“Nasty trick baby! Nasty trick baby!”
Their teeth were white fangs bared in their angry faces. I was frightened and ashamed.
I shouted, “I’m not! I’m not! I know who my father is!”
I was about to burst inside with the tensions of my frustration. My tormentors couldn’t hear my pleas of innocence. My voice was drowned out in the fury of their condemnation. Then in the dream, I felt a sudden glad relief.
My hands turned black. Just as suddenly the huge creatures smiled. They cheered for me and lifted me high into the air. They carried me aloft on their shoulders like I was a hero football star who had scored a crucial touchdown. I cried with joy.
The friendly sea of black faces turned white and hostile. Rough hands threw me down, down . . . I lay on my back, looking up at the circle of terrible faces. I shrieked in terror. The white giants towered above me. They raised their spiked feet high above my face.
They shouted, “Black nigger! Black nigger!” Before the avalanche of spikes could pulp my face I woke up in sweaty, near delirium.
Phala didn’t hear my cries of distress. She had gone to work. A square of white paper was pinned to the couch above my eyes.
It read, “Honey, there’s a quarter on the table. Get some neck bones and put the navy beans on for lunch. Get some pop with what’s left. Please don’t worry, Johnny darling. Mama loves you very much.”
I enrolled in school that fall in the third grade. My social luck changed. Right there in my own class I found a pal my age. He was Lester Gray.
Years later, he’d enjoy brief fame as Livin’ Swell, con man, dope peddler.
He looked like a huge eight-ball with steel pipe stems for legs and arms. His voice was gruff like a man’s. His jolly face was welded to his roly-poly body by an amazingly short, thick neck.
His long coarse eyelashes shadowed the deeply set, very light brown eyes, lurking in their black deep sockets. When he was excited or angry, the eyes would blaze eerily like tawny brutes raging in their cages.
He lived on Thirty-seventh Street in Chicago with foster parents. When he was six, his father had shot his mother through the heart in a jealous frenzy. He saw the whole thing. The only time I ever saw him cry was when he told me about it. His old man got life in Joliet Prison. The second day at school our friendship was sealed.
I walked out the school door to go home several blocks away. A gang of boys blocked the sidewalk. They started cursing me and punching me around. I wrapped my arms around my head to block the blows.
Then I heard screams of pain from my attackers. I peeped out through the barricade. Lester was flailing hell out of them with an old bicycle chain. Lucky for me he had a soft spot for underdogs.
We were bosom buddies from that day. He was a slick thief at his tender age. We stole goodies from groceries and delicatessens. At twelve we branched out.
We would ride the elevated trains on nights Phala gave me permission to stay overnight at his house. I watched him pick the pockets of tired, sleeping commuters. It wasn’t long before I had mastered the art.
We were so talented, or lucky, that we never had a beef or an arrest. I’d buy clothes and tell Phala Lester let me wear them. She thought his father was a clothing salesman.
Phala had quit domestic work. She was doing an exotic dance at a dingy cabaret on Cottage Grove near Drexel Boulevard. She was drinking heavily, both on the job and at home. There were piles of empty Old Crow whiskey bottles throughout the apartment and on the back porch. Phala never felt like cleaning the house anymore. I did the best I could at cleaning. It stayed awfully dirty.
Phala’s neat waistline had thickened. Her once low, creamy voice was louder and coarsened by whiskey. She was still unusually attractive. She was a fixture at the cabaret.
She’d spend a long time at the mirror preparing her face for work. It took a thick mask of makeup to hide the ravages of time and whiskey on her face.
We hadn’t moved from our apartment. I can’t forget that summer in Nineteen Thirty-seven. I was fourteen and six feet tall. I had a girlfriend named Minnie Franklin. We met on an el.
We had been going steady for about six months. She was a beautiful yellow-skinned girl. We went on double dates with Lester and his girlfriend.
We went to amusement parks and movies. Then we’d all go to my couch-bed when Phala was away. Minnie wore honeysuckle perfume. My bed would be fragrant with it long after she’d gone.
She lived in a middle class neighborhood near Sixty-second Street and Woodlawn Avenue on Chicago’s Southside. I never met her parents. She was afraid to introduce me. She said her mother was okay but her father hated white people. She was certain her father would have a stroke if he ever saw my white face. So we took our torrid young love affair underground.
In midsummer, Lester and I let the operator of a shine stand on Thirty-ninth Street con us into making an honest dollar.
Right away I figured an angle. The boss would come in the evening to check us out. He was cagey and suspicious. He would use small wine bottle tops as polish containers. The contents of each would shine one pair of shoes, no more. When he came, first thing he’d count the empty bottle tops. Then he’d check the register.
We bought four cans of polish. Two black, two tan. We gathered a collection of our own bottle tops and filled them each day. We hid them behind the stand. If our boss had sent a spy in during the day, everything was always above board. The two hard-working boys would be shining from bottle tops.
It was that summer of Thirty-seven that cabaret life and whiskey really started getting to Phala. I got off from the shine stand around seven P.M. Phala would get to the mirror about that time. I had begged her to stop the drinking and the dancing job. It was no use.
During every summer vacation from school, I’d go at two A.M. and wait for her outside the cabaret where she danced, to take her home.
One night I had delivered several pairs of shoes to a gambler who lived on Drexel Boulevard. I was passing the dull red front of the cabaret where Phala danced.
I stopped and looked at the glamour stills of her. They were inside a cracked-glass case screwed into the concrete front. I stood staring at her paper image in the gaudy rhinestone G-string.
She seemed to be smiling sadly at me. Her lustrous black eyes were slumberous in professional sexiness. She looked so pitiful. It was like she was imprisoned there.
I had half-turned to walk away toward home. Then I saw it! A filthy legend and gigantic penis drawn in yellow chalk beneath the glass case.
“This is fucking good, eating pussy.”
I went rigid. Anger, sorrow, and pity whirlpooled inside me. I spit on my palms and whimpered as I scrubbed the dirty legend into a yellow blur.
I cursed the unknown artist, “Black nigger bastard! Black sonuvabitching low-life mother-fucker!”
A small crowd gathered around me, awed. I smashed the heels of my palms into the glass. I freed the photographs. I ripped them to pieces with my bleeding hands. I threw the pieces to the sidewalk. Phala’s decapitated head smiled innocently up at me from the littered sidewalk.
Blindly, I made it to the front of our building. There were exactly twenty-six steps to our door. I stood there for a long time gazing at the first of those tragic twenty-six.
I knew she’d be up there at the mirror. Her greeting would tear at my insides. I’d hear the whiskey slur in her voice. The thickness of that slur was always the measure of the emptiness of the always-present fifth of Old Crow whiskey.
I went slowly up the stairs to the front of our door. I was more sorrowful now than angry. I twisted my key in the lock and walked into the apartment. Her eyes were more tragic than ever in the mirror. Her greeting was thick and flat with Old Crow. She said, “Hi, babee. How is Mama’s tall, pretty sweetheart?”
The sight of her and my love and pity kept my bitter, angry thoughts from my voice. I held my gashed palms away from her. I was afraid to let her suspect what violent emotion had exploded insid
e me down there on the street. I didn’t want her to drink any more than she had. I walked to her and kissed her on the crown of her head.
I said, “I’m okay, P.G. How are you doing?”
I moved past her into the bathroom. I cleaned out the slivers of glass from the punctures of my palms. My wounded palms tingled as I sat on the couch and watched her put on her dancer’s face.
She turned her head toward the bottle of Old Crow on the dresser top. She was facing me. She bent her head down toward the bottle. Her eyes were filmy. She was staring at the dapper crow on the paper label.
She said, “Now listen old black nigger crow. Ain’t no use to roll your wicked eyes at me. I ain’t young and tender anymore. But you still ain’t got a chance. You too black. If you white, you right. If you fight, stick around. But if you black, get back, way back.”
I got up from the couch. I eased the door open. I went out carefully and pushed it shut. I cried all the way to Lester’s house.
I can’t forget the summer of Thirty-seven for many reasons, all of them bad. In the middle of August Minnie’s parents sent her to Tampa, Florida, to stay with relatives.
They had gotten worried about her. We had over-sported our after-midnight sessions on the couch. The last of August Lester did a solo hustle after work in an el car. His intended mark was a transit cop.
Stouthearted Lester wouldn’t hold still for the pinch. He weighed nearly a hundred and eighty pounds at fourteen. He was powerful enough to hospitalize the cop. A half dozen city police finally subdued him. He got an indeterminate sentence to Saint Charles Reform School.
8
WHITE LAMB IN THE BLACK JUNGLE
I went back to school that fall. Life was very dull without Lester and the sweet, pulsating roundness of Minnie. I found a way to lick loneliness. I started to draw. Several of my school teachers praised my drawings. I got excited and bought a painting kit.
In the summer, when Phala felt like it, we would go to the beach and to Washington Park. She’d relax while I sketched her. Then many times in the park, I’d put my head on her bosom. She’d stroke my head and croon me to sleep. Later at home I’d paint her. I was careful to paint her as she once was.
One sunny day she looked up at me from the grassy carpet. She said, “Johnny, promise me that when I die, you’ll have me cremated. I don’t want to be lying old and ugly in a casket and have people seeing me like that.”
I said, “Why talk about that now? You’ll live to get a hundred and you’ll always be beautiful.”
By the spring of Nineteen Thirty-nine we had both changed a great deal since the old days. Phala was carrying one hundred and sixty pounds on her five-feet-four-inch frame.
Her once clear velvet skin was muddy and bumpy from her drinking excesses. They still whistled and gaped when she walked down the street. She was buxom with big hips and curvy legs. But all her freshness had vanished. At a distance she was still pretty. Close up, she looked old and haggard.
But then, perhaps, they hadn’t known her as I had. I was in my last semester of high school. I was in the top ten of my class. Phala hadn’t mentioned college to me in years. Her drinking hadn’t let us save a dime.
I was lugging one hundred and seventy-five pounds on my six-feet-two-inch frame. I had been a reserve center on the Wendell Phillip High School basketball team. I played exactly one hundred and thirty minutes all of my senior year.
In the hundred yard dash I ran next to last in the city track meet. For some reason I wasn’t much of an athlete—that’s the guaranteed truth.
I had several acquaintances, but I had no real pal like Lester Gray. In June I graduated. I took an usher’s job at the Regal Theatre near Forty-seventh Street and South Parkway. I was paid twelve dollars a week.
On July sixth the flimsy bottom of my life dropped out. I was at work that afternoon. I was scorching for a tiny doll-faced girl. She had come to see a stage show that matinee. I had persuaded her to stay in the theatre until I got off.
I took the pocket-size creature posthaste to the Manor House Hotel down the street from the theatre. She proved more interesting than even my fevered imagination. I could have been arrested for possession of the pictures I drew of her.
It was four A.M. before I got home. Phala wasn’t there. At first I was worried. Then I remembered the young white cab driver. He had been sniffing after Phala for a couple of weeks.
Several times at two A.M. I’d left, alone, from the front of the cabaret. Phala and the young cabby would come out arm and arm on their way to some after-hours-spot. She liked him even though he was only twenty-two or so. He was tall and blond. With Phala, he had a lot going for him.
I figured she had gone somewhere with him when the cabaret closed. I drank a glass of milk and went to sleep.
I was awakened by a loud pounding on the door. The clock showed eight o’clock. I glanced into Phala’s bedroom. She wasn’t home. I knew it wasn’t the landlord. Maybe it was Phala. She had lost her key.
I had taken my pay the week before and paid our weekly rent. I got up and opened the door. It was the old whore who lived across the hall. I could see she was excited and slightly drunk. She stepped inside. She didn’t say anything right away. She just stood and held both hands over her chest and drew deep breaths.
I said, “What’s wrong?”
She stammered, “Joh– Johnny, something bad has happened to Phala.”
I said, “What? Where?”
She said, “She was brutalized by street niggers. The law took her off the streets hollering and stark naked.”
I snatched my trousers on over my pajamas. In bare feet, I dashed past her and ran a block to the Du Sable Hotel’s public phone on Oakwood Boulevard.
A half hour later, after a half dozen calls, I located Phala. She was in Cook County Hospital’s Psychiatric Division. She couldn’t receive visitors. She was too disturbed. The guy said that in cases like Phala’s, it could be weeks, even months, before they could release them.
I stood there at the phone. I didn’t know what my next move should be. I didn’t have a friend in the world. I thought about my grandparents down in Louisiana. What could they do?
Then I remembered my Aunt Pearl, Phala’s older sister out at Garfield and Calumet. Perhaps she was in the phone book under her maiden name. Surely in a serious situation like this she’d be eager to help her only baby sister.
She’d probably be thrilled to meet and to advise her nephew she’d never seen. Her girlhood hang-up on the color thing was most likely now a dim, humorous memory. After all, she was now at least in her late forties. She shouldn’t have any color regrets. With her dark brown skin, she had done better in life than my near-white mother.
It took a while to scan through all the listed Grigsby’s. There was no Pearl Grigsby in the book. I’d have to pay her a personal call. I went back to the apartment and dressed. On my way out, the whore across the hall stuck her head through her open door.
She whispered, “Come in here, Johnny, quick.”
I went in. She shut the door. She was wearing a pair of transparent lavender panties. Her withered udders were deformed by a navy-blue network of cable veins. A ragged mound of frizzly gray hair jutted against the crotch lavender. I wondered how she made a living. Perhaps all her tricks were blind men.
I stood fidgeting, looking down into her yellow gargoyle face. She patted her palms against my chest. She said, “Johnny, the district cops was here looking for you. I guess they got questions about your mother. Johnny, those bastards ain’t no good. After they grill you, they could take you in to the juvenile people. You’re a minor with no support or family in Chicago.
“Johnny, Phala ain’t coming back for a long time, if at all. I got an idea for you. I could look out for you. I’d hide you here. How about it, honey-long-legs?”
I backed away toward the door and opened it. I said, “Sure, beautiful, it’s a fine idea. I’ll be right back after I go out to see Phala.”
I went acros
s the hall and got my painting kit. I took my pajamas off and put on a tan slack suit. I went out the back door. I walked to South Park and Oakwood Boulevard. I took a jitney cab for a dime to Garfield Boulevard. I walked west to Calumet. I went into the foyer of Pearl’s building.
I pushed the manager’s bell on a lettered panel. A release buzzer for the inner front door sounded. I twisted the doorknob and stepped through it into the ground-floor hallway. I heard a hinge squeak to my right. I looked.
A mountainous bulk filled the doorway. It was a dark brown-skinned woman in a peach-colored housecoat. Well, at least partly in it. The front of her nightgowned belly poked through the front gap in it like a midget blimp, half-hangared.
I said, “Good morning. I’m trying to get in touch with Miss Pearl Grigsby. Could you help me?”
The Saint Bernard jowls quivered. The pea-sized eyes flickered malevolently. A bizarre doll-hand stroked across the scraggly mop of dyed-red hair. The tiny mouth opened and finked on a decayed jumble of uneven teeth.
She said, “I’m Pearl. Who the hell are you?”
She had the sweetest softest voice I’d ever heard. It was hard to believe it came out of her.
She said, “Oh yeah, I heard about you. Come in.”
She dredged herself aside. I stepped into her apartment. She had a severe sanitation problem. I held my breath when I passed her. She smelled like a bitch-dog’s afterbirth. I could sympathize with her. She probably found it impossible to reach her disaster areas.
Her apartment was cluttered with gaudy fixtures and furniture. I sat in a shocking-pink chair in the living room, near a window looking out on the street. She sat on a matching sofa next to me.
She said, “Damn if you don’t look like a peckerwood. How is Phala? Did she send you?”
I said, “She’s in terrible trouble. She’s out of her mind at County Hospital. I was able to find you because she mentioned your building here a long time ago.”