Strivers Row (40 page)

“No. Thank you for asking,” he made himself answer in a level voice. “We're doing all right.”

“I'm glad to hear it.” Charlie O'Kane nodded gravely, then was silent again. The two of them waiting there without speaking for a few, agonizingly long moments until Jimmy returned with the tea—two tall glasses with a slice of lemon hooked over the lip, served on a silver tray that he held out so primly Jonah almost expected him to be wearing a kitchen apron. Suppressing his smile, he thanked the young man and took the glass and a piled spoonful of sugar. Charlie O'Kane, alert as ever, following his glance and favoring Jimmy with a wintry smile of his own.

“That boy,” he said, “should've been a butler in a grand English manor house. He'd a got on famously.”

Jonah smiled weakly at the joke, and took a long, thirsty gulp from his tea, realizing how dry his throat was. When he put the glass down again, Charlie O'Kane was fixing him with a look from across the desk—obviously ready to do business.

“Well, then,” he said straight out, “I wanted to talk to you about yer friend over at the Abyssinian.”

“Adam,” Jonah said in astonishment—amazed that anyone would ask him about Adam Powell.

“The skinny is, he's goin' to run for the new House seat next year.”

Jonah shrugged, and tried to remain as poker-faced as O'Kane, although he felt like laughing. Adam's ambitions were news to exactly no one—to no one in Harlem, anyway.

“He may.”

“Not that we have anyt'ing against it, mind you. It's long past time you had one of yer own in a seat—”

“Yes.”

He hesitated again, and Jonah leaned forward avidly, intrigued now to hear just what Charlie O'Kane had in mind.

“There's just somethin' we wanted to
clarify
.”

“Yes?”

“Would you know what his feelin's are concernin' the Metropolitan Life project downtown?”

So that was it.
The project had been a growing controversy for the last two months, ever since the insurance company had announced its intention to build a huge complex of apartment buildings just above Fourteenth Street. Already, just from that one announcement and the newspaper coverage, it had become one of the City's leading postwar dreams, Jonah knew. Spacious, middle-class homes, complete with playgrounds, and gardens, and park space, designed specifically for the returning GIs and their families. Affordable and open to anyone—except people of color.

“What do
you
think his feelings would be?” Jonah asked stonily.

“It's important to us that those projects get built—without any undue delay,” Charlie O'Kane said very importantly. “Men'll need work when they get back after the war, an' places for their families to live—”

“Important to
us
,” Jonah repeated.

He tried to think what Adam would say. He was so much better at this, tirelessly leading his crusades to get the bus companies to integrate, then the big department stores down on 125th Street— then Con Edison, and Consolidated Gas, and the New York Telephone Company, and the IRT. Always finding some way to get more attention from the papers, to get people out on the picket lines, day after day. When the first bus driven by a colored driver had started its very first route down Fifth Avenue, Adam had even knelt down before the photographers and kissed the pavement—albeit making sure not to dirty his camel-hair coat.

The only effective protest Jonah had ever made was when he had prevailed upon Macy's to stop selling
“Mugging Sticks”
—batons with fashionable silk tassels and a detachable police whistle on the end, that customers were urged to carry with them when passing through
“questionable uptown areas”
during the dim-out. It had been a farcical experience. He had spent almost two hours across a desk from a store executive, trying to explain how their advertisements— two dark hands, and a menacing Negro face lunging out of the darkness at an oblivious white girl—were offensive. The caption underneath reading,
“Don't be caught where it's dark!”
The executive still obdurate, finally bleating out—“
But it
is
dark up there
—”

“It's important that we have those jobs lined up, that we have the housing,” Charlie O'Kane was telling him now, as if he were speaking to an exceptionally slow child.

“So—that means you will do everything you can to see that the project is open to Negroes?”

“Well, now. Some things are beyond our power—”

“Or at least you'll fix it with the unions, then? So that Negro workmen are given a certain number of jobs on the construction crews, in the carpentry and masonry?”

O'Kane said nothing this time. The suggestion that colored men be allowed in the trade unions so obviously outrageous.

“No? I see,” Jonah continued. Keeping his voice level, deliberately speaking as slowly as O'Kane had.

“So you've brought me here,” he recounted, “to ask if I will talk to a brother minister on your behalf. To give his blessing to a housing project that will keep out all colored people—all of
us
—and won't even let us help build the place.”

Charlie O'Kane sat back in his chair, thumbs tucked in his jacket pockets. His face carefully blank, obviously waiting—looking, for the first time during their interview, much less like an executive and more like the middle-aged wardheeler he was.

“So just what was it?” Jonah asked. “Just what was it that made you think Adam or I would go along with such a project?”

O'Kane sat motionless, still saying nothing, his cadaverous eyes boring meaningfully into Jonah's.

“So it's that way,” Jonah concluded. “I'm supposed to tell
you
what it will take. What
personal
things you can do for me. Or for Adam, excuse me. With a percentage for me as—what's the word? The
procurer
—”

“Look, you don't have to talk like that—” O'Kane started to say, grimacing, realizing at last that he had made a mistake.

But Jonah was unable to restrain himself any longer, his voice rising bitterly.

“We're supposed to help you get this when our people are paying the highest rents in the City. Three, four families—a dozen people in an apartment! But nothing for us. Not one Negro carpenter allowed to work a union job in the whole City. We're supposed to take what you give us an' lie down. Me, and Adam, and whatever other minister you choose to call up here next and ask to pimp for you—”

“There's no reason we can't build more projects up in Harlem after the war,” O'Kane said hastily. “It'll be better like that, anyway. Each with their own.”

“Yes,” Jonah said drily. “Just like in Mississippi. Or Poland.”

“What's that?”

“Nothing.”

Jonah got to his feet.

“Don't be such a sorehead,” O'Kane said again. Jumping to his feet himself, and trying to wave Jonah back down—looking faintly embarrassed by how he had mishandled their little talk. “Look, our families go back a long ways—”

“Yes, they do,” Jonah said dryly. “I will pass your proposal on to Adam, and it won't even cost you a thing. Consider that debt paid.”

“Now, just a moment!” O'Kane said, glowering at Jonah as he turned to go. His thick eyebrows pressed together furiously in concentration, actually reaching a hand out over his junior-executive's desk to grab the edge of Jonah's sleeve.

“I'm just tryin' to do yer boy a favor. He ain't sittin' in the Congress yet, ya know. We know certain t'ings about him—t'ings a man a the cloth might not want becomin' public knowledge.”

Jonah looked down at the hand on his sleeve, then back at Charlie. Trying not to let any of the shock within him show on his face.

“It's a good thing our families do go so far back,” he said slowly. “Otherwise, I suppose you might have
started
with threats.”

“Maybe we should consider this more of a soundin' out, then—” O'Kane tried to recoup again, but Jonah was already heading for the door.

“Well, you do that, then. You
sound it out
to yourself, and get back to me when you like what you hear.”

“Which is it? Which is it yer
really
offended by, Rev'rend? The offer, or the fact that yer the messenger boy?” he sputtered after him, losing his temper at last—but Jonah never looked back. Striding on out past the benches of supplicants, and all the alert young men, for what he knew would be the last time.

As he walked back to the Morris Park station, his head was filled with turmoil. Questioning whether there was any truth to O'Kane's jibe, whether or not they could really have anything on Adam.

And what would it profit him anyway, all his theatrical defiance?
The Metropolitan Life project would surely get built. Even the great, liberal mayor had made only the most perfunctory denunciation of its color line, preoccupied by the idea of all that nice middle-class housing, just like everyone else. All of Jonah's indignation would not get one colored family in, or a union card for a single colored carpenter—or one new apartment built in Harlem.

He racked his brain, trying to think if there were some other angle that Adam might have played.
Would he have cut some deal?
Outfoxed the O'Kanes into giving him something, anything, that people could use? And what would his own Daddy have done? Wouldn't he have used his ancient connection with the O'Kanes somehow—rather than having it thrown back in his face?

Yet try as he might, walking back to the subway, Jonah found to his surprise that he could not second-guess himself. Grinning involuntarily every time he thought of Charlie O'Kane's face again—his smug poker face slipping away into consternation. Relishing the thought that, at least for once, he had surprised somebody.

His rare good mood lasted only until he got home. He had hoped that his visit to The Mansion might sustain him in trying to write his sermon again that night, and he had wanted to tell Amanda all about it, the way he had always told her about everything. But the more he thought about it, the more pathetic it sounded to him— like he was trying to impress her, bragging on himself to make up for his failures in the pulpit, and on that train so many weeks ago. For once she misread his mood and did not try to draw him out, but moved quietly around him, letting him have the room and the quiet that she assumed he needed.

Was this what it would be like with children?
he speculated.
Always tiptoeing around Daddy? Himself becoming an evermore withdrawn, remote figure, battling with his own demons?

Not that her circumspection did him any good with his sermon, either. He soon found himself bogged down again—distracted, trying to find some way to put a new rhythm to the old words. Working futilely over the old, familiar themes, used again and again until he was sick of even thinking upon them. The Balm in Gilead, and a Song of Zion. A knock at midnight, and the Good Samaritan, and the fiery furnace—and Jonah in the belly of the whale.

He was still unable to understand why his father had named him such a thing in the first place. Milton always insisting it had come from the old slave song, sung by the people he had rescued when they finally crossed the Potomac. After they had knelt and prayed in gratitude, then made their way across the river into the North, singing as they went—

He deliver Daniel from the lion den,

Jonah from the belly of the whale, And the Hebrew children from the fiery furnace,

And why not every man?

But his father's explanation had never seemed sufficient for the onus he carried around with a name like Jonah. It weighed on him like a millstone, its burden only greater the older he became. He knew that the diaconate had almost denied him his father's pulpit on the basis of it alone and he still heard, sometimes after services, one or another of his congregation insolently whistling that other tune as he went through the door. The one his sister had taunted him with—

My hard luck started when I was born

Least so de old folks say.

Dat same hard luck been my bes' frien'

Up to dis very day . . .

For I'm a Jonah, I'm a Jonah man . . .
“Jonah was bad luck only because he wouldn't do God's bidding,” his father had tried to explain—as slowly and carefully as he tried to puzzle out all the terrible, vindictive things God kept doing in the Bible.

“He was afraid to!” he had said. “An' the Lord saw to it that Jonah was swallowed by the whale—”

“Yes, yes, I know!”

He understood all that, even as a child. How Jonah had fled the Lord, and the Lord had pursued him. How he had spent three days in the belly of the leviathan before he repented, and bent to the will of God. A sign of the Christ to come, Who would spend three days in the ground before
He
was risen.

But how did that apply to him? God had always turned His back and swum away from him, no matter how much he had sought to serve Him.

“You will reach them when you preach from your own story,” was his father's advice. Vaguely blasphemous, delivered years ago, the day Jonah had first preached from the pulpit.
The very day Howard Marsden had come to the New Jerusalem.

Jonah put down the stalled sermon. Lifting the pages of his
History of the Church of the New Jerusalem
out of its locked drawer, its hiding place. This was yet another passage that had no business in a proper church history, that would never see the light of day. But he had written it down anyway.
The whole history spoiled, he might as well put down his own testament, before he left. Let them find it when he was gone, and shock themselves—