White Butterfly by Walter Mosley Read Free Book Online

me.
    But then I had to wonder at the strangeness of all those important white men thinking that they had to come all the way to my house in order to draft me.
    I’d worked for city hall before but usually they called me downtown. They would have me wait on a cold marble bench while they preened and primped. Sometimes they’d call me to the police station and threaten me before asking my favors. But I’d never had a delegation at my house.
    I expected Quinten Naylor, and maybe his white sidekick, but the people that had come were important. They were more important than one dead white girl. Women got killed all the time, and unless they were innocent mothers raped in their husbands’ beds, the law didn’t kick up such a big fuss.
    Even though I’d eaten I had an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach. I filled the hole with three straight shots of bourbon. After that I felt calmer. Enough whiskey can take the edge off sunshine.
     
     
    BY ONE-THIRTY I was ready to go. I’d put on gray slacks and a gray square-cut shirt. My lapels were crimson, my shoes yellow suede. I had a light buzz on and my new Chrysler floated down the side streets like a yacht down some inland canals.
    There was a small public library on Ninety-third and Hooper. Mrs. Stella Keaton was the librarian. We’d known each other for years. She was a white lady from Wisconsin. Her husband had a fatal heart attack in ’34 and her two children died in a fire the year after that. Her only living relative had been an older brother who was stationed in San Diego with the navy for ten years. After his discharge he moved to L.A. When Mrs. Keaton had her tragedies he invited her to live with him. One year after that her brother, Horton, took ill, and after three months he died spitting up blood, in her arms.
    All Mrs. Keaton had was the Ninety-third Street branch. She treated the people who came in there like her siblings and she treated the children like her own. If you were a regular at the library she’d bake you a cake on your birthday and save the books you loved under the front desk.
    We were on a first-name basis, Stella and I, but I was unhappy that she held that job. I was unhappy because even though Stella was nice, she was still a white woman. A white woman from a place where there were only white Christians. To her Shakespeare was a god. I didn’t mind that, but what did she know about the folk tales and riddles and stories colored folks had been telling for centuries? What did she know about the language we spoke?
    I always heard her correcting children’s speech. “Not ‘I is,’ she’d say. “It’s ‘I am.’”
    And, of course, she was right. It’s just that little colored children listening to that proper white woman would never hear their own cadence in her words. They’d come to believe that they would have to abandon their own language and stories to become a part of her educated world. They would have to forfeit Waller for Mozart and Remus for Puck. They would enter a world where only white people spoke. And no matter how articulate Dickens and Voltaire were, those children wouldn’t have their own examples in the house of learning—the library.
    I had argued with Stella about these things before. She was sensitive about them but when you told her that some man standing on a street corner telling bawdy tales was something like Chaucer she’d crinkle her nose and shake her head. She was always respectful, though. They often take the kindest white people to colonize the colored community. But as kind as Mrs. Keaton was, she reflected an alien view to our people.
    “Good morning, Ezekiel,” Mrs. Keaton said.
    “Stella.”
    “How is that little Jesus?”
    “He’s fine, just fine.”
    “You know, he’s in here every Saturday. He always wants to help more than he reads, but I think he’s getting somewhere. Sometimes I come up on him and it seems as if he’s mouthing the words and reading to himself.”
    There was nothing