“Brooklyn ain’t no better than Harlem,” said Strawberry Lips, running the words rolling off his tongue. “Theah’s as much shooting-up and cut-up in Prince Street and ——”
“There ain’t no compahrison atall,” stoutly maintained Susy. “This here Harlem is a stinking sink of iniquity. Nigger hell! That’s what it is. Looka that theah ugly black nigger loving up a scrimpy brown gal right befoh mah eyes. Jest daring me to turn raw and loose lak them monkey-chasing womens this-anight. But that I wouldn’t do. I ain’t a woman abandoned to sich publicity stunts. Not even though mah craw was full to bursting. Lemme see’m tonight. . . . Yessam, this heah Harlem is sure nigger hell. Take me way away from it.”
When Zeddy at last said good night to his new-found brown, he went straight to an all-night barrel-house and bought a half a pint of whisky. He guzzled the liquor and smashed the flask on the pavement. Drew up his pants, tightened his belt and growled, “Now I’m ready for Susy.”
He caught the subway train for Brooklyn. Only local trains were running and it was quite an hour and a half before he got home. He staggered down Myrtle Avenue well primed with the powerful stimulation of gin-and-whisky.
At the door of Susy’s apartment he was met by his suitcase. He recoiled as from a blow struck at his face. Immediately he became sober. His eyes caught a little white tag attached to the handle. Examining it by the faint gaslight he read, in Susy’s handwriting: “Kip owt that meen you.”
Susy had put all Zeddy’s belongings into the suitcase, keeping back what she had given him: two fancy-colored silk shirts, silk handkerchiefs, a mauve dressing-gown, and a box of silk socks.
“What he’s got on that black back of his’n he can have,” she had said while throwing the things in the bag.
Zeddy beat on the door with his fists.
“Wha moh you want?” Susy’s voice bawled from within. “Ain’tchu got all you stuff theah? Gwan back where youse coming from.”
“Lemme in and quit you joking,” cried Zeddy.
“You ugly flat-footed zigaboo,” shouted Susy, “may I ketch the ’lectric chair without conversion ef I ’low you dirty black pusson in mah place again. And you better git quick foh I staht mah dawg bawking at you.”
Zeddy picked up his suitcase. “Come on, Mistah Bag. Le’s tail along back to Harlem. Leave black woman ’lone wif her gin and ugly mug. Black woman is hard luck.”
THE RAID OF THE BALTIMORE
VIII
THE blazing lights of the Baltimore were put out and the entrance was padlocked. Fifth Avenue and Lenox talked about nothing else. Buddy meeting buddy and chippie greeting chippie, asked: “Did you hear the news?” . . . “Well, what do you know about that?”
Yet nothing sensational had happened in the Baltimore. The police had not, on a certain night, swept into it and closed it up because of indecent doings. No. It was an indirect raid. Oh, and that made the gossip toothier! For the Baltimore was not just an ordinary cabaret. It had mortgages and policies in the best of the speakeasy places of the Belt. And the mass of Harlem held the Baltimore in high respect because (it was rumored and believed) it was protected by Tammany Hall.
Jake, since he had given up hoping about his lost brown, had stopped haunting the Baltimore, yet he had happened to be very much in on the affair that cost the Baltimore its license. Jake’s living with Rose had, in spite of himself, projected him into a more elegant atmosphere of worldliness. Through Rose and her associates he had gained access to buffet flats and private rendezvous apartments that were called “nifty.”
And Jake was a high favorite wherever he went. There was something so naturally beautiful about his presence that everybody liked and desired him. Buddies, on the slightest provocation, were ready to fight for him, and the girls liked to make an argument around him.
Jake had gained admission to Madame Adeline Suarez’s buffet flat, which was indeed a great feat. He was the first longshoreman, colored or white, to tread that magnificent red carpet. Madame Suarez catered to sporty colored persons of consequence only and certain groups of downtown whites that used to frequent Harlem in the good old pre-prohibition days.
“Ain’t got no time for cheap-no-’count niggers,” Madame Suarez often said. “Gimme their room to their company any time, even if they’ve got money to spend.” Madame Suarez came from Florida and she claimed Cuban descent through her father. By her claim to that exotic blood she moved like a queen among the blue-veins of the colored sporting world.
But Jake’s rough charm could conquer anything.
“Ofay’s mixing in!” he exclaimed to himself the first night he penetrated into Madame Suarez’s. “But ofay or ofay not, this here is the real stuff,” he reflected. And so many nights he absented himself from the Congo (he had no interest in Rose’s art of flirting money out of hypnotized newcomers) to luxuriate with charmingly painted pansies among the colored cushions and under the soft, shaded lights of Madame Suarez’s speakeasy. It was a new world for Jake and he took it easily. That was his natural way, wherever he went, whatever new people he met. It had helped him over many a bad crossing at Brest at Havre and in London. . . . Take it easy . . . take life easy. Sometimes he was disgusted with life, but he was never frightened of it.
Jake had never seen colored women so carefully elegant as these rich-browns and yellow-creams at Madame Suarez’s. They were fascinating in soft bright draperies and pretty pumps and they drank liquor with a fetching graceful abandon. Gin and whisky seemed to lose their barbaric punch in that atmosphere and take on a romantic color. The women’s coiffure was arranged in different striking styles and their arms and necks and breasts tinted to emphasize the peculiar richness of each skin. One girl, who was the favorite of Madame Suarez, and the darkest in the group, looked like a breathing statue of burnished bronze. With their arresting poses and gestures, their deep shining painted eyes, they resembled the wonderfully beautiful pictures of women of ancient Egypt.
Here Jake brushed against big men of the colored sporting world and their white friends. That strange un-American world where colored meets and mingles freely and naturally with white in amusement basements, buffet flats, poker establishments. Sometimes there were two or three white women, who attracted attention because they were white and strange to Harlem, but they appeared like faded carnations among those burning orchids of a tropical race.
One night Jake noticed three young white men, clean-shaven, flashily-dressed, who paid for champagne for everybody in the flat. They were introduced by a perfectly groomed dark-brown man, a close friend of the boss of the Baltimore. Money seemed worthless to them except as a means of getting fun out of it. Madame Suarez made special efforts to please them. Showed them all of the buffet flat, even her own bedroom. One of them, very freckled and red-haired, sat down to the piano and jazzed out popular songs. The trio radiated friendliness all around them. Danced with the colored beauties and made lively conversation with the men. They were gay and recklessly spendthrift. . . .
They returned on a Saturday night, between midnight and morning, when the atmosphere of Madame Suarez’s was fairly bacchic and jazz music was snake-wriggling in and out and around everything and forcing everybody into amatory states and attitudes. The three young white men had two others with them. At the piano a girl curiously made up in mauve was rendering the greatest ragtime song of the day. Broadway was wild about it and Harlem was crazy. All America jazzed to it, and it was already world-famous. Already being jazzed perhaps in Paris and Cairo, Shanghai, Honolulu, and Java. It was a song about cocktails and cherries. Like this in some ways:
Take a juicy cocktail cherry,
Take a dainty little bite,
And we’ll all be very merry
On a cherry drunk tonight.
We’ll all be merry when you have a cherry,
And we’ll twine and twine like a fruitful vine,
Grape vine, red wine, babe mine, bite a berry,
You taste a cherry and twine, rose vine, sweet wine.
<
br /> Cherry-ee-ee-ee-ee, cherry-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee, ee-ee-ee
Cherry-ee-ee-ee-ee, cherry-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee, ee-ee-ee
Grape vine, rose vine, sweet wine. . . .
Love is like a cocktail cherry,
Just a fruity little bit,
And you’ve never yet been merry,
If you’ve not been drunk on it.
We’ll all be merry when you have. . . .
The women, carried away by the sheer rhythm of delight, had risen above their commercial instincts (a common trait of Negroes in emotional states) and abandoned themselves to pure voluptuous jazzing. They were gorgeous animals swaying there through the dance, punctuating it with marks of warm physical excitement. The atmosphere was charged with intensity and over-charged with currents of personal reaction. . . .
Then the five young white men unmasked as the Vice Squad and killed the thing.
Dicks! They had wooed and lured and solicited for their trade. For two weeks they had spilled money like water at the Baltimore. Sometimes they were accompanied by white girls who swilled enormous quantities of champagne and outshrieked the little ginned-up Negresses and mulattresses of the cabaret. They had posed as good fellows, regular guys, looking for a good time only in the Black Belt. They were wearied of the pleasures of the big white world, wanted something new—the primitive joy of Harlem.
So at last, with their spendthrift and charming ways, they had convinced the wary boss of the Baltimore that they were fine fellows. The boss was a fine fellow himself, who loved life and various forms of fun and had no morals about them. And so one night when the trio had left their hired white ladies behind, he was persuaded to give his youthful white guests an introduction to Madame Adeline Suarez’s buffet flat. . . .
The uniformed police were summoned. Madame Suarez and her clients were ordered to get ready to go down to the Night Court. The women asked permission to veil themselves. Many windows were raked up in the block and heads craned forth to watch the prisoners bundled into waiting taxicabs. The women were afraid. Some of them were false grass-widows whose husbands were working somewhere. Some of them were church members. Perhaps one could claim a place in local society!
They were all fined. But Madame Suarez, besides being fined, was sent to Blackwell’s Island for six months.
To the two white girls that were also taken in the raid the judge remarked that it was a pity he had no power to order them whipped. For whipping was the only punishment he considered suitable for white women who dishonored their race by associating with colored persons.
The high point of the case was the indictment of the boss of the Baltimore as accessory to the speakeasy crime. The boss was not convicted, but the Baltimore was ordered to be padlocked. That decision was appealed. But the cabaret remained padlocked. A black member of Tammany had no chances against the Moral Arm of the city.
The Belt’s cabaret sets licked their lips over the sensation for weeks. For a long time Negro proprietors would not admit white customers into their cabarets and near-white members of the black race, whose features were unfamiliar in Harlem, had a difficult time proving their identity.
JAKE MAKES A MOVE
IX
COMING home from work one afternoon, Jake remarked a taxicab just driving away from his house. He was quite a block off, but he thought it was his number. When he entered Rose’s room he immediately detected an unfamiliar smell. He had an uncanny sharp nose for strange smells. Rose always had visitors, of course. Girls, and fellows, too, of her circle. But Jake had a feeling that his nose had scented something foreign to Harlem. The room was close with tobacco smoke; there were many Melachrino butts in a tray, and a half-used box of the same cigarettes on a little table drawn up against the scarlet-covered couch. Also, there was a half-filled bottle of Jake’s Scotch whisky on the table and glasses for two. Rose was standing before the dresser, arranging her hair.
“Been having company?” Jake asked, carelessly.
“Yep. It was only Gertie Blake.”
Jake knew that Rose was lying. Her visitor had not been Gertie Blake. It had been a man, a strange man, doubtless a white man. Yet he hadn’t the slightest feeling of jealousy or anger, whatever the visitor was. Rose had her friends of both sexes and was quite free in her ways. At the Congo she sat and drank and flirted with many fellows. That was a part of her business. She got more tips that way, and the extra personal bargains that gave her the means to maintain her style of living. All her lovers had always accepted her living entirely free. For that made it possible for her to keep, them living carefree and sweet.
Rose was disappointed in Jake. She had wanted him to live in the usual sweet way, to be brutal and beat her up a little, and take away her money from her. Once she had a rough leather-brown man who used to beat her up regularly. Sometimes she was beaten so badly she had to stay indoors for days, and to her visiting girl pals she exhibited her bruises and blackened eyes with pride.
As Jake was not brutally domineering, she cooled off from him perceptibly. But she could not make him change. She confided to her friends that he was “good loving but” (making use of a contraction that common people employ) “a big Ah-Ah all the same.” She felt no thrill about the business when her lover was not interested in her earnings.
Jake did not care. He did not love her, had never felt any deep desire for her. He had gone to live with her simply because she had asked him when he was in a fever mood for a steady mate. There was nothing about Rose that touched and roused him as his vivid recollection of his charming little brown-skin of the Baltimore. Rose’s room to him was like any ordinary lodging in Harlem. While the room of his little lost brown lived in his mind a highly magnified affair: a bed of gold, fresh, white linen, a magic carpet, all bathed in the rarest perfume. . . . Rose’s perfume made his nose itch. It was rank.
He came home another afternoon and found her with a bright batik kimono carelessly wrapped around her and stretched full-length on the couch. There were Melachrino stubs lying about and his bottle of Scotch was on the mantelpiece. Evidently the strange visitor of the week before had been there again.
“Hello!” She yawned and flicked off her cigarette ash and continued smoking. A chic veneer over a hard, restless, insensitive body. Fascinating, nevertheless. . . . For the moment, just as she was, she was desirable and provoked responses in him. He shuffled up to the couch and caressed her.
“Leave me alone, I’m tired,” she snarled.
The rebuff hurt Jake. “You slut!” he cried. He went over to the mantelpiece and added, “Youse just everybody’s teaser.”
“You got a nearve talking to me that way,” said Rose. “Since when you staht riding the high horse?”
“It don’t take no nearve foh me to tell you what you is. Fact is I’m right now sure tiahd to death of living with you.”
“You poor black stiff!” Rose cried. And she leaped over at Jake and scratched at his face.
Jake gave her two savage slaps full in her face and she dropped moaning at his feet.
“There! You done begged foh it,” he said. He stepped over her and went out.
Walking down the street, he looked at his palms. “Ahm shame o’ you, hands,” he murmured. “Mah mother useter tell me, ‘Nevah hit no woman,’ but that hussy jest made me do it . . . jest made me. . . . Well, I’d better pull outa that there mud-hole. . . . It wasn’t what I come back to Gawd’s own country foh. No, sirree! You bet it wasn’t. . . .”
When he returned to the house he heard laughter in the room. Gertie Blake was there and Rose was telling a happy tale. He stood by the closed door and listened for a while.
“Have another drink, Gertie. Don’t ever get a wee bit delicate when youse with me. . . . My, mah dear, but he did slap the day-lights outa me. When I comed to I wanted to kiss his feet, but he was gone.”
“Rose! You’re the limit. But didn’t it hurt awful?”
“Didn’t hurt enough. Honey, it’s the first time I ever felt his real strength. A hefty-l
ooking one like him, always acting so nice and proper. I almost thought he was getting sissy. But he’s a ma-an all right. . . .”
A nasty smile stole into Jake’s features. He could not face those women. He left the house again. He strolled down to Dixie Red’s poolroom and played awhile. From there he went with Zeddy to Uncle Doc’s saloon.
He went home again and found Rose stunning in a new cloth-of-gold frock shining with brilliants. She was refixing a large artificial yellow rose to the side of a pearl-beaded green turban. Jake, without saying a word, went to the closet and took down his suitcase. Then he began tossing shirts, underwear, collars, and ties on to the couch.
“What the devil you’re doing?” Rose wheeled round and stared at him in amazement, both hands gripping the dresser behind her.
“Kain’t you see?” Jake replied.
She moved down on him like a panther, swinging her hips in a wonderful, rhythmical motion. She sprang upon his neck and brought him down.
“Oh, honey, you ain’t mad at me ’counta the little fuss tonight?”
“I don’t like hitting no womens,” returned Jake’s hard-breathing muffled voice.
“Daddy! I love you the more for that.”
“You’ll spile you’ new clothes,” Jake said, desperately.
“Hell with them! I love mah daddy moh’n anything. And mah daddy loves me, don’t he? Daddy!”
Rose switched on the light and looked at her watch.
“My stars, daddy! We been honey-dreaming some! I am two hours late.”
She jumped up and jig-stepped. “I should worry if the Congo . . . I should worry mumbo-jumbo.”
She smoothed out her frock, arranged her hair, and put the turban on. “Come along to the Congo a little later,” she said to Jake. “Let’s celebrate on champagne.”
The door closed on him. . . .
“O Lawdy!” he yawned, stretched himself, and got up. He took the rest of his clothes out of the closet, picked up the crumpled things from the couch, packed, and walked out with his suitcase.
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