Cotton Comes to Harlem (9 page)

Grave Digger said, “If our people were ever let loose they’d be a sensation in the business world, with the flair they got for crooked organizing.”

“That’s what the white folks is scared of,” Coffin Ed said.

They watched Sarah come from the back and cross the big room. The girls treated her as though she were the queen. She was a buxom black woman with snow-white hair done in curls as tight as springs. She had a round face, broad flat nose, thick, dark, unpainted lips and a dazzling white-toothed smile. She wore a black satin gown with long sleeves and a high décolleté; on one wrist was a small platinum watch with a diamond-studded band; on the ring finger a wedding ring set with a diamond the size of an acorn. Several keys dangled on a gold chain about her neck.

She came towards them smiling only with her teeth; her dark eyes were stone cold behind rimless lenses. She closed the door behind her.

“Hello, boys,” she said, shaking hands in turn. “How are you?”

“Fine, Sarah, business is booming; how’s your business?” Grave Digger said.

“Booming too, Digger. Only the criminals got money, and all they do with it is buy pussy. You know how it is, runs hand in hand; girls sell when cotton and corn are a drag on the market. What do you boys want?”

“We want Loboy, Sarah,” Grave Digger said harshly, souring at this landprop’s philosophy.

Her smiled went out. “What’s he done, Digger?” she asked in a toneless voice.

“None of your mother-raping business,” Coffin Ed flared.

She looked at him. “Be careful, Edward,” she warned.

“It’s not what he’s done this time, Sarah,” Grave Digger said soothingly. “We’re curious about what he’s seen. We just want to talk to him.”

“I know what that means. But he’s kinda nervous and upset now–”

“High, you mean,” Coffin Ed said.

She looked at him again. “Don’t get tough with me, Edward. I’ll have you thrown out here on your ass.”

“Look, Sarah, let’s level,” Grave Digger said. “It’s not like you think. You know Deke O’Hara got hijacked tonight.”

“I heard it on the radio. But you ain’t stupid enough to think Loboy was on that caper.”

“Not that supid, Sarah. And we don’t give a damn about Deke either. But eighty-seven grand of colored people’s hard-earned money got lost in the caper; and we want to get it back.”

“How’s Loboy fit that act?”

“Chances are he saw the hijackers. He was working in the neighborhood when their getaway truck crashed and they had to split.”

She studied his face impassively; finally she said, “I dig.” Suddenly her smile came on again. “I’ll do anything to help our poor colored people.”

“I believe you,” Coffin Ed said.

She turned back into the reception room without another word and closed the door behind her. A few minutes later she brought out Loboy.

They took him to 137th Street and told him to reconstruct his activities and tell everything he saw before he got out of the vicinity.

At first Loboy protested, “I ain’t done nothing and I ain’t seen nothing and you ain’t got nothing against me. I been sick all day, at home and in bed.” He was so high his speech was blurred and he kept dozing off in the middle of each sentence.

Coffin Ed slapped him with his open palm a half-dozen times. Tears came to his eyes.

“You ain’t got no right to hit me like that. I’m gonna tell Sarah. You ain’t got nothing against me.”

“I’m just trying to get your attention is all,” Coffin Ed said.

He got Loboy’s attention, but that was all. Loboy admitted getting a glimpse of the driver of the delivery truck that hit Early Riser, but he didn’t remember what he looked like. “He was white is all I remember. All white folks look alike to me,” he said.

He hadn’t seen the white men when they had got from the wrecked truck. He hadn’t seen the armored truck at all. By the time it had passed he had jumped the iron fence beside the church and was running down the passageway to 136th Street, headed towards Lenox.

“Which way did the woman go?” Grave Digger asked.

“I didn’t stop to see,” Loboy confessed.

“What did she look like?”

“I don’t remember; big and strong is all.”

They let him go. By then it was past four in the morning. They drove to the precinct station to check out. They were frustrated and dead beat, and no nearer the solution than at the start. Lieutenant Anderson said nothing new had come in; he had put a tap on Deke’s private telephone line but no one had called.

“We should have talked to the driver who took those three white men to Brooklyn, instead of wasting time on Loboy,” Grave Digger said.

“There’s no point in second-guessing,” Anderson said. “Go home and get some sleep.”

He looked white about the gills himself. It had been a hot, raw night — Independence night, he thought — filled with big and little crime. He was sick of crime and criminals; sick of both cops and robbers; sick of Harlem and colored people. He liked colored people all right; they couldn’t help it because they were colored. He was quite attached to his two ace colored detectives; in fact he depended on them. They probably kept his job for him. He was second in command to the precinct captain, and had charge of the night shift. His was the sole responsibility when the captain went home, and without his two aces he might not have been able to carry it. Harlem was a mean rough city and you had to be meaner and rougher to keep any kind of order. He understood why colored people were mean and rough; he’d be mean and rough himself if he was colored. He understood all the evils of segregation. He sympathized with the colored people in his precinct, and with colored people in general. But right now he was good and goddamned sick of them. All he wanted was to go home to his quiet house in Queens in a quiet white neighborhood and kiss his white wife and look in on his two sleeping white children and crawl into bed between two white sheets and go to hell to sleep.

So when the telephone rang and a big happy colored voice sang, “… O where de cotton and de corn grow …” he turned purple with anger.

“Go on the stage, clown!” he shouted and banged down the receiver.

The detectives grinned sympathetically. They hadn’t heard the voice but they knew it had been some lunatic talking in jive.

“You’ll get used to it if you live long enough,” Grave Digger said.

“I doubt it,” Anderson muttered.

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed started home. They both lived on the same street in Astoria, Long Island, and they only used one of their private cars to travel back and forth to work. They kept their
official car, the little battered black sedan with the hopped-up engine, in the precinct garage.

But tonight when they went to put it away, they found it had been stolen.

“Well, that’s the bitter end,” Coffin Ed said.

“One thing is for sure,” Grave Digger said. “I ain’t going in and report it.”

“Damn right,” Coffin Ed agreed.

The next morning, at eight o’clock, an open bed truck pulled up before a store on Seventh Avenue that was being remodeled. Formerly, there had been a notion goods store with a shoeshine parlor serving as a numbers drop on the site. But it had been taken over by a new tenant and a high board wall covering the entire front had been erected during the remodeling.

There had been much speculation in the neighborhood concerning the new business. Some said it would be a bar, others a night club. But Small’s Paradise Inn was only a short distance away, and the cognoscenti ruled those out. Others said it was an ideal spot for a barbershop or a hairdresser, or even a bowling alley; some half-wits opted for another funeral parlor, as though colored folks weren’t dying fast enough as it is. Those in the know claimed they had seen office furnishings moved in during the night and they had it at first hand that it was going to be the headquarters for the Harlem political committee of the Republican Party. But those with the last word said that Big Wilt Chamberlain, the professional basketball player who had bought Small’s Cabaret, was going to open a bank to store all the money he was making hand over fist.

By the time the workmen began taking down the wall, a small crowd had collected. But when they had finished, the crowd overflowed into the street. Harlemites, big and little, old and young, strong and feeble, the halt and the blind, male and female, boys and girls, stared in pop-eyed amazement.

“Great leaping Jesus!” said the fat black barber from down the street, expressing the opinion of all.

Plate-glass windows, trimmed with stainless steel, formed a glass front above a strip of shining steel along the sidewalk. Across the top, above the glass, was a big wooden sign glistening with spotless white paint upon which big, bold, black letters
announced:

H
EADQUARTERS OF
B.T.S. BACK-TO-THE-SOUTHLAND
MOVEMENT B.T.S.
Sign Up Now!!! Be a
“FIRST NEGRO!”
$ 1,000 Bonus to First Families Signing!

The entire glass front was plastered with bright-colored paintings of conk-haired black cotton-pickers, clad in overalls that resembled Italian-tailored suits, delicately lifting enormous snow-white balls of cotton from rose-colored cotton bolls that looked for all the world like great cones of ice cream, and grinning happily with even whiter teeth; others showed darkies, clad in the same Italian fashion, hoeing corn as though doing the cakewalk, their heads lifted in song that must surely be spirituals. One scene showed these happy darkies at the end of the day celebrating in a clearing in front of ranch-type cabins, dancing the twist, their teeth gleaming in the setting sun, their hips rolling in the playful shadows to the music of a banjo player in a candy-striped suit; while the elders looked on with approval, bobbing their nappy white heads and clapping their manicured hands. Another showed a tall white man with a white mane of hair, a white moustache and white goatee, wearing a black frock coat and shoestring tie, his pink face bubbling with brotherly love, passing out fantastic bundles of bank notes to a row of grinning darkies, above the caption:
Paid by the week.
Lodged between the larger scenes were smaller paintings identified as
ALL GOOD THINGS TO EAT
: grotesquely oversized animals and edibles with the accompanying captions:
Big-legged Chickens … Chitterling Bred Shoats … Yams! What Am … O! Possum! … Lasses In The Jug … Grits and Gravy … Pappy’s Bar-B-Q and Mammy’s Hog Maw Stew … Corn Whisky … Buttermilk … Hoppin John.

In the center of all this jubilation of good food, good times and good pay, were a blown-up photomontage beside a similarly sized drawing: one showing pictures of famine in the Congo, tribal wars, mutilations, depravities, hunger and disease, above the caption,
Unhappy Africa;
the other depicting fat, grinning colored people sitting at tables laden with food, driving about in cars as big as Pullman coaches, black children entering modernistic schools equipped with stadiums and swimming-pools, elderly people clad in Brooks Brothers suits and Saks Fifth Avenue dresses filing into a church that looked astonishingly like Saint
Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, with its caption:
The Happy South.

At the bottom was another big white-painted, black-lettered banner reading:

FARE PAID … HIGH WAGES …
ACCOMMODATIONS FOR COTTON PICKERS
$1,000 Bonus for Each Family of Five Able-Bodied Persons

The small notice in one lower corner which read,
Wanted, a bale of cotton
, went unnoticed.

On the inside, the walls were decorated with more slogans and pictures of the same papier-mâché cotton plants and bamboo corn stalks were scattered about the floor, in the center of which was an artificial bale of cotton bearing the etched brass legend:
Our Front Line of Defense.

At the front to one side was a large flat-topped desk with a nameplate stating: Colonel Robert L. Calhoun. Colonel Calhoun in the flesh sat behind the desk, smoking a long, thin cheroot and looking out the window at the crowd of Harlemites with a benign expression. He looked like the model who had posed for the portrait of the colonel in the window, paying off the happy darkies. He had the same narrow, hawklike face crowned by the same mane of snow-white hair, the same wide, drooping white moustache, the same white goatee. There the resemblance stopped. His narrow-set eyes were ice-cold blue and his back was ramrod straight. But he was clad in a similar black frock coat and black shoestring tie, and on the ring finger of his long pale hand was a solid gold signet ring with the letters
CSA
.

A young blond white man in a seersucker suit, who looked as though he might be an alumnus of Ole Miss, sat on the edge of the Colonel’s desk, swinging his leg.

“Are you going to talk to them?” he asked in a college-trained voice with a slight southern accent.

The Colonel removed his cheroot and studied the ash on the tip. His actions were deliberate; his expression impassive. He spoke in a voice that was slow and calculated, with a southern accent as thick as molasses in the winter.

“Not yet, son, let’s let it simmer a bit. You can’t rush these darkies; they’ll come around in their own good time.”

The young man peered through a clear crack in the plastered window. He looked anxious. “We haven’t got all the time in the world,” he said.

The Colonel looked up at him, smiling with perfect white dentures, but his eyes remained cold. “What’s your hurry, son,
you got a gal waiting?”

The young man blushed and looked down sullenly. “All these niggers make me nervous,” he confessed.

“Now don’t start feeling guilty, son,” the Colonel said. “Remember it’s for their own good. You got to learn to think of niggers with love and charity.”

The young man smiled sardonically and remained silent.

At the back of the room were two desks side by side, bearing the legends:
Applications.
They were presided over by two neat young colored men who shuffled application forms to look occupied. From time to time the Colonel looked at them approvingly, as though to say, “See how far you’ve come.” But they had the expressions of guilty fathers who’ve been caught robbing their babies’ banks.