He crossed K Street and walked slowly back toward the restaurant, still grasping the heavy, empty bottle by the neck through the bag. Across the street from the Shelbourne, he found a spot, half submerged in shadow and half lit by a streetlamp, which gave him a good view of the front door. A few minutes after 11:00, the restaurant’s interior lights went out. Barry emerged and pulled the heavy wooden door shut tight behind him.
Gibson knew that Barry’s backpack contained the zippered bag that the owner slipped into the bank’s night deposit slot each evening. Barry double-checked the lock on the front door, then crossed the quiet street to walk the half-block to the bank. Gibson stepped back fully into the darkness.
Barry’s footsteps grew louder as he approached, the heels of his boots clapping on the sidewalk. Soon he was inches from Gibson, his eyes focused straight ahead. As Barry passed, Gibson moved out behind him and swung the bottle violently, connecting with the back of Barry’s head. To Gibson, things seemed to be moving in soothing slow motion. Blood jumped into the light of the streetlamp, and Barry’s body thudded to the ground.
Gibson’s heart beat rubbery in his chest, but he was otherwise calm as he reached for the backpack lying beside Barry’s still form. The colors on the street were vibrant and clear. The night breeze was pleasant on his face.
For the first time that day, Gibson felt at peace. His headache, and the weight upon his shoulders, had lifted.
THE MESSENGER OF SOULSVILLE
BY NORMAN KELLEY
Cardozo, N.W.
Connie D’Ambrosio rose from her slumber and slowly rubbed her tingly right ass cheek. Normally she would have smiled remembering the sensation from the powerful slaps her posterior had welcomed the night before; she would have looked at herself in the full-length mirror and marveled at the reddish splotches on her rump. Connie had told her new lover, Douglas, that this was the only thing that carried over in her blood from Sicily, it having been invaded by the Moors, George S. Patton, and others over the centuries.
She was proud of her Mediterranean heritage, especially with people like Fellini, Sophia Loren, and Marcello Mastroianni on the world scene. Her olive complexion, a hint of melanin, meant she could pass for anything from the old, Old World: Arab, Jew, Spaniard, Greek, a southern-coast French woman, or even a Gypsy. With a head full of deep curls and raven-black hair, she knew that she was one generation away from not being considered white. When she had explained to Douglas the previous night the numerous ways in which Italian-Americans had been discriminated against (before becoming officially designated as “white” like Jews and Slavs), he merely smiled and gave her some serious tongue, working her in a way that only a saxophone player could.
But this morning there was a new sensation. It wasn’t the morning afterglow from their lovemaking, or even the receding skin-burn of a wondrous butt-slapping. No. This was an extremely localized sensation pinpointed just below the curve of her luscious right ass cheek.
She instinctively reached for the bed’s linen, only to discover that no sheets or blankets were covering her. Then she felt something else over her: burlap. She was wearing a burlap gown? The texture of the cloth almost made her ill. The thought of such a vulgar fabric touching her skin, covering her body, was beyond the pale. The finest linen, fabrics of the highest order, had graced her since birth. Constance D’Ambrosio was to the manor born: one built on the numerous misfortunes of former associates of her father, Carmine D’Ambrosio, a businessman of indeterminate affairs.
Sensing something was wrong, she rolled over to reach for the night lamp on the evening table. The cold concrete smacked her hard as she hit the floor.
“I don’t like this fucking dream,” she moaned in her Jersey-girl accent that only revealed itself under the most extreme circumstances. Slowly, she sat up and began collecting her wits, adjusting her eyesight to the darkness. She noticed a shaft of dim light slashing through the room, but what truly caught her attention was a shiny reflection off some polished surface. Two polished surfaces. Within seconds her mind began filling in the blanks and she realized that those surfaces were her shoes.
Connie tried to rise, but her foot slipped, landing her on her rump, shooting pain to the tingly spot. “Damn it.”
“Are you all right?” inquired a man’s voice from over by the shoes.
Connie scrambled backward upon the bed and drew her legs in. “Who are you? What’s going on?”
“Don’t be alarmed,” said the man. “No one is going to hurt you.”
“Where am I?” She lowered her volume. “Where’s Douglas? Do you know who I am?”
“Yes,” said the figure sitting quietly in the darkness. “That’s why you were brought here.”
“Then you know who my father is and what he’ll do to anyone who lays a hand on me! He’ll—”
“Does that include Douglas?”
Connie said nothing.
“I’m sure he doesn’t know about Douglas, nor would he approve of your taste for…what do your people call us, mouliani?”
The stains of Connie’s lust were conveyed in a series of photos that the man slid to her across the concrete floor. Though it was dark in the room, she could make out enough of the images to recognize herself in a series of explicit contortions with her black lover. She fleetingly recalled those moments of pleasure, but the wondrous feelings turned to shame and self-recrimination as she imagined her father seeing the photos. Don D’Ambrosio was a man of respect.
“Miss D’Ambrosio,” continued the man from the shadows, “we have a situation that requires your assistance.”
“My assistance?!” she shot back. “You kidnapped me! That’s what this is about, isn’t it? How much do you want? Do you think that you’ll live long enough to get it from my father? He’ll—”
“Not if he sees the photos,” interrupted the voice. It was cool and cunning. Connie had become familiar with the timbre of black men’s voices, and he sounded like one, only educated.
The photos meant blackmail. He was right: Her father would have a genuinely violent reaction if he saw them. Whatever situation she was in, she would have to get herself out of it.
“What is it that you want?”
“This is a delicate situation, Miss D’Ambrosio. We want you to call your father.”
“What?” She shook her head in bewilderment. “No.” The fear had set in. She knew the consequences of breaching her family’s honor.
“Your father has taken something that belongs to anoth man, and he wants it returned.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re a hostage, Miss D’Ambrosio. Your father and his associates have taken something that doesn’t belong to them, and the rightful owners want it back. At the right time, all you have to do is make a phone call to your father and ask him to return it. Nothing else will be required of you; you’ll get the photos and negatives.”
“Return what?” replied the woman. “I wake up in a sack and you hold me responsible for something I didn’t take?!”
The man stood and stepped back into the deeper shadows of the room. She heard him knock three times on a door, then a dead bolt sliding.
“Sophia Devereaux.”
“What? Who the hell is tha—Hey!”
The light that entered the room was quickly extinguished, but it silhouetted the man’s lean body in a dark suit as he left.
“Wait!” She rushed to the door, almost tripping over the burlap gown. “Look, I’ll do it!” She pounded with her small fists. “Just get me some clothes! Get me some real clothes!
GET ME SOME REAL CLOTHES!”
* * *
Dr. Minister Mallory Rex’s footsteps echoed through the cavernous basement as he made his way past the warren of rooms to the stairs leading him away from the devil’s bitch that the Messenger had instructed him to cage. When he got to the ground floor of Washington, D.C.’s Temple of Ife No. 1, he told the chief sister, Maaloulou, to get the captive something better than burlap.
/> “After all, she is our guest, and we Afrikans always attend to our guests’ needs. As is our custom.”
“As is our custom,” replied the dark woman dressed in white from head to toe, then she bowed her head.
The doctor minister continued through the temple, nodding to the other brothers and sisters he passed as he thought about the situation that had been handed him. And he thought the situation was beneath him.
Dr. Minister Mallory Rex made them feel proud. He was a former officer in the United States Marine Corps, a war hero cashiered for sleeping with a fellow officer’s wife—a yacoub’s bitch. He had fallen within the white man’s military, but had risen and moved forward with a new mission after reading Dr. Isaiah Afrika’s words in Rise Ye Mighty Race: A Message to the New Blackman Dr. Isaiah Afrika had laid the foundation for the Original Kingdom of Afrika based on a conflation of Yoruba and Islam: Izlam. Now it was the relentless recruiting, mesmerizing telegenic appearances, and stylistic zeal of Dr. Rex that captivated the faithful and put fear into the hearts of yacoubs, the nation of white devils. And who knew their trickery and deceitfulness better than one who had served faithfully during his years as a “lost Negro” nigorant but loyal, as the Messenger of Izlam once said of the sleeping blacks he called the “walking dead.”
Thus far the operation had gone according to plan. The she-devil, while taking her lusts, was unaware that her new lover, Douglas, a follower of the Original Kingdom of Afrika, was under orders to bring her in. Inebriated, she didn’t feel a thing, thinking she was being pinched and stroked, when he inserted a small needle into her rumptious tush, putting her soundly to sleep. Hiding her inside his double-bass case, Douglas wheeled her from his apartment on 16th Street onto U Street, in the direction of the temple near the corner of 14th. No one would have thought anything was untoward, certainly not a colored musician rolling his instrument down a street of clubs, southern fried joints, and gut-bucket gospel storefronts. These establishments stretched west from the Howard Theater area to the social axis of U and 14th streets, the heart of Soulsville. It was the center of “third places,” the loci between work and home for the city’s colored population, the best place for the Temple of Ife to recruit the walking dead.
Dr. Rex knocked on the double doors leading to the Messenger’s meditation chamber and waited for the word. Upon hearing it, he removed his shoes, entered a large room with a gurgling fountain in the center, and bowed to the figure in white who sat divining the wisdom of Olodumare with cowrie shells.
“May our Lord and Father be with you,” said Rex.
“And He unto you, my son,” answered the Messenger, without looking up. He counted several shells and moved them around. “It’s been written that you have received some wisdom.”
“Yes,” said Rex, who walked over to the old man’s desk and pressed a button. Water ushered forth from the fountain more loudly.
[FBI Agent 1: Damn it, that smart-assed nigger turned up the volume again.
FBI Agent 2: Hoover is going to have our butts if we bring in more flushing toilets!]
Rex placed himself in front of the man who had made blackness a badge of honor. For untold minutes the master and teacher uttered not a word, letting the sound of water wash over them and empty their heads.
Rex slowly opened his eyes and presented a koan to the Messenger: “Why?”
The old man said nothing at first, his dried lips unparted. The student knew something was coming by the way the old man’s Adam’s apple began to move above his collar.
“Because the Blackman has to become a man of respect.”
Man of respect, thought Rex as he crossed U Street, stopping by Brother’s Shoe Shine Shop to pick up a copy of the Evening Star.
“Good seeing you, brother minister,” said Herman, the legless newsie, looking up to Rex from his platform affixed to four wheels. Herman had always considered himself half a man until he met Dr. Minister Mallory Rex, the only black man in America who truly confronted the devils. He and the denizens of Soulsville, while most of them God-fearing Christians, had welcomed back the black prince from exile after his intemperate remarks brought the Kingdom scorn and opprobrium during the nation’s mourning of the white devils’ fallen leader. He had been cast aside for nearly a year, watching lesser men attempt to claim his position, “trying to rap like Rex” but falling flat on their faces. The Kingdom’s numbers were down. Recruitment had flattened, and the coffers were less than full. It was Rex who added a kind of severe glamour and dash to the humorless black men in white robes who preached Izlam on the street corners of America’s urban bantustans while Uncle Tom ministers called for reconciliation and integration. It was the “mighty Rex” who the brothers proclaimed “cool and slick,” and who the sister women, O.K.A. and not, wished would park his shoes beneath their beds.
Rex understood his new mission: He was on a test. Would he do the dirty work of the Kingdom?
“Peace,” he said to the half-man.
As he walked toward his appointment, the prince of Soulsville observed that U Street was having its streetcar tracks removed—a sign that the sleepy little city was maturing. The Metropolitan Board was laying down the beginnings of a subway system like New York’s.
This stretch of northwest D.C., from 11th Street west to 18th, had seen better days. It was, as one book Rex had read suggested, its own “secret city.” Earlier, a better tone of Negroes had resided there, but the influx of rough-and-umble Southern blacks had changed the place and driven them away. It now had the odor of real people; it was a place of beauty parlors, fried hair, and big-hipped bouffant-do sisters. Men still wore hats but the new looks, the “James Brown” process and the “Afro,” were making barbers anxious. There was a different mood in the air; the elders called it “funky” and the youths ran with it. Soul Brother No. 1 had announced a “brand-new bag,” and civil-rights cats working for SNCC hung out at Ben’s Chili Bowl, with kids constantly coming in and out of the three cinemas along the way: the Lincoln, the Republic, and the Booker T.
D.C. was different. D.C. was country, and that meant a slower sense of reality—colored people time, heightened by the lush foliage of the area and its legendary humidity. The whole city had the feel of a village since the buildings were no more than three stories high in residential areas and ten or less in the commercial districts. It was a chocolate city, a city in which over seventy percent of the population was colored, invisible to the master class that lived there and ignored by the indifferent tourists visiting the national edifices.
But D.C. was also a city of an aspiring middle class that was branching out from Le Droit Park, Shaw, and U Street, to the tree-shaded “Gold Coast” of upper 16th Street. There resided the “big-ticket Negroes” that Rex rallied against in the oasis of Meridian Hill Park, cited in the past as one of the most beautiful landscaped parks in the country. On a warm spring day, when the heat brought out the richness in colored people’s skin, making them glow, the Original Kingdom of Afrika would hold its annual Kingdom’s Day in this park, creating a huge Afrikan village in the heart of bourgie D.C. Hundreds of vendors would lay out their wares in stalls, and it was at the Groove Records pavilion on Kingdom’s Day that Dr. Minister Mallory Rex had first met Sophia Devereaux.
And he well remembered her when he slid into the booth at Ben’s Chili Bowl across from her brother, Lorenzo Devereaux. Rex told the record producer that phase one had been completed and that the Messenger approved of the recording that Groove Records was making of his speeches.
Ten years younger than the man facing him, Lorenzo Devereaux shifted the conversation to the real agenda for the meeting: the mob’s encroachment on all that his family had achieved. Groove Records had been on a steady roll of soul and sweaty R&B hit records since the 1950s, and these days even the “legit” labels were salivating over their work, wondering how they were doing it: making music and money. Now these wop bastards thought they could just walk in and take over their company because “niggers ain’
t shit and had no protection.”
Three days earlier, Lorenzo had met with his step-mother and half-brother, Leon, to discuss the family crisis. Sophia, his half-sister, had been kidnapped by the Gambino family of New Jersey, headed by Carmine D’Ambrosio.
“We need to get some back-up,” Lorenzo urged. “We’re going to get some black people who aren’t afraid of the mob.”
O.K.A.
“Are you crazy!!” Leon had recently assumed the position of president of Groove Records and did not like the idea at all. He wanted to call in the police.
“Yeah, sure,” said Lorenzo, stubbing out his Chesterfield in an ashtray. “Go to the cops, the FBI, the same people who been spying on Daddy and Mama for years! I say we handle this way. I have a contact with the Kingdom.”
“You’re crazy, man!” Leon protested.
But Leon had no real plan other than calling the police. Either capitulate or ask the cops to handle it. It wasn’t fair, he thought. He was just supposed to handle record deals, make money, cruise around in his Cadillac, and go to bed with red-bone lovelies…and show up his bastard half-brother, Lorenzo. In Leon’s eyes, Lo resented the fact that their father had chosen him to run the firm, despite the fact that Leon’s own mother thought the half-brother should be at the helm. Perhaps Lo was more competent as an executive, but doesn’t blood—full blood—count for something?
Betty Lou Compton, the legendary jazz pianist and composer, the woman who had rescued Groove from the dark days of the Red Scare, was silent. This was a gamble. Her daughter’s life, certainly more important than the record company, was in the balance. Yet she understood, as did Lorenzo, that the kidnapping was a form of humiliation, that a family such as the Devereaux could not fully protect itself on its own. The police and the FBI would likely be indifferent, given the accusations the bureau had made against them in the past. They wouldn’t even protect those poor civil-rights demonstrators who were beaten during freedom rides in the South. It was rumored that Hoover thought Martha Reeves’s “Dancing in the Streets” was an underground call for riots and demonstrations.
D.C. Noir Page 23
