“That’s right. Now, you dry those tears and go upstairs and apologize to your mama and daddy.”
“But Grannie, ain’t you gonna miss me when I’m gone?”
“Sure ’nuff. I’ll miss you like a hooked fish miss water.”
PART III
Harlem
Chapter 20
To Harlan, New York City was as chaotic and thrilling as the three-ringed circus that came through Macon each spring.
No matter which direction his head spun, there was something new and exciting to behold: white men with long beards and black hats as tall as chimney stacks; poor people begging for money; rich people walking white poodles tethered to long leather leads; blind people tapping walking sticks; fat people munching soft, salted pretzels; and middle-of-the-road people like themselves.
Harlan had never seen an Oriental, so he gawked openly as six Chinese men—mandarin-collared and skullcapped—bore down on him. Sam jerked Harlan out of the way, rescuing him from being trampled beneath their slippered feet. The group hurried along, leaving Harlan gazing at their long, inky-colored braids, swaying like tails against their backs.
In the checkered cab Harlan sat with his forehead pressed to the window, silently ogling the tall buildings, trollies, and fancy automobiles.
His new home was a three-story brick row house on East 133rd Street, between Fifth and Madison avenues, right near the Harlem River. The house was resplendent with wood moldings, parquet floors, and fireplaces. Harlan’s bedroom was on the second floor, in the rear of the house, just down the hallway from his parents’ bedroom. It was small and made smaller by the mountain of toys and games heaped in the center of the floor.
The backyard was a disappointment—just a rectangle of dirt enclosed by a short wooden fence. No matter, all playing—stickball, catch, hide-and-seek, hot peas and butter, tag—happened out front on the sidewalk or in the middle of the street.
When Harlan first arrived, the tenants—the mother and her two children—came down to make his acquaintance. The family paraded into the parlor, brother and sister flanking their mother like bookends.
“Harlan, this is Miss Mayemma Smith,” Emma said, stringing the woman’s two first names together like harlot beads. “And her children, John and Darlene.”
All three had identical beak-shaped noses, slanted eyes, and full lips. Mother and son were the color of coconut husks. The girl was much darker, as if she had been slathered in crude oil. John was clutching a book to his chest; Darlene’s hands were locked tight behind her back.
“So nice to finally meet you,” Mayemma beamed.
“Hey,” said John.
Darlene mumbled a greeting.
“Hi,” Harlan piped.
“John is one of my students,” Emma said. “He plays very, very well.”
Chapter 21
It didn’t take long for Harlan to settle into his new life.
His easy disposition and Southern civility made him popular with the neighborhood children and parents alike. Despite being far from an astute student, those same attributes endeared him to his teachers, and they happily promoted him from one grade to the next.
Needless to say, Emma felt guilty for having missed out on Harlan’s formative years and so indulged him to the point of ruin. When Harlan misbehaved, she refused to take a switch to his behind and threatened Sam with divorce if he did.
“The Bible is specific,” Sam reminded her. “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”
Emma just sucked her teeth.
This is not to say that Emma never hit Harlan. She did. Just once—in 1928 when he was eleven years old. They were at Lucille and Bill’s on a hot, muggy Saturday evening. The air inside the house was as still as a painting. Harlan, bored with watching the adults play spades, wandered outside.
The streets were alive with playing children, the stoops crammed with adults fanning themselves with newspapers, rolling cold bottles of beer over their foreheads before emptying them in one long swallow.
Harlan walked a few houses away, stopped to watch a pair of old men hunched over a chessboard before continuing on to the corner. He dawdled there for a while—counting passing cars and debating whether he should defy his parents and cross the street to discover what mysteries might be lurking on the next block. Deciding against that, Harlan turned around and started back to the house.
Parked in front of the Hegamin home was Bill’s 1926 black and cream Ford coupe. Harlan peered through the driver’s-side window. There were some playbills on the front seat and a few candy wrappers on the floor. His eyes popped with surprise when he saw the key dangling from the ignition. He glanced nervously over his shoulder, jiggled the handle, and found that the door was unlocked. Another quick look to make sure he wasn’t being watched and then, as swift as a cat, he creaked the door open and slipped inside.
Harlan sat in the driver’s seat, hands tightly gripping the wheel, imitating the roar of an engine. “Brrrrrrr . . . b-b-b-b-b . . . Brrrrrrrr!”
He reached for the key. His intention was to bring the car to life, quickly turn it back off, slip out, and leave it unmoved. But Harlan hadn’t even completed that thought before he found himself slamming two feet down on the brake to keep from hitting a kid who had dashed out into the street to retrieve his ball.
Having no idea how to put the vehicle in reverse, with three cars now behind him honking their horns, the panicked Harlan pressed hard on the accelerator, sending the car down the street, through the intersection, and directly into a police car.
The cops hauled him to the local precinct. Harlan had never been so frightened in his life. When the officer asked his name, he said: “Jack Black.” When they asked for his parents’ names, Harlan said he didn’t have any.
Three hours passed before the adults realized Harlan was missing.
Sam’s eyes swept the street. “Where in the world is that boy?”
Bill took a swig of Scotch from the glass he held, blinked, and roared, “Where’s my goddamn car!”
All eyes fell on the empty parking space.
Emma ran down the steps screeching Harlan’s name. Sam followed.
“Where the fuck is my goddamn car?” Bill said again, glaring at Lucille as if she had something to do with its disappearance.
“How am I supposed to know, Bill?”
* * *
Emma and Sam scoured Louisa and Bill’s neighborhood and then their own. They looked into the faces of every black boy they encountered. They checked with friends and acquaintances.
Harlan here?
You seen my boy?
They ended up at Harlem Hospital. Sam asked the admitting nurse if any eleven-year-old black boys had been brought into the emergency unit in the past four hours or so. The woman let out a tired sigh, as if it was the hundredth time that night she’d been asked that particular question. After lazily flipping through a binder filled with pages, she looked up and spoke without a hint of compassion: “I think you might need to check the morgue.”
Emma, who was standing beside Sam, nervously chewing on her bottom lip, stumbled back into the wall, whimpering. After she had taken a few sips from the water fountain and three deep breaths, she and Sam followed a lanky male attendant down a wide corridor to a bank of elevators.
The morgue was located in the basement of the hospital, where the air was sharp with the scent of formaldehyde and bleach, aggravating Emma’s already churning stomach. She closed her hand over her nose and mouth to keep from throwing up.
The morgue was a large, square room filled with a desk and dozens of metal gurneys, bearing corpses veiled in white sheets. The walls were lined with doors that looked very much like the door of any kitchen icebox. And it was cold in that room. Cold enough to turn breath into clouds.
When they walked in, a doctor was shining a penlight down a dead woman’s throat. Emma’s eyes jumped frantically from the woman’s massive, flaccid breasts to the doctor’s blood-splattered scrubs before she was finally able to l
ook away.
The doctor looked up from the corpse and frowned.
“They’re looking for their son,” the attendant announced casually, as if Emma and Sam were searching for something as insignificant as a scarf or glove.
Whistling to himself, the attendant walked over to the desk and retrieved a green sheet of paper. He studied the page, every now and again glancing at the drawers.
Emma was shivering so hard, Sam thought she was going to shake right out of her skin. He wrapped his arm around her shoulder, pulling her into him.
“Okay,” the attendant said, walking across the room, “this is the first one.”
When he reached for the door handle, Emma’s eyelids instinctively snapped shut. She heard the click of the lock, the squeal of the slab wheels, and Sam’s deep inhale. It was just a few seconds, but it felt like hours before she heard Sam’s grateful voice exclaim, “No, that’s not Harlan! That’s not our son.”
The second and third dead boys also proved not to be Harlan.
When the attendant’s hand fell on the silver handle of the fourth and final door, Emma pushed her open palms at him. “Wait, wait a minute, please.”
Each and every time she’d heard Sam utter those magical words—“That’s not our son”—Emma felt like she’d hit a jackpot. She wasn’t a gambling woman, but she figured the odds were in favor of Harlan being in that fourth drawer because they’d rolled the dice three times, and each time—lucky seven. Four in a row? No way that was going to happen. God wasn’t so kind to colored folks; snake eyes had to be on the horizon, because winning streaks always came to an end.
“Go ahead,” she whispered.
When the attendant slid the body into view, Sam broke into sobs. Emma peered down into the dark, still face and promptly fainted.
Chapter 22
While Sam was gently shaking Emma back to consciousness, Bill and Lucille were at the police station filing a report for their stolen vehicle. After handing the two-page statement to the police officer, Bill bid him goodnight, and he and Lucille started toward the exit. But the officer quickly called them back.
“Says here the vehicle is a 1926 black and cream Ford Model T. Is that right?”
“Yeah,” Bill said.
“License plate 15 32 44?”
“Yeah.”
The officer chuckled. “Well, we towed that car from the scene.”
Bill narrowed his eyes. “Towed?”
“The scene? The scene of what?” Lucille asked.
“Well,” the officer started, folding has arms across his chest and leaning way back in his chair, “the driver rammed it right into a police cruiser.”
“What?” Bill blurted, wide-eyed.
“Yep, we got ’im locked up in the back.”
“Well, I wanna see the thieving son of a bitch,” Bill bellowed.
The officer rose from his chair, hitched his pants beneath the swell of his belly, and said, “Sure, follow me.”
Harlan was sitting on the floor with his back against the brick wall of the tiny holding cell. From his tearstained cheeks, it appeared as though he’d cried himself to sleep.
“Aw, shit,” Bill sighed.
Lucky for Harlan, Bill and Lucille weren’t your regular Negroes, but well-known celebrities—well, at least Lucille was. The police chief himself held a standing invitation to their weekly Sunday dinners, of which he took full advantage.
Needless to say, the officer waived Harlan’s bail, the incident report was destroyed, and Harlan was released into Bill and Lucille’s custody.
Lucille thanked the officer, caught Harlan by the ear, and tugged him screaming toward the exit. Bill followed, biting his lip, pulling his belt free from his trousers. They damn near ran right into Sam and Emma who had just dashed into the station.
“Harlan!” Emma cried, rushing to her son and crushing him to her chest.
Relieved to see his son, Sam dragged his hands over his wet face and shook the perspiration to the floor. The episode had left his eyes red and face etched with deep worry lines.
Bill snaked the belt back through the loops of his trousers and stepped hastily to Sam. “Look here, can I have a word?”
Sam looked at Bill’s pinched face. “Yeah, yeah.”
Lucille watched the men walk off to a quiet corner before turning her attention back to Emma, who was blubbering and fussing over Harlan.
“You know he tore up the car?” Lucille said, tapping Emma on her shoulder.
Emma’s head snapped up. “What you say?”
“I said he tore up the car. He stole it and crashed into a police car.”
Emma’s eyes fluttered and she folded her lips into her mouth. For a moment, she thought she was going to pass out again.
Off to the left, Sam’s angry voice bounced off the police station walls: “He did what?”
Chapter 23
They walked all the way home. Sam’s anger reached a state he hadn’t even known existed. Walking helped relieve some of that rage. Had it not, Harlan would still have stood a chance out in the open, where witnesses were plentiful and he had space to run.
They trudged home in tense silence. When they reached the house, Sam sat down on the stoop and dropped his head into his hands. “I’ll just stay here for a while,” he mumbled through splayed fingers.
Emma nodded understandingly, unlocked the door, and followed Harlan into the house.
Once inside, the boy scurried up to his bedroom without a word. Emma closed the parlor drapes, switched on a lamp, and slowly climbed the stairs. In her room, she opened the closet door, rested her chin on the back of her hand, and stood pondering Sam’s belts.
Harlan figured his parents’ smoldering, disapproving silence was the worst it was going to get. So it took him by surprise when a wild-eyed Emma burst into his room whipping a belt through the air.
Thwack!
The stinging lash sent him running for his life.
Emma beat Harlan around the room, up and down the hallways, into the parlor, and around the piano.
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!
Outside, the crack of the belt and Harlan’s terrified squeals raised a satisfied smile to Sam’s lips. Later on, he’d feel sorry for his son, but for now, it was all he could do to keep from cheering.
Harlan managed to keep a length ahead of Emma, but he couldn’t escape the reach of the belt. Like a sprinter hurtling toward the finish line, Harlan summoned all of his speed and exploded down the hallway into the bathroom, where he shut and locked the door.
Emma pummeled the door with her fists and feet. She threatened and cussed and demanded, but Harlan refused to let her in.
And then, just as suddenly as the madness had seized her, it slipped away. Out of breath and drenched in sweat, Emma flung the belt down to the floor and collapsed backward into the wall.
Harlan’s wounded howls pierced her heart, nearly splitting it in half. Soon, she was bawling too.
That was the first and last time she ever beat that boy.
Chapter 24
“The problem is,” Lucille complained to her husband, “they treat Harlan like a man, not a boy.”
“A friend, not a son,” Bill grunted in agreement.
“They let him listen to all that grown-ass music. Mine included. He knows all the words. You hear him, don’t you? Singing ’bout moochers, rolling lemons, and warming wieners!”
“Yep.”
“That boy needs some religion in his life, ’cause the devil’s watching and waiting.”
Church had not been a staple in Sam and Emma’s lives since they’d left Macon. Once they’d settled in Harlem, their religion became swing, jazz, and bebop, ministered by Satchmo, Calloway, and Gillespie.
“What that boy needs is more Our Father who art in Heaven and a little less Hi-dee-hi-dee-ho! and Hep! Hep! Hep!”
“A-yuh.”
“Of course he’s going to do and say as he pleases. There ain’t no consequences to his behavior.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What parents you know don’t beat their kids? Even white folks beat their damn kids!”
“Uh-huh.”
“If they don’t make that boy mind his manners, you know who will, right?”
“The po-lice.”
“Say it again.
“The PO-LICE.”
“You got that shit right.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And you can’t tell him nothing. You notice that? Any good advice you try to sling his way, before you can get it out your mouth, he hollering, I know, I know!”
“I got a nephew just like him,” Bill huffed, “know everything and don’t know shit.”
Well, that wasn’t an entirely true statement. Harlan did know how to con his mama out of money—it only took a smile and a, Aww, Mama, please! As he grew older, he would use the same formula to coax women out of their drawers: Aww, baby, please!
The other thing that he would become proficient in was playing the guitar.
Chapter 25
You can’t expect a child not to become a product of his environment. If you’re a drinker, you’ll raise a drunk. If you’re a single mother, traipsing men in and out of your bedroom in front of your girl child—mark my words, in time she’ll claim a corner and charge money for what you gave away for free. Kings and queens raise princes and princesses. That’s just the way it is.
So who knows why Sam was floored when Harlan—barely fifteen—walked into the house, dropped his school books on the floor, and declared, “I’m done with school, gonna pursue guitar-picking full time!”
“Say what now?”
While Emma had finished high school, Sam had only made it through the fifth grade. Being one of ten children, he’d had a responsibility to his younger siblings, or so his father had reminded him every morning as Sam headed off to work, leaving the senior Elliott splayed on the couch balancing a jar of corn liquor on his chest.
Harlan would have been the first in a long line of Elliotts to attend and graduate high school. Now, his decision to drop out all but dashed Sam’s dreams to silt.
The Book of Harlan Page 5