Strivers Row (39 page)

The mob still coming for you, James Edwards Persons, age thirty-three— my own age. The mob still coming, just as they came for my family, for my father's own family in this city, so many years ago. Still coming, just as they are in Beaumont, and Mobile, and Newark, and Detroit, and they will never stop—

And so you run, and are caught, and beaten. Break away again, and are caught, and beaten, and still you run. No pretending left anymore, between you, James Edwards Persons, and the mob. Knowing all too well what they have seen, and heard. The half-excited, half-embarrassed accounts from middle-aged farmwives, and apple-cheeked young girls. The only thrill they have had since that two-headed calf was born, since Annie Moore ran off with the tractor salesman. Since the bad days of farm foreclosures and milk dumped out on the highway in pitiful gestures of defiance. Since the last election, complete with torchlight parade.

A black face at the window.

They want
you
, for a holiday. For showing your face, outside their fearful night windows, the literal boogie man. And still you run, and are caught, and are beaten by men with axe handles. By men with pistol butts, by men with blackjacks and nightsticks and badges on their jackets. And still you run until somehow—a diversion, a thought that maybe you are already dead, an argument over who will hit you next—
somehow,
you are away. Running free and clear through the fields, while they look on in astonishment after you. Telling each other
They can't be human, skin tough enough to take all that and still run.
Telling each other
Damn, I thought that nigger was dead!

Running and running and running. Until you find—the wreck of a house. The ruined barn beside it. A place where you can lie down inside, amidst the titmouse nests, and the roosting owls. A place where they will never find you, will somehow never even think to look for you. Alone, at last. Feeling your lungs bursting, your ribs and insides and your head hurting like you've never quite felt them before, even when you took that beating from the white sergeant in basic training. Even that time the cop caught you up the side of your head with his billyclub when you didn't move along quite fast enough for him, coming up so quick you didn't see it.

It hurts much more than all those, the normal scrapes and bruises a colored man—
though maybe not a colored preacher
—can be expected to take. The normal quotient of blows, and broken bones, and degradations. It hurts so much more than that, but still you are exultant. Ecstatic to be alive, to have escaped.
To have escaped. The Negro's greatest possible triumph.
Letting yourself down to rest there, just for a moment, by the remains of an ancient plow, behind the skeleton of a tractor. You don't even feel the pain so much anymore. Just a nice place to lie, and catch your breath, until nightfall comes and you can move on—

Curled up to die, like a boiled shrimp, on a hospital bench. Like the old man before him now, completely unattended—

Only then did Jonah realize that he was shouting. Shouting in a purposely loud, embarrassing voice—
his black man's voice,
as Adam liked to call it. Compelling the white orderlies to admit the old man at last. Wrapping a blanket around his shoulders so that he stopped shivering, at least, and walking him slowly on down the corridor and into the ward. Jonah still yelling at them to get a gurney for him, or at least a wheelchair. But the white orderlies ignoring him again now, towing the old man down into the labyrinth of the drab, ill-lighted corridors on his shaky legs.

There is nothing outside a man which can defile him—

He walked slowly home from the hospital, feeling wobbly legged himself. Telling himself that he would not let this moment pass, he would go right up to the study and work on his sermon. But when he got home there was a phone message waiting for him from Charlie O'Kane, requesting his presence up at The Mansion. He was aware of Amanda scrutinizing his face carefully when she told him— suspicious, as she always was, of the O'Kanes and their dealings.

“You know, you don't have to jump lively just 'cause they say so,” she told him.

“Did he say it was an order? Was he rude to you on the phone?” Jonah asked her with affected patience, nettled by her tone.

Was it true, then? Once you lost a woman's respect, did you ever get it back?

“You know how he is. Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth,” Amanda said, imitating the famous O'Kane brogue that waxed and waned according to the occasion, and the number of narrowbacks in any given setting.

“So?” Jonah shrugged. “I might as well go up, then. Sounds important.”

“They want to see you so bad, why can't they come here and see you?”

“You know it isn't like that,” he told her, frustrated and bollixed by her argument at the same time. “I got a little time. Besides, you know they've done a lot for us.”

“And you deliver what they want, every election day.”

“It's not like that, you know it—”

“I'm just saying, you don't have to run out to them.”

“I'm not running!”

His shout resounded in the empty house. Amanda looking at him closely, her lips twisting.

“Aren't you? Aren't you always running these days?” she told him. “I never seem to see you stay in one place anymore, Jonah. Seems to me you're running around all the time.”

“Look, it's just been, uh, a little
difficult
, trying to get my bearings back. After—after—”

She moved closer to him then, taking his hands in hers. Looking up at him from just under his chin, her face softening in understanding.

“I didn't expect you to die for me, on that train,” she said. “I don't expect you to be anything you can't be.”

“I know,” he said, trying to smile. Thinking that the only thing worse than her scorn was her pity. Wondering again:
Do you ever get it back?

“Tell me,” she said. “You haven't been with me since—since we were on the island. Not really. Tell me what's the matter. Just like you used to—”

“I will,” he promised, giving her a hasty kiss on the cheek and all but running out of the front parlor and down the stairs of their golden house. Rushing off to the subway to answer the call of the O'Kanes. Making sure not to look at her face, watching him from the high front window.

He took the No. 5 train up to Morris Park, then walked the remaining few blocks to The Mansion, which was on Silver Street. The train rolling slowly past the proud, single-family homes, the massive apartment houses of the Irish and Jewish and Italian middle classes, newly risen from the Lower East Side, and Hell's Kitchen. Knowing the trip by heart, ever since he was a little boy and his father had first taken him up to see Deirdre Dolan O'Kane—the woman who had taken Milton in when the white people had come and smashed their house, and killed his mother.

“So that's him, is it?” she had said, the moment she set eyes on him. “What a darlin' boy—just as handsome as your girl. Come here and let me see ya, child.”

Jonah standing before her in the dark, musty room, gawking openly at the incredible tangle of blue and purple veins that showed through her white, translucent skin. His father nudging him, hard, from behind—but she had only laughed and looked up at Milton, her eyes glistening.

“But how good that you have a family, then. Good for you!” she told him. “After all these years!”

She had been a very old woman by then—nearly as old as his father was now. Smelling of old-lady smells, ointments and powder, and dizzyingly sweet perfume. But it hadn't been too bad. At least she hadn't tried to kiss him wetly on the mouth, like the old ladies from church, only hugged him tight and tickled him with her bony, gentle fingers until he laughed and squirmed hysterically in her arms. Placing him carefully back down on his feet then, and slipping him a peppermint while a young man with a funereal aspect served them tea.

“This is my grandnephew, Charlie,” she said, introducing him, in a voice that barely contained her distaste. She dismissed him in turn with a curt nod, as soon as he had finished laying out the tea.

She had sat in the middle of the room, in a great, fan-backed chair that looked like a throne. Propped up on pillows, with a fine white-lace quilt clasped up to her neck. All through their visits, Jonah remembered, men would come and go, speaking into her ear in quiet, apologetic tones. She had nodded her head, or shook it adamantly and pursed her lips. Never saying more than
“No. No, that's not likely.”

His father would pull up a chair, and the two of them would talk like old friends—less guardedly, at least, than he did around any other white person Jonah had ever seen him with. He would stand by his father's elbow, letting the old woman slip him more peppermints with subtle, knowing winks; staring idly at the objects on the parson's table next to her chair. There was always a book or two, usually a collection of Shakespeare, or some Irish poems. A bottle of some reddish medicine, a pair of reading glasses. An ancient, framed picture—a daguerreotype, like the mythic picture his father had— of a tall, broad-shouldered white man in a Civil War uniform, looking so gaunt and hollow-eyed that he seemed about to keel over.

“That was my husband, Tom O'Kane,” Mrs. O'Kane told him once. “He fought in the war. On the same side as your grandda.”

“Was he killed, too?” Jonah had asked her, and his father nudged him again, but the old woman only smiled and shook her head.

“Oh, no. He was very lucky, God rest his soul. He got to come home an' become an alderman.”

When Jonah got bored enough by their talk about the old days, or the intricacies of Democratic politics, he would politely excuse himself to go to the bathroom, then go off exploring in the great, gloomy house.

The Mansion had always thrilled and terrified him. It was threaded with long, dark passages that seemed to cross each other repeatedly, or even to lose their way, leading to nothing but locked doors. Most of the windows were made of stained glass, and while some of the scenes they depicted were things he recognized from the life of Jesus, or the saints, the others were strange, even sinister depictions of bats and apes, or jackals with bared teeth. The one that frightened and fascinated him the most was the vast, scaly tail of a sea monster, plunging back into the ocean—the rest of it already submerged, an unimaginable horror beneath the blood-red waves. He would encounter this image at the end of a hall, surrounded by nothing but locked doors, and run breathlessly back the way he had come, calling for his father.

Mrs. O'Kane would only laugh, and chuck his cheek, and hand him a sugar cookie from the tea setting. Serene on her throne there, beaming at the both of them.

“But how nice that you had a boy, then!”

Her papery, old woman's hand running down through Jonah's hair and over his cheek. Looking tenderly at his father.

“How
good
that you didn't die then, Milton.”

The house was a little better lighted now, a little less musty, but no less gloomy. It was more obviously a political clubhouse, overrun with assorted O'Kanes and their myriad cousins, Boyles and McCools, and Quinns and Flynns and Kellys. All these seriouslooking Irishmen in new suits, still moving about mysteriously on one errand or another. Both their numbers and their power had increased exponentially with the years, and out in the front hall now there were two long benches filled with supplicants, waiting stoically to see them about some favor or another. Jonah almost turned around and walked out again when he saw them, but an alert young man stationed there took him in hand immediately, ushering him politely inside.

Charlie O'Kane stood up to greet him when he entered the parlor. He sat where the old lady had, in the middle of the large room—a position that now reminded Jonah of pictures he had seen of Mussolini's office. The fan-backed chair long gone, replaced by a sleek new junior-executive's desk, complete with blotter and ink-well desk set, and in and out boxes. Behind it was Charlie, a tall, lean man—the grandnephew. Still funereal and mostly bald, with only a thin laurel of gray hair over his ears, and a clean-shaven, sallow face. He was the head of the family now—the most serious and alert of all the serious, alert men at The Mansion; officially no more than a state assemblyman, but related by marriage to Ed Flynn, who was the boss of the Bronx, and an intimate of FDR himself.

“Jimmy here'll get us some iced tea,” he said, coming around to offer his hand, his manner with Jonah perfectly cordial, if cool, as always.

“Or would ya be wantin' some coffee? Or perhaps somethin' stronger, Rev'rend?” he asked solicitously.

“Iced tea will be fine, thank you,” Jonah said warily.

Like most of the Irish politicos he was acquainted with, he had never known Charlie O'Kane to take a drink.
Was he seeking some kind of edge?
he wondered, remembering what his father had told him about his grandfather Billy Dove being a drinker. But Charlie only nodded to Jimmy, the young man in a pinstriped suit who had met Jonah at the door, and who went off at once to fetch their tea. He then switched his gaze back to Jonah, staring at him intently across his desk for a long moment, before asking a stream of perfunctory questions about how things were at the New Jerusalem.

“Anyt'ing we can help ya with down there?”

“No, not at the present time—”

“Anyone what needs a draft exemption? A place at a war pr'duction plant? Are there any...
necessities
we can procure fer ya?”

Jonah twitched involuntarily at the last question, aware that Charlie O'Kane was referring not terribly obliquely to the black market. Wondering if there was any way he could possibly know about his visits to the back of Jakey Mendelssohn's department store—