“All right, all right, lots of us have wondered what he might have thought of the consequences,” Anderson admitted. “But it’s too late to charge him now.”
“Couldn’t have convicted him anyway,” Grave Digger said. “All he’d have to do would be to plead good intentions,” Coffin Ed elaborated. “Never was a white man convicted as long as he plead good intentions.”
“All right, all right, who’s the culprit this night, here, in Harlem? Who’s inciting these people to this senseless anarchy?”
“Skin,” Grave Digger said.
16
From where they sat, the rioting looked like a rehearsal for a modern ballet. The youths would surge suddenly from the dark tenement doorways, alleyways, from behind parked cars and basement stairways, charge towards the police, throw rotten vegetables, and chunks of dirt, and stones and bricks if they could find them, and some rotten eggs, but not too many because an egg had to be good and rotten before it went for bad in Harlem; taunting the police, making faces, sticking out their tongues, chanting, “Drop dead, whitey!” Their bodies moving in grotesque rhythm, lithe, lightfooted, agile and fluid, charged with a hysterical excitement that made them look unhealthily animated.
The sweating, red-faced cops in their blue uniforms and white helmets slashed the hot night air with their long white billies as though dancing a cop’s version of West Side Story, and ducked from the flying missiles, chiefly to keep the dirt out of their eyes; then it was their turn and they chased the black youths who turned and fled easily back into the darkness.
Spokesmen from the 125th Street offices of the NAACP and CORE were mounted on Police Department sound trucks appealing to the youths to go home, saying their poor unhappy parents would have to pay. Only the white cops paid any attention. The Harlem youths couldn’t care less.
“It’s just a game to them,” Coffin Ed said.
“No, it ain’t,” Grave Digger contradicted. “They’re making a statement.”
While the police were diverted momentarily to a group of boys and girls launching a harassment on 125th Street, a gang of older youths charged from the shadows toward a supermarket in the middle of the block with beer bottles and scraps of iron. The glass shattered. The youths began darting in to loot, like sparrows snitching crumbs from under the beaks of larger birds.
Coffin Ed looked sideways at Grave Digger. “What’s that statement say?”
Grave Digger straightened in his seat. It was the first time either of them had moved. He noticed the red-faced white cops turn in that direction. “Says there’s gonna be some trouble if they start that shit.”
A cop drew his gun and shot into the air.
Until then the older people on the edge of the sidewalk had been looking on indifferently, some stopping to watch, most going calmly about their business, showing disapproval chiefly by refusing to take sides. But suddenly all movement among them stopped and they became engaged.
The youths fled back into the shadows of 124th Street. The cops followed. There was the sound of garbage cans being thrown into the street.
Another shot rang out from the darkness of 124th Street. The older people began to drift in that direction, seemingly without purpose, but now everything about them showed disapproval of the police.
Grave Digger put his hand on the handle of the door. He was sitting on the curb side, away from the ruckus across the street, and Coffin Ed was beneath the wheel.
Four skinny black youths converged on the car from the sidewalk.
“What you mothers doing here?” one challenged.
In the shadow of the doorway across the sidewalk behind them, Grave Digger saw a squat, black middle-aged man wearing a dark suit and a red fez affected by the Black Muslims. He drew his hand back from the door.
“We’s just sittin’,” he said.
“We run out of gas,” Coffin Ed added.
Another youth mumbled, “You mothers ain’t funny.”
“Is that a question or a conclusion?” Grave Digger said.
Not one of the youths smiled. Their solemnity worried the detectives. It seemed that most of the other youths engaged in cop baiting were enjoying it, but these had a purpose.
“Why ain’t you mothers out there fighting whitey?” the youth challenged.
Grave Digger opened his hands. “We’re scared,” he said.
Before the youth replied he looked over his shoulder. Grave Digger didn’t see the slightest motion by the man in the fez but the youths moved off without another word.
“Something tells me there’s more behind this little fracas than meets the eye,” Grave Digger said.
“Ain’t there always?”
Grave Digger got the Harlem precinct station on the radio. “Gimme the Lieutenant.”
Anderson came on.
“We’re getting some ideas.”
“We want facts,” Anderson said.
Grave Digger’s gaze wandered across the street. The elderly people were collecting in little knots on both corners of the intersection of 124th Street, the white cops were backing slowly from the shadows, empty-handed, but wary. The blazing arc of a Molotov cocktail came down from a tenement roof. The bottle shattered harmlessly in the street. Burning gasoline blazed briefly for a moment and dark figures sprang momentarily into vision, faces shining, eyes gleaming, before sinking back into the gloom like stones into the sea as the blaze flickered and went out.
“There ain’t gonna be any facts,” Grave Digger informed Anderson.
“Something will break,” Anderson said.
Coffin Ed looked across at Grave Digger and shook his head.
“Well, you want we should move around a little and see what we can pick up?” Grave Digger asked.
“No, just lay dead and let the race leaders handle it,” Anderson said. “We want the nitty-gritty.”
Grave Digger stifled an impulse to say, “What dat?” and caught Ed’s eye. Anderson made them hilarious with what he thought was hep-talk, but they had never let him know it.
“We dig you, boss,” Grave Digger gave a reply equally as square but Anderson didn’t get it.
When he had switched off the radio, Grave Digger said, “Ain’t that some shit! Here they got a riot and a thousand cops scattered all over the streets and they don’t know how it started.”
“We don’t neither.”
“Hell, we weren’t here.”
“The Lieutenant wants us to sit here until the answer turns up.”
A black stringbean wearing a floppy white hat came cautiously from 125th Street with a huge brown woman in a sleeveless dress. They moved as though they were crossing no-man’s-land. When they drew abreast they peeped furtively at the two black men sitting motionless in the parked car, peeped across the street at the line of white cops, and drew in their eyes.
Police cruisers and mounted cops were prodding the traffic on. Voices came from the sound trucks. Jokers were crowded in the doorway of a bar. Inside, the jukebox was braying folk songs.
“It ain’t much of a riot, anyway,” Coffin Ed observed.
“Too late in the season.”
“In this mother-raping country of IBM’s I don’t see what they need you and me for anyway.”
“Hell, man, IBM’s don’t work here.”
Coffin Ed followed Grave Digger’s gaze. “He’s gone.” They were looking for the man in the red fez.
Suddenly a scuffle broke out on their side of the street. The five youths who had challenged the detectives previously reappeared from the direction of 125th Street, propelling a sixth youth before them. One held the youth’s arm twisted behind him and the others were trying to take off his pants. He twisted about, trying to break free, and butted his attackers with his buttocks. “Lemme go!” he cried. “Lemme go! I ain’t chicken.”
A couple of grown men stood in burrhead silhouette beneath the corner lamps, watching avidly.
“Less cut off his balls,” one of his torturers said.
“And give ’em to
whitey,” another added.
“Man, whitey wants dick.”
“Less cut that off too.”
“Turn him loose,” Grave Digger said, like an elder brother.
Two of the youths stepped back and snapped open chivs.
“Who you, mother?”
Grave Digger got from the car and freed the youth’s arm.
Three more blades glinted in the night, as the youths spread out.
The sound of the other car door opening broke into the silence, drawing their attention for a moment.
Grave Digger moved in front of the youth under attack, his big loose hands still empty.
“What’s the matter with him?” he asked in a reasonable voice.
The gang stood undecided as Coffin Ed strolled on to the scene.
“He’s chicken,” one said.
“What you want him to do?”
“Stone whitey.”
“Hell, boy, those cops got guns.”
“They scared to use ’em.”
Another youth exclaimed, “These them mothers said they was scared.”
“That’s right,” Coffin Ed said. “But we ain’t scared of you.”
“You scared of whitey. You ain’t nothing but shit.”
“When I was your age I’da got slapped in the mouth for telling a grown man that.”
“You slap us, we waste you.”
“All right, we believe you,” Grave Digger said impatiently. “Go home and leave this kid alone.”
“You ain’t our Pa.”
“Damn right, if I was you wouldn’t be out here.”
“We’re the law,” Coffin Ed said to forestall any more argument.
Six pairs of round white-rimmed eyes stared at them accusingly.
“Then you on whitey’s side.”
“We’re on your leader’s side.”
“Them Doctor Toms,” a youth said contemptuously. “They’re all on whitey’s side.”
“Go on home,” Grave Digger said, pushing them away, ignoring the flashing knife blades. “Go home and grow up. You’ll find out there ain’t any other side.”
The youths retreated sullenly and he kept pushing them down toward 125th Street as though he were suddenly angry. A police cruiser pulled to the curb and the white cops appeared anxious to help, but he ignored them and went back to join Coffin Ed. For a moment they sat untalking, scanning the sullen Harlem night. All the rioters in their vicinity had disappeared, leaving the sanctimonious citizens hobbling along with prim self-righteousness beneath the hot-eyed scrutiny of the frustrated cops.
“All these punks ought to be home doing their homework,” Coffin Ed said, bitterly.
“They got a point,” Grave Digger defended. “What they gonna learn to cancel what they already know?”
“Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young ain’t gonna like that attitude.”
“Sure ain’t, but it’s still putting butter on their bread.”
From behind drawn curtains of a storefront synagogue the black face of a grizzly-bearded rabbi peeped furtively at them. They didn’t see him because some heavy object landed on top of their car and sudden ñame was pouring down all windows.
“Sit still!” Grave Digger shouted.
Coffin Ed was opening his door and dove barehanded to the sidewalk, scraping the heels of his hands on the concrete while rolling over in the same motion. Some flaming gasoline had dripped on the calves of Grave Digger’s trousers but when he undid his belt and ripped open his fly to tear them off he saw Coffin Ed coming around the front end on the car with the back of his coat on fire. He stood straight up with leg power only and clutched the collar of Coffin Ed’s coat when he came within reach. In one swift movement he ripped the blazing back out of Coffin Ed’s coat and flung it back into the street, but his own pants had fallen around his ankles and were burning smokily with the stink of burning wool. He did a grotesque adagio dance getting his feet clear and stood in his purple shorts examining Coffin Ed to see if he was still burning. Coffin Ed had stuck his pistol in his belt and was frantically freeing his arms of coat sleeves.
“Lucky for your hair,” Grave Digger said.
“These kinks is fireproof.”
They looked like two idiots standing in the glare of the blazing car, one in his coat, shirt and tie, and purple shorts above gartered sox and big feet, and the other in shirtsleeves and empty shoulder holster with his pistol stuck in his belt.
From across the street foot cops and cruisers were converging on them and someone was yelling, “Stand clear! Stand clear!”
With one accord they moved away from the burning car and searched the nearby rooftop with stabbing gazes. The tenement windows had suddenly filled with Harlem citizens watching the spectacle but no one could be seen on the edges of the roof.
17
From the outside, The Five Spot was unpretentious. It had plate-glass windows on both St Marks Place and Third Avenue, flush with the sidewalk like a supermarket. But there was a second wall, recessed from the windows, containing irregular-sized elliptic openings, giving Picasso-like glimpses of the interior, the curve of a horn, white teeth against red lips, taffy-colored hair and a painted eye, a highball glass floating from the end of a sleeve, stubby black fingers tripping over white piano keys.
On the inside these openings were covered by see-through mirrors, in which the guests could see nothing but reflections of themselves.
But it was soundproof. Not a dribble of noise leaked in from the street unless the door was opened. And no one outside could hear the expensive sounds that were being made within. Which was the point. Those sounds were too expensive to waste.
When the two rough-looking black detectives entered with their little friend, no sounds were being made except the hot eccentric modern rhythm by the angry-faced musicians. The guests were as solemn as though attending a funeral. But it wasn’t the sight of two black men with an extroverted pansy that brought on the silence. The detectives knew enough about downtown to know that white people dug jazz in utter silence. However, not all the guests were white. There was a heavy seasoning of dark faces, like in the Assembly of the UN. But these black people had caught it from the white people. Silent people surrounded them.
A blond man in a black lounge suit, who was something in the establishment, ushered them to a ringside seat under the gong. The seat was so conspicuous they knew instantly it was reserved for suspect people. They smiled to themselves, wondering how he figured their little friend. Did they look that much like the kind, they wondered.
But no sooner were they seated than the excitement began. The two women who had driven by the lunch counter uptown in a little foreign sports car earlier in the evening, whom their little friend had called “lesbos”, were seated at a nearby table. As though their entrance had been a signal, one of the lesbos leaped atop her table and began doing a frantic belly dance, as if spraying the audience with unseen rays from a gun hidden beneath her mini-skirt. The skirt wasn’t much bigger than a G-string. It was in gold lamé, looking indecent against her smooth chamois-colored skin. Her long, unmuscular legs were bare down to silver lamé anklets and flat-heeled gilt sandals. Her midriff was bare, her navel winked suggestively, her breasts wriggled in gilt fishnet like baby seals trying to nurse.
She was slimmer than she had looked in the sports car. Seen up from under, she was unblemished, tall, voluptuous, like a sculptured sea dream. Her heart-shaped face pointed to thick audacious lips. Her short curly hair gleamed like blued steel. She wore sky-blue eye-shadow above her long-lashed amber-colored eyes encircled in black mascara. She had gone so far with the sex image she had stumbled on indecent exposure.
“Throw it to the wind!” You knew a colored man said that. A white man wouldn’t want to throw all that fine stuff to the wind.
“Go, Cat, go!” And that was a friend. Probably a white friend. Anyway, someone who knew her name.
She had unzipped her mini-skirt and was shaking it down. His face averted, their little friend
jumped to his feet. They looked at him, startled. As a consequence they didn’t see the other lesbian at the stripteaser’s table get up at the same time.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I got to see a man about a dog.”
“It figures,” Coffin Ed said.
“Can’t you take it?” Grave Digger taunted.
He made a face.
“Let him go,” Coffin Ed growled. “Just envious is all.”
Foolishly the blond man in the black suit was trying to push the mini-skirt back into place. The guests whooped with laughter. The stripteasing woman hooked a long brown leg around his neck, encasing his head with the mini-skirt, and pushed her crotch into his face.
The angry-faced musicians didn’t bat an eye. They played on, beating out a modern rhythm of “Don’t Go Joe”, as though a blond man’s head caught in a brown woman’s crotch happened all the time. In the background, the pianist was walking around the platform in a long-sleeved green silk shirt, orange linen pants, with a red and black plaid Alpine hat atop his head, and every time he passed the piano player he reached over his shoulder and hit out a chord.
The place had become a madhouse. Those who had had dignity lost it. Those who hadn’t became hilarious. Everybody was happy. Except the musicians. The management should have been happy too. But instead there was a bald-headed longfaced man rushing to the rescue of the blond man with his face caught in the stripteaser’s crotch. It was debatable whether he wanted to be rescued. Whether he was enjoying it or not, the other white people in the audience were emitting gales of laughter.
The baldheaded man clutched a hot brown leg. Immediately she hooked it around his neck. Then she had both their heads beneath her mini-skirt.
“At the trough!” someone yelled.
“Divide her,” another said.
“But leave some,” a third voice cautioned.
The stripteasing woman became hysterical. She began shaking her hips from side to side as though trying to crack the heads beneath her mini-skirt against one another. With a concerted effort they pulled free, red as boiled lobsters. The mini-skirt fell to the table top. The brown legs stepped out of it, the redfaced men backed away. With one deft motion the sweating brown woman took off her black lace panties, triumphantly waving them in the air. Tight black curls ran down to her crotch, forming a patch the size of a fielder’s glove against the lighter tint of her belly skin.
Blind Man with a Pistol Page 15