Cotton Comes to Harlem

by Chester Himes

  John leaned forward and touched her on the shoulder like a spontaneous caress. His voice thickened with suggestion. “But Jesus say, ‘Commit all the ’dultry you want to, John. Just be prepared to roast in hell for it.’ ”

  “He-he-he,” laughed the church sister and slapped him again on the shoulder. “He was just kidding you. He’d forgive us for just one time,” and she suddenly switched her trembling buttocks, no doubt to demonstrate Jesus’s mercy.

  In so doing she felt the hand easing the purse from between her legs. She slapped back automatically before she could begin to turn her body, and struck the kneeling man across the face.

  “Mother-raper, you is trying to steal my money,” she screamed, turning on the thief.

  Lightning flashed, revealing the thief leaping to one side and the big broad buttocks in rose-colored pants twitching in fury. And before the sound of thunder was heard, the rain came down.

  The thief leapt blindly into the street. Before the church sister could follow, a meat delivery truck coming at blinding speed hit the thief head-on and knocked the body somersaulting ten yards down the street before running over it. The driver lost control as the truck went over the body. The truck jumped the curb and knocked down a telephone pole at the corner of Seventh Avenue; it slewed across the wet asphalt and crashed against the concrete barrier enclosing the park down the middle of the avenue.

  The church sister ran toward the mangled body and snatched her purse still clutched in the dead man’s hand, unmindful of the bright lights of the armored truck rushing towards her like twin comets out of the night, unmindful of the rain pouring down in torrents.

  The driver of the armoured car saw the rose-encased buttocks of a large black woman as she bent over to snatch something from what looked like a dead man lying in the middle of the street. He was convinced he had d.t.’s. But he tried desperately to avoid them at the speed he was going on that wet street, d.t.’s or not. The armored truck skidded, then began wobbling as though doing the shimmy. The brakes meant nothing on the wet asphalt of Seventh Avenue and the car skidded straight on across the avenue and was hit broadside by a big truck going south.

  The church sister hurried down the street in the opposite direction, holding the purse clutched tightly in her hand. Near Lexington Avenue, men, women and children crowded about the body of another dead colored man lying in the street, being washed for the grave by the rain. It lay in a grotesque position on its stomach at right angle to the curb, one arm outflung, the other beneath it. The side of the face turned up had been shot away. If there had been a pistol anywhere, now it was gone.

  A police cruiser was parked nearby, crosswise to the street. One of the policemen was standing beside the body in the rain. The other one sat in the cruiser, phoning the precinct station.

  The church sister was hurrying past on the opposite side of the street, trying to remain unnoticed. But a big colored laborer, wearing the overalls in which he had worked all day, saw her. His eyes popped and his mouth opened in his slack face.

  “Lady,” he called tentatively. She didn’t look around. “Lady,” he called again. “I just wanted to say, your ass is out.”

  She turned on him furiously. “Tend to your own mother-raping business.”

  He backed away, touching his cap politely, “I didn’t mean no harm, lady. It’s your ass.”

  She hurried on down the street, worrying more about her hair in the rain than about her behind showing.

  At the corner of Lexington Avenue, an old junk man of the kind who haunt the streets at night collecting old paper and discarded junk was struggling with a bale of cotton, trying to get it into his cart. Rain was pouring off his sloppy hat and wetting his ragged overalls to dark blue. His small dried face was framed with thick kinky white hair, giving him a benevolent look. No one else was in sight; everybody who was out on the street in all that rain was looking at the body of the dead man. So when he saw this big strapping lady coming towards him he stopped struggling with the wet bale of cotton and asked politely, “Ma’am, would you please help me get this bale of cotton into my cart, please, ma’am?”

  He hadn’t seen her from the rear so he was slightly surprised by her sudden hostility.

  “What kind of trick is you playing?” she challenged, giving him an evil look.

  “Ain’t no trick, ma’am. I just tryna get this bale of cotton into my cart.”

  “Cotton!” she shouted indignantly, looking at the bale of cotton with outright suspicion. “Old and evil as you is you ought to be ashamed of yourself tryna trick me out my money with what you calls a bale of cotton. Does I look like that kinda fool?”

  “No, ma’am, but if you was a Christian you wouldn’t carry on like that just ’cause an old man asked you to help him lift a bale of cotton.”

  “I is a Christian, you wicked bastard,” she shouted. “That’s why all you wicked bastards is tryna steal my money. But I ain’t the kind of Christian fool enough not to know there ain’t no bales of cotton lying in the street in New York City. If it weren’t for my hair, I’d beat your ass, you old con-man.”

  It had been a rough night for the old junk man. First he and a crony had found a half-filled whisky bottle with what they thought was whisky and had sat on a stoop to enjoy themselves, passing the bottle back and forth, when suddenly his crony had said, “Man, dis ain’t whisky; dis is piss.” Then after he’d spent his last money for a bottle of “smoke” to settle his stomach, it had started to rain. And here was this evil bitch calling him a con-man, as broke as he was.

  “You touch me and I’ll mark you,” he threatened, reaching in his pocket.

  She backed away from him and he turned his back to her, muttering to himself. He didn’t see her wet red buttocks above her shining black legs when she hurried down the street and disappeared into a tenement.

  Four minutes later, when the first of the police cruisers sent to bottle up the street screamed around the corner from Lexington Avenue, he was still struggling with the bale of cotton in the rain.

  The cruiser stopped for the white cops to put the routine question to a colored man: “Say, uncle, you didn’t see any suspicious-looking person pass this way, did you?”

  “Nawsuh, just an evil lady mad ’cause her hair got wet.”

  The driver grinned, but the cop beside him looked at the bale of cotton curiously and asked, “What you got there, uncle, a corpse bundled up?”

  “Cotton, suh.”

  Both cops straightened up and the driver leaned over to look at it too.

  “Cotton?”

  “Yassuh, this is cotton — a bale of cotton.”

  “Where the hell did you get a bale of cotton in this city?”

  “I found it, suh.”

  “Found it? What the hell kind of double-talk is that? Found it where?”

  “Right here, suh.”

  “Right here?” the cop repeated incredulously. Slowly and deliberately he got out of the car. His attitude was threatening. He looked closely at the bale of cotton. He bent over and felt the cotton poking through the seams of the burlap wrapping. “By God, it is cotton,” he said straightening up. “A bale of cotton! What the hell’s a bale of cotton doing here in the street?”

  “I dunno, boss, I just found it here is all.”

  “Probably fell from some truck,” the driver said from within the cruiser. “Let somebody else take care of it, it ain’t our business.”

  The cop in the street said, “Now, uncle, you take this cotton to the precinct station and turn it in. The owner will be looking for it.”

  “Yassuh, boss, but I can’t get it into my waggin.”

  “Here, I’ll help you,” the cop said, and together they got it onto the cart.

  The junk man set off in the direction of the precinct station, pushing the cart in the rain, and the cop got back into the cruiser and they went on down the street in the direction of the dead man.

  4

  When Grave Digger and Coffin Ed arrived at the
lot where the Back-to-Africa rally had taken place, they found it closed off by a police cordon and the desolate black people, surrounded by policemen, standing helpless in the rain. The police cruiser was still smoking in the barbecue pit and the white cops in their wet black slickers looked mean and dangerous. Coffin Ed’s acid-burned face developed a tic and Grave Digger’s neck began swelling with rage.

  The dead body of the young recruiting agent lay face up in the rain, waiting for the medical examiner to come and pronounce it dead so the men from Homicide could begin their investigation. But the men from Homicide had not arrived, and nothing had been done.

  Grave Digger and Coffin Ed stood over the body and looked down at all that was left of the young black face which a few short minutes ago had been so alive with hope. At that moment they felt the same as all the other helpless black people standing in the rain.

  “Too bad O’Malley didn’t get it instead of this young boy,” Grave Digger said, rain dripping from his black slouch hat over his wrinkled black suit.

  “This is what happens when cops get soft on hoodlums,” Coffin Ed said.

  “Yeah, we know O’Malley got him killed, but our job is to find out who pulled the trigger.”

  They walked over to the herded people and Grave Digger asked, “Who’s in charge here?”

  The other young recruiting agent came forward. He was hatless and his solemn black face was shining in the rain. “I guess I am; the others have gone.”

  They walked him over to one side and got the story of what had happened as he saw it. It wasn’t much help.

  “We were the whole organization,” the young man said. “Reverend O’Malley, the two secretaries and me and John Hill who was killed. There were volunteers but we were the staff.”

  “How about the guards?”

  “The two guards with the armored truck? Why, they were sent with the truck from the bank.”

  “What bank?”

  “The African Bank in Washington, D.C.”

  The detectives exchanged glances but didn’t comment.

  “What’s your name, son?” Grave Digger asked.

  “Bill Davis.”

  “How far did you get in school?”

  “I went to college, sir. In Greensboro, North Carolina.”

  “And you still believe in the devil?” Coffin Ed asked.

  “Let him alone,” Grave Digger said. “He’s telling us all he knows.” Turning to Bill he asked, “And these two colored detectives from the D.A.’s office. Did you know them?”

  “I never saw them before. I was supicious of them from the first. But Reverend O’Malley didn’t seem perturbed and he made the decisions.”

  “Didn’t seem perturbed,” Grave Digger echoed. “Did you suspect it might be a plant?”

  “Sir?”

  “Did it occur to you they might have been in cahoots with O’Malley to help him get away with the money?”

  At first the young man didn’t understand. Then he was shocked. “How could you think that, sir? Reverend O’Malley is absolutely honest. He is very dedicated, sir.

  Coffin Ed sighed.

  “Did you ever see the ships which were supposed to take you people back to Africa?” Grave Digger asked.

  “No, but all of us have seen the correspondence with the steamship company — The Afro-Asian Line — verifying the year’s lease he had negotiated.”

  “How much did he pay?”

  “It was on a per head basis; he was going to pay one hundred dollars per person. I don’t believe they are really as large as they look in these pictures, but we were going to fill them to capacity.”

  “How much money had you collected?”

  “Eighty-seven thousand dollars from the … er … subscribers, but we had taken in quite a bit from other things, church socials and this barbecue deal, for instance.”

  “And these four white men in the delivery truck got all of it?”

  “Well, just the eighty-seven thousand dollars we had taken in tonight. But there were five of them. One stayed inside the truck behind a a barricade all the time.”

  The detectives became suddenly alert. “What kind of barricade?” Grave Digger asked.

  “I don’t know exactly. I couldn’t see inside the truck very well. But it looked like some kind of a box covered with burlap.”

  “What provision company supplied your meat?” Coffin Ed asked.

  “I don’t know, sir. That wasn’t part of my duties. You’ll have to ask the chef.”

  They sent for the chef and he came wet and bedraggled, his white cap hanging over one ear like a rag. He was mad at everything — the bandits, the rain, and the police cruiser that had fallen into his barbecue pit. His eyes were bright red and he took it as a personal insult when they asked about the provision company.

  “I don’t know where the ribs come from after they left the hog,” he said angrily. “I was just hired to superintend the cooking. I ain’t had nothing to do with them white folks and I don’t know how many they was — ’cept too many.”

  “Leave this soul-brother go,” Coffin Ed said. “Pretty soon he wouldn’t have been here.”

  Grave Digger wrote down O’Malley’s official address, which he already knew, then as a last question asked, “What was your connection with the original Back-to-Africa movement, the one headed by Mr Michaux?”

  “None at all. Reverend O’Malley didn’t have anything at all to do with Mr Michaux’s group. In fact he didn’t even like Lewis Michaux; I don’t think he ever spoke to him.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that Mr Michaux might not have had anything to do with Reverend O’Malley? Did you ever think that he might have known something about O’Malley that made him distrust O’Malley?”

  “I don’t think it was anything like that,” Bill contended. “What reason could he have to distrust O’Malley? I just think he was envious, that’s all. Reverend O’Malley thought he was too slow; he didn’t see any reason for waiting any longer; we’ve waited long enough.”

  “And you were intending to go back to Africa too?”

  “Yes, sir, still intend to — as soon as we get the money back. You’ll get the money back for us, won’t you?”

  “Son, if we don’t, we’re gonna raise so much hell they’re gonna send us all back to Africa.”

  “And for free, too,” Coffin Ed added grimly.

  The young man thanked them and went back to stand with the others in the rain.

  “Well, Ed, what do you think about it?” Grave Digger asked.

  “One thing is for sure, it wasn’t the syndicate pulled this caper — not the crime syndicate, anyway.”

  “What other kinds of syndicates are there?”

  “Don’t ask me, I ain’t the F.B.I.”

  They were silent for a moment with the rain pouring over them, thinking of these eighty-seven families who had put down their thousand-dollar grubstakes on a dream. They knew that these families had come by their money the hard way. To many, it represented the savings of a lifetime. To most it represented long hours of hard work at menial jobs. None could afford to lose it.

  They didn’t consider these victims as squares or suckers. They understood them. These people were seeking a home — just the same as the Pilgrim Fathers. Harlem is a city of the homeless. These people had deserted the South because it could never be considered their home. Many had been sent north by the white southerners in revenge for the desegregation ruling. Others had fled, thinking the North was better. But they had not found a home in the North. They had not found a home in America. So they looked across the sea to Africa, where other black people were both the ruled and the rulers. Africa to them was a big free land which they could proudly call home, for there were buried the bones of their ancestors, there lay the roots of their families, and it was inhabited by the descendants of those same ancestors — which made them related by both blood and race. Everyone has to believe in something; and the white people of America had left them nothing to believe in. But
that didn’t make a black man any less criminal than a white; and they had to find the criminals who hijacked the money, black or white.

  “Anyway, the first thing is to find Deke,” Grave Digger put voice to their thoughts. “If he ain’t responsible for this caper he’ll sure as hell know who is.”

  “He had better know,” Coffin Ed said grimly.

  But Deke didn’t know any more than they did. He had worked a long time to set up his movement and it had been expensive. At first he had turned to the church to hide from the syndicate. He had figured if he set himself up as a preacher and used his reward money for civil improvement, the syndicate would hesitate about rubbing him out.

  But the syndicate hadn’t shown any interest in him. That had worried him until he figured out that the syndicate simply didn’t want to get involved in the race issue; he had already done all the harm he could do, so they left him to the soul-brothers.

  Then he’d gotten the idea for his Back-to-Africa movement from reading a biography of Marcus Garvey, the Negro who had organized the first Back-to-Africa movement. It was said that Garvey had collected over a million dollars. He had been sent to prison, but most of his followers had contended that he was innocent and had still believed in him. Whether he had been innocent or not was not the question; what appealed to him was the fact his followers had still believed in him. That was the con-man’s real genius, to keep the suckers always believing.

  So he had started his own Back-to-Africa movement, the only difference being when he had got his million, he was going to cut out — he might go back to Africa, himself. He’d heard that people with money could live good in certain places there. The way he had planned it he would use two goons impersonating detectives to impound the money as he collected it; in that way he wouldn’t have to bank it and could always keep it on hand.

  He didn’t know where these white hijackers fitted in. At the first glimpse he thought they were guns from the syndicate. That was why he had hidden beneath the table. But when he discovered they’d just come to grab the money, he had known it was something else again. So he had decided to chase them down and get the money back.