Black Alice

by Thomas M. ; Sladek Disch; Sladek Disch

  'And just what do you think you're doing?'

  For the first time Alice noticed the boots in front of her. Her gaze travelled up the gabardine-clad legs, past the gunbelt, the khaki shirt (with silver numbers on the collars), to the large, red, and extremely foreshortened face. The face wobbled atop its tower of flesh, as the policeman (whose face it was) rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet.

  'I'm having my lunch,' Alice said. 'Sir,' she added, for he looked angry enough to be called 'sir'.

  'Come on,' he sighed. 'Move along.'

  'Couldn't I finish my lunch first? I'm not in anybody's way here, am I?'

  He grabbed her up so suddenly that the bottle of milk was knocked over. 'Oh dear!' The accumulated sorrows of the day seemed to reach the threshold of the intolerable, and Alice would have broken out into a flood of tears if she hadn't reminded herself that she would be crying literally over spilt milk. This was such a droll idea that instead of tears she burst into giggles.

  'Where you come from? You don't talk like any piccaninny from around here.'

  'Baltimore,' she replied, watching the last of the spilt milk trickling down a gutter grating.

  The policeman said, 'Uh-huh.' He took her hand and led her into the crowd of people that had gathered about the other people who had sat down (and who were now singing hymns).

  There was evidently not to be a parade, after all; in fact, there was something like a traffic jam going on. Car horns honked festively.

  'Now I want you to point out your mammy and pappy to me, hear?'

  To please the policeman, she looked over all the hymn singers carefully, though it seemed highly improbable that she would find either of her parents here. There were Negroes of all ages, and a number of white teenagers, and a very old white woman who was the loudest of them all, though she sang off-key. 'I don't see my mother or father anywhere,' she said, truthfully.'

  'Uh-huh.' He didn't seem to believe her.

  At the periphery of the crowd the general uproar came to a sudden, sharp focus. The people at the edge of the crowd were pushed forward, right into the laps of the people sitting down. In the ensuing melee, one of the gowned men began to kick the old woman who sang off-key. Alice could scarcely believe her eyes. The old woman hadn't done a thing to provoke him; besides, grown-up men just don't kick old ladies, no matter what old ladies may do! Others of the red-robed men cheered him on: 'That's it, Lem!' or 'Kick her goddam ass off!' And that kind of language. Nobody tried to help the poor old woman. Her friends just sat there singing sad hymns. Perhaps the two groups belonged to different religions.

  'Uh-huh,' the policeman said again, faintly. He let go of Alice's hand and pushed his way through the crowd to the man in red, who stopped kicking to talk with him. His compatriots made a disappointed noise, but the group sitting down kept on singing so that Alice couldn't hear what the policeman said to him. Even the old woman was singing again, though not so loudly. An approaching police siren or fire klaxon tried to drown out the hymn.

  A man in a grey suit, with slicked-back hair that made Alice think of a seal, appeared beside her and thrust a microphone at her. 'I'm Averill Hotchkiss of KHGG-TV's Hotline News. And what's your name, sweety-pie?'

  'Alice,' she said after a moment's indecision. 'Alice Raleigh.'

  'Look into the camera now.' Talking all the while, he turned her about so that she was staring into what appeared to be the window of a mobile and highly-elaborate automatic washing-machine. 'Now, what's that name again?'

  'ALICE!'

  'Alice! Well, Alice, what do you think of all this trouble?'

  'I don't know what to think. I don't think that man should be kicking the poor old ...'

  'A terrible thing, yes. What about school Alice? Do you want to go to the same school as little white girls?'

  Alice looked perplexed. Away from a mirror, it was hard for her to bear in mind that she was no longer a little white girl herself. 'I don't see why not. Shouldn't I want to?'

  Averill Hotchkiss disappeared into the crowd, trailing behind frail, inaudible burblings and the cord of the microphone. Awkwardly, the mobile washing-machine lumbered after him. It wasn't till that moment that Alice realised she'd just appeared on television.

  There was the problem now of food, a problem she had never been confronted with before. Never, at least, with any urgency. It was after six o'clock and she hadn't had anything to eat since breakfast. It was all very well to be free, but did it have to mean starving to death? At least at Bessy's she'd always had enough to eat.

  It was a pity about her loaf of bread. She'd taken it out of the grocery bag, and when the policeman had taken her into the crowd, she'd had to leave both behind. When she'd gone back for them, the grocery bag with the book and the doll (and her ragtag shoe) were still there, but not the loaf of bread. She would have traded everything else to get that bread back now. It was ridiculous: here she was, an heiress for pity's sake, and she didn't have the price of a Salted Nut Roll!

  It was then she chanced to look up (her eyes seldom left the endless plain of the pavement now; she was numb with weariness) and to see the gilt letters in the dusty window. Because of the narrowness of the storefront the letters were bowed upward in an arch:

  STAN'S USED BOOKS AND MAGAZINES

  Covers of used magazines were Scotch-taped to the glass: sun-bleached Playboy's, Rogue's and Knight's, their nudes and demi-nudes changed to various sickly shades of blue and yellow. A few dead flies had somehow managed to wedge themselves down between the magazines and the window.

  'Why, that's it!' Dinah said aloud. (For Alice had better manners than to talk to herself on the street.) 'You can sell your book!'

  'Sell my book?' Alice asked incredulously. 'Sell the book that Uncle Jason gave to me? A first edition of Kipling?'

  'All the more reason, my dear. If it sells for a lot of money, you may have enough left over after you eat to buy a bus ticket. At least to the other side of the Bay. In any case, what else can you do?'

  Dinah, in her usual utilitarian way, was absolutely right, so she pushed open the heavy door, triggering a bell in the farthest reaches of the shop, dark as another Africa. Alice waited demurely before the main counter of the bookstore and passing the time (as the owner seemed to be in no hurry) by looking over the titles: The Kama Sutra (with an introduction by L. T. Woodward, M.D.), The Perfumed Garden (with an Introduction by L. T. Woodward, M.D.), Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence, Song of the Whip (no author mentioned on the cover), City of Night, by John Rechy, and Psychopathia Sexualis (with an Introduction by L. T. Woodward, M.D.).

  'Hello?' Alice called back into the obscurer depths. 'Is anybody home?'

  'Aak? Unx? Mmp!' Then he appeared, a squat balding man with a funny hobbling walk like a chimpanzee's. His dirty white shirt was open to reveal a dirty white tee-shirt, the neck of which had been so badly stretched out of shape that an unseemly amount of his pink, fuzzy chest was exposed to common view. His face was sprinkled with more than one day's growth of salt-and-pepper beard, and his eyes, like the recesses of the shop out of which he had just emerged, were deeply, darkly shadowed.

  'I'd like to sell this book to you, sir,' Alice said, taking Just-So Stories out of the grocery bag.

  'What? Yaa?' He snatched the book out of her hand. 'Wha! Whaziss?' He looked at Alice intently, then back at the book. He opened it to the title page, snorting still more fiercely.

  'Is something the matter?' Alice asked concernedly.

  'Where you steal it, kid?'

  'It's mine! It's my own book. It was a present to me from my uncle.'

  'Ya'spect me to believe a story like that?' He punctuated this question with a very rhinoceros of a snort.

  Tears came into her eyes. 'But it is! Really, really, it is!'

  'Fifty cents,' he murmured, as though to himself. 'I can give you fifty cents. It's more than you'll get anywhere else in town, but I've got a soft heart.' He touched his soft heart, where his lank tee-shirt hung d
own to reveal it. 'Look, this is my price sheet. I can't pay any more than what it says here,' He waved a sheaf of typed papers, dirty as his shirt, in her face.

  'Are you sure that's all? Because it's a first edition, you know. A first edition of Kipling.'

  'So? So, who reads Kipling? This is what people read nowadays ...' He waved a dirty hand at the dirty books spread out on the dirty counter. With his other hand he held out a fifty-cent piece of not more than usual dirtiness. Alice only hesitated a moment before accepting it. Only half a block away, she remembered, there was a restaurant where fifty cents would buy a hamburger and french fries.

  When the little nigger girl had left his shop, Stan hobbled back into the darkness, holding the tattered old book with sacramental respect. He looked at the gin bottle, then at the telephone. He decided to make the phone call first.

  A different woman answered than the woman who had called him that morning.

  'About that book you were asking after?' Stan wheezed. Those Just-So Stories! Well, I got the edition you want. So you can bring your money—I can't take no cheques, sorry—to Stan's Books on 47 Truslove Street. When can you be here by? I'll stay open late if you'll send someone tonight.'

  'I'm afraid, sir, that a rather urgent matter has come up that's taken everyone but myself out of the office. I'm just answering the phone here, and I really can't tell you anything about that book. And I can't say for certain when anyone will be coming back. So maybe the best thing would be for you to call back sometime in the morning.'

  'In the morning?'

  'Yes, in the morning. After nine o'clock. That would be best. Thank you, sir.'

  Stan held the receiver to his ear long after she'd hung up. Then he began to swear. Fifty cents! Fifty cents down the drain! He poured himself a glass of gin and stared at the traitorous phone until the half-light of the July afternoon had become a quarter-light and finally none at all. It never rang again that night.

  Chapter 15

  A million million cars had passed her by, and now it was dark. Would the drivers be able to see her in the dark? The cars swooshed by in sequence, dazzling her with their headlights, deadening her with their utter and unanimous lack of charity. One could understand a driver being reluctant to pick up the usual sort of hitch-hiker (Miss Godwin, for instance, had always refused to) but what sort of threat could an eleven-year-old girl pose? True, this wasn't the ideal spot to be standing (a hundred feet short of the cloverleaf that fed into the tunnel beneath the Bay), but there was room for a car to pull over to the side, and the traffic wasn't so dense now that the drivers couldn't see her in time to stop. It was just another example of Prejudice.

  It had been Prejudice likewise, she realised now, that had been at the root of the trouble she'd witnessed earlier that day. The men in the silk robes had been Klansmen. She hadn't recognised them then, because they hadn't been wearing their pointy hats, but when she'd seen the headlines on one of the morning newspapers (klan violence predicted for the fourth), she'd realised why the man had kicked the poor old woman (because of Prejudice) and why none of the old woman's friends had helped her (Civil Rights). Of course, it was illegal to sit in the streets and sing hymns, or even eat lunch (as she'd discovered), but it seemed probable that if the Klan had been the ones sitting in the street, they wouldn't have been arrested, much less kicked.

  Another and another and another car whizzed by in the nearer lane, and out of the last of them, a convertible, somebody threw a beer bottle. It shattered on the gravelled siding inches from Alice's feet. Had they meant to hit her with it? No, it was scarcely credible.

  And yet—it was equally incredible that anyone would deliberately try to run over her, and some teenagers had tried to do just that only an hour before. She'd had to throw herself into the ditch beside the road to avoid being hit. Kids were certainly different here in Norfolk from kids in Baltimore. She remembered, with an ache of sadness, the busload of butterfly-bright teenagers on the way to the beach, their radios blaring, their blonde hair streaming in the wind. It all seemed worlds away and years ago, and yet she knew that Baltimore wasn't terribly far off and that she'd been on that bus only last Saturday morning, not four full days before.

  A truck approached thunderously. It hardly seemed worthwhile, but she dusted off her dress and put out her thumb. A giant tanker of milk roared past at sixty miles an hour. It had Maryland licences. She sighed. Milk and Maryland—Good Lord, she would never see either again at this rate! Maybe she should start looking for a place to spend the night.

  The next vehicle began slowing before it reached her. Alice was at first uncertain whether she had a ride at last—or if it was another dirty trick. The car stopped and the right-hand door flew open. She ran towards the headlights, which had already attracted a cloud of insects, up to the open door. 'Are you going to B ...'

  A hand grabbed each of her shoulders and pulled her into the car. 'Alice, my darling girl!' His lips kissed her forehead perfunctorily. 'We going home now. The nightmare is over. You're safe.'

  It was her father.

  At ten o'clock, after six hours of futile searching in the streets of Norfolk, Roderick had given up. He paid off Bessy and started back for Baltimore. Alice would have to turn up somewhere, sometime. And if not... Well, it wouldn't be his fault.

  Alice's escape had jeopardised Bessy's position more than his own, but now Bessy and her menage were packing their bags. His own twelve-hours' absence was an embarrassment, but not unaccountable, since he had thought to establish the precedent that morning of receiving and acting under 'secret' instructions from the kidnappers. He had not performed a single action (excepting, of course, the murders) that could not be accounted for in this way, if need be.

  So that when he saw the little Negro girl hitch-hiking on the highway leading into the tunnel, it was a bit of luck too good to be believed. Aside from her first astonished shriek, she hadn't said a word to him. As they drove through the neon whiteness of the tunnel, he would glance at her from time to time, curious about this well-nigh autistic silence. With her hair dyed and curled, with her so dark, he had difficulty believing she really was his daughter. Her manner had changed as much as her appearance. She, who had been so lively and full of giggling nonsense, sat immobile, eyebrows drawn together in a half-frown, pale eyes staring dully ahead at the yellow dashes flicking past down the centre of the road, the very picture of a sullen piccaninny. Bessy had certainly done her job.

  'I bet you're anxious to be getting home, eh, kid?'

  Silence.

  'If you don't want to talk about it, I understand. It must have been pretty bad, back there. You're safe now, thank God, but I suppose it will take a little getting used to.'

  Silence.

  'Your mother has been terribly upset by all this.'

  Alice turned to look at him. Was it a trick of the shifting light or some effect caused by the darker pigmentation of her skin—or was there in those eyes an expression of ... what? He could not be quite sure: contempt? fear? accusation?

  Hold on there, Raleigh, he told himself. Pretty soon you'll be seeing accusations in stop-lights.

  'Daddy,' she said quietly (he realised that he'd been expecting her voice to have changed, to have become a piccaninny voice), 'how did you know where to find me?'

  'Well, you see, my pet, the kidnappers told me to get on the train to Norfolk. I gave them the money in Baltimore, and they were going to hand you back over to me down here. But when I got here they told me you'd escaped. I was frantic. I didn't know whether or not to believe them. I was afraid that they might have ... done something to you. When I saw you out on the highway, I'd already given up searching for you; I was going back to Baltimore.'

  She smiled a curious, lopsided smile, her brows still pinched together in a frown. 'How did you know that it was me on the highway? It was so dark, and I'm ... disguised.'

  Roderick laughed nervously. She had an attorney's mind, the brat! 'Actually, sweetheart, I didn't know it was you unti
l I'd stopped. I surely was surprised. As soon as we get home, we'll wash that brown stuff off you.'

  'Yes, I'll bet you were surprised. I was surprised too.' Her laughter was harsh and humourless. Roderick began to wonder whether the stay at Green Pastures, brief as it had been, might not have accomplished what all the years of Mrs. Buckler had not been able to—to wit, driven his little darling mad.

  'I certainly am glad to see you, Alice. You're my darlingest daughter.'

  'Don't call me that. Don't call me Alice.'

  What was going on in her mind? She was staring out through the windshield again, though there was nothing to be seen but the hypnotic flicker of lane markings. She had put on a pair of cheap plastic sunglasses, and with that token she resumed her former, impervious silence.

  An hour passed. They left the junk architecture of drive-ins and filling stations behind. They crossed the York and Rappa-hanock Rivers. Roderick almost came to forget that Alice was in the car with him. She had fallen asleep curled up at the other end of the seat. He would have liked to be asleep now. He'd got scarcely two hours' sleep the night before. Twice he stopped the car so that he might walk about in the cool evening air and revive himself. He reviewed his alibi and tried to discover loopholes in it.

  Another hour. They had crossed the Potomac on Route 301 and were in Maryland now. He had to have a coffee. He pulled over into the parking lot of Midge's All-Nite Truck-Stop Eateria. Alice woke groggily, making little animal noises of discomfort. 'Let's get something to eat, honeybunch. Okay?' He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. All these charades of father affection! Soon, perhaps, he would leave the country; then there would be no need for such hypocrisies.

  'I wish you wouldn't do that, Mr Raleigh,' she said sleepily. (It was surely Dinah who spoke; Alice would have had better sense.) 'That was a very mean trick you played on Alice. You should be ashamed.'