Strivers Row (6 page)

Above the fishing tackle were hung a series of family photographs. Adam with his parents, and his late sister. Adam and Isabel and Preston on the boat. Adam in the Abyssinian pulpit in full robe and regalia—

Jonah stopped when he saw what might have been his own face, cast in a much darker shade. It was a photograph of his father, posing with Adam Senior, and the Rector Hutchens C. Bishop, of St. Philip's. The three men holding up masonry trowels at what must have been the laying of the cornerstone at one of their churches, nearly twenty-five years ago, trying to look as grave and dignified as befitted the occasion. But peering closely at the picture, even in the darkening hall, Jonah could see how they couldn't help smiling from ear to ear, their lips just barely managing to keep their teeth covered.

And why not, after all they had accomplished? Men who had made themselves from nothing, brought their people up from nothing, the founders and the very embodiment of their churches—

They had been “The Three Kings,” the ministers who had first made the great exodus uptown. Moving their churches up to Harlem lock, stock, and congregation when it was still a place where goats and pigs wandered through the streets. Powell, Bishop, and his own father—the Reverend Milton Dove, pastor and founder of the Church of the New Jerusalem.

He was the least of The Three Kings, perhaps, the one with no real theological training. The New Jerusalem not as large or as influential as the Abyssinian, nor as Old New York and high hat as Episcopal St. Philip's. But it was, more than either of them, the church of the working people of Harlem—the church of the new people, just up from the fields of Mississippi and Georgia, and South Carolina. Heartsick and lost in the big city, just like the first, ragged band his father had so famously led out of the Wilderness.

To do such a thing—

He stared for a long moment at that face. It really could have been his own, a few years older. Save for the darker coloring, of course, and the scars that still remained from when—eighty years ago, now—he had been beaten nearly to death by a white mob on a City street. He knew that his father had been a good-looking man in his youth and he could see, in the photograph, the same elements that people said made Jonah himself handsome—the gracefully rounded cheeks, the noble brow; a prominent nose and full, sensuous lips. Nearly the same face—save for the color, and the scars.

I am not capable of anything like what he did. So what does he want from me? Even to name me as he did. A Jonah man, I'm a Jonah man—

He was gripped in the old fear then. Knowing that his father
was
the church, that he could not possibly replace him, and on impulse he walked the rest of the way down the hall into Preston's room, wanting desperately to ask Adam if he had ever felt the same way.

The moment he was through the door, though, he realized it was pointless. It was impossible to believe that Adam Clayton Powell had ever felt incapable of succeeding anyone, right up to God Almighty, should He ever get tired of the job. He sat now in a low rocking chair in a corner of his adopted son's room—the very picture of self-assurance, lighting up a cigarette while he watched over his boy.

“It's so easy to sleep at their age,” he said softly when Jonah entered, gesturing to where Preston was sprawled out on the bed, one arm flung heedlessly over his head.

“He gets so tired, just being out on the boat. Swimming all day. They have all the energy in the world, then when it's time to sleep they nod right off. It's natural. It's not till we're adults that we learn to clutter up our minds with so many worries and ambitions.”

“Hard not to worry, these days,” Jonah said.

“You mean about the world?” Adam shrugged, fanning the smoke away so it wouldn't reach his sleeping son. “ ‘
Let the day's own worries be sufficient for the day.
' You just have to see to what's closest to you, to do what you can do.”

“Did you really believe what you said out there?” Jonah asked abruptly—a little offended though he told himself he shouldn't be, that it was just Adam, quoting Scripture not five minutes after he had denied the whole divinity of the Bible.

“Hmm? About what?”

“You know. About the
afterlife
.”

He felt like a child even saying the word.

“Sure,” Adam said matter-of-factly. “Heaven and hell are both right here, in the span of years that we spend in this body, on this earth. That's all there is, and after it's over we're gone.”

Jonah flinched, hating to hear such things—though it was how his father usually talked about God. Jonah himself really believed, much as he hated to admit it before someone as worldly as Adam. He knew how ridiculous so much of it sounded—all those kings slaughtering each other at God's command in the Old Testament, Paul railing about the godliness of chastity. All that mystical nonsense in Revelation—

But he loved the Christ—His words, and the very idea of Him. Jonah had never had some burning revelation, so far as he knew it. No blinding light, or life-changing conversion, like so many of his brother ministers, or his fellow students back at the Angel Factory in Pennsylvania claimed to have experienced—like so many of the men and women in his congregation
knew
they had experienced. He had had nothing more than a
feeling
of Christ, which he was intelligent enough and honest enough to admit might be no more than his own inchoate longing. But still he believed.

“Besides, how could there be a God?” Adam was saying, looking up at him. “What God could let what's happening go on now? Why, today it's almost an
insult
to God to believe in him.”

“I know,” Jonah nodded grimly. “I've been talking to Jakey Mendelssohn. He has a cousin who got out of Europe somehow, works in his store now. He says it's true. The Nazis have whole camps where they're slaughtering Jews on—on an
assembly
line.”

“Yeah, I've heard the same things from Maury Rosenblatt, over at the Amalgamated,” Adam said, shaking his head. “They want to wipe out the whole race. Better God
shouldn't
exist.”

“Wipe out the whole race,” Jonah repeated, wondering at the concept.

He turned away, gazing out the bedroom window. It was almost pitch-black now, darker than it ever got in the City with the U-boat blackout here.
The blackness merging into the blackness
. The lights were going out all up and down Nantucket Sound, the only noise the faint ringing of the marker buoys, far out in the bay.
As if to demonstrate how the world will end.
He thought then that the island did not seem very special after all, that it offered no refuge.
What place did, now?

“Why should it surprise you?” Adam said, not unkindly, standing and giving his shoulder a consoling squeeze. “They've been trying to do it to us for years. Whatever you want to believe, you just have to take what's right in front of you, face that. Your father was always very good at that. He always served the people.”

So that
was
it
. The mention of his father confirming Jonah's earlier suspicions, out on the porch. That was why they had been invited up to this marvelous place, to nail down his father's endorsement for Adam's next election. He doubted that Adam would need it, but in Harlem politics you could never be too careful. Jonah's politico O'Kane “cousins,” in with Ed Flynn's machine up in the Bronx, they'd have understood it right away. Nothing too direct, or unsubtle. Have Jonah and his wife up for a couple weeks, be sure to plant some nice words that would get back to his father—

He knew that he ought to be angry, but he was too preoccupied. Instead, he chose to vent some more of his self-pity.

“But am I worthy of that?”

“Well, of course you are! Worthy as anybody.”

Adam's big face looked puzzled.

“Holding up a church in a world without God? In a world without hope, where we're hated on all sides? How can I do that?”

“You can do it. Just like your father did,” Adam said in a comforting voice, putting his hand on his back and guiding him out of his son's bedroom.

“Remember, you want to be like the great man, then
be
the great man. What's that, Socrates?”

“Aristotle.”

“Well, one of those Greeks,” Adam laughed, guiding him back downstairs to the ladies. “You see, my education wasn't completely wasted!”

Back down in the living room, of course, he had had to act like a man in front of his wife, and Isabel and Hycie. Going through the motions, making small talk with the rest of them. That night in bed Amanda had clung to him, sensing there was something wrong, as she always did. Asking him if Adam had disturbed him. He had told her that everything was fine, not even sharing with her his revelation as to why they had been invited. They had made love with more passion than they had in some time, and afterward they had lain awake in the narrow, guest room bed, listening to the tinkling of the buoys out at sea while the delicate subject of a child, and all that entailed, lay silent between them.

And early the next morning—when Wingee had driven them down to the ferry in his usual alarming fashion, whipping the steering wheel wildly back and forth with his one, incredibly strong arm—the sun had been shining, and Jonah had thought that perhaps he
could
do it. Putting behind him any remaining hurt over why Adam had invited him in the first place. Accepting his warm handshake and continuing pastoral concern as he left.
No wonder he

was so good
. Isabel had produced a picnic basket for the train, packed to overflowing with exquisite little chicken and cucumber sandwiches, and fine pastries they had acquired somehow, on an island, despite shortages and ration cards.

They had climbed up the ferry gangplank, waving good-bye to Adam and Isabel and their son, and he had thought that,
Yes, I can do this, there is no reason to go. We can have a good life, just like other people. Even a life with children
.

But when they reached the mainland again, and got back to America, everything changed. Even before they had docked, Jonah had noticed the sharp looks that he and Amanda got from some of the other passengers. Trying to figure out if they really were both colored, he knew, giving them a wide berth in any case. There had been some derisive laughter, some things said—as always, just out of earshot.

He had tried to ignore it, but then they had reached New Bedford and he had bought the newspapers. It was the same thing again, all the news they had been shielded from on their island off the rest of America, plastered across the front page of the Pittsburgh
Courier
edition he had managed to pick up.
A colored private and his mother, both beaten by police and MPs for daring to use a phone in the white waiting room of a Houston train station...a colored officer in Columbus, Georgia, who was told to go to a different window for nigger tickets, then who was knocked to the ground over and over again by fourteen separate white cops armed with nightsticks. His wife struck down, too, when she put out her hand to help him... Eleven Negro shipyard workers hospitalized, two more feared dead in Mobile—

The trouble had started when they had tried to put black welders on a job building Liberty ships—and the white welders had attacked them with iron bars and homemade clubs and bricks. Rioting until the government had been forced to give in, and put all the colored welders on a separate, segregated wharf—

Segregated Liberty ships.
His father had always talked about how his grandfather had been a skilled shipbuilder, but they wouldn't let him make warships, not even in New York during the Civil War, claiming,
This is an all-white waterfront
—

“Well, that's progress for you. Eighty years, and we get our own Jim Crow wharf,” he had murmured.

“What's that, honey?” Amanda had asked, but he had only shaken his head.

The worst, though, was just a small item buried in the back pages of the Boston
Globe
, a white paper—about a lynching in Vigo County, Indiana. It concerned a thirty-three-year-old colored man, James Edwards Persons, honorably discharged from the army. He had been accused of looking into farmhouse windows, and tracked down and beaten by a mob organized by the local sheriff to hunt him through the fields. But the very worst part of all was that it had happened months before. Somehow, even after his beating— even after the terror that must have suffused his being, turning his legs to nightmare lead weights—even after all that, Persons had escaped the mob, and hidden himself away. Only to be found dead now, not truly escaped from anything—

Jonah was still thinking on the story when the white soldiers came into the car. No doubt he would have noticed them earlier if he hadn't been so preoccupied, might have even discovered some ruse to hustle Amanda away from trouble. He was always alert, wherever he was, for groups of white men like that, though he tried not to let Amanda see his fear. He had slipped his clerical collar on before they left, an added precaution he thought worthwhile even if it had drawn a quizzical look from Adam, hoping that its authority would help him.

But it hadn't mattered. Nothing had, save for the color of his skin, and his wife's. The soldiers had spotted them at once, the moment they had walked in from the parlor car, half in the bag and looking for a fight. Sticking their faces, with their sour, whiskey-soaked breath, right into their own—

And no one around them had raised a hand to help. None of the white people in the car had said a thing, no one had even gotten up to look for the MPs, or the conductor. He had been left to sit there, in his seat, and pray to Jesus as best he could while his wife was insulted, and he was humiliated in front of her. About to be beaten, or even worse, just as in all the other shameful, mortifying attacks on black men around the country that he had just been reading about but had never had to endure himself—