Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow [53]
The boy, however, loved the design and was inspired to study the hieroglyphic alphabet. He abandoned Wild West Weekly for magazines that published tales of violated tombs and the coming to fruition of mummies’ curses. He had become intrigued with the black woman in the attic and in his quiet secret games incorporated her as a Nubian princess now captured for a slave. Unaware, she sat in her room by the window, while he passed her door in a beaked papier-mâché mask of an ibis which he had made himself.
One afternoon, a Sunday, a new Model T Ford slowly came up the hill and went past the house. The boy, who happened to see it from the porch, ran down the steps and stood on the sidewalk. The driver was looking right and left as if trying to find a particular address; he turned the car around at the corner and came back. Pulling up before the boy, he idled his throttle and beckoned with a gloved hand. He was a Negro. His car shone. The brightwork gleamed. There was a glass windshield and a custom pantasote top. I’m looking for a young woman of color whose name is Sarah, he said. She is said to reside in one of these houses.
The boy realized he meant the woman in the attic. She’s here. The man switched off the motor, set the brake and jumped down. Then he climbed the stone steps under the two Norwegian maples and walked around the side of the house to the back door.
When Mother came to the door the colored man was respectful, but there was something disturbingly resolute and self-important in the way he asked her if he could please speak with Sarah. Mother could not judge his age. He was a stocky man with a red-complected shining brown face, high cheekbones and large dark eyes so intense as to suggest they were about to cross. He had a neat moustache. He was dressed in the affectation of wealth to which colored people lent themselves. He wore a fitted black overcoat, a black and white hound’s-tooth suit, gray spats and pointed black shoes. He held in his hand a charcoal-gray cap and driving goggles. She told him to wait and closed the door. She climbed to the third floor. She found the girl Sarah not sitting at the window as she usually did but standing rigidly, hands folded in front of her, and facing the door. Sarah, Mother said, you have a caller. The girl said nothing. Will you come to the kitchen? The girl shook her head. You don’t want to see him? No, ma’am, the girl finally said softly while she looked at the floor. Send him away, please. This was the most she had said in all the months she had lived in the house. Mother went back downstairs and found the fellow not at the back door but in the kitchen where, in the warmth of the corner near the cookstove, Sarah’s baby lay sleeping in his carriage. It was a wicker carriage on four wooden tapered spoke wheels and it had a faded upholstery of blue satin with a plush roll. Her own son had slept in it and her brother before him. The black man was kneeling beside the carriage and staring at the child. Mother, not thinking clearly, was suddenly outraged that he had presumed to come in the door. Sarah is unable to see you, she said, and she held the door open. The colored man took another glance at the child, rose, thanked her and departed. She slammed the door harder than she should have. The baby woke and began to cry. She picked him up, comforting him, astonished by her extreme reaction to the visitor.
Such was the coming of the colored man in the car to Broadview Avenue. His name was Coalhouse Walker Jr. Beginning with that Sunday he appeared every week, always knocking at the back door, always