I decided to sleep the night in my old room and leave the next morning for Bakersfield. The idea that Big Mary might have taken him on to Oklahoma was squashed over and over in my mind like a buzzing fly.
—
The small Southern California town on those midnight rides with L.D. had seemed fanciful and unreal; now from the bus windows it was drab and seemed overpopulated with mean-faced whites straight out of my Arkansas past.
A black man gave me a ride to Cottonwood Road.
“If her brother is farming, he got to be living around here somewhere. And you say you don’t know his name?”
“No, but I’ll find him.”
He stopped his old car in front of a café that claimed “Home Cooking.”
“Well, I wish you Godspeed. Try in there. But be careful. These is some rough folks.”
I thanked him and he drove away.
The young waitress shouted over the noisy jukebox and talk, “Anybody here know Mary Dawson?”
Conversation dimmed but no one answered.
She went on, “This woman’s looking for her baby.”
The faces became friendlier, but still there were no answers.
“Nobody knows her, honey. Try down at Buckets.” She directed me to a dirt-floor joint a couple of blocks away.
Old-timey blues whined in the artificial darkness, and one stout bartender walked up and down behind the bar setting up and taking away beer bottles. Every stool was taken by men and women who laughed and talked with the easy familiarity of regulars.
“Mary Dawson? Mary Dawson.” The bartender digested the name as he filed my face in his memory bank. “Naw, baby, I don’t know no Mary Dawson.”
“They call her Big Mary.”
“Big Mary. Naw, I don’t know no Big Mary.”
“She’s got my baby. Took him away from Stockton.” I felt as if I were blowing my breath against a tornado.
His face softened as suspicion left it. “What she look like?”
“She’s as tall as I. As me”—“as I” sounded too dickty—“but bigger, and she has a brother who farms around here. They’re from Oklahoma.”
A little light winked in his eyes. “Does she drink?”
“Not often, but they say she drinks a lot when she does.”
“In a coffee cup?” The smile was abundant.
“Yes.” I wanted to hug him.
“That’s old John Peterson’s sister. Yeah, baby. He lives bout three miles from here.”
In the past, whenever I had slipped free of Fate’s pressing heel, I gave thanks. This time I promised God a regular church attendance.
“Can you direct me?”
“Aw, you can’t walk it. Wait a minute.”
He called to a man over at the jukebox. “Buddy.”
The man turned and came over to the bar.
“Little lady, Buddy runs a cab service … Buddy, you know where John Peterson’s place is?”
Buddy nodded.
“Take her out there, will you?”
Buddy nodded again.
“He’ll treat you right, little lady, good luck.”
I thanked the bartender and followed Buddy to a dilapidated car. He said nothing on the ride, but my heart beat so that I wouldn’t have been able to answer in any case.
He stopped the car on a lonely road surrounded by overturned farmland. A graying clapboard house set deep in a plot of muddy ground.
Buddy nodded toward the house. “That’s it. You want me to come back to get you?”
I looked at the house, which seemed left alone, and thought that maybe its occupants had gone to Oklahoma. Then I noticed some movement a few hundred yards from the house. I focused on the movement, trying to determine if the action was caused by a pet or farm animal rooting in the mud.
In a second, my heart squeezed and I screamed. “My baby! That’s my baby.” One thought shot my legs out of the car and in two steps I was ankle-deep in muck, a new thought sluicing in my mind. Where does he think his mother is?
I picked him up and pressed him close. I felt his body throb and pound with excitement. He stiffened his arms and pushed himself away to see my face. He kissed me and then started crying. The restraint which had held through the long night and the bus trip began to disintegrate. He took a fistful of my hair and twisted and pulled, crying all the time. I couldn’t untangle the hair or pull my head away. I stood holding him while he raged at being abandoned. My sobs broke free on the waves of my first guilt. I had loved him and never considered that he was an entire person. Separate from my boundaries, I had not known before that he had and would have a life beyond being my son, my pretty baby, my cute doll, my charge. In the plowed farmyard near Bakersfield, I began to understand that uniqueness of the person. He was three and I was nineteen, and never again would I think of him as a beautiful appendage of myself.
—
Big Mary leaned against the rickety kitchen table. “I didn’t mean no harm. I just love him. I take good care of him. You know that.”
Her big face crumbled like pastry dough and she trembled. “Why don’t you let him stay with me awhile?”
She looked at Guy in my arms and her voice pinched into baby talk. “Pretty, don’t you want to stay with Big Mary? Tell your momma you want to stay.”
His arms scissored around my neck.
“I’m taking him, Mary.”
She couldn’t control the tears. “Can’t you all stay one night—just one?”
“I have a taxi waiting.” I started to the door.
“Well, wait and I’ll get his things together.”
“No, that’s all right, we have to leave.”
She made a lunge but stopped before she reached me.
“You don’t hate me, do you, Rita? I pray God you don’t hate me.”
“I don’t hate you, Mary.”
“He was the prettiest of them all. And you was always going somewhere.”
“I understand, Mary. Good-bye. Say good-bye, Guy.”
“Good-bye.”
Buddy took us to the bus station and my muddy baby and I headed for San Francisco again.
CHAPTER 30
At home, life stumbled on. Mother was again in residence. The record player spun disks ceaselessly, cooking odors wafted through every room, and ice jiggled in glasses like snow bells.
Bailey had given up his apartment and had moved his belongings back into his old room. He told Mother he was job hunting, and paid her room rent “out of savings.” He now wore one-button roll suits in dun and charcoal-gray; the modified pegged pants and colorful jerkins were given away. And his smiles were less frequent and different. When Papa Ford said something too ribald or old-fashioned, Bailey seemed not to notice. He never lifted his eyes to check with me, and the teasings about my height and arrogance had stopped.
Since I was job hunting too, I asked where he was looking and for what.
“In the streets. I’m looking for a bank roll, then I’m heading for New York City.”
What could he do except wait tables and sing for the family’s enjoyment?
“I can use my brain. I’ve told you ‘all knowledge is spendable currency depending upon the market.’ There’s money to be had, and I intend to have some.”
“Bailey, you’re not going to pimp, are you?”
“Let me straighten you out. Pimps are men who hate women or fear them. I respect women, and how can I fear a woman when the baddest one I’ve ever heard of is my mother?”
He looked at me sharply. “And let me tell you another thing, a whore is the saddest and silliest broad walking. All she hopes is to beat somebody out of something, by lying down first and getting up last.”
I didn’t want to be included in that company, yet I had lived at Clara’s.
“I’m not talking about you. There is such a thing as a whore mentality. You can find it in a housewife who will only go to bed with her husband if he buys a new washing machine. Or a secretary who’ll sleep with the boss for a raise.
Hell, you’re both too smart and not smart enough to be a whore. Never. But I don’t want you trying it again.”
He was seven inches shorter and one year older than I, but as always, he had the last and loudest word. Afterward, as I thought about him, he became even larger in my mind.
He had endured the death of his love and was still going on. Certainly he was limping and using a crutch I didn’t approve of, but he hadn’t atrophied. He had plans for his future. I reasoned that hard drugs might not be as bad as the people who used them. It was possible that the dirty, ragged, smelly hypes, who were so frightening and repulsive, were naturally slouchy and low-class. There were probably many people who took drugs and never lowered their living standards. I knew from experience that weed wasn’t dangerous, so it could follow that heroin and cocaine were victims of rumors spread by the self-righteous. Anyway, man had always needed something to help him through this vale of tears. Fermented berries, corn, rice and potatoes. Scotch or magic mushrooms. Why not the residue of poppies?
The maids and doormen, factory workers and janitors who were able to leave their ghetto homes and rub against the cold-shouldered white world, told themselves that things were not as bad as they seemed. They smiled a dishonest acceptance at their mean servitude and on Saturday night bought the most expensive liquor to drown their lie. Others, locked in the unending maze of having to laugh without humor and scratch without agitation, foisted their hopes on the Lord. They shouted loudly on Sunday morning at His goodness and spent the afternoon preparing the starched uniforms to meet a boss’s unrelenting examination. The timorous and the frightened held tightly to their palliatives. I was neither timid nor afraid.
—
I applied for work along Fillmore Street. Neither the local beauty shop nor record store needed a manageress. The realtor said his friend, an Oakland businessman, wanted a cool-headed person to run his restaurant. I bristled with the big-city disdain for small towns; it was generally accepted in San Francisco that Oakland was placed on the other side of the Bay Bridge to accept snide remarks from city sophisticates. But the chance to rise in the business world to manageress was too tempting to ignore. I didn’t entertain the thought that I wouldn’t do the job well. After all, although my experience had not included managing a restaurant, I had successfully lived through some harrowing events and considered myself mature and adult enough for responsibility.
I took the train to Oakland.
James Cain was impressed with what he thought of as my college vocabulary, and the half-carat diamonds flashing in his two front teeth enchanted me. He didn’t ask for references and offered seventy-five dollars a week and all my meals.
He was a large, gentle man who smiled a lot at life and kept all the details of his many business affairs in his head. He owned a dry cleaners, a shoe-repair shop, and next door to the restaurant, a gambling house. His clothes were tailor-made, and he wore them with a casual flair. If he had tightened his lips over the diamonds, and if he had lived in another world, he’d have passed for an erudite broker who regularly made killings on Wall Street.
“Cain’s” served well-cooked Southern dishes in ample proportions and was popular with the area regulars. Cain had bought three unknown prize fighters and was pushing them toward championship. He wanted to upgrade the restaurant and extend dinner invitations to the successful white fight promoters he met at the gym.
He sat in a red leatherette booth and talked to me. “Ought to have a soup. And a salad. Ought to have a menu, too.” When I went to work for him, the day’s choices were printed on a child’s blackboard near the door.
NECK BONES
SHORT RIBS
HOG MAWS
PORK CHOP
RED SNAPPER
As determined as I was to make good at the job, I couldn’t decide what soup or salad would complement those entrées. Soup had been for me, in my Southern youth, an entrée in itself, and salad was mostly potato or slaw. I suggested bouillon. Cain smiled at the sound and told the cook to fix it.
“Tossed salad. Roquefort dressing.”
Cain gave the signal to the cook.
I also told him that I had seldom seen hog maws or neck bones featured in white cafés.
The chef was told to cut down on his orders.
“They eat a lot of omelettes, and liver and bacon. I would suggest you stock Chicken à la King.”
Cain’s keen intelligence had won for him the position of tycoon in Oakland, and he operated on the theory of an equal distribution of labor. He left the menu design and plan to me.
Within a month customers were delivered large menus which offered, in Old English print,
Chicken à la King
Irish Stew
Veal Cutlet
T-bone Steak
Peach Cobbler—Sweet Potato Pie
Ham Hocks and Mustard Greens (a sop which was always sold out an hour after opening)
As dining business slackened, I had the opportunity to examine the gamblers carefully. They straggled into the restaurant during the high California mornings, well-cut pants bagging away from their knees; hand-painted silk ties undone and hanging, flapping, forgotten, down their shirt fronts. When their hands shook coffee onto the tablecloths, the waiters brought fresh coffee without condemnation.
The winners and losers looked equally disordered but were distinguishable by their company. Beggars, grifters and petty losers hung on their words, pulled chairs out for them, and shouted at slow-moving waiters for faster service.
The street women who met their men at the dining tables (Cain didn’t allow hustling in the restaurant, and no women at all in the gambling room) were of particular interest to me. They came in tired, the night’s glamour gone from their faces and the swing from their hips.
The men who drank whiskey for steadiness or diversion took their women’s money in the open, counting it out bill by bill, then ordering a flunky to run to the liquor store and quickly bring “a taste.” The women’s faces surged with pride and defeat. They had proved they were successful and trustworthy whores, but they also knew the men would return to the gambling tables to chance the night’s earnings, and the women would be sent home exhausted to empty beds.
A man who got his highs from heavier narcotics never treated his woman so carelessly. He would wait impatiently, drinking heavily sugared coffee. As soon as his woman passed the window, he stood up and paid the small check. The woman waited at the door and the couple walked away eagerly and together. I knew they were hurrying to the fix. I knew that the woman had already made the connection before she came to pick up her man. I knew, and could see nothing wrong. At least they were a couple and depended on each other.
Cain had little time to notice that all was not well at the restaurant, since he spent his days engrossed with his fighters. The operators of his cleaning shop and gambling house were hewing to the traditional lines, and their businesses were booming.
I had to speak to him.
“Mr. Cain, I’m afraid this month we, er, slid back a little.”
He thought. “Lost money, huh?”
“Yes. Actually, the menu doesn’t seem to appeal to the regulars and there aren’t enough of the others to equalize the loss of patronage.”
“I see what you mean.” And he did. “Let’s keep it like you got it for another month. Give those backward Negroes a chance for something better.”
He tucked up a large fork of greens, and crumbled corn bread in the pot liquor. “Some people don’t appreciate the better things in life.”
The second month showed the restaurant deeper in the red, and although I brought Guy to the restaurant daily and fed him T-bone steak while I ate veal cutlet, the chef complained that his refrigerator was jammed with spoiled food.
Mr. Cain told me not to worry. “They scared to go downtown and eat, and when I bring them the same food to their own neighborhood they won’t even eat it. That’s all right with me. I did my best.” He told the cook to clean out the refrigerator a
nd go back to the old menu.
“Can you drive?”
“Yes.”
“I want you to take the car and pick up my boxers in the mornings. You drive them to Lake Merrit. They’ll get out and run while you follow them. When they go clear around the lake, you pick them up and take them to the gym. Then you pick me up and I’ll take you home, then I’ll go back to the gym.”
Hooray! At last! A chauffeurette.
—
I guided the Cadillac slowly around the dark curves, and the sounds of the three men panting mixed with the soft slaps of the waves. Two boxers were large, muscular heavyweights who gave me unsmiling grunts when I picked them up at the run-down hotel. They sat like huge black monoliths in the back seat, while Billy, a cute little flyweight, joked in the front seat with me.
“Baby, I’ll burn ’em up … with the uppercut. I’ll cut their flab … with a little jab.”
Billy reminded me of the old Bailey and I determined to see him fight.
Cain bought me a brown suede suit, and a matching snap-brim hat. My shoes, gloves and purse were suede, and I knew I was as sharp as anyone had a right to be.
I sat up front with him and four other fat old men who smoked cigars and passed fistfuls of money in the glaring lights. The whoosh of sound in the auditorium, and the frenetic activity of people rising and sitting, walking, running, the faces turning like cardboard cutouts, made me think I had been stupid not to have attended a fight before.
The lights dimmed and Billy in white shorts ran down an aisle toward the arena. Another small boxer wearing black trunks kneed his way through the ropes from another aisle.
I turned to Cain, who was negotiating money business with his cronies.
“It’s Billy. Why aren’t you watching?”
He glanced up at the lighted square and turned back to the sheaf of money in his hands.
He mumbled, “That’s just the prelims.”
The referee held up both men’s hands, and the gong rang. The boxers crouched with their arms tucked into their sides. They began to inch a circle on the floor leaning in and over as if they were trying to identify the different brands of aftershave lotion. Black Shorts, with a rude immediacy, thrust his left fist into Billy’s ribs.