Daddy Was a Number Runner (19 page)

“Let me see the shoes, Francie.”

I got the shoes and wiggled into them.

“Yeah, they're a good fit. Francie, please try not to kick these out so fast. Lord, but you're hard on shoes. You just had a new pair two months ago.”

“Well, it's not my fault,” I said, getting mad. “They ain't nothing but cardboard, that's why I kick them out so fast,
and I'm trying to tell you something important and all you can think about is these old shoes.”

“Who you talkin' to in that tone of voice, Francie Coffin? If you don't like them cardboard shoes then get some money and buy your own. And they would last longer if you'd pull them off after school like I keep tellin' you to do, and wear your sneakers.

“I'm sorry, Mother, I didn't mean …”

“What is it you trying to tell me?”

It was spoiled now. I was grateful for the shoes but somehow, how did it happen, it was all spoiled now, the excitement of telling Mother how me and Becky had been in Kress's at the time that boy got killed.

“They beat a little boy, or shot him, for stealing a knife or some candy at Kress's. Or maybe it was Woolworth's. Anyhow, it happened on 125th Street and the boy is dead.”

“My God,” Mother said. “What next, what next?”

What next was a riot, and I slept right through it like a dumbbell.

“They tore up 125th Street last night,” Maude told me when we met the next morning to go to school.

“Who tore it up?”

“We did. Had a riot and tore 125th Street to pieces.”

“Over that boy they killed,” I said, excited. “Me and Becky was in Kress's right while it was happening I bet, and we didn't have enough sense to stay on 125th Street and wait for the riot. Let's go by on our way to school.”

We walked up to 125th Street. It was a chilly March day, the winds whipping like sixty around the corners. The street was indeed a mess, a jungle of broken glass, overturned garbage cans, and all kinds of junk hauled from the stores and dumped into the street. Cops were everywhere and storekeepers were nailing up strips of wood over their broken
windows. Some of those little dingy colored stores on Lenox Avenue, like the barber shop and candy store, had painted on their windows, “Owned by colored.” A Jewish cleaners had written on his door, “Colored work here.”

“Hey, look at that lying bastard, would you?” Maude said.

I had passed by that cleaners many a time and had never seen a Negro behind the counter. As we walked by we saw that the door had been knocked down and the inside of the store wrecked.

“He didn't fool a soul, did he?” Maude said.

As we passed Herbert's Jewelers on the corner of Seventh Avenue, I said: “I sure wished I had been here. I would have reached right inside that broken window and got me a diamond ring. I could've pawned it and been rich. But I'll tell you one thing, I'm gonna stop coming to 125th Street with Becky. Every time I do there's a riot.”

We finally made it to school and was late but it didn't matter because everybody was excited and talking about the riot and we didn't have to stay after school to make it up.

The papers the next day had a full report and I read all about it. A Puerto Rican boy, 16, had stolen a knife from Kress's all right, but the cops hadn't shot him but hauled his butt off to jail. Anyhow, that started the riot and three thousand Negroes broke two hundred plate-glass windows and resisted five hundred cops. A hundred people were hurt and one was dead.

The district attorney, who Daddy said was a stooge for Dutch Schultz, said the whole thing was a Communist plot, and he was gonna throw everybody in jail.

Mayor La Guardia sent out some big signs which were put up in store windows on 125th Street and me and Sukie walked up there to see them. The sign said that most of the
people in Harlem were decent, law-abiding American citizens and the riot was started by vicious individuals who spread false reports of racial discrimination.

Sukie turned and pointed a finger under my nose. “You are a law-abiding American,” she said.

“No, I'm not,” I answered, “I'm a vicious individual,” and we fell out laughing. We read the mayor's sign again out loud, each of us reading a line and laughing. All the way home we kept punching each other and hollering: “You're vicious. No, you're decent.” I laughed so hard my stomach ached and I almost didn't notice Sukie was punching me harder than I was her, but if anybody had asked me what was so funny I couldn't have told them.

The riot seemed to have driven Daddy and James Junior in from the streets 'cause they stayed close to home for the next few days. One night we were all sitting around in the front room and Daddy started reading aloud from the evening paper. He was always getting after me and Mother for reading the
Daily News,
that rag, as he called it. Said they was anti-Negro, always labeling us thugs and hoodlums and might as well come on down front and call us niggers and be done with it. But I liked the pictures in the
News,
which was easy to read, and Mother always bought it when she had two cents. She read real slow and liked the pictures, too. Those big papers Daddy liked were awfully long winded, but I was reading them often now and I told him so.

Daddy read us what Adam Clayton Powell Jr. had to say. Adam claimed colored people were mad 'cause they didn't have no jobs and was discriminated against from the cradle to the grave, and that's why they rioted. They couldn't get a job driving a bus in their own neighborhood or delivering milk in Harlem or working in the stores on
125th Street. They were also mad about the Scottsboro case and 'cause Mussolini was kicking asses in Ethiopia and the League of Nations didn't care. Adam didn't say it exactly like that but that's what he meant. He also said rents were higher in Harlem than anywhere else in the city and that these tenements were rat traps and a disgrace, and God knows that was the truth.

Daddy turned the page. “Another one is dead,” he said. “Listen to this: ‘Fifth Riot Victim Dies. Kenneth Hobston, 16, a Negro of 304 St. Nicholas Avenue, died in Harlem Hospital yesterday as a result of a bullet wound received during the Harlem riot. Patrolman John McDonald said that he shot into a group of boys who ran from a store they were looting. However, other witnesses stated that Hobston was merely looking at the rioting. The boy was shot in the back. The police chief has promised to investigate the matter. This is the fifth victim to die as a result of last week's rioting.' ”

“What a shame,” Mother said. “Sixteen years old and dead, and for what?”

“And the police chief is gonna investigate,” Daddy said. “What he means is he's gonna whitewash that cop. Five people dead and four of them black. I don't know what's the matter with these niggers up north. They don't even know how to riot, just getting themselves killed smashing windows and breaking up stuff. That ain't gonna change nothing. Now we had us a riot down in Charleston when I was a boy. And we killed enough peckerwoods so that they got the message. There's never been a lynching in Charleston since then. No, by Christ. After the sheriff killed that colored man, the Negroes went down by the railroad yards and pulled up the iron ties. There was a whole army of us. I was just a young boy, but I was there. Marched right into
town we did and started whipping every white head we could find with them railroad ties. Took them peckerwoods by surprise and they ain't never forgot it.”

“You was in a riot, Daddy?” I asked excited. “You never told us that before.”

“I did so,” Daddy said. “Trouble is you all never listen to me. Yessir, them peckerwoods ain't never forgot that riot. To hell with smashing windows. You gonna smash something let it be a white man's skull. You gonna kill somebody let it count for something.”

He looked hard at James Junior, letting his words soak in before he asked: “And where were you that night, you and your gang? Don't think I didn't notice that cut on your hand. You was out there looting with that gang?”

Junior avoided Daddy's eyes. “We was just wandering around.”

Daddy turned to Sterling. “And where were you?”

“Who, me? I was . . . well, I was with James Junior.”

Daddy shook his head. “I thought you at least had better sense, Sterling. I thought you was gonna learn how to use your brains.”

I was glad Daddy didn't ask me where I was. I would have been ashamed to say I was home sleepin' right through the whole thing, although I had been in on the beginning.

Daddy turned back to Junior. “I guess being in jail once wasn't enough for you. You want to make that place your permanent home? Just keep on messing up and you will, and I swear, I ain't gonna put one foot in front of the other the next time to get you out.”

“Read us some more, Daddy,” I said quickly, trying to get him off of James Junior.

Daddy mumbled a bit more under his breath, then read a
short paragraph about a six-month-old baby who died in Harlem Hospital yesterday after being bitten by a rat.

The mayor named a commission to investigate the riot, and every day there were reports on what they were finding out. Like it wasn't the Communists at all that caused the riot but prejudice and hard times which gave the people the blues, just like Adam said, until they finally exploded.

Then Vallie's trial started, and that knocked all those reports, which Daddy said we niggers knew all about anyway, right out of our minds. I got
The Amsterdam News
to read about the trial 'cause although we got all the facts from the Caldwells it seemed to make it worse to read about it in the paper, too.

The headlines on all the papers that day was about Dutch Schultz. He was on trial in Albany for not paying taxes on the money he made bootlegging beer during Prohibition. A guy by the name of Dewey was trying to bust him.

Then I found the little note about Vallie and them on the back page. Their attorney had asked for a dismissal 'cause he said the boys confessed under duress. That means they whipped them. The judge said he wasn't going to allow no such thing, and ordered the jury to be picked tomorrow.

The Dutch Schultz case stayed on the front pages of the papers. There was much ado about how he ran the policy rackets and even paid off the cops, but the jury didn't find him guilty. They couldn't agree on a verdict, so old Dutch was gonna get a new trial. Everybody said he had paid off the jury like he did everybody else.

Spring came slowly, like it had to fight Old Man Winter to the grave to make him give up, and it wasn't until May that we finally took off our heavy clothes, and it was still cold and damp.

Then Vallie's trial was over and although we were all expecting it, the verdict was an awful blow. The jury stayed out for two hours. They found the three boys guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced them to die in the electric chair.

TEN
      

“IT took me sixteen years to raise that boy,” Mrs. Caldwell said. “How could a handful of people decide in two hours that he ain't fit to live? How can they kill children who haven't grown into their manhood yet?”

Mother and I were visiting the Caldwells the afternoon the news came out. Their whole family was there.

“I tried to raise Vallejo and his brother right,” Mrs. Caldwell said. “Their father did, too. He was awfully strict with them, but he loved those boys. They always knew that. And I stood between them and their father's anger many a time. Now somebody tell me what we did wrong. How could we have done it any better? I've tried and tried to figure it out. What caused my boys to take to the streets like wild animals? I prayed over them and sat up nights waiting for them to come home but none of it did any good. Now somebody tell me what me and their father did wrong. Tell me because I'm all dried up. I can't squeeze another tear out of me.”