Strivers Row (71 page)

All of Harlem seemed transformed to Jonah now, from the gentle, even faintly optimistic place it had been just this afternoon. Changed over into something dark and violent, lit only by brilliant flashes. He knew it was an illusion, of course. He knew that the other, daytime Harlem was still there, had been there all along. But tonight he could not find it. Tonight, he felt blinded by all the seething, random hatred around him, and he ran back to his church, his legs and his lungs pumping slowly in the heavy night air— knowing that there was something to protect.

Malcolm strolled slowly up the avenue, watching all the frantic carryings-on around him. Feeling as if he were moving in slow motion, too—the way a projection reel slowed before it started to flap, and give out. Watching passively as the mobs looted stores all around him. Smiling sometimes, such as when he saw some boys carrying away the entire, stripped carcass of a calf from a butcher's shop, a wino turning around and around in a liquor store as he tried to make up his mind—but never bothering to join in himself.

He followed the crowds when they headed toward some new commotion, ran with them when a detail of police or MPs swept through. He saw one mob of young men surround a couple of white British sailors, knocking them down, kicking them and stabbing one of them in the chest. The man managed to run away, holding his chest and screaming as he did. Malcolm watched him—then walked on up to the curb, where he helped some more men rock a car over onto its top and set it on fire, the choking black smoke rising through the night air.

But then he walked away, still moving uptown. Not sure exactly where he was going or what he was doing. Possessing a vague idea of going back to the St. Nicholas Hotel, where he still had his room, or maybe going to settle things with Sammy the Pimp. Mostly just wanting the hurting inside him to stop, the miserable emptiness to go away.

He looked into each of the gaping, looted storefronts as he passed them, though he was never tempted to venture inside. Sure that he saw a dark figure lying still, just inside the entrance of a ransacked bar. Spotting another body in a vacant lot, a couple blocks later, though no one else seemed to notice or to care.

He heard the sound of another crowd and turned around a corner that seemed familiar, but also strange in the near total darkness. There he saw a dozen men or so, trying to force their way into a small, shabby department store. He started toward them, curious to see what they were getting at—so dazed and preoccupied that he didn't hear the police whistle behind him, the shouts of alarm, until the other men who had been trying to batter their way in had turned and begun to run. They ran into him, almost knocking him down. Dislodging his hat in their panic, so that when he stopped and turned to pick it up it was too late to avoid the policeman's hand that reached out for him, and him alone. Grabbing him by the collar and pulling him up so hard that he choked, his windpipe cut off. Malcolm certain that he was about to pass out even as he grappled for the gun in his pocket—sure that he was dying, and that that was the only reason he saw that minister who kept dogging him moving toward him once more.

Jonah witnessed the whole scene before him as he came back onto the block. The mob smashing its way into Mendelssohn's. The metal mangle already ripped away, and two men with grim, businesslike expressions on their faces, smashing away at the front windows with a couple of ashcans. Jakey Mendelssohn stood off to one side, one arm around that cousin of his. The baseball bat still clutched in his free hand but not interfering, only looking bleakly at Jonah, appealing to him with his eyes, as they began to bash in his storefront.

“Nice. Real nice!” he called out, all of his rage choking in his throat. “Couldn't be any better if I was in Poland!”

But it was the cousin Jonah was looking at. The boy staring out at the shouting, gesturing mob, with his dazed eyes as big as pinwheels. Jonah suffused with pity for him now, wondering how many times he had seen such a scene before. Before he knew it, he was striding purposefully toward the looters.

“Stop that!” he shouted at them. The men pausing, but only staring at him sullenly, as if undecided as to who he was.

“Stop that right now!” he yelled again, on them now, seizing the ashcan from one of them, and wresting it out of his hands. Other faces coming up around him now—Jonah exhilarated and relieved to see that they were members of his congregation.

“Get off this block!” he shouted at the looters once more. They hesitated a moment longer, as if still undecided—then began to scatter from the police whistle screeching behind them. Jonah feeling his chest loosen with relief, starting to turn back to Jakey and his cousin, when he saw the cop coming charging into them.

Just a single cop, thick-shouldered and hermetically white, as only the Irish can be.
Just like the cop he had passed for so many years, winking at him at the corner of Strivers Row.
Charging into the crowd of looters, striking randomly at shins and backs. Jonah watching as he grabbed hold of one man who hadn't done anything, was only reaching down for his hat, and yanked him back up by the collar of his shirt.
Not a whole mob, like his father had gone out to face—but a single, white cop. Surely he could stand up to that—

The policeman was already frog-marching his collar back down the block. The innocent man grasping desperately at his neck, one hand thrust into his pocket. The members of his congregation stirring behind him, but Jonah paying no attention to them. His eyes on the collar instead, not quite believing who it was even as he approached him.

That boy again. Pursuing him even here.

He ran up to them, laying a hand gently on the cop's shoulder. Trying to talk to him as he stared at the boy's unmistakable face, the hand wriggling in his pocket.
What was he trying to get to? A knife? Worse?

“Excuse me, Officer, this man wasn't involved—”

The nightstick caught him by surprise. Flashing at him, just above eye level, leaving a scorching line of pain where it met flesh and bone across the top of his forehead. The blood flowed down immediately, like a red shade pulled down over his eyes—but Jonah managed to reach out and catch hold of the cop's arm nevertheless. Hanging on desperately with both hands, keeping him from yanking the stick back and hitting him again.

“Leggo a me, you black son of a bitch!”

Through the blood, Jonah saw him toss the boy into the street, his hustler's slick shoes slipping and giving way on the broken glass. Jonah still clutching on to the cop's nightstick, even as he saw the officer's freed hand slipping down to unbuckle his holster. Reaching for the gun barrel there—Jonah trying to find the words that had been addled in his brain even as the cop kept yelling at him.

“Leggo right now, you son of a bitch or I'll kill ya right here in the goddamned street!”

Then their hands were all over him. Holding him up, wiping away the curtain of blood that kept dropping down over his eyes. Folding something over the cut on his head that stung like crazy, then numbed him—even as he watched more hands lift the cop's nightstick right out of his grasp, and take the gun away from him. The man's arms pinned back behind him until he was totally immobilized. His pasty, absurdly white Irish face only inches from Jonah's own, looking both outraged and terrified.

“He hit Preacher!”

“Shoot his white ass! Think he can come up an' hit a preacher like that!”

“Hit him with that stick, see how
he
likes it!”

“No!”

More hands were trying to lead him away, and Jonah reeled, racked with nausea, wanting nothing more than to sit down right on the curb. But he pushed them away—knowing that time mattered now. Knowing that he had to say something,
now,
before it got out of hand.

“Nobody's hitting anyone!” he cried, looking at the worried faces of the men and women from his congregation, standing all around him. Looking at the panicked white face of the cop. Feeling as if he were about to pass out, but knowing that he had to find the words,
now.

“Give me the gun!” he ordered.

The policeman's .38 special delivered to his outstretched hand—Jonah surprised by the heft and the solid metallic feel of the gun.
No wonder you think you can do anything, carrying this around.
He broke open the cylinder, knocked the bullets into his palm and thrust them into his jacket pocket, then shut it again.

“Give it back to the man! His stick, too! All right, let go of him!”

They did as he told them, although their faces remained wary and cynical—some of them grumbling their dissent. Jonah knowing he had to make this work.

“He just gonna make trouble!”

“He'll have the whole force up here in no time—”

“No one's doing anything!” Jonah snapped, looking the policeman in the eyes where he stood, surrounded by black faces—gun and nightstick back in his belt, exposed as next to useless now. The man still petrified.

“Listen up!” Jonah called out, as much to the surrounding crowd as to the scared Irish cop, but looking him in the eyes. “I'm saying you fired all your bullets in the air, fending off looters and protecting the block. Isn't that right, Officer—?”

“Murphy,” the cop said, nodding dumbly. Jonah continuing to look him in the eyes as he talked.

“Officer Murphy. Then you continued to stand on the corner and saw to it that the church and the block were defended all night long. For which I will go to the precinct tomorrow and commend you. 'Less you want me to tell a different story to the mayor, who I was just riding with.”

“Yeah, sure. All right,” the cop said slowly, looking at the barely mollified faces all around him.

“All right, then! Go back to your post on the corner!” Jonah said. The circle of people around him grudgingly gave way, and the cop looked all about him. His face still a muddle of fear, rage, hurt, and relief—but he walked slowly off to the corner, doing as he was told. The faces of his congregation still angry, but filled with a newfound respect—looking to Jonah for what to do next.

He quickly doled out more tasks and orders—assigning people to stand guard outside Mendelssohn's, and the church, to watch for fires, and gather water, and keep any outsiders off the block. More people crowding up around him now, touching his face in concern, helping him back toward the church—Jonah letting them carry him along. Feeling nauseated again and barely able to stand, but still searching for one face among them. Finally spotting it—the face of that boy again, moving along warily on the outskirts of the crowd. Jonah stumbled toward him, still wanting to ask him one thing— the boy backing away in alarm even as he did, watching him guardedly from a few feet away.

“What did you do that for?” Jonah called to him, still puzzled by that first time he had seen him, that incident on the train, more than anything else.

“What? Whatta you talkin' 'bout?” the boy called back—no more than a boy, really, Jonah could see that again, despite the grown-up clothes he wore, the gun he undoubtedly carried in his jacket pocket and had been about to use on that cop.
Just a boy—
his face alternately sweet and Satanic, even here and now. Looking as if he weren't sure whether to be grateful or resentful.

“On the train!” Jonah called to him. “On that train, after you— after you helped us—”

“Yeah? What about it?”

The boy bouncing back and forth on the balls of his feet, as if he were still about to flee—as if worried that any admission might catch him up here.

“What did you jump in the water for?” Jonah asked, at last. “By that whistle-stop—what did you do that for, go and jump in the water in front of all those white people?”

“Oh, that!” the boy shouted back, grinning and shrugging then. His voice barely carrying from across the street, over the wail of the fire engine sirens and the continuous pop of breaking glass.

“I just wanted their attention!” he called over. “Ain't you ever felt like that? I just wanted to make sure they all saw me.”

“But
why?
” Jonah called again, unsatisfied, knowing that the boy was about to run off.

“Because they should see me. 'Cause they should get a real good look!” he yelled over, grinning, and then was gone, running into the contentious night.

Jonah tried to get up and go after him—but then he was aware of her hands, her smell around him. Amanda helped him to sit down on the church steps again, and he, grasping at her arm, kissed her as he did.

“Go easy, now. We need to get you a doctor.”

Her voice cool and practical as always—but proud of him, too, he could tell. That sound in her voice like a cool drink of water.

“I really preached today. You should've been there!” he babbled. “I know, baby. I heard.”

“Don't ever go away again.”

“I won't, baby,” she said, smiling and leaning in to gently kiss his mouth. “Not so long as you're here.”

EPILOGUE

Because the building inspector insisted that they start from the top, it took them eighteen days to get to the bodies of the Collyer brothers. First they had to clear away the room full of gas chandeliers, and the room full of weapons; the room full of ancient musical instruments, and the one full of used Christmas trees, and the room full of mantel clocks, including the one that was a metal bust of a maiden, with coins still dropping mechanically from her ears. They had to take away the fourteen grand pianos, including the one that was given to their mother as a gift from Queen Victoria, and the ten grand prizes for piano playing, and the certificate of merit for punctuality and good conduct, and the finest library on admiralty law in existence.

They had to dig down through the twenty-seven paintings of buildings painted in blood red paint, and the specimen of a two-headed baby preserved in formaldehyde, and the grandfather clock that played “The Campbells Are Coming.” Past the sewing machine and the X-ray machine, and the Magneto-Electric machine and the static machine, and the entire, neatly disassembled Model T, and the estimated 136 tons of accumulated newspapers, saved for the day that Homer Collyer regained his sight and could catch up on everything that had occurred during his fourteen long years of blindness. They had to pull out Mrs. Collyer's silk dresses and her unfinished knitting, and her sons' baby carriages, and their school desks and model trains and bicycles and opera tickets, and Sunday school report cards, and designs for the perfect telescope, and the canning jars of their own excrement that had crashed down upon their heads, before they were able to find and remove the lifeless, half-starved, rat-gnawed, perfectly slug-white bodies of the ghosty men.

As the work crew dug their way down through the house, a brisk wind—the first of the fall—blew through the windows. Dispelling some of the foul vapors emerging steadily from the bowels of the house. Sailing the thousands of loose sheets of paper—the personal letters, and the old bills, and the sheets and sheets of the Braille alphabet for the blind—like old leaves into the streets below, where they were grabbed up and scrutinized by all the people of the neighborhood as they picked idly through the mounds of trash piling steadily up around the house.

Jakey Mendelssohn opened a dusty cardboard box his cousin handed him from the pile. Staring at the pristine white shirt, and the bright red tie perfectly preserved inside. A price tag from Macy's for ninety-seven cents still attached, along with a card dated October 3, 1918: “
To Langley, with many happy returns this day, Pop.
”

“To get such a present from a father, and never open it!” he sighed, handing the box back to his cousin, who went on poking and digging through the enormous piles. His eyes more alert now, Jakey thought approvingly. Some of the old blind terror fading— the boy taking more of an interest in things. Jakey had thought of starting him in a high school next month, if his English proved good enough. Not sure just where that might be, now that he was considering giving up on his own stunted department store at last, while he might still get something for it. Dreaming at night of the open potato fields he had driven past, far out on Long Island.

Jonah strolled along the sidewalk with Amanda, taking in the incessant, hivelike activity before them. Watching the old mansion hollow out before their eyes. Their progress slowed by everyone who stopped to talk with them, and shake his hand—men and women from their own congregation, and from many others.

His reputation had spread since the night of the riot. He could see the respect and admiration in people's eyes when they spoke to him now. They had heard the famous story of his bargain with the cop, the whole tale already inflated into some classic story of folk wisdom, of outwitting the white man at his own game. He was now supposed to have converted his forbearance in sparing the white cop's life into great riches, and political power—for his church, his people, himself.

The story fast becoming its own reality. He was here today looking over the deconstructed ghosty men's house at the behest of both Adam Powell and his old O'Kane patrons. Already appointed to half a dozen official, and quasi-official, and ad hoc boards on the reconstruction of Harlem by the mayor; the Council of Churchmen, the local Democratic clubs—anyone and everyone interested in staking their claim. Adam's wolfish political associates from Café Society, Mr. Jones and Mr. Jack, looking him over with newfound interest.

It wasn't just the story of the cop, he knew, or his finding his voice. He had come into his inheritance, at last. A week ago he had stood at the altar of the New Jerusalem and presided over the funeral of his father, Milton Dove, who had passed in his sleep a few nights before. The old man's chair draped in black, sitting empty behind the altar. His massive face looking as pleased and tranquil in death as it had when Jonah had put him to bed that night.
And why not?
Having lived to see his church secured, and passed on to his son; his daughter-in-law returned. Jonah had given his eulogy, reciting again the sacred legends of the church. The story of how Milton had gone out into the street to face the mob, and how he had been saved by his mother, that white woman. How he had descended into the South to bring back his father, and had found his church wandering in the Wilderness.

It had been a necessary ritual. By the end of his eulogy everyone in the church was weeping, and the New Jerusalem was his. Amanda sitting up straight and tall in her usual seat, looking lovely and exquisitely dignified in her black dress and veil. The crowd spilling out onto the sidewalk and down the block, like one of Adam's congregations. Adam there, too, in one of the front pews, along with his politico friends. All of them leaping up to shake his hand when the funeral service was done—to affirm his succession before all the rest of Harlem, as if there could be any remaining doubt about it.

He wondered, on the long drive out to Brooklyn to lay his father's body in the ground, if the prize would be worth as much as they thought. The tires of the hearse and the limousines crunching over the nuggets of broken glass that still lay in the street. So much glass shattered during the riot that it could not be replaced; with the war now they simply weren't making enough for civilian use, so that many of the reopened stores still had planks nailed over their windows. Others would never open again, their owners wiped out, without any insurance. Even the Elder Lightfoot Michaux's revival had finally packed its tents and moved on, leaving a small heap of debris and a whirlpool of evangelical pamphlets, blowing all over the neighborhood as a final, insolent salute to the good people of Sugar Hill. For days afterward there had not even been enough milk to go around, and Jonah and the other ministers had had to organize runs over to New Jersey and up to the Bronx, so the babies and children would have enough to drink.

There had been a great show of unity in the immediate wake of the riot. By common consensus it had all been blamed on hoodlums, and a bad element, and on unattended youths. Everyone— even Adam—was talking about how it had not been nearly as bad as Detroit, and praising Mayor La Guardia and the police for their restraint. The mayor had announced that he would do all he could to see to it that the new Metropolitan Life housing project would be integrated—even if the company itself remained conspicuously silent on the issue. There was much talk of all the grand new things that would be done once the war was over, and the city council had appointed an investigative committee of prominent citizens to root out the underlying causes of the riot, and ensure that such a thing could never happen again—exactly as they had done after the last riot, eight years before.

Jonah had read the editorial in the
Amsterdam Star-News
, decreeing that “Harlem has sung and danced, when it should have been working and praying”—but in fact the one thing that had mollified people the most was the military agreeing that the Savoy Ballroom could be opened for business again. Already, the servicemen had begun to return, the nightly carnival starting up again. The soldiers and their glamour girls walking the streets, laughing louder and drinking more than ever. But somehow even this felt different—as if they, too, sensed that something had changed, and were trying a little too hard to make up for it. The neighborhood looking inescapably more tawdry, and run-down, with all of those boarded-up windows. As if maybe something had finally and irretrievably been yanked out of Harlem, the old Harlem that Jonah knew, and that—after the years of war and the years of the Depression, after all the years and decades before that of suffering and frustration and hatred, tracing back so far in the life of the City and the life of the Nation, to before Harlem even
was
Harlem—it could never be put back right again, no matter what miracles of harmony and prosperity were guaranteed for the world, when this war was finally ended.

It didn't matter, at least not to his future. Jonah had dutifully signed his name to all the statements of civic unity, and accepted his role on the commissions and committees. Knowing that he was here to stay now, come whatever may—that this was what it meant to give himself over to a place, a church, a people.
His people
. He wished for them nothing but the best, would give his all to bring about nothing but good, but whether it happened or not—he would be here. Even if the very worst happened, he would be here. And if it was instead, as usual, the big something in between—the in between men's best visions and the very worst, that God had seen to it for whatever mysterious reason was how we were to almost always live—he would be here for that, too. The big empty house on Strivers Row to be filled up first of all with the running of children's feet—with other voices besides those of himself and his wife, that they could love and cherish, and pass it on to.

Even with his sister's voice, maybe.
He stopped to pick up an old-fashioned picture postcard the wind had blown down on the sidewalk in front of him from the ghosty men's house. It was a hand-tinted photograph from Coney Island, a picture of a spectacular, illuminated amusement park that had not existed for at least thirty years—the ink on the back long ago rubbed away.

He had been receiving blank postcards himself for the past two weeks now. Arriving from points moving inexorably west, across the country, from Chicago, and Kansas City—then most recently an idyllic shot of a little cottage somewhere in Southern California, next to a grove of orange trees. There was never anything on the back of them, not even a signature, but he had no trouble guessing who they were from.

A few days after the riot, as soon as he had had a moment to himself, he had gone downtown to check on Sophia. Surprised but not surprised to discover that she had thrown up her contract at Café Society. The elegant new apartment on Cornelia Street abandoned just as abruptly, no forwarding address of any kind left behind with the oafish doorman.

His sister, disappearing into the broader, white world.
He wondered if he would look up at a movie screen someday and see her face there. Or if she would vanish even more completely, subsumed into marriage, in-laws, a whole new set of ways and customs. Disappearing so thoroughly that one day she would not even be able to remember herself what she had been, and where she had come from. Jonah drawing consolation only from the fact that the postcards had been sent at all, hoping that someday one might include a forwarding address. Wishing only that he could convey again that there would always be a room for her, no matter how long she was gone, if one evening they should hear her uncertain tap on the back door of their home.

He smiled at his wife, and patted her hand where it lay along his arm. Amanda smiling back, reaching up and tracing her finger along the groove that the white cop had put into his forehead, just below the line of his hair. The cut healing up well now along its stitches, though it had stung like hell when the doctor had first put them in, down at Harlem Hospital. Smiling with pride, even as he winced, wondering if it would be as prominent a mark as the one across his Daddy's head.

The wind blew a new shower of paper into the street, and they picked up their stride. Trying not to fall too far behind Adam, who was walking along in front with his politico pals, and a whole phalanx of O'Kanes and Murphys and Quinns, sent down from Ed Flynn in the Bronx. Pacing back and forth, around the corner lot of the Collyer property, moving ostentatiously through the curious, sightseeing crowds drawn from all the surrounding neighborhoods. The streams of colored people who lived on the block, and the battalions of Irish cops and City workers, and the Jews and Italians and Puerto Ricans who came from just over in East Harlem, all to see to the demolition and disposal of the ghosty men's house.

Charlie O'Kane was gesturing munificently at the property before them, trying his very best to appease Adam. Explaining once again just how many brand-new, public-housing apartments might be squeezed into a project on such a grand corner lot. Explaining how one or two of the skilled men working on the site might even be Negroes—in exchange, of course, for letting the all-white, Metropolitan Life project go through as planned.

And Adam Powell, walking along with him, had grinned around the pipe clenched in his mouth. Nodding his head vigorously, as if he understood and agreed with all that the O'Kanes were saying even as Jonah, watching from a distance, could tell how much they were deceiving themselves. Ready for it when Adam swung his great head back, exploding in that infinitely gleeful, infectious laugh of his.

“Oh, no!” he exclaimed, so loud that heads turned all up and down along the site of the ghosty men's old place.

“Oh, no! It's going to take
so
much more than that!”

Malcolm made his way back to the observation car at the rear of the train. Knowing that the conductors weren't fond of free riders, especially young colored men coming back here amidst the white passengers, but not really caring. Just as glad, actually, to see the white mothers and children there eyeing him warily, even picking up to go. The older white men rattling their newspapers and settling them in front of their faces—their open conversations ruined, but damned if they were going to move for any black boy.