Blind Man with a Pistol

by Chester Himes

  “What you staring at, mother-raper?” he shouted belligerently.

  The blind man had no way of knowing Fat Sam was talking to him, all he knew was the loudmouthed mother-raper who’d come in talking to his mother-raping self was now trying to pick a fight with some other mother-raper who was just looking at him. But he could understand why the mother-raper was so mad, he’d caught some mother-raping whitey with his old lady. The mother-raper ought to be more careful, he thought unsympathetically, if she were that kind of whore he ought to watch her more; leastways he ought to keep his business to himself. Involuntarily, he made a downward motion, like a cat buzzing to the object Jeff, “Don’t rank it, man, don’t rank it!”

  The gesture hit Fat Sam like a bolt of white lightning and a ray of white heat, and he jumped on it with his two black feet, as they say in that part of the world. Mother-raper wavin’ him down like he was a mother-rapin’ dog, he thought. Here in front of all these sneakin’ white mother-rapers. He was more incensed by the white passengers’ furtive smiles than by the blind man’s gesture, although he hadn’t discovered yet the old man was blind. White mother-rapers kickin’ him in the ass from every which-a-side anyhow, he thought furiously, and here his own mother-rapin’ soul brother just as much to say, keep yo’ ass still, boy, so these white folks can kick it better.

  “You doan like how I talk, you ol’ mother-raper, you can kiss my black ass!” he shouted at the blind man. “I know you shit-colored Uncle Tom mother-rapers like you! You think I’m a disgrace to the race.”

  The first the blind man knew the soul brother was talking to him was when he heard some soul sister say protestingly, “That ain’t no way to talk to that old man. You oughta be ’shamed of yo’self, he weren’t bothering you.”

  He didn’t resent what the soul brother had said as much as the meddling-ass sister calling him an “old man”, otherwise he wouldn’t have replied.

  “I don’t give a mother-rape whether you’re a disgrace to the race or not!” he shouted, and because he couldn’t think of anything else to say, added: “All I want is my bread.”

  The big white man looked at Fat Sam accusingly, like he’d been caught stealing from a blind man.

  Fat Sam caught the look, and it made him madder at the blind man. “Bread!” he shouted. “What mother-raping bread?”

  The white passengers looked around guiltily to see what had happened to the old man’s bread.

  But the blind man’s next words relieved them. “What you and those mother-rapers cheated me out of,” he accused.

  “Me?” Fat Sam exclaimed innocently. “Me cheated you outer yo’ bread? I ain’t even seen you before, mother-raper!”

  “If you ain’t seen me, mother-raper, how come you talking to me?”

  “Talkin’ to you? I ain’t talkin’ to you, mother-raper. I just ast you who you starin’ at, and you go tryna make these white folks think I’s cheated you.”

  “White folks?” the blind man cried. He couldn’t have sounded more alarmed if Fat Sam had said the coach was full of snakes. “Where? Where?”

  “Here, mother-raper!” Fat Sam crowed triumphantly. “All ’round you. Everywhere!”

  The other soul people on the coach looked away before someone thought they knew those brothers, but the white passengers stole furtive peeks.

  The big white man thought they were talking about him in a secret language known only to soul people. He reddened with rage.

  It was then the sleek, fat, yellow preacher in the black mohair suit and immaculate dog collar, sitting beside the big white man, sensed the rising racial tension. Cautiously he lowered the open pages of the New York Times, behind which he had been hiding, and peered over the top at his argumentative brothers.

  “Brothers! Brothers!” he admonished. “You can settle your differences without resorting to violence.”

  “Violence hell!” the big white man exclaimed. “What these niggers need is discipline.”

  “Beware, mother-raper! Beware!” the blind man warned. Whether he was warning the fat black man or the big white man, no one ever knew. But his voice sounded so dangerous the fat yellow preacher ducked back out of sight behind his newspaper.

  But Fat Sam thought it was himself the old man threatened. He jumped to his feet. “You talkin’ to me, mother-raper?”

  The big white man jumped up an instant later and pushed him back down.

  Hearing all the movement, the blind man stood up too; he wasn’t going to get caught sitting down.

  The big white man saw him and shouted, “And you sit down, too!”

  The blind man didn’t pay him any attention, not knowing the white man meant him.

  The white man charged down the aisle and pushed him down. The blind man looked startled. But all might have ended peacefully if the big white man hadn’t slapped him.

  The blind man knew it was the white man who had pushed him down, but he thought it was the soul brother who had slapped him, taking advantage of the white man’s rage.

  It figured. He said protestingly, “What you hit me for, mother-raper?”

  “If you don’t shut up and behave yourself, I’ll hit you again,” the white man threatened.

  The blind man knew then it was the white man who had slapped him. He stood up again, slowly and dangerously, groping for the back of the seat to brace himself. “If’n you hit me again, white folks, I’ll blow you away,” he said.

  The big white man was taken aback, because he had known all along the old man was blind. “You threatening me, boy?” he said in astonishment.

  Fat Sam stood up in front of the door as though whatever happened he was going to be the first one out.

  Still playing peacemaker, the fat yellow preacher said from behind his newspaper, “Peace, man, God don’t know no color.”

  “Yeah?” the blind man questioned and pulled out a big .45 caliber revolver from underneath his old seersucker coat and shot at the big white man point-blank.

  The blast shattered windows, eardrums, reason and reflexes. The big white man shrunk instantly to the size of a dwarf and his breath swooshed from his collapsed lungs.

  Fat Sam’s wet black skin dried instantly and turned white.

  But the .45 caliber bullet, as sightless as its shooter, had gone the way the pistol had been aimed, through the pages of the New York Times and into the heart of the fat yellow preacher. “Uh!” his reverence grunted and turned in his Bible.

  The moment of silence was appropriate but unintentional. It was just that all the passengers had died for a moment following the impact of the blast.

  Reflexes returned with the stink of burnt cordite which peppered nostrils, watered eyes.

  A soul sister leaped to her feet and screamed, “BLIND MAN WITH A PISTOL!” as only a soul sister, with four hundred years of experience, can. Her mouth formed an ellipsoid big enough to swallow the blind man’s pistol, exposing the brown tartar stains on her molars and a white-coated tongue flattened between her bottom teeth and humped in the back against the tip of her palate which vibrated like a blood-red tuning-fork.

  “BLIND MAN WITH A PISTOL! BLIND MAN WITH A PISTOL!”

  It was her screaming which broke everyone’s control. Panic went off like Chinese firecrackers.

  The big white man leaped ahead from reflex action and collided violently with the blind man, damn near knocking the pistol from his hand. He did a double-take and jumped back, bumping his spine against a tubular iron upright. Thinking he was being attacked from behind by the other soul brother, he leaped ahead again. If die he must, he’d rather it came from the front than behind.

  Assaulted the second time by a huge smelly body, the blind man thought he was surrounded by a lynch mob. But he’d take some of the mother-rapers with him, he resolved, and shot twice indiscriminately.

  The second blasts were too much. Everyone reacted immediately. Some thought the world was coming to an end; others that the Venusians were coming. A number of the white passengers thought the nigger
s were taking over; the majority of the soul people thought their time was up.

  But Fat Sam was a realist. He ran straight through the glass door. Luckily the train had pulled into the 125th Street station and was grinding to a stop. Because one moment he was inside the coach and the next he was outside on the platform, on his hands and knees, covered with blood, his clothes ripped to ribbons, shards of glass sticking from the sweaty blood covering his wet black skin like the surrealistic top of a Frenchman’s wall.

  Others trying to follow him got caught in the jagged edges of glass and were slashed unmercifully when the doors were opened. Suddenly the pandemonium had moved to the platform. Bodies crashed in headlong collision, went sprawling on the concrete. Legs kicked futilely in the air. Everyone tried to escape to the street. Screams fanned the panic. The stairs became strewn with the bodies of the fallen. Others fell too as they tried senselessly to run over them.

  The soul sister continued to scream, “BLIND MAN WITH A PISTOL!”

  The blind man groped about in the dark, panic-stricken, stumbling over the fallen bodies, waving his pistol as though it had eyes. “Where?” he cried piteously. “Where?”

  22

  The people of Harlem were as mad as only the people of Harlem can be. The New York City government had ordered the demolition of condemned slum buildings in the block on the north side of 125th Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues, and the residents didn’t have any place to go. Residents from other sections of Harlem were mad because these displaced people would be dumped on them, and their neighborhoods would become slums. It was a commerical block too, and the proprietors of small businesses on the ground floors of the condemned buildings were mad because rent in the new buildings would be prohibitive.

  The same applied to the residents, but most hadn’t thought that far as yet. Now they were absorbed by the urgency of having to find immediate housing, and they bitterly resented being evicted from the homes where some had been born, and their children had been born, and some had married and friends and relatives had died, no matter if these homes were slum flats that had been condemned as unfit for human dwelling. They had been forced to live there, in all the filth and degradation, until their lives had been warped to fit, and now they were being thrown out. It was enough to make a body riot.

  One angry sister, who stood watching from the opposite sidewalk, protested loudly, “They calls this Urban Renewal, I calls it poor folks removal.”

  “Why don’t she shut up, she cain’t do nuthin’?” a young black teeny-bopper said scornfully.

  Her black teeny-bopper companion giggled. “She look like a rolled up mattress.”

  “You shut up, too. You’ll look like that yo’self w’en you get her age.”

  Two young sports who’d just come from the YMCA gym glanced at the display of books in the window of the National African Memorial Bookstore next to the credit jewelers on the corner.

  “They gonna tear down the black bookstore, too,” one remarked. “They don’t want us to have nothing.”

  “What I care?” the other replied. “I don’t read.”

  Shocked and incredulous, his friend stopped to look at him. “Man, I wouldn’t admit it. You ought to learn how to read.”

  “You don’t dig me, man. I didn’t say I can’t read, I said I don’t read. What I want to read all this mother-raping shit whitey is putting down for?”

  “Umh!” his friend conceded and continued walking.

  However, most of the soul people stood about apathetically, watching the wrecking balls swing against the old crumbling walls. It was a hot day and they sweated copiously as they breathed the poisonous air clogged with gasoline fumes and white plaster dust.

  Farther eastward, at the other end of the condemned block, where Lenox Avenue crosses 125th Street, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed stood in the street, shooting the big gray rats that ran from the condemned buildings with their big long-barreled, nickel-plated .38-caliber pistols on .44-caliber frames. Every time the steel demolition ball crashed against a rotten wall, one or more rats ran into the street indignantly, looking more resentful than the evicted people.

  Not only rats but startled droves of bedbugs stampeded over the ruins and fat black cockroaches committed suicide by jumping from high windows.

  They had an audience of rough-looking jokers from the corner bar who delighted in hearing the big pistols go off.

  One rugged stud warned jokingly, “Don’t shoot no cats by mistake.”

  “Cats are too small,” Coffin Ed replied. “These rats look more like wolves.”

  “I mean two-legged cats.”

  At that moment a big rat came out from underneath a falling wall, and pawed the sidewalk, snorting.

  “Hey! Hey! Rat!” Coffin Ed called like a toreador trying to get the attention of his bull.

  The soul brothers watched in silence.

  Suddenly the rat looked up through murderous red eyes and Coffin Ed shot it through the center of its forehead. The big brass-jacketed .38 bullet knocked the rat’s body out of its fur.

  “Olé!” the soul brothers cried.

  The four uniformed white cops on the other corner eastward stopped talking and looked around anxiously. They had left their police cars parked on each side of 125th Street, beyond the demolition area, as though to keep any of the dispossessed from crossing the Triborough Bridge into the restricted neighborhoods of Long Island.

  “He just shot another rat,” one said.

  “Too bad it weren’t a nigger rat,” the second cop said.

  “We’ll leave that for you,” the first cop replied.

  “Damn right,” the second cop declared. “I ain’t scared.”

  “As big as those rats are those niggers could cook ’em and eat ’em,” the third cop remarked cynically.

  “And get off relief,” the second cop put in.

  Three of them laughed.

  “Maybe those rats been cooking and eating those niggers is why they’re so big,” the third cop continued.

  “You men are not funny,” the fourth cop protested.

  “Then why’d you sneak that laugh?” the second cop observed.

  “I was retching is all.”

  “That’s all you hypocrites do — retch,” the second cop came back.

  The third cop caught a movement out of the corner of his eye and jerked his head about. He saw a fat, black man shoot up from the subway, leaking blood, sweat and tears, bringing pandemonium with him. The other bleeding people who erupted behind him looked crazed with terror, as though they had escaped from the bad man.

  But it was the sight of the bleeding, running black man which galvanized the white cops into action. A bleeding, running, black man spelled trouble, and they had the whole white race to protect. They went off running in four directions with drawn revolvers and squinting eyes.

  Grave Digger and Coffin Ed watched them in amazement.

  “What happened?” Coffin Ed asked,

  “Just that fat blacky showing all that blood,” Grave Digger said.

  “Hell, if it was serious he’d have never got this far,” Coffin Ed passed it off.

  “You don’t get: it, Ed,” Grave Digger explained. “Those white officers have got to protect white womanhood.”

  Seeing a white uniformed cop skid to a stop and turn to head him off, the fat black man broke in the direction of the Negro detectives. He didn’t know them but they had pistols and that was enough.

  “He’s getting away!” the first cop called from behind.

  “I’ll cool the nigger!” the front cop said. He was the third cop who thought niggers ate rats.

  At that moment the big white man who had started all the fracas came up the stairs, heaving and gasping as though he’d just made it. “That ain’t the nigger!” he yelled.

  The third cop skidded to a halt, looking suddenly bewildered.

  Then the blind man stumbled up the stairs, tapping the railing with his pistol.

  The big white ma
n leaped aside in blind terror. “There’s the nigger with the pistol,” he screamed, pointing at the blind man coming up the subway stairs like “shadow” coming out of East River.

  At the sound of his voice the blind man froze. “You still alive, mother-raper?” He sounded shocked.

  “Shoot him quick!” the big white man warned the alert white cops.

  As though the warning had been for him, the blind man upped with his pistol and shot at the big white man the second time. The big white man leaped straight up in the air as though a firecracker had exploded in his ass-hole.

  But the bullet had hit the white cop in the middle of the forehead, as he was taking aim, and he fell down dead.

  The soul brothers who had been watching the antics of the white cops, petrified with awe, picked up their feet and split.

  When the three other uniformed white cops converged on the blind man he was still pulling the trigger of the empty double-action pistol. Quickly they cut him down.

  The soul brothers who had got as far as doorways and corners, paused for a moment to see the results.

  “Great Godamighty!” one of them exclaimed. “The mother-raping white cops has shot down that innocent brother!”

  He had a loud, carrying voice, as soul brothers are apt to have, and a number of other soul people who hadn’t seen it, heard him. They believed him.

  Like wildfire the rumor spread.

  “DEAD MAN! DEAD MAN! …”

  “WHITEY HAS MURDERED A SOUL BROTHER!”

  “THE MOTHER-RAPING WHITE COPS, THAT’S WHO!”

  “GET THEM MOTHER-RAPERS, MAN!”

  “JUST LEAVE ME GET MY MOTHER-RAPING GUN!”