Strivers Row (4 page)

The MPs pulled him off—but Malcolm managed to reach back in and yank the sergeant up by the arm and one ear, bum-rushing him up the coach. All of the white passengers' eyes glued to him as he passed, gaping openly now.

“Don't you
never
lay a hand on Pappy Cousins!” Malcolm shouted at the sergeant. “You hear me? Don't you
never
mess with that man!”

He threw the half-conscious sergeant off the idled train, sending him rolling down the few feet of sand toward the gently lapping waters of the bay. The MPs followed, dragging the other soldiers— glowering at Malcolm. But Pappy was in between them again, keeping up a steady chatter.

“Them fellas attacked me like I was Tojo. Like I was Hitler! Thank God one a my boys was here to help me! Remember, those were the drunks I warned ya about before!”

Then they were gone, hauling the soldiers off. Malcolm watched them, standing out on the sand with Pappy and the rest of the kitchen crew, and a couple of colored porters who had come up to see if they could help. The others grinning at him, teasing him, but gazing at him with a new respect, he could see. Lionel still holding his razor up in the excitement. Pappy pulled out his handkerchief and dabbed mutely at the cuts the sergeant had opened along the side of Malcolm's face, and one corner of his mouth.

“Didn't I tell ya to be careful,” he finally said, his voice so soft it was barely audible. Then he handed the handkerchief over to Malcolm without another word, patting him once on the shoulder before he headed back into the train with the rest of the kitchen crew.

Malcolm held the handkerchief in place, on his lip—but looking down he was both pleased and a little nauseated to see several splotches of blood on his white uniform jacket. He knelt and wet the cloth in the ocean water and tried to clean them off with little success. Then he put the handkerchief back on his lip, letting the saltwater sting his open cut.

When he stood and looked back at the train, he saw their faces. Staring out through the streaked, mottled window glass—all the white faces there, and the preacher and his plain, dark wife, too. All of them staring at
him,
now.

The
Clipper
gave a warning whistle, the last of the troop trains finally pulling past, but he didn't want it to end just
yet.
To go back to peddling sandwiches and cigarettes, collecting his nickels and dimes.

Tom it up—

Just down the spit of beach they were on there was a little platform, some rickety wooden structure built to convey mail or water or something in the old days. Malcolm ran the few yards down the beach and swung himself up on it. Still in full view of all the watching, wondering faces on the train.

He gave them his widest grin, then flung out his arms. Then he bowed, and turned his backside to them, and flung himself out into the waters of Buzzards Bay.

CHAPTER THREE

JONAH

He couldn't understand why the boy had jumped into the water. Until then he had taken it almost as a visitation—that sandwich boy, looking so young and innocent one moment, and literally Satanic the next. That ridiculous red conk sticking out from under his trainman's cap, his mouth turned up in a sardonic, V-shaped leer. Coming upon them just as the whole situation was out of hand and he was about to be shamed in front of Amanda.

He had tried to ignore the soldiers, then he had tried to stand up to them. He had attempted to overawe them with his authority, his solemn Christian dignity. But that hadn't happened. They were about to work him over—when that boy had shown up. Seemingly fearless, taking them all on, hauling the drunken sergeant off the train as if endowed with the strength of ten men.

But then there had been that dive, right into the bay. The other passengers gawking, thinking he had drowned himself for some reason. Instead he had surfaced quickly, and climbed back up on the platform, his white trainman's uniform dripping wet. Bowing again and again for all of them in the car, strutting and grinning before all the white faces that turned away from the spectacle as abruptly as they had from Jonah's own humiliation. The Nigger Triumphant, something no more to be looked upon than a lynching—

He tried to banish that last thought from his head. It was unworthy, he thought—even uncivilized.
How uncivilized everything had become, as soon as they had gotten off the island.

“
He cut off her head!
” Adam Powell's voice boomed out through the summer evening.

“Adam!”

There had been the sound of laughter, the tinkling of ice in a glass. Adam held his hands out wide, in self-absolution.

“He did! I didn't make it up! It's right there in the book!”

Only the night before, they had been sitting out on Adam's front porch in Oak Bluffs, watching the sun set over the trees and the Ink Well down below. Sipping highballs with Adam and his wife, Isabel, and their show business friend, Hycie. Amanda and he both still a little dazed, although they had been there for two weeks. In part it was the drinks themselves: gins-and-tonics served in tall, sweating glasses with a slice of lime. Amanda came from a temperance family, and neither of them were much used to drinking. In part it was everything else—the sheer, casual opulence of their surroundings; the risqué, irreverent talk, right down to the offhanded sophistication of referring to the strip of colored beach by the steamship landing as “the Ink Well.”

All evening Amanda had shot him wide-eyed, incredulous, slightly delighted looks over the lip of her glass. As if to ask, just as she had for the past two weeks
—What are we doing here?
They had never gone anywhere more adventurous before than the Shinnecock Arms or Wright's Cottage, or maybe The Notch. They had heard about Oak Bluffs, of course, living on Strivers Row as they did, but Amanda's conservative, newly middle-class family was thoroughly intimidated by anything to do with Harlem society, and Jonah's father had never paid any mind to such pretensions. The immaculately dressed couples promenading, or cruising their big cars down the Circuit. The green, rolled tennis courts filled with men and women in their tennis whites; the art shows and the yachting regattas; the cocktail parties served under huge, striped tents down by the water.

But above all, there was Adam. Dressed in an outlandish, bright yellow suit, now complete with matching socks and shoes. Throwing back his big handsome head to laugh at his own jokes and stories, dancing down the porch like some sort of bacchanate to wave the gin bottle over their drinks—

That last evening Amanda had brought up the Wright book,
Native Son,
which she had finally convinced her Ladies' Self-Improvement Class at the New Jerusalem to read that spring. Jonah had been wary but he hadn't tried to warn her off it, figuring it was her business—and, as he had suspected, she had been more outraged by the book than the ladies of the congregation. When she decided to give voice to that outrage on Adam Clayton Powell's front porch, Jonah had cringed inside but said nothing—wanting, he had to admit, to see his wife hold her own against Adam.

“I thought it demeaned the race,” she had insisted. “That boy, that Bigger Thomas, is an animal, hardly human at all! He is everything that a Rankin or a Bilbo would have white people believe about the modern Negro—”

To Jonah's surprise, Adam had nodded, and knocked out his pipe against the bottom of his loafer.

“I didn't like it very much, either,” he said, starting to fill the pipe again. “I thought it was much too optimistic.”

“
Optimistic?
” Amanda stared at him.

“Sure, it's downright Pollyannaish. Much too easy on the white man!” he said calmly, puffing the pipe to life—winking at Jonah as he did.

“How in the
world
could you possibly find that depraved book
optimistic
?”

“Consider it,” Adam told her. “Here you have that white boy— what's his name? The communist? Bigger takes his girlfriend and
kills
her. Strangles her like a chicken, in her own bedroom. Then he
cuts off her head
and stuffs the body into a furnace. He does! My apologies, ladies—”

He grinned over at his wife, and at Hycie, who only giggled back at him. Amanda was listening furiously, her brow furrowed in concentration that way Jonah had always loved. Realizing some kind of fun was being had at her expense, but still trying to decipher exactly what it meant.

“But that's what he does!” Adam appealed. “He kills her, stuffs her body into the furnace. And nevertheless, by the end the white boy—because he's a good little communist
—forgives
him!”

“But—”

“I mean,
he cut off her head!
” Adam had roared again, pulling his pipe from his mouth and grinning from ear to ear.

“He cuts off his girl's head, stuffs her in the furnace, and the white man
forgives
him.
There's
your racial propaganda! What kind of tinhorn saint is that white boy? I swear, we got nothing on these communists when it comes to the religion business!”

All of them were laughing now, swept along by Adam's sheer ebullience. Even Jonah—even Amanda, though he could see that her laughter was halting, and more frustrated than anything else, but trying to be a good sport. Adam could sense it, too—and gently steered the conversation off in another direction.

“Say, did I ever tell you about the summer I met Robert Todd Lincoln, up in Vermont?”

“Oh, Adam!”

He had, many times. But Isabel and Hycie knew that Amanda had never heard it before, and so they clamored obligingly for an encore.

“Tell it! Oh, tell it anyway, Adam!”

“All right then.”

He sat back down in his hurricane chair and leaned in confidentially toward Jonah and Amanda, a small grin working its way across his face. Drawing them back in, including them all again, especially Amanda, in that inimitable way he had.

“It was when I was working summers as a bellboy up at the Equinox House, in Manchester, Vermont, and
Robert—Todd— Lincoln
himself was a guest there all season,” he began, sonorously sounding out all three names of the Great Emancipator's son, almost as if to imply they were a cheap imitation of his own.

“He was an old man by then, and mean as a snake. Above all, he haaated Negroes!
Haaated 'em!
He would leave his cottage and come over to have supper in the dining room every night. Have himself driven over in his big old touring car. But whenever one of the colored valets put his hand out to open the car door for him—
bang!
He would bring his cane down
hard
, right on the knuckles!”

He paused to demonstrate this with the gin bottle, banging it down on imaginary knuckles so vividly that all of them winced, and pulled back their hands, smiling and laughing. Adam looked back up at them, grinning wider.

“Now, this was a bit of a predicament, since every valet they
had
at the Equinox House was a Negro! I don't know why, exactly.”

He pretended to look thoughtful.

“They used to dress us up in little vests and caps. Maybe they thought we looked like colored lawn jockeys, all standing out there. This was the enlightened North after all, where most white folks don't even
mind
having a black boy step and fetchit to open a car door for them. But not
Robert—Todd—Lincoln!”

He leaned forward even more now, and they leaned in toward him, drawn as if by a magnet, though save for Amanda they had all heard the story.

“So then the manager asked
me
—since I have on occasion been, uh, shall we say,
mistaken
for white—he asked me if I would open the door of Mr. Lincoln's car every night. Of course, he didn't know if it would actually work, you see. It's hard for a white man, once they
know
you're a nigger—”

—Adam went on, and out of the corner of his eye, Jonah saw his wife's back stiffen at the word—

“—once they
know
you're a nigger, to know if you really can pass. It was going to have to be trial and error, the scientific method. And if it failed—”

He gestured with the gin bottle again, swinging it down hard— “Then
bang!
another rap on the knuckles!”

They nearly convulsed with laughter, even Amanda breaking down and chuckling despite herself.

“So—that night, along comes Mr.
Robert—Todd—Lincoln's
big old chauffeured touring car,” he went on. “It pulls up to the Equinox House, and there he was, waiting in the backseat. The only surviving son of Abraham Lincoln, the Great White Father himself ! Former cabinet member, president of railroads. And he's got the cane ready, he's all set to bring it down on any black hand that dares to open the door of his car! I step forward—a little nervous, I must tell you, all set to pull my hand back the second I see him start to bring that cane down—and he looks down, directly at me, this big, tall, scary old white man...and he
smiles
.

“He smiles! He was satisfied my hand was white—or white enough, anyway. And for the whole rest of the summer, only I could be trusted to open Mr. Lincoln's door. The manager paid me an extra ten dollars a week and Mr. Lincoln himself gave me a dollar every night, just to open that door. I tell you, I was so glad to have that money I even kept my right hand in my trouser pocket the whole rest of that summer, just so it wouldn't get too dark.”

“Oh, Adam, now that's too much!”

“No, no, it's the gospel truth. To this
day
my right hand is lighter than my left. Look, I'll show you!”

He held out both hands before him, the right one palm up, the left one palm down—and roared with laughter again to see that he had made them look. Even in the fading summer light, Jonah thought how light both of them looked, palm or back.
But still not as light as mine
—

He glanced back at Amanda, to see if she was all right, or if she had been further offended. It was usually just the sort of thing she wouldn't like, what she considered a mintrelsy, “l.c.”—lower class— sort of story.

Yet he was relieved to see that she was truly laughing. He had wondered about bringing her to Oak Bluffs at all, knowing the sort of crowd Adam moved in, but it had been too much of a temptation to turn down. He had known Adam all his life but they had rarely socialized outside the usual church picnics, and prayer breakfasts, and ministerial convocations. Adam and Isabel were the very pinnacle of Harlem society. Together, they were the most stunning couple anyone had ever laid eyes on, like something off a movie screen, and Jonah had thought that Adam must want something from him to be graced with a sudden invitation to their sanctum sanctorum, the summer house on Martha's Vineyard.

But Adam had made them feel right at home from the moment they stepped off the Woods Hole ferry. His booming, irrepressible laugh, his teasing jibes and stories making it seem as if they were all in on one great big joke together. He had never been one to hide his light under a bushel back in Harlem, but here Jonah thought he seemed positively outsized. He had even grown a rakish beard for the summer, romping about the island like a big, happy satyr. Driving out along its narrow, winding woods roads at frightening speeds with Wingee, his remarkable one-armed chauffeur. Taking them riding along the beach in the mornings, galloping his horse through the shallows as if he were to the saddle born, while they struggled just to stay upright. Plying them with seafood and alcohol, lively talk and music every evening around the porch.

“Oh, Adam, you haven't changed a bit!” Hycie had exclaimed, clapping her hands. “Why, I remember when he would walk into my apartment and just start swigging gin, right from the bottle. ‘Adam,' I'd say, ‘at least pull the shades down before somebody
sees
you!' ”

Amanda looked away again, at the mention of Adam's blithely walking into the apartment of a woman who was not his wife. But Isabel seemed unperturbed, chuckling along with her friend. She sat curled up in her chair, wearing a flowery print dress that showed off her dancer's legs, and a flamboyant, wide-brimmed hat. In Harlem she dressed more modestly for the sake of his parishioners, but here on the island she let it out a little, too. When they went sailing Adam would insist that both she and Hycie—who was nearly as beautiful, and as light-skinned—go up and pose near the bow in their bathing suits, so that it would look as if he were cruising through Nantucket Sound with two rich, long-legged white girls on the front of his boat, their hair blowing in the wind.