“And, and, and,” Luther said. “Shit, woman, I work hard all day.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” It came out a lot harder than he’d intended.
Lila said, “Why you so cross all the time?”
Luther hated these conversations. Seemed like it was the only kind they had anymore. He lit a cigarette. “I ain’t cross,” he said, even though he was.
“You cross all the time.” She rubbed her belly where it had already begun to show.
“Well why the fuck not?” Luther said. He hadn’t meant to cuss in front of her, but he could feel the liquor in him, liquor he barely noticed drinking when he was around Jessie because Jessie and his heroin made a little whiskey seem as dangerous as lemonade. “Two months ago, I wasn’t a father-to-be.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Lila placed the dishes in the sink and came back into the small living room.
“Shit mean what I said,” Luther said. “A month ago—”
“What?” She stared at him, waiting.
“A month ago I wasn’t in Tulsa and I wasn’t shotgun-wed and I wasn’t living in some shit little house on some shit little avenue in some shit little town, Lila. Now was I?”
“This ain’t no shit town.” Lila’s voice went up with her back. “And you weren’t shotgun-wed.”
“May as well.”
She got up into him, staring with stoked-coal eyes and curled fists. “You don’t want me? You don’t want your child?”
“I wanted a fucking choice,” Luther said.
“You have your choice and you take it every night out on the streets. You ain’t ever come home like a man should, and when you do, you drunk or high or both.”
“Got to be,” Luther said.
Her lips were trembling when she said, “And why’s that?”
“’Cause it’s the only way I can put up with—” He stopped himself, but it was too late.
“With what, Luther? With me?”
“I’m going out.”
She grabbed his arm. “With me, Luther? That it?”
“Go on over to your auntie’s now,” Luther said. “Ya’ll can talk about what an un-Christian man I am. Tell yourselves how you gonna God me up.”
“With me?” she said a third time, and her voice was small and soul sick.
Luther left before he could get the mind to bust something.
They spent Sundays at Aunt Marta and Uncle James’s grand house on Detroit Avenue in what Luther’d come to think of as the Second Greenwood.
No one else wanted to think of it that way, but Luther knew there were two Greenwoods, just like there were two Tulsas. Which one you found yourself in depended on whether you were north or south of the Frisco depot. He was sure white Tulsa was several different Tulsas when you got under the surface, but he wasn’t privy to any of that, since his interactions with it never got much past “Which floor, ma’am?”
But in Greenwood, the division had become a whole lot clearer. You had “bad” Greenwood, which was the alleys off Greenwood Avenue, well north of the intersection with Archer, and you had the several blocks down around First and Admiral, where guns were fired on Friday nights and passersby could still catch a whiff of opium smoke in the Sunday-morning streets.
But “good” Greenwood, folks liked to believe, made up the other 99 percent of the community. It was Standpipe Hill and Detroit Avenue and the central business district of Greenwood Avenue. It was the First Baptist Church and the Bell & Little Restaurant and the Dreamland Theater where the Little Tramp or America’s Sweetheart ambled across the screen for a fifteen-cent ticket. It was the Tulsa Star and a black deputy sheriff walking the streets with a polished badge. It was Dr. Lewis T. Weldon and Lionel A. Garrity, Esquire, and John and Loula Williams who owned the Williams Confectionery and the Williams One-Stop Garage and the Dreamland itself. It was O. W. Gurley, who owned the grocery store, the mercantile store, and the Gurley Hotel to boot. It was Sunday-morning services and these Sunday-afternoon dinners with the fine china and the whitest linen and something classical and delicate tinkling from the Victrola, like the sounds from a past none of them could point to.
That’s where the other Greenwood got to Luther most — in that music. You only had to hear but a few bars to know it was white. Chopin, Beethoven, Brahms. Luther could just picture them sitting at their pianos, tapping away in some big room with polished floors and high windows while the servants tiptoed around outside. This was music by and for men who whipped their stable boys and fucked their maids and went on weekend hunts to kill small animals they’d never eat. Men who loved the sound of baying hounds and sudden flight. They’d come back home, weary from lack of work, and compose or listen to music just like this, stare up at paintings of ancestors as hopeless and empty as they were, and preach to their children about right and wrong.
Uncle Cornelius had spent his life working for men like those before he’d gone blind, and Luther had met more than a few himself in his day, and he was content to step out of their path and leave them to themselves. But he couldn’t stand the idea that here, in James and Marta Hollaway’s dining room on Detroit Avenue, the dark faces assembled seemed determined to drink, eat, and money themselves white.
He’d much rather be down around First and Admiral right now with the bell boys and the liverymen and the men who toted shine boxes and toolboxes. Men who worked and played with equal effort. Men who wanted nothing more, as the saying went, than a little whiskey, a little dice, a little pussy to make things nice.
Not that they’d know a saying like that up here on Detroit Avenue. Hell no. Their sayings fell more along the lines of “The Lord hates a …” and “The Lord don’t …” and “The Lord won’t …” and “The Lord shall not abide a …” Making God sound like one irritable master, quick with the whip.
He and Lila sat at the large table and Luther listened to them talk about the white man as if he and his would soon be sitting here on Sundays alongside them.
“Mr. Paul Stewart himself,” James was saying, “come into my garage the other day with his Daimler, says, ‘James, sir, I don’t trust no one on the other side of them tracks the way I trust you with this here car.’”
Lionel Garrity, Esquire, piped up a little later with, “It’s all just a matter of time ’fore folks understand what our boys did in the war and say, It’s time. Time to put all this silliness behind us. We all people. Bleed the same, think the same.”
And Luther watched Lila smile and nod at that and he wanted to rip that disc record off the Victrola and break it over his knee.
Because what Luther hated most was that behind all this — all this finery, all this newfound nobility, all the wing collars and preaching and handsome furniture and new-mown lawns and fancy cars — lay fear. Terror.
If I play ball, they asked, will you let me be?
Luther thought of Babe Ruth and those boys from Boston and Chicago this summer and he wanted to say, No. They won’t let you be. Comes the time they want something, they will take whatever they fucking please just to teach you.
And he imagined Marta and James and Dr. Weldon and Lionel A. Garrity, Esquire, looking back at him, gape jawed and hands out in pleading:
Teach us what?
Your place.
Chapter six
Danny met Tessa Abruzze the same week people started to get sick. At first the newspapers said it was confined to soldiers at Camp Devens, but then two civilians dropped dead on the same day in the streets of Quincy, and across the city people began to stay inside.