Cotton Comes to Harlem

by Chester Himes

  “Who’s calling?”

  “His wife. I just got back.”

  After a moment another disguised voice said, “Honey, where are you?”

  “I’m here,” Iris said.

  “How’d you get out?”

  Don’t you wish you knew? she thought. Aloud she said, “How would you like to buy a bale of cotton?”

  There was a long pregnant silence. “Tell me where you are and I’ll have my chauffeur pick you up.”

  “Stay put,” she said. “I’m dealing in cotton.”

  “Just don’t deal in death,” the voice sounded a deadly warning.

  She hung up. When she stepped outside she looked up and down the street. Cars were parked on both sides. Crosstown traffic flowed from the Triborough Bridge headed towards the West Side Highway and the 125th Street ferry and vice versa. There was nothing about the black Ford to set it apart from any other car. It was empty and looked put for some time. She didn’t see the two-toned Chevrolet parked down the street. But when she started walking again, she was being tailed.

  Grave Digger and Coffin Ed drove their official car, the little black car with the hopped-up engine that was so well known in Harlem, into a garage on 155th Street and left it for a tune-up. Then they walked up the hill to the subway and rode the “A” train down to Columbus Circle at 59th Street and Broadway.

  They walked over to the section of pawnshops and secondhand clothing stores on Columbus Avenue and went into Katz’s pawnshop and bought black sunglasses and caps. Grave Digger chose a big checkered cap called the “Sportsman” while Coffin Ed selected a red, long-billed fatigue cap modelled after those worn by the Seabees during the war. When they emerged, they looked like two Harlem cats, high off pot.

  They walked up Broadway to a car rental agency and selected a black panel truck without any markings. The rental agent didn’t want to trust them until they put down a large deposit. He took it and grinned, figuring them for Harlem racketeers.

  “Will this jalopy run?” Grave Digger asked.

  “Run!” the agent exclaimed. “Cadillacs get out of its way.”

  “Damn right,” Coffin Ed said. “If I owned a Cadillac I’d get out of its way too.”

  They got in and drove it back uptown.

  “Now I know why the world looks so vague to weedheads,” Grave Digger said from behind the wheel.

  “Too bad there isn’t any make-up to disguise us as white,” Coffin Ed said.

  “Hell, I remember when old Canada Lee was made up as a white man, playing on Broadway in a Shakespearean play; and if Canada Lee could look like a white man, I’m damn sure we could.”

  The mechanic at the garage didn’t recognize them until Grave Digger flashed his sheld.

  “I’ll be a mother,” he said, grinning. “When I saw you coming I locked the safe.”

  “Just as well,” Grave Digger said. “You never know who’s in a panel truck.”

  “Ain’t it the truth?” the mechanic said.

  They had him take their radio-telephone from their official car and install it temporarily in the truck. It took forty-five minutes and Coffin Ed called home. His wife said no one named Abigail had called either her or Stella, but the precinct station had been calling every half-hour trying to get in touch with them.

  “Just tell them you don’t know where we are,” Coffin Ed said. “And that’s the truth.”

  When they left the garage they were able to pick up all the police calls. All cars had been alerted to contact them and order them back to the station. Then the cars were instructed to pick up a slim black woman wearing a red dress, named Lotus Green.

  Coffin Ed chuckled. “By this time that yellow gal has damn sure got that dye off, much as she hates being black.”

  “And she ain’t wearing that cheap red dress, either,” Grave Digger added.

  They drove over to a White Rose bar at the corner of 125th and Park Avenue, across the street from the 125th Street railroad station, and parked behind a two-toned Chevrolet. Ernie was sitting in a shoeshine stand outside the bar, facing Park. The sign on the awning read: AMERICAN LEGION SHOE SHINE. Two elderly white men were shining colored men’s shoes. Across the avenue, seen between the stanchions of the railroad trestle, was another shoeshine, its awning proclaiming: FATHER DIVINE SHOE SHINE. Two elderly colored men were shining white men’s shoes.

  “Democracy at work,” Coffin Ed said.

  “Down to the feet.”

  “Down at the feet,” Coffin Ed corrected.

  Ernie saw them go into the bar but gave no sign of recognition. They stood at the bar like two cats having a sip of something cold to dampen their dry jag, and ordered beer. After a while Ernie came in and squeezed to the bar beside them. He ordered a beer. The white barman put down an open bottle and a glass. Ernie wasn’t looking when he poured it and some sloshed on to Grave Digger’s hand. He turned and said, “Excuse me, I wasn’t looking.”

  “That’s what’s on all them tombstones,” Grave Digger said.

  Ernie laughed. “She’s at Billie’s, the dancer, on 115th Street,” he said under his breath.

  “Don’t pay no ’tention to me, son, I was just joking,” Grave Digger said aloud. “Stay with it.”

  The bartender was passing. He looked from one to the other. Stay with it, he thought. Stay with what? As long as he’d been working in Harlem, he had never learned these colored folks’ language.

  Grave Digger and Coffin Ed finished their beers and ordered two more and Ernie finished his and went out. Coffin Ed used the bar phone and telephoned his home. There had been no call from Abigail, but the precinct station had been calling regularly. The bartender was listening furtively but Coffin Ed hadn’t said a word. Then finally he said, “Stay with it.” The bartender started. Nuts, he thought looking vindicated.

  They left their beers half finished and went around the corner and sat in their truck.

  “If we could tap the phone,” Coffin Ed said.

  “She’s not going to phone from there,” Grave Digger said. “She’s too smart for that.”

  “I just hope she don’t get too mother-raping smart to live,” Coffin Ed said.

  Billie was alone when Iris knocked with the brass-hand knocker on the black and yellow lacquered door. She opened the door on the chain. She was wearing yellow chiffon lounging slacks over a pair of black lace pants and a long-sleeved white chiffon blouse fastened at the cuffs with turquoise links. She might as well have been naked. Her slim, bare, dancer’s feet had bright red lacquered nails. As always she was made up as though to step before the cameras. She looked like the favourite in a sultan’s harem.

  Through the crack she saw a woman who looked too black to be real, dressed like a housemaid on her afternoon off. She blinked. “You’ve got the wrong door,” she said.

  “It’s me,” Iris said.

  Billie’s eyes widened “Me who? You sound like somebody I know but you sure don’t look like anybody I’d ever know.”

  “Me, Iris.”

  Billie scrutinized her for a moment, then broke into hysterical laughter. “My God, you look like the last of the Topsys. Whatever happened to you?”

  “Unchain the door and let me in,” Iris snapped. “I know how I look.”

  Billie unchained the door, still laughing hysterically, and locked and chained it behind her. Then suddenly, watching Iris hurry towards the bath, she called, “Hey, I read you were in jail,” running after her.

  Iris was already at the mirror, smearing cleansing cream over her face, when Billie came in. “I’m out now, as you can see.”

  “Well, how ’bout you,” Billie said, sitting on the edge of the bathtub. “Who sprung you? The paper said you lowered the boom on Deke and now he’s escaped.”

  Iris snatched a clean towel and began frantically rubbing her face to see if the black would come off. Yellow skin appeared. Reassured, she became less frantic. “The monsters,” she said. “They want me to help ’em find Deke.”

  Billie lo
oked shocked. “You wouldn’t!” she exclaimed.

  Iris was slipping out of the cheap red dress. “The hell I wouldn’t,” she said.

  Billie jumped to her feet. “I certainly won’t help you,” she said. “I always liked Deke.”

  “You can have him, sugar,” Iris said sweetly, peeling off the lisle stockings. “I’ll swap him for a dress.”

  Billie left the room, looking indignant, while Iris shed to the skin and began removing the black in earnest. After a while Billie returned and threw clothes across the side of the tub. She looked at Iris’s nude body critically.

  “You sure got beat up, baby. You look like you’ve been raped by three cannibals.”

  “That’d be a kick,” Iris mumbled, smearing her face more thoroughly with the cleansing cream.

  “Here, use Ponds,” Billie said, handing her a different jar. “That’s Chanel’s you’re wasting on that blackening and this is just as good for that.”

  Iris exchanged the jar without comment and went on smearing her face, neck, arms and legs.

  “Did you really kill her?” Billie asked as though casually.

  Iris stopped applying the cream and turned around and looked at her. “Don’t ask me that question. There never was a man I’d kill for.” There was a warning in her voice that frightened Billie.

  But she had to know. “Were you and her-”

  “Shut up,” Iris snapped. “I didn’t know the bitch.”

  “You can’t stay here,” Billie said bitchily, showing her disbelief. “They’d lock me up too if they found me.”

  “Don’t be so fucking jealous,” Iris said and began kneading in the cleansing cream again. “Nobody knows I’m here and not even Deke knows about us.”

  Billie smiled with secret pleasure. Mollified, she asked, “How do you expect to get to Deke after you’ve ratted on him?”

  Iris laughed as at a good joke. “I’m going to cook up a good story about where to find the money he’s lost and see what he’ll pay me for it. Deke will forgive anything for money.”

  “The Back-to-Africa money? Honey, that money has gone with the wind.”

  “Don’t think I don’t know it. I just want to get something out of that two-timing mother-raper any kind of way.”

  Billie had her secret smile again. “Baby, how you talk,” she said, adding: “You can wipe it off now,” referring to the cream. “I’ll make you up in tan so you’ll look brand-new.”

  “You’re a darling,” Iris said absently, but in the back of her mind she was thinking furiously why Deke would want a bale of cotton.

  Billie was looking at her nude body lustfully. “Don’t tempt me,” she said.

  19

  The Monday edition of the Harlem Sentinel came out around noon. Coffin Ed picked up a copy at the newsstand by the Lexington Avenue Subway Kiosk at one-thirty for them to read with their lunch. There had been no word from Abigail, and Paul had just ridden past giving the high sign that Iris was still put.

  They wanted to eat some place where it was unlikely they’d be spotted, and where they wouldn’t look out of place in their black weedhead sunglasses. They decided to go to a joint on East 116th Street called Spotty’s, run by a big black man with white skin spots and his albino wife.

  After years of bemoaning the fact that he looked like an overgrown Dalmatian, Spotty had made a peace with life and opened a restaurant specializing in ham hocks, red beans and rice. It sat between a store-front church and a box factory and had no side windows, and the front was so heavily curtained the light of day never entered. Spotty’s prices were too moderate and his helpings too big to afford bright electric lights all day. Therefore it attracted customers such as people in hiding, finicky people who couldn’t bear the sight of flies in their food, poor people who wanted as much as they could get for their money, weedheads avoiding bright lights, and blind people who didn’t know the difference.

  They took a table in the rear across from two laborers. Spotty brought them plates of red beans, rice and ham hocks, and a stack of sliced bread. There wasn’t any choice.

  Coffin Ed wolfed a mouthful hungrily and gasped for breath. “This stuff will set your teeth on fire,” he said.

  “Take some of this hot sauce and cool it off,” one of the laborers said with a straight face.

  “It cools you off these hot days,” the other laborer said. “Draws all the heat to the belly and leaves the rest of you cool.”

  “What about the belly?” Grave Digger asked.

  “Hell, man, what kind of old lady you got?” the laborer said.

  Grave Digger shouted for two beers. Coffin Ed took out the paper and divided it in two. He could barely see the large print through his smoked glasses. “What you want, the inside or the outside?”

  “You expect to read in here?” Grave Digger said.

  “Ask Spotty to give you a candle,” the laborer said with a straight face.

  “Never mind,” Grave Digger said. “I’ll read one word and guess two.”

  He took the inside of the paper and folded it on the table. The classified ads were up. His gaze was drawn to an ad in a box: Bale of cotton wanted immediately. Telephone Tompkins 2 — before seven p.m. He passed the paper to Coffin Ed. Neither of them said anything. The laborers looked curious but Grave Digger turned over the page before they could see anything.

  “Looking for a job?” the talkative laborer asked.

  “Yeah,” Grave Digger said.

  “That ain’t the paper for it,” the laborer said.

  No one replied. Finally the two laborers got tired of trying to find out their business and got up and left. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed finished eating in silence.

  Spotty came to their table. “Dessert?” he asked.

  “What is it?”

  “Blackberry pie.”

  “Hell, it’s too dark in here to eat blackberry pie,” Grave Digger said and paid him and they got up and left.

  Coffin Ed called his home from a street booth, but there was still no word from Abigail. Then he called the Tompkins number. A southern voice answered, “Back-to-the-Southland office, Colonel Calhoun speaking.” He hung up.

  “The Colonel,” he told Grave Digger when he got back in the truck.

  “Let’s don’t think about it here,” Grave Digger said. “They might be tracing our calls home.”

  They drove back past the 125th Street railroad station and found the Chevrolet parked near the Fischer Cafeteria. Ernie gave them the sign that Iris was still put. They were driving on when they saw a blind man tapping his way along. They pulled around the corner of Madison Avenue and waited.

  Finally the blind man came tapping along Madison. He was selling Biblical calendars. Coffin Ed leaned from the truck and said, “Hey, let me see one of those.”

  The blind man tapped over towards the edge of the sidewalk, feeling his way cautiously. He pulled a calendar from his bag and said, “It’s got all the names of the Saints and the Holy Days, and numbers straight out of the Apocalypse; and it’s got the best days for births and deaths.” Lowering his voice he added, “It’s the photograph I told you about night before last.”

  Coffin Ed made as though he were leafing through it. “How’d you make us?” he whispered.

  “Ernie,” the blind man whispered back.

  Satisfied, Coffin Ed said loudly, “Got any dream readings in here?”

  Passersby hearing the question stopped to listen.

  “There’s a whole section on dream interpretations,” the blind man said.

  “I’ll take this one,” Coffin Ed said and gave the blind man a half dollar.

  “I’ll take one too,” another man said. “I dreamed last night I was white.”

  Grave Digger drove off, turned east on 127th Street and parked. Coffin Ed passed him the photograph. It showed distinctly the front of a big black limousine. A blond young man sat behind the wheel. Colonel Calhoun sat next to him. Three vague white men sat on the rear seat. Approaching the car was Josh, th
e murdered junkyard laborer, grinning with relief.

  “This cooks him,” Grave Digger said.

  “It won’t fry him,” Coffin Ed said, “but it’ll scorch the hell out of him.”

  “Anyway, he didn’t get the cotton.”

  “What does that prove? He might already have the money and the cotton might just be evidence. He might have killed the boy just to keep from tipping his hand,” Grave Digger argued.

  “And advertise for the cotton today? Hell, let’s take him anyway, and find the cotton later.”

  “Let’s get Deke first,” Grave Digger said. “The Colonel will keep. He’s got more than eighty-seven thousand dollars behind him — the whole mother-raping white South — and he’s playing a deeper game than just hijacking.”

  “We’ll see, said the blind man,” Coffin Ed said and they drove back to the White Rose bar at 125th and Park. Paul was waiting at the bar, drinking a Coke. They pushed in beside him. He spoke in a low voice but openly. “We’ve been assigned to another case. Captain Brice doesn’t know we’ve been working for you and we won’t tell him, but we have to report to the station now. Ernie’s waiting for you to take over. She hasn’t moved but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t phoned.”

  “Right,” Grave Digger said. “We’re on the lam, you know.”

  “I know.”

  The bartender approached with a wise, knowing look. These nuts again, he was thinking. But they left without ordering. He nodded his head wisely, as if he’d known it all the time. They drove over to 115th Street and found Ernie parked near the corner watching the entrance of the apartment house through his rear-view mirror while pretending to read a newspaper. Coffin Ed gave him a sign and he drove off.

  There was a bar with a public telephone on the corner of Lenox Avenue. So they parked down towards Seventh Avenue, opposite the entrance, so they would be behind Iris if she came out to telephone. Grave Digger got out and began jacking up the right rear wheel, keeping bent over out of sight of Billie’s windows. Coffin Ed walked towards the bar, shoulders hunched and red cap pulled low over his black weedhead sunglasses. He looked like one of the real-gone cats with his signifying walk. They figured she had to make her move soon.