“A Farewell to Bumpy” is a wonderful look at a Black gangster who went head to head with the white gangsters of the Mafia—who had backed down from no one since he was a boy, and who went on to take over a good part of Harlem’s heroin trade.
Ellsworth Johnson, who was known as Bumpy in the Black sections of every city in the country, is dead of a heart attack at 63.
It begins as an obituary should; an obituary of a man who wanted to own the heroin business. It notes he had a temper. “And on these occasions he was more dangerous than an infantry platoon.”
And then Breslin takes us back to where Bumpy as a boy got run out of Charleston, South Carolina, because he didn’t talk properly to white people when he delivered their newspapers. He came to Harlem, Breslin notes, and panhandled, while nurturing his fierce determination that when he was old enough to work, no white man was going to put a broom in his hand.
By the time he died, he had lived a life that “made him the only Black man in the country to get what he wanted when he sat down with the Mafia.”
The column quickly puts you in the room with Bumpy, as if Breslin, who like his hero Damon Runyon could eat at the best tables in the country but preferred the company of criminals and thieves, was there with him.
There was a morning a month ago when Bumpy was eating hash for breakfast in the Stage Delicatessen on Seventh Ave. and listening to a man tell of his troubles with a shylock.
“Just don’t pay him any more,” Bumpy said.
“But the Italians would be comin’ after me,” the man said.
“Well, you just tell them that you left the money over to Bumpy’s and if they want it, they come and get it.”
“Tell them that?” the man said.
“Just that,” Bumpy said. “And that’ll be the end of it.”
Pretty much everything you need to know about the power Bumpy Johnson had accumulated on the streets. And the setting, better than any movie set, captures how Bumpy enjoyed spending his power: at ease in one of the best delicatessens in the world.
Anecdote piles on anecdote, you learn more about Bumpy Johnson, his rise to power, his hard fists and soft hands in just a few hundred words.
Bumpy had a head that broke a thousand nightsticks. He came up when Dutch Schultz and Owney Madden ran Harlem. He was in and out of jails. Alcohol, numbers, gambling. [And yet] . . . “In 20 years with this man, we never once had a fight in the house,” his wife said yesterday. “He left everything bothering him at the door.”
We learn that Bumpy was the best chess player in Harlem, that he went to school to learn to mix chemicals for a pest control business he owned. That he was halfway, when he died, through studying the ideals of Greek culture: the concept of paideia, which explicated the ideal way to educate a person to become a good citizen.
And we learn of Bumpy’s prized possession:
His prized possession was a typed-up three-act play and a sheaf of poems he had written. One of his poems was about Alcatraz:
Fools in high places should not dwell
For they make life a living hell
And leave behind when they pass
A monument like Alcatraz
We are now far beyond the abilities of the best obituary writer. We are inside the life and mind of a person whom Breslin had spent a lot of time understanding. The kind of person Breslin the writer would call early in the morning when he needed something for a column.
And then, at the close, we discover that this had been an intensely personal voyage.
He always had his own way of explaining who he was. There was one day when a young girl came to Harlem to teach and she was nervous about it, and Bumpy, as a favor to somebody, went over to her.
“Don’t you think about anything, you’ll like it fine here,” he said. “Now you’re here for the Head Start program. Great program. All these things started under President Kennedy. And I served under President Kennedy.”
“You did?” the teacher said. “Where?”
“I served in Alcatraz,” Bumpy Johnson said.
The teacher was Breslin’s sister, Deirdre. The somebody was Breslin.
Michael Daly, who heard the story from Jimmy Breslin himself, says it went like this:
“Do you know who I am?” Bumpy asked, addressing Deirdre’s class.
“Yes, Mr. Johnson,” the class replied.
And Deirdre Breslin now had the best behaved class of students in Harlem.
And that is Breslin’s farewell to Bumpy.