“Puh-lease.” That was me.
“Well, then, he’ll just have to get himself another.” That was Elvina.
Mill said she wanted me to come to church on Sunday, and have supper at her home. As a matter of fact, she’d prefer that I stay with her for the remainder of my time in Baltimore.
I accepted the church and supper invitation, but declined the lodgings.
Mill invited Elvina, too. And Yoyo.
“Mill, how are you going to clean up for a big supper like that?”
“I know how to clean a house, young man. I was cleaning house before your pappy was cleaning you.”
Yoyo took Mill’s arm. She snatched it away. “Watch your hands, mister.”
“I can clean your house,” he told her.
Mill looked up at the ceiling. “I never known a black man all my life could clean a house.”
Elvina said Yoyo could do it. She said Mill would never believe it, but this man could get down on his hands and knees and scrub like the best of them. “He works. This man knows how to work. He did my house.”
“He did?”
“Yes, he did,” Elvina said. “He did it once, and now he keeps it up.” “How much you charge?” Mill asked Yoyo. “Forty-five dollars,” he said. “Under the table.” “You’d better charge her eighty,” I said. “You don’t know what you’re getting into.” “Hush up,” Mill said.
“That’s okay,” Yoyo said. “Forty-five is fine. I clean it spic and span, lickety-split.”
“You talk funny,” Mill said. “Where you from?” “I am an African.”
“We are all Africans in this room,” Mill said. “Even Langston here is an African, once removed. What I’m asking is, where are you from?”
“The United Republic of Cameroon. In West Africa.”
“Don’t tell me where it is, dag nab it. I go to church. We have a map of Africa. I seen that country before on the map. But you talk funny. Other Africans don’t talk like you.”
“French is my first language.”
“It is?” Mill told him he ought to try living in Canada. “I did live in Canada. I lived for a year in the wonderful city of Winnipeg. A long time ago.” “I don’t know where that is.”
“North of Minneapolis. That’s what I always tell Americans.”
“That must have been halfway to the North Pole. You must have froze your backside out there.”
“No, I had a wonderful time. Nice city. Nice women.”
“Don’t you talk disrespectful in front of church women. Elvina here, she’s Baptist. And I’m A.M.E. When you gonna clean my house?”
“How about tomorrow?” Yoyo said.
“How about today?” That conversation took place at eleven in the morning. They brought me fruit and cupcakes and tea and juice, and then Mill drove away with Yoyo. I was writing at eleven p.m. when Yoyo came back in. He saw my light and came up to visit. I had never seen him look so tired. He said he took one look at the place and tried to raise his price to eighty-five. But Mill refused. They had agreed on a price of forty-five dollars, she said, so forty-five it would be. That was good money, Mill said, and it was like sixty if you were paying tax. Yoyo told her he didn’t pay tax. She said that was un-American. He said he was a Cameroonian, living in America, so being un-American wasn’t of concern to him. She said, Look, Mr. Cameroonian, just hush up and clean up this house for forty-five dollars.
Yoyo swept and washed and shook out rugs. He tried to throw out old papers, but Mill wouldn’t let him. Finally, he prevailed on her to let him put all her bits of paper in one heap in a supermarket box. He cleaned the bathtub, the shower curtain, the toilet. He sent Mill out for extra cleaner, and for Windex. He cleaned the windows and dried them with balled-up newspapers.
She tried to make him stop for dinner, but he refused. He said he never ate when he was working.
“Elvina was right,” Mill said. “You do work hard. Keep it up, and I’ll give you a little tip.”
The kitchen was the last thing he tackled. Mill had one big sink, with two feet of counter space on each side of it. The sink was bulging with dishes. Dirty dishes. Some unwashed for three weeks. Under the sink, in the cupboard, was a foot-high stack of crusty plates and juice-dried mugs. Yoyo sighed. A woman couldn’t live like this. If he lived like this, he’d go out of his mind. This woman needed a man to look after her.
He took a break. In his two years of cleaning houses under the table in Baltimore, Yoyo had never before taken a break before his task was done. He did, this time. He accepted iced tea, and two soda crackers, and a tall drink of water.
He said he would haul every single dirty dish out of the kitchen. It was too small to work in, with all those dishes. He would place them in supermarket boxes just outside the kitchen door. Then he would wash the counters, the table, the cupboards. Then he would put paper down on the cupboards. Then he would take the dishes, box by box, and wash them, and dry them, and put them away as per her instructions.
“However.”
“However what?” Mill said.
“You must pay me the eighty-five dollars. This is too much. What I have put into this house would have cleaned four other houses. Really, four times forty-five equals $180 dollars, but all I want is eighty-five.”
“A deal’s a deal. But I’ll give you a tip. And if you do a good job, I’ll make it worth your while.”
“I am doing a good job, Mrs. Cane.”
“Call me Mill. Everyone else does.”
“I am doing a good job, Mill.”
“Then keep it up. A deal’s a deal.”
Yoyo attacked the kitchen. He began at seven-thirty in the evening. And he finished at 10:45. He took no more breaks. Mill sat in the kitchen for the last hour, directing him. “That pot goes under there. The plates, up there. I don’t like that mug any more, throw it out.” Yoyo finished. He washed his hands and face. He accepted an iced tea. He washed the glass when he was through. Mill said she’d pay for his taxi, and he did not object.
“We said forty-five, and a deal’s a deal,” Mill said. “So here’s forty-five. Now, here’s another forty. That’s a tip. And here’s ten for the taxi. Thank you, son. I haven’t seen this kitchen so clean since — well, I don’t believe it’s ever been this clean. The house was dirty when I bought it, and after that it just rolled on downhill.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“Come back tomorrow for supper. Come to church, too, if you like. Have you been saved?” “Saved from what?”
“I guess you haven’t. Come on to church, if you have it in your bones to get up that early. And come on over to supper later.”
“Thank you, Mill. I can’t go to your church, but I will come to supper.”
Yoyo, after telling me that story, said he had to go to bed, and that he was going to the market in the morning.
“What market?”
“You’ve been here all this time and you don’t even know about the Saturday market?” I told him I didn’t.
“It’s just down the street. It’s outdoors. They sell bread, fruit, meat, fish. I have to be there at seven-thirty. It’s beautiful in the morning. Come with me.”
“Why do you have to be there so early?”
“Just come. You’ll see.”
Yoyo rapped on my door. It was seven in the morning, Saturday. I washed my face and hands, picked out my hair, threw on some pants, a shirt, and a sweater, and went out into the May morning with my Baltimore tour guide.
We walked east on Thirty-first Street. The sun was sharp and rising above Greenmount Avenue.
The streets were quiet. I saw some cats dart across a back alley. Electrical wires ran above the alleys and the garbage cans. From the alleys, you could peer at the backs of houses. You saw people’s linen on clotheslines. You saw toys scattered on lawns, tennis balls, rocking chairs on porches. Yoyo told me it was like Winnipeg. Like a region called Wolseley, in Winnipeg, where alleys were common as well. I told him I’d never been to Winnipeg.
r /> Yoyo said he had read a book called How to Succeed in America. It said you should keep your taxes to a minimum, avoid all unnecessary expenses, and keep your money rolling in from as many sources as possible. It said that a person earning a modest twenty thousand dollars a year living in a cheap apartment with no car, no mortgage, no overhead, no kids, and no debts for things like couches and televisions could live better, eat better, pay for more entertainment, and have less stress than a person with three times the income but five times the possessions.
Yoyo told me that the barbecue business had become too risky. He would probably still be in custody if he hadn’t managed to get away from the cop at the police station. He had taken a job — under the table — with the French family that ran the Café Chez Washington. They also sold baguettes, croissants, madeleines, choux-à-la-crème, and other French pastries at the Saturday market. I asked how he had managed to get away from the cop at the police station.
“Tell you later,” Yoyo said. “Here we are.”
In a rectangular parking lot the size of a football field, men and women were arranging fruits and vegetables and baked goods. Women were setting up pamphlets at a “Freedom of Choice” table. A girl who looked about ten helped a man take crates of crabs off the back of a truck. One vendor prepared to sell meat directly from the back of his truck. Yoyo found the French family at the north end of the lot. He got right to work, stacking up baguettes on a table, shooing bees away from a box of croissants. He winked and tossed me a croissant with a chocolate strip running down the middle. I chewed it, bought a glass of hot apple cider from a stall nearby, sat on the curb, and watched the market unfold. It was so busy by eight that you couldn’t move ten steps without bumping into somebody.
Yoyo took a break at eight-thirty. He wandered over to a black man selling used books from a table. A sign by the table said, We Conduct Business in the African Way. Yoyo picked up a book about economic self-sufficiency. A recipe, of sorts, for black success in white America.
“How much is this?”
The man said ten dollars.
“This book isn’t new. It has a tear on the third page, and coloring on the tenth. I’ll give you two dollars.” “Ten or nothing,” the man said.
“I thought you did business in the African way,” Yoyo said. “Three dollars, and that’s my last price.” “Ten,” the man said.
“What do you mean when you say you do business in the African way?” “It means I set my price and I get it and I get exploited by nobody.”
“Well, you won’t get exploited by me. I’m not going to buy your book. And nobody else is, either.” The vendor grunted.
Yoyo shook his head and led me away. He muttered about how some Americans seemed not to know the art and pleasures of negotiating. “In Cameroon, vendors set their prices high. Everybody knows that. Bargaining is a way to know the vendor. So you say, Hey, where are you from? And he says, Northern Cameroon. And you say, My sister lives there. She says it’s too hot, she says she likes it down here, where it’s cooler, where you don’t burn up at night. Bring down your price two hundred francs, in the name of my sister and your family. I’ll bring it down one hundred because your sister is in the North. And he says, One hundred francs off, for your sister. … But this way of talking, of getting to know a vendor, people don’t know about that here.”
Yoyo wandered back toward the French stall. I told him I had to get going, and that I had writing to do. I watched him take his place behind the table, start talking to customers, taking their money, giving change, handing over baguettes and croissants, telling people about the wonders of French breads. A moment later, he dropped to the ground and slid back behind several legs and got behind the bakery truck and — I saw as I backed out into the street — started running. A cop gave chase. “Hey, you! Stop!”
Yoyo raced down Thirty-second Street, turned left into the first alley, and disappeared. I saw the cop give chase. Five minutes later, the cop came back. He was still out of breath. He wandered up to the bakery stand.
“Who is that man? What’s his name?”
“A student, I think,” said the woman at the stall.
“I want his name, and his address, and his social security number.”
“I don’t know that. He just came along, said he was a student, and said he’d sell for us for a few hours if we gave him some bread.”
“You’re not allowed to hire illegal aliens,” the cop said. “I could have you charged with harboring aliens.”
“Go ahead,” the woman said. “Do what you’re going to do. I don’t care. But I’m telling you, I don’t know his name, or his address, or where he lives, or what his number is.”
The cop grunted. “Give me five of those croissants, will you? The ones with chocolate in them.”
The woman handed them over in a bag. He fumbled for his wallet.
“It’s okay,” she said.
“Thanks,” he mumbled. He turned to go away. Then he turned back.
“Are you, uh, interested in a coffee? Later, like.”
“What?”
“Can I buy you a coffee?”
“I’m allergic to caffeine. I’m allergic to police officers. I don’t even like Baltimoreans. So go away. Go, go, go.”
“Okay, already.” The cop walked off with the bag.
The woman beckoned to me. She remembered me from the Café Chez Washington. She had been at the cash register that day. “Tell Yoyo I’m very sorry, but I don’t think we can let him come back. Too risky. We had a Russian woman working for us for three years, we never had any trouble. But it’s too risky, when you’re black, and when you’re illegal. We can’t afford to have trouble.”
I knocked on Yoyo’s door. He let me in quickly, and told me the story. When he had been arrested for selling kebabs on the sidewalk, he had been taken to a police station downtown. They made him turn over his wallet — which contained one hundred dollars. He didn’t have any identification, and he kept his key — a long-term precaution against theft — in his sock. He gave the officers a false name. They made him sit in a room. They were about to fingerprint him. He asked to go to the toilet. They said no. He said, “I’m sorry, but I have to empty my bowels, and if you don’t let me go to the toilet, I’m going to do it right here.” So he was told the toilet was down the hall two doors, and that he had two minutes to hightail it back. Two doors down from the toilet, he found an office. Door open. With a window—a window that opened. Yoyo climbed out that window and dropped ten feet down to the street. That hurt! He ran. Turned a corner and ran some more. One more corner, onto Charles Street. Into a crowded restaurant. Out a back door, into an alley, and away. He was safe for now. But he knew he’d never get away again from the police.
I drove to church on Sunday morning. Parked on Druid Hill Avenue again, with the help of a young man in the street — the same one I’d met a few weeks before.
“Mr. Cane,” he said as I got out of the car.
“Hello there, how are you, and how did you know my name?”
“Your name, you’ll see, is now known to the members of our church. Billy Jones’ family comes here. Word has spread about what you did.” “I didn’t do much,” I said.
“You were there,” he said. “You were there and you did what you could, Mr. Cane.”
“Call me Langston. And I’ll call you …”
“Ishmael. Well, you know, Langston, I don’t know how people in Ontario take care of themselves, but around here in Baltimore, and more particularly on Pennsylvania Avenue, when somebody cocks back his elbow and is fixing to plow you a good one, you don’t just stand there looking like a bull’s-eye.”
“Well, at least he didn’t have a gun.”
“He probably did have one. But he didn’t use it. I guess he liked you.”
“Guess so. And you know what? When he knocked me down and took my money, I appreciated that fact. I appreciated the fact that he liked me.”
Mill was waiting for me inside the door w
ith her two friends, Maggie and Eleanor. She had spoken with Billy Jones’s mother and said the boy was improving. They had operated on him to remove a bullet. One of his lungs had collapsed, but the other was fine.
Maggie asked if I’d like to buy a paper. I noticed the stacks by the door. Today, a young woman was selling them.
I paid for the Baltimore Sun and the Afro-American, and looked again at her. Her eyes were waiting. Leveled on me. Those eyes, brown, wide, alive, said, Hi, I’m paying attention to you. So you pay attention to me.
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’re welcome, Mr. Cane,” she said. “It’s Langston,” I said. “And you’re —” “Annette Morton. I’ll see you later.”
“Later?”
“At your aunt’s, I believe. For supper, this evening.”
Mill nudged me as I stood beside her in the pew. “Cute, isn’t she?”
“Who?”
“Ah, don’t act like a little boy. I’m talking about Annette Morton. Cute, isn’t she?” “How do you know her?”
“I know everybody in this church. Nothing happens without me knowing about it.”
That seemed like a good enough reason not to get involved with anybody from the A.M.E. Church.
The service began with the lesser-ups, as Mill called them. The woman who would never be a fully ordained minister, the choir, the deacons, the announcements. And finally, the reverend. He was a short, squat man with a voice that seemed connected to a megaphone.
“Do you know who you are? You may say you’re a citizen of Baltimore, or you may name your family. You may say that you make your living driving a bus. Or teaching. Or plumbing. Or that you’re at home, feeding children, washing clothes, reading bedtime stories.
“But who are you, really? We don’t know the answer, my friends, until a Divine Moment comes along and our Maker throws a few cards on the table. How will you behave, when the ante is raised? Where will your true character lie?
“My friends, we have among us a Canadian visitor. He is not a practicing Christian. But judge him not on paper. Judge him in the flesh. For he was given a test recently. He was sent into streets overcome with deprivation and violence. I speak of Pennsylvania Avenue, my friends. He was sent there, and he witnessed what we all fear. What makes us all shudder when we turn on the television. He found himself in the middle of a drive-by shooting.