After some contemplation, Sam handed his hat and coat to Emma and crouched down alongside Harlan. “I’ll just have to carry you.” Sam had never been a big man and age had chiseled some of him away.
Emma didn’t think it was a good idea and said so. “I can run up and see if JoJo is home. I’m sure he’d be happy to help.”
Their neighbor JoJo Clark moved furniture for a living, so for him, hoisting Harlan up the flights of stairs would be as easy as carrying a five-pound bag of flour.
“It’ll be fine,” Sam assured her. “Get on, Harlan.”
Up they went, Harlan clamped to his father’s back like a knapsack; Emma close behind, hands braced out ahead of her as if beaming an invisible force to help them along.
By the time they reached the third floor, Sam was perspiring and panting. He set Harlan down and promptly fell against the wall, exhausted. But seeing the shame pulsing in Harlan’s face, Sam swiftly made light of the situation. “I bet you didn’t think your old man had it in him, huh?” he grinned. “Next time you carry me up, okay?”
Harlan nodded.
* * *
The apartment was spacious and cheery with a generous amount of windows. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a kitchen half the size of the one they’d had in the brownstone.
Except for a few new pieces, the furniture was all the same.
Harlan flopped down onto the couch and pointed at the piano in the corner of the room. “That new?”
“Yes,” Emma said.
Sam turned on the radio. Count Basie’s popular tune “Jumpin’ at the Woodside” blared in the air.
Harlan winced, asked his father if he wouldn’t mind finding another station.
“Sure, sure,” Sam said, “whatever you want.”
Emma clapped her hands together. “I bet you’re hungry, huh?” She rushed into the kitchen. “I was cooking all day yesterday. Fried chicken, deviled eggs, collard greens, candied yams, tater salad, mac and cheese . . .”
How many times over the years had Harlan dreamed about eating his mother’s cooking? He couldn’t even begin to count.
“. . . and Mrs. Atkins sent over an apple pie. You remember her, don’t you? I sent your father out to get some ice cream. The fool came back with rum raisin. I told him, You know Harlan don’t like no rum raisin, Harlan likes vanilla! You still like vanilla, don’tcha?” Emma ducked her head around the doorway, her eyes sparkling with something approaching happiness.
“Mama, I haven’t had ice cream in five years. I don’t remember if I like vanilla or rum raisin.”
Emma didn’t know why, but this broke her heart. She moved to the stove and turned the flame on beneath the pot of greens.
Harlan asked, “So, are we expecting company?”
Sam smirked. “Nope.”
“That’s a lot of food for just us three, don’t you think?”
“Well, you know how your mother is.” Sam clasped his hands on top of his head and rolled his eyes to the ceiling.
Emma appeared, blushing with shame. “I just wanted you to have all of your favorites.”
* * *
Just as they sat down to eat, the phone started ringing.
He get in okay?
How he look?
Can we come by?
Aww, yeah, I understand, maybe in a few days, after he’s settled in.
Tell him I asked about him, okay?
I told you, God is good all the time.
Eventually, Sam took the phone off the hook.
* * *
They talked around the pressing questions.
Harlan didn’t bring up the last five years, and Sam and Emma didn’t either. Instead, they spoke about the changes in Harlem; the end of its golden era, the climbing crime rate, Lucille’s new husband, and her career as a nurse at Harlem Hospital.
Harlan listened, head bobbing, eyebrows climbing and falling, barely touching his food.
They tried not to stare, but it was difficult because Harlan looked like death walking. He hadn’t eaten enough to fill the belly of a field mouse when he rubbed his eyes and yawned, “I think I’d like to go to bed now.”
It was barely five o’clock.
* * *
When the sun went down, Harlan turned on the light and kept it on through the night. He lay in bed, keenly aware of every opening and closing door, the clacking of shoes, car horns, and conversations had in the neighboring apartments.
He must have opened and closed his eyes a thousand times, fully expecting to awake from this dream to find himself back at Buchenwald, standing in the prison yard, legs numb.
And then, for one wild moment, Harlan thought that maybe he was dead, and Buchenwald hadn’t been hell after all, but purgatory, and now he had finally ascended into heaven.
Heaven? An apartment on West 119th Street was God’s idea of nirvana? The idea was ludicrous—probably the most ridiculous notion he’d had since those last days in Buchenwald when he’d seriously considered chewing off his thumbs.
In the living room, Emma placed a call to Martin Carter, a family friend and doctor. “He looks real bad,” she whispered into the receiver. “Will you come and give him a look?”
“Of course, I’ll be there tomorrow ’round eleven.”
Chapter 80
Dr. Carter was in the bedroom with Harlan for nearly two hours. When he came out, his toffee-colored face was clouded with concern. “He’s very dehydrated. Don’t worry about his appetite; it’ll get better over time. Give him lots of milk, that’ll open it up. He needs vitamins too. Iron.”
The doctor paused, looked at Emma and then down at his hands. Her pulse quickened.
Meeting her anxious gaze, he blurted, “What happened to him? I asked, but he wouldn’t say. What he tell you?”
Emma shrugged her shoulders. “We didn’t ask. It seems too soon, and he ain’t say. So for now, all we know is what the State Department’s letter said.”
“What was that?”
“That he was found in a German prison.”
The doctor shook his head. “Prison?” He glanced at Harlan’s closed door. “Have you seen him? I mean, under his clothes?”
Emma wrung her hands. “N-no. Why?”
Dr. Carter sighed. “He’s all scarred up. I ain’t seen nothing like it since I was in Virginia, treating them old slaves.”
Emma’s eyes bulged. “W-what?”
He removed the stethoscope from his neck and threw it angrily into his black satchel. “I think he was in one them camps.”
“Camps?”
“Yeah, them camps they killed all them Jews in.”
Emma shook her head. “Nah, Dr. Carter, I don’t think so. Harlan ain’t no Jew, why would they put him in one of those?”
Dr. Carter’s eyes darkened. “Y’all music people. Do you know Valaida?”
“Valaida Snow? Sure, I know her some. Not well, but we get along okay.”
“So you know what happened to her over in Europe, right?”
“I read something in the paper, heard talk.”
“She was in Denmark and them Nazis snatched her right off the street and threw her into one of them camps—them concentration camps. Kept her there for over a year and nearly beat the pretty off her.”
Emma shot a nervous glance at Harlan’s door.
“White folks,” the doctor mumbled disgustedly, “they just ain’t no good, no matter where they are. By the time they let her go, she was damn near dead. Skinnier than your boy in there. Just seventy pounds. Now you know that ain’t no kinda weight for a black woman.”
Emma folded her arms over her breasts. A dull thud beat at her temples. “But they say she lied,” she uttered, so unwilling to believe the unbelievable. “The Daily News claimed she was over there smoking dope. That’s why they put her in jail. Only the black papers said otherwise.”
Dr. Carter shot her a sickened look. “I ain’t take you for a woman who swallowed white lies.”
Embarrassed, Emma lowered her eyes.
Dr. Carter pressed: “Why would she tell a story like that?”
Emma shook her head. “I don’t know, people lie.”
The doctor snatched his bag up and started toward the door. “Well, I believe her,” he said, reaching for the doorknob. “And I say Harlan was in the same sort of place.”
* * *
After Dr. Carter left, Emma made a cup of tea and sat down at the kitchen table to fret.
What if what the doctor said was true? She’d read about what the Jews had gone through in those camps; she’d seen the devastation for herself in a black-and-white newsreel that screened before the main feature of a movie she could no longer recall.
She didn’t remember seeing any black people in the footage, so Dr. Carter must be mistaken. It was just Jews who were interned and murdered in those camps. Wasn’t it? She hadn’t heard any different. Every time the news reported on the Holocaust, they talked about the Jews and no one else. There was certainly no mention of Negroes—she would have remembered that. Yes, Dr. Carter must have his facts wrong.
Emma finished her tea, went to the cabinet, removed a glass from the shelf, and filled it with milk. She carried it down the hall to Harlan’s bedroom, knocked once, and pushed the door open before he could answer.
Even though it was late May and people had already started running their fans, Harlan’s bedroom windows were closed and he was buried beneath two blankets.
“I brought you some milk.” She set the glass on the nightstand, tiptoed to the window, and pulled it open. “Harlan, you awake?”
“Yeah.”
Emma didn’t miss the annoyance in his muffled response. “I said I brought you milk. Dr. Carter said it’ll open up your appetite.”
“Okay.”
Emma grabbed her elbows. “He also said that you need to take vitamins, ’specially iron. I’m going to go to the pharmacy in a few. You wanna come along and get some fresh air?”
“No thanks.”
She cleared her throat. “Um. Dr. Carter also said that . . . well, you got some scars on your body that look . . . well, he said they look real bad.”
Harlan didn’t say a word.
“You wanna talk about it?”
“No.”
Emma moved her hands from her elbows to her shoulders.
“Well, maybe you’d prefer to talk to your father about what . . . um . . . happened to you over there?”
She waited for Harlan to respond. When he said nothing, she sat down on the corner of the bed and rested her hand on his leg.
“For God’s sake, won’t you even look at me?” Looking at her was the least he could do; after all, she was his mother, a mother who had spent five years in turmoil. Five years of praying, crying, and writing letters to the president, not to mention the small fortune she’d spent on overseas phone calls.
After the city bought the house, Emma had gone there every day and sat on the stoop for hours, just in case by some miracle Harlan showed up. Even after the city raised the entire area, she still went and waited in the vast nothingness.
Emma had done everything short of going to Europe to find him herself. And if she could have done that, she would have. So why couldn’t he just give her the little bit she was asking for?
Harlan pushed back the blankets. The corners of his eyes were crusty; his breath was rank. “Mama,” he breathed tiredly, “no sense in both of us walking around with broken hearts.”
Emma gazed at him. Moments later, she rose quietly from the bed and left the room.
Chapter 81
That July, a kind of madness seized Harlem. Place the blame where you want—oppressive summer heat, American hubris gone wild (they’d won the war, after all), or the nuclear bomb the government detonated in the New Mexico desert. Pick one or all—your choice—but the fact remains, Harlem was raging.
In an apartment in the building across the street, a man came home from work, sat down to dinner with his family, and then shot them all dead. The newspapers said that before he killed himself, he ate a dessert of fresh peaches and whipped cream at the very dinner table his wife and children were bleeding out on.
One starry Saturday night, Betty Brown, a single woman, down on her luck and pregnant with her fourth child, took her babies to the Third Avenue Bridge and flung them, and then herself, into the river.
A returning war veteran stripped naked and proceeded to march down 125th Street, blowing a whistle, brandishing his freakishly long penis at astonished onlookers.
Harlan hadn’t washed in weeks and was drinking heavily. He’d drained all the alcohol in the apartment and bloodied his fist against the wall when he demanded that Sam buy more and Sam refused. Afraid that father and son would come to blows, Emma ran out and purchased two bottles of Scotch. If the look Sam gave her had been a bullet, Emma would have been dead.
When Harlan wasn’t drinking, he was sleeping, sitting in bed staring at the walls, or pacing in his room, chain-smoking. Sometimes his parents could hear him sobbing through the walls.
Emma brought him meals because he rarely left his bedroom, except to relieve himself and sometimes not even then. A neighbor reported that she had seen Harlan urinating out the window.
Sam threatened to have him committed, and Emma promised to kill Sam if he did.
Once Emma made the mistake of mentioning Lizard’s name, and for that offense Harlan didn’t speak to her for a week.
Aware of Emma and Sam’s difficulties, Lucille and other close friends sent flowers and notes of encouragement. The religious amongst them lit candles for Harlan and added his name to the church catalogs of the sick and shut-in.
Harlan didn’t know it, but he had entire congregations praying for his recovery.
* * *
One steamy Tuesday afternoon, Emma opened the apartment door to find John Smith standing there in his army duds.
“How long has it been?”
“Too long, Mrs. Elliott.”
After Darlene died and Mayremma moved with John to New Jersey, John had only come back to visit a handful of times in just as many years. However, he had kept in touch by phone, calling on birthdays and holidays.
“You are looking so good. Tall and as handsome as you wanna be.”
John blushed. “It’s the uniform.”
“You make that uniform look good. I will say this: you brave to be wearing it out in public.”
“Why’s that?”
Emma cocked her head. “Ain’t you heard? White boys stringing up Negro soldiers, saying they deserve to die for killing white men, even if those white men were Germans.”
“Oh, yeah, I did hear ’bout that. That’s them crackers down south though.”
“And the crackers up north too.” Emma swept a piece of lint off his lapel. “Sit down. Get you something cold to drink?”
“No thank you, I’m good.”
John studied the dark halos around her eyes and the silver edging her hairline.
“How’s your mother doing?”
“Aww, she’s all right.” His eyes roamed around the apartment. “You miss the house?”
Emma shrugged. “Yes, I do. Living in a building is plenty noisy though.”
“You should come out to New Jersey, it’s nice and quiet.”
“Don’t think it hasn’t crossed my mind.”
John tilted his chin at the piano. “You still giving lessons?”
“Here and there. Not like I used to.”
John glanced at his watch.
Emma got the hint. “Well, I know you didn’t come to jabber with me. How’d you hear he was back?”
“Word gets around.”
“That it does.” Emma smoothed her hands over her skirt. “He hasn’t felt much like company. I’ll tell him you’re here, but I doubt he’ll see you.”
John stood. “No need to announce me, just point the way.”
Emma twisted her lips. “The thing is, John, Harlan ain’t the same person you used to know, and sometimes he gets real
irritable—”
John raised a halting hand. “Does he have a gun in there? ’Cause I can handle a little irritability. I spent the war dodging bullets, but I don’t wanna have to dodge any here at home.” He chuckled.
“Nah,” Emma shook her head, “he don’t have a gun.”
“You sure?”
“You still a fool. Go on now, Harlan’s room is down the hall, second door on your left.”
John didn’t bother to knock; he walked right in and snatched the blankets away. “Get up, nigga!”
Harlan shot up, eyelids flapping. He stared, face contorting, shoulders jumping. “John?”
“The one and only!”
Harlan made an attempt to smile, but his lips refused to cooperate. “John, wow,” he mumbled, pulling the covers over his scarred thighs. “Been years, right? Look at you, an army man.” Harlan reached for the pack of smokes resting on the night table.
“Geez, man, it smells like ass and armpits in here.” John pinched his nose. “Open a fucking window. It’s ninety damn degrees outside, and you closed up in here like it’s winter.”
Harlan slipped a cigarette between his lips. “Aww, shut up, you sound like my mother.”
John sat on the windowsill. “So, how you been?”
“You know,” Harlan raked his fingers across the wild hair on his cheeks, “surviving. H-how ’bout you? And your moms? How’s she doing?”
“Can’t complain. She’s doing okay. I’m driving a cab now.”
“Really? Out there in Jersey?”
“Yep. Just part-time, you know, in between gigs.”
“Oh, you still playing?”
“Of course, ain’t you?”
“Nah, gave it up,” Harlan sniffed.
“Sorry to hear that.”
With the unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth, Harlan said, “No need to sound like somebody died. It’s just music.”
John grunted. “Just music? Was a time when music was your life.”
“Well, things change.” Harlan’s eyes carefully avoided John’s penetrating gaze. “Hey, so how’s your mother?”
John folded his arms. “You already asked me that.”
“Did I?” Harlan laughed. “My mind, it goes in and out sometimes. You got a light?”
The Book of Harlan Page 20