Harlem Hit & Run

By Angela Dews

Harlem Hit & Run is recent history wrapped in a murder mystery. It is full of the dialogue and details of how we were in the 1990s. Harlem is one of the complex characters. So is bad-ass actress native daughter Pearl Washington.

She plays Police Lt. Summer Knight in her action movies and she is studying the Buddha's teaching as part of her martial arts training. Pearl chants over her friend when she is hit by a car on 125th Street: "Remember all this fleeting world is a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightening in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream."

Pearl's lover, a Harlem cop, hears her and asks her to lead his 28th Precinct police people in a meditation.

Neither Pearl nor readers will get inside the board room of the city's only black-owned commercial bank but they will find their footing on the threshold of the "Harlem Empowerment" we have witnessed since that time.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Angela Dews
• Release date: Jul 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201214357

Book preview

C H A P T E R • 1

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Go back to Africa where you came from.

Typical. And where’d you come from, brown man? I thought as I grabbed a camera. Not because a street fight is news in this town, but because I’m drawn to drama, I love the camera and I needed to fill up some spaces in my father’s newspaper on deadline day.

I had to lean out the window, my body secured against the frame, to take pictures of the beef going down two stories below me on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard where it was noisy with its soundtrack.

My pictures were an aerial view of a pair of African street merchants yelling at a well-dressed dark brown-skinned man who seemed to have lost his mind. He started scooping audio cassettes and video tapes off a folding table into a bag with one arm and pointing a gun at them with the other.

I framed the wide shot and then tightened in on close-ups of the tapes still on the table and those that had fallen onto the wide public space. I recognized some of the movie covers were recent films and saw one that I didn’t think had been released yet.

He holstered the gun and raised the folding table that had been the vendors’ street operation up over his head. His African fez didn’t even fall off when he threw the table.

I work my ass off, he yelled at the Africans.

Work your ass off doing what? I wondered.

I pulled back to catch the street vendors scrambling to pick up their inventory and then swung over to the spectators spread out on one wide sidewalk. The crowd was magnetized to pull bits of color from up and down the boulevard to add to its widening edges.

The kids were cheering and were either completely hidden in oversized outfits or strategically exposed like overgrown doll babies.

Their elders were not interfering, my newspaper staff among them in a little knot near the front, where they had no business being on production day.

When the phone rang behind me, I had to ease myself back through the window to run for it.

"You have reached the Harlem Journal. For 40 years, your favorite Harlem weekly newspaper. If you know the extension of the person you are trying to reach, you can enter it now."

Roger’s baritone made the tired message impressive, but before I could get to the phone, I heard, Peace and be strong. And he was finished.

This is Pearl Washington. Hello? Hello?

But the caller was gone.

Roger wrote the music for Last Stop Harlem, the latest of the couple of films that milked every drop out of a good idea. The poster for my first movie hung over the front desk where Lt. Summer Knight is aiming at you, wide-legged, hair wild, invincible, wearing brown leather so tight it looks like paint. She’s me in my other life, before I became the reluctant publisher of one of Harlem’s weekly newspapers when my daddy died.

Distinguished Newspaper Publisher Called Home—Charles Washington, November 21, 1925 to October 22, 1990. I love the language of the black press. But I felt like I was flying without a safety net without him. It made me dizzy and I was still too mad at him to cry.

Three weeks ago, each Harlem honk and siren and holler and song snagged me; now it was all a hum. Until I heard, When I come back, you best be gone.

It was Mr. Cool and he pulled my attention outside again. I took another picture of him and then swung the camera to catch the vendors and discovered Al Carter, the newspaper’s production manager, was helping gather up their mess where it was scattered all over the wide sidewalk. They could have been family—two young brothers from Côte D’Ivoire and one from 111th Street. They were built the same wiry way and had the same hair. Only the Africans’ heads were neat; Al’s was a riot.

The crowd started breaking up in ones or twos to go find something else to do. Except one woman who walked over to Mr. Cool to say something in his ear that made him laugh. I closed in to get a portrait of the woman. It was my father’s girlfriend, now widow, Mrs. Viola, now Washington.

It had been an off-again-on-again thing, my relationship with Miss Viola, since my father brought the owner of the Kit Kat Klub into our lives. It wasn’t just because the woman was only eight years older than me; it was also because she wanted to be the center of attention and I considered that my role. And when he married Viola at her house on the hill, I wasn’t there. Daddy’s death and our shared grief had finally made a quasi-peace between us.

In the close-up, I recognized Mr. Cool was Bobby Bop, a jazz man whose group was one of the acts coming to the big event at the Apollo later in the week.

When I widened the frame, I caught Mr. Cool with his gun out again, pointing in the direction of Al and the vendors. You’ve been told, he said.

He put his weapon away and offered Viola his free hand and walked with her to the street where a red Cadillac convertible was double parked at the curb.

The driver trapped by the double-parked Caddy honked. Viola waved at him and then flipped him a bird twice as he kept honking the whole time it took them to get to Bobby Bop’s car and deposit his bag of tapes into the back, and then continued honking after them while they made a U-turn and squealed away.

When they drove out of my frame, I was left with a wide shot of the people across the street, seemingly oblivious to the action, flowing along at a browsing pace, somehow managing to keep off of each other’s heels and out of each other’s faces. Except my neighbor Cecelia Miller, who walked like she owned 125th Street. She had accessorized her business suit with green and red African fabric folded and tied around her head. Her gelee appeared between a broken line of street businesses at tables heaped with bolts of kente and mud cloth and figured fabric from Mali. She would disappear behind a wall of vendors, then reappear again.

I took a couple of wide shots of her in profile, and when she turned to face me in the middle of the block to cross the street at the light, I zoomed in to catch her face as she looked both ways and then stepped off the curb and into the boulevard. And then her face changed to what turned out to be her reaction to something I had to pull back to include in my viewfinder.

A late model American car was careening diagonally across the street, seemingly out of nowhere, seemingly against the light.

Then the sound of impact filled the space between us. Together we experienced her being catapulted into the air like a rag doll where she hung for a terrible moment before she dropped to the dirty street.

My scream was more of a moan, while I was close, right on top of her, connected through the camera, until I forced myself to swing away to follow the dark car as it bounced off one of the large poles holding up the streetlight. I willed myself to stay with the car, shooting and shooting, trying to get the license plate, as it swerved back into the westbound lane in front of the stopped traffic. When the car was finally gone, I turned back to find a crowd had concealed my girl.

C H A P T E R • 2

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Then I was running down the two flights of front stairs and down the street and through the loose crowd toward Cecelia.

Two women who were part of the group ministering to her got up and shook their heads.

Her neck met her shoulders at an absurd angle, like a broken doll’s. A mess of dark hair had escaped when she lost her wrap and the tangle of it gave her a wild look she never would have allowed in public, in life.

The terrible ominous wailing of a herd of police cars announced their arrival.

I had to remember to breathe. In and out. And again.

I walked closer and put her Coach tote over my shoulder and picked up one grey suede pump. The shoe was almost new. The bottom wasn’t even worn.

In that moment, the absurdity of my need to take control in such an inconsequential way finally broke me. I squatted and gathered my skirt, pulling it out of the way, rocking forward. And I said loud enough for her to hear me, Let go. Remember all this fleeting world is a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightening in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream. Go for the light.

What is that?

I looked up at Police Captain Obsidian Bailey.

Hearing is the last sense we lose, I said. She can hear me.

You told her to let go. What else could she do?

She could struggle to hold on. This is a great and difficult transformation.

But she’s dead.

I know.

Are you a Buddhist?

I’m studying the Buddha’s teaching as part of my martial arts practice.

What you said was weird but kind of peaceful, he said.

But I’m telling her to let go and I’m not about to let go. Not hardly.

You must realize you’ve compromised the investigation by picking up her shoe.

I stopped myself from doing any more.

Come on, Pearl. You played a cop in enough movies to know better. Every kid in America knows the routine at a crime scene.

I think he aimed at her. And I was thinking it was an additional crime for her to be lying in the street looking like that.

Or it was an accident, he said. And he took the shoe and walked away.

Pearl, look over here.

Karl, a freelance photographer they often use at the Journal, took my picture.

He aimed at her, I told Karl. You’ll see.

I took the camera strap from around my neck. I was shooting a fight out the window at the newspaper when I saw Cecelia walking across the street, and I used the camera to get a better look at her. I need the pictures for page one. Can you give a set to the police without telling them you got them from me?

No shit? You mean to say you got us a picture of the hit-and-run car?

It looked like a gypsy cab. It was terrible.

Cool. He made some adjustments in the heavy gadget and lens bag that was brown like everything else—his shoes, pants, windbreaker, face, hat.

He retrieved a little camera. I’ll trade you. It’s my new toy. Easy to shoot. With a zoom. Tell me how you like it.

An instinct must have alerted him because he turned around quickly to take the picture of the Right Reverend Doctor William Garrison kneeling over Cecelia, saying something we couldn’t hear, touching her hand, shaking his head.

An orange had rolled out of a paper bag just beyond her delicate fingers.

C H A P T E R • 3

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I saw Captain Obsidian Bailey walking back toward me and the sight of him made me lightheaded. Then I felt the return of dread as a cold rush.

Obsidian is aptly named, I swear—dark as the stone and grounded. Being a New York City policeman for over ten years and the discipline of various fighting practices could only have sharpened the special gift he was born with.

When he got to me, he said, Come with me. Somebody abandoned a vehicle. We think it’s the hit-and-run car. We can use a witness like you.

My instinct was to back away from witnessing. It happened very fast. Then I felt ashamed of myself. She looked both ways before she crossed the street. I started to speak, stopped, then started again. But the car came out of nowhere.

Breathe, Pearl.

And she still ended up being part of this out-of-control scene. How could you all let it get like this?

Whoa. You moved three thousand miles away, and it’s my fault?

Every time I come back, it’s worse. Like you all just don’t care.

Is it easier to care from a distance? Coward.

Don’t you call me names. How dare you.

How dare me? What is that? So now you’ve made yourself a couple of Hollywood movies, you’re all indignant and shit? Hollywood sounded like a dirty word in his mouth. I’m sure you haven’t spent time with Cecelia Miller in years.

Actually, there’s not much about me you can be sure of anymore.

Perhaps you’re right; although I kind of doubt it. We should catch up.

We traveled three blocks in a police car with the lights flashing and the terrible racket of the siren. Obsidian was in the passenger seat and another cop was driving. I slumped down in the back. There was no way not to look like you belonged back there. It was too definite and final. I watched pedestrians outside, free to stop and look in the open window as we passed, probably mistaking me for some criminal or an informer—a perp or a snitch.

At 122nd Street and Frederick Douglass, just south of the precinct, I panicked when the door handles inside didn’t work. I thought the officer was moving slower than necessary as she climbed from the driver’s seat and opened my door from outside. The little smile she gave me confirmed it. She was enjoying my panic.

Captain? Two of the police people paused just long enough to see if Obsidian wanted anything. About a dozen others buzzed around the car cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape. The front door was open and the radio was on, but the driver was nowhere.

Up close, it was unremarkable—one of the late-model American cars with the T license plates prowling the city for fares their fat yellow cousins won’t take. One headlight was busted and loosened from the metal frame, which was broken into jagged pieces and hurt me to look at. I hoped the big disgusting dent in the front was from hitting the pole.

That’s the car. He had no business being on the downtown side of the street. He hit her on purpose. Otherwise, why didn’t he stop? I asked Obsidian.

There are a dozen reasons why people don’t want to stop and talk to the police.

Don’t patronize me. I hate that.

Does it help to get mad at me? he asked. Go ahead. I can take it.

While I was the subject of his attention, his eyes with those incredible clear whites never left mine.

Can you find out what happened? I asked him. My question skirted what I really wanted to know which was more like, ‘Can you fix it?’

Somebody in this crowd saw something. We’ll get to it. But first I need you to give Detective Stanley your statement. Stanley! Get Pearl here to draw a picture. She has an incredible visual memory.

If you have the car, can you get Ceel off the street? I asked.

The medical examiner is taking her now. I’ll call you later.

It didn’t take long to tell the officer almost everything I knew. She probed and asked the right questions and took me back to what I was watching from my window when Cecelia was hit. I sketched a kind of storyboard for her with arrows pointing to where the car could have come from and where it went. What I didn’t do was tell her about the pictures. They were redundant anyway because what they showed was the car and the police already had the car. And I didn’t want to risk having the pictures called evidence so I wouldn’t be able to publish them on the front page of the paper.

The paper!

Damn. I had forgotten all about my inheritance while I was running around outside, and I could hear the voices of my father and my grandfather in my head. They were both more than capable of haunting a sister.

C H A P T E R • 4

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I walked back from the precinct to 125th Street where it was even more crowded than usual with the people rushing