I took it anyway.
I can’t reproduce the letter here because it was far too long: five pages of tiny chicken scratches written in the grammar of some foreign land. The first page listed the reasons that Belldie, Loren’s aunt, hadn’t written him before. One, which I didn’t read out loud, was that the boy was illiterate. There was also a theft committed, a pregnancy he caused, an incident in church that she didn’t explain, and then there was the boy’s temper and his steadfast refusal to work. After that there came three pages of accolades for Loren’s parents and his brother Jimmy.
It was only on the last page that Belldie, in minute detail, described the collision between his parents’ pickup truck and the Sun Oil truck on the highway near their farm. Jimmy was with them and now they were all with the Lord.
The funeral had been held a week later. The letter was dated six months earlier.
184
FEAR OF THE DARK
Loren was at our feet dripping tears and blood on the floor.
Damn. Even when I remember that letter I realize how bad some people have it. There was that white boy made a punk by black men in an inescapable cell, holding a letter about the deaths of his folks. A letter written by blood that hated him. It might have been tough being a black man in America, but I wouldn’t have traded shoes with Loren — no, sir.
Toward the end of my reading of Loren’s letter the cell door came open and another prisoner was added to the over-crowded room. When Loren fell to the ground crying, someone shouted, “What?” and I thought I had an inkling of who the new inmate might be.
A big man stormed up to us. He was light colored like granite with brownish lichen growing on it. He was big and muscular.
“Who the fuck are you?” he asked Fearless as Fearless rose to the meeting.
“Fearless Jones,” my friend said with no particular sense of pride.
The granite man gave a flinty smile. “I heard’a you. Yeah. I heard’a you. Mothahfuckahs always talkin’ ’bout how bad you are. Huh. My name’s Chapman Grey. I’m a light heavyweight.
Do you think you can kick my butt like these punk-ass niggahs think you sumpin’?”
The grammar didn’t quite hold together, but Chapman posed an interesting question. Could Fearless stand up against a professional?
It took me seventeen seconds to find out.
Before Fearless could reply, Chapman hit him with a stiff right jab. He followed that with a right cross that sent my friend falling against the bunk.
185
Walter Mosley
That was one second.
Chapman pressed his advantage, coming in on Fearless with a body barrage of six or seven blows.
That took care of seconds two and three.
Fearless pushed against the rock-hard boxer, propelling himself away. The crowd around moved out from the fray.
Chapman grinned and strode forward.
By then we were up to second eight.
Chapman hit Fearless in the jaw with a right hook that would have killed me and anyone standing behind me. Fearless was thrown back but not down.
I could hear the guards outside the cell shouting.
By the time Chapman was stalking Fearless again, ten seconds had passed. He threw a straight right, but Fearless stepped to the left and hooked his right arm over Chapman’s.
He twisted around once, throwing the boxer off balance, and then hurled Grey into the bars of our cell. Fearless moved forward then, hitting Grey in the diaphragm, the groin, and the throat. He didn’t use all of his strength, but he definitely inca-pacitated the boxer.
By the seventeenth second, Grey was unconscious on a cot and Fearless was walking back to his corner.
Grey’s question had been answered definitively. In the ring he would have torn Fearless up. But out in the real world he had better watch out.
186
L o r e n c r i e d a l l t h r o u g h the alterca-tion. By the time the guards came, the fight was 29 over. Things settled down, and I sat there thinking how the life I was living would be better in the remembering than it was while it was going on.
Fearless, definitely the nicest and kindest person I knew, would fight at the drop of a hat. If he were a white guy living in the middle-class world, he would have been exactly the same, but there would never be a reason for him to fight. But we were poor and black and so either we fought or we lost ground. That’s all there was to it.
Despite the smell of sweat and urine, despite the blood and tears on my cot, I still felt more secure than I had for many days. While Fearless listened to Loren talk about how much he loved his mother, I lay back and closed my eyes.
The nimbus Sleep sensed my repose and began slowly to drift in my direction.
“Minton, Paris,” someone shouted, and Sleep scurried away to the corner where she resided next to Death and Despair.
“That’s me,” I said, rising from my bunk.
