Tambourines to Glory (3 page)

T
he next morning, which was a blue Monday, when Laura could hardly scrape together enough change to combinate a number and put a dime on the lead, Essie said as she washed the percolator top, “I prayed again this morning for what we was talking about last night.”

Laura, who had left her bed unmade down the hall in Number 7 to tap on Essie’s door in the hope of a hot cup of coffee, looked puzzled. “What?”

“That church we gonna start,” said Essie. “I believe God answers prayer. In fact, that church is started.”

“Started? Where?”

“Right here in this room with you and me.”

“Then lemme pass the collection plate,” said Laura, “because
I dreamed about fish last night—782—and that is a good number to play. Here, put some change in this saucer, and I’ll put the number in for you, too.”

“I said I was
praying
, Laura, not playing. If we’re gonna save souls, have I got to save you from sin first?”

“Oh, you talking about starting a church?” said Laura, her mind clearing of sleep a little. “Well, as soon as the weather warms up a bit, we’ll buy a Bible and a tambourine and plant our feet on the rock of 126th and Lenox and start. But right now, I want me at least forty-five cents to work on these numbers. Suppose
fish
jumps out today? If it did, and I didn’t catch it, I sure would be mad. Girl, pour me one little drop more of that coffee. If I could just find that old Negro who’s liking me so much, so he says, I might could maybe get a dollar or two. But he never does come by here on Monday.”

“Laura, you oughtn’t to be encouraging that married man to be laying up with you.”

“He encourages his self,” yawned Laura. “Can I help it if I appeal to him whenever he can get out of his wife’s sight? The Lord give me my smooth brown body, girl, and I ain’t one to let it go to waste. Excuse me, I’m gonna comb my hair and go downstairs and put these numbers in. A small hit’s better than none. But I sure hate to be so poor! Maybe that Chinese that winked at me from behind the lunch counter will feel in a lending mood this morning.”

“A Christian woman taking up with a heathen,” said Essie.

“On a blue Monday morning I would take up with a dog,” said Laura, “if the dog said, ‘Baby, how about a drink?’ Soon as this coffee dies down, I’m gonna need something a little stronger.”

Laura’s carpet slippers heel-flapped their way down the hall. All the nearby kitchenettes were quiet. Everybody on that floor
except these two women had gone to work. Essie sat down to think, and sat a long while, which was what she liked to do—just sit. Ten o’clock, eleven o’clock, noon. But today, she kept seeing in her mind’s eye herself singing to more and more people on a corner, then in a gospel tent, then in a church, and people weeping and shouting and fainting and coming to Jesus because of her songs, and a railroad ticket, yellow and very long, that she was folding and putting into a letter and sending to her daughter in Richmond writing, “Honey, baby, daughter, child, come to your mother,” and she was signing the letter with her own name,
Essie
. And suddenly she was shouting all alone by herself, “Thank you, God! Thank God! Thank God!”

Then she got up and started sweeping the floor, and imagined it was the living room of a nice apartment, and she was getting ready for Marietta to arrive. She looked out her rear window three stories down into a courtyard full of beer cans and sacks of garbage and saw, instead, a pretty view of a park—because where she lived now with her daughter was way up on the hill and there were trees outside the apartment windows. “It’s all because of You, Lord,” she said, “and because I am walking with God. Yes!” And she began to sing:

Broom in hand, she stopped. “I wonder if that wine-head of a Laura has sure enough converted me? Thank God, I see some kind of light right now!

“Sing it, girl,” cried Laura, breezing past in the hall to find the Chinese counterman in the Japanese restaurant, her numbers writer, and somebody on the corner to buy her a bottle of wine.

Essie sat down again in her chair, filling it amply, and again her mind was sort of empty as it usually was. But the sun came in bright at the window, brighter than the sun had been for many months. It was spring. Vaguely Essie thought, I’ll raise the window in a minute. But she sat a long, long time before she did raise the window. Essie’s life had been full of long, long, very long pauses.

VISIONS OF A ROCK

“W
ell, it did not hit,” said Laura, “no parts of it. The number was 413—so I did not catch the lead, I did not catch the second, and I had no change to put on the third. That Chinese man did not feel so well today. What did you do all afternoon?”

Essie had a report to make. “I priced a Bible.”

“Have I done dreamed up something that you are really taking serious,” said Laura, “about this church?”

“Been passing the store for months and just never noticed,” said Essie, “that stuck back up there in the window of that furniture household shop, midst stoves, hassocks, floor lamps, and overstuffed chairs, is a great big Bible leaning up against a sign that says: G
OLD-EDGED
B
IBLE ON
I
NSTALLMENT
P
LAN
—
Two
Dollars Down, Two Dollars a Month
. That Bible costs eighteen-fifty.”

“Where’s it at?” asked Laura.

“Bernstein’s,” said Essie. “Big beautiful gold-lettered Bible. We might as well buy a big Bible.”

“I agree,” said Laura. “If I hit tomorrow, I’ll put down the first payment.”

“No,” said Essie. “Let’s start this thing right. When my Welfare check comes, I’ll put down a payment. But let’s not use no numbers money to found our church.”

“You are getting holier-than-thou already,” said Laura. “Girl, I believe I’ll go take a little nap before nightfall. Old daddy-boy-baby might come by to keep me awake after dark. Dig you remotely, doll. So long!”

Concerning Laura, “She’s got a fine brown frame,” observed the men in the block. “A hefty hussy,” said the women, “more well-built than plump, but there’s enough of her.” From behind, young boys might whistle, “Whee-ooo-oo-o!” But if Laura turned around they saw she could be their mother, but a good-looking mother for true. When Laura got dressed up, her exterior decorations hung well. Sometimes emerging from the Rabbit Warren with her finery on, Laura looked good. Well ahead of her came her breasts, natural—like singers’ voices in the pre-microphone days, projecting without artificial aid—colloquially termed by the local Lotharios
headlights, forty-fours, easy riders, daily doubles, Maes
, meaning West. Concerning her legs, climbing stairs had kept them sturdy, dancing kept them graceful, pride kept them in runless stockings chosen to match her cocoa skin. Laura would buy stockings when she couldn’t pay her rent. If a man said something nice about her legs on the subway, she
would pull her dress down. Otherwise when seated she was careless. Guile, not modesty, generally prevailed.

Concerning the ancient building where Laura and Essie lived, well, if you didn’t see all those names under the different bells, you wouldn’t believe so many people lived there: B. Jenkins, Sarah Butler, J. T. K. Washington, Ben Wade, Mrs. E. B. Johnson (which was Essie), Katie Huff, Jefferson Lord, Jr., Mr. and Mrs. Titter, Sisseretta Smith, Ed Givens, Laura Wright Reed (which was Laura), and so on and on into the dozens and dozens, sometimes three or four people listed in the same room. It was an old apartment house in which a door opening onto the central hall had been cut directly into every room, and inner communicating doors sealed. Then each room no matter how small had been made into a kitchenette with a gas burner (fire laws notwithstanding) plus a sink installed in a corner for washing both face and feet, pots and privates, clothes, cutlery, dogs and dishes. The building had a name, the Marquette, but the neighborhood called it the
Rabbit Warren
, for short just the
Rabbit
.

Late that afternoon in the Rabbit, through the still-open window facing the areaway, Essie could hear kids coming home from school, romping and playing on other floors in rooms where parents had not yet come home from work. Alone, youngsters could make as much noise as they wished. Sometimes they made plenty. Essie did not mind. She kept thinking of her own child as still a little playful girl—only her daughter
couldn’t
be like that any more. Marietta was sixteen. Essie had not seen her for four years, but Grandma had sent her a picture when the girl came out of junior high school, a golden-faced kid, all in white looking mighty pretty. Grandma kept that child looking washed and clean all the time.

She must be a church girl, thought Essie, because them people are religious down South. Well, when Marietta gets here, she will find me religious, too. Never was much of a sinner, nohow. I can’t go for sin like Laura. Fast life tires me out.

Essie got up to pull down the window, since the sunset was chilly. She put on her coat, a shapeless, heavy old black coat, and sat down again. From the pocket of her coat she took a long pearlhandled knife, pressed a little button in its side and a thin sharp blade shot out. With the blade she began to clean her fingernails—which was about the only use she had ever had for that knife, although Essie carried it in her pocket when she went out, for protection, she said, against robberies and rapes and suchlike calamities. But nobody had ever even tried to snatch Essie’s pocketbook, let alone otherwise accost her rather corpulent person.

Once in a while a man leaning on a stoop might say, “Big mama, you look good to me.” But none had as yet tried to drag her into a hallway to rob her of her virtue, or pull her down a janitor’s steps into a furnace room—where she had heard tell many a good woman had surrendered to males unknown. Had any man laid hands on her, “I have my knife,” said Essie, as she used it to clean her fingernails.

W
hen Essie had finished, she clicked the blade back in place, put her protector in her coat pocket, and sat for a long spell in the gathering dusk before she got up to turn on the light, wash the rice, and start to cook herself some supper. Might be maybe Laura would add something to the pot, and they would eat together. It was rather early in the week for Laura’s Old Man to be coming by.

I need some rock on which to stand
, suddenly thought Essie leaning over the stove. That Laura’s got several rocks of an earthly nature on which she leans, men, numbers, likker, even if they do slip out from under her sometimes. While me, I just set, and set, and set. “But now I see me a rock, and that rock is Jesus!” cried Essie aloud.

Suddenly she was startled that her thoughts had become words rocking about the room, words spoken so strongly and with so much conviction that she almost dropped the spoon with which she stirred the rice.

Then much more quietly and quite aware of the fact that she was
talking
, not merely thinking, “A Rock,” she cried, “I visions me a Rock.”

NATURALLY WEAK

“O
ld raccoon, you,” cried Laura, “if you can’t bring me nothing, then don’t come by here.” Essie heard her friend’s voice all the way up the hall. “Just stay home, Negro!”

“So you want me to stay home, huh?” growled the man.

His walking papers, Essie thought. But they don’t have to let the world know every time they fall out. Some people are too broadcast.

“I can’t come handing you out money every time I look in your face,” barked the old raccoon.

“I know somebody who can,” cried Laura. “And he’s a young man, too.”

Laura’s lying, thought Essie. Laura gives that young man money herself every time her Welfare check comes. Uly do not
give her a thing but a hard row to go. Laura is just trying to collect from that old man to
keep
that young man on her string. That Laura, mused Essie as she cut a great big piece of Cushman’s cake to go with her third cup of tea. Laura’s hungry, that I know, and since that old man did not bring no change with him, this being Monday, I know she just wants to get rid of him quick so she can come on in here and eat. Payday, he’ll be welcome back.