By then, the sergeant had lost his patience. The police continued their investigation without Reverend Sam’s assistance. In due course they learned that the household was supported by the wives walking the streets of Harlem, dressed as nuns, begging alms. They also discovered three suspicious-looking mounds in the dirt cellar, which, upon being opened, revealed the remains of three female bodies.
2
It was 2 a.m. in Harlem and it was hot. Even if you couldn’t feel it, you could tell it by the movement of the people. Everybody was limbered up, glands lubricated, brains ticking over like a Singer sewing-machine. Everybody was ahead of the play. There wasn’t but one square in sight. He was a white man.
He stood well back in the recessed doorway of the United Tobacco store at the northwest corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, watching the sissies frolic about the lunch counter in the Theresa building on the opposite corner. The glass doors had been folded back and the counter was open to the sidewalk.
The white man was excited by the sissies. They were colored and mostly young. They all had straightened hair, conked like silk, waving like the sea; long false eyelashes fringing eyes ringed in mascara; and big cushiony lips painted tan. Their eyes looked naked, brazen, debased, unashamed; they had the greedy look of a sick gourmet. They wore tight-bottomed pastel pants and short-sleeved sport shirts revealing naked brown arms. Some sat to the counter on the high stools, others leaned on their shoulders. Their voices trilled, their bodies moved, their eyes rolled, they twisted their hips suggestively. Their white teeth flashed in brown sweaty faces, their naked eyes steamed in black cups of mascara. They touched one another lightly with their fingertips, compulsively, exclaiming in breathless falsetto, “Girl.…” Their motions were wanton, indecent, suggestive of an orgy taking place in their minds. The hot Harlem night had brought down their love.
The white man watched them enviously. His body twitched as though he were standing in a hill of ants. His muscles jerked in the strangest places, one side of his face twitched, he had cramps in the right foot, his pants cut his crotch, he bit his tongue, one eye popped out from its socket. One could tell his blood was stirring, but one couldn’t tell which way. He couldn’t control himself. He stepped out from his hiding place.
At first no one noticed him. He was an ordinary-looking light-haired white man dressed in light gray trousers and a white sport shirt. One could find white men on that corner on any hot night. There was a bright street lamp on each of the four corners of the intersection and cops were always in calling distance. White men were as safe at that intersection as in Times Square. Furthermore they were more welcome.
But the white man couldn’t help acting guilty and frightened. He slithered across the street like a moth to the flame. He walked in a one-sided crablike motion, as though submitting only the edge of his body to his inflamed passion. He was watching the frolicsome sissies with such intentness a fast-moving taxi coming east almost ran him down. There was a sudden shriek of brakes, and the loud angry shout of the black driver, “Mother-raper! Ain’t you never seen sissies?”
He leapt for the curb, his face burning. All the naked mascaraed eyes about the lunch counter turned on him.
“Ooooo!” a falsetto voice cried delightedly. “A lollipop!”
He drew back to the edge of the sidewalk, face flaming as though he were about to run or cry.
“Don’t run, mother,” someone said.
White teeth gleamed between thick tan lips. The white man lowered his eyes and followed the edge of the sidewalk around the corner from 125th Street down Seventh Avenue.
“Look, she’s blushing,” another voice said, setting off a giggle.
The white man looked straight ahead as though ignoring them but when he came to the end of the counter and would have continued past, a heavyset serious man who had been sitting between two empty seats at the end got up to leave, and taking advantage of the distraction the white man slipped into the seat he had vacated.
“Coffee,” he ordered in a loud constricted voice. He wanted it to be known that coffee was all he wanted.
The waiter gave him a knowing look. “I know what you want.”
The white man forced himself to meet the waiter’s naked eyes. “Coffee is all.”
The waiter’s lips twisted in a derisive grin. The white man noticed they were painted too. He stole a look at the other beauties at the counter. Their huge tan glistening lips looked extraordinarily seductive.
To get his attention the waiter had to speak again. “Chops!” he whispered in a hoarse suggestive voice.
The white man started like a horse shying. “I don’t want anything to eat.”
“I know.”
“Coffee.”
“Chops.”
“Black.”
“Black chops. All you white mothers are just alike.”
The white man decided to play ignorant. He acted as though he didn’t know what the waiter was talking about. “Are you discriminating against me?”
“Lord, no. Black chops — coffee, I mean — coming right up.”
A sissie moved into the seat beside the white man, and put his hand on his leg. “Come with me, mother.”
The white man pushed the hand away and looked at him haughtily. “Do I know you?”
The sissie sneered. “Hard to get, eh?”
The waiter looked around from the coffee urn. “Don’t bother my customers,” he said.
The sissie reacted as though they had a secret understanding. “Oh, like that?”
“Jesus Christ, what’s going on?” the white man blurted.
The waiter served him his black coffee. “As if you didn’t know,” he whispered.
“What’s this fad?”
“Ain’t they beautiful?”
“What?”
“All them hot tan chops.”
The white man’s face flamed again. He lifted his cup of coffee. His hand shook so it slopped over on the counter.
“Don’t be nervous,” the waiter said. “You got it made. Put down your money and take your choice.”
Another man slipped on to the end stool next to the white man. He was a thin black man with a long smooth face. He wore black pants, a black long-sleeved shirt with black buttons and a bright red fez. There was a wide black band around the fez with the large white-lettered words, BLACK POWER. He might have been a Black Muslim but for the fact Black Muslims avoided the vicinity of perverts and were hardly ever seen at that lunch counter. And the bookstore diagonally across Seventh Avenue where Black Muslims sometimes assembled and held mass meetings had been closed since early the previous evening, and the Black Muslim temple was nine blocks south on 116th Street. But he was dressed like one and he was black enough. He leaned toward the white man and whispered in his other ear, “I know what you want.”
The waiter gave him a look. “Chops,” he said.
As he leaned away from the black man, the white man thought they were all talking in a secret language. All he wanted was to get with the sissies, the tan-lipped brownbodied girl-boys, strip off his clothes, let himself be ravished. The thought made him weak as water, dissolved his bones, dizzied his head. He refused to think more than that. And the waiter and this other ugly black man were destroying that, cooling his ardor, wetting him down. He became angry. “Let me alone, I know what I want,” he said.
“Bran,” the black man said.
“Chops,” the waiter said.
“It’s breakfast time,” the black man said. “The man wants breakfast food. Without bones.”
Angrily the white man reached back and drew his wallet from his hip pocket. He pulled out a ten-dollar bill from a thick sheaf of notes and threw it on to the counter.
Everyone all up and around the counter stared from the bill to the white man’s red angry face.
The waiter had become absolutely still. He let the bill lie. “Ain’t you got nothing smaller than that, boss?”
The white man fished in his side pockets. T
he waiter and the black man in the red fez exchanged glances from the corners of their eyes. The white man brought out his hands empty.
“I haven’t any change,” he said.
The waiter picked up the ten-dollar bill and snapped it, held it up to the light and scrutinized it. Satisfied, he put it in the till and made change. He slapped the change down on to the counter in front of the white man, leaning foward. He whispered, “You can go with him, he’s safe.”
The white man glanced briefly at the black man beside him. The black man grinned obsequiously. The white man picked up his change. It was five dollars short. Holding it in his hand, he looked up into the waiter’s eyes. The waiter returned his look, challengingly, shrugged and licked his lips. The white man smiled to himself, all his confidence restored.
“Chops,” he admitted.
The black man got up with the vague suggestive movements of an old darky retainer, and began to walk slowly south on Seventh Avenue, past the entrance to the Theresa building. The white man followed but in a short pace he had drawn even with the black man and they went down the street conversing, a black-clad black man in a red fez announcing BLACK POWER and a light-haired white man in gray pants and white shirt, the steerer and the John.
Interlude
Where 125th Street crosses Seventh Avenue is the Mecca of Harlem. To get established there, an ordinary Harlem citizen has reached the promised land, if it merely means standing on the sidewalk.
One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street connects the Triborough Bridge on the east with the former Hudson River Ferry into New Jersey on the west. Crosstown buses ply up and down the street at the rate of one every ten minutes. White motorists passing over the complex toll bridge from the Bronx, Queens or Brooklyn sometimes have occasion to pass through Harlem to the ferry, Broadway or other destinations, instead of turning downtown via the East Side Drive.
Seventh Avenue runs from the north end of Central Park to the 155th Street Bridge where the motorists going north to Westchester County and beyond cross over the Harlem River into the Bronx and the Grand Concorse. The Seventh Avenue branch of the Fifth Avenue bus line passes up and down this section of Seventh Avenue and turns over to Fifth Avenue on 100th Street at the top of Central Park and goes south down Fifth Avenue to Washington Square.
Therefore many white people riding the buses or in motor cars pass this corner daily. Furthermore, most of the commercial enterprises — stores, bars, restaurants, theaters, etc. — and real estate are owned by white people.
But it is the Mecca of the black people just the same. The air and the heat and the voices and the laughter, the atmosphere and the drama and the melodrama, are theirs. Theirs are the hopes, the schemes, the prayers and the protest. They are the managers, the clerks, the cleaners, they drive the taxis and the buses, they are the clients, the customers, the audience; they work it, but the white man owns it. So it is natural that the white man is concerned with their behavior; it’s his property. But it is the black people’s to enjoy. The black people have the past and the present, and they hope to have the future.
The old Theresa Hotel, where once the greatest of the black had their day in the luxury suites overlooking the wide, park-divided sweep of Seventh Avenue, or in the large formal dining-room where dressing for dinner was mandatory, or in the dark cozy intimacy of the bar where one could see the greatest of the singers, jazz musicians, politicians, educators, prize fighters, racketeers, pimps, prostitutes. Memory calls up such names as Josephine Baker, Florence Mills, Lady Day, Bojangles Bill Robinson, Bert Williams, Chick Webb, Lester Young, Joe Louis, Henry Armstrong, Congressmen Dawson and De-Priest, educators Booker T. Washington and Charles Johnson, writers Bud Fisher, Claude MacKay, Countee Cullen, and others too numerous to mention. And their white friends and sponsors: Carl Van Vechten, Rebecca West, Dodd, Dodge, Rockefeller. Not to mention the movie actors and actresses of all races, the unforgettable Canada Lee and John Garfield.
3
Motorists coming west on 125th Street from the Triborough Bridge saw a speaker standing in the tonneau of an old muddy battered US Army command car, parked in the amber night light at the corner of Second Avenue, in front of a sign which read: CHICKEN AUTO INSURANCE, Seymour Rosenblum. None had the time or interest to investigate further. The white motorists thought that the Negro speaker was selling “chicken auto insurance” for Seymour Rosenblum. They could well believe it. “Chicken” had to do with the expression, “Don’t be chicken!” and that was the way people drove in Harlem.
But actually the “chicken” sign was left over from a restaurant that had gone bankrupt and closed months previously, and the sign advertising auto insurance had been placed across the front of the closed shop afterwards.
Nor was the speaker selling auto insurance, which was farther from his thoughts than chicken. He had merely chosen that particular spot because he had felt he was least likely to be disturbed by the police. The speaker was named Marcus Mackenzie, and he was a serious man. Although young, slender and handsome, Marcus Mackenzie was as serious as an African Methodist minister with one foot in the grave. Marcus Mackenzie’s aim was to save the world. But before then, it was to solve the Negro Problem. Marcus Mackenzie believed brotherhood would do both. He had assembled a group of young white and black people to march across the heart of Harlem on 125th Street from Second Avenue on the east to Convent Avenue on the west. He had been preparing this march for more than six months. He had begun the previous December when he had returned from Europe after spending two years in the US Army in Germany. He had learned all the necessary techniques in the army. Hence the old command car. One commanded best from a command car. That was what they were designed for. Kept you high off the ground, better to deploy your forces. Also it would carry all the first-aid equipment that might be needed: plasma, surgical instruments, cat gut for sutures, snakebite medicine which he felt would be just as effective for rat bites — which were more likely in Harlem — rubber raincoats in case of rain, black greasepaint for his white marchers to quickly don blackfaces in an emergency.
Most of the young men waiting to take formations of squads wore tee shirts and shorts. For now it was July 15th. Getaway day. Nat Turner day. There were only forty-eight of them. But Marcus Mackenzie believed that from little acorns big oaks grew. Now he was giving his marchers a last pep talk before the march began. He was speaking over a portable amplifier as he stood in the tonneau of the command car. But many other people had stopped to listen, for his voice carried far and wide. People who lived in the neighborhood. Black people, and white people too, for that far east on 125th Street was still a racially mixed neighborhood. The elderly people, for the most part, were the heads of families; the younger people in their twenties might be anything, black and white alike. There were many prostitutes, pederasts, pickpockets, sneak thieves, confidence men, steerers, and pimps in the area who served the 125th Street railroad station two blocks away. But Marcus Mackenzie had no tolerance for these.
“The greatest boon to mankind that history will ever know can be brotherly love,” he was saying. “Brotherhood! It can be more nutritious than bread. More warming than wine. More soothing than song. More satisfying than sex. More beneficial than science. More curing than medicine.” The metaphors might have been mixed and the delivery stilted, for Marcus was not highly educated. But no one could doubt the sincerity in his voice. The sincerity was so pure it was heart-breaking. Everyone within earshot was touched by his sincerity. “Man’s love for man. Let me tell you, it is like all religions put together, like all the gods embracing. It is the greatest.…”
No one doubted him. The intensity of his emotion left no room for doubt. But one elderly black man, equally serious, standing on the opposite side of the street, expressed his concern and that of others. “I believe you, son. But how you gonna get it to work?”
“We’re going to march!” Marcus declared in a ringing voice.
Whether that answered the old man’s question or not was never
known. But it answered Marcus Mackenzie’s. He had given a lot of thought to the question. It seemed as though his whole life had been lived only to supply this answer. His earliest memory was of the Detroit race riot in 1943, right during the middle of the United States fierce fight against other forms of racism in other countries. But he had been too young to comprehend this irony. All he remembered was his father going in and out of their apartment in the ghetto, the shouting and gunshots from the unseen street, and his elder sister sitting in the front room of their closed and shuttered flat with a big black revolver in her lap pointed at the door. He had been four years old and she seven. They had been alone all the times their father had been out trying to rescue other black people from the police. Their mother was dead. When he had become old enough to know the diffrence between the “North” and the “South” he had become terrified. Mainly because Detroit was about as far north as one could go. And it had seemed as though he had suffered all the same restrictions there, the same abuses, the same injustices, as his black brothers in the South. He had lived all his life in a black slum, had attended jim-crowed schools, and after graduating from high school had got the customary jim-crow job in a factory. Then he had been drafted into the army and sent to Germany. It was there he had learned the techniques of the march, although for the most part he had served as an orderly in the women’s maternity ward of the US Army hospital in Wiesbaden. He had been very much alone as there were no other Negroes working in the hospital at the same hours. He read only the Bible and he had lots of time to think. He was treated well by the white staff and expectant mothers who, in his ward, were wives of officers, most of whom were from the South. He knew there was little social integration in the army and what there was among GIs was rigidly enforced. The Negro Problem existed there as it had everywhere else he had ever lived. But still he was treated well. He came to the conclusion that it was all a matter of black and white people getting to know each other. He was not a very bright boy and he never knew he had been selected for the job because of his neat, clean-cut appearance. He was tall and slender with sepia skin and a long softly angled face. His eyes were brown. His black hair, worn very short, was straight at the roots. He had always been very serious. He was never frivolous. He seldom smiled. By the time he had served two years, mostly in the company of white people who treated him well, a great deal alone, reading and studying the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, he had come to the conclusion that plain Christian love was the solution to the Negro Problem. But he had learned plenty about marching. For a time he entertained the grandiose idea of returning to the States and imbuing all the inhabitants with Christian love. But he soon discovered that Doctor Martin Luther King had beat him to the idea and he sought about in his mind for something else.
Blind Man with a Pistol Page 2