“When he was telling Mister Sam he’d discovered the solution for the Negro problem was for Negroes to outlive the white people.”
They looked at her curiously. “You’re a strange woman,” Grave Digger said.
“Because I was moved by the idea?” she asked surprisedly. “I was just ashamed.”
“Well, he’s found the final solution now,” Grave Digger said.
Next they interviewed Dick. He answered their questions with a lackadaisical indifference. He didn’t seem affected by either the death of his father or his stepmother, and he couldn’t care less about the others. Sure, he knew Doctor Mubuta was a con man, all the hepcats in Harlem had him made. Of course his father knew, he and Doctor Mubuta were in cahoots. They probably staged the act for Mister Sam to cache some money away. His father was senile but he wasn’t a square, he knew his wife and Van Raff were teaming up on him. The way he figured it, it looked like Doctor Mubuta crossed the old man, he felt certain the Gladstone bag was filled with money. But he couldn’t figure what went wrong at the end, there had to be another person.
“Who?” Grave Digger asked.
“How the hell do I know?” he answered.
He’d never had any part in Mister Sam’s rackets. All he knew was his old man fronted for four numbers houses; he would appear at the houses when the tallies were made and the hits paid off. But other people ran the show. The numbers were like a Wall Street brokerage these days. There were girls with calculators and clerks operating adding machines and a supervisor at each house directing the business. The runners collected the plays from the writers and collected the hits from the house and paid them back to the writers who paid off the players and the staffs at the houses never saw the players. In fact they were like high-paid clerks; they bought big cars and houses on credit and lived it up. His father was just a figurehead and a fall guy in case someone had to take a rap, the Syndicate was the real boss. He didn’t know whether his father got a salary or a commission, anyway, he did all right for himself considering his age, but the Syndicate took forty percent of the gross.
“Good picking,” Grave Digger said drily.
“Multimillion-dollar business,” Dick agreed.
“Why didn’t you take a cut?” Coffin Ed asked curiously.
“I’m a musician,” Dick said as though that were the answer.
He didn’t know anything about Sugartit, he said. He saw her the first time at the seance, if that’s what you want to call it. The only way he knew her name was hearing Anny call her Sugartit.
“Does you wife know much about the Harlem scene?” Grave Digger asked.
For the first time Dick gave a question thought.
“I don’t really know,” he confessed. “She’s at home alone a lot. Most nights she catches the show at The Spot and we go home together. But I don’t know what she does with her days. I’m generally asleep or out. Maybe Viola came to see her, I don’t know who she saw; it was her time and she had to fill it.”
“Did you trust her up there with all the soul brothers?” Coffin Ed asked curiously. “Smalls almost just around the corner and sharp cats cruising up the Avenue all day long in their Cadillacs and Buicks red-hot for a big Southern blonde.”
“Hell, if you got to worry about your white chick, you can’t afford her,” Dick said.
“And you never saw Sugartit before last night?” Grave Digger persisted.
“If you so worried about this mother-raping chick, why don’t you go and see her?” Dick asked peevishly.
Coffin Ed looked at his watch. “Three-fourteen,” he announced.
“It’s too late tonight,” Grave Digger said.
Dick looked from one detective to the other, perplexed. “You guys working on this murder case?” he asked.
“Nope, that’s homicide, baby,” Grave Digger said. “Me and Ed are trying to find out who incited the riot.”
Dick’s hysterical outburst of laughter seemed odd indeed from so cynical a man.
“Man, that’s how you get dandruff,” he said.
Interlude
Good people, your food is digested by various juices in the stomach. There is a stomach juice for everything you eat. There is a juice for meat and a juice for potatoes. There is a juice for chitterlings and a juice for sweet potato pie. There is a juice for buttermilk and a juice for hopping John. But sometimes it happens these juices get mixed up and the wrong juice is applied to the wrong food. Now you might eat corn on the cob which has just been taken out of the pot and it’s so hot you burn your tongue. Well, your mouth gets mixed up and sends the wrong signal to your stomach. And your stomach hauls off and lets go with the juice for cayenne pepper. Suddenly you got an upset stomach and the hot corn goes to your head. It causes a burning fever and your temperature rises. Your head gets so hot it causes the corn to begin popping. And the popped corn comes through your skull and gets mixed up with your hair. And that’s how you get dandruff.
Dusty Fletcher at the Apollo Theater on
125th Street in Harlem
9
A man entered The Temple of Black Jesus. He was a short, fat, black man with a harelip. His face was running with sweat as though his skin was leaking. His short black hair grew so thick on his round inflated head it looked artificial, like drip-dry hair. His body looked blown up like that of a rubber man. The sky-blue silk suit he wore on this hot night glinted with a blue light. He looked inflammable. But he was cool.
Black people milling along the sidewalk stared at him with a mixture of awe and deference. He was the latest.
“Ham, baby,” someone whispered.
“Naw, dass Jesus baby,” was the harsh rejoinder.
The black man walked forward down a urine-stinking hallway beneath the feet of a gigantic black plaster of paris image of Jesus Christ, hanging by his neck from the rotting white ceiling of a large square room. There was an expression of teeth-bared rage on Christ’s black face. His arms were spread, his fists balled, his toes curled. Black blood dripped from red nail holes. The legend underneath read:
THEY LYNCHED ME.
Soul brothers believed it.
The Temple of Black Jesus was on 116th Street, west of Lenox Avenue. It and all the hot dirty slum streets running parallel into Spanish Harlem were teeming with hot dirty slum-dwellers, like cockroaches eating from a bowl of frijoles. Dirt rose from their shuffling feet. Fried hair melted in the hot dark air and ran like grease down sweating black necks. Half-naked people cursed, muttered, shouted, laughed, drank strong whiskey, ate greasy food, breathed rotten air, sweated, stank and celebrated.
This was The Valley. Gethsemane was a hill. It was cooler. These people celebrated hard. The heat scrambled their brains, came out their skulls, made dandruff. Normal life was so dark with fear and misery, a celebration went off like a skyrocket. Nat Turner day! Who knew who Nat Turner was? Some thought he was a jazz musician teaching the angels jazz; others thought he was a prizefighter teaching the devil to fight. Most agreed the best thing he ever did was die and give them a holiday.
A chickenshit pimp was pushing his two-dollar whore into a dilapidated convertible to drive her down to Central Park to work. Her black face was caked with white powder, her mascaraed eyes dull with stupidity, her thick lips shining like a red fire engine. Time to catch whitey as he slunk around the Lagoon looking to change his luck.
Eleven black nuns came out of a crumbling, dilapidated private house which had a sign in the window reading: FUNERALS PERFORMED. They were carrying a brass four-poster bed as though it were a coffin. The bed had a mattress. On the mattress was a nappy, unkempt head of an old man, sticking from beneath a dirty sheet. He lay so still he might have been dead. No one asked.
In the Silver Moon greasy-spoon restaurant a whiskey-happy joker yelled at the short-order cook behind the counter, “Gimme a cup of coffee as strong as Muhammed Ali and a Mittenburger.”
“What kind of burger is that?” the cook asked, grinning.
“Baby, that’s
burger mit kraut.”
To one side of the entrance to the movie theater an old man had a portable barbecue pit made out of a perforated washtub attached to the chassis of a baby carriage. The grill was covered with sizzling pork ribs. The scent of scorching meat rose from the greasy smoke, filled the hot thick air, made mouths water. Half-naked black people crowded about, buying red-hot slabs on pale white bread, crunching the half-cooked bones.
Another old man, clad in his undershirt, had crawled onto the marquee of the movie, equipped with a fishing pole, line, sinker and hook and was fishing for ribs as though they were fish. When the barbecue man’s head was turned he would hook a slab of barbecue and haul it up out of sight. Everyone except the barbecue man saw what was happening, but no one gave him away. They grinned at one another, but when the barbecue man looked their way, the grins disappeared.
The barbecue man felt something was wrong. He became suspicious. Then he noticed some of his ribs were missing. He reached underneath his pit and took out a long iron poker.
“What one of you mother-rapers stole my ribs?” he asked, looking mean and dangerous.
No one replied.
“If I catch a mother-raper stealing my ribs, I’ll knock out his brains,” he threatened.
They were happy people. They liked a good joke. They believed in a Prophet named Ham. They welcomed the Black Jesus to their neighborhood. The white Jesus hadn’t done anything for them.
When Prophet Ham entered the chapel, he found it filled with black preachers as he’d expected. Faces gleamed with sweat in the sweltering heat like black painted masks. The air was thick with the odors of bad breath, body sweat and deodorants. But no one smoked.
Prophet Ham took the empty seat on the rostrum and looked at the sea of black faces. His own face assumed as benign an expression as the harelip would permit. An expectant hush fell over the assemblage. The speaker, a portly black man in a black suit, turned off his harangue like a tap and bowed toward Prophet Ham obsequiously.
“And now our Prophet has arrived,” he said with his eyes popping expressively. “Our latterday Moses, who shall lead us out of the wilderness. I give you Prophet Ham.”
The assembled preachers allowed themselves a lapse of dignity and shouted and amened like paid shills at a revival meeting. Prophet Ham received this acclaim with a frown of displeasure. He stepped to the dais and glared at his audience. He looked indignant.
“Don’t call me a Prophet,” he said. He had a sort of rumbling lisp and a tendency to slobber when angry. He was angry now. “Do you know what a Prophet is? A Prophet is a misfit that has visions. All the Prophets in history were either epileptics, syphilitics, schizophrenics, sadists or just plain monsters. I just got this harelip. That doesn’t make me eligible.”
His red eyes glowed, his silk suit glinted, his black face glistened, his split red gums bared from his big yellow teeth.
No one disputed him.
“Neither am I a latterday Moses,” he went on. “First of all, Moses was white. I’m black. Second, Moses didn’t lead his people out the wilderness until they revolted. First he led them into the wilderness to starve and eat roots. Moses was a square. Instead of leading his people out of Egypt he should have taken over Egypt, then their problems would have been solved.”
“But you’re a race leader,” a preacher shouted from the audience.
“I ain’t a race leader neither,” he denied. “Does I look like I can race? That’s the trouble with you so-called Negroes. You’re always looking for a race leader. The only place to race whitey is on the cinder track. We beats him there all right, but that’s all. And it ain’t you and me who’s racing, it’s our children. And what are we doing to reward them for winning? Talking all this foolishness about Prophets and race leaders.”
“Well, if you ain’t a Prophet and ain’t a race leader, what is you?” the preacher said.
“I’m a soldier,” Prophet Ham said. “I’m a plain and simple soldier in this fight for right. Just call me General Ham. I’m your commander. We got to fight, not race.”
Now they had got that point settled, his audience could relax. He wasn’t a prophet, and he wasn’t a race leader, but they were just as satisfied with him being a general.
“General Ham, baby,” a young preacher cried enthusiastically, expressing the sentiment of all. “You command, we obey.”
“First we’re gonna draft Jesus.” He held up his hand to forestall comment. “I know what you’re gonna say. You’re gonna say other black men, more famous and with a bigger following than me, are employing the Jesus pitch. You’re gonna say it’s been the custom and habit of our folks for years past to call on Jesus for everything, food, health, justice, mercy, or what have you. But there’re two differences. They been calling on the white Jesus. And mostly they been praying for mercy. You know that’s the truth. You are all men of the cloth. All black preachers. All guilty of the same sin. Asking the white Jesus for mercy. For to solve your problem. For to take your part against the white man. And all he tell you is to turn the other cheek. You think he gonna tell you to slap back? He’s white too. Whitey is his brother. In fact whitey made him. You think he gonna take your part against his own creator? What kind of thinking is that?”
The preachers laughed with embarrassment. But they heard him.
“We hear you, General Ham, baby.… You right, baby.… We been praying to the wrong Jesus.… Now we pray to the Black Jesus.”
“Just like you so-called Negroes,” General Ham lisped scornfully. “Always praying. Believing in the philosophy of forgiveness and love. Trying to overcome by love. That’s the white Jesus’s philosophy. It won’t work for you. It only work for whitey. It’s whitey’s con. Whitey invented it, just like he invented the white Jesus. We’re gonna drop the praying altogether.”
A shocked silence followed this pronouncement. After all they were preachers. They’d been praying even before they started preaching. They didn’t know what to say.
But the young preacher spoke out again. He was young enough to try anything. The old-fashioned praying hadn’t done much good. “You command us, General,” he said again. He wasn’t afraid of change. “We’ll give up the praying. Then what’ll we do?”
“We ain’t gonna ask the Black Jesus for no mercy,” General Ham declared. “We ain’t gonna ask him for nothing. We just gonna take him and feed him to whitey in the place of the other food we been putting on whitey’s table since the first of us arrived as slaves. We been feeding whitey all these years. You know that’s the truth. He grown fat and prosperous on the food we been feeding him. Now we’re gonna feed him the flesh of the Black Jesus. I don’t have to tell you the flesh of Jesus is indigestible. They ain’t even digested the flesh of the white Jesus in these two thousand years. And they been eating him every Sunday. Now the flesh of the Black Jesus is even more indigestible. Everybody knows that black meat is harder to digest than white meat. And that, brothers, IS OUR SECRET WEAPON!” he shouted with a spray of spit. “That is how we’re going to fight whitey and beat him at last. We’re gonna keep feeding him the flesh of the Black Jesus until he perish of constipation if he don’t choke to death first.”
The elderly black preachers were scandalized.
“You don’t mean the sacrament?” one asked.
“Is we gonna manufacture wafers?” another asked.
“We’ll do it, but how?” the young preacher asked sensibly.
“We’re gonna march with the statue of the Black Jesus until whitey pukes,” General Ham said.
With the image of the lynched Jesus which hung in the entrance in their minds, the preachers saw what he meant.
“What you need for the march, General?” asked the young black preacher, who was practical.
General Ham appreciated this practicality. “Marchers,” he replied. “Nothing takes the place of marchers for a march,” he said, “but money. So if we can’t find the marchers we get some money and buy them. I’m gonna make you my second in c
ommand, young man. What is your name?”
“I’m Reverend Duke, General.”
“From now on you’re a Colonel, Reverend Duke. I call you Colonel Duke. I want you to get these marchers lined up in front of this temple by ten o’clock.”
“That don’t give us much time, General. Folks is celebrating.”
“Then make it a celebration. Colonel,” General Ham said. “Get some banners reading ‘Jesus baby’. Give us a little sweet wine. Sing ‘Jesus Savior’. Get some of these gals from the streets. Tell ’em you want ’em for the dance. They ask what dance? You tell ’em the dance. Wherever gals go, mens follow. Remember that, Colonel. That’s the first principle of the march. You dig me, Colonel?”
“We dig you, General,” said Colonel Duke.
“Then I see you-all at the march,” General Ham said and left.
Outside on 116th Street, a lavender Cadillac Coupe de Ville convertible, trimmed in yellow metal which the black people passing thought was gold, was parked at the curb. A buxom white woman with blue-dyed gray hair, green eyes and a broad flat nose, wearing a décolleté dress in orange chiffon, sat behind the wheel. Huge rose breasts popped from the orange dress as though expanded by the heat, and rested on the steering-wheel. When General Ham approached and opened the door on his side, she looked around and gave him a smile that lit up the night. Her two upper incisors were crowned with shining gold with a diamond between. “Daddy,” she greeted. “What took you so long?”
“I been cooking with Jesus,” he lisped, settling into the seat beside her.
She chuckled. It was a fat woman’s chuckle. It sounded like hot fat bubbling. She pulled out in front of a bus and drove down the crowded street as though black people were invisible. They got the hell out of her way.
10
Sergeant Ryan came up from the cellar to take over the questioning. He brought along his photographer, Ted, who had finished taking pictures, to get him out of the way of the fingerprint crew who were still at work.
Blind Man with a Pistol Page 8
