My Ears Are Bent (13 page)

The city’s night workers fought the cold wind and went about their business. Taxicab drivers waited outside of saloons, huddled behind their wheels. Scrubwomen hurried from subway stations to clean office buildings. There were lights all night in poolroom windows along Park Row.

Bartenders in market ginmills were lonesome.

“A cold night,” said a West Street bartender.

“Yes.”

“Funny, it was such a warm day. When I got up this afternoon I said to the old lady, I said, ‘It’s a warm day. It’s like spring.’ And she said, ‘It’s good pneumonia weather.’”

The bartender rubbed the bar with a towel. A customer came in, stamping his feet against the floor, blowing hard.

“The last block was the worst,” he said.

“A cold night,” said the bartender.

“Give me a brandy neat,” said the customer.

At 3 A.M. there were only a few beds left on the women’s floor of the Municipal Lodging House, a floor which overlooks the East River. In rows of narrow institution beds 165 women lay sleeping. In white cribs in one corner there were two sleeping children, a boy and a girl. Above the cribs was an exit
light, a pale red bulb, and one could see that there were smiles on the faces of the sleeping children. Somewhere among the 165 women lay their mother. The little girl had red curls, and in one little hand she clutched a sticky toy, a prize from a popcorn box which lay, empty, on the linoleum floor.

Near the door a drowsy matron sat in a rocking chair. (“Somebody has to sit up all night and watch them in case one of the younger women gets to thinking about suicide.”) Unable to sleep, three old women stood at a window and looked down at the murky, symbolic river. They whispered vague sentences to each other and watched the steady progress of a late tug.

Occasionally the disconnected conversation of the old women reached across the warm, quiet room. One said, “And when I was working at that lady’s home in Westchester they said to clean up the cellar and I found a bottle of wine on a shelf and they fired me—not on account of I got drunk, but on account of they thought so much of the wine.”

Minutes passed, and another woman said, “And I told him you people are all alike, and I said, ‘If you think you can get away with that you’re crazy.’” They huddled together, the three gaunt old women, and expressed themselves.

And the matron rocked back and forth in her chair, and the worn-out women snored. Poverty was
an old experience to most of them. They had been intimate with poverty for years, and it did not keep them awake, but here and there a figure stirred fitfully. All night long the matron kept her vigil in the rocking chair.

On the floor below, in her office, sat Miss Ethel Hand, the head matron, an unsentimental, extremely kind lady. Night after night she watches over the city’s fortune-twisted women. She makes them take showers, and she pours medicine down their unwilling throats, and she pulls them apart when they fight, and she puts the drunken ones to bed. She is Irish, and she has retained her sense of humor and her sense of decency, and a drunken woman does not horrify her.

At intervals there was the sound of steps on the stairs and a woman opened the door. Miss Hand provided a clean nightgown, a towel (a large towel, not a “charity towel”) and gave them medicine if they looked as if they needed it. Now and then a drunken woman came in, austere, stumbling, talking to herself.

“In the morning she’ll need iodine and aspirin,” said Miss Hand.

“Most of these women are done for,” she said. “Few of them will ever hold a job again. Their next stopping place will be Welfare Island or the river. They are old and the depression threw them into the
street for good. Now they don’t have a chance. This is their home, and their only possessions are the rags on their backs.…”

Another woman came in.

“I was sleeping in a hallway,” she said, “and the cop came along. So I come on down here.”

“Mamie sits down on the stairs of an elevated station and begs,” said Miss Hand. “Then she takes it out in drinking. She doesn’t like to take showers. Once a week, she says, is all right. If I didn’t make them wash, the fleas would drag the blankets out of the building. They are always arguing and fighting about politics, and their husbands, and what good cooks they used to be. And we have a radio, and they argue about the different entertainers.…”

“Do you know them all by name?”

“They never give their right names,” said Miss Hand. “The only right name they give is the name of their nearest relative or friend. They don’t want to be buried in Potter’s Field, you know.”

Outside, in East Twenty-fifth Street, the wind blew, the cold wind from the dirty river. The wind blew dirty scraps of newspapers along the dirty street.

I have seen a lot of shrill essays about marijuana in the newspapers lately. I found out about marijuana soon
after I came to New York City. One Saturday night in 1930 a Negro detective took me with him on his rounds. We went to a rent social and then we went to a room on the sixth floor of a tenement on Lenox Avenue. In this room three expensively dressed whites—a man with a pale, depraved face, a woman and a girl—were smoking marijuana cigarettes, but at the time I was so naive I did not know what I was seeing. I just thought they were unusual-smelling cigarettes.

Later I saw the pungent narcotic peddled at fifty cents a cigarette in barrooms in Harlem and Greenwich Village, and once I went with a policeman to destroy some of the weeds, just beginning to bud, in a backyard in a Spanish neighborhood in Brooklyn. It resembled alfalfa. Policemen have found crops of marijuana growing rankly in Central Park, on the grounds of Welfare Island penitentiary, and in many backyards. Marijuana cigarettes are made from the yellow buds of the Mexican weed cannabis. In New York City the cigarettes are called reefers, muggles, brifo, moota and Mary Warner. Marijuana induces hallucinations, usually pleasant, in the brain of the smoker, and during one stage of the period of exhilaration the smoker may become abnormally affectionate. In the final stage of the reefer jag the addict becomes depressed, feels numb, walks with a staggering gait and finally goes to sleep, sleeping profoundly
for hours. Criminals sometimes smoke the cigarettes to lose their sense of fear. J. Edgar Hoover believes the drug is responsible for many sex crimes, and judging from the looks of some of the ladies and gentlemen I have seen smoking it I wouldn’t be surprised.

I was covering the Harlem district for The Herald Tribune—the district sprawled over expanses of the Bronx and took in parts of Canada—the night I first saw marijuana smokers. A Negro detective used to drop into our shack in the Hotel Theresa and tell about his adventures. The other reporters had grown tired of hearing about his heroic deeds, so he would bend my ears. One night he offered to take me with him on his rounds. We walked up Seventh Avenue to 134th Street and turned off. We climbed a couple of flights of dark stairs in a tenement and stood at a door. The detective knocked. Inside, above the happy cries of Negro girls and men, we could hear someone making the keys of a piano tinkle and stutter, and we could sense the eager, sensuous move of crowded dancers on a crowded floor. We could smell the corn-whiskey bucket and the plate of chitterlings, and the inevitable smell of hair-straightener came through the cracks of the door into the dark hall. We waited there, hoping no one would come up the wrinkled stairway. On the steps we had passed three
drunken girls and their faces were hostile. The detective laughed when no one came to the door.

“We won’t wait much longer,” he said.

The detective waited a few moments longer. Then he stepped back, lifted his right foot. He hit the door right beneath the knob and it bulged. Then someone opened it.

“Hello,” said the detective. “I have a friend here wants to see a rent party.”

The man at the door opened it wider, so we walked in, and then we could smell the whiskey very well. A man asked the detective for a cigarette, but he did not have any.

“No tengo tobaco, no tengo papel,” he said. Then he walked over to the whiskey bucket, and I ate some chitterlings. The Negroes watched us, and the piano ceased to tinkle.

Now, in Harlem, if a man cannot pay his rent, all of his friends are invited around to his apartment, whiskey and music and food are supplied, and the guests are expected to leave a little money somewhere in the room to help pay the landlord.

Rent parties are very nice affairs, but the trouble is: some people can’t be satisfied, they give a rent party every night. A man’s dwelling place becomes a cabaret. So the detectives have to visit around and quiet people down at 3 o’clock.

When the detective finished his cup of corn whiskey and ginger ale—he drank it from a cup because there were no more glasses around—he felt affable. All the people in the room were watching him. He motioned to the dwarf at the piano to play, and began to whistle. He walked out, began to step nimbly like a race horse. “Let’s have some of yo’ bad, bad music, black boy,” he said to the man at the piano, who smiled and fumbled expertly with the keys. Softly, almost slyly, couples began to move about on the floor. Too tightly together to exactly dance, they moved their bodies in a melancholy undulation. Soon the mass of people in the small room were in motion. They moved slowly, then very swiftly. One man danced with two women. Besides the piano there was a man with a scar on his face, toying insanely with a trap drum. The room was dark and filled with smoke. The electric light bulbs were covered with red crepe paper. With the motion and the music the faces of the dancers changed. They crept stealthily about the floor, moving unconsciously. I was standing by the fireplace, eating a hard piece of fried chicken. In the huddle of faces, I could see my friend, the detective, dancing with a girl, who suddenly began to sing a sad, nervous song, “Safe-crackin’ papa, don’t you try them tricks on me.”…

In a cubicle in the back room two drunken Negroes were quarreling. One of them walked unsteadily
down the narrow hallway of the railroad apartment and stood at the door. Then he picked up a bottle, threw it at one of the red lights. It broke and glass sprinkled to the floor, the music ceased, the dancers became wild and hysterical, and someone slapped the drunken man flat on his back. The detective grabbed me, I was pulled through the door, and it was shut. Inside we could hear angry noises and then the piano’s rattle began again. The detective smiled and lit a cigarette.

“How you like this party, white boy?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said. We went down the shadowed stairway, stumbled over a drunk on the landing, and walked into 134th Street. I followed the detective down an alley, to Lenox Avenue, to another tenement. We walked up six flights of stairs and stood at another door.

He opened it and we walked in. In a corner there was a tall white woman, beautiful, well dressed. She was talking to a Negro with a violin under his arm. There was a strange, unearthly smell in the quiet room, like an incense. In a chair, with a long brown cigarette in his mouth, sat a very pale white man. Beside him, sitting on the floor, there was another white girl, young and piquant, but with a pale face, and also with a brown cigarette held between long, thin fingers. All the others were Negroes.

We stood in the entrance, waiting for a welcome.
Someone fired a revolver smokily. The bullet struck in the lintel. We both jumped outside and slammed the door.

“What the hell kind of a party is this?” I asked the detective.

“This is a nice party,” he said, jerking the door open and walking back into the room. I saw that the two girls had gone away, but the white man was sitting in his chair with the brown cigarette in his mouth. Everyone was watching the tall detective. Suddenly he turned on his heel and grabbed a small, forlorn Negro. Then I saw that the fellow had a .45 in his hand. They caught at each other, and the detective kept a muscular grip on the small man’s gun hand. They wheeled about the room, grappling, until the detective got one hand gripped about the gunman’s neck. He began to choke him, steadily. They fell against the piano, and then the gun went off. It broke a key on the piano, and there was an explosion, and a tiny, futile tinkle came from the piano. All the people began to laugh. The detective choked the gunman to the floor, picked the pistol from his hand, and motioned me to open the door.

He pulled his sparring partner to his feet, and the three of us stumbled out of the room. As I closed the door I saw the very pale man light another dark cigarette. We walked down Lenox Avenue, and people from the night clubs began to question us, but we did
not notice them. The detective was escorting the gunman to the precinct station.

“What kind of place was that?” I asked.

“That was a very nice place,” the tall detective said, smiling.

Sometimes a conjure doctor, a Brother Paul or a Brother Daniel, mocks Western civilization by drinking the blood of a crudely sacrificed bat in a tenement room on Lenox Avenue, a room which contains electric lights and a radio. Sometimes a sacrificed black cat from which certain bones are to be plucked is boiled until the meat falls away on a stove which burns the gas of the Consolidated Edison Company.

Primitive and sometimes inhuman rituals which were spawned centuries ago in the minds of voodoo sorcerers and brought from the hot, damp stretches of West Africa to this country by slaves still are celebrated in deepest secrecy in apartments above the fried-fish cafés, saloons, beauty shops and pool parlors of Harlem.

A large amount of the herbs, roots and incense with which the various schools of voodoo practitioners in Harlem and other urban Negro communities celebrate their rites is bought across the counters of drugstores operated by white men, or from one of
the three or four mail-order houses which also sell crystal balls to clairvoyants ($3 each) and ectoplasm boxes to spiritualist mediums ($15 each).