My Heart Laid Bare (34 page)

The automobile is a four-seater Welch touring car, cream-colored with chocolate-brown leather interior and trim, flawless brass fixtures (rounded headlights, large horn, prominent grill) and stately spoked tires. When he'd been Elisha Licht—when he'd been “Little Moses”—he'd ridden in automobiles as fine as this, owned by the man who'd been his father; he's even driven such an automobile, a beautiful fair-haired young woman snug beside him, whispering and laughing with him. You wouldn't believe it, these suspicious white folks wouldn't believe it, but—it's so.

“Having trouble, sir? I can help, I think.”

“You—?”

“I can try, at least.”

In his rags, in his whiskered lice-bitten mask of a face, taking the crank handle in both his hands, trying to get leverage, at last kneeling in the mud, and—“There! There it is, sir.” Like magic he gets the sodden engine of the Welch touring car to turn over, and spark into roaring, vibrating
life. He squints, wipes his hands on his trousers, tries to rise to his feet but an attack of dizziness slows him, even as the engine drowns out his hopeful words and the gentleman driver in a mud-splashed beige driving costume with flushed face, fatty chin, resentful eyes calls out, “Thanks, boy! You're a lifesaver.” The woman in the cloche hat calls out, “Ohhhh thanks! How did you
do
that!” He's on his feet now smiling shakily yet expectantly at the couple awaiting the invitation from them to climb into the rear of the gleaming cream-colored automobile even as the driver carelessly tosses a coin—dime? quarter?—that falls onto the muddy edge of the roadway, and drives off.

Her fierce spicy fragrance makes his temples pound: he's wild, exhilarated, drunken: wrenched out of his bones for very joy.

A girl with pale blond hair and wide-spaced innocent eyes and feverish lips: her skin burning: her laughter choked: for she too, pressing herself into his arms, clutching at him, is drunken with love, with love, with love . . . .

His heart is ready to burst, he can't control himself, he adores her, he would die for her, he
has
died for her, many times: yet she's frenzied, insatiable: coiling her sweat-slick limbs upon him, writhing violently against him, O Elisha I love you, love you, love you . . . .

O Elisha I love you . . . .

O Elisha I am your wife . . . .

And now suddenly seeing them everywhere. Can't hide from the sight, the knowledge. Blacks, coloreds, Negroes, niggers. On the street, at the roadside, in crowded tenement districts, at the northern edge of the Park.

These people who make their way in a world fully conscious of the
white man and of one another. While the white man, blind, is conscious of nothing.

He
belongs to neither race. So glancing upon both with Olympian equanimity.

For pride will not allow wrath, and pride will not allow despair.

Long vanished are the days when he might live at the Park Stuyvesant Hotel in midtown, as the personal valet (as the hotel management believed) of a wealthy businessman named Fairbairn; long vanished, and nearly forgotten, are the Sunday drives by hackney cab through the Park, Millie's small hand secretly pressing against his, hidden by the pretty flounces of her skirt. Not fully recovered from his illness but he's strong and buoyant and himself again, or nearly . . . a lanky-legged mahogany-skinned entrepreneur named Emile Gaston, or Dupee Jones, formerly of the Barbados . . . formerly of Mexico City . . . given to fits of coughing, violent brief spasms that break the capillaries in his eyes . . . but all in all a proud figure, a shrewd figure, smart black bowler hat, imitation camel's hair polo coat worn loose on his shoulders, pockets jingling with coin . . . from the sporadic sale of 50¢ bottles of hair straightener up in Harlem, skin bleach in putty-colored tubes, lottery tickets printed in various colors, tickets for a Sunday-on-the-Hudson Steamboat Excursion stamped
one-day only
and
non-refundable.
Yes he is himself again! or nearly.

His money is fast running out, however.

And he has made enemies on the street.

In the meantime he comports himself with grace, with a reeling swaying sort of grace, he swallows down gin at midday, never wholly drunk and never wholly sober, not a human being in the world dares approach him to touch him to look him in the eye:
that
not even his enemies would dare.

Twenty-six years old, or is it thirty—but with his thin clipped moustache and his hat tilted forward on his head he looks older. With his ravaged skin and hunted ashy eyes he looks much older.

Emile Gaston, Dupee Jones, Elihu Washburn . . .

When he has coins jingling in his pockets he treats himself to meals that stretch his stomach, not minding if he's nauseated afterward, it's a gift he owes himself. He buys a black bowler hat, makes the purchase of an ivory-topped cane. A
man with a cane
says Father
wields power in the eyes of the weak. If he wields it well.
This high-stepping gentleman
wields it well.
In the lobbies of white-man hotels he buys newspapers to read War news: the Pact of London . . . the Allies and the Germans fighting in the Marne . . . Turkish warships, German submarine blockades, the Allies landing armies at the Dardanelles . . . secret treaties, atrocities . . . the sinking of the British liner
Lusitania
by German submarine, nearly fourteen hundred people killed.

So many! He feels a pang of pity, sympathy. “But they were white—of course. White devils.”

HE SEES THEM
everywhere now, can't not see them.

His kind. His skin. His hunted eyes.

Seeing Little Moses abandoned in the road, bewildered by his fate. An actor who has lost not only his audience but his stage, his purpose for being. The very lights that had illuminated him to himself.

One day in the rain weak from hunger or despair or rage gnawing at his guts he staggers and falls in the street and his polo coat, already soiled, is soiled more—mud, horse droppings, filth—and his smart black bowler hat is snatched from his head by a young boy, brown-skinned, a laughing savage.

He rides the clattering streetcars, he rides the Staten Island ferry, he sleeps where sleep overtakes him unless his pockets jingle with coin. Sometimes he sleeps alone, and sometimes not. Sometimes he shuts his eyes in disdain against the city—against Harlem,
their
city—and sometimes he walks entranced in the streets, eyes stealthy and all-seeing beneath the rim of his dandy's hat. The brownstone tenement buildings like
ridges of a natural outcropping, block following block; crowded sidewalks and streets; the traffic on Broadway rising to a din—trolleys, trucks, horse-drawn wagons, fire engines, careening police vans, uniformed police on horseback; shouts, cries, sirens, alarms, horns; the sharp ringing of horses' hooves on cobblestone; powerful smells—sulfurous, rancid, close, feculent, steamy—that seem to rise out of the bowels of the earth and, if he's in a weakened state, go to his head like an inhaled drug.

Harlem. Their city.

My city?

Through which he walks entranced as a new lover, beginning to recognize landmarks, stores and taverns and sidewalk vendors, beginning to understand the music of their speech, until one day he opens his mouth and his speech is identical with theirs, or nearly—he's one of them! Shaking hands with his newfound contacts, friends and business acquaintances—
Why good mornin' Mr. Jones!
comes a sudden happy cry—
How're you this fine day Mr. Washburn!
—wide smiles, gold-capped teeth, gleaming black skin and elegantly trimmed moustaches and starched white shirts and stiff celluloid collars and bow ties neatly clipped in place—
Ain't shaken your hand in a long time, Doctor
—smoke-colored hair shining, glaring, having been heated and creamed and sculpted into a shellacked surface as seamless to the casual glance as the polished shell of an acorn—
Ain't laid eyes on you in a while Mr. Gaston, and you lookin' good.

And feeling good. At last.

His pockets jingle with coin, his pockets are empty. SPIRIT suffuses him (it's spring, it's a new year), SPIRIT departs leaving him huddled dazed in an alley . . . vomiting rotgut liquor in heaving sobs . . . as close to death as he'll come, and no one's fault but his own. That night in the stifling heat of the United African Baptist Church on Columbus Avenue where buoyant singing and clapping and shouting and the swaying of bodies and wave upon wave of great joy pulse on all sides . . . to pull him down into the tarry-black mud . . . the comforting mud, the muck of Jesus. Black Jesus.

His brothers and sisters are yelling, shrieking, laughing in ecstasy. Clapping, Jesus is in this place with them, Jesus is in their hearts,
can you feel him bro-ther, can you feel him sis-ter
, the sweetly sour smell of flesh, oil-oozing flesh,
Jesus goin to take you home bro-ther, sis-ter Jesus goin' to take you home.

He's weak with relief, tears streaking his face, he isn't going to die as that man who'd been his father that man who'd been the white Devil-Daddy had prophecized.

Though vowing it won't be Black Jesus who takes
him
home.

REVEREND DRISKUS PRICE
of the United African Baptist Church . . . Right Reverend Slocum Diggs of the Free Evangelical Brotherhood . . . Father Moses of the African Methodist Episcopal Church . . . Reverend T. J. Skirm of the Mount Pisgah African Church of Christ . . . Brother Druse Mohammed of the Bethel African Fellowship . . . Doctor Willard Graver of the Lenox Avenue American-Liberian League . . . Supreme Potentate Douglass Fox of the United Negro Colonization Society . . . Brother Ebenezer King of the First Zionist Church of Christ, Harlem . . . Commander Diaz Attucks of the Consolidated Free Afro-American Christian League . . .

Some of the preachers urge Jesus onto their flocks, others urge mass migration back to Africa, others believe fervently that Jesus is to be found in Africa, in the Sovereign Free State of Liberia (founded by freed American slaves in 1847), or in the Sovereign Free State of Sierra Leone . . . .

So many preachers, and so much genuine faith: and what difference, brothers and sisters, has it ever made in your lives? . . .

“Little Moses” for all his cunning is to die a
Negro
death after all: shortly past midnight of 7 June 1915, in the neighborhood of Amsterdam Avenue and 140th Street. In the very street, in fact.

He will die of a savage beating by three New York City mounted
policemen, “riot” police, in the midst of a six-hour uprising by Negroes occasioned by the rumor (afterward verified) that a seventeen-year-old Negro boy had earlier been beaten to death by police elsewhere in Harlem.

(The boy had been arrested on 134th “fleeing the scene of a crime” . . . manacled and beaten savagely for “resisting and threatening police officers” . . . his limp bleeding body, an arm dangling broken, carried away by a speeding police van. More than a dozen witnesses looked on in horror; the incident had taken place across the street from the Afro-American Baptist Brotherhood League.)

In all, eleven Negroes will die in the rioting, nine of them men. A forty-three-year-old pregnant woman, a six-year-old girl.

And among these Little Moses . . . though there will be no official record of his death as there is no record, official or otherwise, of his life.

EXCEPT: ON THE
night of 6 June 1915, less than six hours before his death, he debates with a barroom acquaintance (Marcus Caesar Smith, formerly of the Barbados) the metaphysical conundrum of whether a man's identity lies in what he
resembles
to the outer eye, or what he
is.

For though a man might inhabit a certain shade and texture of skin, that's hardly proof that he must be defined by that skin. And though he resembles other men who inhabit that selfsame skin, it can't be proved that he must be identified with them.

Smith responds, winking at the crowd that has gathered around them, “Brother, look here: if you is talkin' about yourself, or myself, or whoever, say so—without no further ob-fus-ca-tion. If you is claimin' not to be a nigger like the rest of us, then what is you?”

Much laughter, hooting and whistling.

Little Moses, unaccustomed to being laughed at, stiffens; but manages to smile, and winks to draw the crowd onto his side. Saying “Friends, the metaphysics of it is the secret that no ignorant imagination can grasp:
some folks is only what they look like by way of their skin and others, only what they
is
.”

“Tell it, bro-ther! Tell it!” Smith laughs.

“ . . . And the two categories stand apart and never can mingle, like oil . . . ” Little Moses had been drinking, his tongue slurs his smooth words, “ . . . and blood.”

“That so, bro-ther?
How
so?”

“Because it
is
,” Little Moses says. “And some things is
not.
”

Smith plays to the gathering of drinkers saying, “Now you come to your senses, man, and explain to me how come
you
know so damn much and
I
that's older than you and wiser don't know nothin'.”

And Little Moses drinks whatever this is he's drinking, orange flame in his throat, searing his eyes, he's confused saying, “Because it's inside, brother. It's been told
in-side.
”

“Howso? Inside what?”

“In-side.”

“Look, man—there got to be some outside, like a rind or a husk, that there's an inside of, don't there?—ain't that so?” Smith cries.

“No. There don't.”

“Like there's gonna be a, say, catfish—without no skin to keep 'im in? There's gonna be a hog, a cantaloupe, a baby, a flower—and not no outside for the inside to press up against? Not hardly!”

Little Moses removes his wide-brimmed fedora, incensed.

“God-damn don't need to fool nobody,” Little Moses cries. “I mean—I don't need to fool
you.
Don't give any God damn, that shit you sayin'.”