Strivers Row (12 page)

And he told her about how for a long time after his Daddy's death he would not eat—something that would soon be easy enough to do in his mother's house—telling everyone who would listen that those who try to eat disappear, and never return. He had stopped sleeping as well, claiming,
Only dead people stretch out.
But then he really had gotten out of the habit of it, and terrified by the darkness that seemed to grow blacker and denser around him, every minute of the night, he had tried to literally wiggle beneath his brothers' bodies in the bed. Still half asleep, they had kicked him off, irritated, so that he had to lie back and just watch the dark— able to finally nod off in relief only when he saw that last, purple-blue glow that told him the night was finally about to release its grip.

And then, one more thing he had told her, when it was already well on into the morning, and she had finally tried to shush him and begun to move against his body again—

“You're my first white girlfriend,” he had whispered, right into her ear, as if this were the deepest, darkest secret of all. Thinking,
First that wasn't holding a hat over her face, anyway. But he had decided she should be the first.

“Don't tell nobody. Particu'ly not those guys on the train. I told 'em I already had one up in Boston, they'd have a helluva laugh if they knew. But you're my first.”

She had only chuckled again.

“Oh, sugar,” she said. “Your secret's safe with me.”

CHAPTER FIVE

MALCOLM

He sat up suddenly in the little room, fully awake. It took him a few seconds to remember where he was—the fantastic, dreamlike night he had had, and the white girl. But Miranda was gone now, and he was all alone in the narrow bed. He slung his long legs over the side, still naked, his head throbbing—not sure if it had all been a dream, or if he was awake even now.

But the big uncovered window was bright yellow and white in the late morning sun. So bright and streaked that he had to shield his eyes from it, so that at first he did not even notice there was another man in the room with him.

He almost jumped in the air when he did—swinging his legs back onto the bed, scrambling to yank the sheet up over his body. He looked around frantically for his drape with his wallet in the inside jacket pocket, remembering everything he had heard on the train about setups like this—

The man only sat where he was, in the room's one chair, staring calmly at the wall in front of him. His back perfectly straight, hands resting on his knees. He appeared at first glance to be very old, even ancient. A small, frail old man, with lined, papery skin the color of almonds, and hooded, knowing eyes—though looking closer Malcolm thought that he might not even be fifty.

But the most unusual thing about him was his clothes. He was wearing a plain black meeting suit with a prim bow tie, and on his head was a little cap—much like the one Malcolm had seen on the man standing on the ladder, haranguing the crowd the night before. A round black cap, embroidered in gold with all the symbols of the universe, with suns, and comets, and planets, but most prominent of all a single star, embraced by a crescent moon.

“Who are
you
?! What you doin' here?” Malcolm sputtered. But the man only smiled.

“You might as well ask who
you
are, what
you're
doing here,” he answered softly, still without looking at Malcolm. His voice sounding like the Deep South—Alabama, or maybe Georgia—and looking more closely at him, Malcolm thought that he could even
be
the man he had seen on that ladder, next to the big American flag.

“What the
hell
you talkin' 'bout, old man?”

“Black man, sittin' in a white woman's bed,” the old man said. “Black man in a white man's land. How came you here? What are you looking for?”

What's that to you,
Malcolm wanted to tell him. But he could not say it—the man's words piercing through him, though he wasn't even sure he knew what they meant.

“Why
shouldn't
I be here?” he asked instead, truly inquiring despite himself, and looked closely at the man's face again. His eyes didn't seem to move or even blink, much less turn in his direction, so that Malcolm wondered if he might be blind.

“Who are you, anyway?” he asked him.

“Oh, I go by many names,” the man said. “I am called One Much and Muk Muhd. I am called Muck Muck and Muck-a-Mud, and Eli Muck Muck and Muck Eli Muck and Elijah Muck Muck. I am One Eli and One Elizah, and Elijah Black, and Elijah Ford, and Elijah Bogans. I am Bulam Bogans, and Gullam Bogans, and Gulam Gogans. And Elijah Poole and Robert Poole, and Robert Takahashi and Robert Takis, and James Dodd and J. Dodd and Mohammed Rassoull, and Black Moses.

“And that's only for starters,” he said, and laughed deeply. “I have many more names, almost as many as the names of God—far more than the white man's government down in Washington can keep track of. But each one is my own name, given to me by God and by the Estimable Wallace D. Fard, and not one of them is a slave name, such as your own.”

“My Daddy give me my name!” Malcolm told him indignantly, but the little man in the chair only seemed to shrug.

“So you say. So you believe.”

“And why
shouldn't
I be here?”

“No reason. As a so-called Ne-gro, why shouldn't you root around in the muck for slops? Why shouldn't you rut with the white man's dog-fornicatin' woman? Drink his whiskey, listen to his devil's music? No reason a'tall. Not so long as you consider yourself to be a useless, no-'count, so-called Negro.”

“What the hell're you talkin' about, old man?
'Course
I'm a Negro!” Malcolm shouted at him—but the man only laughed again, and went silent. Slowly, gradually, right before Malcolm's eyes, his papery skin seemed to grow thinner and thinner, his whole body became more and more transparent—until at last he faded away altogether, leaving behind only the chair.

Malcolm stared after him for a long time—then he felt his head pounding again, and lay back in bed, and shut his eyes.

He awoke sometime later and looked over to the chair immediately, only to see that it was still empty. Miranda was still gone, and his head still hurt. The yellow light coming through the dirty, streaked window was more blinding and painful than ever—though he was gratified, now, to see his things all laid out by the chest of drawers with touching care. His zoot was hung up on hangers, and his shirt and even his underwear were carefully folded and placed on top of the bureau—his wallet and watch placed neatly on top of them.

He got dressed quickly, working the Punjab pants over his legs as fast as he dared while still careful not to wreck them in his hung-over state. Thinking all the time about the dream he had had—one of those dreams that seemed more real than life. A manifestation of the street preachers he had seen, the kong he'd been drinking, the whole enveloping rush of Harlem, all around him. One of those dreams that stuck in the back of your head, to be worked over, and gnawed at all day long. So vivid, so detailed, even if it didn't make any sense. There was something very familiar about the little man that stuck with him—something he recognized beyond his resemblance to the man on the ladder. It was in the way he spoke, the Deep South in his mouth, how sure he was of himself, and the way he called upon God, and damned the white man—

He slipped back on his jacket and watch, shoved his wallet into his coat pocket after a hurried count of his cash, making sure his trainman's pass was still there. Intent first on just getting out of there, still not certain it wasn't a setup—the white girl, the strange brown man, all of it.

But the rest of the apartment was silent as a funeral parlor, not a living soul in evidence. Only the rolled-back rug and the chairs scattered around the living room, the upright piano with all the bottles and glasses still on top to provide any sign that he had not simply imagined everything that had happened to him in his first eighteen hours in Harlem.

He padded quietly down the long hall, still expecting to meet someone at any moment, but all the doors of the rooms were shut. He thought of knocking on one, still hoping to find Miranda—but it seemed highly unlikely to him that she actually lived in this place.

That was all right.
He had a name for her now, at least. There couldn't be too many white women like her in Harlem, or anywhere else.
First things first.
His train had gone, and he had to recover his bag from Mrs. Fisher's and get a new pad, a job. He had to get breakfast.

He padded noiselessly out of the apartment in his soft-soled, sweet-potato shoes. Shutting the door behind him as quietly as he could, then walking quickly down the hall and swinging himself down the stairs, whistling as he did.

Flying home
—

Outside, the full heat of the day had not yet descended, and the air and sunshine felt good after the dark, smoky cave of the apartment. He strode down St. Nicholas Avenue, still whistling, until he reached Broadway. There he found a soda fountain where he bought a doughnut and a Coke through the window, and stood eating them along the sidewalk, just watching all the people on their way to work. The maids, and the calkeener girls already back out on their day off. Some of them obviously in the same clothes they had worn the night before, on their way to see a movie or a show—and looking him over from top to bottom. Colored men carrying lawyers' briefcases, and doctors' bags, strutting self-importantly to their offices in their conservative suits. Giving him the fish-eye, in his zoot, though he didn't care, just thrilled as he was to see them—

Real Negro doctors, and real Negro lawyers! Not like those ridiculous pretenders up on the Hill, the Boston Four Hundred Ella was always trying to join. Strolling off every morning with their newspapers, only to sweep the floors of the firms, or the hospitals they worked in
—

He wondered what he could do in such a place, or if he should just go back to the railroad and beg for his old job back. Surely Pappy Cousins would get it for him, if anybody could. He would still be back in Harlem for layovers like this, even whole weekends, if he could swing it. Maybe he could track down Miranda then—

A diminutive brown woman turned the corner and came down the block toward him. She was pushing an old baby carriage with the hood torn off it, and the bed filled with gleaming silver porgies, and sea trout. As he watched she stopped there, crooked her head up at the tenement windows, and began to sing out her own song:

A tisket, a tasket,

I sell fish by the basket,

And if you folks don't buy some fish

I'm gonna put you in a casket.

I'll carry you on down the avenue,

And not a thing you'll do.

I'll dig, dig, dig, all around,

Then I'll put you in the ground.

A tisket, a tasket,

I sell 'em by the basket—

Malcolm smiled, then laughed out loud, and finished up his doughnut and the Coke in its little cone-shaped paper cup. Heading on down Broadway, thinking that he might head over to Small's, and ask about that slave—knowing that he was going to stay.

CHAPTER SIX

JONAH

The City hit them in the face like a dirty washcloth.
It was the worst place in the world to come home to,
Jonah always thought—the heat and the dirt and the noise reenveloping them at once, as if they had never been away. It took him days to adjust to it again, to the crowds, and the pace, and the hardness.
Was this what it was like, coming back to a faithless lover?
Of course he wouldn't know, he had been spared so many of life's humiliations.
Until today.

Amanda sat in the Checker with her head back against the top of the seat, eyes half closed and fanning herself with her hat. Acting as if she was all but overcome with the heat, though he was sure that she was just trying to spare him from feeling he had to talk about it. They rode in silence up Seventh Avenue, and as they crossed 110th Street and passed into Harlem, he felt both a sense of relief and a whole new weariness wash over him.

Everything he saw appeared to him to be old, and worn, and lacking. Usually he loved to see so much activity on the streets, the sheer human energy there at all hours of the night and day. But now he saw only what was dreary, and pathetic. The sidewalks filled with women, strutting off bravely into the early summer evening, their hair pressed and scoured and primped into some stiff facsimile of what they thought a white woman's hair looked like. Their dresses too tight or too short, the stitching showing where they had been taken in so many times after being passed down from family or friends, or employers.

And right behind them, the men. Many of them in uniform— Harlem's latest plague. Their faces—black or white—leering and wolfish. Others loping along the sidewalk in their ridiculous new zoot suits, or gang jackets, whistling and calling out to every pretty girl they passed. Most of them obviously looking for a hustle, corn liquor, reefers, cocaine, worse.
Not a one of them with a thing on their minds beyond a drink and a dance, a woman—

Even the things he saw that usually gave him solace, the little things that delighted him, felt sour and heavy now. Along the sidewalks the fire hydrants were still open, half-naked children shrieking as they dashed back and forth through the spray.
No pools still, and hardly any playgrounds
. Old men from the Islands with their potbellies and goiters, spread out on the steps of the stoops or sitting at little folding card tables, slamming down their dominoes. The women leaning over the apartment-house window ledges in short-sleeved housedresses, waiting for the fish man or more likely the policy runner to come by. Screeching out numbers as they threw down their last nickels and dimes wrapped in scraps of paper. Snatched up by the quick, furtive young men on the sidewalk who nodded, and ran off—

Too many people in too little space, with too little to do. Still not enough good jobs, even with the war. No good hospitals, no doctors. Everything needing to be changed, fixed, made better. By whom?

Even the beautiful old buildings that he always loved to look at seemed dismal, and tattered now. He noticed every broken pane of glass, every missing shingle, or cornice. The blocks of fine brown-stones with their stained-glass windows, the Victorians with their turrets and rounded brick; the stately redbrick apartment houses— all of them now seemed to him no more than the crumbling ruins of some greater, vanished civilization.

Poisonous thoughts, on a bad day.
And yet there was that sense of relief, too.
How long does it take to get used to one's ghetto? To cling to it?

The relief was only the comfort provided by familiarity, he told himself. Seeing all the reassuring landmarks, the jeweled, electric towers and marquees of the RKO Alhambra and the Regency, the Apollo and the Renaissance Ballroom. The proud stone-and-brick fronts of the great churches, each of them carefully distinctive. The Greek temple that was Mount Olivet, with its massive Corinthian columns; Metropolitan Baptist with its huge, sloping, black-shingled roof and conical spires; Salem Methodist with its spectacular round stained-glass window out front, and the Abyssinian, and Mother A.M.E. Zion, and Bethel African, and on and on. All of them trying so hard to shine before the Lord. Their ministers and deacons, ushers and elders and church mothers whom he all knew so well—the same people staying, doing their duty, year after year.

But it was more than that, he knew. He still felt some of the excitement, the physical joy he used to feel whenever he came back to Harlem, for all the life around him. All of these people, all of these bright and shining and still hopeful
souls,
making their way as best they could.
Despite all the Lord had denied them
—

He was at home here. And here, he knew, he might live out his whole life in comfort and prestige, just by virtue of who he had been born.
Free from any worry of being beaten in front of his wife.

He tried to tell himself that this was an illusion. That he could, even here, even in his clerical collar, still be picked up off the street at any time for so much as giving lip to a white cop. Taken down to the precinct house, given the third degree just as so many members of his congregation had been, even some of the very deacons who had hired him. But he knew that was a lie, too—that he was one of the very, very few with an exemption.
And an escape, if he wanted it.

Their cab turned onto West 139th Street, and they were home. Amanda started to reach for the door handle, but he put a hand on her arm, gently restraining her, just wanting to look at it for another long moment. Entranced as he always was by what a beautiful place they lived in—perhaps the most beautiful block in the entire City.
Strivers Row.

The brick front of their home was usually a rusty, burnt color, but through some trick of the late afternoon sunlight it looked almost golden now, floating above the graceful trees.
Our golden ghetto.
A block and a half of connected townhouses, designed a generation before by the best architects in the City—built for a white upper class that never quite did show up. Their own built in the style of the Florentine Renaissance, rumor had it by Stanford White himself. Fourteen rooms and two baths, with veined marble fireplaces and cut-glass doors, and French hardwood floors. Shaded by rows of slender trees in front, with a separate garage in the alley out back, where their green, streamlined, prewar Lincoln was slumbering now.

They had even been named the Kingscourt Houses, officially.
Strivers Row
the nickname applied by their fellow Harlemites who affected to mock its residents' pretensions though everyone knew that they, too, would give their eyeteeth to live here. Here, the local beat cops touched their caps with their nightsticks when he passed by, their ruddy Irish faces grinning broadly. Their smiles more than a little patronizing, he knew, full of the guileless joy one might see on the faces of people watching a particularly cunning monkey in the Central Park Zoo:
Well, well, look at all the wealthy darkies!

But no more a threat than that. Nothing more ominous than a permanent condescension.
Don't make it into that,
he told himself.
Don't make your running into some kind of protest, some statement against hypocrisy.
He was safe here, at least for now. For as long as he chose to stand it.

He helped their cabbie carry their bags up the high front stoop, and then it was just the two of them inside. Standing a little uncertainly in the marble foyer, like guests in their own home, breathing in the dark, faintly musty atmosphere of a house that had been closed up for two weeks. Jonah was acutely aware of the stillness—sure that Amanda sensed it, too. Their footsteps echoed in the hallway, the front parlor, and the connected dining room. The early evening light filtering down on them through the tinted, blue skylight that dominated the house just as the great, stained-glass window behind the altar—the single eye of God—dominated a cathedral.
His father's eye?

The house was too big for the two of them. Jonah could already feel again how oppressive it was, how they might rattle around in it for years. It was a house in which one felt bound to have children, and he was sure that was no small reason why his father had picked it up for two thousand dollars, twenty years before, when it finally became apparent that the white people weren't coming, and that after all the years of moving on, he had found a place to plant his seed.

Jonah knew the old man would have been indifferent to anything so fancy for himself, having been raised on a waterfront alley. His indulgences had always run to much more immediate, visceral desires, such as food. The excuse was that it was supposed to serve as a rectory, but after Jonah had married Amanda, his father had forced the diaconate to sign it over to him, personally, and gone to live in his two small rooms in the back of his church. Just as his father had forced them to accept his son in the pulpit, his money and his will never truly distinguishable from the church's to begin with, making sure to bind his congregation to him by the ties of New York real estate, as well as the ties of God.

Well, then, they would have children. This silence was intolerable. Unless. Unless there was another way out—

“I should go check on Daddy,” he murmured.

“All right,” Amanda said, her voice strained, and distant. Still angry at him—no, still
embarrassed
for him from the train, he knew, and it made him feel ashamed all over again.

“I'll start airing the place out, and see about supper.”

“Don't bother yourself about it. Sandwiches will do fine.”

“All right. Better go on, then,” she said, looking past him, her face still hurt and questioning and puzzled.

He wanted to stay and talk to her then, to take her in his arms and try to explain to her. To tell her all the things that kept moving through his head these days, unceasingly, the way the movie news-reels looped the same, short clips of tanks and marching men over and over again. But he felt the tears welling up in his own eyes, and he moved quickly to retrieve his hat and head for the door. The last thing he wanted, now, was to be comforted by her.

“Don't wait up for me if I'm too late, you know how he likes to talk—” he called as he went out. Thinking:
Is this what it will be like that day? Saying I'm just going out to see him?

He padded quickly down the stoop of the golden house, walking to the east. Passing the sets of pillars with their aristocratic admonishment—
Walk Your Horses!
—leftover from the vanished days when the white sportsmen used to use Lenox Avenue as their track, racing their trotters down from the Polo Grounds to Central Park. The street very quiet this evening, most of their neighbors away still. Many of them probably up at Oak Bluffs themselves, or one of the other carefully restricted Negro resorts. On any other night he might exchange courtly nods with all the varied elite of Harlem who were not up on Sugar Hill. Dining out on the encounters—

“It's better than any upper-class
white
neighborhood,” he liked to say. “They tend to segregate themselves by occupation. Why, anytime
I
want I can look out the window and see an architect, or a jazz pianist, or a prizefighter go by. I bet they can't do that on Fifth Avenue!”

It was his standard line, whether they were at a dinner party up on the Hill, or having cocktails somewhere out in the little enclave in St. Albans, or some gala at the Hotel St. George, and it never failed to draw a laugh of recognition. The other young couples agreeing righteously—
Why, that's so! There's so much more
diversity
in Negro society. We're the true egalitarians
—

But lately he had begun to think about something Jakey Mendelssohn's cousin had said about Poland.
They put everyone together,
he had told Jonah—or rather Jakey had said it, sitting on a stool in the shoddy back room of his department store, translating grimly out of the young man's pidgin of Yiddish and halting English.

They picked them up, and put them all in the ghetto together—rich Jews and poor Jews, and everybody in between. Violin players and furniture merchants, and street peddlers. It didn't matter who you were, in you went—

Which is how we live already,
Jonah had thought. Which is how you live when they round you up. Rich and poor, the talented tenth and all the rest—all thrown in together. Same as in the ghettos of Warsaw and Cracow, and Theriesen.
And what then?

He cut over to Lenox Avenue, heading north, and into the Thursday-night crowds. Beginning to feel a little better again among so many people, relieved to walk amidst the raucous goings-on of a City street again after all the carefully orchestrated strolls up on the Vineyard.

So what if all these people, all these young women, were going out to have a good time?
he told himself, knowing that was what Adam would say.
Weren't they entitled to have a little before going back to the work week? “And never a laugh but the moans come double; And that is life—”

But as he walked on uptown he sensed that even here, out on the avenue, there was something missing from the usual hilarity. Something almost palpable, which he had noticed as well before they had gone to the Vineyard, but which he still could not quite put his finger on.

He could see it in the faces of the police—patrolling the streets in their radio cars, on horseback or on foot or those damned motorcycles. Since the war had started, there were more cops in Harlem than Jonah had ever seen before. Always at least two or three of them together, their eyes wary, even their horses jumpy and skittish. Their policeman's sixth sense picking up something—though he suspected that they, too, did not quite know what it was, the crowds no more or less than what they had been for months.