by Odie Hawkins
She strolled down the aisle to the exit, nodding to the people she felt close to. They nodded back, knowing that she had dismissed herself.
She closed the door behind her softly, stood on the outside leaning against it for a minute or two, listening to the shocked silence and then to the furious sounds of ten different debates.
God! she whispered to the shadows what will it take to get black people really and truly together, some kind of way?
Lucille stared out at the darkness absently, tired. “And then what did he say?” she asked politely, glancing at the sight of Lubertha stumbling down the street. Looks like she’s been drinking.
“Nothin’, that was it. You know how it is, they don’t really wanna rehire me no way, at my age, with a bad back. If it wasn’t for the union, they woulda fired me the day I got hurt.”
Lucille Smith stirred her spoon around slowly in her lukewarm coffee, worn down from doing Mrs. Bernhammer’s housework, mind half on her husband’s problems with getting back to work, receiving retroactive compensation, a foulup, courtesy of Ms. Swartz, and coercing a reluctant company doctor to grant him a medical clearance. The other part of her consciousness dealt with more prosaic hardships the bills piling up, the rent due, Mrs. Bernhammer, hip to her problems, becoming snottier every day, making up for all the independent retorts she had received from her “house-worker” in the past.
“Aren’t you finished with the furniture polishing yet, Mrs. Smith?”
“If I had four hands I’d be finished by now.”
“Maybe age is slowing you up, Mrs. Smith.”
Fergy looked down at his hands circling the coffee cup and felt worthless, helpless. What a helluva way to tie a man up. They tell you that you’re able to go back to work, but ineligible. They say that you need a clearance to go back to work and the only one who can grant it, the only one, is the company’s doctor, who doesn’t want to see you go back. And if that ain’t enough, there’s the goddamned Industrial Accident Board and that crock-minded bitch handlin’ the case, Mzzz. FuckitupSwartz.
He looked up from the cup into his woman’s face.
Damn she looks tired.
He reached over to stroke her hands.
“Don’t worry, baby we gon’ work it out somehow.”
She looked down at her man’s hands, so strong and felt a little less tired. “Fergy, I ain’t worried ’bout a gotdamned thing!” she spoke out with sudden energy and started clearing the table. “This ain’t the first time we been shot through the grease, ’n it probably won’t be the last time.”
He slouched in his chair, watching his woman’s hips shimmy slightly as she rinsed their coffee cups out, the movement accentuated by her glistening nylon nightie.
She turned to him suddenly. “Fergy, did you take your medicine tonight?”
He uncoiled himself from his seat and walked over to embrace her. “Nawwww, I didn’t take it, and I ain’t gon’ take it tonight.”
“Why not?” she asked, halfway between honest curiosity and middle-aged coyness.
“’Cause they put me right t’ sleep, and I don’t feel like goin’ right t’ sleep tonight,” he replied purposefully and kissed her flush on the mouth, tenderly.
Chapter 6
Midweek Changes
Kanoon looked deeply into the almond shaped eyes of the tall, dark skinned woman standing under the exit sign with him at the front door of the Pot.
“Why can’t I spend the night, Kanoon?” he heard her ask through his cocaine, music soaked fog.
“’Cause like I told you, baby … I don’t like to spend the whole night with nobody, they think they own you when they spend the night.”
The woman looked out sadly at the cold streets beyond the large, black-painted picture window, and all around herself at the uptilted stools and tables of the club.
“You sho’ is cold, Kanoon,” she said quietly.
He shrugged eloquently, denying nothing.
She leaned her lush pelvis into him and smoothly draped her arms around his slender shoulders. “Why can’t I stay a lil’ while longer?” she cooed into his ear, a fountain of promises in the question.
“Number one, ’cause I don’t want no mo’, and number two ’cause I got some work to do.”
She withdrew her arms and stood back to take his full measure, eyes narrowed, hands on hips. “You know, they told me when I first got on the scene that you were a heartless, cold-blooded lil’ motherfucker, but I didn’t know you were this.…”
Kanoon unlocked the door and stood beside it like a Prussian doorman, impatient for his latest guest to depart. “Good night, Justine.”
She smiled a cool little smile at him as she stepped through the door into the cold air of the pumpkin hour. “Goodnight, Kanoon,” she replied, giving up, and leaned back to kiss him once again.
“Be careful goin’ to your car, baby,” he cautioned her. “We got lotsa high crime rates hangin’ ’round out there.”
She laid a dazzling, sarcastic smile over her shoulder at him as she clutched her fur to her throat and tripped to the gun metal painted Porsche at the curb.
He stood in the doorway, freezing in his paisley caftan, and watched her zip away over patches of ice and tainted snow. He closed the door, carefully rebolted it and strolled around the empty club aimlessly for a minute, winding up finally seated on the apron of the stage.
The Pot, my club, he bragged to himself, my club, no grubby white hands anywhere in the Pot. Funny, he smiled in the dim light, how many different ideas circulate about how I wound up with this place. Some bitch got it for me. The Mafia owns it. So and so own a piece. I bet all them motherfuckers would shit a brick if they knew that my talk is fo’ real, it’s all mines. Yeahhh
He sprawled back on the stage, laced his hands under his grimly tattered naps and stared up at the light fixtures in the ceiling for five thoughtful minutes.
Justine, Nancy, Luella, Mercedes, Donyale, Branille, Hora, Tamu, Cleo, Margarite, Shirlean, Flavia, Maureen, Darcye, Susan, Janice, Loretta, Nicca, Graciela, Toshiko, La Na, Amy, Melba, Eartha, Katherine, Margo, Joan, Yellow Birdeyes, Roberta, Lois, Coco, Azul, Otani, Nina, Freda, Francine, Le Noir, Phyllis, Georgina, Wilhelmina, Norma, Clotilde, Ingrid, Anouk, Jo Jo, Alice, Mozella, Madeline, Jakki, Lady, Bop Girl, Stella, Barbara, Sheryl, Veronica, Daisy, Pashalusta, Maisha, Naima, Aissa, Aissa … Aissa.…
He cut off the litany of females he had slept with over the course of the last two years, those that had made an impression on him, by sitting up.
Damn! he mumbled, feeling the weight of his stiffened penis against his thigh. Damn! I should’ve let that bitch stay.
He sat up straighter, trying to force his erection away Jacqueleen, Carla, Pamela, Francesca, Natalia, Nira … discovered that it wasn’t going to happen as long as his memory continued functioning sensually, walked over to the bar, the front of his caftan jutting out like a Greek spear.
He looked up into the mirror behind the bar as he walked toward it, caught sight of the thumb piano beckoning to him from a chair on the bandstand. Yeahhhhh he spoke to the instrument and himself as he did an about face and hopped onto the stand.
He stood looking down at the small, half-kidney shaped box on the chair, at the flanged arrangement over the hole, feeling his erection throb away as he did so. He picked the instrument up with both hands, reverently, and sat down.
Looking out over the twilit zone atmosphere, gently plinking the instrument, the idea of what he felt he had to do suddenly dawned on him. I got to get away got to get away from all the bitches, the dope, this terrible fast life I’m leading, the music I’m playing “The Concerto for Bassssooon, Kanooooon!” echoed in his ear. The Concerto, shit! that’s been done already, time to move on.
Why should that fuck with me? he’d asked himself many times, everybody wants to hear what a dude got made on. Duke Ellington still has to play “Sophisticated Lady” every now ’n then to keep ’em cooled out. If Dolphy had lived, he might be getting reques
ts for “Aggression.”
He wandered up and down the keyboard, settling on certain patterns and then reversing them, a soulful, melodic refrain happening, playing on for the very first time, an instrument that he had only been playing at.
Yeahhhh … got to get away, his spontaneously composed tune said to him. Got to get off into another music, yeahhhh, another music. The thought of it, coming to him so simply and directly, jammed both of his thumbs down on the metal flanges and held them there.
A Jazz Quartet for Thumb Piano.
He looked down at the box in his hands and felt tears spring to his eyes because he didn’t know the African name for it.
Africa … yeahhhh, Africa … that would be a good, good place to go and get my shit together, the Quartet together. Yeahhhh, Africa. He stood, kissed the wooden box solemnly and replaced it on the chair and gracefully jumped from the low stage.
Yeahhhh suhhh, Africa that’s sho’ ’nuff where I need to go, Momma Africa.
Bessie Mae Black fluttered her eyes open, stifled a yawn remembering her duty and shook Fred Lee’s shoulders gently. “Fred! Fred! you better wake up, baby it’s 6:30.”
Fred grumbled something vaguely obscene and buried his head deeper in the pillow.
Bessie looked lovingly at the back of his head, wishing that their roles were reversed, that she was the one who had to hit it on this cold Tuesday morning. “Fredddd,” she murmured in his ear
“Yeahhhh, I heard you, it’s time to get up,” he said loudly in clear, theatrical tones, and turned toward her, to snuggle his face into her big, warm breasts.
She locked her arms around his head, loving him.
“Heyyyy, you better loose me, unless you want me to smother to death … or.…” He leaned up on his right elbow with a seductive smile on his face.
Bessie met his look with a warm glow in her own eyes, saying, in essence, if you have to go, you have to go, but if you want to stay, that’s cool too.
His smile faded, was replaced by a more serious, dedicated look. He knew he had to go to work, that was his responsibility. He kissed her gently on the mouth, eyes and scrambled out of bed, heading for the chair with his pants on it. “That’s the way to do it,” he said over his shoulder as he hopped to the door, his bare feet chilled by the icy floor. “If you jive around you’ll never make it.”
He peeked out into the hallway to see if the bathroom was vacant, saw that it was and scurried to take his morning piss.
Bessie huddled down under the covers, vicariously feeling the cold floor, the frozen hallway, the icy bathroom. Who would ever have believed that Fred Lee would be hopping out of bed in deep November, making it to a gig, for love?
She pulled the covers around her shoulders a little more snugly and stared at the slightly open door, wondering did jail change him that much?
It must have, she decided. He wasn’t anything like he is now after he came back from Vietnam. After Vietnam they had taken up where they’d left off. Bessie working, Fred Lee chili pimpin’ and trying to be nickel slick, promising matrimony someday.
What was it Big Momma used to say? “Maybe fightin’ them Vietnamese had made him scared o’ work.”
Bessie shook her head at the echo of Big Momma’s words in her head. No, Vietnam hadn’t made him lazy. He had told her many times in different ways exactly what being in Vietnam, fighting yellow men for the white man, had done to him.
And then the bust, at Slick Rina and Taco’s crib, almost five years ago, five years of waste.
And now the post jail period. What had they done to him in the joint?
He had come out walking tall, talking to her about the new lifestyle he wanted to design for them, the first section of that being that she wouldn’t be working any more. He would, he told her, even if it meant shoveling shit with a teaspoon.
Bessie sighhhed, her nose just over the cover’s edge, listening to him pad back through the hall. It was rough, being an ex-con but, because of his honorable discharge, he had been able to find a job as a mail clerk in a big department store out in the suburbs, one of those places that didn’t have a rehabilitated Negro on the premises and needed one or three badly. In walks bruh Lee.
At any rate, she uncovered her mouth as he popped back in, chill bumps on his arms, she hadn’t had to hit a lick at a snake since he got out. “Baby, you want me to get up ’n fix you some breakfast?”
“Nawww, I’ll have some coffee ’n a doughnut soon as I get to work,” he answered, moving energetically around the room to brush his teeth, wash his face, neck and underarms and to add socks, shoes and turtleneck sweater to his pants.
She wanted to ask him, “Baby, ain’t you cold?” but knew it would sound silly, so she simply lay in place, watching him comb out his Afro gettin’ ready to go meet the Man.
Yeahhhh what the hell had happened in the joint?
She stared at his lean hips, the bold, definite way he did things. Funny, she thought, it used to be that they would ship brothers off to prison and they’d return like whipped dogs, tails dragging between their legs. But not any more, not if Fred Lee was any example; “I don’t want my beautiful black queen to be off slavin’ under some blue-eyed devil, it’s bad enough that one of us is forced to do it,” was one of the first beautiful things he’d said, and then followed that with other, equally beautiful statements and actions. “They be tryin’ to practice genocide on us and we be helpin’ ’em. Well, that shit must cease. We needs all the lil’ beautiful black sons ’n daughters we can get.”
Of all things! Fred Lee wanted a baby
She slid her hand down across her stomach with no pills, no coil, no diaphragm, no condoms, no what did they call it? coitus interruption. It shouldn’t be too much longer now, not the way they were keepin’ each other awake at night.
And, “Now here’s my plan, Bess baby all we have to do for a year is keep expenses to a bare ass minumum, don’t piss off any well, not too much dough, save every stinkin’ cent I make and rent a damed storefront, open up a day nursery or somethin’, you dig? Get off into somethin’ of our very own.”
“Fred, don’t you want some toast or somethin’ before you go out in the cold?”
He strode over to the side of the bed, his cap at a rakish angle, his topcoat buttoned, pulling on his gloves, his eyes sweeping from her hips to her face and back. “What I want, right now, would be somethin’ hotter than any piece o’ toast anybody ever had.”
She brushed the covers down from her shoulders, ignoring the cold, and reached her arms out to him.
He sprawled across her body and kissed her, deeply.
“Hey, I’ll be runnin’ late in a lil’ bit,” he whispered, pushing himself up reluctantly.
She released her hold around his shoulders just as reluctantly, whispering back, a tremor in her voice. “I’ll have a nice hot supper for you when you get in tonight.”
“You better have!” he said gruffly, humorously, patted her on the ass and split.
She sprawled herself out, goose pimpled arms played out beside her, aroused, in love, feeling for her man clattering down the stairs to catch a cold bus in the cold dawn for a trip to the cold, white suburbs.
“Fred?” she had asked him one night, having gone to the laundromat, grocery shopped, cleaned the apartment twice, and done a dozen other little things to make their life groovier. “Fred, they don’t hardly have any black people goin’ out as far as you do, do they?”
He had almost swallowed a fish bone laughing at her. “Oh wowwww! Baby you talk, you talk like one o’ them civil wahh niggers!”
“Well, you can call me whatchu will or may, all I know is how ugly some of those white dudes can be, ’specially the middle-aged ones way out there.”
“Bessie,” he had fixed her with a hard look, “I been through enough shit in my young life to get me ready for anything. Are you hip to the fact that I did time in ‘Nam and the joint? And I still ain’t but twenny-seven. I wish one o’ them silly motherfuckers would even look
at me wrong!”
She stared at the clock on the bedside stand. 7:05. He was on the bus now, probably napping to the first transfer point. She stuffed her arms back under the cover, wishing she could dream some money into being as she settled in for another hour’s sleep before her guilt complex forced her to get up, to do something, anything.
Think I’ll talk to him about workin’ again, this evenin’, at least until I get pregnant, she told herself and drifted back off mocking the cold sunshine of another day that was telling practically everybody else in the neighborhood to get up, get out and scuffle again.
Requiem for Mr. Chickens
The people of the community, honest johns, jiffy slicksters, peanut pushers, one-stop do-droppers, duece ’n’ dice guys, three-card molly players, innocents of all ages, children, mushmouth sisters, down home gossipers, snuff dippers, exotic religionists, fast steppers, high rollers and just plain ol’ folks, walked past the Spinning Top Dude, the wind shoveling cold air up their cracks, glancing, if they paid any attention to him at all, at his slow work with a beautiful hourglass top made of Swedish crystal, as he spooled it up and down a spider’s web string, singing sadly in his native Tagalog all the while.
They may have smiled discreetly or laughed quickly, openly, at the sight of his friend Mr. Chickens sprawled out on a pile of cold, crusted garbage, nose snuggled down in a bag of chicken bones ironically, either asleep or dead drunk.
“Hey, did y’all hear about Mr. Chickens!?”
Nathan Holt looked up glumly from his Tuesday evening newspaper, his slippered feet propped up on a box of packed chinaware.
“Yes, Byron, I heard about it. Wasn’t that a shame? They say the poor man laid out there all day before anybody came to get him,” Diane Holt answered, bustling around, packing.
“What did he die from?” Nathan asked, a cynical curl to his lips.
“They say he froze to death,” Byron answered sadly.
“Why didn’t his buddy, what do you all call him?”
“The Spinnin’ Top Dude.”
“Yeah, why didn’t he help him?”