by Alex Haley
Eventually, she rented three midtown apartments where a woman customer could meet a Negro by appointment. Her customers recommended her service to their friends. She quit the beauty salon, set up a messenger service as an operating front, and ran all of her business by telephone.
She had also noticed the color preference. I never could substitute in an emergency, she would tell me with a laugh, because I was too light. She told me that nearly every white woman in her clientele would specify “a black one”; sometimes they would say “a real one,” meaning black, no brown Negroes, no red Negroes.
The Lesbian thought up her messenger service idea because some of her trade wanted the Negroes to come to their homes, at times carefully arranged by telephone. These women lived in neighborhoods of swank brownstones and exclusive apartment houses, with doormen dressed like admirals. But white society never thinks about challenging any Negro in a servant role. Doormen would telephone up and hear “Oh, yes, send him right up, James”; service elevators would speed those neatly dressed Negro messenger boys right up—so that they could “deliver” what had been ordered by some of the most privileged white women in Manhattan.
The irony is that those white women had no more respect for those Negroes than white men have had for the Negro women they have been “using” since slavery times. And, in turn, Negroes have no respect for the whites they get into bed with. I know the way I felt about Sophia, who still came to New York whenever I called her.
The West Indian boy friend of the Profumo scandal’s Christine Keeler, Lucky Gordon, and his friends must have felt the same way. After England’s leaders had been with those white girls, those girls, for their satisfaction, went to Negroes, to smoke reefers and make fun of some of England’s greatest peers as cuckolds and fools. I don’t doubt that Lucky Gordon knows the identity of “the man in the mask” and much more. If Gordon told everything those white girls told him, he would give England a new scandal.
It’s no different from what happens in some of America’s topmost white circles. Twenty years ago, I saw them nightly, with my own eyes, I heard them with my own ears.
The hypocritical white man will talk about the Negro’s “low morals.” But who has the world’s lowest morals if not whites? And not only that, but the “upper-class” whites! Recently, details were published about a group of suburban New York City white housewives and mothers operating as a professional call-girl ring. In some cases, these wives were out prostituting with the agreement, even the cooperation, of husbands, some of whom even waited at home, attending the children. And the customers—to quote a major New York City morning newspaper: “Some 16 ledgers and books with names of 200 Johns, many important social, financial and political figures, were seized in the raid Friday night.”
I have also read recently about groups of young white couples who get together, the husbands throw their house keys into a hat, then, blindfolded, the husbands draw out a key and spend the night with the wife that the house key matches. I have never heard of anything like that being done by Negroes, even Negroes who live in the worst ghettoes and alleys and gutters.
—
Early one morning in Harlem, a tall, light Negro wearing a hat and with a woman’s stocking drawn down over his face held up a Negro bartender and manager who were counting up the night’s receipts. Like most bars in Harlem, Negroes fronted, and a Jew really owned the place. To get a license, one had to know somebody in the State Liquor Authority, and Jews working with Jews seemed to have the best S.L.A. contacts. The black manager hired some Negro hoodlums to go hunting for the hold-up man. And the man’s description caused them to include me among their suspects. About daybreak that same morning, they kicked in the door of my apartment.
I told them I didn’t know a thing about it, that I hadn’t had a thing to do with whatever they were talking about. I told them I had been out on my hustle, steering, until maybe four in the morning, and then I had come straight to my apartment and gone to bed.
The strong-arm thugs were bluffing. They were trying to flush out the man who had done it. They still had other suspects to check out—that’s all that saved me.
I put on my clothes and took a taxi and I woke up two people, the madam, then Sammy. I had some money, but the madam gave me some more, and I told Sammy I was going to see my brother Philbert in Michigan. I gave Sammy the address, so that he could let me know when things got straightened out.
This was the trip to Michigan in the wintertime when I put congolene on my head, then discovered that the bathroom sink’s pipes were frozen. To keep the lye from burning up my scalp, I had to stick my head into the stool and flush and flush to rinse out the stuff.
A week passed in frigid Michigan before Sammy’s telegram came. Another red Negro had confessed, which enabled me to live in Harlem again.
But I didn’t go back into steering. I can’t remember why I didn’t. I imagine I must have felt like staying away from hustling for a while, going to some of the clubs at night, and narcotizing with my friends. Anyway, I just never went back to the madam’s job.
It was at about this time, too, I remember, that I began to be sick. I had colds all the time. It got to be a steady irritation, always sniffling and wiping my nose, all day, all night. I stayed so high that I was in a dream world. Now, sometimes, I smoked opium with some white friends, actors who lived downtown. And I smoked more reefers than ever before. I didn’t smoke the usual wooden-match-sized sticks of marijuana. I was so far gone by now that I smoked it almost by the ounce.
—
After awhile, I worked downtown for a Jew. He liked me because of something I had managed to do for him. He bought rundown restaurants and bars. Hymie was his name. He would remodel these places, then stage a big, gala reopening, with banners and a spotlight outside. The jam-packed, busy place with the big “Under New Management” sign in the window would attract speculators, usually other Jews who were around looking for something to invest money in. Sometimes even in the week of the new opening, Hymie would re-sell, at a good profit.
Hymie really liked me, and I liked him. He loved to talk. I loved to listen. Half his talk was about Jews and Negroes. Jews who had anglicized their names were Hymie’s favorite hate. Spitting and curling his mouth in scorn, he would reel off names of people he said had done this. Some of them were famous names whom most people never thought of as Jews.
“Red, I’m a Jew and you’re black,” he would say. “These Gentiles don’t like either one of us. If the Jew wasn’t smarter than the Gentile, he’d get treated worse than your people.”
Hymie paid me good money while I was with him, sometimes two hundred and three hundred dollars a week. I would have done anything for Hymie. I did do all kinds of things. But my main job was transporting bootleg liquor that Hymie supplied, usually to those spruced-up bars which he had sold to someone.
Another fellow and I would drive out to Long Island where a big bootleg whisky outfit operated. We’d take with us cartons of empty bonded whisky bottles that were saved illegally by bars we supplied. We would buy five-gallon containers of bootleg, funnel it into the bottles, then deliver, according to Hymie’s instructions, this or that many crates back to the bars.
Many people claiming they drank only such-and-such a brand couldn’t tell their only brand from pure week-old Long Island bootleg. Most ordinary whisky drinkers are “brand” chumps like this. On the side, with Hymie’s approval, I was myself at that time supplying some lesser quantities of bootleg to reputable Harlem bars, as well as to some of the few speakeasies still in Harlem.
But one weekend on Long Island, something happened involving the State Liquor Authority. One of New York State’s biggest recent scandals has been the exposure of wholesale S.L.A. graft and corruption. In the bootleg racket I was involved in, someone high up must have been taken for a real pile. A rumor about some “inside” tipster spread among Hymie and the others. One day Hymie didn’t show up where he had told me to meet him. I never heard from him again…b
ut I did hear that he was put in the ocean and I knew he couldn’t swim.
—
Up in the Bronx, a Negro held up some Italian racketeers in a floating crap game. I heard about it on the wire. Whoever did it, aside from being a fool, was said to be a “tall, light-skinned” Negro, masked with a woman’s stocking. It has always made me wonder if that bar stickup had really been solved, or if the wrong man had confessed under beatings. But, anyway, the past suspicion of me helped to revive suspicion of me again.
Up in Fat Man’s Bar on the hill overlooking the Polo Grounds, I had just gone into a telephone booth. Everyone in the bar—all over Harlem, in fact—was drinking up, excited about the news that Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ owner, had just signed Jackie Robinson to play in major league baseball, with the Dodgers’ farm team in Montreal—which would place the time in the fall of 1945.
Earlier in the afternoon, I had collected from West Indian Archie for a fifty-cent combination bet; he had paid me three hundred dollars right out of his pocket. I was telephoning Jean Parks. Jean was one of the most beautiful women who ever lived in Harlem. She once sang with Sarah Vaughan in the Bluebonnets, a quartet that sang with Earl Hines. For a long time, Jean and I had enjoyed a standing, friendly deal that we’d go out and celebrate when either of us hit the numbers. Since my last hit, Jean had treated me twice, and we laughed on the phone, glad that now I’d treat her to a night out. We arranged to go to a 52nd Street night club to hear Billie Holiday, who had been on the road and was just back in New York.
As I hung up, I spotted the two lean, tough-looking paisanos gazing in at me cooped up in the booth.
I didn’t need any intuition. And I had no gun. A cigarette case was the only thing in my pocket. I started easing my hand down into my pocket, to try bluffing…and one of them snatched open the door. They were dark-olive, swarthy-featured Italians. I had my hand down into my pocket.
“Come on outside, we’ll hold court,” one said.
At that moment, a cop walked through the front door. The two thugs slipped out. I never in my life have been so glad to see a cop.
I was still shaking when I got to the apartment of my friend, Sammy the Pimp. He told me that not long before, West Indian Archie had been there looking for me.
Sometimes, recalling all of this, I don’t know, to tell the truth, how I am alive to tell it today. They say God takes care of fools and babies. I’ve so often thought that Allah was watching over me. Through all of this time of my life, I really was dead—mentally dead. I just didn’t know that I was.
Anyway, to kill time, Sammy and I sniffed some of his cocaine, until the time came to pick up Jean Parks, to go down and hear Lady Day. Sammy’s having told me about West Indian Archie looking for me didn’t mean a thing…not right then.
CHAPTER 8
TRAPPED
There was the knocking at the door. Sammy, lying on his bed in pajamas and a bathrobe, called “Who?”
When West Indian Archie answered, Sammy slid the round, two-sided shaving mirror under the bed, with what little of the cocaine powder—or crystals, actually—was left, and I opened the door.
“Red—I want my money!”
A .32-20 is a funny kind of gun. It’s bigger than a .32. But it’s not as big as a .38. I had faced down some dangerous Negroes. But no one who wasn’t ready to die messed with West Indian Archie.
I couldn’t believe it. He truly scared me. I was so incredulous at what was happening that it was hard to form words with my brain and my mouth.
“Man—what’s the beef?”
West Indian Archie said he’d thought I was trying something when I’d told him I’d hit, but he’d paid me the three hundred dollars until he could double-check his written betting slips; and, as he’d thought, I hadn’t combinated the number I’d claimed, but another.
“Man, you’re crazy!” I talked fast; I’d seen out of the corner of my eye Sammy’s hand easing under his pillow where he kept his Army .45. “Archie, smart a man as you’re supposed to be, you’d pay somebody who hadn’t hit?”
The .32–20 moved, and Sammy froze. West Indian Archie told him, “I ought to shoot you through the ear.” And he looked back at me. “You don’t have my money?”
I must have shaken my head.
“I’ll give you until twelve o’clock tomorrow.”
And he put his hand behind him and pulled open the door. He backed out, and slammed it.
It was a classic hustler-code impasse. The money wasn’t the problem. I still had about two hundred dollars of it. Had money been the issue, Sammy could have made up the difference; if it wasn’t in his pocket, his women could quickly have raised it. West Indian Archie himself, for that matter, would have loaned me three hundred dollars if I’d ever asked him, as many thousands of dollars of mine as he’d gotten ten percent of. Once, in fact, when he’d heard I was broke, he had looked me up and handed me some money and grunted, “Stick this in your pocket.”
The issue was the position which his action had put us both into. For a hustler in our sidewalk jungle world, “face” and “honor” were important. No hustler could have it known that he’d been “hyped,” meaning outsmarted or made a fool of. And worse, a hustler could never afford to have it demonstrated that he could be bluffed, that he could be frightened by a threat, that he lacked nerve.
West Indian Archie knew that some young hustlers rose in stature in our world when they somehow hoodwinked older hustlers, then put it on the wire for everyone to hear. He believed I was trying that.
In turn, I knew he would be protecting his stature by broadcasting all over the wire his threat to me.
Because of this code, in my time in Harlem I’d personally known a dozen hustlers who, threatened, left town, disgraced.
Once the wire had it, any retreat by either of us was unthinkable. The wire would be awaiting the report of the showdown.
I’d also known of at least another dozen showdowns in which one took the Dead On Arrival ride to the morgue, and the other went to prison for manslaughter or the electric chair for murder.
Sammy let me hold his .32. My guns were at my apartment. I put the .32 in my pocket, with my hand on it, and walked out.
I couldn’t stay out of sight. I had to show up at all of my usual haunts. I was glad that Reginald was out of town. He might have tried protecting me, and I didn’t want him shot in the head by West Indian Archie.
I stood a while on the corner, with my mind confused—the muddled thinking that’s characteristic of the addict. Was West Indian Archie, I began to wonder, bluffing a hype on me? To make fun of me? Some old hustlers did love to hype younger ones. I knew he wouldn’t do it as some would, just to pick up three hundred dollars. But everyone was so slick. In this Harlem jungle people would hype their brothers. Numbers runners often had hyped addicts who had hit, who were so drugged that, when challenged, they really couldn’t be sure if they had played a certain number.
I began to wonder whether West Indian Archie might not be right. Had I really gotten my combination confused? I certainly knew the two numbers I’d played; I knew I’d told him to combinate only one of them. Had I gotten mixed up about which number?
Have you ever been so sure you did something that you never would have thought of it again—unless it was brought up again? Then you start trying to mentally confirm—and you’re only about half-sure?
It was just about time for me to go and pick up Jean Parks, to go downtown to see Billie at the Onyx Club. So much was swirling in my head. I thought about telephoning her and calling it off, making some excuse. But I knew that running now was the worst thing I could do. So I went on and picked up Jean at her place. We took a taxi on down to 52nd Street. “Billie Holiday” and those big photo blow-ups of her were under the lights outside. Inside, the tables were jammed against the wall, tables about big enough to get two drinks and four elbows on; the Onyx was one of those very little places.
Billie, at the microphone, had just finished a number w
hen she saw Jean and me. Her white gown glittered under the spotlight, her face had that coppery, Indianish look, and her hair was in that trademark ponytail. For her next number she did the one she knew I always liked so: “You Don’t Know What Love Is”—“until you face each dawn with sleepless eyes…until you’ve lost a love you hate to lose—”
When her set was done, Billie came over to our table. She and Jean, who hadn’t seen each other in a long time, hugged each other. Billie sensed something wrong with me. She knew that I was always high, but she knew me well enough to see that something else was wrong, and asked in her customary profane language what was the matter with me. And in my own foul vocabulary of those days, I pretended to be without a care, so she let it drop.
We had a picture taken by the club photographer that night. The three of us were sitting close together. That was the last time I ever saw Lady Day. She’s dead; dope and heartbreak stopped that heart as big as a barn and that sound and style that no one successfully copies. Lady Day sang with the soul of Negroes from the centuries of sorrow and oppression. What a shame that proud, fine, black woman never lived where the true greatness of the black race was appreciated!
In the Onyx Club men’s room, I sniffed the little packet of cocaine I had gotten from Sammy. Jean and I, riding back up to Harlem in a cab, decided to have another drink. She had no idea what was happening when she suggested one of my main hang-outs, the bar of the La Marr-Cheri on the corner of 147th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. I had my gun, and the cocaine courage, and I said okay. And by the time we’d had the drink, I was so high that I asked Jean to take a cab on home, and she did. I never have seen Jean again, either.
