They needed to get to Washington, DC, and switch to the Pennsylvania Railroad line to complete the journey. For many passengers, the train ride was monotonous. But for Mr. Benjamin Charles and the soon-to-be Mrs. Charles, the ride was their time to plan their life.
“First thing we gotta do is get a place to stay,” Angeline said. “A roomin' house or somethin'. Then we gotta get jobs.”
“
I
gotta get a job. I don't want you workin'.”
“Benny, we ain't got no choice. I'll work as long as I can before the baby comes.”
He gave in on that point. He gave in on
a lot
of points. The future Mrs. Charles had definite ideas about how things needed to be done.
“After we on our feet, we'll move out the roomin' house and get a bigger place, but not real big. We won't need nothin' too big till the baby's older. Then we both might have to get two jobs so we can afford it. And I'm good with hair, so I can do that on the side and bring in extra money.”
All Ben could say was, “Yes, Angel.”
One day as the train steamed through North Carolina he asked, “What we namin' the baby?”
She considered. “Benny. We gone name him Benny.”
“But what if it's a girl?”
She took his hand, inserted her fingers between his so they meshed perfectly. “It'll still be Benny.”
In that moment he fell in love with her. The next moment her eyes closed so tightly, the lids wrinkled up with the strain. One hand flew to her stomach, the other clawed Ben's thigh as she clamped her knees shut and gnashed her teeth. A thin line of blood trickled down her leg.
“Help!” Ben shouted. “We need help over here! Please!”
Passengers gathered around them. Some of the women tended to Angeline. The conductor was summoned. He took one look and said, “Nothin' I can do.”
“You can't stop the train?” Ben asked.
“What good would that do, boy? We're in the middle of nowhere. There's a nigger doctor in Fauset, the next town, couple hundred miles up.”
They rushed to the doctor as soon as the train arrived. He confirmed what they already knew.
They stayed in Fauset while she recovered. The doctor and his wife, seeing the young couple had no means, sheltered them.
“I guess you's headin' on to New York,” Angeline said.
“
We's
headin' to New York. Nothin's changed.”
“But I didn't think you'd stillâ”
“Nothin's changed.”
Ben was devastated. The child, his means of redemption, was gone. But there was still Angeline.
They married in Fauset. Instead of a ring, Ben placed Willful's locket around her neck. Their wedding night was Ben's first time with a woman. It was different and it wasn't easy. He was nervous. But Angeline taught him.
They stayed in Fauset, both working odd jobs and living with the kindly doctor in a spare room, paying a few cents each week for rent. It took four months for them to earn enough to continue north. In New York, things worked out almost to the letter the way Angeline had scripted them. They found space in a tenement slum in the Bowery that they shared with three other families. They worked multiple jobs and saved every cent. They moved to a better place. They worked hard. They loved each other.
Six years later, it had come to this: Ben just outside their bedroom, Angeline's back toward him, her perfect, oiled marcel waves glimmering in the small light of the nightstand lamp. How long had she been sitting on this bed that, for him, had more often been a scene of terror than of rapture? He thought of Baby Back's grandma-quilted bed and the twirling-light-wind-hurricane stormed again.
“I'm so sorry I've hurt you, Angeline. But this won't be the last time I stay out like this.”
“Did he play his trumpet for you? Or maybe you gave him another one of my poems. Must have been doing
something
all night and all day besides . . .”
She didn't finish it, but she had affirmed it out loud nonetheless.
Is that progress?
Ben thought, and then he closed the bedroom door. Closed it softly. So softly, he didn't hear it click.
15
J
anuary. The opening stanza in an abundant new poem. An obedient virgin Ben could have his way with. The chance to write his life and bend it to his desire.
And his desire was Baby Back. He wanted him. Wanted every bit and bite of him. Every jazz phrase of him. Every year. Every memory. Every kiss. Every moist pearl from him. Every urge of him. Every sunny, dark, bitter, and sweet mood in him. Every shade of black, brown, and beige on him.
They couldn't be together on New Year's Eve. Each had to serve and entertain drunk carousers, Baby Back at Teddy's, Ben at The Pavilion. Neither left work till six in the morning. Ben arrived at The Oasis first and poured two glasses of the bootleg champagne Mr. Kittredge and David-Nicholas had given him as a New Year's gift. As he waited for Baby Back, he examined the photographs of the mysterious Roland for the hundredth time. Who was this man? Had he been a friend? Lover? Baby Back refused to talk about him, leaving Ben to hypothesize, fantasize, invent.
Baby Back arrived, exhausted from his marathon sets, steaming with the gamy odor of sweat.
“Well,” Ben said.
“Well.”
Too tired for sex, or even to undress, they clambered fully clothed underneath the grandma quilt, latched their arms around each other, and slept.
With opposite work schedules most of each week, their overlap of mutually free time often amounted to only a few hoursâsometimes less. Dear time that had to be used productively. Through experimentation as deft as it was plentiful, they learned the most concise, efficient ways to pleasure each other. These moments were too rushed and not romantic, but the frenetic urgency brought them to a blood-stirring sweat every bit as rewarding.
Bodily recreation didn't consume all of their time. They passed many hours lolling on the floor of The Oasisâsometimes clothed, most times notâtaking turns playing their favorite music for each other. Baby Back loved Louis Armstrong: the piercing sound, his lovely shaded nuances. Ben played song after song by Alberta Hunter, marveling at her mix of cosmopolitan finesse and low-down grit.
Or, in a mood for poetry, they attended readings at the Harlem Library. Impassioned discussion always followed.
“That poem about Africa,” Baby Back said once as they departed a reading, trampling through snow left over from a mid-January blizzard. “It didn't move me. Unoriginal.”
“You're wrong. He used some of the most beautiful language I've ever heard.”
“Please. When are Negroes gonna stop talking about Africa like it's just a big ol' jungle?”
Baby Back always got the last word and it was usually, as now, “
You
could've written that poem better.”
Since Baby Back had liberated him, he wrote more than ever.
The river brought me home.
It put the moon in my mouth,
Sugar and spice in my blood.
It seared light into a dark place,
Made castles of what was once a slave ship.
The middle passage on the vast, unfeeling ocean has ended
And I have slipped
Onto the vein of this river.
Â
A medleyâjazz-bright and friendlyâ
Rides shotgun on the current
As the river bleeds its wet brown body over me,
Under me, on top of me.
As it leads me to its mouth
And releases me.
Baby Back sometimes critiqued his poetry, but mostly just loved it. “You know, it's killer hearing you recite your poems, but when am I gonna
see
them? In print?”
“I'd have to send them out and hope someone likes them enough to publish them.”
“Well, then.”
So Ben restarted the barren work of sending his poems to any publication that would consider a Negro writer, and a few that he knew wouldn't.
January made Ben powerful. He looked into its face and reveled in its eyes fine-tuned to the future. But January is a two-headed god. It looks forward, but is incapable of closing its other set of eyes on the past.
“What you gonna do about Mrs. Charles?”
Baby Back asked this frequently. He wanted Ben to move in with him. But Angeline held fast to their in-name-only marriage. He had approached her about a divorce a few months earlier. She refused, fiercely, as if he'd asked her to go to hell.
“This marriage is a sham. Always has been,” he'd argued. “Now that everything's out in the open, it's time to set us both free.”
“Easy for you to say. You got someone. You got
him
. If you leave, I ain't got nobody.”
“You're young. Beautiful. You'll find someone.”
“I told you before: Nobody wants another man's used goods.”
He could have filed for divorce anyway. Or moved out at the very least. But he couldn't bear to hurt her any more than he already was. So he was biding his time, waiting for the opportunity to win his freedom. But he wouldn't wait forever. Because Baby Back wouldn't.
“Mr. Poet, I asked you a question,” the trumpeter said. “What you gonna do about your wife?”
An edge of impatience that Ben had to tread delicately.
He hugged Baby Back, nuzzled his head on the big man's shoulder. “Don't know yet. But I promise I will soon.”
Â
If not listening to records in private or poetry in public, they took long walks. The early-February air bit them as they walked along the Harlem River one evening. Baby Back was talking about Paris again with starry-eyed fondness, even though he'd never been there.
“They got beautiful parks that are really just big gardens. And the city's old. Ancient. Lot older than New York. A river flows right through Paris. The Seine. Cuts it in half. Left Bank and Right Bank.”
“The East River cuts New York in half. Manhattan on one side, Brooklyn and Queens on the other,” Ben said, anxious to equalize the two cities and keep Baby Back on the ground with him.
Baby Back stopped. He looked north across the river, into the Bronx. He shook his head. “Ain't the same.”
Passing reefer between them in The Oasis later, he said, for the millionth time, “They love Negroes in Paris.” He inhaled too hard and coughed, but didn't lose his train of thought. “Not like here with these fuckin' crackers up in your face. Every time I get a letter from down home, they tell me about another colored boy who got lynched because he was âuppity' or he looked at some white bitch the wrong damn way.”
He passed the reefer to Ben, who was careful to inhale conservatively. “But President Coolidge wants to pass a law against lynching. And anyway, things ain't as bad up here, in the north.”
“It ain't that much better either. Don't be stupid.”
He took the reefer back, relit it, hauled a huge drag.
Reefer blunted physical sensations, but not hurt feelings. If anything, it augmented the hurt, gave it legs so that, no matter what Baby Back said after, all Ben heard was
don't be stupid
.
16
S
aturday morning and Ben awoke with a rampage inside his head, the product of too much reefer and bootleg the previous night. Anna Mossity had kept their teacups full all night. The Clam House was their late-Friday-night routine now. Anna always waited on them unless otherwise indisposed, in which case Ella Vader, Della Kit, or Testa Monial did the honors. And there was always Gladys's horn of a voice as it sobbed out songs:
“My little hole of a home one night caught on fire.
Believe me, dear friends, my desperation was dire.
Then who came to save me, do you suppose?
A fireman, luggin' a big, long hose.
Â
He swung that big hose all over the place.
That man even put it right up in my face.
He shook that big hose in my hole of a home.
That hose seemed to move with a mind of its own.
Â
Then he sprayed out his water and put out my fire.
By the time he was done, we was both wet and tired.
If your home catches fire, child, you can be sure
That a fireman's hose is your ready-set cure.
Where my fireman went, I ain't got no clues.
And that's why I'm singin' these fireman blues.”
Baby Back wouldn't let Ben out of his arms. “Stay here. You don't work today.”
“I need to put in an appearance at home.”
The arms tightened. “Do that later.”
“I have to write.”
“You can write
here
.”
“My typewriter's
there
.”
“Write longhand.”
“Baby, I need to go.”
“You need to bring that goddamn typewriter over
here
.”
He hated leaving, but looked forward to writing time alone in the apartment. Angeline would be at work. He heard a scratch of a voice behind him as he was about to let himself in.
“Only one reason a married man stays out all night.”
Ben didn't bother turning around. “What reason is that, Mrs. Harrisburg?”
She came up beside him and then steadied herself with her ubiquitous walking stick. “Men. All alike. Even my dear late husband. Couldn't keep it in his pants for anything.”
He stepped back, surprised by her indelicate language and the tears drenching her cheeks, and then astounded when she leveled her walking stick at him.
“Don't you know how to treat a woman?” she asked. “Don't you know when you run around, you make her feel bad about herself?”
The screech in her voice must have surprised even her because she collected herself, smoothed her hair down, adjusted her shawl, which had slipped askew. Then she deliberately turned her nose up at him. A gesture so formal, so invested with contempt, it almost hurt his feelings. Evelyn Harrisburg hobbled into her apartment and shut the door. Not with a
slam,
but an aloof
click,
as if Ben rated no better effort.
He entered his apartment, so ruffled by the episode that he couldn't immediately comprehend the scene that fanned out in front of him. The table had been set with Angeline's best linen and the good china they'd saved over a year to purchase. Smells of bacon, smoked ham, eggs, and coffee assailed him. Angeline stood beside the table, a frilly apron over her dress, her marcel wave done up fresh. The locket shone against her chest.
He had never seen her this beautiful. It was as if time had shifted and in that tiny drop of space, Willful,
this thing,
and Baby Back were all reduced to footnotes in the book of his life with Angeline.
“Join me for breakfast?” she said.
“Yes. Yes, I will.”
They didn't know what to say or how to act with each other. It used to come so naturally. It used to be so lovely. Now they bumbled through conversation about their jobs and the weather. But pieces of the old friendship returned.
“Remember when we first moved up here?” Angeline held back a giggle. “And we felt the subway underneath us?”
“We thought it was an earthquake!”
“We ran for cover.”
“Everyone thought we was crazy!”
“Couple of hicks from down South.”
They laughed out loud, recalling their first frightened, naïve days in the big city.
Angeline brought him another slice of toast and buttered it the way he liked it. He knew she had sacrificed to prepare this banquet: Saturday was her most lucrative day at the beauty shop.
This breakfast ain't worth the rent,
Ben thought, and then felt bad.
“How's your poetry?” she asked. Her eyes drooped to her lap. “I miss it.”
A picture assembled in his mind: he and Baby Back, nude on the floor of The Oasis, Ben reading his poems out loud as some pretty tune played on the phonograph.
“I just got published,” he said. “Two poems in
Opportunity.
And I'm reading at the Harlem Library on Thursday.”
“You got published? Benny, that's wonderful!”
She swooped onto his lap and laced her arms around him. She pressed her forehead against his neck. He smelled her perfumeâ vanilla with a dash of rose. Too sweet-smelling and she wore too much. She began to feel heavy on his lap and he didn't know where to put his hands.
“We need to celebrate,” she said. “Exactly what we need to do.”
He heard the charge, the longing in her voice, and knew he was in trouble.
“Why don't I clear the table and then we'll go to the bedroom? Or I can leave the table till later. What do you say, Benny? Benny-boy?”
She lifted her head from his neck and put her tongue in his ear.
He drew away from her. “Don't. You know I can't.”
She swooped off his lap with the same velocity with which she had swooped on. “You mean
won't
.”
He went to the door.
“No, please don't leave yet,” Angeline said. “Not without some more clothes and books. You've taken half your things to
his
house already. Might as well take the other half. You only use this place for storage these days. Like I'm in the fucking storage business.”
The landslide of tears made her sputter the words when she meant to shoot them. She held herself tall and valiant, but was really an abandoned little girl. Ben felt sorry for her, yet here it was: the opportunity he'd been sitting in wait for. He snatched it.
“Then I should move out. Don't want to impose on you.”
He remained calm, held himself as tall and valiant as she, looked directly into her eyes, wouldn't allow himself to look away. He held his breath. His heart beat savagely. They stared each other down with molten-hot glares that melted what was left of the marriage. Angeline blinked first.
“Get out, Ben. Get on out of here.”
She began to clear the table, her movements slow, blasé, as if none of this had ever mattered.
“All right,” Ben said, and breathed, and let his valiant height slip a little.