“But now you can turn that white skin into an advantage I’ve been denied. You’re still young; I’m old. You don’t need me. When we get out of Chicago, go across that invisible steel fence and pass as one of the privileged.
“Folks, you’ll have lots of company. I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that several millions of white Niggers just like you are in that sweet garden of opportunity on that other side.
“It’s really kind of comical when you think about it. I can almost see those Niggers squirming and suffering at their interracial breakfast tables. Even in the executive suites of some of America’s most honored corporations, those white fakes get hot flashes at that word nigger. Of course, some of the fakes don’t quake. They revel in secret glee at the epithet.
“Their lives are booby trapped with the constant terror of exposure. But a fin will get a C-note that for them the reward outweighs the tensions.
“Don’t be a sucker, son. All the milk and honey is on the other side of this hell.”
He glided through the bedroom doorway. I lay there hoping Cleo was home. I wondered how I could phrase the truth about her to Blue. Then I thought about his determination to take her with us. No, he’d be immune no matter how I phrased it.
I heard Bertha’s growls lengthen in sequence. I hoped she wouldn’t awaken. I couldn’t stand a repeat of Blue’s cave tale. I couldn’t understand how Reverend could get a wink of sleep so close to the guttural muzzle of Bertha’s snoring.
I heard muffled thudding, perhaps like a runt elephant stomping on a bale of cotton. It was Blue stocking-footing it up the stairway. He came in and fell into the bunk.
He said, “I didn’t get an answer. I let it ring a dozen times. I don’t understand it. I tried to call Felix. He’s probably at a poker game.
“It’s after midnight. I called the Sutherland Hotel Lounge. Ray Charles is there, I think. She’d go a hundred miles to hear him. I got her paged. No dice.
“There’s a big dance in Robbins. She could be there. Anyway, I’m going to make one more call at three. I’m going to that Southside if she’s not home then. I have to know what’s wrong. Like I told you, I can’t leave without her.”
I started to point out the obvious danger for him. But then I thought about the flaming passion I had felt for the Goddess.
Perhaps if I were in Blue’s spot, and it were the Goddess over there, I’d be chump enough to risk my own life. I decided to soothe him. The odds were long against it, but maybe I could still get an angle later to persuade him to leave town and send for her.
I said, “There’s nothing to worry about. I’m sure she’ll be there at three. If she’s not, you could slip to the Southside in Reverend’s truck. Or you could let Fixer find her for you. Wait until three like you said. No point in getting upset about the unknown. Only suckers do that.”
He said, “I’m not the worrying kind. I just want to get her off the Southside before daybreak. I want to keep my promise to you, that we leave Chicago on schedule.”
We lay there, two slick grifters at bay. We had a load of spending money. But it couldn’t buy us a clean bed.
6
TEARS FOR A LOST DRUM
Bertha had stopped snoring. The tomb silence was broken by the rapid throbbing of a car engine. I could hear tires gnashing their rubber teeth against the gritty alley floor. The car screeched to a halt. The engine idled.
Then I heard the faint thumping of a jazz drummer from the car’s radio playing counterpoint to the presto racing of my heartbeat. Was it Nino out there in the alley? Had he found some way to trace us?
I sat up. I had started to swing my leg over the bunk rim. I was going to the window to look out on the alley. Then I sank back to the bunk in relief. The car throbbed away down the alley.
For some strange reason, I couldn’t forget the sound of that drum. I wondered why. I tried to turn my mind from it. It was no use. Then I closed my eyes and let my mind grope back through the past. Perhaps it could make some kind of connection there.
Then the painful reason why the sound of that drum was so insistent came in a blinding burst of chrome. The connection lay, not in a sound, but in pictures! On the screen behind my closed eyes, I saw once again that glittery, elusive drum. . . .
I saw the featureless image of the blond giant striding through the hazy doorway. I felt again the transient, joyful fear in the pit of my stomach when the shadow hurled me into the air. He’d catch me and squeeze his cheek against mine.
At his feet would be the drum. I heard Phala’s cries of happiness as she rushed into the visitor’s arms.
I heard her soft sobbing moans behind her bedroom door. I saw me so lonely, amusing myself making faces in the gleaming trim of the drum.
I felt an aching boulder of tension roll and tumble inside my chest when I saw me waking up the next morning. I rushed frantically through the apartment.
I couldn’t find it anywhere! The drum! That mute, shiny drum was gone again.
Phala tried to blink back her tears. I got in her lap and we bawled together, because the drum was gone. One day the drum did come and never came again.
The pictures were becoming more vivid. Spinning on the reel of memory, back to Kansas City, Missouri. It was perhaps like the total recall that a dying man might experience.
Shortly after the drum left for the last time, Phala’s loneliness and heartbreak became real to me.
There were blond white men, many of them, in drunken succession. But no drum. They brought bottles, and far into the night I’d be awake listening to Phala’s wild sad laughter.
I was a little past three years of age. My terrible crying seizures started. I’d cry until I threw up. Sometimes Phala would hear me above the clamor of the drunken revelry.
She’d come to me in the darkness. I’d be holding my testicles. She’d turn on the light and look. My testicles would be swollen to big sore lumps from my bitter crying.
It’s a strange thing, I don’t ever remember calling my mother anything except P.G. to her face. The G was for Grisby, her maiden name. She hadn’t liked it. She’d begged me to call her mama. She’d threatened, and even tried to bribe me. Finally she gave up.
In Nineteen Twenty-six she became a waitress-hostess. She was eighteen years old. She had a magnificent body and an Eurasian appearance. Silky clouds of jet hair floated to her twenty-inch waist. She’d found it easy to get work in the wooly roaring-Twenties nightspot in Kansas City, Missouri.
Later, in my teens, she told me how she had run away from her home in the country outside of New Orleans. She’d left her father and mother, one sister and four brothers.
She got work as a waitress in a Rampart Street gumbo house. My father and several other white musicians came there one early morning from Bourbon Street. My father was half drunk. He was stricken foolish at the wondrous sight of Phala. He was stone drunk that same week when he actually married my ravishing fourteen-year-old mother. He was twenty-five.
When his gig on Bourbon Street played out, he and Phala went to Kansas City. Phala said he was a good drummer when sober. His trouble was, he couldn’t stay sober for long.
A second-rate band took him on in Kansas City. The band toured the country, doing one-night stands. Phala got pregnant with me shortly after. John Patrick O’Brien, Jr. was born January fifteenth, Nineteen Twenty-three.
My father had drummed for three bands by the time I was three. Somehow, despite his drinking, he managed to keep food in our mouths and a roof over our heads. He came to see us only when his band was playing near Kansas City.
When he came, it was usually for only overnight. Then he didn’t come at all. Phala told me later he had fallen in love with a wealthy white girl and was living common law with her in the East.
Phala loved him too much to get a divorce. She always hoped he’d come back to us. Maybe I’m better off that he never came back. He might have made a drummer out of me. At least as a con man I could give my brain a play.
Yes, Phala
really needed her waitress-hostess job. But there was one awful drawback. Phala would leave me in the care of a young couple when she left in the evenings for work.
They lived in a decrepit frame house next door to our apartment building. Many times they left me alone. I would go to a front window and watch for Phala. I’d leap with joy when finally she came home in the early morning.
One night I had been deserted by the fun-loving black couple. I was keeping a terrified vigil at the window. I fingered an old-fashioned window spring. It was attached to a sharp hook screwed into the window sill.
The hook slashed into the fleshy tip of my thumb and went to the bone. I remember how I tried, in vain, to twist the thumb free from the fish hook sharpness. I remember pounding on the window with my free hand.
None of the dusky passersby heard it. They were perhaps too enchanted by the magnetic pull of the bright festival of cabaret neon at Kansas City’s famous Eighteenth and Vine Streets, a block away.
Finally I was exhausted by my thrashing agony. I fell asleep on my knees at the window. That hook gouged a scar that I’ll take to my grave.
It was about six months after my musician father and his drum had gone for the last time that a wonderful thing happened. Phala brought Grandma Annie home with her. She was a four-foot-tall, eighty-pound bundle of pure love and kindness.
Her face had the look of a cheerful prune, topped with kinky whipped cream. She was an ex-slave from Georgia. She admitted to ninety-five years of life. Allowing for the certain female shrinkage in this painful area, she was possibly well past the century mark.
In any case, except for cataracted vision and a hobbled pair of feet brutally bunioned by sheer mileage, she was a marvel of physical preservation and mental clarity.
During slavery, as a girl, she had been taught to read and write by a mulatto house Nigger. After slavery, she had gone to Ohio and married. She and her husband built a rough cabin in the wilderness.
Over the years, it was there that she taught hundreds of poor, ignorant freed slaves her magic secrets of reading and writing. The tuition? Hogs, poultry, grain and other currency of the soil.
Phala had brought her home when lame Grandma Annie was fired from one of the cabaret kitchens on Vine Street. She slept in my bedroom. I slept on the sofa.
Less than a month after she came, she had started me to read. She prepared a large chart upon which she’d printed a legend in tall letters. It read, “My name is Johnny O’Brien. I am not a baby. I am a boy. Babies cry. I will try not to cry when Mommy goes to work.”
I clung desperately to the sweet miracle of Grandma Annie. My crying stopped. My loneliness vanished into the fairyland of Mother Goose, Pinocchio, and all the other adventures related nightly to me by Annie.
I followed constantly in the crisp, whispery wake of her starched, old-fashioned, bustled skirts, hemlined below her ankles. Annie was also a good influence for Phala. No more loud-mouth white men with bottles came to call.
It was Nineteen Twenty-nine, the year of the great stock-market crash and I was six years old. That year my brief shelter of contentment collapsed.
Grandma Annie had been helping me with my school lessons. I fell asleep. She had been sitting in an easy chair beside the sofa. I woke up hours later to go to the bathroom. There was Annie, still sitting stiffly erect in the chair with her eyes open.
I’ll never forget my panic when I called her name. She didn’t move. She just sat there like a black zombie, silently staring through me.
I touched her knee. It was cold and hard through her skirt. I jumped up screaming her name. I shook her. She tumbled to the carpet. Her frail body lay there, open eyed, in the same frozen sitting position it had had in the chair. Her soft kindly chimpanzee face was harsh in death.
I cried myself dry of tears. She was still stiff dead there on the floor when Phala got home at eight that morning. I was asleep beside my Grandma Annie, the kindest friend I’ve ever known. Phala couldn’t afford to bury her. The city disposed of the body.
7
THE BIG CRUEL WINDY
The time until we moved to Chicago is a dismal, tearful blur. We moved into a furnished ten-unit slum apartment building. It was at Thirty-ninth Street and Cottage Grove Avenue on the Southside. I was eight years old. Our apartment had running rats and water.
It had a bedroom and a bathroom. The kitchen we shared with legions of cockroaches. At that we were blessed. Hundreds in Chicago had no place to live.
Every Saturday night some guy in the building would beat his woman. The screams were awful. Many times on the morning after, I’d notice dried blood in the hallways and on the stairs.
Phala scrubbed every inch of our apartment with a solution of raw lye. Still, a rank odor clung to it. I don’t think anything can kill the singular stink of an old slum apartment. Its everlasting fixatives perhaps are in the decayed urine in the kitchen-sink pipes.
Perhaps the very pores of the walls have held the sharp stenches of cancer pus and tubercular phlegm from the rotted lungs of perpetual paupers who have perished there, unnoticed, unmourned.
A tidal wave of poverty had flooded the country. Phala took a job as a domestic in River Forest, Illinois, a plush white suburb of Chicago.
There were at least ten to twelve youngsters my age who lived in our building. I was to enroll in school that fall. I was lonesome. I tried several times to join little groups of my neighbors playing on the front stoop and in the hallways. Each time they would break up and move away from me.
One day I saw a band of them playing blackjack for matches. I approached them. They looked up at me wide-eyed. They started to move away.
I said, “My name is Johnny O’Brien. I’d like to play cards with you. I live in apartment seven. Is it okay if I play?”
The lanky black leader of the clique scooped up the deck from the hall floor. The others snatched their matches and stuffed the wooden stakes into their pockets. He gave me an evil slit-eyed look.
He said, “You is a trick baby. My paw whup my ass, I play wid you.”
The young gamblers scrambled up and raced for the sidewalk. They chanted over their shoulders, “You is a nasty trick baby. You is a nasty trick baby.”
I burst into tears. I didn’t know what a trick baby was supposed to be. I cried at their rejection. I couldn’t wait for Phala to come home that night. I went down to the streetcar stop and waited for her. She had scarcely stepped off the streetcar when I tugged at her sleeve.
I said, “What is a trick baby, P.G.?”
She was startled like I had cursed at her. She stopped on the sidewalk. Her mouth was a thin, tight line. She held me by the shoulders and looked down at me for a long moment.
Then she said, “Who said that word? Where did you hear it, Johnny?”
I was really bewildered then. I had hoped all day that it had been just nonsense.
I said, “A bunch of kids in the building called me a nasty trick baby today. What does it mean, P.G.?”
She didn’t answer. Her eyes glistened as she squeezed me close. We walked home silently through the steamy July night. I sensed my question had no easy answer. I didn’t press it.
Two of the blackjack players were on the front stoop. They tittered as we passed them on the way to the third floor. We sat in our smelly combination bedroom-living room on a battered couch.
Phala sighed deeply. She leaned forward and cupped my face in her palms. Her breath was heavy with whiskey odor. I looked down at her open purse at the side of the couch. The shiny neck of a whiskey bottle flashed inside it. She moved her head from one side to the other like a puzzled robin. She always did that under emotional stress.
She said, “Honey, don’t let what they called you upset you, it’s a lie, Johnny. It means a very bad thing. If it was true, then I would be a dirty woman who goes to bed with men for money. You wouldn’t really know who your father was. Do you understand, Johnny?”
I said, “P.G., I understand what you said. But why did they
say it when it’s a lie?”
She said, “Even they didn’t know why they said it. They heard the ugly name from their mamas and papas. Johnny, it’s so hard for Mother to explain the way I should. It all has to do with your white skin and blue eyes.
“You see, honey, this world is really two worlds. The white world and the black world we’re in now. If mother had married a black man, you wouldn’t look white. Then those boys would love you as one of them.
“If we lived in the white world and you had a black face, then the white kids would hate and tease you with hateful words. It’s not the kids, black or white, to blame. It’s their mamas and papas poisoning their young minds with ugly hate for skin colors.
“Johnny, you have to be strong and proud. Don’t let hate and ugliness tear you down. Mother’s going to send you to college if it’s the last thing I do on this earth. You’ll be grown and educated with the brains to do your part to change things.
“Don’t hate your father. His parents disowned him when he married me. Their hate ruined him and made him weak. He really loved us, Johnny. The ugly outside pressure was just too much for him to bear.
“Johnny, I have an older sister right here in Chicago. She owns a big white stone apartment building near the corner of Garfield Boulevard and Calumet. She made a lot of money selling bootleg whiskey.
“Guess why we never visited her? She’s hated me all her life. She has color poisoning. She’s dark brown skin like my mother. She hates me because I’m light skinned like papa. When we were girls, she always felt I thought I was better than her. It wasn’t true, Johnny. I tried so hard to make her love me.
“Anyway, who knows, maybe your father will come back one day for us and take us into his world. With him to back me up, I could pass easy over there.
“I borrowed you real T-bone steak and mushrooms from Mrs. Goldstein’s icebox. Let’s eat supper and go to bed. Mother’s got to get up at five-thirty tomorrow morning.”
I lay sleepless until almost daybreak on my couch-bed. All of what she’d said was too darkly deep for an eight-year-old brain to fathom. I fell into nightmare sleep. The small boys became mammoth black monsters. They screamed down at me in a thunderous chorus.