Amiable with Big Teeth
Page 7
But the Peixota family was a power in the community, although they did not really belong to any of the various cliques, such as the fashionable upper-deck city employers who gave weekend parties in rotation, or the theatrical set, or the professional. Their status was something like that of the family of a successful preacher. Peixota was one of the few men of wealth who was active in promoting the affairs of charitable organizations. In spite of his background he was noted for his honesty, his fervent racial interest and his practical approach to racial problems. And so he was always solicited to assist in organizational work for the welfare of the group. It was not merely because he was honest that the chairmanship or treasurership of an organization was given to him, but also because he was generous in helping an organization when its funds were low.
He inspired great confidence among the ordinary people. It was even said that he still had a hidden hand in the numbers game—that one of his old servitors who was now established as a “banker” was actually fronting for him. The manager of Peixota’s bar and grill was also a former trusted lieutenant in his numbers business. Perhaps nowhere else in America but in such a community could the former promoter of a gambling game arrive at such a position of power and respect.
4
PROFESSOR KOAZHY IS FEATURED
The tides of Italy’s war in Ethiopia had swept up out of Africa and across the Atlantic to beat against the shores of America and strangely to agitate the unheroic existence of Aframericans. Suddenly the people were stirring with action and churches and lodges and clubs and the streets were filled and eloquent with protesting crowds. The burden of the protests was “Help Ethiopia!” The Aframerican newspapers headlined the news of the conflict. The Garveyites1 advocated the raising of an army. More practical members of the intelligentsia planned to send medical assistance with doctors and trained nurses.
But there was little or no coordination of the various efforts. Funds were solicited everywhere. The people generously were responding. But some of the agencies most assiduous in collecting funds had a doubtful standing in their communities and no contact with an Ethiopian government or its representatives. There was evidence of the development of another nation-wide racketeering movement on the credulity of the Aframerican masses.
Acting upon the suggestion of an eminent medical doctor who had visited Ethiopia at the time of the Emperor’s coronation in 1930,2 some prominent Aframericans organized a responsible group in an effort to coordinate the movement to help Ethiopia. They made contact with the scanty few Ethiopian legations and consulates in Europe and tried to obtain official recognition of their action. With the coming of Ethiopian representative Lij Tekla Alamaya, their work was stamped with official approval. The most flagrantly dubious organizations to aid Ethiopia apparently ceased their activities. And with advertisements, broadsides and news articles the people were warned of fake organizations.
It was a little bewildering to many that the vague religious sentiment for Ethiopia existing among Aframericans should so suddenly be transformed into positive organized action and that that country should appear on the horizon as an embarrassing new Canaan. But the events of two decades must have been slowly working on the minds of the people. The first World War and the ill-starred theatrical Pan-African movement had enormously increased the interest in African lands. And Ethiopia specifically swung into the international spotlight when it was admitted to the League of Nations in 1923, after its abolition of slavery. In 1930 the barbaric splendor of Haile Selassie’s coronation was world excitement. Also it attracted a number of Aframericans to emigrate to Ethiopia. Thus the biblical legendary Ethiopia and earliest Christian state was revealed as a reality with a new significance in the minds of Aframericans.
Long after the other guests had left, Peixota and Alamaya continued to discuss campaign plans and the Lij was persuaded to remain overnight so that the discussion could be resumed early the following day. Alamaya was preparing to shave the following morning when Seraphine rapped on the door and entered his bedroom with an armful of newspapers. “Look here!” she said, spreading the papers on the couch. “Koazhy has stolen the place you should have had. They were right and you were wrong about him, the dog-faced fool.” Koazhy had provided rich material for the photographers. Standing in his car, saluting the multitude, erect on the platform, brandishing his sword, he was lavishly displayed. There was not a single photograph of Lij Tekla Alamaya. The news item, “Negroes Organize to Aid Ethiopia,” was written around Professor Koazhy and his gorgeous uniform.
Alamaya smiled and said: “They have spread him like an army with banners.”
“And ignored you,” said Seraphine. “That’s a terribly bad start for your mission.”
“It won’t matter much among the colored people and my mission is for them.”
“But it will. The colored newspapers reprint everything the white ones publish about us. And the colored people eat it up.”
“Well, let Professor Koazhy take the news. Ethiopia is bad news and sad news now. The papers need a little diversion.”
“And perhaps you too, Tekla. I prefer your first name and I want you to call me Seraphine or Sirrie for short. I am invited to a party tonight and promised to bring you along. Won’t you come?”
“Would like to, but I’m invited to one that some of the downtown Friends of Ethiopia are giving. I wish you would go with me.”
“Oh, I’d love to. It may be nicer downtown. The Towers, that is my club, they can wait. But they want to be the first club to entertain you in Harlem. I like that lovely wine color in your pajamas. Were they made in Addis Ababa?”
“No, they are your father’s.”
“Ha-ha! I must hurry, goodbye.”
“Not waiting for breakfast?”
“Had breakfast. You see, I’m working in Father’s office, part-time. And I must open up promptly at nine. Now he’s so busy with your job, I must help take care of his.”
The Executive Committee of the Hands to Ethiopia, meeting at Peixota’s house, had agreed that Alamaya was the most suitable person to act as go-between in connection with their work and that of the White Friends of Ethiopia. It was conceded that the overwhelming sentiment of the people for an all-colored organization should be respected. The one most irreconcilable to this idea was the brown bantamlike schoolteacher Newton Castle. He had been very persuasive arguing that if Aframericans set a precedent by excluding whites who desire to join their organizations, it will give the whites the justification for maintaining barriers against Aframericans and keeping them out of their private clubs and public places. Peixota retorted that since most of the whites and the best of them preferred not to have the Aframericans in their groups, there was a big possibility that that small minority that was so eager to penetrate into Aframerican affairs was doing so from selfish motives and was perhaps undesirable. He cited the numbers game and that the whites who bored in to partnership with the Aframericans came from the lowest vilest sediment of society, so that even the Aframerican racketeers were ashamed of association with them.
The more cultured members of the committee laughed at Peixota’s bluntness, thinking of his former connection with the plebeian racket. But Peixota quoted the popular phrase: “It’s not what you do, it’s the way how you do it.”
“Ours are a weak people,” he said, “and like all weak things they are vulnerable. They’ve got to build themselves up like building a house, brick upon brick. They have been building slowly; we have colored churches, colored fraternal orders, clubs, newspapers, and other enterprises. It’s a long slow building, halting, without real direction, just an instinctive necessity. And now the social tea-hounds who appear to know everything but what life is all about, they tell us that we should admit any white person who wants to join in every colored organization, otherwise we are chauvinists, segregationists and isolationists. Your fathers and mothers didn’t learn to organize their benevolent and prote
ctive societies from drinking cocktails with bohemian white folks. They learned it cleaning the white man’s W.C. and over the washtub in the kitchen. And they learned their lesson hard enough to use it to give you an education. Yes, you who are using that education now to destroy the things which your parents worked so hard to build.”
Newton Castle looked uncomfortable. Peixota was so obviously referring to him. He felt that he ought to reply. He never liked to give up in an argument. He said: “You are mistaken if you imagine the whites who want to join with you are gangsters or liquor heads.”
“Then who are they and what are their motives?” asked Headley, of the Colored Elks.
“They are persons who believe in the solidarity of all races and want to prove their sincerity,” said Castle.
“Well, let them prove it by working from their side and we will be working from ours,” said Headley. “It won’t be helping the situation, bringing white people into a colored organization and disrupting it.”
So Newton Castle was overridden, but he was sulky and said the people’s sentiment cannot always be trusted; the mob must be led by intelligence.
Peixota spent the afternoon giving Alamaya a full report of the Hands to Ethiopia activity. In the treasury there was only $5,096. Much of the monies collected by unauthorized bodies could not be accounted for. But the new organization was protected by the federal law prohibiting unauthorized public soliciting of funds. Peixota said he had plans to organize a national Help Ethiopia drive for $100,000. Under the active leadership of Alamaya, the money could be easily raised, he thought. And he was now convinced that Alamaya should wear an Ethiopian uniform or a decoration that would distinguish him from others on a platform.
“You see how the papers have made a grand hero of Professor Koazhy; they want entertainment.”
“But for a serious cause as this,” said Alamaya, “one would expect something different.”
“Lij Alamaya, in this country our group is identified with entertainment. It is an old tradition. And even in the most tragic things, whether it is love or death, the whites are looking at the funny side of colored life. And our own people, too.”
“I didn’t bring a uniform but I can get one. I had different ideas, thinking that I was coming to a democratic country and that if I were simple in the democratic way, my appeal would be more effective.”
“That’s what most foreigners think, but they are dead wrong.”
Peixota continued to outline the plans for raising funds. Units of the organization were rapidly getting organized in all the large cities. Organizers had been sent to Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago and Detroit. And Alamaya should start out on a tour while the enthusiasm was high. But Peixota warned against pitfalls. He explained the issue of race and color, the complications, the perplexities, the illogicalness, unreasonableness and bitterness of it. Alamaya should avoid becoming involved. The Aframericans were a sensitive lot and the intellectuals confused and jumpy. One mistake might turn the entire group against Alamaya and the cause of Ethiopia.
Peixota proposed that Dorsey Flagg (who unlike Koazhy was a professor in a recognized Aframerican college) should accompany Alamaya on the tour. He thought he was the best man available, for he was on a sabbatical leave from his college, engaged in a study of the comparative intelligence of urban and rural colored families. The itinerary was under discussion, when the maid announced that Newton Castle had called. Peixota told her to show him in.
Castle entered with his briefcase. He was coming straight from school. It didn’t appear as if he were making just a casual call, yet he did not immediately talk. Peixota asked if there were any new developments.
“I want to suggest that we take Dorsey Flagg off the committee,” said Castle.
“But the man is already elected. We don’t want to start anything like that,” said Peixota.
“He shouldn’t be on the committee, for he’s a Trotskyite Fascist,” said Castle. “He’s an anti-Soviet mad dog and Nazi sympathizer. A man like that should never serve with a Help Ethiopia group.”
“Mr. Flagg a Fascist! Impossible,” said Alamaya.
“But he is,” said Castle. “He is anti-Soviet and every enemy of the Soviet is a friend of Mussolini and Hitler.”
“Goddamit! I won’t listen to that,” said Peixota. “What’s Russia got to do with us and Ethiopia? I won’t entertain your proposition. Get that straight. We’re fighting Fascist Italy in Ethiopia and Dorsey Flagg is one of us. We don’t want any Soviets in our organization.”
“We won’t get anyplace without the Soviets, I’ll tell you,” said Castle. “They are the only ones who understand colored people’s problems and take us seriously like other human beings. You saw what the bourgeois papers had about our grand meeting last night, but I guess you didn’t see this.”
Castle took the Sovietist Labor Herald from his briefcase and opened it out on the table. A full page was devoted to the monster demonstration. At the top left there was a photograph of the Emperor of Ethiopia, to the right one of Lij Tekla Alamaya, in the center the people were pictured massed before the church, and at the bottom the speakers were shown grouped on the platform. There was no photograph of Professor Koazhy and no mention of his speech. The accompanying article was dignified and sympathetic, with a forthright denunciation of Fascist Italy’s war against Ethiopia and an indictment of the governments of Great Britain and France in abetting Italy. The article concluded with the statement that Soviet Russia is the only nation interested in the fate of and fighting for the rights of small nations and minorities and colonial peoples.
Standing shoulder to shoulder Alamaya and Peixota read the article. It was the first time that Peixota had read the Labor Herald. He was impressed by the tone of the article and the fine display of pictures. Still he was not convinced that Dorsey Flagg should be ousted from the committee. He said that so soon after organizing a united group, they should not allow themselves to be divided by the Fascists and Communists. He could not see what colored people had to gain from either.
Said Newton Castle: “Now you see what it means to be in right with the Communists. What Capitalist newspaper would have played up our demonstration like that?”
“The Labor Herald has a very small circulation,” said Peixota.
“The circulation doesn’t matter. It’s getting into print that counts. The Labor Herald is the defender of the working class and oppressed minorities.”
“There is one thing that I am determined about,” Peixota banged the table with his fist. “I’ll fight against any white group, Fascists or Communists or the next one which wants to divide my people and disrupt our organization and sabotage our work. S’help me God!”
5
THE EMPEROR’S LETTER
Seraphine telephoned Alamaya to say that she would meet him at his hotel and go from there to the party. Alamaya thought it would be more gallant for him to go and fetch her. But she laughed at his objection and explained that she had a previous engagement to keep, after which she would go directly to the Hotel Santa Cruz.
That other engagement was only an unexpected call upon Bunchetta Facey, whom Seraphine regarded as her rival, not so much in affairs of the affections but chiefly in social affairs. Both girls belonged to the exclusive Tower Club. Seraphine was popular in the club because she was rich Peixota’s daughter. But Bunchetta worked to influence the members of the club from the angle of intellectual prestige. Bunchetta was graduated from the elite colored group in Washington, where her mother resided, and her father was a member of an old Philadelphia family of caterers.
Bunchetta was a social worker in New York. She was older than Seraphine and her tastes entirely different. She read the latest books, she liked modern painting and always visited the galleries, she adored listening to symphonic music and classical singing and her conversation was carefully pitched to an intellectual key. She was a member of an
interracial group and when she had a gathering of friends, there were always white persons among them. Her portrait had been painted by a painter in Greenwich Village, where she was told that her complexion was Balinese, although her shape was full-rounded like a Southern watermelon. She was much liked by the painter and his wife and often visited them. And she held the interest of the Towers with accounts of the unusual persons she met there. Not as arrestingly different and attractive as Seraphine, she nevertheless exerted herself to be charming.
Seraphine was the last person that Bunchetta was expecting to see then, when she burst in in her trailing turquoise blue dress and a short white fur coat. The ensemble was a gift from her father and it was purchased at the first Harlem Fashion Show. This show had been organized by six of the leading matrons (including Mrs. Peixota) and downtown modistes had sent up dresses and models.
“Oh, where you going all dolled up like a princess?” cried Bunchetta.
“Perhaps I could be a princess, if I wanted to. Princes are not so hard to get, but who cares about such things nowadays?” Seraphine shrugged and stepped around.
Bunchetta told her to sit but she stood and looked admirable standing. “You must be going to a swell affair, my dear. Who’s throwing it?”
Seraphine preferred to be mysterious: “Nothing going on in Harlem on a Monday night.” She sat.
“Then you’re going downtown, are you?”
“Is there something going on downtown?” Bunchetta had so many contacts downtown that Seraphine was in doubt whether she knew about the party. Bunchetta was always so snobbish about downtown parties, she enjoyed the sensation of having one on Seraphine which she knew nothing about. Bunchetta always went to Greenwich Village but tonight she was going to Park Avenue.