Home To Harlem

by McKay, Claude; Cooper, Wayne F. ;

  He held her as you might hold a child and she ruffled his thick mat of hair and buried her face in it. She wriggled down with a little scream:

  “Oh, I gotta go get mah bag!”

  “I’ll come along with you,” said Jake.

  “No, lemme go alone. I kain manage better by mahself.”

  “But suppose that nigger is waiting theah foh you? You better lemme come along.”

  “No, honey, I done figure he’s waiting still in Sheba Palace, or boozing. Him and some friends was all drinking befoh and he was kinder full. Ise sure he ain’t gone home. Anyway, I kain manage by mahself all right, but ef you comes along and we runs into him— No, honey, you stays right here. I don’t want messing up in no blood-baff. Theah’s too much a that in Harlem.”

  They compromised, Felice agreeing that Jake should accompany her to the corner of Seventh Avenue and One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street and wait for her there. She had not the faintest twinge of conscience herself. She had met the male that she preferred and gone with him, leaving the one that she was merely makeshifting with. It was a very simple and natural thing to her. There was nothing mean about it. She was too nice to be mean. However, she was aware that in her world women scratched and bit into each other’s flesh and men razored and gunned at each other over such things. . . .

  Felice recalled one memorable afternoon when two West Indian women went for each other in the back yard of a house in One Hundred and Thirty-second Street. One was a laundress, a whopping brown woman who had come to New York from Colon, and the other was a country girl, a buxom Negress from Jamaica. They were quarreling over a vain black bantam, one of the breed that delight in women’s scratching over them. The laundress had sent for him to come over from the Canal Zone to New York. They had lived together there and she had kept him, making money in all the ways that a gay and easy woman can on the Canal Zone. But now the laundress bemoaned the fact that “sence mah man come to New Yawk, him jest gone back on me in the queerest way you can imagine.”

  Her man, in turn, blamed the situation upon her, said she was too aggressive and mannish and had harried the energy out of him. But the other girl seemed to endow him again with virility. . . . After keeping him in Panama and bringing him to New York, the laundress hesitated about turning her male loose in Harlem, although he was apparently of no more value to her. But his rejuvenating experience with the younger girl had infuriated the laundress. A sister worker from Alabama, to whom she had confided her secret tragedy, had hinted: “Lawdy! sistah, that sure sounds phony-like. Mebbe you’ man is jest playing ’possum with you.” And the laundress was crazy with suspicion and jealousy and a feeling for revenge. She challenged her rival to fight the affair out. They were all living in the same house. . . .

  Felice also lived in that house. And one afternoon she was startled by another girl from an adjoining room pounding on her door and shrieking: “Open foh the love of Jesus! . . . Theah’s sweet hell playing in the back yard.”

  The girls rushed to the window and saw the two black women squaring off at each other down in the back yard. They were stark naked.

  After the challenge, the women had decided to fight with their clothes off. An old custom, perhaps a survival of African tribalism, had been imported from some remote West Indian hillside into a New York back yard. Perhaps, the laundress had thought, that with her heavy and powerful limbs she could easily get her rival down and sit on her, mauling her properly. But the black girl was as nimble as a wild goat. She dodged away from the laundress who was trying to get ahold of her big bush of hair, and suddenly sailing fullfront into her, she seized the laundress, shoulder and neck, and butted her twice on the forehead as only a rough West Indian country girl can butt. The laundress staggered backward, groggy, into a bundle of old carpets. But she rallied and came back at the grinning Negress again. The laundress had never learned the brutal art of butting. The girl bounded up at her forehead with another well-aimed butt and sent her reeling flop on her back among the carpets. The girl planted her knees upon the laundress’s high chest and wrung her hair.

  “You don’t know me, but I’ll make you remember me foreber. I’ll beat you’ mug ugly. There!” Bam! Bam! She slapped the laundress’s face.

  “Git off mah stomach, nigger gal, and leave me in peace,” the laundress panted. The entire lodging-house was in a sweet fever over the event. Those lodgers whose windows gave on the street had crowded into their neighbors’ rear rooms and some had descended into the basement for a close-up view. Apprised of the naked exhibition, the landlord hurried in from the corner saloon and threatened the combatants with the police. But there was nothing to do. The affair was settled and the women had already put their shifts on.

  The women lodgers cackled gayly over the novel staging of the fight.

  “It sure is better to disrobe like that, befoh battling,” one declared. “It turn you’ hands and laigs loose for action.”

  “And saves you’ clothes being ripped into ribbons,” said another.

  A hen-fight was more fun than a cock-fight, thought Felice, as she hastily threw her things into her bag. The hens pluck feathers, but they never wring necks like the cocks.

  And Jake. Standing on the corner, he waited, restive, nervous. But, unlike Felice, his thought was not touched by the faintest fear of a blood battle. His mind was a circle containing the girl and himself only, making a thousand plans of the joys they would create together. She was a prize to hold. Had slipped through his fingers once, but he wasn’t ever going to lose her again. That little model of warm brown flesh. Each human body has its own peculiar rhythm, shallow or deep or profound. Transient rhythms that touch and pass you, unrememberable, and rhythms unforgetable. Imperial rhythms whose vivid splendor blinds your sight and destroys your taste for lesser ones.

  Jake possessed a sure instinct for the right rhythm. He was connoisseur enough. But although he had tasted such a varied many, he was not raw animal enough to be undiscriminating, nor civilized enough to be cynical. . . .

  Felice came hurrying as much as she could along One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street, bumping a cumbersome portmanteau on the pavement and holding up one unruly lemon-bright silk stocking with her left hand. Jake took the bag from her. They went into a delicatessen store and bought a small cold chicken, ham, mustard, olives, and bread. They stopped in a sweet shop and bought a box of chocolate-and-vanilla ice-cream and cake. Felice also took a box of chocolate candy. Their last halt was at a United Cigar Store, where Jake stocked his pockets with a half a dozen packets of Camels. . . .

  Felice had just slipped out of her charming strawberry frock when her hands flew down to her pretty brown leg. “O Gawd! I done fohget something!” she cried in a tone that intimated something very precious.

  “What’s it then?” demanded Jake.

  “It’s mah luck,” she said. “It’s the fierst thing that was gived to me when I was born. Mah gran’ma gived it and I wears it always foh good luck.”

  This lucky charm was an old plaited necklace, leathery in appearance, with a large, antique blue bead attached to it, that Felice’s grandmother (who had superintended her coming into the world) had given to her immediately after that event. Her grandmother had dipped the necklace into the first water that Felice was washed in. Felice had religiously worn her charm around her neck all during her childhood. But since she was grown to ripe girlhood and low-cut frocks were the fashion and she loved them so much, she had transferred the unsightly necklace from her throat to her leg. But before going to the Sheba Palace she had unhooked the thing. And she had forgotten it there in the closet, hanging by a little nail against the wash-bowl.

  “I gotta go get it,” she said.

  “Aw no, you won’t bother,” drawled Jake. And he drew the little agitated brown body to him and quieted it. “It was good luck you fohget it, sweetness, for it made us find one another.”

  “Something to that, daddy,” Felice said, and her mouth touched his mouth.

  Th
ey wove an atmosphere of dreams around them and were lost in it for a week. Felice asked the landlady to let her use the kitchen to cook their meals at home. They loitered over the wide field and lay in the sweet grass of Van Cortlandt Park. They went to the Negro Picture Theater and held each other’s hand, gazing in raptures at the crude pictures. It was odd that all these cinematic pictures about the blacks were a broad burlesque of their home and love life. These colored screen actors were all dressed up in expensive evening clothes, with automobiles, and menials, to imitate white society people. They laughed at themselves in such rôles and the laughter was good on the screen. They pranced and grinned like good-nigger servants, who know that “mas’r” and “missus,” intent on being amused, are watching their antics from an upper window. It was quite a little funny and the audience enjoyed it. Maybe that was the stuff the Black Belt wanted.

  THE GIFT THAT BILLY GAVE

  XXI

  “WE GOTTA celebrate to-night,” said Felice when Saturday came round again. Jake agreed to do anything she wanted. Monday they would have to think of working. He wanted to dine at Aunt Hattie’s, but Felice preferred a “niftier” place. So they dined at the Nile Queen restaurant on Seventh Avenue. After dinner they subwayed down to Broadway. They bought tickets for the nigger heaven of a theater, whence they watched high-class people make luxurious love on the screen. They enjoyed the exhibition. There is no better angle from which one can look down on a motion picture than that of the nigger heaven.

  They returned to Harlem after the show in a mood to celebrate until morning. Should they go to Sheba Palace where chance had been so good to them, or to a cabaret? Sentiment was in favor of Sheba Palace but her love of the chic and novel inclined Felice toward an attractive new Jewish-owned Negro cabaret. She had never been there and could not go under happier circumstances.

  The cabaret was a challenge to any other in Harlem. There were one or two cabarets in the Belt that were distinguished for their impolite attitude toward the average Negro customer, who could not afford to swill expensive drinks. He was pushed off into a corner and neglected, while the best seats and service were reserved for notorious little gangs of white champagne-guzzlers from downtown.

  The new cabaret specialized in winning the good will of the average blacks and the approval of the fashionable set of the Belt. The owner had obtained a college-bred Negro to be manager, and the cashier was a genteel mulatto girl. On the opening night the management had sent out special invitations to the high lights of the Negro theatrical world and free champagne had been served to them. The new cabaret was also drawing nightly a crowd of white pleasure-seekers from downtown. The war was just ended and people were hungry for any amusements that were different from the stale stock things.

  Besides its spacious floor, ladies’ room, gentlemen’s room and coat-room, the new cabaret had a bar with stools, where men could get together away from their women for a quick drink and a little stag conversation. The bar was a paying innovation. The old-line cabarets were falling back before their formidable rival. . . .

  The fashionable Belt was enjoying itself there on this night. The press, theatrical, and music world were represented. Madame Mulberry was there wearing peacock blue with patches of yellow. Madame Mulberry was a famous black beauty in the days when Fifty-third Street was the hub of fashionable Negro life. They called her then, Brown Glory. She was the wife of Dick Mulberry, a promoter of Negro shows. She had no talent for the stage herself, but she knew all the celebrated stage people of her race. She always gossiped reminiscently of Bert Williams, George Walker and Aida Overton Walker, Anita Patti Brown and Cole and Johnson.

  With Madame Mulberry sat Maunie Whitewing with a dapper cocoa-brown youth by her side, who was very much pleased by his own person and the high circle to which it gained him admission. Maunie was married to a nationally-known Negro artist, who lived simply and quietly. But Maunie was notorious among the scandal sets of Brooklyn, New York, and Washington. She was always creating scandals wherever she went, gallivanting around with improper persons at improper places, such as this new cabaret. Maunie’s beauty was Egyptian in its exoticism and she dared to do things in the manner of ancient courtesans. Dignified colored matrons frowned upon her ways, but they had to invite her to their homes, nevertheless, when they asked her husband. But Maunie seldom went.

  The sports editor of Colored Life was also there, with a prominent Negro pianist. It was rumored that Bert Williams might drop in after midnight. Madame Mulberry was certain he would.

  James Reese Europe, the famous master of jazz, was among a group of white admirers. He had just returned from France, full of honors, with his celebrated band. New York had acclaimed him and America was ready to applaud. . . . That was his last appearance in a Harlem cabaret before his heart was shot out during a performance in Boston by a savage buck of his race. . . .

  Prohibition was on the threshold of the country and drinking was becoming a luxury, but all the joy-pacers of the Belt who adore the novel and the fashionable and had a dollar to burn had come together in a body to fill the new cabaret.

  The owner of the cabaret knew that Negro people, like his people, love the pageantry of life, the expensive, the fine, the striking, the showy, the trumpet, the blare—sumptuous settings and luxurious surroundings. And so he had assembled his guests under an enchanting-blue ceiling of brilliant chandeliers and a dome of artificial roses bowered among green leaves. Great mirrors reflected the variegated colors and poses. Shaded, multi-colored sidelights glowed softly along the golden walls.

  It was a scene of blazing color. Soft, barbaric, burning, savage, clashing, planless colors—all rioting together in wonderful harmony. There is no human sight so rich as an assembly of Negroes ranging from lacquer black through brown to cream, decked out in their ceremonial finery. Negroes are like trees. They wear all colors naturally. And Felice, rouged to a ravishing maroon, and wearing a close-fitting, chrome-orange frock and cork-brown slippers, just melted into the scene.

  They were dancing as Felice entered and she led Jake right along into it.

  “Tell me, pa-pa, Ise you ma-ma . . .”

  Every cabaret and dancing-hall was playing it. It was the tune for the season. It had carried over from winter into spring and was still the favorite. Oh, ma-ma! Oh, pa-pa!

  The dancing stopped. . . . A brief interval and a dwarfish, shiny black man wearing a red-brown suit, with kinks straightened and severely plastered down in the Afro-American manner, walked into the center of the floor and began singing. He had a massive mouth, which he opened wide, and a profoundly big and quite good voice came out of it.

  “I’m so doggone fed up, I don’t know what to do.

  Can’t find a pal that’s constant, can’t find a gal that’s true.

  But I ain’t gwine to worry ’cause mah buddy was a ham;

  Ain’t gwine to cut mah throat ’cause mah gal ain’t worf a damn.

  Ise got the blues all ovah, the coal-black biting blues,

  Like a prowling tom-cat that’s got the low-down mews.

  I’m gwine to lay me in a good supply a gin,

  Foh gunning is a crime, but drinking ain’t no sin.

  I won’t do a crazy deed ’cause of a two-faced pal,

  Ain’t gwineta break mah heart ovah a no-’count gal

  Ise got the blues all ovah, the coal-black biting blues,

  Like a prowling tom-cat that’s got the low-down mews.”

  There was something of the melancholy charm of Tschaikovsky in the melody. The black singer made much of the triumphant note of strength that reigned over the sad motif. When he sang, “I ain’t gwine to cut mah throat,” “Ain’t gwine to break mah heart,” his face became grim and full of will as a bulldog’s.

  He conquered his audience and at the finish he was greeted with warm applause and a shower of silver coins ringing on the tiled pavement. An enthusiastic white man waved a dollar note at the singer and, to show that Negroes could do just as good or better, Maun
ie Whitewing’s sleek escort imitated the gesture with a two-dollar note. That started off the singer again.

  “Ain’t gwine to cut mah throat. . .

  Ain’t gwine to break mah heart. . . .”

  “That zigaboo is a singing fool,” remarked Jake.

  Billy Biasse entered resplendent in a new bottle-green suit, and joined Jake and Felice at their table.

  “What you say, Billy?” Jake’s greeting.

  “I say Ise gwineta blow. Toss off that theah liquor, you two. Ise gwineta blow champagne as mah compliments, old top.” . . .

  “Heah’s good luck t’you, boh, and plenty of joy-stuff and happiness,” continued Billy, when the champagne was poured. “You sure been hugging it close this week.”

  Jake smiled and looked foolish. . . .The second cook, whom he had not seen since he quitted the railroad, entered the cabaret with a mulatto girl on his arm and looked round for seats. Jake stood up and beckoned him over to his table.

  “It’s awright, ain’t it Billy?” he asked his friend.

  “Sure. Any friend a yourn is awright.”

  The two girls began talking fashion around the most striking dresses in the place. Jake asked about the demoted rhinoceros. He was still on the railroad, the second cook said, taking orders from another chef, “jest as savage and mean as ever, but not so moufy. I hear you friend Ray done quit us for the ocean, Jakey.” . . .

  There was still champagne to spare, nevertheless the second cook invited the boys to go up to the bar for a stiff drink of real liquor.

  Negroes, like all good Americans, love a bar. I should have said, Negroes under Anglo-Saxon civilization. A bar has a charm all of its own that makes drinking there pleasanter. We like to lean up against it, with a foot on the rail. We will leave our women companions and choice wines at the table to snatch a moment of exclusive sex solidarity over a thimble of gin at the bar.

  The boys left the girls to the fashions for a little while. Billy Biasse, being a stag as always, had accepted the invitation with alacrity. He loved to indulge in naked manstuff talk, which would be too raw even for Felice’s ears. As they went out Maunie Whitewing (she was a traveled woman of the world and had been abroad several times with and without her husband) smiled upon Jake with a bold stare and remarked to Madame Mulberry: “Quel beau garçon! J’aimerais beaucoup faire l’amour avec lui.”