Strivers Row (19 page)

But the white woman only stood where she was. Her eyes so reddened and hollow that she looked as if she had just emerged from a cave, her long hair sticking out like a madwoman's.

“She don' do it with men, but she could watch,” Bea said, blithely wiping his jism from her fingers with a tissue, and leading him by the hand back toward the door. The doped-up white woman still staring at him as he left, running up the stairs to his room.

“Tha's why we need some protection. You think about it, Mister Man,” Bea called up after him. “You need a steady earner, we be here.”

As much as they excited him, all of the girls on the stairs seemed ugly and vulgar compared to Miranda. He had never stopped thinking about her after their night together, though he still didn't know how he might find her, or how he would approach her if he did. He had the name of the club, Café Society, where she was supposed to be singing. But it was down at Sheridan Square, and anything below 110th Street still seemed distant, and forbidding. He didn't know if he would be welcome there, remembering how it had been one night up in Boston when he and Jarvis had tried to go into a club where coloreds weren't wanted, and he was too embarrassed to ask anyone about it.

Whenever he so much as hinted about having a regular girl of any kind, the regulars at Small's Paradise had scoffed, and made fun of him. Accusing him of wanting a wife, and telling him he wasn't looking out for his opportunities.

“Lookit all the chicks you got around here,” Sammy the Pimp told him, pointing them out, and Malcolm had to admit that there were a lot of women of all kinds, from the glamour girls setting up at the bar, to Dollarbill's tired, fearful whores, to the Thursday girls and all the stray women the war washed up at Small's. Some of them obviously brand new to the City, cardboard suitcases even in hand, looking country, and wide-eyed, and confused—the pimps at the bar all but licking their chops over them.

“See all the hens you can get? Fo' a pickup or pay, or anything in between? What you want some head chick for?” Sammy would goad him, and he would have to admit that was the smart play. He would try to follow the example of the older men around the bar, thinking the more women he possessed the better, the more there was to get out of it. Trying to think with his wallet, and not his pecker, as they urged him.

But he still couldn't get over Miranda, sure that it must have meant something to have hooked up with her twice in that night— remembering, as well as the sex, how they had lain together and talked, long into that night, and how she had listened to everything he said. He kept his desire hidden, did not want to make any uncool fuss in front of the regulars, but he kept his eyes open, too. Still hoping that she might walk into the Cloverleaf Room late one night, like everyone else, though he never saw her there.

He went back to the Savoy one Saturday night when Doc Wheeler's Sunset Royals, a hard-hitting road band, was playing, certain she wouldn't be able to resist them. There was a dance contest on, and the gleaming, orange-and-blue ballroom was just as full and lively as it had been the first night he had set foot in it, but it wasn't the same. When they broke into “How 'Bout That Mess?” he couldn't resist pulling a girl out to the floor to compete, trying to swing her about as hard as he had Miranda. But his partner's responses were clumsy, and uncoordinated, compared to
hers
. When they strayed into Cat's Corner this time, he felt a sudden, stunning pain in his leg, as if his ankle had been broken. Looking down only too late to see Twist Mouth Ganaway's high shoe striking out at him, the man glaring at him until he was able to limp his way shamefacedly off the dance floor.

He had kept going back nonetheless, sure that he would hook up with Miranda sooner or later and dance the King of The Track himself right off the floor. But one evening when he was still hanging around Small's, the story arrived on The Wire that the Savoy had been closed. He had run up to the ballroom at once, unable to believe it—but as soon as he turned the corner and saw the crowd, he knew it was true. The whole block was filled with seething black and brown faces, swimming in the dim light from the streetlamps. The great front doors chained and padlocked, with the same, black-and-white sign pasted on each of them:

“CLOSED—By order of the City of New York and the United States Military Authorities—”
he managed to read, before the crowd pushed him on past. A steady river of men and women kept jostling their way slowly up to read the sign, cursing when they read it—then turning back to read it again, still unable to believe what it said.

“It's Jim Crow! It's Jim Crow right here in New York City, that's what it is!”

“You see! You see! We're goin' back to segregation, even here in Harlem!”

“We got to stop this. We got to stop the white man
now
—”

Even the regulars at Small's had been rattled by it the next day. They talked as if they had expected it all along, but beneath their cynical japes and smirks Malcolm could tell that it had unsettled even them, their words growing more heated the longer they chewed it over.

“Don't make
sense
! Place never served mor'n ginger ale!”

“Says here the bulls arrested three girls, one pimp, an' one reg'lar employee of the Savoy, for solicitation,” Sammy read from his copy of the
Mirror
.

“Oh, man, that's ole avenue tripe! You get more of a haul Sat'day night down the Wal-dorf-Astoria!”

“You know what it really is. It's the
mixin',
” West Indian Archie told them with his usual air of authority. “It was just a colored hall, you could fill the place up with 'hos. Fact is, they don't want they boys where black an' white are gettin' together.”

“That's who they really fightin'. That's who the goddamn war's really against—it's against us!”

“You hear 'bout that reecheous spade down in Philly?” Sammy the Pimp asked. No one had.

“He was knockin' bones wit' some soldier boys behind a gas station, till some MPs got booted to the play. Mind you, these MPs was chocolate, too, but they broke up the game anyway, an' oiled up his head for him.”

“Motha
fuckers
—”

“That didn't stop him, though. You know what he told them MPs? He told 'em, ‘You some crazy niggers wearin' that uniform. You only fightin' for white trash.' He tol' 'em, ‘This be a white man's war, an' a white man's gov'ment, an' neither one is any damned good!' ”

The other regulars, even Charlie Small, nodded vigorously in approval, their eyes shining at the story.

“Is that right?”

“Well, well! That's a
man
for you!”

“That's nothing. You boys hear about what they did down Duck Hill? Down in Mississippi?” West Indian Archie sniffed.

“They got a camp down there with a lot of colored boys, but every time they went into town they got beat up an' run off by the deputy sheriffs. So Fourth July come, they pick up they guns, walk into Duck Hill, an' just shoot the hell outta that little cracker town.”

“Damn!”

“Yup. They shot out every window, every light. Until ev'ry white cracker in town is inside his house, lyin' on the floor, coverin' they hindquarters an' prayin' for help from they white Jesus.”

“Where'd you hear 'bout this? It weren't in the papers—”

“They won't
let
'em put anyt'ing like that in the white snitchpads.”

“You got that right!”

“It was in the
People's Voice,
Adam Powell's paper. They went down an' asked those colored boys if it happen, but they just said, ‘We only havin' a little fun, celebratin' the Fourth July, an' I guess those white folks got worried.' They said, ‘Mind you, that
could
happen, if those white crackers ever try some o' that lynchin' business here.' ”

“Damn!”

The regulars were all still for a moment, Malcolm as well.

“You know, we should do somethin' like that here,” one of them finally said.

“Give 'em somethin' to think about. Just go down, shoot up the Empire State Building.”

“Not so's you kill anybody, nec'ssarily. Just shoot it up some.”

“Sure. Shoot up Penn Station. Shoot up Macy's an' Gimbel's.” Just then Joe Baker, the undercover man, walked in, and they all fell silent again. Baker going up to the bar for his usual boilermaker, his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the floor as always, giving no indication that he had heard anything. But they stayed quiet nonetheless, until Charlie Small finally cleared his throat.

“Mind you, not that we want those other fellows to win the war,” he said.

“Tha's right. We want America to win,” Fewclothes added solemnly from the bar.

Malcolm didn't know anybody who really wanted the United States to lose the war. Whenever the newsreels came on up at the RKO Alhambra, or the Regency, everyone clapped when the Americans won, and booed and hissed any pictures of Hitler, or Tojo. But he'd also heard plenty of people say that it was a white man's war. When the cops weren't around, the stepladder orators would declaim about how the war showed that the white man could be beat, sure enough.
If those little bandy-legged, four-eyed Japanese fellas could do it, anybody could do it.
He would see the listening people in the crowds, even gray-haired old women out doing the shopping, nodding their heads fervently, murmuring,
Tha's right, Tha's right,
just as if they were in church.

There were things going on below the surface, he was sure of it. He could see, every day, how angry and sullen the faces of the people on the street looked. How when the constant, circling patrols of motorcycle cops came down the avenue—their motors grinding at the nerves—people would curse them openly, and even a beer can or a brick might fly out at them from a tenement rooftop. The words picked up in passing, in the back of barbershops, or on the subway, or in the alleyway outside Creole Pete's, though they were always the same—
It ain't our war
—

On one of his rare afternoons off, looking for someplace he could get comic books, Malcolm had wandered into a strange little store-front on the corner of West 125th Street and Seventh. There was an inscrutable sign over the door that read “
AFRICAN NATIONAL BOOKSTORE*The House of Common Sense and Home of Proper Propaganda, Professer Louis Toussaint, Prop.,
” and inside was the most crowded store he had ever seen. It was jammed almost to the ceiling with precariously stacked piles of books and records, and every inch of the walls was covered with posters and paintings and photographs. Malcolm could barely move among them without knocking something loose, at least some dusty old leaflet or broadsheet.

He wandered back through all of these incredible piles of paraphernalia, unable to find any sign of comic books, but not really caring anymore. He reached what he thought was the back of the store, but saw there was actually a small door, leading into yet another room marked
BLACK HALL OF FAME
. He passed through it, though he had to duck his head to get under the lintel, and found himself in a room little bigger than a closet, where all he could do was stand and gape.

All along the walls of the little room were enormous, larger-than-life portraits of colored men and women. Photographs and paintings, some of them people in old-fashioned clothes, some of them in modern suits and dresses. All of them staring passively back down at him from their pictures, their visages flickering in the light from the large round candles placed in front of each one.

Malcolm looked from face to face, entranced. He didn't know any of them, and wondered what they could have done to be great. All except one. That same face he remembered from his boyhood— round and serious, almost troubled; his eyes looking out from beneath his feathered cockade parade hat into the middle distance, almost as if he could foresee everything that would befall him. It was his Daddy's man.
Garvey
.

“He's the greatest leader we've had yet. But there will be greater. There has to be,” a voice said at his elbow.

Malcolm turned to see a short, grizzled black man with fierce dark eyes and a broad smile standing there.

“You a Garvey man, son?”

“I—don't know. My Daddy was,” Malcolm found himself saying.

“Nothin' to be ashamed of. I was—still am. The man may die, the idea lives on.”

“I guess.”

“Well, don't guess, son.
Know,
” he said, chuckling roughly. Pumping Malcolm's hand and leading him back out to the counter in the front room, under another long banner that read
The White Man's Dream of Being Supreme Has Turned to Sour Cream—Back to Africa!

“Professer Louis Toussaint. And I guess you came to be educated.”

“I don't know—”

“You don't know much, do you, boy?” Professor Toussaint told him, beginning to pull books out here and there from the tottering piles all around him. “I bet you don't know anybody else in that room, do you? Don't worry, we'll take care of that. First we got to get you religion.”

Malcolm peered down at all the books the little man was dropping into his arms. The titles all but unfathomable to him—
The Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple of America. The Onward Movement of America. A Black Man Will Be the Coming Universal King
and
The Knowledge of Self and Others
and
Secrets of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam
and
The History of the End of the World.
There was even a final one that had no title or author at all, just a slim, green volume bound in patent leather, with what looked like a gold crescent moon embossed on the cover.