John Woman Read online

  Also by Walter Mosley

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  John

  Woman

  Walter

  Mosley

  Copyright © 2018 by Thing Itself, Inc.

  Cover design by Daniel Rembert

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  FIRST EDITION

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Text designer: Norman E. Tuttle at Alpha Design & Composition

  This book was set in 13 pt. Spectrum MT

  by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: September 2018

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2841-6

  eISBN 978-0-8021-4641-0

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  18 19 20 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Who will believe my verse in time to come,

  If it were fill’d with your most high deserts?

  Though yet Heaven knows it is but as a tomb

  Which hides your life and shows not half your parts.

  If I could write the beauty of your eyes,

  And in fresh numbers number all your graces,

  The age to come would say, “This poet lies,

  Such heavenly touches ne’er touch’d earthly faces.”

  So should my papers yellow’d with their age,

  Be scorn’d like old men of less truth than tongue,

  And your true rights be term’d a poet’s rage

  And stretched metre of an antique song:

  But were some child of yours alive that time,

  You should live twice—in it and in my rhyme.

  William Shakespeare, Sonnet XVII

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Also by Walter Mosley

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Before the Beginning

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Part One: Professor Woman

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Part Two: The Guerrilla War of History

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Part Three: The Trial

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Part Four: The Last Class

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Back Cover

  before the beginning

  1

  LUCIA NAPOLI’S FAMILY NAME had been Tartarelli before her great-grandfather migrated from Naples to the Lower East Side. No one was certain how the name got changed. Lucia’s Aunt Maria said it was a drunken Irish customs officer on Ellis Island who mistook their origins for their name. Lucia’s great-uncle Christopher said his father, Alesio, introduced himself as Alesio from Napoli so often that the name stuck.

  Lucia didn’t care where Napoli came from. It sounded better than Tartarelli. There were pastries and breasts and something flip in the sound. She liked the way it brought her lips together. “Like a kiss,” she once told her girlfriends after her part-time shift as a filing clerk at Household Insurance Company. The neighborhood girls would go to smoke cigarettes and drink bitter Chinotto sodas at Uno, a little coffee shop on the Lower East Side patronized mostly by young students from NYU and old Italians from the mob.

  She met Jimmy at Uno on a Thursday afternoon, “when it was raining so hard it was like God taking a piss on your head. All Jimmy had on was a T-shirt and some jeans and you could see everything, and I mean everything, that boy
had,” she said to her twelve-year-old son Cornelius, when he told her that he liked Ginny Winters, the smartest girl in his class.

  “You know the first time I seen Jimmy I knew he was the man for me.” She lifted a teacup from the coffee table and used a silver spoon to dump sugar in. One, two, three heaping scoops, then stirring … “His wet hair was hangin’ down on his forehead and he looked at me like I was the only thing in the whole place. You know you can’t argue with a feeling like that.”

  “So what did you do, mama?” Cornelius asked pushing his fingertips against his skinny thighs.

  They were sitting at the little table Lucia had set up in the bay window of the living room, looking down on Mott Street just below Grand.

  “Do?” she asked. “I didn’t do nuthin’, CC, just sat there lookin’ at him and he was takin’ me in too. I waited where I was sittin’ with my girlfriends until he walked up to our table and asked me to go take a walk with him.”

  “In the rain?” Cornelius asked, as he had many times before.

  “Yeah.” Lucia said, wistfully remembering the wet Jimmy Grimaldi at Uno. “I told him that I didn’t want to get wet and he said that he’d try his best to keep me dry, but that he couldn’t make no promises. My girlfriends told me not to go but I did anyway. He took me down this little passageway at the side of the café and brought me into the alley back there …”

  “Then what did you do?” Lucia’s son asked. He was going to stay at her small apartment for the rest of the week, sleeping on the couch, because his father, Herman Jones, was in for a procedure at Marymount Hospital.

  “The same thing you been doin’ with that little smart girl in your class. The same thing that all little boys and girls do when they can get away from spying eyes.”

  Cornelius hadn’t done anything with Ginny Winters but he knew not to say so to his mother. She didn’t like it when he told her she was wrong. And if she got upset she’d stop telling him about Jimmy Grimaldi and how she came to meet his father.

  Cornelius wanted to know what happened and only his mother would be willing to tell him. His father was a good parent but he didn’t talk about what men and women did together. Even if Cornelius could get him to talk about sex it would be very technical, like one of the ten thousand books Herman Jones was always reading.

  “Did you kiss him, mama?”

  “Oh yes I did. Your father has some very nice qualities but I have never met a man who could kiss like Jimmy Grimaldi.”

  “How come?” Cornelius asked.

  “He kissed me like he meant it,” Lucia Napoli-Jones said.

  She was wearing a short black dress and black hose, sitting at the edge of her chair and gazing out the window. Cornelius thought that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. He felt bad that his parents didn’t live together. His mother was still young and alive while his father had gotten too old to keep up with her. But, CC thought, maybe his mother could stay with them and still have her girlfriends’ night out.

  “I love your father, CC,” Lucia would tell her gangly brown son, “but I need to be on my own, to come and go when I want to. Herman only wants to stay around the movie house and read his old books.”

  “I love you, mama,” Cornelius would tell her when she complained about his father.

  “I love you too, baby,” was her standard reply. “And I always will.”

  “So after that day in the rain was Jimmy Grimaldi your boyfriend?” CC asked.

  “Oh yeah,” Lucia said with feeling. “You couldn’t’a pried me off’a that boy with a yard-long crowbar.”

  CC felt his heart catch at the passion in his mother’s voice.

  “I used to climb out my window at night to be with him. There was this apartment building over on Elizabeth Street that had a empty apartment around that time. Jimmy broke off the padlock the landlord had on it and put in his own. Wasn’t no electricity but Jimmy had candles and a mattress. Me and him’d drink wine and then he’d curl my toes for hours.”

  “How did he do that, mama?” CC asked, feeling an empty place in the pit of his stomach.

  Lucia stared out of the window remembering things her thug boyfriend used to make her do. Her nostrils flared and a flush came to her face.

  “It was how he kissed me, baby,” she said.

  She sat back in the padded wicker chair, brought her right hand to her throat and sighed.

  “That was the best three weeks of my whole life,” she said. “Jimmy Grimaldi was something else.”

  CC leaned over and pressed his fingertips against his hard leather shoes. He wanted his toes to curl and his mother to kiss his cheek.

  “How come you broke up, mama?”

  “What’s that, honey?” Lucia asked.

  “How come you didn’t stay his girlfriend if he was so nice?”

  “It just wasn’t meant to be, honey. I mean at the end there he was walkin’ me across the floor like I was a lawn mower. He had me eatin’ dirt and likin’ it.” She sighed and looked out of the window again. “But he was just a wannabe TV gangster. Him and his crew would get into fights when we weren’t in his secret crib. And then he messed with Timothy Michaels.”

  “Was he your boyfriend from before Jimmy?” CC asked, trying to piece together the names his mother had related over the years.

  CC mostly lived with his father—who called him Cornelius. The times he got to stay with his mother were magical because they ate out almost every night and she told him about things that made his body tingle.

  “No, my old boyfriend was Albert. When I told Jimmy I couldn’t go with him because I already had a boyfriend he said that he’d go talk to Albert.”

  “What did he tell him?”

  “I don’t know but the next day Albert said that he thought we should see other people.”

  “Then who was Timothy Michael?”

  “Michaels,” she corrected. “Timothy was my best friend. He was funny you know.”

  “Uh-huh. He told jokes like Uncle Christopher.”

  “No. Funny like he didn’t like girls.”

  “Oh.”

  “Anyway one day Jimmy told Timothy that he didn’t want him to hang out with me and Timothy told him to go fuck himself—excuse my French—then Jimmy and his crew kicked the shit outta Timmy.”

  Cornelius tried hard to keep up with what his mother was saying. He put the words and ideas into an order in his head. Fuck was originally a French word and Timmy rhymed with Jimmy. Timmy was kicked so hard that he soiled himself, as Herman Jones would have described it. And all this happened because Timmy didn’t like girls, which was also funny.

  “… and when I found out about it,” Lucia continued, “I told that asshole that he could find some other girl who didn’t mind him beatin’ up her friends.”

  “Did he get mad?” CC asked, already knowing the answer from another time.

  “Sore as strep,” she said. “He kept callin’ me and comin’ to my window at night. At first he said he was sorry. I made up my mind that he had to say it seven times before I’d even consider goin’ back with him. But he only apologized four times before he started gettin’ mean.”

  “Did he hit you?” CC asked, feeling fear for his young mother in the streets of Little Italy.

  “No but he said he was gonna. That’s why when I was down in the Village and he yelled out my name I ran into the Arbuckle Cinema House over on Second.”

  “And that’s where you met dad,” CC said triumphantly.

  He sat up in his chair and Lucia leaned over to kiss him.

  Whenever she kissed him CC reached out to touch her arm or her knee or some other part of her. And whenever he did that she smiled.

  “Not too many people went to the Arbuckle Cinema back then,” Lucia said. “I run in the front and up the stairs to the projectionist’s door. Your father was sittin’ in there with the projector goin’, readin’ a book under a flashlight that he had wired to the wall.

  “I said, ‘Help me. A man is chas
in’ after me.’ Herman stood right up, pulled out a bookcase that stood against the wall, and it was a secret door just like in one’a those old movies.”

  CC knew this part of the story word for word but he didn’t interrupt. He loved to hear how his mild father became a hero that day, the day he was showing Grandma’s Boy starring Harold Lloyd and reading The Third Policeman by Flan O’Brien.

  “A beautiful white girl wearing a floral dress with bare shoulders came running into my projection room,” CC’s father had said. “She told me that a man was chasing her so I opened my secret doorway and told her to get in.”

  “… and then,” Lucia said, continuing the narrative going on in CC’s mind, “just when the door hit me in the butt I heard Jimmy yellin’, ‘Where is she, man?’

  “‘I dunno,’ your father says,” Lucia remembered, but CC knew that his father would never say dunno. Herman Jones spoke only in proper sentences and words. He never used needless contractions and always corrected his son when he misspoke, as Herman called it when people misused apostrophes, real or imagined, to jam words together.

  “And when Jimmy said that he knew that I was there,” Lucia continued. “Your father told him to ‘Look around for yourself,’ and Jimmy didn’t know what to say ‘cause the projectionist room was hardly bigger than a janitor’s closet.

  “Jimmy still threatened Herman but he didn’t do nuthin’ and finally he left.” CC had asked his father what he would have done if Lucia’s boyfriend found her in the secret closet, or if he just started beating on him.

  “I would have protected her,” Mr. Jones said in his proper, acquired accent—a gentle lilt that came from no known country or clime.

  “But mama said that Jimmy had big muscles,” CC argued.

  “Big muscles are not everything, Cornelius. Sometimes,” Herman said touching his head, “it takes mind,” then touching his chest, “and heart.”

  This tableau of his proper black father John Woman would hold as one of his fondest memories.

  “After that I begged Herman to let me stay with him,” Lucia went on. “I was afraid that Jimmy would be runnin’ around the neighborhood with his crew lookin’ for me. And Herman said that I could wait with him and at the end of the night he’d take me back to my parents’ house. I told him that maybe he could just take me over to Penn Station because I wanted to get out of town and go see your Uncle Christopher down in Philly.”