It was torture, staring out into the rain on Main Street while Vernon Fish savored the effect of his words. He knew about me and Clarence Banks, and clearly suspected I hadn’t given Pop a full and accurate account of the circumstances behind my broken wrist. Now that he’d stuck the knife in me good, Vernon intended to enjoy twisting it.
After a while, though, the silence got to be too much even for him, and he set about unraveling the rest of his smug tale.
“See, I have this policeman friend, Carl,” he said. “Works in a… well, I guess you’d call it an unsavory part of town. And Carl, he tells me there’s establishments out there where Negroes and whites mix, drinkin’ and dancin’ and sinnin’ together in some kind of unholy mess. Turns my stomach to think of it.”
This was news to neither Pop nor me; everyone in town, even polite society ladies in their fancy hats and starched white dresses, knew about Tulsa’s speakeasies and roadhouses. They also knew better than to talk about them.
But Vernon jawed on, saying, “Yep, old Carl and me met up yesterday, and he told me about a little scene he come upon in one of these places the other night. Seems a white boy tangled with a big coon, name of Clarence somethin’ or other. Pissed old Clarence off so bad he broke that white boy’s leg… or was it his arm?”
Vernon stopped, letting the weight of his words settle in on me and Pop. And there was nothing to fill the silence except for the sound of the rain. Not until Pop cleared his throat and said how he thought we might have a leak in the storeroom ceiling, and did Vernon have a bucket he could lend us to catch the drips?
And Vernon, he just smirked and said, “Only bucket I got’s underneath a drip of my own. I ain’t through with my story, neither. See, it turns out old Clarence was such a coward that when he seen what he’d done to that poor white boy, he ran away with his tail between his legs. Only, the cops found out his name, and just last night they caught him sitting down to supper with his little old mammy.”
At that, my heart set to beating fast. Mostly, I’ll admit, because I feared further repercussions from Pop. But I like to think that some small part of me felt a twinge of guilt over the notion that Clarence Banks had suffered a beating on my account. And Vernon kept hammering away, saying, “Cops got ways of keeping the courthouse from getting too clogged up, see, and sometimes good citizens like me help ’em. We got solutions of our own for problems like old Clarence. Ones that don’t cost more’n a strop of leather and a length of sturdy rope.”
Pop wiped imaginary dust from the big, gilded cash register Mama had bought for him the year prior. Vernon blew three smoke rings, plup, plup, plup. Said, “Remind me to show you my whipping strap sometime, Half-breed. Three foot long it is. Four inches wide. Got slits carved into the end, make it cut through skin easier’n warm butter.”
I tried not to let my fear show, but Vernon saw. He saw, and from the way his close-set eyes danced about, he liked it. “You understand, don’t you, Will,” he said, “that righteous men take care of their own?”
I wasn’t so sure that Vernon was qualified to give lectures on righteousness, but it seemed neither the time nor place to point that out.
“Yes, Mr. Fish,” I said.
“And you want to overcome your own mongrel blood and be a righteous man, don’t you?”
To which I whispered yes once more. But that wasn’t good enough for Vernon, who pounded his fist against the counter, saying, “God gave you a voice, son. Use it, I tell you! Use it!”
I looked to Pop, wishing he’d say something—anything—to help me. But he just kept wiping nonexistent dust off the register.
So in the strongest voice I could muster, I looked Vernon Fish dead-on and said: “Yes, Mr. Fish. Yes, I do.”
Whatever thoughts Pop may have had about Vernon Fish’s tale, he kept them to himself. We were learning things about each other, Pop and me, and both of us had the good sense not to make a fuss over them.
As for myself, I was a seventeen-year-old boy with all the wisdom and moral rectitude of a turnip. Bad as Vernon Fish had scared me, bad as I started feeling about Clarence Banks, it didn’t take long to convince myself that Clarence would recover and the whole mess would go away if only I apologized to Addie.
Two days later, I waited for her outside school after dismissal to do just that.
She must have seen me from the foyer, for she made a beeline down the front stairs and across the street, cutting westward in front of an oncoming sedan. “Addie!” I cried, thinking to stop her before she got killed. But she only sped up, forcing me into a jog.
“Addie!” I hollered. “Addie, I’m sorry! Please… just wait a minute!”
Her footsteps slowed enough for me to catch up and fall in at her side. She wouldn’t look at me, though, and I could feel her chilly disdain in spite of the warm afternoon sun. We walked side by side a good ways, me catching my breath, her refusing to acknowledge I was there.
“I truly am sorry, Addie,” I said once I’d worked up the courage to speak.
She glanced at me. Barely. Said, “What exactly is it you’re sorry for, Will?”
“Why, that you’re upset, of course,” I replied.
Addie stopped and spun towards me, and it’s a testament to my ignorance that I took her doing so as encouragement.
“What about Clarence?” she asked.
And though my main concern at that moment was to set things right with the girl I loved, I piped right up: “Oh, sure. Him, too.”
Addie’s eyes narrowed, but I blathered on, saying it was a shame he’d touched her hand like that, and how I wished he’d known better and hoped there wouldn’t be any permanent damage from the beating he took. “Everyone deserves second chances,” I added magnanimously. “Even Negroes.” Then I stopped, waiting for the warm flood of forgiveness I considered my due.
Only, when I looked closer to see what was holding Addie up, I finally registered the fullness of the disgust in her eyes and understood that my true love thought me no better than a pile of dog shit on the sidewalk.
Then Addie walked away.
Now, I wish I could say her reaction didn’t surprise me, or that the suffering I’d caused an innocent man weighed heavier on my conscience than it did. But that would be giving myself too much credit. The truth of the matter was, I came away from the whole incident believing myself to be the injured party. For shouldn’t my apology have sufficed? And shouldn’t any Negro man with half a brain know that no good could come of messing with a white woman in public? What’s more, I told myself that Vernon and Addie must both have been exaggerating the extent of Clarence Banks’s injuries. Why, he’d probably been no closer to death after his beating than before. Vernon Fish was a braggart, after all, and Addie a hysterical girl.
With that fool line of reasoning in my head, I spent near a week feeling sorry for myself, licking my imagined wounds and scratching at the dry skin under my cast with a pencil. My path never once crossed Addie’s, making it all the easier to maintain the delusion that I’d been in the right. And after those days of sulking and skulking about had passed, the delusion felt real enough that I let the matter go and moved on like the jackass I was.
It helped that working in the shop suited me. I wasn’t a natural-born salesman like Pop, but I loved music. Knew all about it, too, so that when people came in able to recall a line from a song they’d heard but not the title, Pop would say, “Let’s see if William here can’t divine what you’re looking for.” And he’d ask them to hum a few bars or sing the words, and most times I’d be able to name the tune straightaway. “Swanee,” “Crazy Blues,” “When My Baby Smiles at Me”—I knew them all. Even when I couldn’t figure out the exact song the customer wanted, I could almost always come up with something close enough to tempt them into buying a record or two.
But when it came to selling Victrolas, Pop was the man for the job. He prided himself on knowing those machines inside and out, on being able to talk a person up from only thinking about maybe buying a cheap model to knowing they couldn’t live without a fancy one. If he was busy with one customer and another came in, he’d have me entertain the newcomer with records until he could talk to them himself. In terms of brass tack Victrola sales, I kept my mouth shut.
That went double when colored folks from Greenwood called up, asking if we carried such-and-such a model they’d seen in a magazine or a catalog. “Telephone sales are tough,” Pop told me. “You can’t tempt folks with fancy cabinets and woodwork, so convincing them to spend more than they’ve planned gets tricky. It’s an art, describing different models for a telephone customer well enough that they end up feeling bad for wanting something simple when they could have something fine.”
Occasionally, though, even Pop failed to close a deal over the telephone. When that happened, he’d have no choice but to invite Negro customers into the shop after hours to look at the different models for themselves. He never did act ashamed of what he was doing, but he sure wasn’t in a hurry to let nearby shop owners in on his secret. Or to stand accused of spitting in Jim Crow’s eye, either.
I always liked the hushed excitement of those visits. We’d hang the CLOSED sign out front, pull the shades down over the windows, and let our customer in through the alleyway door. The first time it happened, Pop told me, “You have to pretend the back is as good as the front. We know it isn’t and so do they. There’s no need to belabor the point.”
In general, those late-night patrons were people Pop considered to be pillars of Tulsa’s Negro society: doctors, lawyers, merchants like himself. But when push came to shove, he wasn’t about to lose a sale just because someone fell a rung or two short of respectable. And it was that drive in him, that will to make his business succeed, that led to my father being bested by an eighteen-year-old Negro boy armed with nothing more than a hundred dollars and a frown grave enough to shame an undertaker.