She jerked her hands away and stood up. Her eyes were blazing. Her face looked old and hard framed by the silky Caucasian blond wig. She was furious and drunk. She spat, “All right, here it is, and don’t call me Baby Sis. Say your people, your niggers, not mine. Niggers didn’t put me up here. White people did. I don’t give a goddamn about niggers, or what they think about me. There are scads of important beautiful white people who have forgotten I’m black. I don’t need niggers, and when I was suffering and scuffling down there with them, not one nigger in my whole life ever did anything for me. White people are in my corner. They love me, and that’s where it’s at.”
I got to my feet while she was still raving and stood looking at her until she stopped to catch her breath. I said, “Holly, I risked my life in Chicago to help you, remember? And I happen to be a nigger.”
Her jaw hinge dropped, and she turned gray. I turned and walked through her house to my car in the driveway. As I drove off, I looked back at her house and remembered the flash of nappy crotch in the ratty dressing room where I first met her. And I remembered the skinny kid singer’s gratitude at the airport in Chicago when I sent her home to her mama, and her boast that she was going to be a star.
She had become a star all right, a black Caucasian star.
A GODDESS REVISITED
I am convinced that most pimps require the secretly buried fuel of Mother hatred to stoke their fiery vendetta of cruelty and merciless exploitation against whores primarily, and ultimately, all women.
Throughout most of my life, my unconscious hatred for my mother leapt painfully from the depths like bitter bile from the guts of a poison victim. But I believe that the unfeeling rejection of me by a lovely young girl at an emotionally crucial period of my life might well have been another reason why I became a pimp.
Her memory, her face, her voice haunted my lonely nights in four penitentiaries. For me, she was a goddess and perhaps such an elusive, unearthly, wonderful creature, real or imagined, torments the private dreams of every man. I will never forget the flavor of those days long ago when the goddess and I were in the spring of our youth. Somehow the bittersweet mystique of the northwest corner at Third and Galena streets in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, will always have a wistful charm and sorrow for me. For it was there in rain, shine or storm, that I sped early mornings to glimpse, to hear the melodic voice of the goddess before the bus arrived to whisk her to Catholic Messmer Junior High. I wasn’t welcome to visit the goddess at home. You see, her Creole mother didn’t approve of me. I was too black.
It was in the spring of ’33, I think, that I met the goddess. Hilarious jokes were making the rounds, like: “That wasn’t no girl you saw me with last night; that was my brother.” Anyway, it was just a short time before that fabulous cripple charmed himself into the most exclusive club there ever was.
Mama was on earth then. I remember how attractive and regal she was. Once a month Mama and I would pass that corner. I’d stare at it and feel little firecrackers of excitement popping off inside me.
We’d be on our way to a gigantic barnlike building. Mama would always proudly square her shoulders before we stepped inside. The slippery sawdust on the rough pine floor would be like shredded ice against the slick, stiff soles of my county relief brogans. There was a fresh pungency in the melded odors of prunes, onions and potatoes stacked inside chicken-wire cubicles.
Tattered paupers filed past the cubicles. Anemic joy lit their drawn faces as bored county clerks shoved a month’s ration of relief groceries across the dusty cubicle counters. They would eagerly fill their gunny sacks and shuffle away to the street with their treasures.
When our turn came, Mama would hold her chin high in the manner of a queen accepting gifts from her subjects. You can’t imagine how my skinny six-foot frame would tremble when I’d hoist our sacks to my back. I remember how the coarse burlap would sear my palms as I stumbled to the sidewalk.
Mama always brought a twenty-five cent piece with her. There were bootleg taxis about the building. The hustlers would be waiting in flivvers to haul people with gunny sacks home.
Many times Mama saved the quarter. A good guy called Giggling George would be out there on the hustle. He and Mama had been kids together down in Nashville, Tennessee. He’d take us home, and the only time he’d stop giggling was when Mama would try to give him the quarter fee. He’d get real serious and act like Mama had insulted him when he turned it down.
One Christmas, George gave me an exciting gift. It was an old .22 rifle. He had cleaned it and polished the walnut stock to a rich patina. I enjoyed blasting out the brains of the hunchback rats nesting in our cellar. Sure, old George drank too much. It’s true he had that ugly giggle, and yes, he cursed a lot. But he was the kindest guy that ever was.
Oh yes, after I met the goddess, I’d often have a crazy wish that Phillippa (that was her name) and her mother would be standing in that charity line for groceries. I guess I thought at least we could have had hunger in common. It never happened.
Her mother was a beautiful widow, a coldly arrogant octoroon. She was color sensitive too, acting like a half-white house nigger in slavery times who was suddenly made boss of the whole damn plantation. Cordelia Cordray was her name, and she was to blame for that corner at Third and Galena in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, being the most poignant corner there ever was.
Now, I’m not so sure about the year that I met the goddess. But I’m damn sure of the day of the week. It had to be on a Sunday morning. Two slightly uncommon events had occurred the night before. Mama and I lived in a flat over Steve’s Bar, at Eighth and Galena streets.
A curvy pushover called Three-way Rosie lived up at Tenth and Galena. Her old man was an ex-heavyweight fighter who ran a sneak poker game in his home every Saturday night.
Rosie had given me this time slot in her very busy schedule. We were on the grass in her backyard. I was fiddling with one of her buttons and looking up at the Big Dipper in the brilliant sky. Strange thing about her was, one of her buttons was a dud. Every Saturday night I’d fritter away crucial time. I’d forget which button lit her fire. Finally Rosie flamed, and moaning, she started working me out the straight way.
Suddenly a shower of kitchen light rained down on our mad thrashing. Rosie’s old man stood glaring down at us. It was lucky for me that I was sneaker shod. I yowled and leaped straight up out of the squishy valley like a black tomcat from the top of a red-hot stove. I slipped through his clutching hands like a buttered eel. He didn’t have even a remote chance of catching me. I vaulted the backyard fence and torpedoed down the alley. I heard his angry bellowing and the pounding of his feet die in the sultry spring air.
That was the first event that makes me certain I met the goddess on a Sunday morning. The second event happened less than an hour after the first.
Recreation has its valid place. Unless you’re a yard-wide square, you need a bit of excitement now and then. Except for the chase scene, the grass game with Rosie was pure recreation.
In small towns a guy has to search out his excitement in the most common ways and places. Perhaps I was hopelessly jaded, but I could never get goose pimples watching the neighborhood mechanic tune up a car motor. Watching the sky for shooting stars gave me no celestial bang. And I would even completely ignore a bustling construction site.
Believe it or not, I got a charge watching mock murders. I guess you have to be black and live in a ghetto to be able to understand and appreciate that kind of thing. But look into it sometime when you have nothing else to do.
On a Saturday night, I’d spend hours at my upstairs window. I’d watch old drinking buddies horse around down on the sidewalk in front of Steve’s Bar. Even though it was almost always drunken play, it was still exciting to see their knives and pistols flashing under the street lamp.
I guess it was so exciting because at first I couldn’t ever be sure that it wasn’t for real. Let me tell you, when those savage pranksters bared their teeth and rolled their eyes in fake mad
ness it was hard to tell. Often one of the phony victims would flop around on the sidewalk like a dying chicken.
The night before the morning I met the goddess, I saw Giggling George on the sidewalk. His best friend, Slick Shorty, was standing looking up at George.
Shorty had his back to me screaming up at George, “George, gimme mah dime you owe me. I saw you bust that half a buck across the bar. Gimme mah dime, George. Ah don’ wanta croak you. Gimme mah dime, George.”
George exploded, “Man, you ain’t only slick, you crazy too. You been paid that lousy dime with interest when you guzzled my bottle of gin dry. Now get outta my face, little nigger. This is Saturday night, and I ain’t for wasting it waiting around county hospital for them doctors to take my foot outta your ass.”
George turned his back on Shorty and lumbered toward his jalopy at the curb. He was giggling up a storm. Then I saw Shorty slip a gleaming butcher knife from his waistband. Even when Shorty bear-hugged George from behind, I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just another mock murder. Poor George screamed like a sledge-hammered calf in a slaughterhouse. The butcher knife in Shorty’s hand was blood streaked when he leaped back from George. I heard a dull clatter when Shorty hurled the blade into the gutter and sprinted away.
George spun around facing my window. He stood there looking down at his ragged belly. His guts gleamed in the glow of the street lamp like ropes of crimson pearls. He tore his phosphorescent eyes away and tried to pump his leaden legs to flee the oozing horror at his waist. His legs buckled and twisted and entwined like magnetized pretzels as he slammed to the sidewalk on his back.
I rushed down the stairs to the sidewalk, where a small, silent crowd stood looking down at him. I looked at his face. His eyes were bucked wide, and his fat black lips were moving. I stooped down close to him.
Through a gout of blood he burbled in a child’s plaintive voice, “Bobby, ain’t it a low-down dirty shame? Shorty done kilt me.”
His eyes closed. He heaved a heavy, liquid sigh and lay still. I cried there on the sidewalk beside him until I heard the squeal of a police siren. It was the real thing that time. George was a good guy. I really liked him. I went to bed, but I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t get butchered George out of my mind.
Now you can see why I’m so sure it had to be on a Sunday morning that I met the goddess. I heard Mama coming in around three a.m. She had served a banquet for a rich white woman. I tossed and turned, wishing for cheerful daybreak, until finally the sun slit night’s treacherous throat with a golden butcher knife.
Later, I heard Sunday school buffs laughing on their way to the church around the corner. I had the worst headache there ever was. I heard Mama humming a hymn, and then shortly the metallic clicking of the boiling coffeepot’s lid. I got up, took a bath and went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. Mama was at the sink washing navy beans to cook for our dinner.
She turned toward me and said, “Good morning, Mr. Red Eyes. My heavens, you look bad. Bobby, I hope you’re not drinking. George Rambeau was killed last night in a drunken fight on the corner. The police have that dwarf buddy of his in jail.”
I said, “Mama, I got an awful headache, but not from drinking. I saw the whole thing last night. George wasn’t fighting. His pal, Shorty, executed him for a dime. Mama, do we have any aspirin?”
“No, we don’t, but there’s a half dollar on top of the icebox. Get some at the drugstore, and you can keep what’s left for pocket change. And Bobby, for God’s sake, don’t tell anyone you saw that killing. The white folks might lock you up until after Shorty’s trial. I hope he gets a life sentence. I’m going down on my knees to pray for poor George’s soul.”
I dressed and went to the drugstore at Seventh and Walnut. I stepped inside. There she was at the soda fountain on the first stool near the window. The bright morning sun ignited tiny blue bonfires in her shimmering black hair. She was sipping a Coke. I forgot the worst headache there ever was.
I feigned an interest in the magazines on the rack beside her. My captive eyes were chained to her. I stumbled to the stool next to her. Her lilac perfume whirled my brain on a wild, fragrant, merry-go-round.
I stuttered, “Good morning.”
She turned her yellow, fawn face to mine. Jade jewels coruscated in her huge, green, almond-shaped eyes. There was a dazzling slash of faultless ivory in her face when she gypsy violined, “Good morning.”
Everything was a blur until I had walked her home. I came out of the trance on the steps of Roosevelt Junior High School at Eighth and Walnut. I was deliriously aware of a powerful posthypnotic suggestion that the goddess had said I could call on her that evening at eight o’clock. I just sat there on the steps hallucinating her voice, her odor, her face until late afternoon.
I got home at five o’clock. Mama was frantic. She thought I had flapped my jaws and gotten jugged as a material witness hostage.
The navy beans were done. But I wasn’t the least bit hungry. I took another bath and spent the next two and a half hours shining my brogans, fingernails, teeth and hair. I ironed a razor crease into my Sunday corduroys.
Mama was awed. She asked, “Whose party you going to?”
I said, “Mama dear, I’m in love. I have a date at eight with Phillippa Cordray.”
Mama frowned and shook her head. “Yes, I’ve heard about her and her mother. They’re big shots from New York. They came to town a couple of weeks ago. But isn’t she out of your league? Mrs. Williams told me they’re high class and they have a beautiful stone house. Her mother teaches in an all-white school. I’ve heard she’s passing for white. Bobby, please don’t get hurt. I’m afraid you’re too brown and we’re too poor.”
I was a love-stricken fool playing against a stacked deck. Mama’s plea didn’t register until too much later. But never since has spring been so magical, so memorable. I floated through the lavender twilight to the goddess. As Mama had told me, she lived in a gray stone house on Fifth Street. I rang the doorbell. My mouth was dry, and my palms were gluey with sweat. Small wonder. How many times in a guy’s lifetime does he call on a goddess?
She opened the door and smiled at me. She said hello, and her voice was perfumed smoke tinted with moonlight. She wore a flowing lime chiffon dress. In the lavender glow, she looked like a nymph who had fled Botticelli’s Allegory of Spring I just stood there mutely with my fifteen-year-old heart savagely mauling my rib cage.
She took my hand, and I followed her into a dazzling gold and white living room. Cordelia Cordray, an older, harder version of the goddess, stood near an alabaster grand piano with languid feline grace eyeing me from head to toe. Almost imperceptibly she seemed to wince at my harsh clothing. She delayed an icy, taut second before acknowledging my introduction with a mute dip of her spectacularly coiffed head. Then she flounced from the room with a hostile look on her face.
Hurt? Sure I was, but in the presence of the goddess I soon forgot the bitch Cordelia. I was having one miracle of a time just gazing at the goddess and hearing that moonlit voice describing the wondrous excitement of New York City when Cordelia made a trilling sound and the goddess excused herself and went into the dining room and through a swinging door to the kitchen.
I sat there on the sofa listening to the velvet bellowing of Gabriel Heater, a newscaster, and hearing the jagged tone of a quarrel coming faintly from behind the kitchen door.
Curiously, I pressed my ear against it and heard Cordelia say, “Sugar Bunny, how can you say something like that about me? We are not in the military. I did not, and I will not, ever command you to do anything. I am suggesting that you are wrong to encourage and clutter up my living room with that unkempt little alley creature when he is so patently not your type. Be patient, Bunny, and select your boyfriends from the professional group in town.”
There was a long pause before the goddess said angrily, “Baloney, Mother, he’s clean and neat, and he has good manners. What’s really wrong with him?”
Cordelia said evenly, “All right, Sug
ar Bunny, you asked for it. He is completely wrong for you from those county gun boats on his feet to his nappy head. His parents, aside from being paupers, are probably drunkards, thieves, ex-convicts or you name it. And he is so wretchedly black my flesh crawls at the remote possibility that you would be insane enough to let him violate you, not to mention the threat and disgrace of a nigger-type grandchild.”
I didn’t wait to hear more. I slunk from the house, vibrating in a hot straitjacket of humiliation and rage. I was a half block away trying desperately to figure an angle to murder Cordelia without leaving clues when I sensed scented smoke rising anxiously behind me. I looked over my shoulder and stopped.
The goddess’s hair was flying in the purple light like an indigo banner as she ran toward me calling my name. “You heard! You heard! I’m so sorry. Please forgive us!” she sobbed as she squeezed my hands and pressed the dizzying softness of herself against me.
But all the excitement as we embraced was inside my head and riotous chest. She walked to Lapham Park with me, and we sat on the stone steps of Roosevelt Junior High planning how, because of Cordelia, we would take our friendship underground.
I walked her back home, nearly. I blurted out I loved her, and then I recited the words of a touching poem by a poet whose name and most of whose words I have now forgotten. But it went something like, “Darling, I feel so sad and strange that all those years before, could be before we met. Don’t you wish there had never been any other lips, any other sweethearts? Darling, don’t you wish we could blot them out just as the smoke from a cigarette rises and fades into nothingness?”
I summoned the courage to brush her cheek with my lips and bashfully turned and sprinted away.