They neared Printer’s Square. The statue of Benjamin Franklin, tarnished and specked by the grey pigeons, grey as the streets, loomed high and serene above the business crowds. North of the statue, the entrance to Brooklyn Bridge was like a giant jaw out of which ceaseless cars were emerging and entering. Suzy piloted Sam through the traffic on the avenue over to the benches in City Hall Park. Behind them were the green lawns, the court buildings; on the park walks, lawyers, plaintiffs and defendants were having their shoes polished by old men in caps and tousled-haired kids. “Let’s sit down awhile,” Suzy said. “And then you can phone Ellis.”
“I wonder what he’ll think.”
“Sam, how does that Stick Together leaflet strike you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Who’s behind it?”
“Some anti-white, anti-Jew outfit. Harlem’s full of crank outfits.”
“So you think it’s a crank outfit?”
“Of course.”
She took the green leaflet out of the suede pocketbook. She read: “ ‘Our enemy isn’t only the Jew cop Miller’.”
“What are you driving at, kid?”
“I’ve read those choice lines a dozen times. That line about Jewish bankers — ”
“You’re over sensitive about the Jews because of me.”
“Maybe?”
“You are. That leaflet’s against the Italians and the Irish. It’s against all the whites that Harlem has any dealings with.”
“It’s a pretty slick job at dividing the races,” she admitted. “Crank outfits from what you’ve told me aren’t so slick. This leaflet has its side dish of red herring, too. ‘Red Uncle Tom Negroes.’ And for the payoff: ‘We real Negroes must stick together against this white man’s (bogus) democracy’.”
“Well?”
“Some fascist organization put that leaflet out, Sam.”
“You’re crazy. The F.B.I.’s shut them all up.”
“If that were so, you wouldn’t be reading of new round-ups and new indictments.”
“That’s the trouble with you, Suzy. You believe all the scarehead literature you read. You read stuff a lot of those half baked intellectuals are always printing in their Nations and New Masses. Where do they get all their information? You’re half baked like all of them. Always seeing ghosts. Things aren’t perfect but — ” He stopped, acutely aware that she was waiting for him to finish blowing off steam. He knew that she could sit like that, her grey eyes level and calm, for another fifteen minutes, for an hour if she had to. He felt silly. “Let’s phone Johnny,” he said.
They crossed over to a stationery store and he went inside one of the phone booths. Dialing Johnny’s number, he smiled at Suzy outside the door. She was looking in at him, her maroon feather jaunty on her hat. Her light brown hair gleamed and a ray of light touched her small ears. Delicately modeled like sea shells, her ears glowed pink and translucent. She lifted her fingers to her lips and threw him a kiss. “Your lipstick’s a gonner,” he said as a man’s voice at the other end of the wire cut in with a gruff hello. “I’d like to speak to Johnny Ellis,” Sam said.
“He’s workin’ now, mister. What do you think this is?”
“It’s very important. He left word for me to call — ”
“He can save his calls for Harlem.”
“Please.”
“Hold on.”
Sam opened the door. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “They’re getting Johnny.”
“I’m excited.”
“No, just hungry. That lunch — ” Johnny’s voice slid through the wire, deep and slow as he had remembered it.
“Hel-lo,” Johnny said.
“Hello. This is Sam. Sam Miller. How are you?”
“Hel-lo, Sam. How’s the boy?”
“Okay, Johnny. I just heard you phoned me or I would’ve called before. Johnny — Hell — Maybe we ought to get together. It’s hard on a phone.”
“Sure. I spoke to Hal Clair. Do you know who he is?”
“No.”
“He’s a Negro. He’s secretary of the Harlem Equality League. I guess you’ve heard of them. Anyway, I told Clair that I knew you and that I didn’t think you were what you were being made out to be. You know. All that Gestapo stuff. Clair was interested. He said he’d like to meet you, to talk to you. But he said there was some kind of a po-lice rule preventing a po-liceman from — ”
“That’s right. It’s a regulation.”
“I don’t know what you can do about it but Harlem’s — I don’t have to tell you Harlem’s cooking. Shucks, if you could get to see Clair before the mass meeting. You’ve heard of the mass meeting?”
“Yes. Go on, Johnny.”
“That’s going to be a big party, Sam. All the big-shot Negro leaders are behind it. Republicans, Democrats, American Labor Party, everybody. They’re making a test case out of what happened. It’s going to be bigger’n you or Randolph. It’s going to be a case of Harlem against the po-lice force and against Jim Crow in general.”
Sam gasped. His head rocked as if a fist had come out of the floor and thudded into his face. “Johnny — I don’t know what I can do — I want to square myself with Harlem. You know the kind of guy I am Johnny — You’ve read the accounts in the papers. What do you think?”
“I don’t get you?”
“I want to know your opinion of what happened, Johnny.”
“Do you want it straight?”
“You bet.”
“This Gestapo stuff — that’s plain cockeyed like I told Clair.
But so many killings in Harlem, people there are awful suspicious, Sam. You know. Most cops could be called Gestapo cops and it’d fit. But that’s getting away from what you asked me. The way I see it — when you were alone with Randolph — You know. Before that cop, O’Riordan popped up, you weren’t beating Randolph. You were trying to get him to drop his knife. Now O’Riordan gets on the scene and he jumps for Randolph and begins beating him. You join in. Is that right, Sam?”
“That’s right.”
“Way I see it, you didn’t want to shoot Randolph or even beat him. But that was before O’Riordan popped up — ”
The operator chimed in that Sam’s five minutes were up. He groped for a nickel, dropped it into the box. “Hello, Johnny,” he said in a stunned lifeless voice. “Go on.”
“Hel-lo. All I’m getting at is that you were swung along by O’Riordan. Suppose O’Riordan had felt about Negroes like you. I don’t know O’Riordan but Sam, don’t you see if he hadn’t jumped in swinging and clubbing, you might have kept Randolph covered until reinforcements came. You might have disarmed him without killing him. He was dangerous and crazy but still you might have saved him, Sam. You hear me?”
“I hear you. Okay. So long, Johnny. I’ll get in touch,” he mumbled hanging up. He staggered out of the booth. Suzy clasped him around his waist with both arms. “Let’s get something to eat,” he mumbled.
“What’d Ellis say to make you — ”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. Square myself? I’ll never square myself with them. Not in a million years. Even Johnny — ”
“What’d Johnny say?”
He told her and he was amazed to see how calmly she took it.
“Sam,” she said. “The main thing is that Johnny’s got faith in you. That’s important. You’ve got to see this man Clair before the mass meeting Sunday — ”
“But the regulations forbid — ”
“You can resign.”
“What. Throw away my job? What for?”
“You said you wanted to square yourself with the Negro people. Do you?”
“Of course. But how? Even Johnny — Councilman Vincent’s judged me already. Do you think they’ll call the meeting off?”
“Mistakes have been made before, Sam. That isn’t what matters. What matters is what are you going to do? It’s you, Sam. But it’s more than you.” For the third time that day she pulled out the green leaflet. “The Harlem Equality
League tries to track down filth like this. They try to discover who the backers are and where the money comes from.”
“What’re you getting at?”
“Sam, we’re in a war. And now it’s come to us right here in New York City. Councilman Vincent’s wrong about you but he’s not the enemy. The enemy’s right here and we have to fight back until we wipe him out or he’ll wipe us out. Johnny was right. Until O’Riordan showed up, Randolph had a chance for his life. I’m not knocking O’Riordan but that cop didn’t feel about Negroes like you, Sam. He’d been poisoned. It was waste-no-time-on-the-niggers with O’Riordan. This leaflet’s the opening shot, Sam and we have to answer that shot with a shot of our own.” She ripped the green leaflet into pieces. Sam stared at the green slips of paper with their black disjoined letters scattered over the gutter. Brighter than lightning, what Suzy had left unspoken struck him: Why couldn’t he help track down the people behind that leaflet?
CHAPTER 3
ON FRIDAY noon, the fourth day after the shooting of Fred Randolph by Officer Sam Miller, the Baton Rouge operative selected by ex-Governor Heney to handle “that Harlem nigger situation” (the ex-Governor’s phrase) was walking to the New York City address of the organization to which both of them belonged. On the preceding Tuesday, the operative had received a long distance call in Baton Rouge from the ex-Governor in Washington, D. C. With his wife, he had flown to the Capitol, stayed overnight, consulted with the ex-Governor and the next morning had again hurled through the great blue skies to New York.
He was a young man, this choice of the ex-Governor’s. In his thirties, he was built like a light-heavyweight who has just begun to take on weight. His shoulders were broad but his stomach bulged too tightly against the cloth of his double-breasted grey suit. His name was Bill Trent but as an operative he’d rechristened himself Bill Johnson. Even his wife believed her name was Johnson.
He was walking rapidly to the address, aware of trifles that would have skipped his notice in Baton Rouge: a loitering Western Union boy with four toothpicks between his lips, a man in a brown felt shaking his head over the newspaper in his hands, the sidewalk girls of lower Broadway, stenographers, typists, secretaries. These New York women, he judged contemptuously; five and ten cent store dolls, a dozen of them weren’t worth one Isabelle. Isabelle was his wife; he had left her in their room at the Hotel Commodore but now her slim body darted across his consciousness. And here they were on the Big Stem. Holy Christ, it was unbelievable.
In New York City! The sales line that worked so well down in the South, in Baton Rouge, in Savannah, in Houston wouldn’t go up here, he knew. Selling Southerners the idea that the South belonged to the white man and that the Negro was only fit for field and mine labor was like representing a staple like Coca Cola. But this was New York City! Hadn’t the ex-Governor warned him that the Harlem assignment was going to demand smart figuring. “This here New York, Jew York,” the ex-Governor had said, “is a union town, a Red town, a nigger-spoiling town.” The ex-Governor had wrapped his ponderous arm around Bill’s neck and his whiskey breath had rolled into Bill’s nostrils. Heney, Bill recalled, had a florid face and a black string tie and looked and behaved like a tintype caricature of what a Southern politician should be. But in the organization Heney was supposed to be as clever as the late Huey Long. The one thing Heney couldn’t fake, Bill thought; were his eyes. Chill and blue, they had appraised him in Washington as a tobacco buyer appraises the bright leaf at an auction. The hell with Heney! Why worry about Heney? He had been the operative picked to come to New York, not Fisher, or Murdock, or any of the others.
Bill’s eyes shone almost drunkenly but the face was impassive. It was a handsome face or rather it had been a handsome face, the nose straight, the chin rugged, the eyes finely balanced. But now a webbing of burn scars laced across the features, jagged as lightning, white and precise in their outlines; a ribbony scar traversed the corner of Bill’s upper lip; the delicate eyelids were crisscrossed with marks of fire. Only the eyes were untouched.
He entered a marble lobby with walls thirty feet high and a vaulted cathedral ceiling. There was a sense of both completion and beginning in him, this address a crossroads. Behind him lay his work in the South. Ahead, was a directory. He focussed on the list of firms that began with A:
A.B.C. Finance Corporation 12th
Abingdon, Fitch, Warren, Inc. 49th
Altoona Products, Inc. 60th
American Freighters 21st
American Can Goods, Inc. 29th
American Research Association 43rd
There! The American Research Association! The New York organization itself! Upstairs, in the middle of the skyscraper they would be waiting for him. Bill hurried by the cigar counter and stepped into the express elevator. About him were the pink powerful faces — so they seemed to him — of the men who transacted big affairs, the inner office men, the money men. He felt himself one of them as the express plunged up into space. At the forty-third floor he got off and walked to the door lettered: American Research Association. He wiped his damp cheeks with a monogrammed linen handkerchief and stepped into an anteroom.
A girl behind a glistening glass wall slid a glass panel open with a red-nailed hand and said. “Good afternoon, sir.”
“I have an appointment with Mr. Norris Hayden.”
“Your name, please?”
“William Johnson.”
“Will you please be seated.”
But he was too nervous to sit down in one of the cream-leather chairs. He glanced at the covers of a score of technical magazines displayed on the table. They dealt with aviation, steel, utilities, railroads. Five minutes passed and an office boy appeared to usher him out of the anteroom. Behind the glass wall, three stenographers clicked away at their machines; six men worked at flat desks. Bill was reminded of the A.R.A. office in Washington. The office boy led him past this common office to a cream-colored door in the rear. “Mr. Hayden’s assistant, Colonel Bretherton, will see you sir.”
Bill seized the chrome door knob and went inside. He saw skyscraper spires and blue sky in a window. The Colonel was sitting at a desk to the left of the window. He was lank and lean, his temples iron grey and he wore rimless glasses. His grey hair was combed back from a narrow forehead. “Mr. Hayden will see you in a few minutes, Johnson. Sit down, won’t you?”
“Thanks.”
“Pull that chair over, Johnson.”
Bill smiled at the Colonel. He was thinking that Hayden was one hell of a big-shot to rate a Colonel as his assistant. “Now,” the Colonel was saying. “We know that you are William Johnson but we have to be positive. I want you to write me something on this pad of paper. Anything will do. A few lines. Here’s a pencil.” Bill sat down at the desk, accepted the pencil and wrote:
“I’ve come north from Baton Rouge. I’ve come on business. I hope that that’s all I have to write. A few lines.”
“Here you are,” Bill said. The Colonel was opening a drawer in his desk. He took out a photograph which he showed to Bill.
“This is you, Johnson,” he explained. He compared the black and white image with the living face in front of him. He dropped the photograph and, holding what Bill had written to one side, he compared it with a small white card he fished out of the drawer. Bill guessed that his handwriting was on that card, his spine stiffened as if he had been dragged into a police station. “You’re Johnson, all right,” the Colonel announced, sweeping sheet, card and photograph into the drawer. He took a cigar out of the humidor on his desk, lit it importantly, saying between puffs, “They’re my own brand. Made for me. Try one if you wish.”
“No, thanks.” He lit a cigarette, feeling a little better. He hadn’t expected to be identified by an elderly man who looked like a banker. But this was the New York City organization. They must be hell on wheels up here. He recalled a remark of Heney’s: “Hayden runs the show up there and he’s smart even if he’s the son of a millionaire. He’s no rich man’s son made a
big stick out of just because he was born rich. Hayden started from the bottom in the organization and he’s got where he is because he’s smart. Maybe his old man’s money helped a little but it wasn’t everything.”
“When do I meet Mr. Hayden, Colonel?”
“Right away. Johnson, do you recall the Sojourner Truth Housing project?”
“Not very clearly.”
“I think it might be instructive if I sketched it to you.”
Bill stared. “Has it any connection with my job up here?”
The Colonel blew out a streamer of white smoke. “Every connection. The Sojourner Truth project was built for the Detroit blacks by the Government. As they began to move in, the organization in Detroit promoted a series of incidents. We formed a united white front, comprising Klan and Black Legion elements, real estate interests, politicians and union men. The U.A.W. fought us but we gained the support of many union men. Not as many as we wanted with the U.A.W. preaching against Jim Crow.”
Bill listened impatiently. Had he come all the way to New York to have this stuffed shirt blow cigar smoke into his face? To hell with Colonel Bretherton. The sooner he met Hayden the better. He watched the Colonel remove his eyeglasses and polish them with a white silk handkerchief.
“We’re hoping for equal success in Harlem,” the Colonel said. “You’re a northerner, Johnson, born and educated in Pennsylvania and that’s important to us. At the same time, you have had considerable experience in the South. I want to impress upon you that you have a difficult task ahead of you. It won’t be as simple as arranging for the shooting of some black soldier. Our methods in Harlem, in addition, are going to be different. Mr. Hayden has other ideas than the usual strategy of pitting whites against blacks. Mr. Hayden proposes to use the blacks themselves to dig their own graves.”
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