Strivers Row (67 page)

“One more thing—when Jonah finally got to Nineveh—when he finally fulfilled his mission, the people of that mighty city were so overwhelmed by his preaching that they fell on their knees, and they covered themselves with sackcloth and ashes, and
begged
God for forgiveness! And being a merciful God, the Lord forgave them, and spared their city. But this only made Jonah angry. Jonah told God that he was
afraid
He would do such a thing, all along. He couldn't understand, after all he had gone through, and all the risks he had taken, why it was that God did not go ahead and
strike down
the evil city, just as he had said—and just as it deserved. He got so angry that he actually asked God to take his life, and he went and sat outside the city and waited to die.

“And the Lord God came to him, and He asked Jonah,
‘Do you do well to be angry?'
He asked Jonah why shouldn't He pity even Nineveh, that great city, if its people truly and earnestly repented. So I say to you today—do you do well to sit, and be angry? For I have seen you. I have seen you out on the stoops, sitting in the barbershops and the bars, and the beauty parlors, just making yourselves more and more angry. I have seen you sit and brood on the injustices done to you and I have to admit I have done the same thing, and I say to you again, ‘Do you do well to sit and be angry?'

“I say to you, don't be so angry that when the day comes that this great and evil city repents, you won't take any joy in it. Don't
be
that angry! Don't be so angry that you despair of your own precious life. Don't be so angry that you won't take the hand of friendship
any
man, of any kind, offers you in sincere equality and friendship, don't you
be
that angry! Don't be so angry that you will come
here
, to the very house of
God
, and refuse to sit too close to your brother and your sister because their skin is too dark or too light! God doesn't want you to sit and be angry like Jonah did at all, but to
stand up
against injustice, so that we can
all
rise up from the belly of the beast, and truly make a new world out of this terrible war! Thank you, Jesus, thank you, Lord!”

He bounded down from the pulpit then, letting the shouts and the praise sweep over him. The choir and the congregation all standing and booming out “Precious Lord Take My Hand” even as he stepped down and took his father's arm again. Leading him slowly back down the aisle with every eye in the congregation on him, even as they sang. Looking down and seeing through the tears—through the big crooked grin on his ancient face—his father give him a quick, secret wink, before Jonah led him out into the hazy sunshine of a Harlem summer Sunday.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

MALCOLM

By the time he raised his head from his brother's bed, the sun was already setting again. He pulled himself up and into the bathroom, where he popped a couple more bennies to get himself going. There was no sign of Reginald, no sign that anything from the night before had happened, save for the guns laid out on his brother's taut bedspread. He picked them both up and pocketed the .25. Holding the .32-20 in his hand, turning it slowly over and over, while he tried to decide just what to do next. Slowly, gingerly, he put it, too, back into his jacket pocket and set out for Sammy the Pimp's apartment—still unable to think of anywhere else he could go.

“What happened to that big score you gonna make, Red?” Sammy asked, eyeing him suspiciously from behind the chain of his door.

“We had a little stumble on that,” Malcolm tried to explain. “I'm still gonna do it, you'll see. I just came to bring your piece back.”

“Uh-huh.”

Sammy regarded him for another long moment, then closed the door and pulled the chain back. He led him on down to the kitchen, still wearing the silk bathrobe he had had on the night before, his eyes looking redder and blearier than ever—the bottle of scotch sitting empty on the table.

“Let's have it then,” he said, holding out his hand, and Malcolm hesitated for just a moment before he drew the gun out. Wanting to hold on to it for some reason, wanting to do something, anything with it. But finally he handed it over, a great sense of relief flooding through his chest as he did so.

“Fine, fine!” Sammy said, taking the .32-20 back and checking the cylinder. Rolling it once and clicking it back in place—before pointing it squarely at Malcolm's chest from across the table.

“Whatta you doin'?” Malcolm asked him, standing very still. “It's all over The Wire, Red. West Indian Archie is lookin' everywhere for you. Say you got his money.”

“That's a lie!”

“You can tell him that yo'self, Red. I'm gonna take you right to him,” Sammy said, shrugging, waving the gun blearily at him. “First, I want you to gimme what you got left—an' whatever it is you got from that score—”

But Malcolm was already diving across the table for him, going for his gun hand before Sammy could even finish his spiel. Sammy pulled the gun up instinctively, squeezing the trigger as both of Malcolm's hands clamped around his wrist, and it fired upward, the bullet creasing Sammy's own slick bald head—the detonation deafening them both as they fell to the floor.

The next thing Malcolm knew there was the sound of wild screaming that seemed to be coming from a long way away, and the feeling of claws tearing at the back of his neck and his face. He wrested the gun from Sammy where he lay, still stunned, on the floor. Trying to push himself up and away from Hortense, who had come out of a back room somewhere in the apartment, and was intent on twisting his neck around to someplace it couldn't go.

“It just grazed him! It just grazed him!” he shouted at her over the ringing in his ears. But she only screamed more curse words in Spanish and went for him again, her long red nails reaching out for his face.

“What? What?”

He stumbled a few steps backward and bumped up against a wall, backhanding her with the gun when she kept coming on. The blow sending her sprawling across Sammy, blood running out of one side of her mouth—still cursing and spitting at him.

“He's the one pulled the gun on
me!
” Malcolm exclaimed, in a tone of sincerely injured innocence.

“Fuck you!”

She cradled Sammy's head protectively in her arms, cooing endearments to him. Sammy tried to stand up, but he couldn't arrange it—his limbs surprisingly spindly sticking out of the folds of his bathrobe, looking like a big cockroach tipped over on its back. There was a long, even groove from the bullet that ran the length of his smooth, bald head, but the blood was already dissipating.

“I think you better run, Red,” he managed to say.

“Yeah? I think
you
finished tellin' me what I better do.”

He trained the gun on Sammy, holding a hand to his own throbbing, wounded face where Hortense had clawed it.

“Get out! Get the hell out, you cocksucker! Look what you done!” Hortense screamed, starting to get up again, and he turned and ran out the door. Slamming it behind him, leaping down the stairs—not even remembering that he still had the gun out in his hand until he was almost through the front door of the building.

He was stumbling back down along the nighttime streets then, his head still reverberating from the gunshot. His face and neck aching from Hortense's nails, hoping no cop would pay too much attention to the blood dripping slowly down his cheek and onto his shirt collar. He clutched desperately to the .32-20, telling himself he would shoot it out if he had to, just like the gunfighters in the movies. He could feel his breath coming raggedly, his heart beating so hard and loud he thought it would tear through his chest.

After a few more blocks, when he felt he was far enough from Sammy's and no one was coming, he ducked into a broad alleyway with a whole series of single-car garages running up and down it. He was dimly aware that he must be in back of one of the blocks that made up Strivers Row, and normally he would have walked on, afraid that these were the only colored folks in the City who might actually be able to summon a cop.

But now he didn't care, he had to rest for a moment. Trying to think what to do—his slave with Sammy done, Archie out looking for him.
And his brother gone. Not even having stayed to do the big job with him, the one that might have made all the difference.

Malcolm tried to swallow, and fought down the fear, and the bitterness. He popped a couple more bennies, then smoked three sticks in quick succession, feeling the smoke spread through his head, calming him. He adjusted his tie and smoothed down the tails of his suit jacket, dabbing at his face and the blood on his collar with a handkerchief. Telling himself that it didn't matter, that he would do it anyway—go through with it all just as he had planned. It was simple now. Just two things, nobody else involved.
Go to the house of the ghosty men, then go find Miranda—and Archie.
That was all there was to it.

He moved unseen down Fifth Avenue, toward 128th Street. He had waited deliberately until the hours after midnight, killing time by smoking a few more of Sammy's sticks, then having a couple of bourbons in a dive he knew that Archie would never set foot in—just enough to calm his nerves, and make sure that his hand was steady. There it was—the lifeless, ramshackle house, stuffed to the rafters with the white men's junk, the single, forlorn tree outside, in a sea of trash. He stepped down to the door beneath the stairs where he had first seen the old ghosty man emerge.
Imagining—wishing—that his little brother was here with him, standing lookout just as he had that night back in Michigan—

He pulled tentatively at the door's ancient iron grate, prepared to jimmy it open with a length of metal pipe he had found in the street. But when he did, the door gave way immediately, even to his cautious tug, swinging open so easily that he dropped the length of pipe in his surprise. It made a hugely loud, clanging noise on the sidewalk of the silent street and he froze in the shadows of the doorway, waiting for some reaction.

But there was nothing, no shouts or sirens, and he went back to business. Softly kicking in the rotted front door, the moldy wood giving way like so much cardboard. The repulsive, wet, splintering sound made his lips curl back, until he felt as if he were smashing in some infinitely foul, decayed old hive. His foot went through once more—and the whole spongy door fell away as if by magic, leaving only the passageway before him, even more dark and bottomless than he had remembered it.

Gathering all of his remaining courage and concentration, he started to make his way down, into the house. An odor of unspeakable corruption, also much worse than anything he remembered, wafted back out at him. He reached for the lighter he had in his jacket and took it out—hesitating before he lit it, though, knowing what he was about to see and hear, the scuttlings of the countless roaches and mice all around him. He pulled out another stick and lit it, letting in the smoke of the gage at least for a few moments. Then he turned the lighter back down the tunnel—and saw why it had indeed seemed even darker and fouler than he had remembered.

There, a few feet before him, he could see the body of a man in an antique suit, lying facedown in the middle of the tunnel. Malcolm recognized immediately the old-fashioned shoes and suit, one of the slug-white hands—a body too thin to possibly block up more than half of even this narrow passageway. The trouble was that the rest of his torso and head were covered by what looked to be half a ton of debris—buried under pressing irons and dumbbells, a rusted engine and several thick volumes of admiralty law; an old Christmas tree, and a tricycle, and several broken canning jars, filled with excrement.

Malcolm stood staring at it all, feeling just as he had stared all around himself that night in the Levandowskis' store, so many years before. Peering down into all that junk, the house full of junk, and knowing that if Langley Collyer had broken his neck in one of his own booby traps, there were doubtless more traps throughout the dark house. Knowing that even if there hadn't been—or even if he had been able to spot and evade them all—he would never be able to extricate what was worthwhile from what was merely junk.
That none of it would have made any difference at all.

He had taken another long toke from his stick, and turned back toward the street, when he saw him. Sitting right by the entrance to the tunnel, perched atop a high pile of the ghosty men's accumulated newspapers as if they were a throne. Staring right at him, instantly recognizable in his neat brown suit and that rounded little cap—the gentle, knowing smile on his face.
Elijah.

“And you still say you don't love the devil,” he said softly. His presence so much more real to Malcolm now than the other times in his dreams when he had seen him, or thought that he had seen him.

“Oh, yes, I have rolled away the stone, and opened up the tomb,” he said now, as if answering Malcolm's thoughts. “For that's what it is, a tomb, full of corruption. But here you are, still craving the white man's cave. Still willing to climb through all of his foulness, if you can get at his things.”

“An' why not?
Why—not?
” Malcolm shouted, the words revolving in his mind, as if he were talking to himself. Feeling the tunnel reverberate with the noise, and worrying that it might bring down the whole rest of the house, all about him, but unable to help himself.

“Why shouldn't
I
have them?”

“Yeah, you almost at the bottom now,” Elijah told him, as calmly as ever. “Livin' in the sewer like some criminal. White man got you almost all the way down—just like he done with me.”

“You mean how you was drinkin'—”

“No, I don't just mean the drinkin',” Elijah corrected him. “That wasn't all what I was talkin' about, though it was the bottom of my ignorant self-degradation. No, I mean even lower. Take a look!”

Malcolm peered harder at him, a little brown man, sitting way up at the end of a tunnel—and suddenly the pile of newspapers he was sitting on melted away, and a whole room began to rise up around him.

“
Look!
” Elijah shouted suddenly, raising his hands above his head—and the room began to grow, and envelop both of them now. The house of the ghosty men, the street, the whole Harlem night all fading into the walls now. Until Malcolm saw, to his fear and amazement, that they were both surrounded by the high stone walls. Elijah sitting on the side of a metal cot now, in a jail cell. All of it around them as clear as day—as clear as a movie set—the bare sink and seatless toilet next to his bunk, the endless rows of bars, and cells beyond them.

“That's right. It's a prison, son. In Milan, Michigan. That's where the white man has me.”

“A prison,” Malcolm repeated, uncomprehending. Staring at the stark pale green walls, the bars and the locked steel doors.
So much like where she was.

“That's right,” Elijah told him, the words flowing out of him relentlessly. “After I got back from Chicago, the hypocrites turned on me, Brown Eel, an' all the others. They asked,
‘Where is Master Fard? Why has no one heard from him?'
until they even turned my own brother, Kallatt, against me.

“They wouldn't listen when I told 'em I had last seen Master Fard in the airport terminal, in Chicago, or that he had appointed me, Elijah Muhammad, the sole messenger of Allah in his stead, before he raised up his arms and ascended into the sky. They wouldn't listen, they turned all the people against me, until one night a shotgun was fired through the window of my house, and I knew that I had to flee to save my life.

“I went all over the white man's country then, living like a hunted animal. But even then, the hypocrites an' the white devils pursued me. Birds have trees, and foxes have their holes, but there was no place for me to lay my head. J. Edgar Herod put me in jail for refusin' to sign up for the draft, an' fight the white man's war. His agents hauled me out of my mother's house, wrapped up in a carpet. Like some criminal—like a
dog!
”

“But—you come an' go as you please!” Malcolm said, unable to understand it. The little man was still wearing his skullcap embroidered with all the marvelous suns and stars and moons. But his neat black suit and tie and handkerchief were gone now, replaced by a blue prison work shirt, with a number on the pocket.

“That's right, son. I go where I want because they can't hold me in here. Because I grow greater in The Knowledge of Self an' Others every day, while my enemies, the hypocrites, diminish. But don't worry, son. Your day is coming, too. Soon they will have you in they prison, too, an' then
you
will learn. Then you will grow as you never did before—”