I tried to keep quiet, tried not to let my body make a sound as it hit the wall, the trash cans, the ground, the ground again. I didn’t want Mabeline to have to hear all that while the bent-nosed cop pushed her against the wall and felt her up. I kept it quiet until he pushed her down on her knees and said, in his Southern drawclass="underline" “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the fruit.” When I heard him say those words, and knew Mabeline was there, and knew it was my fault, I lost it and I roared. Two more blue bodies came and I wanted him to come over too — I roared and raged and clawed and tried to make the cop with the bent nose come over. But he didn’t.
My face was pitted with gravel, my legs somewhere far away. All of me ached, no part any more than the others. I assessed the sounds. Almost dawn. No one around. Mabeline gone.
Eventually I gathered enough focus to move. My neck, my arms, then my legs. I headed slowly toward the police station, but halfway I changed course, limping home, toward the kitchen table. When I arrived, the apartment was silent. I gathered the percolator, the coffee, the water, placed it all on the stove, and settled myself at the table. I waited.
At some point I had to check the gash near my eye that wouldn’t stop weeping. In the bathroom only one toothbrush was in the little glass. I opened the cabinet. Half of it, empty.
What I never told Mabeline: those were the words that strode, uninvited, into my head the first time I laid eyes on her, the first time I saw her beauty there on the streetcar. I didn’t want those words. I didn’t want what those words made of her, what those words made of me, and what they made me make of her. Those words were tracks under a train I didn’t want to ride, but the ticket stub was already in my pocket.
So I tried to protect her from those words, out in the snarl of the streets, the maze of the ship, the cage of a raid, the madness of my mind. I wanted to ride that horse. For Mabeline.
Opened in or before 1933, Oakland’s White Horse Inn is the oldest continuously operating Queer bar in the United States.
Part II
What They Call a Clusterfuck
A Town Made of Hustle
by Dorothy Lazard
Downtown
Poppy Martens trotted out of Selden’s Gym close to midnight, his wallet heavy with the cash he’d just won on a prizefight all his friends had advised him to lay off. But Poppy was partial to southpaws. Their stubborn survival in a right-handed world always surprised people. No doubt the favorite in tonight’s bout was surprised when a left hook sent him sailing backward, nearly out of the ring. Poppy smiled, remembering the fellas around him falling silent, their cigarettes hanging loose from dry lips. All Poppy could do was laugh at the sight, slapping the shoulders of the guy seated in front of him.
Now he strode up 7th Street, toward downtown, snapping out of his reverie as he passed the French laundry, the shuttered storefronts, and the darkened factories. Just a couple of years earlier these foundries and fabricators would have been buzzing with activity, lights on twenty-four hours a day. There’d be people all over the streets. Guys coming home dead tired from the shipyards, clothes sooty with metal dust and smoke. Apartments functioned like hotel lobbies back then, people occupying them in shifts, sleeping in closets, beds, even tubs. Oakland teemed like an engine. Everybody was working, making something or other for the war. All that is done now, Poppy thought as he lifted his jacket collar against the cold.
He smiled again, thinking of all those saps who’d come rushing out here for jobs they thought would never end, to support a war they thought would change their sorry lot in life once and for all. But end they did. And as soon as they did, what happened? What always happens: colored folks were the first to be let go. And where are they now? Back bowing and scraping for a living. Pumping gas, sweeping floors, and slinging hash to the vets who were handed their good-paying jobs. Back to the end of the line, just like before.
The lucky ones got jobs on the Pullman cars, in offices, or at the auto plants in East Oakland. Too smart now to go back home to the fields. And who could blame them? Where could they go, what could they do but stay here and make a way?
These days Poppy made a meager living watching all this change happen, writing down what he saw and what it meant to the Negro. His paper didn’t pay him much, but he didn’t need much. He was alone now. Wife and kids back east and — he hoped — still safe. Away from the trouble he seemed to always deliver to them, like fresh milk. He scraped together a living at an outfit that could barely eke out a weekly edition, but he liked the job. Cobbled things together with temporary gigs of all sorts. It gave him freedom to roam during the day, talk to people, find out how the city worked and the endless number of ways it didn’t. He liked to test his ability to get into their heads and hearts and, sometimes, a little closer. The wad of money he’d just won could certainly help with that.
He headed up to police headquarters in City Hall to sit with the drowsy night desk officer and listen to the police radio.
“Poppy Martens!” the officer called out, his hand held high in greeting as Poppy entered the booking area.
Poppy nodded a greeting, but was all focus. He sat wide-legged in a chair across from the desk and flipped open his notepad, ready to retrieve any leads coming over the speaker. “Anything up tonight?” he asked.
“Nothing yet, but soon enough. It’s Saturday night. Still early.”
Right then a pair of patrol cops dragged in three men who looked too young to be as drunk as they were. When a cop shoved one kid up to the counter, the guy staggered a bit then hurled his guts across the desk. The night cop jumped back just enough to avoid the bilious spray.
Poppy suppressed a laugh.
“Poppy!” Sergeant Webster stood across the room, hands braced against the doorjambs. “Come in here, I wanna talk with you.”
Webster, a burly white man with a perpetually red face, wrestled the jacket off his broad back and draped it over his swivel chair. Poppy approached the man’s desk tentatively. The detective expected him to tell a story; that was their deal. Webster fed Poppy leads for his news stories, and in exchange Poppy dropped the names of a few of West Oakland’s less savory characters. Poppy felt no guilt about this arrangement. Oakland was a town made of hustle and that’s how it would always be. The few bills Webster skimmed off his money clip and gave to Poppy were tucked away, a security blanket in uncertain times.
“Have a seat,” Webster said. “What’s the latest on Raincoat Jones?”
Charles “Raincoat” Jones was a mover and shaker in West Oakland, working both sides of the law. He ran a gym, nightclubs, gaming houses, and a pawnshop. Folks in the neighborhood loved him. Poppy loved him. You could always count on Raincoat to keep a widow’s lights on, or to buy uniforms for some kid’s baseball team, or forward you a loan to start up a little business. And because of that, Poppy never leaked a thing about him to Webster. Oakland needed people like Raincoat.
“Haven’t seen him,” Poppy lied, “not for a while. Heard he was out of town. Reno, someone told me.”
“You mean you haven’t seen him at Selden’s? Not for any fights? I know there’s been a lot activity down there lately.”
“Raincoat doesn’t go to Selden’s. You know, he has his own—”
Webster raised his hand. “Yeah, I know, I know. I just wanted to check it out.”
Poppy wondered why Webster was suddenly after Raincoat. Maybe the dick wasn’t getting what he felt was his due from the protection money Raincoat paid the OPD.