Cotton Comes to Harlem

by Chester Himes

  He went down the stairway like a dive-bomber, didn’t stop until he was in the basement. He heard footsteps coming his way. He froze behind the closed door, assembling his face, making up his story. But the footsteps went on past him into silence. Cautiously he looked out into the basement. No one was in sight. He went in the direction opposite the one the footsteps had taken and found a door. It opened onto a short flight of stairs. He went up the stairs and found a heavy iron door locked with a Yale snap lock. He unlocked it and pushed the door open a crack and looked out.

  He saw 135th Street. Colored people were out in numbers, walking about in their summertime rags. Two men were eating watermelon from a wagon. In the wagon the melons were kept on ice to keep them cool. Children were gathered around a small pushcart, eating cones of shaved ice flavored with colored syrups from bottles. Others were playing stickball in the street. Women were conversing in loud voices; a drunken man weaved down the sidewalk, cursing the world; a blind beggar tapped a path with his white stick, rattling a penny in his tin cup; a dog was messing on the sidewalk; a line of men was sitting in the shade on the steps of a church, talking about the white folks and the Negro problem.

  He stepped from the doorway and crossed the street, and soon he was lost in that big turbulent sea of black humanity which is Harlem.

  12

  When Grave Digger and Coffin Ed came on duty at 8 p.m., Lieutenant Anderson said, “Your car was found abandoned up at 163rd Street and Edgecombe Drive. Does that tell you anything?”

  Coffin Ed backed against the wall in the shadows where Anderson couldn’t see his expression, but Anderson heard him make some kind of sound that sounded like a snort. Grave Digger perched a ham on the edge of the desk and massaged his chin. The curve of his back concealed the bulge of the .38 revolver over his heart but made his shoulders look wider. He thought about it and chuckled.

  “Tell me it was stolen,” he said finally. “What you think, Ed?”

  “Either that or it drove itself.”

  Anderson looked quizzically from one to the other. “Well, was it stolen?”

  Grave Digger chuckled again. “Think we’re going to admit it if it was?”

  “It was them chickens, boss?” Coffin Ed said.

  Lieutenant Anderson reddened slightly and shook his head. He didn’t always dig the private humor of his two ace detectives and sometimes it made him feel uncomfortable. But he realized they attached no significance to the fact their car had been stolen. Whenever they got a clue of importance the air around them became electric.

  It became electric now when he said, “We’re holding Deke O’Hara’s woman Iris on a homicide rap.”

  Both detectives froze in that immobility which denotes full attention. But neither spoke; they knew a story went with it. They waited.

  “She was arrested in the apartment of the man killed in the Back-to-Africa hijack, John Hill. John Hill’s wife Mabel had been shot five times; she was dead when the police arrived. Both women were nude and badly mauled — scratched and beaten as though they’d had a furious go with each other. Tenants had called the police before the shooting to report what sounded like a woman fight in the apartment. A gun was found on the floor — a .32 revolver. It had been recently fired and there’s no doubt it is the murder gun; but it has gone to ballistics. Her fingerprints were on the stock and smeared on the trigger but are partly obliterated by a clear set of prints by a man. Homicide figures a man handled the gun afterwards; maybe Deke. They’re checking against his Bertillon card and we’ll soon know.”

  Grave Digger and Coffin Ed exchanged looks but said nothing.

  “Iris contends Deke wasn’t there. An hour earlier she had escaped from her own apartment. She admits going there looking for him but swears he hadn’t been there. She had escaped on a ruse — you’ll hear all about it. She admits that she and the Hill woman had a fight and she says she took the gun away from the Hill woman and it went off accidentally. She says it was a private fight and had nothing to do with the Back-to-Africa hijacking, but she won’t give any reason for it.”

  Both detectives turned ad looked at him as though guided by the same impulse.

  “Do you want to talk to her?” Anderson asked.

  The detectives exchanged looks.

  “How long after the shooting before the car crew arrived?” Grave Digger asked.

  “About two and a half minutes.”

  “What floor?”

  “Seventh, but there’s a fast elevator and he would have had time to get down and away before the police arrived,” he said, reading their thoughts.

  “Not if they were naked,” Coffin Ed said.

  Anderson blushed. He hadn’t gotten to be a lieutenant by being a square but he was always slightly embarrassed by their bald way of stating the facts of life.

  “And he’d have to dress well in that neighborhood,” Grave Digger added

  “And completely,” Coffin Ed concluded.

  “There was an open window on the fire-escape at the back,” Anderson said. “But no one has been found who saw him leave.” He looked through the reports on his desk. “A woman on the fourth floor directly below telephoned to report that she thought she heard her front door being opened and when she went to look found the chain off. But nothing was missing from the house. Homicide found the window open onto the fire-escape but she said she had left it open. Any prints that might have been left on the doorknob were smeared by her son coming and going afterwards, and she wiped whatever prints there may have been from the windowsill when dusting.”

  “They believe in keeping spick and span in those apartments,” Grave Digger said.

  “So clean that even Deke gets away clean,” Coffin Ed said.

  “Who knows?” Grave Digger said. “Let’s go talk to her.”

  They had her taken from the cell where she was held, awaiting magistrate’s court Monday morning, to the interrogation room in the basement known to the Harlem underworld as the “Pigeons’ Nest”. It was claimed that more pigeons were hatched there than beneath all the eaves in Harlem.

  It was a soundproof, windowless room with a stool in the center bolted to the floor and surrounded by floodlights bright enough to make the blackest man transparent.

  But only the overhead light was on when the jailer brought her in. She saw Grave Digger standing beside the stool, waiting for her. The door was closed and locked behind her. She had a sudden feeling of being taken from the earth. Then she saw the vague outline of Coffin Ed backed against the wall in the shadows. His acid-burned face looked like a Mardi Gras masque to scare little children. She shuddered.

  Grave Digger said, “Sit down, baby, and tell us how you are.”

  She stood defiantly. “I’m not talking in this hole. You’ve got it bugged.”

  “What for? Ed and me are going to remember anything you say.”

  Coffin Ed stepped forward. He looked like the dead killer in the play Winterset, coming up out of East River. “Sit down anyway,” he said.

  She sat down. He stepped towards her. Grave Digger switched on the floodlights. She blinked. Coffin Ed had intended to slap her. But now he saw her. He caught his hand. “Well, well, well,” he said. “Ain’t you beautiful.”

  Her smooth, yellow, creamed and perfumed flesh of the day before now ran through all the colors of the spectrum, from black to bright orange; her neck was swollen, one breast was twice the size of the other; red, raw scratches ran down her face, over her neck and shoulders, to disappear beneath her dress; and her hair looked like it had been doused in the river Styx.

  “It could have been worse,” Grave Digger said.

  “How?” she asked, squinting at the bright lights. The bruises and scratches looked painted on her transparent skin.

  “You could be dead.”

  She shrugged faintly. “You call that worse?”

  “Well, hell, you’re still alive,” Coffin Ed said. “And you can get eight thousand and seven hundred dollars’ reward money if you hel
p us.”

  “How about this chickenshit rap they’re holding me on?” she bargained.

  “That’s your baby,” Grave Digger said.

  She winced at the word baby; that was what had started it all.

  “And it ain’t chickenshit,” Coffin Ed added.

  “It’s a rap,” she said.

  “Where’s Deke?” Grave Digger asked.

  “If I knew where the mother-raper was, I’d sure tell you.”

  “But you went there to see him.”

  She sat thinking for a time, then seemingly she made up her mind. “He was there,” she admitted. “In his drawers. Why else would I be mad enough to shoot the chippy whore. But I don’t remember him getting away. He had knocked me unconscious.” After a moment she added, “I wonder why he didn’t kill me.”

  “How did you get away from the detective guarding you?” he asked.

  She laughed suddenly and her marks formed another pattern’ like one of those innocuous pictures revealing shocking obscenities at certain angles. “That was a beauty,” she said. “It could only happen to a white man.”

  Grave Digger looked sardonic. “As long as it’s got nothing to do with this caper, let’s skip it.”

  “It was just between me and him.”

  “What we want to know, baby, is what was the set-up of Deke’s Back-to-Africa pitch.”

  “Where have you been all your life, you don’t know that?” she said.

  “We know it. We just want you to confirm it.”

  Some of her flippancy returned. “What’s in it for me?” she asked.

  Coffin Ed stepped forward. “Try it on, anyway,” he grated. “Just for size.”

  She looked towards his voice but she couldn’t see him through the light and that made it sound more frightening.

  “Well, you know he was going to take the money and blow,” she began. “But not until he’d played other cities too. He had the armored car made. The guards were his. Only the agents and other personnel were squares. The detectives were to come in and get him off the hook by confiscating the money until an investigation could be made. Since all the suckers thought he was honest, there was nothing to fear. He borrowed the idea from the Marcus Garvey movement.”

  “We know all that,” Grave Digger said. “We want some names and descriptions.”

  She gave him the name and address of Barry Waterfield, alias Baby Jack Johnson, alias Big Papa Domore. She said the two guns who had guarded the truck were known as Four-Four and Freddy; she had never heard them called by their real monickers and she didn’t know where they were staying. They were Deke’s men, he probably got them from prison; and he kept them out of sight. The dead man who had impersonated the other detective had been called Elmer Sanders. They were all from Chicago.

  That was what they wanted and Coffin Ed relaxed.

  But Grave Digger asked, “He wasn’t putting the double-cross on his own men by having himself hijacked?”

  She thought for a moment, then said, “No, I don’t think so. I’m reckoning on the way he’s acted afterwards.”

  “Any idea who they were?”

  “I keep thinking of the Syndicate. Just because I can’t think of anyone else, I guess.”

  “It wasn’t the Syndicate,” Grave Digger stated flatly.

  “Then I don’t know. He never seemed scared of anybody else — Of course he never told me everything.”

  Grave Digger smiled sourly at the understatement.

  “What you got on Deke?” Coffin Ed asked.

  She looked towards the voice behind the lights and felt a tremor run through her body. Why did that mother-raper scare her so? she wondered. Finally she said simply, “The proof.”

  Both detectives froze as though listening for an echo. It didn’t come.

  “You want us to take him, don’t you?” Grave Digger said.

  “Take him,” she said.

  “Be ready,” he said.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  On their way out they stopped again to see Lieutenant Anderson and have him put a tail on Barry Waterfield.

  Then Grave Digger said, “We’re going to put our pigeons on Deke. If they get anything they’ll phone it to you and you call us in the car.”

  “Right,” Anderson said. “I’ll have a couple of cars on alert for an emergency.”

  “There ain’t going to be any emergency,” Coffin Ed said and they left.

  They began contacting all the stool pigeons they could reach. They got many tips on unsolved crimes and wanted criminals but nothing on Deke O’Hara. They filed away the information for later use, but for all of their stool pigeons they had only one instruction: “Find Deke O’Hara. He’s loose on the town. Telephone Lieutenant Anderson at the precinct station, drop the message and hang up. And disappear.”

  It was a slow, tedious process, but they had no other. There were five humdred thousand colored people in Harlem and so many holes in which to hide that sewer rats have been known to get lost.

  Barry telephoned Deke at Mabel’s from Bowman’s Bar at the corner of St Nicholas Place and 155th Street on the dot of 10 p.m. as he had been instructed. The phone rang once, twice, three times. Abruptly a warning sounded in his head; his sixth sense told him the police were there and were tracing the call. He hung up as though letting go a snake and headed towards the exit. The bar girl looked at him as he passed, eyebrows raised, wondering what had spurred him so suddenly. He tossed fifty cents on the bar to pay for his thirty-five-cent beer and went out fast, looking for a taxi.

  He caught one headed downtown and said, “Drop me at 145th and Broadway.” When they turned west on 145th he heard the faint whine of a siren headed towards Bowman’s and sweat filmed his upper lip.

  Broadway is a fringe street. Black Harlem has moved solidly to its east side but its west side is still mixed with Puerto Ricans and leftover whites. He got out on the north-east corner, crossed the street, walked rapidly up to 149th and went down towards the Hudson River. He turned into a small neat apartment house halfway down the block and climbed three flights of stairs.

  The light-bright-damn-near-white woman who had been naked in his bed when Iris had called opened the door for him. She was talking before she closed it: “Iris killed Mabel Hill right after she left us. Ain’t that something? They got her in jail. It just came over the radio.” Her voice was strident with excitement.

  “Deke?” he asked tensely.

  “Oh, he got away. They’re looking for him. Let me fix you a drink.”

  His gaze swept the three-room apartment, reading every sign. It was a nice place but he didn’t see it. He was thinking that Deke must have tried to contact him while he was out.

  “Drive me home,” he said.

  She began to pout but one look at his face cooled her.

  Five minutes later, the young colored detective Paul Robinson, assigned with his partner Ernie Fisher to tail Barry, saw him get out of the closed convertible in front of the apartment where he lived and run quickly up the stairs. Paul was sitting in a black Ford sedan with regular Manhattan plates, parked across the street, pointed uptown. He got Lieutenant Anderson on the radiotelephone and said, “He just came in.”

  “Keep on him,” Anderson said.

  When Barry got off at the fourth floor there was a young man standing in the hall waiting to go down. He was Ernie Fisher. For two hours he had been standing there, waiting to descend every time the elevator stopped. But this time he went. When he came out on the street he got into a two-toned Chevrolet sedan parked in front of the entrance, pointed downtown.

  Paul got out of the Ford sedan, crossed the street and entered the apartment without glancing at his partner. He took the stand on the fourth floor, waiting to descend.

  The deacon-looking landlord told Barry he had had several urgent calls from a Mr Bloomfield who had left a message saying if he didn’t want the car he had found another buyer. Barry went immediately to the telephone and called Mr Bloomfield.


  “Bloomfield,” replied a voice having no affinity to such a name.

  “Mr Bloomfield, I want the car,” Barry said. “I’m ready right now to close the deal. I’ve been out raising the money.”

  “Come to my office right away,” Mr Bloomfield said and hung up.

  “Right away, Mr Bloomfield,” Barry said into the dead phone for the landlord’s ears.

  He stopped in his room on his way out, strapped on a shoulder holster with a .45 Colt automatic, and changed into a loose black silk sport jacket made to accommodate the gun.

  When he came out into the hall he saw a young man standing by the elevator, jabbing the button impatiently. There was nothing about the young man to incur suspicion or jog his memory. He stood beside him and they rode down together. The young man walked rapidly ahead of him and ran down the stairs and across the street without looking back. Barry didn’t give him another thought.

  A Chevrolet sedan parked at the curb was just moving off and Barry hailed a taxi that drew up in the place vacated. The taxi went downtown, through City College, past the convent from which the street derives its name, and down the hill towards 125th Street. The Chevrolet stayed ahead. The Ford had made a U-turn and was following the taxi a block to the rear.

  Convent came to an end at 125th Street. Taking a chance, Ernie turned his Chevrolet left, towards Eighth Avenue. The taxi turned sharply right. The Ford closed in behind it.

  Barry had seen the Ford through the rear window. He had his driver stop suddenly in front of a bar. The Ford whizzed past, the driver looking the other way, and turned left where the street splits.

  Barry had his driver make a U-turn and head back towards the east side. He didn’t see anything unusual about the Chevrolet pulling out from the curb near Eighth Avenue; it looked just like any other hundreds of Chevrolets in Harlem — a poor man’s Cadillac. He had the taxi turn right at the Theresa Hotel on Seventh Avenue and pull to the curb. The Chevrolet kept on down 125th Street.