flat, plowed land, for as far as the eye can see—and your running only gets their blood up. And you know this but still you run, because what else is there?