“Shit on you, you old bastard!” Loretta cried out happily. “So, kids, that’s that with them. Now we are entirely on our own.”
When they neared Detroit it was late in the day. Jules had a headache, the baby was feverish, people sitting near them kept glancing around in irritation—one of the kids was always whining or kicking a seat; they couldn’t help it. Jules couldn’t help it. Loretta lay back in her seat with the baby on her lap, exhausted from the ride, her hair in a mess and her face flushed. She kept saying, “Rita will treat us real well when we get there.” But getting to Detroit was not easy. They began entering a city and kept entering it, going in deeper and deeper but not coming to any center. Jules stared out the window. He had never seen anything like this. No map had prepared him for all these streets, these wide boulevards, these buildings and cars and trucks and people, both white and colored, women with painted-on lips and eyebrows of thick dark lines pausing to cross streets, in shoes with high heels, and young men with hair sprawling out pointed behind their ears, looking very dangerous. His head ached violently.
In a daze, Loretta kept muttering, “Soon as we get in we’ll call Rita…the number is right here…she’ll be so glad to see us and’ll treat us real well…” But the bus kept crossing intersections, stopping and starting, until Jules thought he would go crazy. He couldn’t take this. He wanted the still, empty space of the country even if it was punctuated by his grandmother’s thumping footsteps and his grandfather’s snoring and the dim, oppressive memory of his father, a man in a soldier’s uniform. Maureen began to cry. She cried wearily, like a child who feels the need to cry too often. Loretta said, giving her a pinch, “Don’t you go bawling, because this is a wonderful city and a wonderful opportunity, and Rita will take real good care of us.”
After some hours in a great bus station, hanging around to make the same telephone call again and again, and after what seemed to Jules a nightmare space of time during which he believed that the police would come and arrest them all, send them back to the farm, Loretta finally got hold of her mysterious friend. She jumped up and down in the pay booth like a teenager, overjoyed. “Rita! It’s me! Me, Loretta!” Jules tried not to listen to her, because their lives depended upon this, but he had to stay near his mother in case something terrible happened. Over on the bench the baby had finally fallen asleep, flush-faced, and Maureen sat with her pale, serious, defeated eyes on her mother. Loretta cried out for joy. Some magic was being worked, Jules thought. Certain words. Incantations. Some woman at the other end of the line, a woman who had written exactly five letters on blue paper, and now this—the end of the bus trip, this. His head was seized by a sudden bluish pain as if a stranger’s hand had enclosed it tightly.
They got to Rita’s place, which was on a jumbled busy street, and the baby was changed at last and the kids fed hamburger, and Jules lay pretending to sleep while he listened to the women talk, one of whom was his mother.
“No, look, I ain’t kidding you,” the strange woman said, “he won’t take no mess and won’t laugh anything off, not anything. Sometimes I’m scared to death, that’s the truth. But he’s a real man at least. How many of them left around here are real men?”
“I have thirty-four dollars and a few cents. Let me check—”
“No, honey, sit still. Jesus!”
From a radio somewhere came a muffled whine of music, a popular song about love. If you love me and I love you…Jules fixed his mind upon Rita’s voice, canceling out his mother’s. This woman was saying two things, one in words and the other beneath the words, and he was afraid his mother was hearing only the words. “No, sure, he won’t care. He’s out of town anyway until Friday. No, I don’t know exactly, that’s his way, he won’t talk much or explain anything. Men who talk a lot are no good anyway. Look, Loretta, didn’t I tell you to come visit, and you know me, I never lie…”
So they spent the night there, and Jules thought mournfully of the big house out in the country and his bed there and the country itself, where space was everywhere and there were no airless boxed-in streets. And when morning came they were up and on their way out, Loretta fussy and lightheaded, talking too much. Rita kept saying, “But, honey, you could stay at least until Friday, really,” and Loretta kept saying with a nervous giggle, “It’s time I made my own way. I’m old enough.” Jules winced at her foolish, almost hysterical laugh. She said, “Jesus Christ, I’m almost twenty-five years old,” and finally they were out, trailing along the street, their mother in high-heeled shoes and a yellow dress rumpled from the bus ride, her hair pulled back into a sloppy knot, her lips dabbed with lipstick that had begun to crack.
She found them a room above a funeral parlor. It was the first place she looked at, the first place she saw a sign—ROOM FOR RENT—and she went for it breathlessly, as if fearful it would be taken before she got inside. The room was furnished, with one bed. She put all the kids in it. No cover, but that was all right; Jules put his mother’s sweater over Maureen and the baby.
“This is a nice room, isn’t it?” Loretta said.
Jules said, “Yeah,” and sat on the edge of the bed, a thoughtful and stricken child of nearly eight who wondered how long they were going to last. “Now what are you gonna do?” he said.
Loretta was looking at herself in a compact mirror. Turning away from Jules, moving so deliberately, she seemed to solidify the form of her body, bringing out the thick slow curve of her hips. She had changed into a flowered print dress, all golds and oranges and pinks, and her fingers tapped busily around her hair—she’d combed it out onto her shoulders, hair streaked blond and brown. She seemed to be getting instructions from her reflection in the little mirror.
“You guys all go to sleep now. You didn’t get enough sleep last night.”
“Sleep now?” Jules said.
“You watch them girls then.”
She left. She went out into the street. All that night she had been thinking about Rita and Rita’s man, her mind turning dizzily upon them; she had forgotten Howard entirely. She did not even think to take the wedding ring off her finger.
It was now early afternoon. She walked down the street, alert and yet not alert, in a kind of bright, vivacious daze, her eyes not quite taking in all the people around her—so many people, cars, high buildings, so much to see!—and she turned off onto a side street, swaying in her high heels, already exhausted. Time passed. She was lost but didn’t think about it. She felt vaguely that some invisible thread would get her back to the kids, and anyway Jules had sense enough to watch out for the girls. Finally she saw a man walking alongside her who glanced over sideways at her, in a certain way. Her heart pounded. She looked ahead, she looked back at him. The man was about her height, in a brown suit that might have been an expensive one, she couldn’t tell—she hadn’t even seen a man in a suit for years!—and he stared at her with a serious, quizzical look, in silence, even a little shy, until she said, “Hello!” That did it. He slowed down, he circled around to confront her. She said again, “Hello…this is a nice day…” She was grinning. The man said cautiously, “What were you thinking of?” For a moment she stared at him. Then she went blank; she could not think of anything. Then she came to and said, “Ten dollars…ten…” And he said again, stooping a little as if to hear better, “What were you thinking of?” She said, “Ten dollars…?” and her voice ended in a humiliating quaver, a question.
The man took hold of her wrist. “All right, you’re busted,” he said.
“What?”
“The patrol car is just up ahead, around the corner. Come on.”
She could not move. She wasn’t fighting him, her body was just stunned, heavy. He began shaking her hard. He was no longer cautious. He didn’t care who heard them, passing by on the sidewalk. He said in a nasty voice, “Come on! Around the corner! You’re busted!”
She managed to say, “Let me go and I’ll walk by myself—people are watching!”
Around the corner was a patrol car, as he had promised, with the words DETROIT POLICE in white on its side. Loretta was led up to it to be introduced officially to the City of Detroit.
8
When Jules was twelve he fell in love for the first time. His feelings settled sharply upon a young nun who taught fifth grade at school—a tall, quick, startled-looking woman who played piano at assemblies; she was his sister Maureen’s teacher. It was the piano that had drawn him to her. Marching into the auditorium for assemblies on Thursday mornings, Jules had noticed her, admiring the rapid runs and rushes of her pale fingers. He was entranced by the fluttering of her black sleeves and the flash of white at her slender wrists. Left to himself in class, pretending to be working on an assignment, he let his mind drift onto her and onto the intricate melodious passages of her music, which seemed to him exotic, beyond anything he or the people he knew could ever attain. There was something magical in her, in her very being. She seemed a part of the music she made.
Every evening Maureen had something to say about Sister Mary Jerome. She was a quick-tempered young nun in spite of that fragile look. “Today Sister cried again,” Maureen would report, interested and curious. Why did the nuns sometimes burst into tears? Why did they sometimes slap the wrong students, running down the aisle and picking out the innocent?
“You kids are something, making the nuns cry,” Loretta would say. “The whole bunch of you need a licking.”
“But I don’t know why she cried. She just did,” Maureen said.
After school Jules ran half a mile to a five-and-ten-cent store where he worked. Though he was legally too young for a job, he was hired for a quarter or half a dollar an hour if he showed up early enough, to help unpack and unwrap. He dealt with crates of dishware and toys and various junk. Rattling around in his head were the lessons of that day and the shouted threats and news of the playground, the fluttered passing of Sister Mary Jerome in the corridor and any news about her he might have heard. “How’s your teacher, did she cry again?” he would ask scornfully of one of Maureen’s classmates.
His mother no longer bothered to cry. For years she had cried; now she had stopped. His father was a great wall leaning inward, about to collapse on them, but since he had never quite collapsed they gave up fearing him. At least Loretta had given up. Jules associated Sister Mary Jerome’s tears—he had to imagine them, having never seen them himself—with an exoticism that his mother had never had. And the women in movies cried often. They cried beautifully. At the piano Sister’s clever, violent hands controlled the keyboard, and each note was struck beautifully inside Jules’s skull, to be replayed while he struggled with crates, unloading them, digging through baskets of shredded paper and cardboard. Occasionally he cut his hands. Once he stepped on a nail and it went through his shoe and sock, but nothing happened, only a little blood. Sometimes, at home, he discovered large mysterious bruises on his legs. But while he worked, a strange excitement controlled him. The other kids fooled around and snatched things when no one was looking, but in a daze Jules strained muscles to do the job right. When Sister Mary Jerome was in his head he was always a good boy.
“Here, Jules, have one of these—try this,” one of the salesgirls said. She was sixteen or seventeen and liked to come out to tease him. She gave him cigarettes. Jules, who had been smoking for two years but could not afford cigarettes, pretended shyness and accepted them. The girl struck a match and held it up for him, staring with a peculiar smile into his face. “Well, how’s your mother these days, kid?” she said.
“Okay,” said Jules.
“How’s your father?”
“Okay.”
“I seen you guys in church. Is your mother going to have a baby again?”
It was a question Jules thought should not be asked. He nodded his head, embarrassed.
The girl smiled at him broadly, as if he himself had achieved something.
“You guys hoping for a boy or a girl?”
“I guess a boy.”
“You know all about it, huh? All about that stuff?” said the girl.
She had a sharp, dented, almost pretty face, with long black hair that fell past her shoulders. Around her wrist was an identification bracelet her boy friend had given her. On her forearm was a small tattoo of a heart with an arrow through it and the initials R.J. drawn about it in a design resembling lace; she had shown it to Jules one day, but most of the time it was covered up. She said that the five-and-ten manager, an old bitch, didn’t like it. “One of these days I’ll tattoo you,” she told Jules.
The alley behind the store was always filthy. Big boxes, busted crates, overturned garbage pails, everything was in a mess; dogs seemed to seek out this stretch of alley and Jules was always stepping into something. With him worked a few other boys, differing from day to day, the biggest being Ramie Malone, a friend. Ramie had a reputation at school. He stole things from cars, sometimes even radios; that was his specialty. He was thirteen. Late at night he wandered up and down the neighborhood a few blocks from home, where there were many cars parked outside taverns. He worked alone and sold his merchandise with no trouble to a friend of his brother’s. All Jules’s devotion to Sister Mary Jerome was threatened by Ramie’s enticing tales. “If this deal I got going works out, you won’t see me back here for a long time,” Ramie would promise. He would show Jules switchblade knives someone had given him. He would talk excitedly of the latest news, news not put in the paper, of men found in the trunks of cars only a few blocks from Jules’s house, tied with “bobwire,” shot dead, and kids their own age pushed off roofs by niggers. He would tell Jules of a nigger given a beating at one of the precincts, all the men pounding on him with their clubs, all over his body and on his face, “until that bastard’s eye popped right out of his head and onto his cheek, the real thing. Ain’t that something?” Ramie had a cousin, or a friend of his had a cousin, who was a policeman. He knew everything.
He told Jules all about the niggers. “What they want most is to get some kid like you or me, white kids, and scalp us. They do that. A man was found with his scalp half ripped off, and he said niggers did it. You got to watch out for those dirty bastards.” Jules felt a prick of terror at the promise of trouble; he looked about, awaiting it. When he saw a Negro on the street he stared cautiously, wondering when the trouble would come. What secret did niggers have? Where was the mystery? A few years ago there had been a riot on the Belle Isle bridge and people were still talking about it, still angry. Jules wished he could have seen that riot.
At work he couldn’t help hanging around Ramie. He kept asking him, “Who was it that got scalped, who?” or “But which kids got pushed off a roof?” He trembled, waiting for Ramie’s answer, which was usually evasive and insulting. And sometimes, relying desperately on Ramie’s superior knowledge, he asked him, “Why does my sister’s teacher cry at school? It’s Sister Mary Jerome. Do you know her? She nuts or something?”
“They’re all nuts,” Ramie said.
“But what about her—why does she cry?”
“How should I know? All those bitches only need one thing.”
At home Jules nosed around his mother when she was in a good mood, when she was alone, listening to the radio; he wanted to understand the way women were. Loretta liked to listen to “The Hit Parade.” He wondered if Sister Mary Jerome would like it, if she were allowed to listen to it. He hung around his mother, and occasionally he asked, “You got anything you want me to do?” She was always flattered when he or Maureen asked her this. Much of the time she lay on the sofa, drinking beer and resting the bottle on her stomach, peeling the label from it with her fingernails, listening to the radio. Alone during the day, she was lazy and bland. She listened to songs on the radio or “Ma Perkins” and “One Man’s Family” and “Dr. Malone.” Jules liked her this way, stretched out and lazy, within his reach. On certain days she didn’t bother to make supper, she didn’t feel well, she didn?
??t feel up to it, and Maureen and Jules would go out into the kitchen and make something, playing with food. They made supper with an eye to pleasing their father. On those evenings when he didn’t show up they kept the plate warm in the oven without even being asked to; Jules did a lot around the house without being asked to. He hated to be made to do anything, and he had learned that it was less trouble to do things himself. It kept his mother quiet, lying still and content; it kept his father quiet. But his father’s bulk loomed up in his mind, dark and threatening as any Negro, and he thought idly, One of these days he’s going to die.
He liked his home and he liked school. But he was always tired at home and always tired at school. After that spring morning in 1950 when he first fell in love with Sister Jerome during an assembly, his exhaustion was complex; he was up much of the night and after school he had to work, but still he was lively and enthusiastic, and only when the drill of catechism and history and grammar began did his mind begin to go. He thought of the nun’s fluttering sleeves and her fingers on the keyboard. He thought of her pale, serious face, her eyes that glanced up in a kind of timid alarm when he saw her in the corridor or at Mass. He helped to serve Mass on Monday and Wednesday mornings at the convent. A few hours later, at his desk, he would think back on that eerie dawn in church (the oldest church in Detroit!), a red-brick church of enormous proportions, very dark, shadowy, musty, with an old Irishman saying Mass, crotchety and unpredictable, sometimes giving the altar boys a poke to hurry them up, and the silent, fluttering file of nuns coming up the aisle to the communion rail, among them his beloved Sister Mary Jerome. He slept maybe three or four hours a night, and his mind boggled a little during the day, particularly when motes of dust whirled about his head in the sunlight. I love her, I love her, he thought, sounding in his imagination the dull, sonorous notes of a church bell, planning to run across the building to the fifth-graders’ room when school was out, under the pretext of meeting his sister. He was a fairly tall boy for his age, a little nervous, high-pitched, and with a high, sometimes irritating voice; he had clear skin and clear, serious eyes, though he could not always keep them focused on what he was looking at.