by James Sallis
“Who always wears them? The elect, the preterite. Those who know what’s best for all of us-even when the rest of us don’t.”
“Why aren’t the police on this?”
“You’re kiddin’ me-right, Lew?”
Another man came into the restroom, looked around briefly, and left.
“There’s no way the police are gonna get notified. Who’s gonna trust them, something like this? Better listen to Malcolm, brother. Negroes have to solve their own problems. We can’t expect white society to.”
“Man, you run errands for one of the worst parts of white society. We both do.”
“Yeah. Well, chicken’s cheap, but it ain’t that cheap.”
“You’re telling me the Yoruba theft’s internal.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Blacks ripping off other blacks.’
“Way I see it, sure.”
“A power play of some kind? Something territorial?”
“Could be. It’s an old song, Lew. But I’ll ask around.”
“Thanks. I’ll be in touch.”
When I got back to the bar, Walsh had bought Doo-Wop a drink and was talking to him. Years later, in another bar, I heard Doo-Wop telling someone else who’d bought him a drink about the time he’d been a cop.
Chapter Fourteen
With the work I did, how I lived, there’s no way I was going to keep regular hours. I didn’t keep hours at all. They just loomed around me and passed by like Carnival floats. But my course through days and nights had zigzagged a lot worse than usual that past week or so, and maybe it was starting to wear me down.
Walsh and I walked out of the bar into streets suspended timelessly somewhere between dark and light. Everything was either blinding white or dead black, edges leached away by gray-like in old movies. For a moment I didn’t know if it was morning or evening. And for another terrifying moment I had no idea where I was.
Then Walsh’s hand fell on my shoulder and it all began settling back in place.
“I’ve got to get some sleep,” I said.
“Know what you mean.”
We walked back to his car, in one of those narrow downtown lots that look like they’ll hold maybe eight cars, but the attendants have twenty of them lined up in there.
“Talk to you later,” I said.
“The hell you will. Get in the car, Lewis.”
“I’m going to walk. Clear my head.”
“Man thinks he’s at the beach.”
“Then I better be watching where I step.”
Walsh laughed.
A plane had gone down in Lake Pontchartrain months back, and stories of swimmers treading on disembodied heads as they waded into high water were all the rage. Supposedly this had led to temporary closure of the beach. But the real problem was pollution, all the sewage and industrial waste we’d dumped into the lake. Authorities went on playing open-and-shut for years before they finally closed the beach down. I always wondered what happened to all the rides and buildings they had out there.
I held my hand up, touched finger briefly to forehead, and started off toward Poydras. Watching where I stepped.
Carborne, on bus, on foot, and trolleyback, people were whooshing out of the business district like air from a punctured balloon.
I turned up Magazine and walked along slowly, realizing that this one spinning about me now was a world, a life, I’d never know. Homes and families to go back to or leave, regular jobs, paychecks, routines, appointments, security. A fish’s life would hardly be more alien to me. I didn’t know what that said about me, I didn’t know how I felt about it, but I knew it was true.
I was coming up on a cross street when a man wearing a filthy suit stepped out from around the corner of the building ahead and directly into my path. Bent with age, he turned bleak red eyes to me and stared. Pressed to his chest with both hands he carried a paperback book as soiled and bereft as his suit. Are you one of the real ones or not? he demanded. And after a moment, when I failed to answer, he walked on, resuming his sotto voce conversation.
A chill passed through me. Somehow, indefinably, I felt, felt with the kind of baffled, tacit understanding we have in dreams, that I had just glimpsed one possible future self.
Chapter Fifteen
As it turned out, I didn’t have any trouble finding the guys in berets. I just had to open the door.
I’d stopped off at the Chinaman’s on Washington to walk a shrimp po-boy and got back to the house just as the sky went black and a hard rain started down. I undressed and propped myself up in bed with the sandwich, a pint of vodka and the book Straughter had stuffed in my mailbox. Rain slammed down outside. I dripped lettuce and dressing on the covers, sipped vodka and read about Meursault. He has this nothing job and life, doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral, later on kills an Arab because the sun’s so bright, and he’s writing all this down, or telling it, while awaiting his execution, but he still doesn’t feel anything. I couldn’t make a lot of sense out of it. So once the sandwich and most of the bottle were gone, so was I. I slid down into covers, turned off the light and was asleep before the afterimage on my retinas faded.
I got in two solid hours before someone started kicking my door.
Probably they weren’t kicking the door, but that’s how it sounded. I struggled to the surface and to my feet, stumbled downstairs to the door and opened it. Not mules at all. Two guys in black shirts and berets, one’s skin as black as his shirt, the other’s the color of cafe au lait. The rain had stopped. Light caught on water in trees, in pools on the ground.
“You Griffin?” the darker one said.
Apparently everyone in town knew where I lived.
“Why not. Sure.” I left the door open, turned, and walked into the kitchen. “You guys want coffee or something? A beer, maybe.”
There was coffee left over in the pot. I poured it in a saucepan and set it on a burner.
“We don’t use stimulants,” Au Lait said. He pushed the door shut behind him.
“Or abuse our bodies with alcohol,” Blackie added.
“Okay. You ever use chairs?” I waved toward those around the table.
“We’ll stand.”
“Your call.”
Steam rolled above the pan. I poured coffee into a mug, added milk. Blisters of fat formed on top. I sniffed the milk in the carton. Not bad. I’d drunk worse.
“So what can I do for you gentlemen? Since you didn’t drop by for coffee or to use my chairs.”
They looked at one another.
“Gentlemen,” Blackie said.
The other cocked his head briefly to one side and back. Strange world out here.
“You’ve been asking about … an incident,” Blackie said. “Took place at Dryades and Terpsichore?”
“Yeah?”
“Best stop asking,” Au Lait told me.
“It’s a local thing.” Blackie. Conciliatory. “No one needs waves.”
I sipped coffee.
“Sorry,” I said. “Nigguh ain spose ta unnerstand all this, right? Jus spose ta do what chu say.”
Blackie stared at me a moment. “It’s complicated, Griffin.”
“Sure is.”
“Discretion’s called for.”
“I think I may still have a little bit of that tucked away at the back of my underwear drawer. Some I saved just in case. You want me to go look?”
I dumped the rest of the coffee in the sink and pulled a Jax out of the icebox.
“What do you know?” Blackie said.
A reasonable question.
I told him.
“Where do you think all that money came from, Lewis?”
“Contributions, I heard.”
“Right. And Tar Baby came on strong in the primaries.” He picked up my bottle and took a healthy swig, set it back down in the circle it came out of.
“Body handling the abuse okay?” I said.
“Yeah, they told us you’re a smart mouth.”
“And a tough g
uy.”
I shrugged. “Hobbies.”
“Say no one pushes you around, or stops you when you don’t want to be stopped.”
“I have breaks and bruises to prove it.”
“You’ve also got about the strangest reputation I ever rubbed up against. I asked around. Three out of four people tell me you’re crazy as batshit, the original bad news, cross the street. Then the fifth or sixth one I talk to says he’d trust you with his life.”
“Kind of work I do, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.”
Blackie nodded. “So I figure it like this: your own way, you’re a soldier too.”
“For about ten minutes-but I blinked.”
“What?”
“They threw me out.”
He smiled. There was no humor in the smile. “Exactly. They’ve thrown us all out. For three hundred years. Out of their buildings, their neighborhoods, their schools, their professions, their establishment, their society. That’s what all this is about, right?”
For a time when I was a kid back in Arkansas, every Saturday night someone blackened the face of the Doughboy statue on Cherry Street with shoe polish. And each Sunday morning one of the jail trustees was out there scrubbing it clean. You see how it is, Lewis, my father said. We raise his children for him, cook for him, bring up his crops, butcher his hogs, even fight his wars for him, and he still won’t acknowledge our existence, we’re still invisible.
“Revolution,” Au Lait said reverently.
“Lots of small revolutions,” Blackie went on, “all taking place on their own. Local groups, communities, brotherhoods, churches. All over the country. People helping bring it along in their own way. People like us. Wave after wave coming together, growing.”
“This guy that’s been shooting people: he one of your waves? One of your revolutionaries?”
“Absolutely not. We abhor and decry violence in any form.”
“Unusual attitude for a soldier.”
“There’s more than one kind of soldier, Griffin. Some only keep the peace.”
Au Lait: “That’s why we’re here.”
It was a thought I’d had before: few things are more frightening than a person who’s rendered his life down to this single thing. Religion, sex or alcohol, politics, racism-it doesn’t much matter what the thing is. You look into his eyes and see the covered light, sense something of the very worst we can come to, individually and collectively. But one of the things that’s even scarier is people who haven’t rendered their lives down to anything at all.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I came in in the middle of this movie. I don’t know the plot. Who the characters are. Why everyone’s zipping around so purposefully onscreen.”
Blackie thought it over. “Our intelligence people tell us that you were brought in on Yoruba’s side.”
“In which case your intelligence-with, believe me, no personal slur intended-is sadly lacking. So perhaps you’ll at least raise the level of mine?”
“Then what’s your interest in this?” Blackie said.
“I’ve already told you. The shooter.”
“He has nothing to do with it.”
“That’s my point. But after two hours’ sleep in, I don’t know, three or four days, I’ve got a couple of guys in funny hats standing here in my kitchen either trying to serve me slices off tomorrow’s pie-in-the-sky or threatening me. Hard to tell.”
“You’re not working for Yoruba?”
“I’m not working for anyone. I have a few dollars put away that just might get me through the next week or so, and not much prospect of any more coming in-with rent and groceries happening soon. But a friend of mine went down in front of me. That’s not history or half-assed political doctrine, that’s real. It’s not going to go away. I won’t let it.”
Blackie didn’t say anything for a while. Au Lait walked over to the window and stood looking out.
“Maybe I’ve misjudged you,” Blackie said.
“It happens.”
He held out his hand. “Leo Tate. That’s Clifford.” Au Lait glanced back from the window and nodded. “Good to meet you both,” I said.
Chapter Sixteen
As I look back now, the whole thing’s like a cross-country bus ride, long stretches of inaction punctuated by brief release, the feverish bustle of stops.
There were the accommodations of early years when the walls first started giving way, when suddenly we were able to sit at lunch counters, to enter stores, theaters, rooms previously denied us-when we began to become visible. And when we were joyful at these changes.
I remember bathrooms marked Colored disappearing. I remember walking through front doors for the first time in my life.
We breathed the high, rich air of social challenge, justice, freedom, inalienable rights. But that road, we discovered, penetrated just so far into the wilderness. It ended abruptly, without fanfare or warning, pavement abutting implacable forest. Here ships fall off the edge of the world. Here there be tigers.
Then a great rage. Calls for revolution. Roving patrols of self-appointed guardians. Armies of liberation operating out of vans, storefronts, project tenements.
Later, depending who described it, an embracing of or assault on local politics. Councilmen in place, city and state representatives, a mayor or two. Increments of power.
And finally this unspoken apartheid we live with still.
While the rage turns back on itself. Gnaws away at individuals, families, communities, cities. Begins to consume them.
That evening Straughter came by and spirited me off to Dillard University where we stood close together among similar huddles of others sipping wine from plastic cups and choking down rubbery cheese cubes. An usher in a jacket shiny with wear pushed open double doors giving us access to the small auditorium. Within minutes the room filled to capacity. Latecomers stood shuffling feet, coats over arms, at the back of the hall.
A black man in his fifties, light-skinned, wearing the collegiate uniform of chinos, vest sweater, chambray shirt, tweed sportcoat, came onstage and spoke inaudibly into the microphone there on the podium. He looked off left, shook his head, tried again.
“… welcome you to the first in a series of programs of lectures, readings and performances celebrating African-American art.
“I’m John Dent, and I teach literature-English, we’re taught to call it-here at Dillard. Over the years I’ve likely taught many of you here tonight in this room. I may have tried to teach others.”
Polite laughter.
“Those of you who managed to stay awake while I talked about Claude McKay, Mark Twain, Zora Hurston, Richard Wright, Hemingway or Jimmy Baldwin no doubt will remember that I’ve a special place in my heart and mind for the man I’m about to introduce to you.
“And now I warn you: prepare yourselves.
“Chester Himes is angry. Very angry.
“Chester Himes has been angry for a long time. Those of us who bothered to listen began understanding just how angry he was, how damaged, with his first novels: If He Hollers, Lonely Crusade, The Third Generation.
“Then Himes, like many another before him, discouraged, despairing, fled these United States for residency abroad. He lives now, has lived for some time, in France. And from there he’s sent back to us a stream of project reports, communicados, indictments: mirrors showing this country’s true face.
“First there was The Primitive, dropped like a grenade into the maw of fifties placidity. Truly dangerous, and a novel to match America’s scant handful of almost perfect novels.”
Professor Dent cleared his throat. Swept his eyes over those gathered before him. This was something he knew how to do. He was good at it. There were not many things in life he’d been good at.
“When I was a child, growing up on the banks of the Mississippi, we would catch alligator gar, prop their mouths open with sticks and put them back in the water. They’d rise and dive, rise, dive, till finally they went down for good. Submarines, we cal
led these drowning monsters.
“And that’s The Primitive. Subversive, ferocious. Rising out of depths America has never imagined, never acknowledged, and sinking back into them. Teeth bared. Dying.”
Another purposeful pause.
“More recently Himes has given us several short novels featuring Harlem detectives Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. Originally written for French publisher Gallimard at Marcel Duhamel’s instigation-written for quick money and quickly, unabashed potboilers in the tradition of Faulkner’s Sanctuary, a novel which greatly influenced them-these books appear in the States in paperback only, from various publishers, and on racks in drugstores alongside such monuments of American culture as I, The Jury, Housewife Hustlers and the current month’s new Perry Mason.
“In these books Chester Himes continues to document, as no one else has done, the range of the African-American struggle, from subjection and capitulation to challenge and change.
“I submit to you now that in writing these books-‘telling it like it is,’ our children would say-Chester Himes, again and again, has committed nothing less than. Acts. Of. Absolute. Heroism.”
Stepping back from the podium, Dent began applauding. Applause caught here and there in the audience and spread.
The man who shambled onstage did not look heroic. More than anything else, he looked tired. He was tall, light on his feet and subtly elegant in the way that dancers often are, with delicate features, close-cropped hair, medium skin. He wore a black suit that fit well enough to have been tailored, navy-and-maroon tie, starched white shirt. When the applause died and he looked up, his eyes were dark, intense and full, glimmers of emotion and understanding spilling out from them even as they swept in the finest details of the physical world around them.
Vitriol? Impassioned speech? Anger?
You better believe it.
But at the same time a rare truth: this gentle, cultivated voice, at first so low we could barely hear it, urging us on toward what we might be, imploring us to settle for nothing less than the best within us. To recognize that we had been set against ourselves, turned into our own worst enemy. Whenever walls get torn down, he said, the bricks are simply carried off elsewhere, another wall put up.