The Collected Novels of Charles Wright

by Charles Wright

  A New York mockingbird chirped in the mandarin tree.

  I went back to my room but I couldn’t stay there. I had to get out. Out and walk, walk and try not to think. I wanted to scream to anyone, to the sky: “But I didn’t mean anything! All I wanted was to be happy. I didn’t know to want to be happy was a crime, a sin. I thought sin was something you bought for ten dollars a major ounce and five dollars a minor ounce, both qualities highly recommended, and each wrapped in plain brown paper. I never bought any—not because I couldn’t afford it. I just took pot for a dollar a stick . . .”

  But why go on? Why try to explain? Was there anyone to hear me?

  I dressed hurriedly and, magnificently Bewigged, went out, locked the door, and walked slowly down the steps, thankful that Nonnie Swift was not about.

  Half of a neatly folded telegram stuck out of my mailbox. Filled with apprehension, I ripped the telegram open. It read:

  I bet you can’t guess where I am at. I wasn’t doing nothing. These colored clubwomen wanted me for a benefit but the white clubwomen said I wasn’t college. At least not Ivy and queer. The colored clubwomen agreed. I wished you could have heard the names they called me after the white clubwomen had left. I wasn’t doing nothing but walking through the streets looking for my lavender Cadillac number three and the bluecoats arrested me for nothing at all. I only had a quart of Summertime wine and was just drinking. I paid for it, didn’t I? So why can’t I drink it on the street? So I’m back here. The white devils. I was getting ready to do a profile on TV, too, with Mr. Sunflower Ashley-Smithe. Don’t worry none, though. They got a cell ready for you. Next to mine. How long you think the white devils gonna let you go through the streets with your hair looking like that? Why didn’t you phone me? I left my number.

  Little Mr. Jimmie Wishbone

  Despite the springlike air, goose pimples peppered my body. The nut ward at Kings County! Lord—and all I’d wanted was to breathe easier.

  I tore up the telegram, threw it into the air like confetti. The sky was clear and blue. A glazed sun highlighted the Harlem skyline. Looking at that skyline, I remembered what Mr. Fishback had once said to me. “Lester Jefferson,” Mr. Fishback had said—it was on my sixteenth birthday—“you’re almost a man. It’s time you learned something. That Harlem skyline is the outline of your life. There is very little to discover by looking at the pavement.”

  I didn’t know what he meant then, and I didn’t know now. If I asked him—and I had asked—he’d just say, “You’re on your own for now. My presence won’t be required until . . .”

  As if I wasn’t aware that he was always, always around, hovering over me. He was a prime mover of people, a black magician. But it was the first of April, and too many things had happened, and Mr. Fishback was in Spain, or somewhere. Perhaps I didn’t need him as yet.

  I walked over to Lenox and 125th Street, where I joined a group of Black Muslims standing in front of the Theresa Hotel. The Muslims had flutes and flowers and were making joyous sounds. They were hawking chances on a specially built armored tank that was guaranteed to go from New York City to Georgia and back on one gallon of gas. The chances were only twenty-five cents.

  “I ain’t never going back to Georgia,” one man exclaimed. “Why don’t you have something that will take me to Biarritz or Cuernavaca? That’s more like my speed.”

  Gradually, the crowd grew bored and drifted away. I moved on down the avenue to where a sneaker-shod young man, pink-jacketed with pink low boy trousers, sold French poodles. “Be like the fashionable common masses,” he shrilled in a vaguely cultured voice. “Own a real French poodle sired by Chee of New Jersey and Dame Chowder of Staten Island. Poodles are the latest rage. Everyone has a smart French poodle. Why not you? Poodles should be clipped twice a week. You can use the leftover curls for your own head. The latest word in African hair styles. And these genuine French poodles are only thirty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, plus neighborhood, city, county, state, and federal sales tax.”

  But I needed no poodle curls; I was my own Samson, a Samson with Silky Smooth hair. My true glory had flowered, I thought bitterly, remembering Nonnie Swift’s words.

  “Poodles, poodles,” the sneaker-shod young man called after me, but I crossed the street and went on my way.

  “Look at him,” a small boy cried, pointing his bony hand at me. “I bet he ain’t going to school!”

  Smiling, I said, “No, Sonny. Not today.”

  “But he’s going to school,” the boy’s mother said to me, doubling a suède-gloved fist and slamming it against the boy’s mouth.

  “Jesus, he must be a very bad boy,” I said.

  “He is,” the mother said vigorously.

  I stared hard at the crying boy. “What did he do?”

  “He doesn’t want to go to a segregated school. I broke my broom handle on him a few minutes ago. That’s what the NAACP and the Mayor and the Holy Peace-Making Brotherhood advised. You wouldn’t have a pistol on you, would you?”

  “No,” I shuddered. A sudden pain hit me so hard that I felt faint.

  My throat was dry. “Isn’t there some other way you can make the boy understand?”

  “No,” the mother replied.

  “Maaa,” the boy moaned. “Please take me to the hospital. I ache all over. I think I’m gonna die, Mama.”

  “Shut your trap.”

  Just than a soothsayer wearing a dark policeman’s uniform walked up twirling his nightstick.

  “What’s wrong, lady? Having trouble with your boys?”

  “Only the little one,” the mother laughed. “He doesn’t want to go to a segregated school. I’ve got to beat some sense into the boy’s head if it’s the last thing I do.”

  “Wanna use my nightstick? I’m sorry I don’t have my electric cow prod with me because that does the trick every time. That always makes them fall in line.”

  “Oh, officer,” the mother said, “you’re so kind and understanding.”

  “Think nothing of it. Just doing my duty. I’ve got kids of my own. I certainly wouldn’t want them to go to an integrated school.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” I said angrily. “This isn’t fair!”

  “Buster,” the policeman said, “do you want me to knock that grease out of your hair? I’ll get you thirty days in the workhouse. You’re trying to obstruct justice.”

  Silently, I watched the mother slam the nightstick against the boy’s head. The boy’s mouth opened and he fell to the sidewalk. Blood flowed from his nostrils and lips. “Mama,” he sighed, and closed his eyes.

  “Get up from there, you nasty little thing,” the mother cried. “Get up. Do you hear me? Just look at you, and I stayed up half the night getting your clothes clean and white for school.”

  “I think the boy’s dead,” I said.

  “He ain’t dead,” the policeman said. “He’s just pretending because he doesn’t want to go to school.”

  The mother knelt down and shook the boy and then stood up. “He’s dead,” she commented in a clear voice. “I could never talk to him.”

  “It’s not your fault,” the policeman said. “Kids are getting out of hand these days.”

  I tottered off, knowing that I couldn’t eat any free fried chicken even if it was my day. I hadn’t been to a church in a very long time and I thought I might go to one, but then I remembered that all of the churches in Harlem were closed. The Minister’s Union had declared April first to be a day of soul-searching, a day devoted to making money, a day of solitude for the ministers whose nerves had failed them.

  So I veered on to Eighth Avenue and 116th Street, where all was quiet except for a rumble on the west side of the Avenue. Fourteen shoeshine boys were fighting savagely with a gleaming six-foot Negro man. The shoeshine boys were winning.

  One ferocious shiner jumped me. “Are you a shiner?” he asked.

  “Not today,” I said.

  “Where is it at?” the six-foot man asked. “I’ll call the police on y
ou little black bastards.”

  “Call’m,” the shoeshine boys chorused. “We ain’t done nothing against Lily Law.”

  “That’s right,” the ferocious shiner said. “We ain’t done nothing. We just invented this dust machine to help our business downtown. The dust shoeshine boy stands on the corner with the machine in a shopping bag from Macy’s, rolling his white eyeballs and sucking a slice of candied watermelon. You know. Like he’s waiting on his mama. Every time a likely customer walks by, the dust shiner pulls the magic string. By the time the customer reaches the middle of the block he sure need a shine. He our gravy. And now this mother-grabber is gonna call Lily Law. He wants to suck white ass. He ain’t thinking ’bout us little black boys.”

  The gleaming tall man broke away and ran inside a diner. “I’ll fix you little devils.”

  “I’ll go inside and see what I can do,” I told the shoeshine boys. “Now you boys run like crazy.”

  I wasn’t a hero and I’ve never aspired to be one (except in a private, loverly sense—ah, The Deb), but I’ve always, always, tried to help people. It’s a kind of perverse hobby with me. Opening the diner door, I offered a diplomatic grin. The gleaming man was on the telephone.

  “Mr. Police. This is Jackson Sam Nothingham. Yes, sir. The Black Disaster Diner. What do you mean . . . It’s me, Mr. Police. Your sunny-side-up boy. That’s right.”

  The diner owner hadn’t noticed me. I eased over and deftly pulled the phone cord from the wall.

  “What? I can’t hear you. Say something, Mr. Police. I pays my dues . . . And what’s more, I takes care of the Captain when he comes around . . .”

  “Maybe they hung up on you, Mac,” I said.

  The bewildered owner swung around. “What you mean, boy? They hung up on me? Wait until the Captain gets a load of this. He knows I sell a little gin and whiskey in coffee cups after hours. All the Mister Polices on this beat says they don’t know what they’d do without good old Jackson Sam Nothingham. My good down-home Southern cooking and a nip on a cold rainy day. I’m keeping up the morale of the police force and you try to say they hung up on me?”

  “That’s the way the cookie crumbles,” I philosophized. “It doesn’t have to be a Chinese fortune cookie either.”

  The angry tall man looked hard at The Wig. “You curly-headed son-of-a-bitch. Git out of here. Git out of the Black Disaster Diner. I am the owner and I refuse to serve you. All you spicks and niggers are the cause of my troubles.”

  “If that’s the way you feel about it,” I said.

  “Git out,” the tall man shouted. His whole body trembled. “You people are ruining me. I’ve been in business twenty years and the white people have loved me and I’ve been happy.”

  He slumped down into a cane-backed chair like a wounded animal.

  If that is how he feels, there’s nothing for me to say, I thought, and, lowering my eyes, I walked briskly out of the Black Disaster Diner.

  Now the sun was behind the clouds; there was the quiet of mid-morning except for the sound of singing, coming from an open window.

  Singing was another world as far as I was concerned, although I was capable of producing a rooster’s resonant crow. And it felt a little strange to be walking like a human being on the first of April. Strutting around Manhattan on my hands and feet was good exercise, I’d discovered.

  By the time I reached Central Park and 96th Street, four Puerto Ricans stopped me.

  “Español?”

  “No,” I laughed, trying to break a gut string. I understood. It was The Wig. I realized that many Puerto Ricans wanted to lose their identity. Many of them pretended to be Brazilians. It was not only safer, it was chic. Puerto Ricans had inherited the dog trough vacated by the Negroes.

  Burnished-red-golden-haired Puerto Ricans were extremely rare, as were burnished-red-golden-haired Negroes, I sadly reflected, crossing at 72nd Street and Central Park.

  I walked along, magnificently Bewigged, shoulders erect, firm hands jammed in my blue jeans, jingling nickels and pennies, calm and a little lonely.

  Suddenly I wanted to talk to someone; hoped someone would say, “Good morning. What lovely weather we’re having.” “Yes. Isn’t it?” I’d reply. “I think we’ll have an early spring.” “I hope so,” the other party would say. “Of course, you never can tell.” “That’s right,” I’d say. Corny human stuff like that.

  I was rehearsing the imaginary dialogue when I smiled at a middle-aged woman with a face that looked as if it had stared too long at the walls of too many furnished rooms. The middle-aged woman’s tiny pink eyes went from my smiling face to The Wig. She leaned back on the bench, opened her mouth, and shut her eyes tight.

  Well, I thought moving on, she is not accustomed to beauty.

  An elderly couple were eying me. I heard the man mutter to his wife: “It’s all right, Wilma. Times are changing. Remember the first automobile? World War One? We can’t escape what we’ve never dreamed because we’ve always believed it was impossible. Wilma? Please don’t cry. We’ll be dying soon. And then we won’t have to look at such sights.”

  He meant me.

  The sight went calmly on, smiling at a fat Negro who carried a shopping bag with Silky Smooth printed on the side. The fat Negro woman spat tobacco juice at my shoes, and a blond Alice-in-Wonderland type urinated in a plastic sand bucket and tried to splash me. Her mother applauded.

  I was beginning to get a little sore. I felt like saying, “Nothing, nothing—do you hear me—nothing can stop me.” Who the hell did they take me for? Was I the young man who had ground three hundred pounds of chopped meat out of the bodies of seventy blind people? Or the young man who had rescued a pregnant mother and her five children from their burning home, and then single-handed built them a ranch house overnight? Was I the champion rod who had respectively screwed wife, husband, mother-in-law, part-time maid, twelve-year-old daughter, fourteen-year-old son, white parrot, and family collie pup?

  No! I was the celebrated chicken man, and none of them knew it. Ten hours a day, five and a half days a week, crawling on my hands and knees all over Manhattan. And I’d been a target for such a long time. Five-feet-ten, naked without shoes, normal weight one hundred and forty pounds. Boyish, with a rolling non-nautical gait, my face typically mixed: chamber-pot-simmered American, the result of at least five different pure races copulating in two’s and three’s like a game of musical chairs.

  Following my own shadow, it seemed that I was taking a step in some direction and that The Wig was my guide. Progress is our most important product, General Electric says, and I had progressed to the front door of hell when all I had actually been striving for was a quiet purgatory. And I did not find it strange that hell had a soft blue sky, a springlike air, music, dust, laughter, curses.

  I only wished I could see a friendly face.

  Up ahead I saw a girl wearing what seemed to be a white mink coat. I checked my stride. A trick of nature or a goddam trick of my eyes? I neared the girl. My blood began to percolate. She was different. Blue-black shiny hair. Complexion: light brown, or did it have an Oriental cast, or was it a trick of the light? The girl’s dark eyes were heavily lidded. The lips might have belonged to a beautiful woman of any race. But what was her actual nationality? Mulatto? American Indian? East Indian? Italian?—she had a mustache of moisture on her upper lip and I had been schooled in the folklore of Italian women by printed matter. There was a hint of warmth in her marvelous dark eyes; so it was extremely possible that she was a beauty from North Africa. She might even be Jewish, I thought, remembering that beautiful Jewish girl on West 87th Street.

  I would die if the girl was simply a dark Gentile.

  I was about ten paces from her, when the sun blazed forth. Traffic around the circle was jammed.

  The girl said, “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “And I’ve been waiting too,” I found myself saying.

  “I’ve been waiting for someone exactly like you.”

  “Y
ou’re beautiful. You don’t have to wait for anyone.”

  The girl smiled warmly. “No. You’re wrong,” she said. “Are you coming with me?”

  I nodded doubtfully but I took the girl’s arm. “All right. I’m game. Where are we going?”

  “Just keep in step with me. I’ve been so lonely,” she said, “I feel like I’m living in the desert, though actually I’m living in a great city with millions of people.”

  “I’ve often felt like a hermit, too,” I said. Was this chick stoned? She didn’t look it.

  “I know. I know. Now it’ll be different for us. I’ve got a lifetime of love to give and I couldn’t give it to just anyone. Understand?”

  “Yeah,” I replied, beginning to relax. Man, The Wig was really working! “I know what you mean.”

  “Most people are not very nice, are they?”

  “No. Most people are not very nice.”

  Then we were silent. We danced arm in arm across Central Park West and up the five steps of a very respectable brownstone, just as the siren, like a proclamation, announced twelve o’clock.

  The girl’s two-rooms-and-kitchenette was very clean. There were no cockroaches, rats, mice, no leeches, no tigers.

  Softly feminine, the girl said, “Relax, baby.”

  Then she came over and tried to rip the button-down shirt from my body.

  “Take it easy, baby,” I said, biting her neck. “We have all the time in the world.”

  “I know, I know,” she said contritely, “but I must have this release.”

  She elbowed me so hard that I fell backward onto a big brass bed, where she proceeded to remove my loafers, socks, and blue jeans. I wore no shorts because the chicken costume was very warm.

  The girl kissed the soles of my feet.

  “Come on up here,” I said, feeling my kingly juices.

  “You have beautiful strong legs.”

  I kicked her lightly on the chin, she fell back on the floor. I jumped off the bed. Ready, at attention. She whimpered. I mounted her right on the floor. She sighed and patted my forehead. I sighed. Irritable, I also frowned. “Let’s cut the James Bond bit. Let’s get this show on the road.”