Strivers Row (62 page)

It occurred to him, then, just what the room reminded him of. He pulled himself back in from the window to look at it again, the honks and shouts from far below receding dizzily behind him.
Yes, it was true.
The all-white room was just like the room he'd had at the seminary, in the Angel Factory, down in Pennsylvania. A little better appointed, a carpet on the floor instead of an aging throw rug. A double bed instead of two singles, and his mischievous roommate Johnny Kirk smirking over some volume of Rauschenbusch, across the room—but otherwise very much the same in its blinding whiteness.

All the rooms were white, all the maids were white, all the faculty were white. All white tombs, filled with corruption, they used to joke.

It had felt almost like a monastery when he got there. No locks on any of the doors, strict attendance required in chapel and at meals. Constant personal inspections by the head dean they called Creeping Jesus for his relentless, soundless creeping around the dorm rooms, sniffing for trouble. Jonah had welcomed it. Sure that he deserved it, after his deception. After all his years sticking it out at the college upstate, his shame had ground him down to a nub. His father had objected—relieved that he was going into the ministry, but urging him to try for one of the better, integrated seminaries in Boston or New York. The Angel Factory even then something of a running joke among the students at its affiliated liberal arts college, its faculty and students both varying wildly in ability and dedication. His fellow seminarians themselves had joked about it—
If you can't do anything else, then preach.

Jonah hadn't cared. By the summer after his graduation, he had been walking around in a daze, as if everything he had known and accepted was no longer true. His entire earlier conversion, his sure acceptance of Jesus Christ now worn away like a morning mist. By then Sophia was already gone most of the time, or he might have tried turning to her for some direction. The fissure he hadn't even recognized, meanwhile, had opened up between him and his father. It had begun from the moment he had poured out his confession of passing at the school upstate, and the old man had said simply
Don't do that again
and looked away from him—unable to set his eyes on what his son had become. There had been no one left to talk to, then.

The seminary had been the perfect place for him, as something— J
esus? A blind desire to disappoint and disappear from his father's sight again? His own crushed ego?
—had told him it would be. He had studied beside the sons of ministers of the most prominent Negro congregations in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and Baltimore—and with the sons of jackleg circuit preachers, from down in the Florida pine barrens. Taking classes with high Baptists, and snake-stomping Baptists, and those Baptists so starchy and full of themselves that Johnny Kirk liked to call them Episcopalians. The professors ranging from toothless old Bible thumpers, washed up in the haven of the seminary, who taught them the many kinds of sermons, and The Three Ps—
proving, painting, persuasion
, to actual theologians and vigorous Christian intellectuals—“the kind who have to think up an excuse for Jesus,” as Kirk had sneered.

It was, Jonah considered later, the best education a minister could have. He had learned the rudiments of how to speak from the pulpit (hoping the heart would come later, even if it never did), and he took his classes seriously. Reading Augustine and Spinoza, Nietzsche and Tolstoy and Marx, anything he could get his hands on. Truly studying the history of the Bible for the first time, how it was written, and how even its most blasphemous interpreters had construed it. Reading right through the night sometimes, genuinely wanting to know everything he could. Reading the sermons and the writings of the great colored ministers for the first time, Francis Grimke, and Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, whose words at the depth of the Georgia race riots and lynchings, three decades before, he had always remembered:
“Remember—a people already invisible can be easily made to disappear!”

The Angel Factory was perfectly located for his purposes too, in a small, picked-over industrial city outside Philadelphia—a place full of sullen white people, most of whom spent their lives in factories, stamping out tin cans. The seminary cut off from almost everything, leaving him all the time he needed to read and study. Johnny Kirk mocked him for how seriously he took it all—his relentless studying, and how he kept his clothes neatly cleaned and pressed. Making his bed so tightly, even before the maids got there, that he could bounce a nickel off it. Determined not to be one of
those
Negroes—messy and always late, laughing too much in their embarrassment. He chided Johnny in turn for how sloppily he kept his half of the room, his irreverence. How he eyeballed the younger white maids when they came to pick up the room—asking Jonah after they'd left if he ever thought about seeing how far they might go.

“Don't talk like that,” Jonah had told him grimly.

“Why not?” Johnny had grinned back at him. “These little Irish an' bohunk girls—they're probably dying to know what it would be like. What with all the stories in their heads about jungles, and wild beasts. It'd be the one time they could look back on with pride an' say they'd really sinned!”

“I don't care about them,” Jonah told him.

“Well, that ain't very Christian of you—”

“I care about us—about lowering ourselves to that sort of talk!”

“Why? We're just animals, too. Even in our most divine form.”

“We have to stand for something. We have the burdens of the Negro race on our shoulders—” Jonah had started to tell him, but Johnny waved him off.

“So what?” he laughed. “So we have the burdens of the whole race. So what? We didn't ask for 'em. And we can't possibly carry 'em!”

Johnny's father was the minister of one of the biggest colored congregations in Philadelphia, and he had insisted on taking Jonah into the city on the weekends, saying that he would show him the burdens of the Negro race. Towing him on Saturday nights through the lowest bars and pool halls he knew—getting him to drink beer, and play pool, even though Jonah had sworn he would never again partake of these pleasures—and many more—as part of the penance he had decided on for himself. But after a time he found that he was able to laugh and joke, taking real pleasure in things amidst the laughing, bleary, accepting faces all around him. Finding, to his surprise, that small, irreducible kernel of faith still within him.

But it was she who had really nurtured it, who had built him back up. By the time he had graduated from the Angel Factory and returned to his Daddy's church, he was still wary, and desperately lonely. Not trusting himself, not knowing what he could possibly do for anyone else. He was clumsy in the pulpit, on those Sundays when his father prodded him to speak, uncertain and stumbling, the magic of his effortless debut long forgotten. He had taken some so lace in the ministerial work, the visits to tenement apartments and railroad flats, the hallways stinking from the trash moldering down in the dumbwaiter. The visits to The Morgue, once he managed to overcome his fear and revulsion. All the long, hard, useful work—setting up labor bureaus, besieging welfare offices, wangling stays of eviction, and medical leaves—

But he had only been able to do it with her help, every step of his way back. That marriage so adroitly arranged by his Daddy— Jonah secretly resenting that this, too, was his doing, but not feeling he had any right to resist in his demolished state. Still flattened by Christ, and only just lifting himself back up. Amanda had found what was best in him from the start, forgiving him his fearfulness, forgiving him his every fault and weakness as automatically as she might have done a child's. Accepting everything in him, even his deepest, ugliest confessions as only human. She was cheerful and silly with him when he was exhausted, listened earnestly when he wanted to talk about the endless circumvolutions of church politics. She did more than her share both at home and at the New Jerusalem— running her clubs, appeasing the church mothers; keeping a fine house, and making a good appearance. Always demure but intelligent, informed at the endless receptions, the dinners and receptions on Strivers Row, and Sugar Hill. Shy and inexperienced in bed, as he had been, but always eager and unabashed. Seeking always to please him—

It was best that he leave her,
he had assured himself. Best for her, for the church—for everyone. A sacrifice that he would make, was how he had thought of it. A final penance for all of his failures. For his cowardice, his ineffectuality, his inability to face the coming Poland.
The time of the Jews, here and now, and for us
—

And yet, he realized now as he walked once more around the room and came back to sit on the bed, he had always thought of it as akin to disappearing. That he would cease to be conscious. That he would be gone out of his own life, as well as theirs—a positive good. The disturbing notion only just beginning to overtake him that this halfway point, this way station he had planned, might be all there was.
Sitting for the rest of his life on a white bed, in a white hotel room.
Not good, not bad, only gone. And meanwhile, his brain ticking on and on. Thinking of his Daddy, dying up there. Thinking of the smoothness of her back and arms. The fierceness in her face when she was determined, all the continual moments of kindness, flowing from her as involuntarily as water.

He stood up, feeling almost as if he were choking. Looking back over at the window now, he saw to his bewilderment that it was already starting to get dark. Realizing that he had been sitting and pacing here in this white room for hours already, without any idea how much time had gone by.
His first day, already squandered.

This is how it would have to be,
he knew. Living wholly in isolation, or at least until he could come up with another family, another job, another city. And then living a lie, with his past erased, in constant fear of being found out. Dress white. Talk white. Tell everyone that you are the only child of only children who both died long ago, and that you are Greek, Italian, South American. Don't tell anyone your secret, save maybe your children, and thereby weight them with the same terrible burden after all—

He thought of Sophia, then, wondering, How did she do it? How did she just cut herself off from everything she loved, even everything she hated?
How does she stand the loneliness?

A thought came to him, and he grabbed at it. Shrugging on his suit jacket again. Wondering what time she would be going on tonight, and if he could catch her at her apartment still, but not breaking stride. Needing to speak to his sister now, face-to-face, so he could ask her just how the hell he was supposed to do this.

CHAPTER TWENTY

MALCOLM

The white women made their way through the sugarcane fields in the moonlight. One of them, in a nurse's uniform, leading the other—a tall, thin blond woman who walked as if she were in a trance, with a trace of a smile on her face. The high, papery husks of cane rustled eerily above their heads as they moved through the fields, and there was the sound of beating drums, growing steadily louder from all around them.

They came out of the cane at a crossroads—where a skeletal, half-naked black man loomed up suddenly in front of them, wraith-like and bug-eyed.
A zombie.
The first white woman bit her fist in surprise, a look of ecstatic fear spreading across her face. But the zombie didn't interfere with them—letting them pass on to the voodoo circle even though one of the women lost the protective badge pinned to her dress, the little piece of white cloth fluttering helplessly on a long spear of cane.

Malcolm edged to the lip of his seat in the nearly empty balcony of the Alhambra. Hugging himself tightly at the shoulders, trying to get himself dry after his long run through the rain. He had doubled back downtown to here, at West 126th and Seventh, as soon as he had finally lost the minister, looking for someplace where he could get out of the rain and think for a minute. He had ducked into the Alhambra as soon as he spotted its light blue, Moorish facade, looming like a fairy-tale castle in front of him; the glistening, electrified marquee that read
OPEN ALL DAY ALL NIGHT TWO NEW FEATURES W/ NEWSREEL/ CARTOON *I Walked with a Zombie Plus They Came to Blow Up America with George Sanders—

He had made his way up to the balcony, where the only other people were a few bored defense workers just off the night shift, and some muscatel drunks, most of them sleeping and snoring loudly. Malcolm had been just as glad, moving all the way up to the highest row, where his back was to the wall and he had the whole theater out before him. There he could smoke a few more of Sammy's sticks, and figure out what to do without having to worry about anybody else surprising him.

But he found himself being increasingly drawn into the movie, which delved into so many of his fantasies, right down to the woman in the nurse's uniform, and the smiling blonde, who had also been turned into a zombie. They entered the secret voodoo conclave together, walking past rows of black-skinned drummers, in all their savage markings and trinkets, beating out a furious tattoo on their primitive drums. Moving inexorably toward the closed, forbidding shack of the voodoo priestess, the white nurse steeling herself, leading her companion on. They reached the shack—and a black hand shot out, yanking them both inside.

But there was no priestess there. Only the older, white matriarch who owned the plantation, and who it turned out was using the natives' own superstitions to trick them into taking the medicines they really needed—

Malcolm sat back, exhaling, bitterly disappointed for so many reasons. Not sure of what he had wanted to happen to the white women, the nurse and the serene, smiling blonde, but wanting
something. All just another hustle.

The movie wound down to its predictable ending after that. Malcolm went on working his way through the cigarette pack of Sammy's sticks, offsetting them with another Benzedrine tablet from time to time, to make sure he stayed awake. The only scene that engaged him again was right at the end, when there was a close-up of a masthead, from the ship that was supposed to have first brought the black slaves to the island the zombies were on, centuries before. He stared at it in fascination as the closing credits rolled. It was a blackened, wooden sculpture of St. Sebastian from the waist up; the figure's mouth opened in agony, real arrows sticking out of the wood—so lifelike that Malcolm thought he could almost hear the wooden man screaming—

“Lies! Lies! White man lies!”

Malcolm blinked, and saw that the movie screen before him was filled with a cartoon now. The title unfurled over the usual jolly cartoon music:
Coal Black and the Seven Dwarfs.
A fat, sassy, kerchief-headed colored woman sashayed across the screen with a bag of sugar she was hoarding—followed by seven tiny black soldiers. There were more shouts from the now awakened patrons in the Alhambra orchestra, then a growing chorus of whistles and boos. A barrage of popcorn bags, and paper cups of Coke splattered against the screen, and the cartoon ground to a halt, then flickered out altogether. There were more whistles, then clapping and derisive laughter echoing through the darkened movie theater.

Malcolm pulled himself to his feet, and slipped out the balcony exit. Running down the separate back staircase, left over from when the Alhambra had still been segregated twenty years before, and all its black patrons confined to the nigger heaven in the balcony—the back entrance where all the hustlers he knew preferred to come and go now.

But that's what I am. A hustler.

When his feet touched the sidewalk, he saw that the rain had stopped, and for a moment he just stood there, genuinely confused about where it was he should go now.
Back up to Sammy's, for another assignment, more sticks?
But the cops were just as likely to be around now, with that preacher going on.
Where, then?
To his latest rented room? But he could not even remember where that was just now, with his mind clouded by so many sticks, so many pills back in the movie theater.

Where?

Before he could think it out any further, he simply started to move, heading downtown. As soon as he could, he got off the streets, the fear rising in him as he went that somebody, somehow, was still following him. Making his way through Morning-side and Central Parks as far as he could, sprinting the few blocks in between them only when he was sure there was hardly anyone around. Running and walking all the way to midtown, through the teeming night world of the parks. Interrupting the transactions of sailors and their girls, or their boys, in the bushes along the walls. Drawing the curses of winos bunked down under the trees; the stares and titters of children out on their own adventure, entire families lying out on the grass for a respite from the infernal heat of their apartments. Dodging the strolling cops swinging their clubs, the horses of the mounted patrols clopping their way down the paved pathways. Swearing that he even heard the call of owls in the deep darkness, could see the swoop of hawks against the Great Lawn in Central Park. Listening all the time for the sound of any footsteps coming up behind him.

By the time he reached the end of Central Park, he decided that it was all right to risk showing himself. He ran out from behind a huge boulder, to catch his breath, and down into the subway, under the familiar sign that warned
Hold Your Hat!
against the sudden vacuum suction the trains created. Hanging back against the tiled walls even when he had reached the dim, filthy, concrete platform, his head down. Grateful, for once, to feel the rush of dirty air the A train drew in with it from all over the City—the warm, disgusting subterranean belch of discarded hot-dog nubs, and sewer water, and sticky-sweet fruit drinks, washing over him.

He rode the train the rest of the way into the Village, where he walked the block over from Sixth Avenue and slipped into the alley behind Miranda's building. Vaulting a couple of low brick walls, ignoring the wear and tear on his suit, and the barking dogs, until he had made his way to her apartment house. There he pried open the basement door he had so carefully prepared, and took the stairs up to her place—pausing to listen on every landing, for any footsteps that might be coming back down. Listening carefully again at her door, even though it was nearly dawn by then. Unable to hear anything, but still jumping back by the elevators when he rang her bell. The little .25 in his hand, ready to flee or to shoot, although he couldn't make up his mind which.

“That you?”

The door opened, and Miranda came out in her dressing gown, shielding her half-closed eyes against the sudden hall light.

“Is that
you?
” she asked again, hands on her hips this time, and somehow Malcolm knew she meant him. The sound gratifyingly personal, despite how impatient her tone was.
The way nobody had called him since
she
had
.

“They anybody in there?” he whispered.

“Who would be in here with me, after three shows tonight?” she demanded crossly, spotting him now by the elevator. She shook her head impatiently, but Malcolm thought she looked concerned just the same.

“Get on in here now, before you wake up the neighbors.”

She sat him down in the kitchen and made him some toast and eggs. Forbidding him to have any coffee or any scotch, either, once she had looked closely into his eyes. Undressing him as if he were a little boy and carefully hanging up his suit. Feeding him a Nembutal, and letting him bust down on a nice, fat mezzroll with her once they were in bed together. And after they finished she let him hold her, and put his face in the warm, smooth crook between her neck and her shoulder—still high, still jabbering on about anything that came into his head, while Miranda slowly rubbed his back.

He tried to tell her, then, about everything that he had planned for them, and everything he had been doing. He tried to ask her why she wouldn't see him, and if she was afraid of Archie, or if she loved him, but she wouldn't answer any of his questions.

“It's all right now,” she murmured. “You just rest and get better. We'll talk all you want in the morning.”

After what seemed like a long time he finally fell asleep, not waking up again until light was streaming through the dark blinds. They made love then because he insisted—still half asleep, simply and primally pushing away at her, clutching her, until they were both satisfied. He wanted to talk to her then, but he dozed off again before he could say a word. Dimly aware of the lights in the room going on and off—of her moving around him, trying to get him to eat something. Falling deeper into sleep—

He awakened into darkness. Groping around himself, panicked for a moment when he couldn't remember where he was, or what this place could possibly be. Only after a few minutes of scrambling about the room, searching frantically for his clothes, his money, his stash, did it come back to him what he was doing here. The apartment silent now, Miranda no doubt gone out to her gig—how long ago he wasn't sure. He didn't even know if it was still light outside, behind the close-pulled blinds all over the apartment.

Instead of checking, though, he went over to his suit jacket, where Miranda had hung it neatly in her closet. Pawing through it until he was able to recover a new cigarette pack of marijuana sticks, a little vial of pills—and a book. He frowned for a moment when he felt it out, then remembered: the book from the bus station, that Prof. Toussaint had given him all over again.

He pulled it out again, looking at it in the thin light from Miranda's bedside table. The green cover still wet and streaked from the rain now, he saw with regret, the gilt-edged leaves pocked and warped. The print, too, he saw, was less expensive than it had looked, and it had run badly on several pages, making them all but unreadable now. Even the title page that had fascinated him so was partly obliterated, the only legible part reading
ELIJAH MUHAMMAD
by “X.” Still, the pages of the book that he had yet to read seemed to be intact, and once he had perused them, he gave over any other thoughts of what he might be doing, getting dressed and leaving, or making himself something to eat. Instead, he leaned back in Miranda's bed, where he lit himself another one of the matchstick-thin joints, and began to read again.

When Elijah saw Master Fard again, he was in a straitjacket, in the psychopathic ward of the Detroit Receiving Hospital. The jacket was swaddled all the way up to his chin, so it looked as if the Master were drowning in its thick, white folds, and Elijah had all he could do not to ask him why he didn't break out, why he didn't throw off these shackles and walk out to freedom.

“Patience, my faithful one,” Master Fard told him, as if he were still reading his mind.

“Don't you know, if I wanted to, I could throw off these bonds at once and walk out?” he asked Elijah, smiling his radiant smile at him—the smile that Elijah had missed so much during the days he had been away. “But the white man has a little more time. Allah has willed it.”

“I thought you were Allah,” Elijah asked, before he realized what he was saying.

“Then why do you need to ask any questions?” the Master told him. “Just make sure you talk to my lawyer.”

He had turned to leave then, but before he could go, Master Fard had called him—had drawn him back, actually, he was sure, with the strength of his will alone. His face still gentle but so serious and sorrowful now that Elijah felt he might easily fall at his feet and beg his forgiveness, just as he had been tempted to do the same at the feet of his own Daddy after one of his sermons, so many years before.

“One thing. You must be a leader now, at least so long as I am in here,” Master Fard told him.

“Yes,” Elijah answered, feeling something stir in him at the words.

“You must lead the people,” Master Fard repeated. “And above all, trust no one.”

“No one?”

“
No one.
No matter what they tell you. Not even if they bring you the greatest truth that ever was. And above all else, there is one thing you must know—”

“Yes?”

“Never trust a white man.”

Elijah had taken up his charge to lead with renewed enthusiasm— unsettled though he had been by his last exchange with the Master. He had been there every day during the trial, commanding all the members from the Detroit temples when they went downtown to protest at the trial. And he had done it all himself, now that Brown Eel, and Mr. Takahashi, and all of his other rivals had disappeared, with the police combing all through Paradise Valley to question the Fruit of Islam.