He ran after her, trailing blood from his face and hands.
“Don’t let ’im catch you, baby,” someone called encouragement from the dark.
The train overtook them, thundered by overhead, shaking the earth, shaking her running ass, shaking the blood from his wounds like scattered rain drops. It started grinding to a stop. The thunder terrified her; the brackish sound filled her mouth with acid.
She threw the knife into the gutter and ran past the line of waiting taxicabs, the cruising whores, the colored loiterers; turned, without stopping, through the side entrance into the waiting room, ran back to the women’s toilet underneath the stairs, and locked herself inside.
The motley group of people standing about, sitting on the wooden benches, scarcely paid any attention. It wasn’t unusual to see a woman running in that area.
But when the man hit the door, bleeding like a stuck bull, everybody sat up.
“I’m going to kill dat whore,” he raved as he burst into the waiting room.
A colored brother looked at him and said, “She sho gave him some love-licks.”
The man was halfway to the toilet when the white detective ran up and clutched him by both arms.
“Hold on, Brother Jones, hold on. What’s the trouble?”
The man twisted in the detective’s grip, but didn’t break free.
“Listen, white folks, I don’t want no trouble. That whore cut me and I’m going to get some of her.”
“Hold on, hold on, brother. If she cut you we’ll get her. But you’re not going to get anybody. Understand?”
The colored detective sauntered up, looked indifferently at the bleeding man.
“Who cut him?”
“He said some woman did.”
“Where’d she go?”
“She ran into the women’s toilet.”
The colored detective asked the cut man, “What does she look like?”
“Bright woman in a black coat and a red dress.”
The colored detective laughed.
“Better let those bright whores alone, Daddy-o.”
He turned, laughing, and went back toward the women’s toilet.
Two uniformed cops from a patrol car came in quickly, as if expecting trouble. They looked disappointed when they didn’t find any.
“Call the ambulance, will you?” the white detective said to one of them.
The cop hastened out to the patrol car to call the police ambulance on the two-way radio. The other cop just stood.
People gathered in a circle to stare at the big cut black man dripping red blood on the brown tiled floor. A porter came up with a wet mop and looked disapprovingly at the bloody floor.
Nobody thought it was unusual. It happened once or twice every night in that station. The only thing missing was that no one was dead.
“What did she cut you for?” the white detective asked.
“Just mean, that’s why. She’s just a mean whore.”
The detective looked as though he agreed.
The colored detective found the toilet door locked. He knocked. “Open up, Bright-eyes.”
No one answered. He knocked again.
“It’s the law, honey. Don’t make me have to get the stationmaster to get this door open or papa’s going to be rough.”
The inside bolt was slipped back. He pushed and the door opened.
Imabelle faced him from the mirror. She had washed and powdered her face, straightened her hair, rouged her lips, wiped off her high-heeled black suede shoes, and looked as though she’d just stepped from a band box.
He flashed his badge and grinned at her.
She said complainingly, “Can’t a lady clean up a little in this joint without you cops busting in?”
He looked around. The only other occupants were two white women of middle age, who were cowering in a far corner.
“Are you the woman who’s having trouble with that man?” he asked Imabelle, trying to trick a confession from her.
She didn’t go for it. “Having trouble with what man?” She screwed up her face and looked indignant. “I came in here to clean up. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Come on, Baby, don’t give papa any trouble,” he said, looking her over as though he might consider laying her.
She gave him a look from her big brown bedroom eyes and flashed her pearly smile as though it might be a good consideration.
“If any man says he’s having trouble with me, you can just say that’s his own fault.”
“I know just what you mean, Baby, but you shouldn’t have cut him.”
“I ain’t cut nobody,” she said, switching out into the waiting room.
“That’s the whore who cut me,” the man said, pointing a finger dripping with blood.
The morbid crowd turned to stare at her.
“Man, I’d have cut her first,” some joker said. “If you know what I mean.”
Imabelle ignored the crowd as she pushed her way forward. She walked up and faced the cut man and looked him straight in the face.
“This the man you mean?” she asked the colored detective.
“That’s the one who’s cut.”
“I ain’t never seen this man before in my life.”
“You lying whore!” the man shouted.
“Take it easy, Daddy-o,” the colored detective warned.
“What’d I cut you for, if I cut you?” Imabelle challenged.
The onlookers laughed.
One colored brother quoted:
Black gal make a freight train jump de track.
But a yaller gal make a preacher Ball de Jack.
“Come on, where’s the knife?” the white detective said to Imabelle. “I’m getting tired of this horseplay.”
“I’d better search the washroom,” the colored detective said.
“She throwed it away outside,” the cut man said, “I seen her throw it into the street, before she ran inside.”
“Why didn’t you pick it up?” the detective asked.
“Who for?” the cut man asked in surprise. “I don’t need no knife to kill that whore. I can kill her with my hands.”
The detective stared at him.
“For evidence. You say she cut you.”
“Let’s get it,” one of the patrol cops said to the other and they went outside to look for the knife.
“Course she cut me. You can see for yourself,” the cut man said.
The crowd laughed and started drifting away.
“Do you want to make a charge against this woman?”
“Charge? I’m charging her now. You can see for yourself she cut me.”
Some joker said, “If she didn’t cut you, you better see a doctor about those leaky veins.”
“What are you holding me for?” Imabelle said to the white detective. “I tell you I ain’t never seen this man before. He’s got me mistaken for somebody else.”
Another team of patrol-car cops came on the scene, looking at the cut black man with the curiosity of whites as they drew off their heavy gloves.
“You are to take these people to the precinct,” the white detective said. “The man wants to enter a charge of assault against this woman.”
“Jesus, I don’t want him bleeding all over the car,” one of the cops complained.
The whine of an ambulance sounded from the distance.
“Here comes the ambulance now,” the colored detective said.
“Why they going to take me in when I haven’t done anything?” Imabelle appealed to him.
He looked at her sympathetically. “I feel for you but I can’t reach you, Baby,” he said.
“If you prove your innocence you can sue him for false arrest,” the white detective said.
“Well, ain’t that something?” she said angrily.
Outside, the two uniformed cops searched in the gutter for the missing knife. Two colored men standing on the sidewalk watched them silently.
Finally one of the cops thought to
ask them, “Did either of you men see anyone pick up a knife around here?”
“I seen a colored boy pick it up,” one of the men admitted.
The cops reddened.
“God damn it, didn’t you see us looking for it?” one asked angrily.
“You didn’t say what you was looking for, Boss.”
“By this time the bastard is probably blocks away,” the second cop complained.
“Where’d he go?” the first cop asked.
The man pointed up Park Avenue.
Both cops gave him a hard threatening look.
“What did he look like?”
The colored man turned to his companion.
“What he look like, you think?”
The second colored man disapproved of his companion’s volunteering information to white cops about a colored boy.
“I didn’t see him,” he said, showing his disapproval.
Both cops turned to stare at him in rage.
“You didn’t seen him,” one mimicked. “Well, God damn it, you’re both under arrest.”
The cops escorted the two colored men around to the front of the station and put them on the back seat of their patrol car while they got into the front seat. Passersby glanced at them with brief curiosity, and passed on.
The cops turned the car up Park Avenue on the wrong side to show their power. The red light beamed like an evil eye. They drove slowly, flashing the adjustable spotlights along the sidewalks, into the faces of pedestrians, into doorways, cracks, corners, vacant lots, searching for a colored boy who had picked up a bloodstained knife among the half-million colored people in Harlem.
They were just in time to see a panel delivery truck with a mangled rear fender turn the corner into 130th Street, but they weren’t interested in it.
“What shall we do with these black sons of bitches?” one of the cops asked the other.
“Let ’em go.”
The driver stopped the car and said, “Get out.”
The two colored men got out and walked back toward the station.
When they arrived the ambulance was driving off, taking the cut man to Harlem Hospital so his wounds could be stitched before sending him on to the precinct station to prefer charges against Imabelle.
At the same time the patrol car carrying Imabelle to the precinct station was going east on 125th Street. It passed a hearse that turned slowly from Madison Avenue. But there was nothing suspicious about a hearse traveling about the streets in the early hours of morning. Folks were dying in Harlem at all hours.
The patrol cops turned Imabelle over to the desk sergeant to be held until the cut man came to prefer charges.
“You mean I’ve got to stay here until—”
“Shut up and sit down.” The desk sergeant cut her off in a bored voice.
She started to act indignant, thought better of it, crossed the room to one of the wooden benches against the wall, and sat quietly with crossed legs showing six inches of creamy yellow thighs, as she contemplated her red-lacquered fingernails.
While she was sitting there, Grave Digger came out of the captain’s office. He wore a white patch of bandage beneath his pushed-back hat and an expression of unadulterated danger. He looked at Imabelle casually, then did a double-take, recognizing her. He walked slowly across the room and looked down at her.
She gave him her bedroom look, hitched her red skirt higher, exposing more of her creamy yellow thighs.
“Well, bless my big flat feet,” he said. “Baby-o, I got news for you.”
She gave him her pearly smile of promise of pleasant things to come.
He slapped her with such savage violence it spun her out of the chair to land in a grotesque splay-legged posture on her belly on the floor, the red dress hiked so high it showed the black nylon panties she wore.
“And that ain’t all,” he said.
20
When Jackson turned into 125th Street from Madison Avenue, headed toward the station baggage-room, he was driving as cautiously as if the street were paved with eggs.
He was in a slow sweat from the crown of his burr head to the white soles of his black feet. Worrying about Imabelle, wondering if that woman of his was safe, worrying about her trunk full of gold ore, hoping nothing would go wrong now that he had rescued it from those thugs.
He was steering with one hand, crossing himself with the other.
One moment he was praying, “Lord, don’t quit me now.”
The next he was moaning the lowdown blues:
If trouble was money
I’d be a millionaire.…
A patrol car passed him, headed toward the precinct station, going like a bat out of hell. It went by so fast he didn’t see Imabelle in the back seat. He thought they were taking some thug to jail. He hoped it was that bastard Slim.
An ambulance shot past. He skinned his eyes, his sweat turning cold, trying to see who was riding in it, and almost rammed into a taxi ahead. He caught a glimpse of the silhouette of a man and was relieved. Weren’t Imabelle, whoever it was.
He wondered where that woman of his could be. He was worrying so hard about her that he almost ran down a big fat black man doing the locomotive shuffle diagonally across the street.
Stood on the corner with her feets soaking wet
Begging each and every man she met …
Jackson eased the hearse past Big Fats as though he were picking his way through a brier patch. He didn’t open his mouth again. Couldn’t tell what a drunk might do next. He didn’t want any trouble until he got the trunk checked and safe from Goldy.
He had to drive past the front of the station, circle it on Park Avenue, and come down beside the baggage room entrance from the rear.
By the time he had pulled to the curb before the baggage-room door, behind the line of loading taxicabs, Big Fats had navigated the dangerous rapids of 125th Street traffic and was shuffling up the crowded sidewalk beside the lighted windows of the waiting room, heading up Park Avenue toward the Harlem River.
None of them said anything to Big Fats. No need to borrow trouble with an able-bodied colored drunk the size of Big Fats. Especially if his eyes were red. That’s the way race riots were started.
But it made Jackson nervous to have the police congregating in the vicinity while he was checking the trunk of gold ore. He was so nervous as it was he was jumping from his shadow. He left the motor running from habit. When he got out to go to the baggage room, Big Fats spied him.
“Little brother!” Big Fats shouted, shuffling up to Jackson and putting his big fat arm about Jackson’s short fat shoulders.
“Short-black-and-fat like me. You tell ’em, short and fatty. Can’t trust no fat man, can they?”
Jackson threw the arm off angrily and said, “Why don’t you behave yourself. You’re a disgrace to the race.”
Big Fats put the locomotive in reverse, let it idle on the track, building up steam.
“What race, Little Brother. You want to race?”
“I mean our race. You know what I mean.”
Big Fats bucked his red-veined eyes at Jackson in amazement.
“You mean to say you’d let ’em trust you with they women?” he shouted.
“Go get sober,” Jackson shouted back with uncontrollable irritation, went around Big Fats like skirting a mountain, hurried into the baggage room without looking back.
Big Fats forgot him instantly, began shuffling up the street again.
Jackson found a colored porter.
“I got a trunk I want to check.”
The porter looked at Jackson and became angry just because Jackson had spoken to him.
“Where you going to?” he asked gruffly.
“Chicago.”
“Where’s your ticket at?”
“I ain’t got my ticket yet. I just want to check my trunk until I get my ticket.”
The porter went into a raving fury.
“Can’t check no trunk nowhere if you ain’t got no ticket,” he shou
ted at the top of his voice. “Don’t you know that?”
“What are you getting so mad about? You act like we’re God’s angry people.”
The porter hunched his shoulders as though he were going to take a punch at Jackson.
“I ain’t mad. Does I look mad?”
Jackson backed away.
“Listen, I don’t want to check it nowhere. I just want to check it here until I come down tonight to get my ticket.”
“You don’t want to check it nowhere. Man, what’s the matter with you?”
“If you don’t want to check it I’ll go see the man,” Jackson threatened.
The man was the white baggage-master.
The porter didn’t want any trouble with the man.
“You means you want to check it,” he said, giving in grudgingly. “Why didn’t you say you just wanted to check it instead of coming in here talking ’bout going to Chicago?”
He snatched up a hand truck as though he’d take it and beat Jackson’s brains out with it.
“Where’s it at?”
“Outside.”
The porter wheeled the hand truck onto the sidewalk and looked up and down the street.
“I don’t see no trunk.”
“It’s in the hearse there.”
He looked through the windows of the hearse and saw the trunk on the coffin rack.
“What you doing carrying a trunk around in a hearse for?” he asked suspiciously.
“We use it to carry everything.”
“Well, get it out then,” the porter said, still suspicious. “I ain’t checking no trunk in no hearse where dead folks has been.”
“Aw, man, Lord in heaven. Don’t be so evil. The trunk’s heavy. Ain’t you going to help me lift it down?”
“I don’t get paid for unloading no trunks from no hearses. I checks ’em when they is on the street.”
“I’ll help you git it out,” a colored loiterer offered.
Jackson and the loiterer walked to the back of the hearse. The porter followed. Two white taxi drivers, taking a break, looked on curiously. From down the sidewalk a white cop eyed the group absently.
Big Fats came shuffling back down the street just as Jackson swung open the double doors of the hearse.
“Watch out!” he shouted. “Can’t trust no fat man!”
A Rage in Harlem Page 14