Strivers Row (16 page)

But they were all disappointed, no one ever came to the door. The last time Jonah had seen Langley at all was nearly ten years ago, as best he could place it, in the early hours of the morning. He had been with the brother, Homer—the two of them in their old-fashioned suits, lugging a discarded Christmas tree, with little more than a few strands of tinsel on its branches, back across Fifth Avenue to their home. It had been a strange, disturbing image, the two old white men wobbling under the weight of the tree, Langley gently directing his blind brother.

Yet he strode along now with surprising agility, towing his milk crate along the pavement. His skin an unnatural, chalky white color under the streetlights. The people crowding in around him, trying to touch his sleeve for luck.

“We're with you, Mr. Collyer! We're your friends!” someone called out, and he stopped for a moment, favoring them with a smile that looked harried but not at all displeased.

“I appreciate your kind words,” he said in a formal, starchy voice. “It's nice to know that we have some friends. If you could tell the younger element to stop breaking our windows and littering our yard with junk, I would be most appreciative.”

The crowd applauded for some reason, the faces all around the old white man grinning broadly. Following him jubilantly on up the street, as he marched on into Schwartz's butcher shop.

“Somethin's gonna happen now! You watch!”

“It's a sign, it's a sign for sure!”

But just then the ebullient atmosphere on the street was broken by a blast of sound. Heads whipped around, drawn involuntarily to the metallic, nerve-grinding noise of racing engines. Jonah knew what it was before he saw them—more of Police Commissioner Valentine's sixty-four-man motorcycle corps. Another precaution sent to keep an eye on Harlem for the duration—supplementing the increased foot patrols, and the mounted officers, and the radio cars—the motorcycle cops went racing down the broad avenues as loud as they pleased, any hour of the day or night.

Six of them came motoring slowly down Lenox now, gunning their engines, the noise unbelievably loud and grating in the humid summer night. Their peaked caps shoved down low over their eyes, wearing huge goggles, and leather hip boots and gloves. They frowned disapprovingly at the sidewalk crowds, looking as alien and sinister as creatures from some science-fiction movie, and as they passed, Jonah watched the lips of all the sidewalk pedestrians, colored and white, curl up automatically.

When he got back to Strivers Row, Amanda was sitting up for him. A smile on her sweet face as she came over to put her arms around him, and kiss him—all too plainly having put aside whatever had bothered her about the train.

“There's a sandwich in the kitchen,” she told him, holding on to him, her hands around his waist when he tried to move away. There was a thin trace of perspiration running along the top of her brow, her tightly curled hair swelling in the heat. Once, he knew, they would already have been making love, in need of no further inspiration.

“How was he? How's he been doing?”

“The same—I guess,” Jonah told her. “You know with him. It's hard to tell.”

“Did he talk at all?”

“No—no, I talked to him,” he said, not telling her how much he had confessed.

Like a schoolboy. Like any other of the sad, played-out creatures who walked into his own study every day, to tell him their unsolvable woes.

Amanda had left a thick tuna sandwich on toast for him in the kitchen, along with a glass of cold milk from the icebox. The toast still warm, she had figured nearly to the minute how long he was likely to be with his father. Jonah sat down at the kitchen table to eat while she worked quietly around him—putting things away, washing up a couple of dishes. There to talk to, as always, if he so desired. But he ate in silence, feeling both famished and exhausted by the events of the day, and after a few minutes she padded quietly upstairs with another smile—letting him be alone, too, if that was what he wanted.

It would be hardest to leave her, he knew. He would have even considered asking her to come with him, but he knew what her answer would be.
And her face was so much darker
—

Later, while she slept in their bedroom, he had gone up to his study on the third floor, ostensibly to work on his sermon for Sunday. Fiddling around with yet another variation on how it was that the children of Israel could sing the songs of Zion by the waters of Babylon.

There was always a new variation, a new twist. At the seminary down in Pennsylvania, he had learned all the great sermon forms. There was the
Twin Sermon
and the
Classification Sermon,
and the
Surprise-Package Sermon
and the
Three Points in the Palm of a Hand,
and the
Silent Conclusion.
He had learned the
Ladder Sermon,
in which, like Jacob, the preacher climbed steadily upward, through more and more powerful arguments, and the
Skyrocket Sermon,
which got out of the blocks quick, with a riveting, human story that burst into a profound if obvious moral—then rained a slew of further, more surprising lessons down over the heads of the congregation. There was the
Jewel Sermon,
in which the preacher might actually hold up his hand to imitate a jeweler looking over a precious stone from many angles, and the
Rabbit in the Bushes,
in which the preacher improvised, juking as he went along. Throwing a line out there, and then repeating it. Maybe once, twice, even three times if it seemed to stir something out in the congregation—the very same way that a hunter flushes a rabbit from a bush if he sees it shake.

One had to be fast on his feet to pull off such a sermon, Jonah knew—a master of improvisation, keenly attuned to how his congregation thought and reacted. Picking up in that few seconds just what it was that had made them jump, then clutching it for dear life; worrying it, building on it, never letting it go until you had brought it all the way home.

He had seen his father give such a sermon many times, but he had never had the temerity to try to pull one off himself. He relied on just the opposite, meticulous study and preparation, but the more he wrote this night, the more his words felt strained and spiritless. His hand stayed, as always, by the thought of how any sermon he gave was sure to be compared to his father's. The radiant faces, pumping the old man's hand at the door when he had still been in the pulpit. Exulting, “You
preached
today!”—or even, from some of the oldest church mothers and deacons, that most venerable of accolades:
“He sure can read out of his hand!”

By contrast Jonah would receive, at best, their polite murmurs. Eyes cast down in embarrassment: “Good talk today, Reverend,” or “Good lecture!” Or even the ultimate insult, whispered just loud enough for him to hear as they went out the door—
“Reverend can't preach!”

He sighed, and put the sermon away in its desk cubbyhole—the Spirit refusing to descend again tonight. He gave it up and pulled another project out of his bottom desk drawer. A thick legal note-pad, with a title inked in block letters across the top:
A History of the Church of the New Jerusalem.

It was a project he had started years ago, soon after he had assumed his ministry. Intended as a standard, triumphant history of the church's founding and its rise, like the others put out by the leading churches on the tenth or fifteenth anniversaries of their arrival in Harlem. He had hoped to make it both a tribute to his father and an offering to his congregation, one that might serve as a bond between them.

But like everything else, it hadn't worked out as he'd intended. It had never quite congealed into a real history, devolving instead, no matter what Jonah had tried, into no more than a collection of rambling thoughts and speculations about his father's life. By now it was something he picked up only when he was hopelessly stuck on something else. Leafing through the dusty pages, he realized it had been left untouched for a good six months.

They knew the story already.
That was the main problem. His father a Moses who had not only made it to the promised land but who had outlived everyone else who had wandered through the Wilderness with him. They all knew it, every member of the congregation, at least as well as they knew the story of the Exodus, and the Crucifixion.

The story of how he had rescued his people from the literal Wilderness, nearly eighty years ago. That dismal wood in northern Virginia, still charred and strewn with moldering bodies from the war that had raged through it twice. Even in Harlem, its pulpits filled with self-made men who had engineered miraculous escapes from the fields and the sharecropper cabins, no one had a story to match it.

Milton had gone down as soon as the war had ended. Gone to find
his
father, Billy Dove
—
that proud, scowling black man in the daguerreo-type. Walking all the way down to Virginia, as soon as he could decently take his leave of the neighbor's house where they had been living for almost two years. Ever since the draft riots, when half the City burned and white people ran through the streets like mad dogs, torturing and hanging any Negroes they could find from the lamp-posts.

They all knew that part, especially—though Jonah had never heard his father put it in a sermon.
There was no need to. It was already deep in the marrow of the church. His father had only to refer to the evil he had seen, personally, in the streets of this City, and they knew what he was talking about.

The story of how the mob had come for them, in their home down in the slums of the old Fourth Ward, and how Milton's mother—
the white woman, faded away now to just her eyes and that line of mouth in the old daguerreotype on his desk
—had gone out into the street to fight for her son's life. How they had already beaten Milton unconscious and stripped him of his clothes, preparing to put him to the rope and the torch just as they had already hanged, and mutilated, and burned alive a dozen other Negroes, men and women and children alike.

She had gone out alone, to fight for her son's life, and the white men had set on her, then, in their blind, hateful fury. Beating her with axe handles and fence staves and those iron wagon rims—but she had clung to her son anyway. Refusing to let go, to give up shielding him with her body, no matter how much they beat her and tried to pull him away.

Afterward—after someone had finally come and put a stop to it, and the men with the axe handles and the wagon rims had fled— they had taken her to the neighbor's house, where she had drifted in and out of a stupor for six weeks. Her terrible gasps for breath filling the house where their whole family was forced to live—where Milton himself still lay, beaten half to death. All the prettiness and the youth beaten out of his face by the mob, preserved still only in that single picture he had. Slowly healing, coming back to life in an upstairs bedroom, even as he listened to his mother's racking gasps for breath.

And Billy Dove, his father, stumping back and forth between them on his broken leg, sustained when he had helped to lead the Colored Orphans to safety—another, only slightly lesser founding story. Hobbling between his only child who was as black as he was and whom he had always been hard on, fearing so much for him, and his dying white wife, whom he had only just realized he loved, too late. Until on that Friday in August—
as real and as vivid as Good Friday itself
—when her terrible breathing had finally given out, and he had risen up at once from her bedside, and gone to pack his bags. Signing on before the day was out with the Twentieth Colored New York, despite his explicit promise to his wife on her deathbed that he would stay and look after their five children. Saying only to the white neighbor woman, Mrs. O'Kane, when she had begged and remonstrated with him that they needed a father,
What my children need is to know that their mother cannot be killed in the street like a dog. My children need to know that their lives are worth something.

Not only enlisting, too, but extracting a promise from Milton, Jonah's father, that he would follow him as soon as he should hear that he had fallen. Milton making the oath in good faith, though he could barely sit upright at the time. Actually trying to sign up, too, under the luring, striped enlistment tents along the Battery nine months later, after the battle of Cold Harbor, when he had spotted the tiny line of type in the New York
Tribune
: “Missing—Sgt. Dove, 20th Colored...”

But Mrs. O'Kane, whom Jonah had met when he was very young at the gloomy old manse up in the Bronx, her hands as dry and brittle as tracing paper on his cheek—Mrs. O'Kane had suspected just such a thing, and had run after him, begging him to come back, and help look after his brothers and sisters. And when Milton had told her,
It's not a man's job to look after children,
she had not desisted but had hung on to his arm for dear life—for his dear life. Telling him,
I'm speaking to you like a man now.
Telling him,
We have a duty, too, those of us who just abide.

Once the fighting was ended, he had determined to go, no matter what. To find his father, if he was lost, and bring him home, or at least to find his body in the grave where he lay. Packing only a few victuals, an extra shirt, and the twenty dollars he had diligently saved through any work he could find in the City.
The details of all he had carried, right down to the twenty dollars, known to every member of the church to this day.
Mrs. O'Kane, the white woman—the
other
white woman—letting him go this time without a protest even though she wished he wouldn't, knowing there would be no stopping him.

He had walked all the way down. Following the spongy, late spring roads through New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Stepping, not without a shadow of trepidation, across the Line into Maryland, and the old slave country. Crossing and recrossing the endless rivers of the war, the Potomac and the Rapidan, and the Rapahannock and the Chickahominy, and finally Topotomoy Creek itself, which ran along the field of Cold Harbor, only a few miles to the east and north of the still smoking rebel capital of Richmond. And there, at the last, he had found—nothing.