by Alex Haley
I’d turn up in towns where my friends were playing. “Red!” I was an old friend from home. In the sticks, I was somebody from the Braddock Hotel. “My man! Daddy-o!” And I had Big Apple reefers. Nobody had ever heard of a traveling reefer peddler.
I followed no particular band. Each band’s musicians knew the other bands’ one-nighter touring schedules. When I ran out of supplies, I’d return to New York, and load up, then hit the road again. Auditoriums or gymnasiums all lighted up, the band’s chartered bus outside, the dressed-up, excited, local dancers pouring in. At the door, I’d announce that I was some bandman’s brother; in most cases they thought I was one of the musicians. Throughout the dance, I’d show the country folks some plain and fancy lindy-hopping. Sometimes, I’d stay overnight in a town. Sometimes I’d ride the band’s bus to their next stop. Sometimes, back in New York, I would stay awhile. Things had cooled down. Word was around that I had left town, and the narcotics squad was satisfied with that. In some of the small towns, people thinking I was with the band even mobbed me for autographs. Once, in Buffalo, my suit was nearly torn off.
My brother Reginald was waiting for me one day when I pulled into New York. The day before, his merchant ship had put into port over in New Jersey. Thinking I still worked at Small’s, Reginald had gone there, and the bartenders had directed him to Sammy, who put him up.
It felt good to see my brother. It was hard to believe that he was once the little kid who tagged after me. Reginald now was almost six feet tall, but still a few inches shorter than me. His complexion was darker than mine, but he had greenish eyes, and a white streak in his hair, which was otherwise dark reddish, something like mine.
I took Reginald everywhere, introducing him. Studying my brother, I liked him. He was a lot more self-possessed than I had been at sixteen.
I didn’t have a room right at the time, but I had some money, so did Reginald, and we checked into the St. Nicholas Hotel on Sugar Hill. It has since been torn down.
Reginald and I talked all night about the Lansing years, about our family. I told him things about our father and mother that he couldn’t remember. Then Reginald filled me in on our brothers and sisters. Wilfred was still a trade instructor at Wilberforce University. Hilda, still in Lansing, was talking of getting married; so was Philbert.
Reginald and I were the next two in line. And Yvonne, Wesley, and Robert were still in Lansing, in school.
Reginald and I laughed about Philbert, who, the last time I had seen him, had gotten deeply religious; he wore one of those round straw hats.
Reginald’s ship was in for about a week getting some kind of repairs on its engines. I was pleased to see that Reginald, though he said little about it, admired my living by my wits. Reginald dressed a little too loudly, I thought. I got a reefer customer of mine to get him a more conservative overcoat and suit. I told Reginald what I had learned: that in order to get something you had to look as though you already had something.
Before Reginald left, I urged him to leave the merchant marine and I would help him get started in Harlem. I must have felt that having my kid brother around me would be a good thing. Then there would be two people I could trust—Sammy was the other.
Reginald was cool. At his age, I would have been willing to run behind the train, to get to New York and to Harlem. But Reginald, when he left, said, “I’ll think about it.”
Not long after Reginald left, I dragged out the wildest zoot suit in New York. This was 1943. The Boston draft board had written me at Ella’s, and when they had no results there, had notified the New York draft board, and, in care of Sammy, I received Uncle Sam’s Greetings.
In those days only three things in the world scared me: jail, a job, and the Army. I had about ten days before I was to show up at the induction center. I went right to work. The Army Intelligence soldiers, those black spies in civilian clothes, hung around in Harlem with their ears open for the white man downtown. I knew exactly where to start dropping the word. I started noising around that I was frantic to join…the Japanese Army.
When I sensed that I had the ears of the spies, I would talk and act high and crazy. A lot of Harlem hustlers actually had reached that state—as I would later. It was inevitable when one had gone long enough on heavier and heavier narcotics, and under the steadily tightening vise of the hustling life. I’d snatch out and read my Greetings aloud, to make certain they heard who I was, and when I’d report downtown. (This was probably the only time my real name was ever heard in Harlem in those days.)
The day I went down there, I costumed like an actor. With my wild zoot suit I wore the yellow knob-toe shoes, and I frizzled my hair up into a reddish bush of conk.
I went in, skipping and tipping, and I thrust my tattered Greetings at that reception desk’s white soldier—“Crazy-o, daddy-o, get me moving. I can’t wait to get in that brown—,” very likely that soldier hasn’t recovered from me yet.
They had their wire on me from uptown, all right. But they still put me through the line. In that big starting room were forty or fifty other prospective inductees. The room had fallen vacuum-quiet, with me running my mouth a mile a minute, talking nothing but slang. I was going to fight on all fronts; I was going to be a general, man, before I got done—such talk as that.
Most of them were white, of course. The tender-looking ones appeared ready to run from me. Some others had that vinegary “worst kind of nigger” look. And a few were amused, seeing me as the “Harlem jigaboo” archetype.
Also amused were some of the room’s ten or twelve Negroes. But the stony-faced rest of them looked as if they were ready to sign up to go off killing somebody—they would have liked to start with me.
The line moved along. Pretty soon, stripped to my shorts, I was making my eager-to-join comments in the medical examination rooms—and everybody in the white coats that I saw had 4-F in his eyes.
I stayed in the line longer than I expected, before they siphoned me off. One of the white coats accompanied me around a turning hallway: I knew we were on the way to a head-shrinker—the Army psychiatrist.
The receptionist there was a Negro nurse. I remember she was in her early twenties, and not bad to look at. She was one of those Negro “firsts.”
Negroes know what I’m talking about. Back then, the white man during the war was so pressed for personnel that he began letting some Negroes put down their buckets and mops and dust rags and use a pencil, or sit at some desk, or hold some twenty-five-cent title. You couldn’t read the Negro press for the big pictures of smug black “firsts.”
Somebody was inside with the psychiatrist. I didn’t even have to put on any act for this black girl; she was already sick of me.
When, finally, a buzz came at her desk, she didn’t send me, she went in. I knew what she was doing, she was going to make clear, in advance, what she thought of me. This is still one of the black man’s big troubles today. So many of those so-called “upper class” Negroes are so busy trying to impress on the white man that they are “different from those others” that they can’t see they are only helping the white man to keep his low opinion of all Negroes.
And then, with her prestige in the clear, she came out and nodded to me to go in.
I must say this for that psychiatrist. He tried to be objective and professional in his manner. He sat there and doodled with his blue pencil on a tablet, listening to me spiel to him for three or four minutes before he got a word in.
His tack was quiet questions, to get at why I was so anxious. I didn’t rush him; I circled and hedged, watching him closely, to let him think he was pulling what he wanted out of me. I kept jerking around, backward, as though somebody might be listening. I knew I was going to send him back to the books to figure what kind of a case I was.
Suddenly, I sprang up and peeped under both doors, the one I’d entered and another that probably was a closet. And then I bent and whispered fast in his ear. “Daddy-o, now you and me, we’re from up North here, so don’t you tell nobody
….I want to get sent down South. Organize them nigger soldiers, you dig? Steal us some guns, and kill us crackers!”
That psychiatrist’s blue pencil dropped, and his professional manner fell off in all directions. He stared at me as if I were a snake’s egg hatching, fumbling for his red pencil. I knew I had him. I was going back out past Miss First when he said, “That will be all.”
A 4-F card came to me in the mail, and I never heard from the Army any more, and never bothered to ask why I was rejected.
CHAPTER 7
HUSTLER
I can’t remember all the hustles I had during the next two years in Harlem, after the abrupt end of my riding the trains and peddling reefers to the touring bands.
Negro railroad men waited for their trains in their big locker room on the lower level of Grand Central Station. Big blackjack and poker games went on in there around the clock. Sometimes five hundred dollars would be on the table. One day, in a blackjack game, an old cook who was dealing the cards tried to be slick, and I had to drop my pistol in his face.
The next time I went into one of those games, intuition told me to stick my gun under my belt right down the middle of my back. Sure enough, someone had squealed. Two big, beefy-faced Irish cops came in. They frisked me—and they missed my gun where they hadn’t expected one.
The cops told me never again to be caught in Grand Central Station unless I had a ticket to ride somewhere. And I knew that by the next day, every railroad’s personnel office would have a blackball on me, so I never tried to get another railroad job.
There I was back in Harlem’s streets among all the rest of the hustlers. I couldn’t sell reefers; the dope squad detectives were too familiar with me. I was a true hustler—uneducated, unskilled at anything honorable, and I considered myself nervy and cunning enough to live by my wits, exploiting any prey that presented itself. I would risk just about anything.
Right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday’s and today’s school drop-outs are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did. And they inevitably move into more and more, worse and worse, illegality and immorality. Full-time hustlers never can relax to appraise what they are doing and where they are bound. As is the case in any jungle, the hustler’s every waking hour is lived with both the practical and the subconscious knowledge that if he ever relaxes, if he ever slows down, the other hungry, restless foxes, ferrets, wolves, and vultures out there with him won’t hesitate to make him their prey.
During the next six to eight months, I pulled my first robberies and stick-ups. Only small ones. Always in other, nearby cities. And I got away. As the pros did, I too would key myself to pull these jobs by my first use of hard dope. I began with Sammy’s recommendation—sniffing cocaine.
Normally now, for street wear, I might call it, I carried a hardly noticeable little flat, blue-steel .25 automatic. But for working, I carried a .32, a .38 or a .45. I saw how when the eyes stared at the big black hole, the faces fell slack and the mouths sagged open. And when I spoke, the people seemed to hear as though they were far away, and they would do whatever I asked.
Between jobs, staying high on narcotics kept me from getting nervous. Still, upon sudden impulses, just to play safe, I would abruptly move from one to another fifteen- to twenty-dollar-a-week room, always in my favorite 147th-150th Street area, just flanking Sugar Hill.
Once on a job with Sammy, we had a pretty close call. Someone must have seen us. We were making our getaway, running, when we heard the sirens. Instantly, we slowed to walking. As a police car screeched to a stop, we stepped out into the street, meeting it, hailing it to ask for directions. They must have thought we were about to give them some information. They just cursed us and raced on. Again, it didn’t cross the white men’s minds that a trick like that might be pulled on them by Negroes.
The suits that I wore, the finest, I bought hot for about thirty-five to fifty dollars. I made it my rule never to go after more than I needed to live on. Any experienced hustler will tell you that getting greedy is the quickest road to prison. I kept “cased” in my head vulnerable places and situations and I would perform the next job only when my bankroll in my pocket began to get too low.
Some weeks, I bet large amounts on the numbers. I still played with the same runner with whom I’d started in Small’s Paradise. Playing my hunches, many a day I’d have up to forty dollars on two numbers, hoping for that fabulous six hundred-to-one payoff. But I never did hit a big number full force. There’s no telling what I would have done if ever I’d landed $10,000 or $12,000 at one time. Of course, once in a while I’d hit a small combination figure. Sometimes, flush like that, I’d telephone Sophia to come over from Boston for a couple of days.
I went to the movies a lot again. And I never missed my musician friends wherever they were playing, either in Harlem, downtown at the big theaters, or on 52nd Street.
Reginald and I got very close the next time his ship came back into New York. We discussed our family, and what a shame it was that our book-loving oldest brother Wilfred had never had the chance to go to some of those big universities where he would have gone far. And we exchanged thoughts we had never shared with anyone.
Reginald, in his quiet way, was a mad fan of musicians and music. When his ship sailed one morning without him, a principal reason was that I had thoroughly exposed him to the exciting musical world. We had wild times backstage with the musicians when they were playing the Roxy, or the Paramount. After selling reefers with the bands as they traveled, I was known to almost every popular Negro musician around New York in 1944–1945.
Reginald and I went to the Savoy Ballroom, the Apollo Theater, the Braddock Hotel bar, the nightclubs and speakeasies, wherever Negroes played music. The great Lady Day, Billie Holiday, hugged him and called him “baby brother.” Reginald shared tens of thousands of Negroes’ feelings that the living end of the big bands was Lionel Hampton’s. I was very close to many of the men in Hamp’s band; I introduced Reginald to them, and also to Hamp himself, and Hamp’s wife and business manager, Gladys Hampton. One of this world’s sweetest people is Hamp. Anyone who knows him will tell you that he’d often do the most generous things for people he barely knew. As much money as Hamp has made, and still makes, he would be broke today if his money and his business weren’t handled by Gladys, who is one of the brainiest women I ever met. The Apollo Theater’s owner, Frank Schiffman, could tell you. He generally signed bands to play for a set weekly amount, but I know that once during those days Gladys Hampton instead arranged a deal for Hamp’s band to play for a cut of the gate. Then the usual number of shows was doubled up—if I’m not mistaken, eight shows a day, instead of the usual four—and Hamp’s pulling power cleaned up. Gladys Hampton used to talk to me a lot, and she tried to give me good advice: “Calm down, Red.” Gladys saw how wild I was. She saw me headed toward a bad end.
One of the things I liked about Reginald was that when I left him to go away “working,” Reginald asked me no questions. After he came to Harlem, I went on more jobs than usual. I guess that what influenced me to get my first actual apartment was my not wanting Reginald to be knocking around Harlem without anywhere to call “home.” That first apartment was three rooms, for a hundred dollars a month, I think, in the front basement of a house on 147th Street between Convent and St. Nicholas Avenues. Living in the rear basement apartment, right behind Reginald and me, was one of Harlem’s most successful narcotics dealers.
With the apartment as our headquarters, I gradually got Reginald introduced around to Creole Bill’s, and other Harlem after-hours spots. About two o’clock every morning, as the downtown white nightclubs closed, Reginald and I would stand around in front of this or that Harlem after-hours place, and I’d school him to what was happening.
Especially after the nightclubs downtown closed, the taxis and black limousines would be driving uptown, bringing those white people who never could get enough of Negro soul. The places popular
with these whites ranged all the way from the big locally famous ones such as Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, and Dickie Wells’, to the little here-tonight-gone-tomorrow-night private clubs, so-called, where a dollar was collected at the door for “membership.”
Inside every after-hours spot, the smoke would hurt your eyes. Four white people to every Negro would be in there drinking whisky from coffee cups and eating fried chicken. The generally flush-faced white men and their makeup-masked, glittery-eyed women would be pounding each other’s backs and uproariously laughing and applauding the music. A lot of the whites, drunk, would go staggering up to Negroes, the waiters, the owners, or Negroes at tables, wringing their hands, even trying to hug them, “You’re just as good as I am—I want you to know that!” The most famous places drew both Negro and white celebrities who enjoyed each other. A jam-packed four-thirty A.M. crowd at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack or Dickie Wells’ might have such jam-session entertainment as Hazel Scott playing the piano for Billie Holiday singing the blues. Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, incidentally, was where once, later on, I worked briefly as a waiter. That’s where Redd Foxx was the dishwasher who kept the kitchen crew in stitches.
After a while, my brother Reginald had to have a hustle, and I gave much thought to what would be, for him, a good, safe hustle. After he’d learned his own way around, it would be up to him to take risks for himself—if he wanted to make more and quicker money.
The hustle I got Reginald into really was very simple. It utilized the psychology of the ghetto jungle. Downtown, he paid the two dollars, or whatever it was, for a regular city peddler’s license. Then I took him to a manufacturers’ outlet where we bought a supply of cheap imperfect “seconds”—shirts, underwear, cheap rings, watches, all kinds of quick-sale items.
Watching me work this hustle back in Harlem, Reginald quickly caught on to how to go into barbershops, beauty parlors, and bars acting very nervous as he let the customers peep into his small valise of “loot.” With so many thieves around anxious to get rid of stolen good-quality merchandise cheaply, many Harlemites, purely because of this conditioning, jumped to pay hot prices for inferior goods whose sale was perfectly legitimate. It never took long to get rid of a valiseful for at least twice what it had cost. And if any cop stopped Reginald, he had in his pocket both the peddler’s license and the manufacturers’ outlet bills of sale. Reginald only had to be certain that none of the customers to whom he sold ever saw that he was legitimate.