“The holy man come in today?” said Darius Strange.
“Yes, he was here,” said Tempchin.
“Let me get one of those chickens he got to, then.”
Derek knew that Tempchin kept a shack full of live chickens behind the store. His father had told him that the rabbi, “the Jew version of a minister,” would come to the store and kill the chickens, an odd thing, Derek thought, for a man of God to do. His father had explained, “That’s what makes ’em kosher,” and Derek had asked, “What’s kosher mean?” “I got no clue,” admitted his father. “But your mother thinks the chickens here are better than the ones at the A&P.”
They drove southeast into Petworth and Park View. Darius Strange parked the Mercury on Princeton Place, a street that graded up off Georgia. Row houses holding single and multiple families, mostly colored now, lined the block.
“Go on and get your mother some milk,” said Darius as he set the brake.
“Okay,” said Derek.
Derek went down the block to the east side of the Avenue. On one corner was the neighborhood movie house, the York, and on the other was a small grocery, one of many neighborhood markets scattered around the city. He picked up a bottle of milk and took it to the counter, where the owner, a Jew the kids called Mr. Meyer and the adults called just Meyer, sat on a high-backed stool. Mr. Meyer knew Derek and the other members of his family by name. He marked the purchase down on a yellow pad and thanked Derek for his business. Darius Strange settled his debt with Meyer on payday, or the first of the month, or sometimes whenever he could.
Derek came out of the market. A girl he knew was standing on the corner, wearing a store-bought dress. She was his age and his height, and she had breasts. She had dimples when she smiled. She was smiling now.
“Hi, Derek,” she said musically.
“Hey,” said Derek, stopping in his tracks. He had the milk bottle in one hand, but the other was free. That hand felt awkward hanging there, so he put it in the pocket of his blue jeans.
“Don’t you know my name?” the girl said. Lord, thought Derek, she has got some pretty brown eyes.
“Sure, I know it.”
“Why you don’t call me by it, then?”
“It’s Carmen.”
“I know what it is. You don’t have to tell me it! You should be polite, though, and call me by my name when you see me.”
Derek felt his face grow hot. “Why you got a Puerto Rican name, girl?”
“It’s not Puerto Rican. My mama thought it sounded pretty, is all.”
“It’s all right,” said Derek.
Carmen Hill giggled and began to tap one foot on the sidewalk. She was wearing patent leather church shoes, must have had something on the tips of those soles for dancing, ’cause they made a sound.
“Why you laughin’?” said Derek. “I ain’t tell no joke.”
“That how you give a girl a compliment? My name is all right?”
“It’s pretty,” said Derek quickly, and before he lost his nerve added, “Just like you.”
He turned and went up the street. He passed a German man, one of the last whites on the block, who had once thrown hot water at him and his brother for playing too close to his house, and a boy he recognized who was cradling a Daisy lever-action BB rifle he had gotten for his birthday. Ordinarily Derek Strange would have stopped and checked out the gun. But he kept going, looking over his shoulder at Carmen Hill, still standing there tapping her foot, smiling that smile, her eyes alive, those deep dimples of hers . . .
That girl bothered him nearly every time he saw her. Least he had had the nerve to tell her she was pretty. He wondered what her smart self thought of that.
At 760 Princeton, he took the steps up to his home.
SIX
THE FAMILY LIVED in a row house that Darius Strange had divided into two apartments. A single mother who worked at the cafeteria down at Howard University, not much more than a mile away, lived in the bottom unit with her three wild sons. Darius had bought the house after answering an ad in the Washington Post that read, “Colored, NW, Brick Home.” After putting three hundred and fifty down, he had secured a GI Bill loan at 4 percent. His nut was eighty-six dollars a month, and so far he had not missed a payment. The tenant downstairs was often late with her rent, but she was trying her best, and often he let her slide.
The Strange unit consisted of two bedrooms, a living room/ dining area, and a galley-style kitchen. The furniture and appliances were old but clean. A screened-in porch, where Derek Strange often slept on summer nights, gave onto a view of a small dirt-and-weed backyard and then an alley. The alley, and the grounds of Park View Elementary up the block, were the primary playgrounds for the boys and girls of Princeton Place and those on Otis Place, the next street to the south.
Derek Strange entered the apartment. His father had settled in his regular big old chair, the one facing the television set, a new twenty-one-inch Zenith with Space Command remote control. He had the latest Afro-American spread out in his lap. On the TV screen, James Stewart and Stephen McNally were firing rifles at one each other, both of them having found protection in an outcrop of rocks.
“Young D,” said Dennis Strange, eighteen, tall and lean like his father, dark skinned like the entire family. Dennis was seated at the table where the Stranges took their meals. He, too, had a copy of the Afro-American before him. There were always extras around the house.
“Dennis,” said Derek.
“What you been doin’, man?”
“Playin’.”
Dennis rubbed his fingers along the top of his shaven head. “With your white-boy friend?”
“So?” Derek stared at the gunplay on the TV screen. The sound of ricochet was loud in the room. “Why they tryin’ to kill each other, Pop?”
“One man took the other man’s Winchester in the beginning of the movie,” said Darius Strange. “They just gettin’ around to settlin’ it now.”
Derek looked at the tabloid-sized newspaper in his father’s lap. Derek and his best friend, Lydell Blue, delivered the Washington edition of the newspaper to neighborhood subscribers on Tuesdays and Fridays, earning roughly two dollars a week each. This was real money to them. Derek always tried to read the paper, too. Unlike the stuff he read in the Post and the Star, the stories in the Afro described his world.
Often, though, the stories scared him some. The front page of the latest issue talked about this boy Mack Parker, only twenty-one years old, who got beat half to death and dragged out of his cell by a lynch mob down in Mississippi. His mother was sayin’, “Oh, Lord, why?” ’cause no one had seen Parker since the mob threw him in a car outside the jail. Reminded Derek of the story of that boy Emmett Till, which Dennis was always goin’ on about, who got murdered down there for nothing more than whistling at a white girl.
But in this apartment, with his mother, father, and big brother, Derek felt safe.
“Where Mom at?” said Derek.
“Kitchen,” said Dennis.
Derek walked by the Life magazines stacked on a table by the sofa. The cover story of the issue on top was one in a continuing seven-part series called “How the West Was Won.” Darius Strange had collected every one. Dennis called it “How the West Got Stole” just to annoy their father. The same way he made fun of those programs his father loved to watch at night during the week: Wagon Train, Bat Masterson, Trackdown, and the like. These days, seemed like Dennis and his father were at each other all the time.
Next to the eating table sat a Sylvania hi-fi console combination with records stacked on top. His father listened to some jazz, but mostly the rhythm and blues singers who had started out in gospel. Derek liked to look at the album covers, photos of people like Ray Charles and that Soul Stirrers singer, and a big boy on the Apollo label named Solomon Burke. He wondered what it was like to sing for all those people up onstage, have that kind of money, have the finest women and the Cadillac cars. He wondered if his father, who smelled like grease, sweat, a
nd burned meat when he came home from work, was envious of these men’s lives. Derek didn’t like to think on it too much, because it made him feel bad to imagine that his father would ever leave their home.
As Derek tried to walk by him, Dennis grabbed hold of his shirt and pinned his arms at his side. Derek managed to place the bottle of milk he was holding atop the stack of records. Once he had done this, he tried to break free, but Dennis was too strong. Derek did the only thing he could, dropping to his knees, taking Dennis down with him. They hit the floor and rolled.
“You can’t get away from me,” said Dennis.
“Punk,” said Derek.
“Call me that again and you’ll be lookin’ like one of them polio kids. They’ll be havin’ to fit you for some of them braces and stuff.”
“That’s enough,” said their father, his eyes on the TV.
Derek rolled Dennis so that one of Dennis’s hands was pinned beneath him. Derek felt around and tried to get purchase on Dennis’s other hand. Instead he grabbed Dennis’s crotch.
“You like that, boy?”
“Like what?”
“You got your hand on my rod!”
They rolled into the hi-fi and laughed.
“I said that’s enough,” said Darius. “I ain’t even finished payin’ on that console yet.”
Darius Strange had bought the hi-fi and the television on time. He had first gone downtown to George’s, on 8th and F, but the salesman there, a chubby white man, had treated him with disrespect. When he walked in, Darius had heard Chubby laughing with one of his coworkers off to the side, talking about he was gonna sell that guy a “Zenick” and saying, with his idea of a colored voice, “Can I put it on lays-aways?” Chubby hadn’t thought he’d heard him, but he had. Darius hadn’t raised a stink about it, but he’d left right away and driven over to Slattery’s on Naylor Road, where the man himself, Frank Slattery, had written him up for the Zenith and the Sylvania, gotten him credit, and delivered it all the next day. The colored money got put together with the white money in the register, and once you counted it out come closing time, you couldn’t even tell the difference. That’s what Chubby didn’t understand.
Like the car, he’d be paying on these things for a long while. Darius didn’t worry on it, though. He expected he was going to be working for the rest of his life.
“You gettin’ strong,” said Dennis, looking his younger brother over with admiration as they both got to their feet.
“Bet I can take you soon, too.”
“You can try,” said Dennis. He made a head motion in the direction of the kitchen. “Go ahead, man.”
“I’m gone.”
Dennis chuckled as he pushed Derek’s forehead with the flat of his palm. He tried it again and Derek ducked away, snatching the milk bottle off the record stack and walking through a short hall back to the kitchen.
“Boy wrinkled my shirt,” said Dennis. “I was gonna wear it tonight, too.”
Darius Strange looked over at his older son. “You goin’ out?”
“I’m fixin’ to. Why?”
“Who you goin’ out with? That no-account I seen you with down on the Avenue?”
“Kenneth?” said Dennis. “He all right.”
“He ain’t look all right to me.”
“Well, you don’t have to worry. We just gonna drive around a little with his cousin, is all. Maybe check out that All-Star Jamboree they got down at the Howard. They got Baby Cortez and the Clovers on the bill. Anyway, I won’t be late.”
“Don’t be. You comin’ to church tomorrow morning with us, right?”
“I’m going to temple. There’s a service in the afternoon.”
“Temple,” said Darius with a grunt. “You mean that place on Vermont Avenue?”
“Minister Lucius presiding,” said Dennis.
“He gonna be presidin’ now, huh?”
“The man is a disciple of Elijah Muhammad.”
“I know who that is.” Darius tapped the newspaper in his lap. “There’s an advertisement your man paid for right in here. Calls himself the Anointed Leader. Asking for donations, says he wants to build a hospital. Ain’t they got hospitals already in Chicago?”
“This one’s for our people.”
“Oh. If you so taken with him, why don’t you send him some of your money?”
“If I had any I would.”
“The man is just another hustler. He ain’t no better than any old pimp you see out here on the street. And he ain’t even Christian.”
“That’s the point. Jesus is the white man’s god.”
“Don’t let your mother hear you say that, boy.”
“Look, to me the Christian church is like that paper you readin’. Supposed to be for us, but it’s not. You see the ads they run in there?” Dennis picked up the newspaper in front of him, opened it, and read off the page. “‘Black and White Blanching Cream—a brighter, lighter, softer, smoother look.’ Here’s another one: ‘Dr. Fred Palmer’s Skin Whitener.’ And the pictures of the women write these social columns they got? Those women all got light skin, and the way they got their hair fixed, I mean, they look like they’re trying to be white. So who is hustling who? What you think this newspaper is trying to sell us here, huh?”
“I got eyes. You might think I’m blind, but I am not. Things are changing slow, but they’re changin’. It ain’t all good in this world, but for right now, it’s what we got.”
“You just gonna settle for what we got, then.”
“You’re young,” said Darius. “Sooner or later you’re gonna see, you got to go with some things to get along.”
“You mean like last summer, when we went down to the shore? Remember when you got Jim Crowed, how you just went along? How’d you feel that day? How you think it made us feel?”
Darius had driven the family down to the Annapolis area, looking for Highland, the beach that allowed colored. But he drove to the wrong place, and before he could back up and turn around, he got told by some man in a booth that they didn’t allow his kind. Got told this in front of his wife and sons. Anger was what he felt. Anger and shame. But he didn’t answer his son.
“Things ain’t changin’ quick enough for me,” said Dennis. “I don’t want to just get along. And just so you know, I’m gonna be goin’ to that march next week, too.”
“What march is that?”
“Youth March for Integrated Schools. They say twenty-five thousand strong gonna meet down at the Sylvan theater.”
“Mind what you get yourself into.”
“I know what I’m doin’.”
“You think you do,” said Darius Strange. “But y’all start rising up too hard, they gonna start doing you like they did that boy in that Mississippi jail.”
“I ain’t worried.”
“Course not. Like I said, you’re young.”
In the kitchen, Derek Strange put the bottle of milk in the Frigidaire and went to the sink, where his mother stood washing dishes. There was a window over the sink, but at present it did not let in much light, as Alethea Strange had taped cardboard to the bottom panes. She did this so the humans in the kitchen would not scare the birds that had built a nest in the window frame outside.
“Hey, Mama,” said Derek, touching his mother on her hip.
“Derek,” she said, looking him in the eye. Sometime in the past year, her youngest had reached her height. “Anything special happen today?”
“Nothing special,” he said, thinking of the incident at Ida’s, wondering if he had just told his mother a lie. “How about you?”
“Oh, you know, just work.” Alethea moved a bottle of Kretol roach killer that sat on the sill and peeled back a corner of the cardboard on the window before her. “Look here, son.”
Derek leaned forward on the counter. A mother robin was feeding her babies in her nest. Three featherless heads were going after one half of a worm.
“Where the father at?” said Derek.
“He’s still around, I
expect. He built the nest and now the mother is taking care of the kids. How we do around here.”
Derek nodded. His mother had told him this many times before. He watched her tape the cardboard back in place and leaned his back to the counter.
“Lydell came by,” said Alethea.
“Yeah?”
“Was looking to see if you wanted to go fishing up at the Home. Said he’d come back to pick you up in a little while.”
“Can I go?”
“Yes, but not for long. Sun’s gonna be going down soon anyway, and your father and me were thinking we’d go to a movie tonight. Want you back in the house before we go.”
“What movie?”
“I wanted to see that one, Imitation of Life, ’cause everyone’s been talkin’ about it. But you know your father; he said he wasn’t gonna pay to see no ‘weepie.’ He was pushing for some western, but I am not getting dressed to go out and see some show with men got dust on their clothes. So we made a compromise. We’re gonna go see that new picture I Want to Live! down at the Lincoln.”
“The one where they put that woman in the gas chamber, right?”
“Well, yes.”
“Dag, I’d like to see that, too.”
“You’re not ready to see it. Now listen, your brother will be going out. You can stay here a couple of hours by yourself, can’t you?”
“Sure.”
“We won’t be late. We’ve got church tomorrow.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Derek Strange.
ALVIN JONES AND Kenneth Willis sat in a car in the alley behind Jones’s grandmother’s place, sharing a ninety-seven-cent bottle of imported sherry. Willis, in the passenger seat, was thumbing the wheel of the radio dial, trying to find a song that Jones could get behind. He stopped searching as a DJ introduced a record. The tuned kicked in, followed by a woman’s vocals.