“Do Negroes believe all kinds of crazy things about white girls?”
“Well, I know you ain’t Miss Ann.”
“I ain’t Miss Anybody.” I paused. “Who’s Miss Ann?”
Mabeline hesitated, then said, “She was a friend of my aunt’s. But they had a falling out.”
“What was it about?”
“About Miss Ann not understanding.”
“Not understanding what?”
“Anything.”
“Well, I want to understand everything about you.”
“That could take awhile,” she said, in a voice so slow that if she’d been on a bicycle she’d have tipped over.
When the war ended we went to the California Hotel to celebrate—Mabeline loves music. We generally encountered fewer hassles at tony places. Not because the people were any nicer, but because the wives would pull their husbands back, saying, That’s your best suit. Musicians filled the air with jazz so raucous it made colors stream and waft up the aisles. As we floated out on those currents, some man came up close behind Mabeline and started sniffing loudly. She ignored him, but I was ready to haul off and hit him right there in the lobby. Mabeline grabbed my arm, saying grimly under her breath, “Forget it.”
She pulled me outside to hail a cab. I kept my gaze on that man—there he was, his eyes still on Mabeline. I watched him watching her, my gaze moving between them. A cab passed by. Then another. It stopped up ahead, for other passengers. Another cab approached and I rushed forward, throwing my arm up and piling Mabeline inside. I wanted her away from that man. When I turned to her, her eyes were angry. The cabbie never stopped watching us in the rearview, so we waited till we got home to speak. Mabeline said there were too many things to talk about.
It took me awhile to understand: she wasn’t mad about me getting that cab—didn’t I see that she couldn’t get one herself? Yes, it was good that I could do that for her, but didn’t I understand that I should be mad too, mad that she couldn’t get us one? I explained that I wanted to be the one to get cabs for her, I wanted to lay down my cloak for her, I wanted to do all those things, but she insisted that I still didn’t understand. “Those things only become a welcome gift,” she said, “when I could have done them myself.”
So then I saw how much of what I had to give could only be an insult, an offense, to Mabeline. Cannery pay is always more than kitchen pay. Those steaks I bought for her—they were a gift she should have been able to buy herself.
* * *
Around nine thirty a shadow crossed Evan’s face. I followed his eyes: two men in tight collars had just been served at the bar. Glances ricocheted around the room. The bartender stood sentry, his gaze piercing the smoke the way a lighthouse beam cuts the fog. Conversations were suspended in the air for a moment, hardly something you’d notice in another bar. In the lull Mabeline murmured, “We’ve got company.” Then voices resumed and bodies began to move. Two women rose from the bar, leaving their drinks behind, ambling to the front door mighty fast. Several men slipped quietly out the back. I glanced at Mabeline; her eyes were narrow slits.
“They look too young for cops,” Lester said.
“They recruit ’em young, hung, and handsome for just this purpose.”
“The applicant pool must have been small,” Mabeline noted drily.
“Quite a flamboyant tie on the one. Is that puce?”
“The better to eat you with, my dear.”
“It’s actually quite tasteful. Can’t be department issue.”
The two men got their drinks and came toward our table. Our breaths bottomed out as their shiny shoes squeaked past. They unbuttoned their jackets and settled in at the table behind us. Hands wrapped around their glasses, they leaned back in the universal bar code of invitation. Mabeline and I had front-row seats when Otis weaved his way from the corner, waved merrily as he circled a tableful of friends, and slid sloppily into a seat at the strangers’ table. “Haven’t seen you here before!” he warbled gaily.
The two men smiled, eyes and all. Mabeline swore under her breath.
“You from around here?” Otis queried.
Both nodded, and said they were from San Francisco.
“Oooh, the big bad city!” Otis crooned.
“I’m Fred,” one guy said, extending his hand. “And this is Buck.” I considered the old saw about cops always having single-syllable names as Otis complimented Fred on his tie. Otis gestured to it, leaning exuberantly across the table, his hand landing inches from the glass and the hands of Officer Puce. After a moment Otis slid one seat closer, his hand diddling around on the table near Officer Puce’s beer.
“Jesus,” Mabeline whispered, snapping open her purse and extracting her reading glasses. She slid them on, then quickly smeared away lipstick with the back of her hand, leaving a red streak across her cheek, a macabre mockery of a smile. Then everything happened at once. Otis gave Officer Puce’s hand a fond rub, the cop reached in his back pocket for handcuffs, Mabeline hitched up the front of her dress, pulling it high over her cleavage as bright lights came blasting in the front door. Just before they blinded us Mabeline held my eyes with hers to steady me.
The wagons pulled up to the front of the building, but not to the back. The newly initiated thought this was lucky, and a few made a run for it. Those of us who’d been around awhile knew things were headed south. Wagons at both doors meant they’d load us up, haul us off, and book us. No wagon out back meant other things could happen in that dark alley. Things that made getting hauled off to jail seem like your best option.
The barrage of officers herded us against a wall, shined lights in our eyes, called us faggot, bulldagger, and queer, called some of us nigger and coon. They especially liked mixing words from the first category together with words from the second, in various combinations. A cop with a bent nose and a Southern drawl came down the line with a smile, checking faces. He lingered on Mabeline. I could smell his sweat as he hovered, breathing on her. My body was taut as the mooring line of a warship. I remembered Mabeline’s eyes and held my breath. I waited for him to pass. As he turned, his eyes already on the next woman down the line, he reached out his hand and cupped Mabeline’s breast in a smooth, curving motion. Gave it a squeeze just as he let go. I forgot Mabeline’s eyes and swung for his jaw. He reared back. Blue bodies rushed over, blue arms grabbed me and pulled me toward the back door. He followed, dragging Mabeline.
I tried to keep quiet, tried not to let my body make a sound as it hit the wall, the trash cans, the ground, the ground again. I didn’t want Mabeline to have to hear all that while the bent-nosed cop pushed her against the wall and felt her up. I kept it quiet until he pushed her down on her knees and said, in his Southern drawl: “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the fruit.” When I heard him say those words, and knew Mabeline was there, and knew it was my fault, I lost it and I roared. Two more blue bodies came and I wanted him to come over too—I roared and raged and clawed and tried to make the cop with the bent nose come over. But he didn’t.
* * *
My face was pitted with gravel, my legs somewhere far away. All of me ached, no part any more than the others. I assessed the sounds. Almost dawn. No one around. Mabeline gone.
Eventually I gathered enough focus to move. My neck, my arms, then my legs. I headed slowly toward the police station, but halfway I changed course, limping home, toward the kitchen table. When I arrived, the apartment was silent. I gathered the percolator, the coffee, the water, placed it all on the stove, and settled myself at the table. I waited.
At some point I had to check the gash near my eye that wouldn’t stop weeping. In the bathroom only one toothbrush was in the little glass. I opened the cabinet. Half of it, empty.
What I never told Mabeline: those were the words that strode, uninvited, into my head the first time I laid eyes on her, the first time I saw her beauty there on the streetcar. I didn’t want those words. I didn’t want what those words made of her, what those words made of me, an
d what they made me make of her. Those words were tracks under a train I didn’t want to ride, but the ticket stub was already in my pocket.
So I tried to protect her from those words, out in the snarl of the streets, the maze of the ship, the cage of a raid, the madness of my mind. I wanted to ride that horse. For Mabeline.
Opened in or before 1933, Oakland’s White Horse Inn is the oldest continuously operating Queer bar in the United States.
PART II
What They Call a Clusterfuck
A TOWN MADE OF HUSTLE
by Dorothy Lazard
Downtown
Poppy Martens trotted out of Selden’s Gym close to midnight, his wallet heavy with the cash he’d just won on a prizefight all his friends had advised him to lay off. But Poppy was partial to southpaws. Their stubborn survival in a right-handed world always surprised people. No doubt the favorite in tonight’s bout was surprised when a left hook sent him sailing backward, nearly out of the ring. Poppy smiled, remembering the fellas around him falling silent, their cigarettes hanging loose from dry lips. All Poppy could do was laugh at the sight, slapping the shoulders of the guy seated in front of him.
Now he strode up 7th Street, toward downtown, snapping out of his reverie as he passed the French laundry, the shuttered storefronts, and the darkened factories. Just a couple of years earlier these foundries and fabricators would have been buzzing with activity, lights on twenty-four hours a day. There’d be people all over the streets. Guys coming home dead tired from the shipyards, clothes sooty with metal dust and smoke. Apartments functioned like hotel lobbies back then, people occupying them in shifts, sleeping in closets, beds, even tubs. Oakland teemed like an engine. Everybody was working, making something or other for the war. All that is done now, Poppy thought as he lifted his jacket collar against the cold.
He smiled again, thinking of all those saps who’d come rushing out here for jobs they thought would never end, to support a war they thought would change their sorry lot in life once and for all. But end they did. And as soon as they did, what happened? What always happens: colored folks were the first to be let go. And where are they now? Back bowing and scraping for a living. Pumping gas, sweeping floors, and slinging hash to the vets who were handed their good-paying jobs. Back to the end of the line, just like before.
The lucky ones got jobs on the Pullman cars, in offices, or at the auto plants in East Oakland. Too smart now to go back home to the fields. And who could blame them? Where could they go, what could they do but stay here and make a way?
These days Poppy made a meager living watching all this change happen, writing down what he saw and what it meant to the Negro. His paper didn’t pay him much, but he didn’t need much. He was alone now. Wife and kids back east and—he hoped—still safe. Away from the trouble he seemed to always deliver to them, like fresh milk. He scraped together a living at an outfit that could barely eke out a weekly edition, but he liked the job. Cobbled things together with temporary gigs of all sorts. It gave him freedom to roam during the day, talk to people, find out how the city worked and the endless number of ways it didn’t. He liked to test his ability to get into their heads and hearts and, sometimes, a little closer. The wad of money he’d just won could certainly help with that.
He headed up to police headquarters in City Hall to sit with the drowsy night desk officer and listen to the police radio.
“Poppy Martens!” the officer called out, his hand held high in greeting as Poppy entered the booking area.
Poppy nodded a greeting, but was all focus. He sat wide-legged in a chair across from the desk and flipped open his notepad, ready to retrieve any leads coming over the speaker. “Anything up tonight?” he asked.
“Nothing yet, but soon enough. It’s Saturday night. Still early.”
Right then a pair of patrol cops dragged in three men who looked too young to be as drunk as they were. When a cop shoved one kid up to the counter, the guy staggered a bit then hurled his guts across the desk. The night cop jumped back just enough to avoid the bilious spray.
Poppy suppressed a laugh.
“Poppy!” Sergeant Webster stood across the room, hands braced against the doorjambs. “Come in here, I wanna talk with you.”
Webster, a burly white man with a perpetually red face, wrestled the jacket off his broad back and draped it over his swivel chair. Poppy approached the man’s desk tentatively. The detective expected him to tell a story; that was their deal. Webster fed Poppy leads for his news stories, and in exchange Poppy dropped the names of a few of West Oakland’s less savory characters. Poppy felt no guilt about this arrangement. Oakland was a town made of hustle and that’s how it would always be. The few bills Webster skimmed off his money clip and gave to Poppy were tucked away, a security blanket in uncertain times.
“Have a seat,” Webster said. “What’s the latest on Raincoat Jones?”
Charles “Raincoat” Jones was a mover and shaker in West Oakland, working both sides of the law. He ran a gym, nightclubs, gaming houses, and a pawnshop. Folks in the neighborhood loved him. Poppy loved him. You could always count on Raincoat to keep a widow’s lights on, or to buy uniforms for some kid’s baseball team, or forward you a loan to start up a little business. And because of that, Poppy never leaked a thing about him to Webster. Oakland needed people like Raincoat.
“Haven’t seen him,” Poppy lied, “not for a while. Heard he was out of town. Reno, someone told me.”
“You mean you haven’t seen him at Selden’s? Not for any fights? I know there’s been a lot activity down there lately.”
“Raincoat doesn’t go to Selden’s. You know, he has his own—”
Webster raised his hand. “Yeah, I know, I know. I just wanted to check it out.”
Poppy wondered why Webster was suddenly after Raincoat. Maybe the dick wasn’t getting what he felt was his due from the protection money Raincoat paid the OPD.
* * *
It was nearly two in the morning when Poppy reached his apartment on Jefferson. He found his old friend David “Tak” Takiyama on the sofa. Poppy could smell the bourbon on Tak’s breath before he crossed the room. The war had not been kind to Tak and his people. For all their flag-waving patriotism, pledging allegiance, and Boy Scout merit badges, they were still considered the enemy. Two years after the war Tak still couldn’t catch on with any paper. No detective agency would hire him either. He and his camera, which had been so productive before the war, had both been stilled. Tak’s reentry into society was heartbreaking for Poppy—all the sun had gone out of his pal. It was a daily tragedy to witness. Tak was once the best cameraman in Oakland, but none of that mattered back in ’42 when he and his parents and sisters were rounded up like convicts and shipped to Topaz, Utah, to spend the war years in shame and isolation, away from everything and everybody they had known.
Tak had been the first man to offer Poppy a hand in friendship when he landed in Oakland right before Pearl Harbor. And Poppy didn’t forget it. He welcomed Tak into his little place, happy his friend had been strong enough to survive such humiliation, but the experience had killed something fine in him. He didn’t read anymore. He wasn’t up for club-hopping down 7th Street. No more lusting after the white salesgirls at Owl Drugs on San Pablo. Betrayal had washed him clean of vices, all except one—hatred.
“You’re in the same spot I left you in this afternoon,” Poppy said as he entered the apartment.
Tak didn’t reply.
“You wear a hole in that couch, you’re paying for it. I’ll rat you out to the landlord.”
Tak shifted his body, but said nothing.
Poppy took off his coat and threw it into the bedroom where it landed heavy on the chair. He smiled, remembering the money from the fight. He turned and stepped back toward the couch.
“Man, you shoulda come with me tonight! That light-heavy Selden was bragging about was all bluster. Turns out he had a glass jaw! Went down in the sixth round, hard as a redwood. Bam! Bloody nose, big swo
llen jaw, one eye closed shut!”
Poppy grew excited as he recalled the details, bobbing and weaving to bring the story to life. The fights used to be one of Tak’s favorite pastimes, prewar. He had a taken an enviable collection of fight photos to prove his devotion to “the sweet science,” which Poppy had saved for him, but Tak showed no interest in doing anything with them now.
Poppy went to the kitchenette and scrambled an egg, made some toast, and drank cold coffee that he or Tak—he couldn’t remember who—had made the previous morning.
Poppy wanted to be loyal, but he couldn’t bear too much more of Tak’s inertia. You gotta move, man! Poppy was always telling him. You still got air in your lungs, use it! Today he thought he’d try a new approach.
“Hey, Tak, let me use your camera.” He said it casually, as if he routinely asked for his pal’s most precious possession.
Tak turned, propped himself up on his elbows. “Have you gone insane?”
Poppy shook his head. “Nah.”
“If you’re asking to use my camera, you have. Are you drunk?”
“No,” Poppy said, amused at this accusation coming from a drunk man.
“No is right! You touch my camera, I’ll break your wrists.”
Poppy, a whole head taller than Tak, waved his hands in mock-fright. “Oh no, not my wrists!”
“Yeah. Your wrists. See how many stories you write then. See how many, mister!”
Poppy wanted to laugh but decided not to be cruel. “I’m serious. I need your camera, man. I won’t damage it. I swear.”
“You don’t know nothing about cameras,” Tak said.
“What I need to know you can teach me.”
“I could, but not using my camera. No way, no how.”
Poppy finished his food and placed the plate in the sink. He stretched his long body, raising his hands high above his head, and yawned loudly. “All right, my friend, I’ll use somebody else’s camera. No problem.”
Poppy pulled his shirttails out of his pants and headed toward the bedroom. He scratched his head and his balls, said good night, then went into his room, closing the door behind him. He was pulling a shirt over his head when he heard Tak through the door.
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