His father had died sixteen months ago, along with near a hundred other colored folk while East St. Louis burned around them. Luther got the word from Hollis, the man’s block letters looking pained and cramped on a sheet of yellow paper:
Yor Daddy shot ded by white men. Sorry to tell you.
Luther walked out of the freight yard and into downtown as the sky was beginning to darken. He had the envelope Uncle Hollis had sent his letter in with his address scrawled on the back, and he pulled it from his coat and held it in his hand as he walked. The deeper he traveled into the colored section the less he could believe what he saw. The streets were empty, and much of the reason, Luther knew, had to do with the flu, but it was also because there wouldn’t seem to be much point to walk streets where all the buildings were either blackened or crumbled or lost forever beneath rubble and ash. It reminded Luther of an old man’s mouth, where most of the teeth were missing, a couple broken in half, and the few that remained leaning to the side and useless. Whole blocks were nothing but ash, great piles of it that the early-evening breeze blew from one side of the street to the other, just trading it back and forth. So much ash that not even a tornado could have erased it all. Over a year since the neighborhood had burned, and those piles stood tall. On those blown-out streets, Luther felt as if he were surely the last man alive, and he figured that if the Kaiser had managed to send his army across the ocean, with all their planes and bombs and rifles, they couldn’t have done more damage.
It had been over jobs, Luther knew, the white working-class folks getting more and more convinced that the reason they were poor was because the colored working-class folks were stealing their jobs and the food off their tables. So they’d come down here, white men and white women and white children, too, and they’d started with the colored men, shooting them and lynching them and setting them afire and even driving several into the Cahokia River and then stoning them to death when they tried to swim back, a job they’d left mostly to the children. The white women pulled colored women off the streetcars and stoned them and stabbed them with kitchen knives, and when the National Guard came, they just stood around and watched it go on.
“Your daddy,” Uncle Hollis said, after Luther showed up at the door of his juke joint and Uncle Hollis took him into the back office and poured him a drink, “was trying to protect that little shop of his never made him a dime. They lit it on fire and called for him to come out and once all four walls were burning down around him, he and Velma came out. Someone shot him in the knee and he lay there on the street for a while. They handed Velma over to some women, and they beat her with rolling pins. Just beat her about the head and face and hips and she die after crawling into an alley, like a dog gone under a porch. Someone come up to your father, and the way I was told, he try to get to his knees, but he can’t even do that and he keep tipping over and pleading and finally a couple white men just stand there and shoot him until they run out of bullets.”
“Where’s he buried?” Luther said.
Uncle Hollis shook his head. “Wasn’t nothing to bury, son. They got done shooting him, they picked him up, one on each end, and they tossed him back into his own store.”
Luther got up from the table and went over to a small sink and got sick. It went on for some time, and he felt as if he were puking up soot and yellow fire and ash. His head eddied with flashes of white women swinging rolling pins onto black heads and white faces shrieking with joy and fury and then the Deacon singing in his wheelchair-rocker and his father trying to kneel in the street and Aunt Marta and the Honorable Lionel A. Garrity, Esquire, clapping their hands and beaming big smiles and someone chanting, “Praise Jesus! Praise Jesus!” and the whole world burning with fire as far as the eye could see until the blue skies were painted half black and the white sun vanished behind the smoke.
When he finished, he rinsed his mouth and Hollis gave him a small towel and he dried his lips on it and wiped the sweat from his brow.
“You hot, boy.”
“No, I’m okay now.”
Uncle Hollis gave him another slow shake of the head and poured him another drink. “No, I said you are hot. There’s people looking for you, sending word up and down and across this here Midwest. You kill a bunch of coloreds in a Tulsa joint? You kill Deacon Broscious? You fucking out your mind?”
“How’d you hear?”
“Shit. It’s burning up the wires, boy.”
“Police?”
Uncle Hollis shook his head. “Police think some other fool did it. Clarence Somebody.”
“Tell,” Luther said. “Clarence Tell.”
“That’s the name.” Uncle Hollis stared across the table at him, breathing heavy through his flat nose. “’Parently you left one of them alive. One they call Smoke?”
Luther nodded.
“He in a hospital. Ain’t nobody sure if he gone get well or not, but he told people. He fingered you. Gunners from here to New York looking for your head.”
“What’s the price on it?”
“This Smoke say he pay five hundred dollars for a photograph of your corpse.”
“What if Smoke dies?”
Uncle Hollis shrugged. “Whoever take over the Deacon’s business, he going to have to make sure you dead.”
Luther said, “I ain’t got no place to go.”
“You got to go east, boy. ’Cause you can’t stay here. And stay the fuck out of Harlem, that’s for sure. Look, I know a boy up in Boston can take you in.”
“Boston?”
Luther gave that some thought and quickly realized that thinking about it was a waste of time because there wasn’t any choice in the matter. If Boston was all that was left of “safe” in this country, then Boston it would have to be.
“What about you?” he asked. “You staying here?”
“Me?” Uncle Hollis said. “I didn’t shoot nobody.”
“Yeah, but what’s here anymore? Place been burned to nothing. I hear all the coloreds are leaving or trying to.”
“To go where? Problem with our people, Luther, is they bite into hope and keep their teeth clenched to it the rest of their lives. You think any place is going to be better than here? Just different cages, boy. Some prettier than others but cages just the same.” He sighed. “Fuck it. I’m too old to move and this right here, this right here is as much home as I know.”
They sat in silence and finished their drinks.
Uncle Hollis pushed back his chair and stretched his arms above his head. “Well, I got a room upstairs. We’ll get you situated for a night while I make some calls. In the morning …” He shrugged.
“Boston,” Luther said.
Uncle Hollis nodded. “Boston. Best I can do.”
In the boxcar, with Jessie’s fine coat covered in hay to ward off the cold, Luther promised the Lord he would atone. No more card games. No more whiskey or cocaine. No more associating with gamblers or gangsters or anyone who even thought of doing heroin. No more giving himself over to the thrill of the night. He would keep his head down and call no attention to himself and wait this out. And if word ever came that he could return to Tulsa, then he would return a changed man. A humble penitent.
Luther had never considered himself a religious man, but that had less to do with his feelings about God than it did with his feelings about religion. His grandmother and his mother had both tried to drum the Baptist faith into him, and he had done what he could to please them, to make them believe he believed, but it had taken no more hold of him than any of the other homework he claimed to be doing. In Tulsa he’d grown even less inclined toward Jesus, if only because Aunt Marta and Uncle James and all their friends spent so much time praising Him that Luther figured if Jesus was, in fact, hearing all those voices He’d just as soon prefer silence every now and then, maybe catch Himself up on some sleep.