Farewell, Amethystine

by Walter Mosley

A tall man in a powder-blue suit,

face that looked as though it belonged to a hound whose only job was sniffing down blood.

“Rawlins?” the man asked. “Yeah. Curt?” The left side of the big man’s upper lip, the scarred side, rose to form a sneer. “No. My name’s Purlo, Ron Purlo.”

“People say that you’re a man worthy of respect.”

“So, we decided to talk instead of kickin’ the shit outta you,”

I had once asked the well-informed, even academic, Jackson Blue who he thought the world’s greatest poet was. “Ain’t no answer to that question,”

“The greatest poet,” he opined, “is the man or woman who lives their poetry.” That man was my son.

The police captain was not only tall and good-looking. He was something more. Strong as Sonny Liston and violent someplace way down in his soul.

Only a fool would have riled or disrespected him.

“You can’t help Melvin like this.” “Do a better job than you.” He was considering killing me with his fists, I was sure of that. I was ready

for it. Sometimes a man has to put it out there. Has to. Whatever violence Anatole felt, he also had admirable self-control. That’s why I lived a little longer. “You’re gonna go down on this, Rawlins.” “We all do one day.”

The criminal courts building is on Temple Street downtown. Concrete and steel, it’s a monolith and an edifice, a symbol of the power of a justice system that has managed to hide the corruption fueling its machinations.

I got there on time, and Milo, as usual when it came to money, was early. Milo Sweet, the porcine blackberry of a disbarred lawyer turned bail bondsman.

On the way to meet Amethystine I began to obsess over the wording of my request of her. I want to see you. It was completely wrong and yet absolutely correct. I did want to see her, had wanted to since the last time we’d met.

knoll above Topanga Center.

Minnie Moore owned and lived in. That house also functioned as a...

She had an outside seating area consisting of seven picnic tables set out for people liking her corn bread and fried chicken, pig tails and collard greens.

Looking out over the hippie-populated canyon,

They were young and, I knew, sooner or later they’d trade in these Utopian desires for good-paying jobs and the status quo. I knew it, but it was nice to be out there among them with their long hair and pot smoke, their perfect (if flawed) ideals and deep beliefs.

I ordered the vegetarian plate—black-eyed peas, mustard greens, white rice, and a small side salad. Amethystine asked for ultrathin fried pork chops, grits, and redeye gravy.

that’s where I met Jackson. He used to study the logic of the different games. After he was finished with his studies he’d have three dirty martinis and watch the girls.” “You could use those last words for Blue’s epitaph.”

was, I think, at that moment, in the middle of her talking, that I fell in love with Amethystine Stoller.

put on a pair of glasses that had clear panes for lenses. I got that trick from Jackson Blue, who believed that white people were less suspicious of Black men who wore glasses.

Including me there were twelve janitors working under the white-on-gray man. Mostly Black men, most of them under thirty. It was interesting how the plantation model had survived a century after its demise.

After work, I got two chili burgers and cheese fries at Tommy’s on Beverly

Scrawled on the letter, in pencil, was the name Amethystine. I slumped down on the floor next to the recently murdered man. The wail of Atwater Soupspoon Wise, the Topanga bluesman, came back to me then. I was dressed like a sharecropper and those words sang to me. The twelve-bar blues washed over blood spilt, blood coming from wounds of work and war, wear and tear, and senseless, drunken brawls. And it wasn’t only blood. There was pigs’ fat

the stench of chitlins stewing all day on a woodstove, sewing needles made from the stripped tin of bean cans. I remembered foraging for berries in the deep woods and fighting a man over a few pennies. I cut him bad.

When there’s a dead man on the top floor of the second-tallest building in Los Angeles, they send eighteen cops. Down where most of my people live they never send more than two, unless there’s target practice to be had.

know who you are,” he said, “and who you think you are. But it’s a new day. Commander Suggs is in the wind, and your ass is ours.”

One of the things about the TV age is that people around the nation were slowly being brainwashed. This is what I believed then and now. They turn against their own and themselves because of impossible renditions of goodness, beauty, intelligence, and, worst of all, humanity.

“You didn’t answer my question,” my passenger chided amid this minor revelation. “What question?” “If you trusted me.”

learned a long time ago that when somebody you barely know asks for trust, there’s a

problem somewhere.” Amethystine smiled at

was always a little nervous standing around in a white neighborhood. That fear was composed of four hundred years of experience crushed down into fifty short years of life.

secret pleasure to see the two physically toughest men I know standing side by side. Anatole was taller and at least fifty pounds heavier, but I was pretty sure that Fearless had a sharper left hook.

“Only reason I’m here, Fearless, is ’cause I need your help, and gettin’ that help conflicted with your situation.”

“I went to Paris lookin’ for you. He told me that you forbade him lookin’ me up. But he didn’t look me up. I went to him. Lookin’ for you.”

cherry cocktails were down to the dregs and Sarah Vaughan was singing “Can’t Get Out of This Mood.” Fearless was leaning back on the sofa, his eyes closed and his lips approaching a smile.

went to Tommy’s on Beverly and ordered four chili burgers, two chili-cheese fries, and a few cans of Cel-Ray soda.

“You the luckiest niggah I ever met in my life.” “Mouse once said that to me,” I chortled. “I told him that I had plenty of bad things in my day. He said, ‘I didn’t say you had good luck, just luck, and a whole lot of it.’”

Many women wanted Fearless to be the father of their kids, but few of these wanted him as a husband. He was not a man open to domestication. If he met a mendicant with a problem, he’d bring that soul home. If he lost his temper, war wouldn’t be far behind. He might lose his house, his car, his bank account, at a moment’s notice, and that was not marriage material.

I was taught from an early age that you had to respect people and be straightforward in your dealings with them. This was true even for white people—as far as you could trust them not to lynch you from a poplar tree.

I tried in my dealings to be good and fair without, as much as possible, manipulating folks.

But, living these long hard years of American freedom, I have had to learn that most people exist in a complex maze of manipulation.

find Melvin, help him if I could, but also use him to untangle a woman whom I didn’t know at all from a crime that might be the end of me.

There were thirty-nine steps up the steep incline and I couldn’t help but think of the movie, the book, and Alfred Hitchcock. The porch, which was just a jagged line of four-by-four pine timbers, tilted this way and that, emulating a drunkard’s attempt to toe the line.

heated canned chili over a butane grill. This I poured over Fritos and grated cheese

he turned the corpse over. “Bradley Mirth,” he said. It was a big white man in military-like fatigues. His face was broad, with one eye open. He’d received at least six wounds. “Who is he?” I asked. “Used to be LAPD back in the days of Parker and his Night Riders. The ones who enforced laws that were never written down.”

One of the good things about having lived half a century under the weight of second- and third-class citizenship—bad luck was never a surprise. If they wanted me they would get me. That was all there was to it.

Mama Jo was a witch in the oldest understanding of that term. She had knowledge of a great history of natural medicines, drugs, and ways to enhance and even elongate life. She also knew poisons. She had mastered elixirs, vapors, powders, and even stones that, when they came in contact with the