PASSING STRANGER

“New York City’s famous Hotsy Totsy Club presents the Count Carruthers Orchestra and the beautiful Hotsy Totsy Girls!”

In the wings, Memphis Campbell watched as the scantily clad chorines launched into a high-energy dance number. The club was on fire tonight. Gabe’s trumpet wailed, and the Count’s fingers tore up all eighty-eight keys on the piano. Gabe played a bit from “America the Beautiful,” turning it briefly into a dirge and letting his trumpet slide into despair before picking up the beat again. The white folks in the audience didn’t get it, but smiles broke out on the faces of the black folks.

Gabe hit his last piercing note. The audience applauded as the chorines bowed and sashayed offstage laughing and talking. A curvaceous girl named Jo stroked Memphis’s cheek as she walked past. “Hey, Memphis.”

“Hey, yourself.”

Memphis’s pal Alma rolled her eyes as she adjusted the front of her costume. “You making money or making time tonight, Memphis?”

“Both, I hope.”

Jo giggled and tickled her fingers up his arm. Memphis employed the smile with Jo. “ ‘PASSING stranger!’ ” he said, putting his hand to his heart. “ ‘You do not know how longingly I look upon you/You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking (it comes to me as of a dream)/I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you…’ ”

“You write that, baby?” Jo purred.

Memphis shook his head. “That’s Walt Whitman. ‘To a Stranger.’ You ever read his poems?”

“She doesn’t read anything other than the gossip columns,” Alma said. Jo gave her a murderous glance.

“You’re missing out,” Memphis said, aiming his full-wattage smile at Jo.

“This boy lives at the library over on 135th Street. Wants to be the next Langston Hughes,” Alma informed everyone.

“That so?” Jo asked.

“I could read some poems to you sometime.”

“How ’bout Sunday?” Jo said. She licked her lips.

“Sundays always were my lucky days.”

Alma rolled her eyes again and pulled Jo back into line. “Come on, girls. We don’t have time for foolishness. We need to get changed for the moon number.”

“Bye, baby.” Jo blew Memphis a kiss and he pretended to catch it.

“Memphis!” the stage manager bellowed around the cigar clenched between his teeth. “I’m not paying you to play with the girls. Papa Charles wants you. Hop to.”

In the narrow hallway, Memphis passed Gabe and the Count, who were on their way out back.

“Hey, boss,” Gabe said, gripping Memphis’s hand. “We going to that rent party on Saturday? Plenty of flossy chicks and whiskey.”

“Whose whiskey? Don’t get some coffin varnish off someone you don’t know and put us both in the morgue.” It was a fact that disreputable bootleggers sometimes mixed the booze with kerosene or gasoline.

Gabe spread his hands wide and grinned. “Leave it to Gabe, brother.”

Memphis laughed. Other than Isaiah, Gabe had been the one constant in his life. They’d met in the fourth grade, when Gabe had gotten into trouble with the principal for selling cigarettes behind the school and Memphis had been assigned to be his buddy and set him straight. It set the tone of their friendship: Memphis was still there to get Gabe out of trouble, and Gabe was there to help Memphis get into it. The one thing Gabe was serious about was music. He was one of the hottest trumpet players in town. Word was definitely spreading about the skinny kid with the big sound. Even Duke Ellington had come to hear Gabe play. It was one of the reasons Papa Charles kept him on. Gabe was a prankster and a troublemaker, but once he started playing that horn, it was all worth it.

“Going out for a smoke. You want some mezz?” Gabe asked. His eyes were already a little red.

Memphis shook his head. “Gotta keep a clear head, Gabe.”

“Suit yourself, Grandma.”

“I usually do,” Memphis said. He swiped a hand across the overhead light, feeling the warmth of the bulb, and then passed through a tunnel into the building next door where all the offices were. Several secretaries sat at long tables, counting money from the morning’s numbers racket. Memphis tipped his cap to them and slipped into Papa Charles’s office. From his seat behind a mahogany desk, Papa Charles waved Memphis toward a waiting chair while he finished his telephone call.

Papa Charles was the undisputed king of Harlem. He controlled the numbers racket, the horse races and boxing matches. He ran the bootlegging and fixed things with the cops. If you needed a loan, you went to Papa Charles. When a church needed a new building, Papa Charles gave them the money. Schools, fraternal organizations, and even Harlem’s professional basketball team, the New York Renaissance, or Rens, were financed in part by Papa Charles, the Dapper Gentleman. And at several clubs and speakeasies, like the Hotsy Totsy, he showcased some of the best musicians and dancers in town.

“Well, as long as I’m running the numbers in Harlem, it’ll stay black,” Papa Charles said firmly into the telephone, “and you can tell Dutch Schultz and his associates that I say so.” He hung up forcefully and opened the lid on a silver box, selecting a cigar. He bit off the end and spat it into his wastebasket. Memphis lit the cigar’s tip, trying not to cough as the first puffs of smoke billowed out.

“Trouble?”

Papa Charles waved the thought and the smoke away. “White bootleggers want to run the Harlem rackets now. I don’t intend to let them. But they’re working hard at it. Heard the police raided one of Queenie’s joints last night.”

“I thought she paid off the police.”

“She does.” He let that land while he drew on the cigar, turning the air thick and spicy. “The white folks’ll lose interest in our games. They’ve got bootlegging to keep them busy. Still, might want to be extra careful out there. I’m telling all my runners. How’s your aunt Octavia doing?”

“Fine, sir.”

“And Isaiah? He getting along all right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good, good. And on the streets?”

“Smooth as Gabe’s licks.”

Papa Charles smiled. “Best way to learn the business is from the streets up. Someday, you can be working right here next to me.”

Memphis didn’t want to work for Papa Charles. He wanted to read his poetry at one of Miss A’Lelia Walker’s salons, alongside Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer—maybe even beside Mr. Hughes himself.

“You all right, son? Something the matter?”

Memphis found his smile. “You know me, sir. I don’t wear worry.”

Papa Charles smiled around his cigar. “That’s the Memphis I know.”

Good old Memphis. Reliable Memphis. Charming, easygoing Memphis. Look-after-your-brother Memphis. Memphis had been the star once. The miracle man. And it had ended in sorrow. He wouldn’t ever risk that again. These days, he kept his feelings confined to the pages of his notebook.

“It’s time to collect the gratuities from our grateful friends,” Papa Charles said—code for the protection money every business paid to the Dapper Gentleman if they wanted to stay in business and have his protection. The city ran on corruption as much as on electricity.

“Yes, sir.”

“Memphis, you sure you all right?”

Memphis offered up the smile again. “Never better, sir.”

On the way out of the club, Memphis nodded at Papa Charles’s chauffeur, who stood guard beside a brand-new Chrysler Imperial before blending into the crowds out for a good time on Lenox Avenue. He hit up the various nightclubs Papa Charles ran—the Yeah Man, the Tomb of the Fallen Angels, and the Whoopee—along with smaller speakeasies hidden in brownstone basements on tree-lined side streets. Memphis followed big men through back rooms gray with cigarette smoke where people sat at green felt tables playing cards, hustling pool, or rolling craps. The women would cup his chin, call him handsome, ask him to dance. He’d beg off, using the smile to smooth the rejection. Sometimes the club owners offered him a drink or let him listen in on the jazz or watch the revue girls dance. Other times, they made him wait upstairs in a dimly lit office, where Memphis was never sure if they’d be coming back with money or a Tommy gun. In the neat columns of the ledger, he wrote down the amount paid, dodging questions about whether Papa Charles knew if the fix was in for this fight or that game.

“I’m just a runner,” he’d say and use the smile.

On the streets, he kept an eye out for plainclothes cops. If he got arrested, Papa Charles would have him out in a few hours, but he still didn’t want to take the chance.

It was well after eleven when Memphis returned to the Hotsy Totsy. Gabe came running up to him. “Where you been, boss man?”

“Out on business. Why?”

“Come quick! It’s Jo. She fell and hurt herself.”

“Then call a doctor.”

“She’s asking for you, Memphis.”

Jo sat at the bottom of the stage stairs, crying, surrounded by concerned chorines. Through the crack in the curtain, Memphis could see the audience getting restless. It was time for the next number to start, and already Jo’s ankle was swelling up. “Caught my heel on the second step and turned it,” she burbled through her tears. “Oh, please, Lord, don’t let it be broken.”

“You’d better tell Francine she’s on,” one of the chorines said.

Jo shook her head. “I gotta go on tonight. I need the money!” She looked up at Memphis, her eyes hopeful. “I remembered about you. What you could do. Please, can you help me, Memphis?”

Memphis’s jaw tightened. “I can’t do that anymore.”

Jo sobbed and Gabe put a hand on Memphis’s arm. “Come on, brother. Just try….”

“I told you, I can’t!” Memphis shook off Gabe’s hand and stormed down the stairs as the stage manager cradled Jo in his arms and carried the miserable girl away. Onstage, the emcee announced the next number, the Black Bottom, and the other girls plus Francine scampered out wearing smiles and very little else. Memphis deposited the money he’d collected on his rounds with the secretaries. He pushed out into the night again, his mind troubled by memories of a time when he was someone else, a golden boy with healing hands: Miracle Memphis, the Harlem Healer.

The healing power had come on Memphis suddenly after an illness when he was fourteen. For days, he’d lain in a state of semiconsciousness, seeing the strangest sights as the fever burned through his body. His mother never left his side. When he recovered, they went straight to church to give thanks. On that Sunday morning at the old Mother AME Zion Church, Memphis healed for the first time. His seven-year-old brother, Isaiah, had fallen out of a tree and broken his arm. The bone stuck up under the skin at a terrible angle. Memphis was only trying to quiet his screaming brother when he put his hands on him. He never expected the intense warmth that built suddenly between Isaiah’s skin and his own hands. The trance came on him hard and fast. His eyes rolled back and he felt as if he had left his body and was trapped inside a waking dream. He saw things in that strange empty space he inhabited for those long seconds, things that he didn’t understand: faces in the mist, spectral shadows, and a funny man in a tall hat whose coat seemed to be made of the land itself. There was a bright light and a fluttering of wings, and when Memphis came to, shaking, a crowd had gathered around him in the churchyard. Isaiah had weaseled out from under his brother’s touch and was swinging his arm around in perfect circles. “You fixed it, Memphis. How’d you do that?”

“I-I don’t know.” Despite the New York summer heat soaking the collar on his Sunday best, Memphis shivered.

“It’s a miracle,” someone said. “Praise Jesus!”

Memphis saw his mother standing at the edge of the awestruck congregation, one hand pressed to her mouth, and was afraid she might slap him for what he’d done. Instead, she hugged him close. When she stepped back, there were tears in her eyes. “My son is a healer,” she whispered, cupping his face.

“You hear that? This boy’s a healer,” someone shouted. “Let us pray.”

They bowed their heads and reached out for him, and as Memphis felt their hands blessing his head and shoulders, his mother’s fingers clasped in his, his fear turned to exultation. I did that, he thought in wonder. How did I do that?

Only Aunt Octavia was skeptical. “Why would the good Lord give that gift to a boy?” she’d asked his mother later, in the house on 145th Street. They were in the front parlor sitting beside the radio and snapping beans for the next day’s supper. It had been too hot to sleep well, and Memphis had gotten up for a cup of water. When he heard them talking, he hid in the darkened hallway, listening. “Sometimes a gift is really a curse in disguise, Viola. A test from the Good Lord. Might be the Devil himself in that boy.”

“Hush up, Octavia,” his mother had said. She rarely stood up to her older sister, and Memphis felt proud of her even as Octavia’s words sowed doubt under his skin. “My boy is something special. You’ll see.”

“Well, I hope you’re right, Vi,” Octavia had said after a pause, and then there was nothing but the sharp snip, snip, snip of string beans being broken into halves and dropped into a bowl.

News of Memphis’s powers quickly spread through the Harlem churches. When Pastor Brown balked at using Memphis’s gift during services at Mother AME Zion—“We’re not that sort of religion, Viola”—Memphis’s mother had taken him to the various Pentecostal and Spiritualist storefront churches, over Octavia’s objections: “Low-class holy rollers—and some of ’em talk to the dead, Vi. Nothing good’s gonna come of this, mark me.”

There, on the fourth Sunday of every month, for eight months running, Memphis stood beside the pulpit looking out at faces both hopeful and skeptical. While the choir sang “Wade in the Water,” and people prayed and sometimes shouted out to God, congregants would come forward with their ailments and Memphis would lay hands on them, feeling the warmth build under his palms, seeing into that other place in his mind, the place of vague faces in the mist. Miracle Memphis. And then, when it had mattered most, the miracle had failed him. No, not just failed—turned on him.

From time to time, he’d catch Octavia eyeing him from the doorway, wearing an expression somewhere between contempt and fear. “Doesn’t take much for the Devil to get inside, Memphis John. You remember that.”

Memphis usually thought his aunt’s obsessive thoughts about the Devil were crazy. But what if she was right? What if there was something terribly wrong, a shadow side to him that was biding its time, waiting? The thought was like his dream—unsettling and unreadable.

The trouble with Jo back at the club had left Memphis rattled, and so, his business taken care of for the evening, he hopped the double-decker Fifth Avenue Coach Company bus going uptown and got off around 155th Street. He walked several blocks north, then west toward the river, where the houses thinned out, until he came to a small African graveyard on a bluff, the final resting spot of freed slaves and black soldiers. There, in the peace and quiet of possible ancestors, Memphis liked to sit and write. Memphis found the lantern he kept secreted inside the knothole of a sheltering oak. He struck a match from the book he’d pocketed at the Yeah Man club. The flame inside the lantern gave off a comforting glow. Memphis perched on the cool ground and opened his notebook. In its way, writing was like healing: a cure for the loneliness he felt. Sometimes the cure took; other times, it didn’t. But he kept trying. He bent his head over his notebook, writing by lantern light, chasing after words like trying to grab the tails of comets. All around him, Harlem was alive with writers, musicians, poets, and thinkers. They were changing the world. Memphis wanted to be part of that change.

He was startled from his concentration by the cawing of a crow perched on a headstone nearby. Memphis’s mother had told him that birds were heralds. Warnings. It was silly, of course—nothing more than some leftover African superstition. Birds were just birds. He was reminded for just a moment of the crows in his dream, but the thought was fleeting. The hour was late and Memphis’s eyes burned with exhaustion. There would be no more words tonight. He blew out the lantern, bundled everything into his knapsack, and headed down the empty street with its lonely gas lamp. The moon sat full and gold above the ruin of the old house on the hill, the former Knowles mansion, now dwarfed by the rows of apartment buildings in the distance. No one had lived there in all the time Memphis had been going to the graveyard. The house gave Memphis the creeps, and he usually walked down the center of the street, far from it.

Cold light washed over the boarded-up windows and refuse-strewn lawn. It pooled on the marble limbs of a broken angel statue and made the dead trees seem alive. Memphis glanced quickly at the house and stopped. From the corner of his eye, he thought he saw movement. Something about the house was different, though he couldn’t say what.

The bothersome crow flitted past, making Memphis jump, and he hurried on his way. Once back on the crowded streets of Harlem, Memphis shook his head and laughed softly at his skittishness. He took comfort in the neon signs, the wild strands of jazz creeping out of clubs whenever happy swells of people pushed through the doors in their finery. Blind Bill Johnson shuffled up the street, his cane testing the path ahead of him. Memphis didn’t feel like talking to the old man, so he dodged down a side street and raced on. It felt good to run in the warm September night. He had his notebook of poems, his books, and a pocket full of money. What was there to be worried about? It was time to stop worrying and get on with living. With his world slung on his back, Memphis walked the rest of the way back to Harlem. He passed the brownstones of Sugar Hill, peering from afar into the warm amber light of windows and lives he hoped would someday be his, and headed for home.

His brother, Isaiah, was asleep in the narrow bed by the window in the back room. Memphis took off his shoes, undressed, and slipped into his own bed as quietly as possible. Isaiah sat up and Memphis held his breath, hoping his brother would roll over and fall back to sleep. He hoped he hadn’t woken him.

Isaiah sat very still, staring into the dark. “I am the dragon. The beast of old,” he said.

Memphis raised himself onto his elbows. “Ice Man? You all right?”

Isaiah didn’t move. “I stand at the door and knock.”

A few seconds later, he fell back on the pillow, fast asleep. Memphis felt his brother’s forehead, but it was cool. Nightmare, he guessed. Memphis sure knew about those. He rolled onto his side and let his body go limp. His eyelids grew heavy and sleep overtook him.

In the dream, Memphis stood on a dusty road bordered by cornfields. Overhead, the clouds tangled into dark, angry clumps. In the distance sat a farmhouse, a red barn, and a gnarled tree stripped of leaves. A crow cawed from a mailbox on a wooden post. The crow flew to the fields and perched on the shoulder of a tall man in a funny hat. His skin was as gray as the sky, his eyes black and shining. The half moons of his nails were caked with dirt, and every finger wore a ring. “The time is now,” the man said, though Memphis did not see his lips move.

The dream shifted. Memphis stood in a long corridor. At the end was a metal door, and on the door was the symbol: the eye surrounded by the sun’s rays, a lightning bolt directly beneath it like a long zigzag of a tear. He heard the soft flutter of wings, and then he was lost in heavy fog, and his mother’s voice called to him: “Oh, my son, my son…”

Memphis was not aware of the tears damp on his own cheeks. He moaned softly in his sleep, rolled over, and was lost to a different dream, of pretty chorus girls waving fans of feathers who blew sweet kisses and promised him the world.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 724