Part 21 (2/2)

”No suh thankyuh. No time right now suh.”

”Gotta be goin, suh. Sowrry.”

He's hurt. He's devastated. He's angry. Subhuman brutes, long-limbed apes yet they dare to snub him.

WALKING AT THE side of the highway leading into Paterson, New Jersey. Where his feet should be, a roaring numbness. He's gaunt with hunger. ”Little Moses” with a swollen potbelly. Not ill, yet not well. Is something wrong with his eyes? A glaring nimbus of sun burning his brain.

He sleeps in lice-infested bedding, or out in the open. He sweats like a draft horse. Until he sweats himself dry, and his bowels have emptied out with dysentery. Stooping to drink ditch water like a lapping dog. Splas.h.i.+ng icy water onto his face and pausing staring at the face . . . the mask . . . with his eyes. Yes it's me. Yet no name.

His several names, he's lost along the roadside. He's lost in sweat. A peculiar peace to it, no-name. Just the skin, and the eyes.

And, at the outskirts of the city he isn't fully aware is Paterson, let alone that he's in the state of New Jersey. That blinding glaring sun. His bloodshot eyes. The handsome couple in the stalled automobile, in the mud. The driver, a white man in his thirties, squatting in the roadway and turning the crank clumsily, failing to start the car; his pa.s.senger, a white woman of about his age, with a fleshy pale face and rouged cheeks, a peach-colored cloche hat on her curled hair.

To the rescue! He'll give them aid, and they'll give him aid. He'll ride off with them. And the anxious woman in the cloche hat will recognize him for the person he is and not this . . . mud-splattered creature with jaundiced eyes, sulky lips and protuberant wristbones.

The automobile is a four-seater Welch touring car, cream-colored with chocolate-brown leather interior and trim, flawless bra.s.s fixtures (rounded headlights, large horn, prominent grill) and stately spoked tires. When he'd been Elisha Licht-when he'd been ”Little Moses”-he'd ridden in automobiles as fine as this, owned by the man who'd been his father; he's even driven such an automobile, a beautiful fair-haired young woman snug beside him, whispering and laughing with him. You wouldn't believe it, these suspicious white folks wouldn't believe it, but-it's so.

”Having trouble, sir? I can help, I think.”

”You-?”

”I can try, at least.”

In his rags, in his whiskered lice-bitten mask of a face, taking the crank handle in both his hands, trying to get leverage, at last kneeling in the mud, and-”There! There it is, sir.” Like magic he gets the sodden engine of the Welch touring car to turn over, and spark into roaring, vibrating life. He squints, wipes his hands on his trousers, tries to rise to his feet but an attack of dizziness slows him, even as the engine drowns out his hopeful words and the gentleman driver in a mud-splashed beige driving costume with flushed face, fatty chin, resentful eyes calls out, ”Thanks, boy! You're a lifesaver.” The woman in the cloche hat calls out, ”Ohhhh thanks! How did you do that!” He's on his feet now smiling shakily yet expectantly at the couple awaiting the invitation from them to climb into the rear of the gleaming cream-colored automobile even as the driver carelessly tosses a coin-dime? quarter?-that falls onto the muddy edge of the roadway, and drives off.

Her fierce spicy fragrance makes his temples pound: he's wild, exhilarated, drunken: wrenched out of his bones for very joy.

A girl with pale blond hair and wide-s.p.a.ced innocent eyes and feverish lips: her skin burning: her laughter choked: for she too, pressing herself into his arms, clutching at him, is drunken with love, with love, with love . . . .

His heart is ready to burst, he can't control himself, he adores her, he would die for her, he has died for her, many times: yet she's frenzied, insatiable: coiling her sweat-slick limbs upon him, writhing violently against him, O Elisha I love you, love you, love you . . . .

O Elisha I love you . . . .

O Elisha I am your wife . . . .

And now suddenly seeing them everywhere. Can't hide from the sight, the knowledge. Blacks, coloreds, Negroes, n.i.g.g.e.rs. On the street, at the roadside, in crowded tenement districts, at the northern edge of the Park.

These people who make their way in a world fully conscious of the white man and of one another. While the white man, blind, is conscious of nothing.

He belongs to neither race. So glancing upon both with Olympian equanimity.

For pride will not allow wrath, and pride will not allow despair.

Long vanished are the days when he might live at the Park Stuyvesant Hotel in midtown, as the personal valet (as the hotel management believed) of a wealthy businessman named Fairbairn; long vanished, and nearly forgotten, are the Sunday drives by hackney cab through the Park, Millie's small hand secretly pressing against his, hidden by the pretty flounces of her skirt. Not fully recovered from his illness but he's strong and buoyant and himself again, or nearly . . . a lanky-legged mahogany-skinned entrepreneur named Emile Gaston, or Dupee Jones, formerly of the Barbados . . . formerly of Mexico City . . . given to fits of coughing, violent brief spasms that break the capillaries in his eyes . . . but all in all a proud figure, a shrewd figure, smart black bowler hat, imitation camel's hair polo coat worn loose on his shoulders, pockets jingling with coin . . . from the sporadic sale of 50 bottles of hair straightener up in Harlem, skin bleach in putty-colored tubes, lottery tickets printed in various colors, tickets for a Sunday-on-the-Hudson Steamboat Excursion stamped one-day only and non-refundable. Yes he is himself again! or nearly.

His money is fast running out, however.

And he has made enemies on the street.

In the meantime he comports himself with grace, with a reeling swaying sort of grace, he swallows down gin at midday, never wholly drunk and never wholly sober, not a human being in the world dares approach him to touch him to look him in the eye: that not even his enemies would dare.

Twenty-six years old, or is it thirty-but with his thin clipped moustache and his hat tilted forward on his head he looks older. With his ravaged skin and hunted ashy eyes he looks much older.

Emile Gaston, Dupee Jones, Elihu Washburn . . .

When he has coins jingling in his pockets he treats himself to meals that stretch his stomach, not minding if he's nauseated afterward, it's a gift he owes himself. He buys a black bowler hat, makes the purchase of an ivory-topped cane. A man with a cane says Father wields power in the eyes of the weak. If he wields it well. This high-stepping gentleman wields it well. In the lobbies of white-man hotels he buys newspapers to read War news: the Pact of London . . . the Allies and the Germans fighting in the Marne . . . Turkish wars.h.i.+ps, German submarine blockades, the Allies landing armies at the Dardanelles . . . secret treaties, atrocities . . . the sinking of the British liner Lusitania by German submarine, nearly fourteen hundred people killed.

So many! He feels a pang of pity, sympathy. ”But they were white-of course. White devils.”

HE SEES THEM everywhere now, can't not see them.

His kind. His skin. His hunted eyes.

Seeing Little Moses abandoned in the road, bewildered by his fate. An actor who has lost not only his audience but his stage, his purpose for being. The very lights that had illuminated him to himself.

One day in the rain weak from hunger or despair or rage gnawing at his guts he staggers and falls in the street and his polo coat, already soiled, is soiled more-mud, horse droppings, filth-and his smart black bowler hat is s.n.a.t.c.hed from his head by a young boy, brown-skinned, a laughing savage.

He rides the clattering streetcars, he rides the Staten Island ferry, he sleeps where sleep overtakes him unless his pockets jingle with coin. Sometimes he sleeps alone, and sometimes not. Sometimes he shuts his eyes in disdain against the city-against Harlem, their city-and sometimes he walks entranced in the streets, eyes stealthy and all-seeing beneath the rim of his dandy's hat. The brownstone tenement buildings like ridges of a natural outcropping, block following block; crowded sidewalks and streets; the traffic on Broadway rising to a din-trolleys, trucks, horse-drawn wagons, fire engines, careening police vans, uniformed police on horseback; shouts, cries, sirens, alarms, horns; the sharp ringing of horses' hooves on cobblestone; powerful smells-sulfurous, rancid, close, feculent, steamy-that seem to rise out of the bowels of the earth and, if he's in a weakened state, go to his head like an inhaled drug.

Harlem. Their city.

My city?

Through which he walks entranced as a new lover, beginning to recognize landmarks, stores and taverns and sidewalk vendors, beginning to understand the music of their speech, until one day he opens his mouth and his speech is identical with theirs, or nearly-he's one of them! Shaking hands with his newfound contacts, friends and business acquaintances-Why good mornin' Mr. Jones! comes a sudden happy cry-How're you this fine day Mr. Washburn!-wide smiles, gold-capped teeth, gleaming black skin and elegantly trimmed moustaches and starched white s.h.i.+rts and stiff celluloid collars and bow ties neatly clipped in place-Ain't shaken your hand in a long time, Doctor-smoke-colored hair s.h.i.+ning, glaring, having been heated and creamed and sculpted into a sh.e.l.lacked surface as seamless to the casual glance as the polished sh.e.l.l of an acorn-Ain't laid eyes on you in a while Mr. Gaston, and you lookin' good.

And feeling good. At last.

His pockets jingle with coin, his pockets are empty. SPIRIT suffuses him (it's spring, it's a new year), SPIRIT departs leaving him huddled dazed in an alley . . . vomiting rotgut liquor in heaving sobs . . . as close to death as he'll come, and no one's fault but his own. That night in the stifling heat of the United African Baptist Church on Columbus Avenue where buoyant singing and clapping and shouting and the swaying of bodies and wave upon wave of great joy pulse on all sides . . . to pull him down into the tarry-black mud . . . the comforting mud, the muck of Jesus. Black Jesus.

His brothers and sisters are yelling, shrieking, laughing in ecstasy. Clapping, Jesus is in this place with them, Jesus is in their hearts, can you feel him bro-ther, can you feel him sis-ter, the sweetly sour smell of flesh, oil-oozing flesh, Jesus goin to take you home bro-ther, sis-ter Jesus goin' to take you home.

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