Mama Black Widow Read online

  He parked three doors away and said, “Jack, we’ll cool it. She’s gonna’ turn that old bastard in a flash and hit these streets.”

  They sat fidgeting and cursing as time passed and Sally didn’t show. They were talking about interrupting Sally’s business when the white guy came out and walked past us.

  A couple of minutes later Sally came down the sidewalk toward us. Railhead and Junior got out and stood on the sidewalk beside the Buick. When Sally was almost abreast of them Railhead stepped to the middle of the sidewalk and blocked her way.

  She halted and backed up. Her thickly made-up face was a hateful mask in the dim glow of the street lamp. Her eyes glittered strangely as she quickly shifted her eyes from Railhead to Junior.

  She smiled crookedly and said, “Well, I’ll be damned. It’s Junior Tilson and Railhead Cox. You studs want to do some business?”

  Railhead said sneeringly, “Do business with a ‘come dump’ for peckerwoods? My name is Charles. I don’t let no funky bitches call me Railhead. Where’s Bessie?”

  Sally backed away another half step. Junior moved quickly to her side.

  She looked up at his hard face and said shakily, “You niggers better stop fucking over me and split back to the Westside. My old man greases the heat down here, and I don’t have to take no shit.”

  Railhead grinned and moved close to her.

  He said harshly, “You silly bitch. I’m gonna’ cave your face in. Where’s Bessie?”

  Sally backed against Junior and said shrilly, “Ain’t this a bitch? How am I supposed to know where some whore is. Chicago is a—”

  Railhead’s fist made a crunching sound when he punched her in the eye. She fell to the sidewalk on her knees. She moaned and pressed her hands against her face. Railhead stooped over and grabbed a fist full of her hair.

  He jerked her head back and said, “I’m gonna’ do something bad to you. Where’s Bessie?”

  Sally said, “She got a bad break last night.”

  Junior said, “She en jail?”

  Sally waggled her head no.

  Railhead said, “You just ain’t gonna’ tell us where Bessie is.”

  He slipped the butcher knife from his waistband and pressed the blade against her throat.

  He looked at Junior and said, “Jack, this bitch ain’t gonna’ hip us where Bessie is. I’m gonna’ put her light out.”

  Sally yelped, “I’ll hip you! I’ll show you where she is.”

  Railhead and Junior picked her up and hurled her onto the front seat. They got in.

  Sally said, “Turn right at the corner.”

  Railhead roared the Buick away and said, “What the hell did that peckerwood you hump for do to her?”

  Sally blurted hysterically, “Tony didn’t do it! A paddy trick did it. I warned her about him. I told her he didn’t look right. But she wouldn’t listen. She thought I was jiving her because I was afraid she’d make more money for Tony than me last night. The fool thought Tony would cut all his girls loose and marry her. She was my best friend, but after she fell in love she . . .”

  Railhead said, “Shut up! Where now?” as he turned off Prairie into Thirty-second Street.

  Sally pointed and mumbled, “Go down that alley over there.”

  Junior seized her and shook her violently.

  He screamed, “Whut happuned tu mah sistah?”

  Sally gasped. “The trick was a maniac . . . He killed Bessie.”

  Junior slumped back on the seat as Railhead turned into the alley. I was numb with shock. It seemed that the Buick had crawled through the narrow filthy tunnel for hours before Sally said, “There it is! She’s in that burned building.”

  Railhead drove another fifty feet and stopped beside the fire-blackened shell of a garage. Junior got out and stood at the side of the car. Sally started bawling.

  Railhead took a flashlight from the glove compartment and got out of the car. He stood at the open door for a moment, and watched Sally cry. Then he reached inside and grabbed her wrist. He pulled her out of the car and pushed her around the front of the Buick.

  I got out and followed them into the burned out garage. Railhead’s flashlight played across the gutted skeleton of an old car.

  Sally said weakly, “She’s under there.”

  Railhead and Junior got on their knees and peered beneath the hulk. They pulled out a dark shapeless thing. The flashlight shone on the bloodstained gray of the army blanket shroud.

  My legs started to give way. I sat on the wreck’s running board. Junior knelt beside her. His face looked older than Mama’s and his hands shook so terribly the blanket flapped eerily as he struggled to unwrap her.

  Railhead said hoarsely, “Helly! Stop assing around, Jack.”

  He reached and snatched the blanket from Junior’s hands and bared the butchered horror to the waist. Her bucked eyes were frozen in hideous terror as they stared up at Junior.

  The fiend had hacked off her nose to the whitish bone of the bridge, and her lips had been raggedly slashed away to give the awful visage a grisly bloodstained grin. Where her breasts had thrust, there were blackened stumps.

  I closed my eyes tightly, but I couldn’t shut out the heartbreaking sight. I wanted to run. But all I could do was sit on the running board rocking and crying. Then like in a dream, I followed as Railhead and Junior carried her down the alley and put her in the car trunk.

  As Railhead drove down the alley, he said, “Who dumped her up here?”

  Sally said, “Tony had to move her out of the joint so I could work. He just stashed her until he could figure out all the angles.”

  Railhead said coldly, “You a dirty nigger bitch to let that peckerwood throw Bessie away like a dead dog.”

  Junior muttered, “One peckuhwood kilt her, an’ anuthah one throwed her en th’ alley.”

  Railhead stopped the car and cut the lights. I saw headlights moving on Thirty-third Street a hundred yards away. Railhead turned on the seat so his back was against the door as he faced Sally. His arm came up, and his pistol was pointed at the side of Sally’s head.

  He said, “Bitch, look at this.”

  She turned her head and squinted her left eye that Railhead had lumped nearly shut.

  He shoved the pistol’s muzzle against her forehead and said, “I’m gonna’ pull this trigger if you try to play any stuff on me. Where is your old man?”

  Sally said, “I don’t know. Honest, I don’t!”

  Railhead said, “He’s gonna cop your scratch. Where? When?”

  Sally didn’t answer. The pistol made a clicking sound like the cylinder was in motion.

  Sally blurted, “He picks me up at the joint after the bars close. What are you going to do?”

  Railhead ignored her and drove in silence to Prairie Avenue. He parked several doors from the basement apartment. The street was still except for an occasional passing car and a few drunks staggering from Thirty-first Street.

  It was scary the pitiful way Sally begged Railhead and Junior not to hurt Tony and the rigid way they sat like under a hellish spell until daybreak.

  A white Caddie convertible with the top down swept by and double-parked in front of the basement joint. It was Tony. He glanced toward the basement and hit three short blasts on the Caddie’s horn. Then he leaned back and lit a cigarette.

  Junior croaked, “Whut we gonna do, Rail?”

  Railhead said, “He’s gotta’ heater. We gonna’ tee roll him. Take your kicks off and come behind the bastard while I’m talking shit to him.”

  Junior took off his shoes and eased from the car. He crept on hands and knees to the side of a car parked just ahead of the Buick and crouched tensely on the curb. Railhead leaned forward and looked intently into Sally’s face. She opened her mouth to say something.

  He tapped the barrel of the pistol against her cheekbone and said, “Chump bitch, you don’t wanta die for the peckerwood.”

  She shook her head.

  He said, “Climb across me and stan
d by the door. Call that motherfucker down here and cut me into him as a vine connection. You get slick out there or try to split and I’ll put another hole in your ass.”

  Sally climbed out and stood facing Tony’s Caddie.

  She shouted, “Daddy! Here I am, back here.”

  Tony looked back, and the Caddie came roaring toward us in reverse. It screeched to a stop abreast of the Buick. Junior darted out of sight toward the front of the car ahead. Tony, hatless and immaculate in a cream-colored suit, leaned across the seat and flung open the car door.

  Sally said, “Daddy, this Westside stud wants to rap to you about copping some vines.”

  A look of annoyance creased Tony’s handsome face.

  He said, “Forget it, baby. Get in the car.”

  Sally turned away and looked at Railhead. Railhead stuck his head out with a big grin on his face and said, “Man, I’m hip you pretty and pimping a zillion. But helly, you don’t have to go ninety on ugly-ass Railhead. I been knowing Sally and Bessie way before they was whores. I got Hickey Freemans your size in that trunk that you ain’t gonna believe at a double dime.”

  Tony smiled thinly and slid across the seat to the street. He took a cigarette from a gold lighter case and stepped to the Buick’s front door that Railhead had half opened. He lit the cigarette and held out the case to Railhead. Railhead shook his head and started out of the car.

  Sally screamed, “Look out, Daddy! He’s got a gun!”

  Tony backpedaled and pawed desperately at his breast pocket. Railhead was aiming his pistol at Tony’s chest when Tony’s leg shot out and kicked the pistol from Railhead’s hand.

  I heard it clatter beneath the car. Junior was a blur as he streaked toward Tony’s back who had finally freed a small black automatic.

  Sally screamed, “Behind you!” just as Junior brutally smashed the blackjack down on the top of Tony’s head and pinned his arms to his sides in a bear hug.

  The automatic bounced to the pavement. Railhead got the butcher knife off the Buick’s front seat. He grinned at Sally cringing against the side of the Caddie.

  He pranced over and stared at Tony struggling feebly in Junior’s bear hug. Then in a sudden terrible backhand he stabbed the heavy blade in and jerked it across Tony’s belly.

  Tony belched a gout of blood over Junior’s hands, locked across his chest. Junior dropped his arms away and walked dazedly toward a wide-eyed knot of black people in pajamas and robes huddled on the sidewalk.

  Tony stood reeling and looking down at his ripped belly. His entrails were oozing from the long slash in his trousers front like curly red eels from a ragged fishnet. He had a puzzled look on his chalk white face like perhaps he wasn’t convinced they were his own guts. He shuddered and scooped his palms underneath the glistening nest. He was trying to stuff it back inside himself when he collapsed and fell flat on his back.

  I got out of the car and went to Junior on the sidewalk. Sally was kneeling beside Tony and weeping. Railhead leaned on the Buick’s front fender and stared stonily at her. There was the sorrowful cry of sirens, and then seemingly suddenly the police descended.

  Junior left the sidewalk and walked toward two black cops in uniform who were looking at Tony and shaking their heads.

  Junior held out his bloody hands pleadingly as he whined, “Ah ain’t knowed he wuz out tu sho nuff kill th’ peckahwood.”

  Railhead, handcuffed and in the grip of two towering white cops, snarled, “Dummy up, cunt! It was self-defense.”

  I slipped through the crowd and caught a jitney cab at Thirty-first Street and Indiana Avenue to Forty-seventh Street. I made it to Papa’s rooming house where I was hysterical and thoughtlessly blurted out everything about Bessie and Junior.

  I knew I had made a mistake when I saw how grey Papa’s face got and how he shook like he had palsy. Soldier gave me and Papa a sedative and put us to bed. Then he went to contact Mama and to help her with the tragedies of Bessie and Junior.

  Bessie’s funeral was held in the chapel at the funeral home, and it cost Mama less than two hundred dollars with most of it on credit. Mama cried, but she didn’t lose control like she had at Carol’s funeral.

  Papa collapsed at the chapel and couldn’t go to the cemetery. Soldier composed and delivered the eulogy. I cried harder after he’d said the beautifully poignant things about Bessie than I did at the grave.

  Soldier looked like a magnificent Indian chief as he stood at the lectern and said, “Bessie Tilson, she was in her early pretty teens the first time I saw her. She was a good girl, fresh from a Mississippi plantation.

  “Old big evil Chicago had excited her though. I remember the wild music in the little girl laughter. And now that she’s no longer pretty and lies here dead, I can remember a sad thing about her in life.

  “I remember that no matter how gay and happy she seemed to be, there was always a shadow—a little girl lost look in her eyes.

  “She was starved for love and affection like everyone must be who has been denied Mama’s bosom. She sought them in the jungle and found death.

  “Perhaps like the multitude of trapped black females she drank to push back the awful walls of despair and loneliness. I know that whenever I hear a young girl’s bubbly laughter, I’ll remember Bessie and that little girl lost look in her eyes.

  “She’s gone and left the flashy dresses and men she loved so much. She’s escaped the torment of that dark world where innocence is reviled and evil applauded.

  “Perhaps her mischievous spirit is somewhere way out there in the blue of heaven watching us saying good-bye to her here and laughing with that long-ago music in her voice and with a little girl ‘found’ look in her eyes.”

  12

  A DOLL FELLA FOR DORCAS

  I visited Papa at least three times a week after Bessie’s funeral. He had started to cheat on his strict no-sweets, low-fat diet, and he looked drawn and weak.

  Soldier told me Papa was even drinking wine again and often had to be reminded to take his insulin shots. Soldier told me that somebody at Bessie’s funeral had inadvertently let Papa know about Carol while extending sympathy.

  Railhead and Junior went to trial for first-degree murder in Criminal Court, several weeks before Christmas in 1940. Their lawyers from the public defender’s office advised them to plead guilty and avoid the electric chair.

  The black lawyer for Junior explained to Mama that with a hostile witness like Sally for the prosecution it was foolhardy to buck the white folks.

  They took the lawyers’ advice and each drew sentences of 99 years in Joliet Penitentiary. Grief-stricken Ida Jackson, Junior’s girlfriend, was drunk and called the prosecutor a dirty motherfucker in court. She got thirty days.

  I was in a Criminal Court’s corridor with Mama after the sentencing. She was really in a bad way, what with Bessie’s death, the tension of Junior’s trial and then the shock of the sentence. Mama was wailing and clutching at Junior’s lawyer. She just couldn’t understand why Junior got such a stiff sentence since he had no prior record and Tony had been a pimp.

  Finally, the harassed lawyer jerked himself free and said angrily, “Damn it, Mrs. Tilson. You should be bright enough to know why he got the book thrown at him. He helped to kill a white man in Chicago. He’s lucky he didn’t get the chair.”

  The chain of violence and tragedy that had claimed three of the Tilsons locked around Papa less than a week after the New Year of 1941 came in.

  Papa had crawled behind a pile of junk furniture in a storage room in the basement of his rooming house and died of diabetic coma. He was found with an almost empty quart bottle of cheap muscatel wine.

  Soldier was convinced Papa had hidden himself away from the possibility of taking or being given his lifesaving insulin shots.

  Soldier notified Papa’s father who had disowned Papa when he married Mama. The old man sent money to a Southside mortuary to prepare the body and ship it down South.

  For weeks I moved about like a sleepwalker. I av
oided Mama as much as I could. It was sickening the way she hugged me and sweet-talked me and tried to alibi away the evil things I had seen her do.

  The sharp hurt in what had happened to the twins, Junior and Papa dulled as the year 1941 staggered by.

  I took an interest in school and the library I had never had before. Most of the time I could keep sad things off my mind and not be lonely. But between midnight and dawn, I often awoke screaming out of nightmares about Carol’s baby and Bessie’s butchered body.

  A few days before the attack at Pearl Harbor, Connie, our landlady suffered her second stroke. Hattie Greene was dressing Mama’s hair for a visit to Junior. She was telling her about how Connie was lying helpless in her house down the street.

  Hattie said, “Sedalia, I knocked and knocked on her front door to pay my rent early yesterday morning. I went to the back door and saw her through the glass lying on the kitchen floor in all her clothes.

  “Her funny eyes were wide open looking at me, but I thought she was dead because she wasn’t moving her body at all. I was turning away when I saw the dirty bitch move her eyes. I realized she was paralyzed.

  “A few minutes ago I went and peeped at her, and she ain’t moved a peg. She abused and robbed black people all her life. She’ll be dead and stinking before I help her.”

  Mama and Hattie recounted Connie’s bad deeds and laughed about her plight until I got a headache and went to bed. I lay there long after Mama had gone to bed. I tossed about, alternately worried and angry. I worried about Connie lying crippled and all alone in the darkness.

  I got angry with myself for worrying about her when I knew so well how crooked and rotten she was. But what could I do to help her? She was probably locked in. And even if I got in some way, I couldn’t lift her or anything.

  My kid’s mind kept busy. I thought, It’s no use. Mama and everybody in the block hate her. If I help her, they’ll hate me too.

  Finally, I argued myself out of bed and into my clothes. I eased out the back door with the intention of calling a hospital or the police about Connie.

  I realized when I reached the deserted street that it was close to two A.M. and I couldn’t wake up anybody to make a phone call for Connie, and I didn’t have a nickel to use a pay phone blocks away.