Home To Harlem

by McKay, Claude; Cooper, Wayne F. ;

  “Oh, sure! Them gals not all in the straight business, you know. Some o’ them works and just go there for a good time, a li’l’ extra stuff. . . . It ain’t like that nonetall ovah in Europe, chappie. They wouldn’t ’a’ treated you so nice. Them places I sampled ovah there was all straight raw business and no camoflage.”

  “Did you prefer them?”

  “Hell, no! I prefer the niggers’ way every time. They does it better. . . .”

  “Wish I could feel the difference as you do, Jakie. I lump all those ladies together, without difference of race.”

  “Youse crazy, chappie. You ain’t got no experience about it. There’s all kinds a difference in that theah life. Sometimes it’s the people make the difference and sometimes it’s the place. And as foh them sweet marchants, there’s as much difference between them as you find in any other class a people. There is them slap-up private-apartmant ones, and there is them of the dickty buffet flats; then the low-down speakeasy customers; the cabaret babies, the family-entrance clients, and the street fliers.”

  They stopped on a board-walk. The dining-car stood before them, resting on one of the hundred tracks of the great Philadelphia yards.

  “I got a free permit to a nifty apartmant in New York, chappie, and the next Saturday night we lay over together in the big city Ise gwine to show you some real queens. It’s like everything else in life. Depends on you’ luck.”

  “And you are one lucky dog,” Ray laughed.

  Jake grinned: “I’d tell you about a li’l’ piece o’ sweetness I picked up in a cabaret the first day I landed from ovah the other side. But it’s too late now. We gotta start work.”

  “Next time, then,” said Ray.

  Jake swung himself up by the rear platform and entered the kitchen. Ray passed round by the other side into the dining-room.

  INTERLUDE

  XIV

  DUSK gathered in blue patches over the Black Belt. Lenox Avenue was vivid. The saloons were bright, crowded with drinking men jammed tight around the bars, treating one another and telling the incidents of the day. Longshoremen in overalls with hooks, Pullman porters holding their bags, waiters, elevator boys. Liquor-rich laughter, banana-ripe laughter. . . .

  The pavement was a dim warm bustle. Women hurrying home from day’s work to get dinner ready for husbands who worked at night. On their arms brown bags and black containing a bit of meat, a head of lettuce, butter. Young men who were stagging through life, passing along with brown-paper packages, containing a small steak, a pork chop, to do their own frying.

  From out of saloons came the savory smell of corned beef and cabbage, spare-ribs, Hamburger steaks. Out of little cook-joints wedged in side streets, tripe, pigs’ feet, hogs’ ears and snouts. Out of apartments, steak smothered with onions, liver and bacon, fried chicken.

  The composite smell of cooked stuff assaulted Jake’s nostrils. He was hungry. His landlady was late bringing his food. Maybe she was out on Lenox Avenue chewing the rag with some other Ebenezer soul, thought Jake.

  Jake was ill. The doctor told him that he would get well very quickly if he remained quietly in bed for a few days.

  “And you mustn’t drink till you are better. It’s bad for you,” the doctor warned him.

  But Jake had his landlady bring him from two to four pails of beer every day. “I must drink some’n,” he reasoned, “and beer can’t make me no harm. It’s light.”

  When Ray went to see him, Jake laughed at his serious mien.

  “Tha’s life, chappie. I goes way ovah yonder and wander and fools around and I hed no mind about nothing. Then I come back to mah own home town and, oh, you snake-bite! When I was in the army, chappie, they useter give us all sorts o’ lechers about can-shankerous nights and prophet-lactic days, but I nevah pay them no mind. Them things foh edjucated guys like you who lives in you’ head.”

  “They are for you, too,” Ray said. “This is a new age with new methods of living. You can’t just go on like a crazy ram goat as if you were living in the Middle Ages.”

  “Middle Ages! I ain’t seen them yet and don’t nevah wanta. All them things you talk about am kill-joy things, chappie. The trute is they make me feel shame.”

  Ray laughed until tears trickled down his cheeks. . . . He visualized Jake being ashamed and laughed again.

  “Sure,” said Jake. “I’d feel ashame’ ef a chippie—No, chappie, them stuff is foh you book fellahs. I runs around all right, but Ise lak a sailor that don’t know nothing about using a compass, but him always hits a safe port.”

  “You didn’t this time, though, Jakie. Those devices that you despise are really for you rather than for me or people like me, who don’t live your kind of free life. If you, and the whole strong race of workingman who live freely like you, don’t pay some attention to them, then you’ll all wither away and rot like weeds.”

  “Let us pray!” said Jake.

  “That I don’t believe in.”

  “Awright, then, chappie.”

  On the next trip, the dining-car was shifted off its scheduled run and returned to New York on the second day, late at night. It was ordered out again early the next day. Ray could not get round to see Jake, so he telephoned his girl and asked her to go.

  Agatha had heard much of Ray’s best friend, but she had never met him. Men working on a train have something of the spirit of men working on a ship. They are, perforce, bound together in comradeship of a sort in that close atmosphere. In the stop-over cities they go about in pairs or groups. But the camaraderie breaks up on the platform in New York as soon as the dining-car returns there. Every man goes his own way unknown to his comrades. Wife or sweet-heart or some other magnet of the great magic city draws each off separately.

  Agatha was a rich-brown girl, with soft amorous eyes. She worked as assistant in a beauty parlor of the Belt. She was a Baltimore girl and had been living in New York for two years. Ray had met her the year before at a basket-ball match and dance.

  She went to see Jake in the afternoon. He was sitting in a Morris chair, reading the Negro newspaper, The Amsterdam News, with a pail of beer beside him, when Agatha rapped on the door.

  Jake thought it was the landlady. He was thrown off his balance by the straight, beautiful girl who entered the room and quietly closed the door behind her.

  “Oh, keep your seat, please,” she begged him. “I’ll sit there,” she indicated a brown chair by the cherrywood chiffonier.

  “Ray asked me to come. He was doubled out this morning and couldn’t get around to see you. I brought these for you.”

  She put a paper bag of oranges on the table. “Where shall I put these?” She showed him a charming little bouquet of violets. Jake’s drinking-glass was on the floor, half full, beside the pail of beer.

  “It’s all right, here!” On the chipped, mildew-white wash-stand there was another glass with a tooth-brush. She took the tooth-brush out, poured some water in the glass, put the violets in, and set it on the chiffonier.

  “There!” she said.

  Jake thanked her. He was diffident. She was so different a girl from the many he had known. She was certainly one of those that Miss Curdy would have sneered at. She was so full of simple self-assurance and charm. Mah little sister down home in Petersburg, he thought, might have turned out something lak this ef she’d ’a’ had a chance to talk English like in books and wear class-top clothes. Nine years sence I quite home. She must be quite a li’l’ woman now herself.

  Jake loved women’s pretty clothes. The plain nigger-brown coat Agatha wore, unbuttoned, showed a fresh peach-colored frock. He asked after Ray.

  “I didn’t see him myself this trip,” she said. “He telephoned me about you.”

  Jake praised Ray as his best pal.

  “He’s a good boy,” she agreed. She asked Jake about the railroad. “It must be lots of fun to ride from one town to the other like that. I’d love it, for I love to travel. But Ray hates it.”

  “It ain’t so much fun when
youse working,” replied Jake.

  “I guess you’re right. But there’s something marvelous about meeting people for a little while and serving them and never seeing them again. It’s romantic. You don’t have that awful personal everyday contact that domestic workers have to get along with. If I was a man and had to be in service, I wouldn’t want better than the railroad.”

  “Some’n to that, yes,” agreed Jake. . . . “But it ain’t all peaches, neither, when all them passengers rush you like a herd of hungry swine.”

  Agatha stayed twenty minutes.

  “I wish you better soon,” she said, bidding Jake good-by. “It was nice to know you. Ray will surely come to see you when he gets back this time.”

  Jake drank a glass of beer and eased his back, full length on the little bed.

  “She is sure some wonderful brown,” he mused. “Now I sure does understand why Ray is so scornful of them easy ones.” He gazed at the gray door. It seemed a shining panel of gold through which a radiant vision had passed.

  “She sure does like that theah Ray an unconscionable lot. I could see the love stuff shining in them mahvelous eyes of hers when I talked about him. I s’pose it’s killing sweet to have some’n loving you up thataway. Some’n real fond o’ you for you own self lak, lak—jest lak how mah mammy useter love pa and do everything foh him bafore he done took and died off without giving no notice. . . . ”

  His thoughts wandered away back to his mysterious little brown of the Baltimore. She was not elegant and educated, but she was nice. Maybe if he found her again—it would be better than just running wild around like that! Thinking honestly about it, after all, he was never satisfied, flopping here and sleeping there. It gave him a little cocky pleasure to brag of his conquests to the fellows around the bar. But after all the swilling and boasting, it would be a thousand times nicer to have a little brown woman of his own to whom he could go home and be his simple self with. Lay his curly head between her brown breasts and be fondled and be the spoiled child that every man loves sometimes to be when he is all alone with a woman. That he could never be with the Madame Lauras. They expected him always to be the prancing he-man. Maybe be it was the lack of a steady girl that kept him running crazy around. Boozing and poking and rooting around, jolly enough all right, but not altogether contented.

  The landlady did not appear with Jake’s dinner.

  “Guess she is somewhere rocking soft with gin,” he thought. “Ise feeling all right enough to go out, anyhow. Guess I’ll drop in at Uncle Doc’s and have a good feed of spare-ribs. Hm! but the stuff coming out of these heah Harlem kitchens is enough to knock me down. They smell so good.”

  He dressed and went out. “Oh, Lenox Avenue, but you look good to me, now. Lawdy! though, how the brown-skin babies am humping it along! Strutting the joy-stuff! Invitation for a shimmy. O Lawdy! Pills and pisen, you gotta turn me loose, quick.”

  Billy Biasse was drinking at the bar of Uncle Doc’s when Jake entered.

  “Come on, you, and have a drink,” Billy cried. “Which hole in Harlem youse been burying you’self in all this time?”

  “Which you figure? There is holes outside of Harlem too, boh.” Jake ordered a beer.

  “Beer!” exclaimed Billy. “Quit you fooling and take some real liquor, nigger. Ise paying foh it. Order that theah ovah-water liquor you useter be so dippy about. That theah Scotch.”

  “I ain’t quite all right, Billy. Gotta go slow on the booze.”

  “Whasmat? . . . Oh, foh Gawd’s sake! Don’t let the li’l’ beauty break you’ heart. Fix her up with gin.”

  “Might as well, and then a royal feed o’ spare-ribs,” agreed Jake.

  He asked for Zeddy.

  “Missing sence all the new moon done bless mah luck that you is, too. Last news I heard ’bout him, the gen’man was Yonkers anchored.”

  “And Strawberry Lips?”

  “That nigger’s back home in Harlem where he belongs. He done long ago quit that ugly yaller razor-back. And you, boh. Who’s providing foh you’ wants sence you done turn Congo Rose down?”

  “Been running wild in the paddock of the Pennsy.”

  “Oh, boh, you sure did breaks the sweet-loving haht of Congo Rose. One night she stahted to sing ‘You broke mah haht and went away’ and she jest bust out crying theah in the cabaret and couldn’t sing no moh. She hauled harself whimpering out there, and she laid off o’ the Congo foh moh than a week. That li’l’ goosey boy had to do the strutting all by himse’f.”

  “She was hot stuff all right.” Jake laughed richly. “But I had to quit her or she would have made me either a no-’count or a bad nigger.”

  Warmed up by meeting an old pal and hearing all the intimate news of the dives, Jake tossed off he knew not how many gins. He told Billy Biasse of the places he had nosed out in Baltimore and Philadelphia. The gossip was good. Jake changed to Scotch and asked for the siphon.

  He had finished the first Scotch and asked for another, when a pain gripped his belly with a wrench that almost tore him apart. Jake groaned and doubled over, staggered into a corner, and crumpled up on the floor. Perspiration stood in beads on his forehead, trickled down his rigid, chiseled features. He heard the word “ambulance” repeated several times. He thought first of his mother. His sister. The little frame house in Petersburg. The backyard of bleached clothes on the line, the large lilac tree and the little forked lot that yielded red tomatoes and green peas in spring.

  “No hospital foh me,” he muttered. “Mah room is jest next doh. Take me theah.”

  Uncle Doc told his bar man to help Billy Biasse lift Jake.

  “Kain you move you’ laigs any at all, boh?” Billy asked.

  Jake groaned: “I kain try.”

  The men took him home. . . .

  Jake’s landlady had been invited to a fried-chicken feed in the basement lodging of an Ebenezer sister and friend on Fifth Avenue. The sister friend had rented the basement of the old-fashioned house and appropriated the large backyard for her laundry work. She went out and collected soiled linen every Monday. Her wealthiest patrons sent their chauffeurs round with their linen. And the laundress was very proud of white chauffeurs standing their automobiles in front of her humble basement. She noticed with heaving chest that the female residents of the block rubber-necked. Her vocation was very profitable. And it was her pleasure sometimes to invite a sister of her church to dinner. . . .

  The fried chicken, with sweet potatoes, was excellent. Over it the sisters chinned and ginned, recounting all the contemporary scandals of the Negro churches. . . .

  At last Jake’s landlady remembered him and staggered home to prepare his beef broth. But when she took it up to him she found that Jake was out. Returning to the kitchen, she stumbled and broke the white bowl, made a sign with her rabbit foot, and murmured, foggily: “Theah’s sure a cross coming to thisa house. I wonder it’s foh who?”

  The bell rang and rang again and again in spite of the notice: Ring once. And when the landlady opened the door and saw Jake supported between two men, she knew that the broken white bowl was for him and that his time was come.

  RELAPSE

  XV

  BILLY BIASSE telephoned to the doctor, a young chocolate-complexioned man. He was graduate of a Negro medical college in Tennessee and of Columbia University. He was struggling to overcome the prejudices of the black populace against Negro doctors and wedge himself in among the Jewish doctors that prescribed for the Harlem clientele. A clever man, he was trying, through Democratic influence, to get an appointment in one of the New York hospitals. Such an achievement would put him all over the Negro press and get him all the practice and more than he could handle in the Belt.

  Ray had sent Jake to him. . . .

  The landlady brought Jake a rum punch. He shook his head. With a premonition of tragedy, she waited for the doctor, standing against the chiffonier, a blue cloth carelessly knotted round her head. . . .

  In the corridor she questioned Billy Biasse abou
t Jake’s seizure.

  “All you younger generation in Harlem don’t know no God,” she accused Billy and indicted Young Harlem. “All you know is cabarets and movies and the young gals them exposing them legs a theirs in them jumper frocks.”

  “I wouldn’t know ’bout that,” said Billy.

  “You all ought to know, though, and think of God Almighty before the trumpet sound and it’s too late foh black sinners. I nevah seen so many trifling and ungodly niggers as there is in this heah Harlem.” She thought of the broken white bowl. “And I done had a warning from heaben.”

  The doctor arrived. Ordered a hot-water bottle for Jake’s belly and a hot lemon drink. There was no other remedy to help him but what he had been taking.

  “You’ve been drinking,” the doctor said.

  “Jest a li’l’ beer,” Jake murmured.

  “O Lawdy! though, listen at him!” cried the landlady. “Mister, if he done had a glass, he had a barrel a day. Ain’t I been getting it foh him?”

  “Beer is the worst form of alcohol you could ever take in your state,” said the doctor. “Couldn’t be anything worse. Better you had taken wine.”

  Jake growled that he didn’t like wine.

  “It’s up to you to get well,” said the doctor. “You have been ill like that before. It’s a simple affair if you will be careful and quiet for a little while. But it’s very dangerous if you are foolish. I know you chaps take those things lightly. But you shouldn’t, for the consequences are very dangerous.”

  Two days later Ray’s diner returned to New York. It was early afternoon and the crew went over to the yards to get the stock for the next trip. And after stocking up Ray went directly to see Jake.

  Jake was getting along all right again. But Ray was alarmed when he heard of his relapse. Indeed, Ray was too easily moved for the world he lived in. The delicate-fibered mechanism of his being responded to sensations that were entirely beyond Jake’s comprehension.

  “The doctor done hand me his. The landlady stahted warning me against sin with her mouth stinking with gin. And now mah chappie’s gwina join the gang.” Jake laughed heartily.