Strivers Row (17 page)

Nothing at all but a field full of bodies, half buried and unmarked. Some of them pulled up and looted, still more left where they had fallen, in the trenches and gullies, and wagon ruts by the side of the road. The bodies identifiable only by their remaining scraps of uniform, even most of these faded or missing. All of them reduced to skeletons by the weather and the hogs and the buzzards, so that he could not even distinguish the colored troops from the white.

He hadn't known what to do—so confident had he been that he would retrieve his father in one form or another. His whole journey suddenly senseless, now that there was no possibility of that. He had poked around for a while at this body or that one, out of the thousands. Carefully keeping his distance from the vultures and the other scavengers, the narrow-eyed white people still systematically combing through the corpses for anything they could find. Only after three days had he given up, slipping into his rucksack a skull selected at random—the skull he still kept yellowing on his desk— and started back toward the North.

It was on the way back that he had decided to pass through the Wilderness. Still chary of the local whites, the bitterness and the hatred he had seen in their faces since crossing into Virginia, he had figured that it would be better to go through even the trackless woods than to pass their way again. Once in, though, he had found himself as lost as any army, the woods dark as twilight even at noon. Wandering aimlessly through the tangle of rotted trees and briar and vine; the same ground that had been fought over twice in blind, hopeless battles. Turning up still more bones amidst the scorched oak.

But it was there, lost, that he had found them.
It had happened just as he had tripped over a man's shank bone half buried in the dead leaves on the Wilderness floor, still jutting out from the remains of his blue uniform. Milton lying where he had fallen, so exhausted was he by then, while he had a drink of water from his canteen and tried to figure out where he was.

They had emerged from the trees and the stickers around him all at once, as silent and undemanding as ghosts. More than two hundred of them, run off from the ravaged plantations down by the Peninsula, on the move for months, or even longer. Banding together for whatever safety and succor they could provide for each other. Traveling by night, dodging in and out between the raging armies, even more wary of the whites than he was but with no idea of where they were going or what they might do.

He had never seen human beings more utterly wretched, even in the worst slum streets of the City. Half naked, their bellies rubbing up against their backbones. So ignorant of the wider world, he would tell Jonah,
They might as well've climbed up out of the earth
—

He had taken them in hand at once.
Just like that, a sixteen-year-old boy.
There was no one else, it was just what had to be done—and he had seen at once where his authority must come from. He was no prodigy boy preacher like the ones that some of the small-fry cults, or the Baptists, like to raise up to their pulpits from time to time. Yet it was there, down in the Wilderness, that he had preached—for the first and only time—the story of his life. Reading from the hand just as the plantation slave preachers did, when books and learning were forbidden them, and as he had seen it done on the sidewalks of his City. Holding up his palm and pretending to read God's word revealed there, reciting half-remembered bits of Gospel, and Bible stories.

But above all, the sermon had been
his
story. Everything he had witnessed and endured, sparing them nothing of the horrors of the City during the riot, or what he had been through, or how sorely they would be tried themselves. Leavened with just enough redemptive hope in the story of his mother, the white woman, to make the journey worth the chance. It was his conversion and calling and ordination all at once, down in a Virginia thicket—even though he still didn't really believe.

But surely it was a miracle—blasphemous as it was. It had to be. How else could it be that a boy of sixteen should wander all the way down from New York, and find his calling in a bramble patch? What else but divine will could have brought them together, and made them follow him?

They had let him lead them out of the Wilderness. Milton asserting his authority at once, as easily as if he had been born for this purpose alone, leading them all the way up to the City along the now dust-choked summer highways. Past all the gawking farmers, and the suspicious, silent townspeople and sheriffs along the road. Pausing only for a short, solemn ceremony when they ferried themselves across the Potomac, and over the Line. Milton stopping his father's watch to mark the exact time they passed out of the land of their enslavement. All of them kneeling and praying, and singing the old songs—including the very one that had earned Jonah his name:

He deliver Daniel from the lion den,

Jonah from the belly of the whale,

And the Hebrew children from the fiery furnace,

And why not every man?

When they reached the City, it was Milton who had decided they should live in the wary, shaken, colored neighborhood taking shape around Minetta Lane in Greenwich Village—the only place where Negroes had gathered in enough numbers, and with enough guns, to hold off the whites during the Draft Riots. Taking his own brothers and sisters back from the O'Kanes, and raising them on his own there as well. Shielding his new flock as best he could from all the snares of the City, the gangsters and the two-bit joints, and the black-and-tan halls over on Bleecker Street. Insisting that they learn to read, and write, and get whatever education was open to them, finding them work and food and shelter where he could.

And at the center of it all was the church. Cobbled together from what Milton could glean poring over the Bible at night or aping the other churches.
A rag-and-bone collection of theology,
as he was aware his brother ministers sniffed at it behind his back. He didn't mind, Jonah knew—his father never having cared a dime about matters of doctrine, or even the most basic tenets of the faith. Building up his congregation instead by the sheer power of his personality, his willfulness and his guile. By turns wily and defiant, his own relentless ego subsumed into the physical being of his church.

He had been pushed up the Island of Manhattan anyway, along with all the rest. First to the Tenderloin, then up to Columbus Hill— soon to be renamed San Juan Hill—but always with a plan, always with another place to jump to first. Willing, like Adam, to be fully immersed in the world, using all his connections with the astound-ingly fecund O'Kanes, now happily rising through Tammany Hall, to provide for his congregation.

That terrible summer at the very turn of the century, when the white mobs had come out again—the police themselves leading them up and down Hell's Kitchen, dragging Negroes right out of their homes to beat them in the street—it was his father who had gone to his pulpit in a cold fury one night, and advised his people to arm themselves. It was his father, too, who had been among the first to advocate the final exodus up to Harlem, where they might finally outpace the relentless advance of the white City and the running battles with the Irish on San Juan Hill, and have some place to themselves. Milton himself speculating in land up there when it was still a soggy valley, full of squatters, known as Goatsville. Beating the white middle and upper classes to the brownstones, and the vast new apartment houses that had been planned for them, and even making some money in the process. Plowing most of it back into his church, and his people, but not hesitating to take some for himself, too, with the full approval of the church—a small compensation for all the incalculable services rendered over decades. Using it finally to marry, and to try to start a family, taking as his bride— just as Jonah himself would—a daughter of one of the poorest, blackest, least pretentious families of his congregation. And then, when she died in childbirth along with the baby, marrying another one—Jonah's mother—just when it was almost too late.

After that it had been a matter of consolidating his gains. Willing his church into being, brick by brick, and penny by penny. Acquiring the fine house on Strivers Row, with its thirteen-foot ceilings, and its brass and copper chandeliers, and those French hardwood floors.

And then, the only thing lacking—an heir. Someone to continue his dynasty, just as Adam Senior had done for Adam Junior, over at the Abyssinian, and Hutchens Bishop was doing over at St. Philip's. And what did he get?

These two white children. Such a departure from Milton's own color and that of his young second wife's that there was even some whispering among the more evil-minded members of the congregation—though of course they all remembered the white woman in the daguerreotype.

Jonah's mother—a lovely, almost preternaturally contented woman, always smiling and humming hymns as she went about her duties around the house—had passed untimely, too, more than seven years ago now. Leaving behind only himself and his older sister, Sophia, who had left the house soon after her death, vanishing into the world below 110th Street.
The truest inheritor of the line,
Jonah thought, vanishing just as her grandfather had, down into the South, or her father into the church. Her disappearance nonetheless another source of grief to their father in a lifetime full of loss, and pain—though Jonah knew it was nothing compared to what his grief would be if he knew what had really happened to her.

Which just leaves me.
Jonah scribbled at the bottom of the legal pad—before flipping its leaves over, returning it to the deep, back, false drawer of his desk, where he kept it.
For all that our story is known, and repeated, we are still a family of secrets.

He looked at his desk clock, surprised to see how late it was, and padded quietly back down the stairs to the second floor. Running through his tasks for the day ahead as he always did—the home visits he would have to make, the deacons and assistant ministers he would have to see—while he performed his nightly ablutions before the medicine-cabinet mirror.

He went into the bedroom and had begun to undress as quietly as possible in the dark, in a far corner of the room. Amanda lay naked, asleep in the bed, her strong brown body uncovered even by a sheet. An unspoken invitation, he knew, to disturb her.

At times such as this—late at night, coming into the bedroom where his wife lay sleeping and even the roiling, bumptious City was distant and still—he could not imagine leaving. Thinking how nice it would be to wake her, as he so often had when they were first married, aware of how good it would feel to make love on the fresh, crisp sheets she had knowingly put on the bed, the small but telling relief that she could offer from the drenching heat of the City.

Yet he could do nothing anymore without feeling unworthy. He slipped into his pajamas and got into the bed, as far from his wife as he could lie. Certain, now, that he would go.

CHAPTER SEVEN

MALCOLM

When he went back to Small's that morning, Charlie Small looked as if he had been expecting him all along.

“No slicin' yo' chops all the time, no wild antics,” he told him as he stumped about the bar, pulling the chairs down off tables.

“Yessir,” Malcolm said—hurrying over to help him, running a hand lovingly over the red leather chair backs.

“I don't wanna
ever
catch you hustlin' no soldiers. You understand me?” he said, looking Malcolm in the eyes. “The blue's tryna put a big damp on me. I got all kinds people comin' in here now'days. The ABC boys. Bulls, dicks, MPs—everybody but the goddamned U.S. Marines. All lookin' for the chance to shut me down.”

“That's all right, I can tell a undercover man a mile away. I got a sixth sense for cops!” Malcolm gushed, but Charlie Small shook a finger in his face.

“Listen me now! Most of all—don't you never tell anyone a'tall you can get 'em a woman. You got me, Cholly Hoss?”

“Yessir!”

“All right,” Charlie Small nodded. “How you fixed with Uncle?”

“What's that now?”

“The draft, son, the draft! They puttin' the issue on you anytime soon?”

“Nah, I'm Four F,” Malcolm told him, with a mixture of embarrassment and pride. “I got the card to prove it.”

After that Charlie Small had stopped and looked him up and down, in his now badly wrinkled and tired-looking drape. A close-mouthed smile moving across his face as quickly and fleetingly as a spark on the subway rail.

“What they say your name was, Malcolm
Little?
Well, Little an' Small—we should get along all right!”

He flicked a small wad of bills up out of his pocket, pressing it into Malcolm's hand and ordering him to get some proper waiter's clothes—

“Nothin' flash, now! You come back here in somethin' you momma can bury you in.”

“You gonna make me a waiter?” Malcolm asked, smiling gleefully.

“
Maybe
. If you show me you can clear tables an' bust suds first.”

The slave at Small's was the best job Malcolm had ever had. He kept his mouth shut and did everything he was told, and when one of the regular waiters was inducted a week later, Charlie Small kept his word and put him out on the tables. He worked the worst shift in the joint, eight in the morning till four in the afternoon, but with the war on he could still make fifteen to twenty dollars a day in tips alone.

Most of all, though, he just loved to
be
there. He hated to ever go home, always afraid that he would miss out on something. Working seven days a week when he could; picking up extra shifts when his own were over, or hanging around the Cloverleaf Room to see the cabaret show.

There was always somebody in the bar, with the munitions factories and the shipyards going twenty-four hours a day. Line workers back from the munitions plants in Jersey and the airplane factories in Long Island, still wearing their work boots and dungarees, and smelling of sulphur and cordite, and freshly cut metal. Longshoremen up from Red Hook or the West Side docks, looking to fence whatever they had been able to grab from the night's work, whole crates of whiskey and rum, ten-pound bags of coffee or cocoa beans, and even bunches of mangoes, and cocoanuts. Sailors from the merchant marine, who brought bottles of cognac, and watches from Switzerland; little balls of opium from Morocco, and thick-rolled joints of ganja and kisca that they claimed came all the way from Persia.

Malcolm loved to watch it all, especially how they showed the merchandise off, and slipped it to each other. All fluid, subtle motions, made on their laps, or under the tables. Letting a bag lie open, unbut-toning a jacket to give a glimpse of a bottle, the glint of a gold watch. The cooks and the bartenders had the regular undercover men picked out by now, identifying them with quick winks and glances to Malcolm, and the customers. Charlie Small walking by to warn him again—

“Remember: I don't want you hustlin'
nothin'
.”

They all knew the plainclothesman from the police, a dour-looking Jamaican called Joe Baker who walked around with his head down and his hands in his pockets, and who they would set up immediately with his usual shot and a beer the moment he came through the door. The undercover MPs who still insisted on going unrecognized they would scrupulously charge for their drinks. They were even easier—usually white men who looked more like police than the police, with set jaws and mean, watchful eyes that brimmed with satisfaction whenever Charlie Small asked them for their money, sure that they had remained undetected.

But Malcolm's favorite time was the late afternoon, usually around four o'clock, after most of the workingmen had gone home and before the tourists and the glamour girls could pack the place. That was the time when the regulars began to drift in. Watchful, quiet men, most of them, blending effortlessly into the bar, speaking softly to each other while their eyes picked over the straight customers. Moving with the deliberate, easy confidence of men who know other men are afraid of them.

There were Black Sammy and Bud Hewlett and King Padmore, who had been strong-arm men for Dutch Schultz, and who each had hands like slabs of ham. There were second-story men like the burglar they called Jumpsteady, who liked to claim that he would work only when he was hopped up, tiptoeing along the window ledges of the wealthiest apartment houses downtown, to steal the jewels from the bedrooms of rich white women.

Then there were the pimps, one called Dollarbill who liked to wave around his Hoboken roll—fifty one-dollar bills with a twenty on the top—and another one called Sammy the Pimp, who always had a manicure and a big diamond ring on his middle finger, and who claimed he could tell if a woman was a whore by the look on her face when she danced. There was Cadillac Drake, a jolly little man with a shiny bald head and a big round belly he liked to call “the chippies' playground,” whom they all made fun of for having the skinniest, scrawniest, most worn-looking string of girls anywhere in Harlem. Occasionally one of them would poke her head in the door, looking for him, her face as scarred and wizened as an old man's, weary eyes staring fearfully into the dark interior of the bar, and Malcolm would laugh along with the rest of them.

“Oh, oh, lookit that old settler!” they would point, punching each other's arms. But Cadillac Drake only laughed right back at them.

“Ugly women work harder!” he would insist, his Santa Claus belly shaking with laughter. “You take a chippie that ugly, you got a
producer!
”

There was an older man, too, with black-blue skin and thick, white wire-brush hair who they called Fewclothes, because he always wore the same clothes—a black felt jacket with frayed collar and sleeves, the lapels shiny with age. He liked to boast that he had been the softest, most undetectable pickpocket in Harlem before the arthritis that had swollen his finger joints into what looked like so many old tree roots. Some of the more skeptical regulars said he had never been a pickpocket at all, and even claimed to remember him as an old middleweight from Natey Ward's gym. But he carried himself with an unassailable dignity, and told stories of Harlem from before the twenties, which to most of the hustlers might have been the Middle Ages.

Malcolm picked up on the deference with which they treated him, and whenever Fewclothes came in, Malcolm made a big fuss over him. He would hurry over with a clean napkin and menu, serving him before anyone else—making sure that the others all saw how much attention he paid to the old man.

“Yes,
sir!
What can I do for you this evening, sir? Right away, sir!” Malcolm would boom out, until even the hustlers had stopped their low conversations among themselves and everyone was looking at him. Calling loudly back to the kitchen as soon as Fewclothes had politely put in his order—

“This is for the gentleman here! Only the best!”

And when the food was ready, he would bring it over like a waiter in some fancy hotel restaurant downtown, flourishing the tray high above his head on the tips of the fingers of one hand. Refilling Fewclothes's glass, tucking his napkin carefully up over his worn jacket. Waiting on his every request until he was sure that every one of the regulars and even Charlie Small himself had to look away, blinking or rubbing at their eyes.

On those nights the tips had flowed. All of the hustlers at the bar, he knew, thinking about the day when they would be as old and broken down and unable to make their play as Fewclothes was now. Malcolm satisfied that at least for the moment, he had won their gratitude. He was aware that they still laughed at him behind their hands when he said something foolish, or too loud. Telling each other,
Man, that boy's wild as a tenor sideman huntin' a roach!
Mocking his clothes, his conk, the way he got excited sometimes and talked and bragged too much despite all that he knew he had promised Charlie Small. Their quiet derision making him feel the way he had back in the white school in Lansing, when all the kids in his class had laughed at him, and called him
Chinaman
and
Snowflake
and
Eskimo,
and he had gone home and told his mother,
They don't even know my name.

But he only smiled in their faces, just as he had at the white kids back in Michigan, and eventually they gave him a proud new name. When they asked him what he wanted to be called he had told them simply
Red
—loath as he was to tell them some tom name like the
Sandwich Red
he'd been on the train. But there was already a
St. Louis Red
and a
Chicago Red
, and a junkie and strong-arm man they called
Big Red
, so West Indian Archie decided they should call Malcolm after his hometown, too.

“Where you grow up, boy?” he had asked him one evening in his usual low Island growl.

“Michigan,” Malcolm had told him—not wanting to admit to coming from any place as obscure, and country, as
Lansing
.

“Michigan, huh?” Cadillac Drake had sung out.

“I ain't from Kalamazoo!” Malcolm fairly shouted, surprising them.

“All right, all right then, boy. He's
Detroit Red
,” West Indian Archie had declared, and all the others had nodded.

They always deferred to Archie. He was a big man, with a broad chest and shoulders, and skin nearly the same mariny shade as Malcolm's own. He had a broken hawk nose, and a gold tooth in the front of his mouth, and two long, pink scars on his face—one running down the side of his cheek, stopping just short of the corner of his eye, the other almost tracing the main artery along his throat. Yet he was no bigger, or more scarred, than any of the other old strong-arm men. He dressed better than most of the hustlers, but no flashier. Moving and speaking as quietly as they all did—usually keeping a little distance, sitting down at the far end of the bar, or at one of the small side booths before growling softly for Malcolm to bring him a beer.

There was just something about how quick his hands were, even reaching for a drink or a light, or maybe the particular note of sorrow and exasperation in his voice that made him seem like the sort of man who might be capable of anything. Unlike the other colored numbers runners, he had held on to his own corner of the policy racket, no matter what the Italians or the cops had to say about it. It was an article of faith that he never wrote down a policy slip, keeping all the numbers, even the combinations, in his head; carrying two thousand dollars on him at any time so that he could pay off to his bettors whenever they happened to see him on the street.

Malcolm had seen him pull out the huge billfold many times, ostentatiously peeling off one hickory stick after another. Slipping him a twenty sometimes even when all he'd had on the night was a cup of coffee. Malcolm had been afraid of him at first—afraid as he had been of no other one of the hustlers—shying away like a colt the first time Archie had flashed his sardonic, gold-toothed smile at him. But Archie had only waved him over.

“I seen you hustling,” he said, nodding his head approvingly. “I seen how good you treated the old man, letting them see it, too. A young man got to hustle.”

“You really carry all those numbers around in your head?” Malcolm had asked him, once he had gotten to know him a little better. Unable to believe all the stories even after he had seen Archie's billfold, sure that it must be just one more hype to run up business. It had taken him days to get up the courage to ask, afraid of how he might react, but Archie had not seemed affronted at all—simply telling Malcolm to put all of his tabs for the night down on the table in front of him.

“All right,” he said, passing them each before his eyes just once. “All right, you got your pen? Write these down!”

He had proceeded to rattle off what the sum of each individual tab was, and what the numbers were backward, and every possible three-digit combination of each one.

“You go on back the kitchen an' check out my math, then you see. Go on! Don't take anybody's word on anything in this world, Red!”

Malcolm had done as he said, poring over each of his tabs, at least until the customers were clamoring for attention and Charlie Small ordered him to get himself back out on the floor. And to his delight and amazement, he found that each number Archie had read him—numbers he had to work out torturously with a pencil and eraser—was absolutely correct. Whenever there was any discrepancy, he had gone back over his work—and always found that, sure enough, Archie was right.

“How'd you do that?” he had pressed him. “What's the trick?”

But West Indian Archie had only shaken his head.

“No trick. I just got a head for the numbers, is all. That's why I'm in the numbers business. Man should always be in a business he got ability for. You remember that, Red.”