Cotton Comes to Harlem

by Chester Himes

  Barry dismissed his taxi and entered the hotel lobby, then suddenly turned about and went outside and had the doorman hail another taxi. He didn’t even notice the black Ford sedan parked near the entrance to Sugar Ray’s bar. This street was always lined with parked cars. The taxi kept straight on down to 116th Street and turned sharp right. The Ford kept straight ahead. There were a number of cars coming cross town from Lenox on 116th Street, among which were several Chevrolet sedans.

  The red light caught the taxi at Eighth Avenue and among the stream of cars going north was a black Ford sedan. Harlem was full of Ford sedans — the poor man’s Lincoln — and Barry didn’t give it a look. When the light changed he had the taxi turn right and stop in the middle of the block. The black Ford sedan was nowhere in sight. The Chevrolet sedan kept on across Eighth Avenue.

  Paul double-parked the Ford around the corner on 117th Street and quickly walked back to Eighth Avenue. He saw Barry enter a poolroom down the street. He crossed Eighth Avenue, keeping the poolroom in sight, and stood on the opposite sidewalk. Hundreds of Saturday-night drunks and hopheads were standing about, weaving in and out the joints, putting forth their voices. There was nothing to set him apart other than he was better dressed than most and the whores started buzzing around him.

  Within a minute a Chevrolet sedan turned south on Eighth from 119th Street and double-parked near 116th Street behind two other double-parked cars.

  Paul crossed the street and made as though to enter the poolroom, then seemed to think better of it and turned aimlessly towards 117th Street, collecting whores from all directions.

  The Chevrolet sedan moved off, turned the corner on 116th Street and double-parked out of sight. Ernie called Lieutenant Anderson and reported, “He went into a poolroom on Eighth Avenue,” and gave the name of the poolroom and number.

  “Stay with him,” Anderson said, and got Grave Digger and Coffin Ed on the radio-telephone.

  13

  They were talking to a blind man when they got the call.

  The blind man was saying, “There were five white men in this tank. That in itself was enough to make me suspicious. Then when it stopped, the white man with the goatee who was sitting in the front seat leaned across the driver and beckoned to this colored boy who had been loitering around the station. I turned like I was alarmed when I heard the door click and took a picture. I think I got a clear shot.”

  Coffin Ed answered the radio-phone and heard Anderson say, “They got him stationed for the time being in a pool hall on Eighth Avenue,” and gave the name and number.

  “We’re on the way,” Coffin Ed said. “Just play it easy.”

  “It’s your baby,” Anderson said. “Holler if you need help.”

  Grave Digger said to the blind man, “Keep it until later, Henry.”

  “Nothing ever spoils,” Henry said and got out, putting on his dark glasses at the same time.

  It was five minutes by right from where they were parked on Third Avenue, but Grave Digger made it in three and one half without using the horn.

  They found Paul in the Ford across the street from the poolroom. He said Barry was inside and Ernie was bottling up the back.

  “You go and help him,” Grave Digger said. “We’ll take care of this end.”

  They pulled into the spot he had vacated and settled down to wait.

  “You think he’s contacting Deke in there?” Coffin Ed said.

  “I ain’t thinking,” Grave Digger said.

  Time passed.

  “If I had a dollar an hour for all the time I’ve spent waiting for criminals to come and get themselves caught, I’d take some time off and go fishing,” Coffin Ed said.

  Grave Digger chuckled. “You’re a glutton for punishment, man. That’s the only thing I don’t like about fishing, the waiting.”

  “Yeah, but there ain’t any danger at the end of that kind of waiting.”

  “Hell, Ed, if you were scared of danger you’d have been a bill collector.”

  It was Coffin Ed’s turn to chuckle. “Naw I wouldn’t,” he said. “Not in Harlem, Digger, not in Harlem. There ain’t any more dangerous a job in Harlem than collecting bills.”

  They lapsed into silence, thinking of all the reasons folks in Harlem didn’t pay bills. And they thought about the eighty-seven thousand dollars taken from those people who were already so poor they dreamed hungry. “If I had the mother-raper who got it I’d work his ass at fifty cents an hour shoveling shit until he paid it off,” Coffin Ed said.

  “There ain’t that much shit,” Grave Digger said drily. “What with all this newfangled shitless food.”

  Men came from the poolroom and others entered. Some they knew, others they didn’t, but none they wanted.

  An hour passed.

  “Think they’ve lammed?” Coffin Ed ventured.

  “How the hell would I know?” Grave Digger said. “Maybe they’re waiting like us.”

  A car pulled up before the poolroom and double-parked. Suddenly they sat up. It was a black, chauffeur-driven Lincoln Mark IV, as out of place in that neighborhood as the Holy Virgin.

  A uniformed colored chauffeur got out and hastened into the poolroom. Within a matter of seconds he came back and got behind the wheel and started the motor. Suddenly Barry came out. For a moment he stood on the sidewalk, looking up and down, casing the street. He looked across the street. Coffin Ed had ducked out of sight and Grave Digger was studiously searching for an acquaintance among the bums lounging in the doorways on their side of the street, and all Barry saw of him was the back of his head. It looked like the back of any other big black man’s head. Satisfied, Barry turned and rapped on the door and another man came out and went straight to the limousine and got in beside the driver. Then Deke came out and went fast between two parked cars and got into the back of the limousine and Barry followed. The limousine took off like a streak, but had to slow for the lights at 125th Street.

  Grave Digger had to make a U-turn and by the time he got straightened out, the limousine was out of sight.

  “We ought to have got some help,” Coffin Ed said.

  “Too late now,” Grave Digger said, gunning the hopped-up car past the slow-moving traffic. “We ought to’ve had second sight, too.”

  He went straight north on Eighth Avenue without pausing to reconnoiter.

  “Where the hell are we going?” Coffin Ed asked.

  “Damned if I know,” Grave Digger confessed.

  “Hell,” Coffin Ed said disgustedly. “One day we lose our car and the next day we lose our man.”

  “Just let’s don’t lose our lives,” Grave Digger shouted above the roar of the traffic they were passing.

  “Pull down,” Coffin Ed shouted back. “At this rate we’ll be in Albany.”

  Grave Digger pulled up to the curb at 145th Street. “All right, let’s give this some thought,” he said.

  “What kind of mother-raping thought?” Coffin Ed said.

  He was near enough to the scene where the acid had been thrown into his face to evoke the memory. The tic started in his face and his nerves got on edge.

  Grave Digger looked at him and looked away. He knew how he was feeling but this wasn’t the time for it, he thought. “Listen,” he said. “They were driving a stolen car. What does that mean?”

  Coffin Ed came back. “A rendezvous or a getaway.”

  “Getaway for what? If they had the money they’d already be gone.”

  “Well, where the hell would you rendezvous, if you weren’t scared?” Coffin Ed said.

  “That’s right,” Grave Digger said. “Underneath the bridge.”

  “Anyway, we ain’t scared,” Coffin Ed said.

  The two guns who had handled Deke’s armored car were on the front seat, the same one driving. He was also a car thief specialist, and had stolen this one. He doused the lights when they came to the end of Bradhurst Avenue and eased the big car off the road that led to the Polo Grounds, stopping between two stanchions underneath th
e 155th Street bridge.

  “You two guys spot the car,” Deke ordered. “We’ll wait here.”

  The gunmen got out, careful of the rifles on the floor, and split in the darkness.

  Deke took a large manila envelope from his inside coat pocket and handed it to Barry. “Here’s the list,” he said. He had had it made weeks before from the telephone directories of Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn by a public stenographer in the Theresa Hotel. “You let him do the talking. We’re going to have you covered every second.”

  “I don’t like this,” Barry confessed. He was scared and nervous and he couldn’t see the Colonel giving any clues away. “He ain’t going to pay no fifty grand for this,” he said, taking it gingerly and sticking it into his inside pocket above his pistol.

  “Naturally not,” Deke said. “But don’t argue with him. Answer his questions and take whatever he gives you.”

  “Hell, Deke, I don’t dig this,” Barry protested. “What’s this cracker outfit got to do with our eighty-seven grand?”

  “Let me do the thinking,” Deke said coldly. “And give me that rod.”

  “Hell, you want me to go with my bare ass to see that nut? You’re asking me a lot.”

  “What the hell can happen to you? We’re all going to have you covered. Man, goddammit, you’re going to be as safe as in the arms of Jesus Christ.”

  As Barry was handing over the gun he remembered, “That’s what the Colonel said.”

  “He was right,” Deke said, taking the pistol from the holster and sticking it into his right coat-pocket. “Just his reasons are wrong.”

  They were silent with their thoughts until the gunmen materialized out of the darkness and took their places on the front seat. “They’re over by the El,” the driver said, easing the big car soundlessly through the dark as though he had eyes of infra-red.

  The trucks and cars manned by the workers cleaning the stadium were moving about in the black dark area beneath the subway extensions and the bridge, which was used by day as a parking space, their bright lights lancing the darkness. Once the black limousine of the Colonel was picked up in a beam of light, but it didn’t look out of place in that area where architects and bankers came at night to plan the construction of new buildings when the old stadium was razed. The Lincoln kept to the edge of the area, avoiding the lights, and stopped behind a big trailer truck parked for the night.

  The gunmen picked their rifles from the floor and got out on each side and took stations at opposite ends of the truck. They had .303 automatic Savage rifles loaded with .190-point brass-nosed shells, equipped with telescopic sights.

  “All right,” Deke said. “Play it cool.”

  Barry shook his head once like shaking off a premonition. “My mama taught me more sense than this,” he said and got out. Deke got out on the other side. Barry walked around the front of the truck and kept on ahead. His black coat and dark gray trousers were swallowed by the darkness. Deke stopped beside one of his gunmen.

  “How does it look?” he asked.

  In the telescopic sight Barry looked like the silhouette of half a man neatly quartered, the sight lines crossing in the center of his back as the gunman tracked him through the dark.

  “All right,” the gunman said. “Black on black, but it’ll do.”

  “Don’t let him get hurt,” Deke said.

  “He ain’t gonna get hurt,” the gunman said.

  When Barry stopped walking, two other silhouettes came into the sights, close together like three wise monkeys.

  The gunmen widened their sights to take in the limousine and its occupants. Their eyes had become accustomed to the dark. In the faint glow of reflected light, the scene was clearly visible. The Colonel sat in the front seat beside the blond young man in the driver’s seat. A white man stood on each side of Barry and a third, standing in front of him, shook him down and took the envelope from his inside pocket and passed it to the Colonel. The Colonel put it into his pocket without looking at it. Suddenly the two men flanking Barry seized his arms and twisted them behind him.

  The third man moved up close in front of him.

  Grave Digger cut off his lights when they approached the dark sinister area underneath the bridge. In the faint light reflected from the lights of the trucks and filtering down from above, the area looked like a jungle of iron stanchions, standing like giant sentinels in the eerie dark. The skin on Coffin Ed’s face was jumping with a life of its own and Grave Digger felt his collar choking as his neck swelled.

  He pulled the car over into the darkness and let the engine idle soundlessly. “Let’s load some light,” he said.

  “I got light,” Coffin Ed said.

  Grave Digger nodded in the dark and took out his long-barreled, nickelplated .38-caliber revolver and replaced the first three shells with tracer bullets. Coffin Ed drew his revolver, identical to the special made job of Grave Digger’s, and spun the cylinder once. Then he held it in his lap. Grave Digger slipped his into his side coat pocket. Then they sat in the dark, listening for the sound that might never come.

  “Where’s the cotton?” the Colonel asked Barry so abruptly it hit him like a slap.

  “Cotton!” he echoed with astonishment.

  Then something clicked in his brain. He remembered the small sign advertising for a bale of cotton in the window of the Back-to-the-Southland office. His eyes stretched. Good God! he thought. Then he felt the danger of the instant squeeze him like an iron vise. His body turned ice cold as though the blood had been squeezed out; his head exploded with terror. His mind sought an answer that would save his life, but he could only think of one that might satisfy the Colonel. “Deke’s got it!” he blurted out.

  Everything happened at once. The Colonel made a gesture. The white men tightened their grips on Barry’s arms. The third man in front of Barry drew a hunting knife from his belt. Barry lunged to one side, throwing the man holding his right arm around behind him. And the big hard unmistakable sound of a high-powered rifle shot exploded in the night, followed so quickly by another it sounded like an echo.

  The gunman beside Deke had shot the white man behind Barry dead through the heart. But the high-powered big-game bullet had gone through the white man’s body and penetrated Barry just above the heart and lodged in his breastbone. The gunman at the other end of the truck had taken the white man holding Barry’s left arm, the bullet going through one lung, ricocheting off a rib and ending up in his hip. All three fell together.

  The third man with the knife wheeled and ran blindly. The big limousine sprang forward like a big cat, knocked him down, and ran over his body as though it were a bump in the road.

  “Take the car!” Deke yelled, meaning, “Take out the car.”

  His gunmen thought he meant take their car and they wheeled and ran towards the Lincoln.

  “Mother-rapers,” Deke mouthed and followed them.

  Grave Digger was coming from three hundred yards’ distance, his bright lights stabbing the darkness from where he’d heard the shots. Coffin Ed was shouting into the radio-telephone: “All cars! The Polo Grounds. Seal it!”

  The Lincoln was turning past the head of the trailer truck on two wheels when Grave Digger caught it in his lights. Coffin Ed leaned out the window and snapped a tracer bullet. It made a long incandescent streak, missing the rear of the disappearing Lincoln and sloping off towards the innocent earth. Then the truck was between them.

  “Stop for Barry!” Deke yelled to his driver.

  The driver tamped the brakes and the car skidded straight to a stop. Deke leaped out and rushed towards the grotesque pile of bodies. The white man who’d been run over was writhing in agony and Deke hit him with the .45 in passing and crushed his brain. Then he tried to pull Barry from beneath the other bodies.

  “No!” Barry screamed in pain.

  “For God’s sake, the key!” Deke cried.

  “Cotton …” Barry whispered, blood coming from his mouth and nose as his big body relaxed in death.<
br />
  Grave Digger came around the truck so fast the little car slewed sideways and Coffin Ed’s tracer bullet intended for the gasoline tank shattered the rear window of the Lincoln Mark IV and set fire to the lining of the roof. The Lincoln went off in a hard straight line like a missile being fired and began zigzagging perilously in the dark. He threw another tracer and punctured the back door. Then he was shooting at the dark and the Lincoln kept going faster.

  Grave Digger dragged the little car down and was out and running towards Deke, gun leveled, before it stopped moving. Coffin Ed hit the ground flat-footed on the other side, prepared to add his one remaining bullet. But it wasn’t necessary. Deke saw them coming towards him. He had seen the Lincoln drive away. He dropped the pistol and raised his hands. He wanted to live.

  “Well, well, look who’s here,” Grave Digger said as he went forward to snap on the handcuffs.

  “Ain’t this a pleasant surprise?” Coffin Ed echoed.

  “I want to phone my lawyer,” Deke said.

  “All in good time, lover boy, all in good time,” Grave Digger said.

  14

  Now it was 1 a.m. Homicide had been there and gone. The medical examiner had pronounced all four bodies “Dead On Arrival”. The bodies were on their way to the morgue. Both the Colonel’s limousine and the Lincoln had gotten away. A search was being made. The seventeen police cruisers that had bottled up the area to keep them from escaping had been returned to regular duty. The workmen cleaning the Polo Grounds had returned to their work. The city lived and breathed and slept as usual. People were lying, stealing, cheating, murdering; people were praying, singing, laughing, loving and being loved; and people were being born and people were dying. Its pulse remained the same. New York City. The Big Town.

  But the heads, the mothers and fathers, of those eighty-seven families who had sunk their savings on a dream of going back to Africa lay awake, worrying, wondering if they’d ever get their money back.

  Deke was in the “Pigeons’ Nest” in the precinct station, sitting on the wooden stool bolted to the floor, facing the barrage of spotlights. He looked fragile and translucent in the bright light; his smooth black face was more the purplish-orange color of an overpowdered whore than the normal gray of a black man terrified.