Cotton Comes to Harlem (11 page)

“Since it’s you, I’ll give you fifteen dollars.”

“Forty,” Uncle Bud muttered.

Mr Goodman gestured eloquently. “What am I, your father, to give you money for nothing?” the three colored men stared at him accusingly. “You think I am Abraham Lincoln instead of Abraham Goodman?” The colored men didn’t think he was funny. “Twenty,” Mr Goodman said desperately and turned towards the office.

“Thirty,” Uncle Bud said.

The colored workmen shifted the bale of cotton as though asking whether to take it in or put it back.

“Twenty-five,” Mr Goodman said angrily. “And I should have my head examined.”

“Sold,” Uncle Bud said.

About that time the Colonel had finished his interview with Barry and was having his breakfast. It had been sent from a “home-cooking” restaurant down the street. The Colonel seemed to be demonstrating to the colored people outside, many of whom were now peeking through the cracks between the posters covering most of the window, what they could be eating for breakfast if
they signed up with him and went back south.

He had a bowl of grits, swimming with butter; four fried eggs sunny side up; six fried home-made sausages; six down-home biscuits, each an inch thick, with big slabs of butter stuck between the halves; and a pitcher of sorghum molasses. The Colonel had brought his own food with him and merely paid the restaurant to cook it. Alongside his heaping plate stood a tall bourbon whisky highball.

The colored people, watching the Colonel shovel grits, eggs and sausage into his mouth and chomp off a hunk of biscuit, felt nostalgic. But when they saw him cover all his food with a thick layer of sorghum molasses, many felt absolutely homesick.

“I wouldn’t mind going down home for dinner ever day,” one joker said. “But I wouldn’t want to stay overnight.”

“Baby, seeing that scoff makes my stomach feel lak my throat is cut,” another replied.

Bill Davis, the clean-cut young man who was Reverend O’Malley’s recruiting agent, entered the Back-to-the-Southland office as Colonel Calhoun was taking an oversize mouthful of grits, eggs and sausage mixed with molasses. He paused before the Colonel’s desk, erect and purposeful.

“Colonel Calhoun, I am Mister Davis,” he said. “I represent the Back-to-Africa movement of Reverend O’Malley’s. I want a word with you.”

The Colonel looked up at Bill Davis through cold blue eyes, continuing to chew slowly and deliberately like a camel chewing its cud. But he took much longer in hisappraisal than he had done with Barry Waterfield. When he had finished chewing, he washed his mouth with a sip from his bourbon highball, cleared his throat and said, “Come back in half an hour, after I’ve et my breakfast.”

“What I have to say to you I’m going to say now,” Bill Davis said.

The Colonel looked up at him again. The blond young man who had been standing in the background moved closer. The young colored men at their desks in the rear became nervous.

“Well, what can I do for you … er … what did you say your name was?” the Colonel said.

“My name is
Mister
Davis, and I’ll make it short and sweet.
Get out of town
!”

The blond young man started around the desk and Bill Davis got set to hit him, but the Colonel waved him back.

“Is that all you got to say, my boy?”

“That’s all, and I’m not your boy,” Bill Davis said.

“Then you’ve said it,” the Colonel said and deliberately began
eating again.

When Bill emerged, the black people parted to let him pass. They didn’t know what he had said to the Colonel, but whatever it was they were for him. He had stood right up to that ol’ white man and tol’ him something to his teeth. They respected him.

A half-hour later the pickets moved in. They marched up and down Seventh Avenue, holding aloft a Back-to-Africa banner and carrying placards reading:
Goddamn White Man GO! GO! GO! Black Man STAY! STAY! STAY!
There were twenty-five in the picket line and two or three hundred followers. The pickets formed a circle in front of the Back-to-the-Southland office and chanted as they marched, “Go, white man, go while you can.… Go, white man, go while you can.…” Bill Davis stood to one side between two elderly colored men.

Colored people poured into the vicinity from far and wide, overflowed the sidewalks and spilled into the street. Traffic was stopped. The atmosphere grew tense, pregnant with premonition. A black youth ran forward with a brick to hurl through the plate-glass window. A Back-to-Africa follower grabbed him and took it away. “None of that, son, we’re peaceful,” he said.

“What for?” the youth asked.

The man couldn’t answer.

Suddenly the air was filled with the distant wailing of the sirens, sounding at first like the faint wailing of banshees, growing ever louder as the police cruisers roared nearer, like souls escaped from hell.

The first cruiser ploughed through the mob and shrieked to a stop on the wrong side of the street. Two uniformed white cops hit the pavement with pistols drawn, shouting, “Get back! Get off the street! Clear the street!” Then another cruiser plowed through the mob and shrieked to a stop.… Then a third.… Then a fourth.… Then a fifth. Out came the white cops, brandishing their pistols, like trained performers in a macabre ballet entitled “If You’re Black Get Back”.

The mood of the mob became dangerous. A cop pushed a black man. The black man got set to hit the cop. Another cop quickly intervened.

A woman fell down and was trampled. “Help! Murder!” she screamed.

The mob moved in her direction, taking the cops with it.

“Goddamned mother-raping shit! Here it is!” a young black man shouted, whipping out his switch-blade knife.

Then the precinct captain arrived in a sound truck. “All officers back to your cars,” he ordered, his voice loud and clear from the
amplifiers. “Back to your cars. And, folks, let’s have some order.”

The cops retreated to their cars. The danger passed. Some people cheered. Slowly the people returned to the sidewalks. Passenger cars that had been lined up for more than ten blocks began to move along, curious faces peering out at the black people crowding the sidewalks.

The captain went over and talked to Bill Davis and the two men with him. “Only nine persons are permitted on a picket line by New York law,” he said. “Will you thin these pickets down to nine?”

Bill looked at the elderly men. They nodded. He said, “All right,” to the captain and thinned out the picket line.

Then the captain went inside the office and approached Colonel Calhoun; he asked to see his licence. The Colonel’s papers were in order; he had a New York City permit to recruit farm labor as the agent of the Back-to-the-Southland movement, which was registered in Birmingham, Alabama.

The captain returned to the street and stationed ten policemen in front of the office to keep order, and two police cruisers to keep the street clear. Then he shook hands with Bill Davis and got back into the sound truck and left.

The mob began to disperse.

“I knew we’d get some action from Reverend O’Malley, soon as he heard about all this,” the church sister said.

Her companion looked bewildered. “What I wants to know,” she asked, “is we won or lost?”

Inside, the blond young man asked Colonel Calhoun, “Aren’twe pretty well finished now?”

Colonel Calhoun lit a fresh cheroot and took a puff. “It’s just good publicity, son,” he said.

By then it was noon, and the two young colored clerks slipped out the back door to go to lunch.

Later that afternoon one of Mr Goodman’s workmen stood in the crowd surrounding the Back-to-Africa pickets, admiring the poster art on the windows of the Back-to-the-Southland office. He had bathed and shaved and dressed up for a big Saturday night and he was just killing time until his date. Suddenly his gaze fell on the small sign in the corner reading:
Wanted, a bale of cotton.
He started inside. A Back-to-Africa sympathizer grabbed his arm.

“Don’t go in there, friend. You don’t believe that crap, do you?”

“Baby, I ain’t thinking ’bout going south. I ain’t never been south. I just wanna talk to the man.”

“ ’Bout what?”

“I just wanna ask the man if them chicken really got legs that big,” he said, pointing to the picture of the chicken.

The man bent over laughing. “You go ’head and ast him, man, and you tell me what he say.”

The workman went inside and walked up to Colonel Calhoun’s desk and took off his cap. “Colonel,” he said, “I’m just the man you wanna see. My name is Josh.”

The Colonel gave him the customary cold-eyed appraisal, sitting reared back in his chair as though he hadn’t moved. The blond young man stood beside him.

“Well, Josh, what can you do for me?” the Colonel asked, showing his dentures in a smile.

“I can get you a bale of cotton,” Josh said.

The tableau froze. The Colonel was caught in the act of returning the cheroot to his lips. The blond young man was caught in the act of turning to look out towards the street. Then, deliberately, without a change of expression, the Colonel put the cheroot between his lips and puffed. The blond young man turned back to stare wordlessly at Josh, leaning slightly forward.

“You want a bale of cotton, don’t you?” Josh asked.

“Where would you get a bale of cotton, my boy?” the Colonel asked casually.

“We got one in the junkyard where I work.”

The blond young man let out his breath in a disappointed sigh.

“A junk man sold it to us just this morning,” Josh went on, hoping to get an offer.

The blond young man tensed again.

But the Colonel continued to appear relaxed and amiable. “He didn’t steal it, did he? We don’t want to buy any stolen goods.”

“Oh, Uncle Bud didn’t steal it, I’m sure,” Josh said. “He must of found it somewheres.”

“Found a bale of cotton?” The Colonel sounded sceptical.

“Must have,” Josh contended. “He spends every night traveling ’bout the streets, picking up junk what’s been lost or thrown away. Where could he steal a bale of cotton?”

“And he sold it to you this morning?”

“Yassuh, to Mr Goodman, that is; he owns the junkyard, I just work there. But I can get it for you.”

“When?”

“Well, ain’t nobody there now. We close at noon on Sat’day and Mr Goodman go home; but I can get it for you tonight if you wants it right away.”

“How?”

“Well, suh, I got a key, and we don’t have to bother Mr Goodman;
I can just sell it to you myself.”

“Well,” the Colonel said and puffed his cheroot. “We’ll pick you up in my cah at the 125th Street railroad station at ten o’clock tonight. Can you be there?”

“Oh, yassuh, I can be there!” Josh declared, then hesitated. “That’s all right, but how much you going to pay me?”

“Name your own price,” the Colonel said.

“A hundred dollars,” Josh said, holding his breath.

“Right,” the Colonel said.

Iris lay on her sofa in the sitting-room reading
Ebony
magazine and eating chocolate candy. She had been under twenty-four-hour surveillance since the hijacking. A police matron had spent the night in her bedroom while a detective had sat up in the sitting-room. Now there was another detective there alone. He had orders not to let her out of his sight. He had followed her from room to room, even keeping the bathroom door in view after having removed the razor blades and all other instruments by which she might injure herself.

He sat facing her in an overstuffed chair, leafing through a book called
Sex and Race
by W. G. Rogers. The only others books in the house were the Bible and
The Life of Marcus Garvey. Sex and Race
didn’t interest him. Garvey didn’t interest him either. He had read the Bible, at least all he needed to read.

He was bored. He didn’t like his assignment. But the captain thought that sooner or later Deke was going to try to contact her, or she him, and he was taking every precaution. The telephone was bugged and the operators alerted to trace all incoming calls; and there was a police cruiser with a radio-telephone parked within thirty seconds’ distance down the street, manned by four detectives.

The captain wanted Deke as bad as people in hell want ice water.

Iris threw down the magazine and sat up. She was wearing a silk print dress and the skirt hiked up, showing smooth yellow thighs above tan nylon stockings.

The book fell from the detective’s hands.

“Why the hell don’t you just arrest me and have it done with?” she flared in her vulgar husky voice.

Her voice grated on the detective’s nerves. And her vulgar
sensuality bothered him. He was a home-loving man with a wife and three children, and her perfumed voluptuous body with its effluvium of sex outraged his sensibilities. His puritanical soul felt affronted by this aura of sex and his perverse imagination filled him with a sense of guilt. But he had himself well under control.

“I just take orders, ma’am,” he said mildly. “Any time you want to go to the station of your own accord I’ll take you.”

“Shit,” she said, looking at him with disgust.

He was a tall, balding, redheaded, middle-aged man with a slight stoop. A small dried face between huge red ears gave him a monkeyish look and his white skin was blotched with large brown freckles. He was a plain-clothes precinct detective and he looked underpaid.

Iris examined him appraisingly. “If you weren’t such an ugly mother-raper at least we could pass time making love,” she said.

He was beginning to suspect that was the reason the captain had chosen him for the assignment and he felt slightly piqued. But he just grinned and said, jokingly, “I’ll put a sack over my head.”

She started to grin and then looked suddenly caught. Her face mirrored her thoughts. “All right,” she said, getting up.

He looked alarmed. “I was just joking,” he said foolishly.

“I’ll go undress and you come in with nothing showing but your eyes and mouth.”

He grinned shamefacedly. “You know I couldn’t do that.”

“Why not?” she said. “You ain’t never had nobody like me.”

Red came out in his face as though it had caught fire. He looked like a small boy caught in a guilty act. “Now, ma’am, you got to be sensible; this surveillance ain’t going to last for ever–”