A Rage in Harlem (4 page)

So Jackson went back to the dice game.

He prayed to the dice; he begged them. “I got pains in my heart as sharp as razor blades, and misery in my mind as deep as the bottom of the ocean and tall as the Rocky Mountains.”

He took off his coat when it came his second turn to shoot. His shirt was wet. His trousers chafed his crotch. He loosened his suspenders when his third turn came and let them hang down his legs.

Jackson threw more natural sevens and elevens than had ever been seen in that game before. But he threw more craps, twos, threes and twelves, than he did natural sevens and elevens. And as all good crapshooters know, crapping is the way you lose.

Day was breaking when the game gave out. They had Jackson. He was stone-cold broke. He borrowed fifty cents from the house and trudged slowly down to the snack bar in the Theresa Hotel. He got a cup of coffee and two doughnuts for thirty cents and stood at the counter.

His eyes were glazed. His black skin had turned putty-gray. He was as tired as though he’d been plowing rocks with a mule team.

“You look beat,” the counterman said.

“I feel low enough to be buried in whalebones, and they’re on the bottom of the sea,” he confessed.

The counterman watched him gobble his doughnuts and gulp his coffee.

“You must have got broke in that crap game.”

“I did,” Jackson confessed.

“Looks like it. They say a rich man can’t sleep, but a broke man can’t get enough to eat.”

Jackson looked up at the clock on the wall and the clock said hurry-hurry. Mr. Clay came down from his living quarters at nine o’clock sharp. Jackson knew he’d have to be there with the money
and find some way to slip it back into the safe when Mr. Clay opened it if he expected to get away with it.

Imabelle could raise the money, but he hated to ask her. It meant she’d have to be dishonest. But the kind of trouble they were in now would make a rat eat red pepper.

He went into the hotel lobby next door and telephoned his apartment.

The Theresa lobby was dead at that hour save for a few working-johns who had to make eight o’clock time downtown, and were hurrying into the hotel grill for their morning grits and bacon.

His landlady answered.

“Is Imabelle come home?” he asked.

“Your yallah woman is in jail where you ought to be too,” she answered evilly.

“In jail? How come?”

“Right after you phoned here last night a United States marshal brought her back here under arrest. He was looking for you too, Jackson, and if I’d knowed where you was I’d have told him. He wanted you both on a counterfeiting charge.”

“A United States marshal? He had her under arrest? What’d he look like?”

“He said you knew him.”

“What did he do with Imabelle?”

“He took her to jail, that’s what. And he confiscated her trunk and took that along in case he didn’t find you.”

“Her trunk?” Jackson was so stunned he could barely speak. “He confiscated her trunk? And took it with him?”

“He sure did, lover boy. And when he finds you –”

“Good God! He confiscated her trunk? What did he say his name was?”

“Don’t ask me no more questions, Jackson. I ain’t going to get myself in any trouble helping you to escape.”

“You ain’t got a Christian bone inside of you,” he said, and slowly hung up the receiver.

He stood sagging against the wall of the telephone booth. He felt as though he had stumbled into quicksand. Every time he struggled to get out, he went in deeper.

He couldn’t figure out how the marshal managed to get hold of Imabelle’s trunk. How had he found out what was in it – unless he
had scared her enough to make her tell? And that meant she was in trouble.

What made it so bad for Jackson was he didn’t know where to look for the marshal. He had no idea where the marshal had taken Imabelle. He didn’t believe the marshal had taken her to the federal jail because the marshal was out for all he could get. The marshal wouldn’t take her trunk down to the jail if he expected to get a cut for himself. But Jackson had no idea how to go about tracing him. And he didn’t know what he could do to save her trunk if he found the marshal.

He stood on the empty sidewalk in front of the Theresa, trying to think of a way out. His face was knotted from mental effort. Finally he muttered to himself, “There ain’t no help for it.”

He’d have to see his twin brother Goldy. Goldy knew everybody in Harlem.

He didn’t know where Goldy lived, so he’d have to wait until noon when Goldy appeared on the street. He was afraid to loiter on the street himself. He didn’t have the price of a movie, although there was one in the block that opened at eight o’clock in the morning. But there was a professional building around the corner on 125th Street with a number of doctors’ offices.

He went up on the second floor and sat in a doctor’s waiting room. The doctor hadn’t arrived, but there were already four patients waiting. He kept moving back in line, after the doctor had arrived, letting everybody go ahead of him.

The receptionist kept looking at him from time to time. Finally she asked in a hard voice, “Are you sick or aren’t you?”

By then it was almost noon.

“I was, but I feel better now,” he said and put his hat on and left.

The plate-glass front of Blumstein’s Department Store, exhibiting eye-catching items of wearing apparel and house furnishings for the residents of Harlem, extended from the back of the Theresa Hotel a half block down 125th Street.

A Sister of Mercy sat on a campstool to one side of the entrance, shaking a round black collection-box at the passersby and smiling sadly.

She was dressed in a long black gown, similar to the vestments of a nun, with a white starched bonnet atop a fringe of gray hair. A large gold cross, attached to a black ribbon, hung at her breast. She had a smooth-skinned, round black cherubic face, and two gold teeth in front which gleamed when she smiled.

No one paid her any special attention. There were many black Sisters of Mercy seen throughout Manhattan. They solicited in the big department-stores downtown, on Fifth Avenue, in the railroad stations, up and down 42nd Street and throughout Times Square. Only a few persons knew the name of the organization they belonged to. Most of the Harlem folk thought they were nuns, just the same as there were black, kinky-headed, frizzly-bearded rabbis seen about the streets.

She glanced up at Jackson and whispered in a prayerful voice, “Give to the Lawd, Brother. Give to the poor.”

Jackson stopped to one side of her stool and examined the nylon stockings on display in the window.

A colored drunk staggering past, turned around and leered at the Sister of Mercy.

“Bless me, Sistah. Bless old Mose,” he mumbled, trying to be funny.

“ ‘Knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked,’ sayeth the Lawd,” the Sister quoted.

The drunk blinked and staggered hurriedly away.

A little black girl with witch-plaited hair ran up to the nun and said in a breathless voice, “Sister Gabriel, Mama wants two tickets to heaven. Uncle Pone’s dyin’.”

She stuck two one-dollar bills into the nun’s hand.

“ ‘Buy of me gold tried in the fire,’ sayeth the Lawd,” the nun whispered, tucking the bucks inside her gown. “What do she want two for, child?”

“Mama say Uncle Pone need two.”

The nun slipped a black hand into the folds of her gown, drew out two white cards, and gave them to the little girl. Printed on the cards were the words:

“These’ll take Uncle Pone to the bosom of the Lawd,” she promised. “ ‘And I saw heaven opened, and beheld a white horse.’ ”

“Amen,” the little girl said, and ran off with the two tickets to heaven.

“Shame on you, Goldy. Blaspheming the Lord like that,” Jackson whispered. “The police are going to get you for selling those tickets.”

“Ain’t no law against it,” Goldy whispered in reply. “They just say ‘Admit One.’ They don’t say to where. Might be to the Savoy Ballroom.”

“There’s a law against impersonating a female,” Jackson said disgustedly.

“You let the police take care of the law, Bruzz.”

A couple approached to enter the store. Goldy rattled his coin box.

“Give to the Lawd, give to the poor,” he begged prayerfully.

The woman stopped and dropped three pennies into the box.

Goldy’s saintly smile went sour.

“Bless you, Mother, bless you. If three little pennies is all the Lawd is worth to you, then bless you.”

The woman’s dark brown skin turned purple. She dug up a dime.

“Bless you, Mother. Praise be the Lawd,” Goldy whispered indifferently.

The woman went inside the store, but she could feel the eyes of the Lord pinned on her and the angels in heaven whispering among themselves, “What a cheapskate!” She was too ashamed to buy the dress she’d come for and she was unhappy all the rest of the day.

“I got to see you, Goldy,” Jackson said, looking at the nylons in the window.

Two teen-age girls were passing at the time and heard him. They had no idea he was speaking to the Sister of Mercy and there was no one else nearby. They began giggling.

“A stockin’ freak,” one said.

The other replied, “He calls them Goldy, too.”

Goldy brushed imaginary dust from his lap, took another look at Jackson’s face, then stood up slowly, moving like an elderly woman, and folded the campstool.

“Stay in back of me,” he whispered. “ ’Way back.”

He put the stool under one arm, jangled the coin box in the other hand, and trudged down the slushy sidewalk toward Seventh Avenue, blessing the colored folk who fed coins into the kitty. He looked like a tired, fat, saintly black woman, slaving in the service of the Lord.

He was a familiar sight. No one gave him a second look.

Seventh Avenue and 125th Street is the center of Harlem, the crossroads of Black America. On one corner was the largest hotel. Diagonally across from it was a big credit jewelry store with its windows filled with diamonds and watches selling for so much down and so much weekly. Next door was a book store with a big red-and-yellow sign reading:
Books of 6,000,000 Colored People
. On the other corner was a mission church.

The people of Harlem take their religion seriously. If Goldy had taken off in a flaming chariot and galloped straight to heaven, they would have believed it – the godly and the sinners alike.

Goldy turned south on Seventh Avenue, past the Theresa Hotel entrance, past Sugar Ray’s Tavern, past the barber shop where the sharp cats got their nappy kinks straightened with a mixture of Vaseline and potash lye. He turned east on 121st Street into the Valley, climbed over piles of frozen garbage, kicked a mangy cur in the ribs, and entered a grimy tobacco-store which fronted for a numbers drop and reefer shop. Three teen-age boys had a fifteen-year-old girl inside, all blowing gage. They were trying to get her to undress.

“Go ahead, take ’em off, baby, take ’em off.”

“Ain’t nobody comin’. Go ahead and strip.”

“Why don’t you punks leave the girl alone,” the proprietor said half-heartedly. “You can see she’s ’shamed of her shape.”

“I ain’t ’shamed, neither,” she said. “I got a good shape and I know it.”

“Course you have,” the proprietor said, winking at her lecherously.

He was a tall, dirty-looking yellow man with a lumpy pockmarked face and swimming red eyes.

“Bless the Lawd, Soldier,” Goldy greeted him on entering. “Bless the Lawd, children.” He gave the teen-agers a confidential look and quoted, “ ‘By these three was the third part of men killed, by the fire and by the smoke and by the brimstone which issued out of their mouths.’ ”

“Amen, Sister,” the owner said, winking at Goldy.

The girl snickered. The boys fidgeted indecisively and shut up for a moment.

No one who noticed it thought it strange for a Sister of Mercy to kick a cur dog in the ribs, enter a dope den, and quote enigmatic Scripture to reefer-smoking delinquents.

In silence, Goldy waited for Jackson to catch up, then took him through the rear door, down a damp dark hallway, stinking of many varieties of excrement, and opened a padlocked door. He switched on a dim, fly-specked drop-lamp, slipped warily into a damp, cold, windowless room furnished with a scarred wooden table, two wobbly straight-backed chairs, a couch covered with dirty gray blankets. Against one wall, mildewed cardboard cartons were stacked one atop the other. The other dark-gray concrete walls sweated from the chill, damp air.

After Jackson had entered, Goldy padlocked the door on the inside and lit a rusty black kerosene stove which smoked and stank. He then threw the stool onto the couch, put his money box on the table, and sat down with a long sigh. He took off his white bonnet and gray wig.

Seen without his disguise, he was the spitting image of Jackson. White people in the South, where they had come from, had called them the Gold Dust Twins because of their resemblance to the twins pictured on the yellow boxes of God Dust soap powder.

“I don’t live here,” Goldy said. “This is just my office.”

“I don’t see how nobody could,” Jackson said as he eased his weight onto one of the wobbly chairs.

“There’s people lives in worse places,” Goldy said.

Jackson wouldn’t argue the point. “Goldy, there’s something I want to ask you.”

“I got to feed my monkey first.”

Jackson looked about for the monkey.

“He’s on my back,” Goldy explained.

Jackson watched him with silent disgust as Goldy took an alcohol lamp, teaspoon and a hypodermic needle from the table drawer. Goldy shook two small papers of crystal cocaine and morphine into the spoon and cooked a C and M speedball over the flame. He groaned as he banged himself in the arm while the mixture was still warm.

“It’s the same stuff as Saint John the Divine used,” Goldy said. “Did you know that, Bruzz? You’re a churchgoing man.”

Jackson was glad none of his acquaintances knew he had such a brother as Goldy, a dope-fiend crook impersonating a Sister of Mercy. Especially Imabelle. That’d be reason enough for her to quit him.