DC Noir 2: The Classics

The last days of Duncan Street by Julian Mayfield

(Originally published in 1960)

Kingman Park

It was one of those bright days when that Washington sun wasn’t taking any stuff off of anybody. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the wind wasn’t a big wind at all, just a little itty-bitty breeze to take the edge off the sun’s heat. It was a good day, man, because there wasn’t any school, the grown folks were at work, and we could do anything that crossed our natural minds. It was a crazy day, man, because that night Joe Louis was going to knock the living stew out of a big German named Max Schmeling.

We could have gone swimming. There was the colored pool on the other side of town and the muddy Eastern Branch of the Potomac was only a few blocks away. We could have swiped pop bottles from old man Farbenstein’s store yard and sold them back to him. Then we would have had enough money to ride across town to the picture show. A Bob Steele movie was playing at the Gem and a Tom Mix one was at the Alamo.

But this wasn’t the kind of day when you went swimming or sat in a movie. You could do stuff like that anytime. But how often did Joe Louis have a chance to get into the same ring with that blabber-mouth Schmeling. That German had been doing a lot of talking about how badly he was going to beat Joe. Naturally he thought he was better than Joe because he was white, but the newspapers were hinting that he thought he was better than everybody because he was a German. Well, you know Joe, he hadn’t said much, but all of us knew what was bound to happen. Joe was nobody’s talker, but he could dispose of a man before you could call his name. Yes, this was going to be a great night and we were prepared to celebrate it.

The bricks had come out of an empty lot in the middle of the block. They were red bricks that we had broken into halves, good bricks that were just right for throwing, bricks that you could aim at a white boy’s head. The baseball bats would come in handy for any close fighting. A white boy wouldn’t even know what had hit him if he got beaned with one of those Babe Ruth specials. We had a couple of knives and lots of milk bottles. It was going to be quite a night.

By mid-afternoon all our weapons were stored in Austin’s basement. We lounged and talked on the grass near the basement door. Austin had a real grudge against the white boys. They had caught him near the Peoples Drug store the week before and knocked out two of his front teeth. He was a skinny little high-yellow kid with bow legs and curly hair. We thought his people were well-off because they lived in an entire house instead of a flat like the rest of us.

“Wait’ll I catch one of them,” Austin said, spitting through the space where his front teeth had been. “I’ll knock his gut string out.” He stood up, reached out with his left hand, and clutched the air. “I’ll take that paddy boy like this, see, and I’ll hold him up like this, see …” With one hand Austin lifted the imaginary white boy from the ground. “And I’ll say, ‘You’re one of those paddy rats that jumped me last week.’ And he’ll say, ‘No sir, Mister Austin, that must’ve been some other paddy rat, not me.’ And I’ll say, ‘Well, that’s too damned bad because you’re gonna get it anyway.’ He’ll say, ‘That ain’t fair, Mister Austin.’ And I’ll say, ‘Yes it is, because all you paddy boys look alike to me!’”

We laughed as Austin brought his right fist over and wham! the invisible white boy went sailing through the air.

Teeny Mae said, “Boy, I hear that Joe is in really good shape. Wonder how long it will take him to catch up with that German guy.”

I said, “Three or four rounds.” I wanted to give our man enough leeway. Sometimes Joe needed time to figure out a man’s style.

Robert Jackson yelled, “Gowan! Joe’ll stop that jerk in one round. Wanna bet?” I didn’t want to bet. Robert had set himself up as leader of our gang and so far, because he was a year older than the rest (and presumably tougher), no one had challenged him.

“I’ll show you.” Robert stood up and took the Joe Louis stance, which was the only one any of us ever used. “This guy’s got a hard right, see, but Joe will keep him off with that left jab. Now when this guy comes over with that right, see, Joe’s gonna bring that left hard to the jaw like this. Then he’ll whip it right in, and, man, that’ll be the end of that German.” Robert sprawled face downward on the grass like one of Joe’s victims.

Fat Sammy said, “And that’s when I’m going out and get myself a paddy boy.”

We all agreed that, yeah, there was no better time to beat the paddy boys. Then we got into a loud argument about who had beaten up more white boys during the raid we had pulled after the last Joe Louis fight.

To understand this passion for scrapping with the white boys you have to feel what Joe Louis meant to the Duncan Street gang. We loved him. He was our man. He was right out there in front going for us. Some people called us hoodlums but in our minds there was no doubt Joe would have approved of the raids we went on after his ring victories. We justified them very simply. The white boys had a swimming pool nearby and we didn’t. They could see movies right there in the neighborhood and we had to ride all the way up to the colored business district on U Street. And it was shame on you if, like Austin, you were caught alone by the white gang at 15th and H streets. I think sometimes we could not help wondering if there really was something wrong with us that made white folks treat us so badly. But Joe dispelled our doubts. He made us believe that each one of us was as good as anybody. He was our personal representative.

So it was give and take, man. You gave as much as you could and you took what you had to. Life was a crazy kind of thing full of school and the gang and fighting white boys. It was exciting because something was jumping every minute. Of course, the fever pitch ran highest whenever Joe fought. Those were the craziest nights of all. Talk about kicks, that was it.

When the sun got low it hung on a while, kissing everything in sight goodbye. It dropped away slowly as if it too wanted to stay on and hear the fight. Then the night eased down smoothly like warm milk and a gentle breeze cooled Duncan Street. I felt so good being a part of it all that I wanted to yell out loud.

Sammy’s old man, Mister Speed, came home with a whole case of beer because he had invited friends over to hear the fight. We all had a good laugh on Teeny Mae when we saw his father, who was supposed to be a very strict Baptist, sneak a fifth bottle into the house. My pop sat down in the big easy chair, lit a White Owl cigar, and said he wasn’t going to move until the fight was over.

By ten o’clock the sidewalks were deserted. Every radio in the block was tuned in to New York. Every mind pictured the Brown Bomber, always calm and deliberate, as he stepped through the ropes and raised his hand. We saw him standing before the German, softly pawing the canvas with his toe as the referee droned out the rules. Finally we saw him take off his robe and walk like a bronze god toward the center of the ring to begin his master work.

Well, I don’t have to tell you what happened. That night Joe didn’t have it, and this big German square did just what he said he was going to do to our ace man. He whipped the living daylights out of Joe. I just couldn’t believe it. My eyes got hot and then the tears began to roll. My old man stopped puffing on his White Owl and didn’t say a mumbling word. My kid sister was too young to understand, but she felt it and kept quiet. Mama sighed and said, “Well, you gotta lose sometimes, I guess,” real sad like, and went into the kitchen. I felt just like nothing inside.

Of course, there was no rushing out of doors to snatch up our weapons and fight the white boys. One by one the members of the Duncan Street gang dragged tail out to the side-walk under the lamplight where we usually gathered at night. We sat on the curbstone making figures in the sand. Robert Jackson kept spitting because that was what he did when he was mad or down in the blues. We must have sat there ten or fifteen minutes in complete, mournful silence. The beautiful day with the crazy sun had turned into a miserable night.

Finally, Teeny Mae said, “Boy, you know one thing? That didn’t fight like no Joe Louis.”

“You’re goddamned right it didn’t,” said Austin, and we all agreed, yeah, they were right, that didn’t fight like Joe Louis at all.

Then, as if someone had kicked him, Sammy yelled, “Something was wrong!” That’s right, we chorused, something was damn wrong.

“Do you suppose they doped Joe?”

We turned and stared at Robert Jackson. He was serious. Our mouths opened in astonishment as the thought gripped us. It was such a simple explanation. We knew that Joe could beat Max Schmeling or anybody else any day in the week.

Sammy said, “You know they don’t want no colored guy to be champ, man. My pop says they never did like Jack Johnson.”

Now we were all furious. Imagine doing a nasty thing like that to Joe Louis! Robert Jackson said we ought to go beat some white heads just to make up for what they had done to poor Joe. He reminded us of the bricks and bats we had stored in Austin’s basement. Robert Jackson said that 15th and H streets ought to be our first target because we could probably catch the whole white gang there. We jumped to our feet agreeing loudly that Robert had a damned good idea and we would show those sons of — Crrraaaaaash! A terrible shattering above our heads and pitch blackness. I stopped breathing. Not a soul moved. We were numb with fear as the fragments of the streetlamp showered us. For a moment there was a long, awful silence.

Then, small and hard, the white boy’s voice from the alley. “Oh, you black bastards! We got you now!”

Man, I’m standing there like a dump on a log, and nothing in my hands. Then the bricks and bottles started falling, and the white boys came down on us like white on rice. The first brick hit me and I fell against Teeny Mae. Then we both started running and bumped into one another again. Teeny said, “Man, don’t be holding me up,” and I yelled, “Man, you get out of my way!” We both took flying leaps for a secret hiding place under Sammy’s porch. Once there I huddled close to Teeny. My shoulder was throbbing where the brick had hit me.

Teeny said, “Man, ain’t this something. Those guys done caught us off guard.”

Obviously the 15th and H boys had felt so good about the German beating Joe that they had decided to pay us a surprise visit, something they had never dared before. They were dancing and yelling like Indians in the middle of Duncan Street, and throwing bricks and milk bottles at everything that moved. Then our parents started opening windows to see what all the noise was about, and the light from the houses poured down into the street. The victorious invaders hauled tail for their own territory, disappearing as suddenly as they had come.

We crawled out of our shelters and gathered under the shattered lamplight. You can imagine how we felt. It wasn’t so much my shoulder or Robert Jackson’s bleeding (his hand had been cut) or Austin’s crying (he had lost another tooth). The hurt was deeper than that.

“Ira! Ira!” It was Teeny Mae’s father calling him. “You out there, boy?”

Teeny looked up. “Yes sir, I’m here.”

“What are you boys doing out there? What happened to that lamplight?”

Teeny didn’t know what to say, and the rest of us could not help him. We just stood there with our heads bowed.

“Well, speak up, boys. What happened?”

We didn’t know, not really. After that night we had our victories, especially after Joe became champ and gave Schmeling a good licking. But the spirit was never quite the same on Duncan Street. We were never so sure again.

Washington by Julian Mazor

(Originally published in 1963)

Shaw

When I ran through Pennsylvania Station on a cloudy November afternoon, I was wearing a clean blue shirt with a soft unbuttoned collar, a brown knit tie, a brown herringbone suit, well-polished brown Spanish shoes, and an English overcoat — a gray herringbone — that I had worn for three years. I had some old letters stuffed into the inside pocket of my jacket, and after I had taken out my wallet to buy my train ticket I had trouble putting it back. I was afraid I would miss my train, so I slipped the wallet into the inside pocket of my overcoat, thinking I would sort things out when I was aboard. I had a hundred and forty-seven dollars in the wallet, a sum left over from my last pay check, and I was on my way to Washington, D.C., to see my family — my mother and father and an older sister who had recently got married. I had just left my job as a salesman-demonstrator-instructor in the tennis department of a famous New York department store, where I, John Lionel, was known as “Wright & Ditson.” One day, for some reason, while demonstrating the proper service technique to a twelve-year-old boy and his mother, I tossed a tennis ball up in the air and hit a powerful cannonball service; the ball whizzed by the floor manager’s — Mr. Palmerston’s — ear, and smashed a glass case. Palmerston said it was nice knowing me and told me to pick up my check. So long, Wright & Ditson. It was my third job since coming back from Europe, where I had served a tour in the Army, and although in a way I was a little concerned because I didn’t seem to be going anywhere and didn’t know where I wanted to go, I thought, Well, I’m only twenty-three and I’ve got time.

Somewhere near North Philadelphia, I ate a tuna-fish sandwich that I bought from a vender on the train, and about twenty minutes south of the Thirtieth Street Station I began to feel warm and a little strange. I thought I’d get some air, so I left my seat and went out to the platform between the cars. I leaned against the steel wall and smoked and looked out at the countryside. The cool air made me feel a lot better. I stayed out between the cars until the train was about a half hour past Wilmington, and then I returned to my seat in the coach.

I thought I’d get a book out of my suitcase and read for a while. When I looked up at the baggage rack, I saw that my overcoat was gone. I had forgotten to take the wallet out of it. I had placed the coat neatly folded over my suitcase, and there was no doubt that it was gone. I walked up and down the coach, looking at all the overcoats in the baggage racks, and then I returned to my seat and tried to be calm and think things out. Then I went up and down the car again. When I returned to my seat for the second time, feeling demoralized and enraged, a man sitting across the aisle asked me what was the matter, and I told him that my overcoat was gone. The man folded his newspaper and looked out the window for a while, and then he asked me to describe the coat. I told him that it was a gray herringbone, and that it had been on the rack above my seat. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and then, seeming embarrassed, he told me that he had seen a man pull my coat from the rack as the train got into Wilmington, and that he had, even then, found it a little strange, because this man was already wearing a camel’s-hair coat.

I slumped down in my seat, feeling sick. I always do when somebody steals from me. For a while, I sat there thinking about my overcoat and how it had been part of the friendly continuity of my life. Then I got to my feet and went through my pockets and came up with fifty cents. I had lost my money, my Social Security card, and even my passport. I began to feel cold and hot alternately, and around Aberdeen I began to feel cramps and nausea. I figured it was the tuna-fish sandwich. Just outside of Baltimore, I became desperately sick and went to the men’s room and threw up. I was sick again between Baltimore and Washington, and when the train finally pulled into Union Station and I stepped out into the cold, rainy afternoon, I felt like hell.

I didn’t have enough money for a cab, and it was no use calling home. My family was out of town, visiting my sister’s husband’s family in Maryland. They would be coming back to Washington in the morning. So I got on a bus, and about twenty minutes later got off, in the rain, and transferred to another bus. While I was on the bus, the nausea and cramps came back and I decided I’d have to get off. I began to look for a bar or restaurant or hotel along the way, and when I saw a gasoline station in a very old, shabby neighborhood — a Negro neighborhood — I pulled the cord and picked up my suitcase and got off.

In the men’s room of the gasoline station, I bathed my face in cold water, and went outside again. I was feeling much better, but weak. The rain was cold, and the wind had grown stronger, and I was shivering. I was about to cross the street and wait by a little yellow bus-stop sign, when I saw that I was in front of a small grocery store with a green awning slanting down over a dimly lighted display window. I decided to stand under the awning and watch for the bus from there.

Inside the grocery store, three Negroes were leaning against a long, white refrigerated case, or counter, talking and laughing. Another Negro, in a white apron, was behind the counter, leaning on it and reading a newspaper and eating a sandwich. I thought of going into the store and getting warm, but I had no excuse for going in, really — no money to buy anything with. So I stayed under the awning, which was flapping wildly in the wind. My teeth were chattering, and I felt a sore throat coming on, when I saw a Negro man and woman walking down the street in the rain, arguing. They’d walk without speaking, then stop and argue, then walk some more. Actually, it was more of a dramatic exercise than an argument. The woman would make wordless faces at the man, which unsettled him. He would get ready to say something, and then she would laugh at him. Then he would look surprised and cautious, as though he was searching for a little balance and leverage, and she would scream at him. Then she would tell him to shut up, and he would look surprised, and finally he would begin to scream at her, and then she would begin to laugh at him, which made him more unsteady. The man was squat and round, with a black moonface crowned by a porkpie hat. He was wearing a frayed and very wet fatigue jacket. His companion was mocha brown, and tall and wide. She was large-boned and hefty, but not fat, and although she was obviously strong, she was unmistakably feminine. She wore a man’s raincoat and a pair of bedroom slippers without backs. She didn’t wear stockings, and she didn’t wear a hat. She had a wide nose and a wide mouth, and large, beautiful eyes. She walked ahead of the man into the grocery store, slamming the door after her, and he followed her in, looking worried and confused.

I leaned my back against the window and watched the rain water pour off the awning and splash over my shoes. I was standing in a puddle about an inch deep, but it hardly mattered any more. I was beginning to feel sick again. There was no sign of the bus. To take my mind off myself, I turned and faced the window, and I saw the woman dancing around the store with her arms outstretched and her eyes half closed. The men standing near the refrigerated case kept up a rhythmic clapping. She went on dancing around, having a marvelous time, while the man in the porkpie hat looked sullenly at the floor.

After a while, I turned around and faced the street again. I felt like a shipwreck hanging on a reef, or a piece of driftwood. I think I had a touch of delirium. I was thinking about what to do next, when the woman and the man in the porkpie hat came out of the grocery store.

“You deny that? You deny that?” he yelled at her. He was standing next to me under the awning.

“Go on, man. Go on. Go on,” she said, walking away from him and moving indifferently into the rain.

“Now, you deny that?” he said. “Now where you going? You come on back here.”

“You don’t own me, baby,” she said, walking on.

He gave a few preliminary grunts of frustration, and then he began to scream at her to come back, but she paid no attention to him. “You hear me? I’m talking to you! You come on back here,” he said.

Halfway down the block, she stopped and turned around, put her hands on her hips, yelled something obscene at him, and then stretched out her arms and began to laugh.

“Honey, you getting wet. Now, you come on back here,” he called imploringly.

She yelled something at him again.

“Now, honey, why you talk that way to me?” he yelled.

“Man, leave me alone. You make me sick,” she said, moving on.

“Come on, honey, you know I don’t feel good,” he cried at her in a sad whine.

The woman crossed the street quickly, and the man watched her, moving his mouth without saying anything. He seemed too tired to go after her. For a while, he stood with his arms folded and shook his head. He didn’t seem to know that I was there, even though only about a foot separated us. I was slightly behind him, still leaning against the window, when he turned around and looked surprised; then he closed his mouth and narrowed his eyes and looked angry.

“How are you?” I said.

“What you say?” he asked, putting a hand over his eyes.

“I said, ‘How are you?’”

He held his hand over his eyes, considering the question. “That ain’t what you said,” he told me finally, still covering his eyes.

“O.K., that’s not what I said.”

I looked down at my feet, at the puddle I was standing in, trying to ignore him. I noticed that he was wearing a ripped pair of black, misshapen shoes and no socks, and that his pants legs were rolled up a little above his ankles. Suddenly he jumped into the puddle I was standing in and splashed me. I couldn’t believe it.

“Now, what did you say?” he asked, folding his arms.

I didn’t answer.

“You trying to make a fool out of me?” he asked.

“I’m not trying to make a fool out of you,” I said. I looked down the street, feeling sick and desperate, but the street was empty and it was raining harder than ever.

“You mean you ain’t trying but I am a fool anyhow. Right?” he said.

“I didn’t say that.”

“But that what you mean,” he said. “You a wise guy. Right?”

“I’m just waiting for a bus. If I insulted you, it was unintentional,” I said.

“Don’t give me unintentional. I unintentional you.”

He kicked the puddle, splashing my pants with water, and said he was going to knock me down. Then he stepped back, dropping his hands to the level of his belt, and measured me. I picked up my suitcase and moved it a few feet, setting it on a narrow ledge just below the window.

“Man, I’m gonna wipe you out,” he said, opening and closing his hands several times.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He looked very strong, and I am of medium height and rather frail. “Well,” I said, “you’re going to have the worst fight of your life.”

“You gonna give it to me?” he asked, smiling.

I told him that I was going to beat the hell out of him, and then I brought my hands up.

“Man, will you look at that!” he said. “This is gonna be some fun.”

He touched the brim of his hat, dropped his hands into position again, and, five feet away from me, began to bob and weave. “You come on in,” he said. “I’m a counterpuncher.”

I didn’t move, but watched him closely, keeping my hands high. I told him I was a counterpuncher, too. He began to circle me, and I turned with him. He kept on going through this little shadowboxing routine, paying only nominal attention to me. He looked very good, very agile.

After a few minutes of circling and jabbing and hooking at the air, he stopped and looked at me. “You looks terrible,” he said. We had maneuvered ourselves out into the rain, and the water was streaming over our faces. “You off balance,” he said.

I told him not to worry about it, that I had fast hands and a good punch.

“The only thing you doing right is standing up,” he said, shaking his head. He held up his hands in a truce gesture and walked over to me. He said he wanted to give me some basic instruction. He adjusted my hands slightly and pushed my head down so that it was protected by my left shoulder, and then he kicked my feet to a different position, saying I was standing flat-footed. “Now you looking good,” he said.

“Well, it feels unnatural,” I said, resuming my old position.

Then, to prove that my style was poor, he asked me to try to hit him. He said he wouldn’t try to hit me but would just give me a little demonstration that would do more for me than all the talk in the world.

“I don’t want to hit you,” I said.

“Don’t worry, you ain’t going to,” he said.

“Look, I’ll take your word for it,” I said.

“Come on, now,” he said. “You got to see what I mean to really believe it.”

So he began to bob and weave with his hands low, presenting his head as a slowly moving target. I watched his head bob for about thirty seconds, and tried to measure him. He kept talking the whole time. “You can’t get set, see. Now you see it, now you don’t. You all tied up.”

I pulled my right hand back a few inches, and he broke into a wide grin, and then, while he was grinning, I feinted with my right hand and came hard with a left hook, catching him squarely on the side of the jaw. He whirled around and pitched forward on the pavement, landing hard on his chest and then rolling over on his side. He wasn’t hurt. He grabbed his hat and jumped quickly to his feet, looking annoyed and embarrassed. “I’ll be goddam,” he said, one hand on top of his hat.

“I’m very sorry,” I said. “Are you all right?”

“Some rain got in my eye,” he said. “I ain’t seen your left.”

He said he wanted to give me a few more demonstrations, but I told him I’d had enough. I suddenly felt sick again, with the hot-and-cold business returning — the nausea and cramps and the rest. My legs became weak. Feeling I was going to faint, I walked over to the window and leaned against it. I decided to forget about the bus, for the time being, and go back to the men’s room in the gasoline station. I took up my suitcase and started to walk away, when the man trotted over and grabbed me by the arm. “Where you going?” he asked.

“I’m not feeling well,” I said, jerking my arm away. “Leave me alone.”

“Man, what’s wrong with you?” he asked, smiling. “You knock me down and you is mad.”

Then he began to throw a flurry of punches at the air in front of me, bobbing and weaving, going into a series of strange forward and lateral hops and skips, dancing, and finally winding it up by running in place. I think he felt he was cheering me up, for he kept up the running for about two minutes, making faces, and then he stopped and said, “Now how you feeling?”

I told him to get out of my way, but he continued to block me, and I was too weak to try to run around him.

He jumped up in the air and closed his eyes and flapped his arms. “Now how you feeling?” he asked, after a few jumps.

I told him I was feeling worse than ever, and that if he really wanted to help me he would go away and leave me alone.

He said that I was just a little down and out, and there was nothing to worry about if I listened to him. He told me about his Opposite Theory. “If you feel like lying down, then stand up,” he said. “If you feel like crying, then laugh.”

I tried to get by him, but he grabbed me by the shoulder of my coat. “Maybe if you lie down you never get up. You thought of that?”

I broke away and started to run, but he caught up with me easily and clapped a huge hand on my shoulder and pressed down. I whirled around, dropped my suitcase, and threw a wild right hand at him, but he ducked under it neatly and countered, though intentionally missing, with a classic one-two. “Sickness all in the mind,” he said.

I told him my sickness was in the stomach and that he should get the hell away from me, but he shook his head, half closing his eyes. “I ain’t gonna let you give in to it,” he said. “I gonna help you fight it.”

He said he knew all about the body, because he was an ex-fighter, and most ex-fighters knew more about the human body than any doctor, and that every man has a secret place in him which fights sickness and pain, and the trick was to have faith in that secret place. He said you had to turn on that little secret power by doing just the opposite of what your body asked you to do.

While he was talking, I developed a headache, and I was about to ask him what this headache was telling me to do, so I could do the opposite, when I began to see objects in pairs and threes, and I knew I was going to fall. The nausea was so bad that I couldn’t keep my mouth closed, and the ground seemed to tilt. I dropped down on one knee, pushing at the ground with both hands. “Get up,” I heard him say, his voice far off. “Is you gonna lay down? Is you gonna quit?”

As I pushed at the ground, fighting it and the nausea, a bus went by, and the next thing I knew the man was grabbing me under the arms and pulling me to my feet. “We gonna make it,” he said.

I tried to push him away. I succeeded in breaking free of one hand, but he had me by the collar with the other. “You doing fine,” he said. “You got to keep moving around. It good for the circulation.” The word “circulation” seemed to give him an idea, for he began to slap my face with his free hand.

I called him a stupid son of a bitch, hit him hard on the mouth, lurched and spun away from him, hearing my coat and shirt rip, and fell onto the pavement, where I crawled to the gutter and threw up. He stood near me. He kept saying, “You doing fine. You doing fine. You gonna be a new man now. We gonna clear you out.”

As he was talking, the street lamps came on. I looked over at him and watched the rain bounce off his shoes. One of his pants legs had come unrolled in the scuffle, and the cuff was ripped.

“How you doing?” he asked, smiling, getting down on one knee and putting his hand on my forehead. His lip was bleeding. I knocked his hand away, and looked down at the fast-moving water in the gutter.

“Man, I is wounded,” he said. He leaned over the gutter and brought some water up for his bloodied lip. “Look, I’m gonna tell you a joke,” he went on. I got up and started to walk back to the awning, and he followed me, taking my suitcase from my hand and carrying it for me. “This man, he in a restaurant, and he say, ‘Waiter, there is a fly in the soup,’ and this waiter, he say, ‘Don’t worry, he can swim.’”

He began to laugh. We stood under the awning, and he continued to laugh at his joke while I looked down the street for the bus. He calmed down and then began to regard me seriously, putting a hand over his mouth.

“Say, you know who I am?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“I guess you heard of Ringo Brown,” he said, “who fight in Griffith Stadium in 1939, ’40, ’41, and ’46.”

“If you’re Ringo Brown, I never heard of you,” I said.

“Aw, come on, man,” he said, smiling. “I fight twenty-three preliminaries and one main event. I lose the main event. You remember Red Hickey, from Delaware?”

“No.”

“I lose to him in a split decision. He was a good boy, but he never did nothing. I was a middleweight.”

“You lost only one fight?” I said.

“Now, I ain’t said that, but I never knocked out.”

I pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. The pack was wet, but I managed to find two dry cigarettes, and I gave Ringo one.

We smoked for a while without saying anything, and then Ringo said, “Say, kid, what’s your name?”

“John,” I said. “John Lionel.”

I saw a bus coming, and I picked up my suitcase and began to move away.

“Where you going?” Ringo asked.

“So long, Ringo,” I said.

As I started to cross the street, he came and grabbed me by the arm. “John, I carry your bag,” he said. “You tired.”

“I’m all right. It’s not heavy,” I said.

“No, I carry it.”

Ringo began to fight me for the suitcase, right there in the middle of the street. He pushed me with one hand and grabbed the suitcase away with the other. I ran over to the bus stop and called back to Ringo to bring the suitcase. The bus had stopped and was letting off passengers. Ringo just smiled at me from the other side of the street. I asked the driver to wait a second, but he took one look at me and closed the door and drove off. I walked over to Ringo and took the suitcase from him. “You’re crazy,” I said.

“They be another bus, John,” he said, smiling. “One as good as another.”

I walked back to the bus stop and decided to wait there, even though the rain was coming down harder than ever. Ringo followed me. “I try to do you a good turn and you don’t let me. Don’t you know that hurt?” he said.

“Get away from me!”

“Won’t even let me carry his suitcase across the street,” Ringo said, shaking his head.

He remained standing by me, his arms folded across his chest. I was beginning to feel faint again — not sick, only weak and tired and a little dizzy — and I put my hand over my face.

“Let’s go to Billy’s and have a sandwich,” he said, slapping me on the shoulder. He pointed to the grocery store across the street.

“No, thanks,” I said.

He said that a sandwich would build up my strength, and that he was hungry.

“I’ve only got a quarter,” I said, “and that’s for the bus.”

“You can clean up at Billy’s. He got a bathroom,” Ringo said. “You can watch for the bus inside the store and keep warm. You can dry off some.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Come on, John,” he said. And then he grabbed my suitcase again and ran off across the street with it and into Billy’s. I was so damned mad I slammed my hand against the bus-stop post, and then I followed Ringo across the street and into the grocery store.

“Here I am, Billy,” Ringo was saying when I went in.

“Yeah, I see you,” a slight, light-brown Negro said. He was the one in the white apron. The three Negroes leaning against the refrigerated case were smiling. Billy looked at Ringo, then at me, then back at Ringo.

“Now what you getting mad at? You mad at me, Billy?” Ringo said.

“What you doing with that suitcase?” Billy asked. “You going to catch a train?”

“Ain’t this Union Station?” Ringo said, smiling at everyone.

“You ain’t funny, Ringo. You just ain’t funny,” Billy said. “Give this man his suitcase.”

“You got to be serious about everything. Nobody can take a joke,” Ringo said, handing me the suitcase without looking at me.

“We seen the whole thing,” Billy said. “We seen this man drop you, Ringo.” Billy looked at me. “He deserved it,” he said.

“You got that same tricky style, Ringo,” one of the other Negroes said.

“He sure know how to fall,” Billy said. “He an expert at that.”

“Aw, man,” Ringo said. “We wasn’t in no fight. I teaching him some things.”

“Yeah, you a real teacher, all right,” Billy said. “You teach any man alive how to fall. But fighting something else.”

Billy smiled at the other men, and then he looked at me. “You been sick, right?” he said.

I said yes, that I had an upset stomach. Billy said there was a bathroom in the back of the store, and that I could use it if I wanted to. I thanked him and said that I would like to clean up.

“I give you something for your stomach when you come back,” Billy said. He took my suitcase and put it behind the counter, and then he led me back to the bathroom and switched on the light for me.

When I got back from the bathroom, Ringo was shadowboxing in the middle of the room.

“Go. Go. Go. Hey!” one of the men said.

I walked over to Billy and stood beside him, watching the performance. Ringo was putting together some combinations to the head and body. “He won’t go down. This sucker’s tough,” he said.

“They all tough, Ringo, for you,” Billy said, and then he turned to me. “I lost more damn money on him,” he said.

I asked Billy if Ringo had fought in Griffith Stadium.

“Yeah, I guess so,” he said. “That was a long time ago. He look pretty good when there ain’t nobody in his way. Say, how you feeling?” Billy looked seriously at me. I told him I was feeling a little tired.

“Well, I got something for you,” he said, walking over to a shelf and taking down a large bottle of Coca-Cola syrup. He poured a little into a paper cup and handed it to me. “Drink that down and you be all right,” he said.

I drank the syrup slowly and watched Ringo jump rope without a rope. His footwork was very good.

“See how his eyes is half closed,” Billy said. “He really happy and stupid.”

The three Negroes who had been leaning against the case stood up, nodded and smiled at Billy, and went out into the rain. Ringo continued to jump rope, but when he noticed that they had gone he seemed to lose interest. Looking distracted, as though he were trying to figure out what he could do next, he came over to Billy and me and broke out into a wide smile. “Hey, Billy, how about making me and John a sandwich,” he said, tilting his head a little in a mock coyness that I hadn’t seen before.

Billy turned to me, and I told him I didn’t want a sandwich. Billy looked at Ringo and slowly shook his head. “Of course, you got the money. Right?” he said.

“John here, he carry the money,” Ringo said.

I told Billy that all I had was a quarter.

“Even if you have the money, I ain’t gonna let you buy him no sandwich,” Billy said.

Ringo looked down at the floor and tapped his right foot nervously and scratched his leg. Then he put both hands over his eyes. Nothing happened. When Ringo finally took his hands away from his eyes, he said, “Billy, but I hungry.”

“Hell, you always hungry, Ringo,” Billy said. “But that don’t mean you starving. It obvious you ain’t no middleweight no more.”

“That ain’t nice,” Ringo said, looking pained. “Why the world full of bad feeling?” He put his hands over his hat, crossing his fingers, and closed his eyes and began to twist and contort his mouth. He began to shake his whole body, without moving his feet or changing his position, and then, with his eyes still closed, he smiled. I looked over at Billy to see how he was taking it. He was leaning on the counter, reading the Washington Post. I went behind the counter and picked up my suitcase.

Billy looked up from his paper. “Well,” he said, “you looking better. How you feeling?”

“Much better,” I said. “Thanks a lot, Billy.” We shook hands.

“Look at that fool!” Billy said.

Ringo was still vibrating and smiling, but his eyes were open now. “What you doing with that suitcase?” he asked.

I didn’t say anything, but moved toward the door to watch for another bus.

Ringo came up to me and put an arm around my shoulder. “So you going home,” he said.

“That’s right,” I said.

“What you in a big hurry for?” he asked.

“So long, Ringo.”

“I don’t see no bus coming,” he said.

I made sure I had a firm hold on my suitcase; then I tried to walk away, but he had a strong grip on my shoulder. “There ain’t no bus coming,” he said, smiling.

“Get lost, Ringo,” I said.

“Go on, Ringo. Go on, now,” Billy said. He came out from behind the counter.

“Look, there your bus, John,” Ringo said.

I turned and looked out the window, but the street was clear. While I was looking down the street, Ringo slipped his forearm under my chin and pressed it against my throat. With his free hand he pressed the back of my head forward. “Now what you gonna do?”

I couldn’t talk, because he was pressing too hard on my throat. I swung my suitcase, trying to hit him with it, but could only manage a light, slapping blow to the back of his legs.

Ringo began to laugh. “You can’t do nothing, see? You can’t do nothing.”

Then he suddenly yelled and let me go.

I turned around, rubbing my throat, and saw Billy just back of Ringo, holding a large soda bottle. Ringo was grabbing at his ankle and hopping on one foot.

“Goddam, Billy,” he said. “You nearly break my leg.”

“Next time I break your head.”

Ringo hopped over to the refrigerated case and sat on the front edge of it, holding his ankle. He looked from me to Billy, then back to me again. His eyes were half closed; his mouth was turned down exaggeratedly, like a clown’s. “I just tired to death,” Ringo said. “Man, you coulda hurt me, Billy.”

“Yeah, sure,” Billy said. “Now, why don’t you shut up.”

“I mess around,” Ringo said. “But I don’t hurt nobody.”

“That’s what you say,” Billy said, putting the soda bottle back on the shelf.

I stood by the door, and finally I saw a bus turn the corner three blocks down. I pulled the quarter out of my pocket, grabbed my suitcase, and turned around for a final goodbye. “So long, Billy. Thanks,” I said.

Billy waved and smiled at me. “So long, now.”

As I backed through the door, I waved, knocking my hand against the doorframe. I dropped the quarter and it rolled under the refrigerated case, and I missed the bus again.

“Now, ain’t that a damn shame!” Ringo said. He was all lit up, and had recovered his vitality.

Billy came over with a wooden yardstick to see if he could get the quarter out; it had become lodged between the case and the wall. He worked the yardstick in the crack until he had moved the quarter out onto the open floor. He picked it up, dusted it off on his apron, and handed it to me. “You having a bad day,” he said. “Next time you keep it in your pocket.” He slapped me on the back and told me I was going to make it.

Ringo looked at me with a wide and happy grin. “Well, Charlie, you having some rough luck,” he said.

“My name’s not Charlie,” I said.

“Ain’t you Charlie White Man?” Ringo said, smiling.

“Go on, Ringo. Go on,” Billy said, looking at me apologetically.

“I got to admit that you is some fool, John,” Ringo said, coming over to me. “You all set to go and then you drop the quarter.” He laughed, closing his eyes, and put his hand on my shoulder.

I asked him if he wanted to rip the sleeve off this time.

“It look like you got a flower growing out of your shoulder,” Ringo said, putting a finger on the ripped white lining that was puffing out. “Man, you look like hell. You know that?”

I took out my pack of cigarettes and lit one. Ringo watched me. I gave him the pack and told him to keep it and go away.

“You scares me,” he said, taking my cigarette to light his. “I just can’t figure you out.”

Suddenly I got a terrible headache, and the room began to spin. Down the street another bus had appeared, but I decided it was no use even trying this time. I turned and looked at Billy, and he knew immediately that I was in some kind of trouble. “Don’t you worry, now,” he said. He pointed to the door that led to the bathroom. “See you soon,” he said.

I walked unsteadily toward the door. There must have been a disturbance in my middle ear, because the ceiling seemed to rush at me and then rush away. I fell down, and began to crawl on all fours toward the door.

“He think he a horse,” I heard Ringo say.

Billy helped me to my feet, steadied me, and walked me a few steps toward the bathroom. I told him I was all right and could make it the rest of the way. In the bathroom, I wasn’t sick, but I was so dizzy that I couldn’t stand up. I sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall for a few minutes, waiting for the dizziness to stop. Then I lay down and went to sleep.

Some time later, I felt someone nudging me lightly on the shoulder, and I woke up and saw Billy in his white apron, kneeling on one knee.

“You been in here about twenty minutes,” he said. “I got to worry about you.”

I stood up and walked over to the sink, feeling all right. The vertigo was gone. Billy switched on the light and stayed in the room while I washed up. “John, I think your luck is turning,” he said.

When Billy and I went back into the big room, Ringo was talking to the woman I had seen him with earlier, outside the store. There was also another man — a large, dark-brown, sleepy-eyed Negro whom the woman called Tracy. “All right, Tracy, go on, knock him down,” she said, pointing at Ringo.

Billy set a chair for me in the corner of the room farthest from Ringo and his friends. He saw that I was shivering, and he got his topcoat and told me to put it on. He also gave me another cup of Coca-Cola syrup, and said he was boiling some water for tea, and that I should just relax and take it easy.

“Knock him on his butt, Tracy,” the woman said, looking fierce.

“Aw, honey, now,” Tracy said, and then he smiled shyly at Ringo and folded his arms.

Ringo kicked some imaginary object, and turned on the woman. “Ruby, why you always want to make trouble?” he said. “Now, Tracy’s my friend.”

“I want to see you fight,” Ruby said. “You supposed to be a fighter. Well, I want to see you fight.”

Billy came over with a glass jar of tea and half a lemon. He put the tea and lemon on top of a milk crate near my chair. Then he went behind the counter and came back with a sack of granulated sugar and a spoon. “This gonna give you some strength,” he said, putting the sugar and spoon on the crate.

I thanked him, and, feeling comfortable and warm, sat back and watched the action. While Billy was bringing me the tea, Ruby had hit Ringo on the side of the head with her pocketbook, and now Ringo, looking pained, ignored her, folded his arms, and stared at the ceiling.

“Come on, Tracy, knock him down,” Ruby bellowed, but Tracy, who was about six feet four and two hundred and fifty pounds, just looked down at the floor and smiled. “Now, Tracy, here, done spar with Joe Louis. Now, Tracy was a fighter!” she went on. “A heavyweight!” She looked at Ringo with scorn.

There was a long pause, during which Ringo took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “It don’t matter what class a man fight in,” Ringo said finally. “It only matter if he any good or not.” He opened his eyes and looked at Ruby. “Now, I was a good middleweight.”

“Uh-uh. You only fair, baby. At the most, you only fair,” she said.

Ringo suddenly began to jump rope and put together some combinations, moving around the room with a wide smile and his eyes half closed. As he passed me the first time around, he winked and said, “How you doing, John?”

Billy was talking in a hoarse whisper to Tracy and Ruby. I couldn’t hear what he said to them, but they were smiling. Ruby clapped her hands and threw her head back and shrieked, “Aw, come on, man, you killing me!”

Tracy covered his mouth with one of his enormous hands, trying to stifle the laughter, but some of it got through. He seemed a little embarrassed and shook his head. During Billy’s whispering, Ruby looked at me from time to time and smiled and waved. Tracy looked at me once, too, and nodded shyly. Then Billy brought them over, and when I stood up, Ruby told me to sit down and save my strength.

“John, this here is Ruby Longstreet and Tracy James,” Billy said.

We shook hands.

“Well, John, we sure glad to know you,” Ruby said, shaking hands again.

I told her the pleasure was all mine.

“I seen you outside earlier, John,” she said.

“I was waiting for a bus.”

“I hear that fool Ringo done give you a fight lesson,” she said. She looked at Ringo, who closed his eyes. “Come on, Ringo, open your eyes!” she said.

But he shut them tighter, and closed his mouth tight, too.

Billy laughed. “John knock him flat,” he said.

“What you hit him with?” Tracy asked me.

“A left,” I said.

“He still blind to a left hand,” Tracy said.

I said that some rain had got in his eye.

“Some rain always getting in his eye,” Ruby said. “If it ain’t for the rain, he been champion.”

Billy laughed, and Tracy covered his face with his hands and shook. Ringo turned his back on us and began to take very deep, noisy breaths.

“Aw, shut up, Ringo, you fat fool!” Ruby said.

I was trying to drink the tea, but I began to laugh so hard that I had to put the jar down, and then the laughter increased all around, and Ringo’s breathing became noisier and his shoulders began to shake. I thought he was laughing, but he turned around and he was crying; tears were streaming down his face. “You all finish?” he asked.

“Will you look at that?” Ruby said.

I felt terribly sorry for him. “Come on, Ringo,” I said. “What’s the matter with you?”

“He just acting,” Billy said.

Ringo pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose and wiped his eyes, and then pulled up a crate and sat down next to me. “John, I feel lousy,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

I told him I was feeling all right.

He patted me on the shoulder. “Well, I glad you feeling better,” he said. He offered me a cigarette from the pack I had given him, and struck a match and gave me a light. “John, you my friend,” he said. “They is some people don’t know what friendship is.” He looked around at everyone.

“Man, if you a friend,” Billy said, “then there ain’t no point having no enemy.”

Ruby began to laugh, and she came over to Ringo and kissed him on top of the head. “Baby, why you so stupid?” she said, smiling widely at him. “Maybe you is the dumbest man in the whole world.”

This revived Ringo, and he grabbed Ruby’s arm and asked her to sit down next to him and be nice. Billy brought three more milk crates over, and Tracy and Ruby sat on two of them, and then Billy brought a pack of six cans of beer and an opener. “Ringo, because you such a good friend, we gonna have a little party,” Billy said.

He went to the front door and locked it. He said there wasn’t any point staying open in all this rain anyhow. I drank my tea while the others drank beer, and then, feeling much better, I drank some beer, too. Ruby, holding her can of beer, announced she was going to sing a song. “I ain’t Mahalia Jackson, but I can sing,” she said.

She could, too. She sang a song, mostly humming it, while Ringo accompanied her with a little dance. He closed his eyes and put his hand in the pockets of his jacket and moved his feet very slowly back and forth.

“Where you coming from, John?” Ruby asked, when she had finished singing.

“New York,” I said. “I came down on the train to see my family.”

“Man, you have been travelling some,” Tracy said, “and you still ain’t home.”

“When you with friends, you home. Ain’t that right, John?” Ringo said.

Ruby said she liked to take train trips. “There ain’t nowhere I want to go, but I do like the ride,” she said.

She asked me if I had a good ride down, and I told them the story of my ride, how my overcoat and wallet had been stolen on the train, and how, after that, I had got sick.

“People get you sick every time,” Ruby said thoughtfully.

“Sure,” Billy said. “And then Ringo get you sick in Washington.”

“I ain’t get John sick,” Ringo said. “I been helping John.”

“You been helping John?” Ruby said. “Who else you help lately?”

“John ain’t the only white man I ever help,” Ringo said, smiling.

“Honey,” Ruby said, leaning forward. “What other white man you nearly kill?”

“Few years ago I was working for this man name of Reddy,” Ringo said, biting the corner of his lip. “In this junk yard out northeast.”

“Yeah,” Bill said. “I remember you and that junk.”

“Well, one day,” Ringo said, “Mr. Reddy is standing on the street watching these colored boys working on a trash truck. They up there singing and laughing, and Mr. Reddy, he say, ‘Boys, you happy. You sure is happy. You have all the fun,’ and one of them colored boys, he say, ‘That’s right, boss. We having some fun,’ and they up there tossing them trash cans around and laughing, and Mr. Reddy, he watch them and smile, and then he walk over to me and he say, ‘Ringo, you colored boys sure is happy,’ and I say, ‘Mr. Reddy, I ain’t happy. Them niggers up on that truck may be happy, but I ain’t,’ and he get real angry, and he say, ‘Don’t give me no lip, Ringo,’ and I laugh. ‘Well, I sure ain’t happy,’ I say, ‘with the wages you paying.’ He fire me.”

Billy guffawed and Tracy put his hands over his face and began to shake.

“How you help him, baby?” Ruby said, looking around at everybody.

Ringo spread his arms and turned his palms upward, and then he broke into a wide smile. “Well, I straighten him out!” he said.

Ruby laughed and slapped her thigh. Tracy, still shaking, kept his hands over his face, while Billy just looked at the floor and smiled.

Ringo started jumping rope with his eyes closed. Tracy leaned forward and touched Ruby’s knee. “Ruby, you ain’t gonna give that old moral?” he said, looking disgusted.

“I got to, baby,” Ruby said. “O.K., Billy, you ask me.”

Billy looked serious and folded his arms across his apron. “What’s the moral of that story?”

“The moral of that story—” Ruby began, looking very serious.

“Aw, Ruby,” Tracy said, shaking his head and looking at his feet. Ringo, with his arms straight out and his eyes closed, was standing completely still.

“The moral of that story,” Ruby went on, holding up a hand for quiet, “is that, Ringo, honey, you sure is one dumb nigger.”

They all began to laugh, moaning and groaning with laughter, leaning on one another, and, except for Ruby, Ringo laughed loudest and hardest. The laughter continued for about five minutes, gradually diminishing, then rising again. Ruby had her arms around Tracy’s head, and Ringo sat on the floor. Billy had walked over to the counter and, leaning on it, his hands palms down on the top, laughed in gasps. I was laughing myself.

“Now, what you laughing at?” Ringo said to me from the floor. “That ain’t nice.”

Ruby looked over at me and said, “Honey, don’t pay us no mind.”

After a while, the laughter fell into silence. There were just the sounds of the wind, and Billy’s shoes on the floor, as he walked around taking cans out of cartons and putting them on shelves. Only Ruby was still smiling. Tracy and Ringo seemed sad. They were looking down at their hands. Ringo, who had a very gentle expression, was biting his lip. Billy moved around looking preoccupied and tired. Ruby looked at me and winked, and I smiled at her. She was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. She nodded in the direction of Tracy and Ringo, and said to me, “They looking kind of blue,” and Tracy looked up from his hands and smiled shyly, but Ringo continued to bite his lip and look down.

“Will you look at him?” Ruby said. “Ain’t he cute?”

“Come on, Ruby. I ain’t in the mood,” Ringo said, looking up. His face was still very gentle.

“Is you sad, baby?” she said, going over and putting her hand on his cheek.

“I all right,” Ringo said.

“I just don’t know what I’m gonna do with you,” Ruby said.

Tracy stood up and stretched and yawned, and then sat down again. He was smiling sleepily. “Boy, that laughing take a lot out of me,” he said.

Billy said he guessed it was time he went home, and we all got up and walked slowly toward the door, with Ruby leading the way. Outside, it was foggy and still raining, though it had let up some. Billy came out and locked the door from the outside, and then we all walked up the street. I said I’d go with them a while and get the bus at the stop farther on.

“Well, we certainly glad you is gonna stay with us a while longer,” Ruby said, smiling. She took my arm and Ringo’s arm.

Tracy walked on ahead with Billy. Billy was wearing a neatly fitting raincoat, and as he walked, very erect and relaxed, he seemed much younger than he did in the grocery store. Tracy walked slouching forward. He was slightly pigeon-toed. “Look at Billy,” Ruby said. “He look like a little boy with a big bear.”

“Maybe we is them bears,” Ringo said to me, looking across Ruby, “and, John, you is Goldilocks.” Then he began to laugh very hard by himself.

“Aw, you ain’t funny, Ringo,” Ruby said, squeezing my arm. “You just ain’t funny.”

As we approached my bus stop, Ruby told me to take care of myself. “I hope you remember us,” she said.

She called to Tracy and Billy to come back and say goodbye to me. They turned around and looked surprised, and then they walked back.

“Look, if you ever sick again,” Ringo said, “you come on back and see us.”

“Aw, shut up, Ringo,” Ruby said. “He don’t have to be sick to come back and see us. Right?” She put her arm around my shoulder as I shook hands with Ringo. “He talk like we is some hospital or something,” she said.

“Aw, Ruby, you take everything I say and twist it,” Ringo said. “Look, John, don’t mind nothing I done.”

I told Ringo he hadn’t done anything.

“You lucky he ain’t had more time,” Billy said. “He can do some things.”

I shook hands with Billy and thanked him for everything. Then Tracy stuck out his big hand. “So long, John,” he said. “It been nice knowing you.”

The bus was coming down the street rather slowly, because of the fog. When it pulled in, I picked up my suitcase and said goodbye again.

“Goodbye, honey!” Ruby yelled. “Take it easy.”

Billy gave a serious little wave, and as I stepped into the bus, Ringo yelled, “I hope the bus break down!” and Ruby hit him on the head with her pocketbook. I heard Ringo say that he had said it for luck, and Ruby told him that she had also hit him for luck. I went to the back of the bus and waved to them from the rear window, and the fog closed in and covered them, and I couldn’t see them any more.

Cast a yellow shadow (excerpt) by Ross Thomas

(Originally published in 1967)

Downtown

The call came while I was trying to persuade a lameduck Congressman to settle his tab before he burned his American Express card. The tab was $18.35 and the Congressman was drunk and had already made a pyre of the cards he held from Carte Blanche, Standard Oil, and the Diner’s Club. He had used a lot of matches as he sat there at the bar drinking Scotch and burning the cards in an ashtray. “Two votes a precinct,” he said for the dozenth time. “Just two lousy votes a precinct.”

“When they make you an ambassador, you’ll need all the credit you can get,” I said as Karl handed me the phone. The Congressman thought about that for a moment, frowned and shook his head, said something more about two votes a precinct, and set fire to the American Express card. I said hello into the phone.

“McCorkle?” It was a man’s voice.

“Yes.”

“This is Hardman.” It was a soft bass voice with a lot of bulldog gravy and grits in it. Hardman, the way he said it, was two distinct words, an adjective and a noun, and both got equal billing.

“What can I do for you?”

“Make me a reservation for lunch tomorrow? Bout one-fifteen?”

“You don’t need a reservation.”

“Just socializin a little.”

“I’m off the ponies,” I said. “I haven’t made a bet in two days.”

“That’s what they been tellin me. Man, you trying to quit winner?”

“Just trying to quit. What’s on your mind?”

“Well, I got me a little business over in Baltimore.” He paused. I waited. I prepared for a long wait. Hardman was from Alabama or Mississippi or Georgia or one of those states where they all talk alike and where it takes a long weekend to get to the point.

“You’ve got business in Baltimore and you want a reservation for one-fifteen tomorrow and you want to know why I haven’t made book with you in two days. What else?”

“Well, we was supposed to pick somethin up off a boat over there in Baltimore and there was a little trouble and this white boy got hurt. So Mush — you know Mush?”

I told him I knew Mush.

“So Mush was bout to get hisself hurt by a couple of mothers when this white boy steps in and sort of helps Mush out — know what I mean?”

“Perfectly.”

“Say wha?”

“Go on.”

“Well, one of these cats had a blade and he cuts the white boy a little, but not fore he’d stepped in and helped out for Mush — know what I mean?”

“Why call me?”

“Well, Mush brings the white boy back to Washington cause he’s hit his head and bleedin and passed out and all.”

“And you need some blood tonight?”

Hardman chuckled and it seemed to rumble over the phone. “Shit, baby, you somethin!”

“Why me?”

“Well, this boy got nothin on him. No money—”

“Mush checked that out, I’d say.”

“No gold, no ID, no billfold, nothin. Just a little old scrap of paper with your address on it.”

“Has he got a description, or do all white folks look alike?”

“Bout five-eleven,” Hardman said, “maybe even six feet. Maybe. Short hair, little grey in it. Dark for an ofay. Looks like he been out in the sun a whole lot. Bout your age, only skinnier, but then, hell, who ain’t?”

I tried to make nothing out of my voice; no tone, no interest. “Where do you have him?”

“Where I’m at, pad over on Fairmont.” He gave me the address. “Figure you know him? He’s out cold.”

“I might,” I said. “I’ll be over. You get a doctor?”

“Done come and gone.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can catch a cab.”

“You won’t forget about that reservation?”

“It’s taken care of.” I hung up.

Karl, the bartender I had imported from Germany, was deep in conversation with the Congressman. I signaled him to come down to the other end of the bar.

“Take care of the Right Honorable,” I said. “Call him a cab — the company that specializes in drunks. If he doesn’t have any money, have him sign a tab and we’ll send him a bill.”

“He’s got a committee hearing tomorrow at nine in the Rayburn Building,” Karl said. “It’s on reforestation. It’s about the redwoods. I was planning on going anyhow so I’ll pick him up in the morning and make sure he gets there.”

Some people hang around police stations. Karl hung around Congress. He had been in the States for less than a year but he could recite the names of the one hundred Senators and the four hundred and thirty-five Representatives in alphabetical order. He knew how they voted on every roll call. He knew when and where committees met and whether their sessions were open or closed. He could tell you the status of any major piece of legislation in either the Senate or the House and make you a ninety to ninety-five per cent accurate prediction on its chance for passage. He read the Congressional Record faithfully and snickered while he did it. He had worked for me before in a saloon I had once owned in Bonn, but the Bundestag had never amused him. He found Congress one long laugh.

“Just so he gets home,” I said, “although he looks as if he’ll fade before closing.” The Congressman was drooping a bit over his glass.

Karl gave him a judicious glance. “He’s good for two more and then I’ll get him some coffee. He’ll make it.”

I told him to close up, nodded good night to a handful of regular customers and a couple of waiters, walked east to Connecticut Avenue and turned right towards the Mayflower Hotel. There was one cab at the hotel stand and I climbed into its back seat and gave the driver the address. He turned to look at me.

“I don’t ever go over there after midnight,” he said.

“Don’t tell me. Tell the hack inspector.”

“My life’s worth more’n eighty cents.”

“We’ll make it an even dollar.”

I got a lecture on why George Wallace should be President on the way to the Fairmont Street address. It was an apartment building, fairly new, flanked by forty- or fifty-year-old row houses. I paid the driver and told him he needn’t wait. He snorted, quickly locked all the doors, and sped off. Inside I found the apartment number and rang the bell. I could hear chimes inside. Hardman answered the door.

“Come in this house,” he said.

I went in. A voice from somewhere, a woman’s voice, yelled: “You tell him to take off his shoes, hear?”

I looked down. I was standing on a deep pile carpet that was pure white.

“She don’t want her white rug messed up,” Hardman said and indicated his own shoeless feet. I knelt down and took off my shoes. When I rose Hardman handed me a drink.

“Scotch-and-water O.K.?”

“Fine.” I looked around the livingroom. It was L-shaped and had an orange couch and some teak and leather chairs, a dining table, also of teak, and a lot of brightly colored pillows that were carefully scattered here and there to make it all look casual. There were some loud prints on the wall. A lot of thought seemed to have gone into the room, and the total effect came off fairly well and just escaped being flashy.

A tall brown girl in red slacks swayed into the room shaking down a thermometer. “You know Betty?” Hardman asked.

I said no. “Hello, Betty.”

“You’re McCorkle.” I nodded “That man’s sick,” she said, “and there ain’t no use trying to talk to him now. He’s out for another hour. That’s what Doctor Lambert say. And he also say he can be moved all right when he wakes up. So if he’s a friend of yours, would you kindly move him when he does wake up? He’s got my bed and I don’t plan sleeping on no couch. That’s where Hard’s going to sleep.”

“Now, honey—”

“Don’t honey me, you no good son-of-a-bitch.” She didn’t raise her voice when she said it. She didn’t have to. “You bring in some cut-up drunk and dump him into my bed. Whyn’t you take him to the hospital? Or to your house, ’cept that fancy wife of yours wouldn’t have stood for it.” Betty turned to me, and waved a hand at Hardman. “Look at him. Six-feet, four-inches tall, dresses just so fine, goes around pronouncing his name ‘Hard-Man,’ and then lets some little five-foot-tall tight twat lead him around by the nose. Get me a drink.” Betty collapsed on the couch and Hardman hastily mixed her a drink.

“How about the man in your bed, Betty?” I said. “May I see him?”

She shrugged and waved her hand at a door. “Right through there. He’s still out cold.”

I nodded and set the glass down on a table that had a coaster on it. I went through the door and looked at the man in the bed. It was a big, fancy bed, oval in shape, and it made the man look smaller than he was. I hadn’t seen him in more than a year and there were some new lines in his face and more grey in his hair than I remembered. His name was Michael Padillo and he spoke six or seven languages without accent, was handy with either a gun or a knife, and could make what has been called the best whiskey sour in Europe.

His other chief distinction was that a lot of people thought he was dead. A lot more hoped that he was.

The last time I had seen Michael Padillo he had been falling off a barge into the Rhine. There had been a fight with guns and fists and a broken bottle. Padillo and a Chinese called Jimmy Ku had gone over the side. Somebody had been aiming a shotgun at me at the time and the shotgun had gone off, so I was never sure whether Padillo had drowned or not until I received a postcard from him. It had been mailed from Dahomey in West Africa, contained a one-word message — “Well” — and had been signed with a “P.” He had never been much of one to write.

On dull days after the postcard came I sometimes sat around and drank too much and speculated about how Padillo had made it from the Rhine to the West Coast of Africa and whether he liked the climate. He was good at getting from one place to another. When he was not helping to run the saloon that we owned in Bonn he had been on call to one of those spooky government agencies that kept sending him to such places as Lodz and Leipzig and Tollin. I never asked what he did; he never told me.

When his agency decided to trade him for a couple of defectors to the East, Padillo tried to buy up his contract. He succeeded that spring night when he fell off the barge into the Rhine about a half-mile up river from the American Embassy. His agency wrote him off and no one from the Embassy ever came around to inquire about what happened to the nice man who used to own half of Mac’s Place in Bad Godesberg.

Padillo’s attempt to retire from the secret-agent dodge had involved both of us in a trip to East Berlin and back. During our absence somebody had blown up the saloon in revenge for some real or imagined slight so I collected the insurance money, got married, and opened Mac’s Place in Washington a few blocks up from K Street, west of Connecticut Avenue. It’s dark and it’s quiet and the prices discourage the annual pilgrimages of high school graduating classes.

I stood there in the bedroom and looked at Padillo for a while. I couldn’t see where he had been cut. The covers were up to his neck. He lay perfectly still in the bed, breathing through his nose. I turned and went back into the livingroom with the white carpet.

“How bad is he hurt?” I asked Hardman.

“Got him in the ribs and he bled some. Mush say that boy damn near got both those cats. Moved nice and easy and quick, just like he’d been doin it all his life.”

“He’s no virgin,” I said.

“Friend of yours?”

“My partner.”

“What you gonna do with him?” Betty said.

“He’s got a small suite in the Mayflower; I’ll move him there when he wakes up and get somebody to stay with him.”

“Mush’ll stay,” Hardman said. “Mush owes him a little.”

“Doctor Lambert say he wasn’t hurt bad, but that he’s all tired out — exhaustion,” Betty said. She looked at her watch. It had a lot of diamonds on it. “He’ll be waking up in bout half an hour.”

“I take it Doctor Lambert didn’t call the cops,” I said.

Hardman sniffed. “Now what kind of fool question is that?”

I should have known. “May I use your phone?”

Betty pointed it out. I dialed a number and it rang for a long time. Nobody answered. The phone was the push-button kind so I tried again on the chance that I had misdialed or mispunched. I was calling my wife and I was having a husband’s normal reactions when his wife fails to answer the telephone at one-forty-five in the morning. I let it ring nine times and then hung up.

My wife was a correspondent for a Frankfurt paper, the one with the thoughtful editorials. It was her second assignment in the States. I had met her in Bonn and she knew about Padillo and the odd jobs he had once done for the quietly inefficient rival of the CIA. My wife’s name was Fredl and before she married me it was Fraulein Doktor Fredl Arndt. The Doktor had been earned in Political Science at the University of Bonn and some of her tony friends addressed me as Herr Doktor McCorkle, which I bore well enough. After a little more than a year of marriage I found myself very much in love with my wife. I even liked her.

I called the saloon and got Karl. “Has my wife called?”

“Not tonight.”

“The Congressman still there?”

“He’s closing up the place with coffee and brandy. The tab is now $24.85 and he’s still looking for two votes a precinct. If he had had them, he could have made the runoff.”

“Maybe you can help him look. If my wife calls, tell her I’ll be home shortly.”

“Where’re you at?”

“Right before the at,” I said. Karl had no German accent, but he had learned his English from the endless procession of Pfc’s who came out of the huge Frankfurt PX during the postwar years. As a seven-year-old orphan, he had bought their cigarettes to sell on the black market.

“Never end a sentence with a preposition,” he recited.

“Not never; just seldom. I’m at a friend’s. I have to run an errand so if Fredl calls, tell her I’ll be home shortly.”

“See you tomorrow.”

“Right.”

Hardman raised his six feet, four inches of large bone and hard muscle from a chair, skirted around Betty as if she would bite, and walked over to mix another drink. He was as close to a racketeer as Washington had to offer. I suppose. He was far up in the Negro numbers hierarchy, ran a thriving bookie operation, and had a crew of boosters out lifting whatever they fancied from the city’s better department stores and specialty shops. He wore three- or four-hundred-dollar suits and eighty-five-dollar shoes and drove around town in a bronze Cadillac convertible talking to friends and acquaintances over his radio-telephone. He was a folk hero to the Negro youth in Washington and the police let him alone most of the time because he wasn’t too greedy and paid his dues where it counted.

Oddly enough I had met him through Fredl, who had once done a feature on Negro society in Washington. Hardman ranked high in one clique of that mysteriously stratified social realm. After the story appeared in the Frankfurt paper, Fredl sent him a copy. The story was in German, but Hardman had had it translated and then dropped around the saloon carrying a couple of dozen long-stemmed roses for my wife. He had been a regular customer since and I patronized his bookie operation. Hardman liked to show the translation of the feature to friends and point out that he should be regarded as a celebrity of international note.

Holding three drinks in one giant hand, he moved over to Betty and served her and then handed one to me.

“Did my partner come off a ship?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Which one?”

“Flyin a Liberian flag and believe it or not was out of Monrovia. She’s called the Frances Jane and was carryin cocoa mostly.”

“Mush wasn’t picking up a pound of cocoa.”

“Well, it was a little more’n a pound.”

“How’d it happen?”

“Mush was waitin to meet somebody off that boat and was just hangin around waitin for him when the two of them jumped him. Next thing he knows he’s lyin down and this friend of yours has done stepped in and was mixin with both of them. He doin fine till they start with the knives. One of them gets your friend in the ribs and by then Mush is back up and saps one of them and then they both take off. Your friend’s down and out so Mush goes through his pockets and comes up with your address and calls me. I tell him to hang around to see if he can make his meet and if he don’t connect in ten minutes, to come back to Washington and bring the white boy with him. He bled some on Mush’s car.”

“Tell him to send me a bill.”

“Shit, man, I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I didn’t think you did.”

“Mush’ll be back in a little while. He’ll take you and your buddy down to the hotel.”

“Fine.”

I got up and walked back into the bedroom. Padillo was still lying quietly in the bed. I stood there looking at him, holding my drink and smoking a cigarette. He stirred and opened his eyes. He saw me, nodded carefully, and then moved his eyes around the room.

“Nice bed,” he said.

“Have a good nap?”

“Pleasant. How bad am I?”

“You’ll be O.K. Where’ve you been?”

He smiled slightly, licked his lips, and sighed. “Out of town,” he said.

Hardman and I helped Padillo to dress. He had a white shirt that had been washed but not ironed, a pair of Khaki pants in the same condition, a Navy pea jacket, and black shoes with white cotton socks.

“Who’s your new tailor?” I asked.

Padillo glanced down at his clothes. “Little informal, huh?”

“Betty washed em out in her machine,” Hardman said. “Blood hadn’t dried too much, so it came out easy. Didn’t get a chance to iron em.”

“Who’s Betty?”

“You’ve been sleeping in her bed,” I said.

“Thank her for me.”

“She’s in the next room. You can thank her yourself.”

“Can you walk?” Hardman said.

“Is there a drink in the next room along with Betty?”

“Sure.”

“I can walk.”

He could, although he moved slowly. I carried the forbidden shoes. Padillo paused at the door and put one hand on the jamb to brace himself. Then he walked on into the livingroom. “Thanks for the use of your bed, Betty,” he said to the tall brown girl.

“You’re welcome. How you feel?”

“A little rocky, but I think it’s mostly dope. Who bandaged me?”

“Doctor.”

“He give me a shot?”

“Uh-huh. Should be bout worn off.”

“Just about is.”

“Man wants a drink,” Hardman said. “What you like?”

“Scotch, if you have it,” Padillo said.

Hardman poured a generous drink and handed it to Padillo. “How’s yours, Mac?”

“It’s okay.”

“Mush’ll be here any minute,” Hardman said. “He’ll take you down to the hotel.”

“Where am I staying?” Padillo asked.

“At your suite in the Mayflower.”

“My suite?”

“I booked it in your name and it’s paid for monthly out of your share of the profits. It’s small — but quietly elegant. You can take it off your income tax if you ever get around to filing it.”

“How’s Fredl?”

“We got married.”

“You’re lucky.”

Hardman looked at his watch. “Mush’ll be here any minute,” he said again.

“Thanks for all your help — yours and Betty’s,” Padillo said.

Hardman waved a big hand. “You saved us having a big razzoo in Baltimore. What you mess in that for?”

Padillo shook his head slowly. “I didn’t see your friend. I just turned a corner and there they were. I thought they were after me. Whichever one had the knife knew how to use it.”

“You off that boat?” Hardman said.

“Which one?”

“The Frances Jane.”

“I was a passenger.”

“Didn’t run across a little old Englishman, name of Landeed, about fifty or fifty-five, with crossed eyes?”

“I remember him.”

“He get off the boat?”

“Not in Baltimore,” Padillo said. “His appendix burst four days out of Monrovia. They stored him away in the ship’s freezer.”

Hardman frowned and swore. He put heart into it. The chimes rang and Betty went to open the door and admitted a tall Negro dressed in a crow-black suit, white shirt, and dark maroon tie. He wore sunglasses at two-thirty in the morning.

“Hello, Mush,” I said.

He nodded at me and the nod took in Betty and Hardman. He crossed over to Padillo. “How you feeling?” His voice was precise and soft.

“Fine,” Padillo said.

“This is Mustapha Ali,” Hardman told Padillo. “He’s the cat that brought you down from Baltimore. He’s a Black Muslim, but you can call him Mush. Everybody else does.”

Padillo looked at Mush. “Are you really a Muslim?”

“I am,” the man said gravely.

Padillo said something in Arabic. Mush looked surprised, but responded quickly in the same language. He seemed pleased.

“What are you talkin, Mush?” Hardman asked.

“Arabic.”

“Where you learn Arabic?”

“Records, man, records. I’ll need it when I get to Mecca.”

“You the goddamndest cat I ever seen,” Hardman said.

“Where’d you learn Arabic?” Mush asked Padillo.

“From a friend.”

“You speak it real good.”

“I’ve had some practice lately.”

“We’d better get you to the hotel,” I told Padillo. He nodded and stood up slowly.

“Thanks very much for all your help,” he said to Betty. She said it was nothing and Hardman said he would see me tomorrow at lunch. I nodded, thanked Betty, and followed Padillo out to Mush’s car. It was a new Buick, a big one, and had a telephone in the front and a five-inch Sony television in the back.

“I want to stop by my place on the way to the hotel,” I said to Mush. “It won’t take long.”

He nodded and we drove in silence. Padillo stared out the window. “Washington’s changed,” he said once. “What happened to the streetcars?”

“Took em off in ’sixty-one,” Mush said.

Fredl and I lived in one of those new brick and glass apartments that have blossomed just south of Dupont Circle in a neighborhood that once was made up of three- and four-story rooming houses that catered to students, waiters, car washers, pensioners, and professional tire changers. Speculators tore down the rooming houses, covered the ground with asphalt, and called them parking lots for a while. When enough parking lots were put together, the speculators would apply for a government-insured loan, build an apartment house, and call it The Melanie or The Daphne after a wife or a girl friend. The rents for a two-bedroom apartment in those places were based on the supposition that both husband and wife were not only richly employed, but lucky in the stockmarket.

Nobody ever seemed to care what had happened to the students, waiters, car washers, pensioners and the professional tire changers.

Mush parked the car in the circular driveway where it said no parking and we rode the elevator up to the eighth floor.

“Fredl will be glad to see you,” I told Padillo. “She might even invite you to dinner.” I opened the door. The light from one large lamp burned in the livingroom, but the lamp had been knocked to the floor and the shade was lying a foot or so away. I went over and picked up the lamp, put it on the table, and replaced the shade. I looked in the bedrooms, but that seemed a foolish thing to do. She wasn’t there. I walked back into the livingroom and Padillo was standing near the record player, holding a piece of paper in his right hand. Mush stood by the door.

“A note,” I said.

“A note,” he agreed.

“But not from Fredl.”

“No. It’s from whoever took her away.”

“A ransom note,” I said. I didn’t want to read it.

“Sort of.”

“How much do they want?”

Padillo saw that I didn’t want to read the note. He put it down on the coffee table.

“Not much,” he said. “Just me.”

Reflecting by Rhozier “Roach” Brown

(Written in 1969)

Lorton, VA

Two hands resting on bars of steel

Wondering was all this really real

Living from day to day using dope

Death was waiting with a steel rope.

Living a life I thought was pretty cool

Moving in a hurry and breaking all the rules

Stepping on anyone who got in my way

Never expecting any dues to pay.

I was hooked quite early, and dying quick

Staying high and fly, and pretty slick

The world passed by and I was in a deep nod

To awake a young old man and find no God.

Wine and reefers were a part of my song

Getting my kicks and doing wrong

It’s a miracle, how I managed to survive

Riding a pale white horse, bent on suicide.

Her eyes are moist, bursting from within

Alone and crushed, her man in the pen

Patiently she tried and done all she could

It didn’t work, it just wasn’t any good.

I killed all the love that stood in my path

Love was for suckers, and I was in a Hip Bag

If only I had listened, or even cared

My youth and dreams, wouldn’t die in here.

I knew all the angles, and how to score

But all it’s brought me was time and a steel door.

A few days of fun and years of pain

Is the price I pay for doing my thing.

Now I hurt in a way I’ve never known

For the rest of my life, I’ll be alone.

Here in the House of Time, grown men cry

I, too, am one of them and I know why

My brand of cigarettes tells of a hip young fool

Who destroyed his life and family being real KOOL.

Nora by Ward Just

(Originally published in 1971)

Connecticut Avenue

Nora believed that my stories were old-fashioned. She said once, “Friend, why don’t you write something up-to-date, immediate. The romantics are dead. Friend, they’re gone.” She was really very serious about it, and I had to tell her that hers was a liverish idea whose time had not yet come. Not that it made any difference, because in 1965 nobody would buy the stories except an obscure review in the Midwest, whose payment was in prestige. In the first six months of 1965 I had two payments of prestige with a third on the way. For eats, as Nora liked to call them, I worked as a researcher for Congressional Weekly Digest, an expensive private newsletter which purported to give its subscribers advance information on legislation pending before the House and Senate. I was paid a hundred dollars a week for reading the Congressional Record and reporting my findings to the editor, who would rearrange them into breathless verbless sentences.

But that had little to do with Nora Bryant. She was English and had come to Washington as correspondent for one of the popular London dailies. She had good looks, and good brains to go with the good looks, but she was admired for her idiosyncrasies. Nora believed that America was alive and Britain was dead; interesting, amusing in its way, but dead nonetheless. She thought that this country was open to possibilities and in perpetual motion in a way that Britain was not. She had a wide circle of American friends, and spent as little time at the British embassy as she could manage; the ambassador there was an aging peer whom she called the kandy-kolored tangerine-flake stream-lined baron. In a bewitching West Riding accent she spoke American slang, and the effect was hilarious: Somerset Maugham imitating Allen Ginsberg. Her specialty was southern politicians and she told me it was a high point of her life here when she spent an evening with the then-occupant of the White House and came away with enough vocabulary to last her a month or more. She came to my apartment after dinner at the White House, still laughing over all the wonderful words and phrases she’d learned. I tried to pump her about the man himself, what he was like. How much did he drink? What was on his mind? Was his mood hot or cold?

“I didn’t have a thermometer up his bum, friend,” she said.

“Come on, Nora! Give! What did he say about the war? Anything about—”

She laughed and shook her head.

“Nora …”

“That dog won’t hunt,” she said, and that was that.

We’d met at a party on Capitol Hill, and I was quickly taken with her because she asked me about my stories. Under any normal circumstance a writer doesn’t like to be asked what he’s working on, except in Washington no one cared at all. No one ever asked me about my fiction, so my identity was frozen at “researcher for Congressional Weekly Digest,” a job I despised and was defensive about. Nora understood right away. She was persistent in asking about the stories and it was clear to me as I answered her that I hadn’t thought them out clearly. She saw this, too, but did not press it. She told me to keep working, and everything would be fine.

“You’ll be jake,” she said. “You’re a writer, I can see that.”

“Oh? Just how?”

“You don’t know what you think.”

Nora is barely five feet tall, and I come in at just under six feet four. In a brief moment of anger I saw her as a little girl who worked for a second-string London newspaper, looking up at me and figuratively patting me on my head; the patronage was unmistakable and outrageous, but I was charmed. At our first meeting, listening to her voice and watching her glide around the room, I fell half in love with her. She seemed wonderfully cheerful and inquisitive, intelligent and sure of herself, and I liked the attention. It was a large, jumbled party and she left it early, and two days later called me at my apartment.

“I’ve got a pretty good tip,” she said. “Will that do you any good at that thing you work for? That newsletter?” She sounded brisk and impatient.

“Sure,” I said. Gottschault, the editor, paid me a ten-dollar bonus for any authentic inside story, anything that had not been printed elsewhere. I had never taken advantage of this, because I seldom read the newspapers and therefore did not know what was news and what wasn’t.

“All right,” she said. “The Senate Finance Committee will take up the oil section of the tax bill on Thursday. They will report it on Friday. There will be one day of discussion, in private. No more.”

“Thursday, huh?”

“Yes, Thursday. Now does that suggest anything to you?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, today is Wednesday. That might suggest to you that the oil section has already been written.”

“Stop the presses,” I said.

“Would you like to have that? For your very own?”

“Are you under the Official Secrets Act?”

“I’ll send it over by messenger.”

“Are you serious?” I suspected a joke.

“Yes,” she said, and rang off.

The document arrived that afternoon, and when I gave it to Gottschault he whooped with pleasure and literally did stop the presses to get it in the newsletter. Then he gave me a twenty-dollar bonus, but when I asked Nora to dinner to celebrate, she declined.

I don’t remember when she started calling me “friend.” It was probably the period when she began dropping in at my apartment unannounced. This was a two-room apartment in a brownstone off Connecticut Avenue. I’d know she was there when I heard the phonograph; Brahms if she was in a good mood, Bunk Johnson if she was not. She’d taken to American jazz along with everything else and loved to listen to the blues when she was low. I worked in my bedroom and would finish whatever passage I was writing and join her and we’d sit and talk, sometimes all night. Washington politicians fascinated her, she thought they had nothing in common with the ones she knew in Britain. She came to modify that opinion, but in the first months in Washington she was as intrigued as a biologist investigating a new species. Nora developed categories for the politicians that she met.

It was clear from the first month that there would be no romance. I was never exactly sure why. She seemed to want a friend, someone off the Washington political circuit, who was compatible and what she called “talkable.” I was pleased and flattered — romance or no — because I was being very reclusive and difficult at that time of my life, and Nora was one of the ornaments of Washington. She had her own center of gravity, a distinct and (I thought) hard-won personal style. Late at night we tried to analyze the town, what made it work, why some men were successful and others were not, why women seemed to fail, and what each had to do with the other.

A couple of times a month she’d give me a document or memcon — she’d picked up government slang, a “memcon” is a memorandum of conversation — and as a result of that I was a boon to Gottschault. Now he was paying me a hundred and twenty-five dollars a week, plus a thirty-dollar bonus for really important items. Items that were exclusive. Because of Nora’s tips, Gottschault had become very popular at the National Press Club bar. It was clear to everyone that he had inside information, “inside skinny,” as Nora called it. I enjoyed the extra money, but more than that I enjoyed Nora. I’d wait for her unannounced visits, when we’d sit and drink coffee or beer and talk. The longer she stayed in Washington, the more doubts she had about America; but she never regretted leaving London. Of course she was by then one of the best-known foreign correspondents in town. Her copy was nothing much to read because of the form in which she was obliged to write. The editor of her paper had a theory that no paragraph should be longer than two sentences, no sentence longer than ten words, and no word longer than three syllables. Once she wrote a two-hundred-word political story entirely in haiku, but her foreign desk mixed up the paragraphing so it came out wrong. But it was a noble effort, and (as a matter of fact) excellent haiku.

It was partly Nora’s encouragement that gained me my first real sale, a story to the Saturday Evening Post for eight hundred dollars. I’d received word in the morning and immediately rang her up at her office. But she’d gone. I was agitated the rest of the day, because I wanted to share this news with her. I’d been working on fiction for two years and this was the first evidence I had that I could sell my stories for money. I felt wonderful and spent most of the day congratulating myself that I hadn’t “cheated” or “lowered my standards” or pandered to “the popular taste.” I had eight hundred dollars and virtue, too. At four in the afternoon, I heard the phonograph. Bunk Johnson.

I opened the bedroom door right away and saw Nora sitting on the couch. It had taken me four months to write the story, Nora had followed it from the beginning. I trusted her absolutely, and now I looked at her and grinned and told her I’d sold the story and mentioned the amount. She knew everything about it, including how difficult the writing had been. I was certain that with this story behind me, I’d fly. “Nora, it’s really going to move now. The bastards can’t ignore me any longer,” I said, and scooped her up in my arms. She was so tiny and light it was like lifting a doll. She put her arms around my neck and kissed me on the cheek. She was crying, and I began to laugh.

“Oh, come on. No tears. Think of this, a real sale. Money. I’ve the letter right here. They really like it. They’re thinking of putting my name on the cover of the magazine. Do you know how many copies they sell a week? Five or six million copies.” I held her tightly and laughed. “Every dentist in America reads the Saturday Evening Post.”

When I put her down she was still crying. I started to say something funny, but understood then that the tears had nothing to do with me or the magazine. There was something frightening to me about Nora in tears, Nora hurt with no visible wounds. She cried without covering her eyes.

She stopped crying after a minute, and I went into the kitchen and made tea. She was sitting quietly in the middle of the sofa, a bleak look on her face, her hands in her lap, listening to Bunk Johnson. We had become very close over the six months, and I had a strong protective instinct toward her; it was partly fatherly, and strongly sexual. She had been the one encouraging me, and now I wanted to help her. I thought she was too strong to be hurt that badly by anyone.

“Do you want to talk?”

She shook her head.

“Drink your tea,” I said.

She held the cup in both hands, sipping the tea.

“Trouble,” she said.

“A man?”

She nodded, yes.

She was involved with someone, and I knew it was serious. She was the only woman in Washington who took sex seriously enough to be private about it. She had her own standards, which were uninhibited and seemed to me healthy; she said she loved the pleasure that sex gave her and never confused that with anything else. Beyond that, she was discreet. From time to time she stayed at my apartment, although we never slept together; different stars, wrong chemistry, she said. Those nights she was usually in flight from a bore or a sponge. She was cheerful about it, acknowledging that sometimes she picked the wrong man, and vice versa. But Nora’s life was not an open book.

“Well, I’m a mess today.”

I wanted desperately to say the right thing. She had always encouraged me when I needed encouragement, and I felt very much in her debt. I knew right away that this had something to do with her current liaison, the details of which I knew practically nothing.

“You tell me what you want to tell me,” I said, as gently as I could.

“I have to write a story this afternoon.”

“Well, I’ll write the story. You tell me what it’s about, and I’ll write it. Then you can rest for a bit and tell me what you want to tell me later.”

She smiled at that: “Friend, you can’t write a story for my paper. You don’t know how, your sentences are too long. Won’t work.”

“I’ll cable London and tell them that you’ve got the flu.”

“Would you do that?”

“Of course.”

“No need to cable, just call Judson.” Judson was the bureau chief, the man she worked for.

I telephoned, Judson was out, so I left word with the answering service. Then I went to Nora, who was stretched out full-length on the couch. It took an hour to get the essentials out of her, but I still didn’t have the man’s name. It didn’t matter to me who he was, except from one or two things she said I gathered he was someone important. She told me the usual things, what he was like, what they talked about, how they’d met, what he meant to her, and how it was ended. It was “permanent,” she said, but ended. He wanted to get a divorce from his wife, and that was the last — definitely the last — thing she wanted. It would ruin his career, and he would be no good at anything else. She would become an ego doctor, and she wanted no part of that; she saw it as martyrdom and it seemed to her wrong. If you’re an architect or a lawyer and you get into trouble, you can resign and go practice somewhere else. If you’re a politician and get into trouble, that’s the end of it.

“I can’t see him as anything else, and I don’t want to see him as anything else. I don’t care a hoot in hell,” she said. “Getting married doesn’t mean anything to me. It never did. I don’t care about it. He gets his … juice from politics. Politics and me. If politics goes, there’s only me. You know what happens then.” She shook her head. “It’s a disaster.”

“Does he know the way you feel?”

“Yes, and he says it doesn’t matter what I feel.”

“Doesn’t matter?”

“Yes, he says it matters to him. ‘The only way,’ he says. ‘The only decent way.’ Besides, he hates his wife.”

“Oh.”

“He says he doesn’t want to go on sleeping with me in motel rooms.” She smiled wanly. “Well, that’s rather sweet, really.”

“I guess it is.”

“The thing is, he’s really an awfully good politician. I mean … he’s really good. Damned good. You know?”

“Look, Nora. Who is he?”

“You don’t know?” She was incredulous.

“How would I know?”

“I thought everybody knew.”

“Maybe everybody does. I don’t.”

When she told me, I shook my head. I’d had no idea.

He was a Midwestern senator, about forty, one of those who is always named on the lists of Most Effective Legislators, and for the last two elections as one of the many vice-presidential possibilities. As senators go in Washington, he had what the press calls high visibility. He was not a member of the leadership, but he had an independent base of his own, particularly among academics. He had been a university president at twenty-eight and resigned to run for the Senate. That was a highly implausible sequence except that this particular university president’s father had been governor, and his brother now published the state’s largest newspaper. That was all I knew about him, except that he was a Washington politician who was clean. He was intelligent, he was not a thief, and he seemed to know his own mind.

Nora stayed with me three days, she barely moved from the sofa. Her spirits improved, her confidence returned. In the mornings we drank coffee, in the afternoons tea, and in the evenings beer. She told me the story of the romance, how he had enchanted her …

“I mean literally enchanted,” she said. Then she went on to list the things they did together, her tone of voice changing. She became wistful, a most un-Nora tone of voice. She talked of the future, too, how he’d plotted his political career, the plans he had for the next national convention; this was before he decided to divorce his wife. But she thought he had a self-destructive part of him, and that was not always unappealing, surrounded as he was by success.

And not once in the first weeks did they ever speak of politics. They spent a weekend together in Nova Scotia, “and this was in December. Gosh, friend, did you ever spend a weekend in December in Nova Scotia? I was touched, he used my name to register at the hotel. Mr. and Mrs. N. Bryant. The way he did it, he was … oh, I don’t know what he was doing. I took it to mean he regarded us as equals. We spent that time in Nova Scotia, and other weekends in other wonderful places. Have you ever been to Chincoteague Island? And all the time he was legislating in the Senate, and passing me the documents, the bad ones, to get them out in the open.” She laughed. “He used to call me his publisher. He loved to see them all in print, then listen to the bitching and moaning inside the committee. The FBI was called in to investigate the leak. I thought it was all obvious, too obvious, so I passed some of the stuff on to you. Didn’t you ever wonder where it came from?”

“Well, I thought you just picked it up …”

“Friend, you don’t just ‘pick up’ the sort of stuff I was passing on to you. It was all golden.” She smiled proudly. “He loved it, really loved doing it, watching the reaction …”

“The romance, Nora. It sounds to me a little heavy, it isn’t the sort of thing you pursue in motel rooms.”

“But it is! Why not? It was just fine, it was going along just fine. Nothing wrong, he’d have to go home from time to time. But his wife didn’t really care. I mean he was under no pressure. Not from her. Not from me. Now it’s ended.”

“Say again why.”

“He’d be ruined without his political life. I know that. What do we do now? Does he open a law office, become a lobbyist? How about a beachcomber?”

“My God, you can get a divorce and still run for office. A hell of a lot of guys do that. You can divorce, remarry, and run for office. There’s no law …”

“You don’t understand. He’s a Catholic. He wants to marry me. You don’t recover from that. Not in his state. No, he’d have to give up politics altogether. Go do something else.”

“You’ve talked it all out?”

“Until I’m out of breath! He won’t listen. He wants to wait a year or two, then marry. He says he’s through with motels and through with his wife. But he doesn’t know what I know. Which is that without politics he’s a different man, and not as good a man. It’s the self-destructive part.”

“Nora, someone isn’t defined entirely by what they do. People have other sides to them, sides that have nothing to do with … plumbing or writing or politics.”

“Not him,” she said.

“So you’ve refused absolutely to marry him.”

She nodded slowly.

“What did he say?”

“He said he was going to get the divorce anyway.”

“And then?”

“And then I’ll change my mind, he said.”

The next day Nora left, sad but in control. She was talking now about going back to England or cajoling her editor into a long assignment abroad, Africa or the Far East. She told me that she would never, never marry the man; it would destroy both their spirits, they’d be hypnotized for the rest of their lives by what he’d thrown away. She knew in her heart it was irretrievable. She said she understood the political mind too well not to understand that. If a man gives up power against his will it haunts him. And there was no need, she said. No need at all. Just before she left my apartment she made the only anti-American remark I’d ever heard from her. She generally regarded this country with great affection and enthusiasm, and it amused her to write pro-American articles for her Yankee-baiting London newspaper.

“Goddamned American innocence,” she said. “Destructive virtue.”

“Thank you, Graham Greene,” I replied. The remark irritated me, it was unjustified; it was true of course, but unjustified. “Can’t you see your man is in a bind, too?”

“Well, we’re all in a bind. But he’s the one who’s forcing it, and there’s no need.”

I couldn’t quarrel with that.

A week later, she called me for a favor. She said she would ask me the favor if I would cook her dinner. We ate a memorable meal, and she was full of praise for the Saturday Evening Post story and one other story I was working on. All the time she was talking, I was looking at her and wishing the stars and chemistry had been right. She was in good form, looking as beautiful as I’d ever seen her. She’d had another of her dinners at the White House and was full of new stories and phrases. She was pouring coffee when she said she needed the favor right away.

“He’s coming over here tonight,” she said.

“Great,” I said.

“Just for an hour or two. It’s better to talk here, was what I thought. Not that there’s very much to talk about. Can you make yourself scarce?”

I smiled at the Americanism. “Sure.”

“He’s due in about ten minutes.”

“I’ll go now.”

“You can come back in an hour.”

“I’ll make it an hour and a half.”

“I appreciate it. Friend.”

“Just keep the door closed, and I’ll know you’re still here if I get back too early.”

So I left, half-angry, half-sad. There was a bar down the street that had a color television set. I hadn’t been in the bar in six weeks, but it was empty as usual and I took a seat at the far end, backed up against the wall, and drank draft beer for two hours. I thought I had better give them all the time they needed. While I sat and drank beer I thought about Nora and how she would handle it. It occurred to me that there were a hundred jobs in Washington that the senator could get, all of them close to the — what did they call it? — “the center of events.” There were jobs in this town other than elective ones. Editing newsletters. Influence peddling. I began to think of him as an undersecretary of state or an assistant secretary of defense. Depending, of course, on how messy the divorce was. Whether or not the press picked it up. Well. No adulterers in the Pentagon. But as I sat and drank the beer, I understood that the speculations didn’t matter. What mattered was Nora, and how she saw it. She’d staked out her territory and was a very determined woman. She loved him, so she understood him, and she understood Washington, too; that was the essence of it. It seemed to me that the way she had constructed her argument made retreat impossible.

The night baseball game ended, and I was alone in the bar. The barman and I were watching the late news. There was film from Saigon and a report on the West Coast dock strike. We were chatting quietly, and then the barman moved off to serve a late arrival who had taken a table in the rear. I was preparing to go, when I caught the last of a sentence from the television announcer: “… the senator and his wife had been married for fourteen years.” There was no more, but I knew they were talking about Nora’s man. I turned to go and saw him then, at the table in the rear of the room, near the color television set. He was staring into his drink, a stricken look on his face. He hadn’t taken off his overcoat, its khaki collar concealed his cheeks and jaw. He was almost as big as I am, hunched over the table in the overcoat, his hat on the chair beside him. He stared at the drink and clicked the ice with his finger, apparently unconscious of the surroundings. I turned back to the bar and in a moment I left, leaving a five-dollar bill and walking straight out the door.

I ran up the street to the brownstone, let myself in, and sprinted up the stairs to the second floor. The door was partly ajar, and I could hear Bunk Johnson’s blues inside. Nora was sitting on the couch, a drink in front of her, staring at the bookshelves.

“He’s gone now,” she said. She waited a moment, concentrating, then went on. “He made an announcement tonight; he and his wife are separating. He prepared an announcement, a press release. He and his staff. Is that what you do in Washington? If you decide to get a divorce, leave someone’s bed, do you first prepare an announcement to give to the newspapers? Before you’ve packed, said good-bye?”

“If you’re a senator, I guess you do.”

“Television, too, I suppose.”

“I guess so. I heard it on the news ten minutes ago.”

“I suppose you’d want the largest possible distribution, no part of America ignorant of any personal fact. Do you suppose he’ll have a briefing for the wire services? Off the record? Deep background, perhaps. Lindley Rule with a release date?” She’d begun to cry.

“Nora, Nora.”

“No need,” she said.

“Well, he thought there was.”

“Yes, he did. He did he did he did.”

“How was he when he left?”

“He didn’t like it,” she said.

“It isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever heard a man do.”

“No, not the worst. Unless you regard futility as an offense. Or ignoring other people’s feelings. Or your own … your own sense of yourself. To destroy a part of yourself, what you are, what you have, in obedience … to some stupid …”

I wanted to say something to shock her. “How can you be so goddamned sure?”

It was then that she made the remark about romantics dead and dying, although as I look back on it now, that can be taken two ways. In any case, the senator was duly divorced, and Nora got her assignment abroad. I didn’t see her again for six years, when I was in London on a holiday and rang her up and we had lunch at the Ritz. It was an elegant lunch, and we talked about everything but that. I was waiting for her to bring up the subject and I suppose she was waiting for me. But there was nothing to be said about it, at that late date. Nothing useful or illuminating or constructive. But I could never tell her, then or later, that I’d seen him that night in the bar, hunched over the table, staring at the glass, clicking the ice cubes with his fingernail. In light of everything since, she’d been right as rain.

Our bright tomorrows by Larry Neal

(Written circa 1973)

Georgia Avenue

Martin Luther King was dead.

A gloom descended upon me; and it was as if my body was outside of me like some kind of haunting shadow.

One night during that semester I dreamed I saw my ghost drifting across the campus toward me like a puff of stream. My face drifted above the stream. And although I knew it was my ghost, my face was without definition.

I followed the ghostly twin to a crossroads.

“On one side of this road,” I thought I heard her say, “there is a river of blood. On the other side there is a river of milk. Life could not exist without either. You will have to choose. But there is pain always …”

And now in the cool spring air, I made my way across the campus to the Arts and Humanities building. I liked this time of evening best. Now I would have access to the practice room where I could play what I wanted without the vulgar intrusions and comments of Dr. Reed, who was the chairman of the music department.

I would hang around the library and try to work on my paper on the history of the violin in the development of European music. Needless to say, I found all of that quite boring. Did you know that from 1600 to 175 °Cremona was the center for great violin making? And that Antonio Stradivari was Nicolò Amati’s pupil? Yes, it was boring like Dr. Reed, who must have been teaching this course since the days when this university was five shacks by a dirt road which later came to be called Georgia Avenue. His note cards were frayed and dirty, and he affected a kind of gay British accent.

I was never good at writing papers, but I somehow managed to get by with good grades. In my senior year, I found it harder and harder to work. I was feeling disconnected, a little batty even. And now the death of Dr. King, my hero. It was, nonetheless, my last year. I would have to bear down.

I tried taking notes from Petherick’s book on Antonio Stradivari, but after fifteen minutes into it, I found it hard to stay awake. I would doze off, and then suddenly jerk myself awake like one of these junkies down on U street. This can’t go on.

I played my scales and exercises. Then I worked on the piece by Schumann. I worked hard until I had built up a sweat. But I stumbled through the Hindemith, and finally gave up on the Bartók.

Outside, there was a large crowd of students clustered around the big oak tree just opposite the library. A notoriously controversial student by the name of Jennie Forman was speaking through a white bullhorn. The campus police were there almost in full strength. She wore a high bushy Afro; and she had on an army jacket with red, black, and green epaulets. She must have been quite popular with the male students, because there were a lot of good-looking brothers guarding her.

She shouted through the bullhorn. The sound bounced off of the buildings surrounding the campus green: “You call this education?! Think about it. What are these bourgeois Toms preparing us for? I’ll tell you … Have any of you heard of the Congo, or Vietnam …?” She paused, waiting for an answer. “What about imperialism?”

“Tell it like it is, sister!” a male voice boomed out.

“Brainwash! Make you docile, afraid, and white-minded like them. We have to shake up this university. Find out which members of the board are investing in South Africa. We got to expose the running-dog lackeys in the political science department. The revolution must begin here because this is where we are.”

The crowd cheered her wildly.

“This is nothing but a nigger factory. Look around you. The world is changing. The dark world of Africa, Asia, and Latin America is coming into its own. Students all over the world are making the revolution … And what are we doing? Joining fraternities and sororities …” She seemed to look directly at me. I looked around somewhat self-consciously; there was no one there from either a fraternity or sorority. I shuddered a little, and for some reason I thought of the dream with my ghostly twin at the crossroads. The brisk evening air made me shudder again.

The moon seemed to rise over Douglass Hall now, casting a cool blue light over the tall oak tree under which she stood; that oak tree which was the traditional place for radical speeches on the state of everything from the politics of Reconstruction to the quality of the food in the cafeteria.

She wasn’t much bigger than me. Underneath the army jacket, her faded blue jeans were tight around her firm body. She was surely intelligent, but there was something of the tigeress about her. Even standing back on the edge of the crowd, I could feel her force. But I could never wear my hair like that. My mother would kill me. A disgrace to the race, she would say. And not proper by anyone’s standard of beauty.

“Let’s shut this mother down!” someone shouted. Then they started throwing bottles at the campus guards. Then two more campus patrol cars sped into the main gate. On one car there was a loud speaker: “This is an illegal assembly. All students are requested to disperse. Those failing to move on will be reported to the dean’s office.”

The guards began moving in on the students. But she continued to shout over the bullhorn as they dispersed. Who was she anyway? Her name came up all the time in our rap sessions. And I had seen her from a distance. She always looked determined, like she was mad in quest of something that was speeding ahead of her. One day I had seen her working in the reading room of the library. I watched her furiously taking notes as she went through several volumes of books piled high beside her on the long mahogany table. She was a top-notch student, but the men she went around with were always making trouble. They disrupted student council meetings with their crazy ideas. All that talk about blackness and black people. It was black this and black that. They should just be happy, I thought, happy to have the opportunity to get an education in this world. The crowd broke up. I went back to the practice room in the basement of Arts and Humanities.

It was dangerous to be out anyway. Maybe the District police would have to come on campus like they did last week when Stokely was here. They say that during the rioting and looting Stokely tried to get the crowd off the street. “Go home!” he said. “Go home! Get off the street … We’re not ready to fight!”

Ready for what? I thought … Did people like him really believe that we would ever be ready to fight these white people? It all made me feel very sick and strange. But I had cried for Dr. King. Yes, I had cried and that was that. There wasn’t any need to do anything else. I had done all I could; and hadn’t my roomie and I, with several other girls, wept for the man of peace, as we drank cognac and ginger ale the night I had my first puff of marijuana?

The Arts and Humanities building was semi-dark. But on the top floors light shined from the windows of the art studios. Several of the painters would linger working and talking long into the night. I wondered if painters were more gregarious than musicians. What about me? Was I just one of the herd around here? Was Jennie Forman right when she attacked the lifestyles of students like me and my sisters in the sorority? Who the hell does she think she is, and why does she believe that she has to be right?

Wide dust mops shoved the day’s debris along the marbled corridors. Along the corridor walls were pictures of the founders of the university.

These old photographs showed some determined people. You could tell by looking at them intently and studying their faces, and then you would zero in on their eyes; their eyes looking straight ahead to the future at you! At me! I would shout in my head, and smile. But there they were beige faces, brown faces, yellow faces, black faces, red faces, and damn near white faces all looking forward at me, fine brown Linda Frazier who hasn’t even given up any pussy yet. Linda Frazier who fears the dark crossroads. They were looking at me sternly but sincerely. I was standing in the way of one of the janitors, who pushed a mound of trash along the wall beneath the photographs. I stepped out of the way.

I wondered whether these janitors ever picked up any of the trash and read it. Like if, say, a religious lady was cleaning the office of a professor of theology; and suppose she found a pile of notes on say the Eschatogical Vision in the Book of Revelations; or one on the Hermeneutics of Divine Providence. I wondered what that poor woman would think. I wondered how the God she lived by and prayed to would compare with the analytical abstractions of the theologians …

I set up the music and began working on my various scales and exercises. I went through the exercises automatically, remembering the dream of my ghost in the fog hovering above the crossroads near the rivers of blood and milk. Graduation was one month away. What would I do then? Enter the conservatory in New York? Graduate work? Then maybe a job in an all-white symphony orchestra? Maybe no job, just frustration and anger. I could always teach. I went from the exercises to a piece by Hindemith. I worked the first eight bars of the piece and then stopped. How come I wasn’t as dynamic as Jennie Forman? What made her so tough? I played the piece through. I liked the way it moved, especially the rhythm in the middle sections. It was beautiful, but as I played, it was as if I was drifting out of myself and hovering like a bird looking down on myself …

Next, I improvised on a blues song that my grandfather used to sing. I played the piece in A minor. I just played and played from my heart. I wept as I played and thought about my father and mother, both graduates from this university. I thought about how they were so unlike my granddaddy who died last winter, right before Christmas.

Granddaddy always made my mother mad singing and humming this old blues song. She used to say, “Daddy, you still singing those ole-time songs? Folks up north don’t wanna hear that stuff … It reminds them of slavery …”

Grandfather: “I was never a slave for nobody. I worked for myself all of my life, took care of your mother, and sent you to college. I’ll be singing this song until the day I die …” Then he would go back to humming. But neither Mommy or Daddy liked it. And Dr. Reed didn’t like it either.

Dr. Reed: “The department would like to discourage our students from playing such music as jazz and blues in the practice rooms. The time allotted for these facilities should be used constructively. The classical forms require dedication and discipline. You may, however, play that kind of material on your own, preferably off campus …”

Having said this, Dr. Reed posted a notice on the bulletin board outside of the department office that read:

Needless to say, we constantly disobeyed this directive. No one was ever caught. But it was said that Dr. Reed had spies who reported on the activities of the music majors. Someone tapped on the door. I stopped abruptly. A pair of light brown eyes peered through the little window in the door. I opened it slowly; it was the tall ascetic student from the rally. Up close, he was very handsome, much more than I had previously thought. He was inside of the little room now.

“Sorry to disturb you,” he said, “I was passing this room when I heard your playing — beautiful.”

“Thank you. I thought you were one of Reed’s mysterious spies.”

“Yes, Dr. Reed … He’s one of our targets.”

“Targets?”

“Yes, he is a running-dog lackey. And we want him out of this university.”

“But why?”

“Because he’s not black enough.”

“Black?”

“Not physically, but spiritually … He’s one of those super-brainwashed Negroes who believes that we can’t be educated unless we become mentally and culturally whitened.”

“I see,” I said softly. There was a long pause. I glanced at my music stand.

“What is your name, Sister?”

I was taken back not so much by the word “sister,” but there was something special about the way he said it. A warm blue wave passed quickly over me; and in a flash I felt our future closeness.

“Linda.”

“My name is Eugene, but I’m thinking about changing it.”

“Changing it?”

“It lacks power.”

“Power? What does your name have to do with power?”

“I don’t know … That’s what I’m trying to find out … But — Linda what?”

“Frazier,” I said.

“Well, Linda, we must claim this century in our name. Do you understand …?”

And then he sat down at the piano and played a variation of my granddaddy’s blues. I joined in, and we played together until the night watchman came to close the building. Then I knew it was clear, I had to fall in love with him.

Later, we walked across town and surveyed the burned-out stores in the riot corridor. “The people have spoken,” he said quietly, “but it is us and future generations that will make the revolution.”

“How?” I said.

“We must each find a way … I’m going in law … Jennie’s got her plan …”

“Any place for a violinist in the revolution?” I laughed.

We had crossed the street and were looking at the titles in the Drum and Spear bookstore: The Wretched of the Earth, Muntu, Don’t Cry, Scream, Black Fire, Toward the African Revolution, The Collected Works of Marcus Garvey, Song for Mumu, The Dead Lecturer, The Selected Military Writings of Mao Tse-Tung …

“We’re going to start by dealing with the administration.”

“What’s gonna happen?”

“Something that should have happened a long time ago.”

I certainly don’t want to be involved in any kind of mess, I thought, not now with only a month to go before I graduate … My mother would kill me.

“You should talk to Jennie.”

“I don’t know her, but she seems so hard.” I tried not to show any jealousy.

“Not hard. Determined. The Sisters will have to make the revolution also. Jennie is a poet and a committed revolutionary.”

From the tone of his voice, I could easily surmise that he really admired her. I had only known him for two hours, and already I was jealous of her.

“We’re having a meeting tomorrow. You should stop by … Stokely and Marion will be there. Plus some people from Philly … a group called R.A.M.”

“Ram?”

“The initials stand for the Revolutionary Action Movement.”

“If I get a chance, I’ll check it out.” I was lying. This was going too far.

It was a clear night. We lingered for a moment in front of the large apartment building that the university had purchased and converted into a dormitory. Then he walked me to the security desk as the armed night guard eyed him suspiciously.

Looking around the foyer, he said: “This place is an armed camp since the rebellion.” The guard wore what I later learned was a .38 caliber police special. Eugene grasped my hand and shook it gently. “Keep on pushin’,” he said and walked out of the door.

My heart was jumping like crazy when I got in the elevator. He was nice, but he was a little strange. I tried picturing him sitting with us back home at dinner. I strained to imagine how my bank executive father would talk to him. Would they clash, and ruin dinner? Or maybe they would just talk about sports and money like most men did. But what would they think of me?

I entered my room. My roommate was sleeping, but the radio was still on. I turned it off, undressed, and then stood before the mirror stark naked. I checked out my hips and thighs. I turned around sideways to check out my behind. I touched myself all over. My hands were very hot and moist. I massaged my face with cold cream. Then I turned off the light and sat on the edge of the bed in the dark, thinking …

As I dozed off, my ghostly twin smiled in the fog at the crossroads … Granddaddy’s blues echoed in the distance over the cool murmur of rivers …

We met for lunch the next day. That was nice. But then I didn’t see him again for several days. With a great deal of effort, I suppressed the storm that raged inside of me. After all, wasn’t I a senior — not just a senior, but a mature senior? I’m not a genius, but for the most part, with painful effort, I always manage, manage somehow, to pull through, sometimes with honors even. I guess I get my staying power from my father, who really wanted a son, but who, as my mother tells it, jumped with joy when I was born. I am not frivolous. I play to win.

It was mother’s wish that I major in music. She had wanted to be a classical pianist and concertize all over the world. She was a child prodigy, and depending on your point of view, that was either a curse or a blessing. It had all come to nothing. After a meteor-like burst of fame, it had suddenly all come to nothing. The novelty wore off. And against Daddy’s wishes she ended her professional career. And then they had me. And that was that.

The note I held in my hand was from Dr. Reed. I sat outside of his office that morning nervously chatting with the secretaries in the office. They were talking about the riots.

“Them folks sure showed their asses over in Northeast where I live. Grabbing junk out of Allen’s and Woolworth’s and next to that the liquor store. Girl, you should have seen that mess they were dragging out of the Lerner shops …”

Her intercom buzzed. She picked up the phone.

“You may go in now, Miss Frazier … And good luck, child.”

What did she mean, good luck?

Dr. Reed’s back was turned to me as he looked out of the window onto the campus green. He was a dark, pompous man who clearly thought highly of his long-standing success. He held what looked like a list of grades in his hands. I stood there uncomfortably for a moment. Still looking out of the window, he said: “Have a seat, Miss Frazier.” Then he slowly spun around in that plush leather chair. The wall behind him was full of plaques and photographs. In each photograph, he was giving or receiving some kind of award. His PhD diploma was prominently displayed between two cheap reproductions of Renoir and Degas.

“Your grades are not bad, Miss Frazier. I want to congratulate you on having been a good student. But it is essential that you obey the rules this institution …”

He found out!

“… It has come to my attention that you have violated my directive concerning proper use and conduct in the practice rooms.”

He had me.

“Now that you’re ready to graduate, you’ll need excellent departmental recommendations. And, Miss Frazier, I sincerely believe that all of us here want you to succeed in your chosen endeavors. But you must obey my rules, Miss Frazier … What is happening to civilization? You can play that other music in one of those terrible clubs on U Street. But your applications and general deportment as a student at this university indicate that you have higher aspirations … Keep those aspirations, my child; it is so easy for us, as a people, to fall prey to the baser aspects of human existence.”

Wow!

“Do you have anything to say for yourself, Miss Frazier?” He pressed his sleekly manicured fingers together to form a V, which seemed to point directly at my heart.

I got up slowly, barely able to speak. I bit down on my bottom lip to keep from breaking into tears. But I would not let him break me down. I mumbled some kind of something and excused myself as I groped my way out of there. A menacing, electronic curse whirred in the air. Somehow, I made it past Fannie and the other secretaries in the outer office. It was like an echo chamber in a Frankenstein movie … They said something about pink lingerie being dragged along the street as state troopers stood guard over the burning carcass of the city.

On the phone, she had a soft voice, with a lyrical sort of poignancy about it. It was clearly a different voice from the one she had at the rally; and now muted by the phone, it was a marvelous antidote to the whirring menace that continued to plague my memory of yesterday’s encounter with Dr. Reed.

“We’re having a party Friday night at our place on Ontario Road … Abdul said to call … So, how about it?”

“Thanks, but who’s Abdul?”

“You know him as Eugene … He’s changed his name.”

Why did he have to do that now? All of the fantasies churning within my young heart had Eugene and I on location in some distant erotic country. For a moment, I was angry with him for not sharing his transformation with me.

“Are you still there, Sister?”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m looking forward to meeting you in person … Eugene speaks very highly of you.”

It was a fantastic party!!! Where had all these people been hiding? Most of them were from the university, but I had never seen them before. There were colorful and zany students from the theatre department. Painters from the art department. Mad musicians who I didn’t even know existed. Two or three maverick professors from the English department — one, a woman with a red turban whose long brown arms danced in a circle of passionate wit. Where had all of these people been my four years at this university? There were revolutionary activists from Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, and Harlem. There were different sets of people, all over the house:

In the living room, Jennie was engaged in a spirited debate on the need for a black revolutionary army. Jennie said that was suicidal because the masses had to be organized. The argument was fierce, but there was a great deal of laughter interspersed throughout.

Down in the basement, they were dancing to the music of Martha and the Vandellas, Mary Wells, the Supremes, and the mighty James Brown. In the corner of the basement, somebody passed me a joint, but I turned it down. I get silly and lose prospective when I smoke.

And in the kitchen, there were poets, at least ten of them. There was a thin dark string bean of a woman whose poetry reminded me of my granddaddy’s voice. It was so full of the earth and the sound of life as it is actually lived. The way it made you feel was more like music than literature. It was not like the poetry we studied in Dr. Brawley’s class. That poetry was “beautiful” (like most of my classical repertoire), but beautiful in a distant kind of way. The art of this poetry sprang from the urge to name things anew. As the old folks often said: This is the kind of food that sticks to the ribs. This poetry made you sing and laugh and weep and curse your enemies. Enemies? Who are our enemies? the poets asked.

Then Jennie’s turn came to read, her voice sometimes blazing with images of moribund worlds crumbling. In her poems, women and men died the romantic death of righteous revolutionaries, uttering inspiring slogans as they fought desperately and then died under the awesome firepower of the enemy. There was always something a little corny and sentimental about her concept of change; but that night I loved her poems uncritically. Yet something about her frightened me. She was so much freer than me. Her poems about being a woman, for example, were disturbingly erotic and daring.

And so we partied on into the night, some of us down in the basement shimmying to the music of Smokey Robinson; and others, like me, Jennie, and Eugene, in the kitchen digging on Coltrane while on the stove simmered big pots of peas and rice and spicy creolized stewed chicken.

In a quiet corner, away from the din, I tried to get acquainted with Jennie. I talked on and on about my musical studies; about whether or not I should go to the conservatory, or just get married and have a lot of babies. I went on about how I longed to see places like Paris and Vienna.

Suddenly, she interrupted me: “Don’t you have any commitment to anything other than yourself?” Her question stopped me dead. She was so smug with me then, and her voice was heavily weighted with a tone of moral and intellectual superiority. Yes, compared to her, I was confused about everything. Jennie seemed to have a firm grip on things.

Her family belonged to what she called the “responsible working class.” Her father was a railroad man whose overalls smelled of oil and coal. Her mother worked in a food processing plant in the Frankford section of North Philadelphia. She was the oldest of three children: a brother and a sister. By “responsible” she meant that they were never wards of the state.

They all worked hard. They paid the rent, and later the mortgage, on time. They voted. Did jury duty. Paid taxes. Made sure that there was food on the table. Stood over them while they did their school work. Read them good books. Scraped together money to take them to shows at the Pearl Theatre. And finally, kept them alive and out of jail.

So against all of my best intentions, that night we became friends.

“We need to make a revolution,” she said. “There’s no reason for people to have to live like our people do in this society. This system must inevitably fall. And upon its ashes we must build a new society … That’s what I’m about. What are you about, Sister?”

There was a sudden burst of laughter from the kitchen. I sat there kind of scramble-headed. But she was coolly and quietly arrogant as she waited for me to answer. What could I say that could even begin to compare with her grand apocalyptic visions?

Up until those weird dreams of which I have previously spoken, my life had seemed very ordinary and well made.

But I was not spoiled. No, I am not middle-class lace and frills. To be sure, by some abstract standard of accomplishment, we lived better than most Negroes. But my people have never made a big deal about it. You might call my people “conservative,” but it really wouldn’t mean anything to them. Because they hate oppression and degradation. They never put on airs, but they are certain that they can run this society better than most so-called white people. So life was no crystal stair for them. Like most black people, however superficially fortunate, they have had to claw and scratch for every crumb they could snatch from the white man’s table. With all of this in mind, I found the words to answer her.

“Bitch,” I said quietly, “please don’t try that shit on me … I am a person and my name is Linda Frazier.”

She looked at me stunned for a moment. Then she started laughing. I don’t know whether she was laughing at me or with me; but we laughed together, long and hard …

It was a long weekend. Sometime between that Friday night and Monday morning, I made love to Eugene and plotted with them the takeover of the university. So, I let go. Not knowing where any of this would take me, I became a spring child running wild. My blood afire, my nipples moist with milk …

Monday morning we seized the president’s office, which was located in the administration building. We took over the switchboard. About six hundred of us. All of the campus crazies and passionate ideologues. We chanted and sang slogans as we charged across the campus. We locked the president and his entire staff in the offices. Jennie was in charge of logistics. “Abdul” set up a communications network with other college campuses. I was part of the arts-attack team. We moved on the Arts and Humanities building. We cornered Dr. Reed and the music staff in a department meeting. Our banners demanded black music: Ellington, Parker, Coltrane … They trembled. Dr. Reed and his supercilious flock of incompetents trembled. Seeing them like this, we realized that we had power. In the swirl, I caught a glimpse of Dr. Reed giving me an imploring look. He knew I was with them. But still his mouth was twisted in a painful “Why?”

We pressed our demands on them. A few of the bolder teachers tried to defend the policies of the department, but we shouted them down. Then we played our stomps, rags, blues, and be-bop. We played everything “out,” wailing plaintive, atonal black screeching sounds that made us scream with power. Dr. Reed tried to cover his ears, but the sound was so righteous and judgmental that, despite himself, he was compelled to listen. Yes, it was chaos, but it was good.

We ran the university for seven days. On the heels of our rebellion, more spread to other campuses around the country. Eugene’s press briefings were superb. We made the six o’clock news. Our voices went out on radios and tape recorders all around the world. Yes, it was dangerous. But in a snap I had somehow become reckless in my passion. And in my dreams now, the face of my spectral twin alternately changed her expression from stern acquiescence to wry, cryptic laughter. On the whole, though, she seemed to be thoroughly enjoying herself. Because now I was free to go on. Toward what and where?

No, it was not difficult to wash out my permanent and display this kinky hair like it was a bejeweled diadem. Of course, I briefly thought about my mother’s shock. But I was grown now, and our tomorrows loomed bright before us.

Well, we won most of our demands. Seniors like myself, Eugene, and Jennie would be allowed to graduate. A joint committee of students and faculty members was set up to plan an Afro-American Studies program. The director of the cafeteria promised better food. It was a strange and exhilarating victory. Two nights before graduation day, Eugene and I were back at it furiously. We lay under the sheets together.

“I’ve been accepted to law school.”

“Where?”

“Columbia.”

I was impressed.

“What about you?”

“The conservatory.”

“That’s an odd combination.”

“What’s an odd combination?”

“A lawyer with a violinist for a wife.”

“We’ll have to tell Jennie …”

“Oh yes, Jennie,” he said as he slide inside of me again …

The next day I met Jennie at the West Indian restaurant on Georgia Avenue. She was unusually buoyant. Maybe a little high even.

“Well, this is it, ole girl,” she said, “we finally made it out of this plantation.”

“What are you gonna do now?” That was the question everyone was asking each other.

But before she could answer, I said: “Go ye forth, Children, and tear down the walls of Jericho.”

She laughed, flashing an exquisite set of teeth. She had recently washed her hair, and there was about her the scent of coconut oil. “Of course, Jericho must fall, my Sister. What will be your contribution?”

“Why must I make a contribution?”

“Because there is no such thing as personal anything as long as the Beast rules the planet.”

“But why must I give my life to that? This is the only life I know. I want to make music and have babies. Is there really anything wrong with that?”

“No, but you can’t collaborate with this system.”

“Collaborate?”

“Yes, collaborate!” She was suddenly very angry. Then she paused and softly stroked my hand with her fingertips. “Why don’t you come with me?”

“Where?”

“Chicago, to help organize a revolutionary party.”

“Jennie, I wouldn’t be good at that, and besides, Eugene and I are getting married.” I felt her fingers pause.

“Oh, I see … So you two have really been at it. I wish somebody could have told me before now.”

“We were planning to tell you tonight.” I knew I was taking him away from her; I hadn’t consciously planned it that way, but in the whirl of events my body seemed on fire. My womanhood came down on me, and Eugene got to be a habit I couldn’t break.

“I love you, Linda.” It hung in the air like smoke from a stick of marijuana.

“I love you too, Jennie.”

She almost wept, but held back. “I have an appointment now. Good luck, my Sister.” She kissed me on the cheek and walked out of the restaurant.

She must have left campus the next day, because she did not march down the aisle. She was a summa cum laude student, and they called her name. But she was not there. I met Eugene’s entire family of doctors and lawyers. My family liked his family and his family liked mine. And there was nothing unusual about the rest.

So we married, but there is really nothing very special about us. We take it for granted that we love each other, and that we should succeed in whatever we do. Eugene is a tough lawyer, one of the best of a new breed of black constitutional attorneys specializing in the First Amendment. Me? I’m still trying to get into an orchestra. In the meantime, I fly back and forth to Europe for special concerts. The reviews are good, but nothing big has broken for me over here. I just go on working my stuff on Eugene, playing an occasional gig, and keeping this diary. I suspect that we will have children soon. And as Jennie would say, we will raise them in the proper knowledge of themselves. And what of Jennie now?

She’s on the run, living in Paris or Algeria as a political exile. Expatriate—

Eugene was out of town. I was working on a new composition about seven years ago when the phone rang. I started not to answer it because it seemed to ring so harshly. It was Jennie. She was wanted for murdering a Chicago policeman. It was in all of the papers. Hadn’t she considered that our phone might be tapped? After all, Eugene had successfully defended movement people. I wiped the instrument clean and put it in the case. I went to the bank and withdrew two thousand dollars in cash. Suppose they found out and Eugene lost his license to practice law? Suppose they have been followed? This was Jennie’s vortex, no doubt out it.

It was a dingy Irish bar on the West Side. She was not alone. The man was a little younger than Jennie. He wore a suit and a raincoat. He did not take his hat off. We sat at the table facing the door. With his left hand he sipped his drink, but underneath the table, the right hand held a large-caliber weapon. Jennie introduced me to him, but I didn’t really hear his name.

“Sister, you sure look good. How’s Abdul?”

“He’s fine. But he stopped calling himself Abdul several years ago.” I don’t know why I was compelled to tell her that. She could have just as well remembered him as Abdul.

“How’s your musical career coming?”

I laughed nervously. “It just limps along.”

How could she seem so calm in a situation like this? Suddenly, the real danger I was in confronted me. The man kept his eyes on the door. It seemed he got slightly agitated and alert every time a police car passed the bar …

An awkward pause. “Would anybody like anything to eat?” I asked. No. They had eaten already. The drinks were just fine.

“I’m sorry we don’t have time, my Sister. Are you able to help?”

I clutched my bag with the money in it. I would be lying if I said that she looked good. She had lost weight and it showed in her face, which was now gaunt with strain.

Just as I was about to feel sorry for her, she said: “Life is funny, isn’t it, girl? And we ain’t even turned forty yet.” Then she laughed a little, and with a gesture hinted that we should go to the ladies’ room together.

In the john, she said: “I’m sorry we’ll have to cut this visit short, my Sister.”

“I understand,” I said, fighting back the tears.

I took out the money, all the time thinking about Eugene and imagining if the FBI burst in there right then. But nothing happened. I gave it to her. She took it and grasped my hand tightly. Then she kissed me full in the mouth, and said: “For a better world.”

“For a better world,” I replied

“Thanks. Now, when we get back to the table, you will stay with us for about three minutes. We will leave first … You understand?” Yes, I said. “After a while, you can leave. Good luck with everything, Linda.”

I did just as she said, but that was the longest five minutes of my life. The last time I saw her in person was in that awful West Side bar. But I read about her in the Paris papers and in Freedomways magazine. It is rumored that she operates a gun-running ring for African liberation movements from an office in Paris. Jennie has found her river.

About me, there isn’t much here to say. Except, perhaps, that the children must come now. We’re working on that. I look forward to playing for them. Our parents are quite proud of us. I do find myself a little nervous these days — some hovering tension lurking in the air. We’re doing well, but the pressure to keep up is great. We have a house on a quiet treelined street in Westchester. I go to club meetings once a month. I work with the church choir; and once in a while, for kicks, I get my hair done at Henri Bendel’s …