“Who do you mean?” he said.
“The fellow who rides in with us each morning.”
“Which fellow?”
“The one with the black mustache and the blue eyes and the glasses. Who tells all the jokes in the morning.”
“I think his name is Harry,” Frank said.
“Don’t you know?”
“Well, I’m not sure.”
“He’s your friend, isn’t he?”
“No, no,” Frank said. “My friend? What gave you that idea?”
“I just thought he was your friend,” I said.
“I thought he was your friend,” Frank said.
“Well, whose friend is he?” I asked.
“Search me,” Frank said.
“Well, what’s his last name?” I said.
“Pryor, I think.”
“Thank you,” I said, and hung up, a little annoyed with Frank, I’m not sure why. I debated whether I should call my taxi-mate “Mr. Pryor” (since he didn’t seem to be anyone’s friend) or just plain “Harry” when I broke the news to him, and then I rehearsed it both ways, figuring I’d play it by ear when the time came. I could barely sleep that night. Adele finally poked me in the ribs and said, “Howard, if you don’t stop tossing, I’m going to go sleep in Marcia’s room.” I didn’t answer her as she very often makes dire threats in her sleep. On Monday morning, I drove to the station, and there was Mr. Harry Pryor waiting on the platform with the other fellows, coffee container in one hand, wrapped cheese Danish in the other.
“Morning, Howard,” he said.
“Morning, Harry,” I said.
“Getting off at 125th as usual?” he asked.
“As usual,” I said.
“Would you care to share a taxi with me?” he asked.
That was my opportunity, and I should have given him my rehearsed speech right then and there, but I didn’t want to embarrass him in front of the other fellows. So I said, “Yes, Harry,” and figured this would be our last shared ride together, I’d tell him how I felt on the way down to 86th.
It was a bitterly cold day.
Men were hunched over small coal fires in empty gasoline drums, girls clutched coat collars to their throats, icicles hung from awnings, broken orange crate slats jutted crookedly from frozen curbside puddles.
“I can’t tell you how much I enjoy this morning ride with you, Howard,” Harry said for openers.
I grunted.
“I don’t know many Negroes,” he said.
I didn’t know what to say to that one, so I coughed.
“That’s a bad cold you have there,” Harry said.
I grunted again.
“You ought to quit smoking,” he said.
“I have,” I said. “Temporarily,” and I thought now is the time to tell him. Right this minute. I turned toward him on the seat.
“How else can we get to know each other?” Harry said.
“I beg your pardon,” I said.
“Negroes and whites,” he said. “How else can we possibly breach the barricade?”
“Well,” I said, thinking I didn’t have any particular barricade to breach, and if Harry had one, he shouldn’t attempt to breach it in a taxicab. “Actually...”
“Can I walk up to a Negro on the street and say, “Listen, fellow, let’s have a drink together, I’d like to know you people better.” Can I say that?”
I thought No, you had better not say that, Mr. Pryor, especially not up here in Harlem. I glanced through the window on my right where the city had put up a housing development. On one of the walls, a teenage letterer had painted the name of his club. He had spelled it wrong. For posterity, the words “The Redemers” boldly asserted themselves in white letters on the brick wall.
“So just having the opportunity to talk to you this way, to get to know you this way, is very important to me, Howard. I want to thank you for it. I want to tell you how much I appreciate your generosity.”
“Yes, well,” I said, “don’t mention it, really.”
I felt trapped, and frustrated, and suddenly in danger. Once, in Korea, when we were trying to take this hill, we had two of our guys with a mortar about a hundred yards on the left, and the sergeant and another guy and me with the mortar rounds over on the right. But we couldn’t get to each other because the Chinese had set up a machine gun on top of the hill, and they kept raking the ground between us. It was very frustrating. Finally, somebody called for artillery to knock out the emplacement. But that was after the sergeant had already sent my buddy to get killed trying to lug the ammo across that hundred yards of bullet-sprayed ravine to where the mortar was waiting. The sergeant tapped me on the shoulder. I was next. Just then, the artillery barrage started. I don’t know who called for the support, probably the captain of Baker company which was on a little knoll looking down into this depression where we were trapped and frustrated. I never found out. That was one of the times I almost got killed.
I felt the same frustration now as we rode down to 86th Street, and I also felt the same danger. That’s ridiculous, I know. Harry was only sharing a taxicab with me. But I had the feeling he was also trying to move in on me, he had put all his furniture into a Santini Brothers van and now they were moving into my head and my heart and even my soul, and were beginning to unpack their barrels.
The cab pulled to the curb at Madison Avenue. I silently took out a dollar and a quarter and handed it to Harry.
“Please,” he said.
“Are you sure this is on the business?” I asked.
“Absolutely,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, and shrugged, and put my money away, and got out of the cab. I didn’t tell him to have a nice day. I just closed the taxi door, slammed it actually (the Negro cabbie turned to give me a dirty look), and then stopped for a cup of coffee before going up to the office.
That night, I had my talk with Adele, the one in which she insisted I was a Cheap Charlie. When I finally shouted that the cab fare had nothing to do with the damn situation, she very quietly said, “You’re allowing a white man to buy your freedom and your privacy.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is true, Howard.”
“You’re a racist, is what you are,” I said. “You’re as bad as the segregationists down south.”
“He’s going to ask you to have lunch with him one day, you wait and see.”
“I don’t want to have lunch with him.”
“Do you want to share a taxi with him?”
“No!”
“But you do share one,” Adele said. She nodded sagely. “And you’ll have lunch with him, too, wait and see.”
“I will not have lunch with him,” I said.
“You’re allowing him to enslave you,” Adele said. “Howard, you are letting him snatch you out of the African jungle and throw you into the hold of a ship in chains.”
“He wants to be my friend!”
“Do you want to be his friend?”
“No, but...”
“Are you afraid of him, Howard?”
“No, but...”
“Then why can’t you tell him you don’t want to ride with him? I’ll tell you why, Howard. You can’t because he’s white. And it’s the white man’s privilege to decide whether or not he’ll ride with a nigger.”
“Don’t use that word in this house,” I said.
“Howard,” she said, “if you let Harry Pryor do this to you, you are nothing but a nigger,” and she went up to bed.
I sat alone in the living room for a long time. Then I went upstairs and made sure Marcia hadn’t kicked the blanket off the way she usually did. She was sleeping with a wide grin on her face. Her braces gleamed in the dim light from the hallway. I touched her face gently, tucked the blanket in around her feet, and then went into my own bedroom. Adele was asleep. A frilly cap covered her set hair. My grandmother had worn an old silk stocking on her head the day I came home from trying to walk over the bridge. The toe of the stocking, knotted, had flapped around her ears as she shook her head and washed my cuts.