There was something in the air, but he could not make out what it was. He walked out of the park. He kept looking behind him, expecting something or someone, but he was alone on the street and he saw nothing but the swirling of dead leaves. He continued looking behind him as he made his way up 17th Street. He took out the address book, but found he could not read the names or the numbers under the feeble street lights. He hurried, hoping for a telephone booth where the light would be brighter. He began to run, and as he ran, he kept trying to read the names and numbers, but the rain was now turning them to blurs. He did not know what was in the air. He only knew that tonight would not be a night to be without shelter.
THE STORE
I’d been out of work three four months when I saw her ad in the Daily News; a few lines of nothing special, almost as if she really didn’t want a response. On a different day in my life I suppose I would have passed right over it. I had managed to squirrel away a little bit of money from the first slave I had, and after that change ran out, I just bummed from friends for smokes, beer, the valuables. I lived with my mother, so rent and food weren’t a problem, though my brother, when he came around with that family of his, liked to get in my shit and tell me I should be looking for another job. Usually, my mother was okay, but I could tell when my brother and his flat-butt wife had been around when I wasn’t there, because for days after that my mother would talk that same shit about me getting a job, like I’d never slaved a day before in my life.
That first slave I had had just disappeared out from under me, despite my father always saying that the white people who gave me that job were the best white people he’d known in his life. My father never had a good word to say about anybody white, and I believed him when he said I could go far in that place. I started working there — the Atlas Printing Co. (“75 YEARS IN THE SAME LOCATION”) — right after I graduated from Dunbar, working in the mailroom and sometimes helping out the printers when the mail work was slow. My father had been a janitor there until he got his third heart attack, the one that would put him in the ground when I was in my sophomore year at Dunbar.
At twenty I was still in the mailroom: assistant chief mail clerk or something like that, still watching the white boys come in, work beside me, then move on. My mother always said that every bullfrog praises his own poem, but I know for a natural fact that I was an excellent worker. Never late, never talked back, always volunteering; the product of good colored parents. Still…In the end, one bitching cold day in January, the owner and his silly-ass wife, who seemed to be the brains of the outfit, came to me and said they could no longer afford to keep me on. Times were bad, said the old man, who was so bald you could read his thoughts. They made it sound like I was the highest-paid worker in the joint, when actually I was making so little the white guys used to joke about it.
I said nothing, just got my coat and took my last check and went home. Somewhere along K Street, I remembered I’d left some of my personal stuff back there — some rubbers I’d bought just that morning at Peoples, a picture of the girl I was going with at the time, a picture of my father, my brother, and me at four years old on one of our first fishing trips. I had the urge to go back — the girl was already beginning not to mean anything to me anymore, so I didn’t care about her picture, but the fishing trip picture was special. But I didn’t turn back because, first of all, my balls were beginning to freeze.
My father always said that when the world pisses on you, it then spits on you to finish the job. At New York Avenue and 5th I crossed on the red light. A white cop twirling his billy club saw me and came to spit on me to finish up what Atlas had done: He asked me if I didn’t know it was against D.C. and federal law to cross on the red light. I was only a few blocks from home and maybe heat and thawing out my nuts were the only things on my mind, because I tried to be funny and told him the joke my father had always told — that I thought the green light was for white folks and the red light was for colored people. His face reddened big-time.
When my brother and I were in our early teens, my mother said this to us with the most seriousness she had ever said anything: “Never even if you become kings of the whole world, I don’t want yall messin with a white cop.” The worst that my mother feared didn’t happen to her baby boy that day. The cop only made me cross back on the green light and go all the way back to 7th Street, then come back to 5th Street and cross again on the green light. Then go back to 7th to do it all over again. Then I had to do it twice more. I was frozen through and through when I got back to 5th the second time and as I waited for the light to change after the fourth time and he stood just behind me I became very afraid, afraid that doing all that would not be enough for him, that he would want me to do more and then even more after that and that in the end I would be shot or simply freeze to death across the street from the No. 2 police precinct. Had he told me to deny my mother and father, I think I would have done that too.
I got across the street and went on my way, waiting for him to call me back. I prayed, “Just get me back to one fifteen New York Avenue safely and I’ll never come to their world again…. Just get me back to one fifteen New York Avenue safely….” For days after that I just hung out at home. My mother believed that a day had the best foundation if you had breakfast, so after she fixed our breakfast, and went off to work, I went back to bed and slept to about noon.
When I got some heart back, I started venturing out again, but I kept to my own neighborhood, my own world. Either my ace-boon, Lonney McCrae, would come get me or I would go looking for him and we’d spend the rest of the afternoon together until our friends got off work. Then all of us would go off and fuck with the world most of the night.
Lonney was going to Howard, taking a course here and there, doing just enough to satisfy his father. I’d seen his old man maybe once or twice in all the time I knew Lonney, and I’d been knowing him since kindergarten. His father had been one of the few big-shot Negro army officers in the Korea war, and Lonney was always saying that after the war his father would be home for good. He was still saying it that January when Kennedy was inaugurated.
Lonney liked to fuck bareback and that was how he got Brenda Roper pregnant. I think he liked her, maybe not as much as she liked him, but just enough so it wasn’t a total sacrifice to marry her. I was to be his best man. One night, all of us — me and Lonney and his mother and Brenda and her parents — were sitting around his living room, talking about the wedding and everything. Someone knocked on the door and Lonney opened it. It was his old man, standing there tall and straight as a lamppost in his uniform. You know something’s wrong when a man doesn’t even have a key to his own house.
The soldier didn’t say Hello or Good to see you, son. He just stood in the doorway and said — and I know he could see everybody else in the room—“You don’t have anything better to do with your time than marrying this girl?” Lonney’s mother stood up, in that eager, happy way women do when they want to greet their husbands home from a foreign land. Brenda’s father stood up too, but he had this goofy look on his face like he wanted to greet his soon-to-be in-law. “I asked you something,” Lonney’s father said. Lonney said nothing, and his father walked by him, nodded at Mrs. McCrae, and went on upstairs with his suitcase. The next morning he was gone again.