Black & White

by Lewis Shiner

  The protesters shifted around in apparent confusion for a few seconds, then dropped their signs and quickly lined up across the front of the building, holding hands. Howard and the Harriman kid were in the middle, the word “Dreamland” visible on the plate glass window behind them. It would have made a perfect photo if someone had been there to take it.

  Leon walked up to Howard and said, “What the hell you doing?”

  “Morning, Leon,” Howard said. “I guess we’re not going to let you have this one.”

  “Dammit, Barrett, don’t do this.”

  “It’s already done, man.”

  Leon returned. “What now, Captain?”

  “I don’t see that we have much choice. We’ll come back Monday, try again.” Robert walked over to the crane. “Okay,” he called, “might as well—”

  Johnston, the crane operator, had his window shut and he was staring straight ahead. As Robert watched, he worked the levers and the wrecking ball began to bob gently from side to side.

  Robert climbed onto the running board and rapped on the window with his knuckles. “Hey!”

  The wrecking ball swung out over the street and then dove into the front of the building.

  He’d aimed high, Robert saw, well over the heads of the protesters, and at the sight of the incoming ball, they’d all run for it. Except Howard and the Harriman boy.

  The building groaned as the ball hit. Fissures appeared between the bricks, followed by pinging sounds as the surviving windows cracked and popped loose and shattered on the ground. Dust sifted onto all their heads, including Robert’s.

  “Get away from there!” Leon shouted at Howard.

  Johnston took the ball back for another go. Robert tried the door; it was locked. He pounded on the window with his fists.

  The second blow took the weakened sections of wall apart with a massive crunch. Bricks clattered into the abandoned store. Of the few that fell outward, one caught Harriman in the head.

  He collapsed across the sidewalk.

  Johnston finally looked up. “Get out of there!” Robert shouted. “What the hell is the matter with you?”

  Johnston gestured for Robert to step away, then got out of the crane.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Robert shouted at him.

  Johnston shook his head and walked away. “Damn kids,” he said.

  Robert ran to where Harriman lay. Howard and the other protesters were kneeling and standing around him. Howard was talking to a white girl. “The ambulance first, understand? Then call the papers. You got dimes?” She nodded and sprinted away.

  “How bad is it?” Robert asked.

  “He’s all right,” Howard said. Harriman had his eyes open. Blood seeped through the layer of brick dust and chips on his left temple. “We’ll get our coverage now.”

  *

  By the time the ambulance and the cops and the newspapers had come and gone, it was after noon.

  “It’s my fault that boy got hurt,” Robert said to Howard when it was all over.

  “I want some credit,” Howard said. “I had to do the actual work.”

  “Somebody could have gotten killed.”

  Howard stared at him as if he were a child or a simpleton. “What kind of stakes you think we been playing for? For the last 400 years?”

  Robert nodded. “I guess I’ll be seeing you again, now.”

  “Yeah.”

  Robert turned to go.

  “Robert? You going to see her?”

  “I don’t know.” Even with the crisis, he’d thought about little else all morning.

  “When you do, tell her I asked after her.”

  “If I do,” Robert said, “I’ll tell her.”

  *

  He stayed in the office until after six. Mitch had used up the first part of the afternoon, going over the events of the morning again and again, until Robert managed to convince him that Howard had gotten what he wanted. There would be no lawyers, no police investigations. “Face it,” Robert finally told him. “It was a black crane operator and a black kid. Nobody cares.”

  Later he had taken out the specifications and surveys for the East-West Expressway and tried in vain to picture the highway they implied.

  Ruth had already departed for the weekend when Robert got home. She’d left fried chicken and mashed potatoes cooling on the kitchen counter, slaw in the refrigerator.

  Robert set the food in the refrigerator and showered. When he got out he put Charlie Shavers’ Live from Chicago on the turntable and stood at the window, looking at a small patch of green lawn that had just begun to recover from the winter’s cold.

  He’d spent most of his life in harness to principles. Some he’d gotten from his father, like importance of service, and the need to be independent and strong. On his own he’d discovered the power and satisfaction that came from realizing abstract ideas like home and shelter and commerce in terms of concrete and steel.

  Now he wondered if things were not simpler than he’d ever imagined, so simple that every dog and bird and insect and fish on the planet could understand them. Avoid pain. Seek pleasure.

  The music evoked in lucid detail his night at the Wonderland three years before. The sight of Mercy, the sound of the musicians on stage, even more powerfully, the feelings about the music that he and Mercy had shared, feelings that had stunned and overwhelmed him. Who but a fool would turn his back on feelings that strong? What obligations, what commitments, could be more important?

  He took a bottle of brandy from the kitchen cabinet and set it, with a glass, on the table in the den. Mitch would not hesitate in this situation, he knew. Robert understood that thus far he had let events carry him along, and that if he went forward now it had to be by choice.

  He was not a churchgoing man, but like his father before him he believed in a God of compassion and justice. A weakness like Cindy Berkshire God could surely forgive. A woman like Mercy, who worshipped demons and had given herself to strangers, was another story entirely.

  He also knew that if he opened the bottle he would not stop after one or two drinks, and there would be many, many more nights of insensibility to follow. Surely God did not intend for him to live in a haze of anesthesia.

  He took the bottle and glass back to the kitchen and turned the hi-fi up for a trumpet solo. In doing so, he saw that he had made up his mind. When the song finished, he carefully put the record away, turned off the receiver and turned out the lights, and drove to the house on Beamon Street.

  *

  It was 8:00 when he pulled up in front of Mercy’s house. Her Impala was in the driveway. He was so keyed up he was afraid of a coronary.

  You have only Howard’s word that she remembers you at all, he told himself. And that was three years ago. Most of all, you have no reason to believe there’s not some other man in there with her right now. But with his decisions made and only the last few feet of the journey to go, he was in a hurry. He shut off the engine and locked the car, in concession to the neighborhood, then walked quickly up to the porch, oblivious to the night and everything around him.

  He knocked, heard someone moving inside. The door opened on a chain. He glimpsed Mercy inside as the door closed and the chain rattled and the door opened again. Then, as on that night at the Wonderland, she slipped into his arms as if they’d been holding each other all their lives.

  *

  He didn’t emerge again until Sunday afternoon. He was red-eyed from lack of sleep, freshly scrubbed, back in the clothes he’d barely worn. He wasn’t angry anymore.

  When she’d let him in, Coltrane’s Kulu Se Mama was playing softly in the background. The lights were low and the air was sweet with scented candles. She was even more beautiful than he remembered, in bare feet and jeans and a black T-shirt. “I got so tired of white clothes in my mambo days,” she told him later, “I haven’t worn white since.”

  Robert knew from the first that the night would end in her bed. That certainty made it possible to t
alk, to move slowly, to answer some of the questions that fluttered like moths inside his head. He needed to put words to feelings, to understand what she saw in him, to believe that he was not just a victim of “jungle fever,” as Howard had said.

  “That first time, at the Wonderland, it was the music,” she told him. “It was like a light shining out of you. Then, when I had my arms around you, it was like we were in a soundproof room, no clocks on the walls, nothing outside the doors.”

  It had been the same for him. The feeling you have on the second day of a long vacation, he told her, lying on a beach with all the time in the world. As he said the words, the thought of Ruth and Jamaica gave him a momentary pang of guilt. But the intervening years had taken the heat from the memory, and it had no real power over him.

  Mercy had an astounding collection of records, and she’d played one after another, save for those few hours when they’d slept in each other’s arms.

  They’d talked, a little, of race. Her skin was no darker than that of Spaniards or Italians he’d known. She could have passed for white, lived anywhere. New York, Paris.

  “Only by denying my mama,” she told him, “and I would never do that. Her skin is dark black, African black, and you can see my face in hers. It was my daddy that was white, or so she tells me.”

  “You don’t know who he was?”

  She shook her head. “All she would ever say was that it didn’t matter, that I was her child and not his. All he gave me was his color. All he gave my mama was me. Whenever I’d ask about him, all she’d say was, ‘That’s old business,’ and that was that. She wants that secret to die with her, and I imagine it will. Nobody changes my mama’s mind.”

  Robert tried to imagine his own life without the towering presence of his father. “It must be hard,” he said.

  “A lot of kids my age were the same,” Mercy said. “I wasn’t the only one didn’t even know who my father was. It bothered me from time to time, but there are some things in this life you just got to let go of.”

  They talked about that night in the woods, something Robert had not yet been able to let go of.

  “My mama is what they call a conjure woman,” Mercy said. They were still sitting on her couch. He had his left arm around her, and she was holding his other hand against her right thigh. Her long, fragrant hair fell in black curls around both of their faces. He hadn’t kissed her yet.

  “So I was around hoodoo, as she called it, all my life. Root work, charms, a mishmash of Catholicism and vodou. I grew up in it the way other people grow up Baptist or AME. When I went to college at NCC, I started to learn about the real thing. I was working part-time at a beauty parlor in Hayti then, to help pay for school. I fell in with some people that were still practicing it. They were descendents of the artisans that Dr. Moore brought over from the island of Haiti back around the turn of the century. I even got to meet one of the men who made the symbol for St. Joseph’s. He was the one who first introduced me to Erzulie.

  “It was so powerful. I’d never known anything like it. So I saved my money and I went to Haiti for six months and wrote about it when I got back. They call it independent study now, but they didn’t have a name for it then. I pretty much made up my own curriculum from a mix of religion and anthropology, and they gave me a BA for it, which I used to get a job in a bank.”

  “But you believed in it.”

  “Do you believe in gravity?” Mercy said. “There’s a force in vodou, a power you can feel. You felt it.”

  The sound of the drums came unbidden into Robert’s head. “Yes.”

  “The thing is, it uses you. That’s what I felt when the lwa left me that night and I saw you watching me. At first I was mad. I thought, I don’t need to be seeing myself through some white man’s eyes. White people don’t have any magic of their own, all they want is to rob it from the people that do. But then, a few weeks later, I found myself thinking, What am I doing? As a black person, as a woman, what am I doing letting someone—some thing—use my body this way? Isn’t that how it’s always been?”

  “You were able to just walk away from it? Nobody said anything?”

  “There was trouble. A lot of people were upset, saw it as a betrayal. Barrett stood up for me, made them see they were trying to turn religion into another kind of slavery.”

  “Barrett still believes.”

  “He wants so hard to believe. He thinks black people aren’t strong enough to win freedom on our own. ‘Outnumbered and outgunned,’ he always used to say. He thinks the lwa are our allies. That we need their power to get our rights.”

  “And you?”

  “In real vodou, in Haiti, there’s only one God. The lwa are like saints to a Catholic. They’re a way to let you approach God, Le Gran Met, who can be a little hard to find sometimes. They’re not an end in themselves.”

  “So you believe in God.”

  “I think that when someone does an act of charity, of unselfish kindness, that’s what God is. God is the spirit that enters the person when they do that. But there are other spirits, too. There’s Erzulie, who enters you when you give yourself over to sexual pleasure.” She glanced at him then, with a smile whose implications left him dizzy. “There’s Damballah, who is the desire for power over others, or Ogoun Feraille, the spirit of war and killing. There’s a hundred different lwa. For me it came down to the question of whether I was going to continue to step away and not be there when all these things were happening to me.”

  “And you can control it? Erzulie isn’t going to one day come and push you aside?”

  “No. She’s there. Like God, I think she’s a part of all of us. But I’m the one in control.” She looked at him again and didn’t look away. “You’ll see.”

  It was then that Robert did, at last, kiss her.

  Later, still on the couch, both of them half-drunk with desire, Robert said, “I’m still married. I have to tell you that. The marriage is a travesty, but I don’t know how to get out of it.”

  She shrugged. “Like Houdini used to say, when you’re ready, you’ll get out. I don’t like it, but I’m not going to wait for her to be gone. I’ve waited long enough.”

  So had Robert. He stood up and held out his hand to take her into the bedroom. As on the dance floor, she followed his lead. But once in the bedroom, she said, “I’m going to show you how to give me what I want.” They took off the last of their clothes and he lay down on the bed next to her. The sheets were dark blue and perfumed with the oils she used on her skin: jasmine, vanilla, and sweet almond. She took his penis in one hand and said, “This is very beautiful, and later I want to feel it inside me. But first I want you to touch me with these,” she kissed his lips, “and these.” She took both his hands and put them on her body.

  He didn't need instructions. All words left his head. His self-conscious, supervising brain was evicted by a creature of the flesh that knew only desire and love and excruciating pleasure, tenderness and awe.

  It was a long time before they talked coherently again. That too was intoxicating, and small coincidences took on profound significance. They had, for instance, both read the same Encyclopedia Britannica article about ancient Egypt. Robert was after hard facts about the pyramids. Mercy was caught up in magic and symbols, and had learned to write her grade school friends’ names in hieroglyphics.

  In October of 1950, Mercy’s great aunt Cecilia had driven Mercy to Asheville. They’d driven through the grounds of the Biltmore Estate and seen the mansion from the outside, but Cecilia had declined to go in, despite the fact that the tours were integrated even then. She was a tireless booster of the Negro race who did not care to mingle with whites. There was also some question about the expense.

  The idea that they had been so near to each other so long ago gave Robert an odd, melancholy sense of thwarted destiny. If Cecilia had come inside, and 10-year-old Robert had seen 9-year-old Mercy, would he have felt something? Could it have changed his future, magically prevented his marriage to Ru
th?

  Aunt Cecilia, as Mercy described her, was the opposite of Mercy’s mother. She was vain, materialistic, fond of gin, and quick to laugh. She couldn’t understand why Mercy’s mother never wanted to leave home. So it was Aunt Cecilia who took Mercy to the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem at the age of 13.

  Mercy couldn’t remember the name of the band that played that night. Nobody famous, she said. What she remembered was the power of the jazz orchestra: the blaring wall of trombones, the booming tom-toms, the clarinets and trumpets soaring high above the rhythm. And the dancers. These were the best Lindy Hoppers in the world, filling the 10,000-square-foot dance floor and jumping, she said, “like human popcorn.”

  Robert had only been 6 when he saw his first swing band at the Biltmore, and the dancing hardly compared to the Savoy. But it was the week the war ended in the Pacific, and the mood of jubilation was like nothing he’d seen since. That feeling got tied up in his head with the music and the dancing.

  For Mercy it was life-changing. Home again in Bentonville, she began to sneak out on weekends and hitchhike the 75 miles to Hayti. “I was crazy, out of my mind. I know I made my mama sick with worry, but there was nothing short of handcuffs and leg irons could have kept me in that house.”

  She’d been lucky. On her first trip to Hayti she’d found her way to the Biltmore Hotel. There she had fallen in with sober, married, churchgoing Bernie, who had showed her the basic Lindy footwork and then watched out for her. “Already at 13 I was pretty well developed, and there was more than one man wanted to take me upstairs. After a night of dancing, I might have gone, too, if it wasn’t for Bernie.”

  For Robert there was deep cosmic meaning in his having learned to dance at the Biltmore Estate and her having learned at the Biltmore Hotel. The hand of destiny seemed to be everywhere.

  Time and again Mercy would toss off a remark, turning away as she said it, or dropping her voice nearly to inaudibility, as if she meant it only for herself but couldn’t keep from saying it aloud. Wordplay, quotes from songs, references to a made-up cast of characters that lived in her head, the inventions of a restless intelligence that thought no one was listening. Robert, also an only child, recognized the symptoms. He didn’t catch all of it, especially at first; what he heard and understood showed a soft, goofy underbelly that charmed him as much as anything about her. She reacted to his laughter with a raised eyebrow at first, later with a tentative smile, and finally with a flurry of jokes. Robert saw in all of it a loneliness, a hunger to be understood, a fear of rejection.