Nine Lives

by Dan Baum

  “Moses, right?” Ronald said.

  “That’s right,” the man panted.

  “Where you from, Moses?” Ronald said.

  “Bayou Goula.” Deep country, upriver.

  “Been in New Orleans long?”

  “’Bout three weeks.”

  “Well, good luck to you.”

  The track hummed under Ronald’s foot; two blocks away an olive green streetcar loaded passengers. A hand tapped him on the shoulder and he turned. “What are you getting ready to do?” said Freddy the foreman, a short, red-faced white man in coveralls.

  “Got some rotten ties up under here, Freddy,” Ronald said.

  Freddy frowned and puffed up like he was about to burst. “Tie’s fine,” he said. The ties were invisible under the dirt and grass. Only the thin rails showed.

  “No, it ain’t,” Ronald said. “You watch. Streetcar’s going to roll like it’s on the ocean.”

  The streetcar came clattering up the tracks. They stood back to let it pass, and sure enough, it listed toward the riverside like it was about to tip over. Ronald heard someone inside give a frightened little yip.

  “Needs some fresh slag is all,” Freddy said.

  “How many tracks you fixed with your own hands?” Ronald smiled, giving Freddy a full shot of the grille—the full mouth of gold teeth that never failed to freak out white folks. Freddy winced. “Leave it to the experts,” Ronald said. “If we’re going to dig up the track to put fresh slag under, we might as well replace those rotten ties.”

  “Ties are fine,” Freddy said, growing red in the face. “Just replace the slag.” He glared around at the track jacks listening in. Moses, the skinny kid from Bayou Goula, jumped and said, “Yes, Mr. Freddy.”

  Country boy, Ronald thought. Minstrel man. Mr. Freddy this and Mr. Freddy that. He calls you Moses and you call him Mr. Freddy. “Well, Freddy,” Ronald said. “Let’s get the dirt off’n the track and we’ll see what we got.”

  Charlie Harper passed behind Ronald and whispered, “Easy. You want your raises, you got to swing it a bit.”

  Ronald turned to face him. “Man, I do their work,” he said loudly. “I’m due my raise and I’ll get it.” Charlie shook his head and slunk away. A good man. Hard worker. But another minstrel man. These Mississippi boys from the cotton fields, these sugar-cutting boys from the bayou country, they’d missed out on the liberation movement. Ronald had spent his teenage years eating bean pies with the Black Panthers and handing out their literature on Canal Street. His boyhood friend Pete Alexander from across Deslonde Street had dropped all that talk of being Creole and accepted the beauty of his blackness, and together they’d formed a club called the Black Crusaders. They taught children black poetry and the rudiments of self-defense in an abandoned house in the Lower Nine. Unlike these minstrel men from the bayou and the cane fields, they’d beaten their souls against the anvil of repression to make themselves strong; it’s what coming up in the city did for a man. They quoted H. Rap Brown and Brother Malcolm to one another, but for Ronald it really all went back to Mama: you got to do their work, but you don’t have to give them a song and dance.

  Ronald had a wife now—a small, fiery girl from the Desire Project named Minnie, who wore her hair in a proper Angela Davis natural. She was tough and liked to have her way, but it was up to Ronald to be a man and take charge of the household. That was a tenet of the liberation movement, too: a man is a man at all hours. When their son was born, Ronald wouldn’t hear of saddling the boy with the name Ronald junior. He might be a baby now, Ronald said, but he’ll be a black man someday and he needs his own name, a freedom name. Ronald named him Renaldo.

  The streetcar approached, white faces peering out with curiosity. Ronald pumped his hand, palm down, to let the motorman know the section was settling into the soupy earth. He glanced at Freddy, who watched from the shade of a spreading oak, his arms folded. The streetcar eased by, and Ronald immediately bent to shovel dirt from between the ties. The others fell in beside him, working fast. His muscles bunched and stretched pleasantly under his rough cotton shirt. He liked the feeling; with every shovelful of soil, he grew a little stronger.

  Within minutes, they’d laid bare fifty-two feet of rails and ties. Sure enough, three of the ties were rotten, crushed in the middle, the slag displaced from beneath them. The men dropped their shovels with a clatter and picked up long nipping bars to pry out the spikes. The sun poured like lava over Ronald’s back.

  “Man.” Moses wheezed. “Why don’t they have us do this after the sun goes down?”

  “You don’t want to be up here at night,” grunted Oscar Crandell, as he heaved dirt into a wheelbarrow. “White folks see you on St. Charles Avenue after dark’s likely to call the police.”

  “Stand up here in the middle of the day without a white foreman, see what they do,” Ronald said, and he and Oscar laughed. The join plates came unbolted with a loud groan. The men leaned into their nipping bars and pried a long section of rail free.

  A light blue Lincoln rolled to a stop, and Bob James, the general manager of New Orleans Public Service Incorporated, stepped out, along with three other white men Ronald didn’t recognize. Out-of-towners. Shareholders maybe, or vendors. It always seemed to Ronald that James liked bringing white men out to watch his darkies sweat in the sun. Ronald paid no mind. When Charlie Harper saw them, though, he began singing chain-gang blues. Ronald snorted. He liked Charlie’s deep baritone but hated when Charlie poured it on for the bosses.

  The track jacks rolled the two rails atop the new ties, and using chin-high nipping bars as levers and Charlie’s singing to set the timing, they massaged them into place. Oscar re-bolted the join plates. A streetcar stopped two blocks away, taking on passengers. Ronald grabbed his sledgehammer and beat a spike into place with four quick, heavy blows. The streetcar was rolling now, barely a block away. Charlie and Oscar put on a show for Bob James, each grabbing his hammer halfway up the shaft and twirling it once before bringing it down on the spike head: Charlie then Oscar, Charlie then Oscar, a neat, precise dance, synchronized to Charlie’s baritone. They finished seconds before the streetcar rolled by, clanging and clacking merrily. Bob James and his guests piled into the Lincoln and rolled away. All that remained was to shovel the dirt back into place, smooth it, and throw on a little grass seed. Ronald wiped the sweat from his face on an upper sleeve. His muscles burned pleasantly.

  “Hey, look there, where’s little Moses going?” Oscar said. The man from Bayou Goula was throwing his hammer into the back of the work truck. He headed on down the neutral ground, without looking back. “Couldn’t take it,” Charlie said. “Didn’t last a day.” They laughed, and Ronald felt a warm glow in his belly. This was men.

  ONE MORNING a money green Cadillac pulled up to the corner of Third Street, and Pete Alexander got out, dazzling in a wide-lapelled, ankle-length powder blue coat and matching wide-brimmed fedora—the full Superfly getup. Ronald had to laugh. Not six months ago, Pete had been done up like Shaft, in a black leather coat and pointed boots. Six months before that, it was a dashiki. Before that, the combs and the ’fro. Or did the dashiki come first? No matter, with that Cherokee nose and copper red skin, Pete looked good in all of it. He’d gone his own way when the days of revolutionary poetry and bean pies ended. Pete Alexander wasn’t one to take up the sledgehammer and the pickax. But he never questioned Ronald’s choice, and Ronald never questioned his. From time to time Ronald needed a little help, and Pete would whip out a big roll and peel off three hundred dollars like it was nothing, with no talk of Ronald ever paying it back. And when Pete needed a break from the fast life, he could take off that powder blue coat and sit up at Ronald’s table for a dish of Minnie’s bread pudding like they were both still ten years old.

  Pete held open his Cadillac door with an elegant flourish, like a chauffeur. In back, Ronald saw a passel of Pete’s girls. He was delivering them someplace, along with packages of whatnot that Ronald didn’t care to know nothing ab
out.

  “Freddy,” he said, throwing down his nipping bar. “I’m taking me an early lunch.”

  FRANK MINYARD

  ORLEANS PARISH CORONER’S OFFICE

  1974

  Frank pushed through the “No Admittance” door and stepped down the dimly lit stairs. He spent as little time among the autopsy rooms as possible. It was his little secret: he didn’t like being around the dead. He was glad to have his pathologists and their assistants—the dieners—do the cutting and examining. Ever since medical school, cadavers gave him the willies.

  His eyes adjusted to the dark as he descended, and the temperature dropped ten degrees. A narrow hall led to the examination rooms. He shivered.

  A young black man with haunted eyes sat on a milk crate outside one of the autopsy rooms, head bent to a little transistor radio, right hand pantomiming the valves on some sort of horn. He wore tan coveralls—the new trustee sent over by Orleans Parish Prison.

  “Hey,” Frank said. The man jumped to his feet. “Sit, please,” Frank said. “Nothing going on?”

  “Quiet today.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Edgar Smith.”

  “Mind if I ask what you’re in for?”

  “Charge was armed robbery, but all I did was try to collect money I was owed.”

  “Spare me,” Frank said. “You bothered by working with the dead?”

  “I was with the Marines at Pleiku,” he said. “I’m used to the dead.”

  The music issued softly from his radio, and his fingers unconsciously pushed imaginary valves.

  “What do you play?” Frank asked.

  “Sousaphone.”

  “You any good?”

  “Grew up in the bucket of blood,” Smith said in a deep, gravelly voice. “Gravier and Rocheblave. Third Ward. And I started the first brass band there, the Bulldog Brass Band.”

  “I play in a little band that could use a sousaphone.”

  “Well, I’m in jail right now, as you know.” He gave a short, mirthless bark.

  “Oh, that’s nothing. Foti? The new sheriff? He and I were elected on the same day. The DA—Connick? Him too. We go way back. If you want to play with us on Saturday, I’ll fix it.”

  BELINDA CARR

  ALABO STREET

  1974

  Belinda lay on her narrow bed, reading Nancy’s Mysterious Letter. It was Friday, and a weekend’s worth of third-grade homework from Lawless Elementary School had taken her all of about two minutes to complete. Her little brother Alvin was watching cartoons in the living room. He’d asked for a snack, but all the fridge held was a half-eaten package of baloney. Belinda was free to lose herself in Nancy Drew’s world, where children came home to freshly baked cookies, the chief of police was your pal, and nobody’s dad ever walked out.

  Mom came in the front door singing tiredly “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” She worked by the hospital all day as a nurse’s aide, but on Sundays, at Greater Harvest Baptist Church on North Rocheblave, she was the powerhouse of the choir. She could have been a professional, they said: another Mahalia Jackson. But something had gotten in the way. Something had stuck Mom with a career of changing bedpans and the tedium of raising three kids on her own in a raggedy rented house on Alabo Street.

  Calvin came running in on his thick two-year-old legs; Mom had retrieved him from Grandma’s on the way home. Belinda picked him up and walked into the kitchen. Alvin turned off the TV and followed. Mom sat at the chrome kitchen table with her shoes kicked off, rubbing her feet. She was broad shouldered and thick limbed, with short straight hair and a square jaw. Belinda’s willowy height came from Lord knew where; her dad, gone two years ago to a trucker’s life in Texas, was stocky. “We going to eat?” Belinda asked.

  “I thought we’d go by Aunt Polly,” Mom said.

  “Dy-no-mite!” Alvin shouted, an expression he’d picked up from Good Times. Belinda hated that show; she saw enough unruly shiftless behavior in her own life. She preferred Happy Days and The Waltons, shows about normal people living normal family lives.

  They walked together through the twilight, Belinda carrying Calvin. The evening was warm, and people were out on their porches; it took Belinda and her family half an hour to walk five blocks because they had to say hey to everybody. The air was spicy with the fragrance of vegetable gardens—onions, cabbages—and it was getting dark as they turned onto Egania Street, where Uncle Sammy owned a row of cottages that housed most of Belinda’s relatives. Yellow light and laughter spilled through the oleander hedge in front of Aunt Polly’s, a lilac-colored shotgun. It was a card-game night.

  Alvin ran ahead, up the steps to the crowded porch, where neighbors were taking a break from the games, fanning themselves and smoking cigarettes. The front room was tiny; the walls seemed to squeeze around Aunt Polly’s big furniture. Four men, faces sweaty, sat at a folding table playing a boisterous game of tonk as another half dozen stood around, watching and shouting encouragement. The air was thick and hot, rich with cigars and garlic. Fats Domino was singing on the record player; people in the Lower Nine loved their local boy.

  Belinda snaked her way among the hot, tobacco-and-whiskey-smelling bodies to the kitchen, where Aunt Polly stood at the old stove with a glass of cold drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, laughing with Mrs. Jenkins and Aunt Florie. “Hey, girl!” With two soft hands, Aunt Polly pulled Belinda’s face into her yielding, apron-covered belly. Belinda could feel the crinkle of bills under her cheek, in an apron pocket. Aunt Polly took a cut of every pot, in return for hosting the games and serving massive quantities of smothered pork chops, baked macaroni, chicken, red beans, broccoli and cheese, and jambalaya. By dawn, she might have two hundred dollars in her pocket, and she’d move on to cooking eggs, grits, biscuits, and bacon for the cardplayers. Cousin Faye, a slim eighth grader with shiny, shoulder-length curls, handed Belinda a plate heaped with food and said, “Let’s go out back.”

  They sat on the stoop, watching a yard full of boys cut up. Lionus Jenkins and Kermit Ruffins, both from Belinda’s class, were sword fighting with alder switches. Cousin Stevie and Belinda’s brother Alvin lay down to leg wrestle in the weedy dirt just as Grandma came around the corner holding baby Katina, Belinda’s newest cousin. “You boys acting like satmallie fools!” Grandma shrieked, raising a palm to smack them. “Stop that ruining them clothes!”

  Belinda finished her pork chop and licked her fingers. “You ever been whipped?” she asked Faye.

  “Nope.”

  “Me neither,” Belinda said, setting down her plate. “Miss Wheaton says I’m going to college someday.”

  “College?” Faye screwed up her pretty face. “You dreaming, girl.”

  Belinda shrugged. In truth, she didn’t really know what college was, other than something for shirt-and-tie people on television. That was good enough for her. Eight years old, and she wanted out of this life so bad she could taste it.

  RONALD LEWIS

  NEW ORLEANS PUBLIC SERVICE INCORPORATED, BARONNE STREET

  1976

  Jimmy Zansler put out a big calloused hand as Ronald came up the front steps of the blocky brown downtown office building where NOPSI kept its offices. Jimmy was a bear of a man, with a beard and stylishly long hair, the damndest white man Ronald had ever met. He worked in the body shop of the Carrollton streetcar barn and was trying harder to end discrimination on the job than most blacks. He and Ronald were struggling to organize all three of NOPSI’s departments—power, gas, and transit—into the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, to end NOPSI’s system of separate unions for black and white employees. Both were company controlled, and both were useless. To Ronald, politics had always been about black pride and black power. To join up with a white man to do politics—that was new. He’d have liked to set up on Miss Duckie’s porch again and tell her about it. She’d be proud, he knew. But she’d finally sold her house on Tennessee Street and moved with her family out to New Orleans East; it had becom
e popular, just like she’d predicted.

  Ronald and Jimmy entered the break room and took seats side by side at a Formica-topped table next to the vending machines. Frank Nettles, a big, studious white man who rebuilt streetcar motors at the Arabella barn, sat beside them. A few minutes later, NOPSI’s three big guns walked in: Bob James, his shoulders hunched and a pipe in his mouth; tough little Hero Evans, strutting like he was ready to peel off his jacket and throw down; and big, elegant Clarence Eckelmann—professorial, smiling slightly, in tiny wire-rimmed glasses and a beautifully cut suit. Behind the three big guns, a line of sallow and sullen lawyers seated themselves along the wall in a row of plastic chairs.

  Ronald smiled widely, giving them a big view of his grille to knock them off balance. “We got to talk first about pay on the roadway,” he said. “Right now, we’re second-class workers.”

  Bob James took the pipe from his mouth and banged it on the tabletop. He snatched off his glasses and leaned forward. “Roadway,” he growled, “is nothing more than digging dirt.”

  “Bullshit,” Ronald said, and the three white executives sat back in their chairs. “You were out there just the other day. You take a man from maintenance and put him on the tracks. See if he can get ties, tampers, and slag replaced in the time it takes two streetcars to pass. You got to be roadway to do that.”

  “There’s no way we’re going to pay …,” Hero Evans began.

  “Hey,” Ronald said softly. “Don’t make me tell OSHA you got us riding on the back of a dump truck, with no seats, and covering us with a tarpaulin. And that general manager you got using roadway men to build his house; who should I tell about that?”

  “Can I say something?” said Jimmy in his meaty Irish Channel accent. “I’m old NOPSI. My father worked in the power department. I love this company. But let’s admit it; roadway is South Africa.”