“Marva, wake up. I’m here. Wake up.”
* * *
On the way to the bridge, Nelse drove silently past burning ranch-style houses, past green City of Memphis garbage cans kicked up and down the streets, lying open on their sides like split carcasses. The radio was full of static—whatever had blocked the sun now blocked all the signals. Nelse drove, not quite sure if she would even make it downtown. As she turned on Chelsea, she found herself thinking about a different kind of figurin’. Her mind filled with shifting possibilities that made her stop at Manassas to wipe away fresh tears. And in these dark memories, Nelse would always later place one more figure in the scene, collapse or fast-forward time, just like in her dream, so that Marva made it to the bridge with her, and never looked back. Ridiculous to have thought of then, but there it was. Glowing dimly in her memory, the memory of her friend, the memory of the sun.
Tell Him What You Want
by TROY L. WIGGINS
Uptown
And the night was black, the black of the silence between jilted lovers. It was half past midnight, the time when good folks were keen to lose the string that connected them to their god and let the nasty things inside them roam free.
The only person on the darkened streets was a man, a man carrying a camera, and maybe that camera was his name or his soul, but right then it was just a piece of hard black plastic with some metal bits and glass. A soggy C-note lined his pocket. You couldn’t see the nastiness there, but his god could.
* * *
“It’s all changin’,” Fat Red had been saying when Jackie came into his tavern that night to take photos.
The only thing fat about Fat Red was his lips. They looked like purple bruises against his copper skin. His face was scored with a battlefield of pockmarks, and his thick Afro was the color of a fresh penny. The rest of him was thin as a lost breath.
Fat Red’s was a weekend ritual for many folks. The tavern’s location was a mystery—if you didn’t know where it was, or knew somebody who was privy, you wouldn’t find it.
And it wasn’t much of a place to look at. Inside, it was about as spacious as a medium-sized kitchen. There were five or six metal tables spread in a horseshoe pattern, and each table was ringed with folding chairs. A big speaker sat in a corner near the back, amplifying the blues that oozed from a wood-paneled jukebox. Behind the rickety walnut bar, Fat Red had hooked up an industrial Coca-Cola cooler and packed it with canned beers and soda. Tall bottles of brown liquor with white men’s names adorned the wall behind the bar. Fat Red made sure that folks ate as much as they drank, so the air was spiced with the scent of barbecued turkey legs and red sausages cobbled together from cuts of meat so undesirable that they had to be burned black before eating.
“First they shut down Firestone, then they closin’ up Hurt Village, and now Lauderdale Courts is somethin’ totally different,” Bubba Strong said, leaning back in his chair so far that the metal groaned. Bubba was a philosopher king of North Memphis, as only a transient Negro with five kids could be. “They puttin’ all the folks out and startin’ to call it Uptown.”
“The fuck is a uptown?”
Bubba opened his eyes wide and said, “Shiiiiiit, you ain’t know? It’s what they call a town where all the niggas gotta get up outta there.”
All the men and women laughed, but the laughter was strained. Fat Red pushed open the front door to expose the deepening night, saying, “I need to let some of this North Memphis up outta here.”
It was only ten thirty, and Jackie had a little bit of Wild Turkey in him. He fished around in his pocket for a loose Newport—he’d got a handful for a dollar from the Arab store up the street—and fixed it in his mouth, holding it tight with his bottom lip.
He set up his tripod and unrolled his backdrop—a long piece of plastic airbrushed with a scene of the city: a faded blue sky stretched over a wide green-brown stripe that was the Mighty Mississippi. The Hernando de Soto Bridge was a skeleton of shadows across the water, and the Pyramid stood tall, gleaming, as if spreading a cleansing light. The blue glow from a leaning lamp illuminated Jackie’s corner, cutting through the red-black darkness to shine on some of the hard faces in Fat Red’s.
Liquor flowed and stoked the nastiness. Sir Charles Jones was asking if anybody out there was lonely, and the crowd was replying with their hips and hands and, “Yeah! That’s my record!”
Jackie loosened his tie and moved almost unseen through the dark club, only betrayed by the flash of his camera capturing the grinding of black bodies. Many of them greeted him, “H’lo, Jackie” or “Jackie G, my nigga! Make sure you get my good side!” He made his way to the bar, where Fat Red poured fingers of whiskey into glasses stolen from local restaurants—each glass had a different logo. Jackie leaned over the bar as if ordering a drink.
“You gonna have my money after work, right?” Jackie whispered.
Fat Red grimaced like he had bitten down on a sour pickle and said, “Yeah, fool. Come in here bustin’ my balls about a hunnit dollars. Yeah, I got it.”
Jackie narrowed his eyes at Fat Red, but held his tongue.
Three women were waiting when he got back to his corner. All of them wore dresses so tight you could see what they’d eaten for dinner. He recognized one, Tickey, a neighborhood woman who worked at the train station downtown, but the other two were strangers.
“What up, Jackie?” Tickey said, her two gold incisors making her smile worth a thousand dollars. Her skin was polished ebony, and her dark brown eyes had a pantherish look.
“Tickey, how you doin’, baby?” Jackie glanced at her legs and had a notion of asking her out back behind the club, but he let the Newport burn that notion away.
“Me and my friends wanna coupla pictures.” She flashed a twenty-dollar bill.
Jackie motioned over to a pot of red, pink, and white roses. Each flower was wrapped in cellophane. “Nice night like this, y’all ladies want some flowers?”
“We ain’t ask for no flowers,” one of her friends snapped. A snarl crossed the woman’s bony face, and Jackie knew that she was nasty through and through.
“Don’t pay Tabitha no mind, Jackie,” Tickey said smoothly.
“Yeah,” the third friend said. She was taller and curvier than the other two, her glossy black hair shot through with strands of bright blue and purple. “She really just mad at her boss, because the bitch won’t just go on and pay all her bills. She get a little drank and a big dick, and she be good.”
“Well,” Jackie said, “plenty of both in the house tonight.”
Something clicked to life in Tabitha’s eyes even as her friends laughed. Jackie stared into those eyes. There was an apology in the back of his throat, but it tasted like bile and he didn’t want that flavor on his tongue.
“Y’all pose in front of the drop,” he said. “I’ma take a few, y’all choose which ones y’all want.”
The women assumed a group pose in front of the camera, pointing their curves in the direction of anyone who could see. Heat bloomed in Jackie’s gut, but his hands stayed still. Four flashes brightened the night. Afterward, the women chose their photos from the display on Jackie’s camera, and he hooked it up to his portable printer, which spat the images out on glossy paper.
“Fat Red takes the money,” Jackie said when Tickey pushed the twenty dollars his way.
“Thank you, Jackie,” Tickey drawled, leading her friends away.
“Hold up,” Jackie said, and fished a red rose out of the pot. He went over to Tabitha, put his hand gently in the small of her back, and presented her with the flower. “Don’t let your night stay sour, baby.”
Tabitha took the flower but didn’t smile.
Jackie lit up another cigarette and went back to his spot, waiting for the right moment to capture folks moving their bodies to low-down music that made them shake and holler and spill their drinks. Jackie enjoyed watching. He hated talking and held folks who talked too loud or for too long in contempt. He’d learned long
ago: you could find out much by watching people, which is why he became an eye, capturing slivers of folks’ lives as they let themselves hang loose.
Over at the bar, Les Jackson had his wife Anne hemmed up, trying to beg up on something that she wasn’t coming down off of. Anne rolled her eyes and popped her lips in annoyance.
Jackie captured that annoyance in a flash.
Tickey and her friends were on the dance floor now, bumping hips and fending off the advances of men made doubly aggressive by drinks and the high-speed thrumming in their loins. Tabitha moved her shoulders in a slow rhythm but cradled that rose like it was her dear child.
Jackie drank that tenderness in, captured it.
Eleven thirty rolled in, up, and out. Fat Red closed the front door and opened up the back one, greeted some folks coming in that way, and told his heavy-chested wife Vera to fry up some catfish. Bone Lyles walked in wearing a linen suit as bleached dry as his name, ordered a tall whiskey and a plate of fish. The air inside Fat Red’s blackened a bit.
“Whatcha know good, Bone?” a voice called out.
“Chasin’ up after this money,” Bone hollered, “but the bitch won’t slow down.”
“I know that’s right!”
Jackie watched with a scowl as Bone slid his white-suited ass up to Nikka Coleman and put his arms around her, his hands black against her yellow skin. Nikka Coleman talked with those hazel eyes of hers, and she had a way of saying things that made you think she was in love with you, and only you, and there was no other man in the world but you getting any of her loving. Bone was eating that honey up.
Jackie knew when there was something that needed capturing. His whole body twitched, and he glanced around. Willie Coleman materialized, watched Bone running his thick fingers up and down his wife’s arm. The set of Willie’s lip told Jackie that the man’s bed had been too cold lately.
Bone was a quick wit. Nikka laid her mouth open, and Bone fell on her lips like a predator. Jackie readied his eye.
Willie Coleman was six and a half feet tall, with hands like cast-iron skillets and the disposition of a straight razor in the hands of a poor man down to his last nickel. He rose up, and the room got quiet except Bone snacking on Nikka’s lips—only now it was Nikka having a taste of Bone.
Willie stood over Nikka and Bone for two or three seconds. Jackie watched anger bubble to the surface and twist Willie’s lips. The big man snatched his wife away and slapped Bone twice across the face so hard that the music stopped.
“The fuck you hit me for, man?” Bone cried, shooting to his feet. Willie slapped him again.
“Stop it, Cole!” Nikka screamed, but there was no love for Bone in that cry. “Let him alone! I done told you that I don’t want yo’ ass no more!”
“You comin’ back home with me,” Willie rumbled, “whether you like it or not.”
The nasty thing in the room fled from the shadow of the blues and whirled around the three of them, Coleman standing tall with his wife hanging off his arm, Bone on the floor shaking his head slow.
Rumors had carried around the hood. Word was that Willie would lock Nikka in the house when he went over to Seventh Street to work at one of the pallet factories. He didn’t trust her to be faithful, so he’d installed locks on the outside of the doors and windows. Before he left for work each morning, he would sprinkle flour around the windows and in the doorframe to make sure he’d know if she left him.
The word on Firestone, Manassas, Tully, and Marble was that Bone was a bad man with an angry .38, and Willie Coleman was just two steps from a regular cotton-pickin’ fool.
Willie snatched up his wife and started to drag her outside, but she tore away.
“I told you, Cole. We done. I’m sick of being with you. I’m not yo’ slave or yo’ child. I’m—I was yo’ woman. But we done.”
“Oh, so that’s how you wanna play it?” Willie snarled. “You bad in front of all these peoples, huh? Fine then. When this nigga use you up and toss you out on yo’ ass, don’t come sniffin’ up ’round me.”
Willie moved toward the exit, his shoulders slumped despite his hot words. Jackie captured the man’s defeat. He twitched again, noticed that Bone was going into his jacket. Jackie tried to yell, but he felt like his words got caught in a tornado. His skin tingled with the same chill that jumped through all the folks gathered inside Fat Red’s.
Willie frowned, turned, his snarl betraying a desire to plant his steel-toed boot in Bone’s gut—but a snub-nose .38, blacker than the fingers that held it, stopped him cold.
“You betta not move, mothafuckah,” Bone said.
Nikka leapt on her lover. She ripped the gun from Bone’s hands and jabbed it at her husband like a black-bladed knife.
“Oh—” was all Willie got to say before two pops from the gun opened two dark holes in his blue work shirt.
Jackie’s hands moved on their own, snapping up, camera ready, the all-seeing eye drinking in the violence.
Willie ragdoll-jerked, then stiffened. It was kind of like in the movies, Jackie guessed, because when the shots hit, there was no blood. But by the time Willie landed on the sticky floor, his work shirt was half-black.
“Goddamn!” Fat Red swore, slicing the silence. Folks split like ants hit with bleach—everyone except Tabitha, who just stood staring at Willie’s body, the rose to her chest. Jackie grabbed his camera and made for the back door. It was bad luck to step over a dead body.
The thumping in Jackie’s ears wasn’t his heart, like he thought. It was his boots on Fat Red’s raggedy wooden floor, and as he scrambled down the darkened back hallway, Fat Red jumped out of the shadows and pressed his sour-smelling body up against Jackie.
“Here,” he huffed, slapping a slimy something or other into Jackie’s palm. “Don’t say Fat Red ever did you wrong.”
Money in Jackie’s pocket made him feel like the walls were closing in. He nearly fell out of the door escaping into the North Memphis night.
* * *
The night was black, black as the scum between a bum’s toes, and Jackie’s camera was an anchor weighted by death. There were no stars. The hundred dollars in his pocket sent poison through his legs, slowing him down.
Young folks over from a nightclub run by Fat Red’s cousin lined the street outside Fat Red’s, armored in the swagger and invincibility of youth. Their pants sagged, their shirts and heels glittered, and their teeth gleamed, shot through with gold.
Jackie stumbled down Tully. His thoughts were mechanical: right foot, left foot, breathe, blink, sweat. The blood money in his pocket wasn’t even enough to cover the backdrop and equipment that he left behind while Willie Coleman bled out onto Fat Red’s floor. Half his livelihood was gone. His legs itched to go back to the scene of that killing, but he forced the urge away.
Sirens announced the police blaring down Firestone as Jackie passed shotgun houses. Something moved in the tall grass. Jackie fought to regulate his stride—the streets were hot, and the police were looking to stop any Negro moving too fast.
Across the street, the old Firestone plant was the darkened remains of some long-dead animal. A couple walking in the opposite direction caught Jackie’s eye. The man had his arm flung over the woman’s shoulder, but she supported him despite her own stumbling. As the couple passed, the woman seemed to recognize Jackie. His skin tingled. He could feel her eyes boring into him, and when she yelled out, his bones rattled. Jackie picked up his step.
He hadn’t been to a church since his grandmother dragged him to her little house church when they lived over in Molen Town. He’d even let his grandmama force him up into the choir, where he’d lent his voice to the chorus of “Jesus on the Mainline.”
“Jesus is on the mainline, tell him what you want . . . Oh the line ain’t never busy, tell him what you want,” the old folks had crooned, and when Jackie saw the small white cross on the roof of Grace Baptist, he swore with relief.
Grace Baptist was an old-time church flung out of place. Its brick wa
s painted the color of Christ’s blood. Worn-out green carpet lined the steps and fuzzed around the wrought-iron railing on the wheelchair ramp. A gold mail slot had been cut into the storm door so the church could gather after-hours donations. Jackie opened the slot, dropped in the hundred, and prayed.
“Lord, I know I ain’t been much for visitin’ before now, but I feel the foulness comin’, and I need you around me and mine. I—I don’t know what else to say. I need help. Please. Amen.”
Blue light pierced the night. Jackie realized that he had fallen to his knees. His camera lay beside him, that eye yet staring.
“Stay down there!” the cop’s voice boomed. A white cop. Jackie’s heart fell to his ass, bounced back to his chest.
Hands on head was standard operating procedure if you didn’t wanna get shot and written off as an accident. Jackie stepped outside of his body, wondering if he would die before police got him down to 201 Poplar. Other realizations filled in the scene. Boots—two pairs—on the ground. The burned scent of the police car. Flashing blue light. Strong hands grabbed his wrists, hauled him up.
“The hell are you doing out here this time of night, man, with all this stuff going on up the way?” This voice was different. It rolled in a way that Jackie’s ears found acceptable. He turned, eyes meeting a pair similar to his own atop a black mustache. The black cop turned his mouth into a sneer.
“Leavin’ work,” Jackie replied, apprehensive. Skinfolk wasn’t kinfolk, especially when that skin was covered by a white man’s uniform.
“Where you work at?”
Jackie pursed his lips, then said, “Fat Red’s, up the street.”
The look the cops shared turned Jackie’s bowels to mush.
“You got some ID?”
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