My Heart Laid Bare

by Joyce Carol Oates

  4.

  Her fierce spicy fragrance makes his temples pound: he’s wild, exhilarated, drunken: wrenched out of his bones for very joy.

  A girl with pale blond hair and wide-spaced innocent eyes and feverish lips: her skin burning: her laughter choked: for she too, pressing herself into his arms, clutching at him, is drunken with love, with love, with love . . . .

  His heart is ready to burst, he can’t control himself, he adores her, he would die for her, he has died for her, many times: yet she’s frenzied, insatiable: coiling her sweat-slick limbs upon him, writhing violently against him, O Elisha I love you, love you, love you . . . .

  O Elisha I love you . . . .

  O Elisha I am your wife . . . .

  5.

  And now suddenly seeing them everywhere. Can’t hide from the sight, the knowledge. Blacks, coloreds, Negroes, niggers. On the street, at the roadside, in crowded tenement districts, at the northern edge of the Park.

  These people who make their way in a world fully conscious of the white man and of one another. While the white man, blind, is conscious of nothing.

  He belongs to neither race. So glancing upon both with Olympian equanimity.

  For pride will not allow wrath, and pride will not allow despair.

  Long vanished are the days when he might live at the Park Stuyvesant Hotel in midtown, as the personal valet (as the hotel management believed) of a wealthy businessman named Fairbairn; long vanished, and nearly forgotten, are the Sunday drives by hackney cab through the Park, Millie’s small hand secretly pressing against his, hidden by the pretty flounces of her skirt. Not fully recovered from his illness but he’s strong and buoyant and himself again, or nearly . . . a lanky-legged mahogany-skinned entrepreneur named Emile Gaston, or Dupee Jones, formerly of the Barbados . . . formerly of Mexico City . . . given to fits of coughing, violent brief spasms that break the capillaries in his eyes . . . but all in all a proud figure, a shrewd figure, smart black bowler hat, imitation camel’s hair polo coat worn loose on his shoulders, pockets jingling with coin . . . from the sporadic sale of 50¢ bottles of hair straightener up in Harlem, skin bleach in putty-colored tubes, lottery tickets printed in various colors, tickets for a Sunday-on-the-Hudson Steamboat Excursion stamped one-day only and non-refundable. Yes he is himself again! or nearly.

  His money is fast running out, however.

  And he has made enemies on the street.

  In the meantime he comports himself with grace, with a reeling swaying sort of grace, he swallows down gin at midday, never wholly drunk and never wholly sober, not a human being in the world dares approach him to touch him to look him in the eye: that not even his enemies would dare.

  Twenty-six years old, or is it thirty—but with his thin clipped moustache and his hat tilted forward on his head he looks older. With his ravaged skin and hunted ashy eyes he looks much older.

  Emile Gaston, Dupee Jones, Elihu Washburn . . .

  When he has coins jingling in his pockets he treats himself to meals that stretch his stomach, not minding if he’s nauseated afterward, it’s a gift he owes himself. He buys a black bowler hat, makes the purchase of an ivory-topped cane. A man with a cane says Father wields power in the eyes of the weak. If he wields it well. This high-stepping gentleman wields it well. In the lobbies of white-man hotels he buys newspapers to read War news: the Pact of London . . . the Allies and the Germans fighting in the Marne . . . Turkish warships, German submarine blockades, the Allies landing armies at the Dardanelles . . . secret treaties, atrocities . . . the sinking of the British liner Lusitania by German submarine, nearly fourteen hundred people killed.

  So many! He feels a pang of pity, sympathy. “But they were white—of course. White devils.”

  HE SEES THEM everywhere now, can’t not see them.

  His kind. His skin. His hunted eyes.

  Seeing Little Moses abandoned in the road, bewildered by his fate. An actor who has lost not only his audience but his stage, his purpose for being. The very lights that had illuminated him to himself.

  One day in the rain weak from hunger or despair or rage gnawing at his guts he staggers and falls in the street and his polo coat, already soiled, is soiled more—mud, horse droppings, filth—and his smart black bowler hat is snatched from his head by a young boy, brown-skinned, a laughing savage.

  He rides the clattering streetcars, he rides the Staten Island ferry, he sleeps where sleep overtakes him unless his pockets jingle with coin. Sometimes he sleeps alone, and sometimes not. Sometimes he shuts his eyes in disdain against the city—against Harlem, their city—and sometimes he walks entranced in the streets, eyes stealthy and all-seeing beneath the rim of his dandy’s hat. The brownstone tenement buildings like ridges of a natural outcropping, block following block; crowded sidewalks and streets; the traffic on Broadway rising to a din—trolleys, trucks, horse-drawn wagons, fire engines, careening police vans, uniformed police on horseback; shouts, cries, sirens, alarms, horns; the sharp ringing of horses’ hooves on cobblestone; powerful smells—sulfurous, rancid, close, feculent, steamy—that seem to rise out of the bowels of the earth and, if he’s in a weakened state, go to his head like an inhaled drug.

  Harlem. Their city.

  My city?

  Through which he walks entranced as a new lover, beginning to recognize landmarks, stores and taverns and sidewalk vendors, beginning to understand the music of their speech, until one day he opens his mouth and his speech is identical with theirs, or nearly—he’s one of them! Shaking hands with his newfound contacts, friends and business acquaintances—Why good mornin’ Mr. Jones! comes a sudden happy cry—How’re you this fine day Mr. Washburn!—wide smiles, gold-capped teeth, gleaming black skin and elegantly trimmed moustaches and starched white shirts and stiff celluloid collars and bow ties neatly clipped in place—Ain’t shaken your hand in a long time, Doctor—smoke-colored hair shining, glaring, having been heated and creamed and sculpted into a shellacked surface as seamless to the casual glance as the polished shell of an acorn—Ain’t laid eyes on you in a while Mr. Gaston, and you lookin’ good.

  And feeling good. At last.

  His pockets jingle with coin, his pockets are empty. SPIRIT suffuses him (it’s spring, it’s a new year), SPIRIT departs leaving him huddled dazed in an alley . . . vomiting rotgut liquor in heaving sobs . . . as close to death as he’ll come, and no one’s fault but his own. That night in the stifling heat of the United African Baptist Church on Columbus Avenue where buoyant singing and clapping and shouting and the swaying of bodies and wave upon wave of great joy pulse on all sides . . . to pull him down into the tarry-black mud . . . the comforting mud, the muck of Jesus. Black Jesus.

  His brothers and sisters are yelling, shrieking, laughing in ecstasy. Clapping, Jesus is in this place with them, Jesus is in their hearts, can you feel him bro-ther, can you feel him sis-ter, the sweetly sour smell of flesh, oil-oozing flesh, Jesus goin to take you home bro-ther, sis-ter Jesus goin’ to take you home.

  He’s weak with relief, tears streaking his face, he isn’t going to die as that man who’d been his father that man who’d been the white Devil-Daddy had prophecized.

  Though vowing it won’t be Black Jesus who takes him home.

  REVEREND DRISKUS PRICE of the United African Baptist Church . . . Right Reverend Slocum Diggs of the Free Evangelical Brotherhood . . . Father Moses of the African Methodist Episcopal Church . . . Reverend T. J. Skirm of the Mount Pisgah African Church of Christ . . . Brother Druse Mohammed of the Bethel African Fellowship . . . Doctor Willard Graver of the Lenox Avenue American-Liberian League . . . Supreme Potentate Douglass Fox of the United Negro Colonization Society . . . Brother Ebenezer King of the First Zionist Church of Christ, Harlem . . . Commander Diaz Attucks of the Consolidated Free Afro-American Christian League . . .

  Some of the preachers urge Jesus onto their flocks, others urge mass migration back to Africa, others believe fervently that Jesus is to be found in Africa, in the Sovereign Free State
of Liberia (founded by freed American slaves in 1847), or in the Sovereign Free State of Sierra Leone . . . .

  So many preachers, and so much genuine faith: and what difference, brothers and sisters, has it ever made in your lives? . . .

  6.

  “Little Moses” for all his cunning is to die a Negro death after all: shortly past midnight of 7 June 1915, in the neighborhood of Amsterdam Avenue and 140th Street. In the very street, in fact.

  He will die of a savage beating by three New York City mounted policemen, “riot” police, in the midst of a six-hour uprising by Negroes occasioned by the rumor (afterward verified) that a seventeen-year-old Negro boy had earlier been beaten to death by police elsewhere in Harlem.

  (The boy had been arrested on 134th “fleeing the scene of a crime” . . . manacled and beaten savagely for “resisting and threatening police officers” . . . his limp bleeding body, an arm dangling broken, carried away by a speeding police van. More than a dozen witnesses looked on in horror; the incident had taken place across the street from the Afro-American Baptist Brotherhood League.)

  In all, eleven Negroes will die in the rioting, nine of them men. A forty-three-year-old pregnant woman, a six-year-old girl.

  And among these Little Moses . . . though there will be no official record of his death as there is no record, official or otherwise, of his life.

  EXCEPT: ON THE night of 6 June 1915, less than six hours before his death, he debates with a barroom acquaintance (Marcus Caesar Smith, formerly of the Barbados) the metaphysical conundrum of whether a man’s identity lies in what he resembles to the outer eye, or what he is.

  For though a man might inhabit a certain shade and texture of skin, that’s hardly proof that he must be defined by that skin. And though he resembles other men who inhabit that selfsame skin, it can’t be proved that he must be identified with them.

  Smith responds, winking at the crowd that has gathered around them, “Brother, look here: if you is talkin’ about yourself, or myself, or whoever, say so—without no further ob-fus-ca-tion. If you is claimin’ not to be a nigger like the rest of us, then what is you?”

  Much laughter, hooting and whistling.

  Little Moses, unaccustomed to being laughed at, stiffens; but manages to smile, and winks to draw the crowd onto his side. Saying “Friends, the metaphysics of it is the secret that no ignorant imagination can grasp: some folks is only what they look like by way of their skin and others, only what they is.”

  “Tell it, bro-ther! Tell it!” Smith laughs.

  “ . . . And the two categories stand apart and never can mingle, like oil . . . ” Little Moses had been drinking, his tongue slurs his smooth words, “ . . . and blood.”

  “That so, bro-ther? How so?”

  “Because it is,” Little Moses says. “And some things is not.”

  Smith plays to the gathering of drinkers saying, “Now you come to your senses, man, and explain to me how come you know so damn much and I that’s older than you and wiser don’t know nothin’.”

  And Little Moses drinks whatever this is he’s drinking, orange flame in his throat, searing his eyes, he’s confused saying, “Because it’s inside, brother. It’s been told in-side.”

  “Howso? Inside what?”

  “In-side.”

  “Look, man—there got to be some outside, like a rind or a husk, that there’s an inside of, don’t there?—ain’t that so?” Smith cries.

  “No. There don’t.”

  “Like there’s gonna be a, say, catfish—without no skin to keep ’im in? There’s gonna be a hog, a cantaloupe, a baby, a flower—and not no outside for the inside to press up against? Not hardly!”

  Little Moses removes his wide-brimmed fedora, incensed.

  “God-damn don’t need to fool nobody,” Little Moses cries. “I mean—I don’t need to fool you. Don’t give any God damn, that shit you sayin’.”

  “Then how come you talkin’ to me, brother?—how come you here, and sweatin’ it?”

  “Because I got to be some place.”

  “Yes man, but how come you got to be here?”

  “Because it has come to this,” Little Moses says, suddenly panicked. “Because—I don’t know.”

  “Now you tellin’ us straight, you don’t know no God-damn more than anybody else,” Smith shouts happily, clapping Little Moses’ back so hard Little Moses begins to cough, “—because you is the same as anybody else inside and out. Because you is me, nigger, on the inside just as on the outside, should anybody investigate innards and guts and kinda stuff. Somebody do autopsy on you, my friend, and then on me, you think they gonna find much any different? What you think they gonna find?”

  Little Moses is leaning against the bar, head lowered, watery eyes squinched up tight. His mouth feels as if somebody has kicked it. “Shit, man—I don’t know.”

  “Louder, man!”

  But Little Moses shakes his head, sulky and insulted. If he could retreat somewhere, if he could have some peace and stillness he’d figure out how to reply; but these fools grinning at him, laughing and pointing—it’s hopeless.

  Smith persists, like a horse that can’t stop trampling some poor broken-boned bastard under his hooves, “You think they goin’ to find black guts in one, and no-color guts in the other? I seen nigger guts come spillin out and the sight ain’t pretty, and I sure don’t want to see it another time but I’d swear they ain’t black any more’n a white man’s guts is gonna be white; but maybe you got to see it, friend, like Thomas he got to poke his finger in Jesus’ side before he get the point. Or you getting the point now?” Smith generously lays a hot, heavy hand on Little Moses’ neck, a hand like a small furry animal. Little Moses shudders at the feel of it. “Say what,” says Smith, “we have ourself one more drink and forget that ‘meta-whatyoucallit-phys-cal’ shit. That stuff, my man, only get in the way.”

  NEXT EVENING HE’S running out into the street cursing paying no heed to a woman shouting into his face, “Go back, they killin’ folks out there!”—the night sky is awash with flames, policemen on horseback swinging billy clubs, a girls’ head streaming blood, about to fall beneath a horse’s plunging hooves and he’s shouting he’s cursing not drunk but stone-cold sober making a grab at the policeman’s reins, a grab at the man himself, trying to wrench him down from his saddle but a second policeman sidles his horse close and strikes him on the shoulder, on the side of the head, on the crown of the head as he falls, he’s writhing on the cobblestone pavement trying to shield his bleeding head, his stomach, his groin, as the white-man billy clubs swing in wide arcs like clock-pendulums . . . and the horses whinny and froth in terror . . . bone-crushing hooves strike blindly . . . his right leg, his right arm, his backbone, his unprotected head cracked like a melon.

  One of the unidentified bodies. Negro, male, casualty of Harlem uprising.

  VENUS APHRODITE

  1.

  Does my hand tremble?—it does not. Do I doubt?—I do not. Am I an ordinary suitor, fearful of rejection?—I am not.”

  Silver-haired Albert St. Goar, a gentleman in the prime of life (for who would guess that he is nearly fifty-five?—his skin so ruddy, so flushed with good health, and free of lines and creases) regards himself critically in his full-length bedroom mirror, in his apartment overlooking Rittenhouse Square; sees with relief that the disfiguring puffiness about his eyes seems to have vanished; notes with approval the new style in which his barber fashions his hair, brushing it forward in seemingly lush little wings, rather than back, to expose an uncertain hairline; and experiments with several of his most successful smiles—the hesitant, the boyish, the amused, the half-frowning (as if overtaken by surprise), the “sly.”

  And the lover’s spontaneous smile of fateful recognition.

  (For Albert St. Goar, despite the maturity of his years, and a certain worldliness in his manner, is in love; and, in the lady’s presence, obliged to display the adoration he feels . . . otherwise the lady, being a person of high degree an
d, perhaps, as secretly vain as he, will mistakenly gauge his feeling as less than it is. “For here we have a case—and it has often been so with me—of being required to ‘assume a virtue’ even when I have it,” St. Goar thinks.)

  Slowly, with deliberation, he turns his head from left to right . . . from right to left . . . studying his profile (a just perceptible fleshiness about the jowls, and, yes, some puffiness about the eyes) while he hums Siegfried’s joyous surprise at the discovery of Brünnhilde . . . Brünnhilde surrounded by her daunting tongues of flame.

  “Am I like other men?—I am not. Need I fear, like other men?—I need not. Can she find the strength to resist me?—she cannot.”

  Smartly he slaps his cheeks—adjusts yet again his starched collar, and his black silk four-in-hand—smiles his private Licht smile (rows of strong white clenched teeth)—and declares himself ready for his evening with the wealthy young widow Mrs. Eva Clement-Stoddard.

  IN THE EARLY autumn of 1915, at about the time when, in distant Europe, French and British troops were landing in Greece, and Bulgaria at last declared war on Serbia, all of Philadelphia society was abuzz: for it seemed a distinct possibility that Eva Clement-Stoddard and the cosmopolite Albert St. Goar (formerly of London and Nice, now residing in Rittenhouse Square with his lovely daughter Matilde) might soon announce their engagement . . . and this despite the fact that Eva had vowed, years before, when her husband died, never to marry again; and despite the fact that the handsome St. Goar was more or less a stranger to Philadelphia.