by Ed Bullins
So with care Dandy lifted the bucket and sluiced the contents into the mixture. He stood and watched as the large pieces floated to the top and then were sucked under in the crawling stew, while air bubbles burped and the mess stirred internally and gave off yeasty sounds and sourer smells. The dogs’ whines did not even muffle the popping of the pigs’ pudding.
Dandy stood just off the driveway which half-mooned around the house and cut the yard in two pushing the workrooms, barn and hen house into the background. The slop barrel hunkered beside an old wooden truck trailer that had been mounted on cinder blocks to the right of the house. Uncle Clyde used the trailer for a tool room and stored his pig and chicken feed in its cool wooden gloom.
The horse compound, stall, barn and hen house with a shabby assortment of several other buildings formed a broken-toothed back wall to the yard. In front of the hen house grew a tree with swing hanging from its lower branches. Dandy remembered the first summer when there were two little dark girls with the whitest of whites in their eyes to swing on the empty swing. He turned back and put the top back upon the barrel. In back of the barn and hen house and buildings was the manure pile, and down a small hill to ground spongy wet in the autumn rains, was the pigpen with four large pigs in one half of the compound and four little porkers on the other side. Dandy would feed them after supper when it began to get dark and cool.
Behind the pigpen were woods for a quarter of a mile and behind the trees were the church camp grounds; every year in August the Mary’s Shore colored community gave an ole timey camp meetin’. Mary’s Shore was in fact a town two miles away, two country miles, but where Aunt Bessie’s farm sat was closer to the crossing of Mt. Holy. Three roads converged like blinded snakes; the road from Hamilton, the twisted and adventurous route from Bicksley, and the Biltmore dust highway. On one corner was a store with an ancient filling pump, an old-style one with gauges in the head and the liquid moving down the glass bulb like bubbling sand in an hourglass. On the other corner was Sister Ossie Mae Hewett’s house and land. And at the apex of the triangle was the Mt. Holy Methodist church. Opposite Aunt Bessie’s field, running a quarter mile toward the crossing, was the Mt. Holy cemetery. The small settlement of black farmers and laborers was more often called by themselves Mt. Holy than anything else.
“You sho drag feet, Dandy Wandy,” Marie Ann said when he entered the kitchen. She tickled the back of his head with the fly swatter as he went past. Aunt Bessie was again bent over the oven. She was a largeboned, heavy-fleshed woman who eternally laughed and joked, showing her flashy store teeth. She was very proud of her teeth, almost as proud of them as she was of herself. Dandy thought that the way she managed things and worked the love and affection from people was like a pimp who psychs out his whores. She was a shrewd extrovert with a heart big enough to satisfy even herself. But Dandy knew her, knew she believed in nothing, as he did, not even in the God she went in search of three times a week at the whitewashed church up the road, for she was what Dandy called a phoney, though she was nice, one of his favorite people of all those he knew, so he liked her very much while not trusting her a bit.
“Why, here they come,” Aunt Bessie exclaimed in her booming voice. “Here come my boys.”
An old Packard groaned around the driveway and halted. The front passenger door opened and a tall dark young man stepped out and turned away from the house and headed for the outhouse. From the rear doors skipped a brown laughing boy and a thin dark one circled the car to join the other.
“Hey, hey, Fatso,” the brown boy screamed in mirth as the dogs pranced and yapped about him.
“Ahhh, Roy, you better not tell,” the darker one said. “Ahhh … Roy.”
“Heee hee heee … Oooooo man,” the brown boy laughed and began running around the car with the dark one after him, the dogs completing the circle.
“Git on in the house and get ready fo dinner,” the man in the car said. He sat in his driver’s place and shouted through the window.
The two boys came in the house letting the screen door bang behind them.
“You little boys stop lettin’ that screen door bang,” Marie Ann shouted.
“Oh, shut up, girl,” one of them said.
“Wait, wait … before you two little boys get ready for supper I want you to walk up to Sister Ossie Mae Hewett’s where Ida is workin’,” Aunt Bessie said.
“Yes, Aunt Bessie,” the dark boy said.
“Walk home with Ida and Sister Ossie’s goin’ ta send back some tomatoes and peaches.”
“Hee … hee …” Roy chortled.
“Didn’t you hear Aunt Bess, boy?” Marie Ann asked. “What’s wrong with you little boys?”
“But Aunt Bess … hee hee,” Roy tried to choke out, but his laugh bent him over near to the floor.
“Look at that silly boy,” Aunt Bessie said, her face cracking into a smile for the joke that had to come.
“What’s wrong with that boy?” Marie Ann wanted to know.
“Don’t listen to him, Aunt Bessie,” Richard said. “He’s tryin’ ta make fun ah me. Don’t listen ta him, Aunt Bess.”
“Aunt Bess, Fatso … he … he,” Roy began, pointing at the thin boy, “he tried … heee hee heeee.”
“I don’t want to hear about Richard Bowen,” Aunt Bessie blustered when Roy stretched out on the floor and sobbed with mirth. “Get on up to Sister Ossie Mae’s and get Ida.”
The boys left finally with Richard grabbing a slim stick from the woodshed in back of the trailer and crying “Oooo man” and chasing Roy around the drive and out in front of the house and up the road with the old man’s shouts from the car all the while warning that they better get about their little businesses.
Dandy was helping Marie Ann set the table when the tall youth came in and slammed the screen door.
“There’s mah big son,” Aunt Bess said and shuddered when the door flew shut. “How did it go today, son?”
“Awlright, Aunt Bessie,” he said, deepening his voice on purpose to a musical baritone.
“How’s my big bro’ Bowen,” Marie Ann said, pushing herself against the youth to make him lean sideways.
“What cha doin’ dere, Maurey,” the boy slipped into a playful drawl and began pushing her across the floor.
“Bo, stop pushin’ your little sister,” Marie Ann giggled. She tried to tickle him as they jostled their way across the room.
“Dandy, come and pull this here girl offen me,” Jack called.
“No, Dandy, don’t you dare, Dandy,” Marie screamed, laughing as she acted like she was about to be raped. “Help me, please help me, Dandy,” she pleaded.
“I’m neutral,” Dandy called out, watching their mock battle, seeing the sinews bulge in Marie Anne’s legs and her solid behind below the narrow waist fight the material of the shorts.
“Dandy, you better help out one of them or ole Aunt Bessie’s gonna jump in to even it up,” the old woman teased and began rolling up imaginary sleeves and wetting her thumbs on tongue as she threw up her dukes.
Dandy ran to the sink and pulled a damp towel from the rack and twirled it tight three times and ran across to the squirming couple and popped the towel on the seat of Marie Ann’s shorts.
“Ohh … Dandy, you dirty dog,” she whimpered.
And he popped her again, a loud and cracking whack.
“That’s for the fly swatter, Marie,” he said.
“Hey, what you kids doin’ in dere?” the man in the car called in.
“See here, your Uncle Clyde is goin’ to get you,” Aunt Bess said and moved over to the door, blocking the man’s view.
“Jack Bowen, you go and clean up,” she said.
The couple parted.
“Just don’t worry so much about inside of here when you ain’t in, Clyde,” Aunt Bessie hollered. “Just don’t stick your nose in so much,” she said to the old man in the old Packard.
“I’ll be stickin’ mah foot somewhere if’en I don’t git some peace around here,”
the man in the car said.
* * *
When Jack let Marie loose, Dandy spun around with the girl swinging at him. When they were inside the front room he let her catch him and she slapped at his grinning face until they began kissing. Aunt Bessie called her to finish setting the table.
Dandy didn’t want to go back into the kitchen with his just having gotten kissed and then suddenly having to act like nothing had happened. He didn’t know if he could be normal.
That time at Doris’s he hadn’t been normal, and he had really tried that time. No matter how he tried it always betrayed him. In fact, he knew it was he who betrayed himself.
He had met Doris at school. She was in his homeroom class and Doris had been pretty hard to miss. She was the oldest of either girls or boys for having been put away in reform school for almost three years and she was also the largest and loudest.
Doris was evil to his way of thinking … a type of evil which fascinated him. Not only did she curse like she wanted, she did everything else she wanted. She threatened the boys in class as well as the girls, but it was especially the boys she had made fear her, and she didn’t just bluff. Of course there was probably bluster in her statements to the boys that she could cut or pull their “things” off if they messed with her or got in her way but most believed her, for she had been known to scratch girls up and hit the boys so hard on their arms and in the chest that they swore she hit like a man. Most fourteen-year-olds have not been struck by a man’s full punch, but Doris’s rep was secure.
Somehow she never bothered Dandy before they became friends. For all of Dandy’s swagger, essentially he was a quiet boy. After school he would go home and work on his motor bike, or hopelessly unable to find a defect, he and his friend Homer would take a ride or go by some girl’s house. Homer lived next door to him and they were the only two in their neighborhood who had motor bikes. Dandy had gotten his by begging his mother for two long weeks. Homer had gotten his six weeks later by taking an extra job after school. Some days Dandy didn’t ride with Homer nor tamper with his bike’s efficiency. He went around the corner to the 8th Street gym in the basement of the police station. There he trained for the future. That’s what he thought he would be some day, a fighter.
Columbia Avenue in North Philly in some of its neon stretches has a bar at every corner and one, two or three in between. It is a street of pawnshops, trolley cars, pimps, markets, jazz, real-estate offices, hustlers, the hustled, lawyers, whores, junkies, blues, and more blues and bars and movies—the main artery of a ghetto, Dandy’s neighborhood.
Up north, in the city, Dandy was mostly called Stevie. And the Saturday afternoon that Stevie Benson and Homer met Snoopy and his boys, the Avenue was jumpin’, a drunk’s delight and a cock-hound’s carnival. Stevie and Homer had crossed Broad and passed the five-and-ten when they were stopped by five boys who stepped from the alley next to the show.
“Hey, what’s happenin’, man?” the dark wiry leader said to Stevie.
“How’s it goin’, Homer?” one of the boys said to Stevie’s friend.
“What the fuck is this supposed to be, man?” Homer asked. Homer was older than any of them and the boys in front of him grinned and backed off. Stevie didn’t know any of the gang.
“I said what’s happenin’,” the leader spoke again.
“Nothin’, what’s happen’n’ with you, man?” Stevie replied.
No one else spoke. Homer strolled to the curb and sat on the bumper of a car. The other boys faded aside, leaving the pair alone.
“How ’bout loanin’ me a nickel, man?” the leader said.
“I ain’t got it.”
“Ain’t cha goin’nin’ da movie?”
“Yeah.”
“Den wha’cha mean ya ain’t got it? All I find I can have?” He reached toward Stevie’s pocket.
Stevie stepped back into a fighting stance and shoved the boy’s hand aside. From the edges of his eyes shapes moved.
“Don’t worry ’bout yore back,” Homer said. “This is just between you and him.”
“What are ya supposed to be … bad, man?” the leader asked Stevie.
“Bad enough, man.”
“I’ll see ya ’round,” he said and he and his boys stepped back into the alley, glaring as they retreated.
There were three fights that afternoon in the movies. Two between rival gangs and one in the balcony between two gassed head dudes over a girl who left with a third fellow. Homer told Stevie how well he had done with Snoopy and they stayed out of hassles for the remainder of that day.
The rest of the weekend was spent with Homer instructing Stevie in what to look for and how to face it, for trouble was surely coming.
Monday morning was like many others. The dreary succession of junior high school classes passed with the same amount of perverse violence by the students and the exact amount of hate that big city slum schoolteachers can radiate. The erasers were thrown at Wild Leo in the third row by the hysterical, horn-rimmed redhead who taught something she said was social functioning; the zigging chalk whistled down the aisle at some pompadoured head in math class; the spitball that splattered upon the neck of the shellshocked English teacher caused him to verbally fornicate with Jesus; the dragging of Pancho the Spic down to the principal’s office for writing obscene suggestions to Rita the Jew; the accumulated deadening hate of packing fifty-one haters in a space that only thirty could possibly fit—Monday morning was like many others.
In this school Stevie had to hide always, had to hide his intelligence from teachers as well as students. He had to hide his willingness to learn, his wanting to know and find out. But now, in his second year, he knew how to hide. In his first he was green and had found himself in fights each week; sometimes three or four in a gang would beat him up as he fought back wildly like a caged animal that didn’t have instinct enough to run, even if the gate was opened. These fights usually ended when they hit him in the eyes, blinding him, and then pounded and kicked him to the ground as an added treat to the hundreds of schoolmates jeering the loser.
Force was what the crowd worshipped, Stevie learned. And for all the many good fights he had provided the mob, hardly anybody acknowledged him as a fighter. Losers are not often kept in mind as long as a year. And there had been no fight for Stevie for over a year, since he had learned to hide so well.
After the lunch hour, the kids formed lines to march back into classroom. Stevie waited in his line, behind the numerous heads, not thinking of the long afternoon hours ahead, only sucking at the scraps of baloney caught between his teeth, from the king-sized hoagie he had eaten at the little lunch counter on Fifth Street.
“Hey, mahthafukker!” a voice at his side said loudly.
Stevie turned his head to see as did the rest of the kids; it was Snoopy.
“I’ll be waitin’ fo ya after school, ya little punk,” Snoopy warned. “Don’t try and git away.”
A steady drone teased Stevie’s ears the remainder of the afternoon. Guys and girls he didn’t know stared at him and pointed and giggled. Some made pantomimed gestures—a boney fist smashing his mouth and the bugged-eyed expression of the punchdrunk, a mighty dig to the gut with a boloed right and the resulting doubling up and retching. The mood was intensifying for the afternoon’s pagan dance.
Those who knew Stevie turned their heads or stayed far from him. Two friends from his neighborhood, his age, Brother and Timmy, looked knowingly and smiled and nodded among themselves, sharing this one more defeat of Stevie whom they had known and seen defeated many other times. A few girls told him how sorry they were and for him to run out the side exit when the bell rang, or even before school ended. Who was Snoopy to create this total terror, he wondered. Stevie was out of his neighborhood, with no strong neighborhood friends to side with him, and had always been an outcast and foreigner during his school life because the schools closest to him were so “bad” his mother threatened him with boarding school if he were ever compelled to go by the auth
orities. He constantly lied about his address. So, he had nobody there but himself. The Jewish boys he knew and the several Irish, Italian and Polish guys wouldn’t mix in a fight among Negroes even if one of them was a friend and the other a stranger with a gang to back him up. Fear of the gang was one more reason why he couldn’t ask his few friends.
Toward the end of the last period, Stevie raised his hand and asked to be excused from class. A tittering rustle rose about him as he got up and left the room. Inside the boy’s toilet his stomach knotted as he sat on the john and tried to think of nothing and keep his legs from trembling, and after a while he straightened his clothes and in the mirror above the washbowl he feinted his left like Homer had shown him over the weekend and shadow-boxed a barrage of hooks and uppercuts into his imaginary opponent’s surprised face. He then danced back, waiting for his dream adversary’s vicious counterattack but stopped him cold with a low right hand thrown belt-high as he charged in flailing, and Stevie finally creamed the shadow to the sidewalk with a left bolo to the kidneys. Before he left the cement room he pissed at the urinal, shaking the last drops into his palms and massaging the moist skin for luck.
“Little sucker, you gonna git your ass stomped today,” Doris said, and he saw the joy of his return on his classmates’ faces. “Fool, you should’a got away when ya had the chance,” the big girl said when they lined up to leave school.