Strivers Row (8 page)

“Sacrilege!” one of the men who had surrounded the ladder yelled back. “Blasphemer! Murderer! Elijah Muhammad is a murderer and a false prophet! Brown Eel is the true heir of Fard!”

“No! It is Elijah, who is also One Much, and Ghulam Bogans, and Robert Takis, and Black Moses—”

But at that moment, the other men in fezzes rushed the step-ladder. Shoving past Malcolm, jostling the beige little man in the magician's skullcap off its top step. He flailed away at them with his fist and the holy book in his hands before the whole ladder teetered, and went down, entangling the flag with them. A woman screamed, and there were a few muffled shouts and curses. The whole brawl quickly submerged behind the continuing, fast-paced mobs of people moving along the sidewalks, most of them not pausing to give it a second look.

“C'mon, Nome, we almost there!”

Lionel and Willard, who had doubled back, each grabbed an arm, pulling him onward. Clustered at the next corner there were two separate crowds of servicemen, one black, one white, eyeing each other warily. A cordon of MPs with armbands, and mounted police with hooded eyes and high-crowned hats stood before them—reluctantly letting most of the black soldiers and sailors pass through. Stopping the white servicemen, many of whom tried to double back and get past them anyway, ducking around the legs of the skittish, weaving horses.

“Oh, what I wouldn't give for a black skin right now!” he heard a white sailor exclaim as he sauntered off down the street.

The edges of the crowd kept flaring up, like a fire curling the edge of a page. The colored people in the crowd trying to get through, cursing and throwing up their hands as the cops turned their horses obliviously into them, trying to cut off the white soldiers and sailors. Staring into their angry, contorted faces Malcolm was amazed by how furious they seemed. The cops finally winching their horses grudgingly out of the way to let them by—their haughty, mounted-policeman eyes following Malcolm in his shark-skin zoot.

“He must be
vital
to the war effort!” one of them said, and spat past his horse's left ear. But by then they were already stepping up to a door with a long, glittering marquee above it that read
SMALL'S PARADISE
.

“Now don't be actin' the
fool
in here, boy!” Sandy whispered to him, though the moment Malcolm set eyes on the place there was no need to warn him again.

Inside, everything was instantly cool and dark. A wall of glimmering bottles and glasses rose up before them, with red-and-black-leathered booths and stools surrounding the elegantly curved bar. It was so quiet that Malcolm could hear the panting of the air conditioner, and he thought at first that they must be alone in the place. Only when he had taken a second look around did he realize that the bar was in fact dotted with men—leaning over their drinks, speaking in low, deliberate voices when they spoke at all. Some of them already looking him over, their own faces inscrutable, before turning wordlessly back to their drinks.

“Mmm, more boys just in off the ponies. You want Frank to get you a table?”

Behind the bar stood a pair of stubby stoical-looking men, so much alike they might have been twins.

“No thanks, Charlie. We just gonna cop a squat at the bar,” Willard said.

“Suit yourself.” Charlie shrugged his thick shoulders, as if he thought that was a bad idea but was not about to bother talking them out of it.

“What's your pleasure?”

“Bourbon!” Malcolm blurted out.

“What brand?”

“Uh,” Malcolm said, hurriedly studying the bottles on the shelves behind his head. He had never actually had bourbon, but since they had been in the cab he had been thinking he would have it for his first drink in Harlem, the word had always sounded so elegant and sophisticated to him.

“Umm. J. T. S. Brown. Yeah, that's it.”

“Straight up?”

“What's that now?”

He felt Sandy punch him in the back. Charlie looked Malcolm up and down, from his sweet-potato shoes to his broad-brimmed hat, then turned to the rest of the kitchen crew.

“Who your gate here? He of age?”

“Old enough for whatever you got, old man!” Malcolm told him, but the rest of the kitchen crew quickly pulled him around to the one open stool they could find and sat him down there.

“That's Charlie
Small!
His brother owns the place! What we tell you just now?”

“He all right, Charlie. He's with us, he'll be cool,” Lionel called out.

“All right then. Just make sure you school him,” Charlie said, shooting them another warning look as he turned away to get their orders—his brother now staring bleakly at them, too.

“It's heavy on all fronts these days, with the MPs an' the police dicks in every hour, on the hour. I can't afford to have no underage
boys
drinkin' here.”

Malcolm noticed that many of the older heads around the bar had turned back his way, looking him over again, and he felt thrilled to have their attention even if the look on their faces was one of disdain.

“You got to forgive him for jumpin' salty, it's his first night in Harlem,” Lionel called down the bar again.

“But he a man, all right, don't worry. Ain't never seen no boy throw a couple ofay soldiers off a train!”

“Yeah?” said Charlie, sounding almost intrigued now, coming back with their drinks. “How 'boot that?”

“That's right!” Malcolm couldn't help speaking up again. “They was gettin' playful with a preacher an' his wife. I showed 'em off the train by their ears!”

“Nice, high-yaller preacher an' his wife,” Willard chimed in. “The grays come lookin' for trouble—five of 'em! He tells 'em it's the last stop!”

“Well, now, that's a good story, Red,” Charlie Small said, his face breaking into what was almost a smile. “This bein' your first night in Harlem, I think it's worth one on the house.”

To his utter joy and amazement, the older hustlers around the bar began to move in around Malcolm then, their dark, scarred faces showing real interest.
The face of his father flashing through his head again. Reveling in the respect in their eyes—

He told them about it over and over again, adding and altering details as the story, and the bourbon, moved him. Trying to make his voice sound as cold, and his eyes glaze over just like Robert Taylor did it in
Johnny Eager
, his favorite gangster movie. Feeling lighter each time, as if he were about to finally levitate over the bar, it was so close to the waking daydreams he had every shift, lugging his sandwich box around the train. The older men sending over more drinks, grumbling their approval.

“Damned straight! This ain't Georgia, you know—”

“The young lane showed 'em. Those days are
over
.”

Telling them everything but the last, when he jumped into the bay in his trainman's uniform. Not wanting them to think he was a fool, a boy.
Not sure yet himself just why he had done it. Jumped into the water before all those people—

Yet after an hour or so he noticed that more and more of the old hustlers had drifted away, slipping off their stools and out of the barroom as stealthily as cats. They were replaced by a flashier crowd, women as well as men, well-dressed and already smelling heavily of alcohol—none of them interested in hearing his story. A gaggle of white sailors burst in, having somehow avoided the MPs and the police for the moment, arguing and laughing loudly among themselves, and Lionel and Willard hauled him toward the door. Before they left, though, Charlie Small came out through all the commotion around the bar, and shook his hand.

“You come on back, son, sometime when it's quieter,” he told him. “You ever get tired of the railroad an' need another slave, I fix you up.”

Out on the sidewalk, Lionel and Paddy were pounding his arms with their fists.

“Oh, man,
Charlie Small his own self !”

“Hey, quit that!”

“Oh, Nome! Your first time in Harlem! Man, that's enough for a whole night!”

But out on the street it wasn't even dark yet. The sun was just setting, in cinematic striations of purple and orange flung across the broad evening sky. Looking south he could see all the way down to the dimmed, yellow tops of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, peering up like periscopes over the vague blocks of the City.

“Where we goin' now?”

“How 'bout the Savoy?
Hamp's
band is there, with Dinah Washington—”

“Go to The Track? On Kitchen Mechanics' Night?”

Lionel shrugged.

“Couldn't hurt to try!”

The crowd was backed up half a block from the front door by the time they got to 140th Street. A skinny, drunken whore sat on the curb before them with her dress curled back over her knees and her legs apart, cursing disgustedly.

“Goddammit, but a pro don't have no play tonight, they's so many amateurs out
givin'
it away!”

He could see what she meant. The crowd around him made up almost entirely of women, wearing next to nothing in the heat, and standing so close to him Malcolm wanted to reach out and touch their cheeks and arms, their bare backs. Their skin so smooth, so brown and sable, and coal black, and mariny red like his own, and even white, at least under the distant light of the Savoy marquee. Giddy and impatient to get on the dance floor, squealing and laughing and swearing lustily with each tremor of movement through the crowd.

“Goddammit, we ain't
nevah
gonna get in!”

“I ain't goin' back to work fo' I get
one
dance in—”

After twenty minutes they were about to give it up, the immense dance hall, an entire block long itself, never seeming to draw any closer. But just then the MPs and the police extracted another mob of white soldiers, arguing and throwing punches wildly. The crowd lunged forward as one, Malcolm and the rest of the kitchen crew laughing out loud as they pushed and shoved, and were pushed and shoved right through the front doors.

The lobby looked nearly as huge as the waiting rooms in Pennsylvania Station and even more colorful than the Harlem streets, a blur of brilliant reds and greens, oranges and blues. Half a dozen of the most beautiful women Malcolm had ever seen stood amidst the milling throng with their noses in the air. All of them café au lait, dressed in long, formal gowns and elbow-length gloves, gesturing imperiously toward a marble staircase under a cut-glass chandelier. They climbed on up—and there, momentarily empty, shining in the middle of the ballroom, was the dance floor.

It was at least two hundred feet long, Malcolm thought. An endless expanse of polished maple and mahogany, undulating faintly in the reflected, golden light. More than twice the size of the Roseland State Ballroom up in Boston, and far bigger and grander than anything he had ever seen back in Michigan—with not one but two bandstands down at the end, and nothing but the vast, shimmering space of unlimited possibility from here to there.

The music started again, and the floor was instantly filled with dancers. Every one of them, men and women, better dressed, better looking, moving faster and looser than any crowd he had ever seen before. Hampton's band he had seen up in Boston, but he had never heard them play this fast or this tight. They played as if there were something they were dying to catch up to before it got away. The frenzy of the crowd and the band playing off each other, surging back and forth across the dance floor, as if daring each other to the edge. Illinois Jacquet stood for his solo, then all the rest of Hampton's incomparable sidemen, Alvin Hayse, and Joe Newman, and George Jenkins—tenor sax, then trombone, trumpet, and drums, before Hamp himself raised his sticks, and everything stopped on a dime. The dancers grinning as they caught their breath, the people seated at the side booths still jumping and dancing in place— imploring Hamp to play their favorite.

“
Oh, play
‘Flying Home'!
Oh, please, Hamp, play
‘Flying Home'!”

“ ‘Flying Home'! ‘Flying Home'!”

The band teased them, playing the first few notes of their big hit—then launching into “Pick a Rib,” instead. The dancers gleefully took it up anyway. Their speed all the more remarkable to Malcolm for how crowded the floor was, every inch of it filled save for a ten-foot square just to the right of Hamp's bandstand that was almost empty. There were only six dancers there, moving apart from all the rest, circling around a tall man with impossibly long legs and a face that was screwed up into a permanent smirk. He was dressed all in white, with a white hat that was even broader than Malcolm's lid, and he moved faster than anyone Malcolm had ever seen—keeping the same disdainful expression on his face.

“Who that?” Malcolm asked, enraptured.

“That's Twist Mouth Ganaway, son—the King of The Track,” Sandy warned him. “Keep away from him, Nome. You go on Cat's Corner there without his permission, he gonna break your ankles for you, an' that's no joke, son.”

“I bet he would, too,” Malcolm said, grinning weakly—dying to get out on the floor now but still holding back.
Remembering what had happened up in Boston with Laura—

Instead he stayed back with the rest of the kitchen crew, just behind the floor-side booths and tables. Nearly half of these were occupied exclusively by white people. Some of them were just watching the darker-skinned dancers, he saw, but others rushed out on the floor to dance as freely as everyone else—many of them white women lindy-hopping with colored men, allowing themselves to be as freely handled and flung about as anyone else. He had seen black men dancing with white women at the Roseland, of course, but it had never been anything like this—never so free and easy. Up in Boston the mixed dancers had always had a furtive, slightly shamed air about them, the white women hurrying off the dance floor with their heads down when a number ended.