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  Bailey’s Cafe

  A Novel

  Gloria Naylor

  For the two Luecelias:

  1898–1977

  1951–1987

  hush now can you hear it can’t be far away

  needing the blues to get there

  look and you can hear it

  look and you can hear

  the blues open

  a place never

  closing:

  Bailey’s

  Cafe

  MAESTRO, IF YOU PLEASE …

  I can’t say I’ve had much education. Book education. Even though high school back in the twenties was really school, not what these youngsters are getting away with now, and while Erasmus Hall in general, Miss Fitzpatrick in particular, is still talking about the cream that floated to the top and then to the top of that again, school isn’t where real learning happens.

  I went to kindergarten on the muddy streets in Brooklyn, finished up grade school when I married Nadine, took my first diploma from the Pacific; and this cafe, well now, this cafe is earning me a Ph.D. You might say I’m majoring in Life, standing in front of this grill and watching that door open and close, open and close, as they step in here from all over the United States and some parts of the world.

  A few of them actually think wanting a cup of coffee brought them in, even though they soon find out we make lousy coffee. The grinder’s broken and I can’t ever be sure what size grounds I’m getting one batch to the next. I brew it for them anyway. And covering up its taste with the food is out of the question: I picked up my cooking skills from the navy mess, where you’re taught a little more grease and salt should answer any complaints.

  Then there’s the few who think it’s Nadine’s peach cobbler that keeps bringing them back. I admit it’s close to spectacular. But she only makes it when the mood hits her and will only dish it up and serve them when the mood hits her again.

  And it can’t be for the company, like others think. Our customers are all so different I’ve yet to see anybody get along in here. But that door will still open and close, open and close.

  They don’t come for the food and they don’t come for the atmosphere. One or two of the smart ones finally figure that out, like I figured out that I didn’t start in this business to make a living—personal charm is not my strong point—or stay in it to make a living—kind of hard to do that when your wife is ringing up the register and it’s iffy when and how much she’ll charge.

  No, I’m at this grill for the same reason that they keep coming. And if you’re expecting to get the answer in a few notes, you’re mistaken. The answer is in who I am and who my customers are. There’s a whole set to be played here if you want to stick around and listen to the music. And since I’m standing at center stage, I’m sure you’d enjoy it if I first set the tempo with a few fascinating tidbits about myself. (Nadine, nobody asked you.)

  I grew up in Flatbush believing that Brooklyn was the capital of the world and that all colored people except for my family were rich. I wasn’t a stupid child; Brooklyn had Ebbets Field and the Brooklyn Royal Giants, and since baseball, good baseball, was all I cared about, that settled that for wherever anything else important in the world could possibly happen. And my eyes certainly didn’t deceive me: liveried coachmen, sable wraps, and brownstone mansions meant rich, while getting up at five in the morning to stoke the furnace, start breakfast, and lay out the morning suits for people like that meant you weren’t. And that’s what my parents did as butler and cook for the Van Morrisons, who were as colored as we were; and all their friends sure looked as colored as we were, and while I couldn’t vouch for their homes, there was no denying the silk gowns and beaver top hats as they stepped out of the polished carriages that pulled up in front of the house for one of Mrs. Van Morrison’s balls.

  Those were the only colored people I ever saw until my father started taking me to baseball games, and then I just figured that the hundreds of other Negroes around me were like the Van Morrisons’ friends, only dressed down for the occasion. I didn’t figure they could be like us, because there were no other colored servants in our household or in the neighborhood. Mrs. Van Morrison’s personal maid was a full-busted Swedish girl whose cousin doubled as coachman and gardener. They both ate in the kitchen with us and complained as loudly about Mrs. Van Morrison as my mother did. That left only Bella, a Polish woman, who came in three times a week for the laundry and heavy cleaning. The other homes in the neighborhood were owned by white people and they all had French, Swiss, or German servants. So I think I had it figured out pretty good for a five-year-old: there were rich white people, poor white people, rich colored people—and us.

  If my older brother hadn’t been so much older than me, he probably could have explained things to me a little sooner than I learned them myself. But with a twelve-year difference in our ages, he was already on the road before I started kindergarten—

  —To discover his fortune: my mother

  —A shiftless bum: my father.

  My folks didn’t see eye to eye on much, beginning with their firstborn son and ending with the Van Morrisons. My father would have cut his own throat for Mr. Van Morrison. My mother hated Mrs. Van Morrison with a quiet passion that’s peculiar to women: it burns low, slow, and long. If a man disliked someone as much as my mother disliked that woman, he would have just hauled off and punched him in the face and let the consequences be damned. But a woman can drag the whole thing out—over years—and pick, pick, pick to death. I used to think my mother didn’t just up and poison Mrs. Van Morrison because we ate whatever they had left over from supper, but now I know that she relished hating that woman and would have done anything to keep her alive and well so the whole thing could go on and on.

  I wondered which was the greater or lesser sin: Mrs. Van Morrison not deserving Mr. Van Morrison because she’d been a woman of loose virtue, or because she tried to keep him from hiring my parents. Granted, for my mother, loose virtue could have meant anything from Mrs. Van Morrison’s former stage career—

  —Opera: my father

  —Burlesque: my mother

  to a brief association with a London bordello—

  —As interior decorator: my father

  —Interiors, period: my mother.

  But even my father admitted that the mistress of the house was less than thrilled when her husband insisted upon taking my parents on staff. And my mother got that one nod from him because it helped him prove how wonderful Mr. Van Morrison was, a real race man.

  He had made a small fortune as a tea and spice dealer, rolled that into a larger fortune through some shrewd real-estate investments, and split off part of that into railroad, steamship, and oil stocks. No, he couldn’t have booked first-class passage on any of those railroads and steamships, but the value of his shares kept going up enough to afford him his own private Pullman and yacht. But he was a plain man who didn’t go in for any of that showy stuff. A trustee of the Tuskegee Institute, he’d put money behind the Niagara Movement, what they’re now calling the NAACP, as well as some settlement houses for colored orphans in the Tenderloin district. That’s how he met my folks; they were living in that part of Manhattan, my father being between jobs and volunteering to teach the settlement kids baseball.

  It seemed like a good arrangement: my parents wanted to get themselves and my brother out of those slums in the west fifties, Mr. Van Morrison needed to start staffing his new home on Lafayette Avenue, and he felt why not give his own kind a chance at fresh country ai
r and a living wage? Shows you how long ago it was, when Brooklyn was considered the country.

  And it was giving them a chance, to live and work in a house like that. You’d never know it now, with Negroes doing all kinds of domestic work, but back then colored people had a hard time even getting jobs as servants if you’re looking at the finer homes. A female might come in on day work as a charwoman or laundress, and a male, if he was lucky, could get taken on as a coachman. But if you’re talking about a staff cook and housekeeper or a valet, a gentleman’s gentleman, Europeans did that—and only certain Europeans.

  Wealthy Negroes held the same kind of attitudes as wealthy white people but even more so, feeling that they had more to prove. According to my mother Mrs. Van Morrison didn’t want them as servants because it cheapened their appearance to the neighbors.

  —It don’t matter what color hands is peeling these potatoes; none of them neighbors is about to sit down and eat with her.

  My father’s version was that Mrs. Van Morrison worried about the second child being born. Servants with large families were a nuisance. My mother wasn’t buying it.

  —Two children in twelve years. What does that make me, some kind of rabbit?

  My father, a dark-skinned man, would actually blush as he put his finger to his lips and cut his eyes toward me.

  —Woman, remember yourself now.

  If he’d only known, when he wasn’t around and my mother and the maid put their heads together over a cup of tea, I heard much worse than that.

  I really don’t know if I was or wasn’t the cause of Mrs. Van Morrison’s reluctance to keep my parents on staff. I do know they worked for those people for twenty-five years, retired with a sizable pension, and were later mentioned in Mr. Van Morrison’s will. And the few times over those years that I had reason to run into Mrs. Van Morrison she was always nice to me. A tiny tiny woman who favored shades of beige lace for her dresses, but her voice was round and full, making me think that singing could have easily been somewhere in her past. She would put her jeweled hand on my shoulder to ask me about my studies. That’s what she called them, studies, while I mumbled something about school being fine before she’d pat me and move on. Good, keep improving yourself.

  The truth was, I didn’t like school and it was never fine. When I wasn’t being punished for getting into a fight, I was punished for sleeping in class, and when I wasn’t being punished for that it was for sneaking out early. Now, all of those strappings were justified—except for the last. I wasn’t so much sneaking out of school as sneaking into the ballparks. A fine distinction that my mother had a hard time appreciating.

  Over the years I’ve tried to figure out what it is about the game that hooked me so early. My father being such a big fan probably helped. He’d been a bat boy for the Cuban Giants and wasn’t a bad fielder himself. I think he would have gone out barnstorming with them if he hadn’t met my mother and started a family. In those days, he’d say, in those days they really played ball.

  He had stories about them and the Philadelphia Giants and other Negro independents I took to be a little bit of an exaggeration. No human being could shut out both ends of a doubleheader with the last throw a fastball that went by with so much heat it busted a seam in the catcher’s glove. But I got the glove, my father said as he dug into the bureau and pulled out a catcher’s mitt. There was a slight tear in the seam and scrawled across it in fading ink was the name—

  Smokey Joe Williams.

  But did it really happen because of a pitch? And at the bottom of a doubleheader? A shutout doubleheader?

  You don’t say your father is a liar. And when I was coming up you didn’t even think that your father was a liar. Good thing too, because in 1917 I finally saw an aging Smokey Joe Williams pitch.

  —Not at the top of his prime, my father sat in the bleachers muttering and shaking his head.

  I was there with my mouth so wide open I could have swallowed flies. That tall, swaybacked man had them fanning left and right, and not just any them—the New York Giants. He ended up fanning twenty of them before the game was over and losing 1–0 on a tenth-inning error.

  I had to hear about that error all the way home.

  I still hear about that error in my sleep.

  I thought it was a great performance. And knowing now what I do about baseball, it was a little bit more than that. Something happened when those colored players were out on the field, and I guess I went to so many games trying to figure out exactly what it was. Sometimes it was exhibition games against the white teams, like the one where I first saw Smokey Joe, but most of the time it was them against each other: the Homestead Grays, the Pittsburgh Crawfords, the Baltimore Black Sox, the Chicago American Giants, the Newark Eagles, those amazing—and still-amazing—Kansas City Monarchs.

  I didn’t question why Negroes had separate teams; watching their games and then the white games, it was pretty clear to me. The Negroes were better players. And just like us at school, who wanted to team up with the pee-pants who had snot running out their noses? No, winners stay with winners. But they could have been a little more fair-minded and let the likes of Honus Wagner or Ty Cobb on their teams.

  Even my father would have agreed that the Flying Dutchman could have endured a season that started in February with barnstorming in the Deep South, a game a day, three on Sunday, as he made his way north, sleeping on the bus riding into town, playing a game, riding again to get to the next town just in time for the first pitch, playing a game, riding again before the real season begins in April, which means he can exchange his bed on the bus for a bed in a run-down Northern hotel and the cow turds between second and third for a field line that only slopes slightly in second-rate parks. Still a game a day, still three on Sunday, but more and more dark faces in the crowds, who cheer his speed and don’t sit in deadly silence when he comes in on a two-out hopper and whips it across to first base, so there’s less of a worry that retiring the home team to come back then as third in the batting order, once with a line-drive single, again with two batted in will mean pop bottles filled with piss thrown at his head; less of a worry that if he’s too good a crowd could turn real ugly, if he’s too good he might not make it out of town that night; so the Northern games are where he goes all out and hopefully gets himself voted into the East-West Classics and his team into the Negro World Series, which makes it September but not quitting time because with all of this the pay hasn’t been too great and there’s always winter ball in Florida for the tourists or maybe Cuba, leaving just enough time to start preseason barnstorming again in February.

  Yeah, the Flying Dutchman would definitely have been good enough to join one of those teams; they grow ’em tough up there in Mansfield, Pennsylvania. He could have made it with no rest—in body or mind—and still brought in a batting average of .327 while transforming himself into a golden shield between second and third bases. He’d been just like Pop Lloyd in that respect. And it leaves me confused, why these newspapermen look back at Pop’s career and call him the Black Honus Wagner; all things being equal—or in this case unequal—the highest compliment to pay the Flying Dutchman is to call him the White Pop Lloyd. And I’ll even bring Ty Cobb into that club, although he’d play dirty and spike a man in a second: he’s the White Oscar Charleston if there’s ever been one. Those other players, now, those others just couldn’t have made it. And no, I haven’t forgotten the Babe. Too temperamental. He couldn’t have gone two seasons in Josh Gibson’s shoes and held on to his record, and so as far as I’m concerned, the title of a White Josh Gibson still goes unclaimed.

  And today? You can just forget it today. They’ve gotten so soft and ridiculous they’ll be wanting their mammies in the dugout to suckle them between innings. Only way to explain the hoopla over this new kid, Jackie Robinson. (Just let me make this one last point, Nadine, and then I’m getting on to our own long and blissful twelfth inning.) To hear these people talk, you’d think Jackie Robinson grew up like a mushroom in the jung
le somewhere and Branch Rickey was on some kind of rare-species hunt and stumbled over him. Well, if Rickey was after the rare, he didn’t find it in that player. Robinson is a dime a dozen in a long-established league. The Negro American League, to be exact, whose teams play against the Negro National League. Organized baseball, just not recognized baseball.

  I’m the first to admit the Dodgers needed all the help they could get; nobody was going out to Ebbets Field to see that mess Rickey called a defensive lineup, and it got me so I was becoming embarrassed to say I was from Brooklyn—white baseball or not. When you love the game, you love the game, and mutilation is mutilation. So, yeah, he’s desperate enough to bring in a colored player, but dammit, bring in a colored player. Try to get your hands on a Josh Gibson, a Satchel Paige, an Oscar Charleston. And this is where the Negro race gets on my nerves—because they’re screaming, Hallelujah! and running in droves to see a rookie play with a team so mediocre they end up having to name him Rookie of the Year when he barely made it into the Kansas City Monarchs (don’t take my word, read the papers), and I guess that’s why he’s acting like the Negro leagues didn’t exist for him. Rickey was his Savior. But the fans know better, especially the colored fans, and still they’re killing themselves to see Robinson at first base.

  If they’re so anxious to see colored and white as teammates, all they have to do is keep on doing what they’ve been doing—going to the Negro games cause The Star Spangled Banner is played to the tune of a cash register and with gate receipts as high as they’ve been, the Negro owners could have pressed for a whole team entering the major leagues. And like I said, when you love the game, you love the game. And don’t tell me some of these smart white boys coming up wouldn’t have tried out for a place on one of the best teams in the major league. They’d be hungry and ambitious enough to know that they couldn’t call themselves a real pitcher until they took the crown from Satchel Paige. And then all these folks yelling, Hallelujah, would have had their eyeful of integration; but there would have been some colored people owning teams and colored people managing teams and colored people coaching teams. And yeah out on that field—but above all, in the owner’s box—would have been colored and white together—the American way.