Blind Man with a Pistol

by Chester Himes

  After his discharge he went to Paris to live until his money ran out, as did a great number of other discharged GIs. He got a room with another young brother in a hotel on Rue Chaplain, around the corner from Boulevard Raspail and Montparnasse, almost within hailing distance of the Rotonde and the Dôme. It was a hotel very popular with discharged Negro GIs in Paris, partly because of its location and partly because of the army of prostitutes who cruised from there under a strict discipline similar to that they’d just left. He knew no one but other discharged GIs, all of whom recognized one another on sight, whether they had met before or not. They comprised an unofficial club; they talked the same language, ate the same food, went to the same places — usually to the cheap restaurants by day and the movie theater — Studio Parnasse — down the street, or Buttercup’s Chicken Shack over on Rue Odessa at night. They gathered in each others’ rooms and discussed the situation back home. Mostly they talked of the various brothers back home who had struck it rich and made the bigtime via the Negro Problem. Most of them had no trade or profession or education in any specific field, if indeed any at all. As a consequence, whether they admitted it or not, most of them were resolved to get a foothold in this bonanza. They felt if they could just somehow get involved in the Negro Problem, the next step up the ladder would be good paying jobs in government or private industry. All they needed was an idea. “Look at Martin Luther King. What’s he done?” … “He done got rich. That’s what.” But Marcus had no patience for cynicism. He felt it was sacrilege. He was pure in heart. He wanted the Negroes to arise. He wanted to lead them out of the abyss into the promised land. The trouble was, he wasn’t very bright.

  Then one night at Buttercup’s he met this Swedish woman, Birgit, who was famous for her glass. She had dropped in to look over the brothers. She and Marcus found their affinity immediately. Both of them were serious, both were seeking, both were extraordinarily stupid. But she taught him brotherly love. She was hipped on brotherly love. Although it didn’t mean the same thing to her as it did to him. She had had a number of brothers as lovers and in time she had become enthusiastic about brotherly love. But Marcus had the vision of Brotherhood.

  The same night he met her, he gave up on the idea of plain Christian love. Buttercup was sitting at a big table where she could oversee the entrance, the bar and the dance floor at the same time, surrounded as usual by a number of sycophants, like a big fat mother hen with a brood of wet chicks and ugly ducklings, and she had introduced Marcus to Birgit, seeing as they were both serious, both seeking. At one end of the same table a fattish erudite white man vacationing from his teaching post in Black Africa was holding forth on the economy of the new African states. Feeling the man was getting too much of Birgit’s attention, as he had just met her and didn’t as yet know about her brotherly love, Marcus sought to steer the conversation away from Black African economy to the American Negro Problem where he could shine. He wanted to shine for Birgit. He didn’t know he already shone to her satisfaction. Suddenly he interrupted the man. He held forth his Bible, dangling the gold cross. He was absorbed by Christian love. “What does that mean to you?” he challenged, pointing to the cross, preparing to expound his brilliant idea. The man looked from the cross to Marcus’s face. He smiled sadly. He said, “It don’t mean a damn thing to me, I’m a Jew.” Right then and there Marcus dropped his ideas on Christian love. He was ready for brotherly love when Birgit took him home. But he was serious.

  Birgit took him to live with her in the South of France. She had a good business in glassware and was famous. But she was more interested in the welfare of the American Negro than in glass. She was a perfect foil to the wild ideas of Marcus. They spent most of their waking hours discussing ways and means to solve this problem. Once she declared she would become the richest and most famous woman in the world and then she would go to the American South and call a press conference and let it be known that she lived with a Negro. But Marcus didn’t think much of that idea. He felt she should be in the background and he should take the lead. It was inevitable that two such wildly enthusiastic people would have some misunderstandings. But the only serious one they had was about the correct way to stand on one’s head. She did it her way. He said it was wrong. They argued. He was stubborn. She pointed out that she was older than he was, and heavier. He left her and went back to Detroit. She hopped on a plane and went to Detroit and took him back to France. It was after then that he became convinced of the efficacy of Brotherly Love. He woke up one morning with a vision of Brotherhood. In this vision he saw it solving all the problems of the world. He already knew about the March. That much the US Army had taught him. Put the two together and they’d work, he concluded.

  The next week he and Birgit arrived in New York and took a room in the Texas Hotel near the 125th Street station and went into the business of organizing the “March of Brotherhood”.

  Now the moment had arrived. Birgit took her place beside him in the command car. She pulled up her large striped cotton dirndl skirt made by her fellow national, Katya of Sweden, and looked around with an excited smile. But to onlookers it was more like the strained expression of a Swedish farm woman in a Swedish outhouse in the dead of a Swedish winter. She was trying to restrain her excitement at the sight of all those naked limbs in the amber light. From the shoulders up she had the delicate neckline and face of a Nordic goddess, but below her body was breastless, lumpy with bulging hips and huge round legs like sawed-off telegraph posts. She felt elated, sitting there with her man who was leading these colored people in this march for their rights. She loved colored people. Her eyeblue eyes gleamed with this love. When she looked at the white cops her lips curled with scorn.

  A number of police cruisers had appeared at the moment the march was to begin. They stared at the white woman and the colored man in the command car. Their lips compressed but they said nothing, did nothing. Marcus had got a police permit.

  The marchers lined up four abreast on the right side of the street, facing west. The command car was at the lead. Two police cars brought up the rear. Three were parked at intervals down the street as far as the railroad station. Several others cruised slowly in the westbound traffic, turned north at Lenox Avenue, east again on 126th Street, back to 125th Street on Second Avenue and retraced the route. The chief inspector had said he didn’t want any trouble in Harlem.

  “Squads, MARCH!” Marcus shouted over the amplifier.

  The black youth driving the old Dodge car slipped in the clutch. The white youth sitting at his side raised his arms with his hands clasped in the sign of brotherhood. The old command car shuddered and moved off. The forty-eight integrated black and white marchers stepped forward, their black and white legs flashing in the amber lights of the bridge approach. Their bare black and white arms shone. Their silky and kinky heads glistened. Marcus had been careful to select black youths who were black and white youths who were white. Somehow the black against the white and the white against the black gave the illusion of nakedness. The forty-eight orderly young marchers gave the illusion of an orgy. The black and white naked flesh in the amber light filled the black and white onlookers with a strange excitement. Cars slowed down and white people leaned out the windows. Black people walking down the street grinned, then laughed, then shouted encouragement. It was as though an unseen band had struck up a Dixieland march. The colored people on the sidewalks on both sides of the street began locomotioning and boogalooing as though gone mad. White women in the passing automobiles screamed and waved frantically. Their male companions turned red like a race of boiled lobsters. The police cars opened their sirens to clear the traffic. But it served to call the attention of more people from the sidelines.

  When the marchers came abreast of the 125th Street station on upper Park Avenue, a long straggling tail of laughing, dancing, hysterical black and white people had attached itself to the original forty-eight. Black and white people came from the station waiting-room to stare in popeyed amazement. Black and w
hite people came from nearby bars, from the dim stinking doorways, from the flea-bag hotels, from the cafeterias, the greasy spoons, from the shoe-shine parlors, the poolrooms — pansies and prostitutes, ordinary bar drinkers and strangers in the area who had stopped for a bit to eat, Johns and squares looking for excitement, muggers and sneak thieves looking for victims. The scene that greeted them was like a carnival. It was a hot night. Some of them were drunk. Others had nothing to do. They joined the carnival group thinking maybe they were headed for a revival meeting, a sex orgy, a pansy ball, a beer festival, a baseball game. The white people attracted by the black. The black people attracted by the white.

  Marcus looked back from his command car and saw a whole sea of white and black humanity in his wake. He was exultant. He had made it. He knew all people needed was a chance to love one another.

  He clutched Birgit’s thigh and shouted, “I’ve made it, baby. Just look at ’em! Tomorrow my name will be in all the papers.”

  She looked back at the wild following, then she gave him a melting look of love. “My man! You’re so intelligent. It’s just like Walpurgisnacht.”

  4

  The Negro detectives, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, were making their last round through Harlem in the old black Plymouth sedan with the unofficial tag, which they used as their official car. In the daytime it might have been recognized, but at night it was barely distinguishable from any number of other dented, dilapidated struggle buggies cherished by the citizens of Harlem; other than when they had to go somewhere in a hurry it went. But now they were idling along, west on 123rd Street, with the lights out as was their custom on dark side streets. The car scarcely made a sound; for all its dilapidated appearance the motor was ticking almost silently. It passed along practically unseen, like a ghostly vehicle floating in the dark, its occupants invisible.

  This was due in part to the fact that both detectives were almost as dark as the night, and they were wearing lightweight black alpaca suits and black cotton shirts with the collars open. Whereas other people were in shirt sleeves on this hot night, they wore their suit coats to cover the big glinting nickel-plated thirty-eight-caliber revolvers they wore in their shoulder slings. They could see in the dark streets like cats, but couldn’t be seen, which was just as well because their presence might have discouraged the vice business in Harlem and put countless citizens on relief.

  Actually they weren’t concerned with prostitution or its feeder vices, unlicensed clubs, bottle peddlers, petty larceny, short con and steering. They had no use for pansies, but as long as they didn’t hurt anyone, pansies could pansy all they pleased. They weren’t arbiters of sex habits. There was no accounting for the sexual tastes of people. Just don’t let anyone get hurt.

  If white citizens wished to come to Harlem for their kicks, they had to take the venereal risks and the risks of short con or having their money stolen. Their only duty was to protect them from violence.

  They went down the side street without lights to surprise anyone in the act of maiming, mugging, rolling drunks, or committing homicide.

  They knew the first people to turn on them if they tried to keep the white man out of Harlem after dark would be the whores themselves, the madams, the pimps, the proprietors of the late-hour joints, most of whom were paying off some of their colleagues on the force.

  For such a hot night, Harlem had been exceptionally peaceful. No riots, no murders, only a few cars stolen, which wasn’t their business, and a few domestic cuttings.

  They were taking it easy.

  “It’s been a quiet night,” Coffin Ed said from his seat by the sidewalk.

  “Better touch wood,” Grave Digger replied, lazily steering with one hand.

  “There ain’t any wood in this tin lizzie.”

  “There’s the baseball bat that man was beating his old lady with.”

  “Hell, bats are made of plastic these days. Too bad we ain’t got his head.”

  “Lots of them around. Next one we come to I’ll stop.”

  “How about that one?”

  Grave Digger looked ahead through the windscreen and saw the back of a black man in a black ensemble with a red fez stuck on his head. He knew the man hadn’t seen them as yet nevertheless he was running as though he meant it. The man was carrying a pair of light gray pants over one arm with the legs blowing in the breeze as though they were running too, but a little faster.

  “Look at that boy picking ’em up and laying ’em down like the earth was red-hot.”

  “Reckon we ought to ask him?” Coffin Ed said.

  “What for? To hear him lie? The white man who owned those pants ought to have kept them on.”

  Coffin Ed chuckled. “You said the next one we came to you’d stop.”

  “Yeah, and you said it was quiet too. Let’s keep it that way. What’s unusual about a black brother stealing a whitey’s pants who’s laying up somewhere with a black whore?”

  They were relaxed and indifferent. It wasn’t their business to rescue the pants of a white man who was stupid enough to let them be stolen. They knew of too many cases where the white John went in the room and left his trousers draped over a chair by the door — with his money in it.

  “The first thing to learn about whore-chasing is what to do with your money while screwing.”

  “That’s simple,” Grave Digger said. “Leave what you don’t need at home.”

  “And let your old lady find it? What’s the difference?”

  They let the fez-headed man get out of sight while they shot the bull. Suddenly Coffin Ed blurted, “It ain’t quiet no more.”

  A bareheaded white man had materialized suddenly from the darkness into the dim pool of yellow light spilling from a street lamp, trying to run in the direction taken by the black man. But he staggered on wobbly legs as though drunk. They could see his legs plainly because he didn’t wear any pants. In fact he didn’t wear any underpants either and they could see his bare white ass beneath his white shirttail.

  Grave Digger switched on the headlamps and the next instant he stepped on the accelerator. The car pulled to the curb beside the staggering man with the scream of tires on pavement, and both big double-jointed detectives emerged from opposite sides of the car like hoboes alighting from a moving freight. For an instant there was only the sound of flat feet slapping on concrete as they converged upon the tottering white man from fore and aft. Coming up from the front side Grave Digger drew his torch. It was a rapid dangerous-looking motion until the light hit the white man’s face. Grave Digger drew up sharp. Coffin Ed, coming from the rear, pinioned the white man’s arms.

  “Hold him steady,” Grave Digger said, fishing out his shield and turning the light on it. “We’re policemen. You’re safe.”

  Even while saying it he thought it was a stupid thing to say. The front of the white man’s shirt was covered with blood. More blood spurted from the side of his throat where his jugular had been cut.

  The white man shuddered convulsively and began sinking to the ground. Coffin Ed held him up. “What’s the matter with him?” he asked. He couldn’t see from behind.

  “Throat cut.”

  The white man’s mouth was clamped shut as though he were holding in his life. Blood spurted from the wound at every third or fourth heartbeat. Drops trickled from his nose. His eyes were beginning to glaze.

  “Lay him on his back,” Grave Digger said.

  Coffin Ed lowered the body full-length on its back down the dirty pavement. Both of them could see that life was going fast. He was not a pretty sight stretched out in the headlight glare. There was no chance of saving his life. That urgency had passed. Now there was a different urgency. It sounded in Grave Digger’s voice as he bent over the dying man, thick, constricted, cottony dry:

  “Quick! Quick! Who did it?”

  The glazing eyes of the dying man gave no sign of comprehension, only the grim, clamped mouth tightened slightly.

  Grave Digger bent closer to hear should t
he clamped lips open. Blood spurted from the man’s cut throat into his face, suddenly nauseating him with its sweet, sickish scent. But he ignored it as he tried to hold the man on to life by his eyes.

  “Quick!” Urgent, dry, compelling. “A name? Give us a name!” His jaw muscles rippled over gritted teeth.

  A last brief flicker of comprehension showed in the white man’s eyes. For an infinitesimal instant the pupils contracted slightly. The man was making a tremendous effort to speak. The strain was visible in a slight tightening of the muscles of the face and neck.

  “Who did it? Quick! A name!” Grave Digger hammered, his black face bloody and contorted.

  The white man’s tightly clamped lips trembled and suddenly opened, like a seldom used door. A liquid, gurgling sound came out, followed instantly by a gush of blood in which he drowned.