by Ed Bullins
The fall sky was as grey as a morgue slab, and a pagan dance was held that day, a dance that marked the end and the beginning of something for Stevie Benson. The mob awaited the initiation, jostling and shoving to get better places. All the whites hurried home except for a few from over by the freight yards and from down the waterfront.
When Stevie came out his firetower exit, two boys bigger than he broke through the line and fell in step with him.
Doris ran up behind.
“Let me hold your coat,” she screamed above the gleeful mob.
Stevie pulled his jacket off and put it under his arm.
“Let me hold your coat, little sucker … you can’t fight with a coat!”
He gave it to her. For blocks they walked, blocks of emptied streets except for Stevie, his two escorts, Doris and the two hundred jostling figures. No one over eighteen stepped from a door; not a teacher or coach or administrator was seen seeking out his car or slinking to a bus stop that day until the dancers upon the concrete were blocks away, souls in time to the trotting and trucking of the savage song of the threshing floor.
Wild Leo screamed and whooped, pushing Pancho the Spic and grabbing leering Rita’s hair. Black Delores, her face like a sooted Madonna with white rolling eyes, cried real tears, letting the streaks run over her lovely face like rain tracks upon coal. She stayed near but turned away and cried whenever Stevie glanced at her. Brother and Timmy, on the edges of the mob, smirked and stared straight at him when they got their chance.
The parade crossed Eighth Street, then Darien and at last Ninth waited with a vacant gravel lot across the street from the train bridge. Snoopy squatted there sifting the grit through his fingers with at least ten street fighters around him.
“Dis is gonna be a fair fight, mahthafukker,” Snoopy said when he rose and met the party. “I’m gonna kick yore ass until yore nose bleeds, punk.” He took off his Eisenhower jacket and shrugged his shoulders to ripple his muscles. “You’ll beg yore mamma to give you money ta bring ta me, ya understand!”
Stevie remained quiet. A burly boy with a greasy green tam pulled down over his conked head acted as referee. Cheers and squeals rose among the crowd as the referee gave instructions, and pairs of anxious boys began body-punching, the thuds and whacks beating out until the real fight began. Delores stood high on a stoop down the street, framed in the door, as alone as Stevie. Two bobby-socked girls picked up Snoopy’s jacket and were on the verge of having a preliminary until the smaller backed down.
The referee pointed to Stevie. “When I say break, punk, you better scratch ass and git back like I tell you or you’ll git yore little ass stomped today as well as whupped.”
The two came to the center of the circle and began dancing like lightweights. Stevie was indeed an amateur lightweight but had only sparred with the boys in his neighborhood and the club fighters who used the police equipment on weekends. Snoopy’s twenty-pound weight-edge and his three year advantage caused him to close fast with Stevie. Stevie won the first exchange by giving the clumsier boy two glancing jolts in the face with his left and right; Snoopy’s swing swooshed above the little guy’s head. They closed again, immediately, and Stevie tied up his opponent in a clinch and pumped quick shots to the kidneys and gut as he had been taught. Surprised and ashamed at the crowd’s wild cheers for the underdog, Snoopy tried to butt him but Stevie had been waiting and dug his head into the taller boy’s chest, making him smash his nose. As they broke Stevie hit Snoopy again upon his bloodied nose. And the referee stepped in.
“Here, man,” he screamed, talking to Snoopy, “let me take this mahthafukker.” He had pulled his sweater off in the late fall weather, and Snoopy stood between him and Stevie as the mob surged out into the street.
“No, no, no, man,” Snoopy pleaded. “I can take him. I CAN TAKE THIS LITTLE PUNK ANYTIME I WANT!”
The rest of the gang whispered among themselves, but Snoopy wouldn’t listen to them when they stepped into the circle with the mob at their heels.
“C’mon, man,” Snoopy said to Stevie, pushing his friends back. “It’s you and me now, little mahthafukker.”
Stevie knew it was his fight and didn’t think of anything but winning. No more hiding, no more pulling punches and not talking to the girls at school because he was out of his neighborhood. No more copping out and eating shit. No more, no more! They came for the dance, so now for the floor show. I’m the best, he told himself; I’m the best and today we all find out.
The ring cleared with even the referee pulled out and Stevie bobbed and weaved as he pressed in on the dark boy, something he hadn’t done before. He jabbed Snoopy four times quickly around the arms and chest and landed once in the throat. He danced, he danced so beautifully, he knew, like to music, like to the sound of drums and clashing cymbals. There was no other place in the universe then for him but that dance floor with every fiber poised and executing an ageless war dance passed down from his father and his father’s father before him and the black fathers of his tribe before memory. He danced back, letting Snoopy’s swing slip past and then feinted with his left. Snoopy blinked and then stepped … the gang leader woke up six minutes later with a busted mouth and nose; one eye would be closed shut for two days, and his head would ache for a time because of the mild concussion he received when his skull cracked the curb. Stevie had stood above him for a second after the feint and vicious combination of one, two, three and more jabs pumped into the big boy’s face, and then the overhand right, and the step behind the pivot and the hook which smashed into flesh and bone.
He waited for the fallen boy’s counterattack.
“Here, mahthafukker,” Doris screamed in the stunned second. “Run, mahthafukker, run … RUN!”
Stevie took his coat thrown at him and sped through the crowd behind him, speeding past smiling pearlytoothed Delores, running down the hill toward home. Running like he had never run in his life. All of Snoopy’s boys seemed to be fifty steps behind, and behind them was the insane mob, crazy from the smash performance and lusting for added gore.
At the corner, an old Hudson turned and Stevie grabbed the door handle and leaped inside.
“What the hell?” the driver started, but the exhausted boy pointed back and one look through the rearview mirror gave the driver incentive to tramp on the gas.
After a week of negotiations between Homer and Snoopy and missing days at school with a couple of running fights between Snoopy’s boys and the ones Homer sent to escort Stevie back to his territory, the thing settled, and Brother and Timmy said: “You won!” and nodded their heads as they passed.
The following week Doris took Stevie to her house after school and ordered her little brother out. Then she showed Stevie how to really have sex, the way grownups did.
They met at her place every day after school for over a month. She told him about the other big guys she had at night, real men, she said, some even fathers and husbands that she had whenever she wanted. It seemed to Stevie that it was always she who wanted them from her way of telling it, and refused if they made demands upon her. She lived on the top floor of a tenement and one day when Stevie was between her large dark thighs, his teeth nibbling at her earlobe the way she had showed him as they grunted and strained, they heard a loose step crack. He jumped up and ran to the window and Doris pulled down her dress just as her girlfriend pushed the door open and walked in.
“Don’t ya know how to knock, bitch?” Doris growled.
“I’ve never had to before … was I interruptin’ somethin’?” the girl asked. She was taller than Doris and almost as old. She was a grade ahead of both Stevie and Doris, and she and Doris ran around with a gang that called themselves The Controlerellas.
“How are you, Chuckie?” the girl asked Stevie. In this part of town he had a different nickname.
“Okay,” he said over his shoulder.
He watched out the window. His fly had been buttoned just in time but the front of his pants pushed out. He peered from the
window as the girls talked, watching the trolley and cars go down Tenth Street, and the people on the streets that day, and looking south he saw the tall P.S.F.S. building, rising from the grey dust of the slums, towering above them as if the structure’s foundation was planted in the muck of the ghetto.
The street below looked small to Stevie and innocent, but he knew it was one of the main trails in the jungle. He liked being up high looking down at the people. He liked being there with Doris, even though she bullied him in public; she was nice to him when they were alone, and best of all she said she liked the way he did it to her because he was young and strong and it took him a long time to finish.
“Give me a cigarette, Chuck,” Doris’s friend said.
He turned his head away from the window; she was smiling.
“Give me a cigarette, boy!”
He walked over to the couch and handed her a cigarette from his pack. She shrieked with laughter as she snatched it and leaned across Doris, choking and coughing. Stevie peeped down at his pants front.
He always betrayed himself, he knew. Always.
“Give me one too,” Doris said. She snatched the entire pack from his hands. “You don’t need any, you silly little bastard.”
Her friend laughed even louder.
Doris let him come to see her two more afternoons, but the times after that day of discovery when he asked to be let up her stairs, she told him no, though sometimes she would let him kiss her hurriedly in her vestibule. She stopped coming to school and the kids gossiped that she had been thrown out because of being pregnant.
The week before she died Stevie and Homer were on Hutchinson Street, close to where Doris lived. They waited outside a girl’s house who they were going to walk back to their neighborhood for a party. As they waited Doris walked through the narrow streets with her tall, thin friend.
“Hey, lil’ mahthafukker,” she yelled to Stevie, “whatcha doin’ up this way?” She stopped, placing her hands on over-blown hips, and stared at him through shiny eyes. “You know we don’t allow little pricks up here.”
She was loud and evil-sounding like the times at school when she threatened the boys, so Stevie knew she wasn’t serious.
“Just hangin’ out,” he answered.
“Whatcha been doin’ lately?” she asked.
“Just eatin’ fried chicken and fukkin’ ev’va night, baby,” he said, saying the line of the street song with a smile.
The girls flounced off in hobbling skirts and jeered at him to get out of “their” territory and swung their behinds in huge circles down the street, laughing, stumbling and swearing.
“Whatcha let that whore speak ta ya like that fo, man?” Homer had said. “You should’a punched that black bitch in da mouf.”
Dandy had never told anyone about Doris. She had been his first, the first that mattered, for he had been playing sex games among the tenements since he was seven, but Doris had been the one who had made him feel for the first time that something which frightened and was vital to him. The only times before the quick afternoons with Doris on her couch was when he had had dreams he couldn’t make out but he awoke afterwards on his belly, wet and scared.
Since the first day with Doris he had sought out at least ten other girls. Slum girls who waited for any show of affection, especially from one their own age with a smooth brown face and who knew what to do. Dandy’s challenge to Doris hadn’t been entirely groundless, even though sweet black Delores would only let him love her from across the aisle. He was out in the street every night. He knew Doris wanted to see him after the encounter on the side street, and her boisterous smile made him sweat some as he promised to go see her, for his feelings for the girl had grown suddenly proportional to his pants front which moved out as he thought of her luscious warmth. He didn’t make it to her place that week. The next, Doris died shortly after missing a fire net drawn under the window of her burning apartment.
Dandy stopped by to see her little brother some weeks later and they both whispered of her and cried without thinking of being manly.
“… And by the grace of God … Ahhhmen,” Uncle Clyde intoned.
“Pass the biscuits,” Roy said.
“Just wait a minute, boy,” Richard ordered and acted cross and older than he was. “Shouldn’t be so greedy!”
“Hush up you two little boys,” Ida James said. “All the way back from Sister Ossie Mae’s you been at it.”
“Yeah, keep quiet, you little boys,” Uncle Clyde said with a mouth filled with food.
“Here, Dandy,” Ida said and poured his lemonade for him.
“Why looky dere … old Dandy’s makin’ out like a madman,” Jack Bowen slurred.
“Marie Ann, ya better look out or Ida will be takin’ Dandy away from you,” Roy said.
Marie shrugged and shoveled a spoonful of beans into her mouth. “Nobody’s studden ’bout Dandy.”
“Dandy, your city ways don’t seem to be workin’ any on Marie Ann,” Aunt Bessie said. “What’s wrong, boy?” She prodded Dandy, for she knew that he was working on her favorite and he would have her if he got the chance.
“I don’t know,” Dandy answered. “I guess she thinks I’m a slicker.”
“Hee hee heee …” Roy chortled. “Oooeee … hee heee …”
“Eat your supper, boy!”
“Well, that’s what you is, boy,” Jack drawled and slipped tenses and syntax. “One of dem dere city slickers, and mah lil sister ain’ta gonna be fooled none any by y’all kind, boy.” He made a private joke, though secretly he wanted his sister and Dandy to be friendlier. Dandy would make a pretty fair brother-in-law, he thought, and he felt that any man who ever touched her would have to marry Marie Ann.
“Why are you so quiet, Sister Ida?” Uncle Clyde asked.
“Not much ta say, Unc’ Clyde.”
Ida was a stocky yellow girl who had been turned out by her mother after her father had taken her for over a period of two years and at last had succeeded in giving her his son. She was a ward of the state from being a minor and for having made herself available to any man in her town, forty miles south of Mary’s Shore, who had the courage to talk to the fifteen-year-old for over five minutes. Many had the guts and word finally got around to the authorities that a girl and baby were living in an abandoned shack, close to town, and there were all sorts of carryings-on. The powers couldn’t charge Ida with anything more than vagrancy since she never asked for money from her numerous visitors, and not even vag stuck when it was found she was a teen-ager, though she seemed ten years older, or so it was assumed. Ida didn’t talk much and Dandy suspected that she was a bit dense since she was relieved that her baby had been taken from her. But she had enough sense to slip him a note his first day there that her heart was just about to actually burst from love of him.
She worked each day on a neighboring farm watching children or helping in the kitchen, for at least one member of each family in Mt. Holy had to go into town or farther to jobs in outlying districts. Some drove even to Dover and to Wilmington in Delaware.
Dandy knew his turn would come with Ida. Jack had told him how he would get her when he had the chance, not knowing that Dandy also schemed on her stubby flanks, for they both were sure that Ida James was as hot and ready as a ten-cent pistol.
“Dandy,” Uncle Clyde asked, “when you comin’ out with me or one of the boys on the job?”
“Anytime, Uncle Clyde, how ’bout tomorrow?”
“Clyde, you know that boy don’t want to work,” Aunt Bessie said. She rubbed it in about Dandy being able to pay his board without working, for Dandy’s mother had a civil-service job in the city, and the city slick Dandy was from Philly and had taken piano lessons and boxing lessons and singing and dancing lessons, and had a motorcycle (really only a motor bike). He was her current status symbol.
“No, he probably can’t pull himself away from Marie Ann,” Ida said and peeped over her fork at the other girl across the table.
“I wish
he could go somewheres,” Marie Ann said. “I’m sure tired of lookin’ at him.”
The remainder of the table, except for Uncle Clyde, entered the conversation and bet about which of the girls would get Dandy, and the dinner ended with Aunt Bess promising that if anybody got Marie Ann they would go immediately to jail, whether or not they used “protection.”
“NOW, BESSIE, YOU KNOW YOU SHOULDN’T BE TALKIN’ LIKE DAT IN FRONT OF DESE HARE KIDS,” Uncle Clyde hollered, nearly upsetting his greens.
“Well, all of them are big enough to take care of themselves, and none of mine ain’t goin’ ’round dumb for most of their lives, especially about somethin’ that everybody has got ta do … or at least should try once, Clyde.”
“Oh, hush up, woman.”
“Well, I’ve told them already and even given them money to get ’em with,” the old woman said. “All they have ta do is come and ask and I’ll give them money to buy them. I ain’t takin’ the blame if somethin’ happens. I’ll tell the world it ain’t Bessie’s fault.”
“You talk too much, Bessie.”
It was a good dinner.
After dinner, Dandy went to the trailer and poured hog feed into two large slop buckets and then carried them outside to the pig barrel. Setting them down, he lifted the large ladle and began filling the buckets, a scoop at a time. The dogs had been tied for their evening feed, given by Roy coaxing and wheedling with puckered lips and many “Here boys” to the already leashed animals. As Dandy started on the second bucket Marie Ann and Ida came out of the house and they tugged at each other until one got the last tag; then Marie began trotting over toward the hen house where the outhouse stood.
“I’m goin’ to get you when ya come back, Marie Ann,” Ida called out.
“Ya know what you’ll git, Ida,” she said, turning around and making a fist and showing where on the light girl’s face she would plant it. “And that goes double for your friend Dandy,” she said before she entered the closet-like building.
