Walter Mosley - A Red Death

I went down to the basement.

There I saw a scene that had been a constant in my life since I was a small boy. Black women. Lots of them. Cooking in the industrial-size kitchen and talking loud, laughing and telling stories. But all I really saw was their hands. Working hands. Laying out plates, peeling yams, folding sheets and tablecloths into perfect squares, washing, drying, stacking, and pushing from here to there. Women who lived by working. Brushing the hair of their own children, or brushing the hair of some neighborhood child whose parents were gone, either for the night or for good. Cooking, yes, but there was lots of other work for a Negro woman. Dressing wounds of the men they started out being so proud of. Punishing children, white and black. And working for God in his house and at home.

My own mother, sick as she was, made sweet-potato pies for a church dinner on the night she died. She was twenty-five years old.

“Evenin’, Easy,” Parker Lamont said. He was one of the elder deacons. I hadn’t seen him when I walked in.

“Parker.”

“Odell and the others are out in the back,” he said and began to lead me through the crowd of working women.

Many of them said hello to me. I moved around the neighborhoods quite a bit in those days and if I saw that one of the ladies needed some help I was happy to oblige; there’s all kinds of truth and insight in gossip, and the only key you need is a helping hand.

Winona Fitzpatrick was there. She was bright and full of life even though she didn’t smile at me. She was wearing a flattering white dress that wasn’t made for the kind of work people were doing. But she wasn’t working either. The chairwoman of the church council, she was the power behind the throne, as it were.

“What’s goin’ on here?” I asked Parker.

“What?”

“All this cookin’ an’ stuff.”

“Gonna be a meetin’ of the N double-A C P. Ev’ry chapter in southern California.”

“Tonight?”

“Yeah.”

He led me through a maze of long dining tables and through an open doorway in the back. This led to a closed door. I could smell the smoke even before we went in.

There I found a roomful of black men. All of them smoking and sitting in various positions of ease.

It was a smallish room with a threadbare light green carpet and a few folding tables that the men used to hold their ashtrays. There were checkerboards and dominoes out but nobody was playing. There was a sour smell under the smoky odor. The smell of men’s breath.

Odell rose to meet me.

“Easy,” he said. “I want you to meet Wilson and Grant.”

We nodded at each other.

“Pleased t’meetcha,” I said.

Dupree was there and some other men I knew.

“Melvin and the minister be down in a few minutes. They upstairs right now,” he said. “And this here is Chaim, Chaim Wenzler.”

The white man had been sitting on the other side of Dupree, so I hadn’t seen him. He was short and hunched over in a serious conversation with a man I didn’t know.

But when he heard his name he straightened up and looked at me.

“This is Easy Rawlins, Chaim. He’s got some free time in the week an’ wants t’ help out.”

“Wonderful,” Chaim said in a strong voice. He stood up to shake my hand. “I need the help, Mr. Rawlins. Thank you.”

“Easy. Call me Easy.”

“We are doing work in the neighborhood,” he said. He indicated a chair for me and sat himself. We’d gone right to work. I liked him even though I didn’t want to.

“Food for old people, some driving maybe. I don’t drive and it’s hard to get a ride when you need it. Sometimes my daughter drives me, but she works, we all work.” He winked on that. “And sometimes we need to take messages about meetings here at the church and some other places.”

“What kinda meetin’s?”

He hunched his thick shoulders. “Meetings about work. We do lots of work, Mr. Rawlins.”

I smiled. “Well, what kind of work you want from me?”

He gave me the once-over then and I took him in. Chaim was short and powerful. His head was bald and I would have put his age at about fifty-five. His eyes were gray, about the same color as Mouse’s eyes, but they looked different in Chaim. Chaim’s eyes were piercing and intelligent but they were also generous, rather than cruel. Generosity was a feeling that Mouse only had after someone he didn’t like had died.

You could see something else in Chaim’s eyes. I didn’t know what it was at the time but I could see that there was a deep pain in that man. Something that made me sad.

“We need to get clothes,” he said at last.

“Say what?”

“Old clothes for the old people. I get people to donate them and then we have a sale.”

He leaned toward me in a confidential manner and said, “You know we have to sell it to them because they don’t like to be given wit’out paying.”

“What you do with the money?”

“A little lunch wit’ the sale and it’s gone.” He slapped his hands together indicating breaking even.

“Yeah, okay,” I said. But there must’ve been a question in my voice.

“You have something to ask, maybe?” He smiled into my eyes.

“Naw, not really… it’s just that…”

“Yes?”

There were people around us but they weren’t listening.

“Well, it’s like this,” I said. “I cain’t see why somebody ain’t even from down there wanna do all this an’ they ain’t even bein’ paid.”

“You are right, of course,” he said. “A man works for money or family or,” he shrugged, “some men work for God.”

“That what move you? You a religious man?”

“No.” He shook his head grimly. “No, I’m not a religious man, not anymore.”

“So here you don’t even believe in God but you gonna do charity for the church?”

I was pushing him and wishing I wasn’t. But something bothered me about Chaim Wenzler and I wanted to find out what it was.

He smiled again. “I believe, Mr. Rawlins. Even more-I know. God turned his back on me.” The way he looked at me reminded me of something, or someone. “He turned his back on all the Jews. He set the demons on us. I believe, Mr. Rawlins. There could not be such evil as I have seen wit’out a God.”

“I guess I could see that.”

“And that’s why I’m here,” Wenzler said. “Because Negroes in America have the same life as the Jew in Poland. Ridiculed, segregated. We were hung and burned for just being alive.”

It was then that I remembered Hollis Long.

Hollis was a friend of my father. They used to get together every Saturday afternoon on the front porch. Being the only two black men in the parish that could read, they would smoke pipes and discuss all the newspaper articles that they had read in the past week.

Hollis was a big man. I remember him laughing and bringing me presents of fruit or hard candy. I’d sit on the floor between the two men and listen to them talk about events in New Orleans, Houston, and other Southern capitals. Sometimes they’d talk about Northern cities or even foreign lands like China or France.

Then one weekday I came home from school to find my mother standing over the wood stove crying. My father stood next to her with his arm around her shoulders. Hollis Long was sitting at the table drinking straight whiskey from a clay jug. The look in his eye, the same look that Chaim Wenzler had when he was talking about God, told of something terrible.

No one spoke to me, so I ran out of the house down to the sugarcane field that bordered our land.

That night Hollis slept at our house. He stayed there for two weeks before going away to Florida for good. And every night I could hear him moaning and crying. Sometimes I’d be wrenched out of sleep because Hollis would get up from his bed hollering and smashing the walls with his fists.