by Iceberg Slim
Dorcas had given me a solid glare of angry disgust. I looked in the dresser mirror at my bruised, puffy face. I looked like I had been drunk for a month.
I stood on a chair and turned my back to the mirror. I looked over my shoulder and pulled myself apart. I got nauseated at the sight of my body pocked with ugly bite and pinch wounds.
I knew I needed medical attention for sure. I heard the faint whoosh of the garage door opening to the electronic beam inside the hearse.
I went across the hall to the bathroom and stood there behind the locked door, ashamed to face Dorcas. I heard her come down the hall and go into her bedroom next to mine.
I sat on the toilet. It felt like I was passing my entrails. I almost cried out with the pain. I rose and saw that my stool was bloody. I drew a tub of water and took a bath. I eased the door open and went to my bedroom. I put on pajamas and sat at the window looking out on State Street.
Finally Dorcas came to the doorway and said, “Welcome home, playboy. That call I got from you last night saying you were on the way home must have come from New York. Or maybe you decided not to tear yourself away from Miss whoever she is. What does she look like, Otis? Does she have a lovely slender figure? Go on tell me about her. I won’t be hurt. It will be wonderful to know where we stand.”
I turned and faced her. “Hon, I’m sorry I broke my word and you had to drive the hearse. For the last time, I’m saying there is no other woman in my life. I got into trouble, real trouble that had nothing to do with a woman. It’s the truth, Dorcas. It won’t happen again. But I won’t tell you what happened. So stop quizzing me.”
She came and sat on the bed and said softly, “Otis, please don’t lie to me. I checked all the jails and hospitals. Where have you been? I want to know what happened. I love you, but you have to clear up things for me. Whatever it is, I’ll understand.”
I felt suffocated like under Mama’s pressure. My palms were gluey.
I said sharply, “Goddamnit, Dorcas, I told you I’m not telling you what happened. It’s too personal, and no woman except Mama could understand it. You’d despise me. Now leave me alone. I want to think.”
I got up and went to the dresser. I stood there brushing my hair and watching her in the mirror. She sat there nervously raking her fingers through her long black hair and staring at the floor.
She stood up and came to stand behind me. The big eyes in the furious black face were angry and accusing. I turned and tried to embrace her.
She backed up and spat out, “Don’t touch me, liar. You’ve been cheating on me with one of these Westside chippies. Daddy always told me fellows with your background were dangerous risks. Now you’ve betrayed me, lied to me. Please don’t be a tramp.”
She’d smashed the control on my rage machine with the crack about her father. I opened my mouth to shout at her. A pain grenade detonated in my rectum and reared me back on my heels.
I hung there like a corpse from an invisible hangman’s noose with my tongue lolling out. I crumbled backward on the foot of the bed like a sweaty rag doll.
Dorcas brought a cold towel to my brow and crooned “You see, Otis, it’s ridiculous to carouse with that chippie all night and get hung over like this. What does she look like?”
I lay there looking up at her agonized face.
I cut her off quietly. “Dorcas, I can’t stand pressure, so I’m going to tell you what happened, and then I’m going to get out of your sight and give you a chance to get yourself a real man. I haven’t been out with a woman. I’ve been . . .”
She sobbed and threw herself across me and pressed her lips against mine.
She pleaded, “Don’t tell me, Otis. Don’t tell me if you’re going to leave me. I don’t want to know. You’re my man. I know that, and I love you.”
I pushed her away and stood up. I looked into her eyes for a long moment.
Then I said softly, “Hon, that’s the problem exactly. You’re in love all right, but not with a man. Dorcas, I’m a low-life faggot. A big, black, ugly nigger with a deformed dick fucked me in a filthy attic until he passed out.”
Her mouth popped open. She froze like she was having a stroke. I saw the shock anguish in her eyes and knew I was going to break down. I went to the closet and got my suitcase and threw it on the bed.
She shook the bed in convulsions of weeping. My tears blinded me as I packed the bag and slipped the gray suit over my pajamas. I took my car key and Mama’s door key from the ring of mortuary keys and touched Dorcas on the shoulder. She sat up on the side of the bed and rocked as she held my hands against her face.
She wailed, “Oh! Otis, don’t go. You were wrong about my despising you. I’m just confused and forgive me for saying it, but I’m so relieved that it wasn’t another woman. Otis, darling, that was the only time with a man in the year we’ve been together, wasn’t it?”
I pulled my hands away and picked up my suitcase.
I said gently, “Dorcas, last night was the only time since I’ve been with you. But I’ve had guys on the brain all along, even when we sexed, so I could stay hard. I love you, Hon. But I can’t stay knowing that you know how sick and weak I am. Since we were kids, something has always turned up to keep us apart. I guess we shouldn’t be together.”
I kissed her on the cheek and turned away. She followed me down the hallway to the door. She hugged me around the waist and pressed her face between my shoulder blades.
She pleaded, “Stay here with me. I won’t ever again ask you to marry me. I love you enough to help you get well. You weren’t born that way. Together we can . . .”
I pried her arms loose and faced her.
I said tenderly, “I wish I was good enough to marry you. You’re still pretty. Some high-class guy will come along to make you happy.”
I started down the stairs to the street door.
She said sorrowfully, “I’ll never want anybody but you. Otis, I’m going to wait for you. Please promise you’ll come back to me.”
I opened the door and said, “You’re breaking my heart, but I can’t promise you that. I have to get my mind together. Dorcas, you can’t know how terrible it is to be the way I am. No matter what happens, I’ll never forget how sweet and wonderful you’ve been to me.”
I slowly shut the door to her crying and went down the sidewalk to the Plymouth in a storm of tears.
I drove to a medical building at Sixty-first Street and Cottage Grove Avenue on the Southside. I went up a flight of stairs to the office of an old doctor who had formerly practiced on the Westside.
He examined me and found a ripped anus and a traumatized sphincter. He injected a local anesthetic and took four stitches. He gave me pills for pain and sleep and told me to come back in several days.
I went to the Plymouth and sat there confused, not knowing what to do or where to go.
I drove across the intersection and parked in front of the Evans Hotel at Sixty-first Street and Evans Avenue. I went to the desk and checked into a fourth-floor room facing Sixty-first Street.
I sat in a chair by the window in deep depression until twilight lit its lavender lamp. I called room service for vegetable soup and a Denver sandwich. I felt better after I had eaten.
I got pajamas and a small transistor radio from my bag. I took a pain pill and lay across the bed and tried to untangle the snarl of my life. I stared at the ceiling and listened to sentimental music for quite a while.
Then a newscaster started a recap of the day’s news. I couldn’t believe his words. I leaped off the bed and stood holding my breath.
He said it again loud and clear, “Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. has been murdered by a sniper on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.”
I understood why the streets were so quiet and black faces were so solemn and angry. The shock of the terrible news was just too much for my already chaotic mind. I cried and ran blindly in the darkness crashing myself into the furniture like a stricken animal.
I listened to the radio po
uring out the sorrow and anger of America. Dozens of times during the lonely night I went to the window and tried to argue myself across the sill to the concrete four stories down. Each time I could feel some frightful force inside me pulling to propel me through the window. It was a deadly struggle to snatch myself away. I knew that if I didn’t stop going to that window I would certainly give in to the horrible impulse that got stronger and stronger.
Finally at daybreak I took two sleeping pills. I certainly had a desperate need for sleep because it was late afternoon when I woke up to a news bulletin that burning and looting had started on the Westside.
I was no longer confused. Mama was alone over there. It was true that she could become unbearable with her possessiveness, but she needed me, and I loved her. The least I could do was stay with her until the rioting was over. Besides, I knew I’d be better off with Mama than keeping company with that magnetized window.
I called Mama twice, but her line was busy. It was dusk when I checked out. As I drove toward the Westside, I thought how heartless and stupid it was for the rioters to dishonor the philosophy and death of our leader.
I drove slowly along the 3200 block of West Madison Street. The keening scream of distant fire engines and the hoarse ecstasy of the looters and burners was like baleful music.
Twisting fat flames hula-danced from the tops of gutted buildings. Uneasy policemen stood in the bursts of red light with phony indifference on their faces as the looters crawled through the black window frames into the murky interiors of stores and came out with stacks of flashy finery.
Kinky-topped infants, some no more than five years old, skipped merrily from the sacked stores with their parents. Their tiny black faces lit up in the excitement and joy of the shiny baubles they clutched.
Just ahead in the 3300 block, I saw a fire engine straddling the street pumping streams of water into a flaming building and heard the pop of rioters’ pistols sniping at firemen.
I turned off Madison Street into an alley. I came out on Spaulding Avenue, and there, twenty feet away, was a lone white policeman in the middle of the street.
I parked and walked to the outer edge of a crowd spotlighted by the headlights of a police car. The cop was in the center of the horde cut off from his cruiser.
The revolving red dome light flashed eerily on the cop’s starch white face paralyzed in fear and shock. His mouth gaped open stupidly, and his sea blue eyes spun crazily.
The leader of the cursing mob was larger than Big Lovell, and his kinky hair seemed to stand on end as he thrust his angry black face to within inches of the cop’s face. The whites of his black eyes glowed in released madness, and his wide nostrils dilated in hatred.
I goose pimpled and stood there fascinated.
The heavy blue black lips pulled back from the brown teeth in a grinning snarl. He slapped the slack mouth and shouted into the face of his enemy. “You got a gun, chickenhearted motherfucker. Use it. All you bastards are cunts when the odds ain’t in your favor.”
The cop just stood there with that awed look of fear on his face. Then the black giant in a deft rapid stroke snaked the cop’s gun from its holster. He palmed it in his massive right hand. He twisted his wrist to a backhand and brought his muscular arm back and slammed the blue steel against the side of the cop’s head.
The vicious blow landed with a hollow crunching sound. A spatter of scarlet dotted the giant’s shirtfront. The cop’s legs gave way, and he slipped to the asphalt.
Black fingers clawed at the blue cloth and shredded it. The white figure moaned as the mob kicked at it. Finally, they moved away from the insensible heap lying in the glare of the cruiser’s headlights.
The silver badge, a worthless charm, glittered inches away from a ghost white hand.
As I drove away toward Mama I began to feel bad. I couldn’t get it out of my mind that he hadn’t been born a cop, so maybe he had once been a human being. He could have a wife, children and a mother who cared about him, even though he was a treacherous cop.
I just couldn’t stand the thought that he was lying there helpless and without medical aid, so I stopped at a phone booth and called the district police station. I pointed out that the cop was unconscious and the odds were that some black passerby he had brutalized was certain to come along and cut his throat or blow his brains out if they didn’t hurry to him.
Homan Avenue was quiet except for shadowy figures darting down the sidewalk heavily laden with booty. I parked in front of Mama’s building and hurried down the walk carrying my suitcase.
Mama met me in the vestibule, spidery arms crushing the hell out of me as usual and with a radiant smile of welcome like I had just gotten back from Viet Nam. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I hadn’t come home to stay permanently.
4
FORTY CENTS A HUNDRED AIN’T A PRECIOUS GIFT
I lay alone in the dark rear bedroom remembering Frank, Carol and Bessie, my older brother and sisters, and how we all shared the bedroom until deadly forces within the family and in the treacherous streets cut them down.
I listened to the radio rundown on the savage rioting, and for some strange reason, I couldn’t forget that fearful awe on the cop’s face before he had been smashed to the ground.
That expression on his face was somehow familiar. But I couldn’t remember why.
My thoughts swung to Papa and the smelly one-room sharecropper’s shack in Mississippi with the foul holes in the floor that the tenants before us had used as toilets. Papa had built a privy a hundred yards from the shack and dumped quicklime or something down the holes and sealed them. But the rotten stench seemed to come back with full power in hot weather.
Papa and Mama had a battered old bed. Papa couldn’t get his hands on lumber to build beds for us. Many steamy nights I’d lie sleepless on the rough pine floor. I’d hear and smell Mama and Papa kissing and sexing behind a potato sack curtain in the corner of the room. I’d get a peculiar excited feeling.
I would crawl across my sleeping brother and sisters and tiptoe from the shack. I’d stand there gulping the fresh air that rippled the stark white sea of cotton plants.
I’d often gaze at the alabaster house of the plantation owner gleaming in the sapphire starlight and wonder how much cotton would a sharecropper have to pick at forty cents a hundred to own a house like it.
At the flash of dawn we would eat a breakfast of biscuits, fat back, grits and gravy before going to the fields. At supper we’d have hog maws and turnip greens or maybe black-eyed peas with hot water cornbread.
It was a hard life and coarse food, but we were never hungry because Papa could always get supplies from Mr. Wilkerson, the plantation owner, on tab against the cotton money our family earned.
Our family never had more than a few dollars in cold cash, but Papa had a big pride in knowing he was all-man, one of the best pickers on the plantation. We loved and respected Papa back there in the South, and Papa respected himself.
It was a huge plantation in the country outside Meridian, Mississippi, that worked many families like ours beneath the blistering sun.
I was frail and prone to sunstroke. I collapsed a half-dozen times in the two years I worked the cotton. When I was eight years old I started staying at the shack, helping Mama sew and wash our clothes when she didn’t go to the fields.
The big cast-iron tub Mama used to wash our clothes in was also our bathtub. I’d watch Papa strip off his sweaty clothes when he came in from the fields. I’d admire his muscles that writhed like golden snakes when he bathed.
In the off months of cotton my brother and sisters and I went to a one-room schoolhouse two miles away. Carol and I would often take our reading and writing to a patch of moonlight on the floor after the kerosene lamp had been blown out and Frank Jr. and Bessie were sound asleep.
Papa and my older brother, Frank Jr., and I were real buddies down South. We’d go fishing and hiking together. Papa and Frank Jr. would wrestle each other until they panted. Frank Jr.
was taller than Papa and almost as big, but he was no match for Papa’s wiry strength.
Sunday afternoon Papa would deck himself out in starched and creased overalls and gleaming brogans ordered from a Sears and Roebuck catalogue. He’d preach beneath a clump of cottonwood trees to his amening congregation. He sure stood proud and beautiful out there giving Satan hell with his booming rich voice.
Papa had some importance and a sense of worth down South, even though living conditions were subhuman. Up North, poor Papa would become a zero, unimportant to everyone, even to his wife and children.
Mama wasn’t a bit fire and brimstone like Papa. And when she went to church I could feel that she didn’t go because she was religious. Mama and Papa were completely different from each other in habit and desires and morals. But Papa tried because he was a good man and he loved her and his children. I really doubt that Mama ever loved Papa. Small wonder that the Tilsons were doomed to tears and sorrow.
Mama had an obsession to escape the South and go to Chicago where her cousin Bunny lived like white folks with running water, in-the-house privy and a sitting room and electric lights.
Papa was content in the South and would just sit silently with a worried look on his face when Mama read Bunny’s letters and got all excited and starry eyed about the wondrous North.
Mama and Papa were unlike peas in a pod in other ways too. They met and married in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1919. Papa was twenty-eight and had come in from the country with his father on a Saturday night to bring the gospel to the grog heads, whoremongers and craps shooters.
Papa was taking his preaching turn on a sinful street corner when Mama and cousin Bunny passed him, and then came back for a second long look at the extremely handsome high yellow preacher.
Mama told us she had lived with cousin Bunny since she was ten years old. She was mysterious and vague about her parents and her life before she lived with Bunny. I found out why one terrible day years later.
