Home To Harlem

by McKay, Claude; Cooper, Wayne F. ;

  “Here he is!” Jake greeted the waiter. “What’s the new?”

  “Nothing new in Soot-hill; always the same.”

  The railroad men hated the Pittsburgh run. They hated the town, they hated Wiley Avenue and their wretched free quarters that were in it. . . .

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “Ahm gwine to the colored show with a li’l’ brown piece,” said Jake.

  “You find something already? My me! You’re a fast-working one.”

  “Always the same whenever I hits a new town. Always in cock-tail luck, chappie.”

  “Which one? Manhattan or Bronx?”

  “It’s Harlem-Pittsburgh thisanight,” Jake grinned. “Wachyu gwine make?”

  “Don’t know. There’s nothing ever in Pittsburgh for me. I’m in no mood for the leg-show tonight, and the colored show is bum. Guess I’ll go sleep if I can.”

  “Awright, I’ll see you li’l’ later, chappie.” Jake gripped his hand. “Say—whyn’t you tell a fellow you’ name? Youse sure more’n second waiter as Ise more’n third cook. Ev’body calls me Jake. And you?”

  “Raymond, but everybody calls me Ray.”

  Jake heaved off. Ray bought some weekly Negro newspapers: The Pittsburgh Courier, The Baltimore American, The Negro World, The Chicago Defender. Here he found a big assortment of all the Negro publications that he never could find in Harlem. In a next-door saloon he drank a glass of sherry and started off for the waiters’ and cooks’ quarters.

  It was long after midnight when Jake returned to quarters. He had to pass through the Western men’s section to get to the Eastern crews. Nobody was asleep in the Western men’s section. No early-morning train was chalked up on their board. The men were grouped off in poker and dice games. Jake hesitated a little by one group, fascinated by a wiry little long-headed finger-snapping black, who with strenuous h’h, h’h, h’h, h’h, was zest-fully throwing the bones. Jake almost joined the game but he admonished himself: “You winned five dollars thisaday and you made a nice li’l brown piece. Wha’more you want?” . . .

  He found the beds assigned to the members of his crew. They were double beds, like Pullman berths. Three of the waiters had not come in yet. The second and the fourth cooks were snoring, each a deep frothy bass and a high tenor, and scratching themselves in their sleep. The chef sprawled like the carcass of a rhinoceros, half-naked, mouth wide open. Tormented by bedbugs, he had scratched and tossed in his sleep and hoofed the covers off the bed. Ray was sitting on a lower berth on his Negro newspapers spread out to form a sheet. He had thrown the sheets on the floor, they were so filthy from other men’s sleeping. By the thin flame of gaslight he was killing bugs.

  “Where is I gwine to sleep?” asked Jake.

  “Over me, if you can. I saved the bunk for you,” said Ray.

  “Some music the niggers am making,” remarked Jake, nodding in the direction of the snoring cooks. “But whasmat, chappie, you ain’t sleeping?”

  “Can’t you see?”

  “Bugs. Bumbole! This is a hell of a dump for a man to sleep in.”

  “The place is rocking crazy with them,” said Ray. “I hauled the cot away from the wall, but the mattress is just swarming.”

  Hungry and bold, the bugs crept out of their chinks and hunted for food. They stopped dead-still when disturbed by the slightest shadow, and flattened their bellies against the wall.

  “Le’s get outa this stinking dump and chase a drink, chappie.”

  Ray jumped out of his berth, shoved himself into his clothes and went with Jake. The saloon near by the pool-room was still open. They went there. Ray asked for sherry.

  “You had better sample some hard liquor if youse gwine back to wrastle with them bugs tonight,” Jake suggested.

  Ray took his advice. A light-yellow fellow chummed up with the boys and invited them to drink with him. He was as tall as Jake and very thin. There was a vacant, wandering look in his kindly-weak eyes. He was a waiter on another dining-car of the New York-Pittsburg run. Ray mentioned that he had to quit his bed because he couldn’t sleep.

  “This here town is the rottenest lay-over in the whole railroad field,” declared the light-yellow. “I don’t never sleep in the quarters here.”

  “Where do you sleep, then?” asked Ray.

  “Oh, I got a sweet baby way up yonder the other side of the hill.”

  “Oh, ma-ma!” Jake licked his lips. “So youse all fixed up in this heah town?”

  “Not going there tonight, though,” the light-yellow said in a careless, almost bored tone. “Too far for mine.”

  He asked Jake and Ray if they would like to go to a little open-all-night place. They were glad to hear of that.

  “Any old thing, boh,” Jake said, “to get away from that theah Pennsy bug house.”

  The little place was something of a barrel-house speak-easy, crowded with black steel-workers in overalls and railroad men, and foggy with smoke. They were all drinking hard liquor and playing cards. The boss was a stocky, genial brown man. He knew the light-yellow waiter and shook hands with him and his friends. He moved away some boxes in a corner and squeezed a little table in it, specially for them. They sat down, jammed into the corner, and drank whisky.

  “Better here than the Pennsy pigpen,” said the light-yellow.

  He was slapped on the back by a short, compact young black.

  “Hello, you! What you think youse doing theah?”

  “Ain’t figuring,” retorted the light-yellow, “is you?”

  “On the red moon gwine around mah haid, yes. How about a li’l’ good snow?”

  “Now you got mah number down, Happy.”

  The black lad vanished again through a mysterious back door.

  The light-yellow said: “He’s the biggest hophead I ever seen. Nobody can sniff like him. Yet he’s always the same happy nigger, stout and strong like a bull.”

  He took another whisky and went like a lean hound after Happy. Jake looked mischievously at the little brown door, remarking: “It’s a great life ef youse in on it.” . . .

  The light-yellow came back with a cold gleam in his eyes, like arsenic shining in the dark. His features were accentuated by a rigid, disturbing tone and he resembled a smiling wax figure.

  “Have a li’l’ stuff with the bunch?” he asked Jake.

  “I ain’t got the habit, boh, but I’ll try anything once again.”

  “And you?” The light-yellow turned to Ray.

  “No, chief, thank you, but I don’t want to.”

  The waiter went out again with Jake on his heels. Beyond the door, five fellows, kneeling in the sawdust, were rolling the square bones. Others sat together around two tables with a bottle of red liquor and thimble-like glasses before them.

  “Oh, boy!” one said. “When I get home tonight it will be some more royal stuff. I ain’ta gwine to work none ’tall tomorrow.”

  “Shucks!” Another spread away his big mouth. “This heah ain’t nothing foh a fellow to turn royal loose on. I remimber when I was gwine with a money gang that hed no use foh nothing but the pipe. That theah time was life, buddy.”

  “Wha’ sorta pipe was that there?” asked Jake.

  “The Chinese stuff, old boy.”

  Instead of deliberately fisting his, like the others, Jake took it up carelessly between his thumb and forefinger and inhaled.

  “Say what you wanta about Chinee or any other stuff,” said Happy, “but theah ain’t nothing can work wicked like snow and whisky. It’ll flip you up from hell into heaven befoh you knows it.”

  Ray looked into the room.

  “Who’s you li’l’ mascot?” Happy asked the light-yellow.

  “Tha’s mah best pal,” Jake answered. “He’s got some moh stuff up here,” Jake tapped his head.

  “Better let’s go on back to quarters,” said Ray.

  “To them bugs?” demanded Jake.

  “Yes, I think we’d better.”

  “Awright, anything you say, ch
appie. I kain sleep through worser things.” Jake took a few of the little white packets from Happy and gave him some money. “Guess I might need them some day. You never know.”

  Jake fell asleep as soon as his head touched the dirty pillow. Below him, Ray lay in his bunk, tormented by bugs and the snoring cooks. The low-burning gaslight flickered and flared upon the shadows. The young man lay under the untellable horror of a dead-tired man who wills to sleep and cannot.

  In other sections of the big barn building the faint chink of coins touched his ears. Those men gambling the hopeless Pittsburg night away did not disturb him. They were so quiet. It would have been better, perhaps, if they were noisy. He closed his eyes and tried to hynotize himself to sleep. Sleep . . . sleep . . . sleep . . . sleep . . . sleep. . . . He began counting slowly. His vigil might break and vanish somnolently upon some magic number. He counted a million. Perhaps love would appease this unwavering angel of wakefulness. Oh, but he could not pick up love easily on the street as Jake. . . .

  He flung himself, across void and water, back home. Home thoughts, if you can make them soft and sweet and misty-beautiful enough, can sometimes snare sleep. There was the quiet, chalky-dusty street and, jutting out over it, the front of the house that he had lived in. The high staircase built on the outside, and pots of begonias and ferns on the landing. . . .

  All the flowering things he loved, red and white and pink hibiscus, mimosas, rhododendrons, a thousand glowing creepers, climbing and spilling their vivid petals everywhere, and bright-buzzing humming-birds and butterflies. All the tropic-warm lilies and roses. Giddy-high erect thatch palms, slender, tall, fur-fronded ferns, majestic cotton trees, stately bamboos creating a green grandeur in the heart of space. . . .

  Sleep remained cold and distant. Intermittently the cooks broke their snoring with masticating noises of their fat lips, like animals eating. Ray fixed his eyes on the offensive bug-bitten bulk of the chef. These men claimed kinship with him. They were black like him. Man and nature had put them in the same race. He ought to love them and feel them (if they felt anything). He ought to if he had a shred of social morality in him. They were all chain-ganged together and he was counted as one link. Yet he loathed every soul in that great barrack-room, except Jake. Race. . . . Why should he have and love a race?

  Races and nations were things like skunks, whose smells poisoned the air of life. Yet civilized mankind reposed its faith and future in their ancient, silted channels. Great races and big nations! There must be something mighty inspiriting in being the citizen of a great strong nation. To be the white citizen of a nation that can say bold, challenging things like a strong man. Something very different from the keen ecstatic joy a man feels in the romance of being black. Something the black man could never feel nor quite understand.

  Ray felt that as he was conscious of being black and impotent, so, correspondingly, each marine down in Hayti must be conscious of being white and powerful. What a unique feeling of confidence about life the typical white youth of his age must have! Knowing that his skin-color was a passport to glory, making him one with ten thousands like himself. All perfect Occidentals and investors in that grand business called civilization. That grand business in whose pits sweated and snored, like the cooks, all the black and brown hybrids and mongrels, simple earth-loving animals, without aspirations toward national unity and racial arrogance.

  He remembered when little Hayti was floundering uncontrolled, how proud he was to be the son of a free nation. He used to feel condescendingly sorry for those poor African natives; superior to ten millions of suppressed Yankee “coons.” Now he was just one of them and he hated them for being one of them. . . .

  But he was not entirely of them, he reflected. He possessed another language and literature that they knew not of. And some day Uncle Sam might let go of his island and he would escape from the clutches of that magnificent monster of civilization and retire behind the natural defenses of his island, where the steam-roller of progress could not reach him. Escape he would. He had faith. He had hope. But, oh, what would become of that great mass of black swine, hunted and cornered by slavering white canaille! Sleep! oh, sleep! Down Thought!

  But all his senses were burning wide awake. Thought was not a beautiful and reassuring angel, a thing of soothing music and light laughter and winged images glowing with the rare colors of life. No. It was suffering, horribly real. It seized and worried him from every angle. Pushed him toward the sheer precipice of imagination. It was awful. He was afraid. For thought was a terrible tiger clawing at his small portion of gray substance, throttling, tearing, and tormenting him with pitiless ferocity. Oh, a thousand ideas of life were shrieking at him in a wild orgy of mockery! . . .

  He was in the middle of a world suspended in space. A familiar line lit up, like a flame, the vast, crowded, immensity of his vision.

  Et l’âme du monde est dans l’air.

  A moment’s respite. . . .

  A loud snore from the half-naked chef brought him back to the filthy fact of the quarters that the richest railroad in the world had provided for its black servitors. Ray looked up at Jake, stretched at full length on his side, his cheek in his right hand, sleeping peacefully, like a tired boy after hard playing, so happy and sweet and handsome. He remembered the neatly-folded white papers in Jake’s pocket. Maybe that was the cause of his sleeping so soundly. He reached his hand up to the coat hanging on the nail above his head. It was such an innocent little thing—like a head-ache powder the paper of which you wipe with your tongue, so that none should be wasted. Apparently the first one had no effect and Ray took the rest.

  Sleep capitulated.

  Immediately he was back home again. His father’s house was a vast forest full of blooming hibiscus and mimosas and giant evergreen trees. And he was a gay humming-bird, fluttering and darting his long needle beak into the heart of a bell-flower. Suddenly he changed into an owl flying by day. . . . Howard University was a prison with white warders. . . . Now he was a young shining chief in a marble palace; slim, naked negresses dancing for his pleasure; courtiers reclining on cushions soft like passionate kisses; gleaming-skinned black boys bearing goblets of wine and obedient eunuchs waiting in the offing. . . .

  And the world was a blue paradise. Everything was in gorgeous blue of heaven. Woods and streams were blue, and men and women and animals, and beautiful to see and love. And he was a blue bird in flight and a blue lizard in love. And life was all blue happiness. Taboos and terrors and penalties were transformed into new pagan delights, orgies of Orient-blue carnival, of rare flowers and red fruits, cherubs and seraphs and fetishes and phalli and all the most-high gods. . . .

  A thousand pins were pricking Ray’s flesh and he was shouting for Jake, but his voice was so faint he could not hear himself. Jake had him in his arms and tried to stand him upon his feet. He crumpled up against the bunk. All his muscles were loose, his cells were cold, and the rhythm of being arrested.

  It was high morning and time to go to the train. Jake had picked up the empty little folds of paper from the floor and restored them to his pocket. He knew what had happened to them, and guessed why. He went and called the first and fourth waiters.

  The chef bulked big in the room, dressed and ready to go to the railroad yards. He gave a contemptuous glance at Jake looking after Ray and said: “Better leave that theah nigger professor alone and come on ’long to the dining-car with us. That theah nigger is dopey from them books o’ hisn. I done told befoh them books would git him yet.”

  The chef went off with the second and fourth cooks. Jake stayed with Ray. They got his shoes and coat on. The first waiter telephoned the steward, and Ray was taken to the hospital.

  “We may all be niggers aw’right, but we ain’t nonetall all the same,” Jake said as he hurried along to the dining-car, thinking of Ray.

  THE TREEING OF THE CHEF

  XII

  PERHAPS the chef of Jake’s dining-car was the most hated chef in the service. He was repul
sive in every aspect. From the elevated bulk of his gross person to the matted burrs of his head and the fat cigar, the constant companion of his sloppy mouth, that he chewed and smoked at the same time. The chef deliberately increased his repulsiveness of form by the meannesses of his spirit.

  “I know Ise a mean black nigger,” he often said, “and I’ll let you all know it on this heah white man’s car, too.”

  The chef was a great black bundle of consciously suppressed desires. That was doubtless why he was so ornery. He was one of the model chefs of the service. His kitchen was well-ordered. The checking up of his provisions always showed a praiseworthy balance. He always had his food ready on time, feeding the heaviest rush of customers as rapidly as the lightest. He fed the steward excellently. He fed the crew well. In a word, he did his duty as only a martinet can.

  A chef who is “right-there” at every call is the first asset of importance on an à la carte restaurant-car. The chef lived rigidly up to that fact and above it. He was also painfully honest. He had a mulatto wife and a brown boy-child in New York and he never slipped away any of the company’s goods to them. Other dining-car men had devised a system of getting by the company’s detectives with choice brands of the company’s foodstuffs. The chef kept away from that. It was long since the yard detectives had stopped searching any parcel that he carried off with him.

  “I don’t want none o’ the white-boss stuff foh mine,” he declared. “Ise making enough o’ mah own to suppoht mah wife and kid.”

  And more, the chef had a violent distaste for all the stock things that “coons” are supposed to like to the point of stealing them. He would not eat watermelon, because white people called it “the niggers’ ice-cream.” Pork chops he fancied not. Nor corn pone. And the idea of eating chicken gave him a spasm. Of the odds and ends of chicken gizzard, feet, head, rump, heart, wing points, and liver—the chef would make the most delicious stew for the crew, which he never touched himself. The Irish steward never missed his share of it. But for his meal the chef would grill a steak or mutton chop or fry a fish. Oh, chef was big and haughty about not being “no regular darky”! And although he came from the Alabama country, he pretended not to know a coon tail from a rabbit foot.