Devil in a Blue Dress

I was surprised to see a white man walk into Joppy’s bar.

I noted that Mr. DeWitt Albright didn’t pay for the drinks he ordered. Joppy didn’t seem in a hurry to ask for his money though.

A busy night never saw all his chairs full but I was jealous of his success. He had his own business; he owned something.

Whether he knew it or not, DeWitt Albright had me caught by my own pride. The more I was afraid of him, I was that much more certain to take the job he offered.

All of them and John and half the people in that crowded room had migrated from Houston after the war, and some before that. California was like heaven for the Southern Negro. People told stories of how you could eat fruit right off the trees and get enough work to retire one day. The stories were true for the most part but the truth wasn’t like the dream. Life was still hard in L.A. and if you worked every day you still found yourself on the bottom.

DeWitt Albright had his bottle and his gun right out there in plain view. When he asked me what I had to say I told him; I might have been a little nervous, but I told him anyway. Benny didn’t care about what I had to say. [...] He wasn’t a businessman, he was a plantation boss; a slaver.

The voice only comes to me at the worst times, when everything seems so bad that I want to take my car and drive it into a wall. Then this voice comes to me and gives me the best advice I ever get.

The voice is hard. It never cares if I’m scared or in danger. It just looks at all the facts and tells me what I need to do.

And then he started to tell me things that men should never say about their women. Not sex, but he talked about how she’d hold him to her breast when he was afraid and how she’d stand up for him when a shopkeeper or waiter tried to walk over him.

But I didn’t believe that there was justice for Negroes. I thought that there might be some justice for a black man if he had the money to grease it. Money isn’t a sure bet but it’s the closest to God that I’ve ever seen in this world.

But I’ll never forget thinking how those Germans had hurt that poor boy so terribly that he couldn’t even take in anything good. That was why so many Jews back then understood the American Negro; in Europe, the Jew had been a Negro for more than a thousand years.

“Guilt?” He said the words as if it had no meaning. “You mean like what I did makes you feel bad?”

“That’s right.”

“I tell you what then,” he said. [...] “You let me work on this with you and I let you run the show.”

“Whas that mean?”

“I ain’t gonna do nuthin’ you don’t tell me t’do.”

[...]

“Whatever you say, Easy. Maybe you gonna show me how a poor man can live wit’out blood.”

“I don’t have a gun, Raymond. You know that.”

“You fool enough to go without no piece then you must wanna be dead.” His eyes were glazed and I was sure that he didn’t see me. He saw somebody, though, some demon he carried around in his head.

Most beautiful women make me feel like I want to touch them, own them. But Daphne made me look inside myself. She’d whisper a sweet word and I was brought back to the first time I felt love and loss.

“I mean this house. I mean us here, like we aren’t who they want us to be.”

“Who?”

“They don’t have names. They’re just the ones who won’t let us be ourselves. They never want us to feel this good or close like this. That’s why I wanted to get away with you.”

“I came to you.”

She put her hand out again. “But I called you, Easy; I’m the one who brought you to me.”

“Then, at almost closing time, we passed the zebras. No one was around and Daddy was holding my hand. Two zebras were running back and forth. One was trying to avoid the other but the bully had cut off every escape. I yelled for my daddy to stop them because I worried they were going to fight.”

Daphne had grabbed onto my hand, she was so excited. I found myself worried; but I couldn’t really tell what bothered me.

“Nobody ever knew about him and me and what had happened. But I knew. I knew that that was why he left. He just loved me so much that day at the zoo and he knew me, the real me, and whenever you know somebody that well you just have to leave.”

“Why’s that?” I wanted to know. “Why you have t’leave someone just when you get close?”

“It’s not just close, Easy. It’s something more.”

Daphne was on the couch, naked, and the men, DeWitt and Joppy, stood over her. Albright was wearing his linen suit but Joppy was stripped to the waist. His big gut looked obscene hanging over her like that and it took everything I had not to shoot him right then.

“Now am I gonna lie to you, Ruby? Your brother’s dead.”

I had only been in an earthquake once but the feeling was the same: The ground under me seemed to shift. I looked at her to see the truth. But it wasn’t there. Her nose, cheeks, her skin color—they were white. Daphne was a white woman.

“I’m different than you because I’m two people. I’m her and I’m me. I never went to that zoo, she did. She was there and that’s where she lost her father. I had a different father. He came to my house and fell in my bed about as many times as he fell in my mother’s. He did that until one night Frank killed him.”

“She can love a white man but all he can love is the white girl he think she is.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“That’s just like you, Easy. You learn stuff and you be thinkin’ like white men be thinkin’. You be thinkin’ that what’s right fo’ them is right fo’ you. She look like she white and you think like you white.”