“That’s what it’s for.”
“What’s that milky stuff floating around in it?”
“That’s albumin. The same stuff as is the base for semen.”
“What’s semen?”
“What you ain’t got.”
All of a sudden the teen-aged white girl became hysterical. She doubled over laughing and choking and her face turned bright red. Everyone stared at her until she got over it, then turned their attention back to the jar of rejuvenating liquid.
“What’s them black balls floating around?” Mister Sam asked.
“Just what they look like, black balls, only they is taken from a baboon, which is the most virile two-footed animal known.”
Mister Sam’s lids flickered. “You don’t say. Taken from a live baboon?”
“Live when they was took, and rearing to go.”
“Ain’t that sompin. Bet he didn’t like it.”
“No more than you would’ave fifty years ago.”
“Uhm! And what’s them things that looks like feathers?”
“They is feathers. Rooster primaries. From a fighting rooster what could fertilize eggs from a distance of three feet.”
“Reminds me of a man I knew what could look at womens and knock ’em up.”
“He had a concupiscent eye. One of them is in there too.”
“You ain’t missed nothing, is you? Balls and feathers and eyes and summon. What’s all them other strange-looking things?”
“All of them is mating organs of rabbits, eagles and shellfish.”
Doctor Mubuta uttered these pronouncements without the flicker of an eyelash. His audience stared at him with their eyes popping out. Within the frame of reference — light, heat and Harlem — at some time during the recitation they had all passed the line of rational rejection. It wasn’t hard. It wasn’t any harder to believe in rejuvenation than to believe equality was coming.
“You sho’ got some mixture there, if they all start working at the same time, I’ll say that much,” Mister Sam conceded admiringly. “But what’s that black slimy stuff at the bottom?”
“That’s the secret,” Doctor Mubuta replied, as solemn as an owl.
“Oh, that’s the secret, eh? Looks like hog shit to me.”
“That’s the stuff which invigorates the other stuff which charges the genital glands, like charging a rundown battery.”
“Is that what it does?”
“That’s what it does.”
“What’s it called?”
“Sperm elixir.”
“Sounds mighty fancy. You sure it gonna work?”
Doctor Mubuta looked down at Mister Sam contemptuously. “If you didn’t know this elixir would work, you wouldn’t have me here giving you none, cheap and stingy as you is.”
“All I know is what I’ve heard,” Mister Sam admitted grudgingly.
“What you has heard,” Doctor Mubuta said scornfully. “You has seen people it has worked on. You has been sneaking around asking questions and spying on my clients ever since I have been back from Africa.”
Johnson X was indignant. “I’m ashamed of you, Mister Sam. Ashamed! You used to have the reputation of being a real big sport, you enjoyed your pleasure and didn’t grudge nobody. And now here you is, sitting on a fortune you has made from the sinning of others, and you is so envious of the pleasures of others you is gonna give all yo’ money to be able to sin again yo’self — and it ain’t really yo’ own money, as old as you is.”
“Ain’t that,” Mister Sam protested. “I wants to get married again.”
“Ise his fiancy,” the teen-aged white girl said. Her flat unemotional announcement, spoken in a jarring voice straight out of the cotton fields of the South, exploded in the room like a hand grenade, causing far more repercussions than the exposing of the rejuvenating elixir.
So much blood rushed to Viola’s head it looked like a gorged bedbug. “You beast,” she screamed. Which one she meant, no one knew.
“Don’t worry, he can’t do nothing,” Van Raff consoled her, trying to shake down the blood in his own head.
But it was Anny who looked so ashamed. Noticing, Dick said harshly, “He gonna be young, ain’t he? Don’t go back on your race now!”
And for an instant the mask slipped from Doctor Mubuta’s face and he looked more stupid than ever. “Huh! You going to marry this here, uh, young missy?”
“What’s the matter with her?” Mister Sam asked challengingly.
“Matter with her! Ain’t nothing the matter with her—it’s you I is thinking about. You is going to need more of this here elixir than I has figured.”
“You think I ain’t thought of that.”
“And what is more,” Doctor Mubuta went on. “If I heard you correctly, and if what is common knowledge all over Harlem is the truth, you already has one wife, who is here present in this here room and two wives is too many for this elixir at yo’ age.”
“Give her some too, so she be young as me, and can peddle her pussy.”
The teen-age white girl became hysterical again.
Viola popped open a switchblade knife from her purse and charged the girl. Van Raff was caught by surprise and couldn’t move. The white girl ran behind Mister Sam’s bed as though he could help her. Viola changed directions and headed toward Mister Sam with the open blade. Doctor Mubuta clutched her about the waist. Johnson X started forward. Van Raff jumped to his feet. Viola was trying to stab Doctor Mubuta and his hand was getting slashed as he grabbed for the knife.
He was reaching for the Gladstone when Van Raff came up from behind, shouting, “Oh, no, you don’t!” and snatched it out of his hand. Simultaneously Viola stabbed him in the back. It wasn’t enough to hamper him and he wheeled on her in a red-eyed rage and clutched the blade with his bleeding hand as though it were an icicle, and jerked it from her hand. Her gray eyes were stretched in fear and outrage and her pink mouth opened for a scream, showing a lot of vein-laced throat. But she never got to scream. He stabbed her in the heart, and in the same motion turned and stabbed Van Raff in the head, breaking the knife blade on his skull. Van Raff looked a sudden hundred years old as his face fell apart in shock, and the Gladstone bag dropped from his nerveless fingers.
With blood coming out of his back and hand as though his arteries were leaking, Doctor Mubuta snatched up the bag and headed for the door. Dick and Anny had disappeared and Johnson X was standing in the door like a cross to keep anyone from entering. Doctor Mubuta ran up behind him and stabbed him in the back with the broken knife blade and Johnson X went out into the dining-room as though a rocket booster had gone off. Doctor Mubuta left the knife in his back and made for the kitchen door. The door opened from the outside and a short muscular black man in a red fez came in. The man had an open knife with a six-inch blade in his hand. Doctor Mubuta drew up short. But it didn’t help him. The short muscular man handled his knife with authority and stabbed Doctor Mubuta to death before he could utter a sound.
6
The speaker standing on an upturned barrel at the intersection of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue was shouting monotonously: “BLACK POWER! BLACK POWER! Is you is? Or is you ain’t? We gonna march this night! March! March! March! Oh, when the saints — yeah, baby! We gonna march this night!”
Spit flew from his looselipped mouth. His flabby jowls flopped up and down. His rough brown skin was greasy with sweat. His dull red eyes looked tired.
“Mistah Charley been scared of BLACK POWER since the day one. That’s why Noah shuffled us off to Africa the time of the flood. And all this time we been laughing to keep from whaling.”
He mopped his sweating face with a red bandanna handkerchief. He belched and swallowed. His eyes looked vacant. His mouth hung open as though searching for words. “Can’t keep this up,” he said under his breath. No one heard him. No one noticed his behavior. No one cared.
He swallowed loudly and screamed. “TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT! We launch our whale boats. Iss the night of the great whit
e whale. You dig me, baby?”
He was a big man and flabby all over like his jowls. Night had fallen but the black night air was as hot as the bright day air, only there was less of it. His white short-sleeved shirt was sopping wet. A ring of sweat had formed about the waist of his black alpaca pants as though the top of his potbelly had begun to melt.
“You want a good house? You got to whale! You want a good car? You got to whale! You want a good job? You got to whale! You dig me?”
His conked hair was dripping sweat. For a big flabby middle-aged man who would have looked more at home in a stud poker game, he was unbelievably hysterical. He waved his arms like an erratic windmill. He cut a dance step. He shuffled like a prizefighter. He shadowed with clenched fists. He shouted. Spit flew. “Whale! Whale! WHALE, WHITEY! WE GOT THE POWER! WE IS BLACK! WE IS PURE!”
A crowd of Harlem citizens dressed in holiday garb had assembled to listen. They crowded across the sidewalks, into the street, blocking traffic. They were clad in the chaotic colors of a South American jungle. They could have been flowers growing on the banks of the Amazon, wild orchids of all colors. Except for their voices.
“What’s he talking ’bout?” a high-yellow chick with bright red hair wearing a bright green dress that came down just below her buttocks asked the tall slim black man with smooth carved features and etched hair.
“Hush yo’ mouth an’ lissen,” he replied harshly, giving her a furious look from the corners of muddy, almond-shaped eyes. “He tellin’ us what black power mean!”
She opened, her big green eyes speckled with brown tints and looked at him in astonishment.
“Black power? It don’t mean nothing to me. I ain’t black.”
His carved lips curled in scorn. “Whose fault is that?”
“BLACK POWER IS MIGHTY! GIVE FOR THE FIGHT!”
When the comely young brownskinned miss presented her collection basket to a group of sports of all sorts in front of the Paradise Inn, repeating in her soft, pleasant voice: “Give for the fight, gentlemen,” one conk-haired joker in a long-sleeved red silk shirt said offensively, “What mother-raping fight? If Black Power all that powerful, who needs to fight? It ought to be giving me something.”
She looked the sports up and down, unperturbed. “Go back to your white tramps; we black women are going to fight.”
“Well, go ’head and fight then,” the sport said, turning away. “That’s what’s wrong with you black women, you fights too much.”
But some of the other young women collecting for the fight were more successful. For among the holiday-makers there were many serious persons who understood the necessity for a fund for the coming fight. They believed in Black Power. They’d give it a trial anyway. Everything else had failed. They filled the collection baskets with coins and bills. It was going anyway, for one thing and another. Rent, religion, food or whiskey, why not for Black Power? What did they have to lose? And they might win. Who knew? The whale swallowed Jonah. Moses split the Red Sea. Christ rose from the dead. Lincoln freed the slaves. Hitler killed six million Jews. The Africans had got to rule — in some parts of Africa, anyway. The Americans and the Russians have shot the moon. Some joker has made a plastic heart. Anything is possible.
The young ladies dumped their filled baskets into a gilt-painted keg with the banner BLACK POWER on a low table to one side of the speaker’s barrel, presided over by a buxom, stern-faced, gray-haired matron clad in a black dress uniform lit up with gilt buttons and masses of braid who looked like an effigy beginning to burn on that hot day. And then they went back into the crowd to fill them again.
The speaker raved: “BLACK POWER! DANGEROUS AS THE DARK! MYSTERIOUS AS THE NIGHT! Our heritage! Our birthright! Unchain us in the big cor-ral!”
“Joker sounds like he’s shooting craps,” one brother whispered to another.
The few white motorists threading their way through the crowd, going north on Seventh Avenue in the direction of Westchester County, looked curiously at the crowd, opened their windows and heard the words, “BLACK POWER,” and stepped on the gas.
It was an orderly crowd. Police cars lined the streets. But the cops had nothing to do except avoid the challenging stares. Most of the patrol-car cops were white, but they had become slightly reddened under the hysterical ranting of the speaker and the monotonous repetition of “BLACK POWER”.
A black Cadillac limousine, shining in the sun like polished jet, whispered to the curb in the no-parking zone for the crosstown bus stop, within touching distance of the orator’s barrel. Two dangerous-looking black men clad in black leather coats and what looked like officers’ caps in a Black Power army sat in the front seat, immobile, staring straight ahead with not a muscle twitching in their lumpy scarred faces. On the back seat sat a portly gray-haired black man between two slender, sedate, clean-cut brownskinned young men dressed as clerics. The gray-haired man had smooth black velvety skin that looked recently massaged. Despite his short-cropped gray kinky hair, his light-brown eyes beneath thick glossy black eyebrows were startlingly clear and youthful. Long black eyelashes gave him a sexy look. But there was nothing lush about his appearance, still less about his demeanour. He was dressed in dark gray summer worsted, black shoes, dark tie, white shirt, and wore no jewelry of any sort, not even a watch. His manner was calm, authoritative, his eyes twinkled with good humor but his mouth was firm and his face grave.
The leather-coated flunky next to the chauffeur jumped to the curb and held open the back door. The cleric on the inside stepped to the pavement, the gray-haired man followed him.
The speaker stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence and descended from his barrel. He approached the gray-haired man with a diffidence that didn’t become the masterful exhorter of Black Power. He made no attempt to shake his hand. “Doctor Moore, I need a relief,” he blurted. “I’m beat.”
“Carry on, J,” Doctor Moore commanded. “I’ll send L to relieve you shortly.” His voice was modulated, his enunciation perfect, his manner pleasant, but it held an authority that brooked no contradiction.
“I’m awfully tired,” J whined.
Doctor Moore gave him a sharp look, then he softened and patted his shoulder. “We are all tired, son, carry on just a little longer and you will be relieved. If just one more soul,” he added, shaking his finger to emphasize his point, “gets the message our labors will not be in vain.”
“Yes, sir,” J said meekly and hefted his wet flabby belly back on to his barrel.
“And now, Sister Z, what have you for the cause?” Doctor Moore asked the buxom black-uniformed matron presiding over the gilt keg of BLACK POWER.
She grinned a smile of pure gold; it was like seeing Mona Lisa break into a laugh. “The keg is most near filled,” she said proudly, rows of gold teeth, uppers and lowers, flashing in the light.
Doctor Moore looked at her teeth regretfully, then nodded to the cleric, who opened the trunk of the car and undid a large leather suitcase. The leather-coated flunky took the keg of money and dumped it into the suitcase, which was already half-filled with similar coins and bills.
The onlookers watched this operation in a petrified silence. From down the street the white cops in front of the 135th Street precinct station looked on curiously but didn’t move. None took notice that the limousine was parked illegally. No one challenged Doctor Moore’s authority to collect the money. No one seemed to think there was anything strange about the entire procedure. But yet there were many black people among the crowd and most of the white cops in the police cars who didn’t know who Doctor Moore was, who had never seen him or even heard of him. He had such a positive air of authority it seemed logical that he would collect the money, and it was taken for granted that a black Cadillac limousine filled with uniformed black people, even though two of the uniforms were clerical, was connected with Black Power.
When they had taken their respective seats again, Doctor Moore spoke into the speaking-tube, “Drive to the Center, B,” then as he glan
ced at the back of the chauffeur’s head, corrected himself: “I believe you’re C, aren’t you?”
The front seat wasn’t partitioned off and the chauffeur turned his head slightly and said, “Yes, sir, B’s dead.”
“Dead? Since when?” Doctor Moore sounded mildly surprised.
“It’s more than two months now.”
Doctor Moore leaned back against the cushions and sighed. “Life is fleeting,” he observed sadly.
Nothing more was said until they arrived at their destination. It was a middle-class housing development on upper Lenox Avenue, a large U-shaped red-brick apartment building seventeen storeys high. The front garden was so new the grass hadn’t sprouted and the freshly planted trees and shrubbery looked withered as from a drought. There was a children’s playground in its center with the slides and seesaws and sand-boxes so new they looked abandoned, as though no children lived there.
Across Lenox Avenue, on the West Side, toward Seventh Avenue, were the original slums with their rat-ridden, cold water flats unchanged, the dirty glass-fronted ground floors occupied by the customary supermarkets with hand-lettered ads on their plate-glass windows reading: “Fully cooked U.S. Govt. Inspected SMOKED HAMS 55c lb.… Secret Deodorant ICE-BLUE 79c.… California Seedless GRAPES 2 lbs 49c.… Fluffy ALL Controlled Suds 3 lbs pkg. 77c.… KING CRAB CLAWS lb 79c.… GLAD BAGS 99c.” Delicatessens advertising: “Frozen Chitterlings and other delicacies”.… Notion stores with needles and buttons and thread on display.… Barbershops.… Smokeshops.… Billboards advertising: Whiskies, beers.… “HARYOU”.… Politicians running for Congress.… “BEAUTY FAIR by CLAIRE: WIGS, MEN’S HAIR PIECES, ‘CAPILISCIO’ ”.… Funeral Parlors.… Nightclubs.… “Reverend Ike; ’See and hear this young man of God; A Prayer For The Sick And All Conditions in Every Service; COME WITH YOUR BURDENS LEAVE WITH A SONG’ ”.… Black citizens sitting on the stoops to their cold-water flats in the broiling night.… Sports ganged in front of bars sucking marijuana.… Grit and dust and dirt and litter floating idly in the hot dense air stirred up by the passing of feet. That was the side of the slum dwellers. The ritzy residents across the street never looked their way.
Blind Man with a Pistol Page 5
