“That cousin’a yours is sumpin’ else, man. I mean, I never seen any boy get in as much trouble as him. Damn, he’d be runnin’ numbahs in heaven an’ sellin’ holy water in hell.”
“Whole gotdamned family,” I said. “There you got Nadine cuttin’ down men like wheat and people fallin’ dead all ovah Three Hearts. I don’t know how I lived through a Christmas dinner back in the old days when they’d come by.”
“Yeah,” Fearless said with a nod. “But you ain’t much bettah, Paris.”
“What you mean?” I said. “I ain’t cursed.”
“No?”
“Naw.”
“Paris, I know men who run in the streets every night don’t have half the trouble you got. I know people live more peaceable lives in prison.”
“Fuck you, man. All I do is run my bookstore. Ain’t nuthin’ more peaceful than readin’ a book.”
“That’s what that white boy thought when somebody put that bullet in his head.”
This was no simple banter. Fearless wouldn’t have brought up Tiny Bobchek unless he was thinking that my current problems had something to do with him.
“Uh-uh, Fearless. No,” I said. “Tiny was just a, a coincidence.”
“Ulysses comes to your door one minute and then just a few hours later there’s a dead white man on your flo’ and that’s just a coincidence? You know I ain’t that fast when it comes to figurin’, Paris, but this one looks clear as a bell.”
“It was Jessa,” I said. “Jessa did it.”
“Li’l white girl killed that Goliath?”
“He was shot,” I said. “Shot in the head. Women carry guns. Look at Three Hearts.”
“You said Jessa didn’t even have a bag or drawers,” Fearless argued. He had a good memory when he wanted to.
“Tiny could have been armed. She could have pulled out his pistol and opened fire.”
Fearless threw up a hand and let it fall. “Yeah,” he admitted.
“It couldn’t have been Useless,” I continued. “He ain’t a natural killer in the first place. He never carries a gun and he would run from a big fool like Bobchek.”
“Yeah, but that just proves my point.”
“What are you talkin’ about?”
“First you got Ulysses comin’ to your door, sayin’ how he got to run,” Fearless said. “Then the white girl and her boyfriend aftah yo’ ass. Now Ulysses is gone an’ Three Hearts comes, gettin’ you into trouble up to your ears. If that ain’t some kinda bad luck, I don’t know what is.”
It was my turn to laugh. Fearless wasn’t making fun of me. He was reading my life like I’d read a dime novel.
“So what we gonna do about Ulysses?” Fearless asked.
“What can we do?” I replied. “You heard Anthony. Useless is either gone or dead. And with seventy-two thousand dollars in his pocket, he’s way beyond where we gonna find him.”
“The girl could have took the money,” Fearless said.
“Then he’s runnin’ on empty.”
“Come on, Paris. You know we cain’t turn our backs on Hearts. You know you don’t want that evil eye’a hers on yo’ ass.”
I knew it. I knew it.
Chapter 15
I knew it too well.
Fearless dropped me off at my place at about six.
There was a cardboard box on the front porch. The flaps were folded together and there was an envelope taped to its side. I unlocked the door and kicked the box inside. I sat on the first chair near the entrance and flipped the box open.
Books. Books in which there were many dog-eared pages. I opened the sealed envelope. It was from my literary girlfriend, Ashe Knowles.
Dear Mr. Minton,
Lately I’ve been taking to underlining those places in books where Negroes are denigrated by white authors, and colored ones too. It seems to me that one day our children or their children might want to know how many lies have been propagated against our people over the years and decades and centuries. You will find in these pages references to our low intelligence, our aberrant sexuality, our criminal nature, and our primitive instincts. In some places these comments are meant as compliments and in others as scientific fact. For a long time I believed that everyone was aware of this terrible state of affairs, but just last Tuesday I asked Miss Harrison, the librarian at the 53rd Street branch, if she knew where such outrageous statements would be catalogued. She told me that she wasn’t even aware of any great preponderance of racist statements in American literature. I gave her fifteen examples in the B’s of authors’ last names and she was amazed. But when I asked her if she would set up a catalogue of these gaffes in her branch she told me that that wouldn’t be any help for anyone.
Mr. Minton, you are a well-read and therefore a well-educated man. I know that you will see the value of these notes. My apartment is just one room and very small, but you have lots of room in your bookstore. I was wondering if you might keep these books for me over the next little while until I can find some institution that might want to store and catalogue my research.
Yours truly,
There were eighteen hardback books in the box. Each one had anywhere from five to fifteen dog-eared pages proving Ashe’s claims. She had a relentless, steel-trap kind of intelligence. And I had to admit there was something to her assertion. There must have been thousands of times that I had come across statements in books that insulted and lied about Negroes in America and abroad. Hegel had done it and Karl Marx too. But without a definitive list of these misdemeanors, how could we complain? Even the librarian had denied the allegation until Ashe showed her proof.
I decided to put the books down in the onetime crypt of Tiny Bobchek.
I was happy to have received that box of books, first because of the fact that no one had stolen them from off my porch. Nobody stole books. These bound and printed stacks of paper were the most precious things in the world, and yet no one would have picked them up. That box could have sat on my porch for a week and those books would have gone unmolested and unread.
The second thing that made me happy was that Ashe had distracted me for an hour or so from the worries that had settled all through my mind.
I thought about Ashe and her bumbling brilliance. She would have done much better for herself if she had gone to college and committed all of the plays of Shakespeare to memory. That way the white professors, deans, and provosts would have seen her as some kind of anomaly who would have fit well in the lower echelons of the university hierarchy. There she could have waited until such time that a catalogue of racist quotes in American and English literature might have been presented on a grand stage.
But Ashe could only see truth — not strategy. She worked as a teacher’s assistant at a private Baptist elementary school down on Eighty-third Street. They paid her twenty-two dollars a week, and she lived somehow, sometimes unable to buy even a pencil.
Again I thought of how I could have loved a woman like that. But loving her, I knew that I should leave her alone.
I wasn’t hungry and so I went up to bed at eight. My jaw was aching and my right arm felt weak. I had pains up and down my right side and a thick copy of Titus Groan on my night table. I wanted to read it, but I was experiencing too many aches to grapple with that hefty tome.
So instead I started thinking.
I knew that I shouldn’t have cut off Fearless’s question about Tiny Bobchek’s death. Tiny’s dying like that was just the kind of trouble that Useless would bring down on you. But Useless wasn’t a killer and he’d gone. I hadn’t even let him through the door, so why would he have come back? And I was sure there wasn’t any connection between Useless and Jessa.