And Agatha was acting wistfully. He knew what would be the inevitable outcome of meeting that subtle wistful yearning halfway. Soon he would become one of the contented hogs in the pigpen of Harlem, getting ready to litter little black piggies. If he could have felt about things as Jake, how different his life might have been! Just to hitch up for a short while and be irresponsible! But he and Agatha were slaves of the civilized tradition. . . . Harlem nigger strutting his stuff. . . Harlem niggers! How often he had listened to those phrases, like jets of saliva, spewing from the lips of his work pals. They pursued, scared, and haunted him. He was afraid that some day the urge of the flesh and the mind’s hankering after the pattern of respectable comfort might chase his high dreams out of him and deflate him to the contented animal that was a Harlem nigger strutting his stuff. “No happy-nigger strut for me,” he would mutter, when the feeling for Agatha worked like a fever in his flesh. He saw destiny working in her large, dream-sad eyes, filling them with the passive softness of resignation to life, and seeking to encompass and yoke him down as just one of the thousand niggers of Harlem. And he hated Agatha and, for escape, wrapped himself darkly in self-love.
Oh, he was scared of that long red steel cage whose rumbling rollers were eternally heavy-lipped upon shining, continent-circling rods. If he forced himself to stay longer he would bang right off his head. Once upon a time he used to wonder at that great body of people who worked in nice cages: bank clerks in steel-wire cages, others in wooden cages, salespeople behind counters, neat, dutiful, respectful, all of them. God! how could they carry it on from day to day and remain quietly obliging and sane? If the railroad had not been cacophonous and riotous enough to balance the dynamo roaring within him, he would have jumped it long ago.
Life burned in Ray perhaps more intensely than in Jake. Ray felt more and his range was wider and he could not be satisfied with the easy, simple things that sufficed for Jake. Sometimes he felt like a tree with roots in the soil and sap flowing out and whispering leaves drinking in the air. But he drank in more of life than he could distill into active animal living. Maybe that was why he felt he had to write.
He was a reservoir of that intense emotional energy so peculiar to his race. Life touched him emotionally in a thousand vivid ways. Maybe his own being was something of a touchstone of the general emotions of his race. Any upset—a terror-breathing, Negro-baiting headline in a metropolitan newspaper or the news of a human bonfire in Dixie—could make him miserable and despairingly despondent like an injured child. While any flash of beauty or wonder might lift him happier than a god. It was the simple, lovely touch of life that charmed and stirred him most. . . . The warm, rich-brown face of a Harlem girl seeking romance . . . a late wet night on Lenox Avenue, when all forms are soft-shadowy and the street gleams softly like a still, dim stream under the misted yellow lights. He remembered once the melancholy-comic notes of a “Blues” rising out of a Harlem basement before dawn. He was going to catch an early train and all that trip he was sweetly, deliciously happy humming the refrain and imagining what the interior of the little dark den he heard it in was like. “Blues” . . . melancholy-comic. That was the key to himself and to his race. That strange, child-like capacity for wistfulness-and-laughter. . . .
No wonder the whites, after five centuries of contact, could not understand his race. How could they when the instinct of comprehension had been cultivated out of them? No wonder they hated them, when out of their melancholy environment the blacks could create mad, contagious music and high laughter. . . .
Going away from Harlem. . . . Harlem! How terribly Ray could hate it sometimes. Its brutality, gang rowdyism, promiscuous thickness. Its hot desires. But, oh, the rich bloodred color of it! The warm accent of its composite voice, the fruitiness of its laughter, the trailing rhythm of its “blues” and the improvised surprises of its jazz. He had known happiness, too, in Harlem, joy that glowed gloriously upon him like the high-noon sunlight of his tropic island home.
How long would he be able to endure the life of a cabin boy or mess boy on a freighter? Jake had tried to dissuade him. “A seaman’s life is no good, chappie, and it’s easier to jump off a train in the field than offn a ship gwine across the pond.”
“Maybe it’s not so bad in the mess,” suggested Ray.
“’Deed it’s worse foh mine, chappie. Stoking and A. B. S. is cleaner work than messing with raw meat and garbage. I never was in love with no kitchen job. And tha’s why I ain’t none crazy about the white man’s chu-chuing buggy.”
Going away from Harlem. . . .
Jake invited Ray and Grant to a farewell feed, for which Billy Biasse was paying. Billy was a better pal for Jake than Zeddy. Jake was the only patron of his gambling house that Billy really chummed with. They made a good team. Their intimate interests never clashed. And it never once entered Jake’s head that there was anything ugly about Billy’s way of earning a living. Tales often came roundabout to Billy of patrons grumbling that “he was swindling poah hardworking niggers outa their wages.” But he had never heard of Jake backbiting.
“The niggers am swindling themselves,” Billy always retorted. “I runs a gambling place foh the gang and they pays becas they love to gamble. I plays even with them mahself. I ain’t no miser hog like Nije Gridley.”
Billy liked Jake because Jake played for the fun of the game and then quit. Gambling did not have a strangle hold upon him any more than dope or desire did. Jake took what he wanted of whatever he fancied and . . . kept going.
The feed was spread at Aunt Hattie’s cook-shop. Jake maintained that Aunt Hattie’s was the best place for good eats in Harlem. A bottle of Scotch whisky was on the table and a bottle of gin.
While the boys sampled the fine cream tomato soup, Aunt Hattie bustled in and out of the kitchen, with a senile-fond look for Jake and an affectionate phrase, accompanied by a salacious lick of her tongue.
“Why, it’s good and long sence you ain’t been in reg’lar to see me, chile. What’s you been keeping you’self?”
“Ain’t been no reg’lar chile of Harlem sence I done jump on the white man’s chu-chu,” said Jake.
“And is you still on that theah business?” Aunt Hattie asked.
“I don’t know ef I is and I don’t know ef I ain’t. Ise been laid off sick.”
“Sick! Poah chile, and I nevah knowed so I could come off’ring you a li’l’ chicken broth. You jest come heah and eats any time you wanta, whether youse got money or not.”
Aunt Hattie shuffled back to the kitchen to pick the nicest piece of fried chicken for Jake.
“Always in luck, Jakey,” said Billy. “It’s no wonder you nevah see niggers in the bread line. And you’ll nevah so long as theah’s good black womens like Aunt Hattie in Harlem.”
Jake poured Scotch for three.
“Gimme gin,” said Billy.
Jake called to Aunt Hattie to bring her glass. “What you gwine to have, Auntie?”
“Same thing youse having, chile,” replied Aunt Hattie.
“This heah stuff is from across the pond.”
“Lemme taste it, then. Ef youse always so eye-filling drinking it, it might ginger up mah bones some.”
“Well, here’s to us, fellahs,” cried Billy. “Let’s hope that hard luck nevah turn our glasses down or shet the door of a saloon in our face.”
Glasses clinked and Aunt Hattie touched Jake’s twice and closed her eyes as with trembling hand she guzzled.
“You had better said, ‘Le’s hope that this heah Gawd’s own don’t shut the pub in our face’,” replied Jake. “Prohibition is right under our tail.”
Everybody laughed. . . . Ray bit into the tender leg of his fried chicken. The candied sweet potatoes were sweeter than honey to his palate.
“Drink up, fellahs,” said Billy.
“Got to leave you, Harlem,” Ray sang lightly. “Got to turn our backs on you.”
“And our black moon on the Pennsy,” added Jake.
“Tomorrow
the big blue beautiful ocean,” said Ray.
“You’ll puke in it,” Jake grinned devilishly. “Why not can the idea, chappie? The sea is hell and when you hits shore it’s the same life all ovah.”
“I guess you are right,” replied Ray. “Goethe said the same thing in Werther.”
“Who is that?” Jake asked.
“A German ——”
“A boche?”
“Yes, a great one who made books instead of war. He was mighty and contented like a huge tame elephant. Genteel lovers of literature call that Olympian.”
Jake gripped Ray’s shoulder: “Chappie, I wish I was edjucated mahself.”
“Christ! What for?” demanded Ray.
“Becaz I likes you.” Like a black Pan out of the woods Jake looked into Ray’s eyes with frank savage affection and Billy Biasse exclaimed:
“Lawdy in heaben! A li’l’ foreign booze gwine turn you all soft?”
“Can’t you like me just as well as you are?” asked Ray. “I can’t feel any difference at all. If I was famous as Jack Johnson and rich as Madame Walker I’d prefer to have you as my friend than—President Wilson.”
“Like bumbole you would!” retorted Jake. “Ef I was edjucated, I could, understand things better and be proper-speaking like you is. . . . And I mighta helped mah li’l sister to get edjucated, too (she must be a li’l’ woman, now), and she would be nice-speaking like you’ sweet brown, good enough foh you to hitch up with. Then we could all settle down and make money like edjucated people do, instead a you gwine off to throw you’self away on some lousy dinghy and me chasing around all the time lak a hungry dawg.”
“Oh, you heart-breaking, slobbering nigger!” cried Billy Biasse. “That’s the stuff youse got tuck away there under your tough black hide.”
“Muzzle you’ mouf,” retorted Jake. “Sure Ise human. I ain’t no lonesome wolf lak you is.”
“A wolf is all right ef he knows the jungle.”
“The fact is, Jake,” Ray said, “I don’t know what I’ll do with my little education. I wonder sometimes if I could get rid of it and go and lose myself in some savage culture in the jungles of Africa. I am a misfit—as the doctors who dole out newspaper advice to the well-fit might say—a misfit with my little education and constant dreaming, when I should be getting the nightmare habit to hog in a whole lot of dough like everybody else in this country. Would you like to be educated to be like me?”
“If I had your edjucation I wouldn’t be slinging no hash on the white man’s chu-chu,” Jake responded.
“Nobody knows, Jake. Anyway, you’re happier than I as you are. The more I learn the less I understand and love life. All the learning in this world can’t answer this little question, Why are we living?”
“Why, becaz Gawd wants us to, chappie,” said Billy Biasse.
“Come on le’s all go to Uncle Doc’s,” said Jake, “and finish the night with a li’l’ sweet jazzing. This is you last night, chappie. Make the most of it, foh there ain’t no jazzing like Harlem jazzing over the other side.”
They went to Uncle Doc’s, where they drank many ceremonious rounds. Later they went to Leroy’s Cabaret. . . .
The next afternoon the freighter left with Ray signed on as a mess boy.
THIRD PART
SPRING IN HARLEM
XIX
THE lovely trees of Seventh Avenue were a vivid flame-green. Children, lightly clad, skipped on the pavement. Light open coats prevailed and the smooth bare throats of brown girls were a token as charming as the first pussy-willows. Far and high over all, the sky was a grand blue benediction, and beneath it the wonderful air of New York tasted like fine dry champagne.
Jake loitered along Seventh Avenue. Crossing to Lenox, he lazied northward and over the One Hundred and Forty-ninth Street bridge into the near neighborhood of the Bronx. Here, just a step from compactly-built, teeming Harlem, were frame houses and open lots and people digging. A colored couple dawdled by, their arms fondly caressing each other’s hips. A white man forking a bit of ground stopped and stared expressively after them.
Jake sat down upon a mound thick-covered with dandelions. They glittered in the sun away down to the rear of a rusty-gray shack. They filled all the green spaces. Oh, the common little things were glorious there under the sun in the tender spring grass. Oh, sweet to be alive in that sun beneath that sky! And to be in love—even for one hour of such rare hours! One day! One night! Somebody with spring charm, like a dandelion, seasonal and haunting like a lovely dream that never repeats itself. . . . There are hours, there are days, and nights whose sheer beauty over-whem us with happiness, that we seek to make even more beautiful by comparing them with rare human contacts. . . . It was a day like this we romped in the grass . . . a night as soft and intimate as this on which we forgot the world and ourselves. . . . Hours of pagan abandon, celebrating ourselves. . . .
And Jake felt as all men who love love for love’s sake can feel. He thought of the surging of desire in his boy’s body and of his curious pure nectarine beginnings, without pain, without disgust, down home in Virginia. Of his adolescent breaking-through when the fever-and-pain of passion gave him a wonderful strange-sweet taste of love that he had never known again. Of rude contacts and swift satisfactions in Norfolk, Baltimore, and other coast ports. . . . Havre. . . . The West India Dock districts of London. . . .
“Only that cute heart-breaking brown of the Baltimore,” he mused. “A day like this sure feels like her. Didn’t even get her name. O Lawdy! what a night that theah night was. Her and I could sure make a hallelujah picnic outa a day like this.” . . .
Jake and Billy Biasse, leaving Dixie Red’s pool-room together, shuffled into a big excited ring of people at the angle of Fifth Avenue and One Hundred and Thirty-third Street. In the ring three bad actors were staging a rough play—a yellow youth, a chocolate youth, and a brown girl.
The girl had worked herself up to the highest pitch of obscene frenzy and was sicking the dark strutter on to the yellow with all the filthiest phrases at her command. The two fellows pranced round, menacing each other with comic gestures.
“Why, ef it ain’t Yaller Prince!” said Jake.
“Him sure enough,” responded Billy Biasse. “Guess him done laid off from that black gal why she’s shooting her stinking mouth off at him.”
“Is she one of his producing goods?”
“She was. But I heard she done beat up anether gal of hisn—a fair-brown that useta hand over moh change than her and Yaller turn’ her loose foh it.” . . .
“You lowest-down face-artist!” the girl shrieked at Yaller Prince. “I’ll bawl it out so all a Harlem kain know what you is.” And ravished by the fact that she was humiliating her one-time lover, she gesticulated wildly.
“Hit him, Obadiah!” she yelled to the chocolate chap. “Hit him I tell you. Beat his mug up foh him, beat his mug and bleed his mouf.” Over and over again she yelled: “Bleed his mouf!” As if that was the thing in Yaller Prince she had desired most. For it she had given herself up to the most unthinkable acts of degradation. Nothing had been impossible to do. And now she would cut and bruise and bleed that mouth that had once loved her so well so that he should not smile upon her rivals for many a day.
“Two-faced yaller nigger, you does ebery low-down thing, but you nevah done a lick of work in you lifetime. Show him, Obadiah. Beat his face and bleed his mouf.”
“Yaller nigger,” cried the extremely bandy-legged and grim-faced Obadiah, “Ise gwine kick you pants.”
“I ain’t scared a you, black buzzard,” Yaller Prince replied in a thin, breathless voice, and down he went on his back, no one knowing whether he fell or was tripped up. Obadiah lifted a bottle and swung it down upon his opponent. Yaller Prince moaned and blood bubbled from his nose and his mouth.
“He’s a sweet-back, all right, but he ain’t a strong one,” said some one in the crowd. The police had been conspicuously absent during the fracas, but now a baton tap-tapped upon the pave
ment and two of them hurried up. The crowd melted away.
Jake had pulled Yaller Prince against the wall and squatted to rest the bleeding head against his knee.
“What’s matter here now? What’s matter?” the first policeman, with revolver drawn, asked harshly.
“Nigger done beat this one up and gone away from heah, tha’s whatsmat,” said Billy Biasse.
They carried Yaller Prince into a drugstore for first aid, and the policeman telephoned for an ambulance. . . .
“We gotta look out foh him in hospital. He was a pretty good skate for a sweetman,” Billy Biasse said.
“Poor Yaller!” Jake, shaking his head, commented; “it’s a bad business.”
“He’s plumb crazy gwine around without a gun when he’s a-playing that theah game,” said Billy, “with all these cut-thwoat niggers in Harlem ready to carve up one another foh a li’l’ insisnificant humpy.”
“It’s the same ole life everywhere,” responded Jake. “In white man’s town or nigger town. Same bloody-sweet life across the pond. I done lived through the same blood-battling foh womens ovah theah in London. Between white and white and between white and black. Done see it in the froggies’ country, too. A mess o’ fat-headed white soldiers them was knocked off by apaches. Don’t tell me about cut-thwoat niggers in Harlem. The whole wul’ is boody-crazy——”
“But Harlem is the craziest place foh that, I bet you, boh,” Billy laughed richly. “The stuff it gives the niggers brain-fevah, so far as I see, and this heah wolf has got a big-long horeezon. Wese too thick together in Harlem. Wese all just lumped together without a chanst to choose and so we nacherally hate one another. It’s nothing to wonder that you’ buddy Ray done runned away from it. Why, jest the other night I witnessed a nasty stroke. You know that spade prof that’s always there on the Avenue handing out the big stuff about niggers and their rights and the wul’ and bolschism. . . . He was passing by the poolroom with a bunch o’ books when a bad nigger jest lunges out and socks him bif! in the jaw. The poah frightened prof. started picking up his books without a word said, so I ups and asks the boxer what was the meaning o’ that pass. He laughed and asked me ef I really wanted to know, and before he could squint I landed him one in the eye and pulled mah gun on him. I chased him off that corner all right. I tell you, boh, Harlem is lousy with crazy-bad niggers, as tough as Hell’s Kitchen, and I always travel with mah gun ready.”
Home To Harlem Page 15
