Home To Harlem

by McKay, Claude; Cooper, Wayne F. ;

  “But education is something to make you fine!”

  “No, modern education is planned to make you a sharp, snouty, rooting hog. A Negro getting it is an anachronism. We ought to get something new, we Negroes. But we get our education like—like our houses. When the whites move out, we move in and take possession of the old dead stuff. Dead stuff that this age has no use for.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Can you ask? You and I were born in the midst of the illness of this age and have lived through its agony. . . . Keep your fine feelings, indeed, but don’t try to make a virtue of them. You’ll lose them, then. They’ll become all hollow inside, false and dry as civilization itself. And civilization is rotten. We are all rotten who are touched by it.”

  “I am not rotten,” retorted Grant, “and I couldn’t bring myself and my ideas down to the level of such filthy parasites.”

  “All men have the disease of pimps in their hearts,” said Ray. “We can’t be civilized and not. I have seen your high and mighty civilized people do things that some pimps would be ashamed of——”

  “You said it, then, and most truly,” cried Jake, who, lying on the bed, was intently following the dialogue.

  “Do it in the name of civilization,” continued Ray. “And I have been forced down to the level of pimps and found some of them more than human. One of them was so strange. . . . I never thought he could feel anything. Never thought he could do what he did. Something so strange and wonderful and awful, it just lifted me up out of my little straight thoughts into a big whirl where all of life seemed hopelessly tangled and colored without point or purpose.”

  “Tell us about it,” said Grant.

  “All right,” said Ray. “I’ll tell it.”

  HE ALSO LOVED

  XVII

  IT WAS in the winter of 1916 when I first came to New York to hunt for a job. I was broke. I was afraid I would have to pawn my clothes, and it was dreadfully cold. I didn’t even know the right way to go about looking for a job. I was always timid about that. For five weeks I had not paid my rent. I was worried, and Ma Lawton, my landlady, was also worried. She had her bills to meet. She was a good-hearted old woman from South Carolina. Her face was all wrinkled and sensitive like finely-carved mahogany.

  Every bed-space in the flat was rented. I was living in the small hall bedroom. Ma Lawton asked me to give it up. There were four men sleeping in the front room; two in an old, chipped-enameled brass bed, one on a davenport, and the other in a folding chair. The old lady put a little canvas cot in that same room, gave me a pillow and a heavy quilt, and said I should try and make myself comfortable there until I got work.

  The cot was all right for me. Although I hate to share a room with another person and the fellows snoring disturbed my rest. Ma Lawton moved into the little room that I had had, and rented out hers—it was next to the front room—to a man and a woman.

  The woman was above ordinary height, chocolate-colored. Her skin was smooth, too smooth, as if it had been pressed and fashioned out for ready sale like chocolate candy. Her hair was straightened out into an Indian Straight after the present style among Negro ladies. She had a mongoose sort of a mouth, with two top front teeth showing. She wore a long mink coat.

  The man was darker than the woman. His face was longish, with the right cheek somewhat caved in. It was an interesting face, an attractive, salacious mouth, with the lower lip protruding. He wore a bottle-green peg-top suit, baggy at the hips. His coat hung loose from his shoulders and it was much longer than the prevailing style. He wore also a Mexican hat, and in his breast pocket he carried an Ingersoll watch attached to a heavy gold chain. His name was Jericho Jones, and they called him Jerco for short. And she was Miss Whicher—Rosalind Whicher.

  Ma Lawton introduced me to them and said I was broke, and they were both awfully nice to me. They took me to a big feed of corned beef and cabbage at Burrell’s on Fifth Avenue. They gave me a good appetizing drink of gin to commence with. And we had beer with the eats; not ordinary beer, either, but real Budweiser, right off the ice.

  And as good luck sometimes comes pouring down like a shower, the next day Ma Lawton got me a job in the little free-lunch saloon right under her flat. It wasn’t a paying job as far as money goes in New York, but I was glad to have it. I had charge of the free-lunch counter. You know the little dry crackers that go so well with beer, and the cheese and fish and the potato salad. And I served, besides, spare-ribs and whole boiled potatoes and corned beef and cabbage for those customers who could afford to pay for a lunch. I got no wages at all, but I got my eats twice a day. And I made a few tips, also. For there were about six big black men with plenty of money who used to eat lunch with us, specially for our spare-ribs and sweet potatoes. Each one of them gave me a quarter. I made enough to pay Ma Lawton for my canvas cot.

  Strange enough, too, Jerco and Rosalind took a liking to me. And sometimes they came and ate lunch perched up there at the counter, with Rosalind the only woman there, all made up and rubbing her mink coat against the men. And when they got through eating, Jerco would toss a dollar bill at me.

  We got very friendly, we three. Rosalind would bring up squabs and canned stuff from the German delicatessen in One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, and sometimes they asked me to dinner in their room and gave me good liquor.

  I thought I was pretty well fixed for such a hard winter. All I had to do as extra work was keeping the saloon clean. . . .

  One afternoon Jerco came into the saloon with a man who looked pretty near white. Of course, you never can tell for sure about a person’s race in Harlem, nowadays, when there are so many high-yallers floating round—colored folks that would make Italian and Spanish people look like Negroes beside them. But I figured out from his way of talking and acting that the man with Jerco belonged to the white race. They went in through the family entrance into the back room, which was unusual, for the family room of a saloon, as you know, is only for women in the business and the men they bring in there with them. Real men don’t sit in a saloon here as they do at home. I suppose it would be sissified. There’s a bar for them to lean on and drink and joke as long as they feel like.

  The boss of the saloon was a little fidgety about Jerco and his friend sitting there in the back. The boss was a short pumpkin-bellied brown man, a little bald off the forehead. Twice he found something to attend to in the back room, although there was nothing at all there that wanted attending to. . . . I felt better, and the boss, too, I guess, when Rosalind came along and gave the family room its respectable American character. I served Rosalind a Martini cocktail extra dry, and afterward all three of them, Rosalind, Jerco, and their friend, went up to Ma Lawton’s.

  The two fellows that slept together were elevator operators in a department store, so they had their Sundays free. On the afternoon of the Sunday of the same week that the white-looking man had been in the saloon with Jerco, I went upstairs to change my old shoes—they’d got soaking wet behind the counter—and I found Ma Lawton talking to the two elevator fellows.

  The boys had given Ma Lawton notice to quit. They said they couldn’t sleep there comfortably together on account of the goings-on in Rosalind’s room. The fellows were members of the Colored Y. M. C. A. and were queerly quiet and pious. One of them was studying to be a preacher. They were the sort of fellows that thought going to cabarets a sin, and that parlor socials were leading Harlem straight down to hell. They only went to church affairs themselves. They had been rooming with Ma Lawton for over a year. She called them her gentlemen lodgers.

  Ma Lawton said to me: “Have you heard anything phony outa the next room, dear?”

  “Why, no, Ma,” I said, “nothing more unusual than you can hear all over Harlem. Besides, I work so late, I am dead tired when I turn in to bed, so I sleep heavy.”

  “Well, it’s the truth I do like that there Jerco an’ Rosaline,” said Ma Lawton. “They did seem quiet as lambs, although they was always havin’ company. But Ise got to
speak to them, ’cause I doana wanta lose ma young mens. . . . But theyse a real nice-acting couple. Jerco him treats me like him was mah son. It’s true that they doan work like all poah niggers, but they pays that rent down good and prompt ehvery week.”

  Jerco was always bringing in ice-cream and cake or something for Ma Lawton. He had a way about him, and everybody liked him. He was a sympathetic type. He helped Ma Lawton move beds and commodes and he fixed her clothes lines. I had heard somebody talking about Jerco in the saloon, however, saying that he could swing a mean fist when he got his dander up, and that he had been mixed up in more than one razor cut-up. He did have a nasty long razor scar on the back of his right hand.

  The elevator fellows had never liked Rosalind and Jerco. The one who was studying to preach Jesus said he felt pretty sure that they were an ungodly-living couple. He said that late one night he had pointed out their room to a woman that looked white. He said the woman looked suspicious. She was perfumed and all powdered up and it appeared as if she didn’t belong among colored people.

  “There’s no sure telling white from high-yaller these days,” I said. “There are so many swell-looking quadroons and octoroons of the race.”

  But the other elevator fellow said that one day in the tenderloin section he had run up against Rosalind and Jerco together with a petty officer of marines. And that just put the lid on anything favorable that could be said about them.

  But Ma Lawton said: “Well, Ise got to run mah flat right an’ try mah utmost to please youall, but I ain’t wanta dip mah nose too deep in a lodger’s affairs.”

  Late that night, toward one o’clock, Jerco dropped in at the saloon and told me that Rosalind was feeling badly. She hadn’t eaten a bite all day and he had come to get a pail of beer, because she had asked specially for draught beer. Jerco was worried, too.

  “I hopes she don’t get bad,” he said. “For we ain’t got a cent o’ money. Wese just in on a streak o’ bad luck.”

  “I guess she’ll soon be all right,” I said.

  The next day after lunch I stole a little time and went up to see Rosalind. Ma Lawton was just going to attend to her when I let myself in, and she said to me: “Now the poor woman is sick, poor chile, ahm so glad mah conscience is free and that I hadn’t a said nothing evil t’ her.”

  Rosalind was pretty sick. Ma Lawton said it was the grippe. She gave Rosalind hot whisky drinks and hot milk, and she kept her feet warm with a hot-water bottle. Rosalind’s legs were lead-heavy. She had a pain that pinched her side like a pair of pincers. And she cried out for thirst and begged for draught beer.

  Ma Lawton said Rosalind ought to have a doctor. “You’d better go an’ scares up a white one,” she said to Jerco. “Ise nevah had no faith in these heah nigger doctors.”

  “I don’t know how we’ll make out without money,” Jerco whined. He was sitting in the old Morris chair with his head heavy on his left hand.

  “You kain pawn my coat,” said Rosalind. “Old man Greenbaum will give you two hundred down without looking at it.”

  “I won’t put a handk’chief o’ yourn in the hock shop,” said Jerco. “You’ll need you’ stuff soon as you get better. Specially you’ coat. You kain’t go anywheres without it.”

  “S’posin’ I don’t get up again,” Rosalind smiled. But her countenance changed suddenly as she held her side and moaned. Ma Lawton bent over and adjusted the pillows.

  Jerco pawned his watch chain and his own overcoat, and called in a Jewish doctor from the upper Eighth Avenue fringe of the Belt. But Rosalind did not improve under medical treatment. She lay there with a sad, tired look, as if she didn’t really care what happened to her. Her lower limbs were apparently paralyzed. Jerco told the doctor that she had been sick unto death like that before. The doctor shot a lot of stuff into her system. But Rosalind lay there heavy and fading like a felled tree.

  The elevator operators looked in on her. The student one gave her a Bible with a little red ribbon marking the chapter in St. John’s Gospel about the woman taken in adultery. He also wanted to pray for her recovery. Jerco wanted the prayer, but Rosalind said no. Her refusal shocked Ma Lawton, who believed in God’s word.

  The doctor stopped Rosalind from drinking beer. But Jerco slipped it in to her when Ma Lawton was not around. He said he couldn’t refuse it to her when beer was the only thing she cared for. He had an expensive sweater. He pawned it. He also pawned their large suitcase. It was real leather and worth a bit of money.

  One afternoon Jerco sat alone in the back room of the saloon and began to cry.

  “I’d do anything. There ain’t anything too low I wouldn’t do to raise a little money,” he said.

  “Why don’t you hock Rosalind’s fur coat?” I suggested. “That’ll give you enough money for a while.”

  “Gawd, no! I wouldn’t touch none o’ Rosalind’s clothes. I jest kain’t,” he said. “She’ll need them as soon as she’s better.”

  “Well, you might try and find some sort of a job, then,” I said.

  “Me find a job? What kain I do? I ain’t no good foh no job. I kain’t work. I don’t know how to ask for no job. I wouldn’t know how. I wish I was a woman.”

  “Good God! Jerco,” I said, “I don’t see any way out for you but some sort of a job.”

  “What kain I do? What kain I do?” he whined. “I kain’t do nothing. That’s why I don’t wanta hock Rosalind’s fur coat. She’ll need it soon as she’s better. Rosalind’s so wise about picking up good money. Just like that!” He snapped his fingers.

  I left Jerco sitting there and went into the saloon to serve a customer a plate of corned beef and cabbage.

  After lunch I thought I’d go up to see how Rosalind was making out. The door was slightly open, so I slipped in without knocking. I saw Jerco kneeling down by the open wardrobe and kissing the toe of one of her brown shoes. He started as he saw me, and looked queer kneeling there. It was a high old-fashioned wardrobe that Ma Lawton must have picked up at some sale. Rosalind’s coat was hanging there, and it gave me a spooky feeling, for it looked so much more like the real Rosalind than the woman that was dozing there on the bed.

  Her other clothes were hanging there, too. There were three gowns—a black silk, a glossy green satin, and a flimsy chiffon-like yellow thing. In a corner of the lowest shelf was a bundle of soiled champagne-colored silk stockings and in the other four pairs of shoes—one black velvet, one white kid, and another goldfinished. Jerco regarded the lot with dog-like affection.

  “I wouldn’t touch not one of her things until she’s better,” he said. “I’d sooner hock the shirt off mah back.”

  Which he was preparing to do. He had three expensive striped silk shirts, presents from Rosalind. He had just taken two out of the wardrobe and the other off his back, and made a parcel of them for old Greenbaum. . . . Rosalind woke up and murmured that she wanted some beer. . . .

  A little later Jerco came to the saloon with the pail. He was shivering. His coat collar was turned up and fastened with a safety pin, for he only had an undershirt on.

  “I don’t know what I’d do if anything happens to Rosalind,” he said. “I kain’t live without her.”

  “Oh yes, you can,” I said in a not very sympathetic tone. Jerco gave me such a reproachful pathetic look that I was sorry I said it.

  The tall big fellow had turned into a scared, trembling baby. “You ought to buck up and hold yourself together,” I told him. “Why, you ought to be game if you like Rosalind, and don’t let her know you’re down in the dumps.”

  “I’ll try,” he said. “She don’t know how miserable I am. When I hooks up with a woman I treat her right, but I never let her know everything about me. Rosalind is an awful good woman. The straightest woman I ever had, honest.”

  I gave him a big glass of strong whisky.

  Ma Lawton came in the saloon about nine o’clock that evening and said that Rosalind was dead. “I told Jerco we’d have to sell that theah coat to give the poah wom
an a decent fun’ral, an’ he jest brokes down crying like a baby.”

  That night Ma Lawton slept in the kitchen and put Jerco in her little hall bedroom. He was all broken up. I took him up a pint of whisky.

  “I’ll nevah find another one like Rosalind,” he said, “nevah!” He sat on an old black-framed chair in which a new yellow-varnished bottom had just been put. I put my hand on his shoulder and tried to cheer him up: “Buck up, old man. Never mind, you’ll find somebody else.” He shook his head. “Perhaps you didn’t like the way me and Rosalind was living. But she was one naturally good woman, all good inside her.”

  I felt foolish and uncomfortable. “I always liked Rosalind, Jerco,” I said, “and you, too. You were both awfully good scouts to me. I have nothing against her. I am nothing myself.”

  Jerco held my hand and whimpered: “Thank you, old top. Youse all right. Youse always been a regular fellar.”

  It was late, after two a. m. I went to bed. And, as usual, I slept soundly.

  Ma Lawton was an early riser. She made excellent coffee and she gave the two elevator runners and another lodger, a porter who worked on Ellis Island, coffee and hot homemade biscuits every morning. The next morning she shook me abruptly out of my sleep.

  “Ahm scared to death. Thar’s moah tur’ble trouble. I kain’t git in the barfroom and the hallway’s all messy.”

  I jumped up, hauled on my pants, and went to the bathroom. A sickening purplish liquid coming from under the door had trickled down the hall toward the kitchen. I took Ma Lawton’s rolling-pin and broke through the door.

  Jerco had cut his throat and was lying against the bowl of the water-closet. Some empty coke papers were on the floor. And he sprawled there like a great black boar in a mess of blood.

  A FAREWELL FEED

  XVIII

  RAY and Grant had found jobs on a freighter that was going down across the Pacific to Australia and from there to Europe. Ray had reached the point where going any further on the railroad was impossible. He had had enough to vomit up of Philadelphia and Baltimore, Pittsburgh and Washington. More than enough of the bar-to-bar camaraderie of railroad life.