A Red Death by Walter Mosley Page A

through the block to 112th Place. The back entrance was just a door in a rough stucco wall, like a small office building, maybe a dentist’s office. On the first floor there was an entrance and a short hall with a few plywood doors on either side. At the end of the tan-carpeted hall was a stairwell that went up and down. Odell had told me that the minister had his office and apartment on the upper floor and that there was a kitchen and cafeteria space in the basement.
    I went down to the basement.
    There I saw a scene that had been a constant in my life since I was a small boy. Black women. Lots of them. Cooking in the industrial-size kitchen and talking loud, laughing and telling stories. But all I really saw was their hands. Working hands. Laying out plates, peeling yams, folding sheets and tablecloths into perfect squares, washing, drying, stacking, and pushing from here to there. Women who lived by working. Brushing the hair of their own children, or brushing the hair of some neighborhood child whose parents were gone, either for the night or for good. Cooking, yes, but there was lots of other work for a Negro woman. Dressing wounds of the men they started out being so proud of. Punishing children, white and black. And working for God in his house and at home.
    My own mother, sick as she was, made sweet-potato pies for a church dinner on the night she died. She was twenty-five years old.
    “Evenin’, Easy,” Parker Lamont said. He was one of the elder deacons. I hadn’t seen him when I walked in.
    “Parker.”
    “Odell and the others are out in the back,” he said and began to lead me through the crowd of working women.
    Many of them said hello to me. I moved around the neighborhoods quite a bit in those days and if I saw that one of the ladies needed some help I was happy to oblige; there’s all kinds of truth and insight in gossip, and the only key you need is a helping hand.
    Winona Fitzpatrick was there. She was bright and full of life even though she didn’t smile at me. She was wearing a flattering white dress that wasn’t made for the kind of work people were doing. But she wasn’t working either. The chairwoman of the church council, she was the power behind the throne, as it were.
    “What’s goin’ on here?” I asked Parker.
    “What?”
    “All this cookin’ an’ stuff.”
    “Gonna be a meetin’ of the N double-A C P. Ev’ry chapter in southern California.”
    “Tonight?”
    “Yeah.”
    He led me through a maze of long dining tables and through an open doorway in the back. This led to a closed door. I could smell the smoke even before we went in.
    There I found a roomful of black men. All of them smoking and sitting in various positions of ease.
    It was a smallish room with a threadbare light green carpet and a few folding tables that the men used to hold their ashtrays. There were checkerboards and dominoes out but nobody was playing. There was a sour smell under the smoky odor. The smell of men’s breath.
    Odell rose to meet me.
    “Easy,” he said. “I want you to meet Wilson and Grant.”
    We nodded at each other.
    “Pleased t’meetcha,” I said.
    Dupree was there and some other men I knew.
    “Melvin and the minister be down in a few minutes. They upstairs right now,” he said. “And this here is Chaim, Chaim Wenzler.”
    The white man had been sitting on the other side of Dupree, so I hadn’t seen him. He was short and hunched over in a serious conversation with a man I didn’t know.
    But when he heard his name he straightened up and looked at me.
    “This is Easy Rawlins, Chaim. He’s got some free time in the week an’ wants t’ help out.”
    “Wonderful,” Chaim said in a strong voice. He stood up to shake my hand. “I need the help, Mr. Rawlins. Thank you.”
    “Easy. Call me Easy.”
    “We are doing work in the neighborhood,” he said. He indicated a chair for me and sat himself. We’d gone right to work. I liked him even though I didn’t want to.
    “Food