by Alex Haley
“Man, you can’t tell him nothing!” they’d exclaim. And they couldn’t. At home in Roxbury, they would see me parading with Sophia, dressed in my wild zoot suits. Then I’d come to work, loud and wild and half-high on liquor or reefers, and I’d stay that way, jamming sandwiches at people until we got to New York. Off the train, I’d go through that Grand Central Station afternoon rush-hour crowd, and many white people simply stopped in their tracks to watch me pass. The drape and the cut of a zoot suit showed to the best advantage if you were tall—and I was over six feet. My conk was fire-red. I was really a clown, but my ignorance made me think I was “sharp.” My knob-toed, orange-colored “kick-up” shoes were nothing but Florsheims, the ghetto’s Cadillac of shoes in those days. (Some shoe companies made these ridiculous styles for sale only in the black ghettoes where ignorant Negroes like me would pay the big-name price for something that we associated with being rich.) And then, between Small’s Paradise, the Braddock Hotel, and other places—as much as my twenty- or twenty-five-dollar pay would allow, I drank liquor, smoked marijuana, painted the Big Apple red with increasing numbers of friends, and finally in Mrs. Fisher’s rooming house I got a few hours of sleep before the “Yankee Clipper” rolled again.
—
It was inevitable that I was going to be fired sooner or later. What finally finished me was an angry letter from a passenger. The conductors added their bit, telling how many verbal complaints they’d had, and how many warnings I’d been given.
But I didn’t care, because in those wartime days such jobs as I could aspire to were going begging. When the New Haven Line paid me off, I decided it would be nice to make a trip to visit my brothers and sisters in Lansing. I had accumulated some railroad free-travel privileges.
None of them back in Michigan could believe it was me. Only my oldest brother, Wilfred, wasn’t there; he was away at Wilberforce University in Ohio studying a trade. But Philbert and Hilda were working in Lansing. Reginald, the one who had always looked up to me, had gotten big enough to fake his age, and he was planning soon to enter the merchant marine. Yvonne, Wesley and Robert were in school.
My conk and whole costume were so wild that I might have been taken as a man from Mars. I caused a minor automobile collision; one driver stopped to gape at me, and the driver behind bumped into him. My appearance staggered the older boys I had once envied; I’d stick out my hand, saying “Skin me, daddy-o!” My stories about the Big Apple, my reefers keeping me sky-high—wherever I went, I was the life of the party. “My man!…Gimme some skin!”
The only thing that brought me down to earth was the visit to the state hospital in Kalamazoo. My mother sort of half-sensed who I was.
And I looked up Shorty’s mother. I knew he’d be touched by my doing that. She was an old lady, and she was glad to hear from Shorty through me. I told her that Shorty was doing fine and one day was going to be a great leader of his own band. She asked me to tell Shorty that she wished he’d write her, and send her something.
And I dropped over to Mason to see Mrs. Swerlin, the woman at the detention home who had kept me those couple of years. Her mouth flew open when she came to the door. My sharkskin gray “Cab Calloway” zoot suit, the long, narrow, knob-toed shoes, and the four-inch-brimmed pearl gray hat over my conked fire-red hair; it was just about too much for Mrs. Swerlin. She just managed to pull herself together enough to invite me in. Between the way I looked and my style of talk, I made her so nervous and uncomfortable that we were both glad when I left.
The night before I left, a dance was given in the Lincoln School gymnasium. (I’ve since learned that in a strange city, to find the Negroes without asking where, you just check in the phone book for a “Lincoln School.” It’s always located in the segregated black ghetto—at least it was, in those days.) I’d left Lansing unable to dance, but now I went around the gymnasium floor flinging little girls over my shoulders and hips, showing my most startling steps. Several times, the little band nearly stopped, and nearly everybody left the floor, watching with their eyes like saucers. That night, I even signed autographs—“Harlem Red”—and I left Lansing shocked and rocked.
Back in New York, stone broke and without any means of support, I realized that the railroad was all that I actually knew anything about. So I went over to the Seaboard Line’s hiring office. The railroads needed men so badly that all I had to do was tell them I had worked on the New Haven, and two days later I was on the “Silver Meteor” to St. Petersburg and Miami. Renting pillows and keeping the coaches clean and the white passengers happy, I made about as much as I had with sandwiches.
I soon ran afoul of the Florida cracker who was assistant conductor. Back in New York, they told me to find another job. But that afternoon, when I walked into Small’s Paradise, one of the bartenders, knowing how much I loved New York, called me aside and said that if I were willing to quit the railroad, I might be able to replace a day waiter who was about to go into the Army.
The owner of the bar was Ed Small. He and his brother Charlie were inseparable, and I guess Harlem didn’t have two more popular and respected people. They knew I was a railroad man, which, for a waiter, was the best kind of recommendation. Charlie Small was the one I actually talked with in their office. I was afraid he’d want to wait to ask some of his old-timer railroad friends for their opinion. Charlie wouldn’t have gone for anybody he heard was wild. But he decided on the basis of his own impression, having seen me in his place so many times, sitting quietly, almost in awe, observing the hustling set. I told him, when he asked, that I’d never been in trouble with the police—and up to then, that was the truth. Charlie told me their rules for employees: no lateness, no laziness, no stealing, no kind of hustling off any customers, especially men in uniform. And I was hired.
This was in 1942. I had just turned seventeen.
—
With Small’s practically in the center of everything, waiting tables there was Seventh Heaven seven times over. Charlie Small had no need to caution me against being late; I was so anxious to be there, I’d arrive an hour early. I relieved the morning waiter. As far as he was concerned, mine was the slowest, most no-tips time of day, and sometimes he’d stick around most of that hour teaching me things, for he didn’t want to see me fired.
Thanks to him, I learned very quickly dozens of little things that could really ingratiate a new waiter with the cooks and bartenders. Both of these, depending on how they liked the waiter, could make his job miserable or pleasant—and I meant to become indispensable. Inside of a week, I had succeeded with both. And the customers who had seen me among them around the bar, recognizing me now in the waiter’s jacket, were pleased and surprised; and they couldn’t have been more friendly. And I couldn’t have been more solicitous.
“Another drink?…Right away, sir…Would you like dinner?…It’s very good…Could I get you a menu, sir?…Well, maybe a sandwich?”
Not only the bartenders and cooks, who knew everything about everything, it seemed to me, but even the customers, also began to school me, in little conversations by the bar when I wasn’t busy. Sometimes a customer would talk to me as he ate. Sometimes I’d have long talks—absorbing everything—with the real old-timers, who had been around Harlem since Negroes first came there.
That, in fact, was one of my biggest surprises: that Harlem hadn’t always been a community of Negroes.
It first had been a Dutch settlement, I learned. Then began the massive waves of poor and half-starved and ragged immigrants from Europe, arriving with everything they owned in the world in bags and sacks on their backs. The Germans came first; the Dutch edged away from them, and Harlem became all German.
Then came the Irish, running from the potato famine. The Germans ran, looking down their noses at the Irish, who took over Harlem. Next, the Italians; same thing—the Irish ran from them. The Italians had Harlem when the Jews came down the gangplanks—and then the Italians left.
Today, all these same immigrants’ descendants a
re running as hard as they can to escape the descendants of the Negroes who helped to unload the immigrant ships.
I was staggered when old-timer Harlemites told me that while this immigrant musical chairs game had been going on, Negroes had been in New York City since 1683, before any of them came, and had been ghettoed all over the city. They had first been in the Wall Street area; then they were pushed into Greenwich Village. The next shove was up to the Pennsylvania Station area. And then, the last stop before Harlem, the black ghetto was concentrated around 52nd Street, which is how 52nd Street got the Swing Street name and reputation that lasted long after the Negroes were gone.
Then, in 1910, a Negro real estate man somehow got two or three Negro families into one Jewish Harlem apartment house. The Jews flew from that house, then from that block, and more Negroes came in to fill their apartments. Then whole blocks of Jews ran, and still more Negroes came uptown, until in a short time, Harlem was like it still is today—virtually all black.
Then, early in the 1920’s music and entertainment sprang up as an industry in Harlem, supported by downtown whites who poured uptown every night. It all started about the time a tough young New Orleans cornet man named Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong climbed off a train in New York wearing clodhopper policemen’s shoes, and started playing with Fletcher Henderson. In 1925, Small’s Paradise had opened with crowds all across Seventh Avenue; in 1926, the great Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington’s band would play for five years; also in 1926 the Savoy Ballroom opened, a whole block front on Lenox Avenue, with a two-hundred-foot dance floor under spotlights before two bandstands and a disappearing rear stage.
Harlem’s famous image spread until it swarmed nightly with white people from all over the world. The tourist buses came there. The Cotton Club catered to whites only, and hundreds of other clubs ranging on down to cellar speakeasies catered to white people’s money. Some of the best-known were Connie’s Inn, the Lenox Club, Barron’s, The Nest Club, Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, and Minton’s. The Savoy, the Golden Gate, and the Renaissance ballrooms battled for the crowds—the Savoy introduced such attractions as Thursday Kitchen Mechanics’ Nights, bathing beauty contests, and a new car given away each Saturday night. They had bands from all across the country in the ballrooms and the Apollo and Lafayette theaters. They had colorful bandleaders like ‘Fess Williams in his diamond-studded suit and top hat, and Cab Calloway in his white zoot suit to end all zoots, and his wide-brimmed white hat and string tie, setting Harlem afire with “Tiger Rag” and “St. James Infirmary” and “Minnie the Moocher.”
Blacktown crawled with white people, with pimps, prostitutes, bootleggers, with hustlers of all kinds, with colorful characters, and with police and prohibition agents. Negroes danced like they never have anywhere before or since. I guess I must have heard twenty-five of the old-timers in Small’s swear to me that they had been the first to dance in the Savoy the “Lindy Hop” which was born there in 1927, named for Lindbergh, who had just made his flight to Paris.
Even the little cellar places with only piano space had fabulous keyboard artists such as James P. Johnson and Jelly Roll Morton, and singers such as Ethel Waters. And at four A.M., when all the legitimate clubs had to close, from all over town the white and Negro musicians would come to some prearranged Harlem after-hours spot and have thirty- and forty-piece jam sessions that would last into the next day.
When it all ended with the stock market crash in 1929, Harlem had a world reputation as America’s Casbah. Small’s had been a part of all that. There, I heard the old-timers reminisce about all those great times.
Every day I listened raptly to customers who felt like talking, and it all added to my education. My ears soaked it up like sponges when one of them, in a rare burst of confidence, or a little beyond his usual number of drinks, would tell me inside things about the particular form of hustling that he pursued as a way of life. I was thus schooled well, by experts in such hustles as the numbers, pimping, con games of many kinds, peddling dope, and thievery of all sorts, including armed robbery.
CHAPTER 6
DETROIT RED
Every day, I would gamble all of my tips—as high as fifteen and twenty dollars—on the numbers, and dream of what I would do when I hit.
I saw people on their long, wild spending sprees, after big hits. I don’t mean just hustlers who always had some money. I mean ordinary working people, the kind that we otherwise almost never saw in a bar like Small’s, who, with a good enough hit, had quit their jobs working somewhere downtown for the white man. Often they had bought a Cadillac, and sometimes for three and four days, they were setting up drinks and buying steaks for all their friends. I would have to pull two tables together into one, and they would be throwing me two- and three-dollar tips each time I came with my tray.
Hundreds of thousands of New York City Negroes, every day but Sunday, would play from a penny on up to large sums on three-digit numbers. A hit meant duplicating the last three figures of the Stock Exchange’s printed daily total of U.S. domestic and foreign sales.
With the odds at six hundred to one, a penny hit won $6, a dollar won $600, and so on. On $15, the hit would mean $9,000. Famous hits like that had bought controlling interests in lots of Harlem’s bars and restaurants, or even bought some of them outright. The chances of hitting were a thousand to one. Many players practiced what was called “combinating.” For example six cents would put one penny on each of the six possible combinations of three digits. The number 840, combinated, would include 840, 804, 048, 084, 408, and 480.
Practically everyone played every day in the poverty-ridden black ghetto of Harlem. Every day, someone you knew was likely to hit and of course it was neighborhood news; if big enough a hit, neighborhood excitement. Hits generally were small; a nickel, dime, or a quarter. Most people tried to play a dollar a day, but split it up among different numbers and combinated.
Harlem’s numbers industry hummed every morning and into the early afternoon, with the runners jotting down people’s bets on slips of paper in apartment house hallways, bars, barbershops, stores, on the sidewalks. The cops looked on; no runner lasted long who didn’t, out of his pocket, put in a free “figger” for his working area’s foot cops, and it was generally known that the numbers bankers paid off at higher levels of the police department.
The daily small army of runners each got ten percent of the money they turned in, along with the bet slips, to their controllers. (And if you hit, you gave the runner a ten percent tip.) A controller might have as many as fifty runners working for him, and the controller got five percent of what he turned over to the banker, who paid off the hit, paid off the police, and got rich off the balance.
Some people played one number all year. Many had lists of the daily hit numbers going back for years; they figured reappearance odds, and used other systems. Others played their hunches: addresses, license numbers of passing cars, any numbers on letters, telegrams, laundry slips, numbers from anywhere. Dream books that cost a dollar would say what number nearly any dream suggested. Evangelists who on Sundays peddled Jesus, and mystics, would pray a lucky number for you, for a fee.
Recently, the last three numbers of the post office’s new Zip Code for a postal district of Harlem hit, and one banker almost went broke. Let this very book circulate widely in the black ghettoes of the country, and—although I’m no longer a gambling person—I’d lay a small wager for your favorite charity that millions of dollars would be bet by my poor, foolish black brothers and sisters upon, say, whatever happens to be the number of this page, or whatever is the total of the whole book’s pages.
Every day in Small’s Paradise Bar was fascinating to me. And from a Harlem point of view, I couldn’t have been in a more educational situation. Some of the ablest of New York’s black hustlers took a liking to me, and knowing that I still was green by their terms, soon began in a paternal way to “straighten Red out.”
Their methods would be indirect. A dark, businessman-looking West I
ndian often would sit at one of my tables. One day when I brought his beer, he said, “Red, hold still a minute.” He went over me with one of those yellow tape measures, and jotted figures in his notebook. When I came to work the next afternoon, one of the bartenders handed me a package. In it was an expensive, dark blue suit, conservatively cut. The gift was thoughtful, and the message clear.
The bartenders let me know that this customer was one of the top executives of the fabulous Forty Thieves gang. That was the gang of organized boosters, who would deliver, to order, in one day, C.O.D., any kind of garment you desired. You would pay about one-third of the store’s price.
I heard how they made mass hauls. A well-dressed member of the gang who wouldn’t arouse suspicion by his manner would go into a selected store about closing time, hide somewhere, and get locked inside when the store closed. The police patrols would have been timed beforehand. After dark, he’d pack suits in bags, then turn off the burglar alarm, and use the telephone to call a waiting truck and crew. When the truck came, timed with the police patrols, it would be loaded and gone within a few minutes. I later got to know several members of the Forty Thieves.
Plainclothes detectives soon were quietly identified to me, by a nod, a wink. Knowing the law people in the area was elementary for the hustlers, and, like them, in time I would learn to sense the presence of any police types. In late 1942, each of the military services had their civilian-dress eyes and ears picking up anything of interest to them, such as hustles being used to avoid the draft, or who hadn’t registered, or hustles that were being worked on servicemen.
Longshoremen, or fences for them, would come into the bars selling guns, cameras, perfumes, watches, and the like, stolen from the shipping docks. These Negroes got what white-longshoreman thievery left over. Merchant marine sailors often brought in foreign items, bargains, and the best marijuana cigarettes to be had were made of the gunja and kisca that merchant sailors smuggled in from Africa and Persia.