The Big Gold Dream

by Chester Himes

  “Get the bag,” Frick said, but Coffin Ed had already moved.

  It contained the suit, with the blood splotch around a small cut on the left shoulder, just as she had said. In the inside coat pocket was an old worn billfold with half a dozen cellophane card holders containing licenses and identifications made out to Abraham Finkelstein.

  “This might do it,” Frick said. “But, as his wife, she won’t be allowed to testify against him, and we will need her statement to make it stick.”

  “I’m not his wife,” she said in that tired, dead voice. “I’m just a woman he blinded, beating me with his fists.”

  During the embarrassed silence that followed, no one looked at anybody else.

  “Did you believe her?” Coffin Ed asked as they drove leisurely down Seventh Avenue, returning to the station to write up their report.

  “Hell, no,” Grave Digger said with an almost inaudible chuckle.

  “It’s more likely that Rufus killed the Jew.”

  “Sure it was Rufus.”

  “And it was Susie who attacked Rufus, trying to get the money,” Coffin Ed surmised.

  “That’s the way I have it figured too,” Grave Digger agreed. “Susie had Slick’s car and followed Rufus to the Bronx then beat him back home and killed him.”

  “But she’ll make it stick,’ Coffin Ed said.

  “Yeah, she’ll pay him off,” Grave Digger confirmed.

  Dummy never reported the tan jumper with the bloodstained shoulder he had found in Susie’s hotel room, and the police never discovered it. It stayed like the woman said.

  24

  FOR SIX DAYS ALBERTA lay in bed in a ward with nine other women. Her head was swathed in bandages; her flat, pretty, brown-skinned face was sullen.

  Police came to see her; friends came to see her; Sugar Stonewall came to see her; Dummy came in a wheel chair from another ward to see her. She did not speak a single word to anyone. She lay there with her mouth shut tight and wouldn’t even say hello.

  During that time sympathetic attendants washed her uniform and cleaned her once-white shoes.

  On the seventh day, another Monday, she ate her breakfast in dead silence, as usual.

  Then the nurse brought her clothes and gave her permission to get up and walk about the ward.

  She got dressed in her clean white uniform and wrapped her pink-checked hand towel about the bandages on her head. She walked up and down the ward two or three times, then went out into the corridor. No one stopped her; no one seemed to notice her.

  As though by instinct, she went downstairs to the kitchen. It was a big kitchen with a lot of people working in it, all of them clad in white uniforms. The head cook thought she was a new helper and put her to work peeling potatoes.

  She got a long sharp paring knife and sat down on a wooden stool before a five-gallon can of spuds and went to work. By ten-thirty o’clock she had finished with that can. She quit, stuck the paring knife into the pocket of her uniform, got up and walked out.

  Instinctively, she found the service exit. The guard on duty gave her scarcely a glance as she passed on her way out of the building; to him she looked like any number of hospital workers.

  It was not far down Lenox Avenue to 116th Street. No one on the street paid her the slightest attention.

  She turned over on 116th Street to the Temple of Wonderful Prayer and went upstairs to Sweet Prophet’s reception room.

  Elder Jones congratulated her on being well again, and told her to wait and he would see if Sweet Prophet could give her an audience.

  Sweet Prophet sat behind his desk, clad in the same shining garments he had worn the previous Monday, when she had last seen him. Evidently it was his Monday outfit.

  When Elder Jones informed him that Alberta Wright wished to see him, he exclaimed, “That woman again! My God, she’s got more lives than a cat!”

  But he was prevailed upon to give her an audience.

  He looked more than ever like the rising sun as she came into the room. She walked toward his desk with her hands in her pockets. The secretary, standing behind the Prophet, looked at her compassionately.

  Sweet Prophet was searching in his pocket for the crumb he expected her to buy. He looked up with a patient expression and said, “My child, what’s troubling you this time?”

  She leaned one hand on the desk, whipped the paring knife out of her pocket with the other hand and plunged it into the left side of his chest with such force that only the handle protruded.

  He gasped and dropped forward over the desk like a stone.

  Twenty minutes later, it was announced to the people crowded in the street that word had come from Harlem Hospital that he would live.

  The blade had penetrated the left pleura, but had missed the aorta by a hair’s breadth.

  By that time Alberta was in the booking room of the Harlem Precinct Station, surrounded by bug-eyed cops.

  Finally Sergeant Ratigan, the day man from the Homicide Bureau, who had been on the case from the beginning, arrived. He had brought along his own stenographer, and he took over the precinct captain’s office for the interrogation. The captain sat in, as did several precinct detectives.

  Alberta sat in a straight-backed chair, looking composed and resigned as she faced the battery of officers behind the desk.

  “Why did you do it, Alberta?” Ratigan asked in what he mistakenly thought was a kindly tone of voice.

  “He stole my money,” Alberta replied in the whining Southern voice she employed when talking to white people.

  Ratigan’s eyes popped in amazement, but he controlled his voice.

  “How did he steal your money?” he asked, as though reasoning with a child.

  “I gave it to him,” she said.

  “Oh,” Ratigan said. “But that doesn’t mean he stole it.”

  “Nawsuh, but he didn’t give it back.”

  “All right, let’s get this straight,” Ratigan said. “You gave him the money, and he didn’t give it back. Did you ask him for it?”

  “Nawsuh. I forgot I gave it to him.”

  Slowly, and at first unnoticeably, she began to cry.

  “All right,” Ratigan said. “Don’t get upset. Take your time and tell me just what happened.”

  She swallowed. “I went to him Sunday morning to pay for to get baptized,” she said, “and I told him I needed to get religion because I had won all that money on the numbers.”

  “It was thirty-six thousand, wasn’t it?” Ratigan asked.

  “Yassuh, but I didn’t have but twenty-nine thousand, four hundred left,” she said.

  “Yes, go on,” Ratigan prompted.

  Everyone in the room was staring at her unblinkingly, their mouths half open as though their breathing were suspended.

  “He told me to look him straight in the eye,” she said. “I kept looking him in the eyes until my head seemed to get empty of everything but just his eyes. Then he said, ‘You will do exactly as I say.’ And I said, ‘Yes, Sweet Prophet.’ He said, ‘Go back to your house and get all the money from where it is hidden and bring it to me.’ I said, ‘Yes Sweet Prophet.’

  “And I went and got the money and brought it back and gave it to him. He took it and put it away, and then he looked me in the eye again and said, ‘You will forget everything you have done since you came into this room.’ And I said, ‘Yes Sweet Prophet.’

  “And the next thing I knew I was sitting there talking to him about getting baptized, and I had forgotten everything else. I had no idea where my money had gone until I came to in the hospital after I had got knocked on the head. Then I remembered everything. He knowed I was looking for my money, and he wouldn’t give it back.”

  She started crying out loud. Her big-boned body was racked by uncontrollable paroxysms.

  The hard-boiled cops stared at her in awe.

  “He thought I didn’t know anything about hypnotism,” she wailed. “He thought I was just a big simple fool. He didn’t have to go and hypnotize me
and take my money and then try to keep it,” she blubbered. “I would have given it all to him if he had just come right out and asked for it.”

  Ratigan stared at her in speechless amazement. “You mean you would have given that charlatan all of that huge sum of money that you won if he had asked for it? Good God, woman, why?”

  “Because I believed in him,” she said, crying almost hysterically now. “That’s why. If you is a black woman like me, you got to believe in something.”

  Sergeant Ratigan had intended to ask her, during the course of the interrogations why she had gone with Slick and Susie up to her empty flat where they had tortured her and struck her in the head, but now he didn’t have the heart.

  “The chances are the court is going to let you off if the prophet pulls through, and it looks as though he will,” Ratigan said. “Now don’t you go and stab your man Sugar, next, because you might kill him, and that will be serious.”

  She looked up puzzled. “What’s he done?”

  Ratigan was flustered. “Oh, I thought you knew that he was trying to steal your money, too.”

  A tiny smile peeped through her tears. “Oh, I ain’t mad at him for that,” she said. “He was just doing what comes natural.”

  Ratigan called it a finish. A matron came and locked her up until the wagon came to take her downtown again for arraignment next morning.

  No sooner had the key turned in the lock than she was singing:

  “I’m blue

  But I wont be blue always

  ’Cause the sun’s going to shine in my back door

  Some day.”

  Some days later, when Sweet Prophet was asked by members of the colored press why he had taken her money, he replied,

  “I needed it. It takes a lot of money to be a prophet these days. It’s the high cost of living.”

  Chester Himes was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1909 to parents just two generations removed from slavery. He spent his childhood in Cleveland, Ohio, in Mississippi, in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in St. Louis, Missouri, and again in Cleveland, where he graduated from East High School in 1926. After two years at Ohio State University, Himes withdrew from school for the streets of Cleveland. In 1928 he was arrested for armed robbery and sentenced to twenty-five years in the state penitentiary.

  Himes began his writing career in prison. His first story, “To What Red Hell” appeared in Esquire in 1934. He was released from prison in 1936 and began to rebuild his life. In 1938 he became associated with the Ohio Writers’ Project and wrote a history of Cleveland for the WPA Guide Series. In 1945 he published his first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go, to critical acclaim. His second major work, Lonely Crusade, was not so well received because of the brutal honesty of this protest novel.

  Himes left for Europe in 1953 and remained abroad for the rest of his life. At the suggestion of Marcel Duhamel, who had translated If He Hollers Let Him Go, Himes began writing detective novels. Eight of these starred those overzealous protectors of Harlem, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. He was brought to the attention of the US audience when his novel Cotton Comes To Harlem was made into a successful film of the same name. Chester Himes died of Parkinson’s disease in Moraira, Spain, on November 12th, 1984.

  Big Gold Dream

  Pegasus Books LLC

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  Copyright © 1960, 1996 by Chester Himes

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-9336-4884-2

  ISBN: 978-1-6059-8663-0 (e-book)

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