Harlem Hit & Run Read online

  “The medical examiner is taking her now. I’ll call you later.”

  It didn’t take long to tell the officer almost everything I knew. She probed and asked the right questions and took me back to what I was watching from my window when Cecelia was hit. I sketched a kind of storyboard for her with arrows pointing to where the car could have come from and where it went. What I didn’t do was tell her about the pictures. They were redundant anyway because what they showed was the car and the police already had the car. And I didn’t want to risk having the pictures called evidence so I wouldn’t be able to publish them on the front page of the paper.

  The paper!

  Damn. I had forgotten all about my inheritance while I was running around outside, and I could hear the voices of my father and my grandfather in my head. They were both more than capable of haunting a sister.

  C H A P T E R • 4

  * * *

  I walked back from the precinct to 125th Street where it was even more crowded than usual with the people rushing up to learn whether it was one of theirs who had died that morning. Once they were reassured, they settled down into conversation.

  I took a pencil from the twist of my hair and took out my notebook and my mirror. I needed to make sure I hadn’t messed up the “do” because, even though I was downplaying the movie star bit, I was still vain enough to care. Plus, presentation helps Harlem take me seriously and I needed to do some reporting.

  What I heard was that we were all outraged, shit is out of control and, although no one saw the driver, everyone had a theory. New Yorkers will make up a story rather than send you away empty-handed. I wrote down why people thought she might have been hit on purpose or why she was so careless, and occasionally some quote they had been meaning to get into the newspaper about the ongoing plot against us.

  A vision emerged moving through them from the direction of the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building. It was Cecelia’s mother Elizabeth Miller. She leaned heavily against the support of Marcus Bell, dapper as ever, wearing a fedora, his navy suit hanging loose on his lanky frame. She kept dipping, and the cane which was usually enough to keep her moving through Harlem’s streets, kind of dragged along.

  There was a terrible moment when she walked up to the roped-off accident scene and stood frozen at the place where her daughter died, now empty. Mister Bell bent to gather her into an embrace and rocked with her long enough until they shimmered. I looked away to give them some privacy.

  When he released Mrs. Miller, Mr. Bell took a handkerchief from the pocket of his jacket and dabbed at her eyes and cheeks. Then he wiped his own face. “I’ll be calling you baby,” he said, and he placed her gently into a police car.

  Reverend Garrison walked up beside me.

  “It is inconceivable she could be lying there dead in the street,” he said. “Even after having seen her, I still cannot believe it.”

  “I’m so sorry, Gary,” I said. “I saw it from the window. It was terrible.”

  “How could such a thing happen?” he asked. It was the age-old question. But the reverend didn’t have an answer yet the morning his girl was lying dead in the street.

  We walked together to the police car and I put my hand on the window.

  “I have Cecelia’s bag,” I said and handed it in to her mother. “Is there anything you need? Can I help you do anything? Should I call someone?” They were all good questions and they sounded absurd and inadequate. She reached out and held my hand in both of hers.

  “No, dear. Thank you, Pearl. No.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “I know you are,” she said and let my hand go to take the hand Gary offered.

  He was perfectly creased, his suit and shirt shades of gray. His yellow bow tie was one startling departure from gray decorum and the pointed van dyke beard a second. I hate those little beards.

  She said, “What are we going to do Gary? What will we do without her?”

  She broke my heart. But, I stepped back to what I determined was a respectful distance while the reverend offered the platitudes of devotion and consolation his tribe dispenses at those times. I took a picture of them with Karl’s little compact camera. Being a reporter is no joke.

  When the police car drove Mrs. Miller away, Gary and I walked over to Mister Bell.

  His skin was dark and rich. And his face was full of horrible grief.

  “Mister Bell,” I said, “I’m so sorry. You were probably the last person to spend time with Cecelia. She had oranges in a bag. She must have bought them from you at the bookstore this morning.”

  “Yes. She bought two oranges from me. Always does in the morning. Always did. Loved oranges since she was a little girl.”

  “Can you tell me anything else I can use for the story I’m writing?”

  “Not today, Pearl. Not now.” He was close enough for me to smell the grassy smoke smell of Vetiver, same as Daddy, his friend, always wore. “And not here.”

  Gary interrupted. “If you witnessed something, you must tell it.”

  “I didn’t see doodley squat,” Mr. Bell said. “Not doodley I’m going to tell you.”

  “That’s not fair,” Gary said. “Especially not now. You know it’s not fair.”

  “I know you’re a selfish son of a bitch.”

  “We should be able to share what we loved about her. She wouldn’t want us to be fighting,” Gary said.

  “It’s a little late for you to be worrying about Cecelia. And I don’t think you know what she would want,” Mister Bell said. “Or care.”

  Gary said, “The great tragedy is that we will not now be able to get to the truth behind the lies and innuendo surrounding Cecelia’s relationship with the bank and with the people who love her.”

  Mister Bell’s voice was a croak, “No. The great tragedy is Cecelia is dead. This is not about you.”

  Reverend Gary shifted back and forth on his wingtips, and for a minute it looked like he was going to cry. It was unsettling and unexpected. Then he turned around and walked away, uncharacteristically sunken in the perfect fit of his beautiful grey chalk stripes. His briefcase hung from one hand and the perfect pocket handkerchief in the other hand was seemingly being used for more than decoration.

  “What was that about? Another story for the paper?”

  “I’ve got nothing for you now,” Mister Bell said. And he turned away.

  “I saw it from the window,” I told him. “And I’m not convinced the car didn’t hit her on purpose.”

  He turned back to me. Paused. Then he turned again. I caught up and walked away with him and only glanced up at the open window where my responsibility was waiting.

  C H A P T E R • 5

  * * *

  I followed Mister Bell through the walls of vendors standing close, their tables almost touching, taking up most of the sidewalk space on 125th Street, creating a bazaar.

  On the table in front of his bookstore, red, black and green liberation flags flapped on little sticks among the sale books and videocassettes placed to lure the sidewalk traffic inside. A campaign poster for the incumbent in last season’s Democratic primary was incongruous beside the perennial Marcus Garvey poster propped up on the second table behind an inventory that included apples and oranges (5/$1) and handful bags of nuts and raisins ($1).

  His bookstore was one of the storefronts at the base of the Theresa Hotel where it moved when the State Office Building took its catty-corner site on Seventh Avenue.

  It’s the Speakers Corner, the African Square, where Malcolm, Fidel, our local Kenyatta and President Nelson Mandela have come and gone. Gil Scott-Heron offered “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” as part of the morning’s soundtrack.

  Mister Bell made his way slowly through the small crowd who hover around his store like tick birds at some Serengeti watering hole. They slapped his shoulder and murmured things I couldn’t hear before he escaped into his bookstore.

  “Pearl, I ain’t seen you in a minute,” one of
the crowd outside said to me. “I heard you was putting out your daddy’s paper since he passed.”

  My memory served up the name of a slight built man, to match with the familiar face. “Yes, Riley. Yes, I am. But I’m going back to California this weekend.”

  “I miss Charlie.”

  “Thank you. I miss him too.” And I did. At that moment, away from the office and the responsibility, I missed my father like a little girl.

  This was his world but I had a place in it we made together when I walked around Harlem with my hand in his hand.

  “Man, gimme some grapes,” a customer said, and the light caught his pinky ring as he peeled a five from a money clip.

  “He don’t sell grapes. Don’t you know there’s still a boycott?” another man told the customer.

  I recognized Joseph, another of my father’s cronies who he argued with while I listened and learned.

  “That ain’t got nothing to do with me. Give me an orange then.”

  After he made the sale, Joseph and I watched the customer navigate the crowded street.

  Joseph turned to me. “Pearl, you need to tell the story about this mess in the streets.”

  “Come on,” Riley said. “You know you shop out here.”

  “I do not,” Joseph said. “And this chaos makes it impossible for legitimate businesses to get the bank assistance and customers we need to exist.”

  “If the bank told you that lie, then why’d they give a loan to the white man and his franchise?” Riley asked.

  I pulled out my notebook. “Are any of those so-called legitimate businesses black?” I asked. “Because this street bazaar certainly is.”

  “Pearl, I see you’re taking notes,” Joseph continued. “I’m telling you. There are a lot of us, and there should be more. Especially in the second-floor offices and down the avenues.” He got louder. “No one but niggers would put up with this bullshit.”

  “What about the street vendors in Chinatown? And what about Washington Heights and Flushing?” I asked.

  Joseph said. “They own the inside business and the outside business.”

  “Okay. And who would the Journal reporters talk to for a bank story?” I asked.

  “Cecelia would have been good. She was a bank officer. But she’s gone,” Joseph said. “Reverend Gary is on the board. But he’s not going to talk to any reporters about anything but his self.”

  “You can mourn her,” said a woman standing at the edge of the group. “In fact, I’ll mourn her myself because nobody deserves to die in the street. But God don’t love ugly. She had the nerve to tell me the bank was not in the social work business when I applied for a business loan.”

  “Do you think it’s fair to take it personally?” I asked her. “A bank officer’s job is to say no sometimes.”

  “I’ve heard I could have got my loan if I’d had the right friends.”

  “Can you tell me who the Journal should talk to about the bank’s lending policies? The reporters don’t have to use the name.”

  “I’ll have to think about it.”

  When I went inside Freedom Books, Mister Bell wasn’t in front and I called to him at the door of his back-office sanctuary. He told me to wait and I sat down in the corner in the rocker where I always sat, surrounded by books from floor to ceiling on all sides, with the overflow spilling onto tables and stacks on the floor. But I remained poised at the edge of my seat, vigilant, to keep from losing myself in the warring upset and comfort of being in this familiar space with this man who reminded me so much of my father.

  When he came out, I stood up and asked him, “Do you need anything? Can I do something?”

  “There’s nothing I want that anybody can give me now,” he said.

  He waited for me to follow him and when we were in front of the bookstore, he hugged me and then started preaching.

  “Why don’t the Man stop people from speeding through here like fools? Because they are white people. They are running over the bridge, trying to get out of Harlem before they get caught in the dark. Like Night of the Living Dead.”

  I heard him behind me as I started back to the office. He was husky at first but then he pitched his voice to carry beyond the crowd and Taj Mahal singing “St. Kitts Woman” over the speakers.

  “Our women and children are on these streets.”

  C H A P T E R • 6

  * * *

  I stopped to watch a brother dancing alone in front of Bobby’s Happy House record store to Sam Cooke singing “Another Saturday Night.” But I only watched a few moves before I maneuvered through the folks coming and going to the places 125th Street, Main Street Harlem U.S.A., would take them. It offered a sensory overload. I took some notes because the details needed to be captured in my notebook.

  First sounds. I was aware of sounds landing—of the horns and the persistent beat from sidewalk boom boxes and radios in cars speeding across 125th Street to the bridge in the east. Offering a kind of background music on the street, Hammer told us “U Can’t Touch this” and Madonna was “Voguing.” But there were also the sounds of folks preaching on several sidewalk spaces.

  “Jesus was blacker than me. It’s in the Gospels. It says he was wooly-headed, as if burnt in a fire.” They were a men-only crowd I didn’t remember seeing the last time I was home. They were dressed for war, in boots and belts and crowns. They were shouting into microphones and videotaping themselves. They warned the brothers to go home because their wives were in bed with other men. They predicted the end of the world and called the shoppers “niggers” or “devils,” depending. Theirs was a spooky and deep theology they assaulted us with.

  “Something to read today?” The Jehovah’s Witnesses were still there, occasionally trying to interest one of the passersby in Awake or The Watchtower. But mostly they talked to each other—preaching to the choir.

  “My brother, read the good word. Minister Louis Farrakhan has said Allah made the black man. It was the white man who made the nigger.” The Muslims were a familiar presence, fishing for converts, clean in bow ties, hawking the Final Call and stopping anyone, especially men, to talk about it. They sell half a million copies and could not be distracted from their mission like some other newspaper people I know.

  I even pulled apart the smells: incense, aftershave, perfume, grilled meat and the exhaust from cars and trucks. It was an indulgence, since smells only figured in the rare newspaper piece about the sewage treatment plant or the herds of diesel buses.

  C H A P T E R • 7

  * * *

  When I got back to the office, the staff was in the middle of production day and Samantha was action central, answering phones and collecting envelopes.

  I had finished my short publisher’s letter promising a series about the vendors and was pulling together the details of my hit-and-run story when Sam announced on the intercom, “There’s someone to see you, Boss.”

  Boss. I was getting a lot of that sarcastic attitude. But when I got to the front office, I discovered Samantha was announcing Mister Bell. I didn’t expect him, and I talked to him as I walked to him.

  “I’m surprised, Mister Bell. Please come in. I hope this means there is something I can do.”

  I got too close and he backed away.

  “Yes.”

  Samantha wasn’t even pretending not to listen.

  He looked at her. “I have a story for the paper.” And he motioned toward the office.

  When we were behind the door, he pulled a large manila folder from a vinyl shoulder bag and shuffled through the contents and handed me several sheets.

  “Ceel left me files,” he said. “She said she’d get back to me about what she was going to do about them.”

  I skimmed and flipped the pages. “This is a list of withdrawals from Independence National,” I said. “And something called a National Bid List of banks that were invited to buy First. What does it mean?”

  His eyes were red-rimmed and they never left mine.

  “I
t’s those hand-picked Negroes we need to watch out for. They’re the thin brown line that’s supposed to keep us from acting up. In slavery days, they called such ones overseers. The white man don’t even have to tell those Negroes nothing. They think of the shit all by themselves by now. They got ’em thinking community and culture isn’t important. That we don’t need to know who we are.”

  “But I’m not inclined to piss these people off,” I said. I touched the names on the first page in the too many places that made my point.

  “They’re counting on scaring you off,” he said. “Cecelia didn’t get a chance to say so, but she must have wanted to alert the rest of us that these people didn’t trust the bank anymore and were running away from it.”

  “We don’t have time to do the kind of reporting we need to do to run this before our deadline in a couple of hours.”

  “Trust me.”

  “You’re kidding. Right?” I flipped to a new page in my notebook. “Did you give this to the News?”

  “Not yet. But I will if you don’t want it. You know this is not something Cecelia just decided to do this morning. Somebody’s going to get a helluva story.”

  His voice broke and I waited.

  “Just now, walking in the street where she died, I felt them moving in on me with their bosoms offering comfort and their faces full of pity. It felt like a suffocation. This is something I can do.”

  “And this is something we can do. Thank you. But I still have to make those calls.”

  “Do what you have to do,” he said, and he handed me another sheet of paper. “And I pulled this out so you don’t miss it.”

  I walked him out, but he turned back. The pause was a crowded place. I could see it in his eyes. “You say someone might have hit her on purpose. If it’s true, it’s because of this. Be careful. It could be dangerous.”

  “I’ll be okay,” I told him.

  “I feel like I should have protected her,” he said. “When Ceel was a little girl, Elizabeth always counted on me to do that. But this time I didn’t know from what.”