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We clean the things no one wants to clean.
What about my own heart, Lord? How many years do I have left?
Full of sand, as they say.
Money’s not everything, Deacon. If you have enough to live, that’s enough.”
“She’d say good morning. People don’t do that no more.”
Cause we all brothers and sisters in Christ, mister. Come visit our church sometime. Bring your momma. You’ll see. We likes visitors at Five Ends.”
hope God holds you in the palm of His hand.”
He felt slightly dazed, his heart still light with the thought of fresh, new love, the Governor’s mesmerizing daughter, and now this.
He’d been trained by the best. A man who knew the game. Fucking Sportcoat.
Haroldeen is a girl’s name.”
Soup Lopez
Dominic—who just happened to rise up at five a.m. and just happened to arrive at the basement door at six a.m., and by golly just happened to find himself lined up behind Bum-Bum after trading places with several
Randall Collins. He was killed.”
“Beanie.”
“No, it wasn’t Hettie. Something about a Denise Bibb.”
There’s love in this world, mister. It don’t stop for nothing or nobody. You ain’t never seen that?”
The sight of Beanie’s mother howling at her son’s coffin would haunt them all in the next few days.
because in her heart it was proof that God was forever generous with His gifts: hope, love,
truth, and the belief in the indestructability of the good in all people.
It was the sound of laughing.
“Your guy . . . the old guy, he cut loose over at Enzo Vitali’s pier last night. Shot three people.”
But they killed one of the kid’s crew.
Bunch Moon’s been tryi—”
“Potts told my guy he went into the old paint factory behind Vitali Pier and found a drunk back there who saw it all. The guy told Potts there was a girl.”
“Before the drugs came, Joe. It’s not the coloreds. It’s the drugs.”
Sausage and Deems were alive and in the hospital in Borough Park.
Seeing how we lived under the white folks, how they treated us, how they treated each other, their cruelty and their phoniness, the lies they told each other, and the lies we learned to tell. The South was hard.”
Hollering at a little bitty boy. A boy doing a man’s job. And he was a drunk his own self.”
Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. The lies they tell each other sound better to them than the truth does when it comes out of our mouths.
beat up bad, grinded down from the day he was slapped to life.”
York really is? We come here to be free and find life’s worse here than back home. The white folks here just color it different. They don’t mind you sitting next to ’em on the subway, or riding the bus in the front seat, but if you asks for the same pay, or wants to live next door, or get so beat down you don’t wanna stand up and sing about how great America is, they’ll bust down on you so hard pus’ll come out your ears.”
know is, you got to be right. To let me go, you got to be right.”
The Cause was changing, he could see the transformation everywhere. It was 1969;
Dub explained what he’d seen. Young kids. A girl shooter. Two old men. Two young men. Two of them dropped. A third, maybe a fourth, fell into the harbor.
had never occurred to him that the boxcar and the church, both located at the barren edges of the Cause Houses, were within sight of each other.
Bunch Moon
Haroldeen the Death Queen
Unless you live in one of those places where the welcome mat’s printed in Old English and they don’t like niggers.
“Deems and the Deacon. And the other guy.”
Don’t you ever get tired of hearing yourself talk? Deacon King Kong!”
“See, Deems, in them days, everything had been decided for you. You had to go along. You didn’t even know that you were going along. You didn’t know there was anything else to do. You never wondered about anything else. You was locked into a kind of thinking. It never occurred to you to do anything but what you was told. I never asked why I was doing something or why I wasn’t doing something. I just did whatever I was told. So when my daddy did this to me, I didn’t feel no wrong in it. It was just another natural thing in the world.”
he’d never seen in all the years he’d known old Sportcoat, the happy-go-lucky drunk of the Cause Houses: absolute, indestructible rage.
don’t want that you should end up like me, or my Hettie, dead of sorrow in the harbor.
“The only difference between me and him,” Mel said, “is two hundred forty-three days.”
“Well, I’m a colored woman and it was dark and I know however that cobweb spins out, I’d likely be blamed for whatever wrong happened.
And who should answer the door but this fella.
“I remember his name rightly. One of the finest men I ever knowed. Old Guido Elefante.” “The Elephant?” “No. The Elephant’s daddy.”
“He said, ‘A person who trusts can be trusted.’ “I
“Son, a blessing favors them that needs it. Don’t matter how it comes. It just matters that it does.”
her respect and deference for older people in general, including the old deacon, the rummy who’d worked for his mother, whom she’d finally met just a month ago.
