Strivers Row (32 page)

“Listen to you! Do you even know how you sound?” he asked— trying to hurt her now.

“ ‘Ain't' that, and ‘sucker' this. Talkin' like some girl out on the curb,” he mimicked. “You're a Vassar girl, baby! You were saying ‘whom' just a minute ago.”

“So?”

“So where'd you pick that up, Soph? Sounds awfully colored to me. Is that
Archie's
influence? Or is that just for your gigs?”

“I talk the way I want to—”

“Do you? Really? What's your gig at Café Society called again?”

“ ‘Divas in Black and White.' With Hazel Scott,” she admitted petulantly.

“Uh-huh. And you're the
white
. Only not just any white, are you? Not some high-tone,
Vassar
-girl white? No, no. You a white girl who talks down and dirty. Ain't you?”

“Stop it!”

She jumped up from the couch, starting toward him, as if to shut his mouth, but he stayed where he was.

“No, you a white girl been
uptown
. A white girl who been with colored men,” he kept goading her. “Ain't that it? Ain't it? All that tough street talk. Well, just lookit how
exotic
you are now!”

She had actually picked up a streamlined art deco ashtray—a beautiful silver piece with a jackal head on it, ears pinned back so realistically it looked as if it might take off running. Holding it up as if she might really hurl it at him. But then she collected herself and put the ashtray back down, the hint of a smile playing around her lips as she faced him again.

“That's right,” she said, her voice tight but under control again. “That's right, too. I am just who I wanna be, when I wanna be. Just like any human being. Just like any other
white
person.”

“But why—”

“I don't have to live like other people. I do what I please—and you should, too.”

“Ah, hell!”

He waved an arm dismissively—taking in this whole strange place she lived in. All the more annoyed because he was so intrigued by it.
Another life, in another part of town. An existence freed from every mooring. Doing whatever one pleased, every day—

“You know you'd like to. You do it now, with your playacting,” she told him coldly. “Going around to your restaurants, your bars. Still just like in college—”

“That's
enough.
”

She stared at him now, in the dying light of her apartment. Her face only a little more censorious.

“You got yourself encumbrances,” she said frankly—talking like that street girl again. “That ain't my fault. You got to choose. But that's it, you
can
choose. We both can. That's what that white woman in the picture gave us.”

There was a nauseous rumbling, deep in the pit of his stomach, and he wondered if the pork chop from the Roanoke was churning up on him.
God only knew where they got their meat these days, with the war and the rationing.
He excused himself and hurried into her bathroom, his stomach turning over in dismay. Running from her words.

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing!”

The bathroom even more frilly and posh than the rest of her apartment, all little French soaps, and bunches of potpourri, and hand towels monogrammed with more of her new initials. He felt better, though, alone in there. Standing over the sink, trying to calm his stomach. He splashed some cold water on his face, then mopped at it with one of the matching light blue hand towels. Staring at himself in the medicine-chest mirror, tracing the contours of his cheekbones, then his modest lips and sharp nose, with two fingers.

A still young face, though with lines of worry emerging around the eyes, across his forehead. A face that was not unhandsome, but so serious, and tired. A white face?

Stalling, he pulled the mirror gently open, glancing through his sister's medicine cabinet. His eyes wandered past the same mysterious feminine aids and lotions that he had never deciphered, even after ten years of marriage. They settled on a small jar with a familiar, black-and-white label, tucked away in the upper corner of the cabinet, so that it was barely visible at all. Before he fully realized what he was doing, he had pried it carefully out with the ends of his fingers, was staring more closely at the small print on the label:

“Black and White Bleaching Cream: Plan Today for a Brighter Future!”

He had seen such products many times before, of course. Buried in the pages of the
Amsterdam Star-News
, along with similar ads for Nix Liquid Bleach and Dr. Fred Palmer's Skin Whitener, and Queen Hair Dressing (“
Kinky hair sure comes down!
”), and for hair attachments (“
Become a glamour girl overnight!
”). Their claims always coded in words about “improving complexions” and eliminating pimples. But now he read every line of copy, under the drawing of a smiling, white-featured Negro woman:

“Help yourself right out of that skin-torture victim act and let men and women see you in a new light... Blackheads loosen and that dull, darker outer skin seems to actually roll off...”

The next thing he knew he had the cap off and was scooping up the white, buttery lotion in both hands, smearing it vigorously into his cheeks. Looking up into the mirror again to see if it was actually working, the darker outer skin rolling off to reveal the white face just below—

He stopped when he saw himself. His eyes brimming with hope, and fear. His face smeared with large white blotches on both sides, like a clown's makeup, his jaw slack with eagerness.

He stuffed the jar back in its hiding place in the medicine cabinet as well as he could. Running the water again, scrubbing furiously to get the cream off his face even as he heard his sister's worried tap at the bathroom door.

“Jonah? Jonah, you all right in there?”

He took a deep breath, then threw open the bathroom door. Sophia stood before him, frowning with worry.
Actually worried about him.
He hurried past her, toward the door.

“I got to get going—”

“All right, all right. But you oughta come down an' hear me again sometime, baby brother,” she told him. “I got some solid boys behind me for once. Got a six-month gig—”

She gave a little chuckle. “Funny, ain't it? Your friend Adam's down there all the time, an' he don't even know—”

“I know!”

“You know?”

“Listen, Sophie,” he blurted out, “I-I don't know how much I should be comin' down here for a while. I don't know if it's such a good thing.”

“All right. Well, you be that way,” she said, putting up her hands in disgust. “Let me ask you somethin', though. What're
you
doin' it for?”

“Huh?”

He paused with his hand on the doorknob, unsure of just what she meant.

“Oh, Jonah-man, Jonah-man. Why do
you
go around like that— playin' at bein' a white man?”

He stood there by the door, unable to say anything until she came over to him—running a hand along the side of his face where the darker, outer skin still hadn't rolled off.

“Oh, my poor baby brother,” she said. “You must be the first colored man in the history of the world didn't want to pass in order to be somebody else. You just want to be invisible.”

“I gotta go.”

“Fine, fine! Go, then!”

She gave another dry, sad laugh, but he wasn't looking at her by then, only fumbling with the doorknob, then hurrying down the hall. The door closed behind him as soon as he was out, the recording of “Mood Indigo” starting up again.

He stood there in the sunset hallway, waiting for the elevator— alone in this other place, silent except for the faint strains of the music. Looking at the flowers in the vase, the nicely painted walls, staring down at the floors tiled with mosaics of elephant and jackal heads. Thinking how it would be to just stay here, in this in-between place, for hour after hour, as the early evening faded into night.

Instead, he took a Fifth Avenue bus back uptown. Walking back to Washington Square Park, and catching the No. 1 where it made its loop around the arch. He rode up in the open top of the red, doubledecker Queen Mary, as bulky and unwieldy as a tank. Gazing up at the passing skyscrapers again, as the night came on.

The vertical city
. Its great buildings rising like ancient ziggu-rats. Floor after floor, window after window—the same, machine-made, industrial patterns repeated over and over again. They could be duplicated infinitely, he knew, like all the industrial machines of war, the countless tanks and ships he saw in the Alhambra's news-reels. Multiplied endlessly when the screen split, and split again, rows and rows of boots and bayonets and helmets. All identical, too, marching inexorably into battle.
This horror of repetition—

He rode the bus all the way up to where Fifth Avenue ended abruptly, at a rusting sign by the Harlem River that read only
Dead End
. There he stepped down into the gathering darkness, and walked west, past abandoned factories and warehouses, and the 369th Regiment Armory on 142nd Street. The regiment itself gone now, its soldiers dispersed to Georgia and its officers replaced by white Southern officers, according to the letters his congregation kept receiving.

He could remember standing in the mobs that watched the 369th march home, back from France after the first war. The forest of bayonets, with James Reese Europe himself leading the regimental band.
Harlem's Hellfighters,
they called themselves, coming back covered in medals, and with those proud guns in their hands. When they had passed 110th Street, Europe had them strike up “Here Comes My Daddy Now,” and everyone had gone wild.

Well, that was another time,
Jonah told himself.
The start of a New Age.
Harlem still just rising. A time of parades, and great undertakings. Another literary magazine on the table of their Strivers Row foyer every week, it seemed. Poor old Garvey, with his Lords of the Nile and his Knight Commanders of Ethiopia—his whole Negro shadow world, complete with mythical titles and court—leading his resplendent “Back to Africa” marches up Seventh Avenue. The great dance halls along Lenox, the Savoy and the first Cotton Club, not even up yet—even his father's church only a dream still.

And all of that endeavor, for what? Now here it was, another war, and they could not even be trusted to have their own officers. The progress of the race!

But his mind kept going back to Sophie, still a college girl, running out before him that morning on Coney Island. Whispering the magic words to him—

“Let's be white people today!”

They had played that game all day. They had eaten lunch out on the breezeway at Feltman's without going to the neglected, ill-kempt corner that Negroes were unofficially restricted to. They had ridden all the wild, collisive rides in the great glass emporium of Steeplechase Park—the Bounding Billows and the Razzle Dazzle and the Whirlpool—without his having to worry once that the white boy or the white girl he was smashed into, both of them laughing hilariously, would turn and notice the color of his arm, eyes widening in anger or alarm at having been unknowingly forced to
touch
him. They had skipped freely through the gates of Luna Park, with their huge black-and-white pinwheels, into its tawdry, down-at-the-heels fantasy world of minarets and obelisks and diving pigs. The leering, paper-mâché clown and wolf and pig heads all the more unnerving for how their paint jobs were slowly peeling away.

In the end, they'd gotten lost. They really had forgotten themselves and who they were, black or white. Lulled into complacency by sun and sea, and ice cream and roller coaster rides until, at the end of the afternoon, they had wandered far up the boardwalk, toward Seagate. Trying to find some slightly less crowded stretch of the beach where they might be able to actually lie out full-length on the sand and sleep for a little while, before starting the interminable subway ride home.

There they had stumbled out onto a teenager beach, a stretch of the seashore dominated by Italian kids, and Jonah had realized instantly it was trouble. The I-tie boys and girls both smoking cigarettes together in tight, conniving circles. None of them wearing real bathing suits, only canvas pants and old dresses, some of them even sitting out on the sand defiantly naked.

“Sophie, uh, Sophie!” he had tried to warn her, sliding back into his old self at once. But she would have none of it. Lost in her make-believe, stalking gracefully out onto the billowy sand. Holding up the hem of her dress with one hand, and her shoes in the other.

The heads of the white kids began to turn, one by one—looking as feral and ravenous as a pack of dogs, until Jonah finally stood stock-still on the sand, just watching them watch his sister. Then they began to stand up. Rolling cigarettes around in their fingers, homemade beer in bottles dangling from their hands—their faces still undecided, squinting and half-leering into the sun. Jonah began to run toward her.

“Sophie!
Sophia!
”

She had stopped then, smiling back at him. But one of the Italian boys had already detached himself from the circle. Striding aggressively toward them, a hand shielding his eyes, taking a last, foamy swig from his bottle of beer. He was tall and sinewy, naked except for a pair of cut-off dungarees; black, knotted hair hanging down over his olive, sun-darkened skin.

“Hey!” he called out, his voice ringing along the nearly deserted patch of beach, and off the piled-rock fishing piers.

“Hey, you niggers! This is our beach!”

Jonah at once began to back away, careful to keep his eyes on the boy. But Sophia, to his amazement, stayed where she was—her face angry.