Chester Himes - All shot up

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed looked them over indifferently as they drove toward Harlem hospital. A typical Sunday morning sight, come sun or come rain.

Old white-haired sisters bundled up like bales of cotton against the bitter cold; their equally white-haired men, stumbling along in oversize galoshes like the last herd of Uncle Toms, toddling the last mile toward salvation on half-frozen feet.

Middle-aged couples and their broods, products of the postwar generation, the prosperous generation, looking sanctimonious in their good warm clothes, going to praise the Lord for the white folks’ blessings.

Young men who hadn’t yet made it, dressed in lightweight suits and topcoats sold by color instead of quality or weight in the credit stores, with enough brown wrapping paper underneath their pastel shirts to keep them warm, laughing at the strange words of God and making like Solomon at the pretty brownskin girls.

Young women who were sure as hell going to make it or drop dead in the attempt, ashy with cold, clad in the unbelievable colors of cheap American dyes, some at that very moment catching the pneumonia which would take them before that God they were on their way to worship.

From all over town they came.

To all over town they went.

The big churches and little churches, stone churches and store-front churches, to their own built churches and to hand-me-down churches.

To Baptist churches and African Methodist Episcopal churches and African Methodist Episcopal Zionist churches; to Holy Roller churches and Father Divine churches and Daddy Grace churches, Burning Bush churches, and churches of God and Christ.

To listen to their preachers preach the word of God: fat black preachers and tall yellow preachers; straightened-haired preachers and bald-headed preachers; family preachers and playboy preachers; men preachers and lady preachers and children preachers.

To listen to any sermon their preacher cared to preach. But on this cold day it had better be hot.

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed parked their wreck in front of the Harlem Hospital and went inside to the reception desk.

They asked to speak with Casper Holmes.

The cool, young colored nurse at the desk lifted a telephone and spoke some words. She put it down and gave them a cool, remote smile. “I am sorry, but he is still in a coma,” she said.

“Don’t be sorry for us, be sorry for him,” Coffin Ed said.

Her smile froze as though the insect had talked back.

“Tell him it’s Digger Jones and Ed Johnson,” Grave Digger lisped.

She stared at the movement of his swollen lips with horrified fascination.

“Tell him we’re just ahead of the Confederates,” he went on. “Maybe that will get him out of his coma.”

Her face twisted as though she had swallowed something disagreeable.

“Confederates,” she murmured.

“You know who the Confederates are,” Coffin Ed said. “They’re the people who fought to keep us slaves.”

She smiled tentatively to prove she wasn’t sensitive about slavery jokes.

They stared at her, grave and unsmiling.

She waited and they waited.

Finally she picked up the telephone again and repeated their message to the floor supervisor.

They heard her say: “No, not conferees; they said Con-fed-er-ates

… Yes…”

She put down the telephone and said without expression, “You will have to wait.”

They waited; neither moved.

“Please wait in the waiting room,” she said.

Behind them was a small nook with a table and several chairs, some occupied by others who were waiting.

“We’ll wait here,” Grave Digger lisped.

She pursed her lips. The telephone rang. She listened. “Yes,” she said.

She looked up and said, “His room is on the third floor. Take the elevator to the right, please. The floor supervisor will direct you.”

“You see,” Grave Digger lisped. “You don’t know what those Confederates are good for.”

The room was banked with flowers.

Casper sat up in a white bed wearing a turban of white bandages. His broad black face loomed aggressively above yellow silk pajamas. He looked like an African potentate, but it wasn’t a time for flattery.

French windows opened to a terrace facing the east. Two overstuffed chairs ranged along one side of the bed. On the other side, remains of a breakfast littered a wheel tray. The detectives saw at a glance that it had been a substantial breakfast of fried sausage, poached eggs on toast, hominy grits with butter, fruit and cereal with cream and a silver pot of coffee. A box of Havana cigars sat beside a basket of mixed fruit on the night stand.

The detectives took off their hats.

“Sit down, boys,” Casper said. “What’s this about Confederates?”

Grave Digger looked about for a window sill on which to rest a ham, was thwarted by the French window and compromised on the arm of a chair. Coffin Ed backed into a corner and leaned against the wall, his scarred face in the shadows.

“We were just kidding, boss,” Grave Digger lisped. “We thought you might want to talk to us before the big brass from downtown gets up here.”

Casper frowned. He didn’t like the insinuation that he preferred talking to colored precinct detectives rather than to downtown white inspectors. But since he had tacitly admitted as much by seeing them, he decided to pass it.

“A god-damned embarrassing caper,” he conceded. “Right in my own bailiwick.”

Now he looked like a martyred potentate.

“That’s what we figured,” Coffin Ed said.

Casper flicked a quick, sly look from one to the other. “You must feel the same way,” he observed. “Where were you at the time?”

“Eating chicken feetsy at Mammy Louise’s,” Grave Digger confessed.

Casper stared at him to see whether he was joking, decided he wasn’t. He opened the box of cigars and selected one, picked up a gadget from the table and carefully snipped off the end, then reached for an imported gold lighter behind the box and snapped a flame. He applied the flame like a jeweler using a miniature torch on filigree of gold, snapped shut the lighter, slowly rolled the end of the cigar about between his thick lips and blew out a thin stream of smoke. The good smell of fine tobacco dissipated the hospital odors.

As an afterthought, he extended the box toward the detectives. Both declined.

“I will tell you what I know, which isn’t much,” he said. “Then we will see what we can make out of it. You boys must have been working on it all night yourselves.”

“Still at it,” Grave Digger lisped.

“First we’ll tell you what we got,” Coffin Ed said. “A colored sailor, a country boy from Alabama, left his ship at about six o’clock last evening. He had been working for one entire year to save money to buy a car; when he got his final pay, he had six thousand, five hundred dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills in a money belt. The ship docks in Brooklyn. It was eight o’clock before he got uptown. He met his girl friend, Sassafras Jenkins. They had some drinks and then took a taxi over to an office on lower Convent Avenue, where he had an appointment to meet one Mister Baron, who was selling him the car.”

Casper smoked his cigar softly, his black face impassive.

“The appointment was for ten o’clock,” Coffin Ed went on. “Baron was a half hour late. He rode up in the car with a white man. Roman and his girl were waiting on the sidewalk in front of the dermatological clinic near One-twenty-sixth Street. The white man got out and went upstairs to an office in the rear. Roman and his girl stayed downstairs for another half hour with Baron, inspecting the car. A small crowd of people coming from the supermarket up the street collected.