New Boy (7 page)

"Don't I know you from somewhere?" he said with a wrinkled brow, looking me over carefully. I couldn't place him either. He didn't look much older than me, but he seemed a lot older.

"I don't know," I said. "Could be."

"Where you from?" he said. His eyes narrowed, as though he was on the verge of a discovery.

"Virginia," I said, and a broad smile split his face.

"Booker T. Washington Junior High School," he said with a grin, pointing at me with a long brown finger. "Am I right?" I chuckled and nodded my head in agreement.

"Did you go there too?" I said.

"I was a couple of years ahead of you, but I dropped out in the eighth grade 'cause they kept holding me back. Anyway, it turned out to be the best thing for my career. I used to see you in the library, looking at all them books. I used to wonder why you was in there looking at all them books." And slowly it began to dawn on me. I was talking to Willie Maurice Bowman, of Willie Maurice Bowman and the Rainbows, the hottest local singing group in my hometown when I was younger. They used to win all the talent shows.

"Aren't you Willie Maurice Bowman?" I said. His smile widened.

"That's me," he said. "But for reasons of show business, I don't go by Willie no more. Peoples just call me Maurice now. I didn't catch your name?"

"Rob. Rob Garrett."

"Oh, yeah, I remember. You're Doc Garrett's boy. Your daddy fixes my momma's teeth. What
you
doin' up here?"

"Going to school," I said. Willie Maurice looked puzzled. "What for? Wasn't you going to school at home?"

"Yeah, but this school isn't segregated. My folks thought it would be better for me."

"You like it better?"

"I can't say yet. I just started."

"Where's it at?" said Willie Maurice.

"Connecticut," I said. He gave me a curious look.

"Nothin' but white people up there."

"I know. I'm the only colored student in the whole school."

"Damn!" He looked as though I had just told him I had gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel. "Man, you got a lotta nerve." I decided to change the subject.

"What about you?" I said. "What are you doing up here?"

"Me? I'm still workin' on my act, tryin' to make it as a singer," he said, running his thumbs up and down underneath the lapels of his tuxedo jacket, and occasionally patting his process with the palm of his hand. "I was just in here auditioning for a spot on the Rhythm and Blues Revue."

"How did it go?"

'"Wait and see, wait and see.' That's what they all say. Not as bad as how the crackers put it back home. 'Go home, nigger. Don't bother me,' that kind of stuff, although it works out about the same." He seemed dejected. "It's a rough business." Then his mood brightened. "But I ain't gonna let nothin' stop me. I'm just waiting for a break."

"And the Rainbows?" I said. "What happened to them?"

"I wish I could tell you, man," he said, slowly shaking his head. "They came up here with me. We was all in it together, but I'm the only one that's still singing. Alvin is in prison for robbing somebody 'cause he needed something to eat. Eugene is walking around Harlem somewhere right now with a needle in his arm. Jimmy Bivens got married. He got three kids already and another on the way. He's working in a factory over in Queens somewhere. And Tonto, you remember Tonto? He was part Indian. Choctaw. Handsome as a motherfucker. Couldn't keep the girls off him. Tonto got killed in an apartment down on 116th Street over some broad. Her old man caught him in bed with her and shot 'em both. Boom. Boom. Just like that. Shot 'em both right through the heart. Blood all over the place. I had to go down to the morgue to identify the nigger's body. He looked like Crazy Horse after the soldiers caught up with him."

"Damn," I said. "That's terrible. I had no idea." I was beginning to see Harlem in a different light. Not only as a place of danger, but as a place where dreams became unraveled and abandoned. I was glad to run into someone from home, but Willie Maurice's story was unnerving, and I was becoming concerned about the time. I decided to head to the subway.

"Look, Maurice," I said. "I gotta be going, but I hope things work out for you, man." Shrugging his shoulders and jabbing his elbows against his waist, he looked as if he had just taken the stage, his thin brown face a mask of synthetic invincibility, the pink-yellow palms of his hands open toward me, massaging the air like a spiritualist calling up the dead.

"All I need is a break, man," said Willie Maurice. His face slowly dissolved into a tiny smile. "I hope things work out for you up there at that school. You must have a lot on your mind, bein' around nothing but white folks every day." We consoled each other with a pat on the shoulder, and I turned and headed for the subway. It was beginning to get dark and I knew Cousin Gwen would be worried. On my way to the train, I looked behind me for a moment. Willie Maurice was still standing in front of the Apollo, checking his watch and patting his process.

As I stood on the subway platform waiting for the train, I thought about the old man outside the bookstore. I still had his card, and I reached into my pocket and took it out. It said
LEWIS MICHAUX, FOUNDER AND PROPRIETOR, NATIONAL MEMORIAL AFRICAN BOOKSTORE
. And then I unfolded the newspaper he had given me. The masthead at the top of the front page said
MUHAMMAD SPEAKS
, oddly printed in prim, Old English type, but the headline underneath was bold and unmistakable, like the signs in front of Michaux's store. It read, we must have justice! and at the bottom of the page was an article about a Negro who had been beaten by the police and a photograph of a light-skinned colored man with a boy's skinny haircut. He was wearing a suit and tie and he was looking directly at the camera with an expression of barely contained fury, and he wore eyeglasses with dark plastic frames and metal around the bottom of the lenses, but his eyes were so magnetic, so intense, the demure eyeglasses seemed like a mere prop, like the eyeglasses Clark Kent used to wear to disguise a much more powerful being behind them. The caption underneath the photograph said "Malcolm X, Minister, Muhammad's Mosque No. 7." "We're not interested in white justice," read the quotation under the caption. "We want justice for the black man. If this sort of thing doesn't stop, we'll have to stop it ourselves."

The train arrived, stuffed with Negroes, and I squeezed myself on. The doors shut and I held on to a pole with several other passengers as the train accelerated, and I thought of my encounter with Michaux and his exhortations of Africa. The anger he expressed was not unfamiliar to me. At some point, every Negro wants to scare the wits out of the white man, but I had never heard the anger expressed so openly. As the train hurtled forward, it occurred to me that Michaux had no interest in the integration of the races, which I had been brought up to believe was the ideal for every Negro, the same ideal that Jackie Robinson and Dr. Du Bois and the NAACP had fought for. For Michaux, integration was not an ideal at all, but rather a threat to the future of our people.

When I reached Cousin Gwen's apartment, she immediately took me to task. "Boy, where have you
been?
I been worried sick about you. I called the school and the train station. What took you so long?"

I was ready for her. "I decided to walk over to Times Square to look around," I said, trying to appear as unruffled as possible. "I must have lost track of the time." After admonishing me to remember to call if I was going to be late again, she told me to put down my bag and come into the kitchen.

"Are you hungry?" she said.

"I could use a little something," I said, glancing at my watch. It was almost five o'clock.

"How about a ham sandwich? When you finish it, you can help me get dinner ready for tomorrow." Cousin Gwen took a large baked ham and a jar of mayonnaise from the refrigerator and put them on the kitchen table, and with a big carving knife she sliced several thick slices of ham from the bone, spread mayonnaise on two slices of Sunbeam bread, and made my sandwich. With the wrinkled brown hands that had made the ham sandwich with such care, she placed it on a plate and presented it to me. "Here. Don't eat too fast."

"Thank you." I took the sandwich and began to devour it.

"Would you like a glass of milk to go with that?" said Cousin Gwen.

"Yes, m'am," I said. When she placed the glass of milk next to my plate, I felt a warmth and security I had not felt in many months. I could have been seated in the kitchen at home.

"Well, how are things going," asked Cousin Gwen, in her familiar coy voice, "now that you've been up there for a while?" There was something about her tone that made me uncomfortable, as though she already knew the answer to her question and just wanted me to confirm it. She sounded like a gossip columnist for a newspaper.

"It's okay," I said. "I almost made the honor roll last marking period."

"Well, now that's a pretty good start," she said. I was sure she wanted to know more. "How are you getting along
socially?
" It sounded as though she wanted to hear about Vinnie's travails, which I suspected she had learned about from my parents, but I was in no mood to talk about them.

"I've met a few fellows," I said, "but mostly I've kept to myself. Like you told me to do."

Having taught for many years, she must have sensed my reluctance, because she abruptly changed the subject. "Well, we'd better get started on this dinner for tomorrow. Your parents
should be here by three o'clock, and I'm sure your father will be hungry."

As much as I looked forward to seeing my parents, I still felt the same sense of distance from them that I had felt in September when they were about to leave me at Draper, and I felt it at that moment in the kitchen with Cousin Gwen. They were all residing in the past, living with their memories of encounters with white people that had accumulated over the years, encounters still tainted with humiliation and bitterness, with insults and intimidation. I had already discovered that Draper was not immune from bigotry, and I wasn't certain what my own future would be like. But I knew that I did not want it to be divided by race like my life in the South had been.

I thought about my encounter with old man Michaux and my fleeting introduction to Malcolm X on the subway. The starkness of their vision of the future was like the negative print of a photograph, a vision of racial separation in reverse, but one that also seemed to be rooted in the past. I wondered if that vision would be my future, if I could ever escape history. I was intrigued by Michaux's exhortations to study our African heritage. I didn't know much about Africa and I wanted to know more, but I was not prepared to drop all of my courses to concentrate on an area of study that Draper didn't offer. And the tone of belligerence both Michaux and Malcolm X adopted seemed hopelessly self-defeating, although reminiscent of language I had heard before, used by angry colored men at home
on street corners or at sporting events or in parking lots, arguing with each other about a woman or the result of a ball game or the meaning of a passage of Scripture. It was the voice of anger at the cards that life had dealt.

I got up from the kitchen table and walked over to a window. The sun was setting and the sky was bright red, but below the streets were dark, the paths of the maze deep in shadow. The globes of streetlights, the lighted windows of shabby tenements, the neon signs of shops and bars and the lights of cars and trucks were beginning to illuminate the darkened streets. And I felt once more the urge to wander through that maze, to understand why, in the largest Negro community in the world, there were so few white people. Harlem was in the North, not the South, but when I walked down 125th Street earlier in the day, it seemed like a bigger version of home.

"Can you chop me some onions?" said Cousin Gwen. She removed my empty plate and replaced it with a wooden cutting board, a carving knife, and a bowl with three large yellow onions. I had not been assigned a task like this since leaving home.

"Sure," I said. "I'll just wash my hands." I washed up quickly in the kitchen sink and returned to the table. "What's this for?" I said as I began to peel the onions.

"Collards," said Cousin Gwen. "Collards are tough, so I cook them for a long time over a low flame with onions and smoked ham hocks and water. I'll cook them for a while tonight and finish 'em off tomorrow morning." Cousin Gwen's thin arms were covered with flour and buried in an enormous blue mixing bowl.

"Are you making bread?" I said as she kneaded a pale ball of dough in the bowl.

"Rolls. I'll let this rise overnight and they'll be ready for the oven in the morning."

I started to chop the onions and, as I did, I remembered why I always hated the job. My eyes were filling with tears from the onion fumes. "This is killing me," I said.

Cousin Gwen looked at me and smiled. "You look like you just got a whipping. Take that cutting board with the onions over to the sink and keep the water running while you finish chopping." I was ready to try anything, so I did what she said and it worked.

When I finished chopping the onions, Cousin Gwen put them into a pot with the smoked hocks and the collards that were sitting on the stove, and turned on the burner underneath. "How about peeling and coring some apples for an apple pie?" she asked, handing me a big blue bowl of red apples. She had already begun to make the crust, so I got right to work. As we worked in silence at the kitchen table, I began to think about Harlem. I wondered how much it had changed since Cousin Gwen had arrived. She had lived there for more than forty years, so I asked her, "What was Harlem like when you moved here?"

At first she didn't answer. I thought maybe she didn't hear me, but when I looked at her, I could see that she was concentrating on the pie crust, folding ice water and pieces of lard into the flour. Then she mixed it into a ball and started to roll it out with a rolling pin.

"It was wild. The streets were ruled by bootleggers and racketeers who were paying everybody off. I wasn't twenty-five at the time. I had finished college and managed to find a job teaching school, and I thought I was pretty hot stuff. You could walk down 125th Street and see James Weldon Johnson and Dr. Du Bois and Langston Hughes all on the same afternoon. And Garvey's people would be out, dressed up in those fancy military uniforms and marching up and down Seventh Avenue like they were about to take over the world. I tell you, it was wild." She shook her head slowly, smiling as she recalled the days. "Of course, during the Depression, there was a lot of suffering. I was lucky enough to have a job, so people would come to my door begging for food and I'd give them what I could. Everybody did. You'd see them dressed in rags out on the street holding a sign, will work for food. Little children holding up a piece of cardboard. It was painful to watch, but people managed to get through it. Prohibition was over so the bootleggers were not as prevalent, but the numbers runners were around and there was plenty of good music in the clubs. Harlem has always been a lively place."