‘I was saved that way,’ a boy called out.
‘I saw a mother throw a baby over a fence during an Aktion,’ another boy called out, instigating a flow of uncontrolled conversation from the children in a myriad tongues.
‘Children! Children! Quiet please. Quiet! Do we think Moses’ mother did the right thing then? Was she a good mother?’
‘Yes,’ all the children answered in unison, all except for the newly arrived little boy from Kielce. Henry Border watched him and saw that he gripped the little girl’s hand tightly with his unbandaged hand and remained silent.
*
Outside the Mecca Flats two white men looked at each other as if to say, ‘Can this be it?’ The sidewalk in front of them was pockmarked with fissures and at one point the gaps gave way to a tunnel. Under the street light they saw an old black man pushing a cart. ‘You fellas goin’ in there?’ the man called out. One of the white men nodded. ‘Don’t mind me sayin’ but I think you in the wrong neighbourhood,’ and as he was moving on, as if to underscore his point, for the first time they noticed the tunnel. A small boy who had poked his head out of it took one look at them and ran inside the Mecca. They followed him but he had disappeared by the time they had taken a few steps inside the courtyard. There was no longer even a pretence at concrete underfoot any more. Neither were there plants or grass, just cans, broken glass and milk cartons. The white men continued walking undeterred.
Russell Ford slept alone in a room that he had until recently shared with his mother. So when the nightmares came now, and they came almost every night, there was no one in the room to settle him down. This meant it took him longer to realise where he was and that he was no longer in the setting of the nightmare. His mother hadn’t mentioned the nightmares to James Pearson when she had asked Mr Anything-You-Want to look in on Russell while she was working as a live-in housekeeper for Henry Border. But not only had James Pearson heard the boy from the hall, he had also heard him from inside his own room. At first he thought there was someone else in there with him. The sounds hadn’t sounded like Russell. They didn’t last long but they visited him so often at night that James Pearson would hear them despite the perpetual emanation of one kind of noise or another from some part of the Mecca Flats to compete with whatever you wanted to hear.
Pearson had asked Russell about his interrupted sleep but the boy had seemed reluctant to talk about it. Over time he realised that Russell was less shy when he chose the topic of conversation himself. The chosen topic might be any of a number of things as long as it wasn’t himself. More than once Russell had chosen Pearson’s work at Swift’s as his preferred topic. He had wanted to know about life in the meat-packing house. Gentle but persistent cross-examination from James Pearson revealed that Russell really had nothing to do over the summer. Sometimes he had played with the other kids in the building but their games were too chaotic for his liking. It emerged that he’d spent some time getting in the way of the Icer across State Street and had even tried several times unsuccessfully to get in to the Railroad Men’s Social Club. Occasionally Tommy Parks would throw a ball with him but this never lasted too long and, in any event, Tommy Parks would share his limited attention around at the slightest provocation. No, essentially it seemed that Russell had been spending much of his time alone with nothing to do. On this realisation James Pearson hit upon the idea of asking whether he wanted to come to work with him one day. There was nothing better Russell could have been offered.
Somebody – and James never found out who – told Personnel that someone was bringing in his kid. When they found out it was James Pearson they said that he could stay as long as he didn’t get in the way. By the end of the week they had Russell sweeping up and even salting. It didn’t occur to Russell to ask for money for his work. He was happy just to be there but James Pearson spoke to a few people and got him nine cents an hour, making him promise to give two-thirds to his mother.
‘She gonna be real proud of you when she gets back.’
James Pearson was in the hallway nearing Russell’s bedroom door when he came upon Mrs Sallie with her ear cupped listening at Russell’s door. She saw Pearson approaching but wasn’t at all shamed by being discovered and she continued to listen.
‘He fightin’ them demons again,’ she said turning to James Pearson. He knew what the sounds signified even if he didn’t know where they came from night after night. He opened the door and stood at the entrance to the room where Russell was in bed. He’d never intervened like this before.
‘You all right, son?’
‘What?’ The boy was waking up.
‘I … I heard somethin’ from in there and I thought to check if you all right.’
Russell knew what had happened. He was embarrassed to think that his cries had been heard outside his room and by James Pearson, of all people. Russell knew what the dreams were about because whenever he woke from them they stayed with him more like memories than dreams. They were memories. They had their origins in events he had witnessed. It was going to be just another Detroit summer in a boy’s life. He hadn’t known about the unrest at the Packard plant where 25,000 white workers who had been employed producing engines for bombers and for PT boats went on strike upon learning that a handful of black women had started work there. He was young but he would have understood what it meant to hear a white worker outside the plant say that he’d rather let Hitler and Hirohito win than stand beside a nigger on the factory floor. He hadn’t heard that said but he knew the city in which he lived with his mother and his father, childhood sweethearts now reconciled who had, with some slips, some gaps and a lot of difficulty, stuck by each other since Mississippi.
He had been with his father that morning. It had been a stinking hot Monday morning towards the end of the school year, June 1943. Because of the events of the previous day, the Police Commissioner had met with the Mayor and the US Army colonel in charge of the Detroit area at four o’clock that morning. Mayor Jefferies had a lot of meetings that day and made a lot of phone calls. He was a very busy man and it wasn’t until seven-thirty that evening that he made his own inspection of the streets of his town only to see what he could have seen eleven hours earlier, which was more or less what Russell Ford had seen.
Russell had walked his father to the stop at which his father normally caught the bus to work at the Ford plant. His father wasn’t the first black man Russell saw pulled off that streetcar by a crowd of white men but he is the man he would see the longest. Night after night he now saw his father being dragged off the streetcar, saw him trying not to let go of the satchel he always took with him to work. Russell doesn’t remember what his father used to put in that satchel but he remembers how his father kept hold of it during the first few blows. A mob of men pulled him on to the street but there were too many to hit him all at once. In a brutal display of collectivism they took turns, waiting and jeering while one man after another tired himself out on Russell Ford’s father. The first man hit him in the head while someone else held him. Another man kicked him in the abdomen. No sound came from Russell’s mouth though he tried to scream. A fresh man punched his father in the stomach so many times he tired himself out and then, breathing like a wild stallion at the peak of its run, went on to another black man who had also been dragged off the streetcar. By this time no one any longer cared to hold up Russell’s father for his next assailant but this didn’t lead to the end of the assault. It was not nearly over. Lying on the ground, more of the mob could get to him at any one time. He was kicked and jumped on. By the time his skull was crushed he might already have been dead. No one will ever know, not his wife Callie nor his son Russell, who saw the whole thing from start to end and sees it most nights of the week. When he wakes in a sweat his father is still gone and it has all still happened just as he had seen it. It’s not really a dream at all. In the dark he gets his breath back but never does the terror completely go, never does he not feel ashamed that he hadn’t been able to save his father and nev
er does he stop missing him. He still has his father’s satchel. Callie cleaned it out after the funeral, cleaned off the blood, and Russell keeps it.
‘I … I heard somethin’ from in here and I thought to check if you all right,’ James Pearson asked.
‘Yes, sir. I’m all right.’
Mrs Sallie would have liked to have kept listening to what was going on in that room between James Pearson and the boy whose mother had left him but there was a knock at the front door of the apartment that was too insistent to ignore. She went to the door before anyone else could get there and opened it. There stood the two white men. Mrs Sallie looked them up and down slowly in a questioning manner not untouched by anxiety.
‘Good evening, ma’am,’ the older of the two white men said. ‘Sorry to disturb you at this hour. We’re looking for –’
‘Have you met, met my friend?’
‘Well, we’re looking for –’
‘Have you met, met my friend, Jesus?’
Russell’s bedroom door was slightly ajar and James Pearson heard a man say, ‘Ma’am, we’re looking for Mr Pearson, James Pearson. We understand he lives here.’
‘I understand that too,’ Mrs Sallie said without taking one step back.
‘Do you know him? Is he here?’ the other man asked.
‘He a friend ‘o mine. But I … a lot of friends. My best, best friend is Jesus. He bring the bright, bright light you know … bright, bright sun. He bring it ever’day just like today and …’ she said, thinking as she spoke, looking these two white men straight in the eye, first one then the other, before continuing, ‘just like tomorrow. He bring it tomorrow. I tell you ‘bout him then, tomorrow,’ she said, beginning to close the door on the men when the younger one of the two stuck his foot in the doorway. She was unable to close the door.
Elise Border, who normally slept well, was awake. Something was going on outside. She wasn’t sure but she thought she’d heard something. Was it worth troubling Callie? It might have been just the wind knocking over the lid of a garbage can. There it was again. Would Callie be asleep by now?
Tommy Parks was on State Street heading back in the direction of the Mecca. It hadn’t been a bad night at all and if he could just make it up to his room without anyone bothering him he could sleep off the night’s diversions smiling to himself at the entertainment he’d been able to call up at such short notice and at such a reasonable price. He could see the doorway to the State Street entrance by now and that was when he suddenly sobered up a little. He saw two white men walking from the building and with them was what looked to be his neighbour, James Pearson, Mr Anything-You-Want. He decided to hang back and watch the direction they took. But he hung back too long. They were walking fast and by that time of the evening he wasn’t in any position to walk nearly so fast. The two white men and James Pearson were gone.
*
A man and a woman were about to meet casually, but by arrangement, for coffee. It was with a sense of foreboding that Adam could see Michelle approaching on Amsterdam Avenue. He feared that she might give him news of some kind about Diana that would underscore just how much he had let her down. The pain from expected news of how Diana was faring in her life after they parted had rendered him almost physically incapable of making this arrangement, even after Michelle had left a message on his answering machine requesting it, and it was his procrastination that shamed him as they approached each other, coming closer and closer until he saw her smile. It wasn’t her best smile but it was better than most anyone else’s.
When she hugged him outside the Hungarian Pastry Shop he remembered what a good friend she had always been and thought for the first time ever that perhaps in some way he loved her. That she was strikingly attractive wasn’t news to him but to know it intellectually is not the same as to register it viscerally. She was his friend and also the wife of his friend but still her beauty hit him like a gust of wind by which no man could remain unmoved. When she hugged him he felt a certain pride he was sure he hadn’t earned or, at least, not recently. They were both tired. Adam saw her tiredness in her smiling eyes and realised how good of her it was to nudge him into this casual meeting for coffee, this exchange.
That’s what this was – an exchange, an exchange of information. There was certain updated information about Diana that the maintenance of his self-flagellation required. Not long after the exchange of niceties they got right down to it. Michelle had seen Diana. That was good. She had visited her in Hell’s Kitchen, Diana’s new neighbourhood. How was she? For the first two weeks Diana had barely eaten anything, almost nothing at all. She had lost a lot of weight and grown weak. She had forced herself to go to work. But she hadn’t gone out to buy food, hadn’t even wanted to explore the neighbourhood. She’d felt numb, briefly angry, but mainly numb. She’d told Michelle that she’d heard about this sort of thing happening to other couples but she had never imagined it would happen to her and Adam. But somehow, after about two weeks, as if it were a virus that she had defeated, she began to be able to think, at least tentatively, about the future. She started calling people, exploring the stores in the area, and taking advantage of her new location to see some shows.
‘Did you see her apartment?’
‘No, we met at a café on Ninth Avenue.’
Adam tried to picture the area but he didn’t know it very well. ‘Ninth Avenue; what’s around there?’
‘Oh, there’s a lot going on there, ‘round the high 30s, 40s and 50s.’
‘Really?’
‘Sure, a lot of restaurants and bars.’
Adam sat there trying to process it all. Diana had almost starved for two weeks after which she was calling people, going to shows, eating out and hanging out at Ninth Avenue bars. Starving herself was excessive grief. It suggested depression. Two weeks wasn’t very long.
What exactly had he wanted Michelle to say? If Diana was suffering it would hurt him, if she was coping it would hurt him. What he really wanted, although he wasn’t fully aware of it, was for Michelle to somehow convince him that he and Diana should be together again and then to arrange it. Nor was he aware of both just how unrealistic it was to expect this from Michelle and of how this was the only thing she could have said with respect to Diana that would not have hurt him.
Adam thought about Diana on her own in an apartment he didn’t know, he thought of her looking gaunt, he thought of Ninth Avenue, he thought about how many hours were contained in two weeks as opposed to the number of hours that were contained in almost ten years. Michelle had wanted to know how he was faring but she had felt he couldn’t have been coping too badly because her husband and her father-in-law had mentioned some new project that seemed to have him inspired and kept taking him to Chicago. She didn’t seem to want to know why he’d ended the relationship. Presumably she’d heard some version of it from Diana. She hadn’t wanted to talk him out of it or to pass on any messages. She’d simply wanted to give him this limited information. Had there been anything she’d wanted from him, from Adam?
A beautiful woman, the wife of the Chairman of History at Columbia, a man who even Adam had observed, no longer had time for anything that didn’t involve more than one person at a time, is sharing a coffee with a mutual friend. She is smiling through tired eyes and pleading for someone to talk to. But the pleading is there only in her eyes. It remains unsaid.
‘Adam,’ Michelle said after providing the latest news on Diana, ‘when Sonia came over to your place that day, uninvited, and we came to pick her up –’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘What did she say?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Did she say anything … about Charles and me?’
*
The white men had introduced themselves at the doorway to the apartment at the Mecca and although James Pearson had known they were looking for him and that they had tried to talk to him before, he hadn’t expected them to suddenly arrive at the doorway of his home one hot summer night. Since he knew
who they were and knew that they weren’t going to give up, he agreed to go to a nearby bar with them.
‘I’m real sorry to drag you out of your home, Mr Pearson, but as you can imagine, we couldn’t exactly have had this conversation with you at the plant,’ Herbert Marks said, skilfully placing three glasses of beer on the table of the bar. It was a local bar and Herbert Marks and his older colleague, Ralph Hellerstein, were the only white men there.
‘You got me out this late to talk about business. I was fixin’ to go to sleep. Nothin’ against nobody, Mr Hellerstein –’
‘It’s Ralph.’
‘I ain’t lookin’ for no trouble … Ralph.’
‘Can I call you James?’ the younger man, Herbert Marks, asked.
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘There’s already trouble, James.’
‘Now, I admit things can be … difficult at times,’ James Pearson said. ‘But we already got a union, independent union.’
‘James, that’s not an independent union, that’s a company union.’
‘It’s a union … we got a union.’
‘You got grievance procedures that are going to take care of you … every last one of you?’
‘I guess.’
‘Every last one? You think the company union really takes care of the workers? Does it take care of the Negro workers?’
‘No more ‘n no less than anyone else do,’ James Pearson said, sipping on his beer.
Herbert Marks leaned in close. ‘You work with Billy Moore, don’t you?’
‘Yeah … so?’
‘You like him?’
‘Sure I do.’
‘Not a bad splitter, is he?’
‘He one hell of a splitter. Everybody knows.’
‘Slowed down a bit lately though,’ said Ralph Hellerstein almost to himself.
The Street Sweeper Page 32