Black Betty

by Mosley, Walter

  I took my time looking at them. There was a smell in the house. “The stink of corruption,” as my holy-roller voodoo grandfather used to say.

  “Jewelle,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Go make me some tea, honey.”

  “Uh-uh, I wanna stay here wit’ you and Uncle Willy.”

  “You go on,” Mofass said. He patted the girl’s thigh and she gave in.

  “You want lemon or milk?” she asked, pouting at me.

  “I’ll take it straight.”

  She went out of the door moving her hips in a way that I’m sure she was unaware of.

  “What do I get outta this, William?” I used Mofass’s given name because suddenly I was mad.

  “County planner, Mason LaMone, and the Save-Co corporation.” Mofass’s yellow eyes seemed to infect the words he spoke. “They all been down here. I heard ’em when they thought I was upstairs asleep.”

  “What would men like that want down here, William?”

  “You had a damn good idea, Mr. Rawlins. Damn good. The minute Clovis went down there with the application for permits, that sent shocks all the way up to the top man.” Mofass raised his voice in excitement and then had to cough. It was a hard sort of hacking that sounded as if he were torn and ragged on the inside.

  I watched him with little sympathy. His news meant that there was no way out of my real estate problems and nobody I could trust.

  “So what?” I asked. “They wanna invest wit’ us?”

  Mofass shook his head slowly, not meeting my eye. Maybe he was afraid that if he looked straight at me while delivering his foul news I might take my rage out on him.

  Maybe he was right.

  “They got Clovis to work with’em. She done told them all about you and she give’em back all the papers they processed on yo’ property. They started talkin’, an’ the next thing you know, they’s this sanitation station they figure needs to be built. County planner in LaMone’s pocket and LaMone in bed wit’ Save-Co.”

  “LaMone,” I said. “That the big real estate guy from downtown?”

  Mofass stuck out his big lips and nodded. “That’s why I called you, Mr. Rawlins. He was here last night. Him an’ Clovis got a good ole laugh at how she was gonna make you spend yo’ money to pay her to rob you blind.”

  “But why? Why’d Clovis wanna help the white man? We could build Freedom’s Plaza ourselves. We could own it ourselves.”

  Mofass shook his head again. “Not the way she seen it. Them men tole her that they was gonna take that land one way or t’other. Save-Co was gonna build an’ they wasn’t gonna have no Negro competition. An’ they told her that she could manage the property by herself. You see? She don’t need me no more, so that’s why she wanna take my money now.”

  The spout from Jewelle’s teapot began to whistle somewhere in the big house. It was a weak and strained peeping sound; something like my complaint against Mason LaMone and the Save-Co Corporation—the largest supermarket business in southern California.

  “So why call me, William?” I asked. “If I cain’t beat’em then why I wanna help you?”

  Mofass grinned at me then. If there was one thing I knew about Mofass it was that his smile meant money was somewhere to be had—money that he could trick out of someone.

  “Maybe you cain’t beat them white men, Mr. Rawlins. I don’t know about that. But Clovis is usin’ Esquire Realty to represent Freedom’s Trust. And I own Esquire Realty. If you help me to get it back in my hands, at least you will get whatever profit Clovis made. At least that.”

  I’d spent years having little back-room meetings like that with Mofass; years of hiding, pushing Mofass up front like he was the one who owned everything. I did that because of the weight of black life down where I was a child.

  The logic of my childhood had never proven wrong.

  If a man wore gold chains, somebody was going to hit him on the head. If he looked prosperous, women would pull him by his dick into the bed and then hit him with a paternity suit nine months later. If a woman had money, the man would just beat her until she got up off of it.

  I always talk about down home like it really was home. Like everybody who looked like me and talked like me really cared about me. I knew that life was hard, but I hoped that if someone stole from me it would be because they were hungry and needed it. But some people will tear you down just to see you fall. They’ll do it even if your loss is their own.

  They will laugh at your misfortune and sit next to you at misery’s table.

  “You help me take back what’s mines and I will give you back everything that Clovis was gonna take,” Mofass said.

  “Yeah, uh-huh,” I said. “But there’s gonna be somethin’ new this time, Mofass. I’m gonna be the new one representin’ Esquire. You gonna send me in there t’talk t’them men.”

  “Oh yeah?” he asked, almost amused. “But I thought you liked to stay in the background, Mr. Rawlins.”

  “Well, I guess it’s time for me to get over that.” I was thinking about my ex-wife, Regina. She left me because I couldn’t be honest with her. I never told her about my property or how I got my money. I couldn’t share my life with her and so our love died.

  “Okay, Mr. Rawlins. You he’p me out an’ I’ll let you run the show on Freedom’s Plaza. You know I cain’t get around as well I used to no more anyways.”

  I nodded and we shook hands. Then I asked, “So what’s with the girl?”

  “What you mean?”

  “I mean I ain’t gonna help you with no statutory rape.”

  “It ain’t like that, Mr. Rawlins,” he protested. “JJ kinda starstruck wit’ me ’cause I’m nice to her. An’ they treat her real bad here, so when she see them treat me like that she feel sorry for me.”

  “Is sorry the only thing she feelin’?”

  “Man, what you gonna do?”

  I didn’t know exactly what he meant by that. Maybe he meant that the world makes us and we just do what we have to. There he was, a prisoner in the house he paid for, and there was JJ.

  “If I put the girl someplace, she stays. At least until she’s eighteen or back with her family.”

  “Sure.” He nodded. “She need a home.”

  “It’s gonna cost you, William.”

  “Whatever it take.”

  “Gimme a minute,” I said, gesturing at the door with a motion of my head.

  After Mofass went out I got on the phone.

  “Etta?”

  “Yes, Easy?”

  “I need you t’take in a girl. She’s a teenager and needs a little supervision and some help.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, hesitating. “It take a lotta money to go feedin’ a teenager, Easy.”

  “A man gonna pay for her board and he gonna pay you for your time.”

  “Well… does she really need help?”

  “I think so.”

  Etta hemmed and hawed a little but she finally came around.

  “Okay. Let’s try it,” she told me.

  “Thanks, Etta. Mouse there?”

  “Yeah. You want him? ’Cause you know I’m ready to kick his butt out the house.”

  “He still crazy?”

  “Just cleanin’ his pistol and mutterin’ ’bout his five years.”

  “Get him for me, will ya?”

  While I waited, Jewelle brought in my tea.

  “Get your bags packed, honey. We’re gonna put you somewhere safe for a while.”

  “Wit’ Uncle Willy?”

  “No, honey. Not right yet. First you’re goin’ to stay with some friends’a mine out in Compton.”

  “I wanna stay wit’—”

  “Go upstairs and pack, girl. I don’t care what you want. Don’t you know that William is sick and that this family’a yours might try and hurt him? He cain’t be worried ’bout you and them too.”

  “Hello,” Mouse said in my ear.

>   “Hey, Raymond.”

  Jewelle had turned away.

  “What’s up, Ease?”

  I recited the magic words. “I need your help, man.”

  “With what?”

  “You remember Mofass?” I told him the whole story, emphasizing the part about being cheated out of my idea.

  “Help Mofass for me, Raymond,” I said. “He’ll pay ya and then you could help Etta with the bills.” And I’d have time to keep him from killing any innocent people—including me.

  “All right, uh-huh, sure—but I gotta know somethin’ first.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You the one told them men about me?”

  “What men?” I hoped to sound more certain than I felt.

  “Don’t you be fuckin’ wit’ me, Easy. You know what I’m sayin’.”

  “I know them men,” I said in the dialect and song of my childhood. “An’ ain’t one of’em bad enough or fool enough to give you up to the cops.”

  “Uh-huh. Here you is sayin’ you want my he’p an’ the whole time you pullin’ a load of shit,” Mouse replied.

  “I’m lookin’ for the one turned you in, Ray. I am. You wouldn’t wanna kill the wrong man.”

  We were children in a schoolyard arguing over a ball.

  “I don’t give a shit,” he said simply.

  I thought about Hawaii again. I wondered, for a brief moment, if a man could escape his fate.

  I knew the answer but I wondered just the same.

  “Work with me on this one, Raymond.” He and I had been friends ever since I rolled into Houston in a boxcar—hungry, homeless, and only eight years old. We kept each other alive way back then.

  “How many days you want for this job wit’ Mofass?” he asked.

  “Just a few days,” I said. “That’s all it’ll take.”

  “I could use some money. You know Etta won’t get up off’a dime. Shit. I thought I was gonna have to get out here and rob somebody.”

  “Take Etta’s car and come on over to…” I gave him Mofass’s address. “Mofass and a girl gonna be there. Take Mofass over to Primo’s and tell him that I need him to keep him a day or two and then take the girl out to Etta. Tomorrow you go back and get Mofass. He’s gonna need a lawyer.” I smiled to myself. “A good lawyer.”

  — 17 —

  I DON’T KNOW WHY I went out to Oxnard. Maybe it was because of Mofass and the feeling I got that I was in charge again. Maybe it was because I didn’t want to look too deeply into Mouse’s problems. There was no easy way out of Mouse’s difficulties. I knew from hard experience that when he wanted somebody to die it was like destiny.

  Maybe it was because I never learned to respect women.

  If I knew that a man was dangerous I’d be wary, because a man can be a serious problem. I wouldn’t necessarily be afraid of a man—still, I’d take him seriously. But a woman never called up fear in me. I’ve seen at least a dozen women kill men dead but I’d still laugh if one was to threaten me.

  So when Gwendolyn Jones called me the only thing I took seriously was the promise of six hundred and thirty-seven dollars. Now that I was dealing with Mouse and he was promised cash I knew that I had to have some kind of reserve just in case Mofass was low.

  And everything felt right about going there. The sky was blue over a dark ocean. Cool air blew into my window for the first time in weeks. The gulls sang their blues note and wheeled around. I was almost happy.

  The Lea exit led down a long lane through strawberry orchards, finally coming upon a rocky ridge that looked over the ocean. A big yellow shack was perched on the cliff. There was a hole, roughly the shape of a telephone, cut out of the door. I pulled up next to the structure, parked, and lit a cigarette. The taste of tobacco and the cool sea breeze soothed me.

  You couldn’t see the land below, because the cliff jutted out over the water. The ocean was rolling in like some great, dumb migrating animal.

  The chill of the breeze brought a grin to my face. I got out of the car and went right up to the edge of the cliff. It was beautiful. Even more so because of the troubles I had right then.

  The ocean and wind told me how small my problems were, how stupid I was to get involved with other people’s troubles when there was so much beauty to be had. All I had to do was to look out and see the ocean, or go home and watch my children grow. I laughed and told myself to remember that the next time somebody comes pushing money at me.

  I was ready to get back into my car and go on home. Tomorrow I could take the kids out of school and have a picnic at Pismo Beach.

  But then I heard something, or almost heard it. It was a sweet sound. Behind me was a high rocky hill. A path wended through the big shale boulders and tall brown grasses. And way up at the top of the hill a solitary bicyclist was coming down the path shakily, but not so shakily that she couldn’t wave and call out, “Mr. Rawlins!” I wouldn’t have understood her at that distance if I didn’t know my own name.

  * * *

  GWENDOLYN JONES rode down the hill on her red J. C. Higgins three-speed. I watched her all the way down until she came to a stop in front of me.

  She was even prettier than before in her hot-pink-and-white checkered shorts and pink tennis shoes. Her socks and V-necked T-shirt were white, except there was a tiny pink satin bow at the angle point of the V.

  “Hi,” she said with an innocence that couldn’t be faked. “I was waiting for you. I knew you were going to come but I thought I might have missed your call because Sarah needed help with her bath.” Gwendolyn crinkled her nose with loving disapproval. “Sometimes I think that she can’t even blow her nose without somebody to help her.”

  “You always call your boss by her first name?”

  “Well,” she said. Gwendolyn’s smile was so friendly that it called up images of my childhood, before my mother died. “It doesn’t feel like she’s my boss really. You know, it’s kind of like we just have different chores.”

  “Different paychecks too, I bet.”

  Gwendolyn dismounted her bike and stood before me, holding on to the handlebars.

  “Will you take me?” she asked.

  “Say what?”

  “Up to the farm. It’s pretty far and it’s mostly uphill. I can put my bike in your boot.”

  “My what?”

  “The trunk, silly.”

  While I was folding the bike to fit over my spare tire I took a whiff at my armpits. I smelled like a man but not too strong. I was thankful for Johnson & Johnson baby powder because I didn’t think that Gwendolyn could take anything too strong.

  Maybe a kiss.

  “You have to take the dirt road that goes out around the other side of the phone booth.” She pointed at the slender path that went around the mountainside.

  THE ROAD, if you could call it that, was textured with deep, hard ruts that were excavated by the drainage of the previous winter’s rain. It was a slight pass that snaked its way upward around the coastal mountain. There were times that it seemed as if a deep rut might crumble and that we would go rolling down into the sea or one of the wild valleys below.

  Gwendolyn put her pink-shod feet on the dashboard. I tried, with some difficulty, to keep my eyes on the road and off those long brown legs. The car lurched from side to side, scraping the bottom now and then. I’m not a vain man, nor am I persnickety about my belongings, but I do like to keep my vehicle clean and in decent condition. Driving on that highway took away any trade-in value that my car might have had.

  As we went inland the heat rose. Flies and gnats zipped in and out of the open windows. A stream ran in the gully beside the road. From all around a rotted odor arose. Birds, hidden in the decayed shrubbery, sounded like people being throttled down below.

  “How much longer till we get there?” I asked.

  “About a mile and a half.” Gwendolyn pointed toward the top of the hillside and said, “There’s smooth road starting there, and then it’s not too much further.”

 
; “I sure don’t understand this.”

  “Understand what?”

  “How come somebody rich as Miss Cain would have a house way the hell out where they cain’t even drive without messin’ up their cars.”

  “Oh?” Gwendolyn mused. “We could have gone around the other way. That’s paved, but it takes too long.”

  I couldn’t even say a word. Here I was entrusting myself to the hands of a workingwoman—a black woman!—and she put one of the biggest investments in a workingman’s life on a drive to ruin. If I had said a word I might have had to punctuate it with violence. So I kept my silence, bumping and jerking on that haphazard road.

  When we reached the graded path I pulled the car to the side and stopped.

  “Why are we stopping?” Gwendolyn wanted to know.

  “I wanna talk to you before we get to the house.”

  “About what?”

  I was staring hard at her. All kinds of feelings bubbled in my head. I wanted to know about Betty, and maybe Marlon; I wanted to know why Miss Cain called me before I had to go in and hear her lies (I say lies because, back then, any white person had to prove themselves to me before I could consider trusting them). I wanted to get to know Gwendolyn too. I wanted to know why she said “boot” instead of “trunk.”

  “Where’s Betty?”

  Gwendolyn looked down into her lap, and so I put a finger under her chin to lift her eyes back to me.

  We were both breathing hard.

  “I don’t know.” She tried to pull her head back down but I wouldn’t let her.

  “Okay. I’ll buy that. But what’s goin’ on here? Betty’s just a maid, a house cleaner. Ain’t no reason for lawyers and detectives and hundreds of dollars bein’ paid just to find a house cleaner.”

  “Betty… Miss Eady was a part of the household. Our house wasn’t like you say. I mean… everybody was close. Betty had been with the Cains since before the war.”

  “Why are the cops askin’ about Miss Cain’s father?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is that Mr. Cain died. He died and then Betty was gone and everybody was upset. The police came out to the house and then, the next day, Mr. Hodge came. But nothing happened. It’s just that the police are still looking into something and the will is caught up in court.”