Love Story Black

1
“Miss Pariss? Miss Mona Pariss?”

“Who are you? You my new welfare worker?”

“No, mam—I’m—well, I’m a writer . . .”

Hastily I backed away from the triple-chained crack in the door through which her darting suspicious eyes were studying me, and I assumed the smiling expression of a kindly undertaker to convince her, and myself as well, that I was neither a criminal nor a policeman—though my nose was vibrating convulsively from the exotic stench of collard greens, pork fat cooking, and powerful incense leaking out onto the darkly sinister landing of the fourth floor walk-up apartment where the great lady lived.

“How come those people down at welfare always changing my worker?” she whined, she too shuffling back cautiously from her side of the door, so that I caught a fluttering glimpse of what
looked like a tattered oriental robe of embroidered dragons and poisonous flowers draped over a slender body like an over-sized flag around a corpse.

“I’m not a welfare worker, Miss Pariss,” I repeated loudly, thinking perhaps she was deaf. “I’m a writer—”

“Oh, you one of them welfare auditors. Well, I ain’t got nothing to hide from the government. But where’s my Miss Hollygreen—that nice red-headed white girl got me my telephone put in. I ain’t seen hide nor hair of her since way before Christmas, and my arthritis been accumulating something terrible . . .”

“Miss Pariss,” I said wearily, “I’ve been sent by New Black Woman Magazine to interview you, or at least seek your permission for such an interview—”

Nervously I fumbled in my jacket pocket for the letter Gracie had had her secretary prepare for me, neatly typed and very officious looking on heavy bond paper, and bearing the self-consciously elegant New Black Woman letterhead. I pushed the crisp letter through the crack of the door but Miss Pariss only took another step backward.

“I already been interviewed by the welfare people,” she said, sidestepping the letter, “three times—twice at the Center, and they didn’t even pay my busfare, and once by some pimplyassed dude who came snooping around the apartment looking for rats and cockroaches pretending he was an exterminator, when I could tell right away he was an inspector from the Department of Social Services by that skinny black tie he was wearing and those cheap two-toned Thom McCann shoes, and he had on one of those skinny-brimmed Jewish black hats—”

“Please, Miss Pariss—!”

“Now come to think of it—how come you know my real name before I was married? How come you know my stage name? You a detective from the Bureau of Investigation? If you are, I don’t know nothing about the nigger they found cut up into stewing beef in the apartment across the hall. My motto is ‘See no evil, hear no evil, and talk no evil . . .’ I’m a religious woman, and I stay out of trouble like trouble stinks and trouble stays away from me like I stink—if you’ll pardon the metaphor, that’s show business talk you know—”

“If you’ll just read this letter, Miss Pariss, it will explain everything . . .”

Bony fingers heavily burdened with many gaudy rings and with long purple-painted nails snatched the letter from my hand.

“I got to get my reading glasses,” she said, “so you stand right there and cool your heels while I go and verify your credentials . . .”

Abruptly and definitively the door slammed shut, and there was the grating sound of locks being turned, and I was left standing there on the dark landing, feeling humiliated and impotent, my initial elation over the assignment having abandoned me already, as though the stench of collard greens, pork fat and incense had the effect on my already shaken psyche of a depressant gas.

I lit a cigarette and glanced at my watch, thinking that if I could get this over within half an hour or so I would still be in time for my first class of the Fall semester. But when almost fifteen minutes passed and there was still no sound from within Miss Pariss’ apartment, I knocked urgently on the door—the way detectives knock on doors in the movies.

Still no sound from within. But now in the abrupt silence I heard faltering footsteps climbing the creaky wooden steps that had evidently replaced the concrete steps long since disintegrated;
for Miss Pariss lived in an ancient town house that had undergone countless transformations in its century-old existence.

In a few minutes, a light-skinned Black man with the puffy jowls and slow shuffling one-sided walk of a waiter still carrying an invisible tray appeared on the landing. He was wearing a jaunty red, black and green wool ski cap and a frayed black minister’s coat which was several sizes too small for his flabby cucumber-shaped frame. Under his arm he carried a hand-carved cane with a crudely wrought Coptic cross on the head, and with his free hand he was hugging a gallon jug of red Gallo wine which he delicately placed on the sagging floor in front of the apartment adjoining Miss Pariss’ and began to fumble clumsily in his bulging coat pocket for his keys. Apparently he was in a drunken stupor but after several unsuccessful attempts at fitting the key
into the lock his eyes narrowly focused on me and he turned, his blood-streaked eyes narrowed with suspicion.

“You the new welfare worker?” he asked in a squeaky belligerent tone of voice.

“No, I’m not—I’m waiting for Miss Pariss . . .”

“Miss Pariss? Maybe you mean Madam Sheba Smith—anyway she ain’t home. She gone for the week. Her sister down home in Cedric, North Carolina died—besides she already been inspected
by the exterminator—”

“But I just spoke with her—I’m waiting for her to open the door—”

“You must a been speaking to a ghost then, cause she ain’t back from the funeral. I thought you was the new welfare worker, cause that hinckety white girl ain’t been back since the week before Christmas and she promised me an emergency clothing allowance on account of the fire last Thanksgiving when they turned off my electricity and I had to use candles . . .”

Wheezing as though he had a console of tiny whistles imbedded in his chest, he promptly forgot me and, having finally found his keys, he began unlocking each of three locks with the solemn concentration and dignity of the night watchman of a bank.

When the door closed behind him, I lit another cigarette, and resolved that if Miss Pariss didn’t open the door within a few minutes I was going to leave and renounce the whole project of interviewing her, no matter what Gracie would say about novelists lacking “journalistic initiative,” the exact phrase she had used when I first approached her about doing a “literary” piece for her
new magazine.

“We’re not printing any of that washed out white literary chi-chi bullshit,” was her scathing retort. “We’re trying to get to the nitty-gritty shit about the black experience!”

Gracie didn’t like my novels and said I’d lived in Europe too long.

“You’ve got to take that brain of yours out of that white plastic bag!” she said.

And maybe she was right. At any rate, here I was standing like a fool in a toxic cloud of collard greens, cooking fat and incense waiting for Miss Pariss to open the door. And just as I was about to knock one last time, the door opened wide and Miss Pariss appeared, a sly smile on her nut brown face.

She looked much younger than I expected. Gracie said their research indicated she must have been at least eighty-four years old. But in that dismal light she appeared to be a well-preserved sixty, her true age, whatever it was, betrayed mostly by the shrunken and wrinkled skin on her long claw-like hands, in both of which she still clutched the letter of introduction as though it were an official proclamation to be read before an audience.

“What kind of magazine this New Black Woman?” she demanded. “I ain’t never heard of no magazine like this—”

“Well—it’s kind of like a fashion magazine—” I lied, imagining all too well Gracie’s obscene reaction had she heard me. “Kind of like a black version of Vogue Magazine—”

Miss Pariss looked down at the letter again, her lips moving as she read, and then began to study me for such a long time that I coughed and involuntarily scratched my head.

“It’s a rather new magazine of its kind,” I said in a sinking voice. “As its title suggests it attempts to reflect the new awakening of the black woman. I might add that it is doing quite well financially. Actually, I should have brought along a copy to show you—”

“You one goodlooking Dude, even with that Jew-boy nose—you ain’t one of them dancing queens downstairs keep everybody awake playing that symphonette music on their hi-fi is you?”

“I’m a writer, a novelist—and I teach college—”

“Well you talk educated white. Those dancers, they’s homosexuals, if you get what I mean—funny fannies I call them, not that I hold that against them, but I like my black Dudes doing their stud business through the front door like the Good Lord ordained—”

“About the interview, Miss Pariss? I’m afraid I’m running short of time; I’ve got a class to teach and this is the first day of the semester. I hope you don’t misunderstand my rushing you like
this. But what about the interview?”

“You sure you ain’t no welfare inspector?”

“No mam—nor a detective either—perhaps it would be more convenient if I phone you for the interview—”

“My phone been turned off for two months—”

“But you do agree to the interview?”

“I ain’t agreed to nothing—”

She was studying me now with such intensity, her mouth slack in a sly mocking smile, that I could feel my hands perspiring and I began to rub them nervously along the sides of my trousers.

“You sure one goodlooking dude,” she said suddenly, “and you say you ain’t one of them funny fannies from downstairs—”

She took one more look at the letter, read it through word for word, then meticulously folded it and placed both the letter and the envelope in her sunken bosom.

“Well, I’ll tell you what I’ll do—” she said, lowering her voice to a conspiratory whisper. “You come back this evening, just before the Bill Cosby Show go on the air. There ain’t no lock on the door downstairs, but when you come up here to my door, you knock three times just like this—”

And she rapped on the door three times in a rapid signal—like manner.

“That way I’ll know it’s you and not that wino bum Reverend Grooms lives next door—because he’s not supposed to know I’m back yet—”