The Drifters (20 page)

Reverend Jackson especially liked the passage which dealt with the preparations for throwing the three into the fiery furnace: ‘ “He commanded that they should heat the furnace seven times more than it was wont to be heated. And he commanded the most mighty men that were in his army to bind Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, and to cast them into the burning fiery furnace. Then these men were bound in their coats, their hosen and their hats, and their other garments, and were cast into the midst of the burning fiery furnace.” ’ He came back several times to the hosen.

He droned on and on, bewailing the fate of the three little Hebrew children, but I had no suspicion of what he was leading up to. In his peroration, when the three were saved, he cried exultantly, ‘And today we have in our midst a fine gentleman who has come to save us. He sits among us now, all the way from Switzerland, with millions of dollars for stores and churches and schools and maybe even factories. There he sits, a gentleman of great power, and if you elders with the plates approach him politely, I’m sure he’s going to give us at least fifty dollars.’

I slumped in my seat, but the elders descended upon me and I could do no less than peel off five tens, which the plate carrier bore in triumph to the front of the church, displaying them to the congregation. There were some hymns, some announcements, a long closing prayer in which I appeared favorably, and the service was over.

I tried to slip out a side door so that I wouldn’t have to encounter Reverend Jackson’s effusive thanks, which I could see headed my way, but when I reached the escape route I found it barred by a slim, taut, good-looking young Negro boy in his late teens. ‘Trying to escape? You couldn’t stomach Father’s soaring bullshit?’

And that was how I met Cato Jackson.

In the weeks that followed, Reverend Claypool Jackson became a continuing headache; in any situation he was an unctuous clown who felt no shame at playing the role of plantation Negro buttering up the white man in order to get what he wanted. In my case the problem was aggravated
because he knew I had a substantial sum of money to dispense and he had conceived the idea that he alone could give me advice.

What irritated me was that he assumed the role of Negro leader and was ever willing to speak on behalf of the million or more Negroes who lived in Philadelphia. This would have been tolerable had he had an understanding of the Negro community, but of the actual life in the crowded streets he was sweetly innocent. Every shred of advice he gave me was not only irrelevant; it was corrosive.

His huge Gothic church stood on the corner of Grimsby and Sixth. His home was two blocks away at Grimsby and Fourth. Taking these two points as foci of an ellipse covering six or seven blocks in each direction, the church and the manse were centers of an area epitomizing the collapse of city living, so far as Negroes were concerned. Within the preceding twenty-four months in this area six Negro adults had been murdered, seven Negro children under the age of nineteen had been slain, plus three Jewish storekeepers. Sixty-nine percent of all births had been illegitimate; fourteen adult men made their living pushing heroin to black students attending nearby Classical High, where four teachers had been assaulted in their classrooms and one raped in the cafeteria.

This ellipse of the future was governed principally by Irish and Italian policemen whose sentimental attachment to Catholicism rendered them incapable of comprehending what was happening in the Negro community and insensitive to the aspirations of its residents. Twice the district had been on the verge of explosion, once because a white policeman had shot and killed an eleven-year-old Negro boy, once because Negroes, seeing a white policeman trying to save the life of a Negro boy by breathing into his mouth, thought, naturally, that the policeman was strangling a fallen boy, and so jumped him. In the confusion the boy died and the policeman lost an eye.

As for prostitution, dope, addiction, illiteracy, unemployment, theft and the other indices of urban collapse, the district around Reverend Jackson’s church was a microcosm; indeed, that was why we had selected this particular area for our experiment. We were convinced that the human population within the ellipse was salvageable. We wanted to help this disoriented group find a solid economic base from which to restructure their community and their
homes. To us, Grimsby Street was both a challenge and a promise. We appreciated the special problems of Negroes, and wanted to work with them. We knew that only radical approaches carried any hope for success and were prepared to underwrite them.

I was therefore dismayed when Reverend Jackson insisted that the one good thing I could do to help the Negro population was—guess what? ‘Mr. Fairbanks, I feel sure that what we require most is for you to pay off the mortgage on our church.’

I felt numb, but decided to see what was in his mind: “How much?’

‘One hundred and eighty-eight thousand dollars.’

‘Why would you have so large a mortgage?’

‘When we bought the church …’

‘What do you mean?’

‘God didn’t give us this magnificent edifice. We bought it.’

‘From whom?’

‘From the white folks. When they moved out to the suburbs.’

‘How much did you pay for it?’

‘Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.’

‘And you’ve already reduced the mortgage by more than sixty thousand?’

‘Yes,’ he said proudly. ‘Our whole effort—cake sales, rummages, special summer collections—everything we do is aimed toward one great goal. To make God’s house stand free of debt.’

I noticed that in his talks with me he did not use the exaggerated dialect of his sermons. He had been to college in the south and had apparently done well.

‘What our community needs,’ he told me with varying types of supporting data, ‘is to have the mortgage on this church paid off so that this great edifice can stand like a beacon, reminding us of the life that Jesus would have us follow.’

‘Is the church a leader with the young?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes! Last summer it was the young people who collected the majority of our funds. If you look at our choir, you’ll see it’s filled with bright young faces.’

‘And the young people in the streets? The ones who beat up teachers at Classical High?’

‘Some of them have drifted from the Lord, but when
our church grows strong, they’ll come back. They respond to a good sermon, just like the others. I’m sure I’ve made it clear that the major need of the black community in Philadelphia is to have this church stand free of debt. Then it could assert its leadership.’

At each public meeting Reverend Jackson came back to this theme of religious leadership; before an audience his sense of propriety kept him from pressing his own case, and he did not refer to the mortgage, but he always waited to catch me alone, beseeching me to pay off the debt.

Concurrently with the general Negro community, I was undergoing an ambivalent experience in my attempt to invest Geneva funds. On the one hand, there was a small cadre of knowledgeable Negro experts who presented me with sensible plans for workable projects: small-loan banks, Negro industrial centers, merchandising schemes, cooperative apartments for young married workers, and an idea which I liked very much, an insurance company which would specialize in writing policies on unwed mothers so that in case of disaster their children would be assured of an education. After my meetings with such men I would return to my hotel room, alive with enthusiasm, and think: This community has all the intelligence it needs. Tomorrow we’ll get started.

But on the other hand, there was Nordness. He was a tall, acidulous, unhappy Minnesotan who had accompanied me from Geneva to act as office manager for the Philadelphia project, and he almost gave me an ulcer, because whenever I reported in the morning, eager to get started on some promising project, Nordness would stalk like a ghost into my office and launch his complaint. It was always the same: ‘I was very careful about hiring our master secretary, Mr. Fairbanks. I finally found a Negro who looked much better than the secretary we have in Geneva. But this is his sixth day on the job—and where is he?’ On the seventh, eighth and ninth days, Nordness started my mornings by reporting mournfully that the secretary was still absent. Then on the tenth day Nordness smiled his bitter smile and said, ‘Well, our man is back. And when I asked him where he had been for four days, what do you suppose he said? “Look, Harry got hisself into a bad scrape, somebody got to help out.” Who was Harry? A cousin three times removed.’

It was the opinion of Nordness that any incident relating
to family life was an excuse for a Negro employee to abandon his office responsibilities. ‘And the family is very broadly defined,’ he said dourly. ‘The other day it was an automobile accident involving the nephew of the woman to whom a man’s uncle was married. The man stayed away two days, and when I asked him how he could justify this, he told me, “We talkin’ about a boy. He got to be protected from the bulls.” ’

If I launched a project in which strict performance was essential, Nordness kept things going well at first, but before long he was in my office protesting that he could not make Negro supervisors enforce consistent standards of production because they identified with any worker who came up with a special problem. One day Nordness asked me, almost tearfully, ‘Where the hell do you suppose our treasurer is? I sent a messenger to find out and he came back with this good news: “Miss Catherine say she have to see her aunt in West Philadelphia. She be back start of next week.” ’

I told Nordness, with some impatience, ‘You seem unable to adjust to the Negro community.’ Then I threw in a suggestion which I did not intend him to take seriously: ‘Maybe you’d be happier back in Geneva.’

‘I can leave tonight!’ he cried. I’ve been spoiled by working with Germans. With them, you agree upon a system and it gets done.’

I asked, ‘Can’t you visualize a world in which Germans and Negroes work in their own ways?’

He said, ‘Maybe in two hundred years the Negroes will learn to work like Germans. Until then, you can have Philadelphia.’ He shrugged his shoulders to indicate that he didn’t give a damn what happened to the city, and that night he was on the plane back to Geneva.

So one after another of the hopeful projects Nordness and I had proposed when tackling this problem in the abstract, teetered and fell into the bog of indifference. I wasted a good few million dollars and accomplished little, yet always at my elbow when another enterprise failed would be Reverend Jackson advising me: ‘It’s like I told you at the beginning, Mr. Fairbanks. What Philadelphia really needs is to have the debt of the church paid off so that it can exercise moral authority and give these good people standards they can adhere to.’

When I work in a new community and drink unfamiliar
water I often develop a cold sore on my lip, and if I leave it unattended it grows bothersome. An Austrian chemist has advised a salve which suppresses such sores almost immediately and usually I carry a tube with me, but now I had none, so that evening after a community meeting at Reverend Jackson’s ornate church I stopped by a drugstore at the corner of Grimsby and Fifth, halfway between church and manse. When I pushed the door open, an old-fashioned, spring-activated bell alerted the unseen chemist to the fact that someone had entered his shop. On the wall facing me hung a large sign:
Smile, You’re on Store Detective
, and photographs explained how an unseen camera took pictures of you, even if the owner wasn’t visible. Another sign read:
When You’re in Trouble, We Work Double.
A rather grubby table offered a special to Puerto Rican customers: Emulsion Gimenez, with a portrait of a baldheaded doctor in a velvet-collared evening dress of 1905. Agua de Azahar was also featured, and a bold red package labeled
Assassinator! Takes Care of Bedbugs, Roaches and Other Vermin.

A swinging door from the rear opened and the pharmacist, an elderly man wearing a celluloid badge stating that he was Dr. Goldstein, moved slowly to greet me. He had heard of the Austrian salve. He didn’t have any but he thought he could get some from the wholesale house: ‘You come back tomorrow, ‘I’ll probably have it.’ In cases like this, when I have ordered something which the storekeeper might not be able to sell to anyone else, I always pay in advance, and when I did so, the old man smiled and said, ‘This doesn’t happen very often here. In my father’s shop in Germany it was customary.’

‘How is this community for paying bills?’ I asked.

He sighed. He was past sixty and this would surely be the last store he would own, so that he had a natural inclination to think kindly of it, but he couldn’t: ‘It’s very difficult. This neighborhood is hell put down on earth to test us.’

‘Are the Negroes so tough?’ I asked.

‘No! They’re good people, fundamentally. The hell is worse on them than it is on us. But I don’t think a white man—certainly not a Jew …’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘We’ll have to get out. Three times they’ve broken through that door to get heroin. I don’t carry any, so they get mad,
smash things up and drink a quart of paregoric, which kills them. Is that civilized?’

I asked about the work habits which had distressed Mr. Nordness so much, and he said, ‘I’ve tried Negro helpers. The black people who buy here used to complain that my assistants were Jewish, which was a just complaint. So I hired three different young men to help me—and what happens? They either steal me blind or don’t open the store on my day off. So then I have to fire them—and they charge me with discrimination.’

‘What will happen?’ I asked.

‘Time will happen. I could take you to a dozen homes around here that contain some of the best people in America. Kind, generous, well behaved. You’ve heard of Leroy Clore? Plays third base for Chicago … American League, that is. Well, he lives one block from here, and if he came in right now and said, “Morris, I have to have three hundred dollars,” I’d give it to him. I have great hopes that fifteen years from now we’ll have lots of Leroy Clores. But from now till then … trouble.’