Strivers Row (55 page)

“Fard is Allah, who came to save the dark people.”

He could hear them stamping on the floorboards in their approval. All of the disinherited, the poor and the bound over, pounding on the old wooden floor with their tattered boots, and shoes, and anything else at hand, until the whole temple was shaking. Malcolm realizing only belatedly that the pounding was actually coming from the front door of the apartment—the banging so hard that it was the front door that was bouncing on its hinges.

He froze where he was—afraid that some of the people who waited in the shadows had followed him home now. Afraid that it might be the cops, though he had never known them to ask for entry, anywhere in Harlem. Hurriedly, he stuffed the books from Prof. Toussaint, back between the bedsprings and the mattress, and pulled on a pair of pants. Then he padded down the hall and through the kitchen as quietly as he could in his bare feet, wondering if he could sneak over to the front-door peephole and peer out without whoever it was noticing the telltale shadow eclipsing the light—

Before he could get there, the door came flying open, just missing his head. Malcolm throwing himself back, falling over a kitchen chair and landing on the yellowed linoleum floor—where he found himself staring up at the ferocious-looking figure above him, more massive than ever from his new perspective on the floor.

“Why don't you open yo' door in a timely manner, son?” West Indian Archie growled down at him.

He lifted up one of his huge feet then, and stepped over Malcolm. Limping over to another kitchen chair, where he rubbed gingerly at his ankle.

“Makin' me kick it in like that! Man, I'm gettin' too old for that kind a nonsense!”

Malcolm stayed where he was on the linoleum, limp with relief. He had been terrified when Archie first came through his door. But already, even from his position on the floor, Malcolm could tell that he was only annoyed with him and not truly angry. Archie gesturing at him from the chair, where he had removed his shoe now and was rubbing at his foot. When he was satisfied, he stood up and went over to Malcolm, offering him one massive hand.

“Get on up, son!” he said, looking him over critically as he pulled him back to his feet—Malcolm's arms still clutched over his chest. “You don't look so good. What you been gettin' you self into, young lane? Here, lemme look at your eyes!”

He lifted Malcolm halfway up off the chair. Malcolm flipped his head back, and tried to pull away, but Archie turned him back with one hand behind the neck, using the other to force up his lids, one at a time.

“Uh-huh. Yah, I see it now. You been ballin' day an' night, ain't you?”

“I'm fine as thine,” Malcolm said quickly.

“Don't you be drivin' me some nail, Red. You know you ain't been workin' for a whole week now. Not makin' any a my payoffs, or my connections. Don't hype me now, Red. I checked up.”

“Yeah, well, I been workin' up some new hustles,” he said, looking Archie in the face as sincerely as he dared.

“Yah, you been up to somethin', that's for damned sure,” Archie said skeptically, squinting at him closely then. “You sure you feelin' all right, Red?”

“Sure, Archie—”

“You lookin' a little skinny. Siddown, I'm gonna make you a real breakfast.”

He took his jacket off and hung it very carefully on the back of a chair, then rolled up his sleeves and pulled three eggs out of the icebox. He lit the stove and mixed them up in a pan on the stove top, with a little milk and some butter.

“They ain't mine,” Malcolm protested mildly. “They the other boarders'—”

“Shut up, Red,” Archie said calmly, “an' go get some clothes on. This'll be ready in a minute.”

He did as he was told, and went back into his bedroom. Hastily stuffing away his remaining matchsticks, and Benzedrine tablets, along with his books on the secret knowledge of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam. By the time he came out, West Indian Archie had the omelet plus two pieces of margarine-smeared toast, a slice of tomato, and a fresh cup of coffee waiting for him—all set primly with a napkin and a knife, a fork and a spoon.

“I hadda learn this when I come up from Trinidad,” Archie told him as he began to eat. “I had to learn to take care a myself.”

Hovering over him paternally, his voice almost fond as he reminisced.

“I was just like you. Runnin' policy fo' Alex Pompez, then Big Joe Ison's mob. Out all the time, eatin' anything off the street. It run a body down.”

He squeezed down on Malcolm's shoulders—the huge, hamhock hands feeling a little ominous to Malcolm, though he kept eating anyway. It was the first full meal he had had in days, and he was suddenly ravenous, the eggs and toast more delicious than anything he could remember.

“That's it. Dig in, Red. You got to take care yo'self, you want to last. How you think I steered clear a Dutch Schultz's boys, all those years? Or the I-ties, even worse. You got to be alert, so you keep yo' eyes open all the time on the street. You hear what I say?”

Malcolm nodded enthusiastically, and kept eating, averting his eyes. Archie's hands moved roughly. Rubbing gruffly around the back of Malcolm's neck as he ate, as if trying to help move the food down his throat.

“That's solid, huh? I had a slave as a short-order cook, back in those days. Hadda learn to cook on the job,” he chuckled proudly. “It weren't pretty at first, but I did.”

“What about the numbers, Archie?” Malcolm asked him, honestly curious. “How'd you learn how to do the numbers? Figure all of 'em in your head like that?”

“Ah, Red, I just did,” West Indian Archie told him, shrugging. “When I come up, the cops catch you with any slips, they take you down the precinct basement, work you over bad. Schultz had 'em all paid off, do his work for him—”

“But don't you ever think how it could be different, Archie?” Malcolm persisted, thinking of the books he had been reading. “Don't you ever think about how if it wasn't for the white man, we wouldn't have to live like this? Why, you could be a engineer, or a scientist. Maybe a college professor in mathematics!”

Archie came out from behind him and sat down in a chair, looking at Malcolm closely.

“We're hustlers, Red,” he said, his face more somber than Malcolm had ever seen it before. “We be hustlers if the white man never existed. That's just the way things are.”

“But don't you see, Archie?
The white man is the devil!
”

“Sure,” Archie shrugged. “
Somebody
gotta be.”

“But you ain't hipped to what I'm layin' down—”

“No, Red. You listen up, now,” he said firmly. “Where I come from, I had nothin'. I get up here, people callin' me
monkey chaser
. People callin' me
cocoanut
. Everything I made, I had to earn out on the street. You see this?”

He lifted up his chin, and Malcolm could see a thick scar, running nearly all the way around his jaw. He stared at it, fascinated, wondering why he had never noticed it before, until Archie pulled his head back and it receded into the loose, leathery folds of his middle-aged jowls.

“Three I-talian boys jumped me, up on 147th Street, when they was makin' a move on Dutch Schultz's territory. I was lucky the streetlight was out, an' they aim wasn't too good. I paid 'em for that, you can bet on it.”

He stood up, laying his hands on Malcolm's shoulders again, although this time Malcolm felt a chill go through his body and he stopped eating.

“You say the white man's the devil? All right,” Archie repeated softly. “But I do what I got to do to make my way. Out on the street, man gotta have eyes in the back of his head to live. And I do.”

He leaned suddenly forward, his head next to Malcolm's, his heavy, rum-sweet breath on Malcolm's cheek.

“I see everything that goes on, Red.
Everything.
Don't you be messin' wit' me.”

“I won't, Archie,” Malcolm said, his blood still. Forcing himself to pick up another forkful of the eggs.

“That so?” he asked, in a mournful voice—his hands clamping suddenly around Malcolm's neck. “That so? 'Cause I know you been shortin' me, Red.”

Malcolm froze, his fork clattering back on the plate. He tried to say something, to reassure him, but it was as if Archie had already choked any further words out of his head.

“I ought to shoot you through the ear.”

West Indian Archie bent his head down again until it was right next to Malcolm's. His voice soft, almost crooning to him. One hand left his throat, and Malcolm could feel something hard prodding into his kidneys now, just under the chair backing. Then Archie sighed softly.

“But I like you, Red, so I'm only gonna scare you a tiff. But I got to tell you, boy—I am disappointed.”

The huge hands released his neck, the rod pulled back out of his kidneys—and Malcolm fell off his chair, to the floor. Sobs wracking his body as he turned to Archie on his knees, grasping at his pants legs.

“I hadda do it, Archie,” he confessed between sobs. “I couldn't go out there anymore. They was waitin' for me, everywhere I went. They was just waitin' in the dark for the money, I couldn't do it anymore.”

“People holdin' up one a
my
runners? Where the hell was all those cops I pay for?” Archie frowned, mystified—pulling his .45 back out. “You tell me who they was, son, I'll go take care a them.”

“No, Archie, please! I just can't do that no more! Please, Archie! Just give me some other slave!”

“All right. All right, now, Red,” Archie said uneasily, still frowning down at him. He gave Malcolm a light pat on the side of his head. “You take it easy. What's goin' on with you, son? You sure you all right?”

“Please!”

“All right, I got another job for you, son. C'mon now, boy.”

He lifted Malcolm bodily back into his chair. “You comin' all to pieces on me. Well, that's okay, son,” he said solicitously, though obviously still puzzled. “Some boys just ain't meant fo' the street. You eat some more now, you got to take care a yourself.”

Malcolm nodded, picking at his eggs again, his tears subsiding. Trying to think, now, how he would ever get to see Miranda again, much less take her away from Archie. Telling himself, even as he felt Archie's huge hand still patting his shoulder in concern,
I'll just have to kill him, then. I'll just have to kill him, before he kills me.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

JONAH

The day that had begun with such quiet, rainswept promise began to slowly unravel after the service. Jonah had wanted to invite Private Bandy and his family to the early Sunday dinner they had on Strivers Row, but he was due back on his transport ship, and his mother had to get her train to Connecticut. Jonah had bid the three of them good-bye at the door of the New Jerusalem, Private Bandy pumping his hand vigorously, a big, ingenuous smile on his face.

“That was real fine, Rev'rend, real fine! Thank you for havin' us!”

“Please do come back anytime—”

“Maybe sometime we can hear
you
preach,” Bandy's mother said pointedly, but the tall MP had quickly smoothed over her remark.

“That was a
wonderful
service, wasn't it, Mama? Can't ask for a better service 'n that!”

Instead, it had only been the usual deacons and church mothers at their table. Amanda serving up a whole roast beef that she had somehow managed to finagle from Schwartz's butcher shop. It was a heavy meal for the summer, but when the clouds returned and a steady rain began to beat on the skylight, they had all dug in. These Sunday dinners were always the height of affected gentility, a ritual so polite that it nearly reduced Jonah to tears of boredom. But this afternoon all of them found themselves eating with unusual, silent vigor, as if hunkering in against the storm outside. Only peering speculatively over their food at Jonah when they thought he wasn't looking—as if they might spot what was wrong with him.

As if it were a physical ailment—

He was just as glad to let them think what they would. Once he had seen the last of them to the door, he just sat around the living room, nursing a rare glass of scotch, while Amanda cleaned up. They gave the cleaning woman the day off on Sunday, and usually he helped Amanda with the dishes. It gave them a chance to talk over the service, the endless politics, and gossip, of the church. It was another way they worked together, and often they would go upstairs and make love when they were done. Napping together— spending the rest of the day and evening up there, when he had an assistant minister working the evening service for him.

Today, though, on this blustery, rainy afternoon he had not approached her. Preferring to stay down in the gloomy front parlor with the lamps off, the light through the blue, eye-of-God skylight dwindled to a weak gray funnel. Thumbing moodily through the Sunday papers while he listened to the classical music programs on WNYC. He worked his way through the war news; on through to the last, smallest police items in the back pages.
Where the Negroes were.

There had been another gang stabbing on West 147th Street.
A pastor's son, knifed coming back from a church meeting.
Jonah made a mental note to call the boy's father. A doctor the papers were calling “The White Angel,” for treating Harlem residents free of charge, had been lured into a tenement on 117th Street, and robbed and beaten by four youths. An eighteen-year-old girl taken to a rooftop, where she was robbed and stripped of her clothes—another young woman used as a human shield, in a shootout at a tavern in Brooklyn. The brother of one of the few colored police lieutenants in the City, stabbed to death after a drunken brawl with his female companion on West 154th Street.

“Maybe I killed him and maybe I didn't,” the woman had told police. “I don't know much because I was asleep when you fellows came in here.”

Jonah read through each item with as much interest and even more loathing than he had the stories of racial assaults throughout the country in the
Amsterdam Star-News
. Asking himself, with the grim satisfaction of one who had long become convinced that the world was falling apart,
What are we becoming?
Even though the answer was readily apparent:
Exactly what they want us to be—

Those had been the parts of Lazar Mendelssohn's narrative that he had found the most chilling—back when Jakey's cousin was still talking. Worse even than his accounts of the cattle-car trains, and the human factories, were his stories of what life was like in the Polish ghettos. People reduced to acting like animals, just to survive.

It was the same here. Making us into what they want us to be. So they don't have to feel guilty about what they do to us. So that we will do it for them.

“What are you doing to yourself ?”

Her voice broke through his reverie, compassionate but stern. He hadn't noticed that Amanda had come into the room, was squatting down by the foot of his chair, a hand on his paper.

“What are you doing to yourself, reading all that bad news all the time?” she asked softly.

“They're my people—” he stammered at her, but she only shook her head.

“
Your people!
Like you're responsible for everyone in the world.”

“I'm not saying that,” he snapped. “I'm just saying I have a duty—”

“No, honestly, Jonah. It's blasphemous, is what it is,” she said, cutting him off. “I see you. Reading about every bad thing every-one's ever done. All the crimes, all the war news. All the lynchings. People are people, you taking on all their sins isn't going to change that.”

“But don't you see what's happening?”

“No, Jonah, I don't,” she told him bluntly, and he saw to his surprise that she was genuinely angry now. “I don't see it at all, because you're never here anymore. Always worrying about some-body's troubles, somewhere. Why don't you tell me what's happening to
you
?”

He put down the paper and was about to say something to her. Just what, he wasn't sure himself. Maybe confess it all, everything, the very worst thoughts about what he had been planning, with no idea of how she would take it.
Trusting her, his wife
.

“Amanda, I—”

But it was then that they both noticed the music had stopped. The radio was blurting out a news story now, all bulletins and flashes. For a moment he assumed it was something about the war, another new advance, or a landing on a Pacific island he had never heard of. But no: the story was coming from Detroit—another race riot. It had started with an automobile accident, or a fistfight at a picnic grounds, no one was sure, but already there were stories of rapes, and drownings, and murders. White mobs attacking a housing project that a few, colored, defense-worker families had been allowed to move into. Colored men and women attacked in public, pulled off streetcars and beaten right in front of city hall. The police doing nothing to interfere. Pouring into some colored neighborhood called Paradise Valley, joining in against any Negroes they found, using nightsticks and riot guns, machine guns and even deer rifles—

The radio report went to a siege of something called the Vernor Hotel. Police were firing tear gas at what were said to be fifty armed Negroes holed up inside—at least one of them with a machine gun of his own. As they listened, stupefied, they could hear the crack of what the reporter breathlessly assured them were police sniper rifles.

“We are informed they told the police, ‘Come and get us!' ”

After a few minutes Amanda had stood up and walked without a word out of the room. Jonah kept listening through the rest of the afternoon and evening, even as the long summer evening faded into blackness through the skylight above. Getting up to twist the dial around for more news from time to time, going from one station to another, until at last he cut it back to WNYC just in time to hear a blast of martial music.

“...we are proud to claim the ti-tle of United States Marine!”

“Patience and fortitude!”
a shrill but pompous voice followed immediately, just as it did every Sunday night.

Mayor La Guardia had been speaking directly to the City every Sunday night since Pearl Harbor—a half-hour torrent of threats, advice, and imprecations. Telling housewives to buy snap beans or wear their galoshes, giving out his wife's recipes. Reeling off phone numbers of gambling joints in Passaic that local bookies had been calling, in order to put the local cops over there on the spot. Menacing loan sharks and war profiteers by name.

“Cut it out. Cut it out right now, you no-good, thieving, chiseling tin-horns!”
he railed into the microphone like some comic-book hero.
“That sort of business don't go in New York. Not while I'm mayor. Get me?”

Tonight, though, the little mayor sounded surprisingly calm, his voice somber and level after his usual salutation.

“We must not forget that in New York City we still have the aftermath of prejudice, racial hatred, and exploitation that has existed in many parts of the country,” he said slowly, sounding almost unnaturally controlled—and it occurred to Jonah then that La Guardia, too, was scared.

“Let nothing happen in our City that will disturb our tranquillity! Let no snake agitator come here in New York seeking to start racial trouble. I want to assure the people of this City that with just a bit of cooperation and understanding on the part of the people themselves, we will be able to cope with any situation. I am depending on the people of this City to keep our record clean.”

Jonah leaned over and snapped off the radio, unable to listen to any more. He liked the frenetic little mayor well enough. It was impossible not to. Until the year before he had still lived in a walk-up tenement, over on 109th Street in East Harlem. He had fired or transferred the most brutal and corrupt Harlem cops, built new public housing, opened Sydenham Hospital to finally take some of the pressure off The Morgue.

Yet Jonah thought that the man often acted and sounded as if he had just discovered that race existed.
“The aftermath of racial hatred!” What did that even mean?
As if there were no more bigots left in New York—only his mysterious, snake agitators. For all the time he spent racing to fires or dumping slot machines in the river, the mayor seemed oblivious to what went on all around him, all the time, in his City. How routinely members of Jonah's church ended up with broken heads, and under arrest—even when they went to the precinct houses to report a burglary or a mugging that had been perpetrated against themselves.

Nor was it only Harlem. He had heard other stories from rabbis, told in hushed tones at interfaith dinners, about Irish cops who stood by and laughed, while Christian Front youths up in Washington Heights and the South Bronx attacked elderly Jews with baseball bats. The young thugs bursting into synagogues while services were being held and screaming,
“Kill the kikes!”

The Jews, again. Their other obsession.
And now, with modern science at their disposal, it was going to become...
a process.
The Jews first, Negroes next. It would be such a simple thing—
We are already in our ghettos.
The Nazis were doing it now. Even if they were defeated, once they showed it could be done—

Why not us? Isn't it the natural course of such unslakable hatred? They always wanted to get rid of us, now they have the means. They even have the blueprint.

He knew then, for the first time, that he truly would go. Pass once and for all into that monstrous white world—not for fame or money or some sense of freedom like his sister sought, but just so he wouldn't have to watch from close up anymore. He was not the man to protect them—his church, his people—from this terrible new day. He could not even speak from the pulpit anymore. He could not even protect his own wife on a public train.

Jonah jumped up from the chair where he had been moldering all day. He jumped up and went out right then, pausing only to snatch his raincoat, and the umbrella from the hall stand, then running on out into the night. He hurried to the avenue, where he was stunned for a moment by a blare of horns, somewhere in the darkness before him.
Elder Lightfoot Michaux's revival,
he realized only belatedly. Still going strong even in the rain, annoying the good people up on Sugar Hill, their chanted hymns and rhythmic clapping sounding like a call to war.

We are ready for the battle—

He turned his collar up against the rain, and began to jog in the general direction of the noise, hurrying toward what was supposed to be his church.

He found the old man where he usually did, sitting up behind his desk. His big, black, scarred head bent down, its crown facing Jonah as he came in. Jonah feared for a moment that he might be dead or in some sort of state, but he looked up when Jonah called his name—a look that might have passed for concern crossing his stonelike face.

“Daddy. Daddy, I got to go,” Jonah told him right away, sitting down in the little chair next to the desk, holding his father's hands in his. Speaking in only a barely raised whisper, not wanting to awaken or alarm the Spottswoods, keeping guard in the next room, but hoping that he could make himself understood by the old man.

“I'm going,
Daddy
, do you understand? I have to.”

To his horror, the old man had started to pull himself to his feet then. Grabbing on to the edge of his desk, lifting himself slowly upward.

“Daddy!” he hissed, astonished.

But his father kept going. Lifting himself on up until he was standing on his own two feet, unaided. He was still half bent over at the waist, but Jonah was surprised again to see how big he really was. Not only bulky and solid as granite, but tall—certainly taller than Jonah was, had he been able to straighten himself out.

“Son,” he began to breathe—the word little more than the breath itself, one long inhalation, but unmistakable.

“Son. Son, son, son,” he kept saying, in a sort of rasping singsong, until Jonah could not stand it any longer. He jumped up in turn, and wrapped his arms around his father's vast bulk—slowly, carefully lowering him into his chair again.