Only sixteen years old but there was work to be had, money to be made. He’d never been much for schooling and there was but one high school for Negroes anyway. Jobs everywhere, if not loading and unloading trains then building bombers and fighters up north of the city, building trucks and jeeps and boats, sewing new uniforms and tents and building vehicles and fortifications, so much that would later be destroyed and thus require even yet more uniforms and jets and trucks. They were making things the world would swiftly unmake, and the business of it was grand.
Buildings growing across the city, scaffolds rising and bulldozers beetling everywhere, newness so sudden that you had trouble remembering what had existed before. Maybe it had been an older building or a shack or someone’s untended back plot but now a five-story frame stood there, workers like monkeys dangling in every direction. Too many people in town to fit, the job sites wanted them but the landlords didn’t, the city just didn’t possess the apartments and houses for them yet, so they crammed in, two families to an apartment, three, four. Everywhere clotheslines, everywhere children in the streets and on the sidewalk, everywhere cans of garbage being knocked over by dogs, raccoons, rats, cars. Jeremiah’s family was lucky to have been there first, he’d been born in Atlanta, not like so many of the new folks with their country accents and strange ways. He’d been poor all his life but suddenly he owned things these country folk wanted desperately; he and his friends could buy their own cigarettes, they could sneak drinks, they or someone they knew always heard when the moonshine was coming in, when a few extra cartons of cigarettes had accidentally fallen off a train, there was money to be made, money to be made.
Until his brother got greedy, talked Jeremiah into feeling the same, and it all went to hell.
So long ago. Those days etched in his mind like when he’d shut his eyes after a light had become too bright, the shape of things scored inside his iris, only it stayed there, even after five years of closing his eyes. He’d wake in the morning and still see it there, the Atlanta he’d left behind, but the new city before him didn’t match that memory. It was enough to drive a man mad.
He was walking away from her, and the little boy, the anchor he hadn’t known he’d had.
Since arriving in the city, he’d sought out old friends or friends of his mother’s, people who in some way might substitute for his family. He could find so few of them. Neighbors told him this person had moved to Chicago, that one to Kansas City, these to Toledo. Where on earth was Toledo, and why would one move there? All the people he’d known had been replaced by more country folk, more of those accents. The city at least smelled the same, pork chops and chitlins and pigs’ feet, he smelled spilled beer when he passed the bars on Edgewood, he smelled the vomit and piss and sweat, but it was new people’s sweat.
His brother was dead. His mother and sister had fled to Chicago with his mother’s latest boyfriend, according to one of her letters. He knew they blamed him for his brother’s death. The mere possibility of revisiting all that pain made him not want to consider the journey north, to Chicago and the unknown cold and unknown masses and the very known, very much hated pain of his family.
Some of his friends had vanished to prison—a handful he’d seen there with his own eyes—and some to the grave. How frightening to realize that, to ask after someone and be told he was dead, to have someone killed by a mere utterance like that. And so matter of fact. He dead Didn’t you know?
He had nowhere to go.
He was walking down Decatur Street, shoulders hunched and hands crammed into his pockets against a chill he wasn’t dressed for. Two men were about to pass him when one of them stopped, his thick brows arched.
“Jeremiah? Jeremiah!”
He dimly remembered this man but could not recall his name. He couldn’t even place how he knew the fellow—had they lived on the same block or played sandlot baseball or shot pool? The man introduced Jeremiah to his friend, whom he called Bucket, and Jeremiah nodded a wary hello as the Forgotten fellow smiled as if he and Jeremiah were long-lost friends.
“What happened to you, boy? Been forever.”
“Been down in Reidsville. Five years.”
“Oh, damn, that’s right! The tobacco boys!”
Forgotten explained to Bucket that this here Jeremiah had been nailed for swiping crates of smokes off the trains and reselling them during wartime. Frame job, just something the cops needed to pin on Negroes, that’s how they do.
Forgotten insisted they go into the bar and have a drink. Jeremiah was a free man and this stood for some celebrating. While in prison he had promised himself he’d never touch the stuff again. But this was the first time since his release that someone seemed happy to see him, and because he was hungry he figured drinks might lead to food. So he joined them, even though he felt uncomfortable around Forgotten, as if the man himself were some sin Jeremiah had committed and not atoned for. There was just something unnatural about not remembering someone who seemed to know you so well.
Soon he was half drunk on half-beer. People trickled in, some faces he remembered but not their names. Faces he had not thought of in years, and to be reminded of them made him smile, grinning like an idiot just to hear people say his name, Jeremiah it’s good to see you, boy, and he began to feel alive again.
“Where you living?” Forgotten asked.
“I, uh, I don’t have a place yet.” He had slept the night before in the hallway of an apartment building where some of his friends had once lived. Hadn’t meant to sleep there, but after knocking on the door and finding no answer, and after slumping against the wall and sitting down to plan his next steps, exhaustion had taken him. “I just want to find a job.”
Forgotten laughed. “They ain’t going to hire no Negro with a record! You unemployable, Pure-boy.”
Pure-boy, what some of the men in his brother’s crowd had called him. Because he dared discuss the Bible with them, because he had resisted drinking and smoking reefer for so long, or what had felt like so long. Perhaps it had only been a few months. How sad, he realized. His willpower had held out for what had felt like an almost biblical amount of time, but that was just the blink of an eye to God. Yet they’d continued to call him Pure-boy.
“I’m a hard worker.”
“You are your record, Pure-boy. Ain’t no one gonna hire a colored man who robbed from his last boss.”
He needed to believe that Forgotten was wrong. Surely someone would be impressed by his willingness to push himself, the sheer physical endurance he’d displayed on the chain gang.
“There’s the other kind of work, you know what I mean,” Forgotten said. “Only kind you’ll ever make any money off.”
“I’m not interested. I’m meant for better things. I believe that.”
“That right?”
“I’m not a fully formed thing. I’m the Lord’s clay. He has plans for me.”
Bucket had been half eavesdropping, half checking out women as he’d leaned against the bar beside Forgotten, and he chimed in, “Yeah, you got yourself a real messiah quality. First I saw you, I was gonna ask you when you were gonna do your next miracle.”
Bucket and Forgotten burst out laughing. Jeremiah felt the channels in his mind thicken, anger and fear and embarrassment. There had been a miracle already, that officer in Reidsville, and these two saw fit to mock him?
“You can’t understand,” he said. “Your minds are messed up with this poison.”
They laughed harder, asking him what about the poison he was drinking, and by the way, when was he going to pay for his drinks?
Jeremiah reached into his pocket and removed some of the very little money he had left from what the preacher had given him. He placed it on the bar and thanked the men for their company and took his leave, realizing he still hadn’t eaten and that once the buzz faded his stomach would commence tormenting him.
Outside it was even yet colder. Why had he spoken that way? Maybe they might have put him up for the night if he hadn’t sa
id anything. He would need to find another hallway, and quick. Back before his sentence, police would jail or beat Negroes who were out at this hour unless they carried something from an employer excusing them. He imagined that was still the case.
He passed the mouth of an alley and something hit him in the cheek. His body swayed and before he could fall completely he took two more blows, one of them dead on the nose.
The world reset itself at an incorrect angle and he was staring at the side of the building, diagonal across his vision, and a figure stepped in front of him. It reached into his pockets. There was a second one, reaching for his ankles, removing his shoes. He was kicked until he rolled onto his back, the better for frisking his front pockets, where he’d kept his scant money.
“Thank you, Country,” one of them said, and only later would he understand it as an insult to the rural Negroes moving into town, as they didn’t realize he was from here, that he was Atlantan through and through, that his blood and his family’s blood had been spilled here long ago, but none of that toil led to something better, it wasn’t like farming, where your sacrifice bore fruit, it was just hurt, and right then he hurt about as bad as he could, until one of them lifted a boot and the hurt stopped.
16
EIGHT O’CLOCK, THE city dark as Smith walked with Dewey Edmunds—McInnis liked to switch their partners some nights to ensure they all knew and trusted one another. Dewey was the shortest cop at the Butler Street precinct, officially five five (the cutoff established for Negro officers), but everyone assumed he’d been on his tiptoes when measured. The fact that he also might have been the strongest cop dissuaded people from commenting on his height.
“How’s your brother-in-law?” Dewey asked.
“Bad. But he’s conscious again.”
“He remember anything?”
“No.” Smith had visited Malcolm in the hospital that morning, mere hours after the attack. Hannah had been sitting with him, and after Smith had sat with her for barely ten minutes, Malcolm had opened his eyes for the first time. Well, one of his eyes. The other was so dark purple he wouldn’t be opening it for days. His head heavily bandaged, casts covered his left arm and right foot, which hung from the ceiling like he was a human pendulum. Simply looking at him had hurt, Smith feeling a tingle in his lower abdomen like the first time he rode in a plane, that awful awareness of how fragile we are.
Malcolm had stayed awake just long enough to say he didn’t know what had happened. He dimly remembered being hit in the head, but that was all. No faces, not even any voices. He hadn’t even recalled for certain when he’d gotten off the bus or how far home he’d walked, if he’d been attacked where they’d found him or if he’d been dumped there, couldn’t even remember how late he’d worked beforehand.
Despite the brick through their window and plenty of dirty looks from white neighbors, Hannah had told Smith that she and Malcolm hadn’t endured any confrontations worth mentioning. Until the very afternoon of Malcolm’s assault, only a few hours beforehand. A white man, she told Smith, had come by with his wife, claiming to represent some neighborhood group. They offered to buy the Greers’ house back for three thousand dollars and even showed them an envelope full of cash, right there. They had actually pressed it into Malcolm’s hands, Hannah said. The white folks hadn’t liked it when the Greers refused; they said they’d thought the Greers were “good Nigras” but they were being proven wrong. Hannah hadn’t gotten the couple’s names, but Smith took down their description.
Then there were the letters. As far as Smith knew, the white officer who had responded to Hannah’s call about the brick hadn’t learned anything, or even tried. Smith would have to drop by her house again soon, see if any more letters had come that day.
Nurses had interrupted the conversation before Smith could get much more out of Malcolm. Hopefully his memory would clear soon. Smith needed to find these men who had so broken his brother-in-law, men who would probably be successful in their task after all, because if Malcolm was laid out very long, and if he couldn’t work and earn money to pay his mortgage, they’d lose that house one way or another.
Smith and Dewey called in to Dispatch every hour on the hour to report their whereabouts and get updates from McInnis. When they checked in at eleven that night, McInnis relayed a “call for service” at an apartment two blocks away, a scared neighbor reporting the sounds of a struggle between a man and a woman.
They hated such calls. Either the woman was indeed being beaten but would turn into a doe-eyed defender of her abusive lover in their presence, or she’d stay silent and scared while the man launched into the kind of rage that only occurs when other men dare show up in his home and tell him how to behave.
This time, they heard shouting before they even knocked on the door. It was coming from within a beauty parlor on Edgewood, just down the road from some of the rowdier nightclubs and bars. The sign on the glass read Closed, but an inner light cast shadows.
“Police, open up,” Dewey said as he banged on the glass. Smith stepped back, checking the street for loiterers.
After a second knock, a young woman opened the door. She smiled and said, “I’m sorry, we’re closed.” She seemed out of breath.
“I’m not here for my hair, ma’am,” Dewey said. “I’m here because your neighbors heard screaming, and so did I. Everything all right?”
“I guess I got a little loud there, having a disagreement with my business partner.”
Smith stood behind Dewey, hands at his belt.
“Mind if we come in and talk to your partner?” Dewey asked, edging forward as if he’d already received his answer.
“No, really, I’m fine, I need to be shutting down now and heading out myself.”
But her voice was strained, and she didn’t look at all pleased as she made eye contact with Smith, who entered a step behind Dewey.
Before them the vinyl cushions of six metal swivel chairs shined in the light of a small desktop lamp twenty feet away. The room otherwise empty.
“Everybody out,” Smith announced to the emptiness. He saw a door behind the desk, marked Restroom. Five feet beyond that was another door, unmarked.
“She’s just in the bathroom,” the woman explained.
“Ma’am,” Dewey said, “we got a report there was yelling between a man and woman. That man in the bathroom by any chance?”
A toilet flushed.
“That’s just my partner, Lucy,” she said.
“Where’s that other door go?” Smith asked.
“Storage room. Ain’t nobody in there,” she said, answering a question he hadn’t asked.
The bathroom door began opening. Smith’s hand drifted onto the handle of his gun.
“Step out slowly!” he commanded.
He was fixated on that bathroom door, and the light from within that fell slantwise across the dark room, and the elongated shadow that appeared for but a second until the person (a woman indeed) shut off the bathroom light. “Whoa,” she said when she saw her unexpected guests.
“Open that other door,” Dewey commanded.
The woman who’d answered the door obeyed. It was dark in the storage room. Dewey couldn’t see anything other than the near side of a shelf, full of small containers of hair supplies and cosmetics.
“Turn on the light,” he told her. She stepped inside and reached for the string dangling there, but when she pulled, the click failed to illuminate anything.
“It’s out, I guess,” she said, so Dewey reached for his flashlight, not trusting this at all, and when he turned it on he saw a man’s belt buckle—much higher up than it would normally be—and the buckle came closer as the man took a mighty stride forward. Smith, in the main room, had been keeping his eye on the second woman, but when he sensed movement from the storage room, he turned, and out of the darkened space like some trick of a conjurer emerged one of the biggest men he would ever see.
And one of the fastest. Dewey was still trying to remove something from h
is belt as Thunder Malley lifted him off his feet. Then Malley took another step into the room and tossed Dewey through the glass window onto the sidewalk outside.
Smith was so stunned by the feat he stood there an extra second, marveling at the display, how a grown man could be thrown aside like a toy, and the shards of glass still falling from the windowpane onto the tiled floor inside and the cement outside. Then one of the women set upon him, hitting him with what he would later realize was a hair iron, knocking off his hat and sending sparks through his skull, and then the woman from the bathroom was on him, too, hands around his neck and nails slicing through his arm. Smith tried to knock them away as he saw Thunder Malley moving toward him.
On the sidewalk, Dewey blinked a few times to figure out why his bedroom ceiling was full of stars. The screaming from inside brought him back.
He rolled over, cutting his chest and right forearm on shards of glass. Gradually he raised himself, in stages, knees wobbly at first, his head no higher than his heart, and he exhaled extra slow, like he’d been taught to do after taking a solid punch, and then he lifted his shoulders and looked at his foe.
As a boxer and running back at Morehouse, Dewey had won a reputation as a competitor who would not be brought down easily. He’d heard his fellow officers joke about how maybe he had been wearing high heels the day he’d been measured for the job, and they probably wouldn’t believe the truth, that when the old white man from the city government at the police interview had marked his height as five four, Dewey had said, No, sir, I believe you’re mistaken, it’s five five, and he’d said it in such a way that the white man had eyed him for a cold second or two, probably never having heard a Negro address him that way, and instead of snapping at Dewey, the white man had said, I suppose I may have mismeasured. Either intimidated by Dewey’s stare or just figuring, okay, little fellow, if you really want to be out on the street, you go right ahead and take your chances and it surely won’t be on my conscience.
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