“Let him speak,” Mama overruled the apprentice, “I know I’ll never die sanctified. But I do hope at least to die blessed.”
Bag-of-Sand began pacing up and down, in a sweat from more than the climate; one hand on his belly and one on his head—“and furthermore I’ll tell you how the Church covered up the scientific truth that Jesus Christ was a dwarf. Every time the Church fathers came to a biblical reference to Jesus as ‘tiny,’ ‘little,’ ‘undersized,’ or ‘small,’ they changed it to ‘humble,’ ‘meek,’ ‘gentle,’ ‘modest,’ or ‘sweet.’ I’ve done research all over the world on this and I can tell you: The Church has perpetuated a hoax!”
“Are you for action or aren’t you, buddy?” Big Stingaree wanted to know.
“Well, in May, 1929, I wrote C-U-N-T on a convent wall in red chalk—how’s that for action?”
Big Stingaree clapped his hand to his forehead and staggered backward to show that the mind boggled at the very thought.
“Not only that”—Bag-of-Sand seemed anxious to paint as black a picture of himself as possible—“I was wearing the cloth at the time!”
“No matter how you look at it,” Mama deliberated solemnly, “it’s a bad situation. I hope you’ve confessed, young man.”
“Not formally,” Bag-of-Sand explained, “but later in the same year, while passing the same convent, I wrote Jesus Saves where I’d written that other.”
“What were you wearing,” Mama wanted to know, “when you wrote Jesus Saves where you’d written that other?”
“A sports jacket and huarachos.”
“I see,” Mama said sorrowfully. “You write something like that while wearing the cloth and then come back six months later dressed like Bing Crosby, scribble Jesus Saves, and think you’ve missed purgatory. It isn’t as easy as all that, young man.”
“The Pope himself couldn’t get you off now,” Big Stingaree decided. “How about a bit of action as long as you’re sunk anyhow?”
Bag-of-Sand agreed. For he was geared to the girlies just as he’d said.
In fact, this ghee could scarcely remember one day to the next where he’d lain the night before. And as often as not, he wound up in the very same sack as he had at noon disheveled.
Twitchet-struck and pussy-simple, snatch-mad and skirt-sick, he was a side-street solitary who had nothing but a petticoat with seven ruffles on it in his mind. One who dreamed by night of nothing but what he’d do to the girls tomorrow. This was a sinner whose family had once had him committed because he had decided he didn’t want to be a priest after all. Any man who didn’t want to be a priest was obviously out of his mind. There had been simply nothing left to do but to commit him.
What had thereafter emerged, obsessed by myths, was no longer of either the church or the world, but the ghost of a ghost who roamed a curious twilit land between the world and the church.
A land where the thousand images of sex stood transfixed like stone ruins in a desert place. Lost in a world where sex had gone blind, deaf, mute, cold: and alone as a seaward stone.
“So long as I’m sunk I might as well have some fun out of sinking,” he reasoned Jesuitically. Then, turning to the girl holding the poodle dyed pink, he inquired, “What may your little friend’s name be, miss?”
“Heavensent,” the girl assured him.
“Why, then Heaven must have sent him,” Bag-of-Sand deduced. And offering the girl his arm, all three, girl, poodle and defrocked priest, proceeded up the unsanctified stair.
Now the blinds, drawn fast, held the room in a dappled gloom where
dimly fell the shadows, one by one, of bars. And in this dusk like a jailhouse dusk the juke sang on and on.
In our little penthouse
We’ll always contrive
To keep love and romance always alive
Just over the Hudson
Just over the drive —
The moment the song stopped, the creaking of the overhead fans began, regular and slow. The women shifted restlessly from doorway to divan, lighting fresh cigarettes or opening fresh Dr. Peppers at each new post; yet never finishing either a drink or a cigarette.
“You never know when a trick is a cop or somebody missing one bubble,” the Chicago girl complained.
“When he starts in to strangle you, chances are he ain’t a cop,” Kitty explained, “it’s why I keep saying it would be best if every trick took two girls. Then when he got your neck in his hands, your buddy could holler for help. ”
They never finished anything. Restlessness was their common affliction. Reba was sure the fan was giving her a chill, Floralee wanted to sing; and Kitty had to know why she wasn’t permitted to spike a Coke with gin. While Mama worried lest she should die unblessed.
The girls crowded forward in their watery gloom, shading their eyes against the street: No one had seen the cab drive up.
It came out of nowhere. Like a cab that wheels all night through a misting dream.
All saw step forth in the greenish light a naval lieutenant in full regalia; a seagoing executive in rimless glasses: A hero of sea fights yet unfought. Bearing like a rainbow across his sky-blue breast all the honors a peacetime navy could pin.
Bag-of-Sand, wherever he’d gone, was immediately forgotten when this sight stepped out on Perdido Street.
Mama simply scuttled to the curb. Mama had never captured a prospect so glorious to behold.
Yet he seemed reluctant of capture. For he held Mama there in some earnest discussion; speaking low so as to keep his driver from hearing.
“Mammy-freak,” Mama thought she heard him saying, “stick out so fah behind she hahdly got time to make a child behave.”
Mama took one step closer. “I don’t quite catch what you’re saying, Officer.”
He cupped his lips, leaning toward her—“Made a lemon pie. Made me a lemon pie, little lemon pie all mah own. ”
Mama took a step back. “Lemon?” she asked. “All your own?”
“The very day I broke the chum.”
“Then I have just the girl for you,” Mama decided. For whatever this rascal had in mind, she couldn’t afford to lose a customer so prosperous. “Every man likes a little change now and then. I know exactly how you feel.”
He drew himself up. “Nobody knows how a mammy-freak feels,” he informed her point-blank. “How could anyone but another mammy-freak know how a mammy-freak feels?”
If it was an organization, he was the president. Mama simply turned to go, but he held her back with a wheedling touch. “You know your-self,” he cajoled her, “how they stick out in back.”
“Who stick out in back?”
“Why, all of them; especially when they get in a hurry. Now, admit it.”
Mama shook off his hand. “Who stick out? Who get in a hurry? Admit what?” Mama was getting angry but she didn’t know at what.
“Why, old black mammies, of course,” he told her as though everyone knew old black mammies were the coming thing.
“Maybe you ought to come inside before it rains,” Mama invited him, suddenly feeling she’d be safer in the parlor.
“It isn’t going to rain.” Navy sounded certain as God and began unfolding a little apron from under his coat. He bent to tie it about her waist. It was striped green and white like peppermint; as he tied it Mama plucked without strength at the apron’s price-tag. He picked the tag off himself and the cab dusted off in disgust.
“A good many black-mammy-freaks visit you, I presume?” the officer assumed.
“It’s been several days since one called,” Mama told him. Standing in her Aunt Jemima apron, she now felt she had become the prospect.
“My men call me ‘Commander,’ ” he announced.
“That,” Mama decided inwardly, “isn’t what my chicks are going to call you.”
And led him inside The Hundred Grassfires like leading a child home.
Inside the parlor the six-year-old black boy with the mind of a forty-year-old pimp, the one his grandmother called Warr
en Gameliel but whom the women called the King of the Indoor Thieves, stood on a divan wearing shoes that belonged to a grown man and nothing else but a shirt.
A shirt that barely reached his navel, revealing a hide not exactly high yellow. The King was in fact closer to high brown. He was even closer to dark brown.
Warren Gameliel was black as a kettle in hell.
Truth to tell, the King looked to be a cross between a Black Angus calf and something fished out of the Mississippi on a moonless night. One shade darker and this kid would have disappeared.
“Meet my grandson,” Mama introduced him to the Commander. “Ain’t he just fine?”
Turning his head proudly upon his iron-colored throat, the King fluttered his lashes modestly at the woman’s flattery.
“Age six years, waist thirty-two and a half, weight one hundred and two, and she asks is he fine,” the woman called Hallie Dear mocked Mama fondly. The big overdressed man saluted the small naked one.
“Pledge allegiance, Boy-Baby,” Mama encouraged the King to perform his single accomplishment. But the King simply planted his black toes wider, as though saying he’d have to know more about this gold-braid wheeler-dealer before he’d pledge his teething ring.
Then Reba honked with hollow glee: under the shirt the boy was reacting to the scent of the half-naked woman like a baby bull.
“I do it back,” the King made his intention known.
“Ain’t you shamed,” Mama reproved him in a voice that simply donged with pride, “gettin’ a upper right in front of ladies?”
“He’ll be a pimp like everyone else,” Kitty prophesied.
“I worked for loryers,” Reba entered the stakes, “we specialized in tort’n’seizure.”
These women regarded Hallie Dear with an intermixture of admiration and pity. They felt she held herself aloof because she’d once taught school. At the same time they perceived that she was defenseless. Floralee alone loved and trusted the older woman.
But was there anyone Floralee didn’t trust? If this pale lost blonde wasn’t down the stairs by the time street-lamps came on, somebody went up and fetched her down. For should lamps come on or lamps stay dark, all was one to this pale lost blonde.
Nobody had counted (since nobody cared) how many lamps had gone down since the night she had stood where marquee lights flickered in an uncertain rain; and a cabbie had held a door wide for her. She had gotten in and offered him a pressed flower for her fare.
“I sing just ever so purty, mister,” she assured the officer now. “Only modesty songs, of course; for I don’t know vulgary words. May I recite a modesty poem?”
“Wait till you hear this loony holler,” Kitty warned him. “I think all they did in them hills was bury their dead.”
“Don’t begrudge the child,” Mama put her arm about Floralee’s shoulder to indicate she wasn’t one to begrudge any child, “she got the innocence God protects.”
“He’s got a strange notion of protection then, that’s my opinion,” Kitty told how she felt about everything.
And turned her back on the parlor.
What must I do to win a diadem
Floralee burst into song strung on a silver string—
When I reach that shining strand?
“Shh, honey,” Mama tried to quiet the demented girl, and turning apologetically to the naval prospect, explained, “this one is a regular angel.”
“She’s a whore like everyone else,” Kitty announced with her back still turned. Floralee cupped her face in her hands to hide her blush of shame.
“Anybody can be a whore,” added Kitty.
“Is that true?” the commander asked Mama seriously. “Can any one woman become a whore? Any woman at all?”
“Anyone at all,” Mama seemed optimistic. “Aren’t we all created free and equal?”
“Where do you keep your submarines?” Kitty turned abruptly on the officer.
“Why ask me a thing like that?”
“It would help me in my work—I’m a spy on the side.” Nobody laughed when Kitty turned to the juke.
“I feel rotten about everybody but myself,” she said aloud.
“I got half my choppers out ’n no ovalries,” Reba remembered, “the doctor said he never seen nothin’ like it. So what? I can still be a practical nurse without ovalries, can’t I? Hey! How’d you like all the cigarettes you can smoke, General? Just go down to American Tobacco ’n give my name; they’ll give you all you can haul in one trip.”
“Baby,” the girl called Big Five marveled, “I don’t know what you’re on, but I never heard nothing like it, either.”
“I do it back,” the King insisted, but Mama yanked the gold-braid cap, which he had taken off the commander’s head, far down over his eyes. As if by shutting off his vision she might improve his manners.
“I do it,” the infant insisted, warning everyone of what would happen the second he got this damned hat out of his eyes.
Somebody got the juke going. Somebody said, “Make mine a double.” And somebody else called for gin—
Mama don’t ’low no gee-tar playin’ here
the juke cried in dread—
Mama don’t 'low no banjo-playin’ here —
“Oh, I can sing purtier far than that,” Floralee boasted amid pleas, claims, threats, and tiny squeals. For now the women vied openly for the commander’s attention. While the King worked his thighs in a rage of blinded love but still couldn’t get that cap out of his eyes.
“I want you girls to respect our guest!” Mama began shouting, though nobody had yet gotten around to insulting him. “Look up to this man. Hear this! Hear this! Warren Gameliel, you little black fool, get the commander’s hat off your head this instant!”
“Mama!” Hallie began scolding Mama, “stop giving orders! We’re not in a battle!”
“This man represents the entire Atlantic fleet combined!” Mama cried out. “Warren Gameliel! Pledge allegiance!”
“She’s just being carried away,” Hallie explained to the officer. Brushing the other girls aside, she framed his face in her hands until he returned the look she gave.
“If you don’t behave, I’ll send you to the nigger school,” Mama threatened the King.
Outside the drunks were coming out of the country’s last speakeasies and the street-lamps began to move like the breasts of a young girl under the hands of a man who has bought too many. Warren Gameliel reached out blindly and secured a black stranglehold on the officer’s neck.
And in an odd little silence a girl’s voice said, “I was drunk, the jukebox was playing; I began to cry.” And all the air felt troubled by some cheap cologne.
“Our guest wants to say hello,” Hallie guessed; and pulled Navy’s head right against her breast. He nodded strengthless assent.
She helped him to rise and he rose; more like a sick man than one drunk.
“Send two double-gins to my room,” Hallie ordered Mama. “The rest of you drink whatever you want.”
A kerosene lamp lit Hallie’s room—one that might have served a whore of old Babylon: a narrow bed in hope of bread; a basin in hope of purity. A beaded portiere to keep mosquitoes out yet let a little music in. A scent of punk from an incense stick to bum off odors of whiskey or tobacco. A calendar from the year before and an image above it of something or other in hope of forgiveness for this or that. A whole world to millions since the first girl sold; and a world to millions yet.
The lamp’s brown glow on her amber gown made of Hallie a golden woman. For her eyes burned with a gray-green fire; and about her throat she wore a yellow band. Her gown fell off one shoulder but was kept from falling farther by the rise of her breast.
“No matter how often I trick,” she murmured aloud, “as soon as I’m with a man, I get shaky.”
“No need of even taking off your clothes,” he told her. “Nothing is going to happen.”
Hallie, always defensive about her darkness, was ready to be hurt: “Some men like dark girls best.
”
“Nothing to do with it,” he explained, “I was brought up in a special way. Yet I’ll pay you for your time. I don’t mean charity.”
“I never turn down charity,” Hallie told him candidly, “I have too much pride for that. What kind of whore would I be then?” She held herself proudly upon her dishonored bed.
“I’m from Virginia,” he now thought she should know, “we go back to the Old Dominion.”
“It’s nice to have two homes, I’m sure,” she congratulated him.
He smiled gently; then cupped her ear to confide something—“It’s where Old Black Mammy come by with a broom ’n ’most knock you down—‘Stay outa mah way when ah’m cleanin’, boy!’—but when you stay out of the way here she come with bucket ’n mop ’n ’most knock you down again—‘Boy, when you gonna learn to behave?’—’n when you start behavin’, she come right at you—'Boy! You got nuthin’ to do all day but stand in mah way?’ ” His voice took on a secret excitement. “Wham! She give it to you good. Old Black Mammy got a heavy hand —‘Boy, you fixin’ to git yourself soaked?’ ”
He composed himself.
“Mister,” Hallie asked at last, “how long you been in this condition?”
The big flushed man, boylike yet strangely aged, ran his hand across his hair to be sure its part was in place. He was one of those men whose teeth are so well kept and whose hair is so well groomed that both appear to be false.
“Black Mammy’s been dead nineteen years,” he told Hallie, returning to his white pronunciation. “Hand and foot that woman waited on us; and when the day came that found her crippled, who was there left to wait on her? ‘Mammy,’ I told her, ‘you waited on me, now it’s my turn to wait on you.’ ” A mischievous light came into his eyes: “That wasn’t all I told her.”
“All right—what else?”
“I told her, ‘You made me behave, now it’s my turn to make you behave.’ ”
“Mister,” Hallie told him, “I really don’t take your meaning—couldn’t you get to the point?”
He crossed his large hands and looked at her evenly.
“I was working the chum when the handle snapped. The water from it was flooding the porch. When Black Mammy saw what I’d done, she aimed her hand at me. I slipped and fell trying to get away, so she pad-died me face down. I started hollering, pretending she was half killing me, when it really hardly hurt at all. That was the first time she made me behave.”
The Last Carousel Page 25