Her expression didn’t change, but she threaded her hands together, clasping them so tightly that her unpainted nails reddened. “Probably belonged to my grandson. Didn’t Irene tell you that?”
Irene, apparently, was the other Mrs. Pruitt.
“No, ma’am,” I said. “We’re both sure it didn’t belong to her son.”
Minnie Pruitt’s eyes narrowed. Her lower lip trembled. “Are you having fun with me? Because if you are—”
“Ma’am, I’m sorry,” I said. “But I found it in a wall, along with three skeletons. One had been shot in the head.”
“Oh, my God.” She ran a hand over her mouth. “Oh, my God.”
“The shirt wasn’t on one of the skeletons that we could tell. But it was there with one. It might’ve been stolen, or it might’ve been someone’s clothing. We don’t know. Your daughter-in-law told me your husband disappeared when your son was just a baby.”
“When Wayne was just a baby, yeah. Jasper was five or so, and Jolene, she was three.” Her eyes were lined with tears. “Only Junius, he wouldn’t run from us. He loved those babies. He loved them.”
“I’m sorry to bring up old pain, ma’am.” I waited.
She blinked hard, forcing the tears back by sheer will. “You think that’s him you found?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t even know he’d been missing until I spoke to your daughter-in-law a little while ago.”
“How’d you track her down?” Mrs. Pruitt asked, suddenly suspicious.
“Your grandson went to school with a friend of mine,” I said. “He remembered the unusual name. I thought I’d check to see if it was a family name.”
“You knew that body didn’t belong to my grandson?” she asked.
I nodded. “It’s too old, ma’am. It’s been there a long time.”
She pursed her lips. The tears appeared again, and then faded back. Then she nodded. “I’m tired of the ma’am. They’ll all tease me out there when I get back, so we’d best be on a first-name basis. I’m Minnie.”
“Bill,” I said.
“You don’t look like a Bill,” she said. “You got trouble in your eyes.”
I smiled, and decided to take a risk. “My friends call me Smokey.”
“Now, that’s a man’s name.” She leaned back in her chair. “You have to understand. Juni left me with three little children. It was 1919, and I didn’t have a pot to piss in. The only money we had was from Juni’s work, and that went away the minute he did.”
I nodded.
“He wouldn’ta done that. I told folks he wouldn’ta done that, not with the babies. He didn’t even want to enlist and leave his children. He certainly wouldn’ta run out one day and never come back. Something happened to him, I said, and everyone nodded, but no one did nothing.”
I felt on shaky historical ground. World War One was not my specialty. I knew it had ended in 1918, but that was about all I knew.
“Did you go to the police?” I asked.
She gaped at me, revealing a mouthful of gold teeth which made me think, uncomfortably, of those gold teeth in that attic room. “Lord, son, you’re not from here, are you?”
“No,” I said. “I came here almost two years ago now.”
“Well, in 1919 the police was trying to slaughter anyone with skin as dark as ours. We spent our nights that August on rooftops, with rifles and field glasses, hoping they wouldn’t come into the neighborhood.”
I frowned. Fred Hampton had mentioned something about this. I had ignored it as Black Panther rhetoric. It surprised me to hear similar words come out of this elderly woman’s mouth.
“You were on a roof?” I asked, mostly because I couldn’t picture it.
“When I had to be,” she said. “I tried to stay with the babies, but the nights was hot, and I liked to be near Juni. He was always up there, protecting us, him and the vets, the good shots. They killed a lot of police from up there. Our block was considered the safest.”
“Where was that?” I asked.
“Ah, honey,” she said softly. “That neighborhood’s gone. They done tore it down so they could put up projects and a damn freeway. That’s how they still treat us.”
“I know,” I said.
“And you ask how I could be on a roof with a shotgun,” she said.
“I don’t know what provoked it.”
Her brown eyes flashed, and I saw in that moment the strong young woman she had once been. “It wasn’t just me and Juni. It was all of us. They were trying to massacre us that summer, and we held them back.”
“The police?” I asked.
“The whites.” She hissed the word, and I heard hatred in it. Deep, powerful hatred. “You don’t know the history, so lemme give you some, then you can understand a little.”
I nodded.
“It started with the Great Migration. I hear the South in your voice. I know you know about it. You probably got relatives who come up here, relatives who vanished into the terrifying north.”
I smiled. “I have a few.”
“The Migration started in the early teens. I was already here. I had family here and so did Juni. We were born here. Our people came after the War—”
And by that I knew she meant the Civil War, which was, to our people, the Great War, not World War One.
“—and established themselves south of the stockyards. The Irish in Bridgeport, they hated us more than anyone else because they were the next ones on the rung up the ladder. You know how that works. If you’re getting spit on, spit on the people lower than you so you feel better.”
I nodded again.
“The population doubled, tripled, year after year, till finally we was busting out of the ghetto they’d let us live in.” Her language got coarser the farther back she seemed to go. She wasn’t really seeing me any more. She was staring into her own past. “We tried to move to new neighborhoods, but they bombed us out, burned our houses, and murdered our children. Does that sound familiar?”
Then she did look at me.
“It sounds like the North wasn’t much better than where we came from.”
“Ah,” she said softly. “But it was better. We got jobs. Real jobs with real wages. That’s why the Irish hated us so much. They had to work side by side with us, get paid the same amount, live in the same kinds of houses. Why, if they weren’t careful, they’d become just like us, and white folks just couldn’t stomach that, now could they?”
“I take it this all came to a head,” I said.
“Summer of 1919. Hottest summer I remember. We were sleeping on the roof with other families by May. By June we thought we was gonna die of the heat. Juni, he was spending half his salary on ice, just so I could put it on the children, cool them down.”
She shook her head, looked down, and finally seemed to give in. She rubbed her eyes.
“That summer, things were worse for a lot of reasons. Prohibition started July 1 — no more alcohol, and businesses were going under.”
I frowned. Now I had to show my ignorance. “I thought prohibition started in 1920.”
“Illinois went dry by state referendum. That’s how we got all our gangsters. They were up and running already when the entire country went dry. They had systems and men in place, ways of running the liquor, and Chicago, being the center of the country and a major transportation hub, could act as a supplier. I know lots of men who could only get jobs working that, and there was no shame in it, I thought. Craziness, it was, taking one of people’s only pleasures.”
She glanced at me, as if taking a measure of me.
“So we have no alcohol, and our men’ve just come back from the war. It ended in 1918, you know.”
“I know,” I said, feeling some relief that I had that right at least.
“And the soldiers were decommissioned, coming home to parades and such in January, February. They had pride, those men did. They went to Europe, learned that not everyone saw them as inferior. They thought they’d served and they c
ome home and they were just the same niggers they’d been before.” She crossed her arms and leaned against the desktop. “Only this time, they weren’t gonna take it. White man calls them a name, they answer back. It was worse in our neighborhood, because we were full of Black Devils.”
I opened my mouth to ask for clarification of that term, and she spoke before I had a chance to.
“Black Devils. The Eighth Illinois. They were such a fierce group, the Germans nicknamed them Black Devils. Most of them got the Croix de Guerre from the French—”
And she pronounced it as if she spoke fluent French.
“—and twenty-one of them got the Distinguished Service Cross from our government. Most of those men came home to my neighborhood. Juni was ashamed he hadn’t gone with them. He didn’t say much, but his eyes did. He would always hug his babies, though, when I’d ask about it, and tell me it was worth it. I wasn’t ever sure he really believed it.”
I frowned, trying to put all of this together.
“It was the Black Devils that taught us sniping,” she said. “They’d show us how to lie flat, keep our eyes partly closed and the lights off, how to use the rifles…but I’m ahead of myself.”
Hector peered into the window, startling me. She didn’t even see him. He stared for a minute, saw that she was talking, and then moved back into the kitchen proper. A small group of men had moved a card table into the middle of the room and seemed to be playing a heated game of gin rummy.
“Lots of things happened that July, most never hitting the papers, and I could keep you for three days telling you all about it.” She gave me a tired smile. “But you got work and you didn’t come here for no history lesson. So I’ll cut to it. On July twenty-seventh, four boys decided to go swimming.”
I felt a shiver run down my back. So many Southern stories started like this, and they all ended badly.
“They weren’t little little. They were fourteen, fifteen, thirteen, somewhere in there. Not quite bright enough to realize they could get into trouble sure as they were breathing.”
Just a little older than Jimmy. I felt my entire body stiffen.
“The beaches was segregated — not by law, like in the South, but by custom. The same custom that was keeping us out of new neighborhoods, the custom that gets reinforced with fists and bombs and guns.”
Her voice got stronger as she spoke of this, but her gaze seemed farther and farther away.
“Those boys took a raft out deep, and they drifted on the current, away from the black beaches and into a white area. And you know what happened then, right?”
“They got killed,” I said.
“Only one of them, but that was enough. He was stoned, if you can believe it. Rocks thrown at him till he got hit on the head and drowned. The other boys went back to our beach for help, got the lifeguard, and a black policeman to arrest the man who threw the rocks. Only a white policeman wouldn’t let the arrest happen. It got ugly from there. Fighting and riots and accusations. Someone started shooting, and there you had it. A race riot, they called it. It went on for nearly a week, and at the end, they say, sixteen people died and more than five hundred was injured.”
“They say?” I asked.
“They. The official whites, the counters. I heard it was closer to a hundred dead and a thousand injured, but who counts us anyway, right?”
“That was when you went on the roofs?” I asked.
“Better to die nobly, fighting those that would kill you, than like a hog in a pen with mad dogs circling outside.” She shook her head, smiled faintly, and cursed. “I used to be able to quote that for real. And now I can’t remember a line, just the gist. You know it?”
I shook my head.
“Claude McKay’s poem. They didn’t teach it to you in school?”
“We learned James Weldon Johnson, ma’am.”
“Minnie,” she snapped.
“Sorry,” I said. She was so like a school teacher at the moment that calling her by her first name felt wrong.
“You go look it up. McKay was living here. He published it in The Liberator that summer. It caught how we was all feeling. If they were going to slaughter us and burn our neighborhoods, then we’d go down fighting. It was better than just letting them kill us.”
“Your husband disappeared then?” I asked.
“Lord, no,” she said. “We got through that. The city calmed, as much as it could. The whites got afraid. The Bridgeport gangs, they invaded us first, and then we went after them. In the sixteen dead — the ones they counted were mostly Bridgeport boys.”
She seemed proud of that. Then her gaze met mine and she was back in the present.
“That’s why Mayor Daley leveled our neighborhoods, you know,” she said. “Retaliation.”
“He remembers that?” I asked.
“Remembers, hell,” she said. “He was in the gang that started the murders. He says he wasn’t in the riot, but you go look it up. He became head of that gang right after. How does that happen to a boy who won’t get involved? He hates us. He’d kill us all if he could.”
She spat those last words. She hated the mayor as well.
“You look it up,” she said. “They call it the Chicago Race Riot, like it was our fault. Race. That’s always a code word for Negro.”
“But your husband didn’t disappear then.”
She shook her head. “The city was afraid, afraid it would get worse and we’d burn them out of their homes or something, I don’t know. But things calmed, more or less. And in September the weather eased. By October, things wasn’t exactly back to normal, but they were better. That feeling — you know that feeling, that tenterhooks feeling?—”
I nodded.
“It was gone by then. The mothers in the neighborhood, I remember us talking, saying maybe it would be safe to take our babies out of the Black Belt now and again. Maybe by Christmas, we thought. Maybe then.”
Her voice faded. She looked at the wall. I realized she was fighting tears again.
“He went to work,” she said, so softly I could barely hear her. “He went to work on Wednesday and he never come back. And no one knew what happened. No one would tell me.”
“Where did he work?” I asked, even though I had a hunch, a hunch I wasn’t sure I wanted to have.
She blinked, seemed to gather herself, and then straightened, looking at me with a mixture of sadness and shame.
“He was the piano player to a coon shouter,” she said.
A coon shouter. I hadn’t heard that expression since I was a boy. A coon shouter was a white person, usually male, who sang Negro-inspired songs while dressed in blackface. Al Jolson was probably the most famous coon shouter of them all.
“So he worked in a white speakeasy,” I said.
She nodded tightly, as if she expected me to say more, say something judgmental. No wonder she had trouble finding help. She had been right about people looking down on each other, and the only thing worse than a coon shouter from a black point of view were the blacks who helped him get rich off our music.
“Was that speakeasy Colosimo’s?” I asked.
She closed her eyes. “You found him, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said softly. “I think we probably did.”
THIRTY-NINE
The idea that her husband’s body might have been found broke through Minnie Pruitt’s tough facade. She didn’t cry — she’d been living with this too long to cry — but she was silent for a moment.
I didn’t press her. I waited until she was ready to talk again.
“Skeleton,” she finally said. “That means there’s not much to identify.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She didn’t yell at me for calling her ma’am. She probably didn’t even notice.
“So you need something else to go on, maybe things he was carrying, things he wore.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She nodded, then sighed. “I can’t help much. I sewed his name into everything he owned b
ecause he had a little uniform he was supposed to wear at work — his trained-monkey uniform, he called it — and because he was colored, he wasn’t allowed to take it out of the building. He had to change there.”
“Can you describe it?” I asked.
“I never saw it. I wasn’t supposed to go to the Levee.” The way she said that implied that she had.
“But you did.”
She nodded. “After he … disappeared … died, I did. I went two nights later, found someone to watch my children and took the trolley up. They wouldn’t let me in.”
“Colosimo’s wouldn’t let you in?” I asked.
“Yes.” Her gaze met mine. The sadness and humiliation were back. That moment was as alive for her as this current one was. “I couldn’t go in the front door, and no one would let me in the back, so I sat there, in the alley, watching people come and go, and asking about my husband.”
I could just imagine her, frightened and alone, in the worst section of town, trying to get information on her husband. Clutching at people’s arms, asking them for help.
“Finally, one of the busboys — who wasn’t a boy, he had to be older than you are now — he come out and pulled me aside. They probably sent him because he was colored, as dark-skinned as my Juni. He said he ain’t seen Juni for two days, and when someone don’t show up for work, he got fired.”
It sounded like she was quoting now, but she was staring at me.
“He didn’t expect my Juni back ever. So I asked if anyone seen him leave that night, and no one did. At least no one I talked to. No one seen him after the last show, no one knew what happened.”
“What about his clothes?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I wasn’t thinking clear. I never did ask. I was thinking he walked home, got beat, and was lying in a ditch somewhere, dying. I got folks looking for him, but they never did find him. No one did, and people started looking at me funny. They started thinking maybe he had enough of me and the children and had gone off. It wouldn’ta been hard. The train stations weren’t far from the Levee. That’s one of the reasons it opened where it did. And the more people said that…”
Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel Page 24