“It’s not right for you to do this.”
“I’m not going to argue with you, lady. Either you give up Harold or you give up your white life.”
“Do I look like a black woman to you?” she pleaded.
“You look like Bozo’s grandmother,” I said. “But I don’t care. I would go out in the streets and stage a one-man riot to get to Harold. So either you tell me what I want to know or I’ll tell everybody else about you.”
I could hardly believe how brutal I was toward that fragile, elderly woman. But I knew that Harold had given rise to all kinds of sorrow and the woman before me had given birth to him. She was responsible and I wouldn’t let up.
“Why do you want him so bad?” Jocelyn asked.
“Where is he?” I replied.
“I don’t know. You’ve seen him. He lives in the streets and alleys. He doesn’t have a phone or an address. He’s a derelict. Only thirty-seven and he’s just a bum.”
“Tell me about him,” I said.
“I told you. He’s worthless.” Her lips curled into a feral snarl. “He’s nothing.”
“Is that why he’s killing black women who get together with white men?”
For me it was her eyes. They opened wide at the accusation I leveled, wide and brown and down-home. She had the colored curse in her veins. I was sure that she saw it in the mirror every morning before dousing herself with powders and lightening creams, before she put on her wig and gloves and hat.
It wasn’t the first time I had met someone like her. And I didn’t hate her for hating herself. If everybody in the world despises and hates you, sees your features as ugly and simian, makes jokes about your ways of talking, calls you stupid and beneath contempt; if you have no history, no heroes, and no future where a hero might lead, then you might begin to hate yourself, your face and features, your parents, and even your child. It could all happen and you would never even know it. And then one hot summer’s night you just erupt and go burning and shooting and nobody seems to know why.
“What women?” Jocelyn said.
You. The word came into my mind but I didn’t say it. Maybe it wasn’t even true but I believed it. I believed that Harold Ostenberg had roamed around the streets looking for a place to put his rage. He found women who had betrayed him as his mother had. He killed them and stole their memories.
“The woman across the street said that you made Harold walk to school alone even when he was little,” I said.
“Lots of children go to school alone. I was busy keeping the house in order,” she said.
“She also told me that Harold ran away when he was just twelve.”
“He was a bad seed even then. You know, Mr. Rawlins, that some children are just born bad.”
“Who was his father?” I asked.
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” she said. “His father left when Harold was just a baby.”
“Was he passing like you?”
“I don’t have to put up with this.”
“Yes, you do,” I said. “Either that or you want me to go to your new white husband with this story.”
For a moment I believed that Jocelyn was going to walk out on me. She certainly wanted to. She certainly hated me.
“Carl came from St. Louis,” she said, defeated. “We met when we were both working for Third Avenue Bank. He was a loan officer and I was a teller. They thought we were white and we didn’t set them straight. But we could tell about each other. It wasn’t so wrong. We just wanted to get ahead. We wanted to work together. We bought a house.”
“Just a nice white couple from back East.”
“You have no right to judge me.”
“But black-skinned Harold did,” I said. “Somehow you and your light-skinned hubby made a mess in the nursery. Harold would be like a shit stain on your sheets.”
“You don’t have to be crude,” she said.
“I have never once murdered a black woman, Miss Ostenberg. I never once drove a child from my door.”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “Carl left me. He just went to work one day and never came back. I had no friends or family. All I had was Harold and he just couldn’t act right.”
“You mean he didn’t know why he had to pretend to be your maid’s child? He didn’t know why Honey May was pretending to be his mother?”
“You know her name?” Jocelyn asked.
“I’m looking for Harold,” I said. “I intend to find him with or without your help.”
“I don’t know where he is, Mr. Rawlins. He left me when he was twelve. I haven’t seen him since.”
“You sure you don’t wanna change that story? Once it gets out you won’t have a hole to hide in.”
She stood up on nearly steady feet and turned her back on me. She walked to the door and out without another word. I’d never felt such hatred in my life but I wasn’t quite sure right then of who or what I hated. I wasn’t even certain why.
43
There was only one Honey May in the Los Angeles directory. She lived on Crocker between Eighty-seventh Street and Eighty-seventh Place. I could have walked there from my office but I drove because that was the way you got around in L.A. Down the street or across town, you had your car there at the curb waiting to take you where you needed to be.
Honey lived in a blue apartment building, on the second floor.
“Yes?” she said sweetly from behind the closed door.
“It’s Easy Rawlins, ma’am,” I said. “You don’t know me but I’ve come here to ask you about Harold Ostenberg.”
“Oh my,” she said. “Oh my.”
She opened the door and peered out through the screen.
Honey was a big woman in height and girth and facial features. Her nostrils were cavernous and her eyes were like moons. Only Honey’s voice was small. I got the feeling that the one squeaky voice I heard was just a single member of the chorus that must have lived inside that large body.
She held out a big hand in a delicate motion.
“Mr. Rawlings?”
“Rawlins,” I said. “My grandfather said that we got the “g” shot off, hightailing it out of Tennessee.”
Her grin revealed big teeth. But the smile was quickly replaced by concern. Men had been taking advantage of her by being charming and funny for a whole lifetime—that’s what her face was telling me.
“You said somethin’ about Harold?” she asked.
“He’s in trouble,” I said.
“He been that since the day he was born. You wanna come in, Mr. Rawlings?”
I didn’t correct her.
Honey’s walls were painted violet. She only had four walls to live between because it was just a one-room home. There were framed photographs along the box shelving and prints of paintings tacked on the wall. She had three chairs, one sofa, and a Murphy bed that folded up lengthwise under a window that looked out on a green wall.
“What kind of trouble?” she asked me after I had chosen a seat.
“As bad as you can get,” I said. “So bad that nothing worse could possibly be done to him in revenge.”
My words hit Honey’s face like bombs on a peaceful city.
“It’s not his fault,” she said. “He cain’t help what life made him.”
“Do you know where I can find him, Miss May?”
“Are you plannin’ to shoot him, Mr. Rawlings?”
That was the likeliest solution to a dispute in the black community at that time. If black men had a problem with each other they rarely went to the police. The law didn’t care unless it had to do with white skin or money. Black men settled their own disagreements.
“No ma’am. What Harold’s done has to be made public. He’s killed women,” I said.
“Oh no. No.”
“I don’t even know how many. But he has to be stopped. Because if he isn’t he’ll keep on until he dies.”
Honey started to cry. I got the feeling that she’d been expecting my visit for many years, that she knew
the potential tragedy wrapped up in Harold’s hurting heart. But what could she have done with her gentle nature and chocolate skin, her mild demeanor and giant eyes? She was just an exotic witness, an angel, maybe, with no say over the actions of men.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Rawlings. Did he hurt someone close to you?”
“Not really. But since I’ve been looking for him I’ve seen things that were just as bad as the war.” I paused and then asked, “Do you know where I can find him?”
“I don’t know if I should tell you, Mr. Rawlings. You know, I carried that boy in my arms when he couldn’t even crawl.”
“He’s a man now, Miss May. And men have to stand on their own two feet.”
“But he’s had it so hard,” she argued. “You know that no white judge is gonna care about what happened to him.”
“Do you have a daughter, Miss May? Or a mother or sister?”
She smiled but it was as if I had reached into her breast and wrenched the grin out against her will.
“Right here.” She walked over to a shelf near the window and took down a brass frame containing a Polaroid photograph of a young woman cut from her mold. “Sienna May. She married a man named Helms but we all still call her Sienna May ’cause it sounds right.”
I stood up and went over to the window. I took the frame from the big woman’s hand and admired it. Then I turned it so that she could see it.
“If Helms was a white man Howard would have choked your girl until her eyes and tongue was poppin’ outta her head,” I said. “She’d be cold and dead as a Christmas ham in the icebox. And there’d be a dozen other girls layin’ right up in there next to her.”
Honey grabbed the picture from my hand.
“No!” she said.
“Yes,” I replied. “That’s just what I said when I realized it almost a year ago. And when I went to the cops and told ’em they said that I must’ve been mistaken, no vagabond could get around them like that. Now there’s another woman dead. And I’m askin’ you to help me stop Harold.”
“But why should I believe you, Mr. Rawlings?”
“Because you know the man I’m talkin’ about. You know where he comes from and what he might do. You see him doin’ just what I say and you know why.”
Honey May let herself fall onto the sofa. She looked down at her lap and tears fell from her eyes. She shook her head and her shoulders slumped forward.
“It’s my fault too,” she said. “I knew his mama was colored the minute I laid eyes on her. But I never said so. I didn’t argue when she hinted that things would go better for Harold if people thought that I was his mother. But I never lied to Harold. I told him that Miss Ostenberg was his mother and I was just his big mama. I guess I shoulda taken him wit’ me when I left. But you know I didn’t have the strength.”
“Did he come to you after he ran away?” I asked.
“He’d come stay with me and Sienna May now and then. But you know he was so wild. Most the time he was out in the street, livin’ in empty lots or shelters.”
“Didn’t the state come after him?”
“They did but Harold would just run away. They didn’t want him all that bad and he always looked older than he was. That’s because his face was so hard.”
“Do you know where I can find him, Miss May?”
“He comes by here once a year or so,” she said to the floor. “Last time was four or five months ago. He said that he liked the north side of Will Rogers Park because there was some good guys like to play dominoes there.”
“I won’t kill him, Miss May,” I said. “I want to but I won’t. I’ll just make sure the police get him.”
She looked up at me with those big eyes.
“I can tell that you’re a good man, Mr. Rawlings,” she whispered. “But I know Harold too. He wanna be good but he just don’t know how.”
“Do you have a picture of Harold that I can show to them?”
There was a tiny chest of three drawers next to the Murphy bed. She pulled open the middle drawer and took out a simple dark-wood frame. She handed this to me.
Harold was in his twenties when the picture had been taken, wearing a coat that was too large for him, probably borrowed from the portrait photographer. His eyes weren’t as dull and there was some hope in him at that moment. I wondered if he had already started murdering women then.
“Can I have it back when they’re through, Mr. Rawlings?” Honey May asked me.
“Just as soon as we’re through with it,” I said.
We looked at each other, both knowing what my words meant.
44
It was nearly ten at night. No domino players would be out that late. I drove back to my office and called home.
“Hello,” Feather said.
“What are you doing up so late, girl?” I asked the daughter of my heart.
“Daddy!” she shouted. “It’s you.”
“Sure it is, baby girl. Did you think I ran away?”
“I was scared that you were hurt down in the riot places.”
“No, baby. I’ve just been workin’ at my office. You know sometimes grown-ups have to work day and night.”
“But why can’t you come home, Daddy? I miss you.”
“I’ll be home when you wake up in the morning, baby. I promise.”
“You promise?”
“Cross my heart,” I said. “Is Bonnie there?”
“Uh-huh. Here.”
“Where are you, Easy?” Bonnie asked.
“At the office. What’s wrong?”
“A woman named Ginny Wright called at about eight. She said that Benita Flag had been looking around for sleeping pills. She tried to call Raymond but he wasn’t home. She said that you might want to know that.”
I took a deep breath. The world was feeling too big for me to handle. I wanted to go home and see my family. I wanted to sleep for a week. And when I got up I wanted to go to my job at Sojourner Truth Junior High School, mopping up spilled milk and checking to see that there was no litter in the schoolyard.
“I was gonna come right home, baby,” I said. “But I better look into this. Benita is one’a Raymond’s friends and she’s been under a lotta pressure lately.”
“That’s okay, Easy,” Bonnie cooed. “Jesus is here and he’s going to wait until you get back before he goes out on his boat again.”
WHEN NOBODY ANSWERED I knocked the door in. If I was wrong about Benita I could always put it back on its hinges. Living poor and black had done many things for me. It had made me a plumber and a carpenter, an electrician and a mason. I could put in windows, take a car engine apart, pave a highway, or run a steam engine. Being poor made more out of many men than any Harvard or army could imagine.
Benita Flag was on her bed with white foam coming from her mouth. She didn’t respond to shaking or slaps or cold water in her face.
I could have called an ambulance but poverty had taught me a lesson about that too. I had her at Mercy in less than twelve minutes. They pumped her stomach and shot medicine in her veins. A doctor named Palmer told me that she was so close to death that he didn’t know if they had done enough.
“You did the right thing,” he told me.
“What good is doin’ the right thing if women are dyin’ whichever way I look?” I said.
I think the doctor was put off or worried by my words. But he patted my shoulder and showed me to a chair.
What else did I have to do? It was only one in the morning. I had many hours before I would set up watch at the domino tables at Will Rogers Park. Why not sit in a chair at the hospital, waiting to see if yet another woman had died?
THE EMERGENCY ROOM at any hospital in the middle of the night is mainly made up of the consequences of love. Men and women and children with fearful parents. The men and women had gotten into fights over passionate jealousies and the children were there because their parents had nowhere to turn.
I watched a small boy with a purple bruise on his head drifting off to sleep bu
t before he could go there his mother would shake him, saying, “You might have a concussion, honey. You got to stay up.”
Two men who had stabbed each other over a woman started fighting in the waiting room and the police had to be called to separate them.
With all that blood and worry I still fell asleep.
I WAS A simple seaman on a great gray battleship going off to war far from America’s shores. It was my job to keep the hull bright and shiny and clean. I had thick rope riggings and a platform made from a single plank of oak. All I did day and night was scrub and swab the steel hull from top to bottom, from sunup to sundown. Once I’d cleaned the whole hull it was already dirty at the place where I started. So I’d begin again with no complaint or attempt to shirk my duty.
But after a long while and many, many revolutions of scrubbing I began to wonder why the boat had to be so clean when all it was made for was war. Why shine and glisten on the deep blue sea when it would only come to blood and the deaths of mothers’ sons? The sea would still run red, the skies would still resound with cannon. Then the shining hull would be a disgrace and my work would be scorned throughout history.
“Mr. Rawlins?”
It was a nurse.
“Yeah?”
“Miss Flag is awake now,” the middle-aged, gray-headed white woman said.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Sixteen after six.”
SHE LOOKED AWFUL in that hospital bed. There were two other beds in the room. Each one had curtains to separate them but they weren’t drawn. In one bed was an elderly woman who kept babbling to herself. In the other lay one of the men who had been fighting in the waiting room. His color looked bad. There was a nozzle strapped to his nose, feeding him oxygen, I supposed, and three different intravenous drip sacks putting medicine into his arms. If he had a mother I prayed she didn’t see him like that.
“Easy,” Benita whispered. “Are you the one saved me?”
“I brought you here,” I said. “How you doin’, Benny?”
“I feel like a fool,” she said. “Please don’t tell nobody what happened.”
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