A Taste of Honey

by Jabari Asim

  Doo-wop

  mortimer races through the North Side. His windows are down, but the rush of air fails to drown out the scents and sounds of the dark temptations surrounding him—the unavoidable funk and rhythm of life in this half of the city: the black streets, the black corners, the black skins shining in black windows and lounging insolently on black porches, where the smoky residue of hickory-smoked ribs still lingers. The loud voices, barking dogs, car horns, snatches of music, the distant wail of sirens.

  As he bounces around, over and through the endless maze of potholes in front of Royal Packing Company, the stench of the day’s slaughtered pigs does battle with the dark. Above him the blood-red moon seems more than appropriate. The evening’s activities had provided the most fun he’d had in weeks, until his freak of a partner went creepy on him. First there was the incident in front of the Top Hat. Mortimer had been determined to make that boy sing some Ink Spots or pee in his pants, whichever came first. Kneeling beside the boy lying stretched out on the sidewalk, he sang softly, trying to lead his youthful captive into the first strains of “Cow Cow Boogie,” but the idiot wouldn’t go for it. Mortimer thought he was preparing to join in on the opening of “My Prayer,” but he stayed stubborn. Then Grimes made a sound that distracted him, and the boy got away. Leaning into the little suspect’s frightened, puzzled face, close enough to see his spittle landing on the monkey’s cheeks and nose, he heard a noise behind his ear just like the click of a safety. When he turned around, Grimes’s hands were at his sides and he was looking in the other direction. Tall and deadly silent, his black shadow revealed a hint of crimson under that bloody moon.

  The second incident was at that peculiar-ass sign shop, the Black Swan. They’d cornered that sneaky little no-singing nigger when Grimes actually told him to shut up. Hush, he’d said. In front of other people.

  “Spooky black-ass mother …” Mortimer finds himself pondering that awful click—had he only imagined it?

  Loud as a gunshot, his rear windshield explodes.

  “What the hell—”

  He screeches to a stop at the curb, races out with his gun drawn. He wheels around frantically, scanning the darkness. He sees no one. In his car, a black rock, about the size of a fist, sits on the backseat.

  I really don’t need this, he thinks. Then again, maybe I do.

  He gets back in his car, slowly cruises the neighborhood. Perhaps a little exercise would get it all out of his system. Make the rock thrower pay for his stupidity. Encourage him to sing a little doo-wop while he’s at it. Between two buildings on West Belle, he thinks he spots a furtive movement, casually steers in that direction.

  Nillmon, God rest his soul, he was a partner. Cover for you in a heartbeat, and never too busy or too chicken to bust a black ass when the occasion called for it. And that was nearly every day.

  Of course he’d had other partners. None was as terrific as Nillmon, but none was as god-awful as the scary fucker he was stuck with these days. Always wearing black leather gloves in the heat of the goddamn day. Grimes could break a nigger just as good as a white cop could, but he was strangely choosy; not just any nigger would do. He’d shoot Mortimer a chilly stare to let him know certain niggers were hands-off.

  A well-worn path leads behind the billboards. Mortimer, heading toward it as if on automatic pilot, recalls how it all went down. That crook Ananias Goode must have his wallet up somebody’s ass. One day he’s in there talking to the precinct captain, the next day my lieutenant’s telling me some citizens’ review board has filed a complaint against me. Coons kicking up dust, he says, you know how it is. Then the bastard assigns one of the two black detectives in the whole goddamn city to “partner” with me. Partner my ass. Spooky sonofabitch never even lets me drive.

  Crossing Sarah Street, Mortimer loses himself in a fog of memories. So many ass kickings, all in the name of keeping the peace. The Hudson Brothers, Frank and Jesse, in the alley behind Beaumont High. That uppity L. B. Tate, thought he ran Hebert Street. Well, we took care of that. That blind nigger on Vandeventer. Nillmon had dropped dead of stomach cancer long before that. Drunk-ass Elrod Keys. He got stone-cold sober and started callin’ for his mama when we stretched him across those railroad tracks. That headstrong fool named Alfonso. He was a nigger that needed a thorough job.

  With one hand on the wheel Mortimer strokes the handle of his gun, now tucked into his belt. He leans out the window and spits harder than necessary.

  Just past Sarah, he slows, cuts his engine. In the shadows a stone’s toss away, he spies a figure cutting across a lot that is empty except for a pair of towering, improbably placed billboards. On one of them, a Champale ad features a grinning black couple dressed for a night on the town. The caption urges, “Ready … set … GLOW!” On the other, a white man beams despite his black eye. “Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch,” he declares. He and Mortimer would be the only white faces around if not for the South Side stragglers cruising nearby Washington Avenue—a.k.a. the Stroll—for black prostitutes. Mortimer’s quarry disappears behind the beams supporting the billboards. A little foot pursuit will be good, prolong the pleasure of the hunt. Mortimer grabs his flashlight.

  On a balcony two stories up, a window is open. Sounds of love ride the heat: faint jazz, the thump of a headboard against the wall, a woman moaning. To Mortimer it conjures fierce rutting—wild, sordid, beastly. He wants to stay and bask in its radiance. But he moves on. The Comet Theatre comes into view.

  The moon is evil. Charlotte can’t help thinking so.

  It was superstitious talk, and Dr. Noel would never approve. But Dr. Noel probably also would not approve of a young lady walking unescorted through black Gateway’s oldest neighborhood so long past nightfall. After checking on every last baby in the pediatric ward of Abram Higgins Hospital for the hundredth and final time, Dr. Noel would be cruising in her Cadillac to her mansion on Lindell Boulevard. Maybe she’d stop at Nat-Han Steakhouse and grab something good for a late dinner. Charlotte often imagined what the great woman did in the evenings after work. Charlotte’s two years volunteering at Abram H. had changed her life. She’d seen her destiny in that fabled yellow-brick complex: She was born to be a healer. That feeling had only been reinforced by her time spent assisting the legendary Dr. Artinces Noel.

  Dr. Noel was a nationally known crusader on behalf of black babies. She had popularized a diet of bananas, rice, applesauce, and toast when a scourge of pediatric diarrhea threatened to wipe out the North Side’s youngest. She’d fought loud, long, and hard for ice cream and bananas in the children’s ward of Abram H. after finding out that white infants were being served all they could eat at the public hospital on the other side of town. A petite Southern lady with a brain for science and a will of steel, Dr. Noel had been featured in Time, Life, and Ebony. She could be impatient with adults, but she never hesitated to do everything humanly possible on behalf of children. As far as Charlotte was concerned, the good doctor walked on water. And she wanted to be just like her.

  That’s why she stayed, holding and rocking babies until the night nurses made her leave. Charlotte sings softly to herself and tries to ignore the moon. It’s just a few blocks between Abram H. and the children’s home. Ed had offered to walk her “home” several times, but she wasn’t yet ready to share her life at the orphanage with him.

  Taking the shortcut behind the billboards, she resolved to tell him everything one day soon. Then he’d understand why she had little stomach for his complaints about his meddling dad. What she wouldn’t give for a meddling dad!

  Hearing footsteps, Charlotte picks up speed. She’s heard them on other evenings and thought nothing of it, but tonight, under a blood-burning moon, they’ve acquired a sinister ring.

  The North Side never gets completely quiet. As for the South Side—what the white folks do when the sun goes down and they’re tired but perhaps satiated from kicking the shit out of black folks all day long, Guts can only speculate. Most black peo
ple came to Gateway courtesy of the Great Migration. You’d never need to go back more than a generation, maybe two, to run up against a North Carolinian, a Georgian, or most likely, a Mississippian. Guts was an exception. Even his grandparents—on both sides—had been born and raised in Gateway. This is his city. It’s in his blood, and though he can count the number of times he’s been on the South Side on his two huge hands, he considers himself a metropolitan man. Times like these are among his favorites. His duties done, his woman waiting, he can roll through the streets taking his sweet time. Soaking in the sights and noises, the familiar, comforting blackness of his hometown. High rollers from Chicago and New York quickly grew bored and blew through like a storm. They said Gateway was a country city, barely “up south” from where the cotton grew high. And they were right. But that’s precisely what Guts loves about it: It never gets too fast for comfort. If the Big Apple is the city that never sleeps, Gateway is the city that never woke all the way up. Easing his comfortable sedan west on Delmar with the river at his back, he takes comfort in his community’s sleepy charms.

  Danger always has a scent, though most of us miss it. After the car crash, the drowning, the tragic stumble off the edge of the cliff, some witness will remark that they’d sensed it coming. But they’d written off that tickle in the nostril, that faint, rude hint of something foul, dismissed it as an allergy or a trick of the air. Charlotte knows better. Her life has left her sharp and sensitive, awake to any sign of atmospheric disturbance. In one foster house (she refuses to call them homes) after another, her nose for trouble has kept her out of it. She has learned to recognize the wispy, rotten fume that bypasses most of us. On the night of her twelfth birthday, it’s what made her sit up in bed, waiting for the sounds that she knew would soon follow: the warning groan of a bedspring released from its heavy burden, feet sliding slyly into slippers that muffled the footfalls but not enough to entirely silence the creaking floorboard in the hallway outside her room. The scent led to the sounds that led to Charlotte’s foster “father” easing open her well-oiled door with practiced stealth, only to encounter an empty bed and a wide-open window.

  On this night, the scent follows the sound. Charlotte hears the footsteps long before the smell hits her. Perhaps it had been hidden in the beer fumes hovering in invisible clouds along Sarah Street, or lost in the teasing tang of hickory smoke from ribs long since consumed. When it hits her, acrid and insistent, she abruptly changes course.

  When she turns, her profile is briefly exposed, the taut hips and firm breasts that Ed Jones has lovingly immortalized in charcoal. Mortimer takes in the curves, pleasantly surprised. Woman? Child? Woman enough. Like a disease bubbling up from a single injured cell, an idea forms.

  When Guts gets his mind on Pearl, it seldom shakes free. Because she sashayed into his imagination back at the last stoplight, his attention is fixed. Up to that point, he had meditated on W. C. Handy, the way the streets look after a cleansing rain, the minor repairs he needed to make on the church van that he drives every Sunday. But then lovely Pearl wiggled her way into his neurons and synapses, and that was all she wrote. Guts can almost taste the meringue when a girl runs directly into the path of his sedan. He slams on the brakes, inches from her startled face. She turns and looks like she wants to say something, but thinks better of it and takes off.

  “Why do people keep running in front of my car tonight? Can’t a brother just go home and get some banana pudding and whatnot?”

  Guts notices the air has changed. Something’s messing with his meringue, and it’s not the stench of Royal Packing Company. Unable to put his finger on it, he sighs, eases off the brakes.

  Sweet nigger gals. To be around them all the time and not touch them was a frustration to Ray Mortimer. How different they were from black men, whom Mortimer despised more than he could say. The men looked all the same. The women, every one of them was distinct. They were so musical in their movements, the way their hips swung, the lilt of their voices. Of course he’d heard stories about them, had almost had sex with a black prostitute who was more than willing, but he’d lost his confidence (“C’mon, baby, let’s see what you got,” she’d said, but it sounded more like a challenge than an invitation). And now this little number, not a block from the Stroll. A veteran hunter, Mortimer is a cunning stalker of game. He knows this girl’s plan to circle the Comet Theatre before she does. When she comes around the other side, breathing hard and half-blind with panic, he’ll be waiting.

  After nearly getting flattened by Guts’s bumper, Charlotte resumes speed. Along the way she scans the ground for a bottle, a rock, anything. But it’s too dark, and the stench of danger is so thick it clogs her lungs. Behind the Comet, she hesitates. Left? Right? She chooses, and the ground rushes up to meet her. It’s a harsh landscape, pocked with pebbles and bits of broken glass that find the soft spots in her cheek. Something has hit her from behind. She fights, crawling and kicking. She is furious and swift but still a girl.

  Mortimer places a hand over her mouth. “You scream and I will kill you,” he says. Charlotte thinks of Ed, Dr. Noel, the babies in the ward. They are always so happy to see her.

  She determines to roll over, to look the Devil in the eye.

  As she flips onto her back, Mortimer flicks on his flashlight, the same instrument he used to knock her to the ground. Charlotte sees only the light, which quickly goes flying. Now she can make out only bright asterisks of color colliding with shadows. She hears sounds of struggle and the yelp of a man in tremendous pain.

  And a voice.

  “Run, girl. Get out of here and don’t look back.”

  The words aren’t shouted but still carry a certain effortless ferocity, as if the man who uttered them was accustomed to prompt obedience. Yet they are gentle at the same time, even kind. She’d never forget that voice. She gets to her feet, brushes the glass and pebbles from her cheek, and runs.

  Danger reeks. Even Mortimer smells it now. The grip around his throat feels like steel. Suddenly it’s gone, and Mortimer, flat on his back, seeks air, merciful air. He struggles to his knees. But now the flashlight is back and shining directly in his eyes. Beyond it is utter, ominous blackness.

  “Wait,” he pleads. It hurts to say it. “I’m a cop.”

  He reaches for his gun, but it’s gone. He gropes for his badge.

  Now Guts knows.

  “Well, if it ain’t Mr. Doo-wop. I’m a W. C. Handy man myself.”

  Mortimer is thrown flat on his back. He closes his eyes, but all he finds is more blackness. A boot, size 14 EEE, rests lightly on his throat.

  “It’s all about choices, my man. I could have chosen to head straight home to my banana pudding. I’m telling you, I could almost taste that meringue. But then that girl ran past my car and I decided to have myself a look-see. Come around here and find you trying to drag her down to your level. Choices, ya know? Tonight I stopped. Another day I might have kept on going. Who’s to say how it all comes out in the end? Damned if you doo-wop, damned if you don’t.”

  He puts his full weight behind his boot as Mortimer gurgles to an end.

  Guts deeply appreciates his pun. Nothing new about that. Except this time he lets himself laugh.

  A Virtuous Woman

  the first morning after Paul’s disappearance, Rose began to reconsider. Maybe the mysterious stranger who dragged off her husband had been not an ogre but an angel instead. The Holy Spirit must have known that she was just a fractured jaw or stair-bumping tumble away from breaking all the way down, must have read her thoughts while she tended the bacon sizzling on her stove. God delivered Daniel, didn’t He? Pulled Shadrach and his fellows from the fiery furnace? Maybe, just maybe, Rose Whittier, a humble servant, found herself next in line for a bit of heavenly grace. And didn’t Rev. Josiah Banks just say on Tent Meeting what she’d heard all her days: He may not come when you want Him, but He always comes on time. She may have needed Him then even more than she realized. And now there she was. Sitting in the q
uiet with a song in her heart. At first she was ashamed of her joyous mood. But waking up without her usual burden was like lifting a window shade and letting the sun in. “Praise God,” she said aloud.

  On the second day, Rose washed all of Paul’s clothes. She opened up her dryer, then thought better of it. Minutes later, Reuben Jones, standing in his kitchen and sipping from a cup of coffee, nearly burned himself with the steaming liquid. He motioned to Pristine, who joined him at the window. “Great Kooga Mooga,” he said. “Do you see what I see?”

  The couple watched in silent wonder as their next-door neighbor hung her husband’s shirts on the line. They could tell by the subtle wobble of the clothespins dangling from her lips that she was probably singing as she worked.

  That task completed, Rose scrubbed her already spotless toilet, tub, and sink. She scoured every pot and pan, swept and dusted every nook and corner. Lined up all the knives and forks. Tucked in the sheets with military crispness, just like Paul preferred them, then slept in a chair in the front room.

  On the third day, she prayed. All day.

  On the fourth day, she packed her bags. Later that day, she found herself on Pristine’s porch. She poured her heart out to her neighbor, leaving out the specifics of Paul’s exit and confirming only that he was gone, she hadn’t heard from him, and she was glad.

  Pristine just nodded as if she knew that moment would someday come. She made a few calls, and, within minutes, Rose had a job—office secretary at Good Samaritan—and another place to stay: the spare room at Mrs. Garnett’s house. Her new hostess, smelling of Skin So Soft and sporting a blond dye job, clucked sympathetically after Reuben dropped Rose at her house. “Come right in, child,” she said. “I know something about crazy husbands, so you don’t have to tell me a thing. Unless, of course, you want to. Care for some lemon pie?”