Strivers Row (27 page)

Sure enough, on the day of the party the other children had all opened up presents from the department stores downtown—toy trucks, and watercolor paint sets and boxes of crayons, and dolls and lead soldiers. He had edged off toward the coat pegs at the back of the room as he watched them, thinking that his might be forgotten, or that he could even sneak out of the school. But Allie Shrewbridge, the girl who got his candy bars, went right over and thanked him, shaking his hand very politely, as if she wasn't really disappointed at all.

“Now it's your turn, Malcolm,” the teacher said, although he honestly hadn't thought he was getting anything, due to the paucity of his own gift. The other kids had all known for weeks who their secret partners were, but not one of them had come up to tell him that he or she was his partner.

He had started slowly toward the papier-mâché chimney, still unable to believe he was getting anything—though as he did he noticed that all of his classmates were looking at him, and that even Miss Roosenraad was beaming broadly now. A little unnerved by all this attention, and the sudden, anticipatory quiet in the room, he looked down the chimney to see the biggest present of all still there, with his name on it. It was wrapped in shiny gold paper, with a huge red bow around it, and a card underneath that said simply,
For
Malcolm
—with no indication of who it might be from. He stared at it, not daring to think what it might be, hoping that it was from one of the girls he liked in class, from Allie, or Betty Jane.

“Go ahead, Malcolm. Open it,” Miss Roosenraad urged.

He felt the blood rushing to his head, and desperately wanted to run and hide under a desk somewhere, his desire for attention evaporated now, out in front of them all. He did as he was told, slowly tearing through the nice Christmas wrapping, still intrigued by what it might be, in spite of his embarrassment—and pulled out a coat.

A spontaneous cheer went up around the room as he held it out in front of him, making the floor seem to pitch and sway under him. Miss Roosenraad came up behind him, laying a hand benevolently on top of his head.

“Who—who—” he tried to ask, a lump of agitation forming in his throat.

“Everyone chipped in to buy it,” she said throatily, blinking as if she were fighting back tears herself. “Because we knew you needed it so badly—”

The class cheered again, the kids moving in excitedly around him, and Malcolm felt chills of shame and pleasure running up and down his body. He wanted nothing so much at that moment as to run out of the classroom, to go somewhere far away from all their gleeful, smiling faces. Knowing that his went far beyond any of the other presents, and especially beyond his nickel candy bars. Wanting, with one part of him, to take the coat out to the Italian janitor, and put it on the trash pile where he had been made to burn his lunch.

But instead he had stood where he was, still holding the coat before him with a small, uneasy grin on his face. Admiring it desperately despite himself—a gray-green, corduroy winter coat, the nicest coat he had ever owned, and when the party had finally ended and the other kids began to leave, he had carefully slipped it on. His hands lingering along its smooth corduroy ridges, marveling at how bulky and warm it felt.

He had walked back home uncertain as to how his mother would react, fearful that she might make him take it back once she knew that a bunch of white people had bought it for him. He wasn't sure that she wouldn't tear it off his back and throw it right into their old stove. When he got home he made sure to walk right into the kitchen, where she could see him—the thought occurring to him that maybe this new piece of charity might indeed spark her old, righteous anger.

“Lookit, Momma. Lookit what they give me at school,” he told her, filled with trepidation but also a sort of weird hope, standing right in front of where she was bundled up in the kitchen rocking chair with Butch the baby.

But she had only kept rocking slowly back and forth, staring through him, and he was shocked to look at her now. He had not noticed just how old she had become, even in the last few weeks. Her hair was nearly all gray, matted and unwashed, her blouse covered with breast milk and throw-up stains from the baby. Ugly patches and sores ran up and down her once smooth skin, and the flesh hung loosely off her arms.

“Lookit, Momma!”

“Gave you what?” she drawled slowly, her eyes staring blindly— not even aware, he realized, that he was wearing the fine, corduroy coat.

“Gave you what?” she repeated dully, the only other sound she made the constant, dull squeak of the rocker along the kitchen floorboards.

He had moved away, not knowing what else he could possibly say to her, and three days later, on the morning before Christmas, his sister Hilda had come downstairs to start the stove and found her rocking chair empty. There was a heavy snow falling, and Hilda couldn't believe that she would have gone outside, but when she went to look for her mother, she couldn't find her anywhere in the little house. She had awakened the rest of them and they had all run out to look for her, calling and calling her name, even though it meant that the neighbors heard and came out of their houses—all of them milling about, looking and calling for their mother with them in the steadily falling snow.

They didn't see her again until the first Sunday of the new year, only after the patrol car had found her walking along the side of the road, barefoot and talking crazy to herself. Only after the baby, Butch, had been pried from her arms and deposited in the orphanage, and she had been taken to the state hospital in Kalamazoo for observation.

They had stood before her there in the caged, windowless room— so much like the one he was in now in the police station, save for the fact that those walls were also covered with thick gray pads. Wilfred had held out the gift-shop box of chocolates that Mr. Maynard Allen had given them to give to her. The younger children, Yvonne and Wesley, had started to cry, the rest of them not knowing what to say. Malcolm's nose wrinkling up at the overwhelming smells of urine and old vomit, and fear. He could hear the sound of rubber hitting flesh somewhere, over and over again, just down the hall from where they were. Consumed by the one question he did not dare to ask, and did not want to hear the answer to, for he knew he could do nothing about it—

Do they hit her, too? When she does something, do they hit her with that?

She had looked very thin, and clean, at least, almost radiant in her white hospital gown. The sores on her body healing already, her hair washed and tied with a pretty red bow in the back. She had beamed vacantly at them, while the matron told her who they were—giving no sign that she recognized them herself, only repeating
Is that so?
in a vague, disinterested voice.

They had stood silent in that little room with their mother for nearly the full hour. But as their time came to an end, she began to change. Her face stiffening, the old look of rage creeping back over her again. Malcolm's heart leaped a little bit to see it. She had leaned forward, gesturing angrily at them as she turned to the matron.

“Who are these people?” she asked. “Why are they keeping me here?”

Then she sat back in the chair again, looking neither kindly nor fierce anymore. The fire gone out as suddenly as it had ignited.

“All the people have gone,” she said, repeating it sadly. “All the people have gone.”

A few minutes later they had heard a cart being wheeled down the hall. It stopped at the door of her room, and an orderly had walked in, carrying a tray full of shiny, silver hypodermic needles— the matron bustling them back out of the room, visiting hours done for the day, but Malcolm's eyes had stayed riveted on those needles, even as he was being ushered out into the hall.

Afterward Mr. Maynard Allen had loaded them all into his big Packard for the long drive back to East Lansing. Malcolm had sat up next to him in the front seat, while the rest of them dozed in the warm car—a real car that could really go somewhere. Still leafing idly through the comics he had given him, while Mr. Allen talked to him the whole way home about what was to become of him, of how he would go live with the Gohannases until they could place him in reform school.

“You know, Malcolm, reform school has the wrong reputation,” he told him, speaking in his quiet, compelling voice, as if it were just the two of them alone in the whole world. “Think about what the word ‘reform' really means. ‘To change and become better.' We all need to reform, all the time.”

“Yessir,” Malcolm said, staring down at his comic book. There, the yellow Prince Namor of Atlantis was confronting his secret love, comely Officer Betty Dean, of the New York Police Department:
You white devils have persecuted and tormented my people for years—

“Reform school is a place where boys like you can see your mistakes, and get a new start on life, and become a person everybody can be proud of. I know, Malcolm. I've seen it happen. And Mr. and Mrs. Swerlin, who run the home out there, are mighty good people—”

“Yessir,” he repeated, as Prince Namor began to unleash a tidal wave that threatened to sweep away all of Manhattan.

“Everybody needs to be in the right place,” Mr. Allen went on, speaking very softly now so as not to wake any of the others, his brothers and sisters snoring in the backseat. His words barely audible above the hum of the motor.

“Take your mother, for instance. She's in the best place for her now, where they can take good care of her. Soon, all of you will be in the best places for you.”

“Yessir.”

He turned his eyes from the ferocious, four-color battles in his comic book, looking out at the stark black-and-white Michigan landscape streaming past the windows. The snow and the bare trees, and the broken white line and the asphalt, spooling out endlessly beneath their wheels—

He sobbed silently, wanting to moan himself but not daring to out of fear they would hear him. Writhing in the chair he was cuffed to, trying to relieve the ache in his arms and wrists, the sweat dripping freely down his face. The pimp in the next room was crying now, the detectives having worked him over steadily for another half hour—but all he could think about was that room in the state mental institution, and how his mother had looked there. Her eyes vacant at the end, not even following her children out of the room. Only repeating the last, meaningless thing she had ever said to him:

“All the people have gone.”

Why did they have to go? Why did they all have to go, and her especially? They had sent her to that place all alone. She was sick, so she had to go live all alone, all alone, all alone—

A little while later Detective Joe Baker finally returned and uncuffed him, leading him out the back door of the precinct house. Admonishing him sternly as he gave him a last shove, back out onto West 135th Street—
“Don't you ever let me catch you doin' nothin' like that again!”

Malcolm barely heard him as he wandered, dazed, along the crowded sidewalk. Blinking in the harsh summer sunlight, rubbing his chafed wrists. Relieved almost beyond reckoning to be free, to have not had to take the humiliating beating he had heard the pimp take. He understood, now, with a combination of gratitude and resentment, what Charlie Small had arranged with the detective— putting the fear of God in him, but making sure that he would evade both the MPs and those white cops' fists on him. And at the same time the knowledge sank in that he really never could go back into Small's Paradise, that he was on his own again.

CHAPTER NINE

JONAH

He swung himself out of bed, already drenched in his own sweat despite the overhead fan sweeping methodically through the heavy air of their bedroom. When it was this hot in the City, no fan was any better than the ones on the subways, doing nothing to dissipate the heat, only pushing it down on everyone's heads.

He looked over for his wife, momentarily disoriented, and alarmed by her absence. Then he heard her—moving around in the kitchen downstairs, softly singing a hymn to herself. He sat back on the edge of the bed, inhaling the primal smell of frying bacon, and eggs, while he listened to her below. Wondering to himself, even as he did,
And just how are you going to break away from that?

There is a balm in Gilead,

To make the wounded whole;

There is a balm in Gilead,

To heal the sin-sick soul—

On the Vineyard they had risen even earlier, going down to walk along the beach in the first light of day. Both of them wearing white linen trousers and holding hands, the only other people a few men and boys fishing in the surf. They had both felt as if they had recaptured something then, for those few days—as if the clock had been turned back. Amanda smiling at him shyly from time to time and thinking, he knew, about their honeymoon down in Asbury Park.

She had been so loving then
—more affectionate and devoted than he could ever have pictured one person being, for all the homilies of Christian love he wrote, and listened to every week. Patient with him in his early, nervous fumblings, and open and willing herself; unembarrassed and never coy, despite her own inexperience. She was always seeking to hold him, to touch him however she could when he was near, as if she knew, instinctively, just what it was he needed then. And afterward, dazed by another day of sun and water, they would go back to their bungalow early, intermittently making love and just lying with each other, while it was still light out.

That was what it would mean, leaving. Giving her up, hurting her. Or would it by now be a relief for her, too?

Down in the kitchen Amanda was smiling and talkative, as usual. Giving no indication of anything that had happened between them on that train back from the Vineyard, or in their three weeks back on Strivers Row since then, moving about each other as warily as cats in their oversized house.

“I got a halfway passable chicken from Oppenheimer's for tonight,” she chatted merrily to him while he sipped his coffee. “I'd like to get a good roast for Sunday, but I don't know if we'll have enough ration points left—”

“Uh-huh,” he said, sliding into his chair and picking up the
Herald Tribune
—happier than he wanted to acknowledge, just being around her in the morning.

She placed a steaming plate of scrambled eggs and bacon, rye toast and fresh orange juice before him. The eggs dusted with red pepper, and minute slices of onion cut so thin they would dissolve on the tongue. She had always been a fine cook, better than his own mother, he had to acknowledge. On Sundays she would make him poached eggs on creamy grits, or ham and sweet-potato biscuits, with red-eye gravy made from the pan juice and a little of her fine breakfast coffee. She was even able to re-create the fantastically light codfish cakes and black molasses beans his father still craved. He shoveled the eggs onto a piece of toast and began to wolf them down.

“I guess I'll go see the chairwomen of my clubs,” she said with another rueful smile. “Get all that going again.”

“Mmm-hmm. You going to see Mrs. Purvis about the Ladies' Literary Club? Maybe you ought to get some recommendations from Adam, first—”

She hit him lightly on the top of the head with the wooden spatula she had been using to push the eggs around, and he laughed out loud.

“You see? You don't listen to me!”

She cracked him on the head again, harder this time, and went over to the sink, smiling back playfully at him. There she began to clean the counter, sweeping into the garbage the bright orange halves from which she had hand-squeezed the juice, one by one, on the round, horned metal juice squeezer.

Amanda had barely sat still since they had returned from the Vineyard. She had always liked to work through things by taking action, got restless if she wasn't doing two jobs at the same time. It was yet another way she had proved invaluable to his ministry— invaluable to
him
. Taking care of the church's various clubs, the sewing circle and the cooking club, and the cosmetology class, and of course the literary club. Running the annual women's fund-raisers, the chicken hunts and pot-luck suppers, the candy pulls and fashion shows. Making constant visits to the church mothers and the sick and the old, arranging the annual sheeps-and-goats teas, and the guest speakers for Young People's Day, and Negro History Week. Doing all of the endless, trivial, political things that were necessary to keep a church from fragmenting and falling straight down a hole in the ground through disputation.

There was always a rift, or a potential rift. It was the same for every church. There were rifts over the choir director, or the service, or the hymnals. Rifts over the shade of the choir's robes, or the election of the deacons, or the direction of the missionary society, or that most reliable source of human discord, the collection and disbursal of money.

“But every rift's about the same thing in the end,” his Daddy had told him. “Every rift in every church that ever has been, straight back to Peter an' Paul, is about the
preacher
. Who's with him, and who's ag'in' him.”

The rift in their church had begun over skin color, which was not unusual, either. Most of the New Jerusalem's original congregants and their offspring were lighter-skinned, ironically enough—a legacy from the men who had enslaved them in Virginia. The later members darker, from their long isolation in New York. His father had been patching over their putative differences for years, but by the time Jonah had returned from the Angel Factory in Pennsylvania, the rift had once again become manifest. Most of the lighter-skinned and the West Indian congregants sitting on the left side of the center aisle; the darker-skinned on the right.

Jonah hadn't even noticed the split at first, obvious as it was. Still wallowing then in the trough of his despair, and his final surrender to Jesus. Unaware of anything until he heard the words muttered in the street after services—
“That black son of a bitch,”

“Half-white mothafuckah—”

His father had noticed the split long before, of course, and flayed them mercilessly for it. Mocking all their pretensions of racial pride, or their heritage in the City, from his pulpit. Ridiculing all their discreet little phrases right to their faces:

“Oh, I know how some of you like to say, ‘Be black—but not too black!' I know you do now, don't deny it! I see you puttin' on your airs. Don't deny it! But I got some news for ya. To those white people you measure yo'selves by—you all still just a bunch a niggers!”

But his father had known, too, that even his most flagrant, shocking insults wouldn't heal the rift by itself. He had moved on many other fronts at the same time, quietly and clandestinely, as was also his wont. Understanding, as he did, how the rift threatened everything he had built up—and most especially his son's ascension to his throne.

“You ought to get yourself a dark-skinned girl,” he had told Jonah bluntly. “Seal up that rift. Someone from an old family.”

“But what's it got to do with me?” he had questioned. “What I should do is preach to them the Word of the Lord—”

“They will look to what you do, son,” he had informed him. “Words are easy.”

His father had pressed upon him not only a dark wife, but also a daughter of one of the very few, very dark Virginia families in the congregation. Covering all his bases in typical fashion, so that Jonah wondered, as he would more than once, what position his father might have risen to had he ever been allowed to take part in more secular politics. Jonah had docilely agreed to his plan, being completely untethered then from everything he thought he had known or believed, and his old egotistical ways. Believing, in his new condition, that he had no right to deny anything that was asked of him, although he had never looked twice at Amanda Robb in his life. She had a plain, pleasant face; strong but thick arms and legs; a ladylike demeanor that fell short of true grace due to a certain startling frankness.

Yet from the first hour he had been with her, he had known that this was somebody he could talk to, somebody with whom he could share his deepest apprehensions about his new vocation. She had a ready intellect, and seemed from the start to grasp what Jonah wanted to say even when he couldn't articulate it himself. She was tenacious to the point of stubbornness, yet was never contentious, or petty. She was the most honestly good-hearted person he had ever known, unimpressed by any nonsense, but moved by real suffering of any kind.

She was, in short, such a perfect preacher's wife that he couldn't help but wonder if this was why his Daddy had thrust them together in the first place, and not another of the New Jerusalem's endless, petty squabbles over color and status. But by then, knowing her, he didn't care. He had already decided that this was someone he could hold to, lest he be swept away by the inadequacies of his own faith and ability, and within a month he was pushing her to marry him, and even to set a date. Surprising and flattering her with his urgency, anxious as he was, then, to get his new life underway.

And throughout their life together, she had never let him down. It was much worse—knowing what he would do to her.

He rose from the table, carrying his plate and cup to the sink.

“All right, then.”

“What time should I expect you?”

He shrugged, his eyes sliding away despite himself.

“Can't say, exactly. I'll see who's at the office, then I should make some rounds.”

How could she not suspect—something? But she only smiled lovingly at him.

“Whenever it is, won't be soon enough.”

She kissed him good-bye at the top of the stoop—being careful to remove her kitchen apron even for the few moments she would show herself outside—and then went back inside to finish cleaning up.
Almost perfect,
Jonah thought sadly as he went down Strivers Row.

He headed on up to the New Jerusalem—aware with every step he took that he was failing. The word itself running through his head. Repeating over and over again, as inexorably as the Moto-gram ticker in Times Square. Confirmed by everything he saw, and thought.
Failing, failing
—

He tried to force the thought down, tried to concentrate instead on the sermon he wanted to write, but the words froze and crumbled in his mind. He had not spoken from the pulpit since their return from Oak Bluffs three weeks before, letting one or another of the assistant ministers fill in for him. The congregation accepting it, so far. Everything running slower in the summer, though there had already been solicitous inquiries at the church door after services. The church mothers asking
How you
feelin'
today, Rev'rend?
as they shook his hand appraisingly. Jonah almost wanting to tell them his deepest fear, out of sheer exasperation. That there was no voice left—the words not coming, no matter how much he worked them over, up in his father's old study.

He should have gone, he knew it. Should have been gone three weeks now. But here he stayed—and why?

There was the sound of a distant explosion a few blocks up ahead—something more than the usual levitation of a manhole cover caused by an undulation in the vast pressures coursing constantly beneath the streets of the City. This sounded almost like a cannon shot, breaking the mid-morning, Harlem stillness, followed by cheering, and dozens of voices, pitching jubilantly into a hymn, “We Are Ready for the Battle”—

He could see the people on the sidewalk look up, startled for a moment—no doubt wondering if they were finally under attack, but going on about their business, like stoical New Yorkers, once no ravening Germans or Japs actually appeared. Jonah remembering that it was only the revival, up under the big tent at 148th Street and St. Nicholas. The radio preacher, the Reverend Lightfoot Solomon Michaux, as he styled himself, his revival going strong for over two weeks now, running his ads every Saturday in the
Amsterdam Star-News:

WAR! BLITZKRIEG! WAR!

War Declared on the Devil by America's Most Famous Radio Evan gelist— And His Wife, Mary, the Soloist—

“The Battle will be fought by heralding gospel, and shouts against his satanic kingdom. Every devil is welcome. All things preached will be proved by the Bible. Fighting to Begin At Once—And Will Continue Until Hell Shakes!!!

He had been coming back to Harlem every summer for as long as Jonah could remember, running his big tent wherever he could get permission to pitch it. Drawing huge numbers, at least until a few years before, when there had been a scandal concerning the funds solicited by his radio ministry. But still he came back, undeterred, drawing more penitents than a dozen of the biggest Harlem churches—and endless complaints from the toney residents of Sugar Hill, enraged by all the noise.

His father had always loved the show, attending at least one performance a summer and taking Jonah with him. Unable to stop laughing all the way home, the old man admiring the Elder in his way, although he didn't believe a word—

Jonah had never quite been able to understand his love for such displays. But then Milton had always been a devotee, too, of the storefront churches that sprang up and vanished every season in Harlem, like so many toadstools after a rain.
All the small-fry cults,
as his brother ministers liked to call them derisively. Jonah kept track of them still, to tell his father—all the jacklegs and the holler preachers, the Spiritualists, and conjurers, and rootworkers, jammed into storefronts, or rooms over billiard halls and chicken restaurants. Boyd's Baptists, and Pentecostals, and the Royal Order of the Ethiopian Hebrews. The African Orthodox Church and the Metaphysical Church of the Divine Investigations, and the Church of the Living God, the Pillar Ground of Truth for All Nations; and The Full-Speed Gospel, and the Weep No More Congregation. Some of their founders sincere, some wanting to be the next Father Divine, or Prophet Costonie, or Mother Horn. Some just trying to make a living. Jonah catching one of the longer-lived signs that always made him smile: