Strivers Row (7 page)

Then that crazy boy had shown up. Showing no fear at all. Bantering with the soldiers, tricking them. Throwing the sociopath of a sergeant right off the train. Looking like Satan himself when he grinned, that ridiculous boy with his conked hair—but still fearless all the same.

But why, then, the jump into the bay? Why would he do such a thing?
Just to show off ? To mock them—all the white people in the car? And himself ?

That was the thing Jonah couldn't figure out, even though he thought about it all the way back to New York. He might have asked him. The boy had come back to the car several more times, selling his sandwiches and ice cream. It was the hungriest car of white folks Jonah had ever seen, all of them hastening to slide large tips into his jacket pockets, as if their nickels and dimes and even quarters could make up for their own silence in the face of watching another human being humiliated and beaten.

He could have asked him, could have stood up and thanked him, straight out, man to man. But he hadn't. Every time the boy had come near, he had meant to—but each time he saw his own wife's eyes light up, in gratitude. Amanda, too chary of his own feelings, too sensitive to actually buy something. Turning instead to the picnic basket Isabel had provided. But she had given him that grateful smile, and every time he came by, the thought of standing up and thanking in front of his wife some crazy young street Negro for saving him kept him glued in his seat.

What was still worse was how Amanda had silently, solicitously offered him one of the petite chicken sandwiches that Isabel had prepared—her way of acknowledging his ruined pride. And though he knew that she meant well, Jonah could not even get through one of them. To him it tasted of the porch at Oak Bluffs, and highballs and tennis courts, and fine, intellectual conversations, and all those other wonderful amenities of life that he knew did not mean a thing in the face of a few drunken white soldiers on a public train.

CHAPTER FOUR

MALCOLM

He had his bag on before they hit the station. Ripping off the still soggy sandwich uniform, forcing his long legs through the gorgeous reat pleats as they pounded down the tracks along the Hudson. Barely noticing the wide, slow-moving river, the elegant silver bridge shimmering in the late afternoon haze as they flashed by.

“
Pe-ennn
sylvania Station!
Penn
sylvania Station!” the conductor was hollering, in words that even he couldn't help make sound like a song.

Then they were bolting up into a world of vast steel spider-webs, and large black-and-white clocks floating in the sunlight that poured through the roof. Below the towering metal trellises, the platform waiting benches were filled with young men, in uniform or without. Packed around the railing above them were girlfriends and wives and mothers, staring wistfully down, so close to the objects of their affection but separated by the closed train gates, not daring to call out lest they break their men's hearts or their own. The soldiers and soon-to-be soldiers sitting in their own glum silence, avoided their gaze, smoking or pacing around.

Then they were out in the cavernous main hall. The crowds there even thicker, their quietest murmurs echoing off the marble walls, sitting or sleeping on their duffel bags and suitcases. Thousands of people, waiting alone together. They ran past a mother—a large white woman with gray hair, and a simple worn smock of a housedress. Her face was twisted up in undisguised agony, the tears running freely down her face, while her rough, thick hands twisted violently at the handle of her pocketbook. But Malcolm noticed that no one stopped to talk or to console her, those men and women who walked by her looking annoyed, even angry, as they might pass someone with a contagious cough.

There was the sound of singing then, a beautiful woman's voice with a light Irish brogue descending from above. So beautiful and startling that he slid to a stop, his flat sweet-potato shoes skidding on the smooth marble floor. He peered into the ropes of cigarette smoke that twisted up to the reaches of the vaulted honeycombed ceiling far above him, trying to discern where the voice was coming from. Dizzied by the sheer scale and beauty of it, the vertiginous marble columns and the lustrous amber walls—realizing only dimly that the lovely Irish voice was not singing at all, merely reading out endless lists of departing trains, and their destinations.

“What you gawkin' at, boy? Those Harlem frails ain't gonna wait forever!”

Sandy Thorne thumped him on the back, pushing him on.

“Oh, man, this
is
the place!” Malcolm exclaimed. “Just like I thought!”

“Mr. High Pockets, out on a bat!”

They rushed on, under a huge, blue-and-buff mural of the Western Hemisphere, then down a hall past a long arcade of shops and offices, their functions skimming by in peeling, gold-leaf paint:
LOST-FOUND*NATION L TICK T RES VATIONS*FAR DESTINATIONS
—Laughing and shoving each other, weaving in and around the mobs of people. The rest of them, Lionel and Willard and Sandy still in their white crew uniforms, but heads turned as he ran by in his sharkskin zoot—the faces of the soldiers and sailors smirking or frowning or laughing derisively; Malcolm uncaring, grinning into their stares.

They ran on out to the taxi portico, where the other three stood in front of him, trying to hide the zoot from view, but it was no use. The huge, flying-saucer hat stood out like an electric sign, an advertisement for social deviance, and they had to wait for a colored hack before they got a cab up to Harlem. Piling into the cavernous backseat of his Checker, the others forcing Malcolm to sit facing them, like a little boy, on the lower, foldable jump seat.

“Ho, ho—stay there, Square! We got to look you over!”

“Got to make sure you're ready for the chippies uptown!”

Their teasing more good-natured now—Malcolm still the hero from his fight with the sailors back at the New Bedford siding. The whole rest of the run they had hustled to pack up his box for him, and left his drape alone. He would even have sworn, when he put it back on, that the high, rigid shoulders of the coat had been given a careful brushing. His pockets stuffed with the additional bills Pappy Cousins had slipped into them; the outrageous, guilty tips from every one of the passengers riding in the car from which he had so forcibly evicted those soldiers.

Everyone—except for that preacher himself.
His wife had looked at him, all right, her fierce brown eyes just as grateful as they had been imploring. But not her husband. Every time Malcolm had returned, singing out his wares, the man had turned his smooth, sensitive, all-but-white face toward the window, as if he could not abide the sight of him.
Snotty yaller bastard—

The rest of the crew were giggling like schoolboys, shrugging off their kitchen uniforms in the cab. Struggling into suits that were more conservatively cut than Malcolm's but still sharp—light blues and greens, and creamy whites, with bright, skinny ties that gave him a pang of consternation.

“I thought you said this was a righteous town,” he scoffed at them. “How'm I gonna be gunnin' the hens with you three togged like that?”

“Listen to Mr. Samuel D. Home,” Paddy scoffed at him. “Son, you should latch on to the fact that this is the Apple.”

“You gonna get conked up good, you don't mind us!”

Malcolm grinned back at them, feeling as if he would burst out of the cab.

“Hey, I'm mellow as a cello, rippin' an' rompin', trippin' an' stompin'.”

“Uh-huh. This is
Harlem
, son.”

“So where is it?!”

“Well, you watch now. Keep an eye out here, when we reach the Main Stem.”

“Huh?”

“One hunnert twenny-fith street,
son
.”

“What for, what for?”

He peered avidly out the cab window, wondering if it had anything to do with women.

“Keep lookin'.”

“For
what?
”

Then he saw him. A monolith. A fantastic hallucination, a human balloon swaying in the waves of heat floating up from the pavement. But there was no denying him—at least six-three and two hundred seventy-five pounds, standing right out in the middle of the street, directing traffic.
A black man in a police uniform
.

“That's Lacy!”

“There he is! Hey, Lacy!”

They waved out the window, calling his name, making mocking noises though there remained a note of pride in their voices. Lacy only stared at them balefully, planted inalterably in the middle of the intersection, lugubriously waving the cars on. Malcolm still gawking out the back window of the cab as they passed, unable to get his mind around the sight.

“A cop.
A black cop
,” he marveled.

“Sure, they got 'em up here, you know,” Lionel snorted. “You should see Big Ben Wallace. Ol' Mr. Terror make Lacy look like a schoolteacher. Or the Four Horsemen—”

But Malcolm had already stopped listening, staring out at the amazing sidewalk scene emerging all around them. Suddenly there was color everywhere, as if someone had just switched the screen to technicolor, like in
The Wizard of Oz
, which he had seen six times back in Michigan. Men wearing green, and yellow, and red sports shirts. Men wearing porkpie hats, and Panamas, and fedoras, men in white and lemon-lime and peach ice-cream suits—even men wearing sharper zoots, he had to admit, than what he had on himself.

And
women
. He was sure that he had never seen so many beautiful women in his entire life. There were women everywhere, at least two for every man, not counting the clusters of soldiers and sailors gaping and gesturing at them on every street corner. Women wearing gold and ruby-red glass in their ears, and open-toed platform heels that made them sway with every step. Women in tight violet and red and blue print dresses, held up only by the thinnest of shoulder straps over their smooth, brown backs. Women striding up from the subways, stepping regally down from the trolleys and the elevated, and women, everywhere he looked, strolling out of smoking storefronts, as if their smoldering presence had touched them off.

“What—they on fire?” Malcolm asked in bewilderment, squinting at the smoky little shops, the mysterious lettering in their windows that boasted
WE OFFER: The Apex—Poro—Nu Life—Hawaiian Beauty Systems—

“Mm-hmm, you bet they are,” the cabbie laughed up front. “Those Thursday girls, they always on fire! Even when they ain't gettin' their hair straightened—”

“You in luck, Nome,” Lionel told him. “It's
Thursday
. Kitchen Mechanics' Night. All those maids an' mammies, an' calkeener broads—Friday's they one day off. They be gunnin' for
you
tonight.”

“For real?”

“ 'Course for real, Samuel D.!”

“Where you think we should take him first?” Willard asked the others. “Up the Savoy, beat out a few hoof riffs? Braddock's? The Elks? Take him to a buffet flat an' have a good laugh?”

“Nah, man. We gotta take him by Small's first.”

“Yeah,
Small's. That's
the place to get him his first drink in Harlem!”

First they had the cab let them off at Mrs. Fisher's boardinghouse, where they dropped off their train bags in the sliver-thin rooms where they would bunk for the layover. They clambered right back out onto the sidewalk—and it was then that Malcolm realized everything was moving even faster than it had looked from inside the taxi; as if the sidewalk itself had been set on some war-speed assembly line, activated the moment they put their feet to it.

It caught them up immediately, rushing them past chicken restaurants and hamburger joints, and closed-up basement dance halls, and heat-dazed winos lying in the doorways. Past barbershops that advertised
“Conk It Up! No Burning!”
and more of the smoking beauty parlors where Malcolm could now make out the women in pink smocks pressing irons down on other women's hair like it was so much laundry.

They moved past all the squatting curb vendors selling used books, and carved African animals, and jewelry that shone a little too brightly. Past men with carts full of wilted daisies, and roses and violets, and men selling long, red-orange slices of cantaloupe and watermelon, with the glistening cut mouth of the remaining melon set just above their heads, so that they seemed to mimic their own red mouths and wagging tongues. There were men selling halves of oranges, and alligator pears, and rings of coconut slices floating in dishes of water and their own fragrance while they chanted ritually over them, “
Yo tengo guineos! Yo tengo cocoas! Yo tengo piñas
, también!”—and the fish peddlers who made sudden, high-pitched, terrifying noises, shrieking
“Wahoo! Wahoo! Wahoo!”
before throwing back their heads and singing out their ditties to the sky, or at least to the upper stories of the tenements above them:

Can't go home till all my fish is gone,

Stormy weather.

Can't keep my fish together Sellin' 'em all the time—the time!

Don't see why

You folks don't come an' buy—

There were other people, men and women both, whom they could not walk past but who came straight at him, sticking their hands in the pocket of his coat. Grabbing for whatever they could find, or leaving small cards and flyers there before he struck their fingers away. One man coming up right behind his ear, whispering,
“All kinds of women, Jack. Want a white woman?”
so close and intimate that Malcolm was simultaneously startled, and repulsed, and intrigued.

“I had a white woman, back in Michigan,” he announced loudly to the others in the crew. “No hype! Woman named Sally, fine as a ocean gull—”

“Yeah, Nome, tell us about that later!” Lionel said, taking him by the arm and pulling him, despite the potential alteration of luck involved, right through and under a stepladder that was set up on the corner.

Malcolm looked up—and saw a short, beige-colored man standing on the top rung, wearing a small, round skullcap, and what looked like a magician's robe. Both the fez and the robe were full of crescent moons and stars and ringed planets—not unlike the stars and moons the Comet wore on his crime-fighting costume, he thought idly. Most incongruous of all, there was a large freestanding American flag set up on the corner next to the ladder. The man haranguing the passersby in a voice of bottomless, righteous anger:

“Why should the so-called Negro have to shed his blood for Franklin Roosevelt's America, for Cotton Ed Smith and Senator Bilbo. For the whole Jim Crow, so-called Negro-hating South, for the low-paid, dirty jobs for which we have to fight—”

Malcolm stopped and gaped up at the little man, the words and the scornful, defiant certainty with which they were said striking a chord in him. They reminded him so much of something else he had heard, somewhere, even though most of what the little man said was no more than gibberish to him. The assembly-line sidewalk didn't slow down just because he did, the people bumping into him as they passed, cursing and tsking at him. Malcolm paid them no mind—recalling now where it was that he had heard such language before, back in his father's Garvey meetings. So struck by his realization that he didn't even notice at first that his friends had moved on, or the menacing-looking figures in dark suits, and red fezzes, who had quietly ringed themselves around the man on the stepladder.

“Remember—white man's Jesus is a false god!”
the little man cried out now, holding up some thick, leather-bound book that Malcolm assumed was a Bible.
“W. D. Fard is God, and Elijah Muhammad is his Prophet! Elijah Muhammad is God! All others are from the devil!”