Black & White

by Lewis Shiner

  “Mrs. Cooper? Mitch Antree here. I’m doing splendidly, thank you, how about yourself? Almost feels like spring, doesn’t it? Well, I did have one thing. I asked Robert if he’d be able to work late tonight, and he expressed some concern as to whether that would be all right with you. Uh huh. Well, I’m afraid it might be very late indeed. We’ve got a very significant client in town that we need to have dinner and discussions with, and I expect it will be, oh, round about midnight before Robert gets home.” Antree winked at Maurice, who made a face. “Oh yes, I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important. No, I’ll see to it that he gets a good supper. Why, thank you, Mrs. Cooper. The same to you.”

  He hung up and smiled at Robert. “Any other questions?”

  “No,” Robert said. “No more questions.”

  *

  At 6 they all got into Antree’s Cadillac, with its factory air conditioning, leather seats, and 396-cubic-inch V8. Robert hung back slightly to see how the seating arrangements would fall out, and wasn’t terribly surprised to see Maurice automatically take the front passenger seat.

  They were in Hayti in five minutes. Antree idled on Pettigrew Street outside the Wonderland Theater while Maurice ran up to the box office to get tickets. Robert tried not to stare. Close as it was to the office, Robert had never been there on a weekend. At home, on Woodrow Street, a few of Robert’s neighbors might sit out on their porches of an evening, cigarettes and citronella candles burning against the mosquitoes, while everyone else hurried inside to their televisions. Here the entire neighborhood seemed to be on the sidewalk.

  It was like the stories Robert had heard about street corners in Harlem. Negro businessmen in suits stopped to shake each other’s hands. Women wore skirts slit nearly to the waist, and blouses cut for maximum provocation. There were Negro GIs from Camp Butner, tightly creased and standing in clumps, school kids in striped T-shirts and bright jackets, old men with suspenders and canes and snap-brim fedoras.

  Maurice got in the car and Antree edged into the traffic, crawling east to Fayetteville Street, where he found an open spot at the curb and parked.

  “I suppose we’re going to Elvira’s,” Maurice said.

  “That jake with you?” Antree said.

  “I expect I can take it if Robert can. How’s your tolerance for grease, Robert?”

  “Compared to what I get at home,” Robert said, “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

  They locked the car, and Robert found himself swimming upstream through a river of black humanity. Along with the crowd came the sound, a chorus that rose and fell in slow waves, peaking when three or four voices surfaced momentarily into audible words, then fading again below the rattle of broken mufflers, the drumming of high heels on concrete, the chirp and whistle of distant radios, the claps and hoots and laughter and surprise.

  It was impossible not to brush up against strange Negro bodies. Robert quickly got over his first shock and found nothing to be afraid of. No one seemed to pay him particular attention. I’m handling this well, he thought.

  A couple of the storefronts along Fayetteville Street were boarded up, but when they turned the corner onto Pettigrew, business seemed good. They could hear the presses working inside Service Printing on the corner, and the Carolina Times next door was bustling. Next to Pee Wee’s Shoe Shop was a big plate glass window that read ELVIRA’S CLUB DINE-ET. It was part of a contiguous block of storefronts whose second floor sat back a good ten feet from the first. Peeling white paint covered the bricks as high as the tops of the doors and windows, with plain red brick above.

  “So what gives, here?” Robert said. “This place doesn’t look like a slum to me.”

  “Keep your voice down, won’t you?” Maurice said. “Some folks around here are not that crazy about the word ‘slum’ these days.”

  Robert felt his face heat up. “Sorry. You know what I mean. This isn’t what I expected.”

  “Not enough winos in the doorways for you?” Maurice asked. “They’ll be out later, never fear.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “It was different here, even five years ago,” Maurice said. “Better. It was only when all this renewal talk started up that everybody gave up trying. Why put glass in that broken window when the appraisers are going to pay you the same for cardboard?”

  Through the screen doors of the restaurant wafted smells of burning fat, yeast, cornbread, collards, and spilled beer.

  “We can talk inside,” Antree said, rubbing his hands. “I need me some soul food.”

  With one foot in the doorway, Robert had a sudden memory of the stories his father had read to him as a child. It was possible to come and go from Fairyland as long as you followed a few simple rules: Don’t pick up any stray objects, don’t make any wagers with magical beings, that sort of thing. Above all, never eat the food. Once you’d eaten their food, they had you forever.

  For all its shabbiness, Hayti seemed a magical place. As he crossed Elvira’s threshold he thought, What would it be like to belong here?

  *

  In the end the food was neither unpalatable nor particularly exotic. They all had fresh chicken fried in grease that was not so fresh, collard greens with bits of dried ham, white corn, and sweet potato pie. Afterwards Maurice accepted a Lucky, and he and Robert smoked while Antree drank a third beer.

  Robert’s feelings were complex. He’d been married for two years now, and a full-time employee for just as long. He had found moments of contentment standing in the morning mist and looking at his house, his lawn, his quiet street. There was still pleasure, on rare occasions, in bed with Ruth. Work alternately absorbed and bored him, and the excitement of rebuilding Hayti and creating RTP seemed to recede constantly into the future.

  He and Ruth had little social life, and she had lost interest in dancing after the wedding date was set. Once or twice a month she would go to her parents’ house for the weekend. Sometimes Robert would go along, spending long hours with her father and trying to stay awake through endless sports broadcasts, sometimes on television, often droning on endlessly from the radio. Wilmer Bynum’s encyclopedic knowledge of players, statistics, and history was largely wasted on Robert. Lately he would drop her off at the farm and spend the weekend at work or alone in the house with his records.

  He hadn’t been to see live music since college. The idea of it stirred something in him, memories and longings, a sense of formless possibility, a tang of the forbidden. The libertine atmosphere of Hayti magnified the risks—not only the physical danger that lurked there, but the loss of control that beckoned from darkened doorways. It was, Robert thought, something like Havana before the revolution, a place where you checked your inhibitions at the door.

  “Shall we?” Maurice asked, pushing back his chair.

  “Yeah, man,” Antree said. Robert felt like a teenager, dizzy with anticipation.

  The Wonderland Theater was two blocks east, between Elvira’s and the Biltmore Hotel. It was a three-story red brick cube, with a wide arch across the front that rose as high as the second story windows on either side. The words WONDERLAND THEATER were cut into the stone of the arch, and the box office nestled neatly inside the recess. The place still served as a movie theater, and glass frames held posters for The Great Escape and Fun in Acapulco.

  A crowd had already formed, with an hour yet until showtime. Robert couldn’t remember ever being among so many black people in such close proximity. The truth, he saw, was that he was at one end of a spectrum of skin colors, many of them no darker than his own. The crowd was mostly male, mostly in coats and ties, though there were some turtlenecks and open sport shirts. The main thing that struck him was the obvious care and effort that virtually every one of them had spent on his appearance: hats, slickly processed hair, brightly shined shoes, rings, cufflinks, tie tacks.

  Then there were the women. Some wore furs and broad-brimmed hats, others simple linen dresses and dime store gloves. They had an ease with their own bodies, no matter what size or
shape, that Robert found both alien and appealing. And some of them were simply stunning. He was unable to stop looking at one woman whose long, white silk dress clung to her hourglass figure as if static electricity was all that held it on. She had curly black hair past her shoulders, creamy tan skin, olive-colored eyes, delicate features, and a half smile that made her seem oblivious to everyone around her, as if she were turned inward to focus on the soft hum of the biological machinery that moved her so gracefully through the crowd.

  They began to file into the lobby. The slightly threadbare, multicolored carpet there held the smell of popcorn, though at the moment the concession stand was serving liquor.

  “You want something?” Antree asked. Robert shook his head, thinking he should keep his wits about him. Antree waded away through the crowd. Maurice didn’t seem inclined to conversation. He was nodding slightly as people caught his eye, smiling occasionally. Robert put his hands in his pockets and tried in vain to look inconspicuous.

  Antree came up behind him with two glass tumblers. “The only scotch they had was J&B, that all right?”

  “You’re buying, I’m not complaining,” Maurice said.

  “Look who I ran into at the bar,” Antree said, and Robert turned around to find himself face to face with the woman in the white dress.

  “Hi,” he said, thinking fast. “I’m Robert.”

  She raised one eyebrow and let him take her hand, which she offered with fingers down and wrist bent. “Charmed, I’m sure,” she said. She was not as tall as he’d thought at first. Her perfume was delicate, sweet, intoxicating.

  “Barrett, how’re you doing?” Maurice asked, reaching past Robert to shake the hand of someone standing next to the woman in white.

  “Maurice. What you know good?” the man said.

  Antree said, “Barrett Howard, this is Robert Cooper, my new engineer.”

  Robert forced himself to look away from the woman long enough to shake Howard’s hand. The man’s grip made a statement, Robert discovered. The statement was, “I can take you.” He was six feet tall and looked like he lifted weights. His hair was unprocessed and grown out unevenly half an inch or more. His broad, dark face looked too young for the number of lines crisscrossing it. He wore a blue dress shirt, open at the throat, with a thin black tie hanging loose and a navy blue blazer on top. His pants were dark khaki, worn over suede cowboy boots with pointed toes. “Hey there,” he said.

  Robert had seen Howard’s face on the evening news. “He looks like a gorilla,” Ruth had said, and Robert had let the racist implications pass at the time. Newspaper and TV commentators portrayed him as a kind of monster, violent and threatening in an almost sexual way, not just an integrationist but a communist and a revolutionary. Randy Fogg, on WRAL radio, regularly referred to him as “Fidel” Howard, “The Red Negro,” “The Black Stalin,” and a dozen other epithets. Yet here he was, shaking Robert’s hand.

  “Nice to meet you,” Robert said, then hated himself for the banality. Before he could redeem himself, Antree had his arm around Howard’s shoulder.

  “You going to talk tonight?” Antree asked.

  “Nah, man, I’m here to listen to the music, like everybody else. Listen, I got to go.”

  “I can dig it,” Antree said. “You be cool, now.”

  Howard nodded distractedly, scooped the woman up by her narrow waist, and pushed into the crowd.

  “Who is she?” Robert asked.

  Maurice looked at Antree. “Now see what you’ve done?”

  “Don’t even think about her,” Antree said. “Don’t even look.”

  “What’s her name?” Robert asked.

  “Trouble,” Antree said. “Capital T.”

  “I know who Barrett Howard is,” Robert said.

  “I’m not talking about Barrett Howard,” Antree said. “Forget that crap you see on TV. Howard’s a pussycat. She’s the one you have to watch out for.”

  Robert looked at him blankly.

  “You know what a mambo is?” Antree asked.

  “Sure. Perez Prado, ‘Cherry Pink and Apple—’ ”

  “No, man, I ain’t talking about some Cuban jive. Tell him, Maurice.”

  Maurice cleared his throat. “The rumor has it that she’s a voodoo practitioner. A mambo. Did you see her earrings?”

  Antree said, “I think he might have noticed a necklace, if it hung low enough.”

  “What earrings?” Robert said.

  “Those little heart-shaped things?” Maurice said. “That’s hoodoo stuff. Same as on top of St. Joseph’s church.” He watched Robert’s face. “You’ve never looked at what’s on top of St. Joseph’s church, have you?”

  “You mean the cross?”

  “Look again, daddy-o,” Antree said. “That ain’t no cross.”

  It felt to Robert like the first few weeks of junior high, when the older boys had mocked him for his ignorance of sex. He hadn’t wanted to know what they were talking about, didn’t care about the mystery. He wanted them to leave him alone. “Tell me her name,” Robert said.

  “Mercy,” Maurice said. “Her name is Mercy. And if you have any sense at all, you’ll leave it at that.”

  *

  At 8:15 the double doors opened and the crowd made its way down the aisles. The seats had curved wooden backs and red velvet cushions, many of them loose. Robert could not have cared less. In the muted glow of the footlights he saw a black grand piano, a small trap set, a few microphone stands adjusted to varying heights. It was like the first sight of the ocean in summer.

  They found seats in the tenth row. Though the show was not scheduled to start until nine, the room was filling quickly. Everyone seemed to know everyone else, as if Robert had crashed a private party of a thousand or so. Men stretched across rows to shake hands, women leaned over the railing of the balcony and shouted through cupped hands. Even Antree was getting into the act, calling out to people in the aisles, while Maurice slid ever lower in his seat, staring at his own knees.

  After a few minutes Robert began to feel invisible, began to accept that no one was about to evict him or demand an explanation, and he was able to sit and smoke and observe. He watched Barrett Howard and the woman, Mercy, sail through the crowd like royalty, never lingering with any one group, finally landing on the front row. Everything was foreign, exotic, from the slang that, at its fastest, Robert found incomprehensible, to outsize gestures that were more like dance than anything in Robert’s white world of economical movement.

  And then, at last, the lights came down and from the darkened stage a man’s voice said, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Wonderland,” drawing out the ends of the words, “where later tonight Durham’s own native son is gonna cool this joint, and you know I got to be talking about Mr. Charlie Shavers and his horn of plenty. But first, from North Carolina College, let’s y’all give a warm Wonderland welcome to the Manny…Jackson…Quartet!”

  In the darkness another voice counted to two and then, twice as fast, to four, and the ride cymbal and standup bass took off in a breakneck shuffle. A single, dissonant piano chord broke over the rhythm section like an egg into a hot skillet, and then the lights came up and the tenor sax rode in fast and loose.

  Jackson’s quartet played for close to an hour. During intermission Antree went for more drinks, and Robert sat in a state of quiet euphoria. Then the Shavers quintet took the stage.

  Shavers himself was short and thickset, with hair cut so close and jowls so big his head was pear-shaped. He had a pencil-thin mustache and charcoal gray suit and seemed to vibrate like a kettle on full boil, an impression borne out when he would lean back and point his trumpet straight up into the air and unleash a high-pitched squeal of pure joy.

  What Robert was beginning to understand was that everything he had painstakingly figured out as he listened to his favorite records, the concepts of harmony and modality and counterpoint, all those ideas were not only true and correct, but in the live, red heat of the moment they were so obvious as to
be inconsequential, no more important than Shavers’ clowning on stage. All that counted were the pure emotions that the musicians were transmitting from their guts into Robert’s.

  When the last encore was over, standing in a knot of people outside the Wonderland, Robert knew that he had been transformed, the way heat and pressure turned dull gray shale into glittering mica schist. Secrets he could never put into words had been revealed to him. Some in the audience had heard them and many had not.

  Antree, for one, had been largely unaffected. He stood talking to Barrett Howard, and Robert saw that Howard, too, had not been particularly moved. Maurice had. He and Robert looked at each other with the eyes of initiates and nodded and smiled. And Mercy, the woman in white, seemed to float as she walked up to them. Her face perfectly mirrored Robert’s own emotions, and she acknowledged it with a radiant smile. As if in a dream, Robert felt her slip into his arms and rest her head against his chest for a heartbeat, then two. He didn’t react other than to bring his right hand up and rest it below her shoulder blade, as if they were slow dancing. She was fully present in his arms. He could feel the pressure of her breasts and the heat of her breath through his shirt, smell the aromatic oils in her hair. Then she slipped away again and turned in a slow, elliptical orbit around Howard, lost to everything except the inner worlds the music had opened in her.

  “Did that just happen?” Robert asked.

  “No,” Maurice said. “It most definitely did not happen.”

  They drifted leisurely down the street, still part of the concert crowd, Antree basking in Howard’s attention, Robert tinglingly aware of Mercy as she took her own erratic course around and through them.

  The crowd slowly melted away until the three of them were alone on the street next to Antree’s Cadillac.

  “Well, Maurice?” Antree said. “How’s our boy?”

  “He’s fine, Mitch. Let’s go home.”

  *

  Ruth was asleep when Robert got into bed, her back to him. An arousal came over him that was as dreamlike as the rest of the night, but far more urgent. Lying behind her on his side, he began to touch her gently through her nightgown. She responded to him without waking, and he slipped out of his pajama bottoms. She didn’t come fully awake until he had entered her from behind, and then her first reaction was to press harder against him. A second later she said, “Robert? My goodness, Robert, what are you…?”