The Arrested Life of Eva Perkins

It was the first night of August and the third night in a row with a temperature near 100 degrees. It was too hot to sleep. At 11:30 p.m. Eva Perkins walked over to 135th and Lenox Avenue and picked up Aaron’s supper at the café, three sandwiches and two slices of pie. Her routine had been the same for nearly a year, except for the two days she was in the hospital when she lost the baby. Usually, she arrived at the building where Aaron worked as an elevator operator by midnight. In the daytime, all the elevator runners were women, but the law wouldn’t allow them to work at night. Sometimes, the runner from the neighboring building joined them for dinner and conversation. After an hour or two, Eva headed back to their apartment. By the time Aaron finished work and arrived home in the morning, she was at the factory, so they relished the midnight supper.

It was nearly 1:30 a.m. when Eva reached the front door of the apartment. She had a leftover sandwich in one hand and her keys in the other. In the hallway, she noticed a man she hadn’t seen in the building before. “You want to have a good time?” he asked her. “I’ll give you two dollars.” “I am not interested,” she said and left it at that. When she pushed open the apartment door, three detectives forced their way in behind her. They winked at the colored man and told him to disappear before they charged him too.

“Tell us where Shine is?” She didn’t know anything about Shine, except that he lived one flight up. The rumor was that he was in France, but she didn’t say that. “I don’t know anything,” she replied, trying to explain she had just come back from taking dinner to her husband. “Husband? You’re not married,” one of them said, laughing in her face. “You are just another woman of Kid Happy.” Did he say woman or something worse?

The detectives called Aaron by his fighting name, like they were friends of his rather than the law who had busted their way into his house to harass and threaten his woman. Everyone knew Aaron because he had been boxing at many of the clubs in Harlem and at benefits for the soldiers and the Red Cross. The detective said he knew Kid; then barked, “Go ahead, tell us something.” “I don’t know nothing about Shine,” Eva repeated. That’s when one of them said, “You better come with us.” The other one snickered and said, “Charge her with the Tenement House Law.” Before they dragged her out, Eva asked to leave a note for Aaron. When he came home in the morning, he found it on the table. All it said was: I am locked up.

In Harlem, the police snatched you first and found an excuse later. After the 1905 riot in San Juan Hill, the police commissioner gave the officers a stern warning: They couldn’t beat Negroes up without charging them with a crime; it didn’t look good. Now if they decided to drag you to the station or beat your ass, they charged you with disorderly conduct, public nuisance, rioting, Tenement House Law. Eva didn’t know anything about Shine. Half of the Negroes in Harlem were Kid somebody. Kid Happy. Kid Chocolate. Kid Midnight. If they weren’t Kid, they were Sheik or Shine. It was hard to know if the “bad nigger” the police were after even existed; if he was one man or a composite, a monster to them and a hero to us; or if he was a figure colored folks made up, just a bundle of capacities endowed with a name, a badass hero of extraordinary talents, a Stagger Lee, a street-corner philosopher, a miracle worker able to find a way out from under the thumb of white folks and elude the everyday disasters of the color line. To defy a world unable to see Negroes as anything other than shines—shine my shoes, wash my clothes, and adore me. Shine was a beautiful myth about a Negro who could survive anything and everything a white man could send his way, and yet weather the catastrophe that was life under Jim Crow.

Shine was the hero of a thousand folk ballads; the alter ego of ex-colored men; the leader of a black Republic never to be; he was every Harlem Big Shot or striver with a dream; he was every man who wanted more and had failed. You could find him in nearly any tenement in Harlem. The stories eclipsed and overreached any one person or mere mortal, so it was hard to distinguish the lies from the truth, the fantasy from the facts. Had he been the only passenger to survive on the Titanic? Was he still a soldier in France or just a fugitive on the run? Was he a Harlem maroon or a ghetto rebel endowed with the gift of nine lives?

And what of Shine’s woman—his mate, his friend, his sister, his comrade? Shine, not unlike Caliban, was cast into the fight without a female companion. The most significant absence of all in the dramaturgy of struggle, in the cosmic shattered history of black life, in the unfolding plot of the wretched, was that of his woman. Was the native son ever to be accompanied by a native daughter? Or was there no one at his side as he faced the world? As it faced him? Am I not an ally and a sister? Am I not here? Am I an absent presence? If the text of the human was written over and against him, she fell out of the order of representation all together. Neither subject nor object, but a mute, silenced thing, like an impossible metaphor or a beached whale or a form yet to be named. Her coming of age has been endlessly deferred. What place was there for Eva in the stuff of myth and imagination? Could the Coming of Eva Perkins or its tragic eclipse ever stand as allegory of the race, as the representative tale of blackness? In the drama between the world and him, she disappears, she falls into the black hole; she is the black hole, a person of no account. Unnamed, she waits in the wings, but without her own part to play, the catalyst of nothing. What has she to do with matters of life and death writ large? What about her desire and defiance? Or was she “reduced to having no will or desire except that prescribed” by master and mistress or coaxed by a lover?

What was the text of her insurgency? Did she also possess knowledge of freedom—the miraculous, unfathomable ways of escaping from under the heels of white folks? How did she strike back and lash out? She too had survived a thousand deaths, so why were there no folk ballads about her or exaggerated accounts of her endurance? Stories about how she made a way out of no way? Was her fate to remain trapped within the impoverished realm of realism, or worse, confined in the sociological imagination that could only ever recognize her as a problem? And even in the absence of any evidence of wrongdoing always found her guilty? Yes, she was always to blame.

Had she no say in how the world made use of her? No way of talking back to power? How much rage could the body house before it exploded? What were the harsh words she was forced to swallow or the curses she uttered or the prayers she mumbled under her breath? Were refusal and nonparticipation and dissemblance her only ways to fight? Was acquiescence the mask of retribution and destruction? Overcome ’em with yeses and grins . . . agree ’em to death and destruction. “Yes sir” to hell and back.

Eva hated the police detectives who had forced their way into her home and arrested her simply because they could, because Shine eluded them and she could be seized as his surrogate. Next time, she would give them a reason. Silently, she harbored the protest and the complaint. No talking back, no expletives—not even a whisper. She vowed to tell them nothing.