Cotton Comes to Harlem
Page 7
At Fifth Avenue they came to the circle where Spanish Harlem begins. Suddenly the street goes squalid, dirty, teeming with the many colors of Puerto Ricans — so many packed into the incredible slums it seems as though the rotten walls are bursting wtih human flesh. The English language gives way to Spanish, colored Americans give way to colored Puerto Ricans. By the time they reached Madison Avenue, they were in a Puerto Rican city with Puerto Rican customs, Puerto Rican food; with all stores, restaurants, professional offices, business establishments and such bearing signs and notices in Spanish, offering Puerto Rican services and Puerto Rican goods.
“People talk about Harlem,” Grave Digger said. “These slums are many times worse.”
“Yeah, but when a Puerto Rican becomes white enough he’s accepted as white, but no matter how white a spook might become he’s still a nigger,” Coffin Ed replied.
“Hell, man, leave that for the anthropologists,” Grave Digger said, turning south on Lexington towards 105th Street.
Sarah had the top flat in an old-fashioned brick apartment building that had seen better days. Directly beneath her top-floor crib lived a Puerto Rican clan of so many families the apartments on the floor could not hold them all; therefore eating, sleeping, cooking and making love was done in turns while the others stayed outside in the street until those inside were finished. Radios blared at top volume all day and night. Combined with the natural sounds of Spanish speech, laughter and quarreling, the din drowned all sounds that might come from Sarah’s above. How the families below fared was of no concern.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed parked down the street and walked. No one gave them a second look. They were men and that’s all that interested Sarah: white men, black men, yellow men, brown men, straight men, crooked men and squares. Sarah said she only barred women; she didn’t run a joint for “freaks”. She paid for protection. Everyone knew she was a stool pigeon; but she pigeoned on the police too.
The first thing that hit the detectives when they entered the dimly lit downstairs hallway was the smell of urine.
“What American slums need is toilets,” Coffin Ed said.
Smelling odors of cooking, loving, hair frying, dogs farting, cats pissing, boys masturbating and the stale fumes of stale wine and black tobacco, Grave Digger said, “That wouldn’t help much.”
Next they noticed the graffiti on the walls.
“Hell, no wonder they make so many babies; that’s all they think about,” Coffin Ed concluded.
“If you lived here, what else would you think about?”
They ascended in silence. The stink lessened as they climbed the six flights, the walls became less tatooed. The whorehouse floor was practically clean.
They knocked at a red-painted door at the front. It was opened by a grinning Puerto Rican girl who didn’t bother to look through the peephole. “Welcome, señors,” she said. “You’re at the right place.”
They entered a vestibule and looked at the hooks on the walls.
“We want to talk to Sarah,” Grave Digger said.
The girl waved towards a door. “Come on in. You don’t have to see her.”
“We want to see her. You go in like a good little girl and send her out.”
The girl stopped grinning. “Who’re you?”
Both detectives flashed their shields. “We’re the law.”
The girl sneered and turned quickly into the big front room, leaving the door ajar. They could see into what Sarah called her “reception room”. The floor was covered with polished red linoleum. Chairs lined the walls: overstuffed chairs for the Johns, straight-backed chairs for the girls; but most of the time the girls were either sitting in the laps of the Johns or bringing them food and drink.
The girls were all dressed alike in one-piece shifts showing their shapes, and high-heeled shoes of different colors. They were all light-complexioned Puerto Rican girls with hair shades ranging from blonde to black; all were young. They looked gay and natural and picturesque flitting about the room, peddling their bodies.
Against the back wall a brilliantly lighted jukebox was playing Spanish music and two couples were dancing. The others were sitting, drinking whisky highballs and eating, saving their energy for the real thing.
Alongside the jukebox was a long dimly lit hallway, flanked by the small bedrooms for business. The bathroom and the kitchen were at the rear. A dark brown motherly-type woman fried the chicken, dished out the potato salad and mixed the drinks, keeping a sharp eye on the money.
Two apartments had been put together to make Sarah’s crib and the back apartment was her private residence.
Grave Digger said, “If our people were ever let loose they’d be a sensation in the business world, with the flair they got for crooked organizing.”
“That’s what the white folks is scared of,” Coffin Ed said.
They watched Sarah come from the back and cross the big room. The girls treated her as though she were the queen. She was a buxom black woman with snow-white hair done in curls as tight as springs. She had a round face, broad flat nose, thick, dark, unpainted lips and a dazzling white-toothed smile. She wore a black satin gown with long sleeves and a high décolleté; on one wrist was a small platinum watch with a diamond-studded band; on the ring finger a wedding ring set with a diamond the size of an acorn. Several keys dangled on a gold chain about her neck.
She came towards them smiling only with her teeth; her dark eyes were stone cold behind rimless lenses. She closed the door behind her.
“Hello, boys,” she said, shaking hands in turn. “How are you?”
“Fine, Sarah, business is booming; how’s your business?” Grave Digger said.
“Booming too, Digger. Only the criminals got money, and all they do with it is buy pussy. You know how it is, runs hand in hand; girls sell when cotton and corn are a drag on the market. What do you boys want?”
“We want Loboy, Sarah,” Grave Digger said harshly, souring at this landprop’s philosophy.
Her smiled went out. “What’s he done, Digger?” she asked in a toneless voice.
“None of your mother-raping business,” Coffin Ed flared.
She looked at him. “Be careful, Edward,” she warned.
“It’s not what he’s done this time, Sarah,” Grave Digger said soothingly. “We’re curious about what he’s seen. We just want to talk to him.”
“I know what that means. But he’s kinda nervous and upset now–”
“High, you mean,” Coffin Ed said.
She looked at him again. “Don’t get tough with me, Edward. I’ll have you thrown out here on your ass.”
“Look, Sarah, let’s level,” Grave Digger said. “It’s not like you think. You know Deke O’Hara got hijacked tonight.”
“I heard it on the radio. But you ain’t stupid enough to think Loboy was on that caper.”
“Not that supid, Sarah. And we don’t give a damn about Deke either. But eighty-seven grand of colored people’s hard-earned money got lost in the caper; and we want to get it back.”
“How’s Loboy fit that act?”
“Chances are he saw the hijackers. He was working in the neighborhood when their getaway truck crashed and they had to split.”
She studied his face impassively; finally she said, “I dig.” Suddenly her smile came on again. “I’ll do anything to help our poor colored people.”
“I believe you,” Coffin Ed said.
She turned back into the reception room without another word and closed the door behind her. A few minutes later she brought out Loboy.
They took him to 137th Street and told him to reconstruct his activities and tell everything he saw before he got out of the vicinity.
At first Loboy protested, “I ain’t done nothing and I ain’t seen nothing and you ain’t got nothing against me. I been sick all day, at home and in bed.” He was so high his speech was blurred and he kept dozing off in the middle of each sentence.
Coffin Ed slapped him with his open palm a
half-dozen times. Tears came to his eyes.
“You ain’t got no right to hit me like that. I’m gonna tell Sarah. You ain’t got nothing against me.”
“I’m just trying to get your attention is all,” Coffin Ed said.
He got Loboy’s attention, but that was all. Loboy admitted getting a glimpse of the driver of the delivery truck that hit Early Riser, but he didn’t remember what he looked like. “He was white is all I remember. All white folks look alike to me,” he said.
He hadn’t seen the white men when they had got from the wrecked truck. He hadn’t seen the armored truck at all. By the time it had passed he had jumped the iron fence beside the church and was running down the passageway to 136th Street, headed towards Lenox.
“Which way did the woman go?” Grave Digger asked.
“I didn’t stop to see,” Loboy confessed.
“What did she look like?”
“I don’t remember; big and strong is all.”
They let him go. By then it was past four in the morning. They drove to the precinct station to check out. They were frustrated and dead beat, and no nearer the solution than at the start. Lieutenant Anderson said nothing new had come in; he had put a tap on Deke’s private telephone line but no one had called.
“We should have talked to the driver who took those three white men to Brooklyn, instead of wasting time on Loboy,” Grave Digger said.
“There’s no point in second-guessing,” Anderson said. “Go home and get some sleep.”
He looked white about the gills himself. It had been a hot, raw night — Independence night, he thought — filled with big and little crime. He was sick of crime and criminals; sick of both cops and robbers; sick of Harlem and colored people. He liked colored people all right; they couldn’t help it because they were colored. He was quite attached to his two ace colored detectives; in fact he depended on them. They probably kept his job for him. He was second in command to the precinct captain, and had charge of the night shift. His was the sole responsibility when the captain went home, and without his two aces he might not have been able to carry it. Harlem was a mean rough city and you had to be meaner and rougher to keep any kind of order. He understood why colored people were mean and rough; he’d be mean and rough himself if he was colored. He understood all the evils of segregation. He sympathized with the colored people in his precinct, and with colored people in general. But right now he was good and goddamned sick of them. All he wanted was to go home to his quiet house in Queens in a quiet white neighborhood and kiss his white wife and look in on his two sleeping white children and crawl into bed between two white sheets and go to hell to sleep.
So when the telephone rang and a big happy colored voice sang, “… O where de cotton and de corn grow …” he turned purple with anger.
“Go on the stage, clown!” he shouted and banged down the receiver.
The detectives grinned sympathetically. They hadn’t heard the voice but they knew it had been some lunatic talking in jive.
“You’ll get used to it if you live long enough,” Grave Digger said.
“I doubt it,” Anderson muttered.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed started home. They both lived on the same street in Astoria, Long Island, and they only used one of their private cars to travel back and forth to work. They kept their official car, the little battered black sedan with the hopped-up engine, in the precinct garage.
But tonight when they went to put it away, they found it had been stolen.
“Well, that’s the bitter end,” Coffin Ed said.
“One thing is for sure,” Grave Digger said. “I ain’t going in and report it.”
“Damn right,” Coffin Ed agreed.
8
The next morning, at eight o’clock, an open bed truck pulled up before a store on Seventh Avenue that was being remodeled. Formerly, there had been a notion goods store with a shoeshine parlor serving as a numbers drop on the site. But it had been taken over by a new tenant and a high board wall covering the entire front had been erected during the remodeling.
There had been much speculation in the neighborhood concerning the new business. Some said it would be a bar, others a night club. But Small’s Paradise Inn was only a short distance away, and the cognoscenti ruled those out. Others said it was an ideal spot for a barbershop or a hairdresser, or even a bowling alley; some half-wits opted for another funeral parlor, as though colored folks weren’t dying fast enough as it is. Those in the know claimed they had seen office furnishings moved in during the night and they had it at first hand that it was going to be the headquarters for the Harlem political committee of the Republican Party. But those with the last word said that Big Wilt Chamberlain, the professional basketball player who had bought Small’s Cabaret, was going to open a bank to store all the money he was making hand over fist.
By the time the workmen began taking down the wall, a small crowd had collected. But when they had finished, the crowd overflowed into the street. Harlemites, big and little, old and young, strong and feeble, the halt and the blind, male and female, boys and girls, stared in pop-eyed amazement.
“Great leaping Jesus!” said the fat black barber from down the street, expressing the opinion of all.
Plate-glass windows, trimmed with stainless steel, formed a glass front above a strip of shining steel along the sidewalk. Across the top, above the glass, was a big wooden sign glistening with spotless white paint upon which big, bold, black letters announced:
HEADQUARTERS OF
B.T.S. BACK-TO-THE-SOUTHLAND
MOVEMENT B.T.S.
Sign Up Now!!! Be a “FIRST NEGRO!”
$ 1,000 Bonus to First Families Signing!
The entire glass front was plastered with bright-colored paintings of conk-haired black cotton-pickers, clad in overalls that resembled Italian-tailored suits, delicately lifting enormous snow-white balls of cotton from rose-colored cotton bolls that looked for all the world like great cones of ice cream, and grinning happily with even whiter teeth; others showed darkies, clad in the same Italian fashion, hoeing corn as though doing the cakewalk, their heads lifted in song that must surely be spirituals. One scene showed these happy darkies at the end of the day celebrating in a clearing in front of ranch-type cabins, dancing the twist, their teeth gleaming in the setting sun, their hips rolling in the playful shadows to the music of a banjo player in a candy-striped suit; while the elders looked on with approval, bobbing their nappy white heads and clapping their manicured hands. Another showed a tall white man with a white mane of hair, a white moustache and white goatee, wearing a black frock coat and shoestring tie, his pink face bubbling with brotherly love, passing out fantastic bundles of bank notes to a row of grinning darkies, above the caption: Paid by the week. Lodged between the larger scenes were smaller paintings identified as ALL GOOD THINGS TO EAT: grotesquely oversized animals and edibles with the accompanying captions: Big-legged Chickens … Chitterling Bred Shoats … Yams! What Am … O! Possum! … Lasses In The Jug … Grits and Gravy … Pappy’s Bar-B-Q and Mammy’s Hog Maw Stew … Corn Whisky … Buttermilk … Hoppin John.
In the center of all this jubilation of good food, good times and good pay, were a blown-up photomontage beside a similarly sized drawing: one showing pictures of famine in the Congo, tribal wars, mutilations, depravities, hunger and disease, above the caption, Unhappy Africa; the other depicting fat, grinning colored people sitting at tables laden with food, driving about in cars as big as Pullman coaches, black children entering modernistic schools equipped with stadiums and swimming-pools, elderly people clad in Brooks Brothers suits and Saks Fifth Avenue dresses filing into a church that looked astonishingly like Saint Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, with its caption: The Happy South.
At the bottom was another big white-painted, black-lettered banner reading:
FARE PAID … HIGH WAGES …
ACCOMMODATIONS FOR COTTON PICKERS
$1,000 Bonus for Each Family of Five Able-Bodied Persons
On the inside, the walls were decorated with more slogans and pictures of the same papier-mâché cotton plants and bamboo corn stalks were scattered about the floor, in the center of which was an artificial bale of cotton bearing the etched brass legend: Our Front Line of Defense.
At the front to one side was a large flat-topped desk with a nameplate stating: Colonel Robert L. Calhoun. Colonel Calhoun in the flesh sat behind the desk, smoking a long, thin cheroot and looking out the window at the crowd of Harlemites with a benign expression. He looked like the model who had posed for the portrait of the colonel in the window, paying off the happy darkies. He had the same narrow, hawklike face crowned by the same mane of snow-white hair, the same wide, drooping white moustache, the same white goatee. There the resemblance stopped. His narrow-set eyes were ice-cold blue and his back was ramrod straight. But he was clad in a similar black frock coat and black shoestring tie, and on the ring finger of his long pale hand was a solid gold signet ring with the letters CSA.
A young blond white man in a seersucker suit, who looked as though he might be an alumnus of Ole Miss, sat on the edge of the Colonel’s desk, swinging his leg.
“Are you going to talk to them?” he asked in a college-trained voice with a slight southern accent.
The Colonel removed his cheroot and studied the ash on the tip. His actions were deliberate; his expression impassive. He spoke in a voice that was slow and calculated, with a southern accent as thick as molasses in the winter.
“Not yet, son, let’s let it simmer a bit. You can’t rush these darkies; they’ll come around in their own good time.”
The young man peered through a clear crack in the plastered window. He looked anxious. “We haven’t got all the time in the world,” he said.
The Colonel looked up at him, smiling with perfect white dentures, but his eyes remained cold. “What’s your hurry, son, you got a gal waiting?”
The young man blushed and looked down sullenly. “All these niggers make me nervous,” he confessed.