Farewell, Amethystine

33

I was standing in the colored graveyard on the outskirts of New Iberia, Louisiana. It was nighttime and all the friends and cousins, my father and half sisters, the neighbors and church members, had gone home. My mother had just turned twenty-seven when she gasped her last breath, two days before. I was only seven, but I climbed out the back window of our country shack and made my way to her by moonlight. In his eulogy the minister kept saying that Mama wasn’t dead, that she was with God. That hope pulled me out of the bed and propelled me to her grave.

I don’t remember ever finding her stone back then, but in the dream I got there. They hadn’t filled in the hole yet and so I looked over the side and saw her. It wasn’t my mother but Anger Lee lying there, naked and half-wrapped in a white shroud. She seemed to be sleeping, there at the bottom of the grave.

I knew she was dead but could not believe it. That’s when she opened her eyes, smiled, and said, “Easy.”

“Anger.”

“Oh, baby, don’t look so sad. Bein’ dead ain’t all that bad. There’s a whole world of beauty and love beyond this place.”

“They is?”

“Oh yeah. Climb on down here, honey, and I will make you feel better than you evah knowed. Bettah than evah.”

I wanted more than anything to join her. It was the strongest desire I had ever felt. But the grave was deep and getting deeper. Ten feet down, then twelve.

“Jump, Easy!” Anger called. “Jump!”

Finally, I couldn’t hold back. I leaped into the abyss of the grave.

“Get your black ass up, motherfucker!”

Violently, I was being pulled from the grave and my first true love. When I opened my eyes I was seated at Chita Moyer’s games table. Then I was dragged to my feet. There were at least three uniformed policemen with their hands on me. Sunlight blazed through the big window.

“What’s happenin’?” I called out.

“Breaking, entering, and trespass,” one of the cops yelled back.

“No! No! This is Mrs. Chita Moyer’s house and I’m her guest.”

“This house is vacant,” another cop added, “uninhabited.”

Someone else rabbit-punched me and I went down on my knees. Then I was kicked in the side, making me fall over on my back.

“Get up!” a cop demanded. I think it was the same one that kicked me.

The only thing I could do was hold my hands out with palms up.

“Turn over on your belly,” the highest-ranking uniform commanded.

It took a great deal of faith to turn my back on men who had already struck me twice with no provocation. But I did as I was told and, to my relief, all they did was cuff my hands behind me and then jerk me to my feet.

And though I was cautious, I wasn’t outraged over the mistreatment. After all, I had done the same and worse to Shadrach Tellman.

Someone took the wallet from my back pocket.

“What the fuck were you thinking, nigger?” the top cop asked.

“I knocked on the door and an elderly couple invited me in. We sat at that table and drank till I passed out.”

“What kind of horseshit is that?” He asked questions that denied any answer I might give.

He was a big man and obviously easy to anger. But I figured that the truth, or near to it, was all I had.

“Hey, Sarge,” a guy behind me said. “It says here that this guy’s a PI from LA.”

“A PI?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me see that.”

The wallet was passed over and the big angry sergeant scowled at it.

“Where the fuck you steal this?” he asked.

“It says Ezekiel P. Rawlins,” I replied, more or less respectfully. “If you look at my driver’s license, you’ll see that the picture is me. And if you take out the card behind that you’ll see that it’s for Captain Anatole McCourt of the LAPD. He knows why I’m down here and who I was here to see.”

This was not the script that these peace officers had studied for the entirety of their professional lives. Obviously guilty, I was supposed to beg and lie or curse and threaten. I was supposed to make claims that they could pick apart. Something that would make them have to punish me.

But mentioning a police captain’s card as a reference met none of their expectations. Even a white crook wouldn’t try that.

I was dragged out of the Moyer house and shoved into the back of one of the patrol cars. I sat there a good forty-five minutes. The young officer they left to guard me stood outside the vehicle, next to the back door I was closest to. This sentry was reedy and redheaded. From the bravado of his scrawny posture, I believed that he saw himself as some kind of invincible warrior.

When the sergeant and another cop returned they installed themselves in the front seat.

“Powell,” the sergeant called out of the passenger’s-seat window.

“Yes, sir,” the reedy redhead replied.

“Go up to the front door and keep people away. We’ll send somebody from the station to relieve you.”

“Yes, sir.”

The ruddy boss then turned toward me and said, “You say you were drinkin’ in there?”

“Yeah.”

“What kinda liquor?”

“Vodka martinis with green olives or twists of orange rind.”

I worried that he was going to spit on me. From the twist of his lips, I was sure he wanted to.

We traveled downtown to a fair-size police station. There I was put into an interrogation room. They didn’t take off the cuffs or offer me water but, then again, they didn’t beat on me either.

The room came furnished with a straight-back chair and a metal table with a Formica top. No carpeting. No extras at all. I sat on the tabletop because it was more comfortable than the chair, considering the disposition of my hands. I didn’t do much thinking. Again, it was one of those interim periods where a second-class citizen had to wait, in hopes that his papers would be validated.

It was a long wait.

When the door finally opened, the reedy warrior, his ruddy boss, and Anatole McCourt came in.

I have to admit that when I first saw Anatole there was an expanse of joy in my chest. Then I remembered who I was and where. If it served his purpose, the LA police captain could drop me in a hole.

“Take the bracelets off,” McCourt said to the kid.

I stood up and turned my back.

“I have some questions,” the sergeant said to me.

“What’s your name, man?” I asked, cutting him off.

“Sergeant Carr. Now—”

“Listen, Brother Carr. I got to take a hard piss, either in a toilet bowl or on your shoes. Dig me?”

Carr didn’t like me and I didn’t care. What I wanted was a toilet, some water, and coffee for the drug-induced headache that had been pounding on my skull for hours.

Once these needs were met, I acceded to the San Diego cop’s demands.

Nearly an hour later I had explained to the SDPD sergeant all about Curt Fields, his missing uncle, and the reasons I ended up unconscious in the window.

“So you think this Harrison Fields is somehow involved with the death of his blood nephew?” Sergeant Carr asked.

“He knows all the players and so could be a source of great intelligence having to do with his nephew’s death. I came down here to get that information.”

“But instead, you let the old man drug you.”

“Fuck is wrong with you, man?” I didn’t quite ask. “I already had one clean drink and the woman made it.”

“You don’t talk to me like that in my house,” Sergeant Carr warned.

Rising to my feet I said, “Fine. Let’s get the fuck outta here then.”

The sergeant rose to meet me. It might have been a brawl if Anatole hadn’t stood too.

“Come on, Sergeant,” McCourt said. “Let’s go take a look at the house.”

The only furniture in Chita Moyer’s house was the games table downstairs and a queen-size mattress in the master bedroom on the second floor. In the kitchen there were two plates, two sets of cutlery, along with a cocktail shaker and four martini glasses.

“We figure they probably got a real estate agent to show them the house and then moved in,” Carr told McCourt.

“No,” I said.

“What?” Carr managed to make that one-word interrogative sound like a threat.

“He was provided with the address by my office,” Anatole said. “That means the home must have belonged to her.”

“I mean,” I said as if I were finishing Anatole’s explanation, “why the fuck did you people even arrest me? How’d you know I was there?”

Carr looked at me, considered a curse, but then snagged his lower lip with an upper canine.

“We got a call. She said she was a neighbor and that something looked hinky at this address, said there was a Negro sleeping in the window.”

The rage I felt was both new and old. Older than the oldest man who ever lived and new like when you fall in love for the first time.

With clenched fists I said, sarcastically, “And you think I let somebody drug me?”

Carr understood the criticism, maybe he even agreed with it.

Whatever it was, he turned his anger on the LA cop. “Why would you be working an operation down here without telling us?”

“We just wanted to talk to them, Sergeant. Neither one was suspected of a crime.”

“Well,” Carr said through a sneer. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

“No kidding,” I replied.