We waited for the light to change at First Avenue. Across the street, a small group of men came out of a dull, poorly lighted bar. In an instant the air seemed charged with tension. I don’t know if Lois had noticed it or not. The light changed and we walked across the street, approaching the group. Other men crowded into the door of the bar behind them. They made motions to each other, spoke quickly, quietly.
My stomach began to hammer and fear gripped it suddenly with strong fingers. We were abreast, and then past them. I heard footfalls on the concrete behind us. They were quick, running, then they stopped. Lois was saying something, but I wasn’t listening. I was watching our shadows, tall before us, from the street light behind us. If other shadows suddenly leaped into view—
“You lousy slut, you no-good bitch!”
A two-by-four rattled past us and bounced off a car.
“You! Why don’t you go back where you came from, nigger?”
Part of a brick skidded past us on the walk, crumbled into fast-moving tiny pieces.
“Tramp! White trash! Get back in the gutter where you belong!”
Lois leaped forward as though she’d been struck in the back with a heavy object. “Is that for us?” she asked. She didn’t believe it. She began to shudder.
“I’m afraid so, doll.”
She began to walk faster. She gripped my hand tighter.
“Steve, I’m afraid.”
I looked around for a cop. None there, of course. They were all up in Harlem. “Lois, listen to me. I’m afraid, too—you’ll never know how afraid—but don’t run. That’ll get ’em started.”
She nodded. Her face was pale and her eyes wide, but she didn’t once break stride. We kept sauntering along, holding hands, swinging them. It was our little way of showing defiance.
“Whore!”
“Go, black boy, go!”
“Tramp, tramp, dirty, stinkin’ tramp!”
Finally we were at Second Avenue. It had been the longest block I’d ever walked in my life. I took a deep breath and looked very hard at her. I knew anger so thick, so hot, that I began to choke on it. I wanted a cab to come quickly. When it did, squealing into our silence, I put Lois in and closed the door.
“Steve! Wait! Where are you going? What are you going to do?”
“Go back. I have to go back.”
“No, no, Steve, please get in. There are too many of them. If you don’t get in, I’ll go back with you!” She clutched at the door. I held it firmly closed.
“Take her home,” I told the driver. “She’s drunk.” The cabbie started up. “If I’m not home in an hour, call the cops,” I said to Lois. But the cab was already moving. The white cabbie probably figured that if his passenger was drunk she had no business with me.
God, I didn’t want to go back. I had to. I started back down the block. It had nothing to do with heroics, not even honor, whatever the hell that may be. A little man sat inside my chest beating a tom-tom. I looked for a brick, a stick, anything; a bottle maybe.
I walked quickly down the street. I didn’t want a part of me to talk the other part of me out of it. Anger flowed up to join the fear. They had frightened the hell out of me and that intensified my anger. I was angry mostly because the last place I might have a few moments peace when I left my house were the streets, and now even they were going and, goddamit, I had to fight for the right to share that last, garbage-strewn place, because after that, man, they’d be right inside your damned door asking you out.
The cries of that mob slamming hard off the walls of the empty street, I thought as I approached the corner, were the audible messages many eyes flashed when Lois and I were together. The mob, the animals. They had risen from the inanimate viciousness of a Reginald Marsh painting, had crowded together to give strength to each, and had howled out into the street as beer-sodden hyenas. You kill hyenas.
I saw nothing in the street I could use for a weapon, but it didn’t matter. I wanted to feel flesh pressed tightly between my thumbs, feel skin roll beneath the pressure of them. I wanted to duck a lunge, snatch the feet of the lunger and, spinning, hurl him into the path of an oncoming car. I wanted to drive my fist out of my arm, out of my elbow, out of my shoulder and to hell with massive retaliation.
They were gone. All of them gone.
I didn’t go into the saloon. As angry as I was, I remembered where the cops could tie you up. The bartender would claim I went in looking for trouble and I would have had it.
I stood there on the corner a minute or two, feeling relief, disappointment and confusion. A young, thin cop strode by, bouncing his stick from the end of its thong. He looked at me; he looked at me hard. I walked out into the street and caught a cab before he thought up something.
In the cab I wondered why they were so rough on Lois. Was it because she too was white and had apparently deserted them for me? I didn’t know. All the way home I looked at the back of the cabbie’s head and neck. They were white, and I didn’t want to see anything white. Nothing. So I was surprised to find Lois waiting outside my building.
“I’m glad you’re here. What happened?”
“Nothing. They were gone. How do you feel?”
“A little nervous. You?”
“Uh—like I’d been hit.”
“Shall we go upstairs?”
I didn’t want her to come up. “No. I’m going right to bed.
She was surprised, but she composed herself and changed the subject. “Was that the first time something like that has happened to you?”
“Yes.” I started up the stairs.
“Please, Steve, let me go upstairs with you.”
“No, Lois. This is Saturday, the end.” And I meant it.
“I know, dear, but this—Oh, it was so horrible.” She put her hand to my face. She rubbed it tenderly but it inflamed me.
“It won’t come off,” I said.
She jerked her hand away, but only to give me a stinging slap. In a flash I was on the balls of my feet, my arm half-cocked. Then I halted, wavered a little. If I’d hit her, she would have known what she had almost discovered a couple of times before.
She said, as tears came to her eyes, “I don’t understand why you want to hurt me so much, Steve.”
She turned, then, and walked down the street toward her home. She looked very tiny in the dark with her shoulders hunched way up. I could tell she was crying.
Upstairs, I felt an overwhelming urge to shower. When I finished, I lay in bed smoking and thinking. “I’ll go back with you,” she had said.
I sat up in bed, suddenly feeling very sick, very ashamed, but all the same, when the phone rang, I didn’t answer it. I knew it was Lois.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Letters—dozens of them—began to pour in from Crispus. What had happened? What was happening? What was going to happen? The book seller in his home town had sold twenty-five copies of O, Come Ye Back, but he hoped when he got his financial statement from us we’d have sold five hundred times that.
But we hadn’t.
Each letter during those first two weeks in December was filled with bewilderment and hurt. I answered his letters although they were addressed to Rollie. I signed Rollie’s name. I was pouring over one of Crispus’ letters one day when Obie walked in, thin and tired-looking.
“Where in the hell have you been?” I asked.
“You know.” His voice didn’t seem as powerful as usual. “The grind.”
“I’m going down to the warehouse,” I said. “Come with me.”
“Sure,” he said. “I don’t have anything to do.”
“We’ll grab lunch later.”
“Fine. You buying?”
“If you, buy with your first pay check.”
“It’s a deal.”
Obie was as quiet as a shadow as we walked through the warehouse. I looked at people’s dreams stacked there from floor to ceiling. Books. Their trite titles peered outwards. Poetry, religion, adventure, how-to, fiction, biographies—all sad and
corpselike. I walked slowly through the piles of books. It was like a mausoleum.
This was the light of day Rollie talked about. It was profitable for a vanity house to allow its books only the light of day of this sort. The real money, the only money, was made in printing and printing alone. Shipping and selling only entailed paper work, additional help and expenditures. If a book, by some freak of nature, began to sell, it would then become to the printers an unprofitable book, especially if the number sold exceeded the number originally printed. Then the presses, if this happened, would have to be set up all over again or the entire book photo-offset, and either method costs the printer money. But the authors didn’t know this.
And they didn’t know that a sixty-four page book ran them a bit over five hundred dollars, actual cost for labor and manufacturing—and that four to five hundred dollars, if the subsidy was nine hundred or a thousand, went in clear profit to the printer.
Nor did they know that the greatest cost was in composition. A sixty-four page book cost about one hundred fifty dollars to set up, a five-hundred-page book about fifteen hundred. The press work ranged from seventy to over ninety dollars, depending upon the size of the book. Paper ran about four cents per sheet and jacket art about one hundred dollars. Binding charges started at about ninety and went up to two hundred and thirty-five dollars.
There were few markets for vanity books. Book sellers wouldn’t take them, and only ordered them upon the request of a customer. Most publicity outlets were closed except in the small and medium-sized towns. The only discernible vanity book market was the author’s circle of friends, his true friends, and one seldom has two hundred and fifty true friends.
Two hundred and fifty printed and bound books was the maximum for a vanity house, although the contracts—neat, official, gold-sealed things—usually called for editions of perhaps twelve hundred. The basic run was a printing of five hundred and binding of two hundred and fifty. The vanity publisher, like Rocket, could always say that, like regular publishers, they did not bind the entire edition at once. It was very rare, however, for a vanity publisher to be placed in a position like that.
I saw Crispus’ books in the storehouse. There were ninety there. He had received seventy-five, twenty-five had been sold, and I had sent out sixty to reviewers on small Southern newspapers, mostly in Mississippi. We always sent out books to reviewers, then we could always list the papers to which they were sent for the author, if he demanded it. We then could say, when a book was not doing well, which was usual, “Is it our fault that the reviewer didn’t like it?”
“Obie,” I said, “let’s get out of here.”
“All right. I’m hungry.”
At lunch I asked Obie where he was staying. He wouldn’t tell me. He wouldn’t give me Gloria’s last name either.
“Obie, what the hell’s the matter, man?”
“Steve, when I get squared away, everything will be like it used to be. But now, with me on the skids, I don’t want help, I don’t want sympathy, and I’m sick of handouts.”
“Jesus, man, you’d do the same for me.”
“I got to do it my way, Steve. Try to understand, will you?”
“I understand.”
“Sure?”
“You know I understand.”
“I have to go now,” he said abruptly.
“Obie,” I said, getting up, “don’t rush off like this. When will I see you again?”
He tried to grin. “I’ll drop around, Steve.” He walked off, but stopped. “Don’t worry, man, and thanks.”
“Sure.”
I sat down to finish my coffee feeling for him. From his point of view, he, Obie, was the world—nothing existed without him. He could not be helped out. In his world, he helped people without fanfare, without being Christlike, because it was the thing to do if it had to be done. His faith was great—maybe the only way to have it, if you must—and I dreaded the day when Obie finally would lose that faith. For Obie knew that once the world’s people ceased to barter in skills and human values, once it concentrated on eradicating, by whatever means, people with color, just because they had it, his was a world destroyed. Obie believed in his world much more than he had a right to, maybe, but you have to believe in something until it’s all gone, every mosquito’s pee-drop of it. And that’s just about where Obie was—down to the last drop.
I could understand his wanting to be out of sight. It hadn’t been too long ago when I had wanted to keep out of my brother’s sight—away from his solicitousness, from his kindness and pity. All I had then, like Obie now, was the desire to have some pride.
I was still thinking about it when I stopped at a new employment agency to keep an appointment. The receptionist let me in to see the director right away. He was a pleasant-looking man with glasses and one of those Florida tans you can spot in a second in the jumble of pale-faced New York crowds in wintertime. He was smoking a pipe and it went well with his comfortable-looking office and his tweeds. He cleared his throat and smiled. He tilted back in his chair.
“You didn’t tell me in your letter that you were Negro.”
At least, I thought, he doesn’t beat around the goddam bush. Aloud, I said, “I’m not required by law to tell you what I am.”
“No,” he said with a slow smile, “but perhaps we could do more for you under the circumstances if you had let us know.”
I stared at him, waiting. I didn’t know whether to admire him for his frankness or not.
“Your resumé,” he said, looking down at it, “is excellent. The best one, as a matter of fact, we’ve got for this job. But I can’t send you out.”
“I wish,” I said bitterly, “I could prove what you’re saying.”
He sat back and lighted his pipe. Suddenly he smiled. “Why?”
“You’re liable for prosecution.”
“That’s one way,” he said calmly. “But wouldn’t it be better all around if you stopped butting your head against a stone wall? That’s what you’re doing now, you know. You look like a bright young fellow. Why don’t you start a business with another Negro or even a group of you? That way you don’t come in contact with this sort of nonsense. You could be successful.”
“Mr. Graff, I don’t believe that. I know from experience that it doesn’t work.” I was surprised that I could be so calm about something that mattered so much. “You said my resumé was the best you have for the job. I’m a little older, I guess, than most of the applicants—older because I’ve had to spend the time getting the experience that five years ago people like you used as an excuse for not giving me a job I was qualified for. Now there’s no excuse. You simply tell me you can’t send me out because I’m Negro.
“My best friend,” I went on, and I was beginning to get angry, “is starving right now because he can’t get a decent job, and he’s got my experience beat ten times over and—”
“Hold on, Steve.”
But I didn’t. This comfortable-looking man, this kindly looking man, this intelligent and in some ways admirable man was telling me to go to hell because I was black.
“Maybe,” I said, my voice rising. “Hitler had the right idea, after all!”
Then I stopped, but the words kept ringing in my ears and I wished I could shake them out because I hadn’t wanted to say that, but it had come, surging over the barriers I had thought were very firm.
He looked at me, not unkindly, and there was an expression of infinite patience on his face and, more than that, understanding. I looked down at the floor and wanted it to open up and grab me. As badly as I felt about it, I didn’t apologize. What the hell could an apology do to make up for that?
He sort of smiled and opened a desk drawer. He motioned me near him. “I want to show you something.” He brought out some cards and placed them on the desk. “Look at these cards,” he said. “They’re from the dead files of an employment agency I worked for years ago. Doesn’t matter how long ago—they haven’t changed their practices at all.”
He took out a pencil and pointed to a space on the cards in which the interviewer’s remarks were scribbled in ink. Excellent was the comment on the first card.
“You know what that means, Steve?”
“No.”
“It’s code. It means Jewish, don’t send out.”
“Oh.”
He picked up another card and pointed to another comment. “That means Negro, don’t send out.”
“Do most agencies use codes to get around the law?”
“Most,” he said, shuffling the cards back together. “A lot simply file the applications away and forget them. There are codes for Puerto Ricans, Catholics, Orientals and so on.”
“Who else is there to discriminate against?”
He laughed. “You’d be surprised.”
“But why don’t you do something, if you’re really concerned?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” He’d put the cards away and was now puffing on his pipe. He stared at the wall. “I’m married. I have a family, two kids in college. I have to make a living. Besides, I’m only one man. This work is my life and I would not know how to do anything else. You ask me to sacrifice reality for principle.” He shook his head. “I can’t do it alone. If all the other silent voices joined me, it might be a different story. No, I can’t do it though I probably won’t sleep well for the rest of the week because of you.”
“But are you really living, Mr. Graff?”
He smiled again, that sudden smile. “You saw the office when you came through?”
I nodded and couldn’t help smiling. It was some office.
“I have a home, a maid”—he chuckled—“no, she’s not colored. She’s German … and two cars. I’m living, Steve, such as it is.”
The Angry Ones Page 13
