Three Days Before the Shooting ... (31 page)

Back across the polished floor and behind the door—which explains how we missed her upon entering—she knelt with her golden hair fanned out across the upholstered seat of an early American Chippendale chair. Her backside greeted us like some reluctantly rising moon—completely bare except for a crude and inadequate skirt, which had been threaded together from, of all things, a series of old twenty-dollar gold certificates. These were of the type withdrawn from circulation many years ago, and must have amounted to a small fortune. But there they were, greeting us like a badly wilted sunburst. And our shock and embarrassment held us rigid, as though we were, indeed, watching the death of the sun.

Suddenly the sergeant whirled around to a cluster of dark faces which were now peering in at the doorway, his face flaming.

“Tillman,” he yelled, “get these people out of here and hold every one of them, you hear me! Every single damned one of them!”

Tillman moved off and he turned to the woman then, and with a look of profound distaste and much effort, got her giggling and squirming ticklishly into the chair and covered with his jacket. Whereupon she gave a drunken smile which exploded into a moist hiccup, breaking my enchantment, and I returned my attention to the man in the coffin.

Approaching him now I saw that the coffin was in an advanced stage of decay; and here, according to the moaning man, lay the beginning of the whole fantastic development. Jessie Rockmore, the man in the coffin, had undergone the loss of his lifelong religious conviction, had fallen into profound disillusionment, because
time, life, and termites had reduced his coffin to a hollow shell!
Yes! this was the start of a chain of events which had dragged me from my bed. A man lives long enough to outlast the usefulness of his coffin, but instead of rejoicing and taking pride in his longevity, he loses his lifelong faith. Our Negroes are indeed a strange people!

Nor was the moaning man an exception. When the sergeant began questioning him he had to be reassured that yet another man, a white man (whom no one else had seen), was no longer present in the building. Only then did he try to pull himself together, helped by sips of whiskey which the sergeant sloshed generously into his glass. Then, as we stood in a semicircle between him and the man in the coffin, he looked at each of us with wavering eyes and nodded his head.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll try to tell you all I know.”

“That’s fine,” the sergeant said. “You can start by giving Officer Tillman here your name.”

“Yes, sir. My name’s Aubrey McMillen.”

“And his?” The sergeant nodded toward the man in the coffin.

“That’s Mister Jessie….”

“What’s his first name?”

“That
is
his first name; his last name’s Rockmore, just like you called it outside the door. Mister Jessie Rockmore’s his full name.”

“You get it, Tillman?” the sergeant said.

“Yes, sir. Got it!”

“All right, Aubrey,” the sergeant said, bending forward. “Now tell us what you do.”

“I’m a super.”

“For whom?”

“For Mister Jessie. I work right here.”

“Do you have other jobs?”

“Not anymore. I been working for Mister Jessie for close to ten years. Before that I worked for—”

“Hold it,” the sergeant said. “We’ll come back to that later. Now just tell us what happened here.”

“Well, suh, it was thisaway,” McMillen began. “A few days ago Mister Jessie told me to bring the coffin up from the celler, so I got holt of Leroy—that’s the boy what helps me—and we brought it up, and at first we sat it on a couple of chairs like he told us.”

“Why did he want the coffin up here?”

“That’s just it, I don’t rightly know. Me and Mister Jessie have been friends since I can remember, and he liked to talk to me a lot. In fact, he talked to me more than he did to anyone else.”

“Did he have any relatives?”

“Yes, suh, he does. But he can’t stand them, so he lives here by hisself.”

“What about his wife?”

“She’s dead.”

“Did his family visit him?”

“Sometimes, but not very often. Because, you see, he’s so strict and strait-laced that they can’t get along with him, so they just let him alone. And he liked it that way fine. Mister Jessie used to sit here day after day reading his Bible and
The Washington Post
and that
Congressional Record
, fussing about the things he read in them, and trying to get me interested so I could argue with him about them. Now I argue with him about the Bible, although I don’t have much religion, but that Congress paper, it just makes me mad. It made Mister Jessie mad too….”

“Why?”

“Because he didn’t agree with what it said. He was all the time arguing back with it and talking about the law and stuff which I don’t have the education to know much about—not that Mister Jessie had been to school either, but he taught hisself a lot of things.”

“So he was self-educated,” the sergeant said. “Now tell us what happened.”

“Well, like I started to tell you, when me and Leroy got the coffin up here and resting on some chairs, Mister Jessie looked at it a long time, and right away he seemed to forget about us. He started to mumble to hisself and walk around it, then he began to knock on it with his fist and making a hollow sound. Then all at once he tapped it like a man thumping a watermelon, and you could see a cloud of brown dust rising up out of there…. Mister Jessie bucked his eyes, then turned and looked at me, and he looked like he’d done see a ghost. He shook his head and went to mumbling something I didn’t get, then he balled up his fist and came down real hard and stood back and watched the dust rising up and settling down. Me and Leroy started to sneezing then, and I watched Mister Jessie bend down and unbolt the lid and run his hand inside. And when he straightened up he brought out some ole rotten suit cloth and a pair of those ole sharp-toed, button shoes with gray tops, like they used to wear years ago, and held them up, inspecting them. And all the time he’s looking at them he’s shaking his head and mumbling, and his face was working and that loose skin under his chin was shaking like a mad turkey gobbler’s. Then he got to sneezing and leaned way over and really started to pulling things out of there….”

“Like what?”

“Well, the first thing was a plate and a bowl and a pitcher and some knives and forks. Then out came the statue of a horse, and one of those bottles with a ship in it, and a box of grits, the kind with the colored man on it—”

“Grits? What the hell are you telling us?” the sergeant said.

“That’s right, grits,” McMillen said. “You can see for yourself right over there on the table.”

“What else did he take out of there?”

“He took out a Bible and a little ole wrinkled up U.S. flag and an ole owl-head pistol. A forty-four on a thirty-eight frame—you can see it, it’s right over there—and some old life-insurance policies. Yes, suh, and some no-good oil shares. And then he reached in again and when he straightened up he’s got an old tin box in his hand….

“Said, ‘It’s been so doggone long that I’d almost forgot about this.’ Then he turned to me and said, ‘McMillen, give that there little nappy-bearded boy a dollar and let him go.’ So I give Leroy a dollar and he went on off.”

“Why did
you
pay the boy?”

“Well, you see, Mister Jessie used to borrow money from me all the time. Borrow it one day and give it back the next. He just like to see if I had it, or if I’d let him have it. Not that he needed it, ‘cause he has plenty money in the bank and hardly spent nothing at all except for something to eat and a few shirts now and then. Well, yes, and his newspapers and magazines. He didn’t even smoke or chew.”

“But he drank a hell of a lot.”

McMillen’s head snapped up. He looked indignant. “No, suh, he didn’t, and I tell you about the whiskey in a minute.”

“Go on.”

“No, suh, he didn’t drink and he didn’t chew, so he didn’t need much money. Besides, a man from that big New York museum was always down here trying to get him to sell those plates and things over there in those cases. Offered him all kinds of money for that stuff—way up in the thousands—but he wouldn’t sell…. And another man from a place here in D.C.

wanted those pictures of Indians and other folks, but Mister Jessie wouldn’t hear him either. Told me one time he would give them to those folks over there at the university for nothing if they would have the sense to appreciate them, but he said they weren’t interested because they didn’t understand that they had something to do with them. They ought to raise some hell in the Indians’ name once in a while, he said. And he told me once that he tried to give them those Indian pictures—he’s got some really fine ones—but they didn’t want them, and Mister Jessie got mad as a bitch, as he told it. Said, ‘Those fools are supposed to be educated, and they don’t even realize that for better or worse they have taken the place of the Red Man, even to getting scalped and swindled every time they turn around.’ This was too complicated for me, but Mister Jessie used to say some pretty low-rating things about those folks over there. Course, as far as I’m concerned they seem to be doing a pretty fair job.”

“Stick to the point,” the sergeant said.

“Yes, suh,” McMillen said, taking a drink. “Anyway, so Leroy took his money and left and I went and locked the door after him, and when I got back in the room Mister Jessie was counting out that money that that lady over there is wearing, and spreading it out on the coffin lid.

“He said, ‘McMillen, this stuff has been in there so long it’s against the law to even own it.’ And all at once he turned around and looked at me with a bunch of those big goldbacks fanned out in his hand, and right then he did something I never heard him do before in all the years I been knowing him—he cussed. He said, ‘Goddamn it, it had to slip up on me at a time when by rights I ought to be dead and gone. But now I’m glad, because at least I can say that for once in my life I broke the goddamn law!’

“I was so surprised I didn’t know what to say. Because Mister Jessie was as straight as a die and as hard as steel, and as clean-cut a man, black
or
white, as I’ve ever seen. He was what you call a good, upright Christian man….”

“All right, all right, get on with your story,” the sergeant said.

“Yes, suh,” McMillen said, and I watched him sip the whiskey, then lean forward shaking his head.

“Well, suh, it looked like using that cussword caused something to snap in
Mister Jessie’s head. At the time he was dressed in his bathrobe and with his scrawny neck coming up out of his shirt neckband with the button in but no collar. So he stood there mumbling and counting out the money, then he looked at it a minute and all at once he took his hand and swept it to the floor, disgusted-like.

“I said, ‘What in the world are you doing there, Mister Jessie, treating that money thataway? That’s still good money. You ain’t no criminal or nothing like that,’ I said. ‘You can turn that money in and the bank will give you full value.’

“Well, suh, why did I say that! Mister Jessie looked like he was going to pick up that coffin and throw it at me.

“‘Full value!’ he said. ‘Full value, my foot! There ain’t enough gold in Fort Knox to give me the value of what that money cost me. Back there in the nineties, denying myself and my family, pulling dollars and pennies out of my black hide, helping that white man take heirlooms—all that Spode and Chelsea and Sandwich and Sterling—from ignorant folks. McMillen, wars and thievery in high places and bad monetary policies have put more lead in our silver and more brass in our gold than was in all the bullets shot up during the Civil War. And now time has cut the value of whatever’s left. McMillen,’ he said, ‘let me tell you one goddamn thing: When a man gets as old as I am, money is nothing but the cold excrement of all his life’s labor. Even sweat has more value, because in this hell of a Washington, sweat will at least cool him once in a while. I wore out fifteen of those little ole straight-life, nickel-today-nickel-when-you-git-it insurance policies before I learned I was being drained of my just interest and started saving my money in the banks. Then the Depression started eating on me, and twice, once before they set up the Federal Reserve Board, and again in ‘29, I was the victim of embezzlers. And all this time the value of the money going down and down like that elevator in the Washington Monument. Don’t talk to me about getting my value out of that stuff!’

“And then he really went to preaching. Said, ‘I tried to live by a devalued standard. I’ve denied myself whiskey, women, and warfare, and I’ve seen my labor go to hell and my life turn into a P. T. Barnum sideshow, and all the time I’ve been patient and law-abiding. I’ve prayed and believed and kept the faith. When I was young I never went to a dance or visited a whore. I never knowingly cheated or lied, even when I had to suffer because I didn’t. And I always believed even when times was at their very worse that things would get better. McMillen,’ he said, ‘this was my philosophy. I believed in two things: I believed in the perfectibility of man—including Negroes like you and me—and in the progressive improvement of the American form of government and the American way of life. These two beliefs have been the rock upon which I based my life and my faith. God has seen fit to free me
from slavery when I was still a young boy, and I determined to live according to His rules and according to His time and win as much human perfectibility as I could. Mr. Lincoln tried to make a way for us in this society and had the Constitution amended to help us over the rough places and then got the back of his head blown off for his pains, but still I was determined not to be impatient and to learn citizenship and practice manliness so that at least his spirit would never be embarrassed by me.’ ”

McMillen said, “Mister Jessie looked at me then, gentlemen, and all at once he got to laughing. He laughed until he cried, and he got me to laughing at
his
laughing, then he stopped for a second and leaned back against that coffin, and you could hear something give way inside it, and he started to laughing some more.