Bad Boy Brawly Brown Read online

  Clarissa brought up a big plate full of greens with bits of salt pork in them. The collards gave off a sharp vegetable odor laced with a hint of vinegar.

  “No, I don’t get it, Sam. This here is the best damn food I’ve eaten in many a day. Many a day.”

  I wasn’t lying, either. When you get soul food right, it feeds the spirit. And my spirit was flying with those greens and ribs.

  “Okay, Easy. You done et for free and I answered your questions. Now what you here for?”

  “Brawly’s mom wants to see him. She called on me and I come here to you.” I saw no reason or profit in lying to Sam.

  “So you know about the First Men?” he asked.

  I nodded because my mouth was busy chewing.

  “I don’t have much patience for all this vigilante communist bullshit,” Sam said. “If they come in here after me, I got a shotgun blow ’em all away.”

  “Why’d they come after you, Sam? I thought it was white people they couldn’t stand.”

  “They like all the other ignorant people down here, Ease. They hate colored more’n they hate white. They see a black cop or school principal, they say that that man’s a traitor to the race and deserves to die. They come around askin’ for donations, an’ some people out here is scared enough to cough it up. But you know they only askin’ black people.”

  “Protection?” I was surprised.

  “Not really. I told ’em no an’ they just grumbled. But you know they on the edge of organized crime, they on the edge.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  “One or two of ’em come in here,” Sam said. “Sometimes with Brawly and sometimes not. I can tell by the way they lean close and whisper that they plannin’ things. Not lunches for chirren like they say. No. They got plans that go by the dark’a night.”

  “I see,” I said.

  I had enough of food and talk for a while. I wanted to think about it all, and Sam wasn’t the kind of man to let you stand there quietly.

  “Thank you, Mr. Houston,” I said, straightening up. I saw Clarissa in the back, past Sam. She was looking at me.

  “They got meetins every evenin’ ’bout six,” Sam said.

  “Say what?”

  “The First Men. They give talks just about every night.”

  “Uh-huh.” I gave Clarissa a glance and she looked down, pretending to be doing something. “Thanks for your help, man.”

  7

  I DECIDED TO GO DOWN to the First Men’s storefront and see what it was that they were about. Sam had his point of view and I was sure that he had told me the truth as far as he saw it; but truth, as my uncle Roger used to say, is just one man’s explanation for what he thinks he understands.

  The Urban Revolutionary Party was flanked by a beauty shop and a general-supplies five-and-dime. The front wall was just a big window but it was covered over by a large black curtain. In the center of the curtain was a yellow circle that had the silhouettes of a book and a spear stitched into it. The front door was locked and there wasn’t anyone moving around inside, so I went to get gas at the Tunney station a few blocks away. While they were washing my windows and adding a pint of oil, I made a call on their pay phone.

  “Hello?” a tiny voice answered.

  “Hi, Feather.”

  “Hi, Daddy. Where you?”

  “Down over near John’s house, baby. I have to go to this meeting, so I probably won’t get home till after you’re in the bed.”

  “How come?” There was so much pain in her plea that I almost gave up on Brawly and went home.

  “I’ll come in and kiss you when I get in, baby. Don’t worry.”

  “Can I have hamburgers?”

  “Sure. Just tell Juice.”

  “Okay,” she said, forgiving me all my mistakes and flaws.

  “Did Bonnie leave for the airport?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But Juice is there taking care of you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I love you, honey,” I said.

  “I love you too, Daddy.”

  “Bye.”

  She hung up and I felt loss that went all the way back to my childhood.

  I DIDN’T WASTE THE TIME while waiting for the First Men to get going. I went to a small diner on San Pedro and studied for the classified building supervisor’s exam. That was the next step up the ladder for me. Studying made me feel as though I still had a foot in the workaday world that Feather needed me to be a part of. She needed every day to be the same as the day before and needed something to say when her friends and teachers asked what her daddy did for a living. I became that man for a couple of hours while waiting for night to come on.

  Somewhere in the middle of my third cup of coffee I remembered the dead man. That hump of skin and bones straddling the threshold of Isolda Moore’s home. His form jumped into my mind and I held it there, looking to see if I should be thinking something about it.

  I didn’t feel a thing. Not concern for my fellow man who was murdered or fear for my own safety. I didn’t kill him and I doubted if anybody saw me, so it was as if I were never there.

  THE GLASS DOOR to the Urban Revolutionaries’ storefront was open and people were milling around inside. The sun was gone but it wasn’t yet night.

  The meeting room gave off a slight odor of varnish. Naked fluorescent lights glared overhead. The floor was pine and the walls were composed of cheap plasterboard paneling. There was an iron music stand against the back wall. The thirty folding chairs with reinforced cardboard seats were half filled but most of the forty-odd people in the room were too excited to sit.

  The young black men and women wore dark clothes, talked and listened, posed and watched. Their voices might have seemed angry to someone who didn’t know the gruff bark of the American Negro’s soul. Those men and women were far beyond anger, though. They were expressing a desire for love and revenge and for something that didn’t exist — had never existed. That’s why they were there. They were going to create freedom out of the sow’s ear called America. They believed in the spirit of the Constitution and not the direction of the cash register.

  Maybe, if I stayed there long enough, I might have believed it, too.

  “You a cop?” someone asked. It took me a moment to realize that he was talking to me.

  It was a skinny young cork-colored man. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and a black turtleneck shirt that wasn’t much wider in the body than it was in those extra long sleeves.

  I almost laughed. “What?”

  “I said, Are you a cop?”

  “No.” I looked around the room, noticing that a few heads had turned toward me.

  “It’s okay,” the bespectacled boy said.

  “What’s okay?”

  “It’s okay if you’re a cop,” he explained. “We welcome those brothers who have been brainwashed. What you’re going to find here tonight is truth. If you’re looking for bombs and guns, you’re in the wrong place. What you’re going to find are the real weapons of the revolution: education and love. That’s the revolution of the mind.” He pointed at his own skull in a gesture that reminded me of suicide.

  He was nowhere near handsome, but some girl would fall in love with his eyes. He was absolutely sure of, and in love with, his own ideas.

  “I’m not no cop, brother. I heard about this place down at Hambones. They said you guys do a lotta talkin’ and I decided to come on down and hear you out.” My diction and grammar slid into the form I wanted Junior to hear.

  He nodded and shook my hand.

  “Then welcome,” he said. His smile was uneven but brilliant like an old but well-cared-for blade. “My name’s Xavier [he pronounced it “ex-avier”] Bodan. I’m the Party director.”

  He moved away from me then, greeting his fellow members as he made his way to the front of the room. There was a bounce to his gait that accented his youth.

  I wondered if he had a mother somewhere looking for him.

  “What’s
your name, man?” someone else asked.

  This one was somewhat bigger and darker but was dressed almost the same.

  “Rawlins.”

  “What you doin’ here?”

  “Is ev’rybody in this room gonna ask me that?” I sounded unfriendly enough to make myself clear. “’Cause you know I could just as well go up to that music stand and make a public announcement.”

  This guy was about thirty, with a perfectly round head and a belly just about the same size and shape. He sneered and chewed on a large wad of gum. I think he wanted me to be scared, but he didn’t know anything outside of church or family or clubs like the Urban Party. I could tell by the way he garnered his courage that he expected to be backed up.

  “Rawlins, you say?” Yet another man came from behind the gum chewer.

  His skin was golden brown but everything else about him said white man. Large frame and a big square jaw that stuck straight out. His nose was slender and the only color that I could call his eyes was not exactly brown. The wavy hair had no oil in it. But he was still a black man, at least by American standards.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “This ain’t no party,” the white-looking black man informed me.

  “You askin’ me to leave?”

  “Leave him alone, Conrad,” a woman said. She wore a black cotton dress that might have been a slip ten years earlier.

  “Look at him, Tina,” the matinee idol complained.

  “I am,” Tina replied. “What I see is a brother.”

  Half the room was looking at me by then. Not exactly the way I liked to do business.

  Conrad looked me up and down, contempt snarling in his white man’s lips and nose. But finally he shrugged his shoulders and turned away. People started talking again, giving me only quick, wondering glances.

  “Hi,” the young woman that Conrad called Tina said in greeting.

  “All right,” I said.

  “Everybody’s worried that the police are going to send in some kind of black spy to take us down.”

  “They’re right.”

  Tina was suddenly wary. I didn’t want her to think badly of me. She was only pretty because of her youth, but that dress looked good on her and she had just put herself between me and a room full of potentially violent men and women.

  “I don’t mean me,” I said. “I’m just sayin’ that the cops work through black spies down here. That’s the only way to find out what’s goin’ on.”

  Tina hadn’t fully regained her composure. She brought her hands to her shoulders.

  “I ain’t no cop,” I said. “I just wanted to take a look-see, hear what you folks got to say.”

  Over Tina’s head I saw Clarissa, the waitress from Hambones, enter the room in her pink top and shorts. She saw me and frowned. Behind her came a beefy brown man who had once been the boy in a photograph I had in my pocket. They were across the room from me. Before I could decide whether to cross over to them, everybody faced the music stand. Some people clapped.

  Xavier Bodan had taken his place at the makeshift podium. Behind him stood a large dignified-looking man with half straight, mostly gray hair that he combed back like a groomed lion’s mane.

  “Time to begin,” Xavier chanted. “Time to begin. This is the two hundred thirty-third meeting of the Urban Revolutionary Party. For those of you who are new, I am Xavier Bodan, secretary to the executive council, and a full-fledged believer in the black man and his struggle against the slave master and his dogs.”

  There was applause then.

  “The woman struggles just as hard, Xavier,” a voice called.

  The young man grinned and ducked his head, flashing lights from the flat surfaces of his glasses. “You right, Sister Em,” he said. “Without the sisters, we’re nothing at all.”

  I caught a glimpse of Brawly. He was glowering, looking around the room with the air of a bodyguard or a sergeant at arms.

  “There will be a meeting of the executive committee after the general meeting. That’s Tina, Conrad, Belton, and Swan. See you after. There’s business for us to discuss, fund-raising and our education program, but I don’t want to spend any extra time tonight arguing or planning. We all know why we’re here: to spread the word and feed the children, to stand up straight and love each other.”

  “Preach.” Someone thought we were in a church.

  “We represent an island of civilization in a sea of barbarians. We bring the key to unlock eighteen million chains.” Xavier smiled again and I worried for him; he seemed so frail up there.

  “Tonight,” he continued, “it is my honor to present a lion, a master. This is one of the men who made it possible for an organization like the First Men to come into being. He is our shelter and our conscience. He was taking blows for us before many of us were born. He was sweating in the white man’s cages when we were on tri-cycles and playin’ hopscotch. He is our beacon” — the audience started making a noise. It was like an expectant chatter. Not words exactly but pure emotions making their way into sound. “He marched in Selma in 1955” — the volume from the audience went up a notch — “he marched shoulder to shoulder with Martin Luther King” — the murmur grew into recognizable words of praise — “he is what we once were and what we strive to become” — the applause started then, softly, as if it had been rehearsed — “he is Henry Strong.”

  Xavier stood aside, allowing Strong to take the podium.

  “Henry Strong,” Xavier said again.

  The applause began to thunder. They yelled and whistled. They chanted the elder man’s name. They called out until he had to smile and hold up his big hands. I expected the leader to compliment the respect shown by the crowd and their mouthpiece, but he knew his audience better than I did.

  “I was a Garveyite,” he proclaimed.

  The applause grew even stronger.

  “I was with the first of the first men.”

  “That’s the words!” a man exclaimed.

  “I have seen the red sun of Dahomey and I have bathed in the African sea.”

  “Teach.”

  “I,” Strong said, pausing a moment for effect, “have tasted the sweet nectar of the homeland and I am here to tell you that we are sown from the sweetest flowers in the world.”

  “Watch it!” someone yelled. I think it was Brawly Brown because when I looked he was plowing through the audience toward a door in back marked by an exit sign.

  At that moment the glass door flew open. It shattered but I couldn’t hear it, because at the same time the picture-window wall also crashed. Policemen wearing riot helmets and wielding truncheons forced their way in.

  There must have been thirty of them.

  The assembled crowd balked for a moment, turning to see what the problem was.

  I grabbed Tina and bulled my way toward the rear exit. Just as I reached the door the blows began to fall. Blood was spilling and I knew that there would be a few more chains for Xavier to unlock that night.

  8

  “COME ON, TINA! QUICK!” Conrad, the matinee idol, shouted.

  He was seated in the driver’s seat of a lime green ’62 Cadillac. Next to him was Xavier, and in the backseat Henry Strong crouched down against the window. There was screaming coming from behind us, the sounds of scuffling and the occasional heavy thud and grunt.

  I pressed Tina toward the automobile.

  Conrad yelled, “Not you!”

  “He took me out of there,” Tina hissed.

  I just kept on pushing until I was in the backseat. Conrad took off down the alley in spite of his unwanted passenger. He sideswiped two wooden fences and knocked over a whole family of garbage cans. I could tell by his driving that Conrad would never make the grade on the military side of the revolution; I hoped that Xavier and Strong saw that, too.

  Conrad took side streets. He made so many turns, it seemed to me that we were going in circles. But at some point he pulled out onto Central. We cruised that boulevard toward Florence.

  N
obody spoke for a long time.

  The younger people were in a funk. Maybe it was their first taste of what the world thought of their idealism, their truth.

  Strong was just scared. His eyes were still wide with fear, and his fists were clenched on the hem of Tina’s dress. She didn’t seem to mind. She laid three fingers on the big knuckle of his right hand. There was a great deal of tenderness in the gesture.

  I stayed quiet because there was nothing I could learn from hearing my words. A police raid meant nothing to me. I’d been in whorehouses, speakeasies, barber shops, and alley craps games when the police came down. Sometimes I got away and sometimes I lied about my name. There was nothing spectacular about being rousted for being black.

  After a while Conrad pulled over to the curb. He fumbled around in the front of his pants for a moment and then turned around, leveling a pistol at my head.

  “Hey, Con, what’s wrong wit’ you?” Xavier cried.

  “Conrad!” Tina added.

  “Who are you, man?” Conrad demanded.

  I gazed into his eyes, wondering why I felt no fear. For a moment I thought that I had gone crazy, that Mouse’s death had robbed me of my own survival instinct. But then I thought that it was probably the adrenaline from the escape that kept me unafraid.

  “Easy,” I said.

  “Say what?”

  “Easy. Easy Rawlins.”

  “Put the gun down, Conrad,” Strong demanded in a commanding baritone.

  “We don’t know who he is. Maybe he’s the one called the pigs on us.”

  “They didn’t need him, Conrad,” Tina said. “We were right there in our own place.”

  “Yeah, man,” Xavier complained. “Talk sense.”

  “Put the gun down,” Strong said again.

  Conrad finally did as he was told. It made no difference to me. By then I was thinking about Jesus wanting to drop out of school. Suddenly I felt that I understood my son’s desire. Life was too short and too sweet to be spent in the company of fools.

  “Well, Mr. Rawlins?” Strong asked.

  “I was lookin’ for Brawly Brown. His mother wanted to make sure that he wasn’t in trouble.”