“What did he say to that?”
“He said he’d leave it to my judgment but that he strongly advised against it. He said I needed a vacation more than anything. Anyway, here I am still on the force. Maybe, this’ll sound cynical to you, Mr. Clair, what I’m going to say. But we’re not going to get anywhere unless there’s understanding between us. You said if I’d seen you yesterday you might have succeeded in toning them down. Well, I don’t think so. Like I told you, I was at that meeting and this may sound cynical but the All-Negro Harlem Committee’s a political committee and they’re committed to political action. They’re out to get me before the D. A. They won’t get to first base but that’s what they’re after. Now, the way I see it: Here I am still on the force. If I talk to the Councilman, I think he’d be suspicious of me. Maybe I’m wrong. I’m not making myself clear, Mr. Clair, but I feel that if I could go to the All-Negro Committee after I’d done something and not just go pounding my breast, I’d be better off. What I want to do is work with you. I want to help you run down the bunch printing those leaflets. They’re criminals and I know something about criminals.”
Clair frowned, playing with his Phi Beta key with two tapering white fingers. “It is an unusual situation — ”
“You know Johnny Ellis, Mr. Clair? Well, Sunday after the meeting, Johnny tailed one of the men handing out leaflets.”
“Really? Any results?”
“None. The man he tailed turned out to be a poolroom hanger-on. Johnny got friendly with him and got the whole story. He told Johnny that a guy he’d never seen came into the poolroom early on Sunday. This guy got to talking about Randolph and the lowdown cops and then he asked the men in the poolroom if they wanted to do their share for Harlem by passing out a few leaflets and make three bucks at the same time. That’s the gist of it.”
“Merely a blind alley?”
“We’ll hit a lot of blind alleys, Mr. Clair.” He took the two green paper leaflets from his pocket and placed them down on the desk in front of Clair. He had risen from his chair and now he was leaning over Clair’s shoulder. “I’m no detective but I’ve been trained in criminal investigation. Look at those leaflets, Mr. Clair. It’s a known fact that con-men’ll keep the initials of their first names even when they invent phony names for themselves. A con-man born John Brown’ll change his name to James Smith. He’ll hold onto the J — ”
“What are you trying to say?” Clair’s eyes were amused.
“I’m saying everything backwards today. Those two leaflets were printed by the same bunch. It isn’t the green paper that gives them away. It’s the style. They have the same style. We can locate the writer by the style. He likes to play around with the K.K.K. idea as you see. ‘Mick cops who think.k.k. they’re the old massa down south’ And yesterday’s: ‘We don’t want any K.K.K. (Kike Killer Kops) in Harlem.’ ”
Clair glanced from the leaflets, gazing through the window on his right down on One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street. Anxiously, Sam stared at Clair’s profile, the thin nose, the angular chin; except for the mustache it was like the profile of a Latin priest, ascetic and reserved. He was a queer fish, Sam thought; neither black nor white.
“I believe your enthusiasm is running away with you, Mr. Miller,” Clair said. “Are you aware of the number of organizations that have been publishing leaflets of this category in the past ten years?”
“Dozens, I suppose.”
“Hundreds.”
“But the style can be traced, Mr. Clair. Johnny Ellis, you know, he’s on some inter-race committee in his union and he says that many of the anti-fascist organizations have collections of these leaflets. Please, Mr. Clair, don’t turn me down. It means a lot to me. A letter of introduction from you’d help me a lot.”
“I suppose I can do that much for you.”
“Thanks. Can I have it now?”
Clair’s thin lips twisted in a wry smile. “You can.” He raised his modulated voice and called to his secretary. “Miss Burrow, will you please come in.”
The secretary pushed open the door in the partition, entering, and smiling at the two men. She stood near one of the files, a plump very light brown girl in her twenties. She was wearing a black dress striped with long vertical red ribs of color and her legs were shapely, Sam noticed, inside their sheer stockings. Almost she looked Spanish, too, with her high-bridged nose and full red lips but a Spanish mixed with Negro blood. Observing her, Sam’s uneasiness about the Harlem Equality League and its personnel increased; Hal Clair who didn’t seem like a Negro at all; the secretary who seemed Negro only on second thought. It certainly was strange. What kind of a Negro was Clair anyway and what had prevented him from passing over into the white world? And why had Clair chosen as his secretary a girl like Miss Burrow?
Clair was dictating. “ ‘To Whom It May Concern. Mr. Samuel Miller is doing volunteer work for the Harlem Equality League. He is to be assisted in his efforts. I will appreciate any cooperation shown to him …’ ” Miss Burrow’s black eyes flashed up from her shorthand pad and she smiled quickly at Sam. Her white teeth shown in two even dazzling lines against the warm fruit-like coloring of her skin. Her eyes met Sam’s and he was conscious of a taunting invitation in those eyes, conscious of her silky black hair as she turned on her heel and glided through the partition into the outer office. Clair appeared to have noticed nothing, remarking, “You’ll have your letter in a few minutes.”
“Thanks. You think I’m a pest,” he added grimly. “I don’t blame you, Mr. Clair.”
“How do you intend to conduct your investigation?”
“There are two ways to conduct one. One way’s the stool pigeon method. Cops’ll tell you that the greatest dick is the one with the greatest number of stool pigeons. The other way’s the hard way. Getting all the facts we can and putting them together. That goes for muggers or fascists.” He listened to Miss Burrow’s typewriter pounding out the letter of introduction and he thought that she was on the make. Or was that his dirty copper’s mind? A hot flush burned up his neck and when the secretary returned with the letter for Mr. Clair to sign, Sam didn’t look at her. He was bitterly ashamed of himself.
All afternoon, that Monday, Sam read the throwaways, the leaflets, the pamphlets published by the various shirt outfits. No one organization had a complete file but their secretaries suggested new sources. Towards four o’clock, his eyes ached. The slogans of hate, the sentences of vitriol had hooked one onto the other in his mind like pieces of barbed wire, an endless coil: For A White Gentile America. Return America To The Americans. Jewish Plutocratic Communism Will Lead To A Mongrel Negroid Jewish Nation. Niggers Learn Your Place. The Lusting Nigger Stands At Your Wife’s Bedroom Window. Unions Are A Kike Invention. The Next Time Look At The Shapes Of The Noses Of The People Speaking About Liberty. Niggers Are Not Men For They Have Only Been Out Of The Jungle A Few Centuries.
Patiently he had skimmed through the outpourings, the diatribes, the invectives of the ‘30’s and ‘40’s, comparing the faded letters with the two leaflets printed on green paper. An image of spewing mouths, of waving fists and contorted faces haunted him. Out of the creased flaunting black capitals, a terrible spectre arose. Sam was sitting at a flat desk in an office building on lower Fourth Avenue but now this spectre seized him and he was in the South, in the mid-western industrial centers, in the Atlantic seaboard cities with their large Jewish populations. The lyncher’s rope dangled over the flat desk and the brass knucks crept up behind him. He shuddered, remembering the nightmare on the land: the hooded men of the South ripping the testicles off Negroes; the Christian Fronters knifing Jews in the New York subways; the speeding automobiles with the broken bodies of union organizers and “Reds” on the floorboards under the stained heels. His consciousness echoed the “heils” of all these new orders, these legions for white supremacy, these Christian Protestant Americans and the blood and tears of the murdered and the maimed spilled in his throat until he felt that he himself must perish. Those two
green leaflets were like a key in some shadowy door and behind the door was the nightmare, the spectre, the doom that was always waiting, that would always be waiting to whirl out upon the people until the door was smashed, until the key and the lock were destroyed, until the nightmare was banished by the sunlight in man that also lay waiting to be released. There was hope, Sam thought soberly. Suzy said there was, Johnny said there was, Cashman said there was. There was!
He looked over his notes:
1) Both leaflets written from the Negro viewpoint. Both strongly nationalistic and anti-white.
2) Leaflet 1 is anti-Italian, anti-Jewish, anti-Irish. Jew used three times, wop, twice; mick, twice.
3) Leaflet 1 has the “think.k.k” line.
4) Leaflet 2 is anti-Jewish and anti-Italian but not anti-Irish. Jew used once, kike used once, wop used once. Instead of line about Irish cops in leaflet 1, a line about Reds is substituted. The K.K.K. line is Kike Killer Kops in this leaflet.
Sam leaned over his notes, and started to ask himself questions. Why was the first leaflet more explanatory than the second one? “Our Enemy Isn’t Only The Jew Cop Miller”; “Wop Bar Owners Who Won’t Hire Negroes”; “Jewboy Landlords And Bankers”; “Mick Cops”; “Red Uncle Tom (Bogus) Negroes”. But the second leaflet signed “United Negro Committee” was more revealing in some ways, Sam thought. Why had the anti-Irish stuff been cut? Did that mean whites had put out the second leaflet? Whites! Not Negroes, not the “United Negro Committee”! But whites! But one pen had written both leaflets. Or could he be sure of that? Harlem had plenty of nationalistic Negro groups, any one of whom might have produced those leaflets. But that line, “We Don’t want any K.K.K. (Kike Killer Kops) In Harlem” was Christian Front Doctrine; hadn’t Coughlin’s “Social Justice”, before it was banned, agitated against Jewish policemen? That was a fact to remember. Then the timing of the leaflets; the first one passed out almost coincidentally with the All-Negro leaflet; the second right after the mass meeting in the Silver Trumpet ball room. What did that mean? The second leaflet had been timed to implement the purpose of the mass meeting. The meeting’d not been anti-Jewish but it had been anti-cop brutality. The second leaflet had reiterated the mass meeting’s demand for Negro unity but it lacked the anti-white feeling of the first leaflet. Why had the second leaflet soft-pedaled its anti-white propaganda? Why the cutting of the line about the Irish? Why the confused or confusing identification of K.K.K. (which as everyone knew stood for Kike Koon Katholic) with Kike Killer Kop? The second leaflet marked a strong effort to channel Harlem’s discontent and anger against one scapegoat, the Jewish cop. It attacked “wops” in one reference, “Reds” in one reference, “lynchers” in one reference. But the build-up was on himself. “Why?” Sam asked out loud. Steadfastly he answered his own question. They, whoever they were, were out to get him.
Towards five o’clock Sam turned the corner into One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street, climbing the single flight of stairs that separated the Harlem Equality League office from Harlem. He stepped into the outer office and said hello to Miss Burrow. “Is Mr. Clair in?”
She smiled at him from her desk. “As fellow workers here you can call me Marian.”
He wondered if her crack about fellow workers meant that she regarded him as a Red. Her head pivoted towards the closed door in the partition, her throat pale cream brown in color, her shoulders fleshing solidly and handsomely into her neck. “Oh Mr. Clair,” she called. “Mr. Miller to see you.”
“Come in,” Clair said. Sam walked into the inner office and Clair smiled. “Any results? Come in. I have some real news.”
“What news?”
“Take those newspapers from that chair and make yourself comfortable, won’t you? Before I tell you my news, I would like to hear what you have to say.”
“I’m on the track. It’s a pretty broad track, Mr. Clair. First, I broke down the two leaflets and then I tried to see where they came from. Something like that radio program ‘Missing Heirs.’ I found four heirs, four men who had written stuff using the same sort of style.”
“Who are these men?”
“The Nazi Kalb who used to be in charge of Bundist camps. Congressman Patton. Rodney of Iowa. And a newspaperman called Manders who wrote for the yellow press, a brass-checker as Upton Sinclair described them. It’s not much. I’m not as good at research as I used to be in school. But Manders is out. He went to Germany just before Pearl Harbor. Kalb’s been interned quite a while — ”
“I believe you can eliminate the Congressman. Patton is too busy fighting the poll tax and speaking against Negroes for the Congressional Record to engage in any leaflet writing.”
“Eliminate Patton and we’re nowheres. I checked on Rodney and I found he’s still out in the corn belt. All we have is this Kalb-Manders-Patton-Rodney style. Somebody here in New York is copying that style.”
Clair picked up a pad scrawled with pencil notes, read them, put the pad to his left on the desk. He raised one admonishing finger at Sam. “Before I begin, Mr. Miller, I want to warn you against jumping to easy conclusions. We, who have been in Harlem for years are apt to be more cautious. I have been with the Harlem Equality League for eight years and I have a general perspective that you haven’t.” He again picked up the pad and read:
“ ‘Bars and grills reporting disturbances. The Sunshine Bar and Grill. The Lenox Bar. The Paddleford Bar. The Paradise Grill. Celtic Bar. Leone’s Bar. The Happy Hour Bar. Four Flags Bar and Grill.’ “ His phone rang. “Pardon me,” he said to Sam. “Yes, hello. Yes, this is Mr. Clair. Yes, yes. One minute.” He dug a yellow pencil from under a heap of newspaper clippings, pushed the pad in front of him, writing down what the voice on the telephone was saying. When he hung up, he nodded excitedly. “That was another one. The Aventine Grill.” He counted down on his pad. “Eleven Italian-owned bars have had disturbances this afternoon.”
“What kind of disturbances?” Sam asked. Clair wasn’t listening to him. “What kind of disturbances?”
“They were all the same. A Negro would go inside and shout that Negroes should not patronize Italian bars that refused to employ Negro help.”
“How do you know they’re all Italian?”
“They told me so. The names.”
“Who phoned just now?” Sam was sitting on the edge of his chair. He itched to grab the pad from Clair’s fingers and see for himself.
“The owner of the Aventine Grill, a Mr. Carlucci.”
“How come? I hope you don’t mind my questions but what I don’t know about Harlem or the methods of your organization’d fill a book. Why did Carlucci ring you and not the police?”
“He’s probably phoned the police, too. Why do they phone the Harlem Equality League?” He spoke formally as if at a forum. “We have been in Harlem fifteen years. Wide sections of the population are acquainted with our work. Tens of thousands have heard of our platform: ‘Better relations between white and Negro for the common good of the community’.” He tapped the pad with his pencil. “That’s why they phone us, white as well as black.”
“Have you spoken to any of these Italian bar owners?”
“To all of them.”
“I meant have you seen any of them to talk to?”
“Only Mr. Leone of Leone’s Bar. He was here at two o’clock.”
“What did he have to say?”
“Mr. Leone threatened me. He said I ought to stop ‘the bad colored’.” Clair grinned unhappily. And Sam, even though his nerves were tingling and the blood had rushed into his head, noticed that grin and fleetingly sympathized. Clair, too, was a scapegoat.
“We ought to see every one of these men, Mr. Clair. There’s a connection between these disturbances and the leaflets. The first leaflet attacks, to quote from memory, ‘Wop Bar Owners Who Won’t Hire Negroes’.”
“I knew you would think that.”
“What else can you think? The first leaflet has two anti-Italian references.”
“I warned you not
to jump to conclusions, Mr. Miller.”
“Eleven bars! The timing! It isn’t only one or two bars. But eleven. That’s disturbance organized. That’s fascism!”
“You do not understand Harlem,” Clair reproved him gently. “In addition you are minimizing the possibility of an accidental connection between the disturbances and the leaflets. How can you be positive that there is a direct causative connection? Please let me continue, Mr. Miller. I think that what I have to say may be of help. First of all, there has long existed a great deal of animosity on the part of many Negroes against the Italian-owned bars, who in the majority of cases do not hire Negroes. Many Negro trade union leaders, many ministers have spoken against this practice. Both of Harlem’s newspapers, The People’s Advocate only recently, have exposed these bars and their anti-Negro labor policy. Now, Mr. Miller, would you call these people and these newspapers fascistic? Let us not bandy that epithet so casually.”
“I see your point. But eleven grills. Would you mind if I copied your list? I’d like to talk to these people.” As Clair hesitated, Sam realized that this man with the Phi Beta key from Harvard still didn’t trust him completely. He was still a Harlem cop who had killed a Negro only one week ago. Blood was strong, as his father had raved last Monday night, and this white man who wasn’t a white man had no faith in him. “I don’t blame you for being worried about me, Mr. Clair. All you know about me is that Johnny Ellis was once a friend of mine. But I’m still a cop on leave of absence. You don’t know whether I’m on the level and I don’t know how to convince you. All I can say is trust me a little. As for these grills, I’d like to investigate them. I promise not to do anything without your okay.” Still Clair was silent. The late afternoon light poured through the window, flowing down the yellow enamel of Clair’s pencil. “Mr. Clair, it isn’t easy for me to come to you in the first place. It isn’t easy for me to do what I’m doing. A cop has a strong sense of discipline. It isn’t easy to be doing something no other cop has done. It isn’t easy to go after something that you can’t even see.”
Dark Stain Page 11
