The Angry Ones

by Williams, John A. ;

On the way downtown I thought of what Obie and I had talked about a couple of years before, that as opportunities for Negroes appeared on the surface to be getting better, they would at the same time become subtly worse for some segments. The gains made in the blue-collar areas would be balanced by heightened barriers in the white-collar fields, and would be toughest in the professional fields stressing public contact.

  I had been told that New York City’s employment agencies were the worst offenders against the state’s law against discrimination. But I had to try them—I couldn’t pass up any angle.

  In the first agency, tacked on the wall, was a big State Commission Against Discrimination poster. It didn’t give me any confidence. I filled out an application and handed it to a receptionist. She asked me to have a chair. Some other applicants came in. We exchanged glances. There were no expressions on their faces, but I got the idea that this agency was supposed to be a pretty exclusive little club—they had looked at me just a fraction of a second too long. I know that look pretty well. Finally, I got inside with an interviewer. His name was Thomas.

  “Don’t have a thing right now, Mr. Hill. Why don’t I keep your application and give you a ring—say in two, three days?”

  My next interviewer, in another agency down the street, seemed ill at ease. He kept looking around, as if to discover who was responsible for letting me in. He tried to rush me through in a hurry. I asked what his rush was. It boiled down to his having nothing for me. I went to two other agencies that day, and I had the feeling, as I headed for the hotel, that I would get nothing from an agency.

  Obie had called, so I called him back.

  “How you makin’ it?” he asked.

  “Nothin’.”

  “It’ll break. Be cool.”

  “I’m not worried,” I lied.

  “We’ll get together in a couple of days,” Obie said. “I want you to meet Gloria.”

  “All right.”

  I hung up, showered and went out to eat. I felt like nothing, so after dinner I showered again and smoked myself to sleep.

  The next morning I dashed down to the state employment office on lower Fifth, then rushed back uptown to hit more agencies. I drew a blank all the way around. After lunch I called Bob Graham, another classmate. His mother answered. Bob, she said, was in Argentina running an advertising agency. I was surprised. She said he was doing quite well. She asked me to call again after I got settled.

  I wasn’t feeling so well when I hung up. Bob and I had taken a lot of courses together in college. He was a dummy from way back. I was the boy who supplied the answers for him. I remembered how I used to feel his bony knee digging into my thigh—his reaction to the instructor’s asking him a question. Down I’d go—I liked him—tieing my shoe laces, whispering up brilliant things for him to say while he parrotted them.

  I headed back to the hotel then, too discouraged to think about anything except not spending another miserable night alone. I wondered what to fill it with.

  It came to me in the shower. I could fill it with Kit Higgins, a tall, willowy girl with a nice shape and not too dull a mind. Kit was a “writer’s freak”—she associated only with writers, dated them, slept with them. I called her and we arranged to get together for dinner. Kit had been in college with us, and had been in NAACP, the SDA and all the other progressive things.

  Halfway through dinner I was sorry I had called her. It was not that she still wasn’t attractive and wonderfully put together. I just tired of her harsh, high-pitched voice that seemed to erase the memories of the good times we’d had before. She was still concerned with the inane things that had fascinated her years before—what happened on her job, her love affairs, the new writers to watch for. I could no longer be, or pretend to be, concerned with them. When she asked about my world, I refused her entrance as though it was shabby and unkempt. Then, as people will do when seeking comfortable ground, we began talking about the people we had known at school. She wanted to know if Lint had become a successful writer and I said not yet. Kit brought up Don Zubinsky.

  Don had been in a couple of Shakespeare courses with Obie and me. Between classes, when Obie and I would stand in the hall, watching coeds and smoking, Don would often drop over and talked about the course, reading much into it that sounded like a class war. He wanted us to join his organization. That was the gist of his every conversation with us.

  “I know what you guys have to go through,” he said one day. “Believe me, I know. I go through the same thing. I’m Jewish.”

  Obie looked at me, then at Don and said, “It’s not the same thing. You can change your name. It wouldn’t work, though, for us. So it’s not what I’d call the same.”

  “All right,” Don admitted, his face a little red. “It’s different, but you’ve got to fight and we’re here to help you.” He clenched a big, meaty fist. Obie looked at it, looked at me. I looked at it, then at Obie. It was quite a fist.

  “What did you have in mind?” Obie asked cheerfully.

  “Come around Saturday night to our place. There’ll be a party and lots of girls.” He smiled and rolled his eyes. I became angry, but Obie smiled back coolly. I’m sure we interpreted the same thing from Don’s grin. “You’ll find out for yourself what we can do,” he finished.

  When Don left, Obie said, “What time shall I call for you Saturday?”

  “Don’t call me. I don’t want any part of that outfit.” I was steaming. “Dangling broads as bait to get us in.”

  “Well, man,” Obie said, “I’m not interested in the party, but I do want to dig how great their free love is.”

  We laughed. Obie made the girls all right, and managed to avoid the politics; but Zubinsky, Kit was telling me as we drank coffee, had been tagged as a third-string Communist leader.

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “It was in the papers about six months ago.”

  “You remember Obie Robertson, don’t you? We had some classes with Don.”

  “Oh, yes!” Kit said with sparkling eyes. “He was so smart! He must be worth a lot of money by now. I haven’t run across any of his stories though …”

  I sometimes forgot Obie was a writer too.

  We lapsed into silence with our second coffee. The evening wasn’t as gay as I’d expected—not like the night I’d left New York. We’d had a big, wild party then, with Lint and Bobbie and the hundred other people who always show up at parties and who are all so pleasant with their bellies filled with liquor. Things change.

  It was time for me to do something. I didn’t want to be alone again and I didn’t really want to be with Kit. I didn’t know who I wanted to be with—I just didn’t want to be alone.

  “Let’s go back to the hotel,” I said. I don’t think I’d have been angry if she’d said no, but she didn’t.

  She rose from the chair. “All right,” she said.

  But halfway to the hotel I stopped. “Can I take a rain check?” I asked.

  She stopped, too, and looked at me carefully. “You’re having,” she said, “one of those writing moods and nothing can keep you away from your typewriter. Am I right?”

  “You’re right,” I said.

  I put her on the subway and that was the last I saw of Kit. I felt somewhat sad when the train pulled out because Kit was the sort of girl who in her own way gave a lot to writers; to how many I’ll never know. She was a one-woman phalanx against loneliness.

  Up in the room, the cars cascading down Second Avenue, their tops reflecting the harsh lights of the Daily News Building, my worries returned and I could not sleep.

  So when Lint called I was wide awake.

  “I got a lead for you, man,” he said.

  I waited.

  “It’s vanity publishing, but it could turn out all right.”

  “What the hell’s vanity publishing?”

  “You know. Where people pay to have their books published.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah, I know.”

  “I’ll have more for
you tomorrow.”

  “All right. Thanks.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Night.”

  “Night.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I had been trying not to think about it—getting out of the hotel and looking for a place. It would have been nice to have got hold of a job first, and avoid having the two problems to handle at once. But I had to get out. That horrible imbalance—outgo but no income—was beginning to become pronounced. And so, one morning not long after I had talked to Lint—“tomorrow” didn’t necessarily mean the next day with us—I got a Times and raced through it looking for a place. I called a spot down in the West 20’s, then went to see it.

  Big, ugly garages gaped silently in the mid-morning shadows. Kids played stickball in the streets. Curtains hung listlessly in the heat. The place I went to see had a crayoned sign which read Vacancy. I rang the doorbell. A woman answered.

  “Yeah?” she said. There was a frown on her face.

  “Could I see the place you’re renting?”

  “Oh! I can’t rent it.”

  “Why?”

  “I—uh—lady’s coming back this afternoon to rent it. It’s already taken, you see?” She smiled then, after she had got her lie out without stumbling too much over it.

  “Yeah, I see.”

  There were other places in other neighborhoods for me that day. Sometimes the superintendents or their wives didn’t answer, although I could see them lurking behind the shades if their quarters were just off the door. Other times the places had been rented, but the super had forgotten to take the sign down. It was late in the afternoon when I got back to the hotel and looked through the paper again.

  “Hello,” a woman’s voice answered when I called the first place on my new list.

  “I’m interested in the place you have for rent.”

  “Fine. Come right over. The address is—”

  “I’m colored,” I cut her off, wearily.

  There was a pause.

  “Well, I wouldn’t mind it at all,” she said. “It’s the neighbors. They wouldn’t like it. And I have to please the neighbors.”

  I got angry, hot.

  “Do you own the place?”

  “Well—” she said, then angrily: “Yes! I own it and I will not rent to you!” She hung up.

  A jovial-sounding woman, older than the first answered my second call. “You have a place for rent?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes, a very nice place.”

  “I’d like to come and see it.”

  She gave me the address. “It has two big rooms, bath, shower and tub, closets, and it opens on the front.”

  “That’s very nice,” I said. “Do you have Negroes living in your building?”

  She laughed scornfully. “Negroes? Naw! No Negroes, no Puerto Ricans. I run a nice place. I”—her voice came back into the void I’d left—“are you colored?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I am.”

  “Well, I’m so sorry. I cannot rent it to you.” She hung up quickly.

  I waited a long minute before I turned to the next name.

  I called the final place on my list. I got a real estate broker’s office. The girl who answered said the place was nice, lots of room and all.

  “You have vacancies now?” I asked, looking at the ad.

  “Oh, yes, lots of them.” She gave me the address of the apartment.

  “Very good,” I said. “I don’t suppose it makes any difference if I’m colored?”

  “No. Oh, no,” she said after hesitating for a split second. “You just go right over there and if there are any vacancies the super will show them to you.”

  I hung up. I wanted to laugh, then I wanted to cry, but I did neither. I just hung up and sat looking at the phone like an ass.

  It rang.

  “Boy, is your line busy,” Lint said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I got the poop on this place. It’s Rocket—are you taking this down?”

  I whipped out a pencil and began writing on a piece of paper. “Yes,” I said, “go on.”

  When he finished, I looked at my watch. “I’ll call now. Maybe I can catch them and set up something for tomorrow.”

  When Lint hung up, I dialed the number he had given me and asked for a Mr. Culver, who was, thank God, still there. We arranged an appointment for the following afternoon. I would have time to walk the streets in search of a place tomorrow morning, and if I was lucky, I’d have a job tomorrow afternoon. I went to bed that night feeling much better than I had in days.

  In the morning I took a bus up to the West 80’s and, getting off, I walked from Riverside Drive to Central Park West, up one street, down another. New York can change abruptly from one block to the next, from quiet residential streets with baby trees to teeming, littered ones filled with shouting, lounging people. On the nice streets I had little luck. On the bad streets—Well, who wants to live on a bad street? I finally came to a stop before a new sign on a not-too-bad-looking building between Columbus and Amsterdam. A pleasant-looking man was dawdling over new furniture in the freshly painted lobby.

  “I’m looking for a place,” I announced.

  “A kitchenette?”

  “I don’t know. Let me see what you have.”

  He had only one place left and it was five flights up. It was as large as some bathrooms I’ve seen, half as small as some others, and the rent was seventeen a week. One window opened on the scarred brick facing of the building next door. I took the kitchenette with great reluctance; it was still cheaper than the hotel. I got my receipt and told the man I’d be back the following day. He said all right.

  I couldn’t help but comment, “It’s hard for a Negro to find a place to live if it isn’t in Harlem.” It was more for myself than for him.

  He shrugged. “I rent to everybody. And it’s all right here. I would live here myself.”

  “I bet you would,” I said.

  I left then. It was getting late and I had to get downtown for my appointment. The streets were jammed with Negroes and Puerto Ricans. Most of the stores had Spanish names. Kids squeezed through among the adults, begged for nickels and dimes and cursed you if you didn’t give them anything. Rouged women, some sullen, some artificially vivacious, stood in doorways and on the curbs. Men, resting their backs against parked cars, eyed them, eyed you—anything that moved in the street. On Broadway the black and tan tide lessened. Elderly people with wrinkled, pasty faces and thicklensed glasses sat wrapped in blankets in the sun, dying quietly, easily, unaware or unconcerned with the floods of people lapping quietly behind them, just a block or two away.

  I headed downtown to Rocket. The office was located in that craggy mass of office buildings which rests on 42nd Street between Fifth and Sixth. I was shown immediately to an effeminate-looking man who introduced himself as Roland Culver. He was well-dressed. His suit of dark-blue mohair was beautifully cut; his striped tie was a soft blue and white, and was finely tied with just a hint of a crease below the knot. His pin-collar shirt was white on white. His gray hair was combed in a slight curve back over his head; it glistened. His lips were thin, and matched perfectly the thin bridge of his nose. His blue eyes were set deep but alertly in their sockets and sparkled soft and feminine. A small diamond shone on his finger. His hand, when I shook it, was long, soft and dry. I studied him more as we sat down and he began to examine my folio.

  He nodded as he looked at the samples. “Good, good.” He looked at me with a brilliant smile. “I have one question, Stephen. Has most of your work been among Negroes, for Negro papers and magazines?”

  “No.”

  I told him my background in detail. He watched me with a little smile. He was satisfied. The salary was not the best, but it was a start. It was a job.

  He explained to me what co-operative publishing was; he didn’t use the term, “vanity.” It sounded fair enough, challenging enough. I’ve always been a sort of sucker for challenges, and Roland Culver must have spo
tted this right away, or perhaps it was something else he saw or knew.

  But I had a job and it was in my field.

  I explained that I was checking out of my hotel and Culver said it would be all right for me to start a couple of days later. I went swinging out of Rocket and checked out of the hotel into my new place. I called Lint and Obie to let them know about the job. They were elated, especially Obie. So was I, of course.

  But my elation was cut through the next day by an incident which reminded me that there was little place for happiness—just yet.

  My first day in the new place I came to know the strange scents of cooking—the strongly spiced Puerto Rican foods, the thick smell of hot starches, the cabbages. I could hear the conversations of the people next door or the toilet flushing down the hall. When I ate, I pulled the blinds down so the little kids across the alley could not hang out their windows and watch me. When I sat down to write that first morning, I was conscious that the sounds of my typewriter were alien in that place. Yes, I am sure the landlord would live here, in my room, any room in the building, on the street for that matter. He would live here, sure, with the heat screaming silently in from the asphalt streets and the tarred rooftops. He would live here, an animal in a hole, except when away from it; he would live here and worry about whether or not the toilet seat down the hall would be clean if he had to go, and if it wasn’t, how best to clean it. Sure, he would sit and watch the kids in the next building swing from the window sills or crouch beneath his own window and listen to the sounds of the husband and wife across the way making love, while shouting for the kids to stay out of the room. Yes, I’m certain he would live here and pay his seventeen or twenty or twenty-three promptly and without grumbling every week.

  I was still thinking about it when I put away some dishes I’d got at the five-and-dime. Some man on the floor below was shouting to a woman in the next building. The woman next door had been sneezing—had hay fever or something, because she had been at it all afternoon.

  “Aw, shut up!” the woman shouted in answer to the man.

  “Bitch! I said stop all that goddam noise!” the man shouted again. The way his voice carried, I guessed he was leaning out the window.