Atlantis: Three Tales (6 page)

The woman in red finished at the window. So Sam said:

“You go on ahead there. I'm not in that big a rush.” He hefted the three shopping bags, two in his
right hand, so that the handle cords moved half an inch across his stinging palms.

“That's awful nice of you. They do get restless sometimes, when they have to stand still so long. I appreciate it a lot.” She turned and announced to the shuffling gaggle: “Now you all stay with this nice colored gentleman right here. I'm going to the window there to get you your penny postcards.” She smiled at Sam in turning and stepped toward the bars.

The girls moved up around him. One, though in another torn coat and with the same kind of rag over her hair—and her expression just as vacant—, was actually pretty, as she looked off to the side. Her face was the darkest. The bones in it were fine. Her figure, beneath her poor coat, seemed fit. For a moment Sam imagined her some displaced tribal princess, stepped from an ancient African sect to be dazzled by the modern day—till she turned: the far part of her face was a scarred cascade from a burn.

There was not even an eye in it.

Tides of black and brown made a torrent down her skull. So as not to stare, Sam dropped his eyes—and saw, beneath her torn hem, her ankles and the legs above them were as badly burned as her face. She wore only some sort of slippers, which her heels had slid over the edge of, onto the mat slewed with snot-colored slush. Sam turned a little, lifted his eyes again—and caught a whiff of unwashed sourness. Could that be one of them?

Really, he thought, the things that could be wreaked on the body!

Sam's bags were weighty with Hubert's and Elsie's and Corey's—and his own—gifts. But the floor was too wet to set them down.

Just then the Ablir girl ran forward to the window beside theirs, shouldering aside the generous-breasted, humus-skinned woman who had just handed in a package as the bars had been, for a moment, unlocked and swung aside.

The bars clicked closed; the woman said, “Hey, you—!”

With all her brachydactylic fingers, Ella pointed through.

Inside, the white clerk brought forward a toy horse, that Ella must have seen. He stuck one plush hoof through the bars and waved it at her. Ella took a breath, grabbed it, and tried to tug it out—but, still smiling, the clerk pulled it from her grip and raised it higher between the bars, beyond her reach, to wave the leg once more.

Silent, determined, Ella jumped, missed, jumped again. She didn't jump very high; and the little lift she managed suggested her physical coordination was deeply impaired.

The woman who'd just handed her package through looked down now, frowned, then began to smile.

From behind the bars, the clerk said with a notable brogue: “All right, little girl. Now you have to let the other people mail their letters.”

Biting her broad underlip, Ella Ablir backed from the cage, gazing within.

A bunch of penny postcards in one hand, not yet put into her pocket book, the woman in the green coat stepped away from the next window over to receive the child's shoulders with guiding gloves. At the contact, the woman's worried look relaxed. “All right,” she said. “Let's all behave. Come on, now—let's go. I got your penny postcards for you. We're going to take them back home and draw pictures of what we want for Christmas and send them to Santa Claus at the North Pole. That's what we're going to do now.” As she stepped by Sam, she smiled her gratitude for his brief vigil—and explained: “They won't never get nothing. And they can't write. But they like to draw the pictures and send them to Santa.” She turned to the girls. “Now all of us. Let's go!”

Their cardboard tags at their several levels on threadbare cloth (the tall one's coat was ludicrously too small), they shuffled before the woman, like wounded angels or emissaries from another world, up between the lines of Christmas mailers loaded with letters and packages to be sent by sea and rail and air to where and wherever.

Postage on all Sam's three shopping-bags full came to two dollars and seventeen cents.

Turning from the window, the bags at his side empty and all in one
hand now, flapping like wind-abandoned sails, Sam saw the big clock on the wall above the door. It was circled in eight concentric rings of metal, each one set back from the next (for the eight planets, perhaps?), the face a ninth and central wafer, whiter than ice, arrow-tipped hands upthrust, long one right and short one left, telling him it was five past eleven.

That noon was the first time Sam tried to find the underground magic shop at Forty-second Street. For most of his exploration, he kept making the same turns and going along the same underground alleys, even as he tried to get somewhere new, finally to give up: he didn't want to be late for dinner at Corey and Elsie's. When he was unsure of what train he was actually supposed to take to get back to Harlem, he asked an elderly Negro in a suit with baggy knees and the jacket and vest grayed with powdered plaster, who was carrying a chest of tools on the platform—and came home.

New Year's Day was practically balmy. For a while Sam retained a memory of strolling down Lenox Avenue, just a sweater under his suit jacket. Hands in his pants pockets, he whistled jets of music and condensed breath, ambling by the pine trees discarded that morning at the curb over soiled snow clutching the sidewalk's rim. Wooden stands were still nailed to the trunks: crossed planks, a board square, or some more complicated contrivance with braces. The needle-bare branches transformed the trees into long-slain carcasses.

The next day the temperature dropped to a previously unknown and, till then unbelievable, paralytic cold. What had been snow and slush became a rind of ice over the city. That night, ears stinging and face a mask of pain from the wind, Sam hurried toward Mount Morris past a mound of trees, delicately afire in the corner lot, one still with ornaments on its charring branches, black before crackling flame.

Late in February's icy circuit, when Sam answered the door, Clarice came in, waving a newspaper, cheeks blotched red with cold. “You've got to see this. This is too much. This is, I tell you, the living end!”

Hubert got up from the wing chair. “What is it?”

“What
is
it?” The room was chill; and though Clarice's coat was open, she didn't shrug it off. “Here—now did you believe you were ever going to live to see something like this in a paper—even a New York City paper?”

The picture took up a quarter of the second page.

White actress Mary Blair knelt on the ground beside a seated, twenty-six year old Negro actor, Paul Robeson, kissing his hand! The play was Eugene O'Neill's
All God's Chillun Got Wings
, scheduled to open at the Provincetown Players in Greenwich Village sometime that spring. Robeson played a young, Negro law student—

“See. He was a lawyer, Hubert—like you.”

“He
plays
a lawyer,” Hubert corrected. “In the play.”

Sam read over Clarice's shoulder.

“No, he really
was
a lawyer,” Clarice said. “Before. But he gave it up for the theater!”

“He wasn't a lawyer; he was a football player!” Sam said. “See.” Football was Sam's own sport—he had played center in high school, till Papa—when John's brother broke his leg in the game, the sharp bone coming through his brown, bloody shin—decided it was too rough and had forbidden him: everyone at home had encouraged him to go out for basketball, for which Sam had no particular love. “It says he was All-American Halfback in 1917 and 1918.”

“First he was a football player—when he was at Rutgers,” Clarice explained. “
Then
he was a lawyer. Then he became an actor.”

“Well,” Hubert said, “I can't imagine his being a very good lawyer, then. Where'd he go to law school?”

“Columbia.”

“People are going to try and stop that play from going on,” Hubert said. “You just watch.”

“There's a statement in here by the actress,” Clarice said. “She thinks it's an
honor
to be in the play.”

The picture was . . . well, uncomfortable making. But maybe that was because you just didn't
see
pictures like that.

“Is that man dreamy—or is he dreamy?” Clarice asked. “Oh, Hubert—!” she added. Because Hubert was frowning. “I'm
teasing
you!.”

Still, in March Clarice dragged them off to see Robeson in Nan Stevens'
Roseanne
, over at the Lafayette Theater. “We've
got
to go!” she insisted. “It's only playing for a
week!
” On Saturday afternoon they met before the yellow, horizontally striated walls with the other Negroes at a Hundred-thirty-second Street and Seventh Avenue. In their gloves, scarves, hats, a lot of people must have read the articles that had been appearing. There'd been a slew of them since the first one—and the picture had been reprinted by now in half a dozen papers. Clarice said: “This is surely a lot more people than usually come to this sort of thing.” She took a hand from her fox muff to rub one knuckle on her nose.

The tickets were thirty-five cents. The matinee was supposed to start at two-thirty, but it was almost quarter to three before they let people in. And a tall, West Indian looking—and sounding—man called out something, very loudly, about “a C.P.T. matinee,” which made some people laugh.

“Oh, that's
terrible!”
Clarice whispered. “Come on, let's go inside. I'm freezing!”

Before the curtain went up, a stolid, brownskinned man, Mr. Gilpin, head of the Lafayette Players, came out and made a speech saying the Lafayette was the only Negro dramatic company in the country; and if the audience liked what they were doing for the colored community, they could make extra donations in the lobby. Clarice leaned toward Hubert. Sam heard her whisper: “You read that article in
The Messenger
I showed you . . . ? Where Lewis got on them so for only doing white plays with black actors . . . ?” In the light from the stage, Hubert nodded.

Then Gilpin went back in through the curtain. A moment later red drapery pulled aside from the stage.

Robeson played a Negro preacher—it was hard to see him, at least at the beginning, and not think of Papa—whose actions became more and more sinful. And he was certainly wonderful. When he got excited, his voice filled the theater. He seemed half again as big as most of the other
actors, and he moved around, towering, handsome, like some half-wild, wondrous animal barely caged by the set. Canvas walls and mâché trees shook as he strode by. Indeed, the glee, the wild joy with which he embraced his sins—drinking, crap shooting, shirking his Sunday sermons, and finally falling into the arms of a no-account Negro woman and getting her with child—made those weaknesses seem almost like some socially rebellious strength. Finally, though, his congregation turned on him. He was only saved in the end by a brave black woman—Roseanne—who'd been in love with him all along and who made an impassioned speech to the black people, who'd gathered to lynch him, about his humanity and his weaknesses and how
his
weaknesses were really
their
weaknesses. (Robeson spent a lot of time on his knees in the play, though not the actress.) But in comparison to Robeson's performance, the long-suffering Roseanne's words to the angry townsfolk seemed preachier than any of Papa's sermons.

Clapping wildly, Sam stood up with everybody else when Robeson came to the front of the stage to bow.

But as they were walking down to a Hundred-sixteenth Street, Hubert said, “Another weak-willed nigger and another strong-headed woman. And niggers lynching
niggers?
Where, I wonder, did they get that one from? Now you
know
the woman who wrote that play had to be white!”

Clarice was thoughtful—walking with rapid, thoughtful steps, once in a while coughing into her muff. Possibly it had made her uncomfortable too.

A blizzard rose in the last days of March; and, with only an hour out here and an hour out there, the chill effluvia still fell on April Fool's Day. each Friday at Mr. Harris's he went to the bank at lunchtime thirty-five or forty dollars in pennies nickels dimes quarters and fifty-cent pieces in two thick canvas sacks metal fastenings at the top through the brass bars he exchanged them for an envelope of paper money out of which back at the store Mr. Harris carefully counted Sam's nine dollars for the week the sales girl gum-chewing Missely's twelve and put the
envelope with the rest in his inner suit coat pocket the only profit it looked like Mr. Harris allowed himself from the business Missely was Milly Pott's weight and Milly Pott's color but with not half Milly's sense of humor two Fridays on Mr. Harris came in and unwrapped his scarf “Feels like snow again don't it” and after hanging up the length of maroon wool on the coat rack's brass hook said “Before you go downstairs Sam run over two buildings and hunt up Poonkin he'll probably be in the cellar see if he got those boards he told me about and if he do you bring as many back here as you can carry I want to put me up some shelving downstairs in the back all right” and Sam said “A Mr. Poonkin” and Mr. Harris said “I don't think there's any ‘mister' in with it just Poonkin” and he grinned gold tooth bright between the white ones in a face as deep a brown as Papa's “Poonkin was in the Civil War you know ask him to tell you about it sometime but not on my time now get going” and in only his shirtsleeves Sam went out in the gelid noon through steely cold he hurried two buildings up the wooden planks of the cellar doors gaped between snow banks he ducked down they rose like green board wings beside him as he dropped one foot then the other to a lower step in deepening shadow “Mr. Poonkin . . .” because he was a well-bred boy and his father said you call a man mister now you hear me white or colored but especially a colored man a lot of people won't call a colored man mister it shows you have breeding Sam stepped further down the ceiling of the cellar was crossed by tarred eight-by-ten beams bowed now and gray pipes the joints shiny with new solder low enough so that there'd be no standing easily here