Man Walking on Eggshells Book

First published in 1962, this novel is one of the most lyrical and authenticportraits of a jazz musician ever published. Born into violence, in the midst of a destructive tornado that flattens sections of East St. Louis, Raymond Douglas overcomes obstacles of family and race to become a jazz trumpeter whose music touches greatness.

Rave praise for the Old School Books Series:

"One of the most exciting literary revival series since the rediscovery of Jim Thompson's novels..." —Digby Diehl, Playboy

"If you can't get enough of Shaft, Foxy Brown (the original one) or Dolemite, then check Old School Books' new series of pulp novels featuring the boldest African-American authors of our time. These new cultural artifacts are fast-paced and hard. They take the brutality and ruin of the urban Black landscape and transform them into art. Each character in the series is searching for "old school" wisdom and never loses sight of the racial, political, and emotional context from which they came."—The Source

"My endorsement of Old School Books is a hundred percent. This is the kind of publishing program that shows serious readers that publishing can still be more than just a business. This is a cultural service of the highest order. W.W. Norton and Company deserves a standing ovation. Congratulations."—Clarence Major, University of California, Davis

"Glad to see that at least one publisher isn't afflicted with the bottom-line fever, the republishing of these old time classics proves that Norton is devoted to quality publishing. I'm especially glad to see John A. Williams' The Angry Ones used. It's as fresh as the day it waswritten."—Ishmael Reed, University of California, Berkeley

"As of late, members of the pulp pantheon are finding themselves being revised by Hollywood, scrutinized by serious academics, and canonized by the Library of America, though they never completely went out of fashion. But a little-known subgenre of pulp that faded from public view will soon be getting its second chance when Norton's Old School Books, a series of paperback reprint by black pulp novelists, hit bookstores."—Village Voice Literary Supplement
EXCERPT: Man Walking on Eggshells
Herbert Simmons

An Excerpt


. . . just because I'm in misery . . .

They held him in jail for three days, down in twelfth district where they had all kinds of ways of keeping people from getting away. They also did a pretty good job of keeping visitors form talking to the prisoners they held inside.

Two guys were in the cell with him.

"What they got you in for baby?" asked the tall slim guy. He had red conked hair and wore old, faded army fatigues, turned up a quarter of an inch on each leg in a neat cuff.

"Cat popped me while I was holding some rooney," Raymond said.

"Aw yeh, man?"

"Yeh."

"Yeh, that's a bitch," the other one said. He was a light-tan guy with wide shoulders and a good build that was beginning to go soft. "Man, all them cats on the narcotics squad gets high themselves."

"Yeh, that's what I heard," said the guy with the red conked hair.

"Yeh, man,when them cats popped my brother-in-law, with nineteen cans, they went into the bathroom, supposed to be looking for something and when they came out, Jim they was laid, man."

"Yeh, well, they know it ain't nothing wrong with smoking a little rooney."

"Aw yeh, man, you know they know rooney ain't habit forming. They got to know it, man, with all them doctors and technicians and things they got to test them things."

"Why you think they went and got it outlawed then, man?"

"You got me man, 'lessn it was because they couldn't put no tax on it 'cause it grows so wild and everything."

The guy with the conk laughed. Over in the next cell a hillbilly started singing one of those down-home songs he had heard some brown guy do somewhere once.

"I ain't got nothing but the blues," the hillbilly sang in a high, quivering nasal twang.

"Man, get him," the conk-headed guy said.

"He got the blues, ain't that a bitch. How in the hell he figure he's got the blues. I guess he thinks just 'cause he's in jail that gives him the right to have the blues, or somptin?"

"Man, I ain't arguing with you."

"Aw man, them cats kill me with that stuff. We put the word blues in the language, but they don't want us to have nothing. Them studs is so way out they even want to take our misery and claim it as their own."

"Man, I told you I wasn't arguing with you."

"Yeh, man, them studs is a bitch, ain't they man?" the red-haired guy said to Raymond.

Raymond didn't answer.

They figured him for a weirdo and let it go at that.

Funny how jail did things to people; made them think seriously along channels they had never thought along before. Funny. The world was out there, but you couldn't reach it. People were going along doing a hundred insignificant things that suddenly became very important to you simply because they could do them and you couldn't. That alone was enough to bug a cat out of his sanity. Freedom was something, yeh, freedom was really something, that was why having brown skin and being what people referred to as being a Negro could be such a drag at times. One of these days I'm going to be free, he thought. One of these days I'm going to be really free. Funny thoughts for a guy behind bars facing a jail sentence for something there shouldn't even be a law on. Yeh, funny.

They came and took the guy with the conk away to stand trial for being at a service station with a loaded rifle in his hands.

The next morning they took Raymond and the tan guy down for the line-up in a large police-filled room downstairs.

They walked you up on a platform and shone a hard light in your eyes so that you couldn't see anybody except the other guys up on stage in the line-up with you. Almost like playing up on stage in a band.

The audience cracked up when they were told Raymond had gotten arrested when they found a few grains of marijuana on his lips.

Raymond started thinking about Jetan. Jetan of the honey voice and the mellow body. Jetan who had brushed her thighs against him on so many nights, and who had said she loved him almost as though it were a confession. Jetan who had died having a baby for him.

They asked him questions and he started thinking about Jetan. Jetan whom he would never see again, never speak to again, never love again. He started thinking about Jetan, something he hadn't let himself do since it had happened.

The police didn't know how to figure him. They thought he acted kind of funny. They took him up on another floor, in a little room, where two narcotics detectives told him they would let him go if he told them who his contact was and ratted on all the cats out there on the street who he knew got high.

That was funny too.

Copyright (c) 1997 W. W. Norton and Company, Inc.