Fearless Jones (12 page)

“Hey, Paris.” Fearless opened the driver’s side and leaned in.
“Dorthea got her own car an’ she don’t mind drivin’ it. So you take Layla’s, and I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon at Fanny’s.”

“You know Dorthea ain’t gonna let you go that quick.”

“Cross my heart, Paris. This is just for the night, baby. Tomorrow we got ground to cover.”

“Okay,” I said. “But take this dog anyway. Just in case you get stuck, I don’t want to have to take care’a no dog too.”

I eased in behind the wheel and we shook hands.

“You better take this,” I said, handing him four five-dollar bills and five ones. “Just in case you need somethin’.”

“Hey, Paris. Thanks, man.”

Fearless went around to the passenger door, opened it, and said, “Come on, boy.”

Blood jumped out with a quick bark.

I sat behind the wheel a few minutes after Fearless and his dog were gone, wondering if I would make it through the night
without getting killed. A car behind me honked its horn, and I slid away from the curb, prodded by that unknown driver, into
the night.

I DROVE UP
and down Alameda Boulevard until about twelve-thirty, finally finding the storefront by intuition instead of a sign. I’d
seen the darkened windows twice on my evening reconnaissance, but both times they didn’t make enough of an impression for
me to look closer.

On the third pass I stopped and got out. Up close the drapes were a deep red. As soon as I saw the color I knew that it was
the Messenger of the Divine. The curtains were drawn completely across the windows, but looking down past the sill I could
see a thin band of light. Pressing my ear against the crack between the double doors, I could hear men talking; talking, not
proselytizing, praying, or preaching.

I went around the side of the block. There was no alley behind the row of stores. That meant that whoever was in there had
to
come out on Alameda. I moved Layla’s car down the block and sat low in the seat, not wanting some cop to nab me for loitering.

It was a long wait. There was a chill in the air, and my shirt provided little to no warmth. Whenever I got cold up north
I remembered New Iberia, my home. We didn’t live in the town. My mother and I were country. Our road was a dirt path only
fit for feet or horses’ hooves. We lived in a shack made from tin and wood, cardboard, mortar, and tar paper. There was a
brick oven that burned anything and a floor paved with small stones. There were three rooms, and we fit that place like a
hand in a glove. In the summertime it was as hot as you could take it. It did get cold in December, but I still remember Louisiana
for the heat. I loved it. As far as I could walk in any direction there were colored people, colored people and no one else.
When I was a child I knew that the white people lived somewhere, but I rarely saw one in my daily routine. Our store owners
and undertakers and carpenters were all black. So were our tailors and dressmakers, our butchers, bakers, and milkmen.

Everybody was poor, but nobody starved. We partied on Saturday nights and praised the Lord for our babies on Sundays. We worked
hard when we had to and took it easy when there was a chance. A lot of colored people tell me that they hate the South; Jim
Crow and segregation made a heavy weight for their hearts. But I never felt like that. I mean, lynchings were a terrible thing,
and some of those peckerwoods acted so stupid that they embarrassed the hell out of you sometimes. But I still loved the little
shack I shared with my mother. I’d have still been there if it wasn’t for one terrible event.

That event was learning to read.

I entered school at the age of six. It was a country schoolhouse with two teachers and four rooms. They broke us up among
the classrooms according to size at first, and then they shuffled us around depending on ability. The fourth room was for
study; children went in and out of there at the teachers’ request. On the first day I heard Miss Randolph read a story, and
I knew that books were my destiny, not writing or teaching or inventing spaceships, just reading and reading and reading some
more. I could pick out a simple sentence based on the knowledge of a dozen words by the end of the first week. By the age
of eight I was alone in the fourth classroom, reading everything I could. I read the Bible and the dictionary and every newspaper
I could. I read every book in our whole neighborhood by the time I was fifteen.

There was a library in the white part of town; coloreds couldn’t go inside. For a while I would go there and sit out front
on the bench they had, rereading old books like
The Hinkley Reader
and
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
One day the librarian, an old battle-ax named Celestine Dowling, came out and asked me what I was doing.

“Readin’,” I said proudly.

“Really,” old Miss Dowling said.

“Yes’m,” I replied.

“I don’t believe you,” she stated.

I didn’t know what to reply to such a rude comment, so I sat tight and quiet.

“Read me a sentence,” she ordered.

There is nothing worse than the snows of May,
I read from a story called “Minnesota Snows.”

Dowling frowned and said, “Go on.”

I read the first page and then the second. I read all the way through the story. I had read that book many times and so did
not skip or stutter hardly at all.

When I was through, Miss Dowling said, “Come on with me.”

She led me through the big double doors of the library into a large room that was at least twenty feet high, lined to the
ceiling with shelves that were packed with neat rows of books. I remember my heart catching. I forgot how to breathe altogether.
I had no idea that there were this many books in the whole world. There was a big oak table in the center of the room with
fancy chairs around it. There was a podium with a proper Webster’s open to some page. The dictionary I’d read was just a small
abridged thing that contained words a child might need to know.

“This is the library,” the librarian said.

I nodded and gulped.

“Close your mouth, boy.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said finally. “I never seen nuthin’ like it.”

“Of course you haven’t,” she said. “And do you know why?”

“Because I never been in here before?” I asked, not understanding the question.

“No,” she said from some Olympian height. “It is because this is a white library. And no matter how much you know how to read,
these books are not meant for you. These books were written by white people for white people. This is literature and art and
the way our country is and should be. There will be no library card for you, so you can stop sitting out in front. You have
seen as much of this building as you ever will.”

The impact of her words brought tears to my eyes. I was thirteen, but, like I said, I’ve always been small. I looked up at
Celestine Dowling, and she seemed pleased to see me cry.

“Go on now,” she said.

I went home in tears. My mother asked me what was wrong, but I was too sad to say. I cried that night and all the next day.
Celestine Dowling had broken my heart out of a meanness that I couldn’t understand. Why would she hate me for being able to
read well? I wasn’t hurting her. I would have been glad to check out books from the back door or window. I wouldn’t’ve treated
those books badly.

All of the happiness flowed out of me then. For months I moped around. I made money reading contracts and warranties for my
neighbors, but every time I’d read a line I’d remember the high shelves of that country library.

By the time I was seventeen I was on a train bound for San Francisco, not because I wanted to vote or was afraid of being
lynched. I left because a man told me one night that in California black folks could go into any library they wanted. They
could get library cards and check out books from here to Sunday.

It was cold in Frisco, but I read a book a day in the first year. Libraries still make my heart race. There is nothing like
a book.

“I understand you, sir,” a voice agreed.

I smiled in my doze, thinking that most people thought I was crazy when I told them that story. A door closed and I was jarred
awake. Three men stood in the shadows down the street in front of the curtained church.

Some more words were spoken, but I didn’t understand them. This made me think that I had given meaning to the words I heard
in my sleep. Through the darkness I could tell that one of the men was white and the other two were black. One black man was
well built, wearing a white suit. He laughed and slapped the white man on the shoulder. That was William Grove. I remembered
him going into the church with all of the deacons shaking his hand as he went past. The other black man seemed to be older.
He also wore a suit, but it was shapeless, fitting the man like the everyday uniform of a night watchman or usher.

The white man was powerfully built too. That’s really all I could tell about him, except that he seemed to have some kind
of foreign accent. They talked briefly, and then a dark-colored sedan drove up. The white man got in, and the sedan drove
off.

I crouched down as the sedan went past. When I rose partway up again, the black men were still talking.

They talked for a while more, and then Grove walked away down the street. The older man used a key in the front door to the
church and went in.

I had brought myself to the edge of that minefield by asking a couple of good questions and by perseverance. But every step
from then on was laid out for a better man than I was. So I sat there trying to will myself up the evolutionary ladder from
man to superman. But when I got out of that car, there was no cape dragging behind me, only a tail between my legs.

I NEEDED TO RELIEVE
my bladder, but I was scared. In a car I was an even match for Leon Douglas; on foot gawky Gella Greenspan had about equal
odds to kick my ass.

I knocked on the church door, braced by the cold air and the possibility of finding a toilet. I was standing there for quite
a while before a baritone voice asked, “William?”

“It’s Tyrell Lockwood,” I said, loud and clear.

“What you want?”

“I came to speak to Reverend Grove.”

“It’s three in the morning,” the opera voice informed me.

“It’s very important,” I said. “About a woman named Elana Love.”

There was a moment of silence, and then the lock snicked and
cracked. The door came open and a frosty-headed older gentleman looked at me with a deeply furrowed brow.

“What about Sister Love?” he asked.

“She hired me to find you, said it was somethin’ important she had to say.”

“What?” His features were African Negro with very little other racial influence. Based on his facial structure you would have
expected his skin to be dark, very dark, but instead it was fifty-fifty, coffee and cream.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “But my business is with Reverend Grove. I spent the whole night driving around trying to find this
place and I got to go.”

“I’m Vincent,” the man said warily. “Father Vincent la Trieste. At one time I was the minister of this congregation.”

“May I use your facilities, Father Vincent?”

There was a moment when he might have refused me, but then he stepped back, allowing me in.

I had only seen the Messenger of the Divine church once, about a half year before. The landlord brought me around because
I was making noises about renting a place and the Messenger was behind on the rent for the second month in a row. Mr. Anderson,
the landlord, brought me in on a Tuesday afternoon when there was no one in the place. The room I entered with Father Vincent
was exactly the same as I remembered. Plush red drapes on all four walls. Folding walnut chairs set in rows before an oak
podium that was edged in gold and jet. There were hymn books with cardboard covers lined with royal blue felt on each seat
and a huge, rough-hewn cross propped on its side and leaning against the draperies behind the podium. It was almost an exact
replica
of the room I had seen on Central. I would have taken the place after Anderson showed it to me, but the church came up with
the rent, and I ended up taking the storefront down the street.

In the corner there were three chairs set at a wobbly pine table with three glasses, each one almost empty of red wine, and
a tin ashtray full of butts set in the center.

“Through there,” Vincent said, gesturing at the wall.

“What?” I asked.

“Through that door,” he said in an exasperated tone. “The toilet.”

There was a short hallway that led to an old-fashioned toilet that had a pull handle connected to a tank on the wall above.
As nervous as I was, urinating afforded me great relief and pleasure. I leaned a hand against the wall while I did my business,
exhausted from the past few days of pressure.

I poked my head out of the john, noticing a half-open door a little farther on in the back. In that room I spied a table strewn
with watches, jewelry, and 35-millimeter cameras. There were two console televisions with round screens against the far wall
and a fur coat of some kind hanging on a nail in the back door.

I snaked my way back to the bathroom, flushed the toilet, and then returned to my host.

“You look familiar,” he said when I returned.

“I used to work part-time for the bookstore near to your church when it was on Central.”

“Where is she?” Vincent asked me.

I pulled out a chair from the rickety table and sat.

“Kidnapped.”

“What?”

“She came to me looking for Grove. Like I said, I worked near to where you used to be. She come in there askin’ ’bout where
she could find the reverend.”

“You said she was kidnapped?”

“She told me that if I could find Grove, she’d give me five hundred dollars. So I said I’d help out. Only when I started drivin’
her, a man attacked us and took her away. He chased us. Big motherfucker. You know, I fought him, but he laid me out. Before
he did though, she screamed at him, called him Leon.”