Strivers Row (33 page)

“We ain't no niggers!” she yelled back at him indignantly. Still playacting, trying to imitate some tough street-corner girl from Brooklyn, he had realized to his horror.

“We're
Italians!
” she had yelled at the boy, even more ludicrously. For a wild moment, he had thought it might even work, trusting Sophie as he did in all things.
Why not
—their color even lighter than the wild Italian boys and girls, after a summer not spent on the beach. But the boy only gave them the raspberry, and began to advance on them again. The other white kids running up behind him now, their faces smiling meanly.

“The hell you say!
We're
Italians! You fuckin' niggers! Get the fuck off our beach, you fuckin' niggers!”

He reached back and let fly with the bottle then, hurling it straight toward Sophia. But Jonah was already by her side, grabbing her hand and pulling her back along the sand, toward the boardwalk. At last she seemed to understand, and she ran with him now—the white kids racing after them, laughing and cursing, showering them with more bottles and rocks and anything else they could find. They fell at their heels as they ran back up the boardwalk steps, a steady jeer echoing behind them now:

“Niggers! Niggers! Niggers!”

Sophia outstripping him down the boardwalk by then. Running like a deer from a fire, from those words.

“Niggers! Niggers! Niggers!”

She had tried to explain it to him then, too, on the subway trip back. Shaking with anger, speaking in furious, whispered hisses in the swaying, stuffed car. Using almost the exact same words she had used this day, down in her Village hideout.

“But we're
white!
We're as white as any of those I-ties on that beach! We're white and black, our Daddy's momma was white, so why shouldn't
we
be? Why shouldn't we be whatever the hell we want to be?”

But all he could think of then, and all he could think of now, so many years later, was the lip of that arrogant, half-naked boy on the beach, turning up in scorn and derision after he blew his Bronx cheer at them. Seeing through them as though their color were marked indelibly on something deeper than their skin. Preparing to pelt them with that word until he had run them off the beach with it alone:

“Niggers! Niggers! Niggers!”

CHAPTER TEN

MALCOLM

He kept to his room for a week after he was banished from Small's Paradise. Not even showing his face at Creole Pete's, or the other late-night clubs anymore, he was so ashamed. Going out only to buy food and the latest comic books from the corner drugstore, which he would take into the tub with him to read.

He drew himself up to three or four baths a day sometimes, against the worst of the summer heat and the smell of his own body. Always taking them during the middle of the afternoon, when all the other boarders were out at work, or late at night when he could lie back and read the latest adventures of the Comet or Futura, and listen to all the sounds of the City outside: the cars rushing perpetually uptown, or the shuttle and ring of the trolleys, or the New York Central trains, all the way across the City, blowing their air horns as they emerged from the tunnel on Park Avenue.

In those moments he thought sometimes about going back to the railroad, or even shipping out as a merchant seaman on one of the great, gray ships out in the river, just as Reginald had. He had received a letter from his brother—written weeks ago to Ella's house, and somehow forwarded along The Wire to where he was in Harlem. It said almost nothing, as usual, just that Reginald was really hoping to meet up with him soon, now that Malcolm was in Harlem, but he had kept it and read it over and over, until it started to tear away at the creases, thinking of all the great things they might find to do together in the City. Meanwhile, he still tried to call the house back in Lansing, he felt so lonely, willing to talk to any of them there, Wilfred or Philbert or Hilda—but no one ever picked up.

Mostly, though, he dreamed about how he might find a way back into Small's, or how he might get to see Miranda again, and win her away from West Indian Archie. He kept thinking about the feel of her smooth, powdered skin, or how she smelled of flowers. How she had looked when he had told her that he loved her there in Small's—surprised and moved, and interested, too, he was still sure of it. Sorry that he hadn't pressed things then, sorry for all the mean, angry things he had thought about her since.

But he had no real idea of how to get her back. Most of his plans stolen from comic books, he had to admit, involving disguises and miraculous gadgets, or swinging from rooftops and fire escapes. The inescapable conclusion was that he had lost her, and everything he had had at Small's, and that knowledge made him almost more lonely than he could bear.
Knowing that he was on the outside again, looking in. Smiling while everybody laughed at him, trying to pretend it didn't bother him, just as it always, always had.

He stayed holed up in the bath, nursing the wound that ran all the way through him. Trying to rid himself of himself, to soak the stink of the City and his own sweat off his body. He had been very aware of his own smell since his time with Ma Swerlein, who ran the county juvenile home back in Mason. When he was finished with his bath, he would carefully wash out the ring around the tub, just as Ma Swerlein had taught him. He was always chagrined when someone knocked on the door while he was still in the dirty, cooling water, and any scent of him remained—trying to eradicate any trace of himself in the bath, just as she had taught him.

Mrs. Gold Dust,
they had called her, for the soap she used on everything. Cleaning constantly, compulsively around the home, the way his mother had, before she got sick. She smelled different from his mother, though; more like the soap, harsh and clean and antiseptic. And where his mother was straight and thin as a rail, Mrs. Swerlein was a big woman—taller, and at least twice as wide, with gigantic, round breasts that Malcolm always found himself trying to look down when she leaned over him. Feeding all of them, all her boys and her smaller, quiet husband, at the long kitchen table. Doing everything for them, swooping in to give him a big hug whenever he felt lonely— seeming to know it even before he did himself. Talking freely in front of him, too, about the niggers, as if he were not even in the room.

“Those poor niggers, I just can't see how they can be so happy and so poor, living in shacks like they do,” she would say, cleaning out the tub with the Gold Dust powder, her great, saucy behind swaying freely back and forth. Malcolm watching it, enraptured.
Little Malcolm,
she would call him, teasingly. The name so contrary to the near-man he had already become, six feet tall in the eighth grade—and one that never failed to get something fluttering in his stomach, and lower.

“An' all those big, shiny cars they got out front. You'd think they'd sell the cars, buy someplace better to live with 'em. But niggers is just that way, I guess. Little Malcolm, dear, would ya mind passin' me more a the Gold Dust there—”

He would volunteer to help with the chores, following her around the house. Wanting to ask her if by
niggers
she meant him, too. He was still trying to tell himself, then, that he could be the son of a white man who had forced himself on his mother, but deep down he knew it wasn't so.

He knew it by how he smelled—so different from Mr. and Mrs. Swerlein, and the eight white boys who lived with them there in the rambling, three-storey Victorian that was the county juvenile home. Sure now, every time he sat down at the table with them, or passed them going in and out of the bathroom, that they were as different from him as two different species could be.

He hadn't felt that way at the Gohannases', the neighborhood colored family where Mr. Maynard Allen had taken him to live when his mother had first gone to the state mental hospital in Kalamazoo. There he had shared a room with their nephew, Big Boy, and Mr. Gohannas had taken them both to shoot the rabbits, and go fishing on Saturdays. They were older people, and kindly to him, but he had been restless and bored with their country ways, or how they never seemed to know what he was talking about. He didn't like the Holy Roller church they went to, with all its wild carryings-on, and he hated their friends—many of them the same men he had gone on the rabbit hunt with—and how they came over in their worn, down-home clothes and sat on the porch, speaking slowly and deliberately. Looking at him with those knowing, pitying eyes whenever he came out the porch door; someone tsking and saying something mournful about his mother or his Daddy when he went back inside.

To be pitied—pitied by a bunch of ignorant country Negroes!
Before long he started acting up in school and shoplifting again, stealing change from Mrs. Gohannas's bag, and Mr. Allen had come and taken him to the juvenile home, just as he had promised. Barely with a word this time, looking down at Malcolm beside him in the big Packard not in anger, but almost preoccupied, as if this was what he had expected all along. And Malcolm, on his side of the huge front seat, suddenly apprehensive, worrying that it was all a plan.

How could some white man know so much, anticipate everything he would do? And what did that mean for him?

And yet for all of it—for all of Ma Swerlein's nigger talk, and the strangers he lived amongst—in many ways the home
was
the best place Malcolm had ever been. Even he had seen that, right from the beginning. He was the only boy there Ma Swerlein trusted to come and go as he pleased. She knew everyone in town, and when he said that he wanted to make some money, she had gotten him a job busting suds and cleaning up at a restaurant downtown, after school. There, while he was sweeping up the sidewalk out front, he would be seized with such irrational fits of joy and relief that he could not stop himself from showing off. Dancing with the broom, doing high-stepping solos for the passersby. They would whistle and grin, and throw him coins, so that by his first payday he had had enough money to go downtown and buy himself an apple green suit that was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

He was popular at the Mason junior high, too, thanks to Ma Swerlein. She had invited his whole class over to the juvenile home for a party when he'd first arrived, and introduced all the boys to them—acting as if they were the same as anyone else, and that there was no shame to be had at all from living in such a place. With her encouragement he had joined the debating society, and made the varsity basketball and football teams, even with his job after school. He was still uneasy about playing with other boys, and when they traveled to away games out in the sticks, he would hear calls of
nigger
or
coon
or
Rastus,
drifting down from the bleachers in the dingy little gyms. But his teammates would crowd around him protectively, patting him mutely on the back, glaring back up at the hick fans.

The teachers in Mason were different, too. Mr. Grein, the history teacher, even told nigger jokes in class or laughed at Malcolm openly in class when he said something ignorant. But most of them sent notes home with him to Ma Swerlein, expressly to inform her of how polite and well-mannered he was, and how well he was doing in his studies. She made sure in turn to read them aloud to him, her whole face brightening, and exclaiming,
“Well, Malcolm, isn't this nice!”

And Malcolm, hearing it, wondered why they should remark so on his being well-behaved and smart, but from then on he had approached teachers whenever he could, basking in their attention. Raising his hand in class, volunteering to wash the blackboards or empty the classroom wastebaskets or do anything else that might be remarked upon favorably. He tried to be as helpful as he could with his fellow classmates, too—always talking to them nicely, offering to treat them whenever he had the money, or to help them with homework; refraining from getting into any fights but always smiling, even when he suspected they might be making fun of him.

By the spring semester he was ranked third in Mr. Kaminska's eighth-grade class. He liked Mr. Kaminska most of all his teachers—a big-chested, former high school linebacker with bristly red hair and a red face, who taught his English classes as if they were a football team, running them relentlessly through one drill after another, and who was always quick to compliment Malcolm when he got an answer right. Near the end of one afternoon, he called them to a special homeroom, to announce that they would have an election for class president, and told them to make nominations, and seconding motions. Malcolm had sat in the back-row seat where he was confined as the tallest boy in the class, saying nothing, not wanting to offend any of his friends in class by offering up one or the other for office.

But to his astonishment,
they
had nominated and seconded
him
— and him alone. Mr. Kaminska dutifully chalking up the unanimous vote, student by student, while Malcolm watched incredulously from the back of the room, seeing the tally of little white lines grow under his name. It had all felt like a great, waking daydream, especially in the end, when all the votes were in and the whole class had burst into spontaneous applause. Malcolm had been so close to crying that he had only just been able to stumble to the front of the room at Mr. Kaminska's gruff insistence. Mumbling out his gratitude before the bell rang and he was able to burst out of the school, too embarrassed to stick around any longer—running all the way to his job downtown.

Yet somehow they all knew about it when he got back to the juvenile home after work. Mr. Maynard Allen was there waiting for him, along with Ma and Pa Swerlein, and all the other boys in the home, and most of his classmates, and even Mr. Delmont, who owned the restaurant where he worked. It made him almost dizzy when he saw them standing there, up on the broad front porch under a handmade paper banner reading,
CONGRATULATIONS MALCOLM
. All these white people, clustering around him as soon as he came up the porch steps, grinning at him and slapping him on the back, while he smiled and twitched at their every touch.

“Oh, Malcolm, we're just so
proud
of you!” Ma Swerlein gushed, wrapping him up in a tight, bosomy hug that left him anxious and excited at the same time.

She served out homemade strawberry pie, and ice cream just as she did when it was someone's birthday, and all he could do was stand there. The small, sheepish smile still glued to his face while he held the ice cream, melting in his dish. He managed to make his way outside, but Mr. Allen had followed him there, hitching up his pants over his long legs and sitting down beside him on the porch steps. They had sat there together, spooning up at last the soupy remnants of their ice cream without saying anything, while the party went on back in the house.

“I just want to tell you, Malcolm, I've never seen anybody prove better just what the word ‘reform' means,” Mr. Allen had said at last, in that quiet, confidential voice, fixing him again with that penetrating social-worker look of his. Only this time Malcolm could see that it was not reproving or scolding, but filled with genuine, manly approval, so much so that once again he almost wanted to cry.

“I mean it. You did a man's job here, Malcolm, between your grades, and how you fit in. We're
all
very proud of you,” he told him. “When I think of what you came from—what kind of upbringing you had...the condition your mother was in, the way that house was when we got you out of there . . . well, all I can say is that it gives me hope. You're a living example of how much social progress can really be made, Malcolm.”

He stopped then, a smile creasing his face, and held out his hand. And Malcolm had looked at it for a long moment, the mention of his mother still turning over and over in his head. Seized with the crazy desire now to knock the hand away—to run off the porch, and down the street, and all the way back to Lansing.

Instead he had reached out and shaken it. Mr. Maynard Allen still grinning, cocking his rapidly balding head back toward the home.

“C'mon, let's go get some of that pie,” he said, and ran a hand through Malcolm's hair. “A stringbean like you could use it.”