The crazy kill (coffin johnson and grave digger jones)

by Chester Himes

  The black painted windows of what had been a super market before the Holly Rollers took it over reflected distorted images of the three black Cadillac limousines, and of the big flashy cars strung out behind the big cocky hearse like a line of laying hens.

  People of many colors, clad in garb of all descriptions, their burr heads covered with straw hats of every shape, crowded about for a glimpse of the Harlem underworld celebrities attending Big Joe Pullen's funeral. Black ladies carried bright-colored parasols and wore green eyeshades to protect them from the sun.

  These people ate cool slices of watermelon, spit out the black seeds and sweated in the vertical rays of the July sun. They drank quart bottles of beer and wine, and smaller bottles of pop and cola, from the flyspecked grocery stores nearby. They sucked chocolate-coated icecream bars from the refrigerated pushcart of the Good Humor man. They chewed succulent sections of barbecued pork-rib sandwiches, cast the polished bones to the friendly dogs and cats and the bread crusts to the flocks of molting Harlem sparrows.

  Trash blew from the dirty street against their sweaty skin and into their gritty eyes.

  The jumble of loud voices, strident laughter and the tinkle of the vendor's bells mingled with the sounds of mourning coming from the open church door and the loud summer thunder of automobiles passing in the street.

  A picnic had never been better.

  Sweating horse cops astride lathered horses, harness bulls with open collars and patrol cars with rolled-down windows rode herd.

  When Johnny backed his big fishtail Cadillac into a reserved spot and climbed out behind Dulcy and Alamena, a murmur ran through the crowd and his name sprang from every lip.

  Inside the church was like an airless oven. The crude wooden benches were jam-packed with friends who had come to bury Big Joe-gamblers, pimps, whores, chippies, madams, dining-car waiters and Holy Rollers-but were being cooked instead.

  With his two women, Johnny pushed forward toward the mourners' bench. They found places beside Mamie Pullen, Baby Sis, and the pallbearers-who included a white dining-car steward; the Grand Wizard of Big Joe's lodge, dressed in the most impressive red-and-blue, goldbraided uniform ever seen on land or sea; a gray-haired, flat-footed waiter known as Uncle Gin; and two Holy Roller Deacons.

  Big Joe's coffin, banked with hothouse roses and lilies of the valley, occupied the place of honor in front of the soapbox pulpit. Green flies buzzed above the coffin.

  Behind it, Reverend Short was jumping up and down on the flimsy pulpit like some devil with the hotfoot dancing on red- and white-hot flames.

  His bony face was quivering with religious fervor and streaming with rivers of sweat that overflowed his high celluloid collar and soaked into the jacket of his black woolen suit. His gold-rimmed spectacles were clouded. A band of sweat had formed about his trousers' belt and was coming through his coat.

  " And the Lord said," he was screaming, swatting at the green flies trying to light on his face and spraying hot spit like a garden sprinkler. " As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten… Does you hear me? "

  "We hears you," the church members chanted in response.

  " Be zealous therefore, and repent…"

  "… repent…"

  " So I'm going to take my text from Genesis…"

  "… Genesis…"

  " The Lord God made Adam in his image…"

  "… Lord made Adam…"

  " Therefore I'm your preacher and I want to make a parable."

  "… preacher make parable…"

  " There lies Big Joe Pullen in his coffin, as much of a man as Adam ever was, as dead a man as Adam ever will be, made in God's image

  …"

  "… Big Joe in God's image…"

  " Adam bore two sons, Cain and Abel…"

  "… Cain and Abel…"

  " And Cain rose up against his brother in the field, and he stuck a knife in Abel's heart and he murdered him…"

  "… Jesus Savior, murdered him…"

  " I see Jesus Christ leaving heaven with all His grandeur, clothing himself in the garments of your preacher, making his face black, pointing the finger of accusation, and saying to you unrepented sinners, 'He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword…' "

  "… die by the sword, Lord, Lord…"

  " I see Him point his finger and say, 'If Adam was alive today he'd be laying in that coffin dead and his name would be Big Joe Pullen…' "

  "… have mercy, Jesus…"

  " And he'd have a son named Abel…"

  "… have a son, Abel…"

  " And his son would have a wife…"

  "… son would have a wife…"

  " And his wife would be the sister of Cain…"

  "… sister of Cain…"

  " I can see Him step out on the rib bone of nothing…"

  "… rib bone of nothing…"

  Spit drooled from the corners of his fishlike mouth as he pointed a trembling finger straight in Dulcy's direction.

  " I can hear him say, 'Oh, you sister of Cain, why slayest thou thy brother? ' "

  A dead silence dropped like a pall over the cooking congregation. Every eye was turned on Dulcy. She cringed in her seat. Johnny stared at the preacher with a sudden alertness, and the scar in his forehead came suddenly alive.

  Mamie half arose and cried, "It ain't so! You know it ain't so!"

  Then a sister in the amen corner jumped to her feet, with her arms stretched upward and her splayed fingers stiffened, and screamed, "Jesus in heaven, have mercy on the poor sinner."

  Pandemonium broke loose as the Holy Rollers jumped to their feet and began having convulsions.

  " Murderess! " Reverend Short screamed in a frenzy.

  "… murderess…" the church members responded.

  "It ain't so!" Mamie shouted.

  " Adulteress! " Reverend Short screamed.

  "… adulteress…" the congregation responded.

  "You lying mother-raper!" Dulcy shouted, finally finding her voice.

  "Let him rave on," Johnny said, his face wooden and his voice toneless.

  " Fornication! " Reverend Short screamed.

  At the mention of fornication the joint went mad. Holy Rollers fell to the floor, frothing at the mouth, rolled and threshed, screaming, "Fornication… fornication…"

  Men and women wrestled and rolled. Benches were splintered. The church rocked. The coffin shook. A big stink of sweating bodies arose. "Fornication… fornication…" the religious, mad people screamed.

  "I'm getting out of here," Dulcy said, getting to her feet.

  "Sit down," Johnny said. "These religious folks are dangerous."

  The church organist began jamming the chorus of Roberta Lee on the church harmonium trying to restore order, and a big fat dining-car waiter cut loose in a high tenor voice:

  "Dis world is high,

  Dis world is low,

  Dis world is deep and wide,

  But de longes' road I ever did see,

  Was de one I walked and cried…"

  Thoughts of the long road brought the fanatics to their feet. They brushed off their clothes and sheepishly straightened up the broken benches, and the organist went into Roll, Jordan, Roll.

  But Reverend Short had gone beyond restraint. He'd left the pulpit and come down in front of the coffin to shake his finger in Dulcy's face. The undertaker's two assistants threw him to the floor and knelt on him until he'd calmed down; then the business of the funeral proceeded.

  The congregation arose to the harmonium strains of Nearer My God To Thee and filed past the coffin for a last look at Big Joe Pullen's mortal remains. Those on the mourners' bench were the last to pass, and when the coffin lid was finally closed Mamie flung herself across it, crying, "Don't go, Joe, don't leave me here all alone."

  The undertaker pried her loose, and Johnny put his arm about her waist and started guiding her toward the exit. But the undertaker stopped him, tugging at his sleeve.

  "You're the chief pallbearer, Mr. Perry, you c
an't go." Johnny turned Mamie over to the care of Dulcy and Alamena.

  "Go along with her," he said.

  Then he took his place with the five other pallbearers, and they lifted the coffin, bore it down the cleared aisle and between the lines of police on the sidewalk and slid it into the hearse.

  Members of Big Joe's lodge were lined up in parade formation in the street, clad in their full regalia of scarlet coats with gold braid, light blue trousers with gold stripes, and headed by the lodge band.

  The band broke out with The Coming of John, and the people in the street joined in singing with the choir.

  The funeral procession, led by the hearse, fell in behind the marching lodge brothers.

  Dulcy and Alamena sat flanking Mamie Pullen in the first of the black limousines.

  Johnny rode alone behind the third limousine in his big open-top fishtail Cadillac.

  Two cars behind him, Chink and Doll Baby followed in a blue Buick convertible.

  The band was playing the old funeral chant in swingtime, and the trumpet player took a chorus and rode the staccato notes clear and high in the hot Harlem sky. The crowd was electrified. The people broke loose in mass hysteria, marching in swingtime. But they marched in all directions, forward, backward, circling, zigzagging, their bodies gyrating to the rocking syncopation. They went rocking and rolling back and forth across the street, between the parked cars, up and down the sidewalks, sometimes a boy taking a whirl with a girl, most times marching alone to the music, but not in time with the music. They were marching and dancing to the rhythm, between the beats, not on them, marching and dancing to the feeling of the swing, and still keeping up with the slowly moving procession.

  The procession went down Eighth Avenue to 125th Street, east to Seventh Avenue, turned the corner by the Theresa Hotel and went north toward the 155th Street Bridge to the Bronx.

  But at the bridge the band pulled up, the marchers halted, the crowd began to disperse, the procession thinned out. Harlem ended at the bridge, and only the principals crossed into the Bronx and made the long journey out Bronx Park Road, past the Bronx Park Zoo, to Woodlawn Cemetery.

  The built-in record player in the hearse began playing an organ recording, the thin saccharine notes drifting back over the procession from the amplifiers.

  They went through the arched gateway into the huge cemetery and stopped in a long line behind the yellow clay mouth of the open grave.

  The mourners encircled the grave while the pallbearers lifted the coffin from the hearse and placed it upon a mechanical derrick that lowered it slowly into the grave.

  An organ recording of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot began playing, and the choir sang a moaning accompaniment.

  Reverend Short had gotten himself under control and stood at the head of the grave, intoning in his croaking voice:

  "… in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it was thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return…"

  When the coffin touched the bottom of the grave, Mamie Pullen screamed and tried to throw herself after it. While Johnny was holding her, Dulcy suddenly crumpled and swayed toward the edge of the pit. Alamena clutched her about the waist, but Chink Charlie stepped forward from behind and put his arm about Dulcy and laid her upon the grass. Johnny caught a glimpse of them out of the corner of his eye, and he pushed Mamie into the arms of a deacon and wheeled toward Chink, his eyes yellow with rage and the scar on his forehead livid and crawling with a life of its own.

  Chink saw him coming, stepped back and tried to pull his knife. Johnny feinted with his left and kicked Chink on the right shin. The sharp bone pain doubled Chink forward from the head down. Before the reflex motion had ceased, Johnny hit Chink back of the ear with a clubbing right; and when Chink fell reeling to his hands and knees, Johnny kicked at his head with his left foot, but missed it and grazed Chink's left shoulder instead. His lightning glance saw a spade in a grave digger's hand, and he snatched it out and swung the edge at the back of Chink's neck. Big Tiny from Fats's restaurant had closed in to stop Johnny and grabbed at his arm as he swung the spade. He didn't get a grip but managed to turn Johnny's arm so the flat of the spade instead of the edge hit Chink in the middle of the back and knocked him head over heels into the grave, on top of the coffin.

  Then Tiny and half a dozen other men disarmed Johnny and wrestled him back to the gravel drive behind the plot of graves.

  Johnny was circled in by his underworld friends, with Fats wheezing, "God damn it, Johnny, let's don't have no more killings. That wasn't nothing to get that mad about."

  Johnny shook off their hands and straightened his disarranged clothes. "I don't want that half-white mother-raper to touch her," he said in his toneless voice.

  "Jesus Christ, she'd fainted," Fats wheezed.

  "Not even if she's dropping stone-cold dead," Johnny said.

  His friends shook their heads.

  "You have hurt him enough for one day anyway, chief," Kid Nickels said.

  "I ain't going to hurt him no more," Johnny said. "Just bring my womenfolks over to the car. I'm going to take them home."

  He went over and got into his car.

  A moment later the music ceased. The undertaker's equipment was removed from about the grave. The grave diggers began spading in the earth. The silent mourners slowly returned to the cars.

  Mamie came between Dulcy and Alamena and got into the back of Johnny's car with Alamena. Baby Sis followed silently.

  "Lord, Lord," Mamie said in a moaning voice. "They ain't nothing but trouble on this earth, but I know my time ain't long."

  10

  On leaving the cemetery, the procession disbanded and each car went its own way.

  Just before turning into the bridge back to Harlem, Johnny got held up by a traffic jam caused by Yankee Stadium letting out after a ball game.

  He and Dulcy, along with other well-heeled Harlem pimps, madams and numbers bankers, lived on the sixth floor of the flashy Roger Morris apartment house. It stood at the corner of 157th Street and Edgecombe Drive, on Coogan's Bluff, overlooking the Polo Grounds, the Harlem River and the inclined streets of the Bronx beyond.

  It was seven o'clock when Johnny pulled his fishtail Cadillac before the entrance.

  "I've come a long way from an Alabama cotton chopper to lose it all now," he said.

  Everybody in the car looked at him, but only Dulcy spoke. "What you talking about?" she said warily.

  He didn't answer.

  Mamie's joints creaked as she started to alight.

  "Come on, Baby Sis, we'll get a taxi," she said.

  "You're coming up and eat with us," Johnny said. "Baby Sis and Alamena can fix supper."

  She shook her head. "Me and Baby Sis will just go on home. I don't want to start being no trouble to nobody."

  "It won't be no trouble," Johnny said.

  "I ain't hungry," Mamie said. "I just want to go home and lie down and get some sleep. I'm powerfully tired."

  "It ain't good for you to be alone now," Johnny argued. "Now's when you need to be around folks."

  "Baby Sis'll be there, Johnny, and I just wanna sleep."

  "Okay, I'll drive you home," Johnny said. "You know you ain't gotta ride in a taxi long as I got a car that'll run."

  No one moved.

  He turned to Dulcy and said, "You and Alamena get the hell out. I didn't say I was taking you."

  "I'm getting good and tired of you hollering at me," Dulcy said angrily, getting from the car with a flounce. "I ain't no dog."

  Johnny gave her a warning look but didn't answer.

  Alamena got out of the back seat, and Mamie got in front with Johnny and put a hand over her closed eyes to shut out the terrible day.

  They drove to her apartment without talking. After Baby Sis had left them and gone inside, Mamie said, "Johnny, you're too hard on womenfolks. You expects them to act like men."

  "I just expect them to do what they're told and what
they're supposed to do."

  She gave a long, sad sigh. "Most women does, Johnny, but they just got their own ways of doing it, and that's what you don't understand."

  They were silent for a moment, watching the crowds on the sidewalk drift past in the twilight.

  It was a street of paradox: unwed young mothers, suckling their infants, living on a prayer; fat black racketeers coasting past in big bright-colored convertibles with their solid gold babes, carrying huge sums of money on their person; hardworking men, holding up the buildings with their shoulders, talking in loud voices up there in Harlem where the white bosses couldn't hear them; teen-age gangsters grouping for a gang fight, smoking marijuana weed to get up their courage; everybody escaping the hotbox rooms they lived in, seeking respite in a street made hotter by the automobile exhaust and the heat released by the concrete walls and walks.

  Finally Mamie said, "Don't kill him, Johnny. I'm an old lady and I tell you there ain't any reason."

  Johnny kept looking at the stream of cars passing in the street. "Either's he's pressing her or she's asking for it. What do you want me to believe?"

  "It ain't drawn that fine, Johnny. I'm an old lady, and I tell you, it ain't drawn that fine. You're splitting snake hairs. He's just a show-off and she just likes attention, that's all."

  "He's gonna look good in a shroud," Johnny said.

  "Take it from an old lady, Johnny," she said. "You don't give her no attention. You got your own affairs, your gambling club and everything, which takes up all your time, and she ain't got nothing."

  "Aunt Mamie, that was the same trouble with my ma," he said. "Pete worked hard for her, but she wasn't satisfied 'less she was messing 'round with other men, and I had to kill him to keep him from killing her. But it was my ma who was wrong, and I always knowed it."

  "I know, Johnny, but Dulcy ain't like that," Mamie argued. "She ain't messing around with nobody, but you gotta be patient with her. She's young. You knew how young she was when you married her."

  "She ain't that young," he said in his toneless voice, still without looking at Mamie. "And if she ain't messing around with him then he's messing around with her-there ain't no two ways about it."