Strivers Row Read Free Page B

the other passengers around them. Drinking openly from a bottle of rusty liquid with a rose on it. There were five of them altogether, and they looked drunk and mean, and like they were spoiling for a fight.
    Moving closer, he caught a glimpse of what it was the soldiers had chosen to amuse themselves with. There, sitting very erect in one of the last aisle seats, was a young white minister—with a black woman. He blinked at the sight, but there was no mistaking it: The white minister, wearing a clerical collar and a palpable air of studious martyrdom. The woman truly black, her skin as dark and smooth as the skin of a plum, the two of them sitting side by side, holding hands as if they were man and wife.
    The soldiers were all over them—two in the seat just behind them, two leaning over the seat just in front, a fifth propped up against the seat across the aisle. The soldiers in front were leaning right into the couple’s faces, laughing belligerently while the two behind them were doing the sort of irritating, schoolboy things that could be relied upon to drive anyone to murder—pushing the straw Panama the man was wearing forward on his head, flicking his ears with their fingers; picking at the white, plastic curl of flower on the woman’s hat.
    The woman was staring straight ahead into nothingness, with a blankness that Malcolm recognized at once. The minister was looking slightly upward, as if toward Heaven—though at the same time, ludicrously enough, he was still trying to make small talk with the woman. She only continued to stare straight ahead, into the middle distance, so that they made a kind of perfect triangle—the soldiers baiting the minister, the minister trying to ignore the soldiers, the woman trying to ignore her husband. He might have laughed at the ridiculousness of it all—except that as he came still closer down the aisle he could see how tightly the couple’s hands were clenched together, the man’s knuckles almost white with the effort.
    But he wasn’t, Malcolm realized then. He could see it when he got up close—the man’s hair just a little too curly above his clerical collar, and his good, seersucker suit. His irritatingly smooth, plump cheeks just the lightest shade of olive. So light that without the black woman along, Malcolm might never have suspected.
    The minister was colored, too.
    The soldiers had realized it as well, Malcolm understood now. Abusing him for his propriety, his haughtiness—for being so light-skinned. He felt the palms of his hands itch as he came toward them, a reckless urge washing over him again, just as it had when he was waiting to gauge the train and jump onboard. Unsure of just what it was he wanted more, to smash the soldiers’ faces in or to poke at the nearly white preacher with them.
    â€œHowzat again?” brayed the drunken soldier who was poised over the minister’s face. “Don’ go tellin’ me yer black !”
    His back was turned but Malcolm could tell he was a bruiser all the same, almost as tall as Malcolm was himself and much more solidly built, with a shock of black hair and a sergeant’s stripes on his arm. He was obviously in charge—the rest of them laughing when he laughed, and picking right up on whatever he said.
    â€œDon’ tell me yer a minister, neither! No nigger preacher ever looked like that. You just wear that getup to get the ladies, don’tcha? Particul’y the dark ladies!”
    The sergeant was so close to him now that Malcolm could see little flecks of his spittle landing on the preacher’s face. But the man sat where he was, somehow not flinching, his chin still turned imploringly toward Heaven. Only his grip on the dark hand of the woman beside him betrayed his fear. His face still impossibly refined and serene, so much so that Malcolm could not help but want to smash it in for him.
    Goddamn high-yaller Episcopal bastard. Like all