Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

by Walter Mosley

  He was counting the days so he would know in that final moment how long he’d made it before they cut him down.

  And then, on day sixty-two, he walked past Harpo’s Bazaar, a secondhand store on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Next door was the Canyon minimall. There were only two businesses open out of the five stores, Lucky Liquors and the Capricorn Bookshop.

  Socrates bought a half pint of Apache Gin and walked into the bookstore because he hoped that they had air conditioning.

  Capricorn was on his route then. He was no longer roaming. He had a place to go.

  As the riots raged outside his walls, Socrates remembered the little bookstore and the men and women who despised and loved him.

  {1.}

  “I don’t like you, Socrates Fortlow,” Roland Winters had said. He was pudgy and small, a bespectacled man with strawberry-brown skin. “You, an’ people like you, the whole reason we got so much heartache down here. Always thinkin’ violence; always wantin’ ta beat on, never wantin’ to get on your knees to God.”

  Socrates hadn’t been out of prison for very long, sixty-two days and four weeks. He’d come to the bookstore because you could sit around there and nobody asked you to buy anything or to leave. He could read all day and even talk to other customers who sat along the reading shelf.

  Roland sat in a shaft of green light that shone through the tinted front window of the Capricorn Bookshop. Mrs. Minette, the owner, sat behind her cash register smiling sweetly just as if the men seated at her reading table were trading compliments.

  The hot promise of a slap jerked in Socrates’ right palm. He held back though-—not because he thought it was wrong to hit Roland but because he wanted to be welcome at the Capricorn. He liked browsing through the Afro-American literature and talking to Mr. and Mrs. Minette about what he read.

  Black cowboys running roughshod in Oklahoma. Black scientists and war heroes and con men. He liked the smell of the Minettes’ incense and the promise of things that he never even suspected were true.

  “Oh, Roland, shut up,” Minty Scale said. “Just shet it. All Socco did was ask a question. He ain’t even ask you.”

  “I don’t have to be quiet if I don’t wanna be,” Roland complained. “He could ask a question an’ I could speak my mind.”

  A lazy smile rippled across Minty’s big lips. He was a long-boned man, thirty-five, a wallpaperer by profession, and unemployed. Socrates thought that Minty was trying to fire Roland up rather than calm him down.

  “I’ont need your help, Minty,” the big ex-convict said. “I could take care’a myself.”

  “No, Socco,” the fourth man at the long counter said. “It wouldn’ta made no difference if the African people had gunpowder. Africans just wasn’t warlike-not like them Europeans. Chinese neither, they had ignitin’ powder for a thousand years an’ they never done nuthin’ with it like Europe did.”

  The last man was only known as Big Bill. He weighed nearly four hundred pounds and had to sit on a box instead of a folding chair. He had a job with a real estate agency on Avalon and drove a 1969 Impala that was pink and chrome—in beautiful condition.

  “China!” Roland yelled. “China got guns. They got guns and cannon—an’ the atomic bomb! That’s what men like this one here,” Roland waved dismissively at Socrates, “don’t know about, or don’t care. You start talkin’ guns an’ it all just escalates. From fists to guns, from guns to dynamite, from dynamite to the atomic bomb.”

  “The atomic bomb?” Minty said. “The atomic bomb? Don’t tell me them folks down at the federal buildin’ got you fooled, Roland. The atomic bomb? Shoot! That’s just some lie that they tellin’ to keep people in line. They tell you they got some bomb so bad that you better not ever even think about tryin’ to get what’s yours. That’s how they keep people down—wit’lies like the atomic bomb.”

  Minty turned his chair around so that he could look down the row of men. When he put his big bare feet up on the table Mrs. Minette frowned. Minty, and everybody else, knew that she didn’t like feet up on her furniture, but she would never interrupt an intellectual conversation to say so.

  “Aw, com’on, Minty,” Big Bill said. “You ain’t sayin’ that you don’t believe in nuclear power.”

  “I’m not, huh? You used to watch Walter Cronkite back in ’sixty-four, ’sixty-five?” Minty asked Bill.

  “Yeah?”

  “Me too. Ev’ry night I be sittin’ there lookin’ to see if they’d show a picture of my brother Doren over there in Vietnam. You know I’as only twelve, thirteen but I knew that ole Walt was lyin’ like a motherfucker.”

  “What?”

  “Lyin’, man. Five hunnert VC killed; one American wounded. Next day—two thousand North Vietnamese regulars routed with only three Americans killed. Shit! You add up all that at the end’a the war an’ we done killed over half’a Asia—forget about Vietnam.”

  “But that was war, Minty,” Bill said. “They lie like that durin’ a war to keep up confidence at home.”

  “This is a war,” Socrates said. He was angry at himself for talking so softly but he was intimidated by how intelligent the men at Capricorn sounded. They were so confident about their words.

  “What, Socco?” Minty asked. There was a big grin on his lips.

  “That’s what you sayin’, right, Minty? That we’re in a war against them men own ev’rything. The newspapers, the TV stations, the army, and the police. They tell us what they want us to know. If it’s a lie then it is, but if it’s the truth it don’t matter because they only say it ’cause it helps them out.” Socrates felt a film of sweat form across his bald head. He wasn’t a timid man and he was willing to put his life on the line where most men would have run scared. But he was shy of the men and women at the Capricorn because they were readers. No prison-yard lawyers or bullshitters. These people studied the history of black folks because they loved to learn.

  “There you go again,” Roland chirped. “Talkin’ war, talkin’ violence, talkin’ ’bout how it’s somebody else fault. Say what you want but God know that it’s on you. When the judgment come he ain’t gonna take no excuse. You cain’t be sayin’ that it’s the newspaper fault ’cause you shot that man. You cain’t say it’s the girly magazine made you rape that woman.” The little man slapped his belly as if he had a round drum wrapped up in his T-shirt.

  “Let him talk, Roland.” Her soft voice was ethereal, like the voice of ghosts in old black-and-white movies.

  The men all turned. It was unusual for Mrs. Minette to get involved in the talks that went on in her store. It was said that she was ten years younger than her husband—who was eighty-five—but she didn’t even look fifty. She sat behind her desk all day, smiling and talking little. Mrs. Minette ran the store, which was little more than a big empty room with bookshelves along the walls and the slender reading table across the front window.

  “His kinda talk is wrong, Winifred,” Roland said.

  Winifred. Socrates mouthed the name.

  “Anybody can say what they want here,” she whispered. “What were you saying, Mr. Fortlow?”

  “Uh … I wasn’t sayin’ nuthin’ really.” He was a convict again, lying to a guard. “Minty and Bill was just sayin’, they was just sayin’ that it’s a war of lies that we’re in.”

  “A war of lies?” Mrs. Minette spoke and held her head the way she did when she was talking to the children who came to the after-school day care program that the bookstore ran.

  Socrates didn’t mind her condescension.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what Minty meant. He meant that almost ev’rything we hear is a lie or, even worse, just half’a what’s true. That’s why me an’ an’ an’ uh me an’ Roland get so mad …”

  “Why’s that?” Mr. Oscar Minette asked. Socrates hadn’t even heard the bell on the front door.

  “Hi,” Winifred Minette said to her husband.

  Socrates imagined all of the sweet knowledge buried in her hello. It made him happy
.

  “Hey, Mr. Minette,” Minty said as he removed his feet from the table. “How you doin’?”

  “Oscar,” said Bill in way of a greeting.

  Mr. Minette was tall, thin, and lame. He had on a fuzzy gray suit with a chocolate-brown rayon shirt underneath. His cane was brown and so were his shoes.

  Mr. Minette bowed to each of the men and then asked again, “What were you going to say, Mr. Fortlow?”

  {2.}

  Socrates stared at Mr. Minette. He understood the question but didn’t think about an answer. He knew the answer but somehow that didn’t seem to matter. He felt like a boy in school. He was in awe that he was picked out to speak.

  Call on me, Socrates remembered shouting with his arm held up so stiffly that it shook. Call on me.

  Oscar Minette limped across the big room, slowly approaching his wife. She turned her smooth round cheek to him, he kissed it, then she stood on her toes to kiss him.

  Bill jumped up, grabbing a folding chair from behind the desk, then shaking it out for the elder. But Mr. Minette didn’t sit. He stood behind the chair, holding it to steady himself.

  “What did you say, Socrates?”

  “That Roland an’ me always fightin’ because we cain’t believe in what we sayin’ to each other.” Socrates heard the words as they came out of his mouth. They sounded good, maybe even true. Twenty-three years angry and poor, twenty-seven more in prison, and then all of a sudden it just all fell into place. “They lyin’ to us so much that we always lookin’ for the trick behind what they sayin’. ’Cause there’s always a trick, even if you don’t think there is.”

  “I’idn’t say nuthin’ like that,” Roland Winters said. “I said I don’t like you because you don’t accept God. ’Cause you always talkin’ ’bout crooks like that George Washington Williams, an’ cowboys, an’ guns.”

  Socrates didn’t want to slap Roland anymore. He didn’t want to hurt anybody for the first time that he could remember.

  “Ain’t it Christian to forgive an’ to teach?” Minty asked. He was still grinning, still jabbing the needle.

  Oscar Minette beamed at Socrates; Winifred smiled at her husband. Roland was quiet while Minty grinned at him; Big Bill didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands.

  It was still all so clear to Socrates while the riots raged outside, years later, the picture of his first friends outside of prison. The smell of incense. The radio playing low in the cabinet under Mrs. Minette’s cash register.

  “There’s always a trick,” Socrates repeated. “Man tells another one to believe in something because he believes it; later on he finds out that he was wrong. Boy tells a girl that he loves her but when he gets what he really wanted he see that he don’t even like her. An’ then he blames her for burnin’ the food or spendin’ too much time with her friends.”

  Oscar Minette nodded.

  “It’s a lie when a black man open his mouth,” Socrates said. “An’ he know it too. That’s why if a black man lucky enough to live till he old he don’t have much to say. I’m hungry, I tired, that’s just about all that ain’t some lie.”

  Roland left. He never stayed in the store long whenever Socrates was around after that day. Minty put on his shoes and went too. He had a date, Socrates remembered, with a schoolteacher. Bill stayed and read the newspaper. Bill never read books much but he liked to talk to people who read them.

  “Would you like to come to our house for dinner sometimes, Mr. Fortlow?” Oscar Minette asked Socrates at the door at closing time.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “We’re in the Holy Church retirement residence on Fortyseven and Central.” “I know where it’s at.”

  “Come over on Sunday, ’bout four. We’ll have supper.”

  Socrates expected a much larger apartment. People like the Minettes should have had a long dining table with thick carpets and a kitchen big enough to feed an army of grandchildren. But it was just two small rooms and a kitchen that Big Bill wouldn’t have fit into. The floor was unfinished wood and the table didn’t leave room for a bread basket with the three dinner plates on it. One window only and no bookshelves.

  “Everything we ever had is in the Capricorn,” Oscar Minette told Socrates over baked chicken. “Winnie and I couldn’t have children and so we started the store forty-nine years ago. It’s always been more spiritual than anything but we keep books for everybody.”

  Dinner was only one small chicken but Winifred baked it until the skin was crisp and salty and meat fell from the bone. Socrates found himself more hungry after the meal than he was when he sat down.

  But he wasn’t complaining.

  The Minettes had met James Baldwin and Langston Hughes and both Martin Luther Kings. They hosted plays on the weekends and had gone to Africa with Louis Armstrong in the sixties.

  “We don’t have any money in the bank,” Winifred said. “But our lives are like treasure chests.” She looked at her husband and they linked hands across the table.

  “I can see it,” Socrates told them. He felt himself relaxing in their home. It was a comfort that he’d given up on years before he went to prison. It made him so happy that he was afraid to talk, afraid that he might say something to break the spell.

  “Where’s your people from, Mr. Fortlow?” Oscar asked. Socrates was sitting on the couch while Winifred sat in her dinner chair, Mr. Minette stood because sitting cramped his back.

  “Indiana.”

  “They still there?”

  Socrates waited a moment before saying, “I guess.”

  “You haven’t heard from them?” Winifred asked with a big sorry smile on her fine-featured face.

  “I was in prison,” Socrates said for the first time that he didn’t have to. “When I went away my family forgot me. All except my mother, but she died soon after I was incarcerated.”

  “That’s wrong,” Oscar said in a somber tone. “Wrong.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Socrates replied. He felt so comfortable that he could have fallen off to sleep on that couch. “I was a bad man, really bad. I don’t blame anybody for not wantin’ to claim my blood.”

  “But you got out,” Winifred said. “You paid your debt and now you’re doing good.”

  “I got out okay, but you know I was mean then too. They let me go ’cause all I did was kill black folks. They don’t think that black folks are worth a whole life in a white man’s jail. But I wasn’t cured. I was still mean an’ still confused. You know my main problem was that I was never sure what was right. You know—absolutely sure.”

  The Minettes both stared. Socrates was certain that they weren’t afraid of him.

  “But you did change?” Oscar Minette asked.

  “Comin’ down to your store. Listenin’ to Minty an’ Roland an’ Stanley Pete; gettin’ a ride home from Big Bill now and then. An’ watchin’ you two just sit back lettin’ it all happen. It was like I was seein’ through your eyes. I’d let my mind be smilin’ an’ carin’ ’bout people when I knew that they was wrong. Somehow watchin’ you made me see myself. You know what I mean?”

  “You’re a good man, Mr. Fortlow.”

  “No.”

  Later on, after rhubarb pie, Oscar said, “No, you’re wrong, Socrates. You are a good man.”

  Winifred had gone to bed. Her good-night handshake was like a handful of icy feathers in a dream.

  “Why you say that, Oscar?”

  “Because you know, in your heart, that there’s something good in the world in spite of all the bad you’ve seen and been. You come out to the bookshop and talk to those men because you know that there’s something good in the world and you want it.”

  “What good is this you talkin’ ’bout?”

  “Purpose, Mr. Fortlow. Purpose. We’re all here for a reason. There is a divine plan. Good men want to find their place in that plan. That’s you.”

  “You mean a plan like in the Bible?”

  “No, not in a book. Not in a church or temple or mosque.
You see it, don’t you? Where did life come from? A rock fell in some mud and then lightning struck? A muddy cell turns into a pollywog and he comes to be a frog; the frog jumps up high until he’s a bird and then finally a man falls out of the sky? No, all that’s just science fiction.”

  Socrates could see that Oscar Minette had given his divine plan lots of thought.

  “What there is is a plan, a direction that every living thing is moving toward. There’s a high sign but not everybody can see it. But you saw it.” Oscar Minette smiled with deep expectations at his new friend.

  There hadn’t even been dinner wine at the Minettes’ table but Socrates felt drunk. It was late at night and he was seated in the presence of the first man he’d respected since he was a boy in Indiana. Church songs kept coming into Socrates’ mind; they played in the back of his head while he tried to keep from nodding to their beats.

  There seemed to be music in the room. Music in the way the chairs faced each other, music in the sounds from elsewhere in the building. Socrates wanted to dance for the first time in his fifty years.

  “I don’t …” Socrates said and then stalled. “I don’t … really believe it, Mr. Minette.”

  Mr. Minette’s smile faded into sad resignation.

  “No sir,” Socrates went on. “I wanna believe you. And I sure don’t wanna make you mad. But there ain’t no plan. No sir there ain’t. There’s rules; all kindsa rules. And rules is always made to put money in another man’s pocket; food in somebody else’s children’s mouths.

  “Only two reasons I come by Capricorn. One is ’cause I like you an’ Mrs. Minette. You good people. And the other one is ’cause I wanna know how to break the rules. Because any black man that ever did a thing for hisself broke the rules—he had to because the rules say that a black man cain’t have nuthin’.

  “That’s what I learned in prison. You know I shouldn’ta been up in jail. I murdered and I raped and then I murdered again. A man like me shoulda been hung, gassed, and then electrocuted. But they didn’t kill me because I was the best kinda rule-followin’ niggah. I killed my own people an’ then let myself get caught. To my own people I was a dog, but the men who made the rules threw me a bone and let me live.