Original Sins (78 page)

His mother cocked her head. “First you tell me I deserted you and didn't give you enough guidance. Now you accuse me of giving too much. Now, which is it, baby boy? Make up your mind.”

Donny stomped out, slamming the door.

When he came back for his stuff, Rochelle called, asking when they could buy the ranch house.

“Ain't gon be no motherfucking ranch house.”

A long silence.

“I decide where we gon live. And when I tell you to come up here, woman, that's when you come.”

She hung up right quick.

Donny ran into Leon at Clyde's. They got to drinking, and told Leon about starting to get up tight with Deirdre.

Leon snorted. “Up tight, my ass, farmer. She wants her some black cock, is all.”

“That ain't true.”

“It's an insult, what it is. To Rochelle and your mama and your grandmaw, and to all the beautiful black sisters.”

“Fuck it, man. Them bitches never done nothing but nag me to death.”

Leon shook his bereted head. “I know where you coming from, farmer. But you got to do you a political analysis. Now, how come the sisters has nagged us to death? Whitey done put them up to it….”

“Fuck it, man. I don't
have
to do nothing. You niggers up here is all nuts. Everybody white out to get you just because your skin is dark.”

“You just wait, man.”

One night when Chubby was out of town Donny went up to Deirdre's and drank a cup of coffee with her. She seemed nervous and plucked a couple of times at his shirt sleeve as he told her about wanting on at the Ford plant and all. When he said he had to go, she said, “So soon?”

As Donny walked through the lobby, the doorman gave him a look. The other day he'd tried to send Donny to the service entrance. He probably thought Donny was putting it to Deirdre and couldn't stand it. How come people was all the time thinking sex, sex, sex, up here?

He was walking down the sidewalk to the subway when a cop car pulled up. Two cops jumped out. Donny kept on walking.

“Hold it, son. It's you we're looking for.”

Donny stopped and turned and stared at them.

“Me?”

“Now, don't act so surprised, boy.”

“What can I do for you, sir?” he remembered his grand-maw saying good manners was the best life insurance a nigger could own.

“A woman was just raped two blocks over.”

“Yes sir?”

“So what are you doing in this neighborhood?”

“I work here. In the parking garage at Second Avenue.”

“Sure you do, buddy.”

He looked at them for a minute. “I do, sir.”

“Yeah, that's why you're racing along this street at one in the morning. Shift changes sure happen at funny times in parking garages, don't they, Al?”

“I got done at eleven. Then I visited with a friend.”

They laughed. “What's a black boy doing with friends in this neighborhood?”

It occurred to Donny that he was in trouble. His eyes shifted all over the place. “Go over to the garage, sir. They'll tell you I works there.”

“You telling me how to do my job, boy?”

“No sir.” Donny wondered which would get him in worse trouble—not having an alibi, or having one that involved a white woman whose husband was out of town. The slow shiver crept up his spine.

“Let's see some identification.”

He felt for his wallet. Wasn't there. “Guess I left it at the garage.”

“Come on, son. Hop in the car here. We're going to the station.”

“But man, I ain't done nothing.” Donny was scared. He didn't want to go down to no jive police station.

“That's what you say. We'll see what the woman you raped has to say.”

“I don't know nothing bout no rape.” He looked up and down the deserted street.

“Are you getting in, or do we have to throw you in?” asked the cop, holding open the door. Donny eyed the guns on their hips and climbed in.

On the way downtown he tried to decide what he should have done. What would Leon have done? Run? Would they have shot him? Fight? Insist they go to Deirdre's so she could tell them he'd been with her?

What did he do now? On TV people got to call Perry Mason. He'd demand to call his mother. She'd get him a lawyer. Christ, how could he pay a lawyer? This was dumb. He hadn't done nothing to pay no lawyer for.

They locked him in a cell. “Sir, do I get to make me a phone call?” They walked away. “Hey, I know I get to make me a phone call!”

“Man, ain't no point in you yelling.” A black man sat in the shadows on a cot at the rear of the cell.

“I get to make a phone call. I know my rights.”

“Just stay cool. You be all right.”

Later they came back and moved him to another cell. “May I please use the bathroom?” he called after a while. No one came.

“Hey, I gon piss all over this motherfucking floor!”

A large man with a wart on his chin the size of a bullet came and unlocked the door. “You want to use the toilet?”

“Yes sir, I do. And then I want to make my phone call.”

Donny started walking down the hall. The man planted a fist in his stomach. Donny doubled over. The man brought his locked fists down on the back of Donny's neck. He lay on the concrete.

“I don't like being ordered around, understand?” said the large shadow looming between Donny and the bulb hanging from the ceiling. The guard dragged Donny back to the cell and locked the door. Donny lay on the floor and found he'd wet his trousers.

For what must have been a day or two guards came and led Donny to a room with bright lights where men in shirtsleeves asked questions, the same ones time after time.

“Why'd you do it?”

“I didn't do nothing.”

“Where you from?”

“Tennessee.”

“How long you been here?”

“A few months.”

“Why'd you rape that woman? Answer me, boy.”

“I didn't.”

“How come you're not in the army?”

“I'm married with kids.”

“Why'd you do it?”

“I didn't do nothing.”

One time a Negro guard took him back to his cell, muttering, “Sick of all you down-home jive-ass niggers flocking up here and getting in trouble and giving the rest of us a bad name.”

Back in his cell Donny told himself that his mother would find him when he didn't come home. Then he remembered he had his own place now. Well, Monty would miss him, call his mother. But the day after he got picked up was his day off. What a way to spend a day off.

Well, but he hadn't done nothing wrong. He didn't have to worry.

Bright lights. No sleep. Pukey food he couldn't eat. Shivering and sick to his stomach. Why'd you do it, boy? Before long, he couldn't remember what he had and hadn't done. Started to seem like they was asking him about Deirdre. Yes, I did it. I fucked that white woman. Or had he? Perry Mason. Oak trees. Naw sir, I don't know what you're talking about. Yes sir. No sir. Yes sir.

He was in a line-up just like on “Dragnet,” blinded by bright lights. And the next thing he knew, he was standing on a street, blinking in bright sunshine, with no idea where he was. He wandered up the sidewalk looking for a street sign.

Donny was working late one night when the phone rang. Dog Fur said in her deep voice, “Hello there, Donny.”

“Hello.”

A long pause. “I was wondering if you'd bring my car by after you get off tonight.”

He said nothing. He guessed he owed her some kind of explanation. But he didn't want to get close enough to give her one. Besides, Rochelle and the children were arriving in a few days and he was busy renting and fixing up an apartment.

“Why haven't you stopped by lately?”

“Been tied up.”

“Well, why don't you stop by after you get off tonight?”

These white women didn't have no pride when it came to trying to get their pussies stuffed. “Yeah. See you later, Deirdre.”

As he walked toward Deirdre's, he saw a white woman at the far end of the otherwise empty street. As she approached, he could see her giving him quick glances. When he got close enough, he could see terror all over her face. Suddenly she dashed across the street and ran down the opposite sidewalk. Donny felt an urge to chase her, tackle her, hurt her. If she thought she could escape if he really wanted to get her, she was dead wrong. Then he felt irritated. They saw a black face and they panicked. But he also felt pleasure. He had power over that white woman. She was terrified of him—not from anything he'd done to her, but from what she imagined he might do, based on the fact that his face was dark. His mere existence could impel her to switch sides of the street and race for home, not even venture out in the first place. Stupid fuckers, not to recognize Mr. Junior Church Usher.

“Oh, I
like
that jacket,” Deirdre said, touching the black leather.

“Get away from me, woman,” he snarled. He felt consumed with disgust looking at her eager ugly painted pink face, with her tiny little close-set piglet eyes.

She looked startled.

“I've missed seeing you, Donny.”

“Yeah, I bet you have.”

“But I
have.”

“How could you miss me, you white bitch, when you don't even know me?”

“I've been trying to get to know you, Donny,” she insisted in an injured voice.

“Naw, you haven't, Deirdre. You don't know that I couldn't get it up for several months a while back. You don't know that my TV set got repossessed down in Tennessee. You don't know that I used to be a basketball star and a church deacon. All you know is that I got a long black cock between my legs. You honkies is sick. You see a black man and all you can think of is a good hard fuck. Well, they's a lot more to me than that!”

“But that's not true,” Deirdre gasped as he stomped toward the door. “How can you say that?”

He made no reply.

“If that's what you think I've wanted from you, Donny, then you don't know me either!”

He slammed the door behind him.

Donny got up early to supervise at the breakfast program for the children before going to work. He'd started out a buck private in James's group but was now a corporal. As the little children ate their cornflakes in the store that had been turned into a community center, they glanced up at him and Lucille real shy-like. Like they was heroes or something. He felt proud to be doing his part toward raising up the children of the black community to be strong and courageous warriors.

He recalled the morning when he realized it was time to get his own family up here. Nicole and Isaac were down in Pine Woods looking up with respect at that old Tom, Reverend Stump. And at his “clever” grandmaw. They were good people, meant well and all, but was just plain backward. You didn't get nowhere with these white motherfuckers by asking politely year after year. They took good manners to mean you was weak, and could be exploited that much easier. He wanted Isaac looking up to Leon and to James, and to himself as he was now. He wanted Nicole copying Lucille.

He looked over at Lucille. That woman was something else. Hair kinking a foot out from her head, like those Africans he was all the time seeing in front of the parking garage, on their way to the United Nations to run their countries. Had a mouth on her like a machine gun. Didn't take no shit from nobody. But she could be tender, too, sitting in a child's chair telling those little children stories about Harriet Tubman and Nat Turner, Sojourner Truth and Brother Malcolm. Urging them to eat a good breakfast and do good at school so they could help in their people's straggle to be free. Leon was right. Lucille was a woman who left you no choice but to respect her. Made you look at all women different. He knew he had to get Rochelle up here right quick, expose her to Lucille and the other sisters, let them turn her head around, get her over this diddly thing she had about living in some motherfucking ranch house.

He had phoned Rochelle and told her to get ready, he'd send bus fare. She seemed thrilled and scared to death, both at once. He worried a little about bossing her around like that, but she seemed to like it when he did it over leaving Pine Woods himself. And she seemed to like it this time. Maybe it made her feel secure to know that he was in charge now.

“Where we gon live at?”

“I'm gon find us a place right quick.”

“A house?”

“Can't afford no house.”

“Well, make it a big place, Donny.”

“Woman, you just get your ass up here. I'm the man. I'm running this show.”

“Well, I declare,” she laughed.

He met them at the Port Authority. She grabbed him and spun him around, while Isaac and Nicole tried to climb up his legs. He splurged on a taxi to take them uptown with all their junk.

Rochelle glanced around the small fifth-floor apartment doubtfully. “You fixed it up real nice, honey.”

“It'll do. Where you live at ain't important.”

“To who?”

He looked at her. “Rochelle, just shove it. Don't start in on me, woman. Ever again.”

Stunned, she said nothing. That night in their new bed with the children asleep in the next room, they made love with the old fervor that Donny had thought was gone for good. They both cried a little, laughing in between the tears. Seemed like the pieces of his life was starting to fall into place.

But Rochelle didn't want to model herself on Lucille. She just wouldn't quit trying to straighten her hair. And when he asked her to go to meetings with him, she'd say, “Can't. Too tired.”

“But I need you beside of me, Rochelle. To support me in the struggle.”

“Honey, you gon have to struggle by yourself this evening cause I'm plumb wore out.”

She called the group his “gang” and spent her spare time, when she wasn't clerking at Woolworth's or looking after the apartment, with his mama and Arthur. Seemed like her and his mama was thick as thieves now. Donny reckoned Rochelle spent a lot of time complaining about him because his mama was always lecturing him on letting other people do like they wanted. After she'd spent half her life telling
him
what to do.