Strivers Row by Kevin Baker Page B

car had said a thing, no one had even gotten up to look for the MPs, or the conductor. He had been left to sit there, in his seat, and pray to Jesus as best he could while his wife was insulted, and he was humiliated in front of her. About to be beaten, or even worse, just as in all the other shameful, mortifying attacks on black men around the country that he had just been reading about but had never had to endure himself—
    Then that crazy boy had shown up. Showing no fear at all. Bantering with the soldiers, tricking them. Throwing the sociopath of a sergeant right off the train. Looking like Satan himself when he grinned, that ridiculous boy with his conked hair—but still fearless all the same.
    But why, then, the jump into the bay? Why would he do such a thing? Just to show off ? To mock them—all the white people in the car? And himself ?
    That was the thing Jonah couldn’t figure out, even though he thought about it all the way back to New York. He might have asked him. The boy had come back to the car several more times, selling his sandwiches and ice cream. It was the hungriest car of white folks Jonah had ever seen, all of them hastening to slide large tips into his jacket pockets, as if their nickels and dimes and even quarters could make up for their own silence in the face of watching another human being humiliated and beaten.
    He could have asked him, could have stood up and thanked him, straight out, man to man. But he hadn’t. Every time the boy had come near, he had meant to—but each time he saw his own wife’s eyes light up, in gratitude. Amanda, too chary of his own feelings, too sensitive to actually buy something. Turning instead to the picnic basket Isabel had provided. But she had given him that grateful smile, and every time he came by, the thought of standing up and thanking in front of his wife some crazy young street Negro for saving him kept him glued in his seat.
    What was still worse was how Amanda had silently, solicitously offered him one of the petite chicken sandwiches that Isabel had prepared—her way of acknowledging his ruined pride. And though he knew that she meant well, Jonah could not even get through one of them. To him it tasted of the porch at Oak Bluffs, and highballs and tennis courts, and fine, intellectual conversations, and all those other wonderful amenities of life that he knew did not mean a thing in the face of a few drunken white soldiers on a public train.

CHAPTER FOUR
    MALCOLM
    He had his bag on before they hit the station. Ripping off the still soggy sandwich uniform, forcing his long legs through the gorgeous reat pleats as they pounded down the tracks along the Hudson. Barely noticing the wide, slow-moving river, the elegant silver bridge shimmering in the late afternoon haze as they flashed by.
    â€œ Pe-ennn sylvania Station! Penn sylvania Station!” the conductor was hollering, in words that even he couldn’t help make sound like a song.
    Then they were bolting up into a world of vast steel spider-webs, and large black-and-white clocks floating in the sunlight that poured through the roof. Below the towering metal trellises, the platform waiting benches were filled with young men, in uniform or without. Packed around the railing above them were girlfriends and wives and mothers, staring wistfully down, so close to the objects of their affection but separated by the closed train gates, not daring to call out lest they break their men’s hearts or their own. The soldiers and soon-to-be soldiers sitting in their own glum silence, avoided their gaze, smoking or pacing around.
    Then they were out in the cavernous main hall. The crowds there even thicker, their quietest murmurs echoing off the marble walls, sitting or sleeping on their duffel bags and suitcases. Thousands of people, waiting alone together. They ran past a mother—a large white woman with gray hair, and a simple worn smock of a housedress. Her face was