Mama said, “Thank yu, Sojer. Yu sho is smart.”
Papa had started to say something when there was a knock on the door. Carol opened the door. It was Cousin Bunny in a pink housecoat and matching fluffy slippers. She staggered into the living room and plopped down on Soldier’s lap.
Papa frowned and waved us from the room. We went to bed. The twins and I slept in the bed. Junior slept on a pallet on the floor. But none of us could sleep.
We listened to Bunny’s crying about the little black guy, and then her cursing of the police. And then she wailed about how guilty she felt because she hadn’t blown the white cops’ heads off with her dead husband’s shotgun since she was dying anyway.
I heard Papa go into the bedroom across the hall. For what seemed like hours I heard Soldier and Bunny briefing Mama about the treacherous black ghetto.
Finally Mama let them out and I heard her slow steps to her bedroom. I lay there with my heart raging, and I was trembling all over in fear for my family.
Just before I fell into nightmarish sleep larded with murderous police, thieving and horny black preachers and dope fiend pimps enslaving my innocent sisters, I heard Papa say, “Sedalia, Ah got eight dollars’ snow money. Mayhaps Ah git uh sho nuff job an’ ketch snow wuk tu. Come a nice seasun, we git frum this hellhole an’ mayhaps go somewhar’s else, an’ even th’ big foot country.”
Mama said, “Oh, shoot, Frank, ain’t no use tu rabbit outta’ heah. Bunny an’ Sojer both tol’ me ain’t no town up heah gud fer niggers. They’s all bad an’ Ah ain’t goin’ South, Frank. We just got tu tuff it out an’ keep th’ younguns an’ us hin’ pahts frum eny law truble.”
6
MERRY CHRISTMAS IN HELL
Papa and Soldier were lucky together. When there was no snowfall, they found a few store windows to clean or small hauling and moving jobs to do with Soldier’s truck. Papa managed to keep our stomachs filled with chitterlings and hog balls. The butcher called them hog maws. Every penny not spent for food was put in a lard can toward the sixty-dollar monthly rent.
Soldier had no relatives in Chicago, and he was lonesome. He was so sweet and kind and generous that all of us couldn’t help loving him and treating him like one of the family.
He wasn’t the least perfect. He had his faults, like constantly nipping from a whiskey bottle he always kept in his smelly sheepskin coat. Whiskey was legal, but he drank bootleg stuff. He was loud and cussed a lot when he talked about cops and highfalutin middle-class niggers. But it wasn’t a filthy kind of cussing, and he did it almost charmingly.
He was the smartest man we had ever met. He knew something about everything. Many evenings he brought Papa home and after staying for supper he would be too tired or tipsy to drive to his furnished room on the Southside. Mama would make a bed for him on the living-room sofa.
Soldier gave me the feeling that he felt something extra for me. He called me “Little Brother,” and bought me treats when I went with him in the truck to get groceries for Mama. When we saw a cop I would grit my teeth and put a mean look on my face. Soldier would laugh tears in his eyes. I was crazy about Soldier. I really was.
About a month and a half after we had come North (around December 19), Papa came home with our first Christmas tree. Mama trimmed the tree with dyed cotton balls and stars made from cigarette package tin foil she salvaged from the trash bin.
Christmas morning was so exciting and beautiful with the presents wrapped in colorful paper lying beneath the red, green and silver tree.
I got a black leather jacket lined with fleece and a handsome pair of gray woolen trousers and a pair of shiny high top boots. The twins and Junior also got warm clothing and shoes. It was all used Salvation Army stuff, but we couldn’t have been happier if it had been new.
Bunny and Soldier really helped Mama and Papa to give us kids a very merry Christmas. Mama roasted two fat hens with dressing and candied sweet potatoes topped with pineapple slices and baked biscuits so light and airy they seemed to melt in the mouth.
After dinner, Soldier and the twins sang and danced. Bunny brought her portable Victrola and played Bessie Smith’s blues records. It was the happiest, brightest Christmas our family ever had together. We were never to have another like it.
Mama had decided that we should wait until September to enroll in school. She wanted to be sure we’d be able to afford books and other materials.
On the second floor just above our apartment lived a Mrs. Greene with eight stair-step kids. Only two of them had the same father, and they had it rough on relief.
Two teenage girls, Denise and Sally, came to visit Carol and Bessie a day or so before the end of December.
Sally was golden brown, curvaceous and pretty. Denise was runty and thin with a bad case of acne. But Denise had poise and a large vocabulary. Sally was shallow and giggly, and all she talked about was clothes and boys.
Junior was dazed. He stayed his distance with a worshipful look on his face. Carol and Denise hit it off as pals right away; Sally and Bessie had almost matching temperaments and identical interests.
Denise brought Carol two of her high school books, an English text and the other math. I could tell Carol was puzzled and upset by the nervous way she flipped the pages of the English book.
Soldier and Papa came in just as the Greene sisters were leaving. Sally rolled her hot hazel eyes sexily at Soldier. He gave her an icy look and strode past her.
After supper, Soldier gave the twins and Junior tests in reading, spelling and math. Then he sadly shook his head and told them they would almost certainly have to enroll in the fourth and fifth grade in grammar school instead of high school.
Carol ran from the living room. Bessie and Junior just sat dumbly on the floor. Mama and Papa darted glances at each other, and then quickly dropped their eyes away.
I felt like crying when I imagined how pitifully comical the buxom twins and strapping Junior would look in grammar school with little kids like me.
I played a lot in the hallways of our building with Mrs. Greene’s younger children. Several times we sneaked into the large shed in the backyard. Connie used it to store the shabby almost worthless goods she had impounded that had belonged to tenants who had fallen hopelessly behind in rent payments.
Connie had a big brass padlock on the front of the shed, but she didn’t know about the rotted boards fallen away in the rear of the shed. We’d slip through the opening and prowl the musty gloom.
Lopsided floor lamps, a headless dressmaker’s type dummy and a tall rough carving of a tobacco store Indian cast spooky shadows across the clutter of mildewed clothing and dusty old chairs and sofas.
When Connie, the landlady, snooped around, we’d have to stay inside and suffer the dreary winter days.
Junior spent most of his time with Railhead Cox. He was a tall husky guy about eighteen who lived on the second floor just above Bunny’s apartment. He lived there with his parents and a skinny older brother called Rajah fresh out of Joliet prison for dope peddling. He had a normal length head and a sharp featured tan face.
Railhead had dark brown skin and thick blurry features and a horribly long head. He also had a fancy prancy hip walk. He was the image of Mrs. Cox, his brawny mother.
She suppressed poor Mr. Cox and her sons with her stentorian voice and inventive profanity. Haggard Mr. Cox, a graduate of a Southern agricultural college, had put in twenty years of stoop labor as a bootblack in a Loop hotel barbershop. He was a drunk who moved about with glazed eyes and a slow shuffle like a withered zombie.
Mama started to get the “country” out of herself that first winter in Chicago. Bunny taught her some slick makeup tricks. She gave Mama some dressy clothes that no longer fit Bunny’s wasted frame.
Mrs. Greene pressed and curled Mama’s hair. In those early years Mama was sexy and beautiful when she got herself together. Satiny black skin stretched tautly across her bold African features and fine body.
Several Sundays when Bunny felt like it,
Bunny, Mama and I and sometimes Carol would walk the three blocks to Bunny’s independent church. Papa was unshakably Baptist, so he stayed at home and read his Bible on Sunday. The goo on Mama’s face really distressed him. He’d look at her sternly and turn his face away from her good-bye kiss.
The preacher at Bunny’s church was a dapper slick-haired guy with gem quality false teeth and a debauched yellow face that had once been pretty.
One of the deacons that sat behind the preacher on the pulpit platform was a chubby black guy about forty with a wide drooly mouth, pug nose and slanted eyes that gave his comical face a harlequin look. He was the guy that lived in the third-floor apartment above Railhead ’s flat. His was the same apartment that the little black guy got his head caved in about.
Across the hall from the deacon lived an old man and his son who looked at least seventy years old. Bunny told us she had seen the old man just once, and he was at least a hundred and had been a slave. The son was a cook in a Loop restaurant.
The preacher’s congregation for the most part consisted of broken-down ex-whores, old snuff-dipping crones and a goodly number of that tired army of mop heads and toilet brushes who kept the white folks’ world free of funk and stink.
A seedy mob of starving fornicators winked and grinned at the cow-eyed sisters to latch onto a cinch source of shelter, sex and hog balls.
Almost all of the women leaped in the air and shouted from the ecstatic gut. They quivered their crotches in fits of obscene joy when the bombastic bantam bombed them with fire and brimstone.
When it came time to pass the collection baskets, the crafty extortionist would lean forward in his pulpit with slit eyes and intone in a deadly voice, “Now, Brothers and Sisters, the Lord demands you to share with the Lord what the Lord has let you get.
“Let me tell you children there’s no sin worse than stealing from the Lord what he needs for his work and church. You got to strain and dig deep because the Lord loves you and keeps you lucky.
“I can’t stop you from cheating the Lord if you just want to do something dangerous. Go ON! Hold out on him. But watch it! He’s sure to strike you blind, deaf or dead.”
Then the coldhearted slicker would stand there in the pulpit chanting Amen as the poor suckers stuffed the baskets with paper money.
I remember how angry and nervous I’d get after the services were over. What would almost make me wet my pants was the simpering eye-fluttering way Mama handled the bumptious bastards.
And that goddamn freakish Reverend Rexford was no inducement to serenity. He’d walk right up to Mama acrobating his tongue across his sensual lips, advertising right there in the house of the Lord that he ate cunt.
Looking back at that Sunday torment, I guess I must have been defending and feeling for Papa. The reverend finally persuaded Mama to join the church.
Dear generous Bunny passed away in the middle of March. Her insurance was just enough to bury her. She had spent her savings helping us and on her illness.
The store repossessed Bunny’s new furniture after she died. We just didn’t have the money to pay the two delinquent installments. Mama got Bunny’s clothes, cooking utensils and several old appliances. We were covered with sorrow and missed her very much.
Bunny’s death increased the already terrible pressure on Papa to feed us all and pay the sixty a month rent. He had other more deadly pressure put on him by Mama. She started speaking harshly to him and criticizing his dress and screaming at him for wearing a belt with suspenders when he had done it all his life.
I guess the preacher’s sharp clothes and Cadillac limousine had made her see Papa for the first time as a sloppy dresser from the big foot country who couldn’t even spell Cadillac.
Many times that first winter I got the feeling that if it hadn’t been for her children Mama would have packed Bunny’s flashy clothes and got in the wind.
Bessie’s pal Sally Greene was still in school. Carol had reading material that Denise brought her, and I had Mrs. Greene’s younger children to frolic with in the halls. Junior had Railhead.
Bessie was like a bored cat in a cage. She spent most of her time looking at clothes in the catalogues and gazing out the front window at the racketeers and pimps cruising in long shiny Buicks and Cadillacs. Some days she’d do nothing but play old records by Bessie Smith, the blues singer, on Bunny’s phonograph.
One day about ten days after Bunny had passed, Bessie, Mama and I were sitting on the sofa at the front window. Mama was trying to remove a splinter from my thumb.
Bessie sucked in a loud deep breath and shouted, “Look at Sally! Oh! Look at Sally n’ thet cute fella an’ thet gorgus cah.”
Mama and I forgot about the splinter and looked out at the curb. A brilliant sky blue La Salle was there. A short cruel-looking guy in a blue Chesterfield overcoat was gazing into Sally’s face. He had his hands on her shoulders, and he was talking so fast his white teeth flashed like blinkers in his black satanic face. His processed hair was completely white.
Mama moaned, “Thet fool chile.”
She pounded her fist against the windowpane. Sally spun around. Mama waved her toward the building. Sally came down the walk. The guy sneered at Mama and got into his machine and pulled away.
Sally knocked on our door. I let her in. She came into the living room with a puzzled look on her face.
She said, “You want me, Mrs. Tilson?”
Mama pounded a palm against her thigh and hollered, “Chile, ain’t yu got no sense? Pore Cousin Bunny pinted out thet rat en pants tu me. He’s uh nasty dopehead pimp.
“Bunny tol me th’ pimps an’ whores call him Grampy Dick ’cause he ain’t got no normul natchur. All he do is use his mouf on wimmen. Do Hattie know yu battin’ round wif him?”
Sally giggled and said, “Mrs. Tilson, you just got here from the big foot country. You don’t understand. That’s a lie. He’s called Grampy Dick because his first name is Richard and he has that gorgeous white hair. Grampy Dick is so sweet. Mama wouldn’t care that a rich guy drove me home from school.
“He told me I’m the prettiest chick he’s ever seen, and he wants to marry me. He said he’ll get rid of all his girls and go to work if I say yes.
“Say, Mrs. Tilson, are you sure you’re not turning a little green because Grampy Dick wouldn’t spit on old married women like you?”
Mama just looked at her for a long moment.
Then she waved Sally away and said sternly, “Heifer, yu ah star natal fool an’ don’ darken mah door agin. Yu ain’t gonna mount tu uh jar uh rooster droopins, an’ Ah don’ want yu pizenin’ mah twins. Ah’m gonna tel Hattie whut Ah tol yu. Now git goin’, heifer.”
Sally tossed her head arrogantly and wiggled her way out the front door. Tears welled in Bessie’s eyes.
Mama put an arm around her shoulder and said softly, “Ain’t no need tu bawl. Thet pore chile jes’ ain’t no gud. Yu fin anuthur fren whut ain’t mixin’ wif low-down niggah pimps en big cahs.”
Bessie shook herself loose from Mama and screamed, “Mama, yu wuz wrong tu hurt Sally’s feelins. Ah don’ need no other fren. An’ also Ah wish Ah wuz sweetheartin’ wif a cute rich fella lak thet Grampy, have a fine cah tu ride me en an’ buy me a red satin dress.”
I heard a shoulder seam rip in Mama’s gingham dress when she backhanded Bessie hard across the mouth. Bessie tumbled off the sofa and bounced on the floor. She drew herself into an agonized knot and moaned in high pitch as she pressed her palms tightly against her face.
Mama sat on the sofa staring at her. Finally Bessie got up, dry sobbing, and glared at Mama with reddened, cold eyes. She patted her lips that were swollen fat and went down the hall to the bedroom.
Mama went upstairs to see Hattie Greene. I went to Bessie and hugged her and cried with her until I felt like a firebomb had exploded in my chest.
The last week in March an element of deadly fate popped up in the circumstance that Jonnie Mae Hudson moved into Bunny’s old flat.
Jonnie Mae
was a jolly hulk of black jelly in a size forty dress. She had a wide snoutish nose that coalesced with her fat face and spacious mouth. Her hippolike tiny ears were carelessly pinned toward the rear of a small round head, cockleburred with short kinky hair.
Peewee embers of maroon fire flared in sunken sockets whenever she laughed or was angry. There was nothing deadly about Jonnie Mae herself. In fact, she was likeable. She and Mama hit it off friendly like right away.
It turned out that it was a deadly circumstance that Jonnie Mae was a tool for and sister to Lockjaw Hudson. He was a policy racketeer who had installed Jonnie Mae in the apartment to use it as a policy game check-in station.
In the early evening of April 4, Jonnie Mae brought Mama a big yellow birthday cake that she had baked. Soldier, and then Jonnie Mae, would slip in and out of the bathroom with a quart bottle of Soldier’s colored bootleg whiskey.
We were in the living room having cocoa and cake and laughing at Soldier’s antics when someone knocked on the front door. Carol stopped on her way down the hall and swung the door open.
I saw her stiffen as she looked up into the face of Lockjaw, hideous in a bright spot of living-room light. He had a body and face shaped remarkably like Jonnie Mae’s except that the right side of his face had been crushed in from eyebrow to jawbone. His maimed right orb was crimson and unblinking. It protruded from its mangled socket like a bloody gut.
Carol finally stammered, “Howdy do.”
He stood there staring his live eye down at her. He was breathing hard and fast and cocking his ugly head from side to side like some monstrous dog in heat. The terrible quiet was broken by Jonnie Mae’s flushing of the toilet down the hall.
Papa had risen from the sofa to break up the weird tableau when the monster croaked, “Jonnie Mae here?”
Jonnie Mae came to the doorway and looked at her brother. She smiled and took his arm and led him to the living room. A tough-looking red-haired guy with psychotic yellowish eyes and a battered bulldog face followed on his heels. She introduced him to everyone; everyone except Soldier who was acquainted with him.