A Rage in Harlem

by Chester Himes

  The thunder of the train diminished into the brackish sound of metal grinding on metal as the train braked for a stop at the 125th Street Station.

  Jodie bent down and wiped his knife blade on the hem of Goldy’s black gown. The stroke had been executed so quickly there was blood only on the knife blade.

  He straightened up, pressed the button releasing the catch. The blade dangled loose. With a twist of his wrist he snapped the knife shut. The lock clicked. He put it back into his coat-pocket.

  “I bled that mother-raper like a boar hog,” he said proudly.

  “Talked himself into the grave.”

  As though by speechless accord, Hank and Jodie looked up and down the street, up at the window of the third-story flat, into the dimly lit hall, examined the windows of the surrounding tenements.

  Nothing was moving.

  18

  The short, sharp blast of a train whistle when it had crossed the river into Harlem awakened Jackson in a pool of terror.

  He jumped to his feet, overturning the chair. He sensed someone striking at him from behind, ducked, and knocked the table aside. Wheeling about, he snatched the pipe from the table to knock Slim’s brains out.

  But there wasn’t anybody.

  “I must have been dreaming,” he said to himself.

  He realized then that he’d been asleep.

  “There’s a train coming,” he said.

  His wits were still fuddled.

  He noticed his chauffeur’s cap had fallen to the floor. He picked it up and brushed it off. But there was no dirt on it. The floor was spotlessly clean and still damp.

  The scrubbed floor made him think of Imabelle. He wondered where she could have gone. To her sister’s in the Bronx, maybe. But they were sure to find her there. The police were looking for her too. He’d have to phone her sister as soon as he got the gold ore checked in the baggage room at the station. He wasn’t going to leave it at Goldy’s, no matter what anyone said.

  Suddenly he was filled with a sense of haste.

  He searched his pockets for some paper to write Imabelle a note in case she came back there looking for him and didn’t know where to find him. In his inside uniform pocket was a soiled sheet of stationery with Mr. Clay’s letterhead containing a list of funeral items. He found a stub of pencil in his side overcoat pocket and unfolded the paper onto the kitchen table. He scribbled hurriedly:

  “Honey, look for my brother, Sister Gabriel, in front of Blumstein’s. He’ll tell you where I am at …”

  He was about to sign his name when it occurred to him that Slim was coming back with Hank and Jodie.

  “I ain’t thinking at all,” he muttered to himself, balled up the sheet of stationery and threw it into the corner.

  The rising thunder of the approaching train brought back his nameless terror. He thought of a blues song his mother used to sing,

  I flag de train an’ it keep on easing by

  I fold my arms; I hang my head an’ cry.

  Suddenly he was running without moving. He was running on the inside. He didn’t have any time left to wonder where Imabelle had gone. Just time left to worry. Anyway, he’d gotten her away from Slim.

  He picked up his club from the table. His eyes had turned red. His face was gray and dry, lips chapped.

  An old gray rat poked his head from underneath the grease-covered rusty woodburning stove. The rat had red eyes also. The rat looked at Jackson and he looked at the rat.

  The house began to shake, The floor was shaking, shaking the rat. Jackson felt himself begin to shake. His brains felt as though they were shaking up and down in his head, about to explode. The thunder of the train filled the room, froze the shaking man and shaking rat in a death-like trance.

  At that moment the whistle screamed. It screamed like a stuck pig running through the corn patch with the knife still in it.

  The rat vanished.

  Jackson’s feet began to run.

  He ran blindly from the kitchen, through the bedroom, stumbling over the three-legged chair, jumped up and ran into the pitch-dark hall and started down the stairs.

  Then he remembered Imabelle’s clothes. He turned around, ran back to the kitchen, laid his pipe on the table, gathered the clothes in his arms, turned around again and ran out of the flat, forgetting his club.

  He ran through the dark hall, down the steep, dark stairs, trying to be as quiet as possible. Sweat started to pour from his dry skin. He could feel it trickling down his neck, from underneath his arms, down his sides, like crawling worms.

  The hems of the dresses trailed on the dirty stairs. At the bottom of the first staircase he tripped over the skirts, fell belly-forward, holding the dresses clutched in his arms, and landed with a dull thud.

  “Lord, my Savior,” he muttered getting up. “Looks like I ain’t got long to stay here.”

  He was hugging the dresses as though Imabelle were inside them, just able to see over the top of the pile, when he passed underneath the dim light in the ground-floor hall and came to the outside doorway.

  He expected to see Goldy waiting impatiently on the front seat of the hearse. Instead he saw Hank and Jodie, standing on the far side of the hearse, facing each other and talking. He was petrified. He stood there with his mouth open in his wet black face, white teeth shining from purple-blue gums.

  Hank and Jodie had just that instant withdrawn their gazes from the lighted hallway.

  Hank was saying to Jodie, “Let’s move him out the street.”

  “Move him where?”

  “Inside the hearse.”

  “What for? Why don’t we let the mother-raper lay where he’s at?”

  “He’s a stooly. If the cops find him here they’re on our trail like white on rice.”

  “If it was up to me, I’d leave him lay, and frig the cops. We’re lamming, ain’t we?”

  Hank went back and opened the double-doors of the hearse. If he had turned his head he would have seen Jackson standing petrified in the doorway. But he was looking at the body as he walked back.

  “Grab his shoulders,” he said, stooping to pick up the feet.

  Jodie began putting on his gloves. He was looking at the body also.

  “What the hell, you scared to touch him with your hands?”

  “The mother-raper’s dead. That’s what I’m scared of.”

  Jackson thought they were preparing to move the trunk. The thought released his petrified muscles. Through the rim of his vision he saw the panel truck. He thought they were going to take the trunk and put it into the truck. He didn’t have any way of stopping them. He didn’t even have his club.

  For the first time he realized that Goldy was nowhere in sight. Maybe Goldy had seen them coming and had hidden. Goldy had the revolver. Jackson felt like damning Goldy to everlasting hell, but didn’t want to commit blasphemy on top of all the other sins he’d committed.

  He backed quietly down the hall, half-stumbling at each step, turned at the foot of the stairs and started to run back upstairs to the flat. Then he thought better of it. After they’d moved the trunk into their truck, they might go up to the flat for something or other.

  He looked about for a place to hide.

  The space underneath the stairs had been walled in to form a closet with the door facing a small dark corner at the back of the hall. He backed into the corner, tried the door of the closet, found it opened.

  Garbage cans were crammed helter-skelter among dirty mops and pails. Folding the dresses to keep them from dangling into the cans, he squeezed inside, silently closed the door, and stood in the stinking dark, scarcely breathing.

  Jodie took the body beneath the armpits, Hank the feet. They rammed it feet first into the funeral paraphernalia underneath the trunk. It was a tight squeeze and they had to lay it on its back and push it, with their feet against the shoulders. Finally they got the head in far enough to close the doors.

  Hank went back and picked up the white bonnet and gray wig and stuck it back on
the head. Then he pulled down some of the black bunting and artificial wreaths to cover the head before shutting the door.

  “What you doing that for?” Jodie asked.

  “In case anybody looks.”

  “Who’s going to look?”

  “How the hell do I know? We can’t lock it.”

  They turned and looked up at the window of the third-story flat again.

  Jodie took off his gloves, stuck his bare hand into his pocket and gripped the handle of his knife.

  “Who helped him, you reckon?”

  “I don’t figure it. I had it cased as her and Jackson, but this stooly makes it different.”

  “You reckon Jackson’s in it too?”

  “Got to be, I figure. It’s his hearse.”

  “You reckon they’re still upstairs?”

  “We’re going to see right soon.”

  They turned, crossed the sidewalk, and entered the hall. Both had their hands in their overcoat pockets, Hank’s gripping his .38 automatic pistol, Jodie’s gripping his bone-handled knife. Their eyes searched the shadows.

  As they approached the stairs they were talking loudly enough for Jackson to hear from the stinking closet underneath.

  “Double-crossing bitch, I should have killed her—”

  “Shut up.”

  Jackson could hear each footstep touching lightly on the wooden floor. He held his breath.

  “I don’t care if she does hear me, she ain’t got no place to hide.”

  “Shut up. Other people are in here who can hear.”

  Jackson heard the footsteps as they started to ascend the stairs. Suddenly one pair stopped.

  “What you mean, shut up? I’m getting good-and-goddam tired of you telling me to shut up all the time.”

  The second pair of footsteps stopped just as abruptly.

  “I mean shut up. Just that.”

  Jackson held his breath so long in the dangerous silence his lungs ached before the footsteps began ascending again.

  No further words were spoken.

  Jackson breathed softly, listening to the steps going higher and higher, becoming fainter. He gripped the door-knob, pulled it inward with all his strength, turned it slowly so as not to make a sound, and opened the door a crack with infinite caution.

  He heard the footsteps start up the second staircase, barely hearing them when they moved along the third-story hall.

  He waited a moment longer, then came out of the closet running. An empty garbage can turned over with a shattering clang. The sound kicked him down the hall with his arms full of dresses, like a pointed-toe shoe in his rump.

  He heard feet pounding on the wooden floor of the upper hallway, hitting the wooden steps like a booted centipede. As he crossed the sidewalk he heard a window being opened overhead.

  He grabbed at the handle of the hearse door, threw it open, tossed the dresses onto the seat, jumped inside, fumbled in his pocket for the ignition key, turned on the ignition, and pressed the starter button.

  “Catch, you God-damned son of a bitch, Lord forgive me,” he raved at the reluctant motor. “Catch, you mother-raping bastard son of a bitch of a God-damned car – Jesus Christ, I didn’t mean it.”

  He saw Jodie coming down the dimly lit hall, growing bigger and bigger in the rectangular perspective.

  “Lord, have mercy,” Jackson prayed.

  Jodie came out of the doorway in a long flying leap, the knife blade flashing in the gloom. He hit the pavement, skidded toward the curb, bent forward and flailing the air with both hands as if trying to halt his charge on the edge of a precipice, got his balance and turned as the old Cadillac motor roared.

  Jackson shifted into drive and put weight on the treadle; the old hearse took off with a heavy whoomping sound, so fast the right edge of the front bumper hit the left rear-fender of the pickup truck before Jackson got control, bent the fender into a mangled fin that scratched a river of scars on the black side of the hearse as it roared past, barely missing an iron stanchion of the overhead trestle as it turned west into 130th Street.

  “One more shave that close, Lord, and this brother ain’t going to be here long,” Jackson muttered as he wrapped his short fat arms about the wheel and watched the street come up over the hood.

  19

  When Imabelle came downstairs and left Goldy and her man, Jackson, struggling with her trunk of gold ore, she glanced briefly at the parked hearse, giggled again, and started running down Park Avenue toward the 125th Street Station.

  She didn’t know the train schedule, but there would be a train leaving for Chicago.

  “This sweet girl is going to be on it,” she said to herself.

  The 125th Street Station sat beneath the trestle like an artificial island, facing 125th Street. The double-track line widened into four tracks as it passed overhead on the gloomy, dimly-lit wooden platform. Passengers alighting there for the first time had the impulse to turn about and climb back into the train. The platform shook like palsy and the loose boards rattled like dry bones every time a train passed.

  From the platform could be seen the lighted strip of 125th Street running across the island from the Triborough Bridge, connecting the Bronx and Brooklyn, to the 125th Street ferry across the Hudson River into New Jersey.

  At street level the hot, brightly-lit waiting room was crammed with wooden benches, news-stands, lunch counters, slot machines, ticket windows, and aimless people. At the rear a double stairway ascended to the loading platform, with toilets underneath. Behind, out of sight, difficult to locate, impossible to get to, was the baggage room.

  The surrounding area was choked with bars, flea-ridden flophouses called hotels, all-night cafetarias, hop dens, whorehouses, gambling joints, catering to all the whims of nature.

  Black and white folks rubbed shoulders day and night, over the beer-wet bars, getting red-eyed and rambunctious from the ruckus juice and fist-fighting in the street between the passing cars. They sat side by side in the neon glare of the food factories, eating things from the steam tables that had no resemblance to food.

  Whores buzzed about the area like green flies over stewing chitterlings.

  The whining voices of blues singers, coming from the nightmare-lighted jukeboxes, floated in noisome air:

  My mama told me when I was a chile

  Dat mens and whiskey would kill me after a while.

  Muggers with scarred faces cased the lone pedestrians like hyenas watching lions feast.

  Purse snatchers grabbed a poke and ran toward the dark beneath the trestle, trying to dodge the cops’ bullets pinging against the iron stanchions. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t.

  White gangsters, four and six together in the bullet-proof limousines, coming and going from the syndicate headquarters down the street, passed the harness cops in the patrol cars, giving them look for look.

  Inside the station plainclothes detectives were on twenty-four hour duty. Outside on the street a patrol car was always in sight.

  But Imabelle was more scared of Hank and Jodie than she was of the cops. She had never been mugged or fingerprinted. All the cops had ever wanted from her was a piece. Imabelle was a girl who believed that a fair exchange was no robbery.

  She had her black coat buttoned tight, but running made the skirt flare, exposing a teasing strip of red dress.

  A middle-aged church-going man, good husband and father of three school-age daughters, on his way to work, dressed in clean, starched overalls and an army jumper, heard the tapping of her heels on the pavement when he stepped from his ground-floor tenement.

  “A mighty light-footed whore,” he mumbled to himself.

  When he came out onto the sidewalk he looked around and saw the flash of her high-yellow face and the tantalizing strip of red skirt in the spill of street light. He caught a sudden live-wire edge. He couldn’t help it. His wife had been ailing and he hadn’t had his ashes hauled in God knows when. As he looked at that fine yaller gal tripping his way, his teeth shone i
n his black face like a lighthouse on the sea.

  “You is for me, baby,” he said in a big bass voice, grabbing her by the arm. He was willing to put out five bucks.

  Without breaking the flow of her motion she smacked him in his face with her black pocketbook.

  The blow startled him more than it hurt. He hadn’t meant her any harm; he just wanted to give the girl a play. But when he thought about a whore hitting a church man like himself, he became enraged. He closed in and clutched her.

  “Don’t you hit me, whore.”

  “Turn me loose, you black mother-raper,” she fumed, struggling furiously in his grip.

  He was a garbage collector and strong as a horse. She couldn’t break free.

  “Don’t cuss me, whore, ’cause I’m going to get some of you whether you like it or not,” he mouthed in a red raving passion of rage and lust, aiming to throw her to the pavement and rape her then and there.

  “You going’ to get some of your mama, you big mother-raper,” she cursed, digging a switchblade knife, similar to Jodie’s, from her coat pocket. She slashed him across the cheek.

  He jumped back, clinging to her with one hand, and felt his cheek with the other. He took away his bloody hand and looked at the blood on it. He looked surprised. It was his own blood.

  “You cut me, you whore,” he said in a surprised voice.

  “I’ll cut you again, you mother-raper,” she said, and began slashing at him in a feminine fury.

  He released her and backed away, striking at the knife with his bare hands as though trying to beat off a wasp.

  “What’s the matter with you, whore?” he was saying, but his voice was drowned by the thunder of a train approaching the station. Suddenly the whistle blew like a human scream.

  It scared her so much she jumped back and stared at the slashed man as though it had been he who had screamed.

  “I’ll kill you, you whore,” he said, preparing to charge her knife.

  She knew she couldn’t make him run, couldn’t cut him down, and if he overpowered her he’d kill her. She turned and ran toward the station, swinging the open knife.