Strivers Row (26 page)

When he was finished with his route, he would hike the two miles into downtown Lansing. If it was collection day, he would buy something to eat, and if it wasn't, he would lift anything he could— an apple, or some of the crackers that were kept in barrels near the front of the grocery stores. He was quick, but the white storekeepers were quicker. They had their eye on him the moment he came through the door, and when they caught him they would call in the police and the social workers.

There was a new social worker who had begun coming around their home by this time. He was different from the dour, middle-aged women who were always arguing with his mother, and staring balefully at the bare floors and dangling lightbulbs in their home. His name was Maynard Allen, and he was a lanky white man in a rumpled suit, with striking blue eyes and a bald spot beginning to grow in the middle of his disheveled brown hair. He didn't walk around their home staring with obvious disapproval at everything he saw, but was polite and deferential to his mother, and took each of his brothers and sisters aside to ask them questions.

Malcolm avoided him for as long as he could, but one day Maynard Allen had cornered him where he was sitting behind the wheel in the broken-down old touring car, pretending he was driving to Detroit or Chicago or New York. He had come up suddenly and opened the passenger door, sliding into the front seat beside him as if Malcolm had been waiting for him—smelling of stale cigarettes and hair cream, and other, even more mysterious, white man smells. “Where you going to, Malcolm?” he asked.

“I dunno,” Malcolm answered him, turning his head away— aware of how silly his child's game must look. “Nowhere, I guess.”

“You can go anywhere you want to,” Mr. Maynard Allen said, turning his penetrating blue eyes on him then, compelling Malcolm to look back at him. “You know that, don't you?”

Malcolm only shrugged, looked away again.

“Malcolm, I wanted to ask you what you think we can do to help your mother,” he began again.

“I dunno.”

“But stealing things from stores doesn't help her, does it?”

Malcolm sat silent for a long moment, stunned with guilt and shame by the unexpected question. But Mr. Allen kept looking at him until he replied.

“No,” he managed to choke out at last.

“But you know that already. Of course you know, you're a very bright boy. I've seen your test scores at school. You could make something of yourself, if you would just straighten up and try harder. But you know that, too. Don't you?”

Malcolm shrugged again, squirming in the driver's seat of the old car. Feeling uncomfortable yet quietly delighted by the compliment— a compliment unlike anything anyone had paid him before.

“Tell me,” Mr. Allen asked him, “what do you think of somebody who burns herself ? Or who refuses to take free food?”

“I dunno,” Malcolm said again, more slowly this time. Freezing up, trapped where he was on the car seat.

“For a person to do that—to refuse good food for herself and her family when they don't have enough to eat—don't you think that shows someone isn't thinking straight?”

Mr. Allen shook his head, sadly but forthrightly, as if all but daring Malcolm to contradict him.

“I guess,” he admitted at last, confused and angry with himself for saying that much.
For betraying her.

“Your mother has too much on her mind to always think straight just now. We have to do all we can to make her burden lighter,” the white man went on, still speaking gently. His eyes still on Malcolm.

“That's my job as well as yours. In time, it might even mean having to make some big changes. But for right now, no more shoplifting, or misbehaving in school. Okay, pal?”

Malcolm nodded quickly, averting his head from Mr. Maynard Allen's gaze, close to crying where he sat now behind the driver's wheel.

“I brought you a couple things I thought you might find interesting,” he said casually then, plunking a package of Lorna Doones, a Hershey bar, then a couple of comic books down on the broad seat between them.

Malcolm picked up the comics before he even realized what he was doing, drawn at once by the bright colors, the frenetic scenes of action on the front covers. Reading the titles in their broad, red, block lettering. Amazing Man, and Sub-Mariner. He had seen such books before, in the same stores where he had shoplifted in Lansing, never daring to take anything so brilliant and beautiful even though he had craved them more than the food.

“You know you're different from the rest of them,” Mr. Allen said as he started to get out of the touring car, waving a hand casually in the direction of Malcolm's home, then stopping and ducking his head back in.

“Why do you think that is?” he asked, leveling his bright blue eyes on Malcolm again until once more he felt compelled to say something.

“I don't know,” Malcolm answered, honestly—unaware until now that he was any different at all.

“Well, think about it. You don't have to go through all this, you know. You can be something else.”

The day before Thanksgiving, his mother had given birth to their half-brother, whom she named Butch—just Butch, no matter how much the nurses in the poor ward at the hospital had scolded and tried to bully her. Malcolm had hoped, secretly, that her mood might change again when she finally had the baby, but when she returned home she remained as withdrawn as ever. Retreating at once to her rocking chair in the corner of the kitchen, where she spent nearly all of her time dozing and nursing, even the blind rages seemingly spent in her now.

Neither Malcolm nor any of his brothers or sisters bothered going to school much anymore. Instead he spent his days lying around the house. Reading over and over the adventures of Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, who was a prince of Atlantis though he looked like a Chinaman, and especially Amazing Man, an orphan who had been raised in the mountains of Tibet by the Council of Seven—mystic lamas who had given him all the qualities of strength, knowledge, and the courage necessary to dominate the world, though he had promised always to be good, and kind, and generous.

He couldn't keep from thinking, too, about how his mother had looked while she was still knocked up, scrawny but fat in the belly, like that stray female cat. When she was asleep he would study his new brother's face. It still looked shapeless, not quite like any of theirs yet, but he could see that the baby's skin was already darker than his own—like that of all his brothers and sisters.

It was then that he had begun to think that maybe his Daddy wasn't really his Daddy after all. That this was what he had been trying to tell him, why he had been so angry with him at times, and dragged him along to his Garvey meetings. It was then that Malcolm had first thought that he might be half white, the issue of some terrible white man who had forced himself on his mother, the way the toms did on the stray cats in the lot.
The way Mr. Herbert Walker had.
That this was what Mr. Allen had been trying to tell him, too.

That he was half white, superior and cursed. The cause of all the trouble between them, and therefore his Daddy's death—

He had begun to think about it all the time until one night, well after midnight—unable to sleep from his thoughts, and the constant growling in his stomach—he had gone down into the cellar and taken out his Daddy's old hunting rifle from where it still lay buried in a little slit trench, wrapped in rags and forgotten by everyone but Malcolm himself.

No one else had heard him, his mother snoring in her rocker with the new baby. The rest of his brothers and sisters too exhausted with hunger to be awakened by anything—all save for his younger brother Reginald, who idolized him, and who was as usual attuned to his every footstep. When Malcolm had come back up the cellar stairs with the gun, Reginald was waiting there mutely for him, looking as awkward and comical as ever. His oversize ears sticking out from his head, his stomach extended by the hernia that he'd always had and which made it hard for him to move very easily— but already dressed, ready to follow him anywhere.

At first he had been vexed, not knowing what to do with his little brother, certain he would throw off all his plans. Then deciding that he wanted to have a witness to what he was about to do.

“Well, come on then,” Malcolm told him.

They had taken the rifle and a burlap shopping sack from the kitchen, and slipped out the front door. It was a dark night, with no more than a crescent moon in the sky, and they had stumbled and groped their way down the road. The grass was already covered with frost, but though they were wearing only their loose, slowly unraveling sweaters, for once they didn't feel the cold—too intrigued by how different everything seemed in the deep night world to notice.

They walked for nearly a mile, all the way down to Levandow-skis' grocery. The square one-story wooden store deserted for the night, its windows dark—Mr. and Mrs. Levandowski, its gaunt, tight-lipped proprietors at their home all the way back in Hamtramck. Malcolm had insisted on walking all around the building nonetheless, even though the tiny store sat out in the middle of a block full of vacant lots, without another house around for at least a quarter mile. When he was finally satisfied there was nobody else about, he wrapped the burlap bag carefully around his hand, and smashed in one of the side windows.

The old pane had given way easily, the sound of tinkling glass making them both start, and look around. But there was no sign that anyone else had heard it, no other sound that broke the stillness of the night in response. Taking a deep breath, Malcolm had slipped his Daddy's rifle through the broken window, then pulled himself up after it, climbing into the darkened interior.

Inside, the store seemed even more unreal than anything else in the night world. Everything was exactly where he remembered it being from the daytime, but there was no one around—no one to stop him from doing anything. He did a little dance on the broken glass in his excitement, whirling around, his sneakers crunching along the floor as he looked at the food everywhere around him.

The store's furnishings were meager—a splintered wooden floor, a counter consisting of a plank laid over two barrels. But there were bags of flour and sugar stacked nearly to the ceiling, one on top of another. There were shelves and shelves of dusty canned goods, of fruits and vegetables and meat and fish. There were entire crates by the cash register, filled with penny candies and apples, and rice and potatoes, no longer under the watchful eye of Mr. or Mrs. Levandowski there behind the counter.

“Hey, help me up!” Reginald was calling softly from below the window, and Malcolm went over to try to haul him up. But no matter how hard he tugged on his arms, his brother's hernia hurt too much and he could not make it through the low window.

“You keep a lookout,” Malcolm told him finally, letting him drop back down to the ground. “I'll be right there.”

He unwrapped the burlap bag from his hand, looking over all his choices. Wondering just what it was he should pick, what he would be able to explain if his mother or Mr. Maynard Allen, or anyone else questioned him about it. Knowing that he had to act fast, that all it would take was for one radio car to wander by and they would surely stop and ask what a little colored boy was doing, skulking around a store well after midnight.

Yet he could not make up his mind—and the more he looked at the piles of sacks and cans, the more pointless it all seemed. He wanted to take it all back with him, the whole store, even though he knew it was impossible.
Wanting to show them, to do something that was more than just what a nigger would do.

Only now that he was inside did he realize that he really couldn't. Understanding that he would have to come back to steal again and again, or it would do them no good—that what few goods he and Reginald might take now would only tantalize them with the illusion of having something, when in fact they had nothing at all.

He thought he heard the sound of a car then, and he picked up his Daddy's rifle, listening, in the middle of the empty store. Everything was quiet, but he pointed it toward the broken window anyway— pointed it at the Levandowskis' old cash register, then at the sacks of flour and potatoes, at the barrels of penny candy. Wanting to do something with it, to fire it at something, at least, if only so that the next day the Levandowskis would return to find the broken window and the bullet hole, and wonder at it.

But all he did was hand the rifle down to Reginald and climb out after it, without taking a thing. Even that—even the idea of a shot fired in the dark store seeming completely, hopelessly futile to him. Reginald surprised by his big brother returning with nothing but knowing better than to ask. Malcolm unable to say anything to him, only clutching his fists, and biting down on his lower lip. The two of them walked home as fast as they could, aware now of how cold it was, out in the night air.

The week before Christmas his class had its holiday party, which he had been fearing. Everybody had chosen a name by lot, and then they were supposed to buy a present for the boy or girl they had selected, and wrap it and put it in the red-and-white papier-mâché chimney that their teacher, Miss Roosenraad, had had them make. Malcolm had told her after class, ashamed, that he could not buy anything for the chimney. But she had explained—speaking very slowly, in very simple words—that it didn't have to be anything fancy, that he could buy anything he wanted, or even make something. Sitting back when she was finished and smiling at him knowingly, as if she had just revealed some great secret.

He had thought about that for a while, about the possibility of trying to make anything in their house, then wrapped three nickel candy bars up together in leftover newspaper, and dropped them into the chimney. But even as he did that he noticed how much bigger all the other kids' presents were. Even those of his poorest classmates were wrapped in real store wrapping paper, with bows and cards and snowmen and Christmas trees on the paper, and Malcolm knew with the sense of foreboding he lived in all the time now that his would not be sufficient.