Telegraph Avenue

“The freest black men that ever lived,” Luther Stallings told the boys, “but it was like a kind of secret freedom.”

He described the Pullman porters in terms that conjured up giant sleek-haired warriors of the night, armored in smiles, how they went from place to place, all these little backwoods, boondocks towns, seeing the world, carrying like undercover spies, hidden about their persons, all the news of the clandestine world of black America, the latest records, gossip, magazines, hairstyles, spreading the lore and the styles across the country, to every place where black people lived, and most of all singing the song of California, to be specific the city of Oakland, where Pullman porters got off the trains to rest on their sunset couches in the houses they bought with the money they wrestled loose from Mr. George Pullman, houses in which they built up families that sent children and grandchildren to college and trade school and eventually to the United States Congress, then getting back onto the trains in the morning to ride south and east, spreading the news of their own prosperity, so that by the time World War II blew up, Oakland was the Hollywood of middle-class black aspiration, except that unlike in Hollywood, once you got to Oakland, you actually stood a chance of making good.

“Hollywood,” Titus said, feeling like he was expected to say something. “Well, all right.”

The Secret History came off kind of boring in its particulars, truthfully, built on events and details and historical phenomena whose obscurity to Titus only deepened as his grandfather strung them together: strikes and black labor unions, bourgeoisie and Seventh Street nightclubs, shipyards, the Klan marching down Broadway in broad daylight as white Oakland lined the streets cheering, and yet the arc of the narrative, the sense of sweep across time and territory, stirred, in Titus’s mind, a sense of revelation.

“That was the real underground railroad, a railroad underneath, inside another railroad. And this here was the terminus. This building you in, it was a train barn. You see that line there in the cement, crack like a big circle going all the way around? That’s where the turntable is. Big old concrete turntable, spinning the music of dreams.”

The old man seemed to have concluded his remarks. He sat up, winded, shining from his hairline to his shins.

“Only it don’t turn no more,” Eddie said.

Luther Stallings looked from Titus to Julie and back, wanting to know what they thought, how they were handling it, what they were going to do with their little minds now that they had been blown.

Julie glanced at Eddie. “Is that from the real Batmobile?” he said.

Valletta Moore said, “Huh.” She shook her head. “Luther, they are not listening to you.” She was tucking little foam spacers between the fingers of her left hand. “Nobody is listening to you.”

“Man should have got a Oscar,” Eddie said. “Always playing the silent type.”

He and Valletta Moore fell out laughing.

“I’m listening,” Titus said, trying not to sound contradictory, since contradicting Valletta Moore was painful to him and, in the movies of hers that he had seen, occasionally dangerous.

“All right,” Luther said, firing off a scowl at his old lady, then giving Eddie the other barrel, mopping his face with a ragged but clean square of polishing cloth. “There you go. Now,” he told Titus, “boy, what you got to do, if you want to absorb knowledge, you have to ask questions. So go on. Go ahead.”

Titus understood that he was meant to build off the lecture just completed, but that understanding was unable to outrun the natural impulse of his true curiosity. He knew he should ask a question about Egyptian funeral traditions and Prince Hall Freemasons, but to his dismay, he heard himself saying, “Why you have to live in a garage?”

Another laugh arose irresistibly from the neighborhood of Eddie Cantor, a repressed, apologetic series of semi-coughs. This time Valletta Moore contented herself with studying her own reflection in the clear-coat shimmer of her left index fingernail and muttering a few words to herself in a parody of a stage whisper, hard to make out, something along the lines of Oh, now, I want to hear this.

The old man sat, long arms hugging knees to chest. He pursed his lips and gave his head a slight shake, leading with his jaw. Closed his eyes, opened them again. For what felt like a long time, he said nothing. Titus began to regret the question, particularly when he saw a brief upwelling in the old man’s eyes, though it passed without a tear having been permitted to fall. Titus was on the verge of withdrawing the question and shifting about for a replacement when his grandfather said, “I did some stupid shit in my life. That is the truth.”

Titus glanced at Julie, whose face grew solemn and knowing, a touch pious. “Drugs,” Julie said.

“Even stupider shit than drugs,” the old man said. “And that’s saying a lot, y’all can take my word. But I’m clean and sober, thirteen months, one week, and two days. I have my shit together. I officially have a movie in the active stages of preproduction—”

Valletta Moore pronounced another observation whose syllables hovered just that side of audible. She was like the magic harp from that Disney movie The Black Cauldron, popping a string every time the harp-playing dude, the bard, came up with some new exaggeration of his exploits or abilities.

“Strutter 3?” Titus said.

“You guessed it. But uh, something of that nature, independent type of venture, operating on the kind of small nonstudio level that Stallings Productions operating at, you have to, look here, sometimes you need to get a little creative in your financing. That’s why, to try to answer your question, wasn’t exactly the question I was expecting, but uh, I came up with a way to, uh, make one of those stupid things I did a long time ago, way to turn it around a little bit. Hook up to a major player in the industry.”

“Or so you thought,” said Valletta Moore.

“Goddammit, Valletta—”

“Thinking you could shake down that—”

The old man was up and on his feet like an umbrella opening. In the passage of another half second, he had organized his arms and legs according to a logic more direct than whatever had guided his verbal teaching. There was an impression of wind and gyration contained within a modest ambit, like the procedures of the Tasmanian Devil in cartoons, and then, as with the push given to the back of the Toronado by the tip of his walking stick, it all came down to the point of his left foot, one square inch of contact. The steel drum pitched over, resounding against the cement floor with a Chinese-gong finality. All of Valletta’s little bottles and implements went flying. Over in the bay, the hydraulic pump cut off with a gasp.

“Uh?” Julie said to Valletta Moore. “You okay?”

They were the first words he had directed toward her since the minute they walked into the garage.

“Oh, I’m fine, honey,” Valletta said, all cheerful. She crept around on her hands and knees, trying to put things right, checking bottles for cracks and spills. “Thank you.”

“Well, I better go check on those yo-yos,” Eddie said.

The fighting fish flitted back and forth behind the panes of their aquarium as Eddie surveyed the mess he had permitted in his otherwise spotless body shop, looking like his reasons for having permitted it were no longer apparent to him. Figure his eyes must be trained by now to gauge possibilities for recovery, salvation, hidden in the ruin of a once fine machine. Titus tried to read those eyes for signs of hope, but Eddie was looking at him; Julie; him.

“You boys need a ride anywheres?”

“Uh, well—”

Julie got to his feet, hugging himself, used to hanging with the kind of people who talked it out, shared their feelings, everybody circling up like Care Bears for a big hug when it was through, nobody kicking shit over, spattering the walls and floor with bloody nail polish.

Luther Stallings reached for his walking stick and leaned on it with both hands, watching his grandson but not giving any indication of what he wanted Titus to do or to say.

“We’re fine,” Titus said.

Eddie nodded and, yelling in a contemptuous dialect of Spanglish, went over to critique the efforts of his crew. Luther’s stick banged against the concrete floor as he padded in his Bruce Lee slippers across the stained seas and continents that mapped it, toward the Toronado in the nearest bay. He reached in through the driver’s window to take the keys from the ignition, then went around to the back and popped the trunk. He took a plastic bin with two lids that interfolded out of the trunk, huffed it over to one of the workbenches. He looked at Titus.

“Thought your ass wanted to see my movie,” he said.