The Whisper of the Axe Read online

  “I like what I see,” Mr. Rackin, senior partner, told Teel after he had examined her exceptional credentials in his office where there was no room for Teel to sit unless she sat sideways on the end of the top of his desk like a gangster’s moll in the Warner Brothers stock company studies of the thirties. The chairs, both of them, were piled high with canned food. The walls were lined with canned food. Mr. Rackin had had a terrible experience with food during the Great Depression and he had been unable to take the chance of not having plenty of it near him ever since.

  “I’m not surprised,” Teel said.

  “You’re not surprised?” Mr. Rackin responded with much surprise. “How many offers have you had from downtown? You are a black lawyer, Miss Teel and, believe me, there isn’t another specialized practice in this whole town—although I except Brooklyn and the Bronx from that statement—who could use a specialist like you.”

  “A specialist at what, Mr. Rackin?”

  “At being black. At being a black woman at the same time as being a lawyer. The division I would like you to take over for us is a practice which is loaded with a lot of black women and, believe it or not, whatever they did that got them in the court, they need a little human help, too. I mean, if I can do it, which isn’t always, I’d like to give a little sympathy also for the fees because what they are always in court for is essentially a human condition.”

  “Like what?”

  “Mostly they are whores—you know. Some are thieves—listen, a whole lot are thieves. Some are junkies, some are pushers, some are pimps. But, by and large, they are either hookers or hookers engaged in some other incriminating line.”

  “What the hell, Mr. Rackin! What do I know about all that? I’ve never seen a whore that I know of. You might just as well ask me to train lions in a cage.”

  “They ain’t lions, Miss Teel. But they are in a cage, I admit you that This isn’t difficult law. You’ll have it all figured out by the end of the first day. The clients are picked up in the streets and the bars and in a few raids on a police quota basis; then their pimps come to you with fifty dollars a girl. It’s like an unofficial license fee which they pay every eleven or fifteen days to keep working. Out of the fifty, the cops get eighteen a head which they split with the two local political clubs. Eight goes to the boys in the courthouse, we get the twenty-four that is left and out of the twenty-four, you get eight, which is better money at the end of the year than anybody in your class will get downtown, believe me.”

  To get through the days, Teel began to remind herself that if she had been born white she might have been fat and dumb, but she couldn’t sustain that consolation. She had no use in this law practice for the three other languages she spoke, except Spanish, or for her grasp of the subtle meanings of the law. She was unable to become aimlessly bitter so she became purposively, savagely bitter against her own skin color and the color of the people who had ignored her in the firms where she knew she should be practicing law. She saw that she was getting too emotional to remain objective and design ways to change it. So, she threw emotion out of her life. Emotion keeps people young with empathy, and when it goes it is a bad loss.

  Teel moved into shrewdness, rejected that for hardness, then cut that away in token exchange for a year of despair while her clients told her about how the rats had run off with the baby. When she couldn’t accept any more of it she told Mr. Rackin she was quitting. She liked Mr. Rackin. He was old, he wished everybody well, but he knew that couldn’t be.

  “Whatta you gonna do?” he asked Teel with concern. “You are a very good lawyer. That shows even in this kind of a practice. But you are also a black woman lawyer and the promised land is late in arriving.”

  “I’m going to open my own office.”

  “That’s crazy!”

  “I got to find that out, Mr. Rackin.”

  “Where? Here? In Harlem? Miss Teel, believe me, no matter how it looks there is only so much business. The cops won’t cooperate with you. And the political clubs? Listen, you won’t be able to get a client. You are making a nice, steady forty thousand a year here. Why should you open your own office?”

  “I got a gimmick, Mr. Rackin. I’m going downtown.”

  She rented weekly desk space on East 40th Street. The day before she opened she had a meeting at Chock Full O’Nuts with a former client who was a good thief and who was married to a great booster.

  “Listen, Douglas,” she said, “what I need is something nice in the ladies’ two-hundred-and-eighty-nine-fifty line but I need it once a week. Can you do that?”

  “You know it, baby.”

  “I would glom it if I had the time. But I don’t. Just take stuff at around three hundred retail with good labels and give me a little variety every week. Like jewelry, maybe big perfumes, underwear. You know.”

  “What I don’t know, Ethel knows. She has a good eye and she can keep every week matched up on an ensemble basis. Is it for you?”

  “No, no,” Teel said. “It’s for the Area Billing Supervisor of the telephone company. She will be happy not to send me any bills, long distance or local, if I treat her right in the merchandise line.”

  Teel entered her own practice of law: the defense of the country’s most publicized underdogs. Princely heroin wholesalers who owed her a few favors sent her the first clients. If Teel’s clients were not nationally famous when they were dug up, they were household words by the time Teel had the jury tell them they were Not Guilty. Ghetto communities became so aroused, bleeding hearts hemorrhaged so heavily, that Teel’s soon-heavy fees were put together on a national subscription basis. On a really good civil rights/criminal trial with the front pages working overtime, Teel was good for an average of sixty thousand dollars a case. She averaged three a year. What helped her was that she was a genius.

  She was the sole trial lawyer, flashing her beauty and intelligence like a succoring lighthouse, for The San Antonio Two, The Aspen Six, The Winsted Nine, The Rockrimmon Twelve, and three sharp-looking black girls who had been charged with gang raping an Irish Tourist Board representative in a Hilton Hotel in Duluth. Teel was the most famous trial lawyer in the United States by the time she was twenty-eight years old. She could make a jury beg with their eyes to please stop the shame she made them feel and which they had not known they could feel. She looked so young and brave. She was the idol of every black man and woman who had ever felt the crunch—which included just about every black American except a very rich Jones wholesaler in south Chicago named Grunts Patterson.

  Teel was decorated by the Government of the Democratic Republic of Congo, later Zaire, in a simple ceremony witnessed by 73,000 people inside and outside the Country Ballroom on 129th Street and Lenox. She was invited to convert to Islam and the Republican Party on the same evening. She was given an Agatha Teel Night at Shea Stadium before the start of a ballgame. The park sold out. That night they gave her the Mayor, two Senators, a Mercedes 450SL, a contract to model Blackglama® mink coats in the more established white magazines, $19,238 in cash, and a year’s free supply of pot—all for the wildly popular reason that she had won an acquittal for two of the most admired Jones dealers in south Brooklyn; two men who, as revealed by Teel and confirmed by the jury, had been wrongfully accused of murder.

  She went from triumph to triumph. She recorded “Shit, Baby, You My Man” for the Clef label and it sold 781,285 singles with “Moonlight in Kahlua” on the flip side. She taught labor law at Cornell University. She dined at the White House just as soon as displaying blacks became useful to politicians. After dinner with the Kennedys she attended an evening at Camelot of musical concert by Pablo Casals and Pat Boone. After dinner with the Johnsons she attended a “down home” evening in the East Room starring Pat Boone and Pablo Casals. She was invited by JFK to sit on her first two Presidential Commissions: The Presidential Commission for the Investigation of Civil Rights Horizons for Commercial Airlines Pilots and CRIME: UCDEEM (The Presidential Commission for the Perspective Achievement
Relative to Unauthorized Transient Canadians for American Employment Motivations Within the Publishing & Printing Industries).

  By the time she was twenty-nine Teel’s photograph had appeared regularly in the American press from Women’s Wear to The Messenger of the Sacred Heart, 83 percent of the space having been nurtured by Shraderco, Teel’s own public relations firm, based in the Bahamas.

  By then Teel was earning two hundred-odd thousand dollars a year, but deep into the seams of her own mind, from an earlier season of believing that black people lived and worked apart from white people by choice, Teel now believed that the entire black world of the United States was a horde of broken reeds—addicts, prostitutes, skag merchants and habitual criminals; the amoral and the lost. The second conclusion was reached through her experience in the law and from the fact that everywhere she went or was invited to go outside her practice blacks were neither existent nor imagined. This conclusion also molded her eventual purpose.

  To do what she would do, Teel needed big flaws. For example, her perspective prevented her from understanding that she knew only the most afflicted fringes of the black community. Teel had never had the opportunity to know more. Her grandfather had been the son of a slave who had been passed through the Underground Railway as far as Forestport, New York, and there he had stayed. His daughter had become the great and good friend of a white restauranteur in Utica who, dying, had passed Aunt Mewsie an envelope filled with $37,000 (to keep his wife from getting it). Aunt Mewsie never spent more than on sheet music, yard goods, and Caruso records, so the money went into a Utica savings bank.

  Then Aunt Mewsie caught something which shook her all to pieces. She couldn’t stop shaking and she felt bad. She transferred the money to Teel’s father, a garage mechanic in a village that wouldn’t have been able to figure out what a Negro was if it hadn’t been for that runaway slave stopping over and starting a family with an imported wife from Gloriola, Canada (who had to be smuggled back into the United States under a wagon). Aunt Mewsie knew if she was shaking that much she couldn’t live alone in Utica anymore, so they brought her back up to Forestport. She lived for twelve more years, was a comfort to everybody, most of all to Teel and her little brother; then she died.

  Aunt Mewsie’s money sent Agatha and Jonas off to college as each one’s turn came. Teel went out into the world eight years before Jonas did. From the tune she was a child Teel never had the chance to learn about black people. Then she practiced law and found out by too-close observation. If there were blacks on the streets, in the shops and on the subways around the Barnard campus, they had nothing to do with who she felt herself to be. From the day Teel entered the practice of law on West 124th Street, it was as though her entire chemical composition had changed, the way the chemical structure of food changes when it is deep-fried. Suddenly, she seemed to be composed of one part horror and two parts rage, on being lowered abruptly into that courthouse in Harlem.

  The balance of affection in Teel’s life had been sound from the day she was born. She came from people who knew how to love their children and pay heed to them. Teel never had a minute of loneliness. She never felt she had missed something other people had been given. What she felt, what turned her, was a reversal of that. Later, when she saw all those black people, as black as herself—so many of them—so many tens and tens of thousands of them after eighteen years of imagining that there were only a hazy kind of five of them in the world, the world of Forestport—her Father, Mamma, Aunt Mewsie, Jonas and herself—she decided forcibly, explodingly, that the balance of affection in the lives of all those many other blacks moving in and out of that courtroom must have been overthrown, that they had to be eaten away with loneliness and fear, that they had made themselves miss everything to end up fifty-time whores in a urine-smelling jailhouse, being dependent upon her. And she blamed herself too, for embarrassing herself to herself for being one of them. She blamed them for not having what nice people had. A tilted conviction consumed her that they had to be punished for cheating themselves just as nice people had to be punished for helping cheat them.

  Devoutly, as an overbrilliant, depressed woman, she got the fixation that her clients were all the black people in the world beyond Forestport. It wasn’t that Teel, six years a New York lawyer, didn’t know that blacks had a different status, but she was never able to close the gap between who she knew herself to be and all the others and what they were—except by violence, and that was much later. She began to knit her blind plans for the salvation of all through the punishment of everyone. She began to understand that people never wanted to stand where they were told to stand. They always wanted to go someplace else, do something else, whether they were white, black, or plaid. Never mind them. Her job was to figure out what she had been put there to do. She worked on herself, hardly sleeping or resting, until she was convinced that she must never allow herself to be viewed as black, not as all those other blacks were seen by the world which held them under—the way newborn puppies are drowned in a pail of water.

  She became obsessed and remained obsessed with putting as much actual and psychological distance between herself and those broken people she served as existed in all of outer space. However, deep in her sense of self, and mother, and history—which is what race is—she began to hate herself for what she felt. She had the choice of either admitting that, becoming one of them or, worse punishment because she knew they were her family, of exiling herself from them.

  Her perspective on these conditions altered, of course, as the angles from which she viewed things within the progressing tome of her life altered; she saw—though much later—that her clients back when she had practiced law in 124th Street were no different from her father, her brother, the Presidents of the United States, her favorite movie stars—they were only different from her. The condition had been a long time growing on her soul. Her sense of herself became as attached to her being as her physical, biological system.

  She would talk it over with her brother Jonas.

  “I am glad about certain things,” she said. “I mean, don’t go thinking I walk around singing the blues, holding the handkerchief on my head.”

  “Well, like, what certain things?” Jonas grinned.

  “I’m glad you back in town. I am ecstatic you gone stay awhile. But mostly I am glad you come down to that court to see what the black world is like, you being a college boy in the heartland of the heartland.”

  “It was bad.”

  “Bet your ass.”

  “It was a freak-up. But, I mean, that ain’t the black world.”

  “I been watchin’ it a long time, baby. You been down on the farm. That’s the black world. An’ lemme tay you somethin’ else. If there are any other black people who are different from my clients down there, then they are miserable ass-lickin’ Toms. They are the fakey part of a society which deliberately lured them into non-revolutionary poses.”

  “How come?”

  “And that ain’t all, baby. If any white can’t understand that, then they don’t face up to what they owe their own children by pleading with the blacks to come in with them like the Constitution says—then they are enemies and their punishment, their destruction and the destruction of the brothers for not understanding that, is gone be the central goal of my revolution. You hear?”

  “Well, okay,” Jonas said stoutly. “I’m witchew. You the Momma. What else?”

  “There is no other what-else,” she said grimly. “Both sides got to be punished before I will even consider any what-else.”

  Nonetheless, Teel did have a secondary goal. She intended to amass more money than the richest of all the whiteys to prove to herself, with their own holy medals, that she was superior to them, that she had merely agreed to stay around them as an avenue to power, that since all of it was a society where only qualities of money one possessed had any meaning, she would make her revolution to punish both black and white for what they had done to her and if, later on, some kind of political fo
rmula was necessary to stabilize and solidify what would come after the revolution, she would have more money than all of them and she could buy herself a dozen professors of political science and sit them down in a locked room somewhere to figure all that out when she needed it.

  It was the evolution of all past revolutions: first the agonizing psychological needs of the Leader. When that terrible pain was eased, his great political philosophy, which he hadn’t known he had, would be revealed to change the world and to carry his memory onward into history.

  “Blacks have to be punished,” she told Jonas, “for waiting so long to lift their heads and see what they have been created to be. Not dirt on the ground, but air-breathers and space-fillers and ouch-yellers like everybody else.”

  Black and white had to be punished, she continued, for what they had done to themselves and to each other. When they had been punished, when they had suffered the same pain together, then they would understand each other and would be saved. Teel’s revolution was never a political thing. Like Hitler’s and Attila’s, it was a personal matter.

  When she had exchanged pain for money on West 124th Street and in the courtroom with the hordes of whores and the lamentations of junkies, she had continued to live in the apartment of a serene, white and spotless Christian Science couple, in the rented peace of her room on Riverside Drive, to descend each morning into the agony of a visit to Hell, to suffer its punishment, then to betray each day again by ascending each night unto another resurrection. Both black and white became her enemies; both her torturers. Refusing her own silently screamed demands to choose between black and white, she accepted neither. She hated them both but, vengefully, she began to teach herself to hate herself, or—not only because of her feelings—because she had become both of them. Her hatred turned inward; then, having energy, vision, and intelligence, she turned it outward and condemned herself to a world of terror.