“Excuse me, Calvin, but would you move to the sofa? That chair’s liable to fall apart. My wife doesn’t like anyone sitting on it.” He shook his head, smiled. He did not want to hurt Calvin’s feelings. “I don’t know why we keep the damn thing anyway.”
“Sure, man, I understand.” Calvin was already crossing the room. “I was married myself one time.”
Mitchell sat across from him, in a chair, patted himself for a cigaret, offered one to Calvin (who did not smoke), and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Is that all he said?” He did not really want to know, not today. Knowing that he had given Tam a defective baby was enough. But he knew now that finding Cooley would take at least a few weeks; and whatever Mitchell knew about him would help.
Calvin shrugged. “No. I spoke to him for a couple minutes, but that’s what it came to.”
“What else did he say?”
Calvin stared at him for a long moment. His eyes seemed warm, his face calm. Suddenly, Mitchell realized that Calvin did not want to say anything that might hurt him. He really must have tried to convince Cooley to come to Mitchell’s house. Remarkable, that once a man had overcome the fear and suspicion of these people, they could be quite loyal.
“Go on, it doesn’t matter. I mean, it can’t get any worse.”
Calvin nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.” He smiled, began to laugh, cut himself off. “This is real funny. I been a race man all my life. I mean, I do my share of getting the white man.” He looked at Mitchell again, shaking his head. “But this time, honest to God, I’m for you, man. I mean, I couldn’t tell you where to find him. Cooley and me live in the same world, and, well, you know…honor among thieves and all that. But you got to see that if I set Cooley up for you, I’m a dead man. No one could protect me. But if you find him on your own, I’d be happy for you. I bet I even know why you want to give Cooley that baby. You trying to get your marriage together, right?”
Mitchell realized that it would be ridiculous to hide it. “Yes.”
“Well, I’ll give you the square business truth, you’ll have to do it without Cooley helping you.”
“Maybe so.” But he did not believe it. Eventually, he would find Cooley. “Tell me what he said, Calvin.”
“Okay, Mr. Pierce, if that’s the way you want it.” He shook his head. “Right from the beginning. I guess I got to his place maybe a half-hour ago. He was still in bed. You know he reads the finance section. I mean, he really know what’s going on in this world. So, anyway, I break it down to him. You just want to see him, I say. He starts laughing, bouncing around in the bed with the papers rattling on his lap. He tells me to let you rot. So, like I say, I’m for you, and I was getting a little mad too. It’s his baby, I say to him. Don’t he got no feeling for it? He say, he wasn’t making it with your wife for no baby. He got babies, a couple of them, by a couple girls, and he ain’t married yet. But when he meets a woman he likes a whole lot, he gives her a baby and sends her money. Your wife? He saw her and wanted to find out how someone that evil and messed up in the head would be in bed. It was so bad, and weak, he had to go back a couple times to make sure it was really bad as he thought it was the first time.” Calvin stopped. “I’m sorry, man. This got to be some tough stuff to take.”
“No, no.” Mitchell wondered how Cooley could be so ungrateful.
“Okay. Well, I didn’t give up. I tell him it’s still his baby, no matter how he feel about the mother. I know for a fact he don’t like all the girls who got his babies. You know, Glora got one of his babies, a little girl.” So that was why she had been so upset when Mitchell mentioned Cooley. “Anyway, he says at least he liked them all at one time or another. But he never loved that Tam. At first, it was to see how it would be, then later, there was a few bucks involved. You know, like when he wanted to take a cab somewhere and needed a few extra dollars.” Mitchell tried to keep his face calm; he would not show this man how he felt. “I mean, I know Cooley, and every so often he do get carried away with his story.”
Mitchell nodded.
“But that still don’t make it not his baby, I tell him. And for a minute, I think I got him. He stops laughing. Yeah, he guesses that’s true. But he’s got old scores to settle.”
“Old scores?”
“Yeah. So I ask him, what do he mean? Did Tam or you do something to him?” Calvin shook his head. “Nothing like that. Old scores from four hundred years ago, for his great-granddaddy and his granddaddy. That’s another thing about Cooley. He a long grudge-holding Black man. He don’t never forget a slight. Like what old scores? Like having a wife or a girl you really love and then she gets big with a baby, and you happy as a champ. But when the baby comes, God damn, it ain’t yours. You can’t blame your woman; she a slave too. And you can’t do nothing about it yourself. So you just eat shit, and you and your woman take and raise that kid. Then one day, after you and the baby get good and attached, its natural father up and sells it away from you. So you lost a kid, but you never really had one. So, he says, it’s your turn.”
“My turn? But why me?” Just then, for no reason that he could ever after understand, he saw the fat Black woman sitting beside the highway, shaking her head.
Calvin snorted, smiled. “That’s funny, because he said you’d ask that. And he told me that when you did, I was to ask you why his great-granddaddy?”
“Well, I didn’t do it.” Mitchell was bewildered. “What do I have to do with all that?”
Calvin shrugged. “That’s what I said. But he didn’t go for it. He said that I could figure that out for myself. So here I am, empty-handed.”
They did not speak for a moment. Mitchell tried to accept the idea that all this was happening to him because of things that had taken place four hundred years before. Then he realized that Calvin had not mentioned how Cooley had reacted to the offer of money, and asked about it.
“Yeah, I told him that. But he said he’d want some money just to come and see you. In advance. I laughed at him. I mean, that was just too much. I told him you’d never go for that.”
But Mitchell was excited. “No, wait a minute.” He still believed that if he could see Cooley, could talk to him, he could convince him to take the baby. And somehow he sensed that Cooley knew this too. That would explain why Cooley dared not even see him. “How much would he want just to come see me?”
“Cooley? I bet I could get him down here for fifty dollars. I could put it to him this way: You’ll give me some money if I arrange a meet, and there’s fifty dollars in it for him. He might do it for me.”
“Then we’ll try it.” Mitchell excused himself and went into the bedroom. In the closet, in one of Tam’s hatboxes, he found their strong box. He always tried to keep at least one hundred dollars in tens in the box, for use in an emergency. He counted out seventy dollars and returned to the living room. “Now, here’s fifty dollars for Cooley. And twenty for you. So there is money in it if you arrange a meeting.” He looked at Calvin for a moment. “And even if you don’t.”
Calvin stood up, taking only five of the bills. “I don’t want your money, Mr. Pierce.”
“No, no, take it.” He jammed the money into Calvin’s breast pocket.
Calvin nodded, took the two bills out of his pocket, folded the seven neatly and put them into his pants. “Listen, Mr. Pierce, I’ll go right up and see him. You call me about ten tonight.” He asked Mitchell for pencil and paper, and wrote down his number. “Maybe by ten I’ll have some news for you.” They were standing in the foyer.
“All right. And thanks.” He wondered if he and Calvin would ever meet after all this was over. Probably not. It would remind him of Cooley.
“Then, I’ll see you.” Calvin pushed through the swinging door which led to the kitchen. Mitchell followed. They shook hands at the delivery entrance, and Mitchell heard Calvin going down the smooth, gray cement stairs. When the cellar door thundered shut
, he stepped back into the apartment.
20
HE HAD REACHED the bedroom before he began to wonder how Calvin had known exactly where to find the kitchen, and the delivery entrance, and why it had been so easy for him to unlock the door. All three locks stuck, had to be shaken in a particular way. When he and Tam moved in, Mitchell’s touch had been inadequate for months. Then he realized that he had seen Calvin’s phone number before, and not too long ago.
Suspicious, he went to the phone table and leafed through the small white pad, through pages of Tam’s signature, until he found the one page on which, several times, she had written the name Tam Johnson. He compared the phone number on that page to the one Calvin had given him.
He sat down.
On Sundays he liked to watch the educational programs on television. Perhaps that was where he had learned that, being superstitious, Black people often named their children after the rich and famous, presidents, athletes, movie stars. Calvin Johnson had been named after the thirtieth President of the United States, Calvin Coolidge; Cooley was a nickname.
He picked up the phone and dialed Calvin’s number. The recording came on almost immediately. “The number you have reached is not a working number. If you want any assistance…”
For a while, still at the phone table, he thought about calling the police and reporting that he had been robbed of seventy dollars. He could say that a Calvin Coolidge Johnson had forced his way into his home at gunpoint. But the police would want to know how he knew the name of the bandit, and without the name they might never find him. He knew he could not give an adequate description. The faces of Calvin Coolidge Johnson and his own imaginary Cooley were now hopelessly mixed. He would not be able to keep the whole story from the police. He might even have to testify at a trial. He might lose his job.
He turned his back on the phone, went into the bedroom, and sat down in Tam’s soft chair, trying to make plans. He would not fire Opal. Probably she knew nothing about this. But what Calvin Coolidge Johnson knew, Carlyle would soon know. He would tell Opal. It was much better to have her working for him, dependent on him. In a few days, he would take Opal to the hospital, and she would carry the baby past the doorman, the people waiting for cabs in the lobby. They would say that Tam had given birth to one baby, and that it had died. The funeral would convince their friends of that. Then, they would say that eighteen months before, they had fired Opal because she had begun to date a Negro they did not like or trust. Opal had not learned her lesson until the Negro made her pregnant, and deserted her. She had come to them begging for help. They had taken pity, rehired her, consented to let her keep her illegitimate child in their house.
After he had worked it out, reviewed it a second time, he phoned down to the doorman and asked him if he would be so kind as to have someone bring up the bassinet in their storage locker.
The doorman was delighted. “So, they’ll be coming home soon, huh? You must be real proud, Mr. Pierce.”
For an instant, Mitchell did not know if he could do it—not without his voice snagging on something in his mouth. He found his hand pulling the receiver away from his head, found himself eyeing the cradle. But then he was pressing the slightly warm black plastic to his ear. “It isn’t for Mrs. Pierce. We lost our baby. To a rare lung disease.” He listened to his own voice, grading its sincerity, grief, bravery.
“Oh, that’s too bad, Mr. Pierce. God, I…”
Mitchell could not give him time to recover. “It’s our new maid. Who needs the bassinet. She has a new baby.”
“Is that so?” The doorman was interested. “That’s very nice of you, Mr. Pierce.”
“Nice of me?”
The doorman cleared his throat. “Why, sure. I mean, for you to take in a stranger’s kid in your time of sorrow and all.”
He could not overreact to the compliment. “Well, it was an arrangement we made before the…”
“Still, Mr. Pierce. It’ll be pretty tough on the nerves with a growing boy and two babies in the house.”
“Two babies?” Mitchell did not understand. “But I told you we lost our baby.”
“Both of them, Mr. Pierce?”
Somehow the doorman knew the truth. Eventually, through a network of maids and maintenance men, the entire building would know. But then, he did not speak to anyone in the building, did not care what they knew. And soon, they would move to the suburbs.
But he still had to discover how the doorman had found out about the twins. “Both of them? What are you talking about?” He fought to keep shrillness out of his voice.
“That’s what the hospital said, Mr. Pierce.” The doorman was nervous. “I mean, the management always calls the hospital and asks about our mothers.”
“Well, the hospital was mistaken.” He hoped he did not sound too abrupt for a grieving man.
There was a long pause; behind the doorman, a car was honking its horn. “That’s funny, Mr. Pierce. Hospitals don’t usually make mistakes like that.”
A few sentences more and Mitchell began to believe he had convinced the doorman, and relieved, hung up. But in the quiet of the empty apartment, he was no longer certain. He had to think about it, perhaps make up an alternate story. He went to the bathroom to run himself a hot bath. When the water was gurgling out of the drain under the faucets, he twisted it off, undressed, and tested the tub with his foot. He turned out the light and pulled down the shade. He sank down deep into the hot water, and, on his side, his eyes closed and his hands clamped between his thighs, he filled the darkness with fantasies.
ALSO BY
WILLIAM MELVIN KELLEY
* * *
A DIFFERENT DRUMMER
June 1957. One hot afternoon in the backwaters of the Deep South, a young black farmer named Tucker Caliban salts his fields, shoots his horse, burns his house, and heads north with his wife and child. His departure sets off an exodus of the state’s entire black population, throwing the established order into brilliant disarray. Told from the points of view of the white residents who remained, A Different Drummer stands, decades after its first publication in 1962, as an extraordinary and prescient triumph of satire and spirit.
Fiction
A DROP OF PATIENCE
Five-year-old Ludlow Washington is given up by his parents to a brutal white-run state institution for blind African American children, where everyone is taught music—the only trade by which they are expected to make a living. Ludlow is a prodigy on the horn and at fifteen is “purchased” out of the Home by a bandleader in the fictive Southern town of New Marsails. By eighteen he leaves his wife and baby for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in New York City. Navigating the worlds of music and race and women, Ludlow’s career follows an arc toward collapse, a nervous breakdown, recovery, a long-delayed public recognition, only for him to finally abandon the spotlight and return to his roots and find solace in the black church.
Fiction
ANCHOR BOOKS
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