Strivers Row (18 page)

“Yessir.”

“But you did good, too, boy. Always question it when somebody tell you somethin'—particularly somethin' 'bout how wonderful they are. Don't take anything on anybody else's say-so.”

“Yessir!” Malcolm told him again, and walked away proud to think that he had impressed him. When he went past his table the next evening, Archie had suddenly grabbed hold of his arm, pulling him over again.

“Hold still a minute, Red,” he had ordered him—and to Malcolm's astonishment Archie had whipped a measuring tape out of his pocket, and begun carefully measuring every inch of him; legs, waist, neck, and shoulders. Malcolm forcing himself to stand still while the other regulars, and the early sailors and soldiers and their glamour girls at the bar, grinned and tittered.

“Quit your twitchin' now,” Archie scolded him—his lilting, stern, Island voice reminding Malcolm of his mother's. “You want a righteous peg, this has got to be right!”

Two days later Frank Parks, the headwaiter in the Cloverleaf Room, had silently handed him a thick package wrapped up in tissue paper. Malcolm had torn away the paper like a child on Christmas morning, and found himself holding the best-made piece of clothing he had ever set eyes on. A beautiful, midnight-blue suit made from summer wool, cut every bit as finely and conservatively as one of West Indian Archie's own suits; along with three fine white cotton shirts, and a gorgeous blue silk tie. Malcolm had laid it all out on the bar and simply stared at it there, until Bing Williams, another waiter on his shift, had asked didn't he know that West Indian Archie had an in with the legendary Forty Thieves gang.

“The Forty Thieves?”

“Sure. Ain't you heard about them? They a bad bunch a niggers, been boostin' suits all over town,” Williams told him confidentially. “They send one their whitest, most respectable-lookin' men into a store just before closin' time. He hides out, then shuts off the burglar alarm, an' calls the rest of the gang. Then they drive a truck right up the back door, boost every suit they got! I hear these days they even usin' a army truck they boosted—”

“Oh, yeah?” Malcolm had grunted, unable to tell if he was being played. But in the days and weeks to follow he loved to think about it, whenever he went home to his rented room and slipped into Archie's suit.
A league of thieves
—slick black men, melting into the shadows. Slipping like twilight into the best clothing stores in the City. Like some menace the Spectre, or the Blue Beetle might fight, but better than any comic-book villains he had ever read of. Slinking past the guards and the alarms, making off with whole truckloads of suits, jewels and watches and furs—

It affirmed for him what he had already suspected, that there was some greater, secret knowledge hidden all around him, knowledge that would yield up some great treasure if only he could decipher it. He was sure that he saw it everywhere, in every crack and crevice of the City. He saw it in the windows of the Puerto Rican botanicas, with their pictures of Jesus holding open his bleeding heart, and the plaster saints with their eyes turned to God, and their feet placed on a black man's turbaned head. He heard it in the tirades of the street-corner, stepladder orators; or the twang of the subway rails when a train was coming, or the cymbal clash of the mangles when the merchants pulled them down over their storefronts at the end of the day.

He wanted to see everything, to find whatever there was to find. If his shift ended in time, he stepped over to Small's Clover-leaf Room, where everyone ended up eventually because it was the only cabaret in Harlem with an air-conditioning system that actually worked. In the first week alone, he had seen Billie Holiday and Sugar Ray Robinson, come to see Leonard Harper, the Prince of Harlem, and his Chock Full O'Rhythm Revue, which featured the jumpsinger Dell St. John, and the Lucky Sisters, and Bigtime Crip, the greatest of all the one-legged dancers, and Edna Mae Holly, who wore as scanty a two-piece, leopard-skin costume as could be allowed, and did a shake dance on top of a giant African drum that never failed to bring the house down.

When he stepped back outside, it was after midnight, but he felt less than ever like going home. The streets still jumping, all the clubs and the movie palaces still open for the war workers on the swing shift. Instead he might go with some of the other waiters to World Chop Suey, where Princess Shaloo sang every night, or to have yardbirds and strings at Ralph's Spaghetti House, or maybe to the Colonial Tavern just to watch Fannie, the best-looking waitress in all of Harlem.

Or, best of all, they would cross Seventh Avenue to Creole Pete's after-hours club. The club really no more than a couple of “Beale Street” basement apartments, the wall between them knocked down during Prohibition to make another speakeasy. Nobody was sure that this was such a good idea, and every year the ceiling above seemed to sag lower and lower over the customers' heads. But there was always a phonograph playing slow, late-night records, “Mood Indigo,” and “Sophisticated Lady,” and maybe “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and a beautiful young woman called Brown Sugar who served the customers sugary Island drinks in tall glasses. Sometimes, if he had had enough rum to drink, Pete Robertson himself came out—hauling along his huge black pots under his arm, ladling out heaping portions of his gumbo or jambalaya directly on the customers' plates, his head scraping along the dangerously low ceiling. Gesturing proudly with his pot ladle at all the autographed pictures of ballplayers he had tacked up along the walls, the great Negro League stars like Dihigo, and Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard, Judy Johnson and Ray Dandridge, and even a few of the very greatest white stars like DiMaggio and Williams, or Babe Ruth, who Pete swore was really a colored man, and over which he'd oil up your head if you said different.

He wouldn't get home until it was light out—if he did at all. By then he had a room up on Sugar Hill itself, not far from where he had gone to the rent party his first night in town. The building was full of hustlers and prostitutes, and it cost him twenty dollars a month for a single room in a fifth-floor walk-up, where he had to share the bathroom and the kitchen with six other men. But it was a real room, at least, with a real bed, and not something rigged up with a cot and a beaver-board partition. The apartment house was on the corner of West 150th Street, where St. Nicholas Avenue diverged from St. Nicholas Place, and his room was at the very peak end of the building, facing south. At night it seemed as if the whole City were coming up to him—the car headlights streaming toward him before they swerved off to one side or the other. Below him, he could see the castle walls of City College, and the lights from all the towering apartment houses of the wealthy along Edgecombe Avenue, and if he walked up to Convent Avenue, he could even see the running lights of the destroyers and the troop ships and the carriers where they lay in the Hudson, wheeling slowly around in the river before they made their way out to sea, and on to Europe and the war.

It was the first time he had ever had a room that was truly his own. One that
he
paid the rent on, and that wasn't in his half-sister's attic, or some bug-ridden boardinghouse, that he didn't share with two or three of his brothers. He was so pleased with the idea that as soon as the super was out of the room, he had walked all around it, touching his bed and his chair, the wobbly little dresser in the corner, assuring himself that it was all his.

But it was hard for him to know just what to do, how to go about cleaning up the place, or providing food for himself. He felt that some part of him had been cut off, and glad as he was to be rid of it—to be
free
—he would wake up in the early morning hours sure that he was suffocating in the little, broiling room. He would sit up with his head spinning, no longer sure of just where he was, or what he was doing.

Those few nights when he did stay home, he would end up just sitting by the window, watching the eternal traffic rushing by, and the bottom would drop out. He would feel numb, and so immobilized with loneliness that he wished he was anywhere else, even back at his sister's house. Sometimes he would even go down to the pay phone in the lobby with all the piles of change he had made from the day's tips, and try to make a long-distance phone call to those of his brothers and sisters who still lived in their old home, back in Lansing. But the phone was usually disconnected, and even when he could get through, there wasn't any answer—Malcolm letting it ring and ring, imagining the sound echoing through the empty little house.

He wasn't sure why he called, since he didn't have much to say to them anyway. The only one he really wanted to talk to was Reginald, and he was away in the merchant marine now. Every other week or so, when he was back up in Boston, he would get a cryptic letter from his brother, telling him he was back in port but unable to even say where, due to reasons of military security. Once, up at Ella's, he had gotten a phone call from him, too—Reginald's cheerful, boyish voice sounding as if it was coming to him through a long tunnel. He hadn't been able to tell him much then, either, about where he was or where he was going, but when Malcolm had confided that he was hoping to go to New York soon, Reginald had told him that he hoped to be there, too. Malcolm thinking about that during his long nights alone, looking at the ships out in the Hudson and wondering if his little brother could be on one of them. But if he was, he didn't know how he would possibly find out, or how Reginald would find him in this vast city, and when he thought about that he would have to plunge back out into the wartime, nighttime streets again, threading his way through the mobs of sailors and soldiers, looking for somebody who knew his name.

By the time he got home in the morning, the whole building felt different—better, more reassuring. The whores would all be out, leaning over the balustrades in their bright dressing gowns, smoking and chattering and laughing, like so many of the songbirds in their cages at Woolworth's. It was only a change of shift, like everything else with the war on. The john-walkers already leading in the morning rush—nearly all white men, obviously making a quick stop on their way to work. Wearing suits and ties, and gold bands on their fingers, their eyes flitting about nervously. The john-walkers speaking to them softly, reassuringly, the way a jockey talks to a skittish horse as he leads him into the starting gate.

Malcolm would have to walk up past the whores himself, and they would tease and fondle him as he went by. Trying their best to embarrass him, rubbing their soft bodies and silky kimonos against him.

“Cheez an' crackers, Jack, look at the double bumpers on this one!”

“Hello, young lane, don't you be no square shuffler. Come cop a squat on my softy—”

“Lookit this hipcat in all his steamed seams. I bet you he's hard as a tonk player's hole card,” a big, coal black woman, half a head taller than Malcolm and with muscles like a dockworker's hooted at him, grabbing him by one arm and thrusting a hand down his pants until he had to fight to dislodge it.

“Oh, he is, he is!” She doubled over with laughter, still trying to pull him into her crib. “Oh, c'mon, sweet pea! C'mon in the Jersey side—”

He would pull away and lower his eyes, but he loved their attentions, his head still reeling from the rum and smoke at Creole Pete's. He found everything about them almost unbearably sexy— the smell of their hair and their perfume, the bare shoulders they let slip out of their robes; the glimpse of their breasts when they leaned over the landing. The way they laughed, and laid their soft hands upon him.

There was one girl, in particular, a short, sweet-faced young woman called Bea whose skin was almost white, and who wore her hair in a blond, marceled style. She never taunted him but gave him a sweet, shy smile and brushed against him, as friendly as a cat, when she saw him on the stairs. He had gone straight to her once he'd gotten his first paycheck from Charlie Small—only to find himself suddenly too nervous to do much, once he was inside.

“Ah, that's all right, Mister Man,” she had drawled in her high voice, still smiling at him dopily. Drawing his limp self out of her as casually as she might have taken off an earring and continuing to minister to him by hand.

“Don' worry, honey, I never beat up my gums 'bout the payin' customers. Say, you got a head chick already?”

“Yeah, yeah I do,” Malcolm told her, distracted by her hand still pumping at him.
Wondering if he could count Miranda.

“
'Course
I do! What you think?”

“Tha's too bad,” Bea told him, rolling her eyes up at him and batting her lashes. “ 'Cause if 'n you didn't, I need somebody to look out for Baby an' me. You know what I'm sayin'? I'd pay ya fifty-fifty, right down the line, valentine—”

“Lemme think about it. I gotta knock a stroll right now—” he said hastily, coming in her hand a moment later with a grunt. He was trying to tuck himself back in and button up his fly when he looked over and saw a white woman standing not three feet away, having watched him come in the middle of the living room.

“Hey, what's the play?” he asked in alarm, backing away as hastily as he could, conscious of his drooping member still hanging out ludicrously. But the white woman didn't react, only staring at him with the same doped-up expression Bea had. She was wearing a blue silk Chinese robe that matched Bea's own, and her arms and legs stuck out of it like a scarecrow's. She had waves of wild, black hair running down over her shoulders, and skin so pale it was translucent, the purple veins clearly visible underneath.

“This here's Baby,” Bea said proudly, going over to wrap an arm around her waist. She kissed her on the cheek, then slowly, teas-ingly pulled down the robe from one of her pale, white shoulders.

“Ain't she got nice skin? Ain't my Baby fine?” she asked, running a hand down her shoulder. “Say hi to Red, honey.”