The Salt Eaters

by Toni Cade Bambara

  In his fantasies, snatched moments between racing from the emergency room to psychiatric to the subway to the deli to the office he shared as junior member with three ex-Park Avenue GMP’s, he saw himself in burnt cork, Crispus Attucks returns, ignoring the tomato sauce on the chest, turning his musket on them all, mowing down the red coats, the white coats, the rest of the sons of bitches. And that had been his sole encounter with anything resembling a Mardi Gras.

  Just in front of him, sauntering out of a package store and throwing back over her shoulder at him a smile, a challenge, was exactly the kind of woman his father used to yell “Hey, Big Stockings” at. She had her elbow planted in the flesh of one hip, a wine jug held out in the crook of her finger. But before he could work out his strategy, a flashy young dude stepped between them and took the jug in both his hands like it was a bowling ball. They leaned their heads in, looked back at him and laughed. He reddened and slowed his pace, expecting to have to jump any minute the wine jug rumbling down the alley toward him. He cut down a side street. And then that encounter too drifted, gave way as though it hadn’t happened, gave way to the stark reality of the street.

  This was evidently where the poorer people lived. There were broken-down stoops that looked like city and leaning porches that looked like country. Houses with falling-away shutters and brick walkways that wouldn’t make up their minds. Claybourne hadn’t settled on its identity yet, he decided. Its history put it neither on this nor that side of the Mason Dixon. And its present seemed to be a cross between a little Atlanta, a big Mount Bayou and Trenton, New Jersey, in winter.

  Dented garbage cans, car shells, old Venetian blinds that hung askew. Across the way a half-dressed woman in the open window, her breasts resting on pillows laid on the window sill. The block so like his first a hundred lives ago when Army recruiters would set up booths in the empty storefronts and slap a poster up, the sudden bright colors eclipsing tattered liquor signs and old billboards urging the people to vote for Miss Ballantine. In spiffy uniforms, with scrubbed faces, the white and Black recruiters would be joking with the young men, passing out mess-hall menus and glossy photos of soldiers in warm winter uniforms. How he’d wanted to get on line and have his hand shaken and be told he could learn a trade with Uncle Sam, be sent to school, be somebody. Did they still recruit like that?

  Meadows shuddered. Meadows jumped. A snarling dog was heaving himself against a fence whose rattle said it might not hold. Stiff-legged and all teeth, the dog growled and snapped at the wire mesh, his body trembling.

  “Don’t pay’m no mind, mister.” A woman in housecoat and slippers grabbed the beast by his collar, dragging him back from the gate, mashing his head down between her knees. “Shush, Roger, shush.” She was holding a bag of garbage. She would be opening the gate to get to the garbage can on the curb. Should he reach over the fence and take the bag for her? Would Roger find his way out of her knees and attack him? Meadows hurried down the street.

  A dark-skinned man with a cap yanked low over an unruly bush sat on the bottom step of one of the stoops up ahead. A wool plaid jacket that belonged on a boat or on a hunt. Elbows wedged between his knees, stock still and waiting for a duck or a deer or a woman. Only the rifle was missing. Welfare man, Meadows typed him. The small-change half-men who lived off of mothers and children on welfare.

  He had seen them, made a study of them, knew the look, the posture. In parks, on roofs, in bars, on stoops, but especially in supermarkets running their whining line while the women reached round them for a can of whatever was on sale. The boymen grabbing at their pocketbooks or their arms and the women saying “Naw, man, gotta feed my kids.” Then the whine heard all over the market and the women mashing the can against the shelf for a two cents off for dents. “But mama, look here” or “Say Baby I gotta” and then the “Naaaw man.” But never a name, never names. A ritual. Market theater with anonymous personae.

  He’d seen them back the women into the frozen food tank, bending their bodies back as if over a sofa arm, over a bedstand, pressing and pleading for a dollar walk-around money, or sixty-nine cents for a pint to share with Shorty on the roof, or fifty for a game of pool with Bumpy, or thirty-five cents to put them into contending with the teenage basketball stars, or a dime or a nickel or a penny for the gumball machine. And by the time they got to the line and the welfare mamas were fishing out the coupons, worn out with all the haggling, the boymen would lean in for the kill, mashing their joints into the women, mashing the women into the shopping carts, the mesh outlined on ass or hips, the purses clutched so hard the vinyl tore. “A dime, woman, a damn dime.” And the women, defeated, would dip into the coins and give it up, then look over the items moving along on the belt for the one thing the children might possibly do without.

  Meadows approached the man on the stoop, his eyes on the two shoes jutting out that would have to be walked around. He studied the posture, the clothes, the nappy hair sticking out from under the cap. He had him pegged. He didn’t have to look into the face. He never looked into the faces anyway. The nameless players were faceless too. To look was not part of it. He couldn’t look. He always turned his face away. They scared the shit out of him. Not in the bars so much, even when they were nasty drunk. Not on the streets so much, even when they stalked him and anybody else they thought they could put the bite on. They just angered him then. But in the supermarkets the boymen were frightening. Frightening because the women were there, there and losing. And because he was there, there and helpless.

  Never a basket, never with the women, the boymen raced in after the women in a rush of need and gotta and right now. And never a name—mama, baby, woman—but never a name. And he would turn away, but stand there hearing it. Crushing the lettuce and looking for glass to smash, that mysterious directive from childhood In Case of Emergency Smash Glass, like ticker tape spreading across the produce. He wanted to turn and beat them. Bend the boymen into the stacks of frozen food and beat them with a rock cornish hen or a ten-pound carton of solid hard chitterlings.

  And all the while moving up on line, he’d grip the cart handles till his knuckles went white and he’d turn his face away, bury his eyes in the TV Guide or the Jet but hear it anyway. “Well, a dime then. Damn woman, just a dime.” And he’d hear the weary sigh from the woman. Hear the pocketbook open and he’d turn and watch the woman, they all did it the same way like they’d all studied under the same drama coach. They’d peer into the cavernous bags, wanting no doubt to fall in, jump in and close themselves up in there and be unavailable forever. And why did they never do it? What was it that kept them from diving in head first? What in that five-flight walk-up drudge of a life with babies and babies and pee-stained mattresses and welfare investigators poking in closets and cutting them off and cutting them down and these half-men whining and pleading and bending their wash-bent bodies into the cold tank—why not? But always the hand came out of the bag with little clutch purses, and the purses were snatched at greedily by childish unmannish hands. “Wait now. Just you wait one damn minute, man.”

  One day he would snap. One day he would mount the counter shouting, “Use names for crissake! Haven’t you niggers got any names?” He would run amuck in the supermarket.

  Meadows was laughing out loud. Trampling the man’s feet and laughing out loud.

  “Watchit, honky!”

  “Honky! You muthafuckin dumb bastard, don’t you know a Blood when you see one?”

  “Get the fuck off my feet, whatever the fuck you are.”

  Two more men were coming out of the doorway. Then a woman with half her hair pressed and the other half raw came onto the porch, children swarming all around her hips.

  “You on the wrong side of town, buddy.”

  Meadows moved on fast. The warning from the tall dude by the door was not lost on him. Fat chance of trying to explain his feet’s behavior in terms of supermarket memories. Or trying to share the joke of the ubiquitous red box from subways, public buildings, movie houses th
at offered the magic instruction In Case of Emergency. And there he’d be in the supermarket flying over the baskets to get at the boymen, landing in a clutter of cans and boxes and not a bit of glass to be had. No one remembering to buy a jar of pickled beets to supply him with the talisman. And there he’d be getting pummeled by an army of these boymen who had read his intentions and put his name out on the wire. And him yelling, “Quick, somebody hand me a blunt instrument and quick, quick somebody smash some glass. This is an absolute emergency.”

  “Hey you.”

  Coming up behind him were the stepped-on man and the tall dude from the doorway.

  “Wait up.”

  It was pointless to run. There were no alleys or driveways. And who knew what lay beyond the three-bar fence that read DEAD END? With his luck, a sheer drop to a four-lane highway.

  “Hey, buddy, we ain’t gonna bother you.” The door man held his hands palms up, the ancient sign, no spear, no knife, no hand grenade.

  “You lost? … In some kind of trouble?”

  They were studying him. By now they’d know he was not a honky. He felt himself coming into focus for them, like the movie stars on the lids of Dixie Cups he’d licked long ago into being. Coming into view for them now, his red-gold hair of no less than five grades—curly in front, stringy in back, wavy round the ears, slick on top, and downright nappy at the center. The barbers always went at the nigger hair with clippers ablaze but couldn’t bear to clip the curls or shorten the back no matter how he instructed. Haircuts were a freak show. He licked his lips and tried to be patient. Now the grain of his skin would be coming into view, like a 35mm blowup. He was never more clear to himself than when Black people examined him this way, suspicious. He felt his nostrils flatten. For all his mother’s pinching, his nose splayed out into his cheekbones now as if for the first time, as though willed. And now they were checking out his clothes, the cat in the cap eying his watch. They were satisfied he was one of them, he sensed. Though he wasn’t fool enough to think being a nigger saved him. He felt his feet poised for flight, his arms flexed for a rumble. His adrenaline was up. The coagulants working doubletime in case of wound, in case a gush had to be staunched.

  “Whatcha doin round here?”

  He tried to see under the bill of the cap. The face was a layer of shadows. The voice sounded suspicious but not dangerous yet.

  “I … I’m visiting the Infirmary.”

  “Oh.” They exchanged glances. “You one of the new medics?” “Yeh.”

  He was calm enough now to see them, feel them loosen up. The tall one, in a well-ironed denim suit, fished out a pack of cigarettes by the tail of gold cellophane and studied the picture of the camel as if for his next line. The shorter one in the cap kept his eyes on Meadows’ watch.

  “We’ve been having some trouble around here …” The pack was being offered to him. He waved it aside with what he hoped was a cool air of nonchalance. “Transchemical’s been sending goons … spies … bad times …” The man seemed to be making a question of it. What would he know about labor problems at the chemical plant if he were on a visit to the Infirmary? Meadows waited.

  “What’s your name and who you work for?”

  “Hold on, now.” The taller one was pulling Stepped-On back by the arm though he hadn’t moved; his words, though, had shot forward and Meadows had backed up. “Where’s your sense of hospitality? Your manners?” The tall one extended a hand. “I’m Thurston. This here’s Hull. They call him M1. Meanest nigger in de worrld and you gotta come along and step on his foot.”

  “Feet, man. The fool stepped on my feet. Both of them.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry … I’ve had a rough … I’m really sorry, broth—”

  “You got a name, bra thuh?” The nasty one jutted his chin up at him and now he could see the whole face, the eyes. If this is what the welfare boymen looked like up close, so close, he’d keep on keeping his face turned away hereafter.

  “Meadows. I work for Doc Serge,” he lied, inspired.

  “Doc?” They exchanged looks again, visibly impressed. “Hmm.”

  “He tell you to come round here and step on my feet?”

  “Daydreaming. Just … man, I am really sorry …”

  “You lucky, Meadows. If he’d been drunk, you’d be dead. Did Doc send you round with a message?” He paused for just a beat, then lowered his voice. “He’s still coming tonight?”

  Meadows curled up the notebook against his fly, wondering if his subconscious was trying to signal him. But then he was sorry; the gesture had drawn their attention. They were looking down at his joint. He dropped the pad and discovered he was too afraid to retrieve it. “They’ve got a healing going on,” he finally figured was something hip to be saying.

  “Oh yeah?” The dude called Thurston, which had come across to Meadows as Thirsty, seemed genuinely interested. The other one was still doing his x-ray act. “Who?”

  “A Velma Henry.”

  The two men exchanged glances again. “Obie’s woman,” one of them said. Meadows didn’t see which; he chose that moment to bend for his notebook.

  “What’s the matter with her? He finally bury his foot up her ass?”

  “Dunno.” Meadows addressed the notebook.

  “Something happen to her over at the plant?” Thirsty had lowered his voice again and was massaging his chin. Meadows shrugged. It didn’t seem appropriate or discreet to say he thought it had been an attempted suicide. It hadn’t looked like a serious attempt anyway, not compared to cases he’d seen in emergency. In addition, whatever he might say would only provide further questions he knew he could not answer. So he shrugged again and hoped they’d be interested enough to go make a call and leave him alone.

  “Doc’ll know.” Thirsty was checking his watch, then waving them in the direction of the house. “Come on.” Thirsty straightened his jacket and was moving back down the street as though it was understood Meadows and the friend would follow. The man called Emwahn was obviously waiting for Meadows to move, so he did. They fell in around him, flanked him. Meadows was on guard again.

  “Where you staying?”

  He rolled the notebook up and jammed it into his pocket. “Nadir’s.”

  “Who?” They both stopped, and he was now far enough ahead to consider making a run for it. But he hadn’t got past their stoop yet and there was a man sitting there breaking open a six-pack. And who knew, maybe the raging dog up ahead would jump the fence and come at him.

  “You mean M’Dear? As in Maa Deeear, everybody’s good ole boardinghouse grandma?”

  He felt himself redden and they had caught up enough to see it. So they laughed at that too. He was sure the woman in the floral hat, the woman who ran a boardinghouse, had been introduced by Doc Serge as “Nadir.” He’d thought it country-classic.

  “You somp’n.” The one in the suit slung an arm around his shoulder and was wagging his head. “Callin people out of their name. Didn’t yo mama teach you nuthin? I won’t embarrass you by asking you our names. My name’s Thurston, as in need for a beer. This is Hull as in Walnut, called M1 as in rifle. Come on, my man, let’s have a beer. Wish we could extend an invitation to grit, but the cupboard’s Mother Hubbard’s.”

  “The larder is lean.”

  “The refrig renigged.”

  “The bones are picked clean.”

  “And the breadbox is the private preserve of the roaches.”

  They slapped five in front of him and he smacked their hands recklessly. And they laughed again. And Meadows wondered if he would get off LaSalle street alive. He was a yaller nigger in costly cothes with an Omega watch. An out-of-town cornball who’d stepped on somebody named M1 and called him in earshot of kith and kin a motherfucking dumb bastard. Friends had been killed for less. He’d seen a man impaled on a cue stick for questioning the rack up. He’d seen a woman drowned in a bucket of Kool-Aid for broiling the steak medium well instead of medium rare. On Saturday nights he’d seen life-long friends dragging ea
ch other in all cut up, seen shot-up buddies who’d picked up the tip laid down for the barmaid or had said Richard Pryor wasn’t funny, or had dropped a deck of cards on the table with the seal split. He’d seen men who’d survived Korea or Vietnam together hauling each other into emergency apologizing to each other, a boot the only thing holding the foot and leg together, a starched collar holding a lopsided head on. Meadows exhaled and poked a fist right through his pocket. What the hell, he thought, squatting on the steps between them, a beer’s a beer. Whatever happened, he wasn’t stumbling aimlessly around the streets anymore, at loose ends, alone.

  nine

  “What’s the good word, Short Cakes?”

  “Pussy. And another good one is—”

  “Never mind.” Ruby walked her elbows across the tiny café table. “That kid’s mouth’s getting to be an ecological disaster area,” she moaned, dropping her head down into the crook of Jan’s elbow.

  The rest of the kids, tottering on skateboards or leaning their bikes against the railing, went right on talking to Jan while Short Cakes, balancing his skateboard to a standstill, took the opportunity to pinch from Ruby’s plate what he took to be a crab apple.

  “Yawl going to the park tonight?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for anything in the world,” Jan answered, searching the table for something suitable to offer the kids.

  “Then you won’t be firing the ashtrays tonight?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Do what?” Ruby looked up in time to see the kid bite into the hot cherry tomato.

  “Fire. Bake. Harden. Cure.”

  “Oh, clay.”

  The women clamped their mouths shut, waiting for the hot pepper to register. The kids in on the joke hunched the others.

  “Mighty powerful pickling to get past all that foul sewerage.” Ruby laughed as the kid reached over the café railing to take a swipe at her, his face contorted. Speeding away, he meant to fling the hot tomato back over the railing but his aim was off. The kids ducked and it landed splat on the arm of the tall man in the bow tie, leaning against the railing by the entrance step, talking with the crowd of young people who wanted to know how come Muslims weren’t around like before. The paper boy leaned over and took the napkin from Jan and in passing it, got drawn in by Bow Tie, who was very interested in his paper route. The skateboard kids took off down the street on the ninth wave. The bikers, front tires high like a circus act, sailed into the street on the back tires only, slapping the metallic behinds of their thoroughbreds.