Been Wrong So Long It Feels Like Right: A King Oliver Novel

by Walter Mosley

Marigold Hart, aka Marleigh Mirabel Mann.

I’D MADE IT back to Brooklyn, to my Montague Street office, by midafternoon.

Grandma B and I lived in different worlds. In her realm there was only right and wrong. Two separate paths that brought you to either Heaven or Hell. In my world there was no such a thing as absolute good or undeniable evil. Sometimes you had to embrace iniquity to achieve grace and at other times you had to turn your back on innocence.

After talking to Mel, I had to sit down

The toughest nut to crack in the interrogation game was always love. Love cannot survive without the object of its passion. Love is not a citizen among equals. Love cannot escape, cannot switch loyalty, cannot exist without its yang. And, in my experience, a woman truly in love with her mate cannot be disabused of her commitments. Like a river, love must run its course, and if it is true love in the heart of the woman being questioned, then that truth will keep its own counsel.

The why of love was not a science, no more than most humans’ certainty that they had a soul. Love, like good music, was a feeling that could not be deconstructed.

Tita was a perfect example of the contradictions created by industrial-strength poverty. She was an extraordinary human being but didn’t know it. She could have had a PhD in philosophy or maybe German literature. She could have carved out a place for herself on Wall Street or even in Hollywood. She was that smart, that charismatic. But she was also a hood rat, brought up worrying about last month’s rent, her next meal, and how to get over on those who only knew violence, inebriation, and death. For her, survival was rarely a plan and, more often, just the luck of the draw.

The people closest to you are always the most dangerous. This motto is true both spatially and emotionally; maybe even genetically too.

“That it’s at least three times harder to get outta trouble than it is gettin’ in.”

“Come here,” the old man commanded, and I lurched toward him, a child for just that moment.

“Sit down or I’m’a put you down,” he promised. “Even if you could it wouldn’t make no difference. You are wrong. You been wrong so long it feels like right to you.

Right that your own daughter don’t know who you are. Right that your wife drank herself crazy and then into an early grave. Right that your own mother haven’t seen you for thirty years.”

“You ever met Felix Corn?” “A couple’a times.” “What do you think of him?” “Like any other pimp or plantation owner, white or Black. He owns how people make their money and so he owns them.”

“You like it here?” I stood too. “I missed Mama more than I thought. When I saw her, I cried. It’s been so long that I forgot.” “Forgot what?” “That there’s a reason for this loneliness.”

“The love I’m talkin’ ’bout don’t have nuthin’ to do with the men. Us girls know how to bring together and be together and only fight when we got to. Men so scared they only know how to fight.”

This universal story was that love doesn’t so much conquer poverty as assuage it. This was, in the author’s opinion, why money and love so often run afoul of each other.

The Black Cerberus of the Josephine Weingarten Convalescence Clinic was surprised that I knew one of the secret words in his precious entry

“All rich people ain’t white people,” my father said to me when I was maybe ten. “And all white people ain’t rich. That leaves you with whole big cities lived in by poor people of every color. And the one thing you got to know is that poor people, no matter what color they are, is always hustlin’ round for money.

remembered that parental speech on my drive out to the airport. Once again it came to me how much of my life was dictated by the lessons my father dubbed me with. He wasn’t my enemy or even my friend but more like the ground under my feet, the air I breathed, and the water I drank. That was my father.

I’m always early if I have control. On time is late and late is dead; that’s another thing my pops used to say.