Strivers Row (14 page)

They had walked up through the same streets he had traversed just now in the gray, foggy, Harlem morning. Jonah thrilled to be up at this unfamiliar hour—particularly pleased to know that he had left his older sister, Sophie, still sleeping torpidly in her back bedroom, where she was never awakened by these night disturbances.

At the church his father had flung open the doors and marched straight up the center aisle. A murmur going through the men and women in the pews just to see him—for a self-taught preacher, he had a superb instinct for the dramatic. Jonah had walked up the aisle just behind him, clutching his hand, still wearing his pajamas under his coat, a little chilly in the early spring weather. His eyes wide, staring at all the troubled souls in the pews smelling faintly of the work they did, an intriguing, mixed scent of perspiration and scouring powders, food and cleaning wax and machine oil.

He had seen his father at work many times before, of course—at least every Sunday and during the Wednesday Bible classes, and during the tarry service on Saturday night—but never this close, or this personal. He had strode right up to the altar where Pete Moore, the usher in attendance that night, was standing solicitously over a woman who had thrown herself down on the red carpeting there, and was clutching tight to a leg of the altar table. Mr. Moore, an elderly man with great, round, Coke-bottle glasses, stood helplessly patting her back from time to time with his gloved hand, and from the way they both looked and how hard the woman was breathing, he expected her to be sobbing. But when his father helped Brother Moore pull her up, Jonah saw that she was dry-eyed, and staring off into space with an expression that was more unnerving than any crying could have been.

“You come on now, Lu,” his father had said to her, walking her unceremoniously away from the altar—her body all but limp in his big, bearlike arms.

“You come along now, Sister Lulabelle, you have a talk with me in the back where you can unburden yourself, and we don't have to disturb all these fine people before they go back to work.”

The woman acknowledged him only with another dull stare. To Jonah, at the time, she had looked old beyond reckoning, though much later he realized that she could not have been forty yet. Her hair was laced with gray, and while her red-brown Trinidadian face was not unpretty, it was weathered and deeply folded, like those of so many women who worked at the dryers and steam presses in the big industrial laundries downtown.

His father had half-carried, half-dragged her back to the vestry rooms, with Jonah and Brother Moore tagging along—a further intrigued murmur rising like the surf behind them as they left. His father had ignored it, though, and back in the vestry he had sat her down amidst all the comfortable, well-aged furniture of his office; the soft, enveloping old stuffed sofa where Jonah and Sophie had all but busted the springs as toddlers, jumping up and down on them for hours while their daddy laughed and laughed behind his cluttered rolltop desk. Now his father carried himself more somberly—but still casually, as if the lifeless, dead-eyed woman in his study were no more than any other routine piece of business to him, a meeting with the church custodian, or the deacons' finance committee.

“Tell me what's on your mind now, Lulabelle,” he had begun just as routinely when she was finally seated on the broken couch, still staring out into space.

“C'mon now, you can talk to me. Lulabelle? One step at a time now. You got to tell me what's troubling you, sister. C'mon now.”

Slowly, slowly the woman began to move her jaws, as if her mouth had been fastened shut for a long time, and she had to work up to saying something.

“I cahn't go back there,” she croaked out at last—in her surprisingly crisp Island diction.

“Go back where, Lulabelle?
Where
can't you go back to?” his father prodded her—his voice sounding impatient and almost callous, Jonah thought.

“I cahn't go back to the Slave Mahket again,” she got out, shaking her head. “I cahn't do it. They layin' us off at the laundry, an' I cahn't face it, goin' back up there again.”

Even then, Jonah knew what the Slave Market was. His father had taken him up specifically to see it—the patch of pavement outside the five-and-dime at Gerard Avenue and 167th Street in the Bronx, where the women gathered hoping to get day work cleaning white ladies' homes on the Grand Concourse. They were there every day from eight in the morning until one in the afternoon. Squatting on wooden crates and boxes in the shadows of the elevated, just up the street from the majestic grey walls of Yankee Stadium. Their price dwindling steadily as the day went on, dropping from twenty cents an hour to ten, to even a nickel as it turned noon, and the housewives began to thin out. In the winter they stuffed newspapers up under their coats, and into the crumbling tennis shoes and the cutout men's shoes they wore on their feet to keep warm. They carried their own tools, in brown paper bags, and broken traveling grips— mops and brushes, sponges and dusters, and used toothbrushes to pry dirt out of the white people's woodwork.

His father had wanted Jonah to see it all—the frowning white housewives stalking back and forth before them, trying to tell them apart and remember who had worked for them before, and what they could get away with. Many of them, Jonah had learned long since, finding an excuse not to pay even the few cents an hour they had promised. Hard as they were, the laundries paid a little better, and there the women could talk and sing together as they worked. But there were always layoffs, and strikes that made the jobs nearly as precarious as those to be found at the Slave Market.

“Now, Lulabelle, you have eight children, don't you?” Jonah's father had said matter-of-factly to the crazy Island woman, looking down and writing at something on his desk.

“Yes, I got eight children,” the woman said, as if tortured by the fact.

“Those children I always see sittin' so nice and still in the pews every Sunday, or down in the basement learnin' their lessons? With their faces washed clean, an' their hair combed?”

“Yes—”

“Who takes care a those children, an' provides for 'em, ever since your husband passed?”

She stared up at him then with as frank and despondent a look as Jonah had ever seen on a person's face. Asking him something so odd that he could tell even his father was surprised.

“Tell me, Rev'rend. Is there memory in Hell?”

“In hell?”

“Because you know, more 'n' more, I feel I'd like to just kill all of them. Cut all they throats with the kitchen knife, an' just walk right out the door.”

“And then you'd go to hell—”

“But first, I'd have some time, just by myself ! They cahn't punish you for you sins if you cahn't remember what they were. I'd remember killing all my babies, I know that would be my punishment. But I would have a memory of a good time, too. And I'd know my babies would be safe. They wouldn't have to suffer growin' up in this world, they be safe in Heaven, 'cause Heaven is forgetting, an' Hell is remembering.”

She looked as if she had come back to herself when she had finished. Her eyes dry, her face nearly beatific over how she had figured it out.

“But, Sister, don't you know, if you were to kill your children, there would be only that evil memory,” his father had told her. “There wouldn't be any good time. You'd walk outta that house like a zombie. Whether you went to Hell or not, there wouldn't be any pleasures. Just the memory of you killing them, always before your eyes.”

His father had been lolling back in his swivel chair, the same one that Jonah and Sophie loved to push and race across the office floor. But now he lurched up, the chair spring twanging as he stood. Hovering above the woman, running a hand along her grey hank of hair—the kitchen hacked short as so many laundry workers did, in the hope of receiving just a single cool draft on the back of the neck.

“There is only memory, in heaven
and
hell,” his father was saying now. “Which is why Jesus always remembers you. Don't you think Jesus is standing beside you at that Slave Market? Don't you think he's standing there, just as he's beside you every Sunday in this church? Just as he's beside us
right now
in this room? Don't you think he'll remember what you did for your children?”

She looked up and started to speak, but he cut her off.

“Not a woman in this world, not a mother or a father, don't feel like they could as soon kill their children as look at them some days. No one! If they tell you that they don't, they're lyin'. There's never been a human being yet didn't have the worst thoughts there ever was. Never was a human being who didn't at least
contemplate
doing the worst thing you could ever consider, right down to nailing our lord himself up to a tree.”

“But—”

“I
know.
I seen it.”

He was down next to her then, kneeling on the floor, moving with remarkable grace for a man of his size, and age.

“Not just thought about it, even, but
did
it, right here in the streets of this City! And you have done
nothing
like that.”

Confronting her with the founding story of the church, Jonah knew, which was not quite that of the Crucifixion.
The story of what had been done to his mother, and to him.

“Remember—he is with you always, even standing beside you at the Slave Market.
He
will be strong with you! And if he is with you,
we
—all of us!—are with you as well.”

His father had stood back up abruptly, his joints cracking audibly in the small vestry office. He had snatched a slip of paper off his desk, thrusting it at the still waiting usher.

“Here, Brother Moore! Kindly deliver this over to the deacons' welfare committee tomorrow morning, will you, an' let's see if we can't raise the sister's assistance a little.”

“Yes, sir!”

“And, Brother Moore!”

“Reverend?”

“If she would be so kind, could you see if Mrs. Moore or one of the other deaconnesses might not mind sitting with Lulabelle here for a spell, an' maybe see her through the morning?”

“Yes, sir!”

He went out immediately, and Jonah's father went back to the woman. She was still sitting in the chair but looking reanimated now, her breathing heavier, her hands gripped firmly around the arms. His father had helped her slowly stand up, then kissed her gently on her forehead and slipped a couple of bills into her hand.

“Sister, you go on home now and make your children something nice for breakfast. Sister Moore will be there to help you. You watch them smile, then you go out to that Slave Market for them, and I guarantee that Jesus will be with you there.”

“Yes, Brother Rev'rend,” she had said, delivering the words in one long sigh, as if she were freeing herself of something, and walked out of the office with her legs stiff but her head held high.

Jonah had watched her go, and staggered back out into the church himself. That was when he had had his first, false conversion— walking out all but blinded by the sudden morning light pouring through the yellowy stained-glass windows up by the pulpit. Once before, in Sunday School, his teacher had told them all to shut their eyes and put their heads down, then asked them to raise their hands if they were ready to accept Christ Jesus into their hearts. And afterward the principal, a kindly older woman, had come up to him and told him how glad she was to hear that he had accepted Christ, but he had only felt that his confidence had been betrayed, and that in any case Christ had not come into his heart.

Yet that morning, stumbling blindly toward the altar, Jonah had felt sure that the Spirit had entered into him. Filled as he was with the miracle of seeing that nearly comatose woman walk proudly out of the church, but even more with the beauty of how his father had achieved it. He hadn't realized, then, that he would have to reach bottom—that he would have to be as much in despair as that woman had been, clutching the altar with both hands, before he could really be saved himself. But seeing his father work had been almost like another calling, to the practical application of his vocation. Stepping back inside to the vestry, after his revelation in front of the blinding windows, Jonah had been about to tell his father what he had just undergone when the old man had looked up at him from his desk, where he once again sat calmly writing.

“Well, what did you think of all that?” he had asked, with a sour expression on his face.

“You saved her!” Jonah told him, breathless.

“No, son. I just told her Jesus was standing beside her in this room.”

“And He was!”

“No, he wasn't. He isn't at that Slave Market, neither,” his father had shrugged, a small, tired smile on his face. “Sometimes I feel guilty about it, all the things I put down to his name.”

“But you saved her!”

“Son, I didn't save anybody—me or Jesus, neither,” he said, drumming his fingers thoughtfully on his desk, then jotting down another note. “Who knows but she won't cut those eight babies' throats. We better have somebody keep a eye on her—”

“But Jesus—”

“I give 'em Jesus because that's all I got,” his father said, shaking his head irritably, as if ridding himself of some annoyance.

“All that stuff about what it's like in heaven and hell! You come up with an all-forgiving God, the Prince of Peace. An' then you make out he has a place where he keeps his creations for all eternity, punishing them forever an' ever, over an' over again for their wickedness. It's enough to choke a man!”

Yet as much as his father's words had shocked him, Jonah had remained transcended by the moment. Putting down his father's peremptory dismissal of Jesus as just another of the odd things he liked to say about God, usually at home and only among the family.