Strivers Row (2 page)

CHAPTER TWO

MALCOLM

He would lead the train, waiting until it was almost gone before he grabbed on. It was a little move he had perfected, just for the rest of the kitchen crew. Slowing to a walk beside the beautiful silver cars. Matching his stride to the revolution of their wheels as they slowly picked up speed—turning over one, two, three beats every ten seconds. Letting the marvelously streamlined, green-and-gold-striped electric engine go by. Then the stainless-steel kitchen, and the club car with the big blue, stretched-out letters spelling
THE YANKEE CLIPPER.
The rest of the crew grinning and hollering at him from the door of the kitchen car, Lionel Beane and Sandy Thorne and Willard Chandler, all in their working whites, as gleaming and spotless as the club-car china.

“You gonna have to saunter all the way to New York, you don't stop that!”

“Oh, one a these days that niggah's gonna tear off a arm. Then he won't look so good in his killer-diller!”

He only grinned back at them. Their faces all as black as raisins, these older men who had already put in a good sixty years between them on the Dope, or the Pennsy. Always half-laughing and sniggering behind his back, even after they had become his friends.

The train was picking up speed but he let it go. Running a hand disdainfully down the wide lapels of the new sharkskin zoot he had picked out expressly for the occasion. Its narrowed waist and broad shoulders making the upper half of his body look like one big inverted triangle; the cuffs of the Punjab pants so tapered he had to take off his knob-toed, sweet-potato-colored shoes before he could pull them on.

This was the trip, today was the day—

The sleek, bullet-nosed GG-1 engine was about to reach critical acceleration now. He could feel its heat on his face, the big silver cars deceptive in their speed. Once he had watched as a signalman in the Dover Street Yards, a veteran trainman, had absentmindedly stuck out a leg to stop a sleeper that was ambling slowly backward along a siding, only to see his foot sheered off effortlessly at the ankle.

Still, he waited. Adjusting his beat to the train, trying to think of it as a number, like listening to Jimmie Lunceford's band bang out the “Yard Dog Mazurka” in the Roseland ballroom the week before, just trying to let his feet get the feel of it. Picking up his tempo but still refusing to run. Still waiting, counting off the cars, letting it come to him—beat, beat, beat-beat-beat. Waiting until the last car was already passing, the train going too fast now, hurtling by him—and only then taking one, two more quick strides. Throwing his trainman's bag up through the open door with an easy, overhanded motion. Snapping the gray hat with its four-inch brim and matching gray feather off his head so it did not get caught in the backdraft and—at the same time—sticking out his other hand to
just
grab hold of the railing on the very last doorway before it passed. Letting the momentum of the entire train, throttling along at full power now, pull him up. Pivoting casually on the balls of his feet as it did, so that he swung up easily into the coach instead of pulling out his shoulder, or plastering his face against the side of the moving car, or falling under the last, flashing set of wheels.

The face of his father rising suddenly before him. All but cut in half. That was what she had said at the time, all but cut in half but still alive. Still able to talk and groan out his last breaths, even after he had fallen under the slashing metal wheels—

Then he was inside, rushing up the aisles to the kitchen car. Laughing out loud as the passengers turned to stare at him—big, lunatic, zoot-suited Negro, running up through their train. Changing, too, even as he ran. Shrugging out of the long gray coat of his zoot suit, tugging the spotless white linen jacket on over his under-shirt. Undoing the narrow belt with its gold-plated “L” for “Little” on the buckle even as he tumbled into the kitchen—grinning like a wolf at the rest of them, Lionel and Sandy and Willard staring back at him in amazement despite themselves.

“What say, Cholly Hoss? Thought I was back in the Bunker Hill Apple?”

“Oh, Sandwich Red, makin' a flash. Pappy gonna conk you up
good
for this one!”

“I swear it, he was
mad
this time! Gonna skin yo' marin-y little ass for you.”

The other men tsking and and shaking their heads as they went about their tasks—bent over the stove, stuffing the sandwiches into their dozens of little plastic bags and boiling up the endless pots of coffee. But still impressed, Malcolm could tell.

“Ah, I ain't comin' on that tab,” he snorted back at them as he shucked off his pants and shoes. “You know Pappy
love
me. I'm light an' bright an' damn near white with the man.”

He pulled on the rest of his sandwich man uniform, the dark blue pants with a red crease down the legs, matching blue hat with its brass badge. Pretending to himself as always he did that it was a military uniform, like the dozens of uniforms they saw on the train every day now.
Navy dress whites, maybe. Like a commander, or a rear admiral.
He stuffed his small leather train bag with its razor and toothbrush, a change of underwear, and his Amazing Man and SubMariner comics into the bottom of the little pantry closet. The gray zoot he mounted carefully on a wooden hanger, praying that somehow nothing would spill on it, or that the rest of the crew wouldn't play him some awful practical joke, the suit still out on credit from the Jew store.

“Ooh, dig Mr. High Pockets,” Lionel cooed at him. “He's lookin' fine as thine for the big night.”

“You know it,” Malcolm winked back at him. “Got to be togged to the bricks, you gonna make time with those Harlem chicks.”

“Listen to him knockin' his gums,” Sandy Thorne scoffed, pouring out streams of coffee into the five-gallon silver thermos that would be Malcolm's constant burden for the next six hours.

“Boy don't know any more about Harlem than a pig knows about Sunday or napkins!”

“I will tonight!”

Tonight. He would be in Harlem tonight.

This was finally it—a layover in New York after two and one-half months working straight down to D.C. Spending his nights in streets with names like Pig Alley and Goat Alley, full of craps-shooters and wandering stumblebums, and half-naked children still running around at midnight, begging for pennies. Most nights he preferred to sleep sitting up in Union Station, between all the uniformed soldiers and sailors there. Pretending to himself that, like them, he was on his way to ship out to Algiers, or Tahiti, or Salerno—

But tonight was going to be something else.
Harlem.
He remembered the photographs of it, in his father's copies of the Pittsburgh
Courier
or the Chicago
Defender.
A vast crowd of smiling, confi-dent, well-dressed black men and women. All of them cheering and pointing up at Joe Louis where he stood on the balcony of the Theresa Hotel, the day after he'd won the heavyweight championship of the world. And Louis himself waving back at them, looking as poised and self-assured as an emperor.

“You gonna take me out, ” Malcolm said, alarmed—uncomfortably aware that his voice sounded suddenly high and childlike, but unable to help himself.

“If we got the time—” Sandy started to say, teasing him.

“You
said
you was. You said you'd take me everywhere!”

“Listen to the Home from Rome. Yeah, we'll boot you to the play, all right. I just don't know you can
handle
all the action we'll get you—”

“I'll let you know what I can
handle
!”

“Ah, boy, this ain't none a that down-home Michiganmess we're talkin' 'bout.”

“We ain't talkin' no faust, only a fine dinner—”

“Hey, I'm dracula when it comes to the ladies!”

“Is anybody plannin' to feed the passengers today?”

Pappy Cousins stood in the doorway, with his arms crossed sternly over his chest, but his steward's cap slightly askew and his blue eyes shining. He looked at Malcolm first, as usual.

“Jesus Christ, but you ah gonna miss one a these days!” he sputtered, his words slurring. “We're gonna pull into Grand Central with nothin' but a black arm hangin' off the back a the train, like a Chinaman's cue!”

“Ah, that ain't nothin'. You should seen me last Sat'd'y night, Pappy,” Malcolm told him lightly, but he hurried to grab up the heavy, shoulder-strap sandwich box and the coffee pot that would push him up and down the aisles, bending his back and making his neck ache all the way to New York. He tried to dodge past Pappy and out to the train, but the steward stopped him.

“Hang on theah. Let's have a look at you now.”

He inspected Malcolm with open, fatherly affection, brushing down his sleeves with his whisk broom, straightening his hat. Usually the stewards lorded it over the colored kitchen crews, but not Pappy. He liked to joke with them, turned a blind eye to their lesser hustles, even took their part in disputes with passengers or the railroad. He was a small, fragile-looking man; an old Maine Yankee with leathery skin and large, mournful eyes and a protruding Adam's apple that made him look more than a little ridiculous, but they would do anything for him. At night in the room in Ella's house, Malcolm liked to dream of coming on the
Yankee Clipper
with his own band someday, togged out to the nines. Walking up to an astonished but proud Pappy and stuffing a thick roll of bills into his pocket, telling him,
See, Pappy? See what I made of myself ?

“You watch yourself out theah today,” he told Malcolm now, gripping his arm hard, to impress the seriousness of what he was saying upon him.

“There's some soldjah boys in the parlor car, goin' down to ship out, an' they're some mean little peckahs. They're workin' on a fifth, too, I seen it.”

“You
seen
it? You sure that all you done, Pappy?” Malcolm teased him, the smell of cheap scotch wafting off the little steward through the peppermint he was perennially sucking on. He heard Willard and Lionel chuckle and Pappy's merry blue eyes spun for a moment, but then he was serious again, crooking a finger at Malcolm.

“Nevah you mind what they give
me.
You're different to them. Nevah forget that with those fellas.”

“I won't,” Malcolm said, feeling suddenly hurt, though he knew the older man was only trying to warn him.

“All right then.”

Pappy stood back a step, looking him over with obvious pride, and Malcolm instinctively straightened his long body under his gaze. Drawing his back up under the weight of the sandwich box even as he wondered:
How could any man like you so much? Any stranger? And why wouldn't a father?

“So tonight's the big night, eh?”

“Yeah, it is.” Malcolm grinned despite himself, thinking about it. “Ah, geez, I remembah my first night down in Scollay Square.” Pappy smiled, shaking his head. Before Malcolm could react he slipped a bill into the pocket of his white linen coat, just below the sandwich box.

“Buy a round on me.”

“Thanks, Pappy.”

“Go on now. An' remembah what I told you.”

Then he was out in the coaches, flying back down the aisles between the high, green, upholstered seats with his box. The voice in his head already going.
Tom it up, Tom it up—

“Sandwiches! Sandwiches for sale! Eat 'em now, before they gets stale! I got some ham an' cheese, make you weak in the knees!”

He sold them slices of chocolate layer and coconut cake, and the sandwiches in their individual plastic bags, and boxes of Cracker Jack and bags of potato chips. Coffee from the five-gallon thermos balanced in one corner of his box, and ice cream wrapped in wax paper and kept as far from it as possible. Hershey bars and jujubes, Chicken Dinners and Three Musketeers; tar babies and licorice sticks; and Life Savers and sealed packs of cards and packs of chewing gum and cigarettes, and ten-cent cigars, and little pillows for those who wished to rest their heads and try to sleep on the sweltering, oversold train.

The box was heavy even when it was empty, but once he worked himself into a rhythm he could make it dance. Letting the momentum of the train carry him. Letting his legs roll with the rocking of the car, and sway with the weight of the box until, after six hours on the aisles, he would feel his knees buckle when they hit concrete again, and for the rest of the night would walk as bowlegged as a sailor.

“I got chicken salad an' egg salad, I got turkey an' that's no baloney!” he sang out. “I got no fried fish, but I got whatever else you wish—”

Tom it up, Tom it up now!

—the sardonic little chant he sang to himself
underneath
all the bright patter. The way they all did, every black man on the train crew, from the porters to the dining car waiters to the baggage smashers, knowing that the more elaborate their performance, the better their tips would be. Propping the box on his knee and swinging open the door to the next car where he would, inevitably, watch the twin rows of white faces look up distractedly and suddenly brighten, just to see him standing there.

Oh, but how they like to see us work!

Business was good, with the war on. Every seat was filled, with more bodies jammed into the parlor cars and the diners, standing up the whole trip around the bar car. The coaches full of smooth-faced young soldiers and sailors, looking hungover and frightened. Workingmen on their way to the shipyards, and men in sharp gray business suits, and pregnant young mothers, and card sharps, and aging whores, and whole families. All of them going
somewhere—
to see off a loved one, or make some money, or cut a deal, and
why not me
? He was on his way to
Harlem
after showing up in Boston six months ago still smelling of the country, with his red hair and a green suit so short his arms and legs stuck out—