Harlem Redux (45 page)

“You just don’t understand. My husband says you’ve been away a long time—”

“Yes, I have—but maybe that’s why I see so clearly.”

Emma’s response was cut off by her husband’s arrival. Canfield came in, proudly displaying a red wine bottle.

“Found it,” he said. “A lovely Beaujolais I brought back from France during the war.”

“You should be honored,” Emma told David. “My husband is very discriminating about who he offers his wine to.”

David smiled politely and buried the words that had sprung to his lips.

With Canfield’s presence, the topic of conversation changed. Eventually, it turned to the ideological dispute that was threatening to splinter the Movement. Its leaders were divided as to whether the Movement should fight for total integration or accept compromises along the line of “separate but equal.” For the February issue of the
Black Arrow,
Canfield had written an editorial suggesting that it might be wise to accept limited racial segregation. When Walker Gaines, the Movement secretary, saw it, he had a fit. He wrote a scathing counterstatement that attacked segregation “in any form” and committed the Movement in perpetuity to a war against it. Gaines had expected his piece to be published in the March issue, but Canfield had blocked it. Gaines was now accusing Canfield of considering himself beyond reproach. David, like many others, had been stunned by Canfield’s essay, and he’d watched in dismay as the ideological debate crystallized into a power struggle between the two men. Now, he found himself listening to Canfield as he set forth his position.

“Cultural nationalism,” Canfield said, “is the most important goal our people can aim for. It can be seen in the light of the Zionists’ desire for political separation.”

David felt Rachel shift next to him. She had moved from being intimidated to feeling bored. Canfield warmed to his subject.

“Cultural nationalism relates to ethnic pride as well as political strength. It’s an important concept and rather radical, because it bespeaks a certain amount of self-imposed ‘segregation.’”

David felt another prickle of annoyance. “But segregation is what we’re fighting against—”

“We can’t denounce segregation in theory without denouncing the Negro church, the Negro college, or any other purely Negro institution.”

“It’s one thing for us to choose ethnic privacy; quite another to be forced into—”

“Simple-minded people try to avoid the issue by distinguishing between voluntary and involuntary segregation. But to put it rather colloquially, we can’t have our cake and eat it, too.”

David’s temper surged. “Sometimes ‘simple-minded’ people are the most perceptive.
They
have a mental clarity that many intellectuals seem to lose.
They
don’t lose sight of priorities and they don’t cloud the issues with irrelevancies. Desegregation is, and was, one of the Movement’s primary goals as a means to an end.”

“You’re mistaken. Or misled. The Movement has never ‘defined’ its position on segregation, merely taken concrete steps to oppose it in its baser forms.”

David looked at Canfield, wondering if he had heard correctly. Then he leaned forward, and took a deep breath.

“Mr. Canfield, I have to be blunt. If the Movement isn’t openly opposed to segregation, then it’s lost all meaning.” His eyes met Canfield’s. “And its leaders have lost all credibility.”

Canfield stared at him. “How dare you—”

“Any first-year law student—no, any man in the street—knows that the black man’s desire for ethnic privacy in his lodges and his churches does not exclude his right, his basic human right, to integration and equality in the public sphere.”

“David, please,” Rachel said.

She touched him on the elbow. He shrugged her off—he was beyond caution—and pressed on.

“For the time being, we’ve got to live with Jim Crow’s rule, but it’s an anathema. It must go. You wrote of accommodation, Mr. Canfield, of compromise. Well, you can forget compromise. The Devil doesn’t make compromises. Neither can we. It doesn’t matter whether you or I survive to see Jim Crow die. We have to fight it—to crush it—or we’re all lost. Black and white, we’re all done for.”

Blistering silence. The two men gazed at one another with open enmity. Finally, Canfield cleared his throat.

“Thank you for that little lecture. It’s good to know that you haven’t lost your dedication, or your energy for debate. One wonders, you know, about a man who’s been away for so long.”

Clearly, it was time to leave. David stood and drew Rachel up alongside him. He thanked the Canfields for their hospitality and bade them a good night. Rachel spoke up the moment they left.

“What did you have to insult him like that for? He’s a powerful man. He could’ve been our friend.”

“With a friend like that, a man doesn’t need enemies.”

“So what if you don’t like him. I don’t particularly care for his wife, either. But she knows all the right people. She could make sure that we’re invited everywhere. Now, I’ll have to—”

In that instant it hit him that Rachel hadn’t been intimidated at all. She’d held her tongue because of her social ambitions. That angered him even more and he rounded on her. “Rachel, you’re my wife and I want to make you happy. But I will not play the hypocrite, not even for you.”

“But if you’d just—”

“No, I won’t. So, don’t.” He held up his hand. “Just don’t.”

31.
 
Lulu’s Home Jam

Lulu lived in the poorest section of Harlem. ‘Shatter the gloom,’ her card had said. Well, where she lived, one constant source of gloom was the constant fear of being short on the rent. If you didn’t pay the rent by Sunday, you’d be out by Monday. So you’d do just about anything to raise that money. That included rent parties: opening your home to strangers and charging admission, from a dime to a half-dollar.

Lulu’s place was on 131st Street and Eighth Avenue. David got there at around one in the morning. The door downstairs was broken open. Broken glass, discarded bottles, cigarette butts, newspapers, and one curiously flattened dead cat littered the entryway. From the back of a dark, narrow hallway emerged the distant sounds of a party in full swing. David could make out a piano playing ragtime. He followed the sound to the stairs at the back of the hallway. Lulu’s apartment was on the third floor. The apartment door was ajar. Inside, he found an incredibly fat woman sitting at an itsy-bitsy table behind the door.

“Come on in!” she said. “Make yourself comfortable! Corn liquor’s in the kitchen. Fifty cents a pitcher. You alone, son? I’m sure we can find you some comp’ny.”

The room was hot and funky. It stunk of smoke, sweat, and booze, collard greens, chitlins, hog maws, mulatto rice, and hopping john. Scores of folks had paid their nickels and dimes to get in. The place was jumping, packed with young studs looking for mischief and pretty young things out for fun. There were painters, truckers, policemen, and drag queens. David recognized poets, novelists, even a local politician or two. He glanced back at his hostess. She was watching him with amusement.

“Don’t be shy, sugar, we got something for everybody.”

“I’m looking for a sax player. Name of Shug Ryan. He playing here tonight?”

“Baby, I got a box-beater and that’s that. If Shug was supposed to come, I don’t know nothing about it.” She held out a grubby hand. “So you staying or what?”

He paid his quarter and moved into the crowd. It turned out to be a five-room apartment. A poker and blackjack game was up and running in one bedroom; a “private party” was going on in the next. The parlor and dining room had been nearly cleared of furniture. The music had changed to a slow, bluesy number. A sole red light bulb cast a lurid glow over dancing couples, who shuffled in place, grinding their hips together. From the shadows along the edge of the dance floor came pants and whispers, grunts and groans. The floorboards sagged and creaked as the dancers slow-dragged around the crowded floor.

The box-beater—or piano player, as he’d be known in more polite society—was a narrow, thin man with tired eyes. He swung into a mad folly of light notes tripping over one another. A fat light-skinned girl with dark eyes and long straight black hair climbed atop a chair. She twisted her top so it exposed her midriff and pushed down her long skirt until it sat on her fleshy hips. Raising her arms, she started to rhythmically jiggle her hips to the music. The piano player picked up speed. One loose key flipped off the keyboard. David couldn’t help but think that if that old piano had been alive, it would’ve rocked on dancing feet. He smiled, shook his head, and tapped his feet. After a while, the music started to wind down. David went and bought two cups of liquor and had one waiting for the box-beater when he took a break. The piano player smiled readily when David asked about Shug.

“Yeah, he’s here. Over there, in the corner. C’mon. I’ll introduce you.”

Shug Ryan was in his early forties, a short, bald man with a high forehead and flabby cheeks.

“Let’s go in the kitchen,” he said.

David bought Shug some corn liquor and asked a few questions about Paris, thinking he’d gradually lead the conversation back to Gem. Shug was eager to talk. He’d hated the Paris scene as much as he’d loved it.

“Don’t get me wrong. It’s hot, all right—just sometimes, a tad too hot. Us niggers would head into them nightspots in Montmartre. Pockets full when we got there, pockets empty when we left. Drinking that cheap champagne, making it with the white girls. Them chicks knew how to wheedle free drinks and food out of a man. They’d get hold of a fellah and have him jim-clean before the night was through. But we didn’t care. We wanted fun. Wanted to be
out there.
We was like kids in a candy shop.” He smiled. “We’d get all hopped up, smoking that bamboo, tucking into some snow—whatever and whenever we wanted it.” Then he shook his head and said to himself again, “Yeah, them streetcorner Sallies fleeced us clean.”

“What made you decide to get out?”

Shug took a drink from his cup and set it down. “Well, it was like this. My friend Julian Campbell was playing with the group Jukebox ‘29. One night, he fell down dead while blowing his horn. Had a stroke. Right in the middle of a set. The life did him in. He was young, but the life killed him. Well, that brought me up straight. It sure did. I caught the next boat back.”

“How long you been back?”

“about a month.”

“How’s your luck holding?”

Shug grinned. “Ain’t got nothing but holes in it, man. Nothing but holes.”

“So, did you see Gem McKay over there?”

“Nah, man. Ain’t laid eyes on her in more’n a year.”

“But I thought you were friends with her.”

Shug hunched his shoulders and raised his hands in an I-don’t-know gesture. “Hey, a woman like her don’t have no friends. You know that. You say you her brother, so you got to know that.”

“Well, if you didn’t see her, did you at least hear about her? Where she was, how she’s doing?”

“Far as I know, ain’t nobody heard nothing. And I do mean nothing.”

David tucked ten bits in Shug’s hand and turned away. He felt a deepening sense of dread. He’d been so sure that Shug would give him the information he needed. So sure th—

Wait.

Shug
had
given him something, something important. It was odd—
No, downright strange
––that Shug hadn’t heard anything about Gem. He was part of her crowd.

David felt a chill.

Of course, there was always the possibility that she’d left Paris, gone south to Marseilles or off to Madrid or Barcelona if she’d found a new friend.