I forced my brain to slow down. There were too many thoughts to process, too much information to make sense of. I thought about what Jose had said. “Back when he lived here before, Mrs. Gillespie, up here in Harlem, what did Itch... what did Malachi do for work, and where did he live?”
“He worked in his uncle’s barber shop on 148th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue when he worked, which wasn’t often,” she said.
“Is that because of his, ah, racketeering activities?” I asked in what I hoped was an inoffensive tone. Wasted effort. The woman was looking at me the way Eddie and Mike and Yolanda did when I said something they thought was really dumb. She didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. “He was involved in numbers and bookmaking,” I said by way of explanation. “He was part of one of the big Harlem numbers operations.”
Louise Gillespie gave a most unladylike snort. “Is that what he told you?” Then she laughed out loud. “Malachi Johnson was no big time gangster. He was a petty thief, a robber. He broke into people’s homes and businesses, he stole cars or bicycles or rubber bands or green stamps— if it wasn’t nailed down and he thought somebody would buy it, he’d steal it.”
“He didn’t work for Bumpy Johnson?”
“Who?” Mrs. Gillespie wrinkled her brow again in that concentrated effort to recall the past. “I don’t remember anybody by that...Oh! I know who you mean! Stephanie St. Clair’s man!” And she gave another great whoop of laughter. “Is he going around telling people he worked for Madame St. Clair?”
Now I was totally confused. “I don’t know about anybody named St. Clair, but yes, Malachi did say he worked for Bumpy Johnson. In fact, he said he was his cousin.” I remembered something. That St. Clair name was ringing a bell. “The Queen of Harlem,” I said. “Stephanie St. Clair was the Queen of Harlem.”
My hostess nodded and a wistful look came into her eyes. “Harlem was an exciting, fascinating place back then. Yes, it was occasionally dangerous, and the extreme poverty that plagued so many Negroes was nothing short of shameful and almost too painful to bear, but what made it so special was the triumph of so many spirits over so much degradation. Harlem, for whatever reason, inspired people.”
I was nodding my agreement. “I saw that movie, the one about Bumpy Johnson and the Queen of Harlem.”
Mrs. Gillespie changed so fast I almost got up and moved out of the way. In that instant I saw where Sandra got her touchy streak from. “I know what movie you mean and it still makes me mad just to think about it.”
“Why?” I asked. “I thought it was a really good movie.”
“You ever ask yourself why movies about white gangsters are called things like Godfather and Goodfellas, but a movie about Black gangsters is called Hoodlum?
The thought took the wind out of me.
“Lawrence Fishburne and Cicely Tyson and all those other people, they were every bit as good as those white actors, weren’t they? And isn’t Harlem’s history just as important as the history of Little Italy? So why did their movie have to be called Hoodlum? I know a lot of people who wouldn’t go see it because of that title. I only went because my grandchildren made me.”
I sat in stunned and chastened silence, feeling Louise Gillespie’s pain and anger, until the reality of Itchy Johnson’s lies took over. I needed to steer the conversation back there and I wasn’t certain how to do that. I didn’t have to worry about it.
“I’m sorry I went off on that tangent, Phillip. You didn’t come here to listen to me be mad at Hollywood. What else can I tell you?”
I could have kissed her. In fact, between Louise and Arlene and Gertrude and Jill, I was beginning to wish I’d been born a couple of generations earlier. These were some women! “How did he get to her? Malachi. How did he know Jill? Was he friends with her grandparents? And how did her parents find out what happened to her?
“Elijah and Sarah knew Malachi but they weren’t friends; Malachi wasn’t their kind. Elijah and Sarah were the hardworking, church-going kind. Always two or three jobs, trying to better themselves and make a better way for their children. They wanted Leola to go to City College but she just had to marry that Robert Mason!”
Something about the memory disturbed her because she bowed her head and took several deep breaths, and for the first time, she looked like an old woman. I got up and hurried into the kitchen and returned just a quickly with a glass of water, which she took with a trembling hand and drank down.
I was still standing over her, worried. “You don’t have to talk about this any more, Mrs. Gillespie. You’ve already helped me.”
“Just a bit more,” she said in a voice decidedly less strong, waving me back to my chair. “It’s hard for parents to accept that children have to live their own lives. Anyway. After Jill was born, Elijah and Sarah finally convinced Leola to take some classes at City College, once she got a taste of what real life would be like with a baby and a Colored woman’s job. Leola finally saw the light. Elijah had a vegetable wagon by then, and he was making good money. So Sarah quit one of her jobs and took care of little Jill in the afternoons while Leola went uptown to school. Malachi caught her— Jill— coming home from school. She didn’t know him but he knew who she was. Everybody did. Wasn’t but two blocks and she walked them by herself. Sarah met her at the corner every day and the two of them shared a scoop of ice cream. This day it was raining and Jill was late. Just a few minutes but it was too long for Sarah, so she went looking for her. Hadn’t got half a block before she heard her crying, up above. She looks up at an open window above a shoe shine parlor. She runs in the door and up the back stairs before anybody can stop her. Found that dog with her baby girl. And you know the worst thing? All those people in that place saw him go upstairs with that child and nobody said a word. Every one of them knew Malachi Johnson and knew he didn’t have any children.”
Gertrude Bader’s theory come to light. Which means that wasn’t the first time for Itchy, though it was the last. And other things she said ringing bells: Elijah Graves’s vegetable wagon and the shoe shine parlor. All of the pieces coming together and colliding in my head, then spinning out of control, each element going its own way.
“Terrible! Just terrible! After everybody heard about what happened, and after Elijah took his justice, there were all these whispers about other little girls. People knew! And not one of them sounded a warning to save a child.”
“Mrs. Gillespie, you know that Jill Mason has been attacked?”
She nodded. “Sandra and Yolanda told me. After all she’s been through. They say we’re not given more than we can bear, but that poor child. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, if all that isn’t too much to bear?”
I didn’t dare take a stab at the philosophical nature of this thing. I was happy to stick to the mundane. “Do you think Itc...Malachi would do something like that?”
She thought for a moment, then shook her head. “He’s always been a coward. Mean, but a coward. He always got somebody else to do his dirty work. He always had lots of money and lots of things: Cars, jewelry, fancy clothes, whiskey, drugs. And he always had a group of petty hoodlums around, usually younger than him, who would do his bidding in exchange for money or use of a car or a drink. Or drugs.”
I pictured the four or five young barbers who cut hair for Itchy while he sat at his table in the back. I thought of what I’d learned from Jose just a few hours ago. I thought of what Willie One Eye’s nephew had said. I thought of what Itchy himself had said about Jill Mason and about how he’d said it. I wondered if Eddie had gotten that haircut.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Gillespie, I was thinking about something you said earlier and missed that last part.”
“I said people always thought that Malachi had Elijah killed. Elijah grew up on a farm and knew more about horses than people. Liked ‘em better’n people, too. Nobody ever believed that Elijah Graves got stomped to death by a horse by accident.”
“You’re saying Malachi killed Jill’s grandfather?”
&nb
sp; “I’m telling you want people said at the time, and what I knew to be true.”
I thought about that for a moment, then remembered something else. “He said, Malachi said, that Dr. Mason didn’t want her parents to know what was happening to her. How would he know something like that?”
“That damn Mildred Miller!” She picked her glass only to find it empty. I took it, hurried to the kitchen, got her more water from the crock on the sink, and hurried back with it. Like before, she drank it down and wiped her mouth with her hankie.
“Who’s Mildred Miller?”
“A fool!” Louise spat out. “An eighty year old fool! And she’s been one all of her life! Been sweet on Malachi Johnson since before her husband died. She’s a friend of Jill’s relatives and I’m sure somebody told somebody else and Mildred heard it and told Malachi.” Louise shook her head. “No fool like an old fool.”
“Would Jill Mason recognize him? Malachi? Know who he was?”
“No,” she said emphatically. “Jillie didn’t remember a thing about what happened to her. Her Grandma always said that was the only good thing to come out of all that. Little Jill was what the doctors called traumatized.” Sadness settled over her like a cloud. “But I’m not so sure about that. I’ve always wondered if that’s not why she chose to do the kind of work she does: Because she does remember.”
I wondered myself, up on the surface, but deep down inside, I hoped that she didn’t remember. I just saw what the remembering still did to Yolanda. I wished every little girl or grown woman who ever had to suffer like that, could forget it. I was aware the Mrs. Gillespie was watching me. “Will you tell me a little more about what Harlem was like then? I know this is called Sugar Hill because I’ve heard Sandra say so, but what did you call where you said Itchy lives now?”
“Strivers Row,” she said with a sad smile. “Back then, it was so important for Negroes to feel a sense of accomplishment, and to show it.”
“But didn’t everybody feel that?” I asked. “Didn’t everybody want to show off what they’d accomplished?”
“Not everybody had as much to prove as we did,” Louise Gillespie said. “We were the only ones not a hundred years out of slavery. We were the only ones who couldn’t get jobs or go to school or live in a decent place because of how we looked, no matter how much money or education we had. So to live up here on Sugar Hill, on Strivers Row, where rich white people had once lived— well, that was a mighty big deal back then.” Especially, she said, since people like W.E.B. DuBois and Duke Ellington, Madame C.J. Walker, Joe Louis and Stephanie St. Clair, all lived uptown, north of 125th Street. “But living well wasn’t always the sweet revenge it’s reputed to be,” the old woman said. “Madame Walker and Madame St. Clair were scorned because they weren’t ‘quality.’ Rich as the Queen of England, both of them, but they weren’t educated and they didn’t come from so-called good families.”
I didn’t say what I was thinking, and once again, I didn’t need to. Louise Gillespie said it for me. “We tried so hard to emulate whites, to be white...no, that’s not fair. We were just trying to be good enough to be as American as everybody else, to not be hated simply because we were Black. But we tried so hard that we lost too much of who we were. I think that’s why, ultimately, Harlem died.” She stood up and motioned for me to follow her down the long hallway and into the living room. She stood before the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows and looked out at the magnificent expanse of New York City, including a bird’s eye view of the Harlem River. “This is why I wouldn’t move from here when the neighborhood got so bad. This view, this proximity to heaven, is why I —my husband and I—moved in here, not because we were trying to be like anybody else.”
She turned away from the view of heaven to look at me. “Anyway, we weren’t rich. We moved here because we could afford it. By the time we got here, the really rich people had moved across the river to Queens. My Ollie was just a musician, he wasn’t a band leader like Ellington or Basie, and I was just a school teacher. But like all people everywhere, we wanted to live in a nice place, and to raise our children in a nice place.” She turned back to the view. “And is doesn’t get much nicer than this.” Then she spoke directly to me. “I know you’re trying to do some good and to help some people, and I know you like Malachi. But Philip, son, don’t believe everything people tell you. Don’t even believe me. Read the history. Or for that matter, go look at the movie again. Hoodlum. Look at when those events took place, and how old those people would be today. And one more thing: Why would Malachi have a barber shop when he’s not a barber?”
“What?!” I’d snapped at her and didn’t bother to apologize.
“Malachi was the shoe shine boy when he worked for his uncle. He was a shoe shine boy when he got run out town, even though he was grown man almost forty years old.”
Despite all the improvements of recent years, Harlem still looked better from high atop Sugar Hill than it did at ground level, where the ravages of the hard times still were visible in places. And even in the places where restoration had occurred and where the magnificence and opulence of the past were present in a blasted stone facade or a gargoyle or lion or cherub face looking down on the street from atop a four story townhouse, it wasn’t the Harlem Louise Gillespie reminisced about, or the Harlem Malachi Johnson lied about, because Harlem’s newest residents were young and white and probably knew less of its history than I did. And despite my mental turmoil, I was enjoying my stroll through Harlem. Following no particular route and having no particular destination, I walked south for a few blocks on Edgecombe Avenue when I left Mrs. Gillespie’s, then west for a block or two, then south again, and then east. I wandered in this zig-zag fashion, seeing Harlem for the first time, wishing I could have seen it with Louise Gillespie when she was a young woman, wishing that I could keep walking east, into Spanish Harlem, and into the place where my grandparents had been young people.
When I stopped fantasizing and tuned back into the real work and checked my surroundings, I’d made it all the way down to 125th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard, which used to be Lenox Avenue. A street with some stories of its own to tell, I was thinking, when I suddenly turned and headed east. I may have been a stranger to Harlem but I was a native New Yorker and committed subway rider. I knew where all the trains went, and I knew I could catch a 4 or 6 train on 125th Street in East Harlem. I was walking faster now, as the thought that had turned me toward the east took shape. The wind slicing in off the East River almost cut me in half. I ducked my head, burying my chin in my chest, and hunched my shoulders up around my ears. Everybody on the block looked like fast moving turtles, but I’d lay odds that I was the only one plotting revenge against a friend.
“I don’t understand why you like that bastard. I don’t know anybody who likes him.” Carmine was staring at me with his little beady eyes, daring me to defend Itchy.
I’d asked Carmine to meet me at the coffee shop, telling him I had a favor to ask. “Are you going to help me out or not, Carmine? I need to know.” The favor was that I wanted to be put in touch with anybody who’d have known the owner of the Essex Street barber shop before Itchy bought it. His response was to bust my chops for liking Itchy.
He heaved himself up from the table. “I gotta make a call. I ain’t had lunch yet and they got food other than pastries here. Good food.”
I realized that I hadn’t eaten since my early morning breakfast with Eddie and that lunch sounded like a good idea. The waitress materialized beside the table before I could signal her. “Carmine always eats the chicken parmigiana,” she said.
“Make it two,” I said. “And a couple of beers.”
The food was better than good, which really didn’t surprise me. What did was the fact that Carmine proved to be a charming mealtime companion. I’d told him about my morning— the part about how two different people had told me if I wanted to know the history of a person or a place, I should ask somebody with first hand knowledge. Carmine agreed wholeheartedly
and proceeded to tell one story after another, many of them hilarious, about people, places and events, in Little Italy in particular, but throughout the eastern part of lower Manhattan. He mentioned some of the same places that Louise Gillespie had talked about, and embellished the historical facts with tales of gang warfare. “Not gangs like we got today, stupid fucks with automatic weapons shooting up every goddamn thing. We had civilized gangs.”
I started to laugh. “What, you mean like in West Side Story, with singing and dancing and romancing all the pretty girls?”
“Don’t make fun, Rodriquez, this was serious business.” But he cracked a smile himself as he told me about the some of the Black gangs—the Sportsmen and the Chaplains and the Smith Boys—from the housing projects over on the East River. “They drew lines and marked off the sidewalks. If you crossed the line, the fight was on!”
We both were giggling like young hoodlums, recalling the glory days of our youth, when a shadow crossed the table. We looked up, and Carmine got to his feet faster than I’d have thought possible. I followed suit. One look at the old man standing there told the tale: he probably once was five-foot-ten or eleven, but age had bent his spine. He had more hair in his eyebrows and sticking out of his ears than he had on his head, and it all was white. His eyes were watery and cloudy. I put him at about a hundred and ten, until he opened his mouth. If there really is a God and, unlike Sandra claims, He’s a he, this is what He’ll sound like when he speaks.
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