One of the most intellectually gifted and lauded members of the New Negro Renaissance, Rudolph John Chauncey Fisher was born in Washington, DC, the youngest child of Reverend John W. Fisher and Glendora Williamson Fisher. Raised in Providence, Rhode Island, Fisher was a gifted student, graduating with honors from the Classical High School and later enrolling at Brown University. As a Brown student, he won awards for his performances in German, public speaking, rhetoric, and English composition; and he was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Fisher toured the East Coast with Paul Robeson, an All-American football player at Rutgers University, and a future icon of the New Negro Renaissance. With Fisher playing piano and Robeson singing, the two raised money to pay their way through their universities, from which they graduated in the same year. In his valedictory address for Brown’s Class of 1919, Fisher argued for the compatibility of science and religion, a topic he would pursue later in his career. After completing a master’s degree in biology from Brown in 1920, Fisher entered Howard University Medical School, where he began writing stories in his spare time. In 1925, a year after his graduation from Howard (again with highest honors), Fisher released two stories: “The City of Refuge,” which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, and “High Yaller,” which won the Spingarn Medal for its publication in The Crisis.
While interning with the Freedman’s Hospital in Washington, DC, Fisher met and married Jane Ryder, a DC grade-school teacher. When Fisher became a fellow of the National Research Council at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, the couple moved to Harlem. They immersed themselves in the music and culture of the city’s cabarets, speakeasies, and nightclubs. His essay “The Caucasian Storms Harlem,” published in The American Mercury in 1927, drew inspiration from the experience. His lifelong affinity for jazz, nurtured through his relationship with Robeson and his participation in the New Negro Renaissance, profoundly shaped his literary creativity.
In 1927 Fisher started his own private practice in roentgenology (an early term for radiology) out of his home in Jamaica, Long Island. X-ray technology was still a new tool, unaffordable to most physicians and unknown to many patients. As one of the few doctors to specialize in it, Fisher earned a level of distinction unattainable to most African American medical professionals of his era. He also served as First Lieutenant in the reserve Medical Corps of the 369th Infantry – the famous “Harlem Hellfighters” of World War I. Meanwhile, he published two novels, The Walls of Jericho (1928) and The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery of Dark Harlem (1932). Almost without peer in his intellectual and professional endeavors, Fisher’s promising future was prematurely cut short in 1934. At age 37 he died following four unsuccessful surgeries for intestinal cancer.
Balshaw, Maria. Looking for Harlem: Urban Aesthetics in African American Literature. London, UK: Pluto Press, 2000. Ch. 1 and 2.
Knadler, Stephen P. “Sweetback Style: Wallace Thurman and a Queer Harlem Renaissance.” MFS 48.4 (2002): 899–936.
Poikāne-Daumke, Aija. “The Meaning and Significance of Southern Tradition in Rudolph Fisher’s Stories.” The Harlem Renaissance Revisited: Politics, Arts, and Letters. Ed. Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 63–73.
Powell, Richard J. “Paint that Thing! Aaron Douglas’s Call to Modernism.” American Studies 49.1 (2008): 107–119.
Ross, Marlon B. “Racial Uplift and the Literature of the New Negro.” A Companion to African American Literature. Ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 151–168.
Rothenberg, Molly Anne. “Rudolph Fisher’s Missing Story ‘The Shadow of White’: A Study in the Transformation of Race Consciousness.” PMLA 127.3 (2012): 617–625.
Scruggs, Charles. “Sexual Desire, Modernity, and Modernism in the Fiction of Nella Larsen and Rudolph Fisher.” The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. George Hutchinson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 155–169.
Whalan, Mark. “‘The Only Real White Democracy’ and the Language of Liberation: The Great War, France, and African American Culture in the 1920s.” MFS 51.4 (2005): 775–800.
Confronted suddenly by daylight, King Solomon Gillis stood dazed and blinking. The railroad station, the long, white-walled corridor, the impassible slot-machine, the terrifying subway train – he felt as if he had been caught up in the jaws of a steam-shovel, jammed together with other helpless lumps of dirt, swept blindly along for a time, and at last abruptly dumped.
There had been strange and terrible sounds: “New York! Penn Terminal – all change!” “Pohter, hyer, pohter, suh?” Shuffle of a thousand soles, clatter of a thousand heels, innumerable echoes. Cracking rifleshots – no, snapping turnstiles. “Put a nickel in!” “Harlem? Sure. This side – next train.” Distant thunder, nearing. The screeching onslaught of the fiery hosts of hell, headlong, breath-taking. Car doors rattling, sliding, banging open. “Say, wha’ d’ye think this is, a baggage car?” Heat, oppression, suffocation – eternity – “Hundred’n turdy-fif next!” More turnstiles. Jonah emerging from the whale.
Clean air, blue sky, bright sunlight.
Gillis set down his tan-cardboard extension-case and wiped his black, shining brow. Then slowly, spreadingly, he grinned at what he saw: Negroes at every turn; up and down Lenox Avenue, up and down One Hundred and Thirty-Fifth Street; big, lanky Negroes, short, squat Negroes; black ones, brown ones, yellow ones; men standing idle on the curb, women, bundle-laden, trudging reluctantly homeward, children rattle-trapping about the sidewalks; here and there a white face drifting along, but Negroes predominantly, overwhelmingly everywhere. There was assuredly no doubt of his whereabouts. This was Negro Harlem.
Back in North Carolina Gillis had shot a white man and, with the aid of prayer and an automobile, probably escaped a lynching. Carefully avoiding the railroads, he had reached Washington in safety. For his car a Southwest bootlegger had given him a hundred dollars and directions to Harlem; and so he had come to Harlem.
Ever since a traveling preacher had first told him of the place, King Solomon Gillis had longed to come to Harlem. The Uggams were always talking about it; one of their boys had gone to France in the draft and, returning, had never got any nearer home than Harlem. And there were occasional “colored” newspapers from New York: newspapers that mentioned Negroes without comment, but always spoke of a white person as “So-and-so, white.” That was the point. In Harlem, black was white. You had rights that could not be denied you; you had privileges, protected by law. And you had money. Everybody in Harlem had money. It was a land of plenty. Why, had not Mouse Uggam sent back as much as fifty dollars at a time to his people in Waxhaw?
The shooting, therefore, simply catalyzed whatever sluggish mental reaction had been already directing King Solomon’s fortunes toward Harlem. The land of plenty was more than that now: it was also the city of refuge.
Casting about for direction, the tall newcomer’s glance caught inevitably on the most conspicuous thing in sight, a magnificent figure in blue that stood in the middle of the crossing and blew a whistle and waved great white-gloved hands. The Southern Negro’s eyes opened wide; his mouth opened wider. If the inside of New York had mystified him, the outside was amazing him. For there stood a handsome, brass-buttoned giant directing the heaviest traffic Gillis had ever seen; halting unnumbered tons of automobiles and trucks and wagons and pushcarts and street-cars; holding them at bay with one hand while he swept similar tons peremptorily on with the other; ruling the wide crossing with supreme self-assurance; and he, too, was a Negro!
Yet most of the vehicles that leaped or crouched at his bidding carried white passengers. One of these overdrove bounds a few feet and Gillis heard the officer’s shrill whistle and gruff reproof, saw the driver’s face turn red and his car draw back like a threatened pup. It was beyond belief – impossible. Black might be white, but it couldn’t be that white!
“Done died an’ woke up in Heaven,” thought King Solomon, watching, fascinated; and after a while, as if the wonder of it were too great to believe simply by seeing, “Cullud policemans!” he said, half aloud; then repeated over and over, with greater and greater conviction, “Even got cullud policemans – even got cullud – ”
“Where y’want to go, big boy?”
Gillis turned. A little, sharp-faced yellow man was addressing him. “Saw you was a stranger. Thought maybe I could help y’out.”
King Solomon located and gratefully extended a slip of paper. “Wha’ dis hyeh at, please, suh?”
The other studied it a moment, pushing back his hat and scratching his head. The hat was a tall-crowned, unindented brown felt; the head was brown patent-leather, its glistening brush-back flawless save for a suspicious crimpiness near the clean-grazed edges.
“See that second corner? Turn to the left when you get there. Number forty-five’s about halfway the block.”
“Thank y’, suh.”
“You from – Massachusetts?”
“No, suh, Nawth Ca’lina.”
“Is ’at so? You look like a Northerner. Be with us long?”
“Till I die,” grinned the flattered King Solomon.
“Stoppin’ there?”
“Reckon I is. Man in Washin’ton ’lowed I’d find lodgin’ at dis address.”
“Good enough. If y’ don’t, maybe I can fix y’ up. Harlem’s pretty crowded. This is me.” He proffered a card.
“Thank y’, suh,” said Gillis, and put the card in his pocket.
The little yellow man watched him plod flat-footedly on down the street, long awkward legs never quite straightened, shouldered extension-case bending him sidewise, wonder upon wonder halting or turning him about. Presently, as he proceeded, a pair of bright-green stockings caught and held his attention. Tony, the storekeeper, was crossing the sidewalk with a bushel basket of apples. There was a collision; the apples rolled; Tony exploded; King Solomon apologized. The little yellow man laughed shortly, took out a notebook, and put down the address he had seen on King Solomon’s slip of paper.
“Guess you’re the shine I been waitin’ for,” he surmised.
As Gillis, approaching his destination, stopped to rest, a haunting notion grew into an insistent idea. “Dat li’l yaller nigger was a sho’ ’nuff gen’man to show me de road. Seem lak I knowed him befo’ – ” he pondered. That receding brow, that sharp-ridged, spreading nose, that tight upper lip over the two big front teeth, that chinless jaw – He fumbled hurriedly for the card he had not looked at and eagerly made out the name.
“Mouse Uggam, sho’ ’nuff! Well, dog-gone!”
Uggam sought out Tom Edwards, once a Pullman porter, now prosperous proprietor of a cabaret, and told him:
“Chief, I got him: a baby jess in from the land o’ cotton and so dumb he thinks ante bellum’s an old woman.”
“Where d’you find him?”
“Where you find all the jay birds when they first hit Harlem – at the subway entrance. This one come up the stairs, batted his eyes once or twice, an’ froze to the spot – with his mouth open. Sure sign he’s from ’way down behind the sun an’ ripe f’ the pluckin’.”
Edwards grinned a gold-studded, fat-jowled grin. “Gave him the usual line, I suppose?”
“Didn’t miss. An’ he fell like a ton o’ bricks. ’Course I’ve got him spotted, but damn ’f I know jess how to switch ’em on to him.”
“Get him a job around a store somewhere. Make out you’re befriendin’ him. Get his confidence.”
“Sounds good. Ought to be easy. He’s from my state. Maybe I know him or some of his people.”
“Make out you do, anyhow. Then tell him some fairy tales that’ll switch your trade to him. The cops’ll follow the trade. We could even let Froggy flop into some dumb white cop’s hands and ‘confess’ where he got it. See?”
“Chief, you got a head, no lie.”
“Don’t lose no time. And remember, hereafter, it’s better to sacrifice a little than to get squealed on. Never refuse a customer. Give him a little credit. Humor him along till you can get rid of him safe. You don’t know what that guy that died may have said; you don’t know who’s on to you now. And if they get you – I don’t know you.”
“They won’t get me,” said Uggam.
King Solomon Gillis sat meditating in a room half the size of his hencoop back home, with a single window opening into an airshaft.
An airshaft: cabbage and chitterlings cooking; liver and onions sizzling, sputtering; three player-pianos out-plunking each other; a man and woman calling each other vile things; a sick, neglected baby wailing; a phonograph broadcasting blues; dishes clacking; a girl crying heartbrokenly; waste noises, waste odors of a score of families, seeing issue through a common channel; pollution from bottom to top – a sewer of sounds and smells.
Contemplating this, King Solomon grinned and breathed, “Doggone!” A little later, still gazing into the sewer, he grinned again. “Green stockin’s,” he said; “loud green!” The sewer gradually grew darker. A window lighted up opposite, revealing a woman in camisole and petticoat, arranging her hair. King Solomon, staring vacantly, shook his head and grinned yet again. “Even got culled policemans!” he mumbled softly.
Uggam leaned out of the room’s one window and spat maliciously into the dinginess of the airshaft. “Damn glad you got him,” he commented, as Gillis finished his story. “They’s a thousand shines in Harlem would change places with you in a minute jess f’ the honor of killin’ a cracker.”
“But, I didn’t go to do it. ’Twas a accident.”
“That’s the only part to keep secret.”
“Know whut dey done? Dey killed five o’ Mose Joplin’s hawses ’fo he lef’. Put groun’ glass in de feed-trough. Sam Cheevers come up on three of ’em one night pizenin’ his well. Bleesom beat Crinshaw out o’ sixty acres o’ lan’ an’ a year’s crops. Dass jess how ’t is. Soon’s a nigger make a li’l sump’n he better git to leavin’. An’ ’fo long ev’ybody’s goin’ be lef’!”
“Hope to hell they don’t all come here.”
The doorbell of the apartment rang. A crescendo of footfalls in the hallway culminated in a sharp rap on Gillis’s door. Gillis jumped. Nobody but a policeman would rap like that. Maybe the landlady had been listening and had called in the law. It came again, loud, quick, angry. King Solomon prayed that the policeman would be a Negro.
Uggam stepped over and opened the door. King Solomon’s apprehensive eyes saw framed therein, instead of a gigantic officer, calling for him, a little blot of a creature, quite black against even the darkness of the hallway, except for a dirty, wide-striped silk shirt, collarless, with the sleeves rolled up.
“Ah hahve bill fo’ Mr. Gillis.” A high, strongly accented Jamaican voice, with its characteristic singsong intonation, interrupted King Solomon’s sigh of relief.
“Bill? Bill fo’ me? What kin’ o’ bill?”
“Wan bushel appels. T’ree seventy-fife.”
“Apples? I ain’ bought no apples.” He took the paper and read aloud, laboriously, “Antonio Gabrielli to K. S. Gillis, Doctor – ”
“Mr. Gabrielli say, you not pays him, he send policemon.”
“What I had to do wid ’is apples?”
“You bumps into him yesterday, no? Scatter appels everywhere – on de sidewalk, in de gutter. Kids pick up an’ run away. Others all spoil. So you pays.”
Gillis appealed to Uggam. “How ’bout it, Mouse?”
“He’s a damn liar. Tony picked up most of ’em; I seen him. Lemme look at that bill – Tony never wrote this thing. This baby’s jess playin’ you for a sucker.”
“Ain’ had no apples, ain’ payin’ fo’ none,” announced King Solomon, thus prompted. “Didn’t have to come to Harlem to git cheated. Plenty o’ dat right wha’ I come fum.”
But the West Indian warmly insisted. “You cahn’t do daht, mon. Whaht you t’ink, ’ey? Dis mon loose ’is appels an’ ’is money too?”
“What diff’ence it make to you, nigger?”
“Who you call nigger, mon? Ah hahve you understahn’” –
“Oh, well, white folks, den. What all you got t’ do wid dis hyeh, anyhow?”
“Mr. Gabrielli send me to collect bill!”
“How I know dat?”
“Do Ah not bring bill? You t’ink Ah steal t’ree dollar, ’ey?”
“Three dollars an’ sebenty-fi’cent,” corrected Gillis. “’Nuther thing: wha’ you ever see me befo’? How you know dis is me?”
“Ah see you, sure. Ah help Mr. Gabrielli in de store. When you knocks down de baskette appels, Ah see. Ah follow you. Ah know you comes in dis house.”
“Oh, you does? An’ how come you know my name an’ flat an’ room so good? How come dat?”
“Ah fin’ out. Sometime Ah brings up here vegetables from de store.”
“Humph! Mus’ be workin’ on shares.”
“You pays, ’ey? You pays me or de policemon?”
“Wait a minute,” broke in Uggam, who had been thoughtfully contemplating the bill. “Now listen, big shorty. You haul hips on back to Tony. We got your menu all right” – he waved the bill – “but we don’t eat your kind o’ cookin’, see?”
The West Indian flared. “Whaht it is to you, ’ey? You can not mind your own business? Ah hahve not spik to you!”
“No, brother. But this is my friend, an’ I’ll be john-browned if there’s a monkey-chaser in Harlem can gyp him if I know it, see? Bes’ thing f’ you to do is catch air, toot sweet.”
Sensing frustration, the little islander demanded the bill back. Uggam figured he could use the bill himself, maybe. The West Indian hotly persisted; he even menaced. Uggam pocketed the paper and invited him to take it. Wisely enough, the caller preferred to catch air.
When he had gone, King Solomon sought words of thanks.
“Bottle it,” said Uggam. “The point is this: I figger you got a job.”
“Job? No I ain’t! Wh’ at?”
“When you show Tony this bill, he’ll hit the roof and fire that monk.”
“Wha ef he do?”
“Then you up ’n ask f’ the job. He’ll be too grateful to refuse. I know Tony some, an’ I’ll be there to put in a good word. See?”
King Solomon considered this. “Sho’ needs a job, but ain’ after stealin’ none.”
“Stealin’? ’T wouldn’t be stealin’. Stealin’ ’s what that damn monkey-chaser tried to do from you. This would be doin’ Tony a favor an’ gettin’ y’self out o’ the barrel. What’s the hold-back?”
“What make you keep callin’ him monkey-chaser?”
“West Indian. That’s another thing. Any time y’ can knife a monk, do it. They’s too damn many of ’em here. They’re an achin’ pain.”
“Jess de way white folks feels ’bout niggers.”
“Damn that. How ’bout it? Y’ want the job?”
“Hm – well – I’d ruther be a policeman.”
“Policeman?” Uggam gasped.
“M – hm. Dass all I wants to be, a policeman, so I kin police all de white folks right plumb in jail!”
Uggam said seriously, “Well, y’ might work up to that. But it takes time. An’ y’ve got to eat while y’re waitin’.” He paused to let this penetrate. “Now, how ’bout this job at Tony’s in the meantime? I should think y’d jump at it.”
King Solomon was persuaded.
“Hm – well – reckon I does,” he said slowly.
“Now y’re tootin’!” Uggam’s two big front teeth popped out in a grin of genuine pleasure. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Spitting blood and crying with rage, the West Indian scrambled to his feet. For a moment he stood in front of the store gesticulating furiously and jabbering shrill threats and unintelligible curses. Then abruptly he stopped and took himself off.
King Solomon Gillis, mildly puzzled, watched him from Tony’s doorway. “I jess give him a li’l shove,” he said to himself, “an he roll’ clean ’cross de sidewalk.” And a little later, disgustedly, “Monkey-chaser!” he grunted, and went back to his sweeping.
“Well, big boy, how y’ comin’ on?”
Gillis dropped his broom. “Hay-o, Mouse. Wha’ you been las’ two-three days?”
“Oh, around. Gettin’ on all right here? Had any trouble?”
“Deed I ain’t – ’ceptin’ jess now I had to throw ’at li’l jigger out.”
“Who? The monk?”
“M – hm. He sho’ Lawd doan like me in his job. Look like he think I stole it from him, stiddy him tryin’ to steal from me. Had to push him down sho’ ’nuff ’fo I could git rid of ’im. Den he run off talkin’ Wes’ Indi’man an’ shakin’ his fis’ at me.”
“Ferget it.” Uggam glanced about. “Where’s Tony?”
“Boss man? He be back direckly.”
“Listen – like to make two or three bucks a day extra?”
“Huh?”
“Two or three dollars a day more’n what you’re gettin’ already?”
“Ain’ I near ’nuff in jail now?”
“Listen,” King Solomon listened. Uggam hadn’t been in France for nothing. Fact was, in France he’d learned about some valuable French medicine. He’d brought some back with him – little white pills – and while in Harlem had found a certain druggist who knew what they were and could supply all he could use. Now there were any number of people who would buy and pay well for as much of this French medicine as Uggam could get. It was good for what ailed them, and they didn’t know how to get it except through him. But he had no store in which to set up an agency and hence no single place where his customers could go to get what they wanted. If he had, he could sell three or four times as much as he did.
King Solomon was in a position to help him now, same as he had helped King Solomon. He would leave a dozen packages of the medicine – just small envelopes that could all be carried in a coat pocket – with King Solomon every day. Then he could simply send his customers to King Solomon at Tony’s store. They’d make some trifling purchase, slip him a certain coupon which Uggam had given them, and King Solomon would wrap the little envelope of medicine with their purchase. Mustn’t let Tony catch on, because he might object, and then the whole scheme would go gaflooey. Of course it wouldn’t really be hurting Tony any. Wouldn’t it increase the number of his customers?
Finally, at the end of each day, Uggam would meet King Solomon some place and give him a quarter for each coupon he held. There’d be at least ten or twelve a day – two and a half or three dollars plumb extra! Eighteen or twenty dollars a week!
“Dog-gone!” breathed Gillis.
“Does Tony ever leave you heer alone?”
“M – hm. Jess started dis mawnin’. Doan nobody much come round ’tween ten an’ twelve, so he done took to doin’ his buyin’ right ’long ’bout dat time. Nobody hyeh but me fo’ ’n hour or so.”
“Good. I’ll try to get my folks to come ’round here mostly while Tony’s out, see?”
“I doan miss.”
“Sure y’ get the idea, now?” Uggam carefully explained it all again. By the time he had finished, King Solomon was wallowing in gratitude.
“Mouse, you sho’ is been a friend to me. Why, ’f’t had n’ been fo’ you – ”
“Bottle it,” said Uggam. “I’ll be round to your room to-night with enough stuff for to-morrer, see? Be sure’n be there.”
“Won’t be nowha’ else.”
“An’ remember, this is all jess between you ’n me.”
“Nobody else but,” vowed King Solomon.
Uggam grinned to himself as he went on his way. “Dumb Oscar! Wonder how much can we make before the cops nab him? French medicine – Hmph!”
Tony Gabrielli, an oblate Neapolitan of enormous equator, wobbled2 heavily out of his store and settled himself over a soap box.
Usually Tony enjoyed sitting out front thus in the evening, when his helper had gone home and his trade was slackest. He liked to watch the little Gabriellis playing over the sidewalk with the little Levys and Johnsons; the trios and quartettes of brightly dressed, dark-skinned girls merrily out for a stroll; the slovenly gaited, darker men, who eyed them up and down and commented to each other with an unsuppressed “Hot damn!” or “Oh, no, now!”
But to-night Tony was troubled. Something was different since the arrival of King Solomon Gillis. The new man had seemed to prove himself honest and trustworthy, it was true. Tony had tested him, as he always tested a new man, by apparently leaving him alone in charge for two or three mornings. Tony’s store was a modification of the front rooms of his flat and was in direct communication with it by way of a glass-windowed door in the rear. Tony always managed to get back into his flat via the side-street entrance and watch the new man through this unobtrusive glass-windowed door. If anything excited his suspicion, like unwarranted interest in the cash register, he walked unexpectedly out of this door to surprise the offender in the act. Thereafter he would have no more such trouble. But he had not succeeded in seeing King Solomon steal even an apple.
What he had observed, however, was that the number of customers that came into the store during the morning’s slack hour had pronouncedly increased in the last few days. Before, there had been three or four. Now there were twelve or fifteen. The mysterious thing about it was that their purchases totaled little more than those of the original three or four.
Yesterday and to-day Tony had elected to be in the store at the time when, on the other days, he had been out. But Gillis had not been overcharging or short-changing; for when Tony waited on the customers himself – strange faces all – he found that they bought something like a yeast cake or a five-cent loaf of bread. It was puzzling. Why should strangers leave their own neighborhoods and repeatedly come to him for a yeast cake or a loaf of bread? They were not new neighbors. New neighbors would have bought more variously and extensively and at different times of day. Living nearby,3 they would have come in, the men often in shirtsleeves and slippers, the women in kimonos, with boudoir caps covering their lumpy heads. They would have sent in strange children for things like yeast cakes and loaves of bread. And why did not some of them come in at night when the new helper was off duty?
As for accosting Gillis on suspicion, Tony was too wise for that.
Patronage had a queer way of shifting itself in Harlem. You lost your temper and let slip a single “nègre.” A week later you sold your business.
Spread over his soap box, with his pudgy hands clasped on his preposterous paunch, Tony sat and wondered. Two men came up, conspicuous for no other reason than that they were white. They displayed extreme nervousness, looking about as if afraid of being seen; and when one of them spoke to Tony it was in a husky, toneless, blowing voice, like the sound of a dirty phonograph record.
“Are you Antonio Gabrielli?”
“Yes, sure.” Strange behavior for such lusty-looking fellows. He who had spoken unsmilingly winked first one eye then the other, and indicated by a gesture of his head that they should enter the store. His companion looked cautiously up and down the Avenue, while Tony, wondering what ailed them, rolled to his feet and puffingly led the way.
Inside, the spokesman snuffled, gave his shoulders a queer little hunch, and asked, “Can you fix us up, buddy?” The other glanced restlessly about the place as if he were constantly hearing unaccountable noises.
Tony thought he understood clearly now. “Booze, ’ey?” he smiled. “Sorry – I no got.”
“Booze? Hell, no!” The voice dwindled to a throaty whisper. “Dope. Coke, milk, dice – anything. Name your price. Got to have it.”
“Dope?” Tony was entirely at a loss. “What’s a dis, dope?”
“Aw, lay off, brother. We’re in on this. Here.” He handed Tony a piece of paper. “Froggy gave us a coupon. Come on. You can’t go wrong.”
“I no got,” insisted the perplexed Tony; nor could he be budged on that point.
Quite suddenly the manner of both men changed. “All right,” said the first angrily, in a voice as robust as his body. “All right, you’re clever, You no got. Well, you will get. You’ll get twenty years!”
“Twenty year? Whadda you talk?”
“Wait a minute, Mac,” said the second caller. “Maybe the wop’s on the level. Look here, Tony, we’re officers, see? Policemen.” He produced a badge. “A couple of weeks ago a guy was brought in dying for the want of a shot, see? Dope – he needed some dope – like this – in his arm. See? Well, we tried to make him tell us where he’d been getting it, but he was too weak. He croaked next day. Evidently he hadn’t had money enough to buy any more.
“Well, this morning a little nigger that goes by the name of Froggy was brought into the precinct pretty well doped up. When he finally came to, he swore he got the stuff here at your store. Of course, we’ve just been trying to trick you into giving yourself away, but you don’t bite. Now what’s your game? Know anything about this?”
Tony understood. “I dunno,” he said slowly; and then his own problem, whose contemplation his callers had interrupted, occurred to him. “Sure!” he exclaimed. “Wait. Maybeso I know somet’ing.”
“All right. Spill it.”
“I got a new man, work-a for me.” And he told them what he had noted since King Solomon Gillis came.
“Sounds interesting. Where is this guy?”
“Here in da store – all day.”
“Be here to-morrow?”
“Sure. All day.”
“All right. We’ll drop in to-morrow and give him the eye. Maybe he’s our man.”
“Sure. Come ten o’clock. I show you,” promised Tony.
Even the oldest and rattiest cabarets in Harlem have sense of shame enough to hide themselves under the ground – for instance, Edwards’s. To get into Edwards’s you casually enter a dimly lighted corner saloon, apparently – only apparently – a subdued memory of brighter days. What was once the family entrance is now a side entrance for ladies. Supporting yourself against close walls, you crouchingly descend a narrow, twisted staircase until, with a final turn, you find yourself in a glaring, long, low basement. In a moment your eyes become accustomed to the haze of tobacco smoke. You see men and women seated at wire-legged, white-topped tables, which are covered with half-empty bottles and glasses; you trace the slow-jazz accompaniment you heard as you came down the stairs to a pianist, a cornetist, and a drummer on a little platform at the far end of the room. There is a cleared space from the foot of the stairs, where you are standing, to the platform where this orchestra is mounted, and in it a tall brown girl is swaying from side to side and rhythmically proclaiming that she has the world in a jug and the stopper in her hand. Behind a counter at your left sits a fat, bald, tea-colored Negro, and you wonder if this is Edwards – Edwards, who stands in with the police, with the political bosses, with the importers of wines and worse. A white-vested waiter hustles you to a seat and takes your order. The song’s tempo changes to a quicker; the drum and the cornet rip out a fanfare, almost drowning the piano; the girl catches up her dress and begins to dance. …
Gillis’s wondering eyes had been roaming about. They stopped.
“Look, Mouse!” he whispered. “Look a-yonder!”
“Look at what?”
“Dog-gone if it ain’ de self-same gal!”
“Wha’ d’ ye mean, self-same girl?”
“Over yonder, wi’ de green stockin’s. Dass de gal made me knock over dem apples fust day I come to town. ’Member? Been wishin’ I could see her ev’y sence.”
“What for?” Uggam wondered.
King Solomon grew confidential. “Ain but two things in dis world, Mouse, I really wants. One is to be a policeman. Been wantin’ dat ev’y sence I seen dat cullud traffic-cop dat day. Other is to git myse’f a gal lak dat one over yonder!”
“You’ll do it,” laughed Uggam, “if you live long enough.”
“Who dat wid her?”
“How’n hell do I know?”
“He cullud?”
“Don’t look like it. Why? What of it?”
“Hm – nuthin – ”
“How many coupons y’ got to-night?”
“Ten.” King Solomon handed them over.
“Y’ought to’ve slipt ’em to me under the table, but it’s all right now, long as we got this table to ourselves. Here’s y’ medicine for to-morrer.”
“Wha’?”
“Reach under the table.”
Gillis secured and pocketed the medicine.
“An’ here’s two-fifty for a good day’s work.” Uggam passed the money over. Perhaps he grew careless; certainly the passing this time was above the table, in plain sight.
“Thanks, Mouse.”
Two white men had been watching Gillis and Uggam from a table nearby.4 In the tumult of merriment that rewarded the entertainer’s most recent and daring effort, one of these men, with a word to the other, came over and took the vacant chair beside Gillis.
“Is your name Gillis?”
“Tain’ nuthin’ else.”
Uggam’s eyes narrowed.
The white man showed King Solomon a police officer’s badge.
“You’re wanted for dope-peddling. Will you come along without trouble?”
“Fo’ what?”
“Violation of the narcotic law – dope-selling.”
“Who – me?”
“Come on, now, lay off that stuff. I saw what happened just now myself.” He addressed Uggam. “Do you know this fellow?”
“Nope. Never saw him before tonight.”
“Didn’t I just see him sell you something?”
“Guess you did. We happened to be sittin’ here at the same table and got to talkin’. After a while I says I can’t seem to sleep nights, so he offers me sump’n he says’ll make me sleep, all right. I don’t know what it is, but he says he uses it himself an’ I offers to pay him what it cost him. That’s how I come to take it. Guess he’s got more in his pocket there now.”
The detective reached deftly into the coat pocket of the dumbfounded King Solomon and withdrew a packet of envelopes. He tore off a corner of one, emptied a half-dozen tiny white tablets into his palm, and sneered triumphantly. “You’ll make a good witness,” he told Uggam.
The entertainer was issuing an ultimatum to all sweet mammas who dared to monkey around her loving man. Her audience was absorbed and delighted, with the exception of one couple – the girl with the green stockings and her escort. They sat directly in the line of vision of King Solomon’s wide eyes, which, in the calamity that had descended upon him, for the moment saw nothing.
“Are you coming without trouble?”
Mouse Uggam, his friend, Harlem. Land of plenty. City of refuge – city of refuge. If you live long enough –
Consciousness of what was happening between the pair across the room suddenly broke through Gillis’s daze like flame through smoke. The man was trying to kiss the girl and she was resisting. Gillis jumped up. The detective, taking the act for an attempt at escape, jumped with him and was quick enough to intercept him. The second officer came at once to his fellow’s aid, blowing his whistle several times as he came.
People overturned chairs getting out of the way, but nobody ran for the door. It was an old crowd. A fight was a treat; and the tall Negro could fight.
“Judas Priest!”
“Did you see that?”
“Damn!”
White – both white. Five of Mose Joplin’s horses. Poisoning a well. A year’s crops. Green stockings – white – white –
“That’s the time, papa!”
“Do it, big boy!”
“Good night!”
Uggam watched tensely, with one eye on the door. The second cop had blown for help –
Downing one of the detectives a third time and turning to grapple again with the other, Gillis found himself face to face with a uniformed black policeman.
He stopped as if stunned. For a moment he simply stared. Into his mind swept his own words like a forgotten song, suddenly recalled:
“Cullud policemans!”
The officer stood ready, awaiting his rush.
“Even – got – cullud – policemans – ”
Very slowly King Solomon’s arms relaxed; very slowly he stood erect; and the grin that came over his features had something exultant about it.
1925
Negro Harlem’s three broad highways form the letter H, Lenox and Seventh Avenues running parallel northward, united a little above their midpoints by east-and-west 135th Street.
Lenox Avenue is for the most part the boulevard of the unperfumed; “rats” they are often termed. Here, during certain hours, there is nothing unusual in the flashing of knives, the quick succession of pistol shots, the scream of a police-whistle or a woman.
But Seventh Avenue is the promenade of high-toned dickties and strivers. It breathes a superior atmosphere, sings superior songs, laughs a superior laugh. Even were there no people, the difference would be clear: the middle of Lenox Avenue is adorned by street-car tracks, the middle of Seventh Avenue by parking.
These two highways, frontiers of the opposed extreme of dark-skinned social life, are separated by an intermediate any-man’s land, across which they communicate chiefly by way of 135th Street. Accordingly 135th Street is the heart and soul of black Harlem; it is common ground, the natural scene of unusual contacts, a region that disregards class. It neutralizes, equilibrates, binds, rescues union out of diversity.
In a fraction of a mile of 135th Street there occurs every institution necessary to civilization from a Carnegie Library opposite a public school at one point to a police station beside an undertaker’s parlor at another. But one institution outnumbers all others, an institution which, like the street itself, represents common ground: the barbershop overwhelmingly predominates.
Naturally on the day of the Barber’s Annual Ball this institution clipped off among other things several working hours. The barbers had their own necks to trim, their own knots to conquer, their own jowls to shave and massage. The inevitable last-minute rush of prospective dancers, eager for eleventh-hour primping, would have kept the hosts themselves from appearing at the dance-hall, in their best, on time. Hence the association had agreed that every member’s door be closed and locked today at four.
Shortly before that hour in one of 135th Street’s “tonsorial parlors,” the head barber, for whom a half dozen men were waiting, dismissed a patron and called “Next!” Already Eight-Ball Eddy Boyd, whose turn it was, had removed coat and collar and started toward the vacated chair.
“Make it boyish, Pop,” he grinned to the fat and genial proprietor. “And long as you trimmin’ me, lemme have two tickets for the stom-down tonight.”
Pop Overton smiled goldenly and assumed the grand manner. “You means to grace our function wid yo’ attendance?”
The other’s assent was typical Harlemese:
“I don’t mean to attend yo’ function with my grace.”
As Eight-Ball put one foot on the foot-rest of the chair, someone pulled him back ungently.
“My turn, big shorty.”
Eight-Ball turned, recognized Dirty Cozzens, an enemy of several days’ standing.
“My turn,” disagreed he evenly.
“Yo’ mistake,” Dirty corrected shortly, and moved to brush the smaller man aside.
The move was unsuccessful. The smaller man exhibited something of the stability of a fire-plug which one attempts to boot off the sidewalk. Dirty had bumped him without anticipating such firm footing, and now himself recoiled, careening off toward the mirrored wall with its implement-laden ledge. There was a little giggling jingle of instruments as his elbow struck this ledge. Then there was silence. Of the two barbers, one stopped pushing his clippers, but left them resting against the customer’s neck while he gaped; the other halted, his razor poised, his thumb in one corner of his patron’s mouth. Those who sat waiting dropped their papers, their conversation, and their lower jaws. Everybody stared. Everybody knew Dirty Cozzens.
Eight-Ball stood pat, as if awaiting an apology for the other’s rudeness. Dirty also remained where he had landed, his elbow still amid the paraphernalia on the ledge, his eyes glaring, as if to let everyone see how he had been wronged.
The two made a striking contrast. Dirty Cozzens was a peculiar genetic jest. Heredity had managed to remove his rightful share of pigment even from his hair, which was pale buff. His eyes were gray, their lids rimmed red. His complexion had won him his nickname, “Dirty Yaller,” of which “Dirty,” was the familiar abbreviation. In every other particular his African ancestry had been preserved and accentuated. The buff hair was woolly, the nose flat with wide nostrils, the mouth big, bordered by so-called liver-lips, unbelievably thick. Within the shadow of a black skin, even, Dirty would have been a caricature; with the complexion that he actually had he was a cartoon, a malicious cartoon without humor.
So had heredity handed him over to environment, and environment had done its damnedest; had put sly cunning into the eyes, had distorted the lips into a constant sneer, had set the head at a truculent forward thrust on the large, lank body. With its present evil face, his was a head that might well have adorned the scepter of Satan.
His opponent was his antithesis. Eight-Ball had been nicknamed after that pool-ball which is black, and his skin was as dark as it is possible for skin to be, smooth and clean as an infant’s. The close-cut hair hugged the scalp evenly, the bright black eyes were alive with quick understanding, the nose was broad but sharp-ridged, with sensitive nostrils, the lips thin and firm above a courageous chin. He was beautifully small, neither heavy nor slight, of proud erect bearing, perfect poise, and a silhouette-like clean-cutness.
In the silence, Dirty’s fingers reaching along the marble ledge found and caressed a barber’s tool; an instrument which is the subject of many a jest but whose actual use involves no element of humor; a weapon which is as obsolete as a blunderbuss, even among those whose special heritage it is commonly supposed to be – as obsolete and as damaging. Dirty, skilled in the wielding of steel, would not have considered this instrument in a set encounter, but the devil put the thing now in his hand. He decided it would be entertaining to run his enemy out of the shop.
Pop Overton saw the movement, and it lifted him2 out of his daze. He said:
“Aimin’ to shave yo’self, Dirty?”
“None yo’ dam’ business,” snapped Dirty, still eyeing Eight-Ball.
“No,” said Pop. “’Tain’t none my business. But hit’s my razor.”
Dirty drew himself together, but not erect – “You seen what he done?” – moved then with slow menace across the distance between himself and Eight-Ball. “You seen it, didn’ y’?”
“Now, listen, big boy. Don’t you go startin’ nothin’ in my shop, you hear?”
“I ain’t startin’ nothin’. I’m finishin’ sump’m. Dis started a week ago. Hot nigger, dis black boy, but I’m goan turn his damper down.”
Eight-Ball spoke: “Don’t burn yo’ fingers.”
Dirty advanced another step, knees bent, one hand behind him. Had Eight-Ball retreated a single foot, Dirty would have tossed the razor aside with a contemptuous laugh; would have made a fly crack about fast-black, guaranteed not to run; would have swaggered out, proudly acknowledging that he had picked the quarrel. But Eight-Ball had not retreated. Eight-Ball had stood still and looked at him, had even taunted him: “Don’t burn yo’ fingers”; had watched him approach to arm’s length without budging. Ought to take one swipe at him just to scare him good. Ought to make him jump anyhow –
Whatever might have happened didn’t. Instead of the expected swift sweep of an arm Dirty’s next movement was a quick furtive bending of his elbow to slip the armed hand into his coat pocket; such a movement as might have greeted the entrance of an officer of the law.
As a flame flares just before it goes out, so the tension heightened, then dropped, when eyes discovered that the figure which had darkened the door was only that of a girl. She was a striking girl, however, who at once took the center of the stage.
“Whew-ee!” she breathed. “Just made it. Hi, Pop. Hello, Eighty. One minute to four! And the head barber waitin’ for me! Some service – I scream – some service.” Wherewith she clambered into the vacant chair and effervesced directions.
The waiting customers first ogled, then guffawed. It struck them as uproarious that two men should appear to be on the point of bloodshed over a mere turn and neither of them get it. But the girl seemed quite oblivious.
Eight-Ball greeted her: “Hello, Effie” – grinned, and returned to his seat. Dirty shuffled to the wall opposite the mirrors, got his hat and went toward the door. As he passed the head barber’s chair he paused and spoke to the girl:
“It was my turn, Miss Effie – but you kin have it.” He smiled so that his thick lips broadened against his teeth, and he touched his hat and went out.
His departure released comment:
“Nice felluh!”
“Doggone! Sposin’ he really got mad over sump’n!”
“He wasn’t mad. He was jes’ playin’.”
“He better not play wi’ me like dat.”
“Take ’at thing out’n his hand and he’d run.”
“Leave it in his hand and you’d run.”
Then, to everyone’s astonishment, before Pop Overton had assembled the proper implements, the girl jumped down from the chair, scattering stealthy glances which had been creeping toward the crimson garters just below her crossed knees.
“Whose turn was it?” she asked Pop.
“Eighty’s.”
“Thought so. Come on, Eighty. I got mine this morning.”
“What’s the idea?” wondered Eight-Ball.
“Wasn’t it a fight?”
“Pretty near. How’d you know?”
“Anything wrong with these?”
A purely rhetorical question. There was certainly nothing wrong with Effie Wright’s eyes – nor with her hair, nor with that rare, almost luminous dark complexion called “sealskin brown.” One might complain that she was altogether too capable of taking care of herself, or that she was much too absorbed in Eight-Ball. Beyond that no sane judgment criticized.
Effie ran a beauty-parlor directly across the street, and it was to this that she now referred.
“I was lookin’ out the window over there. Saw you drive up in your boss’s straight-eight. Your friend was standin’ in front of the saloon – he saw you too, so he come in behind you. Pop’s window’s got too much advertisin’ in it to see through, so I come on over. Seem like I spoiled the party.”
“Ain’t this sump’n?” Eight-Ball asked the world.
“Angels rush in when fools is almost dead,” was Pop’s proverb.
“Well, since you won’t open a keg o’ bay rum, I guess I’ll breeze. – Say, Pop, got an extra safety razor blade? – Yes. – Huh? – Oh, a customer gimme a pair o’ pumps to wear to the shin-dig tonight, and I got to whittle off here and there till I can get ’em on. Cheatin’ the foot-doctor. – A single-edged blade, if you got it, Pop. Double-edged one cuts y’ fingers before it cuts anything else. – Thanks. Shall I lock the door on my way out? – Stop by before you haul it, Eighty.”
She was gone in a flurry of words.
“Can y’ beat that, Pop?” Eight-Ball laughed.
“They ain’t but two like her and she’s both of ’em,” admitted Pop. “But what’s that Cozzens boy on you for?”
“We had a little argument in a dark-john game a while back.”
“Yea? Well, watch ’im, boy. Bad boogy what knows he’s bad. And don’t think he won’t cut. He will. Thass th’ onliest kind o’ fightin’ he knows, and he sho knows it. They’s nineteen niggers ’round Harlem now totin’ cuts he gave ’em. They through pullin’ knives too, what I mean.”
“He’s that good, huh?”
“He’s that bad. Served time fo’ it, but he don’t give a damn. Trouble is, ain’t nobody never carved him. Somebody ought to write shorthand on his face. That’d cure him.
“Yes? Whyn’t you shave him sometime, Pop?”
“Mine’s accidental. Somebody ought to carve him artistically.”
“Well,” Eight-Ball considered thoughtfully, “maybe somebody will.”
The Barbers’ Ball does not pretend to be a dicty3 affair. It is announced, not by engraved cards through the mails, but by large printed placards in barbershop windows. One is admitted, not by presenting a card of invitation, but by presenting a dollar bill in exchange for a ticket. It is a come-one, come-all occasion, where aspiring local politicians are likely to mount the platform between dances and make announcements and bow while influential bootleggers cheer. It was quite fitting, therefore, that this fête of, for, and in spite of the people should take place on 135th Street – this year in a second-floor dance-hall just east of Lenox Avenue.
“Well, hush my mouth!” exclaimed Eight-Ball as he and Effie entered somewhat before midnight.
“Do tell!” agreed she.
For there were decorations. Nothing subdued and elegant like the So-and-So’s dance. Nothing “fly,” like the Dirty Dozen’s. Just color in dazzling quantity, presented through the inexpensive medium of crêpe paper – scarlet, orange, brilliant green, embracing the lights, entwining the pillars, concealing the windows, transforming the orchestral platform into a float.
The orchestra also made no pretenses. It was a so-called “low-down” orchestra and it specialized in what are known as shouts. Under the influence of this leisurely rhythm, steady, obsessing, untiring, you gradually forget all else. You can’t make a misstep, you can’t get uncomfortably warm, you can’t grow weary – you simply fall more and more completely into the insistently joyous spirit of the thing until you are laughing and humming aloud like everyone else. You get happy in spite of yourself. This is the inevitable effect of shouts, to which the orchestra tonight largely confined its efforts.
The newcomers joined the gay, noisy dancers, finding their way not too swiftly around the crowded floor. Here someone advised them to “Get off that dime!” and there someone else suggested that they “Shake that thing!”
But the shout to which Eight-Ball and his girl inadvertently kept time had not yet saturated their emotions, and in spite of it they discussed less happy concerns.
“I been so mad I ain’t had no dinner,” said Eight-Ball.
“’Bout what?”
“Notice I didn’t bring the car tonight?”
“Yes. Boss usin’ it?”
“No. – Know when I left your place this afternoon, after you showed me that trick?”
“Yes.”
“Notice anything wrong with the car when I drove off?”
“Nope. Too busy watchin’ the driver.”
“I went about half a block and felt somethin’ wrong. Pulled up and got out to look. Two flat tires.”
“No!”
“Uh-huh. Front and back on the side away from the sidewalk.”
“They was O.K. when you parked?”
“Brand new.”
“Blow-outs? Slow leaks?”
“No. Cuts.”
“What are you ravin’ about?”
“Both tires had a six-inch gash in ’em, made with a knife – ”
“What!”
“Or a razor.”
Effie stopped dancing. “The yellow son-of-a-baboon!”
“Everybody says they ain’t nothin’ he can’t do with a knife. Looks like they ain’t nothin’ he won’t do.”
The shout, the rhythmically jostling crowd, impelled them back into step.
“Eighty, you ought to half kill ’im. Of all the low, mean, gutter-rat tricks – you ought to lay ’im up f’ a year.”
“How you know I can?” he grinned.
“Can’t y’?”
“I can’t prove nothin’ on him. Who seen him do it?”
“Nobody didn’t have to see him. You know he did it.”
“Nope. I can wait. He’s sore. He’ll keep on messin’ around. Thinks he can’t be had.”
“He can be had all right. All I’m ’fraid of is somebody else’ll have ’im first. Everybody that knows that guy hates ’im and most of ’em’s scared to boot. Whoever whittles ’im down will be a hero.”
As the jazz relented, the object of her anger took form out of the crowd and approached.
“Evenin’, Miss Effie,” said he, ignoring Eight-Ball. “Been lookin’ f’ you. I give you my turn in d’ barber-shop today. How ’bout givin’ me mine now?”
Effie looked through him at the decorations surrounding a post. As if she and Eight-Ball had been discussing the colors, she commented:
“That’s one color I’m glad they forgot – I can’t stand anything yellow.”
Dirty turned garnet; but before his chagrin became active resentment, the music returned with a crash. Eight-Ball and Effie moved on past him, their anger partially appeased by knowing that Effie’s tongue had cut like steel.
And now the shout more easily took hold on them, hammering them inexorably into its own mould. The increasing jam of people pressed them more closely into each other’s arms. The husky mellowness of soft-throated saxophones against the trumpet’s urge, the caress of plaintive blues-melody against the thrill of strange disharmonies, the humor of capricious traps against the solidity of unfailing bass – to these contrasts the pair abandoned themselves. Harsh laughter, queer odors, the impact of the mob became nothing. They closed their eyes and danced.
They might have danced for an hour, only half aware of the jumble of faces about, of their own jests and laughter, of the occasional intervals of rest. Then something woke them, and they suddenly realized that it was at them that people nearby were laughing – that a little space cleared about them wherever they moved and people looked at them and laughed.
At first they were unconvinced and looked around them for something comic. Then Pop Overton appeared, smiling roundly.
“Thought monkey-backs was out o’ style, son.”
“What – ?”
“Did you have yo’ coat cut to order?”
Effie switched Eight-Ball around and gasped while onlookers frankly smiled. A triangle of white shirt-back, its apex between Eight-Ball’s shoulder blades, shone through a vertical vent in his coat, a vent twice as long as any designed by a tailor. In the crush and abandonment of the dance a single downward stroke of a keen-edged instrument, light enough not to be noticed, had divided the back of the garment in two as cleanly as if it had been ripped down midseam. The white of the shirt gleamed through like a malicious grin.
As Eight-Ball examined himself unsmilingly, Pop Overton sobered. “I thought it was torn accidental,” he said. “Judas Priest – I bet that ——! Say, Eighty, fo’ Gawd’s sake don’t start nothin’ here. We ain’t never had a row – ”
Eight-Ball and Effie, faces set, stood looking at each other in silence.
* * *
Dirty Cozzens stood in the shadow of the doorway beside that leading to the Barbers’ Ball and in return for a generous drink unburdened himself to a buddy.
“It was in d’ back room at Nappy’s place. Dis lil spade turns a black-jack and winds d’ deal, see? Well, he’s a-riffin’ d’ cards and talkin’ all d’ same time, and he says, ‘You guys jes’ git ready to loosen up, ’cause I’m gonna deal all d’ dark-johns home. I promis’ my boss I wouldn’ gamble no mo’, but dis is jes’ like pickin’ up money in d’ street.’ Fly line, see? Den he starts dealin’. Well, I figgers dis guy’s been so lucky and jes’ turned a black-jack for d’ deal, it’s time fo’ his luck to change. So I ups and stops his bank fo’ twenty bucks, see? And I be dam’ if he don’t deal himself another black-jack – makin’ two in a row!
“Well, he picks up all d’ money befo’ we can git our breath, see? Everybody laffs but me. I figgers day’s a trick in it. Wouldn’ you?”
“Sho I would. Two black-jacks in a row. Huh!”
“So I calls ’im crooked. But he jes’ laffs and tells me to talk wid mo’ money and less mouf. Natchelly dat makes me mad. A guy pulls a crooked deal and says sump’n like dat. Wouldn’ you ’a’ got mad?”
“Sho I would. Sho, man.”
“So I tells him to pass back my twenty, long as he said he wasn’t gamblin’. Den he stops dealin’ and asts me is I big enough to take it. Tryin’ to start sump’n all d’ time, see?”
“Sho he was. Tryin’ to start somp’n.”
“So I says I’ll either take it out his pile or off his hips, see? But when I starts for him, d’ guys won’t let me put it on him, see? Fact dey puts me out d’ game. So natchelly I jes’ got to get me some o’ dis lil spade’s meat, dass all. I got to. He can’t git away wid nuthin’ like dat.”
“Tryin’ to git away wi’ sump’n. Huh!”
“Sho he is. But I’ll git ’im.”
“What you aim to do?”
“I been primin’ ’im fo’ a fight.”
“Dey claim he’s pretty good wif’ ’is hands.”
“Ain’t gonna be no hands. See dis?”
He withdrew from his right-hand coat pocket what appeared to be a quite harmless pocket-knife. He pressed it under his thumb and a steel blade leaped forth, quick as the tongue of a snake, a blade five inches long with a sweeping curve like a tiny scimitar. It was hollow-ground and honed to exquisite sharpness. A little catch fell into place at the junction of blade and handle, preventing the protruding blade from telescoping shut. The steel gleamed like eyes in the dark.
“Whew-ee!” admired the observer.
“He won’t be d’ fuss one I ever put it on. And here’s how I figger. His boss is tight, see. Fired two guys already fo’ roughin’. Dis boogy’s got two new tires to account fo’ now. And when his boss sees he been out, he’ll find out it’s ’count o’ some gamblin’ scrape and fire him too. Dass where I laff. See?”
“’Deed, boy, it’s a shame fo’ all dem brains to go to seed in yo’ head. You could sell ’em and buy Europe, no stuff.”
Then abruptly both shrank into deeper shadow as Eight-Ball and Effie came out.
Diagonally across the street from the dance-hall stands Teddy’s place, an establishment which stays open all night and draws all manner of men and women by the common appeal of good food. Oddly, it was once a mere bar-room lunch, and the mahogany bar-counter still serves the majority of Teddy’s patrons, those who are content to sit upon stools and rub elbows with anybody. But there is now a back room also, with a side entrance available from the street. Here there are round-top tables beside the walls, and here parties with ladies may be more elegantly served. It is really a “high-class” grill-room, and its relation to the bar-counter lunch-room, the whole situated on democratic 135th Street, marks Teddy a man of considerable business acumen.
In one corner of the grill-room there is an excellent phonograph which plays a record repeatedly without changing. A song ends; you wait a few moments while the instrument is automatically re-wound and adjusted; and the song4 begins again.
Tonight the long-distance record was Tessie Smith’s “Lord Have Mercy Blues,” a curious mingling of the secular and the religious, in the tragic refrain of which the unfortunate victim of trouble after trouble resorts to prayer. The record was not playing loudly, but such was the quality of Tessie Smith’s voice that you heard its persistent, half-humorous pain through louder, clearer sounds.
Just now there were no such sounds, for the room was almost empty. The theatre crowd had departed; the crowd from the dance-halls had not yet arrived. Three or four couples sat about tête-à-tête, and near the phonograph Eight-Ball and Effie. Eight-Ball’s back was turned toward the wall to hide the gape in his coat.
The phonograph wailed:
My man was comin’ to me – said he’d
Let me know by mail,
My man was comin’ to me – said he’d let me know by mail –
The letter come and tole me –
They’d put my lovin’ man in jail.
Grief, affliction, woe, told in a tone of most heartbroken despair; desolation with the merest tincture of humor – yet those who listened heard only the humor, considered only the jest.
Mercy – Lawd, have mercy!
How come I always get bad news?
Mercy – Lawd, have mercy!
How come I always got the blues?
“Them’s the blues I ought to be singin’,” said Eight-Ball.
“You’ll feel better after you eat,” soothed the girl.
“I’ll feel better after I get one good crack at that half-bleached buzzard.”
“You ought to pick your comp’ny, Eighty.”
Her tone surprised him. He encountered her look, mingled tenderness and reproach, and his eyes fell, ashamed.
“All right, kid. I’m off gamblin’ for life. – But if that dude keeps messin’ around – ”
“Don’t forget – he cuts.”
“He better cut fast, then.”
As if willing to oblige, Dirty Cozzens appeared at the door. He stood looking about, head hunched characteristically forward, right hand deep in his right coat pocket; calmly observed the relative desertion of the dining-room; then slowly advanced across the open space in the center of the floor.
Quickly Effie reached into her bag, withdrew something, put it into Eight-Ball’s hand. The movement could have been seen, but the object passed was too small for the closest observation to make out. She might merely have been indulging in a heartening handclasp. Eight-Ball looked at her, first with puzzlement, then with understanding and resolution.
This time Dirty ignored Effie. This afternoon he might have had a chance with her; now he knew he had not. Then he had hidden his weapon from her; now he wanted her to see. That, too, had been largely bullying; this was serious challenge. Then he had sought but a momentary satisfaction; the satisfaction pending now would last, arising as it would out of the infliction of physical injury which could cost the victim his job. Let Effie share all of this – by all means let her see.
“Gimme my twenty bucks.”
Eight-Ball looked up, allowed his gaze to pause here and there over his enemy’s frame; then patted his left trouser’s pocket. “It’s right here. You big enough to take it?”
“Listen, lamp-black. You been tryin’ to git fly wid me ev’r since las’ week, ain’t y’? Put d’ locks on me wid a crooked deal. Tried to start sump’n in d’ barber shop today. Tole yo’ woman to freeze me at d’ dance tonight. Aw right. I’m warnin’ y’, see? I done warned you twice. I put my mark on yo’ two shoes today and I put it on yo’ coat tonight. D’ nex’ time I’m gonna put it on yo’ black hide. See?”
Eight-Ball sat quite still, looking up at the lowering face.
“I tole y’ I’d either take it out yo’ pile or off yo’ hips. Now put up or git up, you – ”
Eight-Ball went up as if he’d been on a coil-spring, suddenly released. Dirty staggered backward but did not lose his footing.
Naturally none of Teddy’s three waiters was in sight – it is unlikely that they would have interfered if they had been. Indeed, had they seen the initial blow of Eight-Ball – a familiar patron – they would have been satisfied to let him take care of himself. As for the other guests, they were interested but not alarmed. One does not yell or run at such a time unless a pistol is drawn.
Recovering balance, Dirty Cozzens withdrew his right hand from his pocket. It is difficult to believe possible the expression of evil that now contorted his features. That expression, however, was not more evil than the glint of the miniature scimitar, whose handle his right hand grasped.
He held the weapon in what pocket-knife fighters consider best form – three fingers firmly encircling the handle, but the index finger extended along the posterior, dull edge of the blade, tending to direct, brace, and conceal it. A sufficient length of the curved point extended beyond the end of the index finger to permit the infliction of a dangerously deep wound.
Eight-Ball stood ready, leaning a little forward, arms lax, both palms open – and empty.
Dirty’s scowl concentrated on Eight-Ball’s hands, and that he did not move at once was probably due to his astonishment at seeing no weapon in them. Any such astonishment, however, promptly gave way to quick appreciation of an advantage, and he did what a knifer rarely does. He rushed bringing his blade swiftly across and back in a criss-cross sweep before him.
Eight-Ball neither side-stepped nor attempted to block the motion. Either might have been disastrous. Instead, he ducked by suddenly squatting, and, touching the floor with his left hand for balance, kicked suddenly out with his right foot. The sharp crack of his heel against his antagonist’s shin must have almost broken it. Certainly he gained time to jump up and seize Dirty’s wrist before it could execute a second descending arc.
One less skilled than Eight-Ball would have found this useless. From such a wrist-hold the knife-hand is effectively liberated by simply inverting the weapon, which the fingers are still free to manipulate. The blade is thus brought back against its own wrist, and any fingers surrounding that wrist usually let go at once. Eighty had forestalled this contingency by a deft slipping of his grip upward over the fingers that held the knife handle. The hold that he now fastened upon those fingers was the same that had yanked two slashed balloon-tires off their rims some hours before, and it held Dirty’s fingers, crushed together around their knife, as securely as a pipe-wrench holds a joint.
And now those who had watched this little fellow empty-handed win the advantage over an armed and bigger adversary saw a curious thing occur. Regularly in the ensuing scuffle Eight-Ball’s right hand landed open-palmed against Dirty’s face – landed again and again with a surrounding smack; and for every time that it landed, presently there appeared a short red line, slowly widening into a crimson wheal.
Before long Dirty, rendered helpless now, and losing heart, raised his free hand to his face and as his fingers passed across it, the crimson wheals that they touched all ran together. He looked at the tips of those fingers, saw they were wet and red; his mouth fell open; the hand which Eight-Ball held went limp, the knife fell to the floor; and Dirty Cozzens quailed, as craven now as he’d been evil a moment before.
He began to stammer things, to deprecate, to plead; but Eight-Ball was deaf. The muscles of the latter’s left arm seemed about to burst through their sleeve, while the artificial vent in the back of the coat ripped upward to the collar, as with one tremendous twist he brought the other man to his knees.
In that mad moment of triumph no one may say what disproportionate stroke of vengeance might not have brought on real tragedy. But with that strange and terrible open palm raised, a voice halted Eight-Ball’s final blow:
Have mercy – Lawd, have mercy –
Tessie Smith’s voice, wailing out of an extremity of despair.
Letter come and told me –
They’d put my lovin’ man in jail –
The entire engagement had occupied only the few moments during which the phonograph automatically prepared itself to repeat. Now the words came as warning and plea:
Have mercy – Lawd, have mercy –
Eight-Ball released Dirty Cozzens, stepped back, picked up a crumpled paper napkin from the table where Effie still sat.
“Wipe y’ face with this. Go on ’round to the hospital.” He urged Dirty, whimpering, out of the side door.
Then he turned back toward Effie, stood over the table a moment, returned her rather proud smile. Two of the men who’d looked on came up. Said one:
“Buddy, show me that trick, will you?”
Eight-Ball extended his right hand, palm downward, and spread the fingers wide open. Freed from its vise-like hiding place between firmly adjacent fingers, something fell upon the porcelain table-top. It fell with a bright flash and a little clinking sound not unlike a quick laugh of surprise – the safety-razor blade which Effie had borrowed that afternoon from Pop Overton.
1927
It might not have been such a jolt had my five years’ absence from Harlem been spent otherwise. But the study of medicine includes no courses in cabareting; and, anyway, the Negro cabarets in Washington, where I studied, are all uncompromisingly black. Accordingly I was entirely unprepared for what I found when I returned to Harlem recently.
I remembered one place especially where my own crowd used to hold forth; and, hoping to find some old-timers there still, I sought it out one midnight. The old, familiar plunkety-plunk welcomed me from below as I entered. I descended the same old narrow stairs, came into the same smoke-misty basement, and found myself a chair at one of the ancient white-porcelain, mirror-smooth tables. I drew a deep breath and looked about, seeking familiar faces. “What a lot of ’fays!” I thought, as I noticed the number of white guests. Presently I grew puzzled and began to stare, then I gaped – and gasped. I found myself wondering if this was the right place – if, indeed, this was Harlem at all. I suddenly became aware that, except for the waiters and members of the orchestra, I was the only Negro in the place.
After a while I left it and wandered about in a daze from night-club to night-club. I tried the Nest, Small’s, Connie’s Inn, the Capitol, Happy’s, the Cotton Club. There was no mistake; my discovery was real and was repeatedly confirmed. No wonder my old crowd was not to be found in any of them. The best of Harlem’s black cabarets have changed their names and turned white.
Such a discovery renders a moment’s recollection irresistible. As irresistible as were the cabarets themselves to me seven or eight years ago. Just out of college in a town where cabarets were something only read about. A year of graduate work ahead. A Summer of rest at hand. Cabarets. Cabarets night after night, and one after another. There was no cover-charge then, and a fifteen-cent bottle of Whistle lasted an hour. It was just after the war – the heroes were home – cabarets were the thing.
How the Lybia prospered in those happy days! It was the gathering place of the swellest Harlem set: if you didn’t go to the Lybia, why, my dear, you just didn’t belong. The people you saw at church in the morning you met at the Lybia at night. What romance in those war-tinged days and nights! Officers from Camp Upton, with pretty maids from Brooklyn! Gay lieutenants, handsome captains – all whirling the lively onestep. Poor non-coms completely ignored; what sensible girl wanted a corporal or even a sergeant? That white, old-fashioned house, standing alone in 138th Street, near the corner of Seventh Avenue – doomed to be torn down a few months thence – how it shook with the dancing and laughter of the dark merry crowds!
But the first place really popular with my friends was a Chinese restaurant in 136th Street, which had been known as Hayne’s Café and then became the Oriental. It occupied an entire house of three stories, and had carpeted floors and a quiet, superior air. There was excellent food and incredibly good tea and two unusual entertainers: a Cuban girl, who could so vary popular airs that they sounded like real music, and a slender little “brown” with a voice of silver and a way of singing a song that made you forget your food. One could dance in the Oriental if one liked, but one danced to a piano only, and wound one’s way between linen-clad tables over velvety, noiseless floors.
Here we gathered: Fritz Pollard, All-American halfback, selling Negro stock to prosperous Negro physicians; Henry Creamer and Turner Layton, who had written “After You’ve Gone” and a dozen more songs, and were going to write “Strut, Miss Lizzie”; Paul Robeson,1 All-American end, on the point of tackling law, quite unaware that the stage would intervene; Preacher Harry Bragg, Harvard Jimmie MacLendon and half a dozen others. Here at a little table, just inside the door, Bert Williams2 had supper every night, and afterward sometimes joined us upstairs and sang songs with us and lampooned the Actors’ Equity Association, which had barred him because of his color. Never did white guests come to the Oriental except as guests of Negroes. But the manager soon was stricken with a psychosis of some sort, became a black Jew, grew himself a bushy, square-cut beard, donned a skull-cap and abandoned the Oriental. And so we were robbed of our favorite resort, and thereafter became mere rounders.
Such places, those real Negro cabarets that we met in the course of our rounds! There was Edmonds’ in Fifth Avenue at 130th Street. It was a sure-enough honky-tonk, occupying the cellar of a saloon. It was the social center of what was then, and still is, Negro Harlem’s kitchen. Here a tall brown-skin girl, unmistakably the one guaranteed in the song to make a preacher lay his Bible down, used to sing and dance her own peculiar numbers, vesting them with her own originality. She was known simply as Ethel, and was a genuine drawing-card. She knew her importance, too. Other girls wore themselves ragged trying to rise above the inattentive din of conversation, and soon, literally, yelled themselves hoarse; eventually they lost whatever music there was in their voices and acquired that familiar throaty roughness which is so frequent among blues singers, and which, though admired as characteristically African, is as a matter of fact nothing but a form of chronic laryngitis. Other girls did these things, but not Ethel. She took it easy. She would stride with great leisure and self-assurance to the center of the floor, stand there with a half-contemptuous nonchalance, and wait. All would become silent at once. Then she’d begin her song, genuine blues, which, for all their humorous lines, emanated tragedy and heartbreak:
Woke up this mawnin’
The day was dawnin’
And I was sad and blue, so blue, Lord –
Didn’ have nobody
To tell my troubles to –
It was Ethel who first made popular the song, “Tryin’ to Teach My Good Man Right from Wrong,” in the slow, meditative measures in which she complained:
I’m gettin’ sick and tired of my railroad man
I’m gettin’ sick and tired of my railroad man –
Can’t get him when I want him –
I get him when I can.
It wasn’t long before this song-bird escaped her dingy cage. Her name is a vaudeville attraction now, and she uses it all – Ethel Waters. Is there anyone who hasn’t heard her sing “Shake That Thing!”?
A second place was Connor’s in 135th Street near Lenox Avenue. It was livelier, less languidly sensuous, and easier to breathe in than Edmonds’. Like the latter, it was in a basement, reached by the typical narrow, headlong stairway. One of the girls there specialized in the Jelly-Roll song, and mad habitués used to fling petitions of greenbacks at her feet – pretty nimble feet they were, too – when she sang that she loved ’em but she had to turn ’em down. Over in a corner a group of ’fays would huddle and grin and think they were having a wild time. Slumming. But they were still very few in those days.
And there was the Oriental, which borrowed the name that the former Hayne’s Café had abandoned. This was beyond Lenox Avenue on the south side of 135th Street. An upstairs place, it was nevertheless as dingy as any of the cellars, and the music fairly fought its way through the babble and smoke to one’s ears, suffering in transit weird and incredible distortion. The prize pet here was a slim, little lad, unbelievably black beneath his high-brown powder, wearing a Mexican bandit costume with a bright-colored head-dress and sash. I see him now, poor kid, in all his glory, shimmying for enraptured women, who marveled at the perfect control of his voluntary abdominal tremors. He used to let the women reach out and put their hands on his sash to palpate those tremors – for a quarter.
Finally, there was the Garden of Joy, an open-air cabaret between 138th and 139th Streets in Seventh Avenue, occupying a plateau high above the sidewalk – a large, well-laid, smooth wooden floor with tables and chairs and a tinny orchestra, all covered by a propped-up roof, that resembled an enormous lampshade, directing bright light downward and outward. Not far away the Abyssinian3 Church used to hold its Summer camp-meetings in a great round circus-tent. Night after night there would arise the mingled strains of blues and spirituals, those peculiarly Negro forms of song, the one secular and the other religious, but both born of wretchedness in travail, both with their soarings of exultation and sinkings of despair. I used to wonder if God, hearing them both, found any real distinction.
There were the Lybia, then, and Hayne’s, Connor’s, the Oriental, Edmonds’ and the Garden of Joy, each distinctive, standing for a type, some living up to their names, others living down to them, but all predominantly black. Regularly I made the rounds among these places and saw only incidental white people. I have seen them occasionally in numbers, but such parties were out on a lark. They weren’t in their natural habitat and they often weren’t any too comfortable.
But what of Barron’s, you say? Certainly they were at home there. Yes, I know about Barron’s. I have been turned away from Barron’s because I was too dark to be welcome. I have been a member of a group that was told, “No more room,” when we could see plenty of room. Negroes were never actually wanted in Barron’s save to work. Dark skins were always discouraged or barred. In short, the fact about Barron’s was this: it simply wasn’t a Negro cabaret; it was a cabaret run by Negroes for whites. It wasn’t even on the lists of those who lived in Harlem – they’d no more think of going there than of going to the Winter Garden Roof. But these other places were Negro through and through. Negroes supported them, not merely in now-and-then parties, but steadily, night after night.
Now, however, the situation is reversed. It is I who go occasionally and white people who go night after night. Time and again, since I’ve returned to live in Harlem, I’ve been one of a party of four Negroes who went to this or that Harlem cabaret, and on each occasion we’ve been the only Negro guests in the place. The managers don’t hesitate to say that it is upon these predominant white patrons that they depend for success. These places therefore are no longer mine but theirs. Not that I’m barred, any more than they were seven or eight years ago. Once known, I’m even welcome, just as some of them used to be. But the complexion of the place is theirs, not mine. I? Why, I am actually stared at, I frequently feel uncomfortable and out of place, and when I go out on the floor to dance I am lost in a sea of white faces. As another observer has put it to me since, time was when white people went to Negro cabarets to see how Negroes acted; now Negroes go to these same cabarets to see how white people act. Negro clubs have recently taken to hiring a place outright for a presumably Negro party; and even then a goodly percentage of the invited guests are white.
One hurries to account for this change of complexion as a reaction to the Negro invasion of Broadway not long since. One remembers “Shuffle Along” of four years ago, the first Negro piece in the downtown district for many a moon. One says, “Oh yes, Negroes took their stuff to the whites and won attention and praise, and now the whites are seeking this stuff out on its native soil.” Maybe. So I myself thought at first. But one looks for something of oppositeness in a genuine reaction. One would rather expect the reaction to the Negro invasion of Broadway to be apathy. One would expect that the same thing repeated under different names or in imitative fragments would meet with colder and colder reception, and finally with none at all.
A little recollection will show that just what one would expect was what happened. Remember “Shuffle Along’s” successors: “Put and Take,” “Liza,” “Strut Miss Lizzie,” “Runnin’ Wild,” and the others? True, none was so good as “Shuffle Along,” but surely they didn’t deserve all the roasting they got. “Liza” flared but briefly, during a holiday season. “Put and Take” was a loss, “Strut Miss Lizzie” strutted about two weeks, and the humor of “Runnin’ Wild” was derided as Neo-Pleistocene. Here was reaction for you – wholesale withdrawal of favor. One can hardly conclude that such withdrawal culminated in the present swamping of Negro cabarets. People so sick of a thing would hardly go out of their way to find it.
And they are sick of it – in quantity at least. Only one Negro entertainment has survived this reaction of apathy in any permanent fashion. This is the series of revues built around the personality of Florence Mills. Without that bright live personality the Broadway district would have been swept clean last season of all-Negro bills. Here is a girl who has triumphed over a hundred obstacles. Month after month she played obscure, unnoticed rôles with obscure, unknown dark companies. She was playing such a minor part in “Shuffle Along” when the departure of Gertrude Saunders, the craziest blues-singer on earth, unexpectedly gave her the spotlight. Florence Mills cleaned up. She cleaned up so thoroughly that the same public which grew weary of “Shuffle Along” and sick of its successors still had an eager ear for her. They have yet, and she neither wearies nor disappoints them. An impatient Broadway audience awaits her return from Paris, where she and the inimitable Josephine Baker have been vying with each other as sensations. She is now in London on the way home, but London won’t release her; the enthusiasm over her exceeds anything in the memory of the oldest reviewers.
Florence Mills, moreover, is admired by her own people too, because, far from going to her head, her success has not made her forgetful. Not long ago, the rumor goes, she made a fabulous amount of money in the Florida real-estate boom, and what do you suppose she plans to do with it? Build herself an Italian villa somewhere up the Hudson? Not at all. She plans to build a first-rate Negro theatre in Harlem.
But that’s Florence Mills. Others have encountered indifference. In vain has Eddie Hunter, for instance, tried for a first-class Broadway showing, despite the fact that he himself has a new kind of Negro-comedian character to portray – the wise darkey, the “bizthniss man,” the “fly” rascal who gets away with murder, a character who amuses by making a goat of others instead of by making a goat of himself. They say that some dozen Negro shows have met with similar denials. Yet the same people, presumably, whose spokesmen render these decisions flood Harlem night after night and literally crowd me off the dancing-floor. If this is a reaction, it is a reaction to a reaction, a swinging back of the pendulum from apathy toward interest. Maybe so. The cabarets may present only those special Negro features which have a particular and peculiar appeal, leaving out the high-yaller display that is merely feebly imitative. But a reaction to a reaction – that’s differential calculus.
1927
“The City of Refuge,” Rudolph Fisher, 1925. “Blades of Steel,” Rudolph Fisher, 1927. “The Caucasian Storms Harlem,” Rudolph Fisher 1927.
THE CITY OF REFUGE
1 First published in The Atlantic Monthly (February 1925).
2 Original reads: wabbled [ed.].
3 Original reads: near by [ed.].
4 Original reads: near by [ed.].
BLADES OF STEEL
1 First published in The Atlantic Monthly (August 1927).
2 Original reads: his [ed.].
3 dicty high-class.
4 Original reads: songs [ed.].
THE CAUCASIAN STORMS HARLEM
1 Paul Robeson (1898–1976), African American theater actor and singer.
2 Bert Williams (1874–1922), African American vaudeville actor and comedian.
3 Original reads: Abysinnian [ed.].