Little Scarlet

6

I wandered up and down the halls until I found my way back to the reception desk. The freckled girl glanced up at me when I emerged from the swinging doors. I made it all the way to the exit before she spoke.

“Excuse me,” she said to my back.

“Yes?” I turned my head to be halfway civil.

“I’m sorry . . . about before.”

“About what?” I knew what she meant but I asked anyway.

“I’m from Memphis,” she said.

With the emphasis on the last word her Tennessee drawl took control. Her origins explained why she looked at Suggs and not me when she asked for our names. Where she came from, a white woman didn’t address a black man directly. I wasn’t supposed to speak in her presence or even look in her general direction.

“Yeah,” I said, turning back to the door.

I reached for the knob.

“Mr. Rawlings.”

“No ‘g.’ ”

“I’m sorry. Mr. Rawlins.”

I turned all the way around and went to her desk. “That’s okay. No blood drawn.”

“Are you related to those poor women?” she asked.

“Yes I am,” I said. And I didn’t feel that I was lying. Over the past few days, I came to feel a new connection between myself and the people caught up in the throes of violence. It was as if I had adopted Nola Payne as my blood sister.

“They brought them in in the early morning,” the receptionist-nurse said.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

A tremor went through her and she looked around, maybe for the Klansmen that would hang us both if she answered.

“Marianne,” she said softly. “Marianne Plump.”

We both smiled.

“What were you saying, Marianne?”

“I have a girlfriend, a colored girl that has the graveyard shift. She told me that Miss Landry said that they were killing poor black people.”

“Who?”

“She just said that it was a white man.”

“Did she say anything else?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Marianne said. “I don’t know.”

“What’s your friend’s name?”

“Tina Monroe.”

“Do you have a pencil and some paper, Marianne?”

She pointed at a pad on the edge of her desk and handed me a yellow number two. When I took the pencil our fingers touched. I think we both got a shock. It wasn’t a sexual thing but the breaking of a taboo that had governed her people and mine for hundreds of years.

“This is my number,” I said as I wrote. “I’d really appreciate knowing anything about what happened to Nola, anything that Miss Landry said. So if she can I’d like Tina to call me.”

Miss Plump nodded solemnly, taking the flimsy slip of paper.

WALKING DOWN La Cienega I thought about Marianne Plump and the shock we both felt when we touched. It wasn’t that I’d never made physical contact with a white woman before. I had been through World War II. I had had many French and English and even German lovers. I had known American white women too. But this was different. Marianne and I were cut from the same rag. We spoke the same language. And though I couldn’t explain how, I knew that the riots had broken down the barriers between us.

I WALKED SOUTH to Wilshire and then headed east.

It was a beautiful day. In the eighties and nearly clear because of a slight breeze. Wilshire was a nice street in those days. Small businesses and a few nondescript office buildings. I was walking at a brisk pace, steeling myself for the second test that day.

After I’d crossed to Fairfax Avenue the police car pulled to the curb beside me. Two tall white policemen got out as a team. Really I should call them policeboys because both of their ages put together wouldn’t have added up to my forty-five years.

“Hold it right there,” one cop said. He had a button nose, pale skin, and small, stunned-looking eyes.

His partner was a few inches shorter and six shades darker.

They both wore hats, so I couldn’t say what color hair they had.

“What are you doing here?” the taller, paler cop asked.

“Walkin’ home.”

“Where do you live?”

I gave him my address on Genesee Avenue, a few blocks away.

Without asking permission the interrogator started patting my sides and pockets. The darker white cop stood a few paces away with his hand on the butt of his gun.

“Where are you coming from?” the pale cop asked, still frisking me.

“May I give you something, Officer?” I replied.

“What?”

“A document that will explain my presence here.”

“Did you hear that, Mike?” the pale boy asked the dark one.

“What, Gil?”

“He wants to give me a document that will explain why he’s here.”

Mike got a quizzical look on his face and his partner went over to him. They discussed my unusual request for over a minute. Meanwhile pedestrians and shop owners had come to see what was going on. Everybody in L.A. was on alert. At the height of the riots angry black crowds had threatened to leave the ghetto and bring the violence into the white neighborhoods. Who knew when the Molotov cocktails would start exploding in Beverly Hills?

Mike came up to me.

“What is it you want to show us?”

I took Gerald Jordan’s letter from my shirt pocket and handed it to him.

The Mediterranean-looking boy took enough time to have read the note six or seven times. Either Mike was slow or he was surprised by the content and signature. He looked up at me with dark Hellenic eyes.

“Is this a joke? I mean, do you think you can get away with this?”

“No joke, Officer,” I said. “And yes, I do expect to walk away if not get away.”

Mike went back to the police car and made a radio call while his partner kept an eye on me.

More and more people had gathered across the street in front of the May Company department store. My mind stayed calm but my body was reacting to the situation. I could feel the blood racing and my muscles getting tense. I could have run a quarter-mile sprint but instead I took out a new low-tar cigarette and lit it up.

Cigarettes would kill me one day, I was sure of that, but inhaling that smoke right then probably saved my life. Without the calming effect of the tobacco I might have taken a run at that pale child calling himself the law.

Mike got out of the patrol car and went up to his partner. They discussed the letter, glancing at me from time to time. People across the street were pointing at me and talking about me too. There wasn’t one dark face on the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax.

I took another deep drag on my cigarette, wishing that it were a filterless Pall Mall.

Finally the cops approached me.

“Break out some I.D.,” Mike ordered.

I took out my wallet, pulled my driver’s license from its sleeve, and handed it over.

They eyed the name on the letter and compared it to the license.

“Are you Ezekiel Rawlins?”

“Yes I am.”

“What are you working on for the commissioner?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“What did you say to me, son?” Mike asked.

That brought a smile to my face. The letter worked. The police were impotent and that made them mad.

“May I go now, Officer?”

“I asked you a question.”

“Ask Deputy Commissioner Gerald Jordan,” I said. “Because I’m reporting directly to his office—son.”

Mike stared hard at me, committing my face to memory. He wanted me to know that one day he’d see me again, when I wasn’t protected by his bosses.

It was a serious threat but I didn’t care. I was having my own rebellion against the power structure. I was making a stand right there in West L.A. under the scrutiny of three dozen white people.

“Go on,” Mike said. “Get out of here.”

The police returned to their car. They went east on Wilshire so I decided to walk down Fairfax to Pico.

“We’re not gonna put up with that crazy mess around here, nigger,” a man’s voice said.

I turned and saw a white man, with a white woman at his side—both of them staring hate at me.

“Are you talkin’ to me?” I asked him.

“Yeah.”

He was all loose. His casual clothing, his skin, his drooping jaw.

I took a step in his direction and he scooted away with his girlfriend in tow. After five steps he turned to see if I was running him down. I took another step, and he and his girlfriend took off at a gallop.

“He is a fool,” another white man said. This one had a European accent.

When I turned I expected to see him talking to someone about me but he was alone. A short man wearing wire-rimmed glasses. He wasn’t old, maybe fifty-five.

“He is afraid, and frightened men are almost always fools,” the small man said to me.

“I’m not too much better,” I said, “puffin’ up like that.”

“You can’t help but to stand up for yourself,” he said. “Even if you struck him, it would have been okay. Maybe he would learn something.”

“That’s a hard school you talkin’ about there,” I said.

The little man in the gray suit smiled. “I am Henry Berg,” he said. “I own a watch shop up a block from here, on the east side of the street. If you need a timepiece fixed bring it to me.”

We shook hands and I walked away thinking that I had to keep the lid on. Because if I didn’t all hell might boil over.