The Angry Ones

by Williams, John A. ;

  “Why don’t you lay down, you drunk bastard?” the woman screamed between sneezes.

  “You just stop all that goddam noise,” the man said.

  The woman must have leaned out her window. Her voice was suddenly loud. “Listen—Oh! He fell!”

  I heard the sound. It was like beef being thrown on a chopping block. I went to the window and looked down. The man, clothed only in shorts, lay on his back. Blood was beginning to flow from under him. An ugly splotch of grayish yellow began to form near his head. He seemed out or dead—I couldn’t tell. I got my camera and took two shots before the heads poked out of the window below. People began to fill the little alley between the buildings. They stared at the man, whispered. Occasionally there was a hysterical laugh. The man on the ground tried to turn over. He screamed and jerked and lay still.

  “For God’s sake,” a woman said, “get a doctor.”

  “Is he hurt?” the voices asked. “Is he dead?”

  “What happened?”

  Two cops came—one white, one Negro. The white cop seemed apologetic, the Negro cop was gruff and sharp. Some garbage was flung from the rooftop into the alley, striking the cops and everyone else below. In a flash the colored cop had his pistol out, pointing it skyward toward the unblinking little Puerto Rican girl who had thrown the stuff down.

  “What the hell’s the matter up there? Can’t you see there’s a man hurt down here?”

  The crowd grew silent. It watched the pistol, the cop, the little girl, who moved slowly away from the edge of the roof. I drew in from the window and dressed so I could run to a phone—they hadn’t installed them in my building yet—and call the News. I heard they paid for good pictures and I could use the bills. I got to a drugstore and called. I asked for the desk and was shifted from one department to another until I got the man who handled the spot pictures. I told him what I had.

  “Did you take the shots in mid-air?”

  “No,” I said. “A minute after he hit the ground.”

  “How many stories?”

  “Five.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Not sure. Looks pretty bad.”

  “Is he a colored man?”

  “What?”

  “Is he a colored man?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Why?”

  “We can’t use them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Can’t use ’em. Thanks for calling.”

  He hung up.

  This, I thought over a cup of coffee, is the New York I bragged about in L.A.? I sipped the coffee. I didn’t want to think about it, but it kept coming back. “Is he a colored man? Is he a colored man?” Since when has a colored man’s death been less final to him than the death of a white man?

  There were crowds in front of the building when I got back. Ambulance doors were opened. They came out with him on the stretcher. He was all covered, from head to foot.

  Good-bye, Sam, I thought.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The next day, my first on the new job, I had to concentrate on what was being done, so I could not think too much about the day before. There was much to do. We did a lot of canned reviews and I jumped right in on that. There were, as time went on, manuscript reports to get done, advertising and promotional copy to write. It became my job, also, to set up promotion campaigns for each of the authors to be published that year. One thing surprised me, later, was that most of the manuscripts I’d given poor reports on eventually showed up in production. I figured Roland Culver knew the business better than I.

  But it was good to be working. At lunch I burst into the sun-filled streets and mingled with the crowd, feeling once again that I had some purpose in being. I seldom took a full lunch hour, even when I read the paper—I always rushed back to get into the work. It was nice. You feel better when the end is blocked from sight by things to do, things you like to do.

  But being without this—without a job, without something to do when you want to do something—is the worst thing in the world that can happen to you. In the morning, while millions of people are eating, dressing, rushing to work, where are you? Dragging around the house, pretending you’re glad you don’t have to go to work that day; but the pretense leaves in a few days and you begin wondering what the hell is the matter with you, you can’t get a job. A slow, clinging fear works into your system and stays there no matter how hard you try to chase it away. So when you are offered a job, any job which has the semblance of a salary you color it, make it a nice job, a little less perhaps than what you really wanted, but not bad after all.

  So now I had me a job, and to me it looked good.

  I gave Rocket Publishing everything I had. Sarah, Roland Culver’s secretary, was astonished, and that astonishment gave me pause, for why should she have been astonished had she not in the first place not believed me capable? And if this was so, why, why was I hired?

  The pause, however, was momentary. In the days that followed, I was not unconscious of the fact that I was the only male in the office besides Rollie. He was Rollie to me now, as he was to everyone except Sarah; she called him Roland. I will not say that in time I even forgot I was Negro. I didn’t. But it was not the first time I found myself the only Negro in an office. It was not a good feeling nor a bad one; merely curious. But the setup here, though, was different from what I’d known.

  Ours was something of an interracial office. Anne was a little Japanese Catholic. She’d come to New York from San Francisco only a year ago and her primary concern was becoming sophisticated. She disliked Japanese men and went out only with whites. She was very nice-looking with her finely carved, calm face. She was a little on the stocky side, with not too much breast. At first I was quite sure she didn’t like me; if she didn’t like Japanese men, would she like colored men? Later, though, she came to me to discuss her sex life—women in New York are always discussing their sex lives whether they have them or not. Anne had a fixation—she thought I knew all there was to know about sex. I had never discussed my sex life in the office, so it was odd that she chose to discuss herself with me. Eventually I got around to asking her why she disliked me, but the denial was too quick, too eloquent. In other words, she was lying through her teeth. But we managed to get along in the office.

  Harriet was a middle-aged, slim woman with an arm crippled by polio. She lived in New Jersey with an elderly aunt. She was tremendously aggressive, I guess because of the arm. She joked a lot about men, and always she told me how clever I was, how charming I was, how well I dressed. She had a habit of looking at my pants as if she were lost in thought. It made me uncomfortable. I got into the practice of standing behind my desk so she could not flick her eyes up and down.

  She kept asking me to lunch with her until I gave in one day and we went downstairs. The lunch became uncomfortable when she began asking questions about my girl friends. I didn’t feel like discussing my love life with her, especially when I sensed something not quite wholesome behind her questions. I hurried through lunch with the excuse that I had some things to take care of before I returned to work, and I left her. Harriet was an editor. I supposed she would find it difficult to find work just anywhere. But along with my sympathies I retained the conviction that she had a problem or two.

  I guess I liked Leah best. She had dark hair and green eyes, and a nice figure too. She was a quiet girl who worked very hard. Her typewriter, when she was on it, sounded like a machine gun. She was lots of fun and I never had an uneasy moment with her. She shared her miserably black coffee with me, even when I didn’t want it. “Puts hair on your chest, Steve.” We lunched together often or walked around, shopping. Leah became like a sister. When the pressure was on, we shrieked and shouted at each other like dogs, and when it was over we kissed and made up. Leah was really a swell woman.

  Sarah had a way with Rollie. She was about forty and had the eyes of a small animal, soft, brown, quick. Her expressions were always changing; they fascinated you, but it was her eyes you had to watch. I
first noticed them the day Rollie interviewed me. She had smiled prettily then, but her eyes had been searching. Later, I discovered she found what she had sought.

  Sarah was a totally unexciting woman. She was built with big breasts, stiff hips and thin, little legs. Her hair was gray and cut in gray strings which always seemed to catch in her glasses. She talked fast—sometimes spewing saliva on you if you weren’t careful to stand an extra foot away from her—and she walked fast, as if she might miss something if she didn’t. Sarah appeared compelled to create situations where she had to employ whispering shrewdness.

  I saw little of Rollie; he came in late and left early. Often he had midday conferences out of the office, but when he was in, it seemed that Sarah acted as a shield, keeping herself between him and us. But I fitted in well. I knew it and they knew it. I was happy and felt liked and needed. I did some free-lance work and I got back to writing. It was all a very wonderful feeling and I began to think more and more about Grace.

  We grew up in the same town upstate. I think I have been in love with her since the first time I saw her in our church in a black velvet coat and muff with white trimmings. She didn’t, at the time, live with the rest of us; her parents were something or other in one of the big houses up beyond the park and maybe this kept them away from our neighborhood until the father died. Then they moved down with us and Grace’s mother joined our church. I guess it went pretty hard for them, since they weren’t used to the hard lives we lived, and more than once I saw sadness in Grace’s eyes at church affairs. Eventually, though, Grace and her mother came to be well-liked.

  Grace and I became engaged—that’s what we told each other it was—on a church picnic, and I recall that she kissed me in the basement when we came back to the city. And once, around Christmas time, when the local movie houses showed an hour of cartoons, Grace and I sat together and I slipped a five-cent ring on her finger. We were quite carried away.

  We liked everything about living as we were growing up—the summers splashed with the blue lakes and green hills; the autumns with the ochres, reds, browns and greens, and the scents that went with them. We loved plowing through the snow in ski parkas and ski boots to a movie after church on Sunday or to a party or a dance where, when we danced to Glenn Miller, everything seemed just so right. And in the spring we’d borrow bikes and ride into the country and occasionally I’d have enough money to get horses and we’d select a couple of nags and jog through the deep, beautiful valleys which surrounded our town.

  Grace was a little tall. Her color was a soft new-leather brown and she had upslanting, dancing eyes and a beautiful mouth I never tired of kissing. I learned her body completely. I knew its smells, its curves and hardnesses; I knew how she would respond and when; I knew what each gasp or sigh meant. Even our silences meant a thing I could understand. I never doubted that we would marry.

  Grace’s mother became bedridden and I began to see less and less of Grace. She had to go to school and she had to work and she had to study and care for her mother. I suppose that was the time the fierce desire for security was born in her. And it grew. It became a monster which consumed the love we had for each other as if it had never existed. But the war came, and for a time, through our letters and on my two furloughs, we seemed to have recaptured the things that meant so much to us. But after the war I saw that what she had done was but a war-time measure.

  My brother Grant was the same age as Grace, and a dumbell could see that he was in love with her, but she was my girl—that, I never doubted. We became engaged—this time it was the real thing—as I began college. I could tell she was not pleased with the field I had chosen, but she said nothing then. It was only after college and after a couple of years of grubbing around that she said she wanted security and I was not going to have it in publicity. She wanted me to become a social worker and get a civil service job. I refused, not because I didn’t love her, but because I did so much. She left me. You know how people get to call you and your girl’s name with a certain rhythm? Like Tom and Betty, Paul and Susan, and so on? It’d been Steve and Grace for so long that for years after, people were always stumbling over her name when they talked to me.

  Anyhow, Grant was around after we broke off. He was steady, unimaginative and still very much in love with Grace. He was a skilled machinist and made good money. Hell, he was making good money when most of the plants in the city were only giving out janitorial jobs to Negro applicants. Grant had had his share of the Hill drive. Once he set his mind to a thing, that was it. They married, though Grace discouraged him for a long time, I suppose out of kindness for me. They moved, after awhile to Albany, where Grant got a better job. They had the things—a home, a car, insurance, all that goes into what it takes to be secure in our time.

  I visited them when Grace was pregnant with Teddy. We sat on the porch, just the two of us against the background of autumn. Grant was working. She was so lovely with that child in her, and her eyes were so lustrous and warm. I was quite shaken and I was in love with her more than ever then, and the only thing that saved me was knowing that in spite of everything, she still loved me.

  Then Grant went away to Korea and he stayed there in one of those frozen valleys. I felt sorry for the bastard—to have died so young and to have left Grace and the kids, Teddy and Frankie. It was his death that made me feel so guilty about still loving Grace.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Since I was now making a little money, I decided to look around for another place. The one I had was so small, if you fell you’d be lucky to hit the floor; you had to hit a wall or something. I began moseying up and down the streets after work. The big apartment buildings were closed to me, I knew, but I was hoping to just fall into a place, I guess. I suppose I should have known better. Looking for an apartment you can afford is a full-time job and it is a Herculean labor if you happen to be Negro. Then, one week end, on the spur of the moment, because the weather was going to be nice, late summer, I decided to go up to Albany and visit Grace, and maybe go to the place where we grew up.

  I had never thought much of Albany as a town. It had nothing to do with the experiences some of my friends had had there when they went into the navy—Albany was the navy induction center where they separated the black from the white and sent them off to war. No, it wasn’t that. It’s a town that’s laid out all over the hills. It’s pretty until you get into it, like almost everywhere else.

  You take the New York Central up, shooting out of the underground at 98th Street. You rise heavily above the streets looking into the windows of the uptown slums; they rise on either side of you. Out of the windows people hang, if it is warm, and their faces are all the same, dull, flat, sullen or sad, and their eyes follow the train hungrily and you know they wish they were on it too. Then, to the right, Yankee Stadium shoulders itself into the sky, and you think of the Bombers, the baseball machine, and you wonder how little fun is left in baseball, and how little fun in anything. A minute later the Polo Grounds, with its big orange signs, is there, on the left. Then you are bending against the screeching rails as the train rounds the curve behind Baker Field, and you straighten out and rush through suburbs, up past the Thruway Bridge, Bannerman’s Castle, the Point and the Rip Van Winkle Bridge. If you are sitting with a west view at sundown, the sun shatters streaks over the Cat-skills and you know that although she has flounced her beauty too many times to be counted, and for a long, long time in a great unapplauding silence, she is at that time of day as breathless and beautiful as a spanking new ingénue.

  Not that I was thinking of these things when I arrived.

  Feeling foolish and happy and a bit nervous, I called Grace from the station, hopped into a cab and went over. She stood tall and relaxed in the door, the season all around her. She was wearing shorts which showed her long, well-formed legs. Her eyes danced like the rays of the sun kissing the tips of tiny waves on a quiet lake. Her hair was tousled and fell carelessly over her forehead. Her mouth widened into a smile of welcome an
d she moved toward me.

  The kids, Frankie and Teddy, smiled tentatively beside her. You could tell they were not used to being still so long. They looked like both Grace and Grant. I mean the features were there. They had Grant’s square, rocklike face and Grace’s delicate eyes and her long body.

  “Hello, baby,” I said.

  “Steve, hello.” Her voice had a curious quality, like the ringing of bells heard deep within a woods, telling you the direction of home.

  After so many years and so many things, it was good being there. I hugged her, smelled the smell of her. I felt the curves of her body as she leaned against me and I saw, through half-closed eyes, the wonderful lines of her neck. I released her, fighting hard to keep my breath measured. The kids had been watching us with deep, still eyes that must have, in their brightness, caught everything. They retreated a step or two backwards.

  “Hello, Teddy. Hello, Frankie,” I said.

  They looked at Grace and she nodded. “Hi,” they said, starting to grin.

  “I brought you something,” I said.

  They grinned again, but this time at each other, as though they had made a wager and this was the payoff. They jammed their hands in their pockets, but took them out again when I gave them the gifts.

  “Run along and open them,” Grace said.

  When they had disappeared inside, Grace said, “What have you brought for me?”

  You know, it was one of those two-way questions.

  I said, “You’re not a kid.”

  “But didn’t you bring something for me?” She gave me a curious smile.

  “Don’t be so damned clever,” I said. Then: “You look so good, Grace.”

  “And you.” She took my arm. “Let’s go inside.” When we were in the living room, cool drinks in hand, she asked, “How are the chicks treating you in New York?”

  I didn’t answer right away. I had noticed that Grant’s picture was nowhere to be seen. When I turned to ask what she’d said, a little smile was playing about her lips and her eyes danced.