C H A P T E R • 7
When I got back to the office, the staff was in the middle of production day and Samantha was action central, answering phones and collecting envelopes.
I had finished my short publisher’s letter promising a series about the vendors and was pulling together the details of my hit-and-run story when Sam announced on the intercom, “There’s someone to see you, Boss.”
Boss. I was getting a lot of that sarcastic attitude. But when I got to the front office, I discovered Samantha was announcing Mister Bell. I didn’t expect him, and I talked to him as I walked to him.
“I’m surprised, Mister Bell. Please come in. I hope this means there is something I can do.”
I got too close and he backed away.
“Yes.”
Samantha wasn’t even pretending not to listen.
He looked at her. “I have a story for the paper.” And he motioned toward the office.
When we were behind the door, he pulled a large manila folder from a vinyl shoulder bag and shuffled through the contents and handed me several sheets.
“Ceel left me files,” he said. “She said she’d get back to me about what she was going to do about them.”
I skimmed and flipped the pages. “This is a list of withdrawals from Independence National,” I said. “And something called a National Bid List of banks that were invited to buy First. What does it mean?”
His eyes were red-rimmed and they never left mine.
“It’s those hand-picked Negroes we need to watch out for. They’re the thin brown line that’s supposed to keep us from acting up. In slavery days, they called such ones overseers. The white man don’t even have to tell those Negroes nothing. They think of the shit all by themselves by now. They got ’em thinking community and culture isn’t important. That we don’t need to know who we are.”
“But I’m not inclined to piss these people off,” I said. I touched the names on the first page in the too many places that made my point.
“They’re counting on scaring you off,” he said. “Cecelia didn’t get a chance to say so, but she must have wanted to alert the rest of us that these people didn’t trust the bank anymore and were running away from it.”
“We don’t have time to do the kind of reporting we need to do to run this before our deadline in a couple of hours.”
“Trust me.”
“You’re kidding. Right?” I flipped to a new page in my notebook. “Did you give this to the News?”
“Not yet. But I will if you don’t want it. You know this is not something Cecelia just decided to do this morning. Somebody’s going to get a helluva story.”
His voice broke and I waited.
“Just now, walking in the street where she died, I felt them moving in on me with their bosoms offering comfort and their faces full of pity. It felt like a suffocation. This is something I can do.”
“And this is something we can do. Thank you. But I still have to make those calls.”
“Do what you have to do,” he said, and he handed me another sheet of paper. “And I pulled this out so you don’t miss it.”
I walked him out, but he turned back. The pause was a crowded place. I could see it in his eyes. “You say someone might have hit her on purpose. If it’s true, it’s because of this. Be careful. It could be dangerous.”
“I’ll be okay,” I told him.
“I feel like I should have protected her,” he said. “When Ceel was a little girl, Elizabeth always counted on me to do that. But this time I didn’t know from what.”
“I’m so sorry Mister Bell.”
I walked him to the door, and on the way back into my office I touched two fingers to my lips for Samantha.
The names on the withdrawal lists were mostly the same players who were handling things when I left Harlem to make the Summer Knight movies. Among them were some not-for-profits and development agencies, some of our electeds, some of our reverends—and my father.
On the last list, Mister Bell gave me so I wouldn’t miss it were the earlier withdrawals that gave my father his place where he belonged—in the middle of things. Substantial withdrawals were made before he died. There it was: The Harlem Journal. He all but closed that account.
Then I got mad. As he would have said, now, there was a fire on the mountain.