The Collected Novels of Charles Wright

by Charles Wright

  “Charles! There you go again. You’d better stop that. I mean it.”

  “Shall we have tea, Miss Fancy Pants?”

  “Have you got any cookies? I don’t like tea without cookies. But I like iced tea.”

  “You know I’ve got loads and loads of cookies. Mucho cookies.”

  “Mucho cookies.” Maxine laughed and then added, looking me straight in the eyes, “It’s been a long time since we’ve had tea and cookies. You don’t even buy Ritz crackers anymore.”

  “They don’t go good with vermouth,” I joked.

  The deep sigh and the I-know-that-Charles expression Maxine gives me . . . adds another notch to the guilt scoreboard.

  “Come on, Miss Fancy Pants,” I said, bolting up and taking Maxine’s hand. “Let’s have tea.”

  “I’ll make the tea,” Maxine told me. “I’ve grown very tall this year. I can even light the back burner on your stove.”

  “You’re right, cookie,” I said. “You’re getting to be a big girl.”

  “Yes,” Maxine exclaimed, taking the teapot from the cupboard, and quoting a litany, “I drink plenty of fresh milk and I have strong teeth and bones.”

  Maxine gives a dazzling smile and lights the stove. I have another vermouth.

  “You really drink a lot,” Maxine said. “Mama said the garbage you take down is all beer cans and whiskey bottles.”

  “Is that true, Miss Fancy Pants?”

  “Yes it is, and stop calling me Miss Fancy Pants.”

  “What shall I call you?”

  “Miss Fancy Pants, you jerk.”

  I decided to take a walk. Going out, I encounter Maxine returning from the hall bathroom.

  “Charles, where are you going?”

  “Out,” I said sharply.

  “Well, baby,” Maxine slanged, “don’t blow your cool.”

  “That’s right, cookie,” I grinned and counted the stairs as I went down.

  TODAY I HAD a delivery in the serene, green world of Manhasset, Long Island. A group of nursery school children were playing in front of a large Tudor-style house. One little boy, with space helmet and Davy Crockett tee-shirt, aimed his yellow plastic water pistol at me and shouted, “Hey you! Chinese boy!”

  I ducked the spray of water and reflected that this was the first time I had ever been mistaken for a Chinese. I had a sudden impulse to set the record straight. But then I thought that the kid had the right tone of voice, if the wrong nationality.

  I have always known what I was—if I might have had a brief lapse of consciousness, there was always a sign, gesture, or word from the outside world to help me bear in mind my race. Even with my closest friends among the whites, there are these little reminders. Even Troy Lamb, of Scotch-German parentage with a trickle of Jewish blood, reveals now and then that his feelings are mixed on color. Yet I must be at the hospital at the birth of his second child and meet his in-laws. Laura Vee, the model, with new coiffure, Paris dress, takes my arm proudly and defiantly as we emerge from my building to encounter a sightseeing bus of southerners. But too, Laura Vee can angrily shout, “By God, you treat me like I’m white.” I bow, because Laura has bowed often before my black throne.

  I have moved like an uncertain ghost through the white world. The wounds of my Missouri childhood were no worse than a sudden, sharp pain. As a six-year-old playmate of the twins whose father (a lawyer) my grandfather worked for, I used to go to her birthday parties, though they never came to mine. White Penelope Browne and I played as brother and sister, until we arrived at the acute age of twelve. Afterwards, very polite and formal.

  I remember one white boy named Bobby. He was a cripple and a stammerer. His house was the first white house across the tracks. Daily, he would be at his white picket fence. He always greeted me with “Neigaaar.” I always laughed and imitated his crude shuffle. Sometimes I would do a quick somersault on the sidewalk in front of his house. Then I’d jump up and say, “All right, crip. You try that.” We balanced the score.

  At the local movie, I had to sit in the balcony on hard wooden seats. Downstairs, the seats were upholstered with maroon leatherette. But it was very dark up there in the balcony, and us little colored boys would sneak smokes and pet with the little colored girls. That was something the white kids downstairs couldn’t do. The lights were too bright.

  The first time I spent a weekend exclusively with white people, I was fourteen, very shy, and late for dinner. They were waiting for me and I delayed coming down. I gave my shoes an extra shine, brushed my hair again. Despite the fact that I had just bathed, I checked my armpits. At the time the notion that Negroes smell was still alive; I didn’t really believe it, but white people said it was true and they were always right. And as I came down the carpeted staircase, I heard my fifteen-year-old host’s uncle, a Missouri state senator, say, “Maybe he won’t come down because we ain’t got no watermelon.”

  The senator laughed heartily at his own wit, but there was no other laughter.

  The last word in Negro arguments of my childhood was always “yellow” or “shit-colored bastard.” Sometimes us yellow, shit-colored kids stuck together as a means of protection. The varying light-brown colors of our skin didn’t go to our heads; we were colored. Though a few of my fair-colored, childhood classmates changed in this respect when they grew older.

  When I was sixteen, I got a job as a pinboy at Harry O’Malley’s Fair Lanes bowling alley.

  “Hey, Harry. See you have a coon back there.”

  Harry O’Malley made no reply. He merely looked away.

  “Take a shot at the nigger, baby.”

  “Oh, honey.” (This with giggles.)

  “Look at that nigger go. Fast as lightning.”

  I was nicknamed ‘Lightning’ because I was fast. I worked there a week, frightened, and overly conscious that I must do a good job. This had been pounded into me in my colored neighborhood.

  “Sonny, now you act right. Be the best.”

  “Yes. That’s what white folks expect of you.”

  “Say ‘yes ma’m’ and ‘no ma’m’ and ‘sir’.”

  “Get the lead out of your ass, boy.”

  “You should be proud. The first colored pinboy up there.”

  I did work hard and fast, and the second night I was handling two alleys. The next League night, Harry gave me the slow teams (which a pinboy accepts as a honor and a burden). This became a custom. A fast pinboy speeds up slow bowlers. The compliments of Harry, the envious glances of the white pinboys, and the egging on of other Negroes did very little for my ego. I knew I had done a good job. I was tired. That was that.

  I often took the long way home from the alley, passing the courthouse square and going up a neat, white, residential street that gave onto a bridge, the railroad tracks, and home. I liked the old, crumbling, Victorian houses up that way.

  One night the police stopped me.

  “Nigger, where you going?”

  “What?”

  “I said, where are you going?”

  “Home.”

  “Do you live up this way?”

  “No. . . . I. . . .”

  “Get in.”

  The police station. I remember standing in the center of an empty-looking room thinking, What will I tell Grandma? Above me was a harsh, unshaded light, just like the movies I thought. But I was frightened, surrounded by four policemen. My heart thumped like crazy and my eyes darted from man to man and then at the wall behind the rolltop desk. A portrait of Lincoln, the American flag, and a nude, calendar girl decorated the cream-colored wall.

  Finally the policeman at the desk looked up. “What were you doing up there?”

  “I work at O’Malley’s bowling alley and I like to take the long way home. It’s very quiet and I like to walk.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m pretty fast too. I’m on the track team at school.”

  The policeman at the desk nodded and smiled faintly.

  “Take your hands ou
t of your pockets,” he ordered. “Search’m, boys.”

  The searching policemen found: a sweaty handkerchief, pocket comb, Zippo lighter, and a wallet containing four one-dollar bills, a fifty-cent piece, three quarters, one dime, one penny.

  The policeman at the desk puckered up his lips and ran a pale, blue-veined hand through his close-cropped, gray hair. “No knife, uh? Never been arrested? Like to take hikes . . . and you’re on the track team. Is that right”

  “Yes, sir,” I said brightly in the moment of truth and salvation.

  “WELL, GODDAMMIT. START RUNNING AROUND THIS ROOM!”

  I began running. Head held high, arms arched at my waist, taking it slow and easy like a good trotting horse.

  “Faster,” a policeman yelled.

  “He sure can go,” another added.

  “By God, jest like a rabbit.”

  “Faster, boy!”

  I picked up speed. The room held heat like an overbaked oven. Sweat popped out on my face and ran in little streams down my face. My tee shirt was wet and clung to my body like a new layer of skin. Each time I swallowed, my throat seemed to contract. I closed my eyes once. The room seemed to spin like a top.

  “Faster.”

  I could hardly get my breath but I continued taking long strides. About half an hour later, my legs began to give. A pain throbbed in my leg muscles. The room did not seem like a room to my blurred, dazed eyes: rather like a giant, faded cloth that was being doused in a washing machine. Strange, too; my feet felt as light as cotton.

  “Okay, boy,” the policeman at the desk said rising, “that’s enough.”

  I slumped against the desk exhausted and wiped my face with the back of my hand.

  “That was damn good,” the close-cropped, gray-haired policeman said. He reached in his pocket and threw a nickel on the floor. “That was a miteee fine show.”

  The nickel hit the floor dully, rolled, and fell on its tail as if on cue. I kept my eyes focused on that nickel. (I still remember that nickel. An old Indian-head nickel.)

  Then I knelt down and picked up the nickel because that was the only thing to do.

  “You sure can run fast,” another policeman said, handing me my wallet.

  “Never saw a nigger who couldn’t,” another policeman reflected.

  “Yeah,” the gray-haired policeman agreed. “But stay across the tracks. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied firmly, quickly, and walked out of the Sedalia, Missouri, police station, trying not to think of anything.

  It was a quiet summer night. The small town street was deserted and the crumbling, Victorian houses faded like the night from my dreams.

  As I grew older, the white world beckoned. They wanted me. Now I began to wonder what they wanted from me. I certainly didn’t have money. Were they trying to prove something to themselves, using me as a reassuring springboard? Only a few of the young white women I became friendly with wanted to sleep with me.

  Young Negroes were another matter; the type of young men I met at liberal white parties and chic black parties. Quiet, turned out in Ivy League garb, usually with a pipe and mustache. Perfect gentlemen: sophisticated Uncle Toms. I certainly don’t go for most Negro girls who have gone to a good college. They are usually phony intellectuals. The swinging Negro girls were more likely to be those who had gone to secretarial school—waitresses, maids, promising singers. They knew the racial score; they had paid their dues.

  If you disagree on race relations with another Negro, well, you’re asking for a fight. I remember the fights at school about Lincoln. What did he really do for the Negro? The fights would take place around election time, the man’s birthday, or when we were studying a particular period in American history.

  Born black, not actually without color, brightness, or evil. Black, nevertheless. Rather, the fashionable café au lait. Half and half. Black. My family is almost equally divided between the shades of light and dark. I am tan, a yellowish-brown, exposed to the sun the moment I emerged from my mother’s womb. Beige. I am a man of color. La Ronde began after my ancestors sailed in from Africa. I curse the day of their lust. I wish them many seasons in a syphilitic hell.

  Their curdled semen . . . why couldn’t they have stayed in their race! They make me an outsider. A minority within a minority. They called me dago as a child, before my curls turned to kinks. That sun again! But these kinks form my proud crown. Negro, Negroid, Nigger. Black, brown, and beige. Yellow, shit-colored. Buck, boy. I am the result of generations of bastard Anglo Saxon, African, Black Creek, and Choctaw Indian blood.

  Me, the last of the Negro, southwestern, Missouri Stevensons.

  LENA IS BACK on the scene. I am at Bobby’s apartment in a small West Side hotel.

  “Ah! There’s my daddy,” Lena says, grinning from ear to ear. “There’s my sweet little motherfucker.”

  Lena then bounced over in a yellow, baggy, Italian sweater and form-fitting blue slacks, her buttocks quivering evilly. She planted a mouth-smacking kiss square on the top of my head.

  “Hiya, doll,” I said, bringing on a happy smile. “When did you get out?”

  “Tuesday morning,” Lena said, patting her tight spit curls which were geometrically arranged on her head like a careful bird’s nest. “Yes. I’m operating again. Clipped a joker for two hundred bucks last night.”

  Lena threw back her head and cackled; her teeth were a miniature Fort Knox. Then she started jazzing me—huddling close, her long thief’s hand lunging for my head as if trying to pull out a hunk of hair. Then she bends down, licks my arm with her sharp witch’s tongue, and sinks in her gold teeth savagely.

  I squirm and give her another painful grin. “Take it easy, baby.”

  “Miss Lena,” Bobby says, pursing up his lips like a dried peach. “Child. You’re trying to eat that boy alive.”

  Lena bolts up. “You’re just a jealous bitch. Faggot.”

  Bobby tilts his head grandly. “Miss Thing, you are a freak.”

  A sardonic smile lights up Lena’s amber face. “Yes, a freak. And a good one.”

  “I wish they’d kept your ass in jail,” Bobby chides, handing Lena a beer.

  “Trying to put the bad mouth on me, bitch?” Lena yells, and then in a very businesslike way pulled a roll of bills from her sweater.

  “Child,” Bobby exclaims, popping his butter-bean eyes, “that is enough to choke a mule.”

  Lena counts out one hundred and eighty dollars, puts a twenty back inside her sweater, and gives me the rest.

  “Here, daddy. Take a twenty for yourself. I’ll be over tomorrow to pick it up.”

  “Miss Lena, you love that boy,” Bobby said.

  “Yes,” Lena said diffidently. “I can trust him, too. Can’t trust any of you c———.”

  “Oh please, Miss One,” Bobby tut-tutted. “You’ve got plenty of friends.”

  “Yes. As long as I’m hustling these streets and making a fat score. You Goddamn right.”

  Lena sinks into my lap and tickles my chin. “What’s on your mind, baby? Thinking about Shirley?”

  “We’re not speaking.”

  “Oh, that again. Why don’t you two get married?”

  “I suppose you’d be the bridesmaid at their wedding,” Bobby said sweetly.

  Lena bolted up. “Yes, bitch. I’ll be the bridesmaid and I’ll babysit for them. What Goddamn business is it of yours?”

  Bobby was alarmed and threw up his hands. “Oh please, child, I was only kidding. You don’t have to get up in the air about it. Mercy me.”

  “Here, bitch,” Lena said. “Here’s five bucks. Go out in the kitchen and fix me something to eat.”

  Bobby was insulted. “Miss Thing,” he said, “I don’t need your money. And you know you’re always welcome to eat at my house. Besides, I haven’t forgotten the time you paid my rent when I was in the hospital.”

  “Not hospital, baby, jail. When you got busted for turning a trick in the subway. Don’t try to be piss-elegant bec
ause Charlie is here. I know you from way back when. Now get out in the kitchen and fix me some food. And a plate for Charles, too.”

  “Lena, I don’t want anything,” I said.

  “Oh, make that faggot work. You need to put some meat on those bones anyway.”

  Bobby blinked his eyes and stepped gingerly into the kitchen. Lena flopped back down into my lap and sighed heavily. I massaged her shoulders, and soon the heavy breathing stopped.

  “That feels good,” Lena groaned, closing her eyes outlined with navy blue mascara. The beat lines showed through her pancake makeup.

  “Are you going to move into a pad or hotel?” I asked.

  “Pad? Hotel? I wish I knew, Charles,” Lena said without opening her eyes. “I’m so tired. Think I’ll save my loot and move to California. I wanna make a new start with my old man. He gets out of Sing Sing next year.”

  “That’s a good idea,” I said. “But then, you’d better be careful.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Lena said. “I can’t afford to get busted again. Hustling up by the Park Sheraton is out. But if I’m a good girl, will you help me?”

  “Oh sure, doll,” I said.

  Last summer, Lena and I lived in a place off Third Avenue in the Fifties. I didn’t work because Lena liked to have me around the house. She was out a great deal and there were many phone calls. Lena is a prostitute and a professional thief. Like the Murphy Game players, she works best in the summer. She’ll meet a John in a bar, talk some trash. Once the John leaves the air-conditioned bar and hits the humid streets, he’s Lena gravy.

  The first score only whets her appetite. She used to come home, say at two a.m., hand over the first take, change clothes, have a drink, and hit the streets again. She would still be hustling after the sun had come up. Lena had discovered that there were good scores to be made in broad daylight between six and nine a.m. But this was usually on Saturdays. But it was on an early Sunday morning that Lena got busted in the doorway of a Fifth Avenue dress shop. The John said that Lena had cleaned him for a hundred and seventy dollars. Yet when the cops took her down, she only had ninety in her stockings. Lena never said what happened to the other eighty-five.