Cotton Comes to Harlem

by Chester Himes

  But when they had finally caught up with the meat delivery truck, the white men had disappeared. Perhaps it was just as well; by then he was outgunned anyway. Neither of his guards had been seriously hurt, but he’d lost one of his detectives. The wrecked truck hadn’t told him anything and the driver of the truck that had run into them kept getting in the way.

  He hadn’t had much time so he had ordered them to split and assemble again every morning at 3 a.m. in the back room of a pool hall on Eighth Avenue and he would contact his other detective himself.

  “I’ve got to see which way this mother-raping cat is jumping,” he said.

  He had enough money on him to operate, over five hundred dollars. And he had a five-grand bank account under an alias in an all-night bank in midtown for his getaway money in case of an emergency. But he didn’t know yet where to start looking for his eighty-seven grand. Some kind of lead would come. This was Harlem where all black folks were against the whites, and somebody would tell him something. What worried him most was how much information the police had. He knew that in any event they’d be rough on him because of his record; and he knew he’d better keep away from them if he wanted to get his money back.

  First, however, he had to get into his house. He needed his pistol; and there were certain documents hidden there — the forged leases from the steamship line and the forged credentials of the Back-to-Africa movement — that would send him back to prison.

  He walked down Seventh Avenue to Small’s bar, on the pretense of going to call the police, and got into a taxi without attracting any attention. He had the driver take him over to Saint Mark’s Church, paid the fare and walked up the stairs. The church door was closed and locked, as he had expected, but he could stand in the shadowed recess and watch the entrance to the Dorrence Brooks apartment house across the street where he lived.

  He stood there for a long time casing the building. It was a V-shaped building at the corner of 138th Street and St Nicholas Avenue and he could see the entrance and the streets on both sides. He didn’t see any strange cars parked nearby, no police cruisers, no gangster-type limousines. He didn’t see any strange people, nothing and no one who looked suspicious. He could see through the glass doors into the front hall and there was not a soul about. The only thing was it was too damn empty.

  He circled the church and entered the ark on the west side of St Nicholas Avenue and approached the building from across the street. He hid in the park beside a tool shed from which he had a full view of the windows of his fourth-floor apartment. Light showed in the windows of the living-room and dining-room. He watched for a long time. But not once did a shadow pass before one of the lighted windows. He got dripping wet in the rain.

  His sixth sense told him to telephone, and from some phone booth in the street where the call couldn’t be traced. So he walked up to 145th Street and phoned from the box on the corner.

  “Hellooo,” she answered. He thought she sounded strange.

  “Iris,” he whispered.

  Standing beside her, Grave Digger’s hand tightened warningly on her arm. He had already briefed her what to say when O’Malley called and the pressure meant he wasn’t playing.

  “Oh, Betty,” she cried. “The police are here looking for —”

  Grave Digger slapped her with such sudden violence she caromed off the center table and went sprawling on her hands and knees; her dress hiked up showing black lace pants above the creamy yellow skin of her thighs.

  Coffin Ed came up and stood over her, the skin of his face jumping like a snake’s belly over fire. “You’re so goddamn cute—”

  Grave Digger was speaking urgently into the telephone: “O’Malley, we just want some information, that’s —” but the line had gone dead.

  His neck swelled as he jiggled the hook to get the precinct station.

  At the same moment Iris came up from the floor with the smooth vicious motion of a cat and slapped Coffin Ed across the face, thinking he was Grave Digger in her blinding fury.

  She was a hard-bodied high-yellow woman with a perfect figure. She never wore a girdle and her jiggling buttocks gave all men amorous ideas. She had a heart-shaped face with the high cheekbones, big wide red painted mouth, and long-lashed speckled brown eyes of a sexpot and she was thirty-three years old, which gave her the experience. But she was strong as an ox and it was a solid pop she laid on Coffin Ed’s cheek.

  With pure reflex action he reached out and caught her around the throat with his two huge hands and bent her body backward.

  “Easy, man, easy!” Grave Digger shouted, realizing instantly that Coffin Ed was sealed in such a fury he couldn’t hear. He dropped the telephone and wheeled, hitting Coffin Ed across the back of the neck with the edge of his hand just a fraction of a second before he’d have crushed her windpipe.

  Coffin Ed slumped forward, carrying Iris down with him, beneath him, and his hands slackened from her throat. Grave Digger picked him up by the armpits and propped him on the sofa, then he picked up Iris and dropped her into a chair. Her eyes were huge and limpid with fear and her throat was going black and blue.

  Grave Digger stood looking down at them, listening to the phone click frantically, thinking, Now we’re in for it; then thinking bitterly, These half-white bitches. Then he turned back to the telephone and answered the precinct station and asked for the telephone call to be traced. Before he could hang up, Lieutenant Anderson was on the wire.

  “Jones, you and Johnson get over to 137th Street and Seventh Avenue. Both trucks are smashed up and everyone gone, but there are two bodies DOA and there might be a lead.” He paused for a moment, then asked, “How’s it going?”

  Grave Digger looked from the slumped figure of Coffin Ed into the now blazing eyes of Iris and said, “Cool, Lieutenant, everything’s cool.”

  “I’m sending over a man to keep her on ice. He ought to be there any moment.”

  “Right.”

  “And remember my warning — no force. We don’t want anyone hurt if we can help it.”

  “Don’t worry, Lieutenant, we’re like shepherds with new-born lambs.”

  The lieutenant hung up.

  Coffin Ed had come around and he looked at Grave Digger with a sheepish expression. No one spoke.

  Then Iris said in a thick, throat-hurting voice, “I’m going to get you coppers fired if it’s the last thing I do.”

  Coffin Ed looked as though he was going to reply, but Grave Digger spoke first: “You weren’t very smart, but neither were we. So we’d better call it quits and start all over.”

  “Start over shit,” she flared. “You break into my house without a search warrant, hold me prisoner, attack me physically, and say let’s call it quits. You must think I’m a moron. Even if I’m guilty of a murder, you can’t get away with that shit.”

  “Eighty-seven colored families — like you and me —”

  “Not like me!”

  “— have lost their life’s savings in this caper.”

  “So what? You two are going to lose your mother-raping jobs.”

  “So if you co-operate and help us get it back you’ll get a ten-per cent reward — eight thousand, seven hundred dollars.”

  “You chickenshit cop, what can I do with that chicken feed? Deke is worth ten times that much to me.”

  “Not any more. His number’s up and you’d better get on the winning side.”

  She gave a short, harsh laugh. “That ain’t your side, big and ugly.”

  Then she got up and went and stood directly in front of Coffin Ed where he sat on the sofa. Suddenly her fist flew out and hit him squarely on the nose. His eyes filled with tears as blood spurted from his nostrils. But he didn’t move.

  “That makes us even,” he said and reached for his handkerchief.

  Someone rapped on the door and Grave Digger let in the white detective who had come to take over. Neither of them spoke; they kept the record straight.

  “Come on, Ed,” Grave Digger said.


  Coffin Ed stood up and the two of them walked to the door, Coffin Ed holding the bloodstained handkerchief to his nose. Just before they went out, Grave Digger turned and said, “Chances go around, baby.”

  5

  The rain had stopped when they got outside and people were back on the wet sidewalks, strolling aimlessly and looking about as if to see what might have been washed from heaven. They walked up a couple of blocks where their little black battered sedan with the supercharged motor was parked. It had got much cleaner from the rain.

  “You’ve got to take it easy, Ed man,” Grave Digger said. “One more second and you’d have killed her.”

  Coffin Ed took away the handkerchief and found that his nose had stopped bleeding. He got into the car without replying. He felt guilty for fear he might have gotten Digger into trouble, but for his part he didn’t care.

  Grave Digger understood. Ever since the hoodlum had thrown acid into his face, Coffin Ed had had no tolerance for crooks. He was too quick to blow up and too dangerous for safety in his sudden rages. But hell, Grave Digger thought, what can one expect? These colored hoodlums had no respect for colored cops unless you beat it into them or blew them away. He just hoped these slick boys wouldn’t play it too cute.

  The trucks were still where they had been wrecked, guarded by harness cops and surrounded by the usual morbid crowd; but they drove on down to where the bodies lay. They found Sergeant Wiley of Homicide beside the body of the bogus detective, talking to a precinct sergeant and looking bored. He was a quiet, grayhaired, scholarly-looking man dressed in a dark summer suit.

  “Everything is wrapped up,” he said to them. “We’re just waiting for the wagon to take them away.” He pointed at the body. “Know him?”

  They looked him over carefully. “He must be from out of town, eh, Ed?” Grave Digger said.

  Coffin Ed nodded.

  Sergeant Wiley gave them a rundown: No real identification of any kind, just a phoney ID card from the D.A.’s office and a bogus detective shield from headquarters. He had been a big man but now he looked small and forlorn on the wet street and very dead.

  They went up and looked at the other body and exchanged looks.

  Wiley noticed. “Run over by the delivery truck,” he said. “Mean anything?”

  “No, he was just a sneak thief. Must have got in the way is all. True monicker was Early Gibson but he was called Early Riser. Worked with a partner most of the time. We’ll try to find his partner. He might give us a lead.”

  “Sure as hell ain’t got no other,” Coffin Ed added.

  “Do that,” Wiley said. “And let me know what you find out.”

  “We’re going to take a look at the trucks.”

  “Right-o, there’s nothing more here. We took a statement from the driver of the truck that smashed the armored job and let him go. All he knew was what the three of them looked like and we know what they look like.”

  “Any other witness?” Grave Digger asked.

  “Hell, you know these people, Jones. All stone blind.”

  “What you expect from people who’re invisible themselves?” Coffin Ed said roughly.

  Wiley let it pass. “By the way,” he said, “you’ll find those heaps hopped up. The armored truck has an old Cadillac engine and the delivery truck the engine of a Chrysler 300. I’ve taken the numbers and put out tracers. You don’t have to worry about that.”

  They left Sergeant Wiley to wait for the wagon and went over to examine the trucks. The tonneau of the armored truck had been built on to the chassis of a 1957 Cadillac, but it didn’t tell them anything. The Chrysler engine had been installed in the delivery truck, and it might be traced. They copied the licence and engine numbers on the off-chance of finding some garage that had serviced it, but they knew it was unlikely.

  The curious crowd that had collected had begun to drift away. The harness cops guarding the wrecks until the police tow trucks carried them off looked extremely bored. The rain hadn’t slackened the heat; it had only increased the density. The detectives could feel the sweat trickling down their bodies beneath their wet clothes.

  It was getting late and they were impatient to get on to the trail of Deke, but they didn’t want to overlook anything so they examined the truck inside and out with their hand torches.

  The indistinct lettering: FREYBROS. INC. Quality Meats, 173 West 116th Street, showed faintly on the outside panels. They knew there wasn’t any such thing as a meat provision firm at that address.

  Then suddenly, as he was flashing his light inside, Coffin Ed said, “Look at this.”

  From the tone of his voice Grave Digger knew it was something curious before he looked. “Cotton,” he said. He and Coffin Ed looked at each other, swapping thoughts.

  Caught on a loose screw on the side panel were several strands of cotton. Both of them climbed into the truck and examined it carefully at close range.

  “Unprocessed,” Grave Digger said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen any cotton like that.”

  “Hush, man, you ain’t never seen any cotton like that. You were born and raised in New York.”

  Grave Digger chuckled. “It was when I was in high school. We were studying the agricultural products of America.”

  “Now what can a meat provision company use cotton for?”

  “Hell, man, the way this car is powered. you’d think meat spoiled on the way to the store — if you want to think like that.”

  “Cotton,” Coffin Ed ruminated. “A mob of white bandits and cotton — in Harlem. Figure that one out.”

  “Leave it to the fingerprinters and the other experts,” Grave Digger said, jumping down to the pavement. “One thing is for sure, I ain’t going to spend all night looking for a mother-raping sack of cotton — or a cotton picker either.”

  “Let’s go get Early Riser’s buddy,” Coffin Ed said following him.

  Grave Digger and Coffin Ed were realists. They knew they didn’t have second sight. So they had stool pigeons from all walks of life: criminals, straight men and squares. They had their time and places for contacting their pigeons well organized; no pigeon knew another; and only a few of those who were really pigeons were known as pigeons. But without them most crimes would never be solved.

  Now they began contacting their pigeons, but only those on the petty-larceny circuit. They knew they wouldn’t find Deke through stool pigeons; not that night. But they might find a witness who saw the white men leave.

  First they stopped in Big Wilt’s Small’s Paradise Inn at 135th Street and Seventh Avenue and stood for a moment at the front of the circular bar. They drank two whiskies each and talked to each other about the caper.

  The barstools and surrounding tables were filled with the flashily dressed people of many colors and occupations who could afford the price for air-conditioned atmosphere and the professional smiles of the light-bright chicks tending bar. The fat black manager waved the bill on the house and they accepted; they could afford to drink freebies at Small’s, it was a straight joint.

  Afterwards they sauntered towards the back and stood beside the bandstand, watching the white and black couples dancing the twist in the cabaret. The horns were talking and the saxes talking back.

  “Listen to that,” Grave Digger said when the horn took eight on a frenetic solo. “Talking under their clothes, ain’t it?”

  Then the two saxes started swapping fours with the rhythm always in the back. “Somewhere in that jungle is the solution to the world,” Coffin Ed said. “If we could only find it.”

  “Yeah, it’s like the sidewalks trying to speak in a language never heard. But they can’t spell it either.”

  “Naw,” Coffin Ed said. “Unless there’s an alphabet for emotion.”

  “The emotion that comes out of experience. If we could read that language, man, we would solve all the crimes in the world.”

  “Let’s split,” Coffin Ed said. “Jazz talks too much to me.”

  “It ain’t so much what
it says,” Grave Digger agreed. “It’s what you can’t do about it.”

  They left the white and black couples in their frenetic embrace, guided by the talking of the jazz, and went back to their car.

  “Life could be great but there are hoodlums abroad,” Grave Digger said, climbing beneath the wheel.

  “You just ain’t saying it, Digger; hoodlums high, and hoodlums low.”

  They turned off on 132nd Street beside the new housing development and parked in the darkest spot in the block, cut the motor and doused the lights and waited.

  The stool pigeon came in about ten minutes. He was the shinyhaired pimp wearing a white silk shirt and green silk pants who had sat beside them at the bar, with his back turned, talking to a tan-skinned blonde. He opened the door quickly and got into the back seat in the dark.

  Coffin Ed turned around to face him. “You know Early Riser?”

  “Yeah. He’s a snatcher but I don’t know no sting he’s made recently.”

  “Who does he work with?”

  “Work with? I never heard of him working no way but alone.”

  “Think hard,” Grave Digger said harshly without turning around.

  “I dunno, boss. That’s the honest truth. I swear ’fore God.”

  “You know about the rumble on ’37th Stret?” Coffin Ed continued.

  “I heard about it but I didn’t go see it. I heard the syndicate robbed Deke O’Hara out of a hundred grand he’d just collected from his Back-to-Africa pitch.”

  That sounded straight enough so Coffin Ed just said, “Okay. Do some dreaming about Early Riser,” and let him go.

  “Let’s try lower Eighth,” Grave Digger said. “Early was on shit.”

  “Yeah, I saw the marks,” Coffin Ed agreed.

  Their next stop was a dingy bar on Eighth Avenue near the corner of 112th Street. This was the neighborhood of the cheap addicts, whisky-heads, stumblebums, the flotsam of Harlem; the end of the line for the whores, the hard squeeze for the poor honest laborers and a breeding ground for crime. Blank-eyed whores stood on the street corners swapping obscenities with twitching junkies. Muggers and thieves slouched in dark doorways waiting for someone to rob; but there wasn’t anyone but each other. Children ran down the street, the dirty street littered with rotting vegetables, uncollected garbage, battered garbage cans, broken glass, dog offal — always running, ducking and dodging. God help them if they got caught. Listless mothers stood in the dark entrances of tenements and swapped talk about their men, their jobs, their poverty, their hunger, their debts, their Gods, their religions, their preachers, their children, their aches and pains, their bad luck with the numbers and the evilness of white people. Workingmen staggered down the sidewalks filled with aimless resentment, muttering curses, hating to go to their hotbox hovels but having nowhere else to go.