Little Scarlet Read online

  “Is that why you were crying, Daddy?”

  “When was I crying?”

  “The other night when you were looking at the news and I was supposed to be in bed.”

  “Oh.” I remembered. It was late and Bonnie had been stranded in Europe because of a series of thunderstorms around Paris. I was watching images of the rioters on the late news with the volume turned off, witnessing those poor souls out in the street fighting against an enemy that I recognized just as well as they. I had read the newspapers and heard the commentaries from the white newscasters. But my point of view was never aired. I didn’t want the violence but I was tired of policemen stopping me just for walking down the street. I hated the destruction of property and life, but what good was law and order if it meant I was supposed to ignore the fact that our children were treated like little hoodlums and whores? My patience was as thin as a Liberty dime, but still I stayed in my house to protect my makeshift family. That’s what brought me to tears. But how could I say all of that to a ten-year-old girl?

  “I was sad because the people didn’t understand each other,” I said. “That’s why people fight.”

  “Why?” Feather asked. She leaned her head against my jaw and all the pain released.

  “Because they don’t know what it’s like to be in the other man’s skin,” I said.

  “I’m hungry, Daddy,” Feather said, and I knew I had found the right words.

  “Hi, baby,” Bonnie Shay said.

  I leaned back and looked up, like a child, and saw her upside- down image. She looked down on us with eyes that took me away from America to a place where music was part of talking and walking and even breath.

  Her skin was as dark as mine and her smile knew a happiness I craved. She squatted down and put her arms around Feather and me. Bonnie was the only woman I had known in my adulthood who could make me feel like a child in the presence of maternal love. I leaned back against her and closed my eyes. I’m a big man, weighing one ninety, but her work as a stewardess had prepared her to deal with heavy objects.

  Feather sighed and Jesus came over to beam down on us like the sun on his own ancient homeland. For a moment there I almost forgot about the smoldering slums and Nola Payne’s cold body laid up in a white room under lock and key.

  BONNIE AND I had a deal that I’d always make dinner on the day she returned from a transatlantic flight. I made glazed oxtails and collard greens with cornbread and tapioca pudding. It took fifty-seven minutes for me to do it all from scratch. That’s how you can tell who’s a good cook: by his speed and timing. There are a lot of men, both white and black, who call themselves gourmet cooks. They only work once a month or so and then they make only one dish. Those men have no idea what the real art of cooking is.

  A real cook comes home not knowing what’s in the icebox because he doesn’t know who has eaten what since the last time he looked. You have to be fast on your feet making a balanced meal that has got to be on the table no more than five minutes after your brood gets hungry. And everything should be ready at the same time. I’d like to see these weekend gourmets come up with something new and tasty five days a week on a budget that some housewives get.

  I didn’t get any complaints at the dinner table. It was nice to have everybody there. Bonnie was gone at least one week out of four on her European and African routes with Air France. Jesus spent all day every day either working at the Captain’s Reef supermarket in Venice or sailing along the coast. Most nights he spent with friends on the shore. To have all four of us there together felt like a blessing, even though I am not a religious man.

  “Dad?” Jesus said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What is Vietnam?”

  “It’s a country.”

  “But who’s fighting them?”

  “They’re having an internal disagreement,” I said. “People in the north want to have it one way and the people in the south want it another.”

  “Which one is right?”

  When Jesus dropped out of school I made him promise to read every day and then to talk to me about what he’d read. That carried over into us discussing newspaper articles almost every morning. We had skipped that morning because I left for the office early, so he kept his discussion for the dinner table.

  “Johnson says it’s the south that’s right. I really couldn’t say.”

  “Does Juice have to go over there and fight the Veemanams, Daddy?” Feather asked.

  “I hope not, honey. I really do hope not.”

  8

  Jesus and Feather were both in bed by eight. She because it was her bedtime and he because he worked so hard. Bonnie and I stretched out on the couch in front of the TV and got reacquainted.

  “It sounds so terrible,” she was saying. She had her back against the arm of the sofa and her bare feet in my lap.

  “What?”

  “The fighting and the violence,” she said.

  “I guess.”

  “What do you mean, you guess?”

  “It’s hot and people are mad,” I said. “They’ve been mad since they were babies.”

  “But it’s stupid to attack just anybody because of their skin.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It sure is.”

  “Then why don’t you think it’s terrible? I was so frightened for you and the children when I was away.”

  I began to massage the joint under her big toe. She always relaxed when I did that.

  But Bonnie pulled the foot away.

  “Talk to me, Easy. I want to know what you mean.”

  “I missed you every night,” I said. “I wanted you in the bed with me. I kept thinkin’ that if you were there, then things would be better.”

  “I wanted to be. You know that.”

  “Yeah.”

  Some months earlier Bonnie had met an African prince and spent a holiday with him on the isle of Madagascar. After I found out she told me that they hadn’t made love, but there were questions we both had afterwards—questions we didn’t have before.

  “Pain has a memory of its own,” I said, thinking of Joguye Cham, the African prince, and Nola Payne.

  “What do you mean, honey?” Bonnie asked.

  “If I was to hit you right now,” I said. “Haul off with my fist and crack you upside your head it would be on your mind for the rest of your life.”

  I balled my fist as I spoke. Bonnie leaned down and kissed the big knuckle, then licked it.

  “Every day,” I continued, “you’d wonder why I did it and when I might do it again. You’d wonder if you’d done something wrong. You’d hate me but you’d be angry at yourself too.”

  “Why would I be angry at myself if you attacked me?”

  “If you hit me back, you’d worry that it wasn’t enough or maybe too much. You’d worry that maybe I had a reason to hit you and you just didn’t know what it was. If you didn’t hit me back, you’d feel like a coward or a fool. The pain of that one blow would worm around in your gut and change everything you did from that moment on.”

  Bonnie had had her own share of pain in life, I knew that. I didn’t want to bring it up but I felt compelled to explain myself.

  “But even if something happens to me,” she said, feeling the hurt as she spoke, “does that make anything I do right? Shouldn’t we decide at some time to let it go and move on?”

  “You can’t ever leave something like that behind. You go to sleep with it and you wake up with it too.” I was looking her in the eye then. She wanted to turn away but would not.

  “But it’s worse than that,” I said. “For most people the pain they experience is just inside them. I hit you in the head but that’s you and me. You could leave, find another man. You could go to work and none of the other women got a big knot on their heads. But if you come from down in Watts or Fifth Ward or Harlem, every soul you come upon has been threatened and beaten and jailed. If you have kids they will be beaten. And no matter how far back you remember, there’s a beatin’ there waiting
for you. And so when you see some man stopped by the cops and some poor mother cryin’ for his release it speaks to you. You don’t know that woman, you don’t know if the man bein’ arrested has done something wrong. But it doesn’t matter. Because you been there before. And everybody around you has been there before. And it’s hot, and you’re broke, and people have been doin’ this to you because of your skin for more years than your mother’s mother can remember.”

  There were tears in my voice if not in my eyes and Bonnie was crying too. She put her hands on my forearms letting her heat sink into my skin. We didn’t talk for a long time after that.

  “THE POLICE CAME to see me down at the office today,” I said.

  We were both undressing for bed.

  “What did they want?”

  “They want to hire me.”

  “No. Why?”

  I told her everything from Theodore Steinman’s story to Nola Payne to the cops stopping me and the watchmaker asking for my business.

  “Are you going back down there?” she asked when I was through.

  “What else can I do? Nobody else can do it.”

  “It might be dangerous. You have children.”

  I leaned over and kissed her right nipple. She made a sound that told me that she hadn’t realized how much her nipple missed that kiss.

  We didn’t talk any more about the LAPD or Nola Payne. Our only words were sweet promises about a world made up of two.

  9

  I was up before five. After donning my day’s costume I shook Bonnie out of bed. She wrapped herself in a housecoat without complaint. She didn’t even stop to make a cup of coffee, just staggered out to her pink Rambler and turned over the engine.

  Neither Feather nor Jesus would be up before seven. By then Bonnie would be back in her bed.

  On the ride to my office Bonnie and I said very little. She was slow to wake up the first day after coming back from Europe. But she wouldn’t let me take a taxi.

  The sun was rising but not risen. The streets were fairly empty until we crossed Florence. After that we came across the occasional army Jeep. Two trucks full of armed soldiers sped past us at one point. There were groups of soldiers on a few major corners. But the main thing we saw was the wreckage left by the riots.

  Bonnie gasped and sighed with every new ruin we passed.

  On Avalon and Central and Hooper the burned buildings outnumbered the ones still intact. There was at least one torched car hunkered down at the curb on almost every block. Debris was strewn along the sidewalks and streets. Smoke still rose here and there from the wreckage. Furtive shadows could be seen sifting through the debris, searching for anything of value that had been overlooked.

  City buses were running and the police made their presence felt. They were still riding four to a car, some wearing riot helmets or holding shotguns upright in their laps. They were still jumpy from days and nights when the Negro population rose up and fought back.

  Bonnie let me off in front of my building. She kissed me and told me to be careful and then she kissed me again.

  “Call if you’re going to be late, honey,” she said. “You know Feather will be worried.”

  I kissed her and then walked off to my car.

  TRINI’S CREOLE CAFé on 105th and Central was just an open-air coffee stand with a fancy name. All Trini had were a counter and six stools under a dirty yellow awning.

  “You opened the minute they called the curfew off, huh, Trini?” I said to the open-air restaurateur.

  “I been open every day, Mr. Rawlins,” Trini replied.

  “With all this riotin’ and snipin’ goin’ on?” I asked.

  “Dollar don’t make itself, brother.”

  He had straight black hair from his Mexican father and the chocolate brown face and flat nose of his mother, who worked in the kitchen.

  “Didn’t they give you any trouble?” I asked after enjoying the first real laugh I’d had in a week.

  “Most of your serious riotin’ was done at nighttime. I’m mainly a breakfast place. I had looters, rioters, even cops and soldiers buyin’ coffee and jelly doughnuts.”

  “Cops and looters at the same counter?”

  “Oh yeah. You know the cops come six and eight at a time, and so it wasn’t too much to worry about. But mostly it was just neighborhood peoples comin’ out for to see what had been burnt down and tryin’ to feel a little normal.”

  “Weren’t you supposed to be closed?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah. They come by and told me to shut down a time or two but what was they gonna do, book me with the bombs goin’ off around their heads?”

  I laughed again. Trini was about my age. He held himself like an elder, though. Wisdom was his crutch. He never worried about anything because he could explain it all away with a few sage words.

  “So I guess you know all the dirt, huh?” I asked.

  “So much I got to wash my hands every ten minutes.”

  I smiled. “Lemme have another one’a those lemon-filled doughnuts, will ya?”

  The sun was up and the streets were halfway normal. While Trini got my doughnut, I turned over a question in my mind.

  The stock-and-trade of wise men was to educate. That meant they always had to feel they knew something you didn’t know. So when asking a question of a wise man it was always best to ask it in the wrong way.

  Trini brought my doughnut on a thick tan plate.

  “You hear about some white dude got dragged outta his car and killed down on Grape Street?” I asked when he set the plate down.

  “You ain’t got that one quite right, Easy,” he replied.

  “No? Why not?”

  “There was a boy drivin’ ’round lookin’ at the play when a couple’a the brothers saw him and drug him out for a dustin’.”

  “They didn’t kill him?”

  “Nope. Just a citizen that some’a our boys beat on. They say he run off so quick that nobody could catch him. Nobody said nuthin’ about no body.”

  “I ain’t read about that at all.”

  “That’s street talk, brother. You know what it’s like.”

  “So you sayin’ a white boy come down here in his car and gets dragged out and beaten and the papers don’t even cover it?” I shook my head as if to say that that just couldn’t be true.

  “Oh yeah, Easy. Yes sir. Bobby Grant told me himself and he live right around the corner from there.”

  I sucked the lemon custard out of its pastry pocket. I liked Trini’s mother’s lemon filling because she didn’t add so much sugar that the lemon lost its tang.

  “You got some cigarettes back there, Trini?”

  “What’s your brand this week?” he asked.

  “I’m gonna need a man’s cigarette down around here,” I said. “How about Chesterfields or Pall Malls.”

  “I only got Lucky Strike in the filterless, Easy.”

  “Gimme one’a them then . . . no, no. Gimme two packs.”

  I COULD HAVE asked Trini for Bobby Grant’s address or phone number—if I wanted everybody who came into his shop for the next three days to know about it. The reason so many people braved the violent streets to come to Trini’s café was that they knew all the information of the neighborhood filtered through him. Anything he heard he repeated. And Trini had a piercing voice, so he could be talking to a man at one end of the counter and you heard every word six stools away.

  Bobby Grant wasn’t in the phone book but that was no surprise. Back in 1965 a good half of your poor people didn’t have phones. They used one in the hall or maybe a relative’s line across the street.

  WHEN RAYMOND “MOUSE” Alexander first moved to L.A., he gave Information his name to go along with my number. I still remember the look he gave me when I told him that I had his listing removed.

  Mouse was a serious man who had killing in his blood. Telling him no was as dangerous a task as moving nitroglycerine in a truck with no shock absorbers.

  “What you say, Easy?” the lit
tle gray-eyed killer asked. I remember that he was wearing an outrageous orange suit and a brown porkpie hat.

  “It’s either that or you gonna have to shoot me,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Ray,” I said, “you got women callin’ me on the line day and night. ‘Where’s Raymond? Do you know how I can find Mouse? What’s your name, honey? You sound nice.’ I know you don’t like nobody messin’ with your women but it’s a little confusin’ when they wake you out of a deep sleep and there you are all alone in the bed.”

  The evil stare turned into a grin and a shrug.

  “Easy, you a fool, you know that?”

  “Not me, Raymond. Not me.”

  I PARKED THREE blocks from Nola Payne’s address and walked the rest of the way to her block. There was a group of men, and a few women, standing around on the corner of Grape and 114th. These were working people who got paid a dollar fifteen an hour, when there was a job to be had. But most of their potential employers had gone up in flames over the past five days.

  In order to fit in with that working-class crowd I was wearing faded blue jeans and a T-shirt with a few small tears and paint stains on it. My brown leather shoes were cracked and stained too.

  The men were for the most part loud and blustering, laughing about their adventures and the exploits of their friends.

  “Cops chased Marlon Jones up into the White Front Department Store on Central,” one man was saying when I got there. “They run him up against the back of the store and told him to lay down or die. But you know he out on parole and so he jumped up on a shelf, climbed to the top and popped right out the window before they could catch a bead on his ass.”

  The crowd broke out into loud laughter. His audience didn’t ask why the storyteller wasn’t arrested instead of Marlon Jones. They didn’t want proof. All they asked for was a good laugh in the face of the hard times coming up the line.