The Big Gold Dream

by Chester Himes

  “Shhh,” Grave Digger cautioned. “Here’s the Prophet.”

  Sweet Prophet looked both mad and sleepy. His eyes popped from a scowling countenance. His yellow silk pyjamas, peeping from beneath a dressing gown with candy stripes of red and white, gave the impression of a carnival on the loose. His big feet were encased in bright red Turkish slippers trimmed in gold; and his long kinky white hair was topped with a Fez of matching red with a golden tassel falling from the crown.

  He greeted them in a vexed manner. “Gentlemen, I got the best lawyers east of the Mississippi River.”

  “Okay, throw us out,” Grave Digger said.

  “Since you’re here, sit down, sit down,” he said, plumping himself on a high-backed gilded chair that resembled a throne. “We’re all colored folks, ain’t we? You don’t have to stand on ceremony with me. I am a humble man.”

  The detectives pulled up chairs that put them two feet lower than the Prophet.

  “We hate to trouble you at this hour, Prophet,” Grave Digger said, “but it’s important.”

  Sweet Prophet folded his hands across his stomach. He was wearing all of his diamond rings, but his long fingernails were encased in protective hard-rubber fingers of matching colors.

  It must be hell when he’s got to scratch himself, Coffin Ed thought.

  “Important!” Sweet Prophet echoed. “More important than a good night’s sleep?”

  “It’s about one of your recent converts,” Grave Digger elaborated.

  “My God, don’t tell me another one has dropped dead - took off - departed, I mean,” Sweet Prophet said, searching for the appropriate expression. “That would be the bitter end.”

  Grave Digger carefully laid his battered hat on the bright green-carpeted floor. He and Coffin Ed had uncovered their heads in deference to the great man.

  “No, it’s about Alberta Wright,” Grave Digger said. “We want to ask you a few questions about her.”

  “Gentlemen, let the dead rest in peace, I beg you,” he said piously. “That poor woman deserves it, as hard as she has worked all of her life.”

  “That’s the point. Prophet,” Grave Digger said. “She’s not dead.”

  “What! Not dead!” Sweet Prophet exclaimed in bug-eyed amazement. “Do you mean that woman is still alive? Or has she risen from the dead?”

  “Pull yourself together, Prophet,” Grave Digger said drily, “She never was dead.”

  “Good God, man, I saw her die myself,” Sweet Prophet snapped.

  “She was just unconscious.”

  “In a trance, you mean.” Sweet Prophet fished his yellow silk handkerchief from his candy-striped dressing gown pocket and wiped his dark, sweating brow. “I never thought of that. You startled me.”

  “And what we’re trying to do,” Grave Digger went on calmly, “is get her story.”

  “That woman’s story can be told in two lines,” Sweet Prophet said. “Born like a fool, and worked like a mule.”

  “That might be so,” Grave Digger said. “But we want to know what happened at the baptism.”

  “God only knows, gentlemen. I blessed the bottle of water - I presume it was water - and she drank it and flopped. I thought she was dead, but you say she went into a trance, and that’s all right with me. I’ll have to remember it.”

  “All right, a trance,” Grave Digger said. “That is as good as any explanation for the present. How long had she been a follower of yours?”

  “Bless my soul, gentlemen, she was not strictly a follower of mine, as you put it. Just a new recruit. I never saw the woman before she came to me yesterday morning to confess her sins and request to be baptized.”

  “You mean you baptize people without knowing anything about them?” Coffin Ed put in finally.

  “Gentlemen, you didn’t have to see that woman but once to know everything there was to know about her, like I said before,” Sweet Prophet declared. “She was a born kitchen mechanic.”

  “Okay, be that as it may,” Grave Digger said. “What prompted her to get religion all of a sudden?”

  “Who knows?” Sweet Prophet said, gesturing with his elongated hands. “Women of that type get religion for ten thousand reasons - some have just murdered their husbands, others have had nightmares.”

  “She must have given some reason,” Grave Digger persisted.

  “If she did, I didn’t listen,” Sweet Prophet said. “Women always lie about the reason they get religion. If I harkened to them, I couldn’t last.”

  “Okay, let’s skip it,” Grave Digger said. “Just tell me what she might have owned that someone would go to the trouble of stealing.”

  Sweet Prophet’s eyebrows went up an inch, and his eyeballs extended precariously. “You mean to say someone stole something from her?” he asked in an incredulous voice. “Gentlemen, that would be the miracle.”

  “Her furniture was stolen while she was unconscious, and two people have been killed about it,” Grave Digger informed him.

  His eyeballs came out so far they seemed on the verge of rolling down his cheeks. “She killed them,” he stated more than asked.

  “We don’t think so,” Grave Digger said.

  “Look, brothers,” Sweet Prophet began, wiping his face with the big yellow handkerchief. “We are more or less in the same business, collaring the sinners. Let us level with each other. Nobody has been killed about that sister’s furniture, unless she killed them. I looked on that sister’s face and listened to her confession. She has never owned anything in her life that the white folks didn’t give her. And they haven’t given that sister anything that anybody else would want. She was that kind of woman - is, rather.”

  “Would you be breaking any kind of vows or such if you told us what sins she confessed to?” Grave Digger asked.

  “Nothing worth repeating,” Sweet Prophet assured him. “She was just a poor woman living in adultery and working like a dog to pay for it - like any other thousands of poor simple-minded colored women in Harlem. Nothing to make the Lord skin back His ears.”

  “She had something,” Coffin Ed stated.

  Sweet Prophet looked at him from his popping eyes. “The only thing that sister had was faith,” he said. “And between you and me, gentlemen, her faith were not worth stealing.”

  “Well, let’s try to get some facts,” Grave Digger said. “What happened to her after she seemed to drop dead?”

  “I never found out,” Sweet Prophet confessed. “Until you told me better, I thought the sister at rest with her Maker. Brother Clay’s hearse came and took her away, and afterwards the downtown policemen asked me some questions. But one of them got a phone call, and they dropped it without any explanations.”

  “You didn’t make any effort to find out what had happened to her?” Grave Digger asked.

  “No, with death the work of Sweet Prophet ends and the Lord takes charge,” Sweet Prophet said. “You might ask undertaker Clay.”

  “We will,” Grave Digger said.

  He and Coffin Ed stood up.

  “Thank you for your cooperation, Prophet,” he added. “We hope we haven’t disturbed you too much.”

  “I am always glad to be of service to our colored police,” Sweet Prophet declared. “As long as you don’t come to arrest me.”

  “I may as well tell you that Alberta Wright wants to see you, if you haven’t already got the message,” Coffin Ed said before leaving.

  “Don’t they all,” Sweet Prophet said.

  Mr. H. Exodus Clay had just come down from his living quarters on the top floor of the old brownstone mansion on 134th Street, where he had his undertaking parlor. He looked more than ever like a body dressed for burial, with his parchment-colored skin still half dead from sleep and his long white dried-out kinky hair freshly combed and brushed.

  He received them in his office, the front room that had the light in the window that never went out.

  They went straight to the point.

  “We’re trying to find out what ha
ppened to the woman one of your drivers picked up for dead at Sweet Prophet’s baptism yesterday,” Grave Digger said.

  Mr. Clay adjusted his pince-nez. “You mean the body that came to life,” he said in his dry, impersonal voice. “Just a minute - I will send for the driver.”

  “It was like this, Mr. Clay,” the young man who drove the hearse explained. “They-all sent me to the morgue to get the death certificate. But when I got there the man said I had to bring the body inside so he could look at it before he could give me the certificate, but I couldn’t handle it alone and he helped me. We carried it into a big white room and laid it on a long white table, then the man began messing around with a lot of instruments and things and kept on talking about what a fine specimen it was. I asked him if it was dead, and he asked me where I got it from. I told him, and he said it would take him about an hour to finish his examination and for me to go outside and come back in an hour. Then I asked him if it was going to take a whole hour just to find out if it was dead, and he said it wasn’t dead but it would take him that much time to find out what was wrong with it. So I figured there wasn’t any need of me waiting a whole hour for it if it wasn’t dead. So I just came on back here and put the hearse away and wiped it good and clean.”

  Mr. Clay turned to the detectives and asked, without batting an eye, “Does that answer your question?”

  Grave Digger put on his hat, and Coffin Ed did likewise.

  “It does indeed,” he said.

  They went next to the morgue.

  The morgue attendant who was on duty Sundays was off on Mondays, and the one on duty didn’t know anything about the case.

  “You think we ought to rouse him at his house?” Coffin Ed asked.

  Grave Digger looked at his watch. “Not this morning. It’s already nine o’clock, and my wife has probably begun to worry.”

  “Mine, too,” Coffin Ed said. “So let’s call it a day.”

  “Right,” Grave Digger said. “As long as we keep the woman locked up, nothing is going to happen.”

  12

  THE THREE STEEP FLIGHTS of stairs led to a long dimly lit hall with eight flanking doors. It was the fourth floor, and that was as high as the stairway went.

  Sugar ran to the grimy front window and looked down on the street. Dummy was nowhere in sight. The detectives’ car had disappeared, too. He walked slowly back to the other end and joined the girl, who was huddling in the corner. There was something screwy about this business, he was thinking. It was moving too fast. Too much was happening for Alberta’s money to have been a secret.

  “He lives in there,” the girl whispered, pointing toward a warped door showing yellow light about the edges.

  Sugar smelt the sharp scent of marijuana coming through the cracks.

  “Who?”

  “The man I was talking about with all the money.”

  The door had been fitted with a staple and hasp; it had shrunk so much that the cheap Warder lock was useless.

  “If anyone with a lot of money lives in there, he ought to have his head examined,” Sugar said absently.

  “It ain’t his,” she said. “He stole it.”

  “Shut up and let me think,” Sugar said.

  The only way it made sense was for Dummy to be looking for the money, too, he thought; or how would he know so much about what had happened? And then, as he chewed over that, the whole picture clicked suddenly in his mind.

  It all hung on the murder of the Jew. If the Jew hadn’t been killed, it might have figured that whoever killed Rufus got the money. But it stood to reason that whoever killed the Jew had already sounded Rufus and was convinced he didn’t have it. So he figured the Jew must have it. Because whoever it was must have been someone who had heard Alberta blabbing about her dream at the baptism. All kinds of hustlers hung around Sweet Prophet’s activities, hoping some of the Prophet’s money would fall off. And then this joker, whoever he was, would have found out where Alberta lived and beat it over there to burglarize the house. But he, Sugar, had got there first; then, after he had left, Rufus had come; and the Jew had arrived while Rufus was still there and had moved all the furniture. So this joker must have been watching from the streets waiting for a chance to break in, and when he saw the furniture being moved he knew somebody had already got the money. So the logical thing had been to sound Rufus first.

  But after he had killed the Jew and hadn’t found the money, he figured that Rufus had outsmarted him. So he laid for Rufus.

  But by that time Rufus had been warned by the killer’s first approach, and he wouldn’t be carrying the money around on him. It was ten to one he had hidden it in his own flat, Sugar realized. He had very likely already found it by the time the Jew arrived. Suddenly Sugar understood the reason Rufus decided to sell all the furniture to the Jew - he had already found the money and used that stupid play to cover it up. Rufus must have been laughing at Sugar when they met yesterday afternoon. Yeah, he had been so cute he had gotten himself killed. Sugar thought maliciously.

  And now the fact that Dummy had begun to look for it, too, meant that it hadn’t been found. Dummy wasn’t the kind to waste his efforts on wild-goose chases. It would be just like Dummy to know who killed Rufus and why he was killed - if he hadn’t done it himself.

  “Come on,” he said to the girl.

  “Where you going?” she asked.

  “What do you care,” he said. “You ain’t got no other place to go, have you?”

  She followed him docilely, relieved at being told what to do. She had never done anything on her own initiative in her life.

  He paused in the entrance of the hotel to look up and down the street. No one in sight.

  “Where did Dummy go?” he asked.

  “How do I know?” she replied stolidly.

  “Come on.”

  She started to walk along with him, but he stopped her.

  “You’re subject to get arrested for prostitution walking with me,” he said. “And I don’t want to get picked up, either. So you go ahead, turn down Seventh to a Hundred Twelfth Street and go over to Eighth Avenue. Wait for me on the corner.”

  She started off without a word. He followed at a distance, but when she turned into the dark side street he kept on down Seventh Avenue to a once pretentious apartment house in the middle of the block.

  Mammy Stormy had a six-room apartment on the top floor, where she gave parties for domestic workers every weekend. They began Saturday night and ended Monday morning. She sold food and drinks, and cut the blackjack game. She called them “house rent” parties because, supposedly, they were for the purpose of paying her rent, but she lived from them.

  Back during the depression of the 1930’s, everyone who had a house threw these parties to pay their rent. However, most had quit the practice as industrial jobs opened to colored people and the pay for domestic work increased. But Mammy Stormy had kept right on; she hadn’t missed one for the past twenty-eight years.

  She never left the apartment. She weighed close to four hundred pounds, and she didn’t trust elevators and couldn’t navigate the stairs. She hadn’t worn anything but nightgowns and felt slippers for a decade.

  Sugar found her sitting in an ancient armchair in the kitchen, fanning herself with an undertaker’s fan. Sweat flowed like a waterfall down her smooth black face. A pot of white beans and chitterlings simmered on the coal-burning stove. Dirty dishes were stacked everywhere; empty bottles were strewn about the floor,

  A blackjack game was in progress in the dining room, but the players were just marking time. Other half-drunk, satiated, sleepy people wandered about the other rooms, waiting for daylight and time to go to work.

  The smell of food made Sugar’s stomach crawl, but he didn’t have the price of a dish.

  “Dummy sent me,” he told Mammy Stormy.

  “What do he want now?” she asked.

  “His ears hurt him; he wants you to send him some sweet oil,” Sugar said.

  “Lord, why don
’t he do something about his ears,” she said.

  “Do what?” he asked.

  That stumped her.

  “Look in the bathroom in the medicine cabinet and you’ll find the sweet oil,” she said. “And tell him don’t bring none of his chippy whores into my house.”

  “I’ll tell him,” he said.

  He found the bottle marked sweet oil, but while he was there he noticed one of her rose-colored nylon nightgowns hanging up to dry. That gave him an idea. He took down the nightgown, took a yellow-orange-and-white-striped bath towel from the rack, rolled them into a bundle and hid them beneath his coat. He left the house by way of the parlor, and didn’t see Mammy Stormy again.

  It was dawn when he came out onto the street. The girl was waiting on the corner where he had told her to wait. They went toward Manhattan Avenue.

  In the middle of the block he stopped in a tenement hallway, removed the label from the bottle of sweet oil and slipped the nightgown over his clothes. Then he tied the towel about his head like a turban. The girl stared at him open-mouthed. She was either too tired or too stupid to laugh.

  “What is that for?” she asked.

  “Never mind,” he told her. “You just keep your mouth shut no matter what I do, and don’t laugh.”

  But the garish ensemble was too much even for Harlem. The crew of a garbage truck making its last round froze in open-mouthed amazement as he approached.

  “Great God Almighty, another prophet!” one of them ejaculated.

  The girl started to giggle, but Sugar snapped at her. “Shut up!”

  They found the janitor of the apartment where Rufus had lived taking in the garbage cans. He put the empty can down and wiped his hand across his eyes. His lips moved as he mumbled something to himself.

  He was a big, slow-motioned man with a dark leathery face. Short kinky hair fringed a bald head decorated with a crescent-shaped scar. He wore faded blue denim overalls and a hickory-striped shirt, all neatly washed and pressed. His big misshapen feet were encased in dirt-splotched canvas sneakers. His faded brown eyes gave the impression of a mind that was even slower than his body.