In bed that night I had shpilkes something awful, if you know what I mean. The whole town was cockeyed in the aftermath of the disaster, and I guessed I was no exception to the rule. I’d had my glimpse of the world beyond Third Street, and had finally to admit that all it gave me was an appetite for more. This is not to say that my alcove wasn’t cozy, and the pawnshop always had its moments, provided you could find the space to watch them from. But outside, the overrun city was more interesting than any book I knew. There were local attractions as rare as anything that Richard Halliburton, Memphis’s home-grown Marco Polo, had crossed oceans to observe. Or so I’d heard.
There was Happy Hollow, for instance, the shantytown at the bottom of the bluff, below the Pinch. That’s where the victims of murders, their flesh peeling off like wet paper, were said to wash up under the pilings of houses on stilts, houses constructed out of packing cases and Moxie signs. Towheaded and whey-faced, with eyes like Orphan Annie and shriveled limbs, the citizens of Happy Hollow were popularly bruited to be the issue of fathers and daughters, cousins and cousins, and so forth. There was Mud Island, low-lying as a whale’s back in the middle of the river, formed from silt accumulated around a steamboat sunk before the Civil War. That’s where the fisherfolk lived in their patchwork tents and converted automobiles, who drank sacramental moonshine on Sundays and danced before the Lord with rattlesnakes in both hands. Also, according to the Chamber of Commerce literature, there was a museum in a pink marble mansion that once belonged to a bankrupt millionaire. There was an aerodrome housing a dirigible as big as Goliath’s lung, and a view of three states from a café on top of the Cotton Exchange.
But when I closed my eyes that night after my uncle’s Seder, I was voyaging with shvartzers again. This time, for reasons that would not come clear, we had abducted a young white girl bearing an unfortunate resemblance to Naomi, though the girl in question was more amply endowed. We were sailing through fog toward a cannibal-infested coast in search of a legendary lost mine of unleavened bread.
The next afternoon I went back to the famous end of Beale Street. I’d been hanging around the pawnshop, which now bulged so at the seams that Papa talked of annexing the colored dentist’s office upstairs. While he was at it, he would take up Joshua’s trumpet—which must have been somewhere in stock—and blow down the walls between us and Uncle Sam’s Loans on one side, Pinsky’s Custom Tailor on the other. Kaplan’s would occupy an entire city block, become a Kaplan’s World of Loans.
To his regular clientele, Papa had recently added the flood refugees, who straggled in with items that were questionable even by his standards. Nevertheless my papa, with his unquenchable passion for novelty, took in their crocheted samplers and whittled ax helves, their impermeable ascension shrouds, their divining rods like outsize slingshots, and their foul-smelling panacea herbs. But not before he’d heard their sad stories, jotting down the occasional note.
The inventory ledgers took up as many volumes as a Talmud. Their columns of lengthy descriptions and bewildering numerical entries were limned with glosses that overwhelmed the margins, thus giving the pages the actual look of commentary and responsa. This was a recent feature of my father’s behavior, how he labored over his ledgers like a scribe, refining and expanding the texts. It wasn’t enough, for example, that a wooden crutch belonged to a man who had lost his foot to a snapping turtle; but a cane pole, no apparent relation to the crutch, might once have caught a turtle that slipped from the hook to leave a human foot dangling in its place. In this way my papa endeavored to connect various items along family lines.
It was a method that drove at least one auditor to smoke two packs of Luckys and leave the shop in disgust. It caused the detectives from the pawnshop detail, McCorkle and Priest, to curse the day they’d attempted to make heads or tails of Kaplan’s books. I’d watched them flipping the pages in frustration, unable to distinguish the fishy from the legitimate. It was a sight that put me in mind of overgrown cheder boys struggling with a haftorah portion.
So filled to capacity was the pawnshop that Grandma Zippe, were she ever to be properly buried, would first have to be disinterred. Nor had it escaped my attention that the curios surrounding her casket—the ram’s horn deaf aids and the painted bisque Betty Boops—had recently been joined by an empty copper samovar.
So how did my dotty papa manage to keep from going belly up? Because, for all of his foolhardy squandering of capital, the cash drawer still seemed bottomless, and the level of our family’s newfound affluence had not been reduced. We still enjoyed the freshest whitefish and the choicest cuts of brisket from the butcher, not to mention the most up-to-date in household conveniences, the latest being an electric Hoover, which my mama maneuvered as if she were wrestling the tail of a cyclone. If you subscribed to the theory that my uncle was behind our prosperity, then you had to suppose also that the time would come when he would seek to collect what he was owed.
But on that afternoon following the Seder, the future of my family was hardly even in the running with my major concerns. Besides, with only a minimum of floor space left to accommodate the customers, wasn’t it clear that my own services, marginal at best, were no longer required? What choice did I have but to take up a post out on the sidewalk next to Oboy? From there I could at least keep vigil with the puller until my papa had finished walling himself up alive. And after that we could signal prospective customers to pass on.
Of course I had been a little uneasy around Oboy since the night of our rowboat ride. I was grateful on the one hand that he hadn’t brought it up, which was as good as saying that my secret was safe. But on the other hand I resented that, for him, the event apparently wasn’t worth mentioning. The problem, I suppose, was that I just didn’t know how to read such a character—though I decided the best policy was to settle on distrust. Hadn’t I seen with my own eyes that he was the servant of at least two masters? What functions he performed for Uncle Morris, I didn’t even want to guess. If this so-called puller was making it clear that he didn’t need my company, I could assure him the feeling was mutual. That’s why, when Papa came out in his apron to hand me a fifty-cent piece, asking me to nip around to Segal’s for some seltzer and heart-attack buns, I was glad of an excuse to get away from Kaplan’s Loans.
As I walked down toward the bayou overflow, the afternoon sunshine felt intimate, as if it were getting under not only my clothes but my skin. Dutifully I rounded the corner into the dry side of Third Street, heading straight for the delicatessen, but the clamor from across the lagoon kept distracting me. The Negro flood refugees, having been forbidden from the barracks at the fairgrounds, had made their encampment on the little rise of Handy Park. I could see them, just over the road from where I’d paused to look, beating time on their number 9 washtubs, strumming cigar-box banjos, and presiding over the mounted halves of smoking oil drums. I could see the whole show, or all that I needed to anyway, from my own side of the street, though it was hard to distinguish one voice from another. But then why would anyone want to do that? And besides, my papa was waiting for his pastries; I would be missed if I was away too long. Moreover, after the ferry, it wouldn’t be nearly as exciting just to walk across Third Street here, above the water-line. Though you had to admit that it involved a good deal less fuss.
Jumping over a gutter full of swimming tadpoles that turned out to be wider than it looked, I had a sensation of leaping on board a departing raft. Then I was in the park and surrounded by voices vying for dominion; snatches of howled and rasping lyrics assailed me from all sides. Someone had a mule as hard-headed as a woman, and vice versa, while someone else had nasty habits that high water couldn’t wash clean. One had a boll weevil in his jelly roll, and another was fixing to swap his pillow for the railroad track. There was a preacher on a stump with his thumbs stuck in his armpits like a flapping crow, spouting Pentecost and citing sinners by name: “They’s ol Tyrome don’t think Jesus know he talkin that talk, and Do Funny Weeums, he jus waitin on Mistah Zero, gon give him a thousand-dollah bill.” Behind the preacher a circle of hunkering men, lassoed by smoke, were passing a jar and saying prayers to a pair of yellow dice. They were aped by a bunch of ragged boys gathered around an ashcan lid, tossing knucklebones snatched by a dog half hairless with mange. Broad-beamed mamas balanced clouds of dirty laundry on their heads, cackling evil rumors as they sauntered past: “The gal cain’t have no back-do man ef she ain’t have no back do.” A young girl hollered in her bare-foot hokey-pokey as if the patchy grass were on fire; an old man cooed to a catfish in a hubcap full of sputtering oil.
I moved cautiously among them beneath branches through which the sunlight dropped like doubloons, and told myself I was a bold explorer. I was the first white man to have penetrated these remote parts as far as this settlement. It wouldn’t have surprised me if they’d welcomed my arrival with gifts: a hog maw in redeye gravy, say, which I would sample with gusto, and to hell with the rabbi’s dispensation. So I was disappointed to remark how, wherever I passed, I seemed to put a crimp in everyone’s good time. There was the woman nursing her child, for instance, who quickly buttoned her bodice over the head of the suckling infant. There was the character with the striped cane and dark glasses, bottle caps on the soles of his shoes, who left off his tap dancing on a bench when I came near. A hefty kid with rolling shoulders, holding a watermelon over his head, continued to keep his audience in suspense—as if whatever might spill out of the melon after he’d smashed it on a rock were not for my eyes.
Though it hurt my feelings, I was beginning to take the hint. So maybe it wasn’t in the best interests of white people to know too much about how the other half lived east of Third. Maybe the natives weren’t as friendly as I’d been led to believe, and the color of my skin wouldn’t necessarily keep me safe. Maybe it was time to turn tochis and run. But the thought of retracing my steps in front of all those inhospitable eyes gave me a sickly feeling in the gut. Besides, now that I’d almost crossed to the far end of the park, the fastest way out was simply to push on.
I picked my way gingerly over the perimeter of the camp, detouring around the lagoon, which was frankly not so picturesque by day. For one thing, the skiffs, a practical enough mode of conveyance, now had to compete with any number of jerry-rigged contraptions. Wallowing rafts made from uprooted hoardings and unpilotable outriggers rammed everything in sight. I saw a delivery boy on a mired bicycle watching the loaves and tomatoes float out of his basket. I saw mounted cops on skittish horses kicking up a spray that left everyone drenched in what looked like minestrone soup. They splashed the washerwomen sprinkling the water with Oxydol and the man in the hip boots who forged on ahead, indifferent to the curses of the old lady clinging to his back.
Then I was out of that jangling park, if not yet the woods. I had reached by an overland route the northeast corner of Hernando and Beale Street, the famous and fabled and so forth, without even the excuse of having followed Oboy. This time I had only my own bulbous nose to blame.
The street was just about as populous as it had been on the night of my boat ride, though the skylarkers were mostly supplanted now by a more commercial element. Here also was the smorgasbord of voices. Where the farmers had set up shop along the curbs, behind their ramparts of vegetables, the smousers were operating out of raincoats and the tailgates of trucks. Someone was hawking “Greasy greens, don’t y’all love em!” and “Yams is what it am!,” someone displaying a tree of red felt mojo bags. There was honeycomb, known as the righteous Tupelo sugar tit, “made by the bee have done fed on the blossom a the gospel bush.” A woman stood on a chair to introduce a product whose results would give the user a bust as generous as her own, which resembled a pair of water wings. A man placed over his head a metal device called the Kink-No-More.
It was like North Main Street, wasn’t it, only with the screws a little looser and the volume turned up—North Main as seen through a funhouse mirror, darkly. And if I knew what was good for me, I should beat it back to my own side of the looking glass. So tell that to my feet, which seemed to have no reverse gear this afternoon. In a minute, however, I would be clear of all the tummel; I would cut over to Gayoso Street and make my way up to Third, having taken a scenic loop back to my father’s shop. But the farther I walked along Beale, the farther I felt I had to walk, as if in order to get out of this mess, I had first to pass all the way through.
I was lurking along steadily enough, keeping close to the fronts of buildings, never turning my head for fear of seeing the heads I might have turned. Having edged around a tamale vendor, I scooted behind some grills displaying ribs like fire-damaged xylophones. Then I proceeded at a fair clip past the theater, a greasy spoon cafe, a saloon or two, a recreation hall loud with the reports of knocking billiard balls. That’s when my forward progress snagged temporarily on what I saw in a show window trimmed in faded black bunting.
Sitting there ramrod stiff in a thronelike armchair was a colored gent of untold years. He was wearing a high starched collar gone arsenic yellow with age, a wilted string bow tie, a formal getup ventilated in moth holes that looked like grimy Swiss cheese. Under his flattened chimney-pot hat, behind lopsided spectacles, his eyes were reduced to slots like in a vending machine. His weathered face, which was lightly whiskered and as fierce as a fisted glove, never flinched from its halo of flies. I took account of the awful blue length of his fingernails and the dust that coated his ancient evening clothes; I noted the sign above the window, crudely painted on tin, which declared the place a funeral parlor, and the sign at the foot of the throne: YOUR LOVE ONE PRESERVE FOR ALL ETERNITY. Then it finally sunk in that the old man was a corpse.
At that moment it helped to remind myself that I was still on earth, in Memphis, just the other side of Fourth Street. But at that moment “the other side” had uncomfortable connotations. It put me in mind of what my grandpa called sitra achra, the place where the soul goes after death. It was also the place from which—if certain things went unsettled (such as the burial of mortal remains)—the soul might return to rattle your dishes.
I stumbled away from the mortuary window and got as far as the middle of the block, where I stopped again beside a corkscrewing blue-and-white-striped pole. Adjacent to the pole was a shopfront with a Coca-Cola sign reading MAMBO’S TONSORAL PARLOR. There was a string of red lights around a plate-glass window across which prices had been scrawled in soap:
Harcut & Shav 20¢ Conk & Lektrik Massaj 20¢ Hot Towl & Bay Rum 10¢
Inside, the barbers, in white smocks with military creases, wielded their clippers as if they were conducting a symphony of flying black fleece. Behind them was a long shelf of tonics and pomades in bottles like an oriental skyline. There was a row of basins with blue-tinted mirrors in which you could see the whole shop reversed; you could see my own pale puss off in the distance, looking out at myself looking in. High on a wall was a flag-draped portrait of President Roosevelt, and next to it a stenciled sign warning No Dozen Playin Aloud. There was a blacking stand in the corner where an elegantly turned-out character sat in a raised tubular chair. Kneeling at his feet, a kid in a floppy cap was giving his two-tones the once-over with a chammy cloth. Even from where I stood, you could see that, as he worked, the kid was jabbering away.
With the benefit of hindsight I understood that this had been my destination all along. I took a breath and opened the door to the barbershop, stepping in before my better judgment could intercede.
Everybody froze. Scissors stopped in mid-snip, razors stalled in nicked chins from which blood refused to flow. Patrons lowered their newspapers and raised their brows. Like resurrecting mummies, they unwound steaming towels from their faces. Everyone was staring in bafflement, including the shoeshine boy, who’d swiveled about to reveal himself as none other than Lucifer, the moonlighting navigator. But even that was small comfort to me now. So what was it made me think that white boys didn’t stroll into colored barbershops every day?
I wanted to tell them to relax, Harry Kaplan ain’t exactly John Dillinger, but the best I could muster was a feeble grin. So confusing was their reception that I found myself waiting for someone to tell me why I was there. Seconds passed before I remembered that the explanation was mine to give. Odors of hair oil and rose water stung my nostrils till I almost reeled; I closed my eyes and saw a missionary trying to offer a reason why he shouldn’t be made into soup. Then it came to me, albeit slowly, that my journey had in fact had a purpose from the outset. I had come all this way, hadn’t I, just to settle accounts, to fork over the return passage that I still owed the twins. In lieu of finding my tongue, I shoved my hand in my pocket and produced my papa’s ink-stained fifty-cent piece.
I stood idiotically in the middle of the shop, holding up the coin as if I thought it could deliver me from any tight spot. Only its spell-breaking properties seemed to be defunct. But just as I was wondering if this general paralysis might endure until the coming of the Messiah—kaynehoreh!—Lucifer turned back toward his client long enough to crack his cloth in a final flourish, then stood up and recollected me out loud.
“Mistah Harry from the pawnshops!” he declared to my limitless relief, doffing his cap to fan his bright face as he shambled forward. “Well now, as I live and breave, this indeed a most pleasant suh-prise.”
His eyes goggled as he snatched the half-dollar, proving its authenticity with a chomp before dropping it into a yawning pant pocket. There was a breathless second, then a clink as the coin hit bottom. This was apparently the signal for the barbershop, satisfied that I wasn’t quite a stranger, to resume its suspended activity.
The spotlight was off me, and Lucifer and I were almost as good as alone. At least that’s what I felt, or how else would I have found the gumption to remind him, “That’s um, let’s see,” strewing hair around the tiles with the toe of my sneaker, “forty-five cents change I still got coming.” But Lucifer was already a step ahead of me, chattering as if he hadn’t heard a word I’d said.
“Ordinary, this here four bits get you a mess a ferryboat rides,” he assured me, selling the point with his keyboard’s worth of teeth. “Onliest thang bein we done retire from that partikler enterprise.” In the barely perceptible shift of his eyes, I could imagine the hasty abandonment of the skiff, the hotfooted exit pursued by the oilskin man. “Now, do you woosh to make a sportin investment, they’s this popular game a chance what am the current fashion.” He paused for a between-you-and-me sort of look. “An I just might could see my way clear to advise yo venable self all about it.”
I kept wagging my head like I knew what he was talking about, though I hadn’t a clue—something to do with a game called policy and the way that it was related to your dreams.
“Dream you flyin, put yo smart money on numbah five. Now say you dream you done lost yo left leg, numbah two is yo man, tha’s the numbah to remumbah. Lose yo right leg an play the combo, one two three. Wet yo bed, tha’s a lucky seven.” By this time my jaw had begun to hang. “Wake up with a worry mind, put yo wage on numbah nine. Tell ol Swami Lucifer yo dream an I tells you what to play. I got some power…”
While I was still trying to grasp the concept, Lucifer promised me beginner’s luck and the sure-fire benefits of his proven expertise. Then he remembered that he had first to collect his book of tickets. They were over at a place called the Baby Doll Hotel, where he had anyhow some pressing business to conduct. I was about to tell him thanks all the same but I’d never been much of a gambler, when he turned to the gent who’d stepped down off the blacking stand. As he helped the man into a box-back sport coat, taking a whisk broom to the shoulders, Lucifer tossed an offhand remark in my direction: “Come on along do you like.”
Here the spiffy customer made a fussy inspection of his pocketwatch. “Yassuh,” chimed Lucifer, “it gone time on-the-money fo to carry you to yo pointment in the lap a glory.” Then, ceremoniously presenting his client’s straw hat, he began to back toward the rear of the shop, beckoning the man the way you’d encourage an infant to take its first steps.
When they’d disappeared through the curtained doorway, I waited for conversation to stop again, but Lucifer’s recognizing me seemed to have done the trick. The place was still humming, though not necessarily about yours truly. And while I didn’t want to push my luck by outwearing my welcome, neither was I anxious to return to the conspicuous anonymity that awaited me back on Beale. Not to mention the reception I could expect at Kaplan’s when I turned up without the pastries or the fifty cents.
Hurrying past the garrulous barber chairs, I ducked through the curtain into a storeroom lit only by its open back door. Immediately I was face to face with the boy whose aggressive silence announced him as Lucifer’s unidentical twin. With his head wrapped in a bandanna that pinned back his ears and practically hid his eyes, he was pushing sawdust around the floor with a long-handled broom. He pushed with the same deliberateness that he’d applied to his boat oar, like somebody swabbing the deck of a ship that’s been otherwise abandoned by all hands. A little flustered, I raced out the door and across an alley, stepping over a trampled wire fence to catch up with Lucifer. Though his client turned, the wise guy was much too busy with his come-on to acknowledge my tagging along. He was promising the man (whose stiffness suggested he’d already had an earful) that it was soon to be Christmas in April. It was coming up get-down time. I coughed once or twice to let him know I was there.
We were kicking through a rubbish-filled back yard where a rusty clothes wringer, half sunk in mud, did a poor impression of a wishing well. There was a foul-smelling wooden privy on top of which sat a featherless rooster, like a weather vane come partially alive. A clothesline, strung from the outhouse to the porch of a narrow three-story building, sported an array of ladies’ bright waving scanties. They bussed your cheek as you stooped to pass underneath. With Lucifer still arm-in-arm with his client, we mounted the tilting back steps. Through a screen door we entered a passage that was dense with a stew of odors. Dry rot, boiled meat, and cat spray were what I recognized, but what I didn’t recognize, I somehow associated with sin. All along the dim passage Lucifer kept insisting that his man was about to think he was dead or dreaming. “Gon think you the Lawd High Muckamuck a Fanny Land.” Then we rounded a staircase at whose foot was a bamboo curtain, which the wise guy flung dramatically apart.
What I’d been prepared to see, I saw: a cavern of topaz light inhabited by languid mermaids. Then I blinked and a tawdry room appeared. It was a room that hadn’t decided whether to be an exotic harem or a more or less respectable parlor, and so made halfhearted pretensions toward each. There were cheesy chintz draperies through which the sunlight was sifted into a fine brown dust, brass cuspidors anchoring the corners of a woven carpet, floor lamps covered in veils of red gauze. On top of a cast-iron mantelpiece, framing a gas stove, was a collection of guttering aromatic candles. (They had been poured into the shapes of bearded heads, these candles, their features melted to monstrous stalactites.) There was a neon clock, an enamel Dixie Peach calendar on a water-stained wall, and a portrait of a gimlet-eyed Jesus with a rich golden tan. A footstool supported a phonograph playing a record of what sounded like a tomcat in the rain. Around the phonograph, relaxing in moss-grown armchairs and sunk in a deep-cushioned divan, were several women of dusky hue.
They were wearing kimonos in orchid prints and pastel dressing gowns. Some of the gowns were left carelessly open, revealing silk shimmies and stockings rolled to the knee. One of them, with her crossed leg kicking, her full lips in a pout like a lilac bow, was sniffing powder from a pillbox with a straw. Another, whose buttery bosom was barely contained by a torn lace border, rolled the condensation from a jar of chartreuse liquid round her brow. A yellow girl in a short white slip was kneeling beside the draperies, her wavy ocher hair spread across the wing of a table. Standing over her, a turbaned woman in a skin-tight housedress licked a pinkie to test the heat of the flatiron in her hand. She made a similar gesture with sizzling sound effects as she touched the finger to the curve of her backside. When she put down the iron on the girl’s lush hair, the room was suffused with an odor of burnt oranges.
Meanwhile on the divan, a pair of ladies sharing a single cushion, their arms about each other’s shoulders, made turtledove noises as they passed a pipe back and forth. From its shallow clay bowl rose arabesques of azure smoke, out of which you might imagine that the room had just materialized.
“Frail sustahs, may I have yo undivide tention if you please!” This was Lucifer demanding to be heard, flagging the women with his cap, though not one of them so much as bothered to look his way. “I have the distink pleasure,” he went on undaunted, “of introduce to you Mistah…” He turned toward the dapper client, who only grunted. “Mistah Rather-Not-Say,” christened Lucifer, “a traveler in notion what tooken a notion to sample y’all wares.”
He grinned in appreciation of his own turn of phrase and, his mission apparently accomplished, held his empty cap under the traveling gent’s nose. But the gent proved as tight with his pocketbook as with his name. This prompted Lucifer to expand on the special generosity of the colored traveling salesman, who understood the value of a hard-earned dollar, and so forth. When it began to look like the proceedings would not be hastened any other way, the gent dropped some change in the cap; and when the cap never moved, he was forced to cough up some more, each coin increasing the width of Lucifer’s grin. It made you wonder what it would take to extend the grin a full three hundred and sixty degrees.
Summoned from dreams, the pair of ladies rose in unison from the divan, moving in a fluid traipse toward the traveling salesman. Stationed in what I took to be relative safety (between the doorpost and a fishbowl on a pedestal), I watched them remove his straw hat and muss his freshly embrocated hair. The hair remained in upstanding spikes like a woodpecker’s crest. By the time they’d enticed him into the depths of the divan, they had his coat off, his tie undone, his paisley suspenders pulled down over his shoulders. They’d picked his pockets, relieving him of wallet and watch, never mind his unshakable composure of moments before. Rather than made comfortable, he looked, as he slumped between them, succumbing to their dalliance, like a patient being prepared for surgery.
Clearly amused by his client’s broken defenses, Lucifer couldn’t resist adding insult to injury. “When they done with you, m’fine feather frien,” he taunted, “you ain’t remember yo name do you got one.”
It was then that the building began to shake. Maybe I was a little distraught, because my first thought was that the city was on a major fault line. Crevices might be rupturing the surface of the earth, broadening the lagoon till the distance between this place and my father’s shop was unbridgeable. With every tremor the record skipped, the tomcat hiccuped. Then the bamboo parted beside me with a sound like breaking glass and the seismic disturbance stopped, its source having descended the stairs and entered the parlor.
Keeping my head down at first, I saw her feet stuffed into worn mules, the protruding toes wrapped for bunions like bonneted babies. Gathering courage, I saw the thick maple trunks of her legs. She was wearing a flowery housecoat as large as a landscape, hung on hulking shoulders surmounted by a perspiring, monolithic head. Her hair was a nest of curlers over which she was pulling on a tangerine wig.
“Loosfer boy,” she singsonged in a genial, high-pitched voice, “you got some rascal mouf almighty on you. It gon get you strung up one a these day.” With a movement that was all of a piece, nimble despite her bulk, she snatched the flat bottle out of the wise guy’s coat and cuffed his ear. She uncorked it and took a deep pull before consigning it to a pocket of her housecoat. “Everybody gettin quainted in here?” she continued in her cheerful vein. “Now you gals make the genleman feel to home. Sugar Monkey, don’t be mess with his private e-fex, you hear, or I switch ya.” She wiped her glazed forehead with the bladderlike back of her hand. “Do one a y’all kindly loan me yo hosanna fan? It a mite sticky this afternoon.”
So far, happily forgotten, I’d been enjoying a measure of invisibility. But as the fat lady plodded forward, smiling with a menacing sweetness at the beleaguered salesman, I began to feel pretty vulnerable myself. I hugged the wall, managing, as I edged toward a corner, to sidle into the wooden pedestal supporting the fishbowl. The pedestal toppled with a resounding thud, though not before I was able to get under the bowl. Then, with all eyes upon me, it was the barbershop all over again.
The fat lady pivoted her head on neckless shoulders, giving a malevolent squint that nailed me in place. Trying not to cower, I presented the bowl of flat-headed, mustachioed fish like a peace offering. She pointed a pudgy finger and changed her tune. “What this?” she inquired, frowning. Her voice, having dropped several octaves, was practically a baritone now, a voice that you felt like a growling stomach.
I turned hopefully toward Lucifer, who was looking like he couldn’t quite place me either. Was I supposed to come up with another coin? He circled me warily, chewing his lip, yet to decide whether it behooved him to identify me twice in one day. I urged him with a look to be big about this. In the end, please God, he awarded me a conciliatory wink, whispering the word “supper” as he relieved me of the dingy fish. He raised the pedestal and replaced the bowl.
“This here be Mistah Harry from the pawnshops,” he volunteered at length, though his usual hubris seemed a little subdued in the presence of the giantess. “He have come down to try his luck at the policy sweepstake. Meantime I be scortin him round the Negro quarter, kinda edumacate him bout the lay a the land.” His voice swelled as he tugged at my sleeve, which caused me to stumble forward. “Mistah Harry”—always the soul of diplomacy—“I delight for yo honah to meet my gracious Aunt Honey, the very one have fetch I an my brother out the bullrush. She’m the awful grand propriatricks of this fine stablishment, which it is known far and wide as the Baby Doll Hotel.”
I looked up at her avalanche of flesh, the chins rolling in terraces toward her bosom, where the whole prodigious mudslide disappeared into the arbor of her billowing housecoat. My thoughts turned from earthquakes to volcanos.
“Happy to know you,” I stammered, a salutation that came out like a question. “I’m sure,” I added, hoping to resolve the ambiguity. I even went so far as to extend a hand, which, because of my nervous condition, shook itself. This earned me a sonorous horse laugh from Aunt Honey. The windowpanes rattled, the floorboards buckled like waves.
“Got nice manners, don’t he,” she nickered, coming closer to drop her heavy hand on my shoulder, further weakening my knees. Then, sharing the wind from her fluttering fan (which might have blown me away but for her leaden grip on my shoulder), she was ominous again, her narrowed eyes nearly lost in the folds of her lacquered face. “Mistah Harry,” she inquired, placing her fan-holding hand on my other shoulder to correct the list, “yo people know where you at?”
Detecting a way out, since out of this fix was where I was definitely ready to get, I wanted to tell her no. I wanted to say that as a matter of fact, given the unaccountable length of my absence, my people were probably speculating on my whereabouts even now. That is, if they hadn’t already panicked, notifying the authorities, who might be tracking me down as we spoke. But the best I could manage was a tongue-tied shake of the head.
Meanwhile one of the ladies had glided over. It was the chartreuse sipper, rampant tsitskehs nosing curiously out of the torn lace of her camisole, who began to run her fingers through my hair. “Bout nappy as a home boy” was her disappointed conclusion, though it didn’t discourage her from continuing to tease. Then another pair of hands, very slender and cloyingly fragrant, began to snake their way around my ribcage from behind. They invaded my shirtfront from which a button popped.
Aunt Honey stepped back to cock her head and fold her ham-size forearms, the flab hanging off them like unfurling sails. “What game it was you say that Mistah Harry come lookin to play?” she insinuated. Lucifer, to whom I silently petitioned for help, favored me with his most patronizing grin so far.
Ticklish as I was ordinarily, I couldn’t laugh. In fact, no sound escaped my throat beyond a miserable whimpered squeak. It was the squeak you sometimes heard out of bubbling mashed potatoes. In seconds I would be reduced to the same degraded circumstance as what was left of the traveling salesman on the divan. The ladies—with their hair of floating seaweed, with their gills and their tailfins shaped like simpering lips—would drag me down, and I would drown here in a fleshpot a couple of blocks and an ocean away from Kaplan’s Loans.
The problem was that I didn’t think I would particularly mind. They could have done whatever they wanted with me, if I hadn’t been so scared. If good old fear hadn’t rattled my bones, even as they were turning to mush, and given me the strength to break free.
“Thank you for your hospitality!” I cried out like bloody murder. As well as I was able on rubber legs, I bolted through the bamboo curtain and made blindly for the nearest crack of light.
I don’t think I’d ever been so happy to see the pawnshop. Having wheeled around the corner from Third Street, I burst in panting on my papa, who was poring over his books. “I’m back!” I declared, like he should slaughter a fatted calf. Not only did he fail to look up at my entrance, to take note of how recent experience had marked my face for life with a terrible knowledge, not only did he ignore his only son, who elsewhere had brought brothels and barbershops to heel, but he never even missed the pastries I hadn’t bought with the money I’d forfeited.
Later that night in my alcove I couldn’t sleep. I wrestled with my pillow, which kept turning into a woman the color of twilight. Then I wrestled with my conscience. After all, there was a point of honor at stake: the matter of forty-five cents change that had yet to be refunded. That Lucifer, he was some kind of sharper all right, and I for one didn’t like being taken in. Of course you could argue that the wise guy had bailed me out of a couple of tight situations, never mind how he might have gotten me into them in the first place. And as for having been careless with Kaplan capital, so what? You had to get up awfully early to be more careless than Kaplan himself, who threw away cash like confetti at a parade.
But if it wasn’t the money, then what was it that prompted me to put on my glasses, to slip out of my pajamas and into my pants at such an advanced hour of the night? Was it really that I thought I had something to prove to some motor-mouthed colored bunco artist? It’s the principle of the thing, I decided, and left it at that, stuffing some dirty clothes under the covers—this in case my father should look in on me, as he sometimes did when he came home from the shop. I pulled on my sneakers and straddled the open window, swinging into the branches of the blossoming mimosa tree.
The spring peepers peeped, the katydids ululated like bicycle bells. The night air, laced with honeysuckle and the high taint of the river, went immediately to my head; I felt, give or take forty-five cents, like a million bucks. I dropped into the alley and picked my way through rank grass, stepping over the corroded pedal cars. Rather than turn toward North Main, which was certainly quiet enough, I preferred to seek out other alleys and back streets. That way, with the stars as my compass, I traveled toward Beale by a kind of underground railroad.
At the corner of Beale and Hernando, there was the usual crush of frantic activity despite the late hour. I walked along briskly, pumping my arms, so that anyone looking would think that the white boy must be on urgent business, let him pass. Intending to head straight for the tonsorial parlor, I glanced to neither the left nor the right. I tried also to disregard their voices, lest some discouraging word tossed my way should spoil my good mood. Still, I couldn’t help catching the odd remark: somebody making supernatural claims for an alto saxophone, somebody threatening to send somebody else home directly—“What you mean home?” “Mean yo home over Jordan, fool!”—somebody saying, “Whoa now, looka here Michael, the man be smoke up the road!”
It took me the better part of a block to put on the brakes and turn around. I hadn’t quite counted on how apprehensive I would be to see him. He was standing next to a fireplug in his undershirt and rug coat, his hands thrust nearly to the elbows in his gaping pockets. It was a posture studiously duplicated by his brother beside him in the ragged straw hat and overalls.
“Mistah Harry,” commented Lucifer when I’d come back within greeting distance, “you must be the most runninest white folks in town.”
I wanted to explain to him how, when last seen, I wasn’t exactly running away. It was just that I’d remembered I had important matters to attend to. There was no end to the responsibilities associated with a pawnshop, he should understand. But instead, still winded from my long dogtrot through the alleys from North Main Street, I leaned casually against the fireplug, like I was accustomed to taking the air at this hour in shvartzer neighborhoods.
There followed an awkward moment when Lucifer, who’d hailed me amiably enough, retreated to a more impersonal “Hidey.”
“Hidey,” I replied with perhaps a little too much bluster, picturing in my agitation a colored girl picking edelweiss on a mountainside. Then I braced myself and came right out with it. “That forty-five cents you still owe me.” At the mention of this Lucifer made a face like he hadn’t the foggiest. Like, even if he knew what I was talking about, it didn’t erase the fact that certain parties were starting to become a nuisance. So be it, I thought: a nuisance is better than the chicken-livered wonder I was determined he shouldn’t see again. “Course, it’s all the same to me,” I went on, “but now that I think of it, that forty-five cents … How much, you know, sightseeing will it get me?”
Lucifer reared back with his hands on his hips to size me up, shaking his head like I just wouldn’t do. He tugged at an earlobe to coax the subtle workings of his brain, then looked toward the silent twin for advice. When none was forthcoming, nothing but the other’s somber vacancy, Lucifer nodded anyway; the point was well taken. Pulling a toothpick out of his cap, he began to pick at a point of light that gleamed from a prominent incisor.
“I have you to know,” he formally announced, “that I an my honable brothah, we bout to commence our shank-a-the-evenin round. Got to visit certain underworld stablishment. Be proud do you woosh to company the bofe of us two.”
It was a dare only thinly disguised as an invitation. But before I could puff myself up enough to answer, the wise guy had already started to walk away. “Jus say uncle when you done had enough,” he added over the shoulders of himself and his brother, who shambled in lockstep at his heels.
I told myself that this was what I’d come for, wasn’t it?—though I wished he’d given me time to study the pros and cons. But never mind. I intended to show him what I was made of, how I had graduated in a single afternoon from a fraidycat to a full-fledged I-don’t-know-what. The word “goat” came to mind.
The way the kid behaved, you’d have thought that he owned the street, which I was perfectly content to believe. Dogging Lucifer’s coattails, slightly to the rear of his brother’s single-strapped overalls, I was happy to be a shadow once removed. Hadn’t I been sore thumb enough for one day? I kept close behind them with my profile low, imitating a little (as did his brother Michael) Lucifer’s loose-limbed walk—the way his hands scooped the air as in a swimmer’s stroke. Once I paused only long enough to do a double take at the spectacle of a one man band. Then I learned, as I hurried to catch up with them, just how much I didn’t want to be left behind.
When I asked what exactly was the nature of these evening rounds, Lucifer turned to say only, “Round mean lak in a circle.” But pretty soon it became apparent that what they were doing was running errands. They were couriers, delivering messages to men in Stetsons with snakeskin hatbands. Men with hair like crows’ wings and parts like zippered seams, with gold-inlaid stars in their teeth. These were none too friendly characters whom Lucifer didn’t seem to mind distracting from intense pursuits. They might be, for instance, involved in drawing a bead down the shaft of a custom pool cue; they might be blowing on a pair of dice or shuffling cards with such dexterity that it looked like they were playing accordion—when Lucifer chose to butt in.
With his mouth running in its fluent patter, he took what looked to me to be dangerous liberties, hailing these rough customers by name. “Hello Hardface. Shithouse, how do, y’all still on the ruination train? 01 Nine Tongue here be drinkin that ugly milk, fo long his head turn to a biscuit. What say Mastah Ajax, which his mama she be teachin me to lawdy-lawd. An they’s Race Riot hissef, what I’m hear got him a sissy man…”
From the depths of his fathomless pockets, he would draw forth the ribbon-bound envelopes that the men sniffed discerningly. Then they appointed the scholar among them to read aloud, for the edification of all, the sometimes amorous, sometimes petulant (often vengefully poison-pen) billets-doux from the ladies of the Baby Doll Hotel. After that the scholar, turned scribe, would draft a dictated reply, naming rendezvous and such. This was dutifully scrolled and handed back to Lucifer along with his gratuity. Sometimes there were tokens exchanged in the transaction—say, a lady’s frilly nothing for a gentleman’s solid-gold something—which Lucifer might fetch from and return to an office annex under his brother’s headrag. Occasionally the tidings were not so welcome: subpoenas and court summonses for those who used the Baby Doll as their mailing address. Then I noticed that the wise guy’s tip wasn’t so readily forthcoming.
Sometimes Lucifer carried their markers. These were items toward which the gamblers, usually seated in front of a depleted stack of chips, would profess a deep sentimental attachment. They were rabbit’s feet, cat’s-eyes, souvenir bullets dug out of old gunshot wounds—apparently anything would do. One character at a rummy table offered the lesser half of a wishbone; another yanked a dogtooth out of his grimacing head, spitting gobs of blood onto the floor. Then the markers were dutifully carried to fat men eating ribs in airless back rooms. (Rooms even farther back than the back rooms were where the gambling took place.) The fat men would in turn, and according to the reputation of the man who’d sent the token, either grumble, spit, or flick ashes, which meant to get lost. Or else they would hand over a wad of grease-stained bills.
That’s how it was that I got to see the Monarch Club of evil repute. “This a bad luck house where the boss man get put on the spot bout oncet a week,” Lucifer had informed me, making a revolver out of his forefinger and thumb. “Putty soon ain’t nobody be boss less they dead already, livin mens need not apply. See that skillethead over by the do?” He pointed toward an obsidian gorilla in a double-breasted suit. “Tha’s Big Six the take-off man, like to mess with folks’ bones an he ain’t no doctah. So ugly he hurt yo feelins, now don’t he?”
If he was trying to scare me, then all right, I was scared. What else was new? But I was also glad that he’d begun to take the time to talk to me. I was glad that he remembered I’d come along, even if it was only to remind me of the terrible, sinister places we were in. Besides, had I decided to break and run—which I confess that I was once or twice inclined to do—I would have been on my own again. And the thought of facing the street all alone, now that I’d gotten used to the cover of their company, made me stick even closer to the twins.
When he realized that I wasn’t going anywhere, Lucifer eventually began to drop the scare tactics. Then he was anxious, in his proprietary manner, that I shouldn’t overlook the classier features of a nightclub’s decor. “Ain’t nothin can compare this side a King Keedoozle commode!” he’d boasted as we entered the Club Panama, waving a hand that took in brass rails and leather banquettes, a fairy ring of lights around the dance floor. There was a raised bandstand where the soloist for the Rhythm Hounds, a lady horn player in a gown like an aluminum rain barrel, had been brought to her knees by her own shrill signature. People at the tables jerked and squirmed as if the music were running loose in their clothes. They hallelujahed as the lady unbent her high note and allowed it to dissolve in the air. Then it seemed that the music had vaporized into the lavender smoke that hung over the green gaming tables at the rear of the room.
As the night wore on, Lucifer became ever more expansive, as if he’d made a decision that nothing should be lost on me. The sights that had been previously supposed to inspire fear now seemed to serve only for my enlightenment. In Pee Wee’s Saloon, bobbing his head in time, he called my attention to an upright piano: “This what you call the hesitashum beat, an tha’s the very bar it own self where Mistah Handy done first writ down the blues”—indicating it the way my grandfather might have pointed toward Sinai.
On top of the bar, in the absence of Mr. Handy, a kiss-curled tootsie was lifting her dress to bang together cymbal-clad knees. A dusty crowd was milling about in the acid yellow light, some dancing a slow drag near the piano, others clustered around the bumpered crap tables. These tables, as Lucifer (like a flea in my ear) divulged confidentially, could be converted to billiards the second that the cops arrived. By the same token, the roulette wheel became a clock on the wall, and the lottery barrel a canary cage. In fact, the whole place was fraught with contrivances that instantly transformed the furniture from its felonious purposes back again to innocence. Which was maybe why Pee Wee’s was also known as the Garden of Eden.
There was a portrait on the wall of a giant Negro with a head like a polished plum, straddling an angry ocean in which a ship was going down. Again Lucifer: “Tha’s Jack Johnson was worl champeen, which the XX Titanic have refuse to carry him on board.” Beneath the painting was a bench where a group of old men, several of them amputees, were holding guitars and beat-up cornets like badges of office. These, I was told, were the emeritus musicians whose years on the road had cost them literally an arm and a leg. But as Lucifer assured me: “It don’t take but three fanger to play the blues Delta-style.”
Here I would have liked to toss in a tidbit of my own, just to show I wasn’t so dumbstruck as some. Unlike the tagalong brother Michael, for instance, I had a mouth. I tried to tell the wise guy that in my own neighborhood there was also a bench. There the old kockers sat in front of another tonsorial parlor, missing digits that the Cossacks had relieved them of long years ago. But before I could finish my footnote, Lucifer was in motion again.
Even on the street he made every minute count. Brazenly he collared members of the colored baseball league strutting in their red-socked uniforms, their cleats on the sidewalk like munching teeth. He stopped the roustabouts and country boys stumbling out of juke joints, pie-eyed from too much temptation. He hooked thumbs in the bibs of their overalls and stood on tiptoe to whisper in their ears. Then they would lick their lips, their eyes waxing banjo, and turn over whatever they had in their pockets. Like sheep they would follow Lucifer and Michael (and Harry!) around the corner and through the portals of the Baby Doll Hotel.
As the designated envoys of their redoubtable Aunt Honey, the wards of the Baby Doll had carte blanche everywhere. And Lucifer, he was a regular Pied Piper of Beale Street. Running with him, I began to feel almost indestructible, like when someone touches the Baal Shem’s robe in a holy story. So long as you hung on tight, you could go anywhere; you could travel out of time to paradise. Or you could plunge into the thick of some dank and flyblown hole-in-the-wall, where Lucifer would shout “Western Union!” or any of a dozen variations on “Open, Sesame” to clear the way.
Then we would nudge and shove through an overheated press of stump drinkers, of dancers shaking in the throes of the shimmy-she-wobble. (I was beginning to pick up the lingo.) We crossed floors so sticky with tobacco juice, bellywash, and blood, for all I knew, that they squished like a swamp under the soles of your shoes. I heard hysterical laughter and language that could have wilted flowers. I saw cryptic high signs and tempers at the end of short fuses, a man in a corner fingering the outline of the pistol in his pocket, a woman on a table skirt-dancing herself into a stupor. I saw rose-colored lights illuminating the cavern of a crooner’s mouth, his uvula vibrating like the devil’s own speed bag. I saw the lights playing off sweat-spangled shoulders and cheeks, saw them flash from a drawn knife blade. In short, I kibbitzed to my heart’s content a life that was never meant for my eyes. A life that waited until gentlefolk were safely tucked in their beds before coming out to play.
If anybody looked askance at me or aimed some barbed remark my way, I never noticed. In league with Lucifer, I’d begun to take it for granted that I shared his immunity. Not only did I feel unthreatened, but I’d begun to assume that my presence was as naturally accepted (or ignored) as the twins’. That’s why I missed my stride when a gambler in one of the dives, his splayed nose spread like a sand dollar over his face, brusquely called me to his table.
“Hey white folks,” he’d tipped back his chair to ask me, “y’all mind do I rub yo hade for good luck?” After I’d obliged and he’d frowned his dissatisfaction with my hair, that it lacked the fine texture he’d been led to expect from my race, I froze. I groped for an excuse. But before my backbone could turn entirely to jelly, Lucifer was there beside me to set him straight.
“He ain’t white,” he was sorry to have to inform the gambler. “He Jewrish.”