Rudolph Fisher, "The Walls of Jericho" (1928) (full text)
Dedication
For Glendora—
May her laugh be silver,
like her hair
Epigraph
Joshua fit d’ battle of Jericho
And d’ walls come tumblin’ down—
Jericho
I
Despite the objections of the dickties, who prefer to ignore the
existence of so-called rats, it is of interest to consider Henry
Patmore’s Pool Parlor on Fifth Avenue in New York.
The truth about Fifth Avenue has only half been told, that it harbors an
aristocracy of residence already yielding to an aristocracy of commerce.
Has any New Yorker confessed to the rest—that when aristocratic Fifth
Avenue crosses One Hundred Tenth Street, leaving Central Park behind, it
leaves its aristocracy behind as well? Here are bargain-stores, babble,
and kids, dinginess, odors, thick speech. Fallen from splendor and
doubtless ashamed, the Avenue burrows into the ground— plunges beneath a
park which hides it from One Hundred Sixteenth to One Hundred
Twenty-fifth Street. Here it emerges moving uncertainly northward a few
more blocks; and now—irony of ironies—finds itself in Negro Harlem.
You can see the Avenue change expression—blankness, horror, conviction.
You can almost see it wag its head in self-commiseration. Not just
because this is Harlem—there are proud streets in Harlem: Seventh Avenue
of a Sunday afternoon, Strivers’ Row, and The Hill. Fifth Avenue’s shame
lies in having missed these so-called dicky sections, in having poked
its head out into the dark kingdom’s backwoods. A city jungle this, if
ever there was one, peopled largely by untamed creatures that live and
die for the moment only. Accordingly, here strides melodrama, naked and
unashamed.
Patmore’s Pool Parlor occupied the remodeled ground floor of a once
elegant apartment-house: two long low adjacent rooms, with a smaller one
in the rear. You could enter either of the larger two from the street,
and a doorway joined them within. There were no pretenses about these
two rooms: one was a pool room, its stolid, green-covered tables
extending from front to back in a long squat row; the other was a
saloon, with a mahogany bar counter, a great wall mirror, a shining foot
rail and brass spittoons. In the saloon you could get any drink you had
courage and cash enough to order; in the pool room you could play for
any stake and use any language you had the ingenuity to devise. The
third room was off the pool room and behind the saloon; this gave itself
over to that triad of swift exchange, poker, black-jack, and dice.
Such was Pat’s standing in the community that you might at any time find
in this little rear room a policeman sitting in a card game, his coat on
the back of his chair, his cap on the back of his head. For men, Pat’s
was supremely the neighborhood’s social center, where you met real
regular guys and rubbed elbows with authority. Henry Patmore was no
piker, no sir, not by a damn sight.
In Patmore’s the discussion concerned a possible riot in Harlem, a
popular topic among these men who loved battle.
Jinx Jenkins and Bubber Brown led the argument on opposite sides,
reinforced by continuous expressions of vague but hearty agreement from
their partisans:
“Tell im ’bout it!”
“That’s the time, papa!”
“There now—shake that one off yo’ butt!”
Jinx and Bubber worked at the same job every day, moving furniture. At
this they got along tolerably, but after hours they were chronic enemies
and were absolutely unable to agree upon anything.
Jinx was thin and elongated, habitually stooped in bearing, lean and
sinewy, with freckled skin of a slick deep yellow and a chronically
querulous voice.
“Fays got better sense,” said he. “Never will be no riot no mo’ ’round
hyeh.”
Bubber was as different from Jinx as any man could be, short, round and
bulging, with a complexion bordering on the invisible.
“’Tain’t due to be ’round hyeh,” he corrected. “It’s way over Court
Avenue way. Darkey’s gonna move in there to-morrer and fays jes’ ain’t
gon’ stand fo’ it.” Bubber spoke with a loose-lipped lisp, perfected by
the absence of upper incisors.
“Who he?” Jinx inquired.
“Some lawyer ’n other name’ Merrit.”
“The one got Pat in that mess with d’ government?”
“Nobody else,” said Bubber.
“Well ef he’s a lawyer he sho’ mus’ know what he’s doin’?”
“Don’ matter what he is,” argued Bubber. “Ef he move in that
neighborhood, fays’ll start sump’m sho’—and sho’ as they start it, d’
boogies’ll finish it. Won’t make no difference ’bout this Merrit
man—he’ll jes’ be d’ excuse—— Man, you know that. Every sence d’ war, d’
boogies is had guns and ammunition they stole from d’ army, and they
jes’ dyin’ fo’ a chance to try ’em out. I know where they’s two machine
guns myself, and they mus’ be a hund’ed mo’ in Harlem.”
“Yea,” said Jinx. “I’ve heard ’bout that, too. But I don’t think no
shine’s got no business bustin’ into no fay neighborhood.”
“He got business bustin’ in any place he want to go. Only way for him to
git any where is to bust in—ain’ nobody gon’ invite him in.”
“Aw, man, whut you talkin’ ’bout? Hyeh’s a dicky tryin’ his damnedest to
be fay—like all d’ other dickies. When they git in hot water they all
come cryin’ to you and me fo’ help.”
“And they git help, what I mean. Any time dickties start fightin’, d’
rest of us start fightin’ too. Got to. Dickies can’t fight.”
“Jes’ ’cause they can’t fight ain’ no reason how come we got to fight
fo’ em.”
“’Tain’ nothin’ else. Fays don’ see no difference ’tween dicky shines
and any other kind o’ shines. One jig in danger is ev’y jig in danger.
They’d lick them and come on down on us. Then we’d have to fight anyhow.
What’s use o’ waitin’??”
“Damn’ if you’d ever go out o’ yo’ way to fight f’ no dickies,” Jinx
taunted.
“Don’ know—I might,” Bubber said.
“Huh!” discredited Jinx. “You wouldn’ go out o’ yo’ way to fight f’ yo’
own damn self—and you far from a dicky.”
“Right,” cheerfully agreed Bubber. “I’m far from a dickty, no lie. But I
ain’ so far from a rat.” Jinx missed the meaning of this, so Bubber
gilded up close to him and drove it home. “Fact I’m right next to one.”
Encircling grins improved Jinx’s understanding. “Next to nuthin’!”
exploded he, giving the other a rough push.
“Next to nuthin’, then,” acquiesced Bubber, caroming off. “You know what
you is lots better ’n I do.” Whereupon he did a triumphant little buck
and wing step, which ended in a single loud, dust-raising stamp. Dry
dust and drier laughter floated irritatingly into Jinx’s face. Jinx was
long and limber but his restraint was short and brittle. Derision
snapped it in two.
“So’s yo’ whole damn family nuthin’!” he glowered, heedless of the
disproportion between the trivial provocation and so violent a reaction.
For it is the gravest of insults, this so-called “slipping in the
dozens.” To disparage a man himself is one thing; to disparage his
family is another. “Slipping” is a challenge holding all the
potentialities of battle. The present example of it brought Bubber up
short and promptly withdrew the bystanders’ attention from their gin.
The bystanders began “agitatin’”—uttering comments deliberately intended
to urge the two into action. The agitators concealed their grins far up
their sleeves, presenting countenances grave with apprehension and
speaking in tones resigned to the inevitability of battle.
“Uh-uh! Sho’ mus’ know each other well!”
“Wha’ I come fum, dey fights fo’ less ’n dat.”
“Ef y’ can’t stand kiddin’, don’ kid, I say.”
“I don’ b’lieve he’s gon’ hit ’im, though.”
“I know what I’d do ’f anybody said that ’bout my family.”
As a matter of fact, the habitual dissension between these two was the
symptom of a deep affection which neither, on question, would have
admitted. Neither Jinx and Bubber nor any of their associates had ever
heard of Damon and Pythias, and frank regard between two men would have
been considered questionable to say the least. Their fellows would
neither have understood nor tolerated it; would have killed it by
derisions, conjectures, suggestions, comments banishing the association
to some realm beyond normal manhood. Accordingly their own expression of
this affection had to take an ironic turn. They themselves must deride
it first, must hide their mutual inclination in a garment of constant
ridicule and contention, the irritation of which rose into their
consciousness as hostility. Words and gestures which in a different
order of life would have required no suppression became with them
necessarily inverted, found issue only by assuming a precisely opposite
aspect, concealed a profound attachment by exposing an extravagant
enmity. And this was a distortion of behavior so completely imposed upon
them by their traditions and society that even they themselves did not
know they were masquerading.
Bubber, his round face gone ominously blank, drew slowly closer to Jinx,
who, face thrust forward a little and scowling, stood with his back to
the bar counter, on which both elbows rested.
“Mean—my family?” inquired Bubber.
Jinx dared not recant. “All the way back to the apes,” he assured him
“—and that ain’t so awful far back.”
“The apes in yo’ family is still livin’,” said Bubber, “but they’s go’n’
be one daid in a minute.”
“Stay where you at, you little black balloon, or I’ll stick a pin in
you, you hear?”
By this time Bubber was almost within range and an initial blow was
imminent. Absorbed in the impending clash, no one had noticed the
arrival of a newcomer. But now this newcomer spoke and his words, soft
and low though they were, commanded immediate attention.
“Winner belongs to me.”
Everybody looked—spectators holding their drinks, Bubber with his blank
black face, Jinx with his murderous scowl. They saw a man at one end of
the bar counter, one foot raised upon the brass rail, one elbow resting
on the mahogany ledge; a young man so tall that, though he bent forward
from the hips in a posture of easy nonchalance, he could still see over
every intervening head between himself and the two opponents, and yet so
broad that his height was not of itself noticeable; a supremely tranquil
young Titan, with a face of bronze, hard, metallic, lustrous, profoundly
serene. He repeated his remark in paraphrase:
“I am askin’ fo’ the winner. I am very humbly requestin’ a share in his
hind-parts.”
It was apparent that the bristling antagonists bristled no longer, had
limply lost interest in their quarrel.
“Aw, man,” mumbled Jinx, “what you talkin’ ’bout?”
“You know what I’m talkin’ ’bout you freckle-face giraffe, and so does
’at baby hippopotamus in front of you. We got that Court Avenue job in
the mornin’, and if I got to break in one rooky on it, I might as well
break in two.” The voice, too, was like bronze, heavy, rich in tone,
uncompromisingly solid, with a surface shadowy and smooth as velvet save
for an occasional ironic glint.
“This boogy,” explained Bubber, “thinks he’s bad. Come slippin’ me ’bout
my family. He knows I don’t play nuthin’ like that.”
“Needn’t git uppity ’bout it,” mumbled Jinx sullenly.
“Ain’ gittin’ uppity. Jes’ natchly don’ like it, thass all. Keep yo’
thick lips off my family ef y’ know what’s good fo’ y’.”
He who had interrupted queried blandly, “Ain’t there gonna be no fight?”
Jinx said to Bubber— “Aw go ’haid, drabble-tail. Ain’ nobody studyin’
yo’ family.”
And this questionable apology Bubber chose to accept. “Oh,” said he.
“Oh—aw right, then. Thass different.”
The atmosphere cleared, attention returned to gin and jest, and Bubber
approached the giant, who now was grinning.
“Certainly am sorry th’ ain’ go’n’ be no hostilities,” sighed the
latter. “Been wantin’ to spank yo’ little black bottom ev’y sence you
broke that rope this mornin’.”
“Aw go ’haid, Shine. That boogy’s shoutin’ ’cause you was hyeh to
protect ’im. I’m go’n’ ketch ’im one these days when you ain’ ’round,
and I’m go’n’ turn ’im ev’y way but loose.”
“Don’t let ’im surprise y’. He kin wrastle the hell out of a piano.”
“Piano don’t fight back.”
“Don’t it? Well—neither will you if he get the same hold on y’.”
“Humph. Who the hell’s scared o’ that—freckle-face giraffe?”
II
Patmore, the proprietor, appeared, a large, powerful man with a broad,
hard face, a bright display of gold teeth, and the complexion of a
guinea hen’s egg. He wore a loose brown suit, of which the coat was
large and boxy and the ample trousers sharply creased but so long that
they broke about his ankles in cubistic planes and angles. Smoke and the
caustic vapors of rum had rendered his voice rough and husky, and when
he spoke you had an irresistible impulse to clear your throat.
Pat addressed Bubber. “You and Long-Boy still at it, huh?”
“Aw—a’ string-bean’s crazy. I’m gon’ snap ’im in two and string ’im one
these times.”
“Know what I’m go’n’ do with you two?”
“Whut?”
“See that door over there?”
“Yea.”
“That’s the cellar door, see? Next time y’all start anything in hyeh,
I’m go’n’ send the two of you down there and let you settle it once and
for all. Best man come out—other one drug out. See?”
“Any rats down there?”
“Yea—and y’all ’ll make two more.”
“Well,” grinned Bubber, “when I walk out, them rats’ll have some bones
to gnaw on anyhow,” and he moved off toward the pool room.
Ignoring Pat’s attempt to play the genial host. Shine had already
returned to his drink with an indifference hardly short of insult. He
now replenished his glass from a pint bottle in his hand, and slipped
the bottle into his own hip pocket.
Pat’s green eyes narrowed. “That’ll be only three bucks to you, Shine.”
Shine looked up. “What?”
“Anybody else—four.”
“This,” said Shine, “is good licker.”
“’Course ’tis. All my licker is good.”
“This ain’ never been yourn—’scription licker.” Shine sampled his glass
with an odd mingling of relish and unconcern, the one unmistakably for
his drink, the other for his company.
Pat feigned incredulity. “Mean that’s your licker?”
“’Tain’t my brother’s.”
“Mean—” Pat’s unbelief mounted “—mean—you buy licker somewhere else and
bring it in my place to drink?”
Shine tossed off the rest of the glass, set it down on the bar counter,
and looked upon Pat, who was almost as tall as himself, with a wearily
tolerant smile.
“’Sho’ takes you a long time to see a thing,” he remarked. “You hear me
say it’s ’scription. You ain’t runnin’ no drugstore, are y’? You see me
drink it. You ain’t blind, are y’? Yea, I bought it. Yea, I brought it
here. Yea, I’m drinkin’ it. Now what the hell ’bout it?”
A smaller man equally “bad,” equally convinced of the necessity of being
hard, but aware of physical odds against him, would have said this with
sneers and sarcasm, thus bolstering his courage against his handicap.
Shine however had never found it necessary to be nasty as well as bad.
He had spoken with an air of amusement, and there was but a touch of
challenge in his terminal remark.
Pat stood silent a moment. Eventually he said, “Nothin’ ’bout it, big
boy. Nothin’. Jes’ askin’ f’ information, that’s all.” And rather too
abruptly he walked away.
Shine stared long into his third glass of ’scription liquor before he
lifted it to his lips. Good whiskey is not like gin. Gin makes you
forget, good whiskey makes you remember. Perhaps it was at the memories
in this, his third glass of good whiskey, that Shine now stared. …
A boy, overgrown, bigger by far than his fellow orphan asylumites, so
much bigger that they never challenged him to do battle as they
frequently challenged the others. As big, almost, as the superintendent,
about whom the smallest thing was his pebble of a heart. They were all
at work in the truck garden, Shrimpje, Frankfurter, Jellybean, and the
others, as well as this overgrown one whose name was then Joshua Jones.
They were picking tomatoes, mostly green ones, to be taken to the
kitchen and made into “pickalilly.” They were seeing who could pick most
in the hour allotted to them for the work.
And Shrimpie, unaware that they were being watched from the window of
the nearest cottage, suddenly stopped, staring in surprise and delight
at a big, red, prematurely ripe tomato in his hand.
“Y’all kin work fast as you please,” Shrimpie declared. “I’m gon’ stop
and eat this hyeh one.”
Three bites out of the luscious thing—and the superintendent’s hand was
on Shrimpie’s shoulder. Three cruelly vehement shakes of Shrimpie’s
little body—and a hard green tomato sped through space and broke on the
super’s cheek.
The red face became redder, the super dropped Shrimpie and turned toward
the big boy, enraged. Made for him—dodged another tomato—came on.
Grappled, scuffled, slipped, fell, and found the boy astride him.
Pounding on his head—pounding—gone quite crazy, pounding. The super was
stunned less by the pounding than by the fact that the boy kept doing
it. Even after he was shaken off, the boy kept fighting aggressively.
Without a rod it wasn’t so easy to tame as overgrown sixteen-year-old
devil. When they both let up, it was at least spiritually Joshua Jones’s
round.
A bigger boy now, almost a man; well over six feet tall, but still ribby
and hungry-looking. Eighteen now. Shining shoes in front of a Lenox
Avenue barber-shop. Making nine, ten, sometimes twelve dollars a week.
The head barber liked to stand in the doorway and kid the boy about
being so big.
“Great big husky—” he would draw out the “great” till it was as long as
Joshua himself— “great big husky like you—it’s a shame. You oughter be
movin’ pianos ’stead o’ whippin’ shoe-leather. Benny, come ’eh. Look at
dis boy. When he stoop over his heels is higher ’n his head.”
Joshua Jones took it good naturedly, grinned occasionally, said little.
“Shine?” was the most he ever uttered, and from this the men dubbed him
Shine.
Nobody called him Shine, however, but Negroes. A fay patron, with no
other intent than to be genial, once repeated the name Shine after
hearing the head barber use it. “How do you get to the subway from here,
Shine, my boy?” he asked, paying his bill.
Shine looked him up and down, and after a moment inquired, “How’d you
know my name was Shine?”
“Guessed it,” smiled the patron.
“Guess how to get to the subway, then.”
The patron stared, gaped and departed mystified at so sudden hostility.
But the head barber, looking on, grinned and approved. “Tight kid,” he
commented. “What I mean, tight.”
A tight kid makes a hard man—two hundred and twenty pounds of hardness
in this case, wrestling daily with pianos; pianos equally hard and four
times as heavy; two hundred and twenty pounds of strength; not the mere
strength of stevedores hooking cotton bales on a wharf; you can’t hurt a
bale of cotton—it can’t hurt you; tumble it, hook it, kick it—what the
hell? But pianos—even swaddled in quilting—pianos must be handled like
glass. Not mere strength do they require, but delicacy and strength; not
muscles driving out or yanking in with abandoned force, but muscles held
taut, precisely controlled under however great tension, released or
restrained at will. You are protecting not only the instrument but
yourself and your partner at the other end. The soft edge of a
cotton-bale won’t hurt a fellow’s foot—the hard one of a piano will
break it.
A piano is a malicious thing; it loves to slip out of your grip and snap
at your toes, with an evil chuckle inside. Push up its lip and see it
sneer; touch it and hear it rumble or whine. Ponderous, spiteful,
treacherous live thing—a single spirit in a thousand bodies, one of
which will crush you soon or late.
A malicious thing. Only to-day they were putting a piano into a
third-story window of a house on a busy street. They had used hooks over
the cornice, and the cheap rotten cement crumbled. Cornices aren’t
supposed to bear weight—an inferior mixture will do. One hook came
through just as Shine was reaching out of the window to catch hold of
the suspended instrument and guide it through the frame. He heard the
crackle of broken cement above, saw the instrument sag a little while
over it showered crumbs of broken cornice. With the hand already
extended he grabbed the nearest leg of the upright and pulled it part
way through the window just before the other hook lost its hold above.
The greater part of the piano however was still unsupported outside the
window—the longer arm of a lever that all but broke even Shine’s
tremendous strength. Straining back with all the power of his back and
arms, his knees braced against the lower edge of the window-frame, he
held the instrument there slipping on the sill till Jinx and Bubber
reached him. Someone must have been hurt in the crash that would surely
have come otherwise.
“Thing nearly pulled me out the winder,” he remarked when the piano was
again under control. “Why the hell didn’ y’ let it go, then?” Shine
looked rather blank. “Damn ’f I thought of it,” he said and grinned at
his own stupidity.
III
Joshua Jones, whom his fellows called Shine, came out of his reverie, to
observe the return of Jinx and Bubber, arm in arm and quite happily
drunk.
“This yeh freckle-face giraffe, he’s a good boogy,” Bubber declared.
“Good boogy—yassuh. He’s my boy. Ain’t you my boy, biggy?”
“No lie,” Jinx agreed. “Tell ’im ’bout that licker we ruint.”
“Try some good licker,” Shine invited, turning the rest of his pint over
to them. “Go ’head—I got enough.”
“Jes’ had some good licker, I tell y’—Pat saw us go——”
“Y’all drink,” Shine ordered, “and let me do the talkin’.”
“Talk, then—talk. Don’ nobody have to listen jes’ ’cause you talk.
Talk.”
“I told y’all ’bout that Court Avenue job in the mornin’.”
“What d’ hell you so worried ’bout that job for?”
“Might have to get me some extra hands. Boss told me find somebody.”
There was quick and sober resentment on the part of Jinx and Bubber.
“Extra hands—fo’ whut? Ain’ no job too big fo’ us three.”
“Trouble, maybe,” Shine explained. “You know what’s happened already.
Guy tried to move in on One Hundred Forty-ninth Street, this winter and
they dared ’em to take the stuff out of the van. Jes’ las’ month, four
blocks from where we go tomorrow, somebody put dynamite under a shine
that moved in on his hardness. Well, boss is making this dicky pay for
risk this time, and we get a bonus, see? But we got to get the stuff in
safe, else—no bonus. And we got to keep our eyes open, or we may leave
some of our hips right up there on that Court Avenue asphalt.”
“Won’t leave none o’ Jinx’s,” Bubber prophesied.
“How come?” challenged Jinx.
“’Cause you ain’ got none to leave, you doggone eel.”
“So be ready for anything,” Shine said. “Five bucks extra apiece if the
junk gets in o.k.”
“Well—” Bubber was uncertain, “—five bucks is five bucks, but they’s a
lot mo’ five buckses loose in the world ’n they is hips. Look yeh.” He
exhibited his own hips by drawing his coat in tight around the waist.
“See them? It’s took me twenty-five years to git them. And you talkin’
’bout lettin’ somebody throw dynamite at ’em fo’ five bucks. Huh. Man
down at Coney Island once offered me ten bucks a day jes’ to let ’em
throw baseballs at my haid—and baseballs don’t explode.”
“Furthermore,” Jinx added, “you could spare that haid. ’Twouldn’ be no
loss whatsoever.”
“Point is,” said Shine, “five bucks or nothin’, I’m jes’ tellin’ y’ to
be ready, see? If anybody bother us jes’ up and knock hell out ’n ’em,
that’s all.”
“You a pretty hard boogy, Mr. Shine,” Bubber observed, “but I ain’t
never see you knock the hell out ’n no dynamite.”
“Far as I’m concerned,” contributed Jinx, “I’m ready now—to run. I been
haulin’ furniture, and I been haulin’ pianos; but when they starts
plantin’ dynamite, this baby’s gonna start haulin’ hindparts!”
“Be the first honest haulin’ you ever done, too,” commented Bubber.
To Shine this banter was merely pledge of allegiance in case of crisis,
assurance that the hiring of extra hands would in no event be necessary.
Beneath the jests, the avowed fear, the merriment, was a characteristic
irony, a typical disavowal of fact and repudiation of reality, a
markedly racial tendency to make light of what actually was grave—a
tendency stressed in Jinx and Bubber by the habitual perversion of their
own conduct toward each other. Members of another race might have said
simply:
“What the hell do you think we are—quitters?”
So between them they killed the rest of the pint and mourned its death
with laughter.
Patmore returned, grinning.
“You two,” he directed Bubber and Jinx, “catch air. I got a bug to put
in the big boy’s ear.” And when they had eventually obeyed, he went on
to Shine: “Jes’ to show y’ they’s no hard feelin’s, I got a scheme that
means bucks, and if you got two good eyes, you kin see how to make some
of ’em.”
“They’s mo’ guys in jail for schemin’ than they is for bein’ blind.”
“Listen. You don’t specially like no dickties, do y’?”
“I ain’t none too fond o’ rats.”
“But dickties give you a very special pain, don’t they?”
“Lot’s o’ places. No lie.”
“Me too. Now that’s where you and I are alike, see?”
Shine’s silence admitted nothing; but Pat went on:
“Heard you say sumpin’ ’bout movin’ this dicky Merrit.”
“Did?”
“Yea. Now there’s a guy I can’t see with field glasses.”
“No?”
“No.—Tell you sumpm’.” Pat looked about to be sure of privacy, leaned
closer to the bar counter. “If Merrit died to-morrer—I wouldn’ send ’im
no flowers.”
“What you got ’gainst ’im?”
“Plenty.” There came a characteristic confidential twist to one side of
Pat’s mouth. “He put me in some time back, see? Damage suit—ten thousand
berries. Hit a guy crossin’ the speedway—knocked him f’ a gool, the
dumbbell. Well—it was pay off or see jail, and naturally I wasn’ go’n’
see jail. Coulda’ got out cheaper may be, on’y this bird Merrit wouldn’t
listen to reason. Claim’ he was go’n’ bring in my occupation and lots o’
other stuff if I didn’ come clean—forcin’ my hand, see? Knew I had cash
and knew he could make me pay off by threatenin’ to squeal. I ought to
’a’ crowned him then, but he was too wise—knew where to meet me and
when. So all I could do was pay off. Ten thousand bucks to stay out o’
jail.”
“Ten thousand bucks wasted,” Shine said.
Pat misunderstood. “Yea,” he agreed. “Nothin’ to show for it. Know what
I could ’a’ done with that much at that time?”
“What?”
“I could ’a’ bought in a fay neighborhood and held on for a price. I
could ’a’ made fifteen thousand on that ten. Same as he’s doin’ now.”
“So now you figger on a come-back?”
Pat was almost reproachful. “’Course not—that ain’t the kind o’ bird I
am. Hell, I ain’t evil, Shine. Anyway th’ ain’ nothin’ I kin do ’bout it
now anyhow, is they?”
“How ’n hell do I know?”
“All I want is his trade, man. Bygones kin be bygones, far as I give a
damn. Gittin’ even is woman’s stuff—man don’ hold no grudges. But if I
kin sell him and his friends licker regular, it’ll mean a lot to me,
see?”
“Unscheme yo’ scheme, boogy.”
“Listen, I’m handlin’ a Canadian Club that’ll sell itself, no stuff. If
I kin git him to sample it, he’ll take it—order it for himself and
recommend it to his friends. It’s bound to go big, see? But hyeh’s the
thing: if he knows I sent it he’ll figure I’m tryin’ to poison him and
be scared to touch it, see? Now I got half a case on hand he kin have
and I got ten bucks you kin have if you deliver it along with his things
in the mornin’.”
Shine’s brows lifted. “Yea?”
“Yea. You’re my agent, see? Only don’t tell him—let him think you’re
handlin’ it y’self. They’ll be more later—not only to him but his
friends, and you kin collect ev’y time. How ’bout it?”
Shine’s answer did not come promptly.
“Fact,” Pat pursued, “with yo’ job, you could work up a wonderful
delivery service for me—no suspicion attached to it, see? Hyeh’s yo’
chance, man—start out as my agent.”
“Agent yo’ hiney,” said Shine. “Listen. Ain’t you heard ’bout me?”
“’Bout you?”
“Sho’, man. I done started already.”
“Bootleggin’?”
“No lie. I got a regular business. Ain’ but two people in it, though,
the bootlegger and the customer. I’m both of ’em.”
Once again Pat eyed Shine in silent frustration and, after an angry
moment, turned away wordless.
Watching him go, Shine grinned, then frowned and muttered to himself:
“Wise guy. Aimin’ to choke Merrit and throw the blame on me. Jes’ cause
I bring my own licker in and pass up his kerosene. Can y’ beat it——?
Wonder how many kinds of a jackass that bozo thinks I am?”
IV
By way of contrast, it is of further interest to drop in on a little
group of dickties, superiorly self-named the Litter Rats, who were
assembled informally this evening in the dwelling of one J. Pennington
Potter, their current president.
This particular meeting of the Litter Rats’ Club had been set apart for
the discussion of The Negro’s Contribution to Art and The Lost Sciences
of Ethiopia. But when Fred Merrit announced that he had bought a house
on Court Avenue, most exclusive of the residential streets adjacent to
Negro Harlem, scheduled discussions were for the moment forgotten; and
when he added that he intended to live in the house, and to do so
whether a riot resulted or not, the dozen men about the room came
promptly to the edges of their chairs.
“Preposterous!” said J. Pennington Potter, a plump little sausage of a
man, whose skin seemed stuffed to the limit with the importance of what
it contained.
“Why so?” inquired Merrit.
“This colony,” Potter pronounced, “should extend itself naturally and
gradually—not by violence and bloodshed.”
“The extension of territory by violence and bloodshed strikes me as
natural enough,” Merrit grinned. “I haven’t much of a memory, but I seem
to recall one or two instances—”
“Progress is by evolution, not revolution,” expostulated J. Pennington
Potter. “And you may be sure that race progress is no exception.”
“Who the deuce said anything about race progress or about extending the
colony?” asked Tod Bruce, the young and far from fundamentalist rector
of St. Augustine’s. “Why is it that a shine can never do anything except
as a shine?”
“Well,” commented Langdon, an innocent looking youngster who was at
heart a prime rascal and who compensated by writing poetry, “if Fred
will just keep his hat on, none of his neighbors will know he’s a
shine.”
“Or he could try Stay-Straight for those kinks—” some one suggested.
“My point,” said Bruce, “is that Fred probably isn’t concerned primarily
with the racial aspect of the thing——”
“He ought to be!” exploded Potter.
“I am,” said Merrit coolly. “All of you know where I stand on things
racial—I’m downright rabid. And even though, as Tod suggests, I’d enjoy
this house, if they let me alone, purely as an individual, just the same
I’m entering it as a Negro. I hate fays. Always have. Always will. Chief
joy in life is making them uncomfortable. And if this doesn’t do it—I’ll
quit the bar.”
“Well, Fred,” said Langdon, “don’t forget the revenue. They’ll pay you
double the value of the place just to get you out, you know.”
“I had that in mind, but hell—what’s money? They won’t pay me what I’ll
ask anyhow, and I won’t sell for less.”
There was a certain grimness about Merrit, for all his rosy cheeks and
cherubic grin. He was anomalous in certain important particulars. Fair
as the northernmost Nordic, his sandy hair was yet as kinky as that of
any pure blooded African; and not the blackest of Negroes could have
hated the dominant race more thoroughly.
“You know,” he said, “I especially wanted my mother to live there. How
she would have queened it—it would have been part compensation——”
It was another of Merrit’s anomalies that, though he hated his lineage
in general, he had been especially devoted to his mother. She had always
seemed to him a symbol of sexual martyrdom, a bearer of the cross, as he
put it, which fair manhood universally placed on dark womanhood’s
shoulders. Of all those whom he blamed and cursed for his own mongrel
heritage, she was the one exception; for her, the only one he had
actually known, he had only racial pity and filial devotion. She had
recently died, late enough in her own life, but too early in his, to
enjoy the luxuries he had just become able to give her. And so in
addition to what she already represented, she had now become a symbol of
motherhood unrewarded, idealized in memory far beyond what had been true
in life.
“I think,” he added, “my housekeeper’ll give the neighbors enough of a
shock, though. She’s as colored as they come.”
“There’ll be a riot!” exclaimed J. Pennington Potter.
“Good!” grinned the cherubic Fred.
“They’ll set fire to the place—they’ll blow it up—the way they did
Morris and Peters.”
“Insurance is a marvelous invention, isn’t it?”
“Uncalled for distress. I thoroughly disapprove of deliberate,
intentional havoc. It’s just what we’re trying to prevent.” This was to
be expected of the extremely proper J. Pennington Potter, a “social
worker” with a windy, pompous voice and a deep devotion to convention.
“Well,” moderated Bruce, “Harlem began its growth by riots. I remember
when I was a youngster, I used to be scared to stay out after dark. It
was pretty bad then—either a crowd of fay boys would catch a jig and
beat him up or else a crowd of jigs would get a fay boy and teach him
the fear of the Lord. In either case the thing would be the first
skirmish of a pitched battle somewhere on the frontier. The shins
tricked a half dozen Irish lads into One Hundred Thirty-fourth Street
one night, I remember, and two of them never came out. Cops—there
weren’t any black cops then—always went in threes at least. And I recall
one day when twelve mounted policemen came galloping up One Hundred
Thirty-fourth Street after one little West Indian ice-man—and galloped
back without him. It was really comical.”
The others gave Bruce attention, watching him as he spoke. He too was
fair, but less so than Merit, and his skin was uniformly pallid. His
face was lean, his features prominent and severe to the point of
austerity, the nose large and narrow, the chin advancing, the mouth
wide, straight, and thin-lipped. As if to offset the ascetic in this
countenance, his eyes were deep-set and black, and in them some curious
passion gleamed constantly like a flame. As he spoke these eyes engaged
everything that might hold a drop of interest, comprehended it, drained
it, left it; swiftly flashed from this to that, paused, penetrated,
abandoned; sought further, halted, penetrated again, departed—a pair of
black wasps.
“Those were the happy days,” he went on. “People kept kettles of hot lye
on the stoves and carried them to their doors whenever the bell rang.
And you could go upon the roof of your house and not see a chimney
within four blocks: they’d all been knocked down and the bricks stacked
at front room windows for ammunition. And say—one night a bunch of bad
jigs—like those over on Fifth Avenue now—mistook me for a fay, and I had
a devil of a time proving I was a Negro, too!”
“I had the same experience,” said Merrit. “You should’ve seen me
exhibiting my kinky head.”
“It was probably straight for a while,” grinned Langdon.
“It’s the old, old story,” said Bruce. “War—conquest of territory. But
our side of the thing isn’t all there is to it. The fays have a side
too, you know.”
“I know,” Merrit protested, like the lawyer he was, “but we aren’t
supposed to see that.”
“Well, I don’t know. It’s easy to laugh now. But the fact is, it was
tragedy. Black triumph is always white tragedy. We won—we won territory.
All the fays had to get out, make way, make room for us. What did they
do? Resist, of course—why the devil shouldn’t they? Clung to their
district, tried to recover. And we broke their heads with chimney bricks
and bathed their bodies in hot lye. How do you suppose they felt about
it?”
“Best thing that ever happened to ’em,” grinned Fred.
“But tough on them, you’ll admit.”
“What of it?”
“Only this—that when you move up there on Court Avenue, you’re opening
up all those old scars. Just as Pott says, they’ll resist. They’ll warn
you with threatening notes. They’ll try to buy you out. If these don’t
work, they will probably dynamite you.”
“I’ve received one warning already.”
“You have?”
“You heard about Gamby, last month,” said someone. “They had a gang of
toughs on hand and they wouldn’t even let the movers land his stuff on
the sidewalk. Had to get the police.”
“Glad you mentioned that,” said Merrit. “I’ll send my worst stuff first,
and I’ll get the toughest furniture-movers in Harlem.”
“Nowadays,” Bruce observed, “we grow by—well—a sort of passive conquest.
The fays move out, and the jigs are so close no more fays will move in.
So the landlord has to rent to jigs and the colony keeps extending. But
if Fred wants to return to the older method, I don’t think it will do
any great harm to the rest of us. He’s taking all the risk. And even
though he claims a racial interest, he has admitted that the chief
motive is personal after all. It’s his business.”
“There is absolutely no excuse for it,” was J. Pennington Potter’s final
dictum.
“Who the hell asked for an excuse, Pott?” was all that Merrit answered.
V
Court Avenue is a straight, thin spinster of a street which even in July
is cold. There is about it an air of arched eyebrows, of skirts drawn
aside and comments made with a sniff. It is adorned in sparse, lean,
scrawny maples, all suffering from malnutrition, and these tend to
stress rather than relieve the hardness of dry, level pavements.
The dwellings are all the same pale gray and are all essentially alike,
four stories tall, thin to gauntness, droop-eyed with drawn shapes,
standing shoulder to shoulder in long, inhospitable rows. Stone stoops,
well withdrawn from the sidewalk, lend an air of inaccessibility, and
the tiny front yards that might dispel this illusion by only a bit of
grass or a flower are instead uniformly laid away beneath slabs of
expressionless concrete.
Twice a day, when sunlight touches the windows of this side in the
morning and again of that side at night, Court Avenue smiles a chilly,
crystalline smile. It is the sort of smile that goes with the words, “My
dear! Can you imagine such a thing?” and you might suppose that the
street was returning even the sun’s genial greeting and warm farewell
with a disapproving sneer.
In short, Court Avenue is a snob of a street. Yet it is somewhat to be
pitied in its pretense at ignoring the punishment that is at hand: the
terribly sure approach of the swiftly spreading Negro colony.
Isaacs’ Transportation Company, which is to say old man Isadore Isaacs,
would have trusted Joshua Jones with any moving job whatever. It was
work that Shine loved because of the challenge it presented to his
personal strength and skill. He took charge, accepted responsibility,
helped execute the orders he gave. Whenever a staircase or hallway
presented a difficult turn or an insufficient dimension, he was at hand
to decide just how the problem should be solved. Whenever a valuable
piece of ungainly size had to be dismembered, and afterwards
reconstructed, his knowledge of the mysterious anatomy of furniture was
wholly adequate. Whenever a piano was to be hoisted, he saw to each
important item: himself selected and anchored the tackle and guided the
instrument through the window that was chosen to admit it.
Pianos indeed, were his particular prey, his almost living archenemies.
He personified them, and out of controlling them, handling them,
directing them helpless through midair, he derived a satisfaction
comparable to that of a tamer of beasts. There was a superstition that a
piano would “get” a man one time or another. Jinx and Bubber had both
suffered injuries from instruments that slipped from their grips. But
Shine laughed at this superstition, not because it was a superstition,
but because he knew that he simply couldn’t be “had.”
Even the four-ton van was to Shine a beloved companion. He called her
Bess; and Bess was the only thing on earth that he coveted. She was
padded within and especially designed for the moving of things fine and
fragile; her engine was responsive and smooth, her treads pneumatic,
single in front, double in the rear. She rode like a private ambulance
and she could make forty on a level. It was Shine’s ambition one day to
win her away from old man Isaacs.
The crew was usually made up only of Shine, Jinx, and Bubber, and these
three in two years of cooperation had come to work together in a fashion
beyond fault-finding, carefully, quickly, punctually, untrailed by
patrons’ complaints.
This early summer morning Shine swung Bess, loaded with Merrit’s
possessions, into the chilly Court Avenue atmosphere, and, with
deliberate malice, sped up to a roar, then coasted, shifting his spark
to make the motor spit.
“That’ll wake up somebody,” he grinned as Bess bang-banged like an
automatic. “Come on you bomb-throwers—do your stuff—Let’s go!”
“Boy, lemme out this cab,” said Bubber. “This darkey done gone crazy.”
“Shuh!” complained Jinx. “Ain’t go’n’ be no rough stuff in this
neighborhood. Deader ’n Strivers’ Row.”
They drew up and backed against the curb before number three-thirteen.
The door opened and Merit himself came out to meet them. He wore his
usual air of nonchalance and his usual cherubic grin.
“Hello, fellows,” he greeted. “Get it all on one load? That’s clever.”
All three stared. Such cordiality in a dicky was nothing short of
astonishing, and it put the suspicious workers immediately on guard.
While Jinx and Bubber unfastened van-doors, Merit went up to Shine and
leaned carelessly against a tree. “What do you think of this?” he said,
producing a letter.
Shine accepted the proffered note without enthusiasm. It was without
heading or salutation, typewritten, and lacking a signature:
You are not wanted in this neighborhood.
If you move in, we’ll move you out.
“Where’d you get it?” Shine asked Merit.
“Found it in the vestibule when I came up to look around yesterday.”
“Humph,” said Shine. “Jes’ let ’em start sump ’n while we’re here,
that’s all.” And because he disliked dickties and wanted no talk with
any one of them, he changed the subject rudely. “Where you want us to
put this stuff?”
“Anywhere. Spread it all over the first floor. My housekeeper’ll come in
from the country-place and have it arranged later.”
“Hear that?” Jinx said to Bubber, out of sight at the rear of the van.
“Thass what I say ’bout a spade. Spade can’t git a little sump ’n
without stretchin’ it. His housekeeper. His country-place. Humph—what’s
a use lyin’ like that——?”
“He ain’ lyin’, fool. That jasper’s got mo’ bucks ’n you got freckles.
Got a swell place on the upstate Pike, not far out o’ town. Throws big
parties and raises hell jes’ like d’ fays. Folks up there didn’t know he
was a jig till he had a party—and they offered him a million dollars fo’
the place jes’ to git him out. He wouldn’ leave, though.”
“Million dollars?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And he wouldn’ leave?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Huh! You lie wuss ’n he do.”
Merrit’s words came to them repeating, “Mrs. Fuller will take care of
everything later.”
“Thare now,” commented Jinx, “y’see?”
“See what?”
“Soon as a old crow gits up in d’ world, he got to grab hisse ’f some
other guy’s wife.”
Bubber regarded him with pity. “How you figger dat out?”
“His name ain’t Fuller, is it?”
“No. And yo’ name ain’t Sherlock. Don’t you know what a housekeper is?
And ain’t you never heard of sech a thing as a widow?”
“Aw man, what you talkin’ ’bout?”
“You ought to be a policeman, brother.”
“How come?”
“’Cause you very suspicious and very, very dumb.”
These two had been unwrapping carefully covered hindmost pieces of
furniture. Shine came around to lend a hand, and Merrit moved along the
curb to a position such that he could observe them. Now he indulged in
another astonishing speech.
“Don’t be too damn careful about these things. Flat didn’t have anything
but junk in it, anyway. Good stuff’s in the country—won’t move it in
till fall. Just chuck this stuff in and let it lay.”
What manner of dickty was this? He greeted you like an equal, casually
shared his troubles with you, and did not seem to care in the least what
the devil you did with his furniture.
Jinx said sullenly to Bubber. “All he wants is for us to scratch up
sump’m, so he kin call the five bucks off.”
Bubber said to Jinx, “That ain’t it. He’s jes’ makin’ sure o’ friends in
case d’ fays start sump’m.”
Shine said to himself, “If this bird wasn’t a dickty he’d be o.k. But
they never was a dickty worth a damn.”
The job was finished and they were throwing by-products into the emptied
van—burlap and canvas wrappers, quilting, hemp rope, leather straps.
Merrit had just turned the key in his door and was facing about for
departure, while Shine was on the point of climbing into the cab. At
this juncture, simultaneously, everybody made an observation. It was the
only observation that they all would have been likely to make at one
time, and it held Merrit at attention on the stoop, rendered Shine
motionless with one foot upon the step of his cab, and halted Bubber in
the act of throwing a gunnysack over Jinx’s head. Along the hitherto
empty street a girl was briskly approaching.
You could see that she knew they were staring, so completely did she
ignore them, and the ease with which she did so, the queenly unconcern
with which she passed, indicated that she was accustomed to being stared
at and did not mind it at all.
There was quite obviously no reason why she should have minded it.
Certainly her attire invited no criticism—a brief frock of cool black
satin, sheer gun-metal hose, and trim patent-leather pumps. Nor did she
herself. She was tall and her face was pretty, and her body slenderly
invited, though her legs perversely eluded, the persistent caress of the
sedulous soft black satin.
Even if this had been all—a pretty girl on that gaunt empty street at
this solitary hour, the staring would have been pardonable. But there
was in addition an especially extenuating circumstance: the girl was not
white.
Before she quite passed beyond earshot Jinx and Bubber were indulging in
low enthusiasms:
“Boy, do you see what I see?”
“Law-a-aw-dy!”
“Mus’ be havin’ a recess in heaven!”
“No lie. Umh-umh-umh—” Grunts to signify admiration far beyond words.
“Lady, you kin have all my week’s pay—ev’y bit of it.” Bubber dived
elaborately into his empty pockets, while Jinx vowed:
“I’m go’n’ get religion and die so I kin go to heaven and meet that
angel—yassuh!”
Suddenly comment ceased. Only two doors beyond Merrit’s house the girl
turned in, traversed the short cement walk, mounted the stoop, unlocked
and entered the front door.
Merrit raised his brows in a characteristic little expression of
surprise. Shine saw him do so and had a swift interpretation for that
expression:
“Figgerin’ on a jive already—the doggone dickty hound. Why the hell
dickties can’t stick to their own women ’thout messin’ around honest
workin’ girls—”
Bubber was rapturizing without restraint, “Man—oh—man! A honey with high
yaller laigs! And did you see that walk? That gal walks on
ball-bearin’s, she do—ev’rything moves at once.” He illustrated his idea
with head-wobblings, shoulder-rollings, and loose backward protrusions
and retractions of buttocks. “See what I mean? Tail-conscious, man,
tail-conscious——”
“You jes’ a damn liar,” came unexpectedly from Shine. “She walks like
what she is, a lady—and you talk like what you is, a rat. Come on, it’s
gettin’ late—let’s go from here.”
Whereupon Jinx looked at Bubber and Bubber looked at Jinx. Here was
indeed something new, Shine championing a woman.
“Well, kiss my assorted peanuts!” ejaculated Bubber.
“Guess that’s the dynamite,” was Jinx’s dyspeptic surmise.
Uplift
VI
Miss Agatha Cramp had, among other things, a sufficiently large store of
wealth and a sufficiently small store of imagination to want to devote
her entire life to Service; in fact, to Social Service on a large scale.
And because Miss Cramp took very personal interest in her successive
servants, it came about that this Social Service was directed towards
definite racial groups. When her maid had been French, Miss Cramp had
organized a club to assist rebuilding demolished French villages; when
her maid had been Polish, she had taken up with a Society for the Aid of
Starving Poland; and shortly after hiring a Russian girl, she became a
member of the Russian Relief Committee.
Thus Miss Cramp had devoted the more recent years of her life to
Service, and now, with a colored maid on hand, she had no outlet for her
urge. For two weeks she had been idle, and idleness drove her to
distraction. She felt worse and worse day by day, until at last her
doctor said what she paid him to say: that she was on the verge of a
nervous breakdown and would simply have to go to bed and rest.
She rested three days; whereupon an ironic Court Avenue sun revealed to
her something of which she had hitherto been unaware: her colored maid,
bringing in her breakfast, looked somehow amazingly pretty. And although
Miss Cramp had no very generous eye for beauty, she was so struck by the
discovery of what hitherto had mysteriously escaped her that she was
moved to exclaim:
“Why, Linda, what’ve you done to yourself? You look so nice this
morning.”
Linda stood stiff in astonishment, eventually managing what might have
been construed as a reply:
“You—feeling better, Miss Cramp?” The twinkle in the maid’s eye escaped
her mistress.
“I believe I am, Linda. I really believe I am.” Miss Cramp stared at the
girl a while, then turned her attention to the tray just placed on her
lap; inspected it, looked through it absently.
“Something else, Miss Cramp?” asked Linda.
“No. This is very nice, Linda. Very nice. But don’t go. I want to talk
to you. Something has just occurred to me.”
It had indeed. For fifteen years Miss Cramp had been devoting her life
to the service of mankind. Not until now had the startling possibility
occurred to her that Negroes might be mankind, too.
The bare statement is extravagant; the fact is not. The only Negroes
Miss Cramp had ever spoken to were porters, waiters, and house-servants
of acquaintances. These were the only ones of whose existence she had
been even remotely aware. Negroes to her had been rather ugly but
serviceable fixtures, devices that happened to be alive, dull
instruments of drudgery, so observed, so accepted, so used, and so
forgotten. Had all the dark-skinned folk in the country been blotted out
by some specific selective destruction, Miss Cramp would not have missed
them in the least, would not have been glad nor sorry, would have gone
serenely on us aware, tchk-tchk-ing perhaps over the newspaper account,
but remaining wholly untouched in her sympathies.
Not so with remoter disasters: Over the slaughter of Armenians by Turks
she had once sobbed bitterly and even over the devastation of the
Japanese by earthquake she had mourned a little; because, though she had
never known Armenian or Japanese, she had thought somewhat about them;
though they had never approached her person, they had penetrated her
intellect a little. But Negroes she had always accepted with horses,
mules, and motors, and though they had brushed her shoulder, they had
never actually entered her head.
But now something had occurred to her.
“Linda you’re quite different from most—er—colored people, aren’t you?”
To Linda, who had no idea what “most colored people” might mean, this
was a baffling question.
“I don’t know, Miss Cramp,” she said.
“I mean—you know—you’re—I hadn’t noticed before. You’re really quite
pretty.” She was experiencing the difficulties familiar to all who itch
with curiosity but prefer not to be seen scratching. “You’re so light,
you know.”
Linda’s lips twitched. “Why I’m not so awfully light, Miss Cramp. And
plenty folks lighter than I am are far from being pretty.”
“Yes—of course,” Miss Cramp considered. “Even white people. To be sure.
But of course you meant—er—colored. But your hair now—it isn’t kinky.”
At once an assertion and a question.
The only answer was, “No, Miss Cramp.”
“And how can you afford to wear such nice looking things on eighteen
dollars a week?”
“Well,” Linda said, “’course I could do better on twenty.”
Miss Cramp did not hear this, but observed, “Patent-leather pumps and a
black satin dress—”
“They’re cheap shoes,” Linda explained. “Just look nice ’cause they’re
new. The dress I got down on Eighth Avenue for seven dollars.”
“But your skin, my dear. You might pass for a Sicilian or an Armenian.”
Linda was not sure about these. “I was a gypsy once in a concert,” she
admitted.
“A concert?”
“At church.”
“You go to church?”
“I like to go very much.”
“Now that’s just what I wanted to ask you about. Your people are very
religious creatures aren’t they?”
“Well, some are and some not.”
“I thought—er—slavery, you know, would have made you very religious.”
“Maybe it did,” said Linda. “I wouldn’t know ’bout that.”
“But don’t you have your own hymns? Spirituals, I believe they are
called.”
“Not in my church,” Linda said.
“What church is that, Linda?”
“Saint Augustine’s,” said Linda. “It’s Episcopal.”
“Episcopal!” incredulously. “Why I’m an Episcopalian.” The tone
indicated clearly that there must be some mistake.
A little devilishly, Linda smiled, but all she said was, “Is that so?”
“But you—” began Miss Cramp, then reconsidered. “But you must sing
spirituals. All Negroes sing spirituals, don’t they?”
Doubtfully Linda ruminated. “Why—I remember some jubilee singers gave a
concert of ’em once at the Parish. And I’ve been to Methodist revival
meetings where they sang ’em just like jazz. We only went for fun, to
see the folks get happy and shout. I’ve never heard them at my church in
regular service, though.”
“Well,” said Miss Cramp. And again, “Well.” Then, “What I was getting at
was—do your churches make any effort to improve conditions, to render
any real service to your people?”
“Oh, yes. We have an employment agency. They sent me to the one that
sent me to you.”
“No, no, Linda.” So stupid a reply restored Miss Cramp’s self-assurance.
“That is not what I mean, my dear. I mean the people that are mentally
ill, the criminals, the dope-fiends, the fallen women. Do your churches
try to help them?”
“I don’t think so—not unless they’re members.”
“There must be some organization to do such work among your people,”
Miss Cramp insisted.
“Well,” Linda suggested brightly, “maybe the same organization does it
that does it among your people.”
“Of course—of course. One would think so, wouldn’t one? But I haven’t
come in contact with—of course, I haven’t worked in colored
communities—…”
After a vacuous pause, Linda said, “Maybe you mean the G.I.A.”
“G.I.A.? What’s that?”
“General Improvement Association.”
“What do they do?”
“Well, they collect a dollar a year from everybody that joins, and
whenever there’s a lynching down south they take the dollar and send
somebody to go look at it.”
“Whatever’s the good of that?”
“I don’t know, Miss Cramp. Seems like they just want to make sure it
really happened.”
“Well. Then what do they do?”
“Well, by that time the year’s up and it’s time to collect another
dollar. So they collect it.”
“Why don’t they turn their attentions to conditions here at home?” Miss
Agatha wanted to know. “There must be much to be done here among you—an
alien, primitive people in a great, strange metropolis. Why don’t they
do something here?”
“Well, nobody gets lynched here.”
The simplicity of this response did not satisfy Miss Cramp, who could
never have suspected that her colored maid would dare make game of her
ignorance or play upon her credulity.
“Why I can’t understand—I really can’t. Here is a situation that surely
needs attention, and the people do nothing—absolutely nothing—about it.
Lynchings—of all things! When right here in New York City there are— How
many of you are there here, Linda?”
“Two hundred thousand, according to Father Bruce.”
“Oh, that’s an exaggeration, of course. But even if there are as many as
ten thousand, a great work could be done among them. This organization
you mention—”
“The G.I.A.”
“Yes—quite evidently needs someone to point the way. Their attention is
entirely in the wrong quarter.”
“Why’n’t you help them out, Miss Cramp?”
“That’s just what occurred to me Linda. Exactly what occurred to me.
When I saw you this morning and noticed for the first time how different
you were from most colored people, I said to myself, ‘There now—why
can’t they all be like that?’ And I said, ‘Why they can be if they have
the right sort of help. Some organization that could render real
service, that’s just what they need!’ Then you mentioned this G.A.R.—”
“G.I.A.”
“—and told me of the mistake they were making, and I said, ‘There now,
there is an instrument that can be turned to good use in the proper
hands.’ Yes indeed, Linda, I think I will help them out. I really do
think I will.”
“They’ll certainly appreciate it, Miss Cramp.”
“Of course… Well, that’s all, Linda. Thank you very much. Linda, bring
me the ’phone book when you come back, won’t you? I presume they have a
telephone?”
“Who, Miss Cramp?”
“This G.I.R. Society.”
“A telephone? I don’t know, Miss Cramp.” Linda was elaborately
uncertain, eventually concluding, “They might have one. They might at
that. I’ll bring the book, Miss Cramp.”
VII
There is at least one occasion a year when Manhattan Casino requires no
decorations, the occasion of the General Improvement Association’s
Annual Costume Ball. The guests themselves are all the decoration that
is necessary.
This is not only because many guests attend in costume, but also
because, of all the crowds which Manhattan Casino holds during the year,
none presents a greater inherent variety: There is variety of personal
station that extends from the rattiest rat to the dickiest dicky, for
this is not an exclusive, invitational “function” but a widely
advertised public affair; and it is supported by everybody, because the
proceeds are to be given over to Negro advancement. There is variety of
personal appearance that ranges from the dingiest ding to the most
delicate pink; variety of age, from little brown gnomes of nine or ten
to Cleopatras of sixty; variety, finally, of occupation, related of
course to variety of social standing. At the So-and-So’s Dance you would
find chiefly doctors, lawyers, and undertakers; at the Speedway Club
Dance, bootleggers, big-time gamblers, professional politicians; at the
Barbers’ Ball, tonsorial artists, chauffeurs, and head-waiters. Anybody
may achieve admittance to any one of these, but the crowd somehow
remains in large measure distinct and characteristic. Not so with the
G.I.A. Costume Ball. This is the one occasion in Harlem when everybody
is present and nobody minds. The bootleggers raise no objection to their
rivals, the doctors. The K.M.’s are seldom if ever seen to turn up their
noses at the school teachers. Elevator boys and gamblers together
discuss their ups and downs: and the richest real estate man in the
colony greets his bootblack with a cordial smile. The bars are down.
This is for the Race. One great common fellowship in one great common
cause.
There was the great dance floor, large as a city block, with a
fifteen-piece orchestra exhausting itself at the far end. On either side
of this dance area, separated from it by railings and extending the
length of the building between the dance floor and the lateral walls, a
raised level or low terrace, occupied by a tangle of round-top tables
and wire-legged chairs. Either terrace broken midway by a wide
staircase, that turned at right angles and led up alongside the wall to
the upper level, the level of the tier of boxes that encircled the hall
and roofed in the two lateral terraces below.
Those who between dances repaired only so far as the terraces and sat at
the round-top tables and drank Whistle, perhaps tinctured with corn,
were either just ordinary respectable people or rats. But those who
mounted the stairs and crowded into or about the boxes, who kept waiters
busy bringing ginger ale, which they flavored from silver hip
flasks—those were dickties and fays.
Of the people downstairs, a few of the girls wore inexpensive costumes;
others wore gaudy habiliments that were just as truly costumes but were
probably not so intended. The men wore anything, from clothing so
inconspicuous as to attract no attention to outfits positively
stunning—light gray suits, cerise crêpe ties and bright yellow,
broad-toed oxfords.
Of the dickties, the women were all extravagantly dressed. Whether they
wore costume or evening frock, it quite obviously had to outglitter
everyone’s else. The men, however, uniformly clad in dinner-coats,
performed well their sole esthetic function of background.
Of the usual sprinkling of fays, a few were the friends and guests of
dickties; several were members of the Executive Board of the G.I.A.,
professional uplifters, determined to be broad-minded about this thing;
and accompanying these two groups, a third consisting of newcomers to
Harlem, all gasps, grunts, and ill-concealed squirms, or sighs and
astonished smiles. The first group coming to enjoy not the Negroes but
themselves, hence perfectly at ease; the second coming to raise up the
darker brother, hence sweetly beaming and benevolent; the third coming
to see the niggers, hence tortured with smothered comment and stifled
expression. On the whole corresponding pretty well to their hosts, these
visitors: usually dull and ordinary, occasionally bright and
substantial, once in a blue moon brilliant or beautiful.
So swept the scene from black to white through all the shadows and
shades. Ordinary Negroes and rats below, dickties and fays above, the
floor beneath the feet of the one constituting the roof over the heads
of the other. Somehow, undeniably, a predominance of darker skins below,
and, just as undeniably, of fairer skins above. Between them, stairways
to climb. One might have read in that distribution a complete philosophy
of skin-color, and from it deduced the past, present, and future of this
people. … Out on the dance floor, everyone, dickty and rat, rubbed
joyous elbows, laughing, mingling, forgetting differences. But whenever
the music stopped everyone immediately sought his own level.
One great common fellowship in one great common cause.
VIII
Downstairs at one point on the terrace were Jinx and Bubber, oblivious
to everybody, arguing heatedly over the relative speed of corn and gin
as intoxicants. Neither had either. At another point a group of girls
dressed as gypsies sat laughing around a table. The prettiest of these
was Linda, not the dry and quiet Linda that served Agatha Cramp her
meals, but a vivacious light-hearted child, out on a lark, being
herself. Not far away, leaning against one of the pillars that supported
the tier of boxes, stood Henry Patmore, calculatingly watching Linda.
Further back, unnoticed, like a great shadow against the wall, Shine
stood with his hands in his pockets, motionless, watching Patmore.
He had not long to wait before what he anticipated began to happen.
Henry Patmore was acknowledged among his friends a perfect ladies’ man.
He had all the qualifications: money to burn, with a constant large
supply of banknotes on his person, after the fashion of bootleggers;
excellent taste in dress, as exemplified to-night by a sack suit of
light greenish gray, a shirt of slate radium silk with collar to match,
a bright green satin cravat caressing a diamond question mark, and a
breast pocket polka dot handkerchief, whose crêpe border matched the
tie. He was large and self-assured with an engaging manner and a
flashing smile. Some people might not have cared for the fishy blankness
of Patmore’s gray eyes, nor for his tough-looking tan skin, thickly
bespecked with small brown freckles, nor for his rather heavy jowls nor
his rather thick neck with its two deep transverse creases behind. But
so courteous was his manner with ladies, so deferential, so flatteringly
humble his approach, that almost never did a girl deny his request for a
dance, whether she knew him or not.
Further, there was about him the reassuring deliberateness of complete
self-confidence. He was thirty-five years old, as free of the
uncertainties of youth as of the infirmities of age; on the one hand
debonair but not dashing, on the other, solid but not set. He had
reached a point where his person might still inspire admiration while
his maturity dismissed apprehension. Never did Patmore’s manner suggest
his motive.
It follows that Patmore’s conquests were many and his reputation
enviable. Nor can it be denied that he made the most of this reputation
among his fellow men, taking little pains to conceal either the nature
of his activities or the identity of their object. He even allowed it to
be suspected that there were dicky homes where he made it convenient to
deliver liquor only during the hours when the head of the house was
absent. Of this he did not openly boast, of course—not, at least, when
he was sober. That would have been bad business indeed, just as it would
be bad business to-night to mount the stairs and try to mingle with his
many patrons in the boxes. Occasionally, however, his own liquor did
make him excessively talkative. He would stride into his establishment
proclaiming his own excellence in this or that particular, and not
infrequently the particular was conquest of ordinarily inaccessible
women. Accordingly, his fellows declared him to be a “jiver from way
back.” And while, drunk or sober, he did not deny this, still he always
insisted that he was business man first of all.
For to-day however his business was done. He had provided more of the
life of this party than any other single person, and he now fell back
with a clear conscience upon the pursuit of his avocation.
As a field for such an avocation, the uniqueness of Harlem is that there
are always new realms to conquer. Incredible, bewildering variety.
Consider the mere item of complexion, you whose choice may run only from
cool white to warm rose-and-olive. Harlem offers its cool white too,
with blue eyes and flaxen hair, believe it or not; proceeds on through
the conventional shades to the warmth of rose-and-olive; and here, where
the rest of Manhattan ends, Harlem has just begun: on through the
creams, the honeys and high-browns, the sealskins and chestnuts—a dozen
gradations in every class, not one without its peculiar richness. And if
white be cool and olive warm, must not chestnut be downright fever?
Harlemites swear that the Queen of Sheba was without doubt a sealskin
brown and further insist that Cleopatra could have been but a honey at
the fairest. And for evidence they will point out a dozen Shebas and any
number of Cleopatras in the flesh.
Here is every variation of skin-color, every variety of feature-form,
every possible combination of these variations and varieties. And of
course every imaginable result, from the most outrageous ugliness to the
most extraordinary beauty. Harlem is superlatively rich in diversity.
Accordingly Henry Patmore enjoyed almost boundless choice, and it was no
mean tribute to Linda’s beauty that to-night his wandering eye fell and
lingered upon her. He saw that she was with other girls and therefore
probably unattended—legitimate prey. And if he caught something vaguely
different about her, it but served to heighten his interest.
Shine too had seen Linda and recognized her as the girl of the Court
Avenue comments. It had given him strange and moving sensations, this
recognition, had made him stare again just as foolishly as he had stared
that morning a fortnight before. For him the rest of the picture
thereupon faded into background, grew abruptly distant—people, laughter,
shouting, music—while this dark-eyed girl in her gypsy attire, scarlet,
gold, and black, became and remained the center and reason of it all.
Joshua Jones, be it confessed, was himself no cipher among the ladies.
There had been girls aplenty: Sarah Mosely, Babe Merrimac, Lottie
Buttsby, Becky Katz, Maggie Mulligan, and others. An acknowledged master
of men is usually attractive to women, and in his world of sinew and
steel, Shine had the necessary reputation; there was no end of stories
about what he could do with his hands.
But his general philosophy of conduct, of being impenetrably hard, of
repudiating sentiment and relaxing toward no one and nothing, shielded
his spirit if not his body from the women he so far had known, and while
he might have claimed some excellence as a man of affairs if he had so
chosen, it would not have been the same in degree or kind as that
attributed to Patmore. Patmore’s victories had been achieved, Shine’s
had been thrust upon him, and what the one would have eagerly pursued
the other intentionally eluded.
“Women,” Shine had often said, “don’t mean a man no good. Always want
sump’m. Always got they hands out. Gimme. Any bird that really falls for
a sheba is one half sap and th’ other half sucker.”
It did not matter that he had derived this conclusion from observation
rather than experience. He believed it firmly. And so it was that
triumph to Patmore would have been defeat to Shine, and the former’s
reputation was to the latter nothing at all to brag about. Indeed, this
reputation of Pat’s was one of the things about him that Shine most
disliked. It summed Pat up as less of a man to be so much of a sap.
A new dance began, and from the orchestra, keyed up now to its very
low-downest, there issued a current of leisurely, compelling rhythm, a
rising tide of rhythm which floated couple after couple off the bank
into midstream. Presently Linda was left alone at her table.
Henry Patmore went forward. To request the dance, less accomplished
beaus would have simply extended a hand toward the girl, an audacious
gesture, bordering on the presumptuous. Not Patmore. In addition to the
slightly extended hand, he bent forward in a most ingratiating bow,
smiled the metallic smile which revealed so much of his wealth, and said
earnestly:
“Would you do me the favor, miss?”
Linda, however, knew how to dismiss strangers. She looked up, smiled
very, very sweetly, and said with great finality, “No, thanks.”
The average sheik would have passed on. Patmore was not the average
sheik; and perhaps Linda had smiled a little too sweetly to convey
sarcasm. Said he:
“The next one, maybe?”
“I’m leaving after this one,” the girl lied easily.
“My, my. What a shame, both of us wastin’ it.” He drew up a chair and
sat down, his manner indicating clearly that though she might not dance
with him, she could have no objection to his sharing her table. And he
casually continued the conversation.
“You got a good chance to win the costume prize,” he observed.
Linda silently annoyed, was on the point of rising to leave. His next
remark detained her:
“I’m one o’ the judges, y’ know.”
Her brows went up and he knew that now, at least, he had her interest.
It quickened his own. A girl who was wise would have answered, “Yea—and
I’m Norma Talmadge.”
Linda, instead, exclaimed without irony, “Are they really going to give
prizes?”
Patmore grinned within, congratulating himself on his own good fortune.
“Ripe in the body and green in the head. What more could a man want?”
“No lie,” he assured her. “And I’m gonna vote for you—unanimous.”
Of course, if you happened to be wearing a costume and unexpectedly
found a prize in sight, there was no sense in throwing a chance away.
And if this courteous man was a judge, that meant he must be Somebody
and not just an ordinary masher as she had supposed.
“I been noticin’ you specially,” he said.
She was decently silent.
“That’s why I ast you to dance. Wanted to find out all about you.” He
took out his business address-book, which contained the names and
addresses of many prominent Harlemites, and wrote the words which he
repeated after her aloud:
“Miss Linda Young. Three hundred and nine Court Avenue, Washington
Heights.’ Fine. Fine. Miss Young, the first prize is twenty-five
dollars, and it’s as good as yours right now.”
“Oh, no——”
“‘Deed so. Now listen, Miss Young. My name is Patmore—Henry Patmore—and
we might jes’ as well be friends. And if you’ll finish this dance with
me, I’ll see that th’ other judges gets a good look at you.”
Shine, several yards away, could hear nothing that was said, but he saw
the whole thing: first, the girl’s obvious reaction to being approached
by a stranger; despite this, the ease with which she had been engaged in
conversation; then the promptness with which she had given over her name
and address to be written in the new friend’s notebook. Now he saw her
smile and rise and let Patmore steer her to the dance floor. In a moment
more the pair was engulfed in the stream.
The scene occasioned in Shine a curious reaction: not an intensification
of his contempt for Patmore, as might have been expected, but an
unaccountably violent revulsion of feeling toward the girl. His
inordinate admiration turned to equally inordinate scorn.
“As easy as that!” he scowled. “Well, I be damned!”
IX
Of course, he now fell back on his own unfailing gospel.
“See?” said he to the cock-eyed world, “that jes’ goes to show y’, see?
One mo’ sheba, that’s all. Mo’ different they look, less different they
are. Bet he offered her a stick o’ candy or sump’m. … And here I come
near gettin’ excited jes’ lookin’ at her. Can y’ beat it?”
But though this might be only one more instance of a far-reaching
general truth, somehow the cynic did not dismiss it with customary
casualness. As the evening progressed, he admitted this to himself,
indeed could not deny it. For even after he had danced through “Do it,
Daddy,” with Babe Merrimac, who vamped him desperately without avail,
and through a slow and easy, somewhat disturbing “Shake That Thing” with
the voluptuous Lottie Buttsby, the earlier incident still stuck fast in
his mind. Babe and Lottie both complained of finding him even less
enthusiastic than usual; he was, they avowed, downright leaden, and
Lottie specified precisely where anyone interested could find the lead.
But neither succeeded in bantering him into promising to see her safely
home after the shout.
He caught sight of Linda occasionally, dancing with boys, nice,
Sunday-Schoolish boys he did not know, and he blamed these occasional
views of her for the persistence in his mind of what he had seen. He
began to resent that persistence:
“What the hell I keep thinkin’ ’bout that for?”
Then, by way of excuse, “Well she sho’ is good to look at. Ain’ no sense
in a woman bein’ that good-lookin’. Ain’ no excuse for it. Dangerous,
what I mean. Ought to be locked up somewheres where she couldn’ do so
much harm.”
He encountered Jinx and Bubber and they did nothing to help him forget.
“Boy!” exclaimed Bubber, “’member that sheba we seen that mornin’ on
Court Avenue?”
Shine grunted assent.
“She’s right hyeh at d’belly-rub to-night, big boy. Sharp out this
world. We jes’ seen ’uh—right over yonder. Great Gordon Gin—talk about
one red hot mamma! Dressed like a fortune-teller—wish she’d tell mine.
Anything she say ’d be aw-right with me. Tell me I go’n’ die tomorrer,
I’d go right on and die happy.”
“I mean,” Jinx agreed. “And when I was dead and buried, all she’d have
to do ’d be walk over my grave, see?—and damn if I wouldn’t git up and
follow ’uh. Boy, she’s got what it takes, and papa don’ mean maybe!”
“She’s the owl’s bow’ls,” Bubber epitomized.
Shine looked at them scornfully. “You guys,” he observed, “mus’ both
have glass eyes.”
When he had glumly departed, they looked at each other a long time
solemnly; then they grinned and finally laughed aloud.
“What’s a matter with my boy?” Jinx wanted to know.
“Nothin’. She jes’ done put d’ locks on ’im, thass all.”
“Nothin’ different. And then up and give him lots o’ air.”
“Seems lak,” Bubber grew serious, “our boy has been smote sho’ ’nuff,
though, don’ it?”
“Smit,” corrected Jinx.
“Smote.”
“Smit.”
“What you know ’bout language?”
“Mo’ ’n you. Don’ nobody talk language down yo’ home in South Ca’lina.”
“What they talk, then?”
“Don’ talk ’tall. Jes’ grunt.”
“Yea—and so did that man grunt what run you out o’ Virginia, too.”
“Thass aw right ’bout that. Fact is, ev’y time you forgit you up nawth,
you start gruntin’ in yo’ native language.”
“Maybe. But what I mean, you don’ never forgit you up nawth—and ain’
nobody never heard you sing that song ’bout ‘Carry Me Back to Old
Virginny’ neither.”
“D’ word is smit.”
“Smote.”
“Smit, I say.”
“Listen, squirrel-fodder. When you git a letter in yo’ mail what
somebody write y’, it’s wrote, ain’t it?”
“You listen, Oscar. When you git a hole in yo’ hiney where some dog bite
y’, you bit, ain’t y’?”
The debate between these two was no more undecided than another,
conducted within the mind of Joshua Jones. The question at issue was
this: If Henry Patmore had so easily picked up the girl, why should not
he pick her up also? Or—why should he?
On the one side were all the customary objections of his avowed attitude
toward women. On the other were a number of obscure things, imponderable
as vapor, but just as present and annoying: an impulse to win her favor
just to have the pleasure of discarding it, compensating somewhat thus
for his own recent disillusion; a plaguing curiosity to observe the girl
at close range and satisfy the suspicion that she couldn’t be all that
she seemed to be at a distance; a thought of riling Patmore by outdoing
him at his own game and robbing him of this, his latest triumph; these
but the half-conscious excuses, really, for a far simpler, unadmitted
urge: the unquestionably compelling attractiveness of the girl herself.
This debate terminated suddenly and decisively. Linda finished a dance
with one of the Sunday-School boys, and now, completely bored, shoed him
off into the crowd, insisting that otherwise the following dance would
begin before he could find his next partner. She came now unaccompanied
toward the low terrace, reaching it just as the orchestra struck up a
new number. Here she and Shine met face to face and the argument was
settled; she was alone, she was at hand, and a new dance was beginning.
Their eyes met and he grinned and said:
“Didn’t you promise me this one?”
It was a good grin, wide, honest-looking, a trifle amused, a trifle
audacious. His chin assumed more than its usual challenge, and the flash
of his teeth set up twinkling echoes in his eyes. It was a perfectly
spontaneous, disarming grin and it ought to have turned the trick. But
it failed.
The girl looked at him a moment at first surprised, then puzzled; then
with a little smile of comprehension and disdain, brushed past him
without a word.
The superiority of that smile was far and away more telling and
convincing than any scornful toss of the head or sneer or gesture of
anger could have been. It placed the notion of dancing with him beyond
anger, resentment, or contempt. It stamped such a possibility as too
absurd to be aught but a trifle amusing. And it raised Shine’s
temperature.
On the impulse of his anger he turned and followed her the short
distance to her table, and when she sat down and looked up, there he
was. She was mildly astonished.
“Wrong number,” she said briefly and smiled that smile again.
He sat down and put his arms on the table and leaned forward as she drew
back in surprise. He spoke very gravely, and his voice, though low,
suffered no loss of clarity by reason of the bedlam ’round about; indeed
the merry confusion seemed to lend them a certain seclusion.
“Listen, Long Distance—who you kiddin’?”
“Wrong number, I said,” the girl repeated less generously and pushed
back her chair to rise.
“One moment please, operator,” returned Shine. “What number’d you think
I was callin’?”
“The number on that policeman’s badge,” she said, although “that
policeman” was nowhere in sight.
“Where?” He looked about unconcernedly.
“Or—one of the officials.”
“Officials?”
“Yes officials!”
“Oh. They all friends o’ mine.”
“Mr. Henry Patmore, I suppose?”
“Who?”
“Henry Patmore.” She knew that would settle him.
“Pat? … Well I take it back. I know him well but he ain’t no friend o’
mine.”
There was but one way to keep him from imperturbably trailing her the
rest of the evening; she had recourse to insult:
“No—he wouldn’t be.”
That went wide. “What official is he—official bootlegger?”
“He’s a judge—and a gentleman.”
“Judge? Judge of what?”
“Of costumes—and of people that try to be sheiks.”
He looked at her as she sat on the edge of the chair, a bird poised,
postponing flight only for one last jab at the snake; and instead of
laughing aloud at what she had said about Patmore, he scowled and
muttered, “Judge. Humph. So that was his jive. Huh. Judge.”
This piqued her curiosity and further delayed her departure. “Yes,
judge.”
“What else did he tell y’?”
“Nothing else about himself—but a whole lot about you.”
“Me?”
“Yes you.”
“Me? How he come to——?”
“I saw you looking and asked him.” She rose at last. “I promised him
this dance, if?”—no missing the sarcasm this time—“if you will excuse
me.”
“No—wait a minute—listen.” He too was standing now, towering over her,
leaning a trifle toward her, and perhaps less composed than he’d ever
been in his life in the company of a girl. If she had been interested
enough to ask Pat about him, there was no sense in releasing her now so
easily, just because she was playing tight. Or maybe she wasn’t playing.
Maybe she was scared. “Listen—I admit I got you all wrong. But it
looked——Listen. I’m standin’ over there, see? And Pat comes up and puts
on his jive—anybody can see you don’ know ’im. But you lap it up. You
swallow it whole. I mean that’s the way it looked. Naturally I figger I
can get away too, see? Y’ can’t kill me f’ that, can y’?”
From Shine this was abject apology. Babe would have taken it so, or
Lottie, and been delighted and amazed. But Linda, to whom his
implication was insult, stiffened as if something unclean had touched
her, while her eyes dilated with anger and resentment. Then her body
relaxed into an attitude of casual contempt and her look became tranquil
scorn. She said quietly, as if verifying a memory:
“Mr. Patmore said you were just a dirty rat.”
At first the words merely stuck in his ears unrealized and meaningless,
like the monotonous pulse of the orchestra’s bass drum. Then suddenly,
as if their beating had finally broken through a wall, they burst full
into consciousness and throbbed in his head like pain.
He stood quite still, experiencing new and terrible feelings. Rat. Well
enough from an equal—but from this girl——Rat. Dirty rat. Patmore said
you were just a dirty rat.
Linda saw the change come over his face; saw the brows contract, the
eyes gleam, the jaws tighten, the lips set; saw his body go taut like a
rope under tension and the bronze skin lose its life and turn dirty
copper. Linda had not the sophistication nor the cultivated
self-protective cruelty of most beautiful women. She did not see that
she had achieved her purpose, had effected a serious wound, and could
now perhaps go on her way unafraid. She saw only that her thrust had
gone too deep and said impulsively:
“Oh, I’m sorry—I didn’t really mean that——”
Then in a flutter of contrition and fright she whirled about and fled.
For yet a while longer he did not move. Music, dancing,
laughter—tumultuous silence, uproarious, crowded solitude. Presently he
was aware of a voice periodically snarling “R-r-rat!” and after a while
realized that the trap-drummer was executing a series of rolls each
swelling to a terminal snap like the epithet. “R-r-rat!”
That woke him. The stupor had been the recession of a wave, withdrawing
only to gather new impetus. Now again it rushed over him, hot and
impelling. He looked about a little madly and very grimly, and he said
aloud:
“Judge. Hmph. Show me that judge. I’m go’n’ give ’im sump’m to judge.”
X
Upstairs in the box of J. Pennington Potter, who was one of the dozen
vice-presidents of the General Improvement Association, an incredibly
ill-chosen variety of personalities squirmed. It was J. Pennington
Potter’s conviction that only admixture produced harmony between races.
He argued quite logically. Prejudice and misunderstanding were due to
mutual ignorance and ignorance due to silence. This silence must be
broken. How break it save by acquaintanceship—how acquaint save by
admixture? Social admixture—there was the solution to all the problems
of race.
And so he proceeded to admix. There was himself, proud, loud, and
pompous, and his wife, round, brown, and expansile, who always seemed
bursting with something to say, but had never been known to say it; a
woman so inflated with her husband’s bombast that one felt she’d
collapse at a single thrust. There was the Hon. Buckram Byle, an
ex-alderman from the twenty-ninth district, whose presence was intended
to give the party some notion of the dignity of a Negro public servant.
This he assuredly did, his habit being to stand apart, alone, with
folded arms, motionless, silent, scowling, in the deeps of meditation.
But few suspected the real basis of this air: that Mr. Byle was simply
very angry at his young and pretty wife, Nora, who had managed to elude
his jealously watchful eye all evening; and that the scowl, as usual,
evidenced his resolution to take her straight home the moment she should
reappear.
There was Noel Dunn, the Nordic editor of an anti-Nordic journal, who
missed no item of scene or conversation that he thought he could use for
copy. Dunn’s readers gobbled up pro-Negro pieces, not because they were
pro-Negro so much as because they were anti-White, and he and Mrs. Dunn
were frequent visitors to Harlem, finding the Pennington Potters
convenient wedges in effecting several profitable entrances.
The Potters were very proud of this friendship, and J. Pennington never
missed a chance to mention, parenthetically of course, that Mr. and
Mrs. Noel Dunn were up to dinner the night before last. The Dunns were
known among their friends to mention these excursions also, but not at
all parenthetically. The Dunns always explained elaborately about the
“wealth of material” to be found in Negro Harlem, and they punctuated
their apologies with different intonations of the word “marvelous.”
Everything in Harlem, to the Dunns, was simply “marvelous!”
A friend of the Dunns, one Tony Nayle, who was visiting Harlem for the
first time, was absent from the box at the moment. He had found the
music and Nora Byle an irresistible combination; and Nora admitted later
that she had continued dancing with him not merely to aggravate her
jealous spouse, but also to verify what at first she could hardly
believe. Nora always insisted that fays danced with a rhythm all their
own, if any. She found Tony Nayle to be the first fay partner she’d ever
known, so she said, to dance as though he was paying any attention to
the music at all.
And finally, side by side in the front of the box, sat Fred Merrit and
Miss Agatha Cramp.
It would have been enough to kill the spirit of any party just to have
the inarticulate Mrs. Potter as its hostess; enough to distress any
company just to inject into it a chronically jealous husband like Byle,
let alone bringing his pretty wife, Nora, into contact with the
attractive and willing-to-learn Tony; enough to insure discomfort in any
group to include guests whose purposes were so different—amusement,
profit, uplift; difficult enough to bring together unacquainted,
dissimilar people without attempting to mix diverse motives as well. But
to have put Fred Merrit and Miss Agatha Cramp side by side—this was the
master touch; only a J. Pennington Potter could have done that.
One view only did they all have in common, the scene on the floor below.
“Marvelous!” said Mr. Dunn.
“Marvelous!” echoed Mrs. Dunn.
“Wonderful!” said J. Pennington Potter with a certain air of discovery.
So dense was the crowd of dancers, so close each couple to the next,
that an observer from above might easily have lost the sense that these
were actually people. They seemed rather some turbulent congress of
bright colored, inanimate things, propelled by a force over which they
had no control. The couples were like the leaves and petals of flowers
strewn thick on a stream; describing little individual figures and
turns, circling capriciously in groups here and there, but all borne
steadily onward in one common undertrend. Each seemed to answer with a
smile the whim of every breeze; all actually obeyed unaware the
steadfast pull of the current.
“Marvelous!” duoed the Dunns.
“Wonderful!” said J. Pennington Potter.
“M-m—” grunted the Hon. Buckram Byle.
“Don’t you think, Penny,” said Noel Dunn, “that your organization would
be more specifically defined if it were named The General Negro
Improvement Association?”
“Why, yes. Yes indeed. That is, perhaps. As a matter of fact we
originally conceived the name as the General Negro Improvement
Association. But it was I myself who contended, and without successful
contradiction, that any improvement of the American Negro would
inevitably improve all other Americans as well. There was
therefore—ah—no point, you see, in including the word ‘Negro,’ and I
succeeded in having it deleted.”
Mr. Dunn smiled, noting that the trap-drummer was at the moment very
amusing.
Meanwhile Miss Agatha Cramp sat quite overwhelmed at the strangeness of
her situation. This was her introduction to the people she planned to
uplift. True to her word she had personally investigated the G.I.A. and
been welcomed with open arms. Certain members of the executive board
knew her and her past works—one or two had been associated with her in
other projects—and her experience, resources, and devotion to service
were unanimously acclaimed assets. And nobody minded her excessively
corrective attitude—all new board members started out revising things.
Furthermore, the Costume Ball was at hand and that would be enough to
upset anybody’s ideas of revision.
Never had Miss Cramp seen so many Negroes in one place at one time.
Moreover, never had she dreamed that so many of her own people would for
any reason imaginable have descended to mingle with these Negroes. She
had prided herself on her own liberality in joining this company
to-night. And so it shocked and outraged her to see that most of these
fair-skinned visitors were unmistakably enjoying themselves, instead of
maintaining the aloof, kindly dignity proper to those who must sacrifice
to serve. And of course little did she suspect how many of the
fair-skinned ones were not visitors at all but natives.
When she met Nora Byle, for instance, she was first struck with the
beauty of her “Latin type.” To save her soul she could not help a
momentary stiffening when Buckram Byle, who was a jaundice-brown, was
presented as Nora’s husband: Intermarriage! She recovered. No. The girl
was one of those mulattoes, of course; a conclusion that brought but
temporary relief, for the next moment the debonair Tony Nayle had gone
off with the “mulatto,” both of them flirting disgracefully.
It was all in all a situation which robbed Miss Cramp of words; but she
smiled bravely through her distress and found no little relief in
sitting beside Fred Merrit, whose perfect manner, cherubic smile and
fair skin were highly comforting. She had not yet noticed the
significant texture of his hair.
“Well, what do you think of it?” Merrit eventually asked.
“I don’t know what to think, really. What do you think?”
“It? Why—it’s all too familiar now for me to have thoughts about. I take
it for granted.”
“Oh—you have worked among Negroes a great deal, then?”
Merrit grinned. “All my life.”
“How do you find them?”
That Merrit did not resist temptation and admit his complete identity at
this point is easier to explain than to excuse. There was first his
admitted joy in discomfiting members of the dominant race. Further,
however, there was a special complex of reasons closer at hand.
Merrit was far more outraged by the flirtation between Nora Byle and
Tony Nayle than had been even Miss Cramp herself, and with greater
cause. His own race prejudice was a bitterer, more deep-seated emotion
than was hers, and out of it came an attitude that caused him to look
with great suspicion and distrust upon all visitors who came to Harlem
“socially.” He insisted that the least blameworthy motive that brought
them was curiosity, and held that he, for one, was not on exhibition. As
for the men who came oftener than once, he felt that they all had but
one motive, the pursuit of Harlem women; that their cultivation of
Harlem men was a blind and an instrument in achieving this end, and that
the end itself was always illicit and therefore reprehensible.
It was with him a terribly serious matter, of which he could see but one
side. When Langdon once hinted gently that maybe it was a two-way
reaction, he snorted the suggestion away as nonsense. That he should
allow it to disturb him so profoundly meant that it went profoundly back
into his own life, as it did into the lives of most people of heredity
so diverse as his. The everyday difficulty of his own adjustment
engendered in him an unforgiving hatred of those past generations
responsible for it. Hence every suggestion that history might repeat
itself in this particular occasioned revolt. If there could be no fair
exchange, said he, let there be no exchange at all.
He knew that no two ardent individuals would ever be concerned with any
such formulas, but the very ineffectuality of what seemed to him so just
a principle rendered its violation the more irritating. And in the
particular case of Tony and Nora—well, he rather liked Nora himself.
And so beneath his pleasant manner, there was a disordered spirit which
at this moment almost gleefully accepted the chance to vent itself on
Miss Agatha Cramp’s ignorance. To admit his identity would have wholly
lost him this chance. And as for the fact that she was a woman, that
only made the compensation all the more complete, gave it a quality of
actual retaliation, of parallel all the more satisfying.
“How do I find Negroes? I like them very much. Ever so much better than
white people.”
“Oh Mr. Merrit! Really?”
“You see, they have so much more color.”
“Yes. I can see that.” She gazed upon the mob.
“How primitive these people are,” she murmured. “So primeval. So
unspoiled by civilization.”
“Beautiful savages,” suggested Merrit.
“Exactly. Just what I was thinking. What abandonment—what unrestraint——”
“Almost as bad as a Yale-Harvard football game, isn’t it?” Merrit’s eyes
twinkled.
“Well,” Miss Cramp demurred, “that’s really quite a different thing, you
know.”
“Of course. This unrestraint is the kind that is hostile to society,
hostile to civilization. This is the sort of thing that you and I as
sociologists must contend with, must wipe out.”
“Yes indeed. Quite so. This sort of thing is, as you say, quite
unfortunate. We must educate these people out of it. There is so much to
be done.”
“Listen to that music. Savage too, don’t you think?”
“Just what had occurred to me. That music is like the beating of—what do
they call ’em?—dum-dums, isn’t it?”
“I was just trying to think what it recalled,” mused Merrit with great
seriousness. “Tom-toms! that’s it—of course. How stupid of me. Tom-toms.
And the shuffle of feet——”
“Rain,” breathed Miss Cramp, who, since her new interest, had deemed it
her duty to read some of Langdon’s poetry. “Rain falling in a jungle.”
“Rain?”
“Rain falling on banana leaves,” said the lady. And the gentleman
assented, “I know how it is. I once fell on a banana peel myself.”
“So primitive.” Miss Cramp turned to Mrs. Dunn, who sat behind and above
her. “The throb of the jungle,” she remarked.
“Marvelous!” exhaled Mrs. Dunn.
“These people—we can do so much for them—we must educate them out of
such unrestraint.”
Whereupon Tony and Nora appeared laughing and breathless at the box
entrance; and Tony, descendant of Cedrics and Caesars, loudly declared:
“I’m going to get that bump-the-bump dance if it takes me the whole darn
night!”
“Bump the what?” Miss Agatha wondered.
“Come on, Gloria,” Tony urged Mrs. Dunn. “You ought to know it, long as
you’ve been coming to Harlem. Mrs. Byle gives me up. You try.”
Mrs. Dunn smiled and quickly rose. “I’ll say I will. Come along. It’s
perfectly marvelous.”
“Furthermore,” expounded J. Pennington Potter, “there is a tendency
among Negro organizations to incorporate too many words in a single
designation with the result that what is intended as mere appellation
becomes a detailed description. Take for example the N.O.U.S.E. and the
I.N.I.A.W. There can be no excuse for entitlements of such prolixity.
They endeavor to encompass a society’s past, present and future,
embracing as well a description of motive and instrument. There is no
call you will agree, no excuse, no justification for delineation,
history and prophecy in a single title.”
“Quite so, Penny,” said Mr. Dunn. “Mrs. Byle, may I have this dance?”
“Certainly,” said Nora, smiling a trifle too amusedly.
“We’re going home after this one,” growled her husband as she passed.
Miss Cramp said in a low voice to Merrit: “Isn’t he a wonderful person?”
“Who?” wondered Merrit.
“Mr. Potter. He talks so beautifully and seems so intelligent.”
“He is intelligent, isn’t he?” said Merrit, as if the discovery
surprised him.
“He must have an awfully good head.”
“Unexcelled for certain purposes.”
“I had no idea they were ever so cultured. How simple our task would be
if they were all like that.”
“Like Potter? Heaven forbid!”
“Oh, Mr. Merrit. Really you mustn’t let your prejudices prevail. Negroes
deserve at least a few leaders like that.”
“I don’t know what they’ve ever done to deserve them,” he said.
Unable to win him over to her broader viewpoint, she changed the
subject.
“Mrs. Byle is very pretty, isn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“She is so light in complexion for a Negress.”
“A what?”
“A Negress. She is a Negress, isn’t she?”
“Well, I suppose you’d call her that.”
“It is hard to appreciate, isn’t it? It makes one wonder, really.
Mrs. Byle is almost as fair as I am, while—well, look at that girl down
there. Absolutely black. Yet both——”
“Are Negresses.”
“Exactly what I was thinking. I was just thinking—— Now how long have
there been Negroes in our country, Mr. Merritt?”
“Longer than most one hundred percent Americans, I believe.”
“Really?”
“Since around 1500, I understand. And in numbers since 1619.”
“How well informed you are, Mr. Merrit. Imagine knowing dates like
that—— Why that’s between three and four hundred years ago, isn’t it?
But of course four hundred years isn’t such a long time if you believe
in evolution. I consider evolution very important, don’t you?”
“Profoundly so.”
“But I was just thinking. These people have been out of their native
element only three or four hundred years, and just see what it has done
to their complexions! It’s hard to believe that just three hundred years
in our country has brought about such a great variety in the color of
the black race.”
“Environment is a powerful influence, Miss Cramp,” murmured Merrit.
“Yes, of course. Chiefly the climate, I should judge. Don’t you think?”
Merrit blinked, then nodded gravely, “Climate undoubtedly. Climate.
Changed conditions of heat and moisture and so on.”
“Yes, exactly. Remarkable isn’t it? Now just consider, Mr. Merrit. The
northern peoples are very fair—the Scandinavians, for example. The
tropic peoples, on the other hand are very dark—often black like the
Negroes in their own country. Isn’t that true?”
“Undeniably.”
“Now if these very same people here to-night had originally gone to
Scandinavia—three or four hundred years ago, you understand—some of them
would by now be as fair as the Scandinavians! Why they’d even have blue
eyes and yellow hair!”
“No doubt about that,” Merrit agreed meditatively. “Oh yes. They’d have
them without question.”
“Just imagine!” marveled Miss Cramp. “A Negro with skin as fair as your
own!”
“M-m. Yes. Just imagine,” said he without smiling.
XI
The comments of the occupants of nearby boxes would have been
illuminating to J. Pennington Potter’s party, the box, for example,
containing Cornelia Bond’s guests. Among these were young Dr. and
Mrs. Peter Long, Mrs. Hermie Boston, Conrad White, who was a writer of
stories about Negroes, and Betty Brown, his fiancée. Miss Cramp would
have found their comments vulgar, unforgivable of Con and Betty, who had
a way of forgetting all about the fact that they were white. J.
Pennington Potter would have classed them as “Preposterous!” Dunn would
have taken notes and written an editorial on the passing of Nordic
supremacy. Merrit would have chuckled inwardly with glee.
“Who’s the scrawny neophyte with the J. Pop-eyed Potters?” from the
reputedly wealthy Cornelia, who was tall and regal in bearing and
thoroughly, beautifully Ethiopian in appearance.
“There are two,” said Hernie. “Which one?”
“Where’s the two?” demanded Cornelia.
“One’s off dancing with Nora Byle.”
“Nothing scrawny about him,” said Sarah Long.
“No,” agreed Cornelia, “and nothing dumb. The way he’s learning, it
won’t be long now—that Nora Byle is a dog.”
“Jealous!” grinned Hernie. “After the way you extracted Jimmie Polio
from her clutches?”
“Don’t be a damn fool, Hernie. Wonder where Jimmy ran off to, come to
think of it? Hasn’t reported to headquarters for an hour—Sarah”—to
Mrs. Long, “I want you and that bad-haired husband of yours over to a
little stomp-down Saturday night. Consider yourselves flattered—Con and
Betty’ll be the only other shines present.” Her eye fell again on Miss
Agatha Cramp. “That’s the homeliest woman in the world, bar none,” she
avowed.
Peter Long, who was “tight,” rose and sang in a loud voice:
Oh her face was sharp as a butcher’s cleaber,
But dat did not seem to grieb ’er—
“She’s looking right at you, Cornelia,” said Hernie.
“Yea,” said Cornelia, “and I bet ten dollars she’s saying”Beautiful
savage” or “So primitive.”
Conrad said, “Potter’s got a sense of humor anyhow. Hooking her up with
Gloria Dunn and Nora Byle. I’ll bet Gloria snubbed her.”
“No, Con. You’re the only fay I know that draws the color line on other
fays.”
“It’s natural. Downtown I’m only passing. These,” he waved
grandiloquently, “are my people.”
“Yea—so you seem to think, the way you sell ’em for cash,” said
Cornelia.
“They enjoy being sold,” returned Con.
Betty said, “Don’t you think that Nora Byle has the most beautiful hands
in the world?”
“I never pay much attention to her—hands,” grinned Con.
“All the girls I know in Harlem have beautiful hands,” Betty complained.
“You don’t know many, then,” Cornelia remarked.
“Just look at mine,” Betty went on. “Pudgy as a poodle’s paw. This
Caucasian superiority stuff is a lot of bunk.”
“Don’t let your liquor out-talk you, Betty.”
“No danger,” said Betty. Then, “Say—do you know what I’m going to do?”
“Commit suicide,” suggested Cornelia.
“In a way. I’m going to write a novel much better than anything Con has
done——”
“Not much of an ambition——”
“——and present it as the work of a Negro.”
“Negress,” corrected Hernie with irony.
“Well,” said Con, “you can be sure of two things.”
“What?”
“You can be sure some critic will call it the best thing ever done by a
Negro.”
“Yes,” said Cornelia, “as if that’s paying you a hell of a compliment.”
“And,” Con continued, “you can be sure that some fay will insist that it
should have been more African.”
“And the critic’s name,” said Cornelia, “will probably be Rabinowitch.”
A tall, very blond young man with rosy cheeks, whose eyelids were ptotic
with alcohol, came clambering into the box as if he had six pairs of
feet.
“Where’s my Ethiopian?” he cried at the top of his lungs, peering about
myopically and waving his arms like antennae. “Hey!—where’s my Ethiopian
queen?”
“Jimmy!” called Cornelia. “Bottle that racket. Come here and sit down,
you imp.”
“Where?” pleaded Jimmy Polio. “Can’t see you at all, really. Can’t seem
to get my silly eyes open——”
“Look, Con,” said Betty, indicating Miss Agatha Cramp, who had heard
Jimmy’s cry and was now observing from a distance. “Look at the horror
on that poor woman’s face. She’s just about ready to die.”
Together they looked at the wide-eyed Miss Cramp and together they
chuckled with merriment.
“Well,” sighed Miss Cramp, “Mr. Potter told me that this would be an
excellent chance to observe different types of Negroes.”
“It seems to be an excellent chance to observe different types of
Caucasians, also,” said Merrit.
“Disgusting, isn’t it? I can’t understand why people of apparently our
own kind, Mr. Merrit—— It’s humiliating, isn’t it?”
“They out-Herod the Romans, don’t they?”
“Unpardonable. How can we hope to help these others if we set so poor an
example ourselves?”
“An excellent point. If we are not careful, instead of helping them, we
will find them helping us.”
“Helping us?”
“Yes. Or more. Transforming us. If things go on like this, one of these
days this country’s going to wake up with dark brown skin and kinky
hair.”
“Horrible!”
“Horrible? Why?”
“Oh, Mr. Meritt!”
“I really see nothing horrible about it. I rather think the country
would enjoy it.”
“Well—I for one shouldn’t.”
“But think, Miss Cramp,” he prodded, “how much better off our country
would be——”
“With dark brown skin? I can’t imagine——”
“No. Figuratively of course. With a spiritual attitude—an emotional
make-up like the Negro’s.”
“Just what do you mean?”
“This tropic nonchalance, as Locke calls it. This acceptance of
circumstance not with a shrug, like the Oriental, but with a
characteristic grin. Nobody laughs at the miseries of life like the
Negro. He laughs at himself, at his own pains and dangers and
disappointments and oppressions. He accepts things, not with resignation
but with amusement. That, it seems to me, should be a most alarming
thing for his enemy to see.”
“I don’t understand at all.”
“No? Suppose you were fighting somebody, and at every blow you
delivered, your antagonist simply grinned and came on. Wouldn’t you soon
get scared? Wouldn’t you begin to lose your nerve? Would you begin
wondering if maybe the other fellow wasn’t grinning at the futility of
your blows—if maybe he wasn’t just biding his time in the certainty of
his power? How could you wound a fellow who simply laughed? How could
you be sure what he was laughing at? Himself? Maybe. But I know I’d
begin to think he might be laughing at me.”
“It isn’t easy to follow you, Mr. Merrit. But it seems to me that the
Negro would be far better off if he didn’t laugh so much, no matter at
whom. He doesn’t take anything seriously. If he did, if he worried more,
I think he’d be far better off to-day.”
“Well—maybe to-day, Miss Cramp. But what about to-morrow?”
“What can you mean?”
“Wouldn’t it be funny, Miss Cramp, if the Negro let his fair-skinned
brother—or cousin, to be a trifle more exact—do all the so-called
serious work? Build bridges, dig canals, capture natural forces, fly
airplanes, amass wealth, evolve society—these are serious things.
Wouldn’t it be amusing if the Negro let others worry their brains out
devising and developing the civilized luxuries of life—while he spent
his time simply living, developing nothing but his capacity for
enjoyment; and then when the job was finished, stepped in and took
complete possession? Suppose—just suppose, for one can never know—that
this irrepressible laughter, this resiliency, is caused by the
confidence that he will reap what his oppressors have sown?”
“But that’s impossible. Where will he ever get the power to take
complete possession?”
“Power? Sheer force of numbers—the overwhelming majority of dark skins
in the earth. Together with the—er—the effect of climate. If the climate
keeps changing, or if people keep exposing themselves to changes in
climate, the time will eventually come when there won’t be but a few
pure skins left—— Now won’t it be positively uproarious if the serious
achievements reach their height about then?”
“Well,” she said after a moment, “I don’t think either you or I need
worry over that, Mr. Merrit. It’s altogether too remote. If I can’t see
that far, I doubt that any Negro can. It need not worry you at all.”
“Quite right. Nobody needs worry over any of it—past, present, or
future. Its course is unchangeable by anything so futile as people’s
worry. That’s the joker in this very occasion, Miss Cramp. Uplift the
Negro? Why, his position is the most profoundly strategic on earth.”
“You really think so?”
“He that is last shall be first.”
“Well, that would certainly be awful, wouldn’t it?”
There was silence between them.
Presently Miss Cramp remembered that Merrit had been presented to her as
an injured bachelor. She said:
“Mr. Merrit, these are serious questions. We must thresh them out some
time.”
“I should like nothing better,” he said.
“Do you spend the summer in town?”
“I’m leaving for the country to-morrow but I’ll be back the end of the
summer.”
“Then you must come and see me on your return. We shall have so much to
discuss.”
“Nothing would give me greater pleasure,” he said, and she saw from the
present pleasure in his eyes that he must mean what he was saying.
It gave her a thrill, “Summers,” she sighed, “are so long, aren’t they?”
“My maid,” said Miss Cramp, “is a Negress. The first one I have ever
had, and I must say, the best. She is very pretty, too. She is so
different from what one thinks of on hearing the term, Negress.
Extremely pretty, really.”
“And she remains a maid?”
“Why not? It’s honest work and very good pay.”
“The pretty ones usually prefer to go on the stage.”
“Oh, Linda wouldn’t think of any such thing. You see she was raised in
an Episcopal Orphanage and seems to be rather religious—— I was quite
glad to learn how many Negroes are Episcopalian. I didn’t know there
were any, did you?”
“Are there?”
“A large number, from what this girl says. And what do you think
Mr. Merrit? Religious as she is, she never sings spirituals!”
“No? I can’t believe it. But she must have some vices?”
“Her only recreation is dancing. Her rector seems to be a very
up-to-date person. There are weekly affairs at her church community
center and she always goes.”
“Must be an awfully dull person.”
“On the contrary, extremely interesting. It was through her that I
learned of the General Improvement Association. No doubt she is here
to-night. In fact, I thought I saw her once just now, down there on the
floor, dancing.”
She looked sharply for a prolonged moment, then suddenly exclaimed, “I
did too! There she is, there. That tall one in the gypsy costume—isn’t
she unusual?”
“The one just starting to dance with the big chap in gray?”
“Yes.”
Merrit too looked sharply. Appreciation of unfamiliar features at that
distance in a crowd was difficult, but——
“I’ve seen that girl somewhere. You say she’s your maid?”
“I’m positive that’s Linda.”
A moment’s rumination; then he remembered. Slowly over his face came an
expression of elation far more than commensurate with the recognition.
“Miss Cramp,” he said, “do you by any chance live on Court Avenue?”
“Yes, I do.” She was extremely well pleased. “I was about to give you my
address. However did you know?”
“Why, Miss Cramp,” there was no mistaking his joy, “we’re neighbors!”
“Really? Why, Mr. Merrit!”
“You live at three hundred nine, don’t you?”
“Yes!”
“And I live at three thirteen—that is I will when I come back to town.”
“How lovely! But—how——?”
“I saw that girl go into your house one morning when I was having some
things moved in. She had her own key.”
“Well, isn’t this nice, Mr. Merrit.” She laughed. “I suppose when you
saw Linda come in like that, with her own key, you thought you might
even have got into a Negro neighborhood?”
“I admit, I wondered.”
“That would have been tragic.” She lowered her voice. “I can imagine
nothing more awful. To help them is quite all right. To live beside them
is quite another matter.”
“It is indeed, Miss Cramp. It is indeed.”
“You need never have any fear of that in Court Avenue. Frankly, we are
rather exclusive, you know.”
“I had that in mind when I purchased.”
“And to think we are next door neighbors, Mr. Merrit.”
They beamed at each other, each in the delight of his own withheld
motive, his own private anticipations; a tableau that was soon
interrupted by the noisy return of the two couples that had been
dancing. Whereupon, rather suddenly it seemed, Merrit decided that he
must leave. He rose to go.
“I shall look forward to your call,” she reminded.
“If I could only be sure you were doing that,” said he, “you’ve no idea
the pleasure ’twould give me.”
“You can be sure,” she said.
As he left, he chuckled and chided himself: “Damn shame to worry that
poor woman like that—she’ll die before the night’s over. Somebody’ll
tell her sure.”
XII
He had hardly gone when Tony called attention to an odd commotion on the
floor below.
“What’s going on there?”
Dunn forgot his gallantries to Nora Byle in his eagerness to reach the
front of the box. Everyone else pressed forward also to see, Miss Cramp
bewilderedly, Gloria Dunn eagerly, Nora Byle amusedly, J. Pennington
Potter apprehensively.
“The big guy in gray——” explained Tony. “Girl—yes, the gypsy
costume—suddenly pulled away and he wouldn’t let her go. Don’t blame
him, she’s a peach. Look—she jerked away so hard she upset everybody
around. They’re all stopping to look.”
“See—he’s apologizing,” observed Dunn. “Elaborately. Drunk, I suppose.
Drawing quite a crowd, aren’t they?”
“Look!” Gloria cried. “Over on the side—that one—he’s starting for them!
God—he’s big!”
“This looks like a fight,” Dunn said. “See him move over that floor—why,
he actually leaves a wake!”
“There’ll be a wake somewhere else if those two big boys meet.”
“That’s Linda!” exclaimed Miss Cramp.
“Who?”
“Linda—my maid——!”
“Who? The gypsy?”
“Yes. Oh—however did she——?”
“Poor kid can’t get out of the crowd. Gray-suit’s right on her heels,
protesting. Some sheik.”
A suppressed cry of “Fight!” went about. There were gasps and quick
searching looks of alarm. The orchestra, distant, oblivious, struck up:
“Take Yo’ Fingers Off It.”
Then those who from above focused attention on the little crowd of
dancers around Patmore and Linda, saw Shine succeed in breaking through
to meet Linda as she endeavored to escape; saw Patmore look up, draw
back, shrink, stand for a moment uncertain, as if both eager and loath
to flee; saw Shine and Linda halt, facing each other, the girl
distressed and surprised, the man grim and tense, saw her then fling
herself impulsively toward him, uttering an inaudible but obvious plea;
saw him catch her, thrust her behind him, and turn back—to find Patmore
gone; saw Patmore, already out of the crowd, moving with surreptitious
speed toward one of the lateral exits.
Then they saw the collection of observers disperse, Shine and Linda
moving off together. Couples casually resumed dancing, and the stream,
as if undisturbed, resumed its course.
Everyone in J. Pennington Potter’s box sighed prodigiously.
“Marvelous!” commented Mr. Dunn.
“Marvelous!” echoed Mrs. Dunn.
And after a moment, “Marvelous!” cried J. Pennington Potter, like one
who at last sees the light.
Miss Cramp found that Nora Byle had dropped into the chair beside her,
and that insistent questions in her own head clamored for utterance at
this opportunity. She was however quite unprepared to make the most of
this opportunity, because she had never considered that certain methods
of approach might be useless. She thought she had only to ask, and it
would be given.
Between members of opposed races, however, the subject of race is
difficult, almost indeed delicate. Neither party quite wholly sacrifices
his illusions about his own people nor admits his ignorances about the
other. The conversation, therefore, becomes a series of unwitting
affronts, mutual mistrusts, and suppressed indignations increasingly
harder to bear, till at last it futilely breaks off with both parties
ready to burst—each inwardly smoldering at the other’s unforgivable
ignorance and tactlessness. Here is the hedonistic paradox if anywhere,
that one best learns the facts of a race by ignoring the fact of race.
If Nordic and Negro wish truly to know each other, let them discuss not
Negroes and Nordics; let them discuss Greek lyric poets of the fourth
century, B.C.
Wise observers sense this and avoid the crassly obvious. But Miss Cramp
was too deeply sincere and too genuinely curious to exercise tact. She
ventured the usual opening:
“Your people seem to enjoy themselves so.”
“They do seem to,” agreed Nora with slightly different emphasis.
“You mean they really don’t?”
“Well, some folks laugh to keep from crying, you know.”
Miss Cramp thought she saw in this a personal confession. This exquisite
creature of blended blood must indeed be very unhappy. The personal
implication surely invited intimacy. She said sympathetically:
“I suppose you speak from experience, my dear. How much white blood have
you?”
Nora suppressed a gasp; then said too, too gently, “I don’t quite know,
Miss Cramp.” And added sweetly as if returning a greeting, “How much
black have you?”
Miss Cramp did not suppress her gasp; she merely prolonged it into a
sputtering little laugh and exclaimed, “What a sense of humor you have,
Mrs. Byle!”
“Yes, haven’t I?”
“I was just saying to Mr. Merrit,” Miss Cramp persevered, “that so much
can be done for your people. Not for you, of course. Or Mr. Potter. But
the great majority. You have heard that remark of somebody’s, no doubt,
that most Negroes are just three jumps ahead of the monkeys?”
“White monkeys?” smiled Nora.
“Oh, Mrs. Byle—how amusing——!” But seriously. I think there is much to
be done, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes indeed——”
“I was telling Mr. Merrit about my maid, Linda. The girl we were
watching down there just now—I must scold her severely for that.
But—why, do you know, I had no idea what really marvelous servants they
make. After having Linda I wouldn’t think of having any other kind of
maid. I’ve had Irish and French and German, but none of them were nearly
so good as Linda.”
“The best maid I ever had,” disagreed Mrs. Byle, “was a German girl.”
That Mrs. Byle should have had a maid at all seemed to come as a shock
to Miss Cramp, a shock unrelieved by the casual reference to the maid’s
Nordicity. “You had a—a German maid?”
“Yes. A wonderful worker. But I had to let her go finally. I simply
couldn’t endure her English.”
“Well—” said Miss Cramp “—well—anyway I prefer colored girls to any of
the others.”
“Perhaps because they’re American.”
“American? Oh—well, yes, they are—in a way.”
Nora bit her lip.
“I’m so int’rested in the Negro problem, genuinely int’rested, you
know,” Miss Cramp continued.
“How do you plan to solve it?”
“Well there is the labor aspect of it. As I said before they make
excellent servants. Why not have more Negro servants?”
“Porters and scullions and chamber maids?”
“Exactly. It may be possible to increase the numbers of such workers.”
“I don’t see how increasing the numbers helps solve any problem.”
“Well——”
“Why not try to change them over into governesses and secretaries?”
“Oh, my dear—who would want a colored secretary?”
There was an awkward silence between them which neither the beating of
tom-toms nor the rain falling on banana leaves seemed to relieve.
Eventually Miss Cramp said:
“You met Mr. Merrit, of course?”
“Met him?”
“Didn’t you, my dear? A fine type of American gentleman——”
“Why, I’ve known Fred Merrit for years.” The familiarity in this remark
struck Miss Cramp as unseemly.
“Yes,” remarked she. “He said he’d worked among Negroes all his life.”
Nora experienced first resentment at the implication of this supremely
thoughtless comment, then, conflicting with it, amusement at the
realization that Fred had evidently been masquerading at this lady’s
expense.
“Is there any reason,” she said, “why he shouldn’t work all his life
among his own people?”
The statement transfixed Miss Cramp like a lance, and the swift change
of mien from complacency to unbelieving horror was so violent that Nora
almost felt remorse at having occasioned it.
“What!” Miss Cramp managed a faint little squeal.
“You weren’t under the impression that Mr. Merrit was not a Negro, were
you?”
“Why—I—I didn’t know. I thought——”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t have deceived you intentionally.”
“But Mrs. Byle—his complexion—his skin is so fair——”
“Yes. He even has green eyes.”
“I should never have thought——”
“You ought to have noticed his hair, ‘my dear.’”
“His hair?”
“It’s all that betrays him and you have to look close to see that it
really is kinky.”
At this point the irate Buckram Byle made his presence felt. No one had
been paying much attention to Mr. Byle. And so, as much to attract
notice as to punish his wife, he now called loudly to her that he had
long since indicated his intention to go home and had no idea of letting
her ignore it. Nora, having topped off an excellent evening, raised no
objection.
“I must go,” she said to Miss Cramp. “It’s really so very nice knowing
you—er—my dear——”
Miss Cramp sat staring about with eyes that comprehended nothing, the
turbulence in her own mind confusing every perception: eddies and
currents of heads swirling about in the stream below her; constantly
shifting, insane patterns of color, coming and going; wanton cries,
prodigal jests, abandoned Negro laughter; and the orchestra, remotely
dominant, sustaining it all with a ceaseless rhythm like the pulse of a
pounding heart.
All this the mad accompaniment of a pitiless cycle of reflections:
“A Negro on Court Avenue and I asked him to call—they’ll blame me——A
Negro on Court Avenue——”
Jive
XIII
Despite the genial atmosphere of Pat’s pool room, the substantial good
will of the table over which the vari-colored ivory balls rolled, the
cozy cheer of the green-shaded low-hung light, Jinx and Bubber could not
discuss even the weather in agreement.
“Sho is hot,” Bubber had commented, missing a shot and wiping a
glistening brow on his arm.
“Don’ blame d’ weather jes’ ’cause you can’t shoot pool,” returned Jinx.
“I likes warm weather like this.”
“Can’t see what fo’.”
“Well—we got to work outdoors, ain’t we?”
“Yea—in d’ heat.”
“Aw right. In warm weather you kin find some place outdoors to cool off,
but when it’s cold, damn if you kin find any place outdoors to git
warm.”
“Cold weather fo’ mine,” disagreed Bubber.
“Shuh!”
“Yas suh. We got to wear clo’es, ain’t we?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, when it’s cold you kin put on enough to git warm, but when it’s
hot, damn if you kin take off enough to git cool!”
Jinx pretended to ignore this unanswerable point by bending far and low
over a long corner shot.
“Number eight,” he called, signifying his intention to pocket the black
ball. “Sho loves to make this eight-ball—jes’ like punchin’ you in d’
nose.” And he made it, cueing the ball with exaggerated vehemence.
Henry Patmore sauntered up. “Where’s yo’ boy?” he inquired.
“What you mean—Shine?”
“Don’ mean his brother.”
“Hell,” said Bubber. “Ain’ see ’at boogy a single night sence d’ dance.”
“Jivin’ a dickty gal now,” explained Jinx, regarding the table
critically, with a sidewise twist of his head. “Bringin’ me mud.”
“Yea?” said Pat.
“Dictky?” scoffed Bubber. “What’s dicky ’bout ’er?”
“Ev’rything,” said Jinx preparing to try a difficult combination,
“—compared to him.”
“Mean the gal he picked up at the Casino th’ other night?” asked Pat.
“Don’ mean her sister,” assented Bubber. “She ain’t nobody’s dicky,
though. Powerful easy to look at but jes’ ordinary K.M. right on.”
“She may be a K.M.” conceded Jinx, “but if they’s anything ordinary
’bout her, I ain’ seen it.”
“Got the big boy goin’, huh?” grinned Pat.
“Goin’ and comin’,” said Bubber; then to Jinx, “How long you go’n’ look
at that ball, man? Go on—shoot!”
“Who d’ hell’s makin’ this shot?”
“Ain’ nobody makin’ it, far as I kin see.”
Pat smiled metallically and moved off. Jinx called and shot, dispersing
a cluster of balls, of which not one found its way into a pocket.
Whereupon Bubber echoed their cackling laughter, revealing his stretch
of bare upper gum between the two lateral stumps.
“One of these times when you laff like that,” prophesied Jinx with great
ill-humour, “I’m go ’n bus’ you in d’ mouth so hard you’ll grow yo’self
some teeth.”
Bubber’s scorn was superlative. “You might stick out a fis’,” he warned,
“but you won’t draw nothin’ back but a nub.” He busily chalked his cue,
surveying the pattern of balls with enormous gravity.
“Yo’ laigs is so bowed,” Jinx observed, “that you wear yo’ shoes out on
d’ sides. Better stop laffin’ at me like that. One of these times I bet
I’m go ’n run you knock-kneed.”
“I wouldn’ run that fas’,” returned Bubber, squatting to squint over the
table, “after nobody.”
“Ain’ talkin’ ’bout after—talkin’ ’bout from.”
“From?” Bubber stood erect. “Me run from you?”
“You do have bright moments, dark as you is.”
“Brother, let me tell you sump’m. If it ever even looks like I’m runnin’
from you, they won’t be but one explanation fo’ it.” Bubber paused
oratorically. “Be ’cause you done outrun me so fas’ you mos’ caught up
wid me ag’in.” Wherewith he made his shot.
Jinx solemnly shook his head. “It sho’ would be awful hard,” he said.
“What?”
“Awful hard on old man Isaacs.”
“What you talkin’ ’bout?”
“To lose two good men at once.”
“Boy, you done gone crazy?”
“No. I was jes’ thinkin’——”
“Oh. Thass different.”
“——I’m go’n’ have to kill you sooner or later—only way to git along with
y’. And that gal is jes’ ’bout ru’nt Shine—he ain’ never go’n’ be no mo’
good.”
“Shuh!” scoffed the other. “She might scratch ’im a little, but ain’ no
gal go’n’ put no deep dents in that jasper. He ain’t got no place soft
enough.”
“The hell he ain’t. Know where I seen ’im goi’n’ to-night, dressed up
like a monkey-back?”
“Where?”
“Seen ’im goin’ in ’at ’Piscopal church.”
Bubber stared a moment, then proceeded disgustedly with his sighting.
“What d’hell you ’spect a man to believe?” he commented.
“Swear I did. Not d’ main door. You know that side door—’nuther buildin’
it is, where they have dances and basket-ball and ev’ything else they
scared to do in d’ church itself. Call it d’ immunity-house or sump’m
like that.”
“Yea?” Bubber dropped his stick. So long as Shine hadn’t entered the
main door of the church, the matter was credible enough to be startling.
“I sho did.”
Bubber slowly shook his head. “Bye-bye, blackbird.” Then, still somewhat
suspicious, “Where was you when you saw ’im?”
“Followin’ ’im. Thought he might need some help if he was out sheikin’.”
“Well, kiss my Aunt Annie’s preserves!” Bubber pondered the imponderable
a moment, slowly recovering his stick and most of his incredulity.
“Aw, don’ be no fool. That jigaboo’s jes’ jivin’.”
“Maybe. But, same time, ain’ nuthin’ to hinder her from jivin’, too. And
when two folks gits to jivin’ each other, first thing y’ know sump’m
happens.”
“Sump’m go’n’ happen awright, but ’tain’ go’n’ happen to him.” Bubber
resumed his survey of the balls scattered widely by Jinx’s miss. “Bet
I’m go’n’ run off all the res’,” he wagered.
Jinx, however, had become philosophical. “Jes’ goes to show y’. see?
There’s a guy what’s so big and hard he can’t be had. Mos’ these gals
’round hyeh tries they damnedest to make him—but he jes’ don’ fall. No
mo ’n he fell that time Spider Webb cut at him and missed and nearly got
broke in two. So hard. So hard his spit bounces. Says to me—say, ‘Jinx
you speckled-hide awstrich you, women ain’ no different from men—only
worse. You gotta be tough and tight, boy. Once they see you slippin’,
it’s yo’ hiney from then on—they’ll put d’ locks on you and throw d’ key
away. But if you be hard with ’em, they ain’ no trouble ’tall.’ Yea. And
then this one come along. She’s diff’runt, see? Act all dickty ’n
ev’ything. High-hats ’im. K.M. awright—but not jes’ ordinary K.M.—Dicky
K.M., see? That jes’ ’bout gits ’im. He gives up without a struggle.”
“How do you know he’s give’ up?” Bubber’s doubt persisted.
“Went in d’ damn church after ’er, didn’ he?”
“That ain’t nothin’. I’ve seen women I’d go in worse places ’n that
after.”
“Yea?”
“No lie. And they wasn’t near as easy to gaze on as that sister, either.
Dicky—shh—that ain’t got nothin’ to do with it. It’s that ball-bearin’
movement, thass what.”
“Damn if it makes him run any smoother. One day he’s good natured as a
puppy-dawg, ’nother he’s evil as a black cat. Never seen a man change
so. She done put it on ’im all right.”
“Bet he go’n’ put sump’m on her, too.”
“Damn ’f I believe it. She’ll have ’im goin’ in d’ main door nex’. This
is serious.”
“So’s this,” said Bubber, who had meanwhile run off seven balls,
unnoticed. Thereupon, mimicking perfectly, he duplicated the shot which
Jinx had made earlier with such exaggerated vehemence. The ball was the
last on the table, and it sped to an already full pocket eagerly,
greeting its fellows with a cheerful “clack!”
Bubber looked at his victim with a grin. Jinx frowned unbelievingly at
the clean green table top and, as Bubber broke into his customary
guffaw, stood scowling malevolence at him, as if undecided whether to
dispose of him at once or let him live a little time longer.
XIV
“Baby——” began Shine.
“Don’t call me baby!” exploded Linda.
“’Smatter? Don’t you like children?”
“It sounds so—common.”
“I couldn’t mean it that way—you know that.”
“How do I know what you could mean?”
“Couldn’t ever say nothin’ common ’bout you. Couldn’t even think it.
‘Baby’s’ a nice name.”
“Think so? Well, save it for your sweetheart.”
“I did,” he grinned.
“Wrong number,” she said, but she smiled.
“That was my lucky day,” he mused. “What did Pat say to you that night?
Why wouldn’t you ever tell me?”
Thus, while Bubber and Jinx discussed them over a pool table, Shine and
Linda strolled slowly along the west walk of Riverside Drive. A few
blocks east lay Harlem, black and sullen, too uncomfortable by far for
dancing this hot August night, even the distant and circumspect dancing
permitted in a parish hall. Nearer was Court Avenue, whither the present
roundabout walk led.
Here on the Drive it was cool. Occasional meandering couples passed arm
in arm, and on the long benches that rimmed the walk, facing the Hudson,
still others made love, oblivious and unashamed.
“Huh?” insisted Shine.
“Nothing to tell,” murmured Linda.
“Must be. Saw enough myself to know that.”
“What’d you see?”
“Well, I’m lookin’ for Pat myself, see? He’s jes’ pulled a crooked deal
on me a minute before, and I’m askin’ for ’im. Well, you know the
crowd—only people you can find is them y’ ain’t lookin’ for. I’m
standin’ at the foot o’ the stairs lookin’ for that gray suit. Finally I
sees it ’way across the floor—and damn if the sleeves ain’t ’round your
waist.”
“Stop swearing——”
“That sort o’ cramps my style, see? Don’ want to mix you up in anything.
But I got to have some o’ Patmore. So I’m standin’ there wonderin’ what
the top card is and lookin’ at you. Then I see you don’ look so
good—kinda like a kitten some rough kid won’t turn loose. Turnin’ y’
head this way and d’ other way and sorter pullin’ ’way from this bird
even though y’ keep on dancin’. And I smoke him over, and he’s grinnin’
like a Chess-cat with a mouse—a nice young tender mouse, see what I
mean? Well, I’ve seen that grin before, and I know it like I know my
landlady’s. Only, any time I see a guy grin like that before, I jes’
feel kinda sorry for ’im f’ bein’ such a sap. This time I ain’t sorry.
That same grin turns me cold.”
He paused so long that she urged him on. “You didn’t stay cold long.”
“No—and why? Because the next thing I know you stop dancin’ right in the
middle of a step and look at him like you didn’t know anybody’s breath
could smell so bad——”
“Oh!——”
“But it don’ worry Mr. Patmore none. He jes’ pushes his face on out at
y’, and makes another crack. That’s the one I want to know about,
because that’s the time you jerks away from him like as if he burnt your
fingers. Meantime the kacks is closin’ in and you can’t make a quick
getaway. And when I come to, I’m down on the floor haulin’ it through
the crowd.”
“There’s an empty bench under that tree,” discovered Linda. They sat
down, deep in the shadow of foliage, and during a moment’s silence,
looked out over the river. Directly opposite loomed the Palisades, like
a wide and gloomy black fortress, clear-limmed against a sky dimly pale
with an adolescent moon. Below, the dark water glittered a smile that
derided the callow moon’s wooing.
“Well, I don’ know jes’ what happens then,” Shine presently continued,
“but when I reach for Pat, he’s breezed. Never see a man catch so much
air so fas’. Then you looked like you was gonna cry and said you wanted
to go home or some place—so I took you.”
“I didn’t know what I was saying.”
“I did.”
“Seen ’im since?” she asked.
“No. That’s why I want the dope. When I crown ’im I want to tell ’im
exactly what he’s king of.”
“You mustn’t bother ’im—let ’im alone.”
“I got a picture o’ myself lettin’ any guy alone that gets fly with my
girl.”
“Your what?”
“You ain’ blind.”
“Well of all the nerve!”
“Hit me,” he invited contritely, exposing a rugged cheek.
“Your——” She was overcome. “Well what do you know about that?”
He answered her literally. “Nothin’, but I’m willin’ to learn.”
She averted her face to hide her smile. “I couldn’t have been
your—anything—anyway, then. Didn’t even know your name.”
“Well,” he said with elaborate innuendo, “maybe I was jes’ a little bit
previous.”
“What do you mean!?”
“Nothin’ lady—nothin’. Don’t get so excited. I jes’ mean to say, you
know my name now, thass all.”
“Well, you needn’t think——”
“And now that storm is over, how ’bout the dope?”
“What dope?”
“What ’d Pat say?”
She was silent a long time. The lights of a homeward bound excursion
boat broke through the river’s moonlit smile, but when the ship had
passed, the smile was still ironically there. Wraiths of music and
laughter drifted shoreward.
“If you promise not to get in trouble over it——”
“Promise anything. Spill it.”
“You know he had said there were prizes for the best costumes.”
“Yea—and he was a judge.”
“Yes. Well, I believed it. When he came back for the second dance, he
was lit. I’d asked some other folks about it——”
“The Sunday School boys you was dancin’ with?”
“No! The girls I came with. I asked them about the prizes and nobody
knew anything about ’em. But I wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to offend
him if he was telling the truth. So instead of asking him right out, I
said, ‘I thought you told me there were going to be prizes,’ just as if
I’d already found out there wasn’t. And all he did was to grin with all
those brass teeth of his. That made me mad, and I told him what I
thought of anybody that would do anything like that—and——”
“Yea?”
“Well, finally when I saw he really had been lying, I stopped dancing
and tried to walk off but he held me and people began to look. Then he
said——”
“Said what?”
“He said—I needn’t act so disappointed over losin’ twenty-five
dollars—that he was a judge, all right—and——”
Her voice became low and hard. Unconsciously they drew closer together.
“And what?” he said after a moment.
“Well—he offered me twenty-five dollars.”
Silence enfolded them, deeper than the shadow. It seemed an endless
period before someone laughed in the darkness a distance away. Thereupon
the leaves of the tree overhead heaved a gentle, prolonged sigh.
They sat for a long time wordless, looking across the sardonic Hudson.
XV
It happened the next morning that Linda ran out of sugar, discovering
her predicament only a few minutes before Miss Cramp’s breakfast was to
be served. There were, of course, no grocery stores within three blocks
of exclusive Court Avenue, and while ordinarily Miss Cramp would have
waited without complaint till the errand was run, to-day the situation
was awkward: Miss Cramp had company, a lady from Baltimore, Maryland; a
friend, to be sure, but a friend whose breakfast must not be delayed by
the delinquencies of a colored maid.
Linda, therefore, following professional tradition, resolved to borrow
sufficient from her next-door neighbor to tide over the temporary lack,
and was already on the kitchen-porch going to the Irish girl next door,
when she saw a Negro woman beating rugs in the back yard of the second
house. She had her own curiosity about that particular house, because
she had overheard Miss Cramp and the present guest discussing it, and
she decided that this was her chance at an opening that would satisfy
that curiosity. She would borrow the sugar from the colored woman.
It was thus that she made the acquaintance of Fred Merrit’s housekeeper,
Mrs. Arabella Fuller.
“Drop in any time,” invited Mrs. Fuller, who was a genial, lonesome
soul, not too insistent on the social distinctions between housekeepers
and maids, and who would apparently have had more to say had Linda been
less obviously pressed for time.
“Thanks,” smiled Linda. “This afternoon. My folks are going to a show.”
And so that afternoon found her and Mrs. Fuller conversing in the Merrit
kitchen with all the ease and confidence of a much more extended
friendship.
Without conscious effort Mrs. Arabella Fuller would have arrested any
cartoonist’s attention. Her profile was a series of adjoining
semicircles—a large one for the bulbous forehead, then a succession of
smaller, approximately equal ones, forming from above downward nose,
upper lip, lower lip, first chin, and second chin. From above downward,
moreover, this series slanted unanimously rearward, so that the forehead
bulged and the chins receded, and the general attitude was that of one
caught in the act of swallowing half a banana.
This profile only stated the motif on which Mrs. Fuller as a whole was
composed. Every outline of every part was a perfect semicircle, and so
on integration she naturally became a cluster of hemispheres. There
were, to be sure, unanticipatedly sudden constrictions about her at
points: between chins, for example, at wrists, at waist, and at ankles.
But these repressions were futile, for on either side of each
constriction the flesh triumphantly bulged. They simply heightened the
lady’s agglomerate bulbosity.
Out of the midst of this there escaped on occasion, an asthmatic wheeze.
This confab was such an occasion, and it revealed at once that the
asthma in no wise discouraged Mrs. Fuller’s flow of language.
“Yes, indeed, chile. Any time you want anything like that jes’ come
right on over and get it—we always has plenty ev’ything on hand. Thass
one thing about Mr. Merrit—he sho believes in eatin’. Reckon thass why
he so thin. And it makes him mad as a wet hen to run out ’n anything and
thass why I always has plenty ev’ything on hand. So anytime you run out,
jes’ come on over and I’ll trust you to keep ’count o’ ev’ything you
get.” She fanned her shining round brown face with a limp dishcloth and
smiled as she paused for breath. The smile revealed a shining row of
white teeth, each of them just half a circle.
“It’s nice here,” Linda observed, looking about.
“’Deed it is. And Mr. Merrit’s such a nice man to work fo’. ’Cose he
have his big times and so on, and he like his toddy now ’n then a little
too good, and ev’y once in a while he gets tied up with some woman
’nother, but ’cose thass natural, him bein’ a bachelor and havin’ so
much money. I jes’ shets my eyes and says nothin’, ’cause ’tain’t none
my business, and he ain’ never said nothin’ out the way to me, y’
understand, so I jes’ do my work and go on. You know how ’tis—you mus’
see and don’ see.” There was another reluctant pause.
“Indeed so,” agreed Linda, already somewhat apprehensive at the conflict
in Mrs. Fuller’s speech. It appeared that while Mrs. Fuller’s labored
respiration sought to shorten her sentences, her sentences had a will of
their own and simply refused to be shortened. Linda already found
herself drawing deep sympathetic, but wholly useless breaths.
“’Cose there’s a lot o’ folks what don’ like to work fo’ colored, I
understand that, and I don’ know as I would myse ’f if it had to be some
these uppity colored women what ain’ never been used to nothin’ and jes’
now got sump ’n and think they so much mo’ n’ eve’ybody else. Take fo’
’n instant that Sarah Bell Long, what’s always ridin’ ’round in Cornelia
Bond’s auto. I knowed her when she was a baby—knowed her father and
mother before ’er. Neither one of ’em wasn’t nothin’. Ole man Bell run a
saloon in Augusta till he made enough to buy up half the black belt;
then he retired, got religious, gave d’ church a lot o’ money and got
hisse ’f preached into d’ kingdom and his wife along with ’im. Then this
Sarah gal married this young doctor—least, he was then—and set him up in
business, and when they got tired livin’ down there ’cause some them
women liked his treatment too well, why they up and comes to New York.
And havin’ plenty money natchelly they starts right out at the top. But
I always say the top ain’ but a little way from the bottom—can’t
be—‘tain’ been risin’ long enough. And ain’ none of us so much better ’n
the rest of us that we can afford to get uppity ’bout it——And thass why
I jes’ couldn’ stand workin’ ’round nobody that act that way. Ain’ no
sense in it. But Mr. Fred ain’ like that. Ain’ nobody in Harlem got no
better things ’n Mr. Fred is, and some them things up in the country he
brought back with ’im all the way from Europe and France and them places
’way yonder ’cross the water. You’ll see ’em when they get hyeh—he
always have ’em sent in town fo’ the winter. An ain’ nobody in New York
got nothin’ no better, but it don’t turn his head none. Look like he
jes’ buy things to spend his money on and when he get ’em that ends it.
All ’ceptin’ one thing—a picture of his mother. Least, I think it mus’
be his mother, though he ain’ never tole me so, but he stands and looks
at that picture fo’ hours at a time, seems like. I b’lieve ’twould near
’bout kill ’im to lose it. But he sho’ is a nice man to work fo’—don’
never bother you ’bout nothin’.”
Linda decided it would be less exhausting to do some of the talking
herself. She hastened to inject at this pause, “I should think it would
be nice, working for a man, anyhow. Bet he isn’t fussy ’n’ everything
like an old woman—specially an old maid. Gee!”
“Yo’ madam ain’ never had a husband of her own?”
“Uh—uh.”
“How come she ain’t?”
“Guess she never knew whether a man wanted her or her money.”
“What diff’runce that make?”
“Well, I guess she figured if he did want it, she didn’t want him, and
if he didn’t want it, there must be something wrong with him. That just
made the whole thing sorter hopeless.”
“She nice to work fo’?”
Linda saw that the way to prevent Mrs. Fuller from talking herself to
death was to keep her asking questions. “Well,” she answered, “she could
be worse. Nicest part is she lives all alone and that makes the work
light. But she get sick over the least little thing and she spends a lot
o’ time in bed. She just got over a three weeks’ spell yesterday—only
reason she got up was because this friend from Baltimore was coming last
night. You can’t imagine what made her sick this time.”
“Is this visitor a gen’leman friend?”
“Nope.”
“Then what?” Linda could sense that Mrs. Fuller was merely nosing for an
opening through which she could break for a long unobstructed run of
speech.
“She found out that your boss was a jig, and it put her in bed for three
weeks. I didn’t know what the trouble was till last night and I heard
her talking to this Baltimore woman. The way she’s carrying on you’d
think the house had turned to a hospital for small-pox. ’Deed it
wouldn’t surprise me to see it burnt down any time.”
“What you mean, chile?”
“Well, you know how much fays like to have jigs move in next door to
’em.”
“Deed I do. I remember years ago——”
“Specially if it’s a nice neighborhood. They’d do most anything to get
’em out. Look at what they did to that man in Staten Island last fall.
Ku-Kluxed him. It was even in the fay papers, how they burnt the man’s
house down while he was out. I believe Miss Cramp is wild enough to do
the self-same thing—or have it done.”
“Have it done—how you mean?”
“Pay somebody to do it.”
“No!?”
“Bet she’d offer to pay you to do it.”
“And I bet I’d smack her from hyeh to yonder, too!”
“Well, there’s plenty of fay toughs around here—not right on this street
but near enough—and I bet she could get somebody to get them. Then she
wouldn’t be suspected. Everybody’d think it was like that house on One
Hundred Forty-ninth Street somebody put dynamite under.”
“What!”
“Didn’t you read about it?”
“No!”
“It was in The Black Issue—oh, a long time ago now. Man bought a house
on One Hundred Forty-ninth Street and they dared him to move in. Sent
letters and all. But he went on in. And less ’n a week after he moved
in, they blew him out—bajoey!—just like that.”
“Well I never in all my life!”
“Deed they did. And Miss Cramp is worried and mad and everything. You
ought to ’ve heard her last night talking to this southern woman.”
Linda decidedly had the floor now and she did not intend to relinquish
it.
“She’s from some little dump in Maryland, but she swears she lives in
Baltimore—as if even that was anything to brag about. She’s just like
Miss Cramp, only more so. Well, you know one time Miss Cramp asked me a
lot o’ dumb questions about shines and I gave her a lot o’ dumb answers
and she went and joined the G.I.A. to find out for herself. And for
doing it!”
“Say what?”
“Last night she was telling this other one all about it, and I mean they
just carried on. Miss Cramp says, ‘My dear, I’m in the most awful
trouble—you simply must tell me what to do.’
“This other one is the funniest thing—talks like a jig fresh from down
home. First time I ever heard a fay talk like a shine—I was never so
surprised——. She says, ‘Deed, honey, with all yo’ money Ah cain’t
imagine what could worry you.’
“Then Miss Cramp says, ‘If something isn’t done pretty quick this whole
neighborhood’s going black!’
“‘What?’ says this Mrs. Parmalee—that’s the other one.
“‘And that isn’t the worst of it,’ Miss Cramp sniffles. ‘The worst of it
is that I’ll get the blame for it.’
“‘You’ll get the blame fo’ it?’
“‘I’m not responsible, really. But I got int’rested in the welfare of
Negroes and joined a mixed organization for the improvement of
conditions among them, you know. Well, naturally, I had to go about
among them—’
“‘Ah’ve always tole yuh yo’ chai’ty’d get y’ in trouble.’
“‘Well it certainly has. I went, on a friend’s advice too, to see how
they acted in their own surroundings and there were both white and
colored people in the box with me——’
“‘What!’
“‘And one of them was the man that has bought a house almost next door
to me here on Court Avenue—and Irene, he intends to live in it!’
“And Irene says, just like a jig for the world—‘Well, bless mah soul!’
“‘But my dear,’ says Miss Cramp, ‘that isn’t the worst of it. You can’t
imagine. My dear, I asked him to call!’
“‘You what!’
“‘I thought he was white. He looked like it. He’s blonder than I am.’
“‘How’d you find out he wasn’t?’ says Irene.
“‘Someone else told me after he’d gone.’
“‘Well, Agatha,” says Irene, ’if you didn’t have no better sense’n to
invite a strange man to call——’
“‘But he was so nice, Irene——’
“‘Agatha!’”
“‘I mean—you wouldn’t have suspected, yourself. And, Irene, he swore he
was coming, too.’”
“‘You don’ mean you ackshally think he will?’”
“‘Why won’t he?’”
“‘A nigger ought to know better.’”
“‘Well, this is New York, you know.’”
“‘Ah don’ care what this is——’”
“‘Anyway, suppose neighbors of mine see my name on the literature of
this organization. As soon as this man moves in, I’ll be accused.’”
“Then Mrs. Parmalee looks real evil and says, ‘He wouldn’t move in down
in Balt’mo City, I bet y’.’”
“‘He will here though,’ Miss Cramp says. ‘And if he does, I declare I’ll
move out. I couldn’t bear the shame.’
“‘Thought you so anxious t’ uplift ’em?’ Irene says, and I nearly split.
“‘Well,’ answers Agatha, ‘it’s one thing to help them and quite another
to live beside them as equals. And to have everyone in the street
blaming me—I simply couldn’t bear it.’
“‘Mean to move?’
“‘What else—?’
“‘Move all these hyeh beautiful old things you’ve accumulated and yo’
daddy befo’ yuh? Leave this house he left yuh, where you’ve lived all
yo’ life? Mean to jes’ get up and walk out and do nothin’ else at all?’
“‘But that’s why I’m telling you, Irene. What else can I do?’
“‘Ah’ll tell yuh what else you can do. You can——’ Then she stops a
minute and says in a lower voice, ‘That maid o’ yours likely to be
eavesdroppin’——?’
“So of course then I had to catch air. Certainly wish I knew what she
told her to do.”
The oppression of Mrs. Fuller’s compulsory silence together with the
emotions excited by what she had heard by this time had her in the
throes of dyspnœia. She panted and gasped while Linda paused to look on
with curiosity and some alarm. The girl’s apprehension cost her the
floor.
“Know what you ought to do?” Mrs. Fuller managed to get in; to which
there was but one thing to say:
“What?”
“You ought to refuse to stay in that woman’s house another minute. You
ought to up and leave.”
“And go where?”
“Ain’t you got——” Mrs. Fuller stopped short, struck with a notion. The
notion flowered into an idea. She grinned a half-moon grin, scalloped
with tiny lesser half-moons, drew breath prodigiously, and delivered
herself:
“Chile, I’m go’n need a maid right hyeh. I done told Mr. Merrit already,
and he say soon’s he come in town it’d be all right. Y’see we been
livin’ in a ’partment all along and ’twasn’t but six rooms and I could
take care of everything with a little day help, but now with all this
house it’s go’n’ be too much for one pair of hands to tend too much fo’
me and I don’ feel none too good nohow so Mr. Merrit say it’ll be fine
and to get a good girl and make sho’ she ain’t too ugly ’cause he didn’
want his stomach turned, and bless my soul if I ain’t forgot all about
it till this very minute. Now if you ain’ got no objection to workin’
fo’ y’own people, he’s a fine man to work fo’ and ’ll never give you no
trouble—least, not about yo’ work. ’Cose you kinda pretty fo’ a maid,
but I reckon you can take good care o’ yo’se’f, and anyhow he’s a
gen’leman. So hyeh’s a job ready and waitin’ fo’ you if you want it.”
“How much?” said Linda. “I’m getting eighteen—that’s pretty good, you
know.”
“Shuh, chile, he’d give you twenty—jes’ to be givin’ you mo ’n you been
gettin’. He pays me twenty-five—and says it’s a heap cheaper ’n
marryin’, but I jes’ tells ’im he needn’ hint at me like that ’cause
they’s some things he couldn’ pay me to do——”
“Twenty dollars!”
“Sho, chile. All I got to do is tell ’im——”
Linda jumped up. “You mean it?”
“Mean ev’ry word of it and you’d have lots mo’ time to yo’se’f, too.”
“Honest? Do you think——” An old ambition raised its head——“Do you think
maybe I could go to night school sometimes and learn to run a
typewriter?”
This time Mrs. Fuller stopped breathing altogether. “Do which?”
“I don’t want to be a K.M. all my life.”
“Aimin’ to better yo’se’f, huh?”
Linda was afraid she had made the wrong move here, but it was too late
to change. She nodded with exaggerated vigor.
“Glory be!” was Mrs. Fuller’s surprising comment. “Glad to see it,
chile, glad to see it. Does me good to see one our young girls what
wants to better herse’f. Our girls ain’t got no ambition, no ambition
’tall, ’ceptin’ to go on the stage or dance in a cabaret or some such
thing as that.”
There followed a lengthy dissertation on the laziness of “our” girls, to
which Linda listened, eagerly impatient. Finally Mrs. Fuller perorated
with:
“Deed, chile, that’s fine and I’m glad to see it and I’ll help you all I
can—you can get off mos’ every night—and I bet Mr. Fred’ll give you all
the encouragement in the world—and maybe one them typewritin’ things to
boot. Well, want to try it? You can start soon’s he get back. How ’bout
it?”
“How ’bout it?” Linda exulted. “How ’bout it?—Oh boy!”
XVI
While he couldn’t compare it with the Lafayette Theater of course, still
Joshua Jones considered it a pretty good show. At least it would have
been if the dumb-bells hadn’t jumped up and down so often.
It began with music, a chorus singing far away behind the
audience—outside the church, it seemed. The singing came nearer and
entered at the rear, and Shine obeyed the impulse to turn and look; but
before he could determine what the trick in it was, Linda pinched his
arm sharply and brought him about, puzzled and resentful, to see her
shaking her bowed head with ill-concealed vigor. Thereupon he noticed
that everyone else stood like Linda, motionless, with lowered head, as
if it wasn’t proper to look; and he wondered what manner of performance
this was, which one might attend, but on which one might not gaze.
Into his surreptitious sidewise vision first came two kids carrying
enormous lighted candles. The kids wore black bordered white robes and
seemed to have an awfully hard time waiting for the rest of the
procession to catch up. Then came the leading man, distinguished by his
sedate bearing and singular position, also in a flowing white robe;
Shine saw the lean face with its sharp profile and pallid skin and
concluded that this guy didn’t much enjoy his job.
There passed, following the leading man, a countless succession of
increasingly taller couples, all in robes, all singing lustily without
ever once consulting the books they carried before them: not much of a
chorus, since the costumes made it almost impossible to distinguish the
chorines from the chorats. Good singing though, funny, slow, no pep, but
something about it——
Eventually they all found their places up front. There followed fifteen
minutes of many and mysterious diversions: The two kids playing a game
with the candles—lighting a lot more candles arched over the stage,
seeing who could light the most. That ended in a draw. The leading man
singing a solo with the whole chorus coming to his rescue every time he
paused for breath or seemed to falter. The leading man was all right,
but he sure couldn’t sing. More singing—this was better—with the
audience joining tardily in. Much jumping up and down on the part of
everybody. And now the taking up of admission—Shine exhibited a quarter
to Linda questioningly. She nodded and presently he dropped the coin
into the proffered box, murmuring—“Well, y’can’t go wrong for a
quarter.”
This marked the end of the first act. The leading man rose in his place
at one side of the stage and began to talk. His deep-set black eyes
seemed to fasten themselves on Shine, who soon found himself watching
and listening intently. If ever as a youngster he had heard this tale at
the Orphanage Sunday School, it had been in so different a guise that
now it appeared brand new.
He told it to Jinx and Bubber later, and told it with great accuracy:
“It was all about a bird named Joshua—a great battler some years back. A
general, see? Led his own army, and how! This bunch could lick anything
that marked time, see?
“Well, this Joshua thought he was the owl’s bowels, till one day he run
up against a town named Jericho. Town—— This place was a flock o’ towns.
It was the same thing to that part o’ the country that New York is to
this. It was the works. Without it the rest of the outfit jes’ simply
couldn’t go ’round.
“But try and get in. This burg has walls around it so thick that the
gals could have their jazz-houses on top—not a bad idea at all: if a
tight Oscar held out on ’em, they could jes’ let him out on the wrong
side o’ the wall. And here this red hot papa, Joshua, who’s never had
his damper turned down yet—here he is up against that much wall—and the
damn thing don’t budge.
“Now comes the castor oil—the part that’s hard to swaller but that does
you good if y’ do. Joshua asks the Lord what the hell to do about this
wall. And the Lord says, ‘Josh, you’re my boy, see? You do jes’ what I
tell you and them walls ’ll fall so hard they’ll make a hole in the
ground.’ ‘Spill it,’ agrees Josh, and the schemes is un-shum.
“Take it or leave it, this crack army o’ Joshua’s don’t do a damn thing
but walk around that wall once a day for a week—Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday too. Jes’ walk around, blowin’
horns. On Sunday they walk around seven times and on the last go ’round,
the way they blow on them horns is too bad, Jim. Sounds like a flock of
steam-boats lost in a fog.
“Then every son-of-a-gun and his brother unhitches a hell of a
whoop—and—take it or leave it—that wall comes tumblin’ down same as if
it was trained. Dynamite couldn’t a done it no better. The birds on the
inside have been laffin’ at Joshua for a week—damn fool tryin’ to blow a
wall down, tootin’ a few horns. The brass-band army. Huh—but now they
ain’t even got time to pull up their pants, and what happens to their
hinies is a sad, sad story, no lie.”
But Shine did not repeat what Tod Bruce said from this point on. Enough
to admit that you’d been in a church, without further confessing a
genuine interest in the meaning of a sermon—especially if the meaning
was a little too deep for you anyhow.
Bruce spoke quietly, without show but with impassioned conviction; and
though many of his hearers no more grasped his message than did Shine,
there was none who felt the same when Bruce ended as when he began. His
honesty and sincerity were contagious and the very defects in his
imperfect analogy revealed a convincing absence of artifice, a contempt
for trifling disparities, an impressive disregard of minor obstacles in
conveying a major idea.
“Many a man laughs,” said he, his voice penetrating like his eyes, “at
the preposterousness of this Hebrew fairy-tale. Some of you perhaps are
laughing now. For your sake I am going to say something that a minister
of the Gospel is not expected to say. I am going to say this: that I
don’t care the least little bit whether this thing ever happened or not.
To us it does not matter. Consider it a Jewish legend—a parable of
Paradise, if you will—a myth, without any basis of factual truth. Even
so, the spiritual value of the story looms and remains tremendous.
“You, my friend, are Joshua. You have advanced through a life of battle.
Your enemies have fallen before you. On you march till a certain day
that sooner or later comes to us all. And then you find yourself face to
face with a solid blank wall—a wall beyond which lies the only goal that
matters—the land of promise.
“Do you know what that goal is? It is the knowledge of man’s own self.
Do you know what that blank wall is? It is the self-illusion which
circumstance has thrown around a man’s own self. And so he thinks
himself a giant when in reality he is a child, or considers himself a
weakling when truly he is strong, or more often judges himself the one
or the other when he is actually both. There are still subtler
contrasts: he may consider himself irreligious when at heart he is
devout. Atheists and agnostics—this may be heresy, but it’s true—are
likely to be the most profoundly religious of all men, and clergymen,
with whom it is all so routine, the least. A man may think he is black
when he is white; boast that he is evil and merciless and hard when all
this is but a crust, shielding and hiding a spirit that is kindly,
compassionate, and gentle; may pledge himself to a religion when he is
by nature a pagan, thus robbing himself and his generation of all that
might come out of honest self-expression.
“There is no better advice, I think, than that of the ruffian on the
street, whose motto is ‘Don’t kid yourself.’ But we can’t help kidding
ourselves sometimes, and we almost always kid ourselves about our Self.
And what is our Self, our knowledge of ourself, if not Jericho—chief
city of every man’s spiritual Canaan? And how can we strip off illusion
and take possession of our own soul save by battle? No man knows himself
till he comes to an impasse; to some strange set of conditions that
reveals to him his ignorance of the workings of his spirit; to some
disrupting impact that shatters the wall of self-illusion. This, I
believe, is the greatest spiritual battle of a man’s life, the battle
with his own idea of himself.
“Far more incredible than this tale of the Israelite warrior are the
circumstances under which you and I engage in a similar battle to-day.
It is easier to believe, I think, that the blast of rams’ horns and the
shouting of a mob could cause a stone wall to crumble than that you and
I should hope to find ourselves—to take our Jericho—by some brief event
that shatters in a moment what self-deception has built up only over the
course of years. But it is true. It is not only possible—it must happen
to all who would see things as they are. Self-revelation is the supreme
experience, the chief victory, of a man’s life. In all the realm of the
spirit, in all the Canaan of the soul, no conquest yields so miraculous
a reward.
“I urge you therefore to besiege yourselves; to take honest counsel with
the little fraction of God, of Truth, that dwells in us all. To follow
the counsel of that Truth and beset the wall of self-deception. So will
towering illusion tumble. So will you straightway enter triumphant into
the promised land.”
XVII
A casual visitor to Seventh Avenue that bright Sunday noontime might
have thought, on seeing the released congregations, that many had
already entered triumphant into the promised land.
This weekly promenade is characterized not only by an extravagant and
competitive elegance but also by an all pervading air of criticism.
Hither come self-satisfied, vari-colored flocks from every fold in
Harlem, to mingle and browse, to inspect and sniff, to display and
observe and censure.
It must be explained that of Manhattan’s two most famous streets,
neither Broadway nor Fifth Avenue reaches Harlem in proper guise. Fifth
Avenue reverts to a jungle trail, trod almost exclusively by primitive
man; while Broadway, seeing its fellow’s fate, veers off to the west as
it travels north, avoiding the dark kingdom from afar. A futile dodge,
since the continued westward spread of the kingdom threatens to force
the side-stepping Broadway any moment into the Hudson; but, for the
present, successful escape.
And so Seventh Avenue, most versatile of thoroughfares, becomes Harlem’s
Broadway during the week and its Fifth Avenue on Sunday; remains for six
days a walk for deliberate shoppers, a lane for tumultuous traffic, the
avenue of a thousand enterprises and the scene of a thousand hairbreadth
escapes; remains for six nights a carnival, bright with the lights of
theaters and night clubs, alive with darting cabs, with couples moving
from house party to cabaret, with loiterers idling and ogling on the
curb, with music wafted from mysterious sources, with gay talk and loud
Afric laughter. Then comes Sunday, and for a few hours Seventh Avenue
becomes the highway to heaven; reflects that air of quiet, satisfied
self-righteousness peculiar to chronic churchgoers. Indeed, even Fifth
Avenue on Easter never quite attains to this; practice makes perfect,
and Harlem’s Seventh Avenue boasts fifty-two Easters a year.
Shine and Linda, released from church with the others, might have
overheard much critical comment as they walked along Seventh Avenue:
“My Gawd—did you see that hat?”
“Hot you, babu——!”
“——’co’se it’s a homemade dress—can’t you see that crooked hem?”
“Wonder where the fire sale was?”
“Whut is these young folks comin’ to—dat gal’s dress ain’ nuthin’ but a
sash!”
“Now you know a man that black ain’t got no business in no white linen
suit——”
But Shine and Linda had issues of their own to decide.
“How’d you like it?” she asked.
“He’s a smart guy, that dude,” Shine passed judgment. “After he got
through tellin’ ’bout that bird, Joshua, I didn’t know what the—what it
was all about. Where’s he get that stuff ’bout knowin’ y’seif? How’s a
guy go’n help knowin’ hisself? What’s the grand secret?”
“It’s easy,” said Linda. “’Spose a girl thinks she likes a fellow. Likes
him better than anyone else. Then s’pose somebody else comes along and
she falls head over heels in love with him. Well, see? She didn’t know
herself the first time.”
He grinned. “Who was the guy ahead o’ me?”
And she answered with merry eyes, “There wasn’t any. You’re the first
one. I’m talking ’bout the one that’ll come next.”
“Hope I don’t have to spank nobody ’bout you,” he said gravely.
“You make me tired,” she declared. “Just because you’re big you’ve got
the idea that nobody can lick you. You think muscle’s everything.”
“It’s all that ever done me any good.”
“Did.”
“I mean did.”
“Well, why don’t you say what you mean?”
“Aw right—listen. Here’s what I mean. I ain’ never yet hurt nobody as
much as I could’ve, see? But, what I mean, the first bird gets in
between me and my girl——”
“Oh—you didn’t tell me you had a girl.”
“Well I have—and she’s the owl’s—feathers.”
“Really?”
“No lie. She’s right, what I mean. All ’cept one thing.”
“Yes?”
“Yea. She looks like an angel, but talk about one evermore hard woman to
get along with——”
“I am not!”
“Who’s talkin’ ’bout you? Girl I mean ain’ nothin’ like you. This girl
likes to go to church a lot and it’s near ’bout ruint her. She’s jes’ as
evil and tight and hard to get along with as all d’ other church folks.”
“That isn’t true!”
“What isn’t?”
“That about church folks. They’re the best peoples on earth. Kind and
nice and—everything. They’re the only ones that even make believe doin’
to others as they’d have others do to them.”
“Make believe is right. Look at my landlady. My landlady lives in
church—all day Sunday and mos’ every night in the week. Yea. But jes’
let me miss a week’s room rent—jes’ one, that’s all.”
“Is she the girl you were talking about?”
“Girl! Shuh—that woman’s got a grandson in the old men’s home.”
“Do you mean you don’t believe in church?”
“Ain’t talkin’ ’bout church. Talkin’ ’bout folks. ’Tain’t the church
that makes the folks, it’s the folks that makes the church. Only trouble
with church is, folks ain’t no ’count. All time kiddin’ themselves, jes’
like the man said this mornin’. He’s right. Take my girl. My girl kids
herself sump’m terrible. She thinks she’s the hardheartedest Hannah that
ever poured water on a drownin’ man. But she ain’t. Naw. Say, she’s soft
as a baby.”
“Is that so?”
“Yea. She ain’t foolin’ nobody but herself. Say—that’s what that guy
meant, huh?”
Linda sniffed and changed the subject. “I’m going to change my job.”
“No!”
“Uh-huh. Got a new job starting next week—pays twenty dollars a week.”
“Pretty good for a girl. Y’know I always wonder how come you ain’t in
some show. Make lots mo’ money.”
“Never tried—haven’t had a chance. I was in the Home till I was sixteen
and I’ve been in service these other two years.”
“Well you’re lucky. Where you go ’n work now?”
“Right on the same street. For a man named Merrit.”
“Merrit!”
“He’s a jig.”
“Don’ do it.”
“What?”
“I said don’ do it.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I know that bird. I done—I did a job for him once. He’s funny.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“First thing is, he’s a jig. Jigs is bad to work for.”
“He isn’t. He’s a——”
“Nex’ thing he’s too doggone yaller. Yaller men ain’ no good.”
“No good! Huh—he’s got money enough to——”
“Nex’ thing is, he’s a big-time dickty. Dickties is evil—don’ never
trust no dickty.”
“Well—is that all?”
“No. Worst thing is, he drinks too much licker.”
“Really?”
“Patmore was crazy to get his trade a while back—claimed it was enough
by itself to support him. I don’ think you ought t’ have no licker-head
for a boss.”
“Huh! I can take care of myself.”
“Maybe. But where you’re at now, you don’t have to take care o’
yourself. Th’ extra money ain’ worth th’ extra worry.”
They had turned west, leaving Seventh Avenue, and were now entering
progressively quieter neighborhoods.
“But I’ve got to take it. I talked with his housekeeper, and she said I
could probably go to night school ’n everything. In a little while I
could get a job in an office.”
“And turn dickty.”
“Well, you don’t think I want to be a K.M. all my life?”
“I don’t mean you to be. I’m go’n’ have my own business one these days.
Long distance movin’. Good money.”
“Really?”
The sarcasm was ignored. “You won’t have to be nobody’s K.M. then.”
“You mean nobody else’s.”
“Well, jes’ since you get what I mean.”
“Well, I don’t. And even if I did I’d take that job.”
“Why?”
“Because if I do I’ll learn to typewrite.”
“You sure are the hard-headest woman——”
“Hush—and if I learn to typewrite you can give me a job in your
office—when you get one.”
In astonishment he stopped to stare at her. The expression of mingled
amusement, decision, and tenderness with which she returned his look
gave him a sudden overwhelming happiness. It almost upset him.
“Gee!” he said, his face shining. “Gee—Lindy——”
He had an impulse to catch her up and kiss her right there, on the
street corner oblivious to broad daylight and possible observation. Had
he done so, spontaneously, on the crest of that emotional wave, the
result would doubtless have been different. But the old habit of
hardness, which for the instant he had almost escaped, promptly clamped
itself down on his exuberance and distorted his natural impulse into a
presumably safer substitute. Every act must be sentimentally airtight.
The device he adopted to make this one so, lost for them both that
surging moment to which the girl would have responded.
“Ain’t it somewhere in the Bible sump’m ’bout turnin’ th’ other cheek?”
Puzzled, her own spell broken, she answered, “You mean—if a man smite
you on one cheek, turn him the other also?”
Before she sensed his intention, he had pinioned her arms and kissed her
on one cheek. “Well, turn me th’ other one, then,” he grinned.
But Linda could play as safe as he. For answer she snatched herself
away, and the sounding smack that met his face must have made the girl’s
palm burn.
Shocked, strangely hurt within, gigantically helpless without, Shine
stood rubbing his cheek and watching her stride indignantly away.
What he eventually said was:
“Now ain’t she a hell of a Christian?”
Walls
XVIII
On the night when Shine told Jinx and Bubber the story of the battle of
Jericho, he had no sooner left Pat’s than another argument was on.
Hitherto, Jinx and Bubber’s nocturnal enmity had always ended at least
without catastrophe; to-night catastrophe descended upon them, and the
thing which each sought to divert by the very extravagance of his
quarrel was by the same extravagance rendered inevitable. To-night they
came to blows.
Jinx started it:
“There now, you dumb Oscar,” he said to Bubber with great relish, in a
voice that carried throughout Pat’s barroom.
“There now whut, jackass?”
“Didn’t I tell y’?”
“You ain’t tole me nuthin’—and if you did, it ’twasn’t nuthin’ nohow.”
“I tole you——” Jinx spaced his words for emphasis, “that nex’ thing we
knew she’d have ’im goin’ in d’ main door of d’ church—and whut ’d you
say? ‘Aw no. Ain’ no gal goin’ do nuthin’ like that to that boogy. Hard
boogy, he is.’ Thass whut you said. Yea. And look. He comes in and tells
us ev’ything d’ damn preacher said. Don’ leave out nuthin’.”
“That don’ prove he went in d’ main door,” argued Bubber with overacted
patience. “He could ’a’ come down through d’ skylight f’ all I know.”
“Like a big black angel, I s’pose?” said Jinx and grinned with
surrounding laughter.
“Yea—or a long-laigged, speckle-face giraffe,” retorted Bubber,
swelling.
Jinx grew sombre. “That’s d’ trouble with a li’l round black hippo like
you. All give and no take. When you kid me I kin take it. When I kid you
you can’t.”
“You don’ seem to be taken’ that so good,” said Bubber. “Don’ nobody git
no madder ’n you do.”
“No?—look at y’ now. ’Bout to bus’ open and spatter d’ whole bar room
with ink.”
“I kin remember,” Bubber returned, “when you didn’t act like nobody’s
long lost brother. Never will fo’get that night you got so mad you
started slippin’ me in d’ dozens.”
This was approaching dangerous ground, this reference to their own
reactions. To quarrel over subjects in general was bad enough; to
quarrel over each other might be disastrous. It brought them closer to
the truth about themselves, yet not quite close enough; it did not reach
the actual sore, it only lifted off the scab.
“Well you oughter been slipped,” Jinx said. “Any bird can’t take kiddin’
no better ’n that needs to be kidded and kidded hard.”
The customary comments accompanied this discourse:
“Tell ’em ’bout it!”
“That means fight in my home.”
“Grease us twice!”
“They jes’ foolin’. If they meant it they’d both be laid by now.”
“Me, I’m bettin’ on Long Boy. He’ll wrap hisself ’round Squatty and
squeeze all th’ ambition out ’n ’im.”
Bubber challenged, “Well—you better not slip me ag’in.”
“No?” said Jinx like a small boy who has been dared to knock off the
chip. “No? Well—yo’ granddaddy was a mule—— Now—what you got to say
’bout that?”
Bubber said nothing. Instead he moved toward Jinx with surprising ease
and mysterious rapidity and suddenly Jinx doubled forward from the force
of an almost invisible blow to the midriff. “What you go ’n say ’bout
that?” Bubber asked, looking belligerently up into Jinx’s astounded
face.
Not quite certain whether this was serious or make-believe, Jinx reached
mechanically forward and gathered Bubber’s neck and shoulders in an
embrace usually reserved for pianos. Failing to twist himself free,
Bubber began swinging away at the other’s kidneys, and in a moment the
tussle removed from the atmosphere all suggestion of possible jest.
“Look a yeh!” somebody gasped.
“They ain’t roughin’ sho’ nuff, is they?”
“They ain’ playin’ hop-scotch.”
“Well, ain’t this sump’m?”
But before either could damage the other, Pat, who was an excellent
manager and always at the spot that needed him most, had heard the
commotion from the next room and hurried to the scene. Pat was not bad
with his hands himself, and it is significant that with apparent ease he
managed quickly to separate them.
“What the hell you think this is?” he inquired, as for a moment they
stood off from each other glaring.
“Jes’ git out d’ way, thass all,” said one.
“He been cryin’ fo’ it—now he gon’ git it,” vowed the other.
“Not here he ain’t,” Pat decided. “Look,” he pointed, “Y’all see that
door? All right. I told y’ once before the nex’ time you wanted to
settle sump ’n I was go ’n put you in the cellar and let the best man
come up.” He strode to the door, unlocked and opened it, and pressed a
button. “Come on, if you mean it—— Come on.”
Neither was willing to admit that he did not mean it, and in another
moment the gaping bystanders saw them disappear through the cellar door,
which Pat promptly closed behind them.
“Well, what do y’ know ’bout that?”
“Ain’t this a dog?”
“Salty dog, I mean.”
“Damn if d’ worm ain’t turned.”
“Yea—but which a one is d’ worm?”
The bystanders crowded about the door, listening. Pat, grinning, kept
his hand on the knob, his ear against the panel. The others pressed
forward: a lean black boy as tall as Pat, with tight slick skin and
wide, white, shifting eyes; a thin, short tan-skinned lad of twenty,
with a sharp face half hidden by a voluminous, lopsided cap; a paunchy
old brown fellow in shirt sleeves and suspenders, with puffed cheeks and
rolling pop-eyes; a long, thin, senilely crouching grandad with the
complexion of a mummy and a gloating, toothless grin; a
parchment-covered gambler, a tea-colored card-shark, a khaki-skinned
pick-pocket easing one hand into a pompous racing-man’s pocket, a dozen
others, all surging forward, all listening with arched brows or grins of
relish. This was gonna be good, this was. Them two guys meant blood.
Most of these, hearing nothing, presently fell back commenting:
“Bet on the long boy!”
“Give you odds.”
“Don’ tell me—that jasper can fight.”
“Squatty’ll wear him down, though.”
“I knowed they’d ask f’ each other sooner or later——”
“Too bad now.”
“Thass the reason I never kid nobody—might have to make him take it,
see?”
“Wonder if they’ll cut?”
“Can’t tell what a guy’ll do when he’s losin’.”
“Who’ll move pianers to-morrer?”
“Better git yo’ mop out, Pat.”
“Anybody sent for the ambulance?”
“Ain’ got a chance in the world——”
“Five bucks says he is——”
“Who—String-bean?”
“Put yo’ money wha’ yo’ mouth is——”
It seemed an endless time, but nobody’s eyes left the door for long.
Stories suggested by the present affair began to be told, sudden gusts
and flurries of laughter swept the room. Argument ensued over the nature
of the quarrel—— How had it begun? So—— The hell it had—it was like
this—— Good thing: those two were a constant pain in the what’s-a-name
with their continuous quarrel. Over a woman, hey? Huh—jes’ goes to show
y’——
Pat was called away from his post by some duty in the pool room. He made
sure the cellar door was locked and went about his business, promising
to return in time for the rest of the fun.
Another long wait followed—— Hear anything? Not a damn thing. Fools
must’a gone down there and kilt each other. Remember the night Sam Tyler
and Joe West got hooked up? Yea. Waitin’, they was, in the same hotel.
The head waiter give Sam a check that should ’a’ been Joe’s, so Joe was
sore to start with. Well the man ordered Washington pie, see? You
know—that white stuff with whoop’ cream all over it. And Sam brought
chocoate pie by mistake. So the fay man looked up at Sam, he did, and
turned up his nose, like, and says, “Waiter, I ordered George. You’ve
brought me Booker.” Well, Joe heard it and when he got through kiddin’
Sam ’bout it, ’twasn’t nothin’ left for ’em to do but fight. Brother, I
mean, neither one of ’em ever got over that scrap.—Judas Priest—it’s
been three-quarters of an hour! Nary a sound. Better get Pat—thought he
was coming back so soon? He was, but he got in a argument with Boody
Mullins over a protection-fee. Well, let’s go get him for Chris’
sake—them two damn fools may be tricklin’ all over the floor by now. …
Patmore came hurriedly in from the pool room, flanked by the two who’d
summoned him. He paused a moment to listen, his ear against the door. “I
hear sump’n,” he said. “Wonder is——?” and at once unlocked and opened
the door. Everyone had pressed forward behind Pat, but now they all fell
back, and as a lane opened through their midst, Jinx was seen framed in
the dooray. He was swaying a little from side to side even though he
attempted to steady himself against the door frame, and there was a
far-off vacancy in his eyes that made him seem completely unaware of
those who stood and stared at him. No one said anything, no one moved to
help him, as he relinquished his support and started uncertainly
forward.
He took four or five grotesque tottering steps, then his legs and feet
seemed to get all tangled like those of a fly trying to escape sticky
paper, and rather slowly, he sank to the floor and lay crumpled in a
twisted, senseless heap.
Pat, who alone of all the onlookers could afford to take an active hand
in this matter, started toward that crumpled heap. A sound behind him
brought him up short and he turned with the others to see the short
broad form of Bubber come into and through the doorway.
Bubber looked decidedly dazed, yet not so much so as had Jinx, and the
unsteadiness of his bearing was somewhat modified by his rotundity. His
progress through the crowd toward his prone enemy resembled that of a
pool ball through a scattered field of its fellows, kissing first this
one then that and accordingly zig-zagging forward from side to side;
like the other balls, his fellows each withdrew a little at each
glancing impact, not one extending a supporting hand or revealing a
sympathetic impulse. Even Pat did not offer to catch him when he reached
Jinx’s figure, tripped over Jinx’s feet, and fell across Jinx’s body.
Then curious things happened.
Jinx, roused by the jolt of Bubber’s fall, stirred drowsily with a
movement that rolled Bubber off to one side, and Bubber was heard to
murmur stupidly, “Ain’ nuthin’ to fight about, boogy. Ain’t you my boy?”
Pat called abruptly to a bystander for help, and together they reached
down and raised Jinx to his feet. He opened his eyes for a moment, then,
as if realizing the futility of trying to see anything, allowed his
heavy lids to drop again. They got him on to a chair and his head sagged
limply forward.
As they were in the act of turning to render similar assistance to
Bubber something halted them half-about and they exchanged puzzled and
apprehensive looks. Everyone exchanged similar glances with his
neighbor, gazed at Jinx’s sagging form in a fear that grew into
conviction; for in that moment the something happened again, as if to
substantiate itself by repetition: A shudder took hold on Jinx’s body,
shook it from below upwards, halted in his throat with a little choking
sound that seemed almost to break his neck.
“Death rattle—Jesus——!” somebody muttered. One or two peripheral
observers near the door eased stealthily out. “Ain’ goin’ be no witness
in no murder case—no suh.”
Scowling, Pat stepped forward, seized Jinx’s shoulder, shook him, called
him, pushed up his lids with a thumb. Each lid, released, drooped slowly
resolutely shut. Pat frisked Jinx’s clothing, palpated him, searched
swiftly but futilely for the wound that must have been dealt; swung
around to find Bubber on hands and knees trying to rise, laid hold and
yanked him to his feet. Bubber stood teetering like an exercising-ball,
stared sleepily about, said, “Where-my-boy?” and unceremoniously sat
down unanswered. Pat strode through the cellar door and disappeared down
the stairs.
Somebody now searched Bubber for a weapon, and somebody else said Pat
had gone to find it. Periodically a spasmodic shudder almost jerked Jinx
off his chair. Nobody seemed to know what to do, everyone was helpless.
“Must a strangled ’im, huh?”
“Seem like it—chokes off his breath.”
“Jes’ goes to show y’——”
Presently Pat returned and came into the circle with ominous
deliberateness. He stood for a moment looking down on the helpless pair,
nodding his head in mingled conviction and disgust. Then he held up what
he had found downstairs, a round quart bottle with perhaps a half-inch
of whiskey left in its bottom.
“Give it to Jinx,” urged a bystander. “Might stop that rattle yet——”
“Rattle, hell,” said Pat. “That jigaboo ain’t got a thing but the
hiccoughs.” He set the bottle on the bar counter with a sarcastic thump.
“That,” he growled glumly, “is the only damn thing they hit. They found
a case.”
XIX
The fact that Linda had taken the job in Fred Merrit’s house as soon as
it was available seemed to Shine, like the slap, a mere gesture of
defiance, as a matter of fact rather complimentary and encouraging. But
the fact that she stubbornly withheld her company and had done so now
for two weeks seemed an unnecessary emphasis of her already defined
position.
And because it was for him an entirely new experience, for which his
knowledge of women contained no therapy, his own futile resentment
rendered him daily more and more violent. He worked harder and played
harder and knew that nothing ailed him; but with a stubbornness greater
than Linda’s he refused to admit to himself that the girl had anything
at all to do with the change. No mamma in this man’s world was tight
enough to put it on him.
Bess, the great van, became a willing mistress, and from her he derived
a sort of unconfessed consolation; took to driving her at top speed
whenever conditions permitted: when traffic was light and fast and Bess
was empty; literally hurled her, roaring like a fire truck, along
Seventh Avenue’s asphalt; and when opportunity presented, took her over
to the Speedway for a rattling headlong romp. On such occasions if Jinx
and Bubber were present, they would exchange wise looks and apprehensive
grimaces, and Bubber invited annihilation one day when, on narrowly
missing a coal truck, he asserted that it just wasn’t good arithmetic
for no three men to commit suicide over one woman.
But the zest with which Shine drove Bess did not give him sufficient
relief, left him still unsatisfied, like the deep but ineffectual
breathing of a man suffering acute air-hunger. Hence his whole behavior
took on a reckless vehemence, and whether he laughed or cursed, worked,
drank, or gambled, he did so to excess.
Ordinarily he used two belts around an upright piano to be hoisted; two
belts surrounding the treacherous instrument near either lateral end, a
cable joining either belt to a central metal ring. When the tackle was
hooked into this ring and raised, the two short cables became the legs
of an isosceles triangle, the apex of which was the ring and the base
the top of the piano. This arrangement was absolutely proof against
tilting and slipping.
Now however he decided, jes’ for meanness, to dispense with
approximately half of this apparatus and used only a single belt about
the middle of the piano. It pleased him then to stand off and dare the
blam-blam thing to slip.
Ordinarily when he drank it was with a modicum of caution. No sense
getting drunk down. The way to lick liquor was to hit it and run—no man
was lined with copper. Drop in on one of these new young doctors that
had to write “scrips” to make it; or go to one of these drugstores that
had prescriptions already written and could sell you the best rye right
off at five or six bucks a pint. On thirty-five bucks you wouldn’t be
able to do that but once a week, and so you’d be pretty sure to take it
easy.
Now, however, he told himself he could drink anything anybody else could
drink, and drink as much of it, too; sought out the venders of synthetic
corn and gin and drowned himself in the pale stuff; and cursed to find
that he awoke the mornings afterward without even so much as a headache.
Ordinarily, when he played blackjack in Pat’s back room, he played with
a definite system: started with the minimum stake, doubled three rounds,
then passed. Above all he never hit seventeen.
Now he played with no regard for rules or the laws of chance; doubled
often five times straight, “stopped” the bank at every opportunity, and
invariably hit a soft seventeen and usually a hard one as well.
None of these devices satisfied. Not a piano slipped, none of the liquor
proved to be poison, and at the end of a week, his blackjack stood him
eighty-six berries to the good.
In the midst of these exaggerated reflexes, an order came to the office
of Isaacs’ Transportation Company for the removal of one load of
valuable furniture from Fred Meritt’s country house to his residence on
Court Avenue. Old man Isaacs was off duty, ill abed with a bad heart,
otherwise Shine would have had the boss appoint a new foreman. Finding
this impossible, he told himself that no girl’s presence was going to
make him dodge a job any damn how.
There was, nevertheless, an unmistakable reluctance in his piloting of
Bess this morning. Meritt’s place was only a dozen miles north of New
York, but it took Bess two hours to get there. Once arrived, there was
much palaver about the best way to negotiate the terrain.
“This place jes’ sprawls all over this hill,” observed Bubber. “Looks
like a flock o’ hencoops. How we go’n’ git up yonder?”
The question was settled by uproarious but careful navigation of a steep
side road which led to a plateau behind the flock of hencoops. Here they
were greeted by Mrs. Arabella Fuller, who began at once to wheeze
interminable directions.
Eventually, in spite of all Mrs. Fuller said, the load was on, each
piece swaddled partly in quilting, and partly in that lady’s verbiage,
which seemed to hover about it long after Bess was headed back toward:
“Yes—that goes—that’s a picture of his mother—the onliest one he’s got,
so be awful careful. I know he’d die if he lost it. Take care o’ that if
you lose all the rest. Now be careful—you’ll never care how you handle
things and them table laigs’ll snap off if you sneeze at ’em—that’s a
genuine redwood table and you know them’s expensive—look out f’ that
vase!—the way y’all handle things, anybody’d know they wasn’t yourn.
Chile, that vase cost mo’ ’n yo’ foot—if it break yo’ foot yo’ foot’ll
git well, but if yo’ foot break it—yes—them’s chests and y’ needn’t
think they ain’t valuable and that you can scrape ’em up bad as you
please jes’ because they ain’t go not paint on ’em and got the hinges on
th’ outside; they come from Siam or some them places Mr. Fred was where
the folks is all colored but won’t admit it and you carry ’em by puttin’
two broomsticks through the sides, but deed I ain’t got no broomsticks
f’ y’all to scratch up and break—they have their own kings and queens
and ev’rything jes’ like in the Bible, only I say colored folks ain’t
got no business tryin’ to act white ’cause it always gets ’em into
trouble—where’s that other boy—that big one come with y’all? Why don’t
he turn in and help?—he’s big enough—ought to be ’shamed o’ hisse ’f
lettin’ y’all do all the work—— Ain’t we been had the worst summer
rainin’ ev’ry day and look like it always had to ketch me outdoors with
nothin’ on my head and you know what happens to this kind o’ hair when
it gets wet——”
“Whew-ee!” heaved Bubber. “Damn ’f that woman can’t talk d’ spots off d’
dice.”
“No lie. I ain’t got my breath back yet—jes’ listenin’ to ’uh.”
“Yea—and you tellin’ ’uh she could ride back with us if she wanted.”
“Who?”
“You?”
“When?”
“Didn’t you stop and tell ’uh to come on, less go—we was finished?”
“Oh yea. But I swear I thought I was talkin’ to you. Y’all look like
sisters. If you and her didn’t have d’ same grandaddy, somebody played a
awful dirty joke on y’ both.”
The inevitable quarrel ensued, and this somewhat took their minds off
Bess’ unusual jogtrot. If the trip out had been slow, the trip back was
endless. For out of all that had reached his ears, Shine remembered only
one part of Arabella Fuller’s dyspeptic discourse, and this hummed in
his mind as persistent and unvarying as the rumble of Bess’ innards:
“Go where, chile? Back to town with y’all? Deed I’ll have to stay out
hyeh mos’ another week packin’ things f’ the winter. Y’all go right
ahead, though—Linda’s there and I done told ’er where to tell y’all to
put ev’ything——”
Linda living alone in the house with Fred Merrit, toper and dickty.
A piano is a malicious thing, the temporary dwelling of some evil spirit
that follows you from one instrument to the next. Sooner or later that
spirit catches you off guard and, using the instrument as its weapon,
swiftly, viciously strikes. Either it gets you then and there or is
itself permanently defeated.
Every man who enters this work thereby invites this pursuit. Both Jinx
and Bubber had escaped for a time, but finally each had been caught.
Bubber had lost a part of one foot. Jinx’s elbow had been crushed,
leaving a permanent deformity. These injuries, however, did not
materially hamper their work, and so Jinx and Bubber considered
themselves fortunate; for, as the superstition had it, they now enjoyed
immunity.
Shine had so far gone without a scratch, had never been caught off
guard. It was Jinx and Bubber’s belief that he would probably go on
escaping. What chance did any piano have at a steel man lined with
cast-iron? Shine was just as hard toward things as toward people, no
more vulnerable in the one case than the other, and though ordinarily he
could afford to be more generous and genial than most men, who dared not
thus risk imposition, still in a pinch he was known to be more
unyielding than bedrock. Nothing fazed Shine. “Remember how he held on
to that piano the day the roof broke?”
But to-day for the first time Shine’s preoccupation put him quite off
guard; and so to-day his evil pursuer struck.
The piano was an elderly upright which Merrit kept because it had been
his first luxury. It was to go to the front room on the third floor of
the house, a room which had been set apart as a remote and private
playground—a combination of den, poker room and too-bad-party resort.
The instrument stood alone and sullen at the edge of the cluttered
sidewalk, aloof, superior, apart, permitting the lesser pieces to go
first.
Shine likewise aloof and apart, refused to enter the house with the
others. He saw Linda only once, when first she gave Jinx admittance, and
although he did not allow himself to make frank observations, he was
aware from many a covert glance that the girl had withdrawn into the
inner regions, evidently as intent upon avoiding him as was he upon
avoiding her.
The time soon came, however, when all but the piano had been removed.
Shine’s active participation had so far consisted only in handing things
down from the van. Now he must direct the hoisting and so lend a more
active hand.
It was now that his brooding inadvertence combined with his recently
assumed recklessness to make him do an unprecedented thing. During his
two years of working with Jinx and Bubber he had not once trusted either
of them to anchor hoisting tackle. But now, instead of going to the roof
of the house to anchor the tackle himself, he ordered Bubber to do so in
his place. He’d be damned if Linda should think he was trying to see
her.
“Well—what the hell’s holdin’ y’?” he inquired as Bubber hesitated,
doubting that he had heard aright. Bubber turned slowly, shaking his
head and meditating aloud:
“When that boogy gits evil he gits so evil. They’s so damn much of ’im.”
“Then come down and unsash that winder,” Shine commanded balefully, “and
stand by to pull in, see?”
Jinx would have followed to check up on his confrère’s technic, but
Shine halted him to give further orders.
“You keep them flat feet o’ yours right on the sidewalk and hold on to
this guide rope. I’ll do the pullin’. When Squatty pulls in up there you
can go up and help him take it down.”
So it was arranged, and presently Bubber, directed to the roof by the
red-hottest mamma that had ever smiled upon him, was casting about for
anchorage. A cylindrical airduct presented itself as the most likely
object to use; it was well away from the front ledge of the roof; giving
good purchase, it was of ample height and diameter, and it was
apparently constructed of heavy cast-iron, cold, black, and shiny. As a
matter of fact it was made of glazed mortar and had a hidden joint just
below the roof.
To this duct Bubber made his major attachments, using many windings of
line and an intricate system of knots; and for double security he
carried the line ten feet further rearward to a chimney and around this
wound the rest of it, fastening it uncompromisingly with a second
complex of knots. When he tossed his tackle line over the edge, it was
with the air of one who is sure that at least his end of the job has
been well done.
Shine, on the sidewalk, had surrounded the uncovered piano with a girdle
of quilting, and about this, somewhat loosely, had adjusted a single
belt. Now he hooked the block into a ring fastened to the top of this
belt. Then, with quite unnecessary vigor, he took hold and began yanking
on the pulley. Jinx held the guide rope. The piano began to rise.
It rose in a succession of small, upward jerks, each epitomizing the
vehement force that Shine imparted to the pulley line. That force,
increased by the piano’s weight, extended to the anchorage on the roof,
and the joint of the airduct in the floor of the roof felt and responded
to each impulse from Joshua Jones’ inner conflict, heard and answered
each wanton effort to vent through muscle what could not escape through
mind. An even ascent that joint might have borne, a jerky one it could
not; there was no question of whether it would snap, but simply of when.
Shine’s malevolent pursuer chose to decide this important question: the
piano was just short of the end of its journey when the break came.
Shine, getting a sort of satisfaction out of prodigious effort, gave an
especially tremendous tug—to find resistance vanish so suddenly that he
pitched forward on his face still holding the line. He heard Jinx utter
a terrified “Jesus!” and as he rolled over, instinctively attempting to
clear the pathway of the falling instrument, he glimpsed it swaying
above, knew that a second “safety” anchoring was all that gave him that
instant’s doubtful grace, and heard a girl scream, “It’s slipping out——!
Quick—it’s slipping out!”
The second anchorage held, but the initial drop had been enough to
displace the soft girdle and belt from the center toward one end of the
instrument. There was an instant’s hesitancy, as if to give direction,
and abruptly the belt released the piano, which dropped like a live
thing freed; plunged with a drive to crush and kill, like a beast
pouncing on witless prey. The crash was like no other sound on
earth—explosion, groan, and whine—thick wood, coarse metal, taut wires—a
noise that struck and shattered itself, then rose, spread, and hovered.
It was as if a corner of hell had been blasted off and a thousand souls
swarmed out, wailing.
Shine stood erect, looking dazedly about, touching an abrasion over one
eye with exploratory fingers. And miraculous as a vision, Linda was
before him, breathless with horror, apprehension, relief, with the
effort of reaching him so quickly.
“Honey——” she said, and found that nothing more would come.
“I’m all right— Gee—if you hadn’ ’a’ hollered——”
“Oh—” she managed, “I was at the window—upstairs—” and stood there a
while in silence. Then because words failed, because something pinioned
her arms that wanted to reach out to him, and because her eyes and
throat mysteriously and ridiculously filled, she had a blank moment in
which to realize how silly and impetuous she was, and another in which
to be ashamed and take swift refuge in the house.
Shine on one side, Jinx on the other, looked down upon the wreckage. The
piano lay half supine in a grotesque angular posture, its row of white
keys gleaming like teeth, the lid of its keyboard sprung back and fixed,
like the retracted upper lip of a creature that has died in agony.
Jinx gave forth a prayer of thanksgiving:
“It sho’ as hell meant to get y’—but it’s long gone now.”
Shine remained silent and contemplative.
Bubber came down. He and Jinx ejaculated comments. Bubber came over to
palpate Shine and ask how the hell he ever missed it. A small crowd was
gathering. People were looking out of windows.
“Crazy as hell,” Shine muttered absently. “‘Honey’—— Well, I’ll be
john-browned—”. His hand again touched the raw place over his eye.
“Little cold water wouldn’t do it no harm——” And following in Linda’s
wake, he too entered the house.
XX
That Shine should visit a hospital when he felt almost perfectly well
meant that some decided difference had come about in him. The scramble
which had delivered him from grave injury had had no more serious
visible effect than to abrade his hands and forehead against the cement,
but it marked a conscious internal change which first came to light when
he followed Linda into the house. Shine, the disciple of hardness, would
not in any imaginable situation have been guilty of a surrender like
that. Now again the change appeared when he decided that maybe he’d
better go on ’round to the man’s clinic and let one them doctors look
him over—might even be some bones broke, who could tell?
He sat at one end of a white metal pew, an article of hospital furniture
as uncomfortable in fact as it is in suggestion, and awaited his turn.
Funny kid, Linda. Come runnin’ out there yesterday, scared clean white,
then didn’t do a damn thing but turn around and go back. But “Honey——?”
Yea. He fell for that. And when he went in the house for water—huh—she
was like as if nothing had happened. Showed him the sink and let him
wash his head and gave him a towel—but not another word. Honey. Yea.
When he had stalled around as long as he could, he too said, “Well,
honey——” And all she answered—didn’t need to be so tight about it,
either—was, “You better go see a doctor and make sure you’re all right.”
Damned if he would. But here he was—a whole day late, but here.
Since Harlem Hospital was in a state of transition, it happened that, of
the two internes on the service, one was white with brown angora
goat-hair and the other brown with black sheep’s wool. A blank white
door opened, a patient was ejected and the white interne beckoned
summarily to Shine. Shine looked at him a moment then said: “I’ll wait
for th’ other doctor.”
He settled back in his pew. Sweet kid, though, no lie. All women are
funny, but you can overlook that—if they’re good-looking enough. And
Lindy was sure good to gaze on. Skin like honey—honey with red cherries
in it. Clear like thin wax with light behind it. You could almost see
through it—you could see through it—you could see red flowers behind it;
and when she got excited over anything it seemed that somebody waved the
flowers back and forth. Like in the Casino that night, or that Sunday on
the corner of Court Avenue. Gee——! Eyes, too. Talk about eyes! Looking
into her eyes was like looking into the sky at night—looking from the
bottom of an airshaft: deep, soft, and awfully black, with bright little
stars twinkling away off——. That night on the Drive—Judas Priest!
“Next!” called the brown interne cheerfully from a different blank white
door, and Shine found himself in a clinical dressing room with tables
and screens about and a little bed on wheels in one corner. There were
mysterious varicolored bottles and jars and wickedly gleaming
instruments everywhere, and the odor of phenol and iodoform took all the
humor out of the air.
Not, however, for the interne nor the dressing-nurse who assisted him, a
little round, stiffly starched brown doll-baby who should have been in a
toy-shop window.
“Yes, sir,” said the interne to the nurse, watching as she soaped and
dried Shine’s forehead. “Best looking girl that’s been in this place
since the man said, ‘Let’s have Harlem.’ Came in last night late. Ward
VII. I sure mean to see her again.”
“Ward VII—oh Doctor—not Ward VII!”
“What difference does it make? She can be cured.”
“Find out her name?”
“I didn’t miss. Young. Linda Young. And as soon as dressing clinic’s
over, the doctor—ahem!—is going to take Miss Linda’s history. This
fellow’s my last case. Oh boy—how I love to take histories: Did you ever
have measles, chicken-pox, whooping cough, mumps, scarlet fever? How
many children? Oh no—of course not—I meant brothers and sisters? How
many nights a week do you have to yourself, and how? When were you last
out with the boy-friend? And now you have a pain in the bottom of your
stomach——?”
The interne dabbed iodin on the denuded area of Shine’s forehead. An
abrasion, baring the most sensitive nerve-ends, is nothing to dab iodin
on without due consideration. But Shine might have been anesthetized for
all the pain he felt. Linda in this hospital? Linda?—What the——? Linda?”
The interne finished his dressing after a fashion and bustled the dazed
Shine out, hurrying on past him. The interne was on the way to more
pleasant duties.
Shine, numbly incredulous, followed slowly in the same direction. The
white uniform was soon lost in a tangle of other white uniforms. Shine
wandered on. Ward VII. Oh yes, you want the G.Y.N. service? Down that
way, turn left then right—— Looking for some place, mister? Ward VII?
Second floor north. Ward VII? Right around the corner—yes, you’ll see
the sign—if you look——
Ward VII. Yes, this is Ward VII. Whom do you wish to see? Linda
Young—yes, she’s a new patient—— Have you a card? She’s a ward case you
know, and visiting hours are over. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to go back
and get a card.
He went back to get a card. Miss Linda Young on Ward VII. Was it a
relative? No. Just a friend? Sorry. Couldn’t be issuing cards all day.
Come at visiting hour to-morrow—two to three P.M. Very sorry, but it was
really against the rules. Find out how she is for you, if you like.
Click … G.Y.N.? … How is Linda Young? … Yes. Resting comfortably? …
Click. Resting comfortably.
Scarcely able to sense direction, Shine wandered away through a
labyrinth of hallways. Linda resting comfortably—what kind of a joke,
for Pete’s sake—— He was completely lost when, after a long time, he met
a familiar figure, the interne who had dressed his wound and gone off to
consult Linda Young. He caught the interne by the arm—had a crazy
impulse to laugh at the way in which the interne shrank from that
apparent attack. The interne had quite forgotten him.
“Listen, doc—Linda Young—Ward VII—I want to know about her.”
“You want to know about her? Know what?”
“Is it really her?”
“Really her? What the—— Do you know her?”
“She—yea—I know her well.”
“Oh—so you’re the guy?” There was untold scorn in the interne’s voice.
“Me? What guy? Is she hurt?”
The interne looked him over cynically. “You ought to know.”
“Know? Know what, doc? I didn’t even know she was sick. I saw her
yesterday. She was all right yesterday.”
“What time yesterday did you see her?”
“Early afternoon.”
“Early afternoon. Oh. Well—she came in late last night. You didn’t see
her last night?”
“No. Why? What’s wrong with her?”
“Nothing much. Only some guy ought to get his block knocked off.”
“What you talkin’ ’bout, doc?”
“Tell me—is this your girl?”
“She ain’t nobody else’s?”
“Well then, you ought to know this. Some guy found her alone last night
where she works, see, and tried to—show her a deep point. He couldn’t
make her listen to reason, so he tried cave-man stuff. There was quite a
scuffle. The girl got loose and out of the house, but she keeled over on
the sidewalk before she got two blocks away. Scared dumb. She was
brought in with a diagnosis of assault with intent——”
The change that distorted Shine’s face told the interne he had gone far
enough. The features writhed, the bronze skin seemed to have suddenly
been dusted with ashes, and there was unquestionable intent to kill in
his eyes and the whole attitude of his body. The interne, too late as he
now realized, tried to mitigate his story:
“It’s all right of course—he didn’t succeed. She’s just got a sprained
ankle and a little shock——”
But Shine brushed past and moved away in huge, infuriate strides. Even
far down the corridor he looked the size of ten men.
The intern watched him swing out of sight, then shrugged his shoulders
helplessly. “I wonder,” he asked himself, “when I’ll learn some sense?”
Battle
XXI
Overnight Fred Merritt’s Court Avenue house had become a ghastly ruin.
Every pane had been bashed in with flood, every window frame charred
with fire, each of the gray stone window margins frayed and blackened
with smoke. Yesterday these windows had surveyed the world serenely,
bright and alive. To-day they looked like the deep, dark-circled orbits
of sunken blind eyes.
The place had been gutted, heart and bowels. Its vitals, whatever things
had given it substance, circulation, and life, all had been hopelessly
battered and crushed till they’d shrunk out of sight: One could stand on
the sidewalk and see the sunset through and beyond the rear wall—a hard
broad grin of a sunset, which transilluminated the flame sacked
dwelling, mocking its emptiness without pity, deriding its devastation.
When eventually the sun’s grin faded out, it was as if a contemptuous
amused observer had at last turned aside and gone off on more important
business.
The house stood stark as a corpse in the shrouding dusk.
It was upon this scene that Shine came, less frantic now, but no less
grim than when he had left the hospital earlier in the day. Even then he
had realized that Merrit would not be found at home during the day, and
had finished his afternoon’s work in a silent turmoil. Added delay had
not subdued his fury—had merely stored up a greater potential violence,
like added tension on a spring. Now, when he unexpectedly came upon this
ruin, it was as if the spring suddenly cracked.
He stood on the sidewalk looking up at the looming gray carcass of a
house. For a moment it took his breath. Twilight made it the more
indistinct—he craned his neck forward and stared; looked all about him
to verify the neighborhood, walked forward to a point where he could
discern the number on the house next door—315—came back, stood in a
stupor of unbelief; and after a while heaved a great sigh of reluctant,
bitter conviction:
“Damn if the fays didn’t get ’im,” he muttered. “The dirty——” For the
time being his present mission of vengeance was submerged in the onrush
of a greater hatred, a hatred more deeply ingrained and of far longer
standing; for the moment he glared insanely around at the cool, still,
empty street and at the rows of serene gray houses standing side by
side. They gave forth a maddening impression of distance and unconcern.
They looked quite satisfied. This catastrophe was for them the answer to
all their prayers. Now that it was done, they could go on as they always
had. The ruined dwelling had simply earned and received the wages of
sin—— If Shine could have trampled and crushed them all in that moment,
he would surely have done so.
But as this tide of hatred fell and receded, his original murderous
intent emerged like a spire through abating flood. What if they had got
Merrit? A guy like Merrit deserved everything he got. And he hadn’t got
half what was coming to him yet—not if he could be found—Linda resting
comfortably—the dicky liquor-head——
He knew it. Merrit had meant to put it on her ever since that first
morning here on Court Avenue—the morning she strode past like a million
dollars, ignoring Jinx and Bubber’s comments. “Figgerin’ on a jive
already—the doggone dicky hound. Why the hell can’t dickties stick to
their own women, ’stead o’ messin’ ’round some honest workin’ girl?”
That was the thought he had got from the way Merrit looked at her that
morning— Well—it wouldn’t be long now—let him get one hand on that
yellow throat—just let him sink the fingers of one hand into it—just let
him take the bastard’s ankle in his hands and twist it off——
But this house—— Hell a’mighty—what a wreck——
His turbulent emotions strangely dominated by curiosity, he slowly,
almost fearfully made his way up the front stoop of the house. Shattered
glass, strewn over the steps, crunched dryly under his feet. The
doorways bounding the vestibule were open; the outer door a mere frame
to which angular fragments of glass still clung like monstrous teeth;
the inner a fallen barrier, shattered and blackened, prone on the floor.
He explored the front room, stepping cautiously over obstructing
wreckage, just able to perceive in the dimness the utter, unsparing
destruction; ceilings black, walls gray and water-soaked, woodwork a
burnt-cork caricature, patches of plaster fallen away baring the
carbonized understructure.
“Whoever done this sho’ knew his business—the——”
The floor was a clutter of water-soaked pieces, some still wrapped in
burlap. A cabinet lay on its side in a corner, its upper half bared and
blackened, its lower still embraced in a scorched, wet covering. Little
puddles glistened here and there; a rug protested under Shine’s step
with the squish of a full sponge, compressed. A besooted
prism-chandelier still hung from the channeled ceiling, against the gray
of which it was silhouetted like a shadow of itself. To the rim of the
broad doorway leading from this room, there still hung traces of what
had yesterday been portieres of metal brocade, now shreds of gray lace
woven of cobwebs, the greater part fallen about the threshold, a scum of
soft wet ash.
“This ain’t a damn thing compared to what I’ll do to him——”
Shine moved through the foyer past a crumbled charcoal staircase, and on
thence into the back room. This room, equally demolished, was narrower
than the front, and presented at one side a doorless doorway leading
into a small side room. Disregarding the settling darkness, Shine went
over to this doorway, then suddenly halted, stood quite motionless,
intent on an unexpected sight within that room.
The rear wall was almost entirely occupied by a tall broad window. There
was a table before this window, and seated at the table, a man. Looking
obliquely through the doorway, Shine saw that the man did not sit wholly
erect, but slumped down in his chair as limply as if his backbone had
melted, drooped there almost double, his head bowed forward on his
chest. Despite this lifeless posture, it was possible to recognize the
figure by the gray dusk of the window against which it was outlined.
Shine knew that he was looking upon Fred Merrit.
He stared scowling a moment, bent forward a bit to catch some sign of
life, and was on the point of approaching the figure when it moved in a
curious way: shook like a man with a chill—slumped quiet—violently shook
again. Slowly it dawned on Shine that maybe the bird was crying. And as
he continued to stare and wonder on this unfamiliar sight, he became
aware of something grasped in one of Merrit’s extended hands: a fairly
large picture-frame, out of which the canvas had been burnt, leaving
only a frayed, singed, marginal rim. Shine belabored his brain to catch
an elusive memory of that frame, till it broke upon him that this was
the one that had contained the likeness of Merrit’s mother; the one
about which Mrs. Fuller had warned, “He’d die if he ever lost it.”
For what seemed a long time Shine stood looking, things romping through
his brain. Linda struggling—no—resting comfortably. The God-damned
dickty—what happened? Fays got him—dirty sneaks—I mean they got him—look
at this place. Merit. There he is—what the hell—crying—Jesus—that
picture of his mother——
Then Shine did what would have seemed to his associates an amazing, an
unpardonable thing. There with the man he’d set out to punish alone,
within his grasp, he stood silent, apparently undecided, made not a
single move to strike. And after a while, slowly turned about and found
his way out of the house.
It amazed Shine himself—amazed him and chagrined him. He felt rather
glad of the darkness outside—it was a sort of balm for his shame. Hard
boogy he was—yea—awful hard—the hardest boogy in Harlem. There he was,
this dickty, this guy that—right there, crying to be crowned. And what
does the hard guy do—the hardest boogy in Harlem? He gets a seasick
feeling in the belly and turns around and sneaks out!
He mumbled excuses to himself as he wandered away down the street:
“Hell—I’ll get ’im later—— Gee—y’ can’t hit a guy when he’s down——”
XXII
He was the first visitor to arrive on Ward VII the next afternoon. The
odor of phenol and iodoform that had pervaded the clinic hovered here
also. The beds were repellently white and orderly. There were only a few
scattered patients—ugly women in bath robes and mules.
He found Linda seated beside a bed; a profusion of cotton and gauze was
piled at one end of the bed, and from these Linda, with great
concentration and delicate, mysterious precision was fashioning oblong
pads which she stacked at the opposite end. Her back was toward him, and
he stood for a moment behind her, looking; and if yesterday he had had
strange emotions watching the unaware Merrit, to-day his feelings were
past understanding watching the unaware Linda. Nothing seemed to be
wrong with her, yet the sight of her sitting there in that clean,
sparse, terrible place, bending so intently over her task, made his
breath stop in his throat, so that he had to swallow it deliberately
before he could speak.
“Hello, Lindy.”
She turned and looked up, half rose, sank back; the stars came out in
her eyes, which consumed him in unbelieving astonishment, and she gave a
little catching laugh. “Why—how’d you know I was here?”
He appropriated the chair beside the next bed and sat down.
“Didn’t you tell me to go to the hospital?”
She quickly sought the iodin stained place on his forehead, reached
impulsively toward it, checked the motion. “No—’tisn’t s’posed to be
touched, is it?”
“You—all right, Lindy?”
“Great. Going home to-day. Wasn’t any sense in them bringing me here
anyhow. I wasn’t—I was only scared—I guess.”
“That all?”
“Well—I hurt my ankle—see?” She displayed a bandaged joint. “Not bad.
Strapped. They’d transfer me to another ward if I wasn’t leaving so
soon. How’d you know?”
“Doc in the clinic told me. Told me all about it.” There was silence. To
relieve her embarrassment, evident by her averted face, he assured her,
“He won’t pull nothin’ like that any more, Lindy.”
She was alarmed.
“You didn’t—didn’t——?”
“Nope. Not yet.”
“Don’t!”
“Don’t? Don’t what?”
“Don’t—you know. It’s all right. Really. You’ll get into trouble——”
“Trouble?”
“Please——”
“Listen, baby. Trouble ain’t half what I’d get into if——”
“But what’s the use? What good will it do?”
“He’s got it comin’ to him.”
“He’ll get it—without you gettin’ into trouble.”
“I ain’t go’n’ get in no trouble. It’s him that’s go’n’ get in trouble.”
She was silently distressed, and this reinforced his vengefulness as if
he were witnessing her original pain instead of this that he himself was
causing. He too was silent, far in the depths of a thwarted and now
redoubled malevolence. Just let him get his hands on that half-white
dicky cake-eater—he’d tear him apart slowly—he’d rip his yellow arms
out—just let him get that close again——
But the vision of Merrit as he’d last seen him, limp and shuddering amid
devastation, grew clear, whereupon, in spite of himself, this redoubled
malevolence sagged.
Linda said, “Remember that morning in church what Father Tod said ’bout
Joshua and the battle of Jericho? ’Bout people kidding themselves?”
“Yea. I can see that story all right ’bout the walls; that’s a good one.
And I can see how people kid themselves. That’s easy. But I never did
get the connection. Little too deep for me.”
“You’re the connection.”
“Me?”
“Uh-huh. There’s a wall around you. A thick stone wall. You’re outside,
looking. You think you see yourself. You don’t. You only see the wall.
Hard guy—that’s the wall. Never give in, never turn loose. Always get
the other guy. That’s the wall.”
“Mean you don’t really b’lieve I’m go’n’ get this bird for what he done
to you——?”
“No—no—no. He didn’t do anything. I mean——”
“Gee, Lindy—what’d you think of a guy that claim’ to be likin’ you and
let a bird get away with anything like that?”
“He didn’t get away with anything, I keep telling you.”
“He didn’t miss tryin’.”
“I’m not talking about just him. I mean all the time. Everything. You’re
kidding yourself. You’re not hard.”
“What?” His eyes dilated as if that explicit remark were a sort of doom.
“You’re not hard or mean or tough or any of those things. You’re just
scared.”
“Scared?”
“Scared. Scared to admit you’re not hard. Scared you’ll be found out. So
scared, you take every chance you can to prove how hard you are. I don’t
believe you’d ever do anything really cruel. Don’t believe it’s in you.”
Again that vision of Merrit stricken and of himself paralyzed, strangely
unable to strike. Linda kept on:
“You’re just big. You can lick everybody. So you get away with it. All
you have to do is let folks think you’re hard. That’s all right. Let
them think so if that’s any fun. But when you think so yourself—well,
you’re kidding yourself, that’s all.”
He grasped vaguely for comprehension and captured only excuse:
“Well, you kid yourself too sometimes, Lindy.”
That seemed to kindle something in her that flared and persisted like
fire. “I know it—and I’ll never be happy while I do. Oh, I see what he
meant all right—I tell myself things, things about you. I tell myself I
don’t even want to see you any more—that you can’t be really liking me
after I let you pick me up—yes, that’s what it was, a pick-up—that night
in Manhattan Casino. I tell myself I hate you for grabbing me up on the
street that Sunday. Lies—all of ’em. I liked it. I’ve been wild to see
you. And the only thing I hate about you is the thing that keeps you
from telling me what I’d give both ears to hear. But no—you wouldn’t do
that, because?”—her voice was all scorn—“just because you’re hard and
it’s soft to fall for a girl.” Her eyes filled, and she turned her face
away, biting her lip.
To save his life, he could not utter a word.
“And now look at me,” she said, her face still averted. “Making believe
I’m ashamed when I’m not a doggone thing but mad. Oh you’re right. I kid
myself, too.” There was a long pause. Then, “But I know I’m doing it——
You don’t.”
“But listen, Lindy. The only time I tried to tell you, you hauled off
and bat me one.”
“Of course I did.”
“But now you’re sayin’ you liked it.”
“I didn’t say I liked the way you did it. Playing safe. Making me quote
the Bible—giving yourself protection. Scared. Scared to be yourself.
That’s what I—that’s what I hit at.”
For a while there seemed to be nothing to say. When at last Shine spoke
it was to make a quite irrelevant statement:
“Lindy— I’m crazy ’bout you.”
Still she did not look at him, but she said:
“That’s how I know about you. That’s how I know you’re not really hard.
That’s why I don’t want you to bother—him. You say you’d be doing it for
me—but you could kill him and it wouldn’t give me any satisfaction—just
make me unhappy because you’d done it and kept us apart—maybe for life——
So if you bother him now, knowing I don’t want you to, knowing it won’t
give me any satisfaction and ’ll only make me unhappy, why then you’ll
just be doing it for your own satisfaction. You’ll just be proving again
to yourself how tough and tight you are. It won’t be because you’re
crazy about me—that’ll just be the excuse.”
He went through a good deal of figuring before he answered that. What he
eventually said was:
“Well—I’m crazy ’bout you, Linda.”
Only then did she look fully at him, and again there were stars in her
eyes, and color deep in the honey of her skin. She gave him that little
halting laugh and said, “The walls must be tumblin’ down.”
He wanted to tell her then about Merrit—how right she was. He wanted to
tell her how completely she had dominated him these past days, all the
newly realized illusion about himself that now was crumbling. He wanted
to say “Walls? Tumblin’? You said it, baby,” but habit sealed his lips.
It did not however close all avenues of communication. He reached out,
not fully aware of his gesture and placed his great hand over hers on
the bed. She placed her other hand on top of his. It was the closing of
a switch, the making of a circuit through which leaped new, strange,
shattering impulses. Not a thousand dances all in one with Lottie
Buttsby could have moved him so, not a thousand of Babe Merrimac’s
entreaties and avowals. For one brief, eternal moment that mere contact
of hands as completely obliterated the surroundings as if their whole
bodies had been fused in passionate, tender embrace. When eventually the
white beds came back into the picture, they might have been billowy
clouds, the ugly women in their bathrobes and mules might have been
winged angels, and the odors of phenol and iodoform might have been the
fragrance of roses.
Shine smiled. He thought yet again of his strange behavior yesterday
which now through her, he was beginning to understand; and the
self-disgust he had felt as he spared and left Merrit within his ruin,
began curiously to give way to a sense of tremendous relief.
A familiar sound came from outside. Bess had been parked in the street
below. Jinx and Bubber had grown impatient and were “laying” on the
horn, by way of suggesting that the driver hurry and return. The sound
came faint but clear through the open windows.
“Know what that is?” Shine asked her.
She smiled and answered, “I guess that must be the ram’s horn.”
XXIII
In the small back room of Pat’s place, the regular evening black-jack
game was in session. A green shaded electric light hung low over an oval
dining-room table covered with a dishonorably discharged brown army
blanket. Around it a dozen players sat and around them a dozen
side-betters stood. The room was full of men, and smoke and low talk.
The dealer, standing, taunted the players in a soft, half plaintive
voice:
“What’s your contribution, friend? Only a half? Can’t buy the sweet
mamma shoes on four-bit bets. How much to you, dumb-and-ugly? One buck,
right. Next? A dollar and a dime to Jinx, the freckle-face wonder—dime’s
for luck—my luck. How ’bout you, Squatty? Make it light on y’self.
Two-dollar bills is bad luck, you know. Wha’ d’ y’ say, Stud? The rest
of it? Nineteen bucks four bits to you. Deal it? Consider it doled.
Perfect, gentlemen, perfect.”
He had dealt each player a card as he spoke. Now he dealt them each
another, renoting the amounts of their bets as the second card fell. He
put down the rest of the deck, picked up his own two cards and, holding
them close to his chest to prevent his neighbors’ seeing them, studied
them long and hard. Suddenly he warned with exaggerated malignancy—
“Don’t a man move!—knew I’d turn the bug on you dinkies this time!” And
he threw down an ace and a jack, the supreme combination.
He was collecting his winnings when Shine came in, edging sidewise
through the crowd. Finding no place available at the table, Shine would
have ordinarily lifted some player out by the collar, thanked him with a
grin, and assumed his place. To-night he simply looked on. Had anyone
else appropriated valuable space just to look on without betting, there
would have been trouble; first gentle hints about how crowded it was,
then less gentle hints about the value of fresh air to kibitzers, and
finally, if the offender was especially dense, an ultimatum suggesting
that he try the pool room or the roof. Nobody however, manifested a
trace of annoyance at Shine’s profitless presence.
As for Shine, he felt to-night a new exhilaration, a satisfying ability
to fill his lungs, a conscious, pitying superiority over these
companions of his. For to him, through Linda and after considerable
meditation, had come a new outlook on old things. He had finally been
able to phrase it for himself in terms that brought it home to him,
terms that made it ridiculous to feel shame for having let Merrit off
unpunished. He put it thus:
“The guy that’s really hard is the guy that’s hard enough to be soft.”
That about got it. That covered him. That made him unafraid to do what
he damned pleased in any situation. If he felt like letting a bird off,
he was big enough to do it. Hitherto he’d been like a little shrimp that
dares not go without a gun or a knife, only his size and strength had
taken the place of the weapon. Sort of coward, sure ’nough —no wonder it
made Lindy sore. She sure had got him told, too. Sure had—some kid, no
lie. Funny he never could see it before—the walls of Jericho.
Lindy—Judas Priest—he’d forgotten to ask where she was going from the
hospital. Dumbbell. Well he’d find out. Gee, what a feeling! Boy! Like a
port-wine drunk——
He saw the men ’round about anew—lean and long bodies, thick and short,
round heads, egg heads, bullet heads, steeple heads, thick lips stuck
out, thin lips drawn in, skins black, brown, tan, yellow. He picked out
two or three strangers, conjectured about their occupations. This
lopsided one was undoubtedly a waiter, that plump cocoa one a porter,
the bald, custard one whose cheeks had been left in the oven a trifle
too long a—— Well, what the hell else were boogies but waiters and
porters?
In this superior frame of mind, he was not at all prepared for what he
was now to learn.
Wearying of the turn of cards, the stereotyped comments of players, the
occasional deft, furtive exchanges between collaborating cheaters, Shine
waded out into the pool room, where the air was a trifle less thick.
Here the talk was loud and the laughter unmuffled; the clack and clatter
of pool balls, the thump of cue sticks, the eager shuffle of players’
feet, freed this room of the covert atmosphere oppressing the other.
As Shine abandoned the game room he encountered Patmore who was coming
toward it; and he was a little surprised to observe Patmore quite so
drunk. A slick coat of sweat made Pat’s face shine as though it had been
greased; his eyes, also, were unusually bright and his manner a trifle
too genial.
“Hello, Mr. Jones!” he greeted Shine. “What’s Mr. Jones gonna say
to-night?” And Shine felt a vague disproportionate annoyance at the
ironic form of address. He brushed past with a non-committal response,
while Pat stood back, turned to watch him pass, and grinned derisively:
“Must be turnin’ dickty.”
Shine ignored this as he had ignored Pat himself ever since the dance.
He found a cue stick and an empty table and proceeded to amuse himself
solitaire. He had hardly racked’em-up when Bubber appeared at his side.
“Come ’eh,” Bubber said, “Come listen to this.” And Joshua Jones went
and listened.
Pat was proclaiming to all his friends in the game room:
“Yassir. Fair and square, that’s Henry Patmore. Anything you do for him,
he’s gonna do for you. Good or bad, don’t make no difference. You know
what the man says—as ye sow so shall ye reap. You see me go—I’ll see you
go. You put it on me, I’ll put it on you. Sooner or later. Don’t make no
difference—sooner or later, thass all. Five years ago, I tell y’, this
dickty—dickty, mind y’—put it on me, see? Cost me damn near all I had.
Ten thousand Got-damm dollars. Cost me that to stay out o’ jail.
Yassir—ten thousand berries. Well—thass aw right. Jes’ go up on Court
Avenue and look at his house now. Huh. Thought I’d forgot it, see? So
damn smart, movin’ in ’mongst d’ fays. Fay nigger. Movin’ in ’mongst d’
white folks. Well, d’ white folks sho’ give ’im a welcome. Jes’ go up on
Court Avenue and see what d’ white folks done. White folks. Yea. Henry
Patmore—white folks. Hah!—damn if this ain’t d’ first time in my life I
ever passed for white.”
The players were giving Patmore only divided attention. They had heard
such proclamations before, and no particular example of any of Pat’s
special excellences could be expected wholly to detract them from their
game. But at this moment the dealer, who was still standing, caught
sight of Shine looming in the doorway; and the dealer became fixed as
suddenly as a figure in a cinema when the projector abruptly stops;
fixed in the act of dealing, with his thumb at his lip and the deck in
his hand, his eyes wide, set, unmoving.
All the men turned and looked. What they saw affected them differently.
The dealer, now like an actor in a slow motion picture, his eyes still
set on Shine, put the deck down on the table, gathered up the bank
without looking at it, and retreated toward the far door of the room,
which led into the saloon. Those nearest him seized their piles and
moved in the same direction, as if the dealer were attached to them,
drawing them along by strings. The lop-sided waiter backed terrified
against the wall and stood there as if stuck, while the plump cocoa
porter, his eyes on Shine, clawed absently and futilely at the place on
the blanket where his pile should have been, and made no effort to rise.
Some pushed back their chairs and yet seemed too fascinated to get out
of them, some jumped up and elbowed their way through the midst of their
slowly retreating comrades, while a few sat quite still as if aware that
the effort to get clear of danger was useless. All this because of what
even the blindest of them saw in the face of Shine.
Not slowly, first with doubt, then with mounting conviction, had
revelation come to Shine this time; not as in the case of the ruined
house, nor of the sobbing Merrit, nor of Linda’s analysis of his
hardness. Not so, but instantaneously, like something revealed by
lightning in the dark—the moment he heard Patmore’s words he knew all of
what had happened; knew who had craftily sent Merrit that fake warning
the day before the lawyer moved in; knew who had thus established an
alibi, awaiting an opportune moment to strike safely when suspicion
would fall elsewhere. Knew who, finding Linda alone, had renewed the
advances which had been interrupted at the Manhattan Casino dance; knew
all Pat’s motives and all his moves, from the unsuccessful attempt
months ago to enlist his own aid as an “agent” to this last vicious
spiteful snap at him himself, through Linda. And it seemed that all the
hatred he had ever felt for anybody welled up within him to be
concentrated now on Henry Patmore alone: his hatred of the asylum
superintendent, of the fay who had called him Shine, of all fays, of the
evil thing he’d escaped in pianos, of dickties in general and the
blameless dickty Merit in particular—all these now gathered in one
single wave, advanced in one tidal onrush. And all that he knew and felt
gleamed in his bronze face.
Patmore saw it there and confessed everything by reaching for his gun.
Jinx, one of those who had not moved from his seat at the table, was
near enough to strike at Pat’s arm as the weapon went off. Shine felt
his left hand go numb, felt his hatred break into action. All of a
sudden he became a madman with no notion of what he was doing, with no
sustained consciousness, only a succession of fragments that thumped in
his head.
Linda resting comfortably. Merrit crying like a baby. Picture of his
mother. Fays sure got him. Fays? Fays hell—Patmore got ’im. Wonder how
many kinds of a jackass that guy thinks I am——? Never seen a man catch
air so fast. Walls tumblin’—damn if they ain’t. Offered me twenty-five
dollars—no—Linda. Fly guy, passing for white. Assault with intent—not
Merrit—Patmore. Patmore done it—did it. Not the fays—Patmore. Patmore
put it on Merrit. Like this—— Walls—haw!—damn right, walls—look at ’em
fall—let ’em raise hell when they fall—like that God-damn piano——
From the saloon room a few observers, some of them those who’d escaped
the game room but had in intention of sacrificing the spectacle of a
good fight, watched the tumult grow. The game room door had been shut
tight behind them, but the wide passage between the saloon and the pool
parlor revealed a part view of the latter; and presently forms came into
sight, were framed in the doorway, vanished, returned for brief moments.
The field of vision was maddeningly small, but it showed that more men
than Pat and Shine had become involved in the battle. Those who watched
could not know that when Jinx had knocked Pat’s gun out of line, an
adjacent friend of Pat’s had seized Jinx and retaliatively yanked him
back; that Bubber had cheerfully kicked the shins of another interferer
who would otherwise have tripped Shine at his first move; an interferer
who resented interference and so promptly turned on Bubber; that from
such small beginnings the conflict had grown to a come-one-come-all
fracas, and that Jinx and Bubber were gleefully trouncing some of those
who would have enjoyed seeing them trounce each other not long since.
Unintelligible, fragmentary glimpses came through the too narrow
doorway—Bubber ducking a cue stick, swung butt-end to in a villainous
arc—somebody reaching for a pool ball in a corner of the one visible
table—a figure pitching forward headlong out of sight—Jinx with a
pianohold, vehemently bending his particular adversary back across the
edge of the table—wild swings of bodiless arms, senseless twist and
tangle of disjointed legs and feet. Accompanying these glimpses, noise,
a strident yet muffled tumult: shuffle of feet, grunts, curses, thumps,
thwacks, hisses, stifled cries; a deep background of sound against which
stood out an occasional wooden crash.
And now there swept into the doorway, framed as if by stage design, that
pair of antagonists from whom all the others derived their energies, the
two whose bitterness reduced the rest of the conflict to mere friendly
tiff. Patmore, ordinarily no mean combatant, now gin-mighty and frantic
with fright; and Shine, a gigantic madman, himself heedless of what
everyone else saw: that his useless left hand was an impediment to
himself and a decided advantage to Pat, a more than equalizing damage
and all that had prolonged the battle.
They had lost their coats and clawed each other’s shirts into shreds,
and though Pat had been shiny at first, he now glistened no more than
Shine. Shine however, maintaining himself with one arm, gave the
superior impression: blocked knee-jabs, anticipated kicks, foiled
elbow-thrusts, invalidated all the other man’s rough-and-tumble skill.
Even in the short time and brief space of this doorway view, one could
see that all of Pat’s effort was maximum, final, as though he were
trusting each blow to be decisive; while Shine’s every move only
anticipated some future stroke that he knew would be wholly crushing.
Every instant, every buffet seemed to enlarge his ominous intent; his
purpose mounted visibly, so that those who watched saw in him not merely
one crippled yet splendid in battle, but a towering, inescapable
instrument of vengeance.
The end came suddenly. Had Pat been less of a toper and less of a jiver,
it might have been different; but in a prolonged encounter these
handicaps of his were far more telling than Shine’s. A thrust from the
latter’s bare left shoulder sent Pat’s head back like a blow from a
fist. It snapped away the last of his reserve, and of a sudden his whole
body sagged as if his spine were broken. Clinging to Shine like a man
slipping down a tree trunk, he sank to the floor on his knees, and his
head remained sprung back like the open lid of a box. This was the
moment that Shine had seemed to be awaiting; his fist hip-high, he
deliberately drew back his right arm to strike the exposed throat. Every
observer knew that if that blow should land Pat’s neck would be broken.
It did not land. Some friend of Pat’s in the room beyond hurled a pool
ball at the imminent victor. The heavy ivory sphere missed its mark,
sped through the doorway and over the observers’ heads, shattering the
great bar mirror behind them.
The crash and jangle of the falling glass wall was all that snatched
Shine out of madness. The sound transfixed him as if all the walls of
the place had tumbled instead of just one. He stood set, motionless,
blinked once or twice and stared a long moment at Pat.
Only then, perhaps, did he actually see him, on his knees, gasping,
helpless. Presently the poised, retracted arm began to relax; the
tension went out of Shine’s frame. His head sank a little forward, and
his good arm slowly dropped to his side, as limp as its useless fellow.
Jericho
XXIV
Whenever a caller told Fred Merrit an unanticipated story, he whirled
about in his swivel chair, jumped up and walked to the window. This he
did now, as soon as Shine stopped talking. For a long time he stood
looking down on the Avenue.
“Well,” he said at last, “I’ll be tarred and feathered if that isn’t the
damnedest——”
His office commanded a corner. On the curb two portly well dressed
idlers stood in leisurely conversation; they proclaimed their important
opinions to all and sundry. A thin, hunched, hungry-eyed vagabond nearby
watched them in ominous silence. A boy with yellow hair and the fairest
of skin came slowly up the street, leading an aged, black, gray-bearded
blind beggar.
“Can you imagine it? A Negro—using white prejudice to cover what he
wanted to do—putting the blame in the most likely spot—almost getting
away with it, too— Can you beat that?”
Merrit came back, sat down in his chair and shook his head. “So it
wasn’t Miss Cramp after all—I swear I thought it was she. Well—” he
showed himself true to his race hate—“it isn’t because she wouldn’t have
done it if she could.” He banged his fist on the desk. “I’d bet the
insurance on that house that Patmore just beat her to it.”
“Insurance?”
“Yes sir.”
“Mean the house had life insurance on it?”
Merrit laughed. “Yes. Not a bad name for it.”
“Mean you didn’ lose nothin’?”
“Well, not as much as you’d think to look at the place.”
“Well—but when I seen you in there——”
“Yes—I know. I had been out of town overnight—just got back that
afternoon. It was quite a shock—but it wasn’t the house. Not altogether.
That is—the picture, you see, wasn’t insured—can’t replace that.”
“That’s too bad,” said Shine.
“Got to admit he was wise,” Merrit mused. “Sent several of those
warnings. Wise. Rather admire that chap really. And I swear I’m sorry it
wasn’t the fays.”
“Well—” Shine rose—“jes’ thought you’d like to know the whole story.”
“Wait a minute—where you going?”
“Goin’ to look for a job,” Shine grinned. “Old man Isaacs bumped off
this time. Business for sale.”
“Sit down. Let’s have a drink.” Merrit produced part of a pint and they
drank, rat and dicky, as equals.
The drink gave Merrit a thought:
“You know what killed old man what’s-his-name? Your boss?”
“Bad heart.”
“Yea. And bad news: when he heard you busted my piano. You’re a hell of
a mover.”
“No lie,” Shine admitted. “But the next guy won’t know nothin’ about
that.”
“Yes, he will.”
“Huh?”
“Keep your jumper on—I’m the next guy.”
“Say, it gets you quick, don’t it?”
“What?”
“The liquor.”
“I’ll be on my feet when they haul you out, my boy. This isn’t whiskey
talk. Listen.”
Shine listened. He owed Merrit a piano, so it was to Merrit’s advantage
to get him employed. On the other hand, Merrit owed him—or the girl,
maybe—something more. Nothing but the grace of God had stayed Shine’s
hand the evening he stood behind him, intent on murder. All right. Here
was the idea: Here was a business. Shine knew that business, didn’t he?
Been in it five years now. Why the hell couldn’t he run it, then? He ran
it when the old man was sick, didn’t he? Suppose Merrit bought
it—easy—only a one-truck moving business—and turned it over to Shine to
run? Fifty-fifty on the profits with an option to purchase outright in
due time. That’s what we Negroes need, a business class, an economic
backbone. What kind of a social structure can anybody have with nothing
but the extremes—bootblacks on one end and doctors on the other. Nothing
in between. No substance. Everybody wants to quit waiting table and
start writing prescriptions right away. Well, here’s a chance for you
and a good investment for me. Race proposition, too. How ’bout it?
Shine had no word to say, so suddenly had this thing come.
“All you put up is experience,” Merrit said. “You’ve got your own
hoisting license, haven’t you? You and that girl can hit it off sooner,
maybe—she’s out to the country-place now, by the way. And there you are.
Well, what’s the hold-up? How about it?”
Even now that Shine saw Merrit meant it, all he could manage to utter
was “Gee——!”
XXV
The thrill and terror of a house fire so uncomfortably close by had been
a little too much for Miss Agatha Cramp. Even now, a week after the
night of the uproar, she was still having breakfast in bed. Every time
she thought of the excitement—the smoke, filling the quiet neighborhood
before anyone suspected its origin, the long wait for the engines while
the flames gained headway, the shriek, roar and clangor of arriving fire
trucks, men shouting, thumping her own front door, yelling for
admittance, dragging hose line through her house to the roof—she had to
suppress shudders and draw deep breaths. It was a shattering ordeal.
She said as much this morning over her tray to her new Irish maid, Mary.
Mary, an extremely acquiescent person, answered solidly, “Yes’m.”
“I feel so badly,” Miss Cramp went on, “about such a great loss of
property. It must be extremely discouraging. The poor man never had a
chance to take up his residence in the place, you know.”
“No, mum.”
“No. You see, he was a Negro.”
“Yes ’m.”
“And I shouldn’t be surprised if someone weren’t guilty of arson in this
case.”
“Y’ nivver kin tell, mum,” said Mary wondering what in limbo arson was.
“There is so much hatred between races,” sighed Miss Cramp. “Still, it
is all that can be expected. Now Negroes, for instance are most
extremely deceitful.”
“Is ’at so, mum?”
“Indeed it is. Why, this man Merrit, who owned the house that burnt
up—he was always practicing some sort of deceit. Do you know what he
did, Mary?”
“No mum.”
“Of course you don’t. Well, he was extremely fair of skin, you see, so
that you wouldn’t ordinarily have noticed that there was anything wrong
about him. So many generations in this climate, you understand. But he
was always posing as a white man.”
“Y’ don’t say, mum.”
“He certainly was. He posed as white when he purchased that
house—otherwise he’d never have gotten it. And, Mary, you can’t imagine
what else he did.”
“No, mum.”
“He even went so far as to deceive white women in order to get into
their homes—God knows for what purpose.”
“Is that so, mum?”
“Yes. So you see, after all, some disaster like this was all that he
could expect. It was simply poetic justice, that’s all.”
“Justice of the peace,” amended Mary.
“I once had a colored maid. She was very deceitful, also.”
“Is that so, mum?”
“Very. She used to go out at night without letting me know, and finally
she left on only three days’ notice.”
“Y’ don’t say, mum.”
“So you see, everything considered, there is some basis for
race-distrust after all.”
“Like England and Ireland,” suggested Mary.
“Exactly, Mary. Exactly what I was thinking. And that reminds me, Mary.”
“Yes’m.”
“Who is the president of your country now?”
“Feller named Coolidge,” said Mary.
“No, no, Mary. I do not mean the United States. I mean the Irish
Republic, your native land.”
“I sorter fergit, mum,” Mary apologized. “Y’ see, when I come away, sure
there wasn’t no Irish Republic.”
“Isn’t it a man named De Valera?”
“Yes—I believe it is, mum.”
“Now there is something I can’t understand—how a Spaniard—he is a
Spaniard isn’t he—how a Spaniard could become a native son of Ireland?”
“Well,” said Mary philosophically, “them things will happen, mum.”
“But I wonder, Mary—I wonder if your people don’t need help. Look at the
way that McReeny starved to death. Something ought to be done. Isn’t
there some organization that takes care of such matters?”
“I think his family buried him all right,” Mary reassured her.
“No—no, Mary. You do not understand at all. What I mean is this. Here is
a young and inexperienced newborn nation, planted on a little isle of
the sea, and left quite alone, helpless. It does seem to me that those
of us who are in a position to do so should contribute all we can toward
their welfare.”
“Yes’m.”
“Indeed there should be some organization having that as its purpose.
Are you sure there isn’t?”
“Well—there’s what they call the Irish Free State Association, mum.”
“There!” said Miss Cramp triumphantly. “I knew it. Exactly what I
thought, Mary. I must get in touch with them at once. Have they a phone,
do you suppose?”
“Wouldn’t be surprised if they did, mum.”
“Very well, then. That will do, Mary. That’s all. When you come for the
tray, bring the phone book, will you, Mary?”
XXVI
When Shine, en route upstate with Bess, drew up at the driveway that led
into Merrit’s country place, he had no idea that the sound of Bess’s
voice would awaken even the dog. It was barely daybreak, and though
Merrit had promised yesterday to be up in time to greet him as he
passed, Shine had no faith in the possibility of getting a dicky out of
bed in the cool gray dawn. It surprised him therefore to see, before a
minute had elapsed, a dim figure at the head of the driveway coming
quickly toward him.
It surprised him a good deal more, however, when the figure came near
enough for recognition. It was Linda, bareheaded, wrapped in a coat,
smiling at his astonishment.
“Heard you were coming,” she said. “Got up early and waited.”
It seemed to Shine that the sky turned from gray to gold in the
twinkling of an eye.
“When you coming back?” she asked.
“To-night.”
“To-night?”
“Yea. Barrin’ accident. Only a fifty mile trip. Got to go pick up a load
and bring it back.”
“Where’s your gang?”
“Still gettin’ over the fight—I’ll pick up a couple o’ guys to load on
up there.”
“And you’ll only be gone till to-night?”
“Be back by bed-time easy.”
“And you’re going up alone and coming back alone?”
“Sure.”
Linda made up her impetuous mind. “You’re doing no such thing,
Mr. Jones.” And she circled Bess’ nose and clambered into the cab from
the opposite side. While Shine regained his breath, she casually
adjusted herself; stretched out her legs, rested her head back, hunched
up her coat, stifled a yawn and murmured with great unconcern:
“’S chilly—huh?”
Merrit from the head of his driveway had seen her climb into the cab.
Before he reached the road, Bess, with a joyous roar, carried them off.
Too amazed to call out, Merrit went on down, out into the middle of the
road, and having confirmed his vision, grinned and told the world he’d
be damned.
He stood there smiling and watching in the middle of the road, one hand
absently plucking at his throat where the soft, open collar of his shirt
left it bare. He had preposterous feelings, far too absurd to admit: an
impulse to run after the departing Bess, crying, “Wait—for God’s sake—”
as if she were carrying off some chance of his own; a terrifying sense
of some slow crushing futility, allowing them to escape, but holding him
captive, surrounding, insulating, oppressing him, like the haze of this
morning’s mist, beyond which he could perceive but out of which he could
not emerge; as if he moved and must always move in a dismal, broad, gray
cloud, outside of which were clear blue skies that he could know of but
never reach.
Strangely irrelevant people and things flashed into and out of his mind:
a fleeting glimpse of his brown mother’s picture—Patmore in court
shaking his fist—Tod Bruce in his pulpit drawing some remote and
ridiculous analogy—Shine in the office explaining unintelligibly why he
“let him out”—Miss Cramp inviting him to call—Why in hell couldn’t it
have been Miss Cramp instead of Patmore? All wrong, the way it actually
happened. Should’ve been Miss Cramp. Should’ve been the fays—damn
it—fays were supposed to do such things. Well—of course—Patmore had just
beaten ’em to it—just beaten ’em to it, that was all. Bright boogy,
Patmore, figuring it all out like that—bright jig-walker—knew how to do
things. Perfect alibi—perfect. … Jigs had a future, really—jigs were
inherently smart. …
He stood and watched and smiled. The road led up and over a crest beyond
which spread sunrise like a promise. Away for a time, then up moved
Bess, straight into the kindling sky. With distance the engine roar grew
dim and the van seemed to stand and shrink. Against that far background
of light he saw it hang black and still a moment—then drop abruptly out
of vision, into another land.
An Introduction To Contemporary Harlemeze
Expurgated and Abridged
Ain’t Got ’Em
Possesses no virtues—is no good.
Ask for
Challenge to battle in terms that don’t mean maybe.
Belly-Rub
An indelicate but accurate designation of any sexy dance, the bump
being the popular current example.
Biggy
Sarcastic abbreviation of big boy.
Boogy
Negro. A contraction of Booker “T,” used only of and by members of
the race. My own favorite among all the synonyms of Negro, of which
the following are current: Claud, crow, darkey, dinge, dinky,
eight-ball, hunk, hunky, ink, jap, jesper, jig, jigaboo, jigwalker,
joker, kack, kase, race-man, race-woman, Sam, shade, shine, smoke,
spade, zigaboo.
Boy
Friend and ally. Buddy.
Bring Mud
To fall below expectations, disappoint. He who escorts a homely
sheba to a dickty shant brings mud.
Brother
A form of address, usually ironic. A bystander, witnessing the
arrest of some offender, may observe: “It’s too bad now, brother.”
Bump
Bumpty-Bump
Bumpt-the-Bump
A shout characterized by a forward and backward swaying of the hips.
Said to be an excellent aphrodisiac. Also said to be the despair of
fays.
Butt
Buttocks.
Can
Buttocks.
Catch Air
To take leave, usually under urgent pressure.
Choke
To defeat. To turn one’s damper down.
Chorine
A chorus girl.
Chorat
A chorus man.
Cloud
See boogy.
Crow
See boogy.
Daddy
Provider of affection and other more tangible delights.
Darkey
See boogy.
Dickty
Adj.—Swell.
Noun—High-toned person.
Dinge
See boogy.
Dinky
See boogy.
Dog
Any extraordinary person, thing, or event. “Ain’t this a dog?” is a
comment on anything unusual.
Do It!
Do That Thing
Do Your Stuff!
“More power to ye!”
Down The Way
Designation of some place familiar to both parties talking.
Do One’s Stuff
Exhibit one’s best. Show off.
Eight-Ball
The number 8 pool ball is black.
Evermore
Extremely, as an evermore red-hot mamma.
Drunk Down
Plumbing the nadir of inebriation. Souzed to helplessness.
Fay
A person who, so far as is known, is white. Fay is said to be the
original term and ofay a contraction of “old” and “fay.”
Freeby
Something for nothing, as complimentary tickets to a theater.
From Way Back
Of extraordinary experience and skill.
Get Away
I.e., with something. Escape unpunished for audacity; to triumph, as
does the successful jiver or the winner at blackjack.
Give One Air
To dismiss one with finality. To “give one the gate.”
Gravy
Unearned increment. Freeby.
Great Day in the Morning!
Exclamation of wonder.
Haul It
Haul hiney. Depart in great haste. Catch air. It, without an obvious
antecedent, usually has pelvic significance. “Put it in the chair”
means “Sit down.”
High
Enjoying the elevated spirits of moderately advanced inebriation.
“Tight” in the usual slang sense. Cf. tight in the Harleemse sense.
Hiney
Affectionate diminutive for hind-quarters. “It’s your hiney” means
“It will cost you your hiney,” i.e., “You are undone.”
Hot
Kindling admiration. As overdone among jigs as is “marvelous” among
fays.
Hot You!
Pronounced hot-choo. Equivalent to Oh no, now! q.v.
How Come?
Why?
Hunk, Hunky
See boogy.
I Mean
“You said it.” Ex “Some sheba, huh?”—“I mean.”
Ink
See boogy.
Jap
See boogy.
Jasper
See boogy.
Jazz
1. The modern American musical idiom, of course.
2. Sometimes synonymous with jive, q.v.
Jig, Jigaboo, Jigwalker
See boogy.
Jive
1. Pursuit in love or any device thereof. Usually flattery with
intent to win.
2. Capture.
In either sense this word implies passing fancy, hence, deceit.
Jiver
One who jives.
John Brown
Dog-gone.
Joker
See boogy.
Kack
Extreme sarcasm for dickty, q.v.
K.M.
Kitchen mechanic, i.e., cook, girl, scullion, menial.
Long-Gone
Lost. State in which it’s one’s hiney.
Lord Today!
Exclamation of wonder.
Mamma
Potential or actual sweetheart.
Martin
Jocose designation of death. Derived from Bert Williams’ story: Wait
Till Martin Comes.
Miss
Fail. A question is characteristically answered by use of miss or
some equivalent expression. Ex. “Did you win money?”—“I didn’t miss”
or “Nothing different.” “Do you mean me?”—“I don’t mean your
brother” and so on.
Monkey-Back
Dude.
Monkey-Man
“Cake-eater.”
Mose
See boogy.
Miss Anne
Mr. Charlie
Non-specific designation of “swell” whites. Ex. “Boy, bootlegging
pays. That boogy’s got a straight-eight just like Mr. Charlie’s.”
“Yea, and his mamma’s got a fur coat just like Miss Anne’s, too.”
Mud
See bring mud.
No Lie
You said it. I mean.
Ofay
See fay.
Oh, No, Now!
Exclamation of admiration.
Oscar
Dumb-bell.
Out (of) This World
Beyond mortal experience or belief.
Papa
1. See daddy.
2. Equivalent to brother.
Play That
I.e., play that game, hence, to countenance or tolerate.
Poke Out
Be distinguished, excel.
Previous
Premature, hence, presumptuous. He who tries to break into a
ticket-line is likely to be warned, “Don’t get too previous,
brother.”
Put One In
To report one to some enemy or authority in order to have one
punished.
Put (Get, Have) The Locks On
To handcuff. Hence to render helpless. Most frequently heard in
reference to some form of gambling, such as card games and love
affairs.
Put It On One
To injure one deliberately.
Race-Man (Woman)
See boogy.
Red-Hot
Somewhat hotter than hot. Extremely striking.
Right
Somewhat in excess of perfection.
Right On
Nevertheless.
Rat
Antithesis of dickty.
Salty Dog
Stronger than dog.
Sam
See boogy.
See One Go
Give one aid. “See me go for breakfast?” means “Pay for my
breakfast?” It is the answerer’s privilege to interpret the query
literally, thus: “See you go—to hell.”
Sharp
Striking “Keen.” A beautifully dressed woman is “sharp out this
world.”
Sheba
Queen. Frail. Broad.
Shout
1. Ball, Prom.
2. A slow one-step in which all the company gets happy.
Slip
1. To kid.
2. To slip in the dozens, to disparage one’s family.
Smoke
See boogy.
Smoke Over
“Give the once over.” Observe critically.
Smoothe
Verb—To calm, to quell anger. What sweet mamma does to cruel papa
when he gets tight, q.v.
Adj.—1. Cunning, “slick,” as a smooth jiver. 2. —Faultless, as a
smooth brown.
Strut One’s Stuff
See do one’s stuff.
Stuff
1. Talent, as above.
2. Hokum. Boloney. Banana oil. Ex. “They tell me that sheba tried
to commit suicide over her daddy. —”Huh. That’s a lot o’ stuff.”
Tell ’Em!
Tell ’Em ’Bout It!
Exclamation of agreement and approval.
The Man
Designation of abstract authority. He who trespasses where a sign
forbids is asked: “Say, biggy, can’t you read the man’s sign?”
There Ain’t Nothing to That
This signifies complete agreement with a previous assertion. It is
equivalent to saying, “That is beyond question.”
Tight
Tough. Redoubtable. Hard. Not “drunk” in the usual sense, for which
the Harleemese is high.
To Be Had
To be bested.
To Be On
To bear actual or pretended malice against.
Too Bad
1. Marvelous.
2. Extremely unfortunate.
Tootin’
Right. Unquestionable. Full remark is “You are dog-gone tootin’.”
Turn ’Em On
Strut one’s stuff.
Turn One’s Damper Down
To reduce the temperature of one who is hot, q.v. Hence, to choke.
Uh-Huh
Yes.
Uh-Uh
No.
Uppity
High-hat.
What Do You Say?
How do you do?
Can’t Say It
No complaint.
Zigaboo
See boogy.