IT was during that rumorous dappled hour when evening spreads like the latest scandal, before the night’s true traffic starts. When such whore’s foliage as vermilion bras and chartreuse panties still hang, in the airless heat of backyard lines, between G-strings that once were silver. A joint-tog jungle festooned by garments of such bright shame as stay washable. Above a vegetation of contraceptives lying in puddles of gray decay.
This is the early-buyers’ hour when women dust their navels for afternoon bugs who can’t wait till evening to fly: all those hurrying from loneliness in order to preserve their solitude later. The city was full of lonesome monsters who couldn’t get drunk any more.
At The Hundred Grassfires the night’s first girl stood in the night’s first door; feeling sweat molding her pink pajama to her thighs.
The whole street felt molded, thigh to thigh. Perdido Street was a basement valet shop with both irons working. In the round of her armpits the girl felt sweat creeping in the down.
She did not solicit; it was too hot for that. She had lived fifteen years in Chicago without once feeling warm; now she had lived almost ten in New Orleans without once feeling cool.
It was so hot that at the sight of a man she could feel both of their watery navels stick. So she merely crooked her small finger now and then and let it go at that.
The courts were against these cork-heeled puppets, the police were against them as well. Politicians used them; editors mocked them. Doctors disdained them. Judges and ministers were sustained by them. Daughters, sisters and wives were perpetually outraged by them. So mothers organized against them. Their own pimps conspired regularly against them.
Now a man wearing a shadow for a cap marched up and down, across the street, below a curious sign—
The missions were dispatching mercenaries announcing that Christ Himself had decided against them.
The man under the sign cut slantwise across the street to give the girl full benefit of his warning. She turned her hip to give him a bit of her backside; simply to show how little she needed him. Like all the women who kept the doors, Chicago Kitty knew that, like the police, the columnists, the courts, the doctors, the preachers and the pimps, he wanted to save her only to have her. For all the indignation these women provoked, no one ever wanted them to be anything but whores.
The prostitute never sent for anyone’s husband. Husbands came to her. She never sent for a brother or son; sons and brothers came to her.
In the parlor behind Kitty sat other outlaws, eight nine ten, who had died of uselessness one by one. Yet now they lived on, behind veritable prairie-fires of wishes, while prying salt-water taffy from between their teeth. Envy and ennui divided each.
“A light drizzle wound be good for trade,” Kitty heard a man’s voice say behind her, “but a heavy fall would rain it.”
That would be that appleknocker, an apprentice pimp calling himself Big Stingaree, recently arrived from nowhere in a red shirt and high-heeled Spanish boots; who’d be gone once more before the heels ran down.
The juke began complaining about everybody—
It isn’t fair for you to taunt me
You only want me for today
A small man wearing a clerical collar, under a face favoring a raccoon’s, skipped up—he was built like a bag of sand and somewhat favored a badger, too. As Kitty stepped aside to let him pass, she caught a whiff of violet talc. The juke went on complaining—
It isn’t fair for you to want me
You only want me for today.
A moment later she followed him inside just to see what he really wanted.
He was pulling off his collar—then flinging it across the room, then challenging the house:
“Bring on your beasts of the wild!”
“Are you sure you’re in the right place, mister?” the appleknocker pimp, standing a full head higher, inquired.
“Oh, I know what you people do here,” Bag-of-Sand lowered his voice confidentially—“I know what you do.”
“What we do best,” a girl holding a poodle dyed pink remarked, “is pitch people out on their skulls.”
Bag-of-Sand laughed into the palm of his hand.
“Exactly what do you think you’re geared to, mister?” the apprentice pimp wanted to know, stepping closer.
“Exactly what am I geared to?” Bag-of-Sand glanced up. “My dear young man, I’m exactly geared to the girlies; exactly. Otherwise why would I be here exactly? Or is this a hardware store?” And turning his back on the slow-witted macker, he began an explanation of the Immaculate Conception that not even Mama, the mulatto madam of The Hundred Grassfires, had ever heard before.
“Parthenogenesis is scientifically possible,” he explained as though the question had been troubling him for some time, “but it can only occur in the haploid chromosomes. As these are only half the size of the somatic chromosomes, they result in dwarfism. That was what happened to Mary.”
“The hell with all that,” the apprentice pimp decided. “How about some action?”
“Let him speak,” Mama overruled the apprentice, “I know I’ll never die sanctified. But I do hope at least to die blessed.”
Bag-of-Sand began pacing up and down, in a sweat from more than the climate; one hand on his belly and one on his head—“and furthermore I’ll tell you how the Church covered up the scientific truth that Jesus Christ was a dwarf. Every time the Church fathers came to a biblical reference to Jesus as ‘tiny,’ ‘little,’ ‘undersized,’ or ‘small,’ they changed it to ‘humble,’ ‘meek,’ ‘gentle,’ ‘modest,’ or ‘sweet.’ I’ve done research all over the world on this and I can tell you: The Church has perpetuated a hoax!”
“Are you for action or aren’t you, buddy?” Big Stingaree wanted to know.
“Well, in May, 1929, I wrote C-U-N-T on a convent wall in red chalk—how’s that for action?”
Big Stingaree clapped his hand to his forehead and staggered backward to show that the mind boggled at the very thought.
“Not only that”—Bag-of-Sand seemed anxious to paint as black a picture of himself as possible—“I was wearing the cloth at the time!”
“No matter how you look at it,” Mama deliberated solemnly, “it’s a bad situation. I hope you’ve confessed, young man.”
“Not formally,” Bag-of-Sand explained, “but later in the same year, while passing the same convent, I wrote Jesus Saves where I’d written that other.”
“What were you wearing,” Mama wanted to know, “when you wrote Jesus Saves where you’d written that other?”
“A sports jacket and huarachos.”
“I see,” Mama said sorrowfully. “You write something like that while wearing the cloth and then come back six months later dressed like Bing Crosby, scribble Jesus Saves, and think you’ve missed purgatory. It isn’t as easy as all that, young man.”
“The Pope himself couldn’t get you off now,” Big Stingaree decided. “How about a bit of action as long as you’re sunk anyhow?”
Bag-of-Sand agreed. For he was geared to the girlies just as he’d said.
In fact, this ghee could scarcely remember one day to the next where he’d lain the night before. And as often as not, he wound up in the very same sack as he had at noon disheveled.
Twitchet-struck and pussy-simple, snatch-mad and skirt-sick, he was a side-street solitary who had nothing but a petticoat with seven ruffles on it in his mind. One who dreamed by night of nothing but what he’d do to the girls tomorrow. This was a sinner whose family had once had him committed because he had decided he didn’t want to be a priest after all. Any man who didn’t want to be a priest was obviously out of his mind. There had been simply nothing left to do but to commit him.
What had thereafter emerged, obsessed by myths, was no longer of either the church or the world, but the ghost of a ghost who roamed a curious twilit land between the world and the church.
A land where the thousand images of sex stood transfixed like stone ruins in a desert place. Lost in a world where sex had gone blind, deaf, mute, cold: and alone as a seaward stone.
“So long as I’m sunk I might as well have some fun out of sinking,” he reasoned Jesuitically. Then, turning to the girl holding the poodle dyed pink, he inquired, “What may your little friend’s name be, miss?”
“Heavensent,” the girl assured him.
“Why, then Heaven must have sent him,” Bag-of-Sand deduced. And offering the girl his arm, all three, girl, poodle and defrocked priest, proceeded up the unsanctified stair.
Now the blinds, drawn fast, held the room in a dappled gloom where
dimly fell the shadows, one by one, of bars. And in this dusk like a jailhouse dusk the juke sang on and on.
In our little penthouse
We’ll always contrive
To keep love and romance always alive
Just over the Hudson
Just over the drive —
The moment the song stopped, the creaking of the overhead fans began, regular and slow. The women shifted restlessly from doorway to divan, lighting fresh cigarettes or opening fresh Dr. Peppers at each new post; yet never finishing either a drink or a cigarette.
“You never know when a trick is a cop or somebody missing one bubble,” the Chicago girl complained.
“When he starts in to strangle you, chances are he ain’t a cop,” Kitty explained, “it’s why I keep saying it would be best if every trick took two girls. Then when he got your neck in his hands, your buddy could holler for help. ”
They never finished anything. Restlessness was their common affliction. Reba was sure the fan was giving her a chill, Floralee wanted to sing; and Kitty had to know why she wasn’t permitted to spike a Coke with gin. While Mama worried lest she should die unblessed.
The girls crowded forward in their watery gloom, shading their eyes against the street: No one had seen the cab drive up.
It came out of nowhere. Like a cab that wheels all night through a misting dream.
All saw step forth in the greenish light a naval lieutenant in full regalia; a seagoing executive in rimless glasses: A hero of sea fights yet unfought. Bearing like a rainbow across his sky-blue breast all the honors a peacetime navy could pin.
Bag-of-Sand, wherever he’d gone, was immediately forgotten when this sight stepped out on Perdido Street.
Mama simply scuttled to the curb. Mama had never captured a prospect so glorious to behold.
Yet he seemed reluctant of capture. For he held Mama there in some earnest discussion; speaking low so as to keep his driver from hearing.
“Mammy-freak,” Mama thought she heard him saying, “stick out so fah behind she hahdly got time to make a child behave.”
Mama took one step closer. “I don’t quite catch what you’re saying, Officer.”
He cupped his lips, leaning toward her—“Made a lemon pie. Made me a lemon pie, little lemon pie all mah own. ”
Mama took a step back. “Lemon?” she asked. “All your own?”
“The very day I broke the chum.”
“Then I have just the girl for you,” Mama decided. For whatever this rascal had in mind, she couldn’t afford to lose a customer so prosperous. “Every man likes a little change now and then. I know exactly how you feel.”
He drew himself up. “Nobody knows how a mammy-freak feels,” he informed her point-blank. “How could anyone but another mammy-freak know how a mammy-freak feels?”
If it was an organization, he was the president. Mama simply turned to go, but he held her back with a wheedling touch. “You know your-self,” he cajoled her, “how they stick out in back.”
“Who stick out in back?”
“Why, all of them; especially when they get in a hurry. Now, admit it.”
Mama shook off his hand. “Who stick out? Who get in a hurry? Admit what?” Mama was getting angry but she didn’t know at what.
“Why, old black mammies, of course,” he told her as though everyone knew old black mammies were the coming thing.
“Maybe you ought to come inside before it rains,” Mama invited him, suddenly feeling she’d be safer in the parlor.
“It isn’t going to rain.” Navy sounded certain as God and began unfolding a little apron from under his coat. He bent to tie it about her waist. It was striped green and white like peppermint; as he tied it Mama plucked without strength at the apron’s price-tag. He picked the tag off himself and the cab dusted off in disgust.
“A good many black-mammy-freaks visit you, I presume?” the officer assumed.
“It’s been several days since one called,” Mama told him. Standing in her Aunt Jemima apron, she now felt she had become the prospect.
“My men call me ‘Commander,’ ” he announced.
“That,” Mama decided inwardly, “isn’t what my chicks are going to call you.”
And led him inside The Hundred Grassfires like leading a child home.
Inside the parlor the six-year-old black boy with the mind of a forty-year-old pimp, the one his grandmother called Warren Gameliel but whom the women called the King of the Indoor Thieves, stood on a divan wearing shoes that belonged to a grown man and nothing else but a shirt.
A shirt that barely reached his navel, revealing a hide not exactly high yellow. The King was in fact closer to high brown. He was even closer to dark brown.
Warren Gameliel was black as a kettle in hell.
Truth to tell, the King looked to be a cross between a Black Angus calf and something fished out of the Mississippi on a moonless night. One shade darker and this kid would have disappeared.
“Meet my grandson,” Mama introduced him to the Commander. “Ain’t he just fine?”
Turning his head proudly upon his iron-colored throat, the King fluttered his lashes modestly at the woman’s flattery.
“Age six years, waist thirty-two and a half, weight one hundred and two, and she asks is he fine,” the woman called Hallie Dear mocked Mama fondly. The big overdressed man saluted the small naked one.
“Pledge allegiance, Boy-Baby,” Mama encouraged the King to perform his single accomplishment. But the King simply planted his black toes wider, as though saying he’d have to know more about this gold-braid wheeler-dealer before he’d pledge his teething ring.
Then Reba honked with hollow glee: under the shirt the boy was reacting to the scent of the half-naked woman like a baby bull.
“I do it back,” the King made his intention known.
“Ain’t you shamed,” Mama reproved him in a voice that simply donged with pride, “gettin’ a upper right in front of ladies?”
“He’ll be a pimp like everyone else,” Kitty prophesied.
“I worked for loryers,” Reba entered the stakes, “we specialized in tort’n’seizure.”
These women regarded Hallie Dear with an intermixture of admiration and pity. They felt she held herself aloof because she’d once taught school. At the same time they perceived that she was defenseless. Floralee alone loved and trusted the older woman.
But was there anyone Floralee didn’t trust? If this pale lost blonde wasn’t down the stairs by the time street-lamps came on, somebody went up and fetched her down. For should lamps come on or lamps stay dark, all was one to this pale lost blonde.
Nobody had counted (since nobody cared) how many lamps had gone down since the night she had stood where marquee lights flickered in an uncertain rain; and a cabbie had held a door wide for her. She had gotten in and offered him a pressed flower for her fare.
“I sing just ever so purty, mister,” she assured the officer now. “Only modesty songs, of course; for I don’t know vulgary words. May I recite a modesty poem?”
“Wait till you hear this loony holler,” Kitty warned him. “I think all they did in them hills was bury their dead.”
“Don’t begrudge the child,” Mama put her arm about Floralee’s shoulder to indicate she wasn’t one to begrudge any child, “she got the innocence God protects.”
“He’s got a strange notion of protection then, that’s my opinion,” Kitty told how she felt about everything.
And turned her back on the parlor.
What must I do to win a diadem
Floralee burst into song strung on a silver string—
When I reach that shining strand?
“Shh, honey,” Mama tried to quiet the demented girl, and turning apologetically to the naval prospect, explained, “this one is a regular angel.”
“She’s a whore like everyone else,” Kitty announced with her back still turned. Floralee cupped her face in her hands to hide her blush of shame.
“Anybody can be a whore,” added Kitty.
“Is that true?” the commander asked Mama seriously. “Can any one woman become a whore? Any woman at all?”
“Anyone at all,” Mama seemed optimistic. “Aren’t we all created free and equal?”
“Where do you keep your submarines?” Kitty turned abruptly on the officer.
“Why ask me a thing like that?”
“It would help me in my work—I’m a spy on the side.” Nobody laughed when Kitty turned to the juke.
“I feel rotten about everybody but myself,” she said aloud.
“I got half my choppers out ’n no ovalries,” Reba remembered, “the doctor said he never seen nothin’ like it. So what? I can still be a practical nurse without ovalries, can’t I? Hey! How’d you like all the cigarettes you can smoke, General? Just go down to American Tobacco ’n give my name; they’ll give you all you can haul in one trip.”
“Baby,” the girl called Big Five marveled, “I don’t know what you’re on, but I never heard nothing like it, either.”
“I do it back,” the King insisted, but Mama yanked the gold-braid cap, which he had taken off the commander’s head, far down over his eyes. As if by shutting off his vision she might improve his manners.
“I do it,” the infant insisted, warning everyone of what would happen the second he got this damned hat out of his eyes.
Somebody got the juke going. Somebody said, “Make mine a double.” And somebody else called for gin—
Mama don’t ’low no gee-tar playin’ here
the juke cried in dread—
Mama don’t 'low no banjo-playin’ here —
“Oh, I can sing purtier far than that,” Floralee boasted amid pleas, claims, threats, and tiny squeals. For now the women vied openly for the commander’s attention. While the King worked his thighs in a rage of blinded love but still couldn’t get that cap out of his eyes.
“I want you girls to respect our guest!” Mama began shouting, though nobody had yet gotten around to insulting him. “Look up to this man. Hear this! Hear this! Warren Gameliel, you little black fool, get the commander’s hat off your head this instant!”
“Mama!” Hallie began scolding Mama, “stop giving orders! We’re not in a battle!”
“This man represents the entire Atlantic fleet combined!” Mama cried out. “Warren Gameliel! Pledge allegiance!”
“She’s just being carried away,” Hallie explained to the officer. Brushing the other girls aside, she framed his face in her hands until he returned the look she gave.
“If you don’t behave, I’ll send you to the nigger school,” Mama threatened the King.
Outside the drunks were coming out of the country’s last speakeasies and the street-lamps began to move like the breasts of a young girl under the hands of a man who has bought too many. Warren Gameliel reached out blindly and secured a black stranglehold on the officer’s neck.
And in an odd little silence a girl’s voice said, “I was drunk, the jukebox was playing; I began to cry.” And all the air felt troubled by some cheap cologne.
“Our guest wants to say hello,” Hallie guessed; and pulled Navy’s head right against her breast. He nodded strengthless assent.
She helped him to rise and he rose; more like a sick man than one drunk.
“Send two double-gins to my room,” Hallie ordered Mama. “The rest of you drink whatever you want.”
A kerosene lamp lit Hallie’s room—one that might have served a whore of old Babylon: a narrow bed in hope of bread; a basin in hope of purity. A beaded portiere to keep mosquitoes out yet let a little music in. A scent of punk from an incense stick to bum off odors of whiskey or tobacco. A calendar from the year before and an image above it of something or other in hope of forgiveness for this or that. A whole world to millions since the first girl sold; and a world to millions yet.
The lamp’s brown glow on her amber gown made of Hallie a golden woman. For her eyes burned with a gray-green fire; and about her throat she wore a yellow band. Her gown fell off one shoulder but was kept from falling farther by the rise of her breast.
“No matter how often I trick,” she murmured aloud, “as soon as I’m with a man, I get shaky.”
“No need of even taking off your clothes,” he told her. “Nothing is going to happen.”
Hallie, always defensive about her darkness, was ready to be hurt: “Some men like dark girls best.”
“Nothing to do with it,” he explained, “I was brought up in a special way. Yet I’ll pay you for your time. I don’t mean charity.”
“I never turn down charity,” Hallie told him candidly, “I have too much pride for that. What kind of whore would I be then?” She held herself proudly upon her dishonored bed.
“I’m from Virginia,” he now thought she should know, “we go back to the Old Dominion.”
“It’s nice to have two homes, I’m sure,” she congratulated him.
He smiled gently; then cupped her ear to confide something—“It’s where Old Black Mammy come by with a broom ’n ’most knock you down—‘Stay outa mah way when ah’m cleanin’, boy!’—but when you stay out of the way here she come with bucket ’n mop ’n ’most knock you down again—‘Boy, when you gonna learn to behave?’—’n when you start behavin’, she come right at you—'Boy! You got nuthin’ to do all day but stand in mah way?’ ” His voice took on a secret excitement. “Wham! She give it to you good. Old Black Mammy got a heavy hand —‘Boy, you fixin’ to git yourself soaked?’ ”
He composed himself.
“Mister,” Hallie asked at last, “how long you been in this condition?”
The big flushed man, boylike yet strangely aged, ran his hand across his hair to be sure its part was in place. He was one of those men whose teeth are so well kept and whose hair is so well groomed that both appear to be false.
“Black Mammy’s been dead nineteen years,” he told Hallie, returning to his white pronunciation. “Hand and foot that woman waited on us; and when the day came that found her crippled, who was there left to wait on her? ‘Mammy,’ I told her, ‘you waited on me, now it’s my turn to wait on you.’ ” A mischievous light came into his eyes: “That wasn’t all I told her.”
“All right—what else?”
“I told her, ‘You made me behave, now it’s my turn to make you behave.’ ”
“Mister,” Hallie told him, “I really don’t take your meaning—couldn’t you get to the point?”
He crossed his large hands and looked at her evenly.
“I was working the chum when the handle snapped. The water from it was flooding the porch. When Black Mammy saw what I’d done, she aimed her hand at me. I slipped and fell trying to get away, so she pad-died me face down. I started hollering, pretending she was half killing me, when it really hardly hurt at all. That was the first time she made me behave.”
Hallie saw light however faintly.
“What happened exactly?”
“Exactly? Exactly what happens when a man is having a girl, exactly. And I’ve never been able to make it any other way since.” He laughed in the watery light. “Exactly.”
Hallie waited.
“That was when I was ten. She died when I was twenty-one. And the day she died, the last motion she made was to give me a backhanded slap on my bottom. To let me know she had understood all along.” He put his hand to his forehead. “I’m terribly tired, I don’t know why.”
“She must have been grateful for your care,” was all Hallie could think to say. For it came to her that this wasn’t a monster of the nastier sort: but only a boy playing commander with his nose still running.
“She was. As I’m grateful today for her. Who else but Mammy ever felt I was worth human care?”
“Mister,” Hallie told him quietly, “you don’t need a girl. You need a doctor.”
“There aren’t any doctors for black-mammy freaks,” he explained dryly; as though he’d tried looking one up in the city directory.
“Then just try to rest,” Hallie told him. “I’ll do what I can.”
“There’s money in my wallet. It’s in my coat,” he instructed her.
She took the coat off the chair and found the wallet. “I won’t take it all,” she assured him.
He didn’t look interested in her count.
He looked stricken.
Fast as she could pin, Hallie began preparing Mama for a great impersonation.
“You don’t think he stole his ship’s money, do you?” Mama had to know. “He isn’t going to get us all in trouble, is he?”
“You never made an easier dollar your whole enduring life,” Hallie reassured her. “He’s just a green boy kept on black titty too long. All you got to remember is he keeps getting in your way. Don’t hit him too hard—just hard enough. Make it look good. Getting whupped by his old black mammy is what he come here for—turn around so I can pin you.” She began stuffing a small pillow into Mama’s bosom. “The more you stick out in front the more you stick out behind. I’ll have you sticking out so far you’ll look like Madam Queen.”
“Girl, I was born in this country. You won’t catch me hitting no member of our armed forces.”
It was plain Mama hadn’t caught the play.
“Mama,” Hallie pleaded, “forget the man’s uniform. I’m trying to tell you he isn’t like other men.”
Mama stiffened like a retriever. “Honey, he ain’t one of them O-verts? I won’t cater to them. Not for no amount.”
“If he were, he’d be better off,” Hallie reassured her, “now turn around.” And pinned skirt over skirt till Mama, weighted down, sank heavily into a chair.
“Honey, I’m starting to sweat,” she complained.
“Sweat till you shine,” Hallie encouraged her, “but don’t show your face till I give you the sign.” And stepped through the portiere.
Beneath the ruin of the commander’s gold-braid hat, the King of the Indoor Thieves had collapsed at last; his undershirt tangled about his throat as if someone had tried to improve his manners by finishing him off altogether. He snored till his toes were spread; he stretched till he creaked in dreams. Dreams of some final assault for an earth about to be his for keeps.
“All of you stop talking out of the comers of your mouth like you were Edward G. Robinson and everybody was in the can,” Hallie quieted the women. “You’ve got a guest tonight that means gold from way back. Try to show manners.”
For down the stair with an admiral’s tread came the hero of sea fights as good as won. Looking like the dogs had had him under the house. With a gin glass latched to his hand.
Hallie crooked one finger toward the portiere and Mama came forth with forehead shining, bandana and broom; all sweat and Aunt Jemima in a peppermint apron that hung like candy.
The second he saw her, Commander dropped his glass. “I didn’t mean to do that,” he apologized immediately, and began trying to clean the floor with his sleeve, glass, splinters, and all, immediately making a worse mess than before.
Mama seated herself across from him in her preposterous gear. The girls exchanged looks; part fear and part wonder.
“I’m a Protestant by birth but a Catholic by descent.” Mama felt it was time to explain the curious no-man’s land of her faith. “I’ve shod the horse all around.” Meaning she had had four husbands. “So I’m not acceptable to the Church. But if I can’t die sanctified I do hope to die blessed.”
His elbow touched Floralee’s glass. It tottered; he reached as if to keep it from tipping and knocked it over instead. The girl pushed back her chair and he began mopping it up with a silk handkerchief; although all he was doing actually was swishing the handkerchief around in it. “Go on with your story,” he told Mama, “I’m sorry to be so clumsy.”
Mama had lost the thread. All she could remember was that she’d shod the horse all around.
“Three of them were thieves and one was a legit man—I’d never marry another legit man. Do you know that you’re safer living with a man who kills for hire than with a man who has never killed? That’s because one knows what killing is; the other don’t.”
“Why,” Commander remarked, “in that case, ill-fame women ought to make better wives than legitimate girls.”
Nobody knew what to say to that.
“Navy, I think that’s the nicest thing I’ve heard anyone say since I’ve been in the trade,” Hallie said at last.
His elbow tipped Mama’s glass into her lap.
“Now don’t tell me that ‘just happen,’ ” Mama scolded him in earnest now. “Mister, my frank opinion is you done that a-purpose.”
“Honest I didn’t, Mammy,” he lied patently.
“Don’t whup him, Mama,” Floralee pleaded for him.
“I’m sure he won’t do it again,” Hallie defended him, too.
“Give me one more chance, Mama,” he whimpered.
“Only out of respect for your uniform,” Mama issued final warning, “and one more is all you gets.” She turned to shake out her skirts, somebody tittered and somebody honked and she whirled just in time to catch the Commander with two fingers to his nose. Mama scarcely knew what to feel.
“Why, that isn’t the least bit nice, a man of your background to have such manners—”
“He didn’t mean anything, Mama,” Hallie was sure.
“Don’t whup him,” Floralee begged.
“Cross my heart I didn’t mean anything,” Commander swore in that same unbearable small-boy whine that in itself entitled him to a thrashing.
“Oh, he meant it all right,” Kitty informed, “I seen him with my naked eye. And I have a very naked eye.”
“I will try to do better, Mammy,” he promised too humbly. “Oh, I will try to behave. Oh, I will be a good boy, cross my heart ’n hope—” Standing up to cross himself, his hand caught the tablecloth and brought cloth, bottles, decanters, ashtrays, Cokes and a centerpiece of artificial pansies crashing to the floor.
In the silence everyone heard a small clock saying “sick-sick-sick.”
Then Mammy went even blacker with rage as he went whiter with fright. Now she went at him with no pretending, and he flung his two hundred and fourteen pounds under the table in true fear.
“Don’t whup me, Mammy,” they heard him pleading. “Please don’t whup me just this one time.”
Hallie tried to hold her and Floralee helped, because Mama could do murder when out of control. Reba fastened onto Mama’s waist to hold her back. Kitty stood to one side not caring particularly who got killed so long as blood was spilled.
“Beat him blue!” Big Five joined Mama’s forces. “If you can’t do it, I will!” and dove right for him.
“He’s Mama’s date, not yours,” Hallie hauled Big Five back and held her until she calmed down—holding a strip of gold-braided blue serge in her hand ripped from the officer’s sleeve.
“I’m just a little boy,” they heard somebody under the table whine, “please don’t hurt me.”
“Now he’s really asking for it,” Kitty commented.
Just as the apprentice pimp showed up at last, complete in sombrero and boots newly shined. He was the only one capable of holding Mama in a true rage and Mama herself knew this. When he got both arms around her, she ceased to struggle and began to cry. He and Hallie got Mama into a chair; where she daubed at her eyes with his big bandana.
Big Five got hold of one of the commander’s silken ankles and Floralee the other. Between them they succeeded in pulling him forth.
He lay on his stomach, rump elevated to invite kicks, eyes closed with rapture. Big Five pushed him onto his side. Then, by inserting one toe underneath him, rolled him over like lifting a great drugged cat onto the flat of his back.
He lay face up, his eyes still shut.
“He got no right to lay around so loose, without being drunk or sick, either one,” Big Five expressed her disgust, “somebody get some water.”
“I don’t have any water,” Floralee reported in her light sweet voice and a white pitcher in her hand—“Wouldn’t beer do as well?”—and emptied it full in the officer’s face.
Then, looking down into her pitcher, the girl saddened: “Now it’s empty.” And she looked ready to cry.
“You could use Cokes,” Hallie told her.
Now who but Hallie Dear would have thought of that? Floralee gathered the half-finished bottles standing on ledge and divan, and in no time at all had her pitcher refilled. But this time she poured it down the front of the Commander’s shirt.
“That was fun,” she reported hopefully to Hallie, and lifting his legs and holding them, began to sing—
while all the while the commander lay licking his big ox-tongue like a Coke-dripping Lazarus too languid to rise.
“I’ve been everywhere God got land,” Hallie told him, “but you are the most disgusting sight yet seen—you can drop his legs any time,” she told Floralee. Who promptly let both legs fall at once.
“I had a very strong hankering to go to sea at one time myself,” the apprentice pimp recalled, kicking the big man lightly: “Get up, officer.”
But nobody really knew what to do with this hero of sea fights yet unfought.
Except the King of the Indoor Thieves. He always knew what to do.
“I do it back,” he repeated. And with no further ado, straddled the fallen leader and began urinating upon him with solemn delight. “I’m a sonofabitch,” he explained, “I do do it back!” And fluttered his lashes above the torrent.
“Why!” Mama came suddenly to herself in a burst of sunrisen pride, “Why! Listen to that! A child of six using the language of a child of ten! Hear this! Hear this! Salute the Atlantic fleet!”
“Mama,” Hallie sought to calm the older woman, “I respect the Atlantic fleet as much as the next person, but I do feel this child is going too far.”
Mama came to attention, eyes straight forward, put her palm to her forehead in the hand-salute and began the Pledge of Allegiance. The King brought his own hand up to his forehead and stood at attention as well as he could while continuing to urinate.
The big man on the floor looked up. He opened his eyes so blue, so commanding. “That was the nicest party I’ve had in eleven years,” he announced, rising at last.
Someone handed him his crushed hat and his soiled coat.
At the door he smiled; but no one smiled back.
Mama lowered herself, inch by inch in all her finery, onto a divan. She felt like the real thing in black mammies. But all she did was sigh. Just sigh.
Outside, she heard the night’s last drunk pause as if listening for a friendly voice; then cry out: “God forgive me for my sins! Empty saddles in the old corral!”
And passed on toward the breaking day.
Half in wake and half in sleeping, Mama heard the jukebox weeping—
When the juke began to bark, she wakened. Down the stairs the poodle dyed pink came bounding and barking all the way. Behind him came the girl who owned him, crying to Heaven: “Heavensent! Heavensent!”
And behind her, holding the banister with one hand, Bag-of-Sand came feeling his way down.
If he’d been out of shape when he went upstairs, he was really disheveled now. He came down like a man fearing to break his neck at every step. And when he made it all the way down, he found himself facing the apprentice pimp; who seemed to have grown in size somehow.
“Are you for action or aren’t you, buddy?” the would-be pimp wanted to know.
Bag-of-Sand got past him and stood in the middle of the parlor boggling blindly about.
“I can sing like a damned bird,” Floralee told him, ‘‘only how did I fly in here?”
Bag-of-Sand turned slowly away. But at the door he turned.
“Good-night, girls,” he told them. “Someday I’ll tell you about the time I reviled the Virgin for fifteen minutes.”
And he passed, like the commander had passed; through a dark door-way into a darker dream.
“Go out and get the morning papers,” Mama instructed Floralee, “I want to see what the white folks are up to.”