Strivers Row (69 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

JONAH

He had just settled his father into bed at the church when he heard the shouting—the shouting and the sound of running feet, rushing over them like a great wind. Their strange, wild chant, nearly incomprehensible, but telling him all that he needed to know, once he was sure that he had heard it correctly.

He was worried that he had overtaxed the old man, having had him out for so long on such a humid day. But his father had only seemed to grow stronger, even loquacious, the more that people came over to greet them. Basking in the rain-forest heat, the mobs of promenaders strolling down Seventh Avenue and on up Lenox. The women in their best chiffon dresses and flowered hats, their pocketbooks and shoes dyed to match. The men in their white linen suits, coming out to chat and ogle, even if they hadn't been in church.

And everyone coming over to Milton, even the worst hustlers and sharpies and glamour girls. Looking so genuinely happy to see him alive that tears came to Jonah's eyes. All of them shaking his own hand, as well. The word already out about his sermon, some of his congregation even exclaiming exultantly behind him, for the first time he could remember, “
Rev'rend
preached
today!
”—so that he had to smile, though he told himself he was just pleased to be out with his father on his arm.

The Sunday like so many he remembered from growing up in Harlem and even before, down on Columbus Hill—before all the years of separation and doubt, all the worst years of the Depression. A warm, slow day. Everyone out in their best clothes, and looking well enough, happy enough—even if there weren't so many young men around. Even if he could still see the little groups of angry men and women, gathered on their stoops, reading their newspapers and letters to each other. Fighting to ignore the hole inside himself, as well—the fact that his wife had still not returned.

He thought, of course, that he should have done this years before, even though he pushed the idea down as completely unhelpful. Certainly, it had sparked his father. Milton still hadn't wanted to go home, even as the afternoon began to dwindle and Jonah insisted on starting him back to the church. There the Spottswoods had made them a light summer meal, but the two of them, father and son, had remained both too exhilarated and too anxious to eat much of anything. The absence of Amanda still hanging heavily between them. Milton talking more than he had in months to cover it, reminiscing at random about his brothers and sisters, and his father.

“I never could find him,” Milton told him, after Jonah had finally prevailed on his father to leave the chair at his desk, and actually lie down on the stiff metal cot.

“That's what always ate at me. Couldn't find him down there. All those bodies laid out like that. Just brought back that skull. But nobody could tell me it was him. Nobody could tell me it was even a black man's, for all their talk about the races.”

“You found the church, instead.”

“I know. But he was a proud man, my Daddy. Wouldn't want his bones lyin' down in a slave state like Virginie, all these years.”

Milton chewed at his lip for a little while more, frowning contemplatively, until a mischievous look unexpectedly crept across his massive face—the ghost of a laugh wheezing up from his chest.

“But—he sure as hell be glad he got outta South Carolina!” Jonah stayed with him until he nodded off. Watching him there in the late summer light, unaccustomed to seeing his father's big head in repose. He was still there with him, just happy to watch him sleep, when he heard the shouting and the running feet like a rush of wind—like a wave rolling over them. It surprised him, he had to admit that, not having suspected the day and the hour, but he couldn't say he was really shocked. Watching the excited people, men and women of all kinds, running past the front door of the church. Listening for some minutes to their wild, garbled yells before he could finally discern what they were saying—the words so at odds with the gleeful, carnival expressions on their faces.

“White man kill black soldier! Get the white man! Get the white man! He's to blame!”

By the time Jonah got back to his office, the phone was already ringing. He took and made half a dozen calls to other ministers, trying to piece together what had happened.

“Word is some white cop killed a colored soldier at the Brad-dock,” Earl Ward, Adam's vigorous assistant minister from down the block, finally told him.

“Oh, no. Is it true?”

“We don't know. But it's just like '35 already,” Ward said. The situation they had been dreading ever since then, when a rumor had spread that a store dick had killed a colored boy for shoplifting at Kress's, and the looting and burning, and the rage had spread all through Harlem before anyone could quite understand what was happening.

“Where's Adam?” Jonah asked automatically, wanting to bite his tongue even as he did.

“He's up in Oak Bluffs. There's no way he can get back tonight.

The mayor wants any ministers who can make it down at the Twenty-eighth Precinct.”

“All right.”

Brother Peter Moore and most of the other deacons had already begun to gather in the nave of the church, asking Jonah what they could do. He gave them and the Spottswoods directions, telling them to keep the doors locked, and to fill anything they could with water, in case of fire. His orders sounding unreal to him even as he gave them, certain that no harm would fall to the New Jerusalem. The Spottswoods wanted to know about moving his father, but the old man was still sleeping through all the commotion, and Jonah instructed them to move him only in an emergency.

“I'll be back as soon as I can,” he told them, and went out on the street, following the crowds.

Everyone was still moving downtown, no one doing anything more than shouting, but all the stores and bars he passed were already shutting their doors. The sheet-metal mangles slamming down onto the sidewalk like rolling thunder, one after another.
The big circus closing down for a night.

At the end of the block he saw Jakey Mendelssohn and his cousin, standing grimly outside their department store. The store was shut up tight behind them, but both of them were holding baseball bats—the cousin's big cow eyes staring out at the world more fearfully than ever.

“You should take him inside,” Jonah told him, gesturing at the people running down the street like madmen. “You should go, too.”

“This is my store. I'm not letting anything happen to it—not so long's I can help it,” Jakey said truculently, looking through Jonah to the excited crowds hurrying down the sidewalk.

“I'm going down to the Twenty-eighth Precinct now, I'll do what I can about getting some protection up here. Don't be foolish!”

“It's my store!” Jakey repeated, flinging up his arm contemptuously in its direction.

“Get him inside!” Jonah told him again, backing down the street, hurrying as the mob was hurrying now.

He had thought about stopping back at Strivers Row first and getting the big green Lincoln, figuring it would be quicker to maneuver around Harlem. But as he went on he saw that the crowd was still swelling, overflowing the sidewalks and blocking traffic. At 135th Street they had clotted around Harlem Hospital. Hundreds, maybe thousands of men and women, simply milling about in the dark, talking excitedly to each other.

“This where they took him! They inside right now!”

“This where the white cops took him!”

Every time the door to the emergency ward opened, a shout would go up, and the crowd surged in a little closer. A sea of dark faces pressing toward the entrance, shouting out questions at anyone they saw in a white coat—“
Is he alive? Is he still alive?
” Groaning in disappointment until a man boosted himself up on a corner mailbox— teetering on its rounded sides there, waving his arms wildly to get their attention.

“He prob'ly dead already!” he shouted out. “You think they wouldn't say if he was still alive? He dead already! What you waitin' for?”

The crowd roared, surging forward and then back, the man on top of the mailbox toppling into their midst. A bottle smashed against the wall of the hospital, then another, and then people started to break away, running along the side streets, and on downtown.

Jonah heard a steady
pop-pop-pop
sound, and turned to see a group of teenage boys racing along Seventh Avenue, knocking out every streetlight as they ran by. Hitting them with lengths of pipe, table legs, even tree limbs they had pulled down. The block went instantly dark, and he heard the sound repeated again and again in the distance
—pop-pop-pop—
echoed by a heavier, more ragged series of reports that sounded very much like gunshots. The people around him still whooping and laughing giddily, raising the same strange cry he had heard before—

“White man kill black soldier! Get the white man! Get him!”

He plunged on down toward the precinct house, and 125th Street—and as he did, he heard the heavier, crushing sound of whole plate-glass windows falling. All along the avenue now, people were smashing at things. The front display windows of all the big stores, Blumstein's and Orkin's, Koch's and Lerner's and McGrory's, were already cleaned out. The denuded white store mannequins, headless or missing limbs, lying strewn out along the sidewalk. A pretty young woman stepped over one of the dummy corpses, and kicked daintily at a remaining section of window glass. A man chivalrously held her hand while the people around her egged her on—“
Tha's it! Tha's it, girl!
” She smiled shyly at the attention, and pushed away the remaining shards of glass with her toe, her companion helping her on up into the window where she posed for a moment, just like the displaced mannequins, before dissolving into giggles. As she did, three teenage girls passed her on the way out—their faces dreamy, holding yards of puffy party dresses bundled up in their arms.

But it was not just the big stores that were being cleaned out, Jonah saw. People were smashing their way into pawnshops and grocery stores, bars and liquor stores, furniture and clothing and jewelry shops. Twisting the protective mangles and metal gates right off their hinges with terrible, metallic squeals. Smashing the glass with bricks or ashcans, or the things they had taken from other stores.

They jumped inside, grabbing for whatever they could in the darkness. Howling and cursing as they cut themselves on the jagged remains of the plate glass, but most of them still laughing—the carnival feel of the wartime City at night still prevailing. The poorest, shabbiest-looking people in the crowd leading the way, some of the men not even wearing shirts. Jonah was sure that he could recognize many of them from the little aggregations he had been seeing all summer out on the stoops and curbs, stoking and nurturing their anger. Their faces now distorted with excitement, with amazement, with sheer wonder at what they had done.

He could see the better-dressed men and women on the street, too, in their hats and suspenders and Sunday show-off shoes. Only watching at first, their faces animated with a mixture of suspicion and disbelief. But then they plunged in, as well—visibly shrugging, and jumping in to take what they could from stores that were already wrecked beyond salvation anyway, hauling away whole armfuls of merchandise. Not just the things of obvious value—fancy dresses and suits, slabs of beef and bottles of liquor, jewelry and coats and radios from the pawnshops—but anything and everything they could use, every little necessity, or less. They took milk and bread, and cans of beans and peas, and sardines and dog food. Boxes of cornflakes and laundry detergent, towels and bedsheets and mattresses, pots and pans and dishes. Tubes of toothpaste and single shoes, and shoehorns; eyeglass samples, and pawned mandolins and flutes and accordions. Boxes of baking soda and bandages and cans of Flit; bottles of vinegar, and hot-water bottles and pairs of socks, and of course jars and jars of all those cold creams guaranteed to erase that outer, darker layer of skin.

Jonah tried to stop them at first. He shooed one group away from a grocery, pulled others out of a Florsheim's window—those particular looters shamed by his clerical collar. But more just slapped his hands away, or casually shouted curses at him, only moving on to another store when he could move them at all.

He gave it up finally, wandering down 125th Street and just watching the mob going about its business—amazed to see how many
things
there were. It was as if all of Harlem had been turned inside out before him, like the stuffing of a pillow. The sidewalks carpeted with loose clothing and bedding. Groups of looters staggering down the street together, trying to haul away dressers, vanities, entire kitchen and bedroom sets. Others had already set up shop on the curb, where they were eagerly reselling things they didn't want or didn't need, at cut-rate prices. The big things they couldn't do anything with—emptied cash registers, industrial scales, refrigerators and iceboxes from the backs of stores—lying smashed out in the street like so many flattened waterbugs.

All this stuff,
Jonah thought, staring at it.
And all this wanting. Who could have suspected there were so many things, hidden away behind store windows, and guards? What could have been done with it all?

Some store owners had been quick-witted enough to post signs announcing their color, but mostly the mob either didn't believe them, or it didn't care. At C. D. King's shoe store there was a gaping hole in the glass, just below where someone had chalked the plea,
COLORED STORE—NEGRO—
the shelves and trees all stripped of their shoes. Jonah watched as a bunch of men lined up a clothing dummy at the window of the bar at the Hotel Theresa, only to be stopped by another man who ran over, telling them, erroneously—“
Don't break out that window, ol' man. That's Joe Louis's hotel!
” They acquiesced—moving the dummy a few windows on down, to bash in the front of A. Philip Randolph's National March on Washington headquarters.