Blind Man With a Pistol (7 page)

6

     
The speaker standing on an upturned barrel at the intersection of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue was shouting monotonously: "BLACK POWER! BLACK POWER! Is you is? Or is you ain't? We gonna march this night! March! March! March! _Oh, when the saints_ -- yeah, baby! We gonna march this night!"

     
Spit flew from his looselipped mouth. His flabby jowls flopped up and down. His rough brown skin was greasy with sweat. His dull red eyes looked tired.

     
"Mistah Charley been scared of BLACK POWER since the day one. That's why Noah shuffled us off to Africa the time of the flood. And all this time we been laughing to keep from whaling."

     
He mopped his sweating face with a red bandanna handkerchief. He belched and swallowed. His eyes looked vacant. His mouth hung open as though searching for words. "Can't keep this up," he said under his breath. No one heard him. No one noticed his behavior. No one cared.

     
He swallowed loudly and screamed. "TONIGHT'S THE NIGHT! We launch our whale boats. Iss the night of the great white whale. You dig me, baby?"

     
He was a big man and flabby all over like his jowls. Night had fallen but the black night air was as hot as the bright day air, only there was less of it. His white short-sleeved shirt was sopping wet. A ring of sweat had formed about the waist of his black alpaca pants as though the top of his potbelly had begun to melt.

     
"You want a good house? You got to whale! You want a good car? You got to whale! You want a good job? You got to whale! You dig me?"

     
His conked hair was dripping sweat. For a big flabby middle-aged man who would have looked more at home in a stud poker game, he was unbelievably hysterical. He waved his arms like an erratic windmill. He cut a dance step. He shuffled like a prizefighter. He shadowed with clenched fists. He shouted. Spit flew. "Whale! Whale! WHALE, WHITEY! WE GOT THE POWER! WE IS BLACK! WE IS PURE!"

     
A crowd of Harlem citizens dressed in holiday garb had assembled to listen. They crowded across the sidewalks, into the street, blocking traffic. They were clad in the chaotic colors of a South American jungle. They could have been flowers growing on the banks of the Amazon, wild orchids of all colors. Except for their voices.

     
"What's he talking 'bout?" a high-yellow chick with bright red hair wearing a bright green dress that came down just below her buttocks asked the tall slim black man with smooth carved features and etched hair.

     
"Hush yo' mouth an' lissen," he replied harshly, giving her a furious look from the corners of muddy, almond-shaped eyes. "He tellin' us what black power mean!"

     
She opened her big green eyes speckled with brown tints and looked at him in astonishment.

     
"Black power? It don't mean nothing to me. I ain't black."

     
His carved lips curled in scorn. "Whose fault is that?"

     
"BLACK POWER IS MIGHTY! GIVE FOR THE FIGHT!"

     
When the comely young brownskinned miss presented her collection basket to a group of sports of all sorts in front of the Paradise Inn, repeating in her soft, pleasant voice: "Give for the fight, gentlemen," one conk-haired joker in a long-sleeved red silk shirt said offensively, "What mother-raping fight? If Black Power all that powerful, who needs to fight? It ought to be giving me something."

     
She looked the sports up and down, unperturbed. "Go back to your white tramps; we black women are going to fight."

     
"Well, go 'head and fight then," the sport said, turning away. "That's what's wrong with you black women, you fights too much."

     
But some of the other young women collecting for the fight were more successful. For among the holiday-makers there were many serious persons who understood the necessity for a fund for the coming fight. They believed in Black Power. They'd give it a trial anyway. Everything else had failed. They filled the collection baskets with coins and bills. It was going anyway, for one thing and another. Rent, religion, food or whiskey, why not for Black Power? What did they have to lose? And they might win. Who knew? The whale swallowed Jonah. Moses split the Red Sea. Christ rose from the dead. Lincoln freed the slaves. Hitler killed six million Jews. The Africans had got to rule -- in some parts of Africa, anyway. The Americans and the Russians have shot the moon. Some joker has made a plastic heart. Anything is possible.

     
The young ladies dumped their filled baskets into a gilt-painted keg with the banner BLACK POWER on a low table to one side of the speaker's barrel, presided over by a buxom, stern-faced, gray-haired matron clad in a black dress uniform lit up with gilt buttons and masses of braid who looked like an effigy beginning to burn on that hot day. And then they went back into the crowd to fill them again.

     
The speaker raved: "BLACK POWER! DANGEROUS AS THE DARK! MYSTERIOUS AS THE NIGHT! Our heritage! Our birthright! Unchain us in the big cor-ral!"

     
"Joker sounds like he's shooting craps," one brother whispered to another.

     
The few white motorists threading their way through the crowd, going north on Seventh Avenue in the direction of Westchester County, looked curiously at the crowd, opened their windows and heard the words, "BLACK POWER," and stepped on the gas.

     
It was an orderly crowd. Police cars lined the streets. But the cops had nothing to do except avoid the challenging stares. Most of the patrol-car cops were white, but they had become slightly reddened under the hysterical ranting of the speaker and the monotonous repetition of "BLACK POWER".

     
A black Cadillac limousine, shining in the sun like polished jet, whispered to the curb in the no-parking zone for the crosstown bus stop, within touching distance of the orator's barrel. Two dangerous-looking black men clad in black leather coats and what looked like officers' caps in a Black Power army sat in the front seat, immobile, staring straight ahead with not a muscle twitching in their lumpy scarred faces. On the back seat sat a portly gray-haired black man between two slender, sedate, clean-cut brownskinned young men dressed as clerics. The gray-haired man had smooth black velvety skin that looked recently massaged. Despite his short-cropped gray kinky hair, his light-brown eyes beneath thick glossy black eyebrows were startlingly clear and youthful. Long black eyelashes gave him a sexy look. But there was nothing lush about his appearance, still less about his demeanour. He was dressed in dark gray summer worsted, black shoes, dark tie, white shirt, and wore no jewelry of any sort, not even a watch. His manner was calm, authoritative, his eyes twinkled with good humor but his mouth was firm and his face grave.

     
The leather-coated flunky next to the chauffeur jumped to the curb and held open the back door. The cleric on the inside stepped to the pavement, the gray-haired man followed him.

     
The speaker stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence and descended from his barrel. He approached the gray-haired man with a diffidence that didn't become the masterful exhorter of Black Power. He made no attempt to shake his hand. "Doctor Moore, I need a relief," he blurted. "I'm beat."

     
"Carry on, J," Doctor Moore commanded. "I'll send L to relieve you shortly." His voice was modulated, his enunciation perfect, his manner pleasant, but it held an authority that brooked no contradiction.

     
"I'm awfully tired," J whined.

     
Doctor Moore gave him a sharp look, then he softened and patted his shoulder. "We are all tired, son, carry on just a little longer and you will be relieved. If just one more soul," he added, shaking his finger to emphasize his point, "gets the message our labors will not be in vain."

     
"Yes, sir," J said meekly and hefted his wet flabby belly back on to his barrel.

     
"And now, Sister Z, what have you for the cause?" Doctor Moore asked the buxom black-uniformed matron presiding over the gilt keg of BLACK POWER.

     
She grinned a smile of pure gold; it was like seeing Mona Lisa break into a laugh. "The keg is most near filled," she said proudly, rows of gold teeth, uppers and lowers, flashing in the light.

     
Doctor Moore looked at her teeth regretfully, then nodded to the cleric, who opened the trunk of the car and undid a large leather suitcase. The leather-coated flunky took the keg of money and dumped it into the suitcase, which was already half-filled with similar coins and bills.

     
The onlookers watched this operation in a petrified silence. From down the street the white cops in front of the 135th Street precinct station looked on curiously but didn't move. None took notice that the limousine was parked illegally. No one challenged Doctor Moore's authority to collect the money. No one seemed to think there was anything strange about the entire procedure. But yet there were many black people among the crowd and most of the white cops in the police cars who didn't know who Doctor Moore was, who had never seen him or even heard of him. He had such a positive air of authority it seemed logical that he would collect the money, and it was taken for granted that a black Cadillac limousine filled with uniformed black people, even though two of the uniforms were clerical, was connected with Black Power.

     
When they had taken their respective seats again, Doctor Moore spoke into the speaking-tube, "Drive to the Center, B," then as he glanced at the back of the chauffeur's head, corrected himself: "I believe you're C, aren't you?"

     
The front seat wasn't partitioned off and the chauffeur turned his head slightly and said, "Yes, sir, B's dead."

     
"Dead? Since when?" Doctor Moore sounded mildly surprised.

     
"It's more than two months now."

     
Doctor Moore leaned back against the cushions and sighed. "Life is fleeting," he observed sadly.

     
Nothing more was said until they arrived at their destination. It was a middle-class housing development on upper Lenox Avenue, a large U-shaped red-brick apartment building seventeen storeys high. The front garden was so new the grass hadn't sprouted and the freshly planted trees and shrubbery looked withered as from a drought. There was a children's playground in its center with the slides and seesaws and sand-boxes so new they looked abandoned, as though no children lived there.

     
Across Lenox Avenue, on the West Side, toward Seventh Avenue, were the original slums with their rat-ridden, cold water flats unchanged, the dirty glass-fronted ground floors occupied by the customary supermarkets with hand-lettered ads on their plate-glass windows reading: "Fully cooked U.S. Govt. Inspected SMOKED HAMS 55c lb.... Secret Deodorant ICE-BLUE 79c.. .. California Seedless GRAPES 2 lbs 49c. .. . Fluffy ALL Controlled Suds 3 lbs pkg. 77c.... KING CRAB CLAWS lb 79c.... GLAD BAGS 99c." Delicatessens advertising: "Frozen Chitterlings and other delicacies". . . . Notion stores with needles and buttons and thread on display.... Barbershops. . . . Smokeshops.... Billboards advertising: _Whiskies, beers_. . . . "HARYOU".... _Politicians running for Congress_. . . . "BEAUTY FAIR by CLAIRE: WIGS, MEN'S HAIR PIECES, 'CAPILISCIO'".... Funeral Parlors.... Nightclubs. . . . "_Reverend Ike; 'See and hear this young man of God; A Prayer For The Sick And All Conditions in Every Service; COME WITH YOUR BURDENS LEAVE WITH A SONG_'". . . . Black citizens sitting on the stoops to their cold-water flats in the broiling night.. . . Sports ganged in front of bars sucking marijuana.... Grit and dust and dirt and litter floating idly in the hot dense air stirred up by the passing of feet. That was the side of the slum dwellers. The ritzy residents across the street never looked their way.

     
The black Cadillac limousine drew to the curb in front of the unfinished lawn. Miraculously the banner across the back which had previously proclaimed BLACK POWER now read: BROTHERHOOD. The two black-coated, black-capped men in front got out first and stood flanking the rear door. Away from the motley crowd at 135th Street and Seventh Avenue, with that quiet, pretentious apartment building in the background, they looked larger, tougher, infinitely more dangerous. The bulges beneath their leather coats on the left sides were more pronounced. There, on the quiet, shady side of the old, wide, historic slum street, they looked unmistakably like bodyguards. The well-dressed people coming and going from and to the apartment entrance gave them a wide berth. But no resentment was shown. They were familiar. Doctor Moore was a noted personage. The residents held him in high esteem. They admired his efforts at integration; they commended his nonviolent, reasonable approach. When Doctor Moore himself alighted, standing between his two clerics, passing residents tipped their hats and smiled obsequiously.

     
"You boys come with me," he said.

     
He walked briskly into the building with his retinue at his heels. There were both confidence and authority in his bearing, like that of a man with a purpose and a will to achieve it. Residents passing through the foyer bowed. He smiled amiably but didn't speak. The doorman kept an empty elevator waiting for him. He rode it to the third floor, where he dismissed his bodyguards and took his clerics inside.

     
The entrance hall was sumptuously furnished. A wall-to-wall carpet of a dark purple color covered the floor. On one side was a coat-rack with a full-length mirror attached and beside it an umbrella stand. On the other side a long low table for hats, with twin shaded lamps at each end, flanked by straight-backed chairs of some dark exotic wood with overstuffed needlepoint seats. But Doctor Moore did not linger there. After a brief glance into the mirror he turned right into the salon along the front of the building with two wide windows, followed by his clerics. Except for translucent curtains and purple silk drapes behind white venetian blinds, the salon was as bare as Mother Hubbard's Cupboard. But Doctor Moore kept on through to the dining-room with his clerics at his heels. It was equally bare as the salon with similar blinds and curtains. But Doctor Moore did not hesitate, nor did his clerics expect him to hesitate. Into the kitchen they marched in single file. Not a word had been spoken. And as yet still without speech, his clerics shed their coats and clerical collars and donned white cotton jackets and cooks' caps while Doctor Moore peered into the refrigerator.