Strivers Row (35 page)

“Kill the niggers!”

That whole summer there was smoke in the air, a distant, acrid haze that they would see in the morning no matter where they were, and which would grow only thicker and closer with the dusk. Elijah was working with Jarmin, then, and they had to move around to keep their jobs with the railroad, but they tried always to stay as close to the colored parts of town as they could.

One Saturday evening in early September, though, there was no avoiding it, they had had to make their way down from Macon to Cordele. Saturday was always the most dangerous day to travel, after the white sawmill hands had gotten their pay and their liquor, and were looking for fun. But they had had no choice, they had to be in Cordele for their shifts early the next morning, and they had started down a dirt back road Elijah knew, hoping they could slip into the boardinghouse in Cordele's Negro town without drawing any attention.

Before they were within five miles of the town they could see the smoke, already smudging the enormous yellow-red sun that was setting over the trees. Soon black men and women, and whole families, began to appear, carrying all their possessions in bundles on their backs. Telling them only not to go to Cordele, unable or unwilling to say anything else at all about what they were fleeing. Trudging on as fast as they could move with their things, stopping from time to time to peer back at the smoke over the trees, as Elijah thought the people must have looked back as they fled from the Cities of the Plain.

But it was much too late for Elijah and his brother to turn back now, with the night about to come on. They had walked the rest of the way into town single file—Elijah staying out in front, the both of them sticking carefully to the side of the road. Peering deep into the stands of pine, and cottonwood, the thick coils of briar beside the road. The smoke growing thicker as they drew closer to town, until it was nearly choking them, and Elijah had to fight to keep his asthma from overwhelming his weakened lungs. It had an oily scent that mixed uneasily with the smothering odor of the magnolia, and the honeysuckle, in the woods around them.

Gasoline,
Elijah recognized—the two of them slowing their steps even more the closer they got to the town.

The back dirt road they were traveling took them directly into the colored part of town, as nearly all back roads tended to do. But when they stepped out of the woods and padded slowly down the first, unpaved street of Cordele, there wasn't a black person to be found. All of the doors, and the shutters, were closed up tight, and when Elijah led Jarmin quickly around a corner—hurrying now to be somewhere, anywhere inside—they stepped out before a crowd of white men, gathered in the town's dirt square.

They tensed to run—Elijah's head reeling with fear and bitterness, certain that they were already caught. But then he realized that the white men were simply leaning on the hitching posts by the watering troughs, or against the closed-up storefronts on the wooden sidewalks. Drinking openly from whiskey bottles, wobbling about the nigger town of Cordele like so many crows that had just been feeding off a dead horse. The ebullient, furious purposefulness that always preceded the worst of their violence vanished now, content to show that they could be here, in the middle of the colored town, and do whatever they wanted.

Elijah led Jarmin along by the hand, his head down, afraid to catch the eye of any of them. Sidling along by the storefronts, hoping they were slight enough to be taken for boys, although he knew that was no real refuge. Afraid to glimpse the poor, tattered bundle that he knew must be there somewhere, amidst one of the little clumps of white men—no doubt still to be kicked and prodded at, and hung back up somewhere as one of their endless warnings. He could smell the gasoline emanating from their clothes and bodies now, stronger even than the whiskey they were drinking, the odor sticking in his throat and making him want to retch.

They were almost through the square when one of the older white men had stepped down from the wooden sidewalk, blocking their way. His jowly, red-baked face smiling at Elijah purposefully in the yellow torchlight. A farmer, he could see—no doubt come into town for the market day, or just for the festivities. His mail-order dungarees still smelling of cow dung, thick white bristles of hair, and his ears, sticking out from under his battered field hat. He had stood there, grinning silently at them, until Elijah wondered if he were stupid with the drink. Trying to calculate how long they should wait before trying to move past him. Holding his hat respectfully down by his side, his other palm pressed so hard into Jarmin's moist hand that he felt it squirm under his nails; both of them knowing enough not to speak until they were spoken to.

Then the white man, still smiling, held out a hand to them.

The fingers closed in a fist—but not raised, not menacing in and of itself. Holding it there for another long moment, until he was sure their eyes were on it. Only then had he opened his big hand to them, revealing a brown ear there in his palm.

Elijah had stayed where he was, even as he heard Jarmin beginning to cry behind him—studying the ear, as he knew the white man wanted him to study it. Thinking how beautifully formed it was, in all its complexity. A small ear for a man, if it was a man's— subtly curved, the inner lobes a slightly more delicate, pinker color than the dark brown skin. Severed almost perfectly from the head, only a single dark splotch of blood along the outer lobe. The white man seemingly overjoyed that he could grasp such a thing in his hand, still grinning and staring at them.

Elijah had waited carefully until the white man had closed his fingers over his trophy again, and stepped back from their path, still grinning. Keeping his own face perfectly blank, and making sure that Jarmin saw that he did, with no idea of how the white man possibly expected him to react to such a sight, and unwilling to show him fear no matter what it cost. Only when the man had finally stepped aside did he walk on as quickly as he could without running, holding grimly on to Jarmin's hand to stanch his tears. Not trusting himself to stop or look back until they had found the boardinghouse, far up the street from the sated, meandering white men, and only then losing his composure, the both of them pounding and shouting at the door until they were let in.

After that Elijah had decided that he could not go back into the white man's Christian church again, telling the people to forgive and forget. He had decided instead that night that they should leave. Between the lynchings and the boll weevil running through the cotton, colored people everywhere were trying to get up North that summer. He could see them swarming through the fields, trying to jump the freight trains. The whites—frightened suddenly, somehow by the idea of losing so many of them at once, even after their summer of terror—sending the state police and the local deputies out to stop them. Turning back families from the stations even when they had already bought tickets, throwing them bodily off the trains.

Elijah had had to plan it out, as he would plan everything for his family and his people. Using his railroad job to get them all on a train to Detroit, where he had heard there were jobs, smuggling them all onboard at a lonely country water stop before it was dark. And once they were on, once they were past the Jim Crow line, he had stood in the aisle of the colored car, looking at all of them there before him—his wife and children, and his mother and father, and all of his many brothers and sisters, and their families with them. Suffused with pride to know that it was he who had brought them all up out of Egypt land, and even through the many trials and hardships that lay ahead through their long sojourn in Detroit, even his own degradation and his betrayal at the hands of those he loved, he would remain proud that it was he who had done this, brought them up North, and away from the life of a Georgia country Negro.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

MALCOLM

He felt the big hand on his shoulder before he had even realized there was anybody behind him. He was just walking out of his building, still not yet synchronized to the pace and clamor of the street after all his time up in his room. He had turned quickly, afraid it was the police—and was no less frightened to see the rough, scarred face that loomed up into his own.

“Whoa there, Detroit Red! I want to talk to you,” West Indian Archie told him, and Malcolm had frozen, afraid that somehow he knew about him and Miranda. But he saw almost immediately that the look on the big man's face was benign, even concerned. Grinning, sticking out one ham-sized fist to crush Malcolm's hand.

“How you been keepin' yourself, young lane?”

Malcolm looked down, scuffing his shoe on the sidewalk. “It's solid. I got my eye on some things.”

“That so? 'Cause you know, they all miss you down Small's.”

“They do?” Malcolm asked, hating to hear the eagerness in his own voice, but wanting to know more.

“Uh-huh. Everybody ask about you. Even Miranda want to know how you doin', says whatever happen to that Detroit Red boy,” Archie told him, chuckling, and Malcolm felt his heart lift.

“That a fact?” he wondered. But even as he did, he was aware of how happy Archie still seemed to be, his laugh so inordinately pleased and self-satisfied.
She was still with him.

“Yeah, ole man, she sure do. We all miss you,” Archie said—his voice turning more serious, looking him over discerningly now. “You look short as my hair an' ripe for a beg, Red.”

“I been comin' up to the tab,” Malcolm told him tersely. “I know you do. I know you do, son,” Archie said, trying to placate him. “But I thought maybe you'd like to come work for me anyway.”

“Work for you?”

“Yeah, you know. Do some runnin'. Sharpie like you, work you way up in no time.
If
you got the time, that is—”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess I could fit that in,” Malcolm told him, trying not to sound too eager. Imagining what it would be like, to run numbers for West Indian Archie.
To see her again.

“Well, I'm glad I could meet your schedule,” Archie chuckled again, sounding more amused and pleased with himself than ever, and Malcolm frowned as he slapped him on the back.

“You come meet me at the Fat Man's Bar, an' we get you fixed up. Who knows? Maybe we even get you back into Small's, Red!”

That was how he had gone to work for West Indian Archie, running numbers from 110th Street to Sugar Hill, up and down the Cannon, and all the main stems. Archie had his regular routes already covered, so he used Malcolm wherever he needed him, putting him into a new area whenever one of his regular runners was picked up, or lost to Uncle.

“You be like my utility man, Red—my Willie Wells,” he told him, still chuckling that deep, new, jubilant back-of-the-throat laugh that had begun to get on Malcolm's nerves.

“Now listen up—wherever I need you, that's where you go. You get ten percent a all the bets you bring in. You pay off somebody when they hit,
they
tip you ten percent. You try to cheat me, I shoot you t'rough the ear. That's the rules.”

“How you keep track of it all?” Malcolm asked him.

“
You
can keep the slips—but you be sure an' get rid of 'em if the blue collars you. No slips, no evidence,” Archie said, tapping the temple of his huge brown head.

“Runners get picked up a lot?” Malcolm asked, trying to sound casual but thinking back on his stay at the Thirty-second Precinct.

“I already pay the cops their figger. Any a them wanna sweeten the coffee, you tell 'em you work for me. They still want it,
you give it to 'em.
Then
you come squawk to me,” Archie instructed him, wrapping one huge arm paternally around his shoulder.

“Main play is, don't get picked up. It cost me more just to come down, bail you out. An' that way the police don't oil up you head for you.”

Nevertheless, Malcolm liked to move fast when he was making his rounds. Perusing the lay of every street before he went down it, making sure he didn't see any blue uniforms, any white man in square shoes who didn't look like he belonged there. He had even bought a gun to carry along, though Archie had expressly told him not to. He had purchased it from a small, disappointed-looking man in a gabardine suit and a porkpie hat who lived upstairs from him, and who sold hot cameras, hot perfume, hot ice out of his apartment. The gun no more than some lady's pistol, but he liked its shiny silver-plated handle, and how it was light and quick as a knife in his hand.

He kept it tucked carefully away when he was out collecting. Selling his wares just like the fruit and ice and fish vendors, only much more softly. Wishing he could make up a song like the ones they sang brazenly to the uppermost stories of the tenements, though he knew that would be too brazen for the police. Quietly repeating, instead, his one word over and over as he walked by groups of men and women in the street, or passed by their first-floor windows yawning open in the heat:

“Policy...policy...policy...”

In Harlem, everybody played the numbers. The glamour girls, beckoning him wickedly into their beauty parlors through clouds of steam. Balding men clustered wistfully around their barbershops. Sidemen and hoofers, betting their lucky numbers outside the stage door while they waited to go on, young men in uniform, leaving addresses of sweethearts to give their winnings to if they had to ship out before their number came in. The old ladies wobbling back from church teas on their canes, making him wait while they stopped to catch their breath. Laundrywomen holding out their coins in hands as warm and hard as the ironing boards they worked on, and cal-keener broads and maids, handing him their money without breaking stride while they hurried to cook and clean in the homes of white women, and housewives who whistled for him from their apartment windows—expertly shooting the slips of paper wrapped around their nickels and dimes down through the shadowy slats of the fire escape.

The odds were always 999 to 1, the winning numbers in Archie's bank drawn from the last three digits of the Dow Jones index, every day, at the closing bell on the Exchange. Like all the other policy banks, Archie paid off at 600 to 1, skimming his profit off the top, but that still meant a penny would bring in six dollars—a nickel, thirty; a dime,
sixty
. A veritable fortune, just waiting out there on the sidewalks for anyone lucky or adventurous enough to claim it, and the pockets of Malcolm's suit jacket and pants sagged with coins before he was through with his rounds for the day.

Everyone had their own system. Some stuck with the very same number, every day. Others kept lists of every number that had hit, going back for years and years, and tried to figure the odds of their reappearance. Some liked to combinate, betting all six possible combinations of the three numbers they picked. Some people played the numbers of addresses, or the license plates of the taxicabs that had nearly struck them down in the street, or the numbers of the hymns they had sung in church that Sunday. And some played the numbers they saw on letters, or in box scores; the numbers on telegrams, or on their laundry slips, or of the daily toll of the war dead in the newspapers—all of the endless streams of numbers, great and obscure and terrible, that poured in on them from everywhere, all the time.

Still others went in for supernatural assistance, relying on palm readers or even storefront preachers to divine a number for them. Or, if they had enough money and were frustrated or eager enough, they bought the dream books Malcolm also carried with him, for a dollar apiece. These were shoddy, closely printed little paperbacks, with red or blue or yellow covers, always with drawings of turbaned men, or witches, or gypsy women, or Napoleon himself on the cover—surrounded by stars and crosses, and crescent moons, or staring into crystal balls. They had names like
PRINCE ALI LUCKY FIVE-STAR FORTUNE-TELLING DREAM BOOK, or THE THREE WITCHES COMBINATION DREAM DICTIONARY—
or
NAPOLEON MASCOT DREAM BOOK FORTUNE-TELLER AND HOROSCOPE WITH COMBINATION NUMBERS.
Random, portentous claims on the back—
Numbers That Have Made Me Famous and Others Happy! Remember 431! Watch 368 and 327!
—with long lists of names, and words for simple objects, and their guaranteed, corresponding three-digit numbers in between.

When he went home at night, Malcolm spent most of his time going through the different dream books—neglecting not only his comics but also the books he had bought at Prof. Toussaint's store. He felt slightly embarrassed by them. It all felt like kid stuff to him compared to what he was doing now, moving like a spy along the streets of Harlem with a gun in his pocket. Working for West Indian Archie, picking up some real money, and looked for and welcomed by all kinds of people on the street. He was pleased by their shows of respect, and he spent much of his time thinking about all the things he could get with his money—pearl gray Cadillacs, and suits even finer than the one Archie had bought him—and maybe even Miranda, somehow.

But above all, he was interested in the dream books themselves. The ones that were merely lists of numbers next to objects didn't interest him so much as the more elaborate books, which were as thick as Bibles, and filled with claims to all sorts of knowledge, not just winning policy numbers. They were written in an antique and rural language that was as obscure as anything in the books from Prof. Toussaint. Stuffed with odd little stories, and quotes from Shakespeare, and the Old and the New Testament—looking as if they had just been printed over and over again, from back to the very beginning of when there were books. His favorite had a Negro woman in a kerchief on the cover, grinning and holding up the number 444. A single title page proclaiming it:

OLD AUNT DINAH'S POLICY PLAYERS' SURE GUIDE TO LUCKY DREAMS AND LUCKY NUMBERS

The Analyzation and Interpretation of Dreams
To Which Is Added—
Sibyl's Book of Fate, and the Complete Oraculum
By Means of Which Any Person May Procure
Answers to Questions Touching
Future Events
Containing Also
An Explanation of Human Physiognomy; Or, How to Discern
the Character of a Man By External Appearances, and
Emotive Physiognomy, or Natural Language—Looks, Gestures
and Postures of Different Dispositions
Containing also an Explanation of the Interpretation of Moles,
of Signs, of Predictions, Etc., Etc.,
Also
A Few Good Recipes
And Addendum

Here he found much more detailed explanations of dreams, and numbers. Not only for names or cars or horses, but also for cities and states and places—
Coney Island (171)!
—or people—
Napoleon (558)!
—or
mayonnaise (211)!
Or states of being—
naked (678)!
—or the numbers of times you sneezed in a row
(seven—879)
, or anything that one saw, or heard, or felt.
When your left eye jumps, 376; Your apartment robbed, 513; When you are in love, 736—

The books instructed a person in how to divinate the future through cards and dice and dominoes, and the lines in your palm, and the grounds in your coffee cup. They told you the significance of the moles on your body, and the color of your pupils, the lines of your forehead and the hair on your head—
“Curled hair, and black, denotes heat and drought, like that of the people of the South—”

—and how to see with the eyes closed, and how to communicate in The Silent Language, and what the date and the day of the week they were born on augured for the fate of their children
(Friday— He shall be of a strong constitution, yet perhaps remarkably lecherous).
And they told of the Nine Keys, and the acorn charm, and how to make a dumb cake, and discover a thief by the sieve and the shears, and how to judge a person by the nails of the toes, and the nails of the fingers, and by the navel, and also by the ribs, and the haunches and hips, and by the hairiness of the parts, and by their coming and going, and their personage and stature.

Malcolm was often unsure if what he was reading made any sense at all, but he kept going during what little time he spent up in his room now. He volunteered for every extra shift he could get with Archie, the job giving him the opportunity to go everywhere, to look into every hidden place as he went on his rounds. No longer dwelling so much on the visitations from the little brown man, or his own visions. They were eclipsed by all the things and the people on the street, right before him, that he hadn't noticed before.

What he saw most of all was how angry people were. Gathered in little clumps, all over the stoops and street corners, jabbing fingers at each other as they talked. He saw it in their eyes when they saw a cop—more than the usual lowered glance full of bitterness and fear, but an active resentment now. Every head on the sidewalk going up when they rode by in their constant, roaring motorcycle patrols; stopping in their tracks, their gaze following them down the block.

But none of that mattered very much to him. Hustling to make his money as he was, betting a dollar a day or more of his own earnings on the numbers, too—hoping to make a big score that he could take to Miranda and show her. Looking out for any other opportunities on the street, which was how he had discovered the ghosty house for himself.

He had heard about the house, and the strange old white men in it, from some of the regulars at Small's. But he had never seen it until well after midnight one night, when he was searching on 128th Street for an address to pay off some musicians who had hit with
888 (smoke!).
He had paused at the corner of Fifth Avenue, staring up idly at a high, gloomy brownstone that looked to be abandoned—its yard covered in junk, the windows all either broken or boarded up, stuffed closed with stacks of yellowed newspapers.