“HEY, EASY, what’s happenin’?” Jackson asked when we got to the main room at the bottom of the long stairway. He was wearing a dark red silk robe that was tied carelessly about his slender waist. He was yawning even though it was late afternoon.
“I wake you up?” I asked.
“I been workin’ day and night for the past three days at Proxy Nine,” he said. “They was puttin’ in this special line to pass information over the phone, but the technicians didn’t have it right. You know I had to roll up my sleeves, baby.”
“You installed a computer line all the way from France?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah.” Jackson sighed. He was lazy in everything but his mind. Physical labor was an abomination to him, but Immanuel Kant was a piece of cake.
“You don’t have any training in that,” I said, not because I believed it but to pull him out of his stupor so that I could ask for his help.
“Ain’t so hard, Easy,” he said. “The thing that gave me the most trouble was learnin’ French so that I could talk with the technicians overseas.”
“You speak French?” my daughter asked.
“Oui, mademoiselle. Et tu?”
“Un peu,” she replied modestly.
“Jewelle, can you take the kids out on the patio for a while?” I asked. “I need to talk to Jackson here.”
Feather, Jesus, Easter, and Benita with Essie followed the lady real-estate genius outside into her garden at the bottom of a well-like yard.
When they were gone, I told Jackson what had been happening.
“Damn, Easy,” he said when I was through. “Why don’t you get into somethin’ sensible? Shit. You think that they woulda really killed the kids?”
“I’m sure they would, man. Will you keep ’em for me?”
“Okay. No problem. I mean, it’a mostly be Jewelle takin’ care of them. I’m workin’ at the office, but she do most of her work over the phone.”
“How’s it goin’ with her?”
“She’s a silent partner in that new Icon International hotel goin’ up downtown,” he said proudly. “If it fly, she be so rich that we could live in downtown Rome, and I don’t mean Rome, New York.”
“I might need to call on you again, Jackson,” I said.
This request caused fear to rise in the small man’s face. He didn’t want to have anything to do with me. He had a good job and made more money than anyone we knew, except Jewelle. He wanted to kick me out of his house, but even a coward like Jackson knew when his debts had come due.
“I hope not, Easy,” he said. “But I’ll be there.”
I WENT OUTSIDE and explained to my extended family that they were to stay away from their friends and neighborhoods, their homes and schools. They shouldn’t make phone calls or answer them or tell anyone where they were.
“What if my mama wanna talk to me?” Benita asked.
“Tell her that Juice is taking you to Frisco for a few days, by boat. Tell her that, and she’ll wait for you to come back.”
“Are these men really all that bad?” Benita asked.
“They make Mouse look like Juice,” I said, and she didn’t ask any more questions.
26
Once I was in my car again, I felt a moment of exhilaration. My children were safe, my family protected from the assassins of Christmas Black’s world.
Also, I was shocked out of the melancholy that had settled in on me. I remembered what it was to be a man living in the cracks: a slave, nigger, jigaboo, coon, spade, spear-chucker, darky, boy. Walking down the streets of white gentility, I was always a target. And a target couldn’t afford roots or a broken heart. A target couldn’t fire back on the men who used him for sport.
All a man like me could do was to wait for the sun to go down, move through darkness, and hope.
The validity of this litany of the past was fading, but it had not gone away. It was true — I was an American citizen too; a citizen who had to watch his step, a citizen who had to distrust the police and the government, public opinion, and even the history taught in schools.
It was odd that such negative thoughts would invigorate me. But knowing the truth, no matter how bad it was, gave you some chance, a little bit of an edge. And if that truth was an old friend and the common basis for all your people all the way back to your origins, then at least you found yourself on familiar ground; at least you couldn’t be blindsided, ambushed, or fooled. They could try and kill me, but I’d see them coming. They might see me too, but I would see them first.
I WASN’T EVEN THINKING about Faith Laneer, but there I was parked in front of her courtyard apartment complex. It was logical that I came to her. She was the closest link to Christmas and the men he had somehow fooled into thinking that they were stalking him.
The sun was just a red glow on the horizon, and I sat in my car with no particular thoughts in mind. Bonnie would pass through now and then, but I had left her in the light of day, where people made lives like marble statues that couldn’t be moved.
I was a shadow and the sun was going down. In this transition I remembered a book that Gara, Jackson Blue, and I had read passages from some while before, Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Hegel, a German philosopher who had no respect for Africa. Gara and I had found the dense prose hard going, but Jackson took to it like a vulture clawing through the guts of a dead elephant. He explained how Hegel saw a thing and its opposite as connected and that this connection was what caused progress.
“It’s like turnin’ into a skid, Easy,” Jackson Blue had said. “You slidin’ right and turn in the same direction. Logic tell ya that you gonna go even farther over, but the truth is, you straighten right out.”
The darkness was my negative freedom. While everyone else feared and avoided night, I saw it as my liberation. I lived a life opposite from Hegel’s bright light of truth, and so, I realized, he, my enemy, and I agreed on the path that set us at each other’s throats.
SHE OPENED THE DOOR without asking who it was. The charcoal-colored dress was shapeless, but her figure would not be denied.
“Mr. Rawlins,” she said, the catch in her voice telling me that she had been alone for too many days and needed the company of a man who would buy her strawberry shortcake to sweeten her bitter lot. “Come in.”
The living room was small, but the window faced the vastness of the Pacific.
“All I have is water,” she told me.
“Want me to take you shopping?” I offered.
“Let’s sit for a while,” she said.
The small sofa was coral colored, built for two and a half people. She sat at one end and I at the other, but we were still close.
“Have you found Chris?” she asked.
“No. I got worried about my family, though, and moved them out of my house.”
“You’re married?”
“No. I adopted some kids. One’a them has a girlfriend, and now they have a kid. And then there’s Easter Dawn.”
“You’re like me, Mr. Rawlins,” Faith said.
“How’s that?”
“You have a little orphanage that you care for and love.”
I held out my hand, palm upward, and she took it with both of hers.
“I had a girlfriend,” I said. “But she was torn. There was a man, an African prince she saw now and again. I left her.”
“Did she love him?”
“Yeah. But, but not like she loved me and our little family.”
“Then why leave her?”
Her question grabbed me like a pair of pliers working on a rusty lug nut. At first I resisted her, but then I gave way.
“Did you ever feel like there was something you wanted?” I asked Blonde Faith. “A way you wanted someone to make love to you? A way you wanted to be touched?”