A Rage in Harlem

Hank counted the stack of money. It was a lot of money – a hundred and fifty brand new ten-dollar bills. He looked at Jackson through cold yellow eyes.

“You give me fifteen C’s – right?”

He wanted it straight. It was strictly business.

He was a small, dapper man with mottled brown skin and thin straightened hair. He looked like business.

“That’s right,” Jackson said. “Fifteen hundred bucks.”

It was strictly business with Jackson too.

Jackson was a short, black, fat man with purple-red gums and pearly white teeth made for laughing, but Jackson wasn’t laughing. It was too serious for Jackson to be laughing. Jackson was only twenty-eight years old, but it was such serious business that he looked a good ten years older.

“You want me to make you fifteen G’s – right?” Hank kept after him.

“That’s right,” Jackson said. “Fifteen thousand bucks.”

He tried to sound happy, but he was scared. Sweat was trickling from his short kinky hair. His round black face was glistening like an eight-ball.

“My cut’ll be ten percent – fifteen C’s – right?”

“That’s right. I pays you fifteen hundred bucks for the deal.”

“I take five percent for my end,” Jodie said. “That’s seven hundred and fifty. Okay?”

Jodie was a working stiff, a medium-sized, root-colored, rough-skinned, muscular boy, dressed in a leather jacket and GI pants. His long, thick hair was straightened on the ends and burnt red, and nappy at the roots where it grew out black. It hadn’t been cut since New Year’s Eve and this was already the middle of February. One look at Jodie was enough to tell that he was strictly a square.

“Okay,” Jackson said. “You gets seven hundred and fifty for your end.”

It was Jodie who had got Hank to make all this money for him.

“I gets the rest,” Imabelle said.

The others laughed.

Imabelle was Jackson’s woman. She was a cushioned-lipped, hot-bodied, banana-skin chick with the speckled-brown eyes of a teaser and the high-arched, ball-bearing hips of a natural-born
amante
. Jackson was as crazy about her as moose for doe.

They were standing around the kitchen table. The window looked out on 142nd Street. Snow was falling on the ice-locked piles of garbage stretching like levees along the gutters as far as the eye could see.

Jackson and Imabelle lived in a room down the hall. Their landlady was at work and the other roomers were absent. They had the place to themselves.

Hank was going to turn Jackson’s hundred and fifty ten-dollar bills into a hundred and fifty hundred-dollar bills.

Jackson watched Hank roll each bill carefully into a sheet of chemical paper, stick the roll into a cardboard tube shaped like a firecracker, and stack the tubes in the oven of the new gas stove.

Jackson’s eyes were red with suspicion.

“You sure you’re using the right paper?”

“I ought to know it. I made it,” Hank said.

Hank was the only man in the world who possessed the chemically treated paper that was capable of raising the denomination of money. He had developed it himself.

Nevertheless Jackson watched Hank’s every move. He even studied the back of Hank’s head when Hank turned to put the money into the oven.

“Don’t you be so worried, Daddy,” Imabelle said, putting her smooth yellow arm about his black-coated shoulder. “You know it can’t fail. You saw him do it before.”

Jackson had seen him do it before, true enough. Hank had given him a demonstration two days before. He had turned a ten into a hundred right before Jackson’s eyes. Jackson had taken the hundred to the bank. He had told the clerk he had won it shooting dice and had asked the clerk if it was good. The clerk had said it was as good as if it had been made in the mint. Hank had had the hundred changed and had given Jackson back his ten. Jackson knew that Hank could do it.

But this time it was for keeps.

That was all the money Jackson had in the world. All the money he’d saved in the five years he’d worked for Mr. H. Exodus Clay, the undertaker. And that hadn’t come easy. He drove the limousines
for the funerals, brought in the dead in the pickup hearse, cleaned the chapel, washed the bodies and swept out the embalming room, hauled away the garbage cans of clotted blood, trimmed meat and rotten guts.

All the money he could get Mr. Clay to advance him on his salary. All the money he could borrow from his friends. He’d pawned his good clothes, his gold watch and his imitation diamond stickpin and the gold signet ring he’d found in a dead man’s pocket. Jackson didn’t want anything to happen.

“I ain’t worried,” Jackson said. “I’m just nervous, that’s all. I don’t want to get caught.”

“How’re we goin’ to get caught, Daddy? Ain’t nobody got no idea what we’re doing here.”

Hank closed the oven door and lit the gas.

“Now I make you a rich man, Jackson.”

“Thank the Lord. Amen,” Jackson said, crossing himself.

He wasn’t a Catholic. He was a Baptist, a member of the First Baptist Church of Harlem. But he was a very religious young man. Whenever he was troubled he crossed himself just to be on the safe side.

“Set down, Daddy,” Imabelle said. “Your knees are shakin’.”

Jackson sat down at the table and stared at the stove. Imabelle stood beside him, drew his head tight against her bosom. Hank consulted his watch. Jodie stood to one side, his mouth wide open.

“Ain’t it done yet?” Jackson asked.

“Just one more minute,” Hank said.

He moved to the sink to get a drink of water.

“Ain’t the minute up yet?” Jackson asked.

At that instant the stove exploded with such force it blew the door off.

“Great balls of fire!” Jackson yelled. He came up from his chair as if the seat of his pants had blown up.

“Look out, Daddy!” Imabelle screamed and hugged Jackson so hard she threw him flat on his back.

“Hold it, in the name of the law!” a new voice shouted.

A tall, slim colored man with a cop’s scowl rushed into the kitchen. He had a pistol in his right hand and a gold-plated badge in his left.

“I’m a United States marshal. I’m shooting the first one who moves.”

He looked as if he meant it.

The kitchen had filled with smoke and stunk like black gunpowder. Gas was pouring from the stove. The scorched cardboard tubes that had been cooking in the oven were scattered over the floor.

“It’s the law!” Imabelle screamed.

“I heard him!” Jackson yelled.

“Let’s beat it!” Jodie shouted.

He tripped the marshal into the table and made for the door. Hank got there before him and Jodie went out on Hank’s back. The marshal sprawled across the table top.

“Run, Daddy!” Imabelle said.

“Don’t wait for me,” Jackson replied.

He was on his hands and knees, trying as hard as he could to get to his feet. But Imabelle was running so hard she stumbled over him and knocked him down again as she made for the door.

Before the marshal could straighten up all three of them had escaped.

“Don’t you move!” he shouted at Jackson.

“I ain’t moving, Marshal.”

When the marshal finally got his feet underneath him he yanked Jackson erect and snapped a pair of handcuffs about his wrists.

“Trying to make a fool out of me! You’ll get ten years for this.”

Jackson turned a battleship gray.

“I ain’t done nothing, Marshal. I swear to God.”

Jackson had attended a Negro college in the South, but whenever he was excited or scared he began talking in his native dialect.

“Sit down and shut up,” the marshal ordered.

He shut off the gas and began picking up the cardboard tubes for evidence. He opened one, took out a brand-new hundred-dollar bill and held it up toward the light.

“Raised from a ten. The markings are still on it.”

Jackson had started to sit down but he stopped suddenly and began to plead.

“It wasn’t me what done that, Marshal. I swear to God. It was them two fellows who got away. All I done was come into the kitchen to get a drink of water.”

“Don’t lie to me, Jackson. I know you. I’ve got the goods on you, man. I’ve been watching you three counterfeiters for days.”

Tears welled up in Jackson’s eyes, he was so scared.

“Listen, Marshal, I swear to God I didn’t have nothing to do with that. I don’t even know how to do it. The little man called
Hank who got away is the counterfeiter. He’s the only one who’s got the paper.”

“Don’t worry about them, Jackson. I’ll get them too. But I’ve already got you, and I’m taking you down to the Federal Building. So I’m warning you, anything you say to me will be used against you in court.”

Jackson slid from the chair and got down on his knees.

“Leave me go just this once, Marshal.” The tears began streaming down his face. “Just this once, Marshal. I’ve never been arrested before. I’m a church man, I ain’t dishonest. I confess, I put up the money for Hank to raise, but it was him who was breaking the law, not me. I ain’t done nothing wouldn’t nobody do if they had a chance to make a pile of money.”

“Get up, Jackson, and take your punishment like a man,” the marshal said. “You’re just as guilty as the others. If you hadn’t put up the tens, Hank couldn’t have changed them into hundreds.”

Jackson saw himself serving ten years in prison. Ten years away from Imabelle. Jackson had only had Imabelle for eleven months, but he couldn’t live without her. He was going to marry her as soon as she got her divorce from that man down South she was still married to. If he went to prison for ten years, by then she’d have another man and would have forgotten all about him. He’d come out of prison an old man, thirty-eight years old, dried up. No one would give him a job. No woman would want him. He’d be a bum, hungry, skinny, begging on the streets of Harlem, sleeping in doorways, drinking canned heat to keep warm. Mama Jackson hadn’t raised a son for that, struggled to send him through the college for Negroes, just to have him become a convict. He just couldn’t let the marshal take him in.