Dark Stain (9 page)

“Who you think I am?” Cashman said to them. “What do I do for a living?”

The boy in the sneakers said. “You a lawyer, mister.”

Johnny laughed, Sam smiled and Cashman said hurriedly, “A labor lawyer, son. No degree or diploma but you guessed it.” He gave each of the boys a penny.

They took the pennies and begged. “Gotta penny, mister?”

“I just gave you some.”

“Gotta penny, mister?” they chorused.

“Scram,” Cashman said. “This piecemeal charity stinks!”

Sam was thinking that those two kids belonged to what had happened on Monday, to the whole series of events that had begun in an ambulance and ended on a sidewalk in a pool of blood. There’d been no understanding between those colored kids and Cashman just as there had been no understanding between Randolph and himself. He hadn’t been a man to Randolph or to the crowd; he’d been a gorilla, a big white gorilla. They were nearing the Silver Trumpet Ballroom and the sidewalks were full of Negroes going in their direction. A gorilla, Sam thought; even the eyewitnesses wouldn’t recognize him if they saw him walking with Johnny and Cashman; he was only man-size now.

At four o’clock, the Silver Trumpet Ballroom was packed with over five thousand people. The pull-up chairs on the waxed boards showed empties only over on the extreme right and extreme left of the band platform. Sam, Johnny and Cashman found seats in a row that filled up even as they were getting settled. Sam stared about him, feeling as if he were in some chair like a barber-shop chair, rotating in the middle of a vast Negro arena. He saw their hundreds of faces and he was acutely conscious of his own white skin.

“They’re pinning the flag up front,” Johnny said. “Sam, did you notice all the cops outside?”

Sam nodded, listening to the swelling voice of the thousands, their whisperings, the scraping of their shoes, the rustling of their newspapers all fusing into the voice of judgment itself.

“Think any of the cops recognized you?” Johnny asked cautiously, speaking close to Sam’s ear.

“No. They wouldn’t expect me here.”

“What’re you guys stewin’ about?” Cashman said. He was on Sam’s right; Johnny was on Sam’s left. “You can’t leave me out of it.” Cheers rocked the ballroom as ten or twelve Negroes, men and women, walked out from the wings, sitting down in the row of red leather chrome-finished chairs on the platform. “Is that big guy the Councilman?”

“Yes,” Johnny said.

A Negro minister in black cloth and white collar stepped in front of the gleaming dancehall chairs. The minister looked small and out of place on this platform, surrounded by the ballroom murals of giant-sized waltzers and tangoists. All the dancers were white. In the audience, thousands of heads lowered from habit, meekly, piously, indifferently. The minister prayed the Sunday words. “My brethren, on this day we have gathered so that justice will be done….” When he finished the Councilman strode forward, waving a big white envelope. “These are the affidavits of the eyewitnesses,” the Councilman said. “But for fear that someone would get them from me I have had two photostatic copies made. This was necessary, my friends. Did you know that the Mayor attempted to have this meeting called off?” The crowd murmured. “The Mayor said this meeting was an incitement to riot.” The crowd’s murmur mounted. “It is not an incitement to riot but we Negro people do demand a full investigation of this Randolph killing. We are not going to have the eyewitnesses address you for we do not want to inflame Harlem more than it is already inflamed. On this I Am A Free Man Day, we Negroes demand the right to be treated as free men in this community. The people of this community, and its leaders present on this platform, the All-Negro Harlem Committee, are united on this problem. We must be united. For the atrociousness of this deed is more inflammatory than any words and we need unity in order to be calm and wise. Now let me introduce to you the first of our speakers, Mr. Charles Godkin, Harlem’s Democratic Assemblyman.”

All this time Sam had been staring at the face of Mrs. Randolph. She was sitting on the platform in silence but her silence challenged him:
You White Murderer
. He was crushed by her silence as another speaker followed the Democratic Assemblyman. And another. Cashman nudged him with his elbow. “Hey, who’s the white guy just come in?”

“Who?” Sam mumbled.

“Up there on the platform.”

A paunchy white man with scanty hair brushed carefully was being introduced by Councilman Vincent. “Our friend, Congressman Toole has come to us from Washington, D. C.” Toole waited for the Councilman to wind up, his face absent-minded as if he were thinking of his train back. “Congressman Toole,” the Councilman concluded.

Briskly, the Congressman began. “It is right and fitting that on this day, Sunday, consecrated by Christians to the service of God, on this day dedicated in the name of Jesus Christ, there will be no riot coming out of this meeting.”

“Do you want to go, Sam?” Johnny whispered.

“No,” Sam said. Johnny’s tone had warmed him, making him feel that he wasn’t alone, surrounded by thousands of Negroes who hated him and might attack him if they found out he was in their midst. Johnny was his friend. Johnny believed in his integrity. Sam glanced gratefully at the brown profile on his left. Up on the platform Congressman Toole concluded his oration; he shook hands with Councilman Vincent and Mr. Charles Godkin and departed. Again, there were only Negroes in the dance hall chairs.

The next speaker was the Republican leader, Chauncey Barnow, a fat grizzled Negro with an Elk’s tooth on a gold chain. “If a southern Senator from Alabama or Texas or dear old Virginia were on the platform to see this meeting,” the Republican leader declared, “they’d carry back to their dear old southland the news that people in Harlem are civilized. We are most of us civilized. But every community has its screwball elements. And we of the All-Negro Harlem Committee wish to state our opposition to this unsigned leaflet put out by the screwball elements, this piece of gutter filth that misguided Negroes, unknown to us, have circulated throughout Harlem. You have seen it. I won’t soil my lips or your ears with its language. It was put out to stir trouble and dissension among us. Because of its venomous language against the religion of Officer Miller, because of its attacks on Italian and Irish citizens, the police out there are thicker than flies at milking time. This piece of gutter filth is the excuse the police have that we honest law-abiding Negroes intend to start a riot against the white people of this city. We won’t give those policemen the satisfaction of rioting.”

“Yes, sir,” the audience boomed a fervent response.

“None of us would give those policemen any satisfaction,” the Republican leader continued. “We are law-abiding but are they? I follow police blotters carefully and ninety-nine out of one hundred white people hurt in Harlem are joy seeking. The police know that. But does that stop them from attacking and molesting and persecuting the law-abiding citizens? No. There is a reason for all this police violence. For who are the police in Harlem? Isn’t it a fact that police who misbehave in other districts of this city are sent here for punishment? I don’t know whether Officer Miller is one of these exiles from Brooklyn or the Bronx. I don’t know whether he is stupid and brutal. But the evidence points to that assumption. We have twenty-two affidavits of eyewitnesses. We are not going to give their names or addresses to the police. We don’t want them intimidated. We won’t divulge any names until the D.A. is ready to try Officer Miller.”

Sam barely heard the Republican leader. Johnny on one side of him, and Cashman on the other weren’t real any more. They were like dummies, voiceless even when they spoke, silenced by something that was walking through this ballroom; a giant was walking, a giant taller than the dancers in the murals, a giant that borrowed the voice of one speaker after another for its own and discarded all the voices in turn as it breathed up the air in the lungs of the listeners, and out of the five thousands fashioned its own pealing voice.

Councilman Vincent had now stepped forward. “I haven’t much more to add. You have heard the speakers whom I have introduced to you. Now whether Officer Miller had to use his gun to save his own life and the life of Officer O’Riordan or not, he was stupid and a menace. We who live in Harlem, in the North, can speak up against those who menace us. Whether that menace is a policeman, or the menace of high rents, or the menace of job discrimination, or the menace of a Jim Crow army, we can speak up. We have democracy in the north although some say it is only a democracy that permits a Negro to ride in the subway with the whites. Both of these definitions are right. Ours is a limited democracy. We Negroes demand genuine democracy. We demand the right to happiness, the right to opportunity, to all those rights that were denied Randolph. He’s passed and gone but what about the thousands of other Randolphs? They say Randolph was demented. He was. But it is the terrible conditions under which the Negro people live that cause the Randolphs to be demented. I say to you that the United Nations cannot win this war without the help of the Randolphs. They cannot win without the help of the colored peoples of the world….”

Men were handing out leaflets when Sam, Johnny and Cashman inched out of the ballroom. Johnny accepted a leaflet from a little Negro man with a warty chin. The leaflet was printed on green paper. Homewards, the crowd walked, reading as they went. Cashman and Sam lowered their heads to the green paper in Johnny’s hand.

“This rag’s signed,” Cashman said.

“United Negro Committee?” Johnny frowned. “Never heard of ‘em.”

On all sides, the crowds buffeted and bypassed the two white men and the black man. Slowly, they started walking again. “Union’s got to stir its hump,” Cashman said. “Who’s behind the rag?”

“I’m going to find out,” Sam said slowly. “Johnny, I’ve been thinking. You can help me — ”

“Say the word,” Johnny said.

“Follow one of these people handing out leaflets. See where he comes from.”

Johnny circled Sam’s shoulders with his arm. “Good guy, Sam.” Bright and flashing, his smile spread from his lips into his dark-brown eyes. “I’m with you all the way.”

People were staring and Cashman growled. “Cut this demonstration. Come on, you two guys.”

“T
HAT’S
about all,” Sam said after he had finished telling his story to Hal Clair in the office of the Harlem Equality League. The noonday sun broomed inside upon a cluttered interior that was full of Monday’s newspapers; there were two roll-top desks so close together they made the office like a storage room; battered files ranged in a row against the stained wood partition. The partition stopped a foot short of the ceiling, dividing Hal Clair’s cubby hole from the even smaller office of his secretary. Uneasily, Sam realized that the secretary had heard everything. He had a feeling that he was indiscriminately shouting his experiences to a mob of strangers. He felt uncomfortable with Hal Clair. Clair was in his middle forties and he didn’t look like a Negro, his skin the white of a Spaniard’s, his features cut small and fine. His eyes were hazel and he wore a black mustache over his thin lips. His grey tweed suit was almost the same pattern as Sam’s and a Phi Beta Kappa key from Harvard hung from a chain looped across his vest.

“I appreciate your confidence, Mr. Miller,” Clair said finally. “Too bad you didn’t choose to see me yesterday. Perhaps, and I am not stating this as an iron-clad statement, perhaps we might have succeeded in moderating the tone of the meeting.”

Sam waited for Clair to express an opinion. Opinions! God Almighty, he was getting fed up with opinions. He was sorry he’d ever come to this office. The desks and files were littered with newspapers, the metropolitan papers; sheets from Atlanta, New Orleans, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, the dates of the past week on their mastheads; there were the papers of the Negro press,
The A fro-American, The Chicago Defender, The Pittsburgh Courier
, and all these newspapers had been blue-penciled, items clipped out. It was as if they had been blown in through the window from the street outside. Sam heard the red and yellow crosstown trolleys, below, on One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street and suddenly he couldn’t stand Clair’s silences. “They didn’t carry much on yesterday’s meeting,” he said.

“What did you say? I beg your pardon.”

“There wasn’t much in the papers about the meeting.”

“Very little. Mr. Miller, how seriously have you endangered your position by coming here?”

Sam laughed. “I should have mentioned it before but I was down at Headquarters this morning. I saw Deputy Inspector Coombs and I told him how I felt about straightening myself out with people like you. I was all prepared to resign and I had the surprise of my life — Coombs wouldn’t think of me resigning. I showed Coombs the leaflet put out by the bunch calling themselves the United Negro Committee and said I wanted to run them down. I said that I’d have to cooperate with the Harlem Equality League and other Negro organizations. Well, Coombs thought I was crazy. I could see it in his face and then he said why didn’t I take a leave of absence. I said I’d be glad to but did that mean I could be free to cooperate with Negro organizations — ”

“What did he say to that?”

“He said he’d leave it to my judgment but that he strongly advised against it. He said I needed a vacation more than anything. Anyway, here I am still on the force. Maybe, this’ll sound cynical to you, Mr. Clair, what I’m going to say. But we’re not going to get anywhere unless there’s understanding between us. You said if I’d seen you yesterday you might have succeeded in toning them down. Well, I don’t think so. Like I told you, I was at that meeting and this may sound cynical but the All-Negro Harlem Committee’s a political committee and they’re committed to political action. They’re out to get me before the D. A. They won’t get to first base but that’s what they’re after. Now, the way I see it: Here I am still on the force. If I talk to the Councilman, I think he’d be suspicious of me. Maybe I’m wrong. I’m not making myself clear, Mr. Clair, but I feel that if I could go to the All-Negro Committee after I’d done something and not just go pounding my breast, I’d be better off. What I want to do is work with you. I want to help you run down the bunch printing those leaflets. They’re criminals and I know something about criminals.”

Clair frowned, playing with his Phi Beta key with two tapering white fingers. “It is an unusual situation — ”

“You know Johnny Ellis, Mr. Clair? Well, Sunday after the meeting, Johnny tailed one of the men handing out leaflets.”

“Really? Any results?”

“None. The man he tailed turned out to be a poolroom hanger-on. Johnny got friendly with him and got the whole story. He told Johnny that a guy he’d never seen came into the poolroom early on Sunday. This guy got to talking about Randolph and the lowdown cops and then he asked the men in the poolroom if they wanted to do their share for Harlem by passing out a few leaflets and make three bucks at the same time. That’s the gist of it.”

“Merely a blind alley?”

“We’ll hit a lot of blind alleys, Mr. Clair.” He took the two green paper leaflets from his pocket and placed them down on the desk in front of Clair. He had risen from his chair and now he was leaning over Clair’s shoulder. “I’m no detective but I’ve been trained in criminal investigation. Look at those leaflets, Mr. Clair. It’s a known fact that con-men’ll keep the initials of their first names even when they invent phony names for themselves. A con-man born John Brown’ll change his name to James Smith. He’ll hold onto the J — ”

“What are you trying to say?” Clair’s eyes were amused.

“I’m saying everything backwards today. Those two leaflets were printed by the same bunch. It isn’t the green paper that gives them away. It’s the style. They have the same style. We can locate the writer by the style. He likes to play around with the K.K.K. idea as you see. ‘Mick cops who think.k.k. they’re the old massa down south’ And yesterday’s: ‘We don’t want any K.K.K. (Kike Killer Kops) in Harlem.’ ”

Clair glanced from the leaflets, gazing through the window on his right down on One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street. Anxiously, Sam stared at Clair’s profile, the thin nose, the angular chin; except for the mustache it was like the profile of a Latin priest, ascetic and reserved. He was a queer fish, Sam thought; neither black nor white.

“I believe your enthusiasm is running away with you, Mr. Miller,” Clair said. “Are you aware of the number of organizations that have been publishing leaflets of this category in the past ten years?”

“Dozens, I suppose.”

“Hundreds.”

“But the style can be traced, Mr. Clair. Johnny Ellis, you know, he’s on some inter-race committee in his union and he says that many of the anti-fascist organizations have collections of these leaflets. Please, Mr. Clair, don’t turn me down. It means a lot to me. A letter of introduction from you’d help me a lot.”

“I suppose I can do that much for you.”

“Thanks. Can I have it now?”

Clair’s thin lips twisted in a wry smile. “You can.” He raised his modulated voice and called to his secretary. “Miss Burrow, will you please come in.”

The secretary pushed open the door in the partition, entering, and smiling at the two men. She stood near one of the files, a plump very light brown girl in her twenties. She was wearing a black dress striped with long vertical red ribs of color and her legs were shapely, Sam noticed, inside their sheer stockings. Almost she looked Spanish, too, with her high-bridged nose and full red lips but a Spanish mixed with Negro blood. Observing her, Sam’s uneasiness about the Harlem Equality League and its personnel increased; Hal Clair who didn’t seem like a Negro at all; the secretary who seemed Negro only on second thought. It certainly was strange. What kind of a Negro was Clair anyway and what had prevented him from passing over into the white world? And why had Clair chosen as his secretary a girl like Miss Burrow?

Clair was dictating. “ ‘To Whom It May Concern. Mr. Samuel Miller is doing volunteer work for the Harlem Equality League. He is to be assisted in his efforts. I will appreciate any cooperation shown to him …’ ” Miss Burrow’s black eyes flashed up from her shorthand pad and she smiled quickly at Sam. Her white teeth shown in two even dazzling lines against the warm fruit-like coloring of her skin. Her eyes met Sam’s and he was conscious of a taunting invitation in those eyes, conscious of her silky black hair as she turned on her heel and glided through the partition into the outer office. Clair appeared to have noticed nothing, remarking, “You’ll have your letter in a few minutes.”

“Thanks. You think I’m a pest,” he added grimly. “I don’t blame you, Mr. Clair.”

“How do you intend to conduct your investigation?”

“There are two ways to conduct one. One way’s the stool pigeon method. Cops’ll tell you that the greatest dick is the one with the greatest number of stool pigeons. The other way’s the hard way. Getting all the facts we can and putting them together. That goes for muggers or fascists.” He listened to Miss Burrow’s typewriter pounding out the letter of introduction and he thought that she was on the make. Or was that his dirty copper’s mind? A hot flush burned up his neck and when the secretary returned with the letter for Mr. Clair to sign, Sam didn’t look at her. He was bitterly ashamed of himself.

All afternoon, that Monday, Sam read the throwaways, the leaflets, the pamphlets published by the various shirt outfits. No one organization had a complete file but their secretaries suggested new sources. Towards four o’clock, his eyes ached. The slogans of hate, the sentences of vitriol had hooked one onto the other in his mind like pieces of barbed wire, an endless coil: For A White Gentile America. Return America To The Americans. Jewish Plutocratic Communism Will Lead To A Mongrel Negroid Jewish Nation. Niggers Learn Your Place. The Lusting Nigger Stands At Your Wife’s Bedroom Window. Unions Are A Kike Invention. The Next Time Look At The Shapes Of The Noses Of The People Speaking About Liberty. Niggers Are Not Men For They Have Only Been Out Of The Jungle A Few Centuries.

Patiently he had skimmed through the outpourings, the diatribes, the invectives of the ‘30’s and ‘40’s, comparing the faded letters with the two leaflets printed on green paper. An image of spewing mouths, of waving fists and contorted faces haunted him. Out of the creased flaunting black capitals, a terrible spectre arose. Sam was sitting at a flat desk in an office building on lower Fourth Avenue but now this spectre seized him and he was in the South, in the mid-western industrial centers, in the Atlantic seaboard cities with their large Jewish populations. The lyncher’s rope dangled over the flat desk and the brass knucks crept up behind him. He shuddered, remembering the nightmare on the land: the hooded men of the South ripping the testicles off Negroes; the Christian Fronters knifing Jews in the New York subways; the speeding automobiles with the broken bodies of union organizers and “Reds” on the floorboards under the stained heels. His consciousness echoed the “heils” of all these new orders, these legions for white supremacy, these Christian Protestant Americans and the blood and tears of the murdered and the maimed spilled in his throat until he felt that he himself must perish. Those two green leaflets were like a key in some shadowy door and behind the door was the nightmare, the spectre, the doom that was always waiting, that would always be waiting to whirl out upon the people until the door was smashed, until the key and the lock were destroyed, until the nightmare was banished by the sunlight in man that also lay waiting to be released. There was hope, Sam thought soberly. Suzy said there was, Johnny said there was, Cashman said there was. There was!

He looked over his notes:

Sam leaned over his notes, and started to ask himself questions. Why was the first leaflet more explanatory than the second one? “Our Enemy Isn’t Only The Jew Cop Miller”; “Wop Bar Owners Who Won’t Hire Negroes”; “Jewboy Landlords And Bankers”; “Mick Cops”; “Red Uncle Tom (Bogus) Negroes”. But the second leaflet signed “United Negro Committee” was more revealing in some ways, Sam thought. Why had the anti-Irish stuff been cut? Did that mean whites had put out the second leaflet? Whites! Not Negroes, not the “United Negro Committee”! But whites! But one pen had written both leaflets. Or could he be sure of that? Harlem had plenty of nationalistic Negro groups, any one of whom might have produced those leaflets. But that line, “We Don’t want any K.K.K. (Kike Killer Kops) In Harlem” was Christian Front Doctrine; hadn’t Coughlin’s “Social Justice”, before it was banned, agitated against Jewish policemen? That was a fact to remember. Then the timing of the leaflets; the first one passed out almost coincidentally with the All-Negro leaflet; the second right after the mass meeting in the Silver Trumpet ball room. What did that mean? The second leaflet had been timed to implement the purpose of the mass meeting. The meeting’d not been anti-Jewish but it had been anti-cop brutality. The second leaflet had reiterated the mass meeting’s demand for Negro unity but it lacked the anti-white feeling of the first leaflet. Why had the second leaflet soft-pedaled its anti-white propaganda? Why the cutting of the line about the Irish? Why the confused or confusing identification of K.K.K. (which as everyone knew stood for Kike Koon Katholic) with Kike Killer Kop? The second leaflet marked a strong effort to channel Harlem’s discontent and anger against one scapegoat, the Jewish cop. It attacked “wops” in one reference, “Reds” in one reference, “lynchers” in one reference. But the build-up was on himself. “Why?” Sam asked out loud. Steadfastly he answered his own question.
They
, whoever
they
were, were out to get him.

Towards five o’clock Sam turned the corner into One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street, climbing the single flight of stairs that separated the Harlem Equality League office from Harlem. He stepped into the outer office and said hello to Miss Burrow. “Is Mr. Clair in?”