I started working at the Victory Victrola Shop on a Saturday morning, less than twenty-four hours after the incident at the Two-Knock. And, truth to tell, the arrangement wasn’t near so bad as I’d thought it would be.
I liked watching my father sweet-talk customers out of their hard-earned cash. We lured people in off the street by propping the door wide open and piping music out through it. Pop put me in charge of choosing records and making sure the demo machine stayed wound. It was a task I took to straightaway. So long as the songs kept playing, the customers kept coming.
But the best part of being at the shop was getting to watch the never-ending parade of folks strolling up and down Main Street. Tulsa had sprung up so fast and fierce during the oil boom that folks called it the Magic City. Ladies sporting fine hats and Parisian dresses walked alongside leather-skinned roughnecks in dirty overalls. Flannel-suited oilmen and jingle-spurred ranch hands bellied up to crowded lunch counters together, trading stock tips and livestock reports over plates of fried pork chops with rice and brown gravy. To the south, oil derricks pumped night and day, sucking crude from the big Midcontinent oil field. And around Greenwood Avenue, just to the north and east of where the Frisco Railroad tracks divided the city, colored Tulsans had built a boomtown of their own.
During the day you could find Negroes aplenty downtown, working as domestics in white homes, shining shoes, making deliveries. But come quitting time, the ones who didn’t live in quarters behind their white employers’ houses went north to sleep in homes of their own. And on Thursdays, when colored maids and cooks got the evening off, downtown Tulsa’s streets turned white as fresh-bleached sheets.
Of course, Jim Crow laws kept Negroes from shopping in white stores unless they were fetching orders. But all rules have exceptions, and one of the first things I learned in Pop’s employ was that his principles were far more flexible as a businessman than as a father.
“We’re packing up that VE-300 for delivery,” he said, half an hour before closing time on my second day. “Get its crate from the back.”
I hesitated, not knowing which Victrola he meant.
“The electric one with the dome top,” Pop said curtly. “You have those model numbers memorized by the end of the week, hear?”
I mumbled, “Yes, sir,” but I was confused. Just the other evening, he’d said over dinner how he regretted stocking the new electric model. Yet there we were, boxing it up for delivery.
I stood like a big lump of useless until Pop looked up from his newspaper and gave me the stink eye.
“Get the crate,” he said. And I hustled off to do as I was told.
Two shoppers wandered in over the next thirty minutes, neither of them in a buying mood. At seven o’clock on the dot, we locked the front door, hung the CLOSED sign in the window, loaded the Victrola into our delivery truck, and drove north. After a few blocks, I asked where we were going. Pop said I’d see when we got there. When I asked who we were delivering to, he kept mum and left me chewing on my thumbnail as we turned east.
In the geographic sense, Greenwood was only a short walk from downtown. But for a boy like me, it may as well have been on the moon. Not that I hadn’t spent my fair share of time out and about on the streets; it’s just that Greenwood wasn’t a place I’d ever thought to visit. Greenwood was for Negroes.
But oh, it was a sight to behold. Twilight was settling in when we got there, softening the glow against brick buildings that were every bit as impressive as the ones downtown. Smoke and barbecue smells made my stomach growl. Men, women, and children strolled the sidewalks in clothes fine as any worn by white folks on Main Street. I must have looked a fool, staring out that window with my eyes big as doughnuts and my jaw hanging slack.
In the business district, electric lights flickered on over the Dreamland Theatre’s facade, and were already burning bright in the sweetshops, drugstores, diners, and hotels that lined the avenue. A few streets over, the north end of Detroit Avenue was lined with pretty, well-tended houses. Pop stopped the truck in front of a big one and told me to get out. I helped him slide the Victrola crate onto the hand truck as best I could with one arm in a plaster of Paris cast, steadying it as Pop grunted his way up the porch steps.
After he’d knocked, a little girl no taller than my belt pulled the curtain back from a side window and stared up at us. She was light brown and pigtailed, with mischief in her eyes.
Pop knocked again, and soon after that an elegant woman in a pale green dress stood in the open doorway while the little girl hid behind her skirt. “It’s so nice to see you, Mr. Tillman,” the woman said. “Please forgive Esther; she isn’t allowed to open the door for anyone she doesn’t recognize.”
Pop tipped his cap in greeting and told the lady that was a wise rule indeed. She smiled, her straight white teeth standing out like pearls on jewelers’ satin, and pointed us towards the parlor.
Pop pushed the cart. I followed, thinking Mama would have liked how the gold flowers on the thick rug under my feet stood out against the blue background. Pop asked if we should unpack the crate and set the Victrola up, and the woman replied no thank you, for her husband was looking forward to doing it himself when he got back from seeing patients. After which Pop cleared his throat and said then that just left the matter of payment. “Of course!” the woman murmured, and hurried off towards the back of the house, heels clicking against the polished wood floor.
I looked around, taking in the room’s fancy chandelier and furniture, trying to ignore Esther’s gaze. She sat in a velvet-padded chair, feet swinging back and forth a good six inches over the rug. “I got no brothers, only sisters,” she said. “You got a sister?”
Pop stared overhard at a painting of fruit, pretending he hadn’t heard. And a vision of my baby sister flashed through my mind, three years old, shrieking with glee as Pop tossed her into the air. “Again!” she’d cried as Mama feigned disapproval and Pop launched her higher and higher. Until he finally caught her up for good and covered her flushed cheeks with kisses.
“My sister’s an angel in heaven,” I told Esther in a tight-jawed voice, thinking how sometimes good memories hurt worse than bad.
Esther thought on that awhile, then looked at me square and said, “That’s sad. You want one of mine?”
Little as I cared to engage in further conversation with her, I couldn’t help replying, “One of your sisters?” And she eyed me like maybe I was slow in the head, and said, “Sure. I got two of ’em. Take your pick.”
I laughed in spite of myself.
“You can’t give away your sisters!” I said. “They’re family.” Which turned Esther’s face angry and set her feet to kicking harder, right up until she heard her mother’s footsteps coming back. Pop turned away from the painted bowl of fruit, smiling his best salesman’s smile. And when she arrived, he counted out the bills she handed him, one by one.
There should have been three hundred and fifteen dollars in all, plus five for delivery. The VE-300 was a pricey model; not the most expensive, far from the cheapest. But when Pop was done, he handed two dollars back, saying, “It’s three hundred and twenty even, Mrs. Butler.”
That flustered the lady badly. “Yes,” she stammered. “But I thought… for your time…”
“Delivery’s five dollars,” Pop said. “No tipping necessary.” Then Mrs. Butler did her best to compose herself as Pop thanked her for her business and wheeled the handcart across the fancy carpet and out the front door.
He never spoke a word the whole way home. But after he’d parked the truck behind the Model T under the porte cochere, he said, “A sale’s a sale, William. Things are hard now, what with crude oil prices so low. If a Negro comes to me with money in his pocket, I’ll hold my nose and sell him a Victrola, Jim Crow be damned. As for tonight, we had a late customer. That’s what you tell anyone who asks, your mama included. Do as I say, and I’ll teach you to drive this truck once your wrist’s healed.”
Then he tugged down the brim of his hat and got out. And though that certainly wasn’t the last delivery we ever made to Greenwood, it was the last time the matter was ever discussed.
I never hid from Addie. Not exactly. But Central High had enough students so that as long as you didn’t share classes with a person, you could pretty well stay away from them. You couldn’t avoid crossing paths completely, though, especially if they had a mind to hunt you down. And at lunchtime the day after my first trip to Greenwood, Addie did.
She found me in the cafeteria holding a cheese sandwich in my good hand and explaining yet again how my wrist got broke. Clete sat at my side, for though things had cooled between us after the Two-Knock, habit kept us from separating completely at school. We’d even settled into a kind of routine where I’d tell how I’d saved an unnamed but ever-so-lovely young lady from the savage advances of a Negro cad, and Clete would nod and utter exclamations of agreement every now and again. With each retelling, Clarence Banks grew an inch, gained ten pounds, and turned two shades darker. On top of that, my pitiful punch turned into something fierce, and a baseball bat assumed responsibility for breaking my wrist rather than my own drunken stumbling. Out of all the lies I’d worked up, my favorite was the one I used to finish the story: “He tried to bash my head in, boys. My poor arm here was all that stood between me and certain death.”
Addie put an end to all that.
She came at me sideways, inching up so quiet that I didn’t see her until a flash of blue gingham caught the corner of my eye. Fast as lightning, she slapped me hard enough that the sound of it silenced all the lunchtime chatter around us. I can still feel the sting today, and hear her thick words in my ear: “He might die. Did you know that? They beat him so bad he might die!”
My hand went to my cheek. Addie’s fury had coiled her up and washed her out, save for her red-rimmed eyes and two angry spots of color on her cheeks.
Being a dunce, I replied, “Who?”
The wrath in Addie’s eyes rendered down to fat, shiny tears.
“Clarence! Clarence might die! And all because of a stupid little boy with a stupid little crush and too much Choc in his belly. You can go to hell for all I care, Will Tillman, if hell will have you.”
Far as those harsh, hushed words knocked me back, they didn’t prevent me from seeing our mathematics teacher, Ms. Newlin, eyeing us from across the room. I dragged my hand from my cheek and the red mark Addie’s slap surely must have left there. Ms. Newlin made her way towards us, and the next thing I knew, Addie was clearing her throat, telling her everything was fine.
The teacher surveyed us with her little piggy eyes and asked about the noise she’d just heard. I held my chin sideways, angling my struck cheek away. One of the boys beside me, a wax-skinned trumpet player named Burt, held up a library book and said, “I dropped this, ma’am. Sorry ’bout the ruckus.”
Ms. Newlin looked both unconvinced and too tired to care. Word around school was that her preacher husband had run off to St. Louis with the church secretary two months prior, leaving the woman more dour than ever. Distracted, too. She glanced up at the big clock over the doorway, smoothed her skirt, and shooed us off to class. We yes’md her and gathered our things while she walked away. That’s when Addie put herself in front of me, so close I could have kissed her.
“They whipped him yesterday,” she whispered. “And beat him and left him in the street to die. Far as I’m concerned, you’re as much to blame as they are. And if he does die, that’s murder. Just you remember that, Will Tillman. Murder.”