The Big Gold Dream

by Chester Himes

  Dummy jumped from his stool and sprinted down the street. He turned in past the exit doorways of the theater where he had met the detectives earlier, and came out into an alley between the two streets. He was in time to see the big dark woman in the print dress come stealthily from the back entrance of Sweet Prophet’s house. She turned toward Seventh Avenue, hurrying along. He followed her.

  She caught a Number Three Fifth Avenue bus at 110th Street, and he just managed to get in behind her. She got off at 145th Street and Convent Avenue and walked over to Broadway. He was right behind her. She entered a branch of the Chase National Bank and stopped at the window of a receiving teller. When her turn came, the teller smiled and greeted her. “Good morning, Sister Hopeful, how is Sweet Prophet?”

  “Fine and dandy,” she said happily. “He wants to put three thousand dollars in the bank.”

  She passed him the deposit slip, already made out, and thirty bright green, brand-new hundred-dollar bills.

  He looked at the top note, and his eyes widened in incredulity. Quickly he thumbed them back, staring at each in turn, his eyes becoming wider and wider. Then, very much as the Jew had done, he doubled over and began to laugh. He couldn’t help it; he knew the cashier would give him hell, but what could he do?

  Finally he said in a strangled voice, “You are ninety-four years late and in a different country.”

  She continued to grin; she didn’t know what he meant.

  “This is Confederate money,” he explained.

  “Confederate money,” she echoed stupidly.

  “Money issued by the Confederate states - the South - during the Civil War. It is not legal tender any more, I’m afraid.”

  Numb with shock, she reached over slowly and picked it up and stared at it. “It do look different, don’t it?” she said stupidly. “And you say it ain’t worth nothing?”

  “Well,” he said hesitantly, “It’s valuable as a souvenir - if you’re from the South.”

  All of a sudden, her eyes popped from their sockets as though they had exploded. Her face turned gray. Her mouth opened wide. Sound came from it - a lot of sound.

  “I been robbed!” she screamed. “I been swindled. That black son of a bitch has done beat me out of all my Christian money!”

  It required the efforts of two bank guards to subdue her and send her to the police station to tell her story.

  Dummy stole quietly away.

  16

  AT TEN O’CLOCK, Alberta was arraigned before the Municipal Court and bound over to the Grand Jury. Her bail was set at $2,500. No one was there to go her bail.

  She was transferred downstairs from the city prison to the county prison. They are both in the same building, because Manhattan is a county as well as one of the boroughs of New York City.

  She was mugged and fingerprinted, and her Bertillon measurements were taken. Then she put in a cell with a light yellow sloppy-looking woman serving a year and a day for shoplifting.

  “The top bunk, dearie,” the yellow woman said.

  Alberta climbed up into the top bunk and lay down.

  “What’s your rap, dearie?” the yellow woman asked.

  “I ain’t got any rap,” Alberta muttered.

  “What are you down for, then?”

  “I ain’t down for nothing.”

  “That ain’t going to get you nowhere, dearie, acting like that. You’ve got your mouth stuck out a country mile.”

  “What if I is,” Alberta said.

  The yellow woman laughed maliciously. “You’ll get used to it, dearie. I’ve been down so long that down don’t worry me.”

  “I want to see my preacher,” Alberta said.

  “Who is your preacher, dearie?”

  “Sweet Prophet.”

  “That old hustler.”

  “Don’t talk like that about my preacher,” Alberta said.

  “He ain’t no preacher,” the yellow woman said. “He’s a pimp.”

  Alberta got down from her bunk and stood over the yellow woman. Her face was puffed up, and she looked threatening.

  “You take that back,” she demanded.

  The yellow woman sized her up. “All right, dearie. I was wrong,” she said. “Have you got any money?”

  “I got fifty dollars,” Alberta said.

  “You have, honey!” the yellow woman exclaimed in a sugary voice. “You got fifty bucks. Why, honey, you just give me half of it and I’ll get word to your preacher.”

  “How are you going to do that?” Alberta asked suspiciously.

  “It’s easy. You just got to grease the right palm. What’s the older - prophet’s phone number?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, it don’t make any difference, if he’s in the book. You just give me the money and relax.”

  “I ain’t got nothing but ten-dollar bills,” Alberta said.

  “Well, just give me thirty dollars,” the yellow woman said. “It ain’t going to break you.”

  Alberta fished three ten-dollar bills from her brassiere and handed them to the yellow woman.

  “If he don’t come, I want my money back,” she said.

  “I can’t do no business like that, honey,” the yellow woman said as she stuffed the bills into the toe of her shoe. “Use your head. All I can do is to get word to him; if he don’t come, it won’t be my fault.”

  Alberta gave in. “All right. Maybe he won’t have time to come, but just tell him to get me out of here.”

  “I’ll sure tell him that, honey,” the yellow woman promised.

  She raked her tin cup across the bars, then lay on the floor and writhed and screamed.

  Shortly, a big Irish matron appeared.

  “I got the cramps,” the yellow woman gasped. “I feel like I’m dying.”

  “All right, just relax,” the Irish matron said. “If you ain’t died yet from the cramps, you won’t die now. I’ll call Mrs. Ball to take you to surgery.”

  When the matron left, the yellow woman winked at Alberta and said, “You got to learn that if you’re in here for any length of time. The only thing they’ll take you to surgery for right away is the cramps. After you get there, you can make any connections you want.”

  “I just want to see my preacher,” Alberta said. “He’ll tell me what to do.”

  17

  SUGAR STONEWALL WAS IN the courtroom when Alberta was bound over. It was safe enough. Half of the spectators were colored people who looked just like him. Still, he was tense.

  He had begged his subway fare downtown. Now he stopped a colored woman in the corridor and asked, “Lady, can you give me fifteen cents to get uptown? I just ain’t got no money.”

  She fished a subway token from her purse and handed it to him without looking up.

  He stopped on the way out and drank from the fountain. Water wouldn’t nourish him, he knew, but it helped to weight his empty stomach down.

  He walked over to Broadway and caught the A express train, transferred to a local at 125th Street and rode back to 116th Street.

  It was about eleven o’clock when he arrived at the tenement on 118th Street where Alberta had her flat.

  The big black woman hanging out of the front window on the ground floor was beginning to show signs of wear. The sun was on that side of the street, and her eyes blinked sleepily in the sunshine, but she was still hanging on with grim determination.

  Sugar tried to slip past her, but she opened her eyes and caught him.

  “I thought you’d be in jail by now,” she said by way of greeting.

  “Why don’t you leave me alone, woman,” he muttered.

  “I ain’t doing nothing to you,” she said, taking offense. “It ain’t none of my business what you people do.”

  He entered the hall without replying. He kept going, up to the roof, and paused for a moment at the top of the fire escape to case the windows on the other side of the back court. Most of the windows were wide open, and housewives were visible doing their Monday morning ch
ores. The weekly washings were strung on pulley lines from one building to another, crisscrossing one below the other down the narrow pit to the bottom. The graveled tar of the flat, burning hot roof was soft beneath his feet.

  Finally he relaxed. He was on familiar ground. The heat bubbling from the tarred roof, the smell of cooking collard greens and pork and the jarring clash of colors on the lines of Monday wash put him at his ease.

  He went down the fire escape and tried the window. A woman watched him from the kitchen window across the courtyard, but she had seen him in the flat often enough to know him. The shades were drawn and the window was locked, but he had long before prepared for such an emergency. A tiny hole was chipped in the window glass just above the catch, and a rusty tenpenny nail was wedged in the comer between the window frame and sill, where he had left it.

  He opened the latch, raised the window and went inside, slipping beneath the shade. The woman across the way lost interest and returned to her chores when she didn’t hear any sounds of fighting.

  He discarded his sweat-stained rayon jacket and dirty straw hat and went to work. He searched every nook and cranny in the three rooms, going about it methodically. He examined every board in the floor, the baseboards, probed all the rat holes. He even pried loose the tin can tops nailed over the larger rat holes and speared in the openings with a fork. He went through the closet and the clipboards, moving the dishes and the utensils, and the cans, boxes, cartons and stacks of old paper sacks to look underneath them. He emptied the containers of salt and flour, sugar and corn meal, dried peas and hominy grits, and refilled them one by one. He searched the fire-box of the potbellied stove in the sitting room, the oven of the gas stove in the kitchen, inside the electric refrigerator and underneath.

  Then he dumped the shoe box containing the policy slips and studied them. They didn’t give him any clue.

  Two hours later he was convinced the money wasn’t there. He was beginning to doubt whether there had been any money. The only thing left to do was to go back and try to find Mabel. It wasn’t likely that Rufus had given her any large sum of money to keep for him, but she might know something. The trouble was getting in to see her.

  From the kitchen window he could see the people in the various kitchens across the courtyard sitting down to eat. He figured this would be a good time to call on Mabel. But he was so tired and hungry his wits were blunted. He figured he ought to eat first. He had seen food in the refrigerator but had not paid it any attention.

  Now he explored it again. He found three pork chops, two eggs, a saucepan half-filled with cold hominy grits and a serving dish containing dandelion greens and okra that had been boiled with pigs feet. The pigs feet had already been eaten.

  He got out the big iron skillet, poured in some half rancid drippings from the lard can on the back of the stove and put the chops on to fry. While they were frying, he pried the hominy grits from the saucepan in one piece, and cut it into slices an inch thick.

  When the chops were done he added more drippings, fried the hominy grits a rich brown, stacked them alongside the chops and fried eggs country style. He put the fried eggs on top of the grits and dumped the greens and okra into the pan, bringing it just to a boil.

  He left everything on top of the stove and ate, standing, until it was all gone. By then he was so sleepy he couldn’t keep his eyes open.

  He went into the bedroom, stretched out on the floor with his head on the pile of Alberta’s lingerie and went to sleep.

  Twenty minutes later he was snoring loud and steadily. When he exhaled, his snores sounded like a herd of buffalos drinking water; when he inhaled they sounded like a round saw cutting through a fat pine knot. His mouth was open, and a bottle fly was crawling about the crater as though trying to get up nerve to take the plunge. Every now and then Sugar would strike at it limply with his right hand, but he only succeeded in knocking his bottom lip out of shape.

  He didn’t wake up when the window was slowly raised by someone on the fire escape. He didn’t see the man slide cautiously underneath the shade and enter the room.

  The man had an open knife in his hand. It had a heavy, brutal-looking blade about seven inches long. The man approached on tiptoe and looked down at his face. He chased the fly with his shoe, but Sugar didn’t stir.

  The man tiptoed to the door and looked into the kitchen; then he tiptoed to the other door and looked into the sitting room. Then he went back, stood over Sugar and watched him sleeping. He looked as though he were trying to make up his mind about something.

  After a while he knelt down beside Sugar and placed the knife on the floor within easy reach. He took his time searching all of Sugar’s pockets.

  All this didn’t even cause a break in Sugar’s snoring.

  The man did not even smile. Obviously he had no sense of humor.

  He picked up the knife and stood up. Still holding the knife open and ready, he scrounged out of the window backwards and went up the fire escape, leaving the window open.

  18

  A SHORT TIME AFTER Sugar arrived at the tenement on 118th Street, Dummy arrived back on 116th Street.

  The clock in the window of the credit jeweler’s said: 11.27.

  Dummy kept along that side of the street until he came to the hotel. After looking about in all directions, he entered the hotel like a minister ducking into a house of prostitution. He climbed the smelly stairs to the fourth floor.

  It was hot and airless beneath the low, flat, tarred roof, and the heat brought out stinks from the half-rotten floor that had been buried for decades.

  A heavy brass padlock hung from the staples screwed to the door frame, but the wood where the hinge of the hasp was screwed to the door looked weakened by previous screw holes. Dummy could have broken through the flimsy door with his shoulder, but it was too risky at that time of the day. He hadn’t brought along anything to pry loose the hasp because he had been expecting to find a simple warded lock.

  In exasperation he snatched at the big brass lock, and it came open in his hand. His mouth gaped open in a grunting laugh. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred confronted with that lock would have attempted to break open the door, he thought; and hardly anyone would spot that it was a phony. Not a bad idea if you couldn’t afford a lock that worked, he thought.

  He removed the lock, pushed the door open and walked in. The occupant hadn’t taken the trouble to bother with the warded lock.

  The room stank with the scent of stale reefer fumes and the rank body odors that collect in stagnant air. A green window shade was drawn over the single tightly closed window, but sunlight filtered through the cracks in it to form an abstract pattern on the dirt-gray sheet that covered the three-quarter bed. A corner was curtained off for a clothes closet by a sleazy curtain, faded with age. In another corner was a wash basin the size of a bird bath; the single tap dripped cold water that left an indelible rust stain on the white enamel. Dirt encrusted the linoleum floor.

  Dummy closed the door and snapped up the shade, flooding the room with hard bright sunlight. The light couldn’t hurt it.

  Dummy looked beneath the bed. He found the remains of a cotton mattress that had been split down the middle and the padding pulled out and stuffed back in. He began grunting with excitement, making a sound like a hog guzzling swill.

  He left the mattress where it was and gave his attention to a warped, scarred pasteboard suitcase lying flat on the floor against the inside wall. The lock didn’t work, and the snaps weren’t fastened. He lifted the lid and poked about in an accumulation of dirty cotton socks and underwear, holding his nose with his other hand. He didn’t bother to close the suitcase. He crossed the room, drew open the sleazy curtain and examined the few soiled garments draped over wire hangers hanging from a sawed-off broomstick. The clothes took more of his time than anything else. But, even so, he was finished in under five minutes.

  He was relieved to get out of the room, but his muscles didn’t relax until he had quit the hotel and p
ut a block’s distance in between.

  Around the corner on Lenox Avenue, a smooth-looking curly-haired young man sat in a two-toned Buick hardtop parked at the curb. Colored men and women approached him at the rate of one every ten seconds and handed him a canvas bag of money and a rubber-bound scratch pad, the size of a playing card, filled with pages of numbers.

  He was a pickup man for a numbers house. Two hard-faced, oversized colored men sat in a black Mercury sedan parked directly behind him. They were the bodyguards hired by the house.

  Dummy stopped to write in his scratch pad. He tore out the sheet and approached the pickup man. Before he got there, one of the big colored men in the Mercury opened the door and hit the pavement. No sooner had Dummy passed the written sheet to the pickup man than the bodyguard clutched the back of his neck.

  “It’s just Dummy,” the pickup man said.

  “I know it’s Dummy,” the bodyguard man said. “Since when did he get to be one of our writers?”

  “He wants to know where we’re drawing today,” the pickup man said.

  Since the police had tightened up on gambling, the lottery was floated to a different place every day.

  “Don’t tell him nothing,” the bodyguard said. “He’s a stool pigeon.”

  A writer squeezed ahead with his bag of money and play slips and the pickup man said, “Woodbine.”

  The bodyguard gave Dummy a push, and the pickup man didn’t look at him again. Dummy gave no sign that it mattered.

  Fifteen minutes later he got out of a taxi in front of a hotel way uptown in the Harlem Heights on St. Nicholas Avenue near 154th Street. The sign over the entrance read Hotel Woodbine. Dummy paid the driver and went inside.

  Two men came in with heavy luggage and were sent to a suite reserved in advance. Two women followed with modernistic cases that might have been sound recorders and were sent to the same suite. They came in taxis, two at a time, well-dressed men and women, until the entire staff of sixteen had arrived.