Strivers Row (21 page)

“No one knows when the hour of Africa's redemption cometh,” he would always tell them at the end of the meeting. “It is in the wind. It is coming. One day, like a storm, it will be here.” Leading them in the closing chant:

Up, you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will!

Up, you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will!

Up, you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will!

Africa for the Africans! Ethiopians, Awake!

And afterward, on the car ride back through the dark—his Daddy driving even slower now because of how little he could see at night with his one eye—he would harangue Malcolm about his skin color again, and about how much he hated all white people, and most especially the white blood that flowed in the veins of his wife, and which gave her such airs.

But as he got older, Malcolm noticed that whenever white people were around, his Daddy was friendly to them. Evenings, Early would stand out in front of their house with him—always with
him
—gripped firmly in one of his huge hands. Greeting their white neighbors like Mr. and Mrs. Stohrer with big smiles, or even going over to knock on their doors and offer them fresh tomatoes and corn and watermelons from their vegetable garden out back—and taking him along again. Only Malcolm noticing how the smiles clenched on their white faces when they opened their doors and saw his father there.

Once his Daddy had spied one of the white neighbors surreptitiously dumping some of the fresh, yellow corn he had just given him out into his pigsty, and he had raged about the house for hours. Wondering over and over again why the man would throw out his good corn, until finally Malcolm had asked his father there:

“Daddy, why do you like white folks so much, when we a mighty race?”

The blow surprised him, since his father hit him so rarely, the back of his hand sending him sprawling across the stringy throw rug on their parlor floor. His Daddy standing over him, seething, his hands clenched into two fists. He had propped himself up on his elbows—too scared to get all the way up, but too stunned to cry, just blinking at his father.

“Don't you
never
say that! Don't you
never
say anything like that to me again, boy!” he yelled at him.

But later that same night, holding Malcolm on his lap at the kitchen table, he had sipped whiskey and launched into a rambling explanation of himself—a moment that made Malcolm squirm when he remembered it, which he did at least every week.

“Sometimes, you got to deal wit' the devil hisself to get what you need,” he'd said, his words coming out slurred and slowed by the whiskey. “Sometimes, you got to play up to the enemy, get what you want, 'fore you can send him back down to hell. I ain't never been a lucky man. I got ten chil'ens, got to dig where I can.”

But still Malcolm saw that their white neighbors' aloofness bothered him. He never understood—as Malcolm did—that they had heard all the running fights emanating from their house; the beatings, and the shouting, and the shrieking of women and children. He didn't hear the rumors that he never worked, only faked accidents to collect the insurance money.

It was true that things happened to Earl Little. He had lost his eye when he sideswiped a nail on a construction job, and after that, with his depth perception gone, he was always falling off ladders and roofs, or smashing his fingers. One night he had even turned their old black touring car over in a ditch, with all of them inside. Malcolm had watched it unfold like a nightmare from his place in the backseat, sandwiched between his brothers and sisters. His father driving the car slowly, carefully, right into the ditch—Malcolm wanting to shout out a warning but unable to believe it was happening until the first wheel sank in. The big car toppling over as ponderously as an ocean liner, all of the children screaming and falling onto each other as it slowly went over on its side.

Miraculously, they had all been able to scramble out with just a few cuts and bruises—if only because his Daddy was so blind at night he could not drive any faster. He had pulled them all out, brushing them off, not even yelling at any of them, he was so embarrassed. Unable to so much as look at his wife.

“C'mon, c'mon, you're not hurt,” was all he said to them. Lining them up by the side of the road to make sure they were all accounted for. Making them help him right the car, before they all piled back in and motored slowly on through the darkness again.

It was the abiding faith of his Daddy's life that he had never been lucky. He liked to talk about how nobody in his whole family had ever had any luck, how three of his brothers had been shot dead, and how he himself had had a dress shop that made money back in Omaha, until the Klan had run him out of business and burned down their house—though when he did, Louise would always sniff and say it never happened that way.

“You know what really happened in Omaha,” she would add meaningfully, and Malcolm always thought they were about to get into it again. But his Daddy would only throw up one hand and mutter in her general direction.

“Women don't want to see any stone what's in a man's way,” he said. “It's a man's job to see his way clear.”

Despite his bad luck he was always full of plans. He told them that he was going to get a job on the line at the Olds Reo plant, but when he went down to apply he was handed a form for a janitor's job and he had crumpled it up and thrown it on the floor; walking slowly away, daring the white man who had handed it to him to do anything about it. Some days he would say he was going to the employment agency he claimed to run downtown, and leave in the morning whistling, dressed in his business clothes and with an empty briefcase in his hand. But by the time he got back, he was always in a bad mood. The briefcase still empty, Malcolm knew from when he had run down to the curb to carry it for him. Earl waving off his wife when she questioned him about it.

“Money's no problem!” he yelled at her.
“Money's no problem for a man like me!”

But one day, soon after his sister Yvonne was born, they had received a letter from the landlord summoning them to court for breaking the white covenant on the block where they lived. When they had rented the house, Earl had sent Louise to see the man— confident that she could pass herself off as white. When the summons came she had looked at it with her mouth open in shock. Holding it up to her husband's face, demanding to know, “Early, what does this mean?
What does this mean?
”

He had slapped the letter away—“Why don't you tell
me,
wit' all yo'
Anglican
schooling?”—then walked down off the porch with his hands in the pockets of his work overalls, scuffing at the dirt.

He had tried fighting it, even going to the trouble of hiring a white lawyer, though that had only succeeded in adding his fee, and the court costs, to their burden. He had promptly ordered the lawyer to appeal—but in those weeks while their appeal was being considered, Malcolm had never seen his father so quiet. Walking around and around their property, staring up at the house as if he expected the structure itself to provide him with the answer to their dilemma.

Malcolm couldn't fathom why any white man would want their house, with its tar-paper shingles already worn from black to red, the paint peeling off it, and the rusted nails bobbing up through the floorboards of their porch. Even as a child he could see it was the worst house in their neighborhood, the most narrow and forlorn.

Yet it was the eviction notice that terrified him, with its salient passage that he read over and over again, trying to decipher its meaning—
“This land shall never be rented, leased, sold to, or occupied by persons other than those of the Caucasian race.”
Unable to believe that it could really mean what he thought it did, until he had his mother confirm it for him, in one of those increasingly rare moments when she could talk about anything instead of just slumping down in a kitchen chair for hours at a time.

What he wanted to ask her then was how it was that the white people in the neighborhood could claim that no one but them could live there forever. What if they were to put a white covenant over everything? What if they put a covenant over the whole face of the earth? Where would they go then?

It was hopeless, as far as he could see, and from his mother's silence he knew that she thought the same. But over the next few days, while the rest of them waited fearfully for the appearance of the sheriff and the eviction men, Earl's spirits seemed to revive. Malcolm actually heard him come down in the morning whistling, and he told Louise that she shouldn't worry, their eviction would be a blessing in disguise.

One Saturday night early in November, when the jagged ridges of hoarfrost had first started to appear on what remnants of grass there were in the yard, Earl had told them all in a loud voice that he was going out to get more kerosene for the kitchen stove. Louise had started to tell him that there was plenty for the night, but he had cut her off sharply, saying that he might as well go get some now since he had to be up early in the morning for church.

They had all sat around the kitchen table, staring at each other while they listened to the sound of the old car rumble into life on the third try and slowly lumber away. His mother hadn't said a thing—but soon after his Daddy had left, she had informed them all that it was too cold to sleep upstairs tonight. She had settled Hilda and herself and the baby Yvonne on pallets on the kitchen chairs, and put Malcolm and his three brothers together under their blankets, on the stringy throw rug in the middle of the parlor floor. There it had felt colder than it ever had upstairs in their bed, but they had enjoyed the adventure. Huddling up close against the wind that sliced its way in through the window jambs, and between the shingles of the aged, ramshackle house. Poking and pushing at each other under the thin blankets, the four boys trying to get comfortable until they achieved a sweaty, drooling equilibrium—legs over each other's legs, arms around each other's necks.

It was a dream-haunted sleep, the wind slapping at the loose corner slats of the house. Malcolm thought he heard something that sounded like a car backfiring, or even a gunshot, and the sound of feet padding rapidly across their little yard outside. Someone was running over to the neighbor's house, where they banged on their back door—then retracing their way across their yard, over to the other next-door neighbors, then running crazily back and forth, all up and down their block until suddenly Malcolm felt a hand on his arm. His mother yanking him up, Wilfred and Philbert and Reginald right after him, from their tent of blankets on the floor.

“Come
on,
” she said—her voice quiet but more urgent than he had ever heard it in his life, even in those moments when he had thought she was mad enough to actually beat him to death. Frantically shoving him and his brothers into pullover shirts and pants, Reginald and Philbert complaining sleepily that she was putting them in the wrong ones.

“It doesn't
matter!
” she hissed at them. “The
house
is on fire!”

“I don't smell nothin' burnin',” Wilfred said, sniffing about him.

She slapped him across the face so hard his whole body turned halfway around. Then she grabbed them up by their skinny arms again, two boys to a hand, and began to pull them out toward the front door where Hilda was already waiting, her eyes large with fear and the strain of holding the baby.

“When I tell you somethin', you best
believe
it!” she hissed, still pulling them forward, until they were tumbling down the front steps.

Malcolm thought Wilfred was right, he didn't smell anything himself save for the usual tang of the kerosene stove, maybe a little stronger than usual. But as soon as they reached the front yard, his Daddy loomed abruptly up in front of them, also shouting that their house was burning down. He looked back toward the house—and as if on command saw a little light spring up, back in the darkness of the house, where the kitchen was. It looked like no more than the flame of a church altar candle at first—then it shot up, and out, already beginning to engulf the whole first floor of their home.

“My house is burning! They set my house on fire!” his father was yelling, stretching out his long arms as far as they would reach. Until it seemed to Malcolm, still half in his dreams, that his Daddy was larger than ever, standing like a great tree before the fire. His endless arms covering the entire width of the little house, and yard—holding, at the very end of his reach, a pistol in one of his enormous hands, and a double-barreled shotgun in the other.

“They set my house afire!”

The neighbors were already pouring out onto their front lawns. Some of them wearing bathrobes and pajamas, others yanking up pants and wrapping kitchen dresses around themselves. Their visages bleary and slack with sleep still, so that it seemed to Malcolm as if all the white people on the street were somehow wearing their real faces, instead of the clenched, guarded expressions he saw on them all day long. Their confused, wondering cries carrying back and forth across the darkened yards:

“Anybody in there?”

“You call the fire department?”

“Somebody was poundin' on my back door—”

They pulled up short when they reached his Daddy, standing there with his arms stretched wide as a tree's branches. Malcolm could see them grimacing in recognition—the clenched, white faces back in place—but approaching him anyway. Staring past him in amazement at his latest catastrophe.

“Anything we can do, Earl?”

“I'll get my hose—”

“Don't worry! Don't worry!” Earl shouted—his voice surprisingly mild and reassuring to Malcolm's ears, compared to the way he had just been yelling. Pointing to all of them, and his mother, huddled pathetically in their thrown-on clothes and the blankets she had somehow been able to fetch for them.