Devil in a Blue Dress

Chapter 14

You lettin’ them step on you, Easy. Lettin’ them walk all over you and you ain’t doin’ a thing.”

“What can I do?”

I pulled onto Sunset Boulevard and turned left, toward the band of fiery orange light on the eastern horizon.

“I don’t know, man, but you gotta do somethin’. This keep up and you be dead ’fore next Wednesday.”

“Maybe I should just do like Odell says and leave.”

“Leave! Leave? You gonna run away from the only piece’a property you ever had? Leave,” he said disgustedly. “Better be dead than leave.”

“Well, you say I’ma be dead anyway. All I gotta do is wait fo’ nex Wednesday.”

“You gotta stand up, man. Lettin’ these people step on you ain’t right. Messin’ with French white girls, who ain’t French; workin’ fo’ a white man kill his own kind if they don’t smell right. You gotta find out what happened an’ set it straight.”

“But what can I do with the police or Mr. Albright or even that girl?”

“Bide yo’ time, Easy. Don’t do nuthin’ that you don’t have to do. Just bide yo’ time an’ take advantage whenever you can.”

“What if…”

“Don’t ask no questions. Either somethin’ is or it ain’t. ‘What if’ is fo’ chirren, Easy. You’s a man.”

“Yeah,” I said. Suddenly I felt stronger.

“Not too many people wanna take down a man, Easy. They’s too many cowards around for that.”

The voice only comes to me at the worst times, when everything seems so bad that I want to take my car and drive it into a wall. Then this voice comes to me and gives me the best advice I ever get.

The voice is hard. It never cares if I’m scared or in danger. It just looks at all the facts and tells me what I need to do.

The voice first came to me in the army.

When I joined up I was proud because I believed what they said in the papers and newsreels. I believed that I was a part of the hope of the world. But then I found that the army was segregated just like the South. They trained me as a foot soldier, a fighter, then they put me in front of a typewriter for the first three years of my tour. I had gone through Africa and Italy in the statistics unit. We followed the fighting men, tracing their movements and counting their dead.

I was in a black division but all the superior officers were white. I was trained how to kill men but white men weren’t anxious to see a gun in my hands. They didn’t want to see me spill white blood. They said we didn’t have the discipline or the minds for a war effort, but they were really scared that we might get to like the kind of freedom that death-dealing brings.

If a black man wanted to fight he had to volunteer. Then maybe he’d get to fight.

I thought the men who volunteered for combat were fools.

“Why I wanna die in this white man’s war?” I’d say.

But then one day I was in the PX when a load of white soldiers came in, fresh from battle outside Rome. They made a comment about the Negro soldiers. They said that we were cowards and that it was the white boys that were saving Europe. I knew they were jealous because we were behind the lines with good food and conquered women, but it got to me somehow. I hated those white soldiers and my own cowardice.

So I volunteered for the invasion of Normandy and then later I signed on with Patton at the Battle of the Bulge. By that time the Allies were so desperate that they didn’t have the luxury of segregating the troops. There were blacks, whites, and even a handful of Japanese-Americans in our platoon. And the major thing we had to worry about was killing Germans. There was always trouble between the races, especially when it came to the women, but we learned to respect each other out there too.

I never minded that those white boys hated me, but if they didn’t respect me I was ready to fight.

It was outside Normandy, near a little farm, when the voice first came to me. I was trapped in the barn. My two buddies, Anthony Yakimoto and Wenton Niles, were dead and a sniper had the place covered. The voice told me to “get off yo’ butt when the sun comes down an’ kill that motherfucker. Kill him an’ rip off his fuckin’ face with yo’ bayonet, man. You cain’t let him do that to you. Even if he lets you live you be scared the rest’a yo’ life. Kill that motherfucker,” he told me. And I did.

The voice has no lust. He never told me to rape or steal. He just tells me how it is if I want to survive. Survive like a man.

When the voice speaks, I listen.