February 14, 1948
Dearest Isaak:
How can I begin but to beg forgiveness for the shameful lateness of this letter? But considering the circumstances I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s a miracle that I’m writing at all, or doing anything, for that matter, & no one is more surprised than I am about my apparent return to the land of the living after giving myself up for dead. I honestly could not imagine even finding the will to put food in this mouth after what happened & for the first few days I didn’t.
Virginia was the first and last woman Selmar ever loved; that’s what he told her, and it was true. He never even loved his own mother. The more superstitious of his confreres believed that this is what marked Selmar for high tragedy and they were nervous in his company, especially when he’d spit and scratch himself and joke on her as she lay grinning in the dark of her coffin. “I’m the only niggra on the South Side of Chicago, man,” he’d complain, “who never got a lip on those titties. I hear they were good, too. Damn shame.”
He wouldn’t stop at that, either. Selmar nursed a vital contempt for the American God, the God of his captivity, and he’d do the dozens on his mother or on the solemn Teutonic figure whom the blacks in those days referred to as Christ Jesus, despite the fact that he worked sometimes as a Deacon in the Baptist Church.
“That Deacon shit,” he would say, swatting the air, “that’s all just for pussy, man! Pussy and corn pone!”
But every outrageous pronouncement came with such a handsome big grin that it was impossible to hold the heresy against him. On the other hand, you didn’t want to stand too close to Selmar Gussman during a thunder storm, no matter how good looking he was. Just in case.
Selmar shared a house on the South Side in an area where recent refugees from Memphis and Selma and Little Rock were keeping goats and chickens like members of their extended family. The house was a two storey wood-frame tinderbox on a quarter acre of land wrapped in a sturdy woodscrap fence. He shared the house with four other musicians and they were able to pay rent and live well on top of it. Their business model involved running an opium den in a windowless back bedroom upstairs.
The walls of the opium den were painted deep red, with gold trim and the floor was covered with pillows. Most of the customers were white college students from over at the University of Chicago. Opium dens were a lucrative cottage industry in that high-pressure town and the competition between them was fierce, but non-violent, early on. The white kids were not so much concerned with the quality of the poppy or hemp available at a particular Jook Joint, as some erroneously called them… the major concerns were comfort and safety.
The places in demand were the places where a cleancut upper class lotus eater could relax into the electric blue cloud of his drug of choice without any fear of being harassed, robbed, kidnapped or stuck with a knife, because even a flicker of anxiety could interfere with the revelatory quality of the high. Inspired by Theosophy, many of these pince-nez’d poppy-lovers were seeking enlightenment, a bridge to the other side and required in this pursuit an atmosphere of spiritual peace. On any given evening, there’d be three or four barefoot Humanities majors stretched out on the over-sized satin pillows, pink toes wiggling, contemplating the fine print of cosmology by candle light, sucking on hookah pipes and gathering enough direct experience to write prize-winning thesises on the works of Sam Coleridge.
Virginia was the first and last woman Selmar ever loved but she was by no means the first or last he ever fucked. Even Virginia knew better than that. And no profounder testament to the force and clarity of their devotion than that she should fully face, remain unshaken by, this fact. But then, she had her own open secrets to keep. Male infidelity and female infidelity are different: female infidelity usually makes some kind of sense. But the primary, the primeval, bond was between Selmar and Virginia.
An habitué of Selmar’s opium den, a bespectacled English graduate student of Sociology named Isaac Edel-Stein, came around sometimes, even in broad daylight on a Sunday, to play guitar with Selmar, the two of them rocking in tandem on the front porch and juking away. Isaac had been soothed (bronchitis; twanging nerves) on opium-rich tonics as a boy… Battley’s Sedative Solution, Dr. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne, Dover’s Powder, et al… and now the wonderful stuff (merely the powdered exudate of the milk-teat of the white poppy) was forbidden, even in medicine. So Selmar brought Isaac his chemical solace. Sometimes they played chess, too, or talked metaphysics, since Selmar was always on the look-out for an explanation for everything; a belief system that wasn’t just bedtime stories for pickanninies, which was how he described Christianity. Isaac, who was Jewish, tried a bit of the Kabala out on him, but that just struck Selmar as being so much humbug jazzed up with Vaudeville stage magic.
Isaac and Selmar became fast friends, which inspired Isaac to want to share something special with Selmar: a beautiful little colored girl he was seeing, Beth. Her actual name, Bethany (accent on the second syllable), was fine for everyone else, but to Isaac she was Beth, which had also been the name of his mother, short for Elsbeth. Beth had a part time job working the kitchen in Acton Hall, the cafeteria on the Woodlawn campus of the University. She was wasp-waisted petite, narrow-hipped but busty and black and moist as fresh fudge, with her hair in two stiff wooly braids and big molasses-colored eyes and a button nose plus a delicious circumflexed upper lip that filled Edel-Stein with deliriums of sexual transport whenever she smiled at him, which was often.
Isaac used to go back in the kitchen ostensibly to discuss Bolshevism and Racial Equality with the Negro and Dahlit staff, but after the first time he saw Beth in her white kitchen uniform and thick black stockings and hairnet, she was the sole reason he began spending part of every weekday afternoon back there, helping to dry dishes beside her in the sizzle and steam and loud clang of the busy kitchen. It gave him a chance to roll up his shirt sleeves and show his muscular forearms; he wasn’t particularly tall or handsome; he was owlish, with a cautious physique, but his forearms were masculine from years he’d spent doing research on a farm. There’s a picture of him looking very young and upper class and yet posing proudly with a pitchfork. Later, Bethany showed someone a copy of this photo and remarked, “I loved the way he talked… could listen to that man go for hours. Everything, you know, was veddy veddy and teddibly this and frightfilly that, old chap…”
Isaac loved the way Beth talked, too. He called her speech patterns the God-given music of her Race. He had an old Edison wax cylinder recorder up in his dormitory room and it was under the pretext of recording her natural speech that he got Beth up there one Sunday evening, sneaking her past the hall monitor. Isaac Edel-Stein, a disciple of the seminal sociologist Robert Park, used his Ediphone for field work and had dozens of wax cylinder recordings of everything from trolley conductors to auctioneers to mediums to Baptist ministers in a cabinet he kept by the bed. The same cabinet in which he stored his thick reusable condom.
“Go and sit in the lounges of luxury hotels and on the doorsteps of the flophouses; sit on the Gold Coast settees and on the slum shakedowns; sit in the Orchestra Hall and in the Star and Garter Burlesque. In short go and get the seat of your pants dirty in real research.”
This is how Isaac’s hero and father-figure, Park, had put it in a quote attributed to him from that very year and that was what Isaac was doing, in a way, humping with grateful astonished reverence into Beth on his bed in her bloody ripped bloomers while the wax recording cylinder went around and around, inscribed by the quivering needle, over-recording Beth’s original speech five times with the sounds that kept coming after it, until Isaac finally reached without looking and switched the thing off, discovering to his delight, later, that he had two minutes and thirty seconds of Bethany hollering and gasping and whimpering No, no, Baby Jesus no as Isaac dabbled in and out of her tight slick dust-colored pussy with the lip-smacking sounds of a feast.
They began fucking on a weekly basis, but never again in his dorm room, which would have been a form of attempted career-suicide. Often it was at an expensive $7-a-night hotel that specialized in miscegeny and its furtive protocols. Isaac suspected there were peep-holes drilled in the walls, but what could he do? Go to the police?
Isaac was more addicted to Beth than he was to the opium that he took at Selmar’s den, but, whether he loved her or not, and he wasn’t quite sure that he did, though he definitely felt comfortable with the formulation “he treasured her”, marriage was out of the question. With an upper-class, English, Jewish girl that he treasured so, marriage would have been the swift and obvious result, love or not. But with Beth, what could he do? The greatest unnecessary risk he’d ever taken in his life was the five hundred meters he’d walked with her at three o’clock one foggy morning down the campus midway, heart drumming like two Krupas, his white hand clutching her tiny black one, both hands smelling of sex.
Driven by exaggerated emotions he could barely name, he offered Beth to Selmar. Not to keep but to share, as though to diffuse the strength of his own responsibilities to her, whatever they were gradually becoming, magnified by the fact of the debt of virginity that Beth had left with him. He had made sure, of course, to use his condom in every instance and to wash it carefully after every use, hanging it discreetly to dry from a blunt hook in the cabinet.
Part of him felt shame and disgust at how clever, how self-protecting a move it was, in a social or legal sense, to involve Selmar. “Isaac Stein, you calculating bastard, I hope you calculate yourself right out of happiness this time,” he admonished himself in his shaving glass that Sunday morning. But still he did it. He lugged his Ediphone over to Selmar’s place that very afternoon and played him the record of what sounded like Bethany’s participation in a raucous Baptist revival, minus the sound of everyone else in the congregation. Selmar was intrigued. Isaac proposed an arrangement.
In those days, white men fucked with some or all of their clothes on, they rarely fucked uncovered, which is why for a time the word pyjama was a slang term for white man in colored communities where interaction between the races was WM>BF, as opposed to BM>WF. Examples of the former were neighborhoods that had developed around domestic service, areas with a high percentage of colored nurses, maids, cooks, fortune tellers, midwives and nannies (often enough themselves the fruit of droit du seigneur style exogamy). These neighborhoods were well off by black standards and were deep repositories of folk wisdom about the white male phallus and featured lots of mocha children at play on its semi-genteel lawns. Colored neighborhoods more rich in lore about white pussy, on the other hand, tended to be rather short on mocha children but thick with blue-black musicians. And much, much poorer.
Unlike their white counterparts, the black men tended to fuck (given the luxury of time, and a safe bed to do it in) “buck” naked, au fauve, an intense experience for corseted matrons who had never been overwhelmed by the erotic totality of the human corpus before, more the less under a tide of persistent black flesh smelling of sweet sweat and dense with slavery-bred muscles. It was the original Beatlemania. Niggermania. Same mechanism: Apollonian repression, Dionysian release. Quite a few of the white women went nuts and those who could control themselves became, instead, deeply satisfied, but when Selmar fucked Bethany, who wasn’t even white and should have known better, she went nuts. Two little brown bastards worth of nuts.
When Virginia, who became “Gussie” long after Selmar had died, first brought Selmar Gussman home in early 1939, her mother pretended not to like it one bit. It wasn’t that he was black as anthracite, as Virginia had feared would be a problem… Selmar’s straight hair more than made up for his blackness; he looked like a Hindu. Hindus were fine. It wasn’t even much of a shock that Selmar was thirty and that daughter Virginia had just turned nineteen only a month before he first darkened the family doorway, clutching a futile box of Fanny Mae chocolates. Virginia had been bringing boys home since she was seven, boys were moths and she was a midsummer night’s porch light and Virginia’s mother got used to it. When Virginia showed up with a thirty year old man, a musician, an angular buck they called The Sheik, propriety demanded that the matriarch feign horror. But really it was the answer to her prayers.
Virginia had a thick black braid down her back, dense as a licorice twist, and a white angora sweater she wore when she meant business. That sweater with a pearl-gray pleated skirt, and her Sunday shoes, her mary janes. She had a big beautiful face with very high rock-cut cheekbones and a freckled nose that was the smallest that anyone had ever seen on an adult. It certainly wasn’t that they didn’t look good together, Virginia and Selmar, Selmar in his baggy Cab Calloway finest, with his precise features and patent leather hair, widow’s peak included. They looked too good. They looked, as Uncle Man put it when Man was well into his 90′s, “like an ode to real good fucking.”
“What do you want with my baby?” Virginia’s mother had demanded at the threshold, separating them physically, shoving Virginia to a safe spot behind her. A chorus of crickets performed high-pitched Doo-Wop in the background, the street lights over-hanging the hedge were glass fruit and a jalopy puttered by on 115th Street.
“Why, I want to love her, Ma’am,” Selmar responded, clutching the rim of his fedora piously. He had been a Deacon in the Baptist church over on Mud Lane. Not a trace of the slick-head reefer aficionado, or death-defying diddler of white girls, to be seen at that moment. “I just want to love her with all my heart, Mrs. Douglas.”
“You can do that from a distance,” retorted the matriarch, “Until I’m ready.” She stared him down and said “Now git.” And the screen door slammed on him.
After they were married, Selmar and Virginia could tell the story for laughs, with new embellishments every time they told it, Virginia on Selmar’s lap, playing with his brilliantined hair. One version had the matriarch chasing Selmar down the front porch steps with a broom. Moose, Virginia’s big sister, remembered that all that happened then was that Selmar said,
“I’m sorry you feel that way about it…”
…and walked back down the stairs and got in his brand new sky-blue Buick and drove off, impressing the whole family, who was crowded together in the front window to evaluate his exit.
–
–
2.
August 7, 1966
Ike:
Did you ever get my last letter? I only wonder because there was no mention of it in your telegram. If so (if you did get it & merely thought it didn’t merit a response) don’t consider this a reprimand of any kind! But if not, if you really didn’t get my last letter, we have to consider the possibility that you aren’t receiving all your correspondence, & everything that implies. I’m in a queer position as you know & doing my best to be understanding, although it isn’t always the easiest thing, which I’m sure you’ll admit.
As for me, my brain comprehends it all perfectly well & I only wish I could say the same for my heart, which can’t help wanting to sit you-know-who down for a good long lecture (& a spanking) about who came first by twenty years, need I remind her, & who came second & who will under no circumstances come last. But I suppose that’s enough on that topic, especially if your mail is making unauthorized detours before reaching your desk. Enclosed you will find the promised picture.
Meanwhile, Louise, as you can imagine, is being quite the pain & it seems I will owe that child until one of us goes to her grave but the last time I tried to make that point in a telephone conversation with Moose she read me the riot act so I’ve learned to keep these bee-stung lips of mine zipped. But for you if you were here, never doubt that I would be happy to unzip them (now let’s see if that gets past the censor),
-Gussie
Thanksgiving, 1966. It was snowing, the snow wouldn’t stop and the house was packed with relatives. The kitchen windows were fogged with cookery and uncle farts and familial breath, blurring the view… the silverpoint trees and the sugared hedge and icicled bird bath and wrinkled plush dunes of snow. The kitchen was noisy but outside in acres of early winter it was mute and blank as a never-used diary. A Sahara of snow. Breathing on the freezing glass was like painting the cold gray skin of some saint. The house was all hassock and magazine rack and book case in the living room, and cloudy drained milk bottles on the back porch like an x-rayed wedge of ten-pins, and bales of hay-yellow newspaper beside the bin of potatoes in the kitchen near the cellar door which somebody kept opening to go down and shovel more coal in the furnace.
There was double-aproned Moose, impossibly black-haired and pony-tailed, her face as wrinkled as a hand, her hands on her hips, her hips like a man’s, controlling the stove with a scowl. The stove like an Indiana steel mill with its Hoover-era two-tiered pots and gothic skillets and Basilica-lidded steamers and pepper-flecked flames. The dials on the stove all yellowed and brown-blushed with old heat. The stove clanging and hissing and wooshing with fire, the controlled explosion of smelting the family feast back when cooking was still a heavy industry, when gas and iron were still a big part of it. It took real physical strength to prepare a meal for so many people, it took real strength to eat it. Moose was taller than most of the men in the family but her posture was terrible, hunching through the room like a big old Indian, coarse with the knowledge of hog slaughtering.
Gussie and Lula Dee weren’t on speaking terms. Everyone else tried to ignore this. Lula Dee would walk into a room where Gussie was standing and turn right around and walk out again.
“Moose,” said Gussie’s other sister. She wiped her hands on a kitchen towel, blackening it, and closed the cellar door behind herself. “You think you got enough coal down there to get through the week, more the less the winter, dear heart?” The three sisters, in order of height and age, and reverse order of beauty, by nickname: Moose, Oz, and Gussie.
“0z,” said Gussie. “Button up that cardigan and hush.”
Gussie was the youngest, but she was the Queen. And what was Moose? Moose was defender of the family. There were three sisters and five brothers and Moose ended up in a bare-knuckle skirmish at one point or another in defense of each and every one of them, although she wasn’t the elder sibling. Two brothers were older and already dead by the time of that Thanksgiving in ‘66, but there was still Uncle Sally, the brother just under her in age, and Uncle Booth, the middle brother who had run off to the “South Seas” (possibly a lie) and Uncle Man, the one with the bright green eyes and the center-parted wavy red hair who smelled of cloves and who everyone realized was almost undoubtedly Gay. Uncle Man, most of all: Moose was his defender on the playground.
Gussie grew up in this house and lived the length of her married life in an identical house just four blocks over, on 111th Street, and to stand there again as a 46 year old widow, in the bosom of a family whose thoughts on her were mixed at best: this was a genuine sensation, as Selmar would have put it. Well, not everybody in the world… not even everybody in her goddamn family… needs to like her. She’s old enough to know that.
But every time she saw Lula Dee on the other side of a room, or leaving a room she’d just entered, she had to admit it broke her heart a little and she was sorry things had happened as they had. Gussie followed Lula Dee, who was carrying an ash tray, through several rooms and cornered her on the front porch, empty because it was too chilly. Lula was shadowed in a dark corner and her face appeared briefly as she struck a match to touch to her Salem. Gussie experienced a moment of panic when it seemed that neither of them would be capable of speech. She forced herself.
“Lula Dee, can you please tell me the sense of each of us pretending the other don’t exist?”
Lula, 23, was round-faced. Full-bosomed and over-stuffed in the region of her behind. Attractive to plenty of men, Gussie allowed, but unmistakably wounded during that perilous jump from youth to young womanhood. In Gussie’s frank opinion Lula could have passed for the older of the two.
Lula Dee took a long drag on her cigarette, blew the smoke out through her nose. “It’s worked out just fine for ten years this way and another ten years can’t hurt nothing,” she said. Somebody in the living room put on a 45 rpm of Ramsey Lewis and the music pushed muffled through the front porch door. The In-Crowd. They could feel the floor quake as some of the teenaged cousins danced to it.
“Can’t we talk about this?”
Lula smiled and said, in a mockingly sweet voice, “Talk about it? Why, so I can forgive you, Auntie Gussie? Fine! You’re forgiven, Auntie Gussie! You’re forgiven! Now, please, please allow me to finish this motherfucking cigarette in peace.”
Gussie, hugging herself, pushed back through porch door into the living room and shut the door quietly behind her. Oz was clearing the floor of dancing cousins and glanced at Gussie as she sailed by. In the kitchen, where Gussie put on a regal smile and took a seat at one end of the long table on which she’d taken baths in a bucket as a baby, the beaux belonging to some distant cousin, a student at the University of Chicago, held forth on foreign films while carving the turkey.
The adults were listening politely to him as to a baffling sermon in a foreigner’s church. The college man said Godard and he pronounced it like something from an episode of Star Trek conjuring a fish-eyed alien with a veiny skull. A suspendered great-uncle raised his hand and said,
“And this Godard feller, you say he’s a big man in the motion pictures, like Paul Robeson?”
Uncle Sally’s wife: “Paul Robeson is a Communist, Sally. He was on a black list.”
“Negro on a black list. Ain’t that something.”
Uncle Man’s guffaw. “Shoot! They put him on the white list… then he’s in real trouble!”
“Ya’ll hush now and let the boy finish! He’s educating us!”
Uncle Man twinkling. “I could certainly use some educating.”
Uncle Sally rubbing his hands together. “He’s educating that turkey, I’ll give him that.”
“Hush!”
Then somebody in the living room put on another record. That record and the older listeners all froze. The college beau kept carving turkey and bringing them his fancy news from the outside world, raising his voice to be heard over the syncopated intro of the song, unaware that the family at the table was suddenly in a panic, all sneaking worried glances at Gussie who sat like a hard-eyed Queen with a faded smile at her end of the table. Because the song was taboo. The record was taboo, even as an object. The ten inch heavy-as-a-dinner-plate 78 rpm recording of Selmar Gussman and his Diplomatics performing “Virginia Don’t” on the Imperial Ochre label.
“Reggie!” Moose called out, twisting in her seat at the other end of the table. Leave it to a third cousin to find, in the stacks and stacks in the cabinet, the one platter that Moose had done her best to hide.
“Reggie, turn that contraption off, now, we’re trying to converse in here, child!”
Don’t run ‘round Chi-town, givin’ them bloods a thrill
Don’t Virginia don’t
Don’t run ‘round even up on Beacon Hill
Don’t Virginia don’t
Jus’ comb your waist-long hair and keep real still
The living room, where the record player was (on top of the massive four-legged mahogany edifice that was the Magnavox console television), now held three collapsible card tables, set up for the kids to eat on. This was the arrangement every Christmas and Thanksgiving: kids around the card tables in the living room, adults in the kitchen around the expandable oak table, and snoring pot-bellied eggnog casualties on the back porch divan or glider. Lula Dee was still out on the front porch smoking.
“Reggie! Rebecca! Don’t make me come in there, now!” Moose yelled again. “Are you children deaf?”
But Gussie moved around the table and commented, quietly, as she circled behind Moose, “Y’all are acting like the record killed him,” and then, louder, to the college man with the carving knife, a tallish black boy with dimples and close-cropped peppercorn hair whose horn-rimmed glasses were an affectation to camouflage a demeaningly good physique, “We know you can carve a turkey, sugar, but can you cut a rug?”
Reaching for him without looking.
Don’t tease me sugar, ‘less you gonna swing
Don’t Virginia, don’t!
Don’t hum no verses ‘less you gonna sing
Don’t Virginia, don’t!
Don’t sit on a King Bee ‘less you cravin’ that sting!
And then they were jitterbugging in the living room while the kids pushed the card tables out of the way again and clapped rhythm or stomped the floor, rattling the plates in the china cabinet. Picture it in black and white, the gatefold photo on an album of mid-century dance music: the wild black flash of Gussie’s hair, her open mouth, the shock of pleasure in her eyes, the arc of her skirt, one leg kicking, one hand clutching the college boy’s, the other hand flailing, crazy, snatching at the sound of her long-dead husband in the ether.
And Lula Dee alone on the cold dark porch, peering through the fogged glass as Gussie, the center of the whole family’s attention yet again, out-did even the college boy dancing to Selmar’s record, the song that Selmar had written for her. Gussie’s way of saying fuck you to Lula Dee.
Well, what could you do with a child like that? She was nothing but a dyed-in-the-wool Jew-hater!
–
–
3.
Oct 24, 1976
Sir Isaac:
You know perfectly well that I’m not about to let myself be strapped into a flying machine & shot like a cannon ball over the Atlantic & you must surely be aware that Virginia Douglas Gussman has never been known to risk her neck with daredevil stunts like air travel & she is not likely to start. But thank you for the invitation, although being certain that you knew that I’d say no to it takes some of the sparkle off the noble gesture (wink).
Heartfelt thanks many times over for the Polaroid, you look as distinguished & handsome as ever, I’d even say aristocratic. Well, December 18th came & went this year as usual & it was a lugubrious affair & it’s awful, isn’t it that the grief over his loss now out-shines the feelings I would have had for him had he lived to grow old with me.
I’m not saying that he & I couldn’t have kept the magic alive over the years but I won’t whitewash things & the truth is there’s no way of knowing what vexations & humiliations Selmar would have put me through with his philandering if he’d lived to be the handsome gray-haired devil he most certainly would have become.
You’ve been more of a husband to me over the years than he could have managed Isaac & it’s the downfall of this generation that sex is the king in matters of the heart to them but you & I old fogies know better. We’ve outlasted two of your marriages, haven’t we & haven’t I been patient in the out-lasting? Well, if you’re ever truly serious about this latest brainstorm of yours, I suppose what I’m saying is that you’ll have to pack up your sword & your shaving kit & sail to Philadelphia. You’ll understand I hope that I make this counter-offer secure in the knowledge that you’re certain to decline (a technique I learned from the master himself),
-Gussie
It was the Christmas season of 1947, they were window-shopping at Marshall Fields, holding hands in front of the mechanized yuletide display that Marshall Fields was famous for, which was second only to the ten story decorated 150,000-light super tree downtown as the thing for a family to gawk at on a December night in Chicago.
State street was bustling, it was a long black mirror reflecting the juxtaposed chains of white headlights and red tail lights and the galaxy of shimmering Christmas bulbs overhead, and shop windows blazing, and all of it packed in snow, snow like white velvet, like the frosting on gingerbread men, like the cuffs on Santa’s jacket, the packing material in the life-sized box of the brilliant gift of State Street. Early evening, workers getting off, shoppers circulating in a thick stream through revolving doors, and those big green and white CTA busses rounding the corner stuffed with more, more shoppers, and men clutching brief cases, mothers clutching children, the busses rounding the corner and roaring up the street as Selmar and Virginia clutched each other in front of the mechanized Kris Kringle display at Marshall Field’s department store, grinning like kids.
She became gradually aware of a man to her right. Tall, good-looking, a silver-haired man in a high-collared camel-haired coat. He looked like Xavier Cugat…he didn’t look entirely white. Pale-skinned South Americans and Cubans in those days were on the verge, but not quite there. Their whiteness was still up for debate, and popular band leaders like Cugat, and Desi Arnaz, or actors like Caesar Romero and singers like Carmen Miranda, were the Trojan horses of the invasion. They were prying the North American mind open to the notion of a new flavor of white, a spicy kind of white, the hot-tempered-but-good-natured playboys and heart-of-gold spitfires of the Latin Diaspora. Drawing the line, of course, at Mexico and Puerto Rico, which were too Indian, or too brown and far too poor.
This man who looked like Cugat was not facing the department store window like Selmar and Virginia were, he was angled to face them, smiling fiercely. He was wearing expensive kidskin gloves, his hands clasped in front, his head cocked, saying something between the teeth of his smile. At first, Virginia just smiled too, and looked away, but he was still talking…it took a bit for it to dawn on her that he was speaking Spanish, not a word of which was comprehensible, and expected a response, if not a reply.
At first she felt guilty: here’s this foreign man, she thought, this poor foreigner, far from home, reaching out for a human connection, trying to make chit chat on a December night in a gigantic city, trying to make contact of some sort, and I can’t help. I studied Latin and French in school, she thought, and I don’t even remember anything about either of those, and that was just two years ago! He must think all Americans are stupid! I’m an Ambassador for my country, and I’m letting my country down! But then she thought: oh.
Wait.
He was mistaking her racially ambiguous beauty for something familiar; he was mistaking her for one of his own. He thought Virginia was South American…he thought she was Argentinean, or something. Now he was frowning on top of the smile, speaking with more force, the fog of his breath simulating a fire in his mouth. She was close enough to smell the peppermints he’d been sucking. She knew that facial expression; she knew exactly what it meant; only there weren’t words precise enough for it in English.
His rant was obviously about Selmar, shiny black Selmar with his arm around a tiny pale ultra-desirable doll that this well-dressed shit was mistaking for his own, a refugee from his own damn culture or country, disgusted by the sight of a nigger’s hand on her. Cugat repeated one sentence in particular three or for times and Virginia memorized it phonetically. Because it was in Spanish, the sentence was beautiful, it was cruelly so, it sounded like singing, almost. He delivered himself of that evil song and marched off with patrician languor, his hands clasped behind him, with one glance back before he disappeared in the bustle. Selmar, in his innocent way, a head full of musical arrangements and high-school pussy, was mostly oblivious. He didn’t pick up on it. He squeezed his wife’s waist instead.
“Hey, what kinda stuff was that feller talking at, lamb?”
“Spanish, brown eyes. He was speaking Spanish. He said we were the best looking couple he’d ever seen.”
Selmar hugged and kissed Virginia for being so smart, or to proudly reward her for having inspired the fictitious compliment, but she could barely control herself… she could barely stop herself from shaking, or keep her heart from popping… could barely withstand the pleasured pace of the rest of their Christmassy evening downtown. She didn’t hear a word Selmar said after that, as though Cugat’s secret words were soaking like an acid through her brain, despite the fact that their meaning was locked to her mind by her perfect ignorance of Spanish. Her task was to memorize the sound of it long enough for her to get home and write it down. And after writing it down, have it translated. And after having it translated, what? Call the police? Write an angry letter to the editor?
Of course, she never did. Get it translated. By the time they got home that evening, and she locked herself in the bathroom with paper and pencil and ran a bath so Selmar wouldn’t wonder what she was really doing in there for so long, the sharp edges of the phrase were gone, it had sunken into the soft substance of her thoughts leaving only a palpable form, a shape, a niggling infuriating imprint that she couldn’t get at or dig back out or hammer down flat which continued to bother her for years. Sitting on the toilet with a notebook on her lap and a pen suspended speechless over the page on which she’d already started the notes for a recipe for a North Carolina-style squash casserole which she was trying to reconstruct from memory, she laughed at herself, cuffed a tear from her cheek, turned off the tub spigot, exited the bathroom still dry and elaborately coiffed and fully clothed. She was even still wearing her coat, a veiled hat, everything. Race is the death of a thousand cuts, she has more than once remarked. Race is disconnection. That particular lovely evening, which started out with all the signs that it would go down in history as one of the sweetest Christmas memories of her adult life, was ruined now forever.
“You feelin’ level, Cake?” asked Selmar, with feigned alarm, when they met on the stairs, he on his way up, both of them still dressed for winter. He pulled her hat off tenderly and she kissed her husband’s cheek, eyes closed.
“Just ran you a bath, Sheik, that’s all…”
“Aw, pity, doll…,” he kissed back. He had a late rehearsal to get to, on his way upstairs to gather a sheaf of his music…and dab on some cologne when he was sure she was down in the kitchen or in the bath and wouldn’t wonder too closely after the smell, following the trail down Throop Street to wherever it might lead. Selmar had that talent…even Gussie referred to it as such. He could be faithful with his heart while his big black dick claimed everything lovely in heels. And it all came together in his music.
It was just slightly after 7 pm that same evening when Selmar met Lynton Davis.
Just after 7pm but it was dark, snow-glow dark, and the sky was no higher than four stories tall. The wet black street and creamed-white cars and lamp posts and fence rails and stair steps; all this and the feathered wind; were waiting for Selmar when he stepped, whistling, out of his house. He had to pick his route carefully because where he was going ran almost entirely out of sidewalk a few blocks before he would reach his destination…only one complicated path provided a clean walk the whole way. He couldn’t take the car for fear of having it spotted within half a mile of Bethany’s house. Coming home later with muddy shoes and pant-legs would surely give him away. Bethany’s block was even nicknamed Mud Lane by the members of his band, who all frequented the area in their casual (but daily) pursuit of reefer.
Selmar had a sheaf of random music nooked under the arm of his cashmere coat. He hurried towards the railroad tracks. He glanced over a shoulder at the light upstairs in the bathroom and he was torn between the pleasure awaiting him over on Throop Street and the pleasure he could have by simply staying at home. But then his heart performed the rapid calculation that if he did Throop now and came back to 111th Street later, he could have both. He felt no twinge of guilt because everything he did, even cheating on her, was purified by his innocent love for his wife, or so he felt. And Virginia was trying to relax in the bath that she’d drawn for him.
“Aw, pity, doll,” Selmar had said, when she’d first offered it to him. “I can’t take no bath, as the boys and I have a little date this evening. New charts they got to learn. Why don’t you, Baby?”
She had still been dressed up in her coat and hat and he’d pulled her hat off and turned her around on the stairs and prodded her back towards the bathroom, squeezing her ass through the coat. The front of her mind distractedly accepted that he was on his way to a late rehearsal. If not for that unpleasant experience with the South American gentleman, ruining the whole day retroactively, she would have been more vigilant about her husband leaving the house again without her in his new cashmere coat on Christmas Eve wearing cologne (Selmar had tried to hide it but Virginia could smell it). But she was still bothered to distraction by the phrase that was taunting her from the outside edge of her memory. The phrase that Xavier Cugat look-a-like had hissed at her and Selmar who were just minding their own business in front of the Christmas display in the big windows of Marshall Field’s.
Virginia couldn’t speak a word of Spanish but she knew somehow that mellifluous phrase was festooned with thorns and it was evil with race hatred. The Spic had assumed that Virginia was one of his own, crossing the line with an inferior, a Negro, so he’d spit that phrase at her. She could see it scrawled in arced highlights across the red deco scallops of her toenails, or, even, in the fine silver script that wove through the weft of her floating pussy… there it was in the gouache of stains in the plaster ceiling, and in the block-letter cracks of the tiles. But the problem was that she couldn’t read it… she could only, looking directly at the sentence as her mind projected it all over the bathroom, hear it as the Spic himself had spit it out. His damning flattery. It had triggered in her again that old foe.
Coppery Cugat was there in the bathroom in his camel hair coat, grinning like the Devil, hissing that Virginia Gussman belonged in Brazil or Argentina or Cuba, perhaps…but not in this dingy Negro neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. He was saying that when the Latins creeped over that border between non white and white, as they were soon to do, Virginia should come with them. Thank the Lord, thought Virginia, opening her eyes suddenly at the vivid fantasy that Cugat really was standing beside the bathtub, that Selmar Gussman has no idea that his bride is a mental case…
Snow was plinking on the little window over the bathtub. The light bulb hanging on a chain over the tub flickered as the refrigerator snored to semi-wakefulness in the dark kitchen downstairs, directly under the bath. Virginia loved this house. They’d bought it outright, for cash, no mortgage, for the handsome sum of five thousand seven hundred and nine dollars, more than half of which had come from the proceeds of Selmar’s opium den. The house was identical to the house of her childhood, the one Moose now lived in, designed by the same architect and built by the same construction company, same year, 1902, the year that Jelly Roll Morton invented jazz.
A big kitchen and a cozy parlor downstairs; three modest bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs; a back yard, a front yard and an enclosed porch to over-look each. Selmar had a contraption of canvas and rusty poles (originally intended for stringing wash between) in the back yard he could rig up so as to bar-b-cue in the rain while everyone ate off of napkins on the back porch, and Virginia’s most beautiful summer memories were of far off thunder and hickory grill smoke and lightning like fine roots in the sky and pebbles of rain on the porch windows. Cuddling with the chef on the davenport and feeding him ribs with her fingers and letting him lick off the sauce and the (good-natured) envy of every other woman on the porch; the guys in Selmar’s band telling off-color jokes or playing the spoons and singing with mouths full of hot cake or chicken…
The house was grand by colored standards, but there were things like the fact that most of the furniture in it didn’t match, and none of it had been new when they moved in, which niggled, which bothered her. The house was grand by colored standards, but not much compared to the mansion in nearby Beverly which was owned by the lawyer Robert Appel, for whom she did the part-time clerical work that kept food on the table between Selmar’s windfalls. Virginia shifted in the tub and sank her chin to the level of the suds; her knees rose and her goose-bumped breasts sat like hills on the water and she wondered how much of her body belonged to her husband, how much belonged to The Race, and how much was simply hers, beyond any legal claim or category.
Her pussy was the base from which Selmar confiscated, every day, more of the territory of her married body. The Colored race, meanwhile, was still attempting to take possession from the other end, starting with her mouth, where its vocabulary… words like saditty (pretentious) and tinkle (urine) and tinklebox (penis) and Fay (Caucasian) and dookie (feces)… were seeded with the first breaths she’d taken as a conscious child. But even as Selmar had won the war for her pussy, the colored race was still struggling for her face, her head, her mouth… as evidenced by that upsetting skirmish with Cugat. But am I really a Negro, is what Virginia couldn’t help wondering in the aftermath, whenever things like that happened. Even within her own family. Some were more Negro than others. How much less Negro did you have to be? How much less…
This is not Negro hair, she thought, with guilty defiance. These are not Negro lips…nostrils…
Maybe this… and she touched her water-thick pussy.
The first time Virginia had laid eyes on Selmar, she wasn’t thinking… certain things never occurred to her. She hadn’t been able to see that far in advance. Real True Love, being ruthless, had clouded her mind in executing a strategy for fulfilling its powerful needs. The craving for Selmar… the raunchy hunger for his weight on her, for his black flesh to crush her mouth on, had started immediately, with the insistent beat of a painless headache, when she looked up and saw him on stage at the Regal Theatre, leading his Diplomatics through a version of Thou Swell, shaking his thick head of hair like Cab Calloway and bopping his shoulders and teasing the microphone. Virginia’s brother Manfred had brought her to the show and when Virginia walked into the ballroom in her cocked hat and floor-length cloud-colored coat, on Manfred’s arm and looked up and saw the band leader, she squeezed Man’s arm so hard he howled, laughing, because he knew what she meant. Now that was a man. Black as black black vinyl, smooth-muscled under his stylish duds, you could feel his muscles sucking up gravity on stage and you could imagine that gravity pressing on you in turn. How it would shape you to the fit of his fucking and you could, as both Virginia and Man did, relish the thought and start dancing.
Man, being what they called “sweet,” was a great dancer, athletic but soft, guiding his sister around the floor with calligraphic flourishes, like he was signing the floor with his name, Manfred Wiley Douglas, the loose change in his pocket banging the swing-beat quarter notes like a tambourine and Selmar noticed. Selmar noticed from his lordly vantage on stage… that South-American looking girl with the well-built mulatto beau, cutting a rug, Daddy.
At first he thought Man was competition… who was it (his drummer? Willie Fortneaux?) came back with the welcome information that the crazy young high-yellow couple seen tearing up the dance floor at the end of the first set were a brother and sister team from Golders Park? Before knowing that, Selmar wouldn’t have made a move on her, not with a fella in the way (he was truly tickled to learn later about Man being queer), because that was how a Negro could get himself killed. He had a girl to think about. He had a child.
“This next song,” said sly Selmar, “is dedicated to you, honey…” pointing at Virginia. “Why don’t you come up here and keep me company while I try to sing it?” The crowd cheered and forced her up there. She was so flustered that she tripped on her way up the stage, but Selmar caught her, lucky enough to get one hand on a breast, under her coat, as she fell against him, and he kept an arm around her, tight, for the duration of the song. At the end of which he pulled off her hat and kissed her full on the mouth in front of everyone. To the bold go the spoils. A white singer, with a white girl; a black singer, with a white girl; any kind of singer, with a white girl, on stage like that, in that year? Never would have gotten away with such a maneuver.
The tub water was cooling and Virginia’s fingers were prune-wrinkling so it was time to climb out and towel off and get dressed and shell some peas for Selmar’s late dinner. And after dinner she would give him, as usual, whatever he wanted, every trick she’d learned or imagined, making him the happiest husband in Golders Park and in this way continue absolving herself. Guilt is a good motivator.
“Why didn’t you and Selmar ever have kids, Gussie?” Someone might have asked. They had been, after all, married for more than six years before he died. “Why didn’t you have children?” No one had had the nerve to ask her that question in forty years. But she barely dared answer it for herself… what could she have said… how could she have put it to others?
By their second year of marriage, Selmar had stopped asking Virginia about starting a family, pretending that he believed that she avoided the topic because she was afraid that a pregnancy would ruin her looks; her vaunted 15 inch waist, for example; her hard-as-green-apples tits. He’d known women to loose teeth in a pregnancy, he admitted… women who’d gone from eighteen to thirty five in nine months. He was good about understanding, which meant he was good about ignoring the truth. Successful marriages are built on this faculty. Virginia was sorry to have to test this faculty in her husband so cruelly.
There was a book, when Virginia was a little girl… it was the only thing, beside scarred furniture, she inherited from her mother when the old girl died. A book in the house she grew up in, the house on 115th Street, the house identical to the house she shared with her husband: a book. An old book from before the days when books had paper dust jackets. It had a beautiful cloth cover, embroidered with flowers grown livid and threadbare in time but as lovely to look at as they were a pleasure to touch, Easter pinks and greens and blues. She’d reach up and run her hand over the cover where the book was kept on a reading table taller than she was. This was especially delicious because it was taboo: Virginia’s mother had admonished her not to.
“You’re wearing the flowers down, child! Are your hands clean?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“There is no such thing as clean in this world, Dear Heart.”
When she was finally old enough to read Virginia opened the heavy tome in her crushed lap and spent the longest time gazing upon the interwoven vines and fronds of the fairytale script of the title page: “For Every Flower in His Garden, An Illustrated Guide to the Types and Talents of the Colored Diaspora, written and illustrated by Soeur Worth Fontaine.”
Under an engraving of the fine-featured Miss Fontaine herself, the editor (Roger Havram) had this to say:
—Born to the haut monde of colored Louisiana Society, Soeur Worth Fontaine is no less sui generis than this her magnum opus, the welcome result of several years of painstaking toil one can only compare in temperament and symmetry to the prodigies of master engravers of such lofty rank as Hogarth or Blake, though this tome be as much a work of Scientific Inquiry as it is of Poetry or of Art. Manifestly, we see that it is Hogarth’s fascinating study of Physiognomics, the correlation between aesthetic gradation and intrinsic character in the faces of mankind, which Miss Fontaine, of noble Creole origins herself, draws upon in limning the variety, comedy, turns and tempers of her own beloved Negro race. From the lowliest Hottentot of the fathomless African jungle, to the fairest Octoroon taking tea in a Baltimorean drawing room, the canny Miss Fontaine admonishes the reader to remember the too-easily forgotten Truth that each is of the design and purpose of Our Lord The Creator Himself, for reasons of His own, no less a delight to His eye than any other flower in His garden—
Each chapter was headed by an illustration of the type of Negro to be illuminated by the chapter (full of faux-ethnological improvisations), a full color engraving, for example, of a bare-breasted “Hottentot” in a grass skirt, balancing a basket of plantains atop the smallish head at the end of her longish neck, a simple-mindedly brilliant smile stretching her big red lips while lion cubs gambol in the background. “Quadroon of Savannah,” conversely, showed an olive-skinned Gibson girl seated primly at the console of a spinet.
Virginia would linger the longest on the face plate for the chapter headed “Black Mestizo of The Pampas,” showing a straight-haired, black-skinned Ulysses in an open-to-the-navel white shirt, drawstring britches tucked into stylish boots, striking a dynamic pose, front leg bent, peering across the Atlantic (4-masted schooner on the horizon ) with his sextant. The Mestizo, though shiny black, displayed the profile of a Matinee Idol and the young Virginia would stroke the page and bite her lower lip and daydream above the limits of her experience.
The horror of the book was on a page in the middle; little Virginia skipped it when she could. Meant as comedy, the tableaux struck nauseated terror in her. “Wage Day” showed a goofy bug-eyed Coon and his yellow mate, got up in a parody of 19th century finery, her bustled ass enormous, a stove pipe hat crushed down on his proto-afro, he clutching a bottle labeled de debil’s gin, she clutching a bottle labeled last ditch hair straightener, both a foot off the ground, dancing. Behind them, a toothless old Uncle Tom on a stool, twanging a Jew’s Harp, while a nearby rag-headed fat black buxom mammy shucks corn and scattered around the cabin floor, crawling among debris, were their awful offspring… pellucid and glistening as bakelite appliances… bawling or giggling or simply open-mouthed dumb… seven of them, one barely a year older than the next… quasi-human like anthropomorphized bear cubs.
What if Selmar fucked Virginia one morning and she wasn’t careful and she got pregnant and the baby she pushed out nine months later looked like that? A golliwog, a Bud Billiken, a Little Black Sambo, Devil’s-food black and red-lipped and pop-eyed, with nappy kinks all over its peanut-shaped skull? A bone through its nose, like the cannibals in those Bugs Bunny cartoons? Setting the family back two hundred years, right back to the mud-walled huts of Africa? These kinds of thoughts made Virginia sick, sick of herself, sick, almost, of life… but still she thought them. Moose had set into her one night about it and Gussie had had something to say about that, but still she knew Moose was right. Nothing makes you more of a coon, had shouted Moose, than hating coons, Virginia!
Goddamn you you ugly old thing, had screeched Virginia in return, stamping her feet, hugging Moose in tears before she could even finish the sentence. In all the family, Virginia suspected that it was only her mother herself who might sympathize with her position on it. Perhaps it was a rare trait, a disease, and Virginia was the daughter it had been handed down to. Or maybe it was a truth so raw that it consumed her as an inner flame: that there is no right or wrong but only how you truly feel about something and Virginia was a martyr to it.
She climbed out of the tub and wrapped up in a towel, avoiding her own eyes in the mirror over the bathroom sink. Years later, after her husband’s murder, when it was no longer possible to get pregnant by him, regret about this attitude, regret about her ugly ridiculous fear of having a too-black baby, would haunt her; dog her to crying spells and burn her soul ashy white.
But tonight she was bathing then drying herself. Singing, tunelessly, Thou Swell while Selmar was over on Carpenter Avenue, hurrying along, when headlights cornered the intersection behind him, sweeping the snow. The driver, in a canary-yellow suit, leaned out the window yelling through a blue cloud of exhaust, “Sheik, Sheik! Hey, man!”
It was Lynton Davis, one of the fellas that Selmar had run his Jook Joint with back when so Selmar he waved and Davis revved the engine. “Get in the car, Sheik! Man, you won’t believe it! Get in!”
Selmar couldn’t very well admit what he was up to but he said “I’d love to, Lynton, but I got some business…” and he gestured up the dark street. He crossed over to the car and touched the fender. It was an old car but Lynton kept it well and Salter said “Maybe some other time, though… we got plenty to…”
“No, Selmar,” Lynton shook his head, “it’s happening now, Daddy! They got a hold a Topper! They got him over at Doby’s! Get in!”
He shoved open the passenger-side door and put the car in gear. Selmar wasn’t sure what compelled him to jump in, but he did, knowing already that it was a mistake. Lynton had his foot on the gas before Selmar was even completely in the car, and his right hand was shaking as he worked the clutch. Hard to tell if he was hopped up or just scared; the car was roaring and screeching like it was scared. Selmar braced two hands on the dashboard thinking: Serves me right if this nigger crashes the car with me in it… if I get out of this in one piece, I’ll never cheat on Cake again…
Doby’s was a record store at 111th and Pryor, in a one-storey white-washed clapboard building with bars over its windows and a hand-painted sign on the front porch that said Doby’s. It was a crucial outlet for two dozen independent record labels of the upper Midwest, specializing in 45 rpm records of “race music,” and if you couldn’t get it there, you couldn’t, to transpose the tense of Doby’s catch phrase. Doby’s other slogan: “If we ain’t got it, you don’t want it.” Business hours: when Doby felt like it. Doby also did a brisk business selling pickles and beer in the summer. He had a wife he called Miss Doby.
By the time Lynton and Selmar had parked in the next block over and run towards the crowd which was gathered in a circle in the snow on Doby’s sloping front yard, it felt like it was already over, whatever it was, because the crowd was ominously quiet, except for one voice. One theatrical voice. The scene was lit only by Doby’s porch light and the moon… the crowd was so quiet that all you could hear was someone being sick, retching in the snow. Something told Selmar to stay away… to go back…but Lynton’s car had been Fate itself, delivering him to that moment.
Topper was a fair-haired medium-built white boy who played good piano, a Polack from the Northside who couldn’t keep away from Negroes and liked to sit in with groups at the Starlit Lounge and the Blue Light Social Club (turning his nose up at tonier places like the Dreamland Café, or the Royal Gardens), run-down joints serving pig’s feet and “coon gin” and mud-thick music all nights of the week, even Christmas. Most importantly, Topper, as everyone knew, had a 13 year old colored mistress.
Selmar had gigged with Topper a couple of times, and considered him a passable if self-conscious imitator in the vein of Fats Waller or Jimmy Johnson, a style the old-timers disdained as too commercial. About Topper’s relationship with the little girl Selmar had no particular opinion…the two were just another circus attraction of Golders Park’s low-down good time nightlife… no more shocking than Opal Tears the Beige Queer… they were local color… if you didn’t extend your imaginative empathy to the point of actually picturing them writhing as one on a hotel bed, they looked quite cute together, almost.
Topper, at 26, was exactly twice her age, but they both seemed to be playing grown-up when they dressed and did the town. No one had ever heard her speak a word or seen her smile; she affected the pitch-perfect hauteur of an Emperor’s daughter, though there wasn’t even a toilet in the shack she was raised in. Topper opened doors and pulled out chairs and lit cigarettes for her. When he ordered drinks he’d say, “And the lady would care for a root beer.”
He had her in heels and evening gowns and she was a scale-model wife on his arm as he tipped the bouncers on their way into the clubs, these low low joints that the Mick cops (who’d written off Topper as a nigger-lover anyway) wouldn’t set foot in, simply because there was no money in it. She’d be with him at his “reserved” table, demure in her marcelled hair and painted lips and (faux) pearl necklace, titless as a boy but pretty, her hand in Topper’s lap while Topper slugged back his bathtub liquor. The attitude was that if Olivia’s legal guardian (an Aunt) wasn’t bothered, and Olivia herself didn’t mind, and Topper was careful…whose business was it? Girl wasn’t even old enough to have any jealous suitors, so, for very nearly a year (they first met when she was 12), Topper got away with it.
The trouble commenced when she started showing. As elbow-straw skinny as ever, she wittily developed a bowling ball for a belly by Thanksgiving… she seemed to go from flat-as-a-plank to ten months pregnant in about a week: the same week that Topper decided to disappear. This is when the Golders Park Patrol took an active interest in the situation.
Like many colored neighborhoods of that era, far beneath the notice of the city’s constabulary (until such time as non-colored interests were somehow piqued or threatened), Golders Park spontaneously created its own, a posse run by a pecan-brown bald-headed guy named Chessa Dagget. The Golders Park Patrol. You did not want to run afoul of them, and the real police had nothing to say on the matter, especially as regarded the darkest corners of the parish. Let Dagget deal with his own kind, with his lawless primitive jigaboo coons… seemed to be the attitude at the relevant precinct. Saves us manpower.
Dagget was big, and unemotionally mean, like a red-hot potbellied stove. He’d spent his working life on the docks along the Chicago River, unloading boats and breaking down flatbeds and busting up jawbones in afternoon lunch break bar fights; he had a permanently hemorrhaged right eye full of black blood from taking a lead pipe in a gambling dispute; Dagget liked to joke that the guy who had done it was in no position to gloat. A bad back had forced Dagget off the docks at an early age, but he eased into a new vocation, accepting “incentives” from local merchants exasperated with petty theft and vandalism and who expected Dagget to deal with it. Even a Baptist church or two had Dagget and his boys on the payroll.
In a few years, Dagget’s mandate grew from simple security to the ethical maintenance of the poorest patch of the neighborhood, dispensing justice and settling disputes. A seventeen year old had his front teeth bricked out for stealing britches off a wash line. A Bible salesman got himself hamstringed for peeping in windows a few nights. Dagget had deputized about a dozen of the least-employable roughnecks in the neighborhood, and they had a uniform, of sorts: a tell-tale red kerchief, knotted around the neck. This posse lingered around Golders Park well into the ‘fifties, when the white cops started referring to them as Mau Maus and decided to put a stop to it.
Selmar spotted several of these red kerchiefs in the crowd as he pushed forward towards the center. Before he saw it he smelled it…the stench and pressure of a life’s extruded heat in the chill air, a Dead Sea reek from the body’s interior. He pushed through and saw everyone arranged around a big black valentine of blood, five feet across, darkening as it froze to the snow… and in the center of the valentine was Topper, shoeless, in a spattered white shirt and tuxedo trousers, making his mess in the black slush, trying to get his footing, up and down and up again, struggling for balance. Topper would stumble too close to the crowd and the crowd would back away, running a few steps like children in a game of “it”, and when he fell back, the circle would close again. The women in the crowd had their hands over their mouths… the men were harder to read. The faces were all silver-eyed and shiny black and timeless I mean they already looked like historical photographs of crowds at awful spectacles such as a beheading in China.
Selmar had heard that the word was out and that they were looking for Topper. And he’d heard that Topper had been spotted further south. The boy should have left the State; eighty miles would have made all the difference. Now he was here, doing his drunken jig, trailing vomit, gushing blood. Selmar couldn’t, somehow, fit the whole small scene in his mind at once… he saw Topper staggering…. he saw Topper’s shirt-sleeved right arm at an unreasonable distance, half-sunken in the snow… but he couldn’t, at first, put it all together. He couldn’t picture Topper together again.
“Where’s Dagget?” Selmar said, out loud to himself, but then he looked and saw Chessa Dagget up there on Doby’s porch, coming around from the back, hefting an axe from high on its handle, right under the blade, like a woodsman. Dagget looked so stern up there, in his short sleeves and his shirt open in the dead of winter, not even deigning to gaze upon his handiwork but at the crowd gathered around it instead, and he was showing a look of near-disgust as though it was upon them that he had acted, as though it was them he had mutilated.
Selmar wanted to shout something, but he wasn’t a fool; he wanted to do something, but he didn’t want trouble. He’d been on his way to a nice two hours with his mistress when all this loomed up. What was to keep him from just walking away, back on over to Bethany’s? He barely even knew Topper… who was coughing and babbling, kneeling in slush, his one hand covering his eyes… but if the man had been a dog, Selmar would have prayed for someone to shoot him.
“If this boy don’t get to a hospital soon the life gonna bleed right out of him,” a voice called out, and Dagget shouted, with his booming response, “Why don’t you use your car, then, nigger?”
“Fuck you, nigger, who the hell are you, nigger?” was shouted back, and Dagget just laughed. “Me? I’m the nigger with the axe!”
“Who made you judge and jury and executioner, Dagget?”
“Who made the white man?” answered Dagget.
“That’s right,” an old-timer shouted. “Least the boy alive! Would a Dredd Scott be so lucky?”
“Nigger be on fire by now! Nigger be waltzin’ with flames!”
“On the end of a rope!”
“They woulda lit him up…”
“For just looking at Miss Anne!”
“…for failing to cross the damn street…”
“I seen a nigger go headless!”
“…and then piss on the goddamn ashes…”
“I seen it myself!”
“I say ta Hell with ‘em!”
“…ain’t nobody here ain’t feared it once!”
A woman, crying, shrieked, “But it’s not right!”
And Dagget said “Go home, sister! You just go home and pray for us, y’hear? Go on…”
Selmar found Lynton in the crowd and asked him if he had a blanket in the car and Lynton said Yeah, a dirty old blanket I keep in the trunk for traction when I get stuck in the snow. Selmar said run back to the car and lay that blanket over the back seat and pull up in front here, Lynton, and keep the motor running. Hurry. You got to.
Then he said “Wait!” and when Lynton stopped Selmar tossed him his cashmere coat. Then Selmar pushed back through the crowd and stepped into the circle of blood, slipping his belt off.
“Topper,” he said. “Can you hear me, man?”
Topper was staring up, stinking of blood and alcohol, an old man grinning. His teeth had been bashed out, too. Selmar knelt beside Topper and used his belt to tie off the stump. Topper was staring sidelong at Selmar with such wide eyes that it was frightening, as though another Topper, a complete one, was hiding inside the bloody wreck, afraid to come out, unable to stay in, looking to Selmar for guidance.
“See here, you straight-haired nigger,” said Dagget, who was suddenly off the porch, down there in the action again, standing so close that his crotch was in Selmar’s face where Selmar squatted. He grabbed a handful of Selmar’s hair. “You’re interfering with justice.”
Selmar batted Dagget’s hand away. “Chessa, man,” he said, trying to control his voice, though he was breathless, “what this white boy ever done to you?” And then, to Topper, “Come on and stand up, man. Come on now. You can’t stay.”
“This here white devil,” orated Dagget, “violated a daughter of our community! And he laughed in our faces while doing it!”
Selmar stood and pulled Topper to his feet, locking a shoulder under Topper’s arm to brace him, and it was like lifting a corpse. Topper was shutting down.
“Who am I gonna love? My sister in her hour of need, or this blue-eyed demon in rut? When he violates a child of my sweet Negro Race …”
Selmar exploded “Why don’t you let the child decide if she been violated, man?!! What the fuck is wrong with you?!!”
He pushed at Dagget; it was like shoving a truck. Dagget enjoyed that. He relished it. He said, simply, “You are late, loud and wrong! The child has decided! Behold, nigger!”
And sure enough, with a showman’s flourish Dagget materialized her, who was stepping forward for Selmar to see, five foot two and fourteen years old with a stomach out to there, draped in Dagget’s coat, skinny legs ending in too-big shoes, but with a grown woman’s face somehow, dark and cat-eyed and eerily pretty. The dim light and the crowd and the blood of the drama transformed her into a parable from the Old Testament, and Selmar felt himself sick to see the faintest smile of satisfaction curl her unpainted lips before she sniffed and turned to go, illuminated suddenly in profile by Lynton’s headlights.
Selmar got Topper on the back seat and hopped in the front and they took off up Pryor Avenue, swerving around some crazy nigger who was shouting from an open Bible in the middle of the street with his yellow teeth in the headlights. Lynton gripped the steering wheel like it was sizzling with wall current and Selmar was trying to organize his mind in order to think just what they might possibly do with the white boy bleeding to death on the back seat.
“What’re we gonna do, Selmar? We take him to the hospital and he dies, we gettin’ the death penalty, no two ways around it. Ain’t nobody gonna confess on Chessa Dagget… you and me’ll take the fall… I got a wife, man… I got responsibilities…”
“I’m way ahead of you, Lynton. Hell no. We ain’t as stupid as all that.”
“Well, we ain’t as smart as all that, either…”
“You know Doc Romeo?”
“That nigger dentist up in Beverly that do abortions?”
“I figure that’s where we’re going. Nigger owes the world a life or two, wouldn’t you say?”
Lynton laughed. “That’s one way of looking at it.”
Topper died from blood loss anyway. And the Golders Park Patrol caught up with Selmar and Lynton later.
The Funeral Director (the whitest looking colored man Virginia had ever seen, with silver wavy hair and hazel eyes and just a hint of soul in his lips and jut in his lower palate) took her by the elbow and eased her away from Selmar’s casket and spoke softly under the organ music to the effect that she wouldn’t want to remember her husband the way he looked in that box. They did their best to fix him up but there was only so much you could do in cases like this. After all, he added, they never did recover your husband’s… and he could come up with nothing better than an embarrassed gesture to finish that sentence.
She nearly fainted. Because it was only then that it dawned on her how wrong, how crazy and wrong, it had been of her not to take the blood-soaked package to the police. Or if not to the police, then to the undertaker. It had come in the mail two days after Selmar’s body was discovered folded up in the trunk of his own car in an alley near Mud Lane and the only reason she hadn’t notified authorities immediately was her canny intuition that they wouldn’t have let her keep it.
THE IMPERIALIST 