I opened The Pinch to where I’d left off the night before, at the part where the trucks came and went from the park and the merchants of North Main Street began again to contact wholesalers and contractors beyond their neighborhood. I read that another artesian well had been located in a sand aquifer by means of a water witch in Orange Mound, that the Reverend Billy Sunday accompanied Sheriff Hoss Tatum, Longwillie’s cretinous son, on a “still” raid in the Loosahatchie Bottoms. Machine Gun Kelly was captured in his skivvies in a bungalow on Rayner Street, and Lenny Sklarew …
The door chimes jangled and I looked up in the vain hope of seeing old Avrom hobbling back into the store. The goldbrick, he’d been exaggerating his symptoms as usual. What need did he have of dying anyway, when his closeted residence here in the Book Asylum was just as good as? But instead of my old boss there appeared an elderly colored man attired in a back-numbered suit that practically swallowed his meager frame. His face was dour, his cotton-boll hair, when he’d doffed his hat, center-parted like opposing waves.
An actual customer.
“Can I help you?” I asked, because it occurred to me that, shipwrecked as I felt, I needed to make some scratch. I was down to pennies since Lamar had taken a powder, and I hadn’t received my starvation wages from Avrom in weeks. Nor was there anything in the drawer of the antique cash register beyond a little silver and some paper-clipped IOUs. Then it interested me that, aside from my native distrust of private enterprise, to say nothing of my battered heart, an entrepreneurial impulse seemed to take hold. Was this what Muni Pinsker had felt when he quit his writing (or the writing quit him) and took over the operation of Pinchas’s store?
“I need a good book,” I thought I heard the man say in his deliberate cadence.
Eager to show my familiarity with the Harlem Renaissance, I began naming titles from the canon. “We’ve got The Blacker the Berry by Wallace Thurman and Nig … ummm … Negro Heaven by Carl Van Vechten—” when he interrupted me.
“I said the good book.”
I looked at him quizzically. “You mean the Bible?”
“Yassuh. I lef’ home this morning without mine.”
Prying myself out of Avrom’s chair, I inquired, “Any particular edition?”
“The good news edition,” he asserted, as if to say, is there another?
I nodded, though I hadn’t a clue what he meant, and went to the Religion shelves. From a row of Tanakh, Pentateuch, Vulgates, and Masoretic texts I chose a Revised King James version published by the Gideon Society. He snatched it from me and began thumbing its pages with urgency.
“‘So God created man in He own image,’” he read aloud. “‘In the image of God He created him.’—Genesis one, twenty-seven.” He gazed a moment over the rims of his spectacles, seeming to take my measure, then began frantically riffling pages again. “‘Is this not the fast I choose,’” he intoned, stabbing the page with an index finger, “‘to loose the bonds of wickedness and undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free?’—Isaiah fifty-eight, six.” His authoritative delivery suggested he might be a preacher, and I was his congregation of one. “‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.’—Amos five, twenty-four,” he practically sang, when I remembered it was the day of the big march in support of the garbage strikers. The reverend was apparently priming himself for the occasion.
Having satisfied himself with these passages, he returned the scripture to me so forcefully that I had to take a step backward to receive it. He continued to stare at me, his quince-yellow eyes boring auger-like into my own.
“‘Then fool,’” he pronounced, “‘not nex’ year, not nex’ week, not to-morrah, but this night thy soul is required of thee.’—Luke twelve,” upon which he turned and scuttled out of the shop without bothering to close the door.
“But it’s not night,” I objected at his parting, albeit idiotically. I hit the NO SALE key on the register and wondered why it was my lot to be always hounded by sanctimonious old gadflies. I understood well enough the moral imperative I was meant to draw from his visit: Who cowers in a shop nursing his nebbish ego when history is calling just outside the door? Stop already with the lotus eating and join the struggle for justice and equality; there are larger issues afoot than self-centered concerns that “don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” And so forth. But I was far beyond being susceptible to such a conspicuous pricking of conscience.
Nevertheless, when I set down the Gideon Bible on top of the single edition of The Pinch, I had the troubling notion that I was laying a trump card over an inferior suit. I got up to close the door, but instead of pulling it to, stepped over the threshold and pulled it shut from outside. Then I began to follow the right reverend gent down Main Street.
Though he was nearly a block ahead of me I kept him in view, following past the discount clothiers, package stores, newsstands, and five-and-dimes ranging from business as usual to locked up tight. Squad cars outnumbered ordinary vehicles in the street, and the nearer we got to Beale the denser were the sidewalks with quick-stepping pedestrians carrying signs. I saw the reverend take out a pocket watch then pick up his pace, scurrying down a sidestreet where he melded among others flooding the alleys on their way to the gathering place of the march. That’s when I lost sight of him, surrounded as I’d become by the hordes of people pouring into the intersection in front of the brick-domed pile of the Claiborne Temple. This was at the junction of Pontotoc and Hernando Streets just a few blocks off Beale.
Then, without the reverend for a bellwether, I experienced an abrupt failure of nerve. What the hell did I think I was doing so far from my hill of beans? Still, the atmosphere was unthreatening, even festive, the crowd reassuringly inclusive of every stratum of the Negro community: mothers with babies in strollers, skinny boys from the neighborhood in kneeless britches, pigtailed girls in jumpers turning cartwheels. There were ministers straightening clerical collars, business types adjusting horn-rims and foulard bowties. Strikers attempting to shepherd whole families were themselves called to order by designated marshals sporting megaphones and pumpkin-colored armbands. Smartly dressed ladies in stiletto heels accompanied aunties with cumbrous bosoms, their flinty-faced husbands in tow. Teenagers chanting the names of their high schools along with their opposition to the mayor were greeted with complicit nods from their elders. The only other white faces I saw were a smattering of union leaders and a group of tense women holding a banner reading Rearing Children of Good Will Workshop. But even the police helicopter flying low overhead seemed to contribute to the field-day mood.
While I consoled myself that I was ignored by most, caught up as they were in the general exuberance, I was aware of attracting a number of stares, some of which seemed a bit chilly. Again my resolve began to waver. Was this really my fight? I reproached myself for my pigeon heart, though I couldn’t have been the only one who detected unbenign elements in the throng. Among the omnipresent placards proclaiming I AM A MAN and NO DREAM DEFERRED were less circumspect slogans such as MAYOR LOEB EAT SHIT. The latter were brandished by unsmiling youths regarded misgivingly by the older marchers. A child riding the shoulders of a man in combat boots carried a branch dangling a noose with a sign attached reading LOEB’S HANGING TREE. But just when I was close to succumbing to a paralysis of irresolution, someone slapped my back, and I turned in alarm to be hailed by none other than Elder Lincoln. He was wearing a puff-sleeved paisley shirt, a beaded headband encircling his ’fro like a fence around a billowy black cloud.