Bailey’s Cafe

A Novel

Gloria Naylor

MAESTRO, IF YOU PLEASE …

THE VAMP

THE JAM

THE WRAP

For the two Luecelias:

1898–1977

1951–1987

The author wishes to thank the Guggenheim Foundation and Jonathan Culler at the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, for their generous financial and moral support during the writing of this novel.

hush now can you hear it can’t be far away

needing the blues to get there

look and you can hear it

look and you can hear

the blues open

a place never

closing:

Bailey’s

Cafe

I can’t say I’ve had much education. Book education. Even though high school back in the twenties was really school, not what these youngsters are getting away with now, and while Erasmus Hall in general, Miss Fitzpatrick in particular, is still talking about the cream that floated to the top and then to the top of that again, school isn’t where real learning happens.

I went to kindergarten on the muddy streets in Brooklyn, finished up grade school when I married Nadine, took my first diploma from the Pacific; and this cafe, well now, this cafe is earning me a Ph.D. You might say I’m majoring in Life, standing in front of this grill and watching that door open and close, open and close, as they step in here from all over the United States and some parts of the world.

A few of them actually think wanting a cup of coffee brought them in, even though they soon find out we make lousy coffee. The grinder’s broken and I can’t ever be sure what size grounds I’m getting one batch to the next. I brew it for them anyway. And covering up its taste with the food is out of the question: I picked up my cooking skills from the navy mess, where you’re taught a little more grease and salt should answer any complaints.

Then there’s the few who think it’s Nadine’s peach cobbler that keeps bringing them back. I admit it’s close to spectacular. But she only makes it when the mood hits her and will only dish it up and serve them when the mood hits her again.

And it can’t be for the company, like others think. Our customers are all so different I’ve yet to see anybody get along in here. But that door will still open and close, open and close.

They don’t come for the food and they don’t come for the atmosphere. One or two of the smart ones finally figure that out, like I figured out that I didn’t start in this business to make a living—personal charm is not my strong point—or stay in it to make a living—kind of hard to do that when your wife is ringing up the register and it’s iffy when and how much she’ll charge.

No, I’m at this grill for the same reason that they keep coming. And if you’re expecting to get the answer in a few notes, you’re mistaken. The answer is in who I am and who my customers are. There’s a whole set to be played here if you want to stick around and listen to the music. And since I’m standing at center stage, I’m sure you’d enjoy it if I first set the tempo with a few fascinating tidbits about myself. (Nadine, nobody asked you.)

I grew up in Flatbush believing that Brooklyn was the capital of the world and that all colored people except for my family were rich. I wasn’t a stupid child; Brooklyn had Ebbets Field and the Brooklyn Royal Giants, and since baseball, good baseball, was all I cared about, that settled that for wherever anything else important in the world could possibly happen. And my eyes certainly didn’t deceive me: liveried coachmen, sable wraps, and brownstone mansions meant rich, while getting up at five in the morning to stoke the furnace, start breakfast, and lay out the morning suits for people like that meant you weren’t. And that’s what my parents did as butler and cook for the Van Morrisons, who were as colored as we were; and all their friends sure looked as colored as we were, and while I couldn’t vouch for their homes, there was no denying the silk gowns and beaver top hats as they stepped out of the polished carriages that pulled up in front of the house for one of Mrs. Van Morrison’s balls.

Those were the only colored people I ever saw until my father started taking me to baseball games, and then I just figured that the hundreds of other Negroes around me were like the Van Morrisons’ friends, only dressed down for the occasion. I didn’t figure they could be like us, because there were no other colored servants in our household or in the neighborhood. Mrs. Van Morrison’s personal maid was a full-busted Swedish girl whose cousin doubled as coachman and gardener. They both ate in the kitchen with us and complained as loudly about Mrs. Van Morrison as my mother did. That left only Bella, a Polish woman, who came in three times a week for the laundry and heavy cleaning. The other homes in the neighborhood were owned by white people and they all had French, Swiss, or German servants. So I think I had it figured out pretty good for a five-year-old: there were rich white people, poor white people, rich colored people—and us.

If my older brother hadn’t been so much older than me, he probably could have explained things to me a little sooner than I learned them myself. But with a twelve-year difference in our ages, he was already on the road before I started kindergarten—

—To discover his fortune: my mother

—A shiftless bum: my father.

My folks didn’t see eye to eye on much, beginning with their firstborn son and ending with the Van Morrisons. My father would have cut his own throat for Mr. Van Morrison. My mother hated Mrs. Van Morrison with a quiet passion that’s peculiar to women: it burns low, slow, and long. If a man disliked someone as much as my mother disliked that woman, he would have just hauled off and punched him in the face and let the consequences be damned. But a woman can drag the whole thing out—over years—and pick, pick, pick to death. I used to think my mother didn’t just up and poison Mrs. Van Morrison because we ate whatever they had left over from supper, but now I know that she relished hating that woman and would have done anything to keep her alive and well so the whole thing could go on and on.

I wondered which was the greater or lesser sin: Mrs. Van Morrison not deserving Mr. Van Morrison because she’d been a woman of loose virtue, or because she tried to keep him from hiring my parents. Granted, for my mother, loose virtue could have meant anything from Mrs. Van Morrison’s former stage career—

—Opera: my father

—Burlesque: my mother

to a brief association with a London bordello—

—As interior decorator: my father

—Interiors, period: my mother.

But even my father admitted that the mistress of the house was less than thrilled when her husband insisted upon taking my parents on staff. And my mother got that one nod from him because it helped him prove how wonderful Mr. Van Morrison was, a real race man.

He had made a small fortune as a tea and spice dealer, rolled that into a larger fortune through some shrewd real-estate investments, and split off part of that into railroad, steamship, and oil stocks. No, he couldn’t have booked first-class passage on any of those railroads and steamships, but the value of his shares kept going up enough to afford him his own private Pullman and yacht. But he was a plain man who didn’t go in for any of that showy stuff. A trustee of the Tuskegee Institute, he’d put money behind the Niagara Movement, what they’re now calling the NAACP, as well as some settlement houses for colored orphans in the Tenderloin district. That’s how he met my folks; they were living in that part of Manhattan, my father being between jobs and volunteering to teach the settlement kids baseball.

It seemed like a good arrangement: my parents wanted to get themselves and my brother out of those slums in the west fifties, Mr. Van Morrison needed to start staffing his new home on Lafayette Avenue, and he felt why not give his own kind a chance at fresh country air and a living wage? Shows you how long ago it was, when Brooklyn was considered the country.

And it was giving them a chance, to live and work in a house like that. You’d never know it now, with Negroes doing all kinds of domestic work, but back then colored people had a hard time even getting jobs as servants if you’re looking at the finer homes. A female might come in on day work as a charwoman or laundress, and a male, if he was lucky, could get taken on as a coachman. But if you’re talking about a staff cook and housekeeper or a valet, a gentleman’s gentleman, Europeans did that—and only certain Europeans.

Wealthy Negroes held the same kind of attitudes as wealthy white people but even more so, feeling that they had more to prove. According to my mother Mrs. Van Morrison didn’t want them as servants because it cheapened their appearance to the neighbors.

—It don’t matter what color hands is peeling these potatoes; none of them neighbors is about to sit down and eat with her.

My father’s version was that Mrs. Van Morrison worried about the second child being born. Servants with large families were a nuisance. My mother wasn’t buying it.

—Two children in twelve years. What does that make me, some kind of rabbit?

My father, a dark-skinned man, would actually blush as he put his finger to his lips and cut his eyes toward me.

—Woman, remember yourself now.

If he’d only known, when he wasn’t around and my mother and the maid put their heads together over a cup of tea, I heard much worse than that.

I really don’t know if I was or wasn’t the cause of Mrs. Van Morrison’s reluctance to keep my parents on staff. I do know they worked for those people for twenty-five years, retired with a sizable pension, and were later mentioned in Mr. Van Morrison’s will. And the few times over those years that I had reason to run into Mrs. Van Morrison she was always nice to me. A tiny tiny woman who favored shades of beige lace for her dresses, but her voice was round and full, making me think that singing could have easily been somewhere in her past. She would put her jeweled hand on my shoulder to ask me about my studies. That’s what she called them, studies, while I mumbled something about school being fine before she’d pat me and move on. Good, keep improving yourself.

The truth was, I didn’t like school and it was never fine. When I wasn’t being punished for getting into a fight, I was punished for sleeping in class, and when I wasn’t being punished for that it was for sneaking out early. Now, all of those strappings were justified—except for the last. I wasn’t so much sneaking out of school as sneaking into the ballparks. A fine distinction that my mother had a hard time appreciating.

Over the years I’ve tried to figure out what it is about the game that hooked me so early. My father being such a big fan probably helped. He’d been a bat boy for the Cuban Giants and wasn’t a bad fielder himself. I think he would have gone out barnstorming with them if he hadn’t met my mother and started a family. In those days, he’d say, in those days they really played ball.

He had stories about them and the Philadelphia Giants and other Negro independents I took to be a little bit of an exaggeration. No human being could shut out both ends of a doubleheader with the last throw a fastball that went by with so much heat it busted a seam in the catcher’s glove. But I got the glove, my father said as he dug into the bureau and pulled out a catcher’s mitt. There was a slight tear in the seam and scrawled across it in fading ink was the name—

Smokey Joe Williams.

But did it really happen because of a pitch? And at the bottom of a doubleheader? A shutout doubleheader?

You don’t say your father is a liar. And when I was coming up you didn’t even think that your father was a liar. Good thing too, because in 1917 I finally saw an aging Smokey Joe Williams pitch.

—Not at the top of his prime, my father sat in the bleachers muttering and shaking his head.

I was there with my mouth so wide open I could have swallowed flies. That tall, swaybacked man had them fanning left and right, and not just any them—the New York Giants. He ended up fanning twenty of them before the game was over and losing 1–0 on a tenth-inning error.

I had to hear about that error all the way home.

I still hear about that error in my sleep.

I thought it was a great performance. And knowing now what I do about baseball, it was a little bit more than that. Something happened when those colored players were out on the field, and I guess I went to so many games trying to figure out exactly what it was. Sometimes it was exhibition games against the white teams, like the one where I first saw Smokey Joe, but most of the time it was them against each other: the Homestead Grays, the Pittsburgh Crawfords, the Baltimore Black Sox, the Chicago American Giants, the Newark Eagles, those amazing—and still-amazing—Kansas City Monarchs.

I didn’t question why Negroes had separate teams; watching their games and then the white games, it was pretty clear to me. The Negroes were better players. And just like us at school, who wanted to team up with the pee-pants who had snot running out their noses? No, winners stay with winners. But they could have been a little more fair-minded and let the likes of Honus Wagner or Ty Cobb on their teams.

Even my father would have agreed that the Flying Dutchman could have endured a season that started in February with barnstorming in the Deep South, a game a day, three on Sunday, as he made his way north, sleeping on the bus riding into town, playing a game, riding again to get to the next town just in time for the first pitch, playing a game, riding again before the real season begins in April, which means he can exchange his bed on the bus for a bed in a run-down Northern hotel and the cow turds between second and third for a field line that only slopes slightly in second-rate parks. Still a game a day, still three on Sunday, but more and more dark faces in the crowds, who cheer his speed and don’t sit in deadly silence when he comes in on a two-out hopper and whips it across to first base, so there’s less of a worry that retiring the home team to come back then as third in the batting order, once with a line-drive single, again with two batted in will mean pop bottles filled with piss thrown at his head; less of a worry that if he’s too good a crowd could turn real ugly, if he’s too good he might not make it out of town that night; so the Northern games are where he goes all out and hopefully gets himself voted into the East-West Classics and his team into the Negro World Series, which makes it September but not quitting time because with all of this the pay hasn’t been too great and there’s always winter ball in Florida for the tourists or maybe Cuba, leaving just enough time to start preseason barnstorming again in February.

Yeah, the Flying Dutchman would definitely have been good enough to join one of those teams; they grow ’em tough up there in Mansfield, Pennsylvania. He could have made it with no rest—in body or mind—and still brought in a batting average of .327 while transforming himself into a golden shield between second and third bases. He’d been just like Pop Lloyd in that respect. And it leaves me confused, why these newspapermen look back at Pop’s career and call him the Black Honus Wagner; all things being equal—or in this case unequal—the highest compliment to pay the Flying Dutchman is to call him the White Pop Lloyd. And I’ll even bring Ty Cobb into that club, although he’d play dirty and spike a man in a second: he’s the White Oscar Charleston if there’s ever been one. Those other players, now, those others just couldn’t have made it. And no, I haven’t forgotten the Babe. Too temperamental. He couldn’t have gone two seasons in Josh Gibson’s shoes and held on to his record, and so as far as I’m concerned, the title of a White Josh Gibson still goes unclaimed.

And today? You can just forget it today. They’ve gotten so soft and ridiculous they’ll be wanting their mammies in the dugout to suckle them between innings. Only way to explain the hoopla over this new kid, Jackie Robinson. (Just let me make this one last point, Nadine, and then I’m getting on to our own long and blissful twelfth inning.) To hear these people talk, you’d think Jackie Robinson grew up like a mushroom in the jungle somewhere and Branch Rickey was on some kind of rare-species hunt and stumbled over him. Well, if Rickey was after the rare, he didn’t find it in that player. Robinson is a dime a dozen in a long-established league. The Negro American League, to be exact, whose teams play against the Negro National League. Organized baseball, just not recognized baseball.

I’m the first to admit the Dodgers needed all the help they could get; nobody was going out to Ebbets Field to see that mess Rickey called a defensive lineup, and it got me so I was becoming embarrassed to say I was from Brooklyn—white baseball or not. When you love the game, you love the game, and mutilation is mutilation. So, yeah, he’s desperate enough to bring in a colored player, but dammit, bring in a colored player. Try to get your hands on a Josh Gibson, a Satchel Paige, an Oscar Charleston. And this is where the Negro race gets on my nerves—because they’re screaming, Hallelujah! and running in droves to see a rookie play with a team so mediocre they end up having to name him Rookie of the Year when he barely made it into the Kansas City Monarchs (don’t take my word, read the papers), and I guess that’s why he’s acting like the Negro leagues didn’t exist for him. Rickey was his Savior. But the fans know better, especially the colored fans, and still they’re killing themselves to see Robinson at first base.

If they’re so anxious to see colored and white as teammates, all they have to do is keep on doing what they’ve been doing—going to the Negro games cause The Star Spangled Banner is played to the tune of a cash register and with gate receipts as high as they’ve been, the Negro owners could have pressed for a whole team entering the major leagues. And like I said, when you love the game, you love the game. And don’t tell me some of these smart white boys coming up wouldn’t have tried out for a place on one of the best teams in the major league. They’d be hungry and ambitious enough to know that they couldn’t call themselves a real pitcher until they took the crown from Satchel Paige. And then all these folks yelling, Hallelujah, would have had their eyeful of integration; but there would have been some colored people owning teams and colored people managing teams and colored people coaching teams. And yeah out on that field—but above all, in the owner’s box—would have been colored and white together—the American way.

It’s not gonna happen now. The best I can see for baseball is the same old way. The Rickeys of the world calling the shots because a hundred Jackie Robinsons isn’t gonna really integrate baseball and baseball is not going to help integrate America. Having Jackie Robinson out there with Pee Wee Reese is the same as having my mother and Mrs. Van Morrison’s maid trading gossip in the back kitchen. We all ate together—Marie, her brother, and Bella—but that wasn’t bringing about no real change because Mrs. Van Morrison’s neighbors wouldn’t dream of eating with her, while Mr. Van Morrison wasn’t about to sit in anybody’s boardroom. And until that happens, real power getting shared at the top, nothing but a game of smoke and mirrors is going on at the bottom.

I know my position about that Second Coming out at Ebbets Field doesn’t sit well with most people, but I call. ’em as I see ’em. And if you’ve got a problem with how I feel, well, there are other cafes. It’s never been my ambition to win a popularity contest. If it had been, I wouldn’t have married a woman even I have a hard time liking. (I told you I’d be getting to you, darling.) But liking Nadine has nothing to do with the fact that these have been twelve wonderful years.

We’re the right kind of fit, me and my woman. I can talk a blue streak and I believe that she hasn’t strung more than six sentences together in her whole life. Nadine doesn’t have to go on and on about anything. She times what she has to say and makes those one or two words count. I’d get plenty of care packages while I was overseas, but short short letters. Some of the guys got mail from their girlfriends and wives that it would take ’em a whole hour to read, telling them everything Aunt Tessie, Aunt Muriel, Cousin Joe was saying, describing how the snow looked outside the window, what the dog was doing—that kind of stuff—along with the usual how-much-I-miss-and-love-you’s. And even those women who weren’t too flowery with the words would fill up the page with x’s and hearts. I dreaded mail call cause it meant I was going to get ribbed. Deenie doesn’t waste words and so she wasn’t gonna waste paper. My letters came in these little thumbnail envelopes that weren’t much bigger than the stamp. How the guys would laugh. But like I said, she has perfect timing. And going into the third year of my stint in the navy, when I didn’t think none of us were gonna survive now that we were winning the war against the Japanese, and my nerves were wound so tight I feared popping loose like a lot of good men around me, I got this one-line letter: If you don’t make it home, I’m marrying the butcher. Love, Nadine.

I knew she wasn’t kidding. My wife doesn’t kid. There was no way to imagine her smiling as she wrote that letter, because Deenie rarely smiles. It was one of the hardest things I had to get used to when I first met her. She looked like an African goddess, plunked right down on the third row of bleachers at a Brooklyn Eagles game. A full, round face holding an even rounder set of eyes, all of it as dark as that gorgeous unruly hair. She had it in one thick crown of braids that circled her head. When my eyes moved down, the scenery got even better: one of those gazelle necks, a compact chest, an invisible waist, and then what can only be described as a Bantu butt. I can’t remember anything about her legs or the turn of her ankles; my journey ended at that butt. Only a fool keeps on traveling when the road’s brought him to paradise.

I did a lot of dreaming between the fifth and sixth innings. You do a lot of dreaming when a face and body like that is sharing the same plank of wood only ten feet to your right. Luck was with me and the Eagles were in fine form, sending them long and deep into left field, giving me plenty of reason to turn my head in her direction and reassure myself that no, I wasn’t imagining it, those lips do look like that, those eyes do look like that, and yes, the butt was still there. I did think it peculiar she was watching the game so quietly. I took it that she must be a Grays fan and it was certainly one of those days they must have wished they’d kept themselves in Pittsburgh. But even when they threatened to make a small rally at the top of the seventh with two men on and Josh Gibson, of all people, up to bat, she wasn’t smiling and cheering like the other Grays fans. Little for them to be happy about later: two ground fouls and a foul tip meant even the mighty Gibson could be put out.

That game was doomed to be over at the top of the ninth and I was wracking my brains over how I was going to meet this strange girl without appearing to be a masher. I’d already made sure there was no wedding ring, and surprisingly she must have come to the ballpark alone. A kid no more than thirteen was on her right and the fella in the plaid suit on her left was pushing seventy. And if it turned out she did happen to be into geriatric papas, I wouldn’t have no problems beating him up. And I was even willing to tie one hand behind my back to make it a fair fight. But Mr. Plaid Suit went on about his business and I was left to follow her at a distance as the crowd made its way out of the park.

Tall as she was, with the pink ribbons in her straw hat and the wind fluttering the pink swiss dots in that voile dress, she was easy to follow. I had to hold myself back from grabbing each fella by the scruff of the neck who had the nerve to turn his head and watch her as she passed. One jerk almost walked right into a pole and I couldn’t resist a snide Good for you, even though he was no more guilty than me of absolute awe over the motions of that unbelievable rear end. No idea that kept popping into my head for introducing myself would work if this was a nice girl. Nice girls who looked like that had heard it all before and weren’t about to take the bait from some strange man. And how I wanted her to be a nice girl—because I had made up my mind to follow those swiss dots out of the ballpark, onto the elevated train over the East River, and even up into the Bronx if need be. And when you’re from Brooklyn, that’s the same thing as committing yourself to the ends of the earth.

She stopped at a peddler’s to buy a raspberry ice. I hate ices; they break me out in hives, which has little to do with the fact that I stopped and bought one too. Only three feet away now; my hands were shaking and my heart was pounding so fast I couldn’t hear the traffic on the street. And something told me then, in that way you just know things, that if I didn’t make my move at that very moment I would lose her. I cursed myself for all the naps I’d taken during elocution classes. Mrs. Fitzpatrick had warned me I would rue the day when I sneered at learning to round my vowels properly. I could have been standing there right now, putting her under my spell, as I talked about the wonders of raspberry ice, delving into the origin of raspberries; the origin of ice in general; the origin of summer, which made the need for ices all so possible and her obvious delight in them all so understandable. Nothing directed at her specific person more closely than that, not even turning my head her way—it would label me a masher—but just standing there, you know, elocuting out into the air, would be enough to get her attention, dammit.

My throat was so clogged up I wouldn’t have made it through all of that anyway, and she was about to walk off from the peddler’s cart. One run behind at the bottom of the ninth, so you make an all-or-nothing play for the home team. When this girl walked out of my life, what on earth was I going to do with this melting raspberry ice? Since I knew the answer was Absolutely nothing, I dumped it right down her back. She spun around and called me a clumsy fool. I smiled broadly and agreed with her. Then she smacked me in the head with her straw purse. The courtship was on.

My first big letdown came when I found that she didn’t care much for the movies. I really didn’t either, but I kept looking for ways to get her alone in the dark. And I’m a little ashamed to say that after discovering she was, indeed, a very nice girl it became exciting to try and make myself her one exception. I think that’s why it took me weeks to realize that Nadine wasn’t much of a talker. All of my conversations had one slant, which only required a firm no from her. And even after I’d given up and moved on to other subjects, the sound of my own voice was so pleasing to me I only needed one or two sentences from her to let me catch my breath before I started off again. But the problem was that when I came to the real amusing parts of my life’s story, she didn’t laugh. And I can remember pausing—to let her laugh. I remember the pauses getting longer and longer—to drop her a subtle hint or two. And longer and longer, until I worried that she might be retarded.

—You don’t laugh much, I finally ventured.

—I laugh all the time, she said.

But she was just being mean, because she didn’t. And I knew it wasn’t me; I’m a very captivating fella. And besides, what about all those times at Coney Island?

We practically lived at Steeplechase Park. Nadine was from the Sea Islands and she’d always agree to see me if I offered to take her out by any kind of water. One of the nice things about Brooklyn in those days was that I had a lot to choose from. When my money was tight we’d promenade across the Brooklyn Bridge, pretzels for me, a fruit ice for her. And if I was flush, Sunday suppers at the old Iron Pier on Brighton Beach. Coney Island was the best cause there was always something to do there if you had a little or a lot. And Nadine didn’t much care as long as she could smell or glimpse the water. Seeing how she grew up on an island, it was odd she didn’t know how to swim, and I’d have the hardest time just getting her to wade near the edge of the beach. She’d spend hours on the boardwalk, though, and that’s how I learned she rarely laughed at anything—it wasn’t me.

Steeplechase Park had a bit of amusement for just about everyone’s taste—except Nadine’s. Did she want a fast and furious ride? we could get on the steeplechase horses; she wanted slow? we could get on the carousel. She wanted high and exciting? the roller coaster; high and soothing? the Ferris wheel. The human pool table and two-headed baby for the bizarre, the strolling minstrels for the ordinary. If she liked dark, loud, and scary, there was the Fun House. If she wanted dark, quiet, and romantic, there was the Tunnel of Love; but I already knew not to bother wasting a ticket with this stone-faced girl on that one. Why on earth did she always agree to come when nothing about it pleased her?

—I don’t know what you’re talking about. I enjoy myself every time we’re here.

—Nadine, you haven’t smiled all afternoon.

—But what does that have to do with being pleased?

At home I had a whole notepad filled with columns of female names, and at least two of them were still speaking to me. I didn’t need to be spending my time with this nut case. Unrequited lust can only carry you so far. What does that have to do with being pleased? Just that it’s something everyone in the whole universe understands—like slitting your throat with a knife. Go to Upper Borneo and smile; they’ll say, He’s happy. Go there and slit your throat; they’ll say, He’s dead. It is basic. It is simple. And I was out $2.15 while this dimwit wouldn’t even ride the bumper cars with me because it was too tight a fit. But Nadine was still leaning against the boardwalk railing—on her third cherry ice—patiently waiting for me to answer. Like I was the dimwit.

—I’m more than my body, she finally said.

Now there was a piece of wisdom. She certainly was. She was also that vast empty prairie between her ears. I had been more considerate to this girl than to a dozen of the others rolled up together and had gotten no appreciation. No effort on her part. Wronged and wounded, that was me. Misused. Abused (yeah, I could feel the blues coming on). And with me definitely the offended party in all of this, why was I also feeling just a tiny bit guilty?

—Nadine, I am deeply hurt by what you’re implying. I have only thought of you as a lady. And I have never, never had anything but the most honorable intentions in mind.

—Good, she said. Then I accept.

—You accept what?

A man palsied with fear is an awful sight. The sea breezes were chilling the circles of sweat spreading under the armpits of my shirt. My mind went totally blank except for the message my throbbing temples sent racing across it: Please, God, oh, God, no, God, please. I didn’t mean what she thought I meant and if she means what I think she means, I need a way to find out if that’s what’s really happened, and if that’s what’s really happened, then I’ll have to fight my way out of it, yes, there must be some way I can get out of it; but these next few minutes are going to be the worst of my life (I had yet to meet the Japanese) and what’s the most that she could do, huh? what’s the most? hit me? she’s done that before; call me a slimy double-dealer? well, let her say it; cry and wail? well, let her cry; the cops’ll come by, I’ll get arrested, but then I’m only sentenced to thirty days.

I summoned up the courage to stare her down. I was going to the slammer like a man. I saw the same set face. The same quiet attention to her cherry ice. But looking deep into her eyes, I saw that she was laughing. Down at the bottom of those dark orbs, she was bent over double and howling. She laughed and laughed and laughed.

—I’ve never seen a man more scared.

To put it mildly, I was crushed. And, taking pity on me, she tried her best to stop. Calmly finishing her ice, she disposed of the paper cone in the trash. I saw that a giggle would burst through from the bottom of her eyes every now and then, but she was getting herself under control. As angry as I was with her, I knew she’d only gotten even.

—Let’s do the Helter-Skelter now, she said.

She held out her hand to me. I took it. And to this day, I’ve never let it go.

Sure, she taught me a lesson, and a whole different way of looking at her—and women—which doesn’t negate the fact that my wife is still a little strange. While most of what happens in life is below the surface, other people do come up for air and translate their feelings for the general population now and then. Nadine doesn’t bother. You figure her out or leave her alone. Falling in love with her, there was no question that she was going to be a part of my life, but if I could have gotten a handle on her at times I’d probably have liked her more. I knew why I finally married her; I just didn’t know why she married me.

I wasn’t what you’d call promising material. My job as an indoor aviator at the St. George Hotel was about what Miss Fitzpatrick had predicted for me: We are on the verge of unimaginable changes in this country. There are several men in your race who will rise to the top. You won’t be one of them. My elevator only ran between the lobby and tenth floor. The penthouse elevator was in the rear, and true to her words, I didn’t stay long enough to be promoted to that. After marrying Nadine, I quit to become a Fuller Brush man. I bought into all of their flimflam about early retirement and Cadillac sedans because I knew I could talk to anyone about anything. And a little common sense meant that you started with the dirtiest house on the block and you’re sure of a sale to build on when you got to the next house. Nadine had told me that it would be smarter to work it the other way around. But who was listening to her? She was too mean to even buy from me when I was practicing my sales pitch.

War broke out in Europe and saved us both from starvation. It’s odd how events can be going on three, four thousand miles from you, deciding your fate on the very ground you stand on, but the dominoes taking as long as they do to reach home, you never make the connection. I can vaguely remember reading in the early part of ’36 that German troops had reclaimed some of their land on the west bank of the Rhine. Like most people, I scanned the headlines before going on to the sports page. And since I always picked up the afternoon paper to read while I took a bite of lunch between rounds with my suitcase and brushes, I’m sure I glanced right over the news that six years later I was being called up to ship out from Camp Smalls and head to the Pacific.

Nobody missed the meaning of Pearl Harbor. Those headlines were three inches tall and they yelled that the dominoes had finally come home. I was proud to be assigned to the messmen’s branch because the talk at Camp Smalls was all about Dorie Miller, another messman, third class, on the USS Arizona, who had carried his captain and other wounded men to safety before manning a machine gun and shooting down six enemy planes at Pearl Harbor. The navy gave him credit for four planes. The newspapers gave him credit for nothing. No surprise to me. I had already learned from baseball who does and doesn’t exist when it comes to my country needing heroes. Dorie Miller was the Satchel Paige of the war in the Pacific. But we all knew his name, which is what really counted, since we were the ones who were being sent over there to face those same maniacs.

We weren’t getting into Tokyo

I told Nadine I didn’t know when I would be back. But I told her I would miss her dearly, think of her every moment, and carry her picture next to my heart. She told me nothing. I promised I would write every chance I got. I promised that my wedding vows would remain as sacred as the day I made them. No shore leave. No women. No wine. No song. She called me a liar—and a pretty lousy poet. Then I stopped all that crap and told her the truth: I knew this would be the most exciting thing to ever happen in my life. And that was when she finally told me that she loved me.

We weren’t getting into Tokyo

—Who you gonna kill?

—We’re gonna kill Japs!

—Louder

—Japs! Japs!

—Louder

—Japs! Japs!

—Who you gonna fuck?

—We’re gonna fuck Japs!

—Louder

The first thing you learn in basic training is to march in time. It makes no difference if you’re headed for the cockpit of a plane or the cramped engine room of a cruiser. Navy doctors. Navy dentists. Painters. Metal-smiths. Warrant officers assigned to intelligence, who would spend the war at the Navy Department in their dress whites, learned to march in time. Though there wasn’t anybody at Camp Smalls slated for those jobs when I was called up. I marched beside many Fisk and Howard men and a few Yalies too, but they were going to be regular seamen or steward’s mates just like me. Those types mostly hung together and I didn’t like ’em cause they beefed too much. They came in acting like Jim Crow was something new, like they got drafted from Mars somewhere. They had been living with segregation, and so how did they figure the navy expected them to die without it?

If anything, I’m a realist. It was the spring of 1942 and America was what it was. Cockeyed and mixed-up, new and still growing, with all its faults, I had no place else to call home. And the law was the law. I could either learn to bake bread and peel potatoes or spend the summer of ’42 in jail. I opted not to go to jail and ended up spending the summer on Guadalcanal. And that’s where I discovered that Japan was what it was.

We weren’t getting into Tokyo

From the moment my left foot sank into the level sands of that calm beach near Lunga Point (and I remember it was my left foot because the right was bracing me in the supply boat), I stopped calling those people Japs. There wasn’t any fighting that day. And my specific job was only to haul supplies through the coconut groves and set up base. But swinging my right foot out of that boat was to land me at war in the entire Pacific.

No vet ever says he went to war in the Gilbert Islands. He might have fought only on those islands, at Makin or at Tarawa, but he went to war in the Pacific. Cause any man who’s ever been at war will tell you, you can feel everything that happens on the earth where you are. It’s one of the shittiest feelings you can imagine, the way it cakes around the soles of your boots as you first haul ass on up that beach toward those muddy coconut groves, ignoring your stinking sweat as you keep falling and dying at that very moment twenty-five miles away in Tugali, a thousand miles away in New Guinea. For the next three years me, the Brits, the Aussies, the Dutch, and the Filipinos were at war in the Pacific against the Japanese—and only the Japanese—

We weren’t getting into Tokyo

—as inch by inch, island by island, we were pushing them back. And they told me I was on the winning side, long before the A-bomb was dropped. But believe me, I understand about that bomb. Cause even with every Medal of Honor they gave me, every victory broadcast, every assembly called to hear the latest greetings from my supreme commander, I wasn’t gonna win a war from the sea or in the air, I had to win it on land—

We weren’t getting into Tokyo

—the enemy’s land.

I don’t expect my unborn children to forgive me. But they have to understand how beautiful it was. The end of the world is blue. And it wasn’t about saving my life; I was willing to give that up for them—not my country, them. Without them I knew there would be no America. But when the sun rises at the end of the world, the sky and the sea are so blue they only deepen to swallow those streaks of red-gold. Yeah, I know I’ll be judged a coward. But I couldn’t march into Tokyo. I feared for my immortal soul.

They had taken Guadalcanal. I was taking it back. I was trained to kill. They were trained to kill. And I fought them like a man. They came at me wading across the Ilu River with rifles. I cut them down with my own. And they kept coming. I cut them down with machine guns. And they kept coming. I finally stopped them with antitank canisters from guns meant to rip open steel. Their bodies covered the sandy banks of the Ilu; the treads of my advancing tanks gummed up with their flesh as I felt their heads popping under me like scattered coconuts. They lost Guadalcanal—fair and square—but for six months they still kept coming. I blew them back up into the jungles; I drowned them in Ironbottom Sound. What kind of people were these?

.