Prologue
Harlem
waits.
Patched
and tarred. Hawked and bitten in the winter, smothered and melted
in the heat.
Harlem
waits…
Under
its broad skies, pincered between two rivers. Within sight of
salvation, the city’s lights, the jeweled bridges. Battered
and besieged, on its knees, but unbowed. With blood in its mouth—
Harlem
waits,
and
listens for its savior.
MALCOLM
The
rest of the crew were giggling like schoolboys, shrugging off
their kitchen uniforms in the cab. Struggling into suits that
were more conservatively cut than Malcolm’s but still sharp—light
blue and greens, and creamy whites, with bright, skinny ties that
gave him a pang of consternation.
“I
thought you said this was a righteous town,” he scoffed
at them. “How’m I gonna be gunnin’ the hens
with you three togged like that?”
“Listen
to Mr. Samuel D. Home,” Paddy scoffed at him. “Son,
you should latch on to the fact that this is the Apple.”
“You
gonna get conked up good, you don’t mind us!”
Malcolm
grinned back at them, feeling as if he would burst out of the
cab.
“Hey.
I’m mellow as a cello, rippin’ an’ rompin’,
trippin’ an’ stompin’.”
“Uh-huh.
This is Harlem, son.”
“What
for, what for?”
He
peered avidly out the cab window, wondering if it had anything
to do with women.
“Keep
lookin’.”
“For
what?”
“Then
he saw him. A monolith. A fantastic hallucination, a human balloon
swaying in the waves of heat floating up from the pavement. But
there was no denying him—at least six-three and two hundred
seventy-three pounds, standing right out in the middle of the
street, directing traffic. A black man in a police uniform.
“That’s
Lacy!”
“There
he is! Hey, Lacy!”
They
waved out the window, calling his name, making mocking noises
though there remained a note of pride in their voices. Lacy only
stared at them balefully, planted inalterably in the middle of
the intersection, lugubriously waving the cars on. Malcolm still
gawking out the back window of the cab as they passed, unable
to get his mind around the sight.
“A
cop. A black cop,” he marveled.
“Sure,
they got ’em up here, you know,” Lionel snorted. “You
should see Big Ben Wallace. Ol’ Mr. Terror make Lacy look
like a schoolteacher. Or the Four Horsemen—”
But
Malcolm had already stopped listening, staring out at the amazing
sidewalk scene emerging all around them. Suddenly there was color
everywhere, as if someone had just switched the screen to Technicolor,
like in The Wizard of Oz, which he had seen six times
back in Michigan. Men wearing green, and yellow, and red sports
shirts. Men wearing porkpie hats, and Panamas, and fedoras, men
in white and lemon-lime and peach ice-cream suits—even men
wearing sharper zoots, he had to admit, than what he had on himself.
“And
women. He was sure that he had never seen so many beautiful
women in his entire life. There were women everywhere, at least
two for every man, not counting the clusters of soldiers and sailors
who gaped and gestured at them from every street corner. Women
wearing gold and ruby-red glass in their ears, and open-toed platform
heels that made them sway with every step. Women in tight violet
and red and blue print dresses, held up only by the thinnest of
shoulder straps over their smooth, brown backs. Women striding
up from the subways, stepping regally down from the trolleys and
the elevated, and women, everywhere he looked, strolling out of
smoking storefronts, as if their smoldering presence had touched
them off.
“‘What—they
on fire?’ Malcolm asked in bewilderment, squinting at the
smoky little shops, the mysterious lettering in their windows
that boasted WE OFFER: The Apex—Poro—Nu Life—Hawaiian
Beauty Systems—
“‘Mm-hmm,
you bet they are,” the cabbie laughed up front. “Those
Thursday girls, they always on fire! Even when they ain’t
getting’ their hair straightened—”
“You
in luck, Nome,” Lionel told him. “It’s Thursday.
Kitchen Mechanics’ Night. All those maids an’ mammies,
an’ calkeener broads—Friday’s they one day off.
They be gunnin’ for you tonight.”
“For
real?”
“Course
for real, Samuel D.!”
“Where
you think we should take him first?” Willard asked the others.
“Up the Savoy, beat out a few hoof riffs? Braddock’s?
The Elks? Take him to a buffet flat an’ have a good laugh?”
“Nah,
man. We gotta take him by Small’s first.”
“Yeah,
Small’s. That’s the place to get him his
first drink in Harlem!”
First
they had the cab let them off at Mrs. Fisher’s boardinghouse,
where they dropped off their train bags in the sliver-thin rooms
where they would bunk for the layover. They clambered right back
out onto the sidewalk—and it was then that Malcolm realized
everything was moving even faster than it had looked from inside
the taxi; as if the sidewalk itself had been set on some war-speed
assembly line, activated the moment they put their feet to it.
“It
caught them up immediately, rushing them past chicken restaurants
and hamburger joints, and closed-up basement dance halls, and
heat-dazed winos lying in the doorways. Past barbershops that
advertised ‘Conk It Up! No Burning!’ and
more of the smoking beauty parlors where Malcolm could now make
out the women in pink smocks pressing irons down on other women’s
hair like it was so much laundry.
“They
moved past all the squatting curb vendors selling used book, and
carved African animals, and jewelry that shone a little too brightly.
Past men with carts full of wilted daisies, and roses and violets,
and men selling long, red-orange slices of cantaloupe and watermelon,
with glistening cut mouth of the remaining melon set just above
their heads, so that they seemed to mimic their own red mouths
and wagging tongues. There were men selling halves of oranges,
and alligator pears, and rings of coconut slices floating in dishes
of water and their own fragrance, while the men chanted ritually
over them, ‘Yo tengo guineas! Yo tengo cocoas! Yo tengo
pinas, tambien!’—and the peddlers who made sudden,
high-pitched terrifying noises, shrieking ‘Wahoo! Wahoo!
Wahoo!’ before throwing back their heads and singing
out their ditties to the sky, or at least to the upper stories
of the tenements above them:
‘Got
blackberries today, folks!
Blackberries
for the baby,
Blackberries
for the ol’ lady,
Blackberries
for the ol’ man—
If
you ain’t got no ol’ man, take me!”
JONAH
It
started to rain before dawn that Sunday, hard little pellets that
raked their bedroom window, so that Jonah knew he would have to
be up early. By the time he eased the big, green Lincoln out of
its back-alley garage, the rain had begun to taper off, but between
the weather and the gas rationing, he was sure the buses would
be out again. After he dropped Amanda off at the church, he trolled
up and down Lenox, and Eighth Avenue, in the big car, looking
for any members of his congregation who might still be waiting
at a bus stop.
All
along the way he saw the ministers from every other church in
Harlem, doing the same. Exchanging friendly waves and honks with
them—at least all those who still had a car, and the ration
points to fuel it. Picking up entire families still huddled under
the bus shelters. More women than men, as was always the case,
but especially so now with the war on. The older church mothers
in their proud hats, undaunted by the rain. The children with
their hair and clothes immaculately combed and pressed. The boys
in blazers that were too big too small, showing inches of white
cuff, and the plastic tabs on their neckties; little girls in
dresses that spread out above their knees like umbrellas, and
shiny black patent shoes—
Jonah
would fill the Lincoln with as many as he could, then move on
to the next family, rolling down the window to tell them the buses
were out. The mother or father would lean in, nodding—the
news nothing they hadn’t expected to hear. They would thank
him solemnly, and begin to walk slowly up toward the church, moving
as fast as the youngest or the oldest among them could manage.
By
late morning it had settled into a blustery, turbulent day; the
dark gray clouds skittering across the sky, and the fleeting water
rainbows forming and dissolving on the sidewalk. A day of illusions,
and second glances. Passing “Beale Street,” at 133rd
and Seventh, Jonah glimpsed the working girls there still staggering
along the curb—soaked to the skin, disappearing into doorways.
Men in uniform climbing up from the after-hours bars below the
street, ducking back down behind the stoops when they spotted
the armbands of approaching MPs. Harlem never did shut down
anymore. Not even on Sunday—
At
132nd Street, idling at a light, he noticed a crowd drawn to a
pair of women evangelists. He had seen them on the corner before.
The one tall and slender as a reed, belting out Bible passages,
the other one short and pudgy. The short one held the umbrella,
stretching to raise it up over her partner, and the Bible—while
at the same time she interpreted each verse in a shrill, raucous
shout, and according to her own vehement theology.
“I
ain’t talkin’ ’bout no Paraoh an’ the
Israelites. I’m talkin’ ’bout the he-in’
and she-in’ a you Harlemites, right here an’ right
now!” she ranted, while the crowd around her laughed and
clapped.
“I’m
talkin’ ’bout how mothers and fathers teach their
chillen one thing in the South but they do another thing in the
North, and they will surely pay the penalty. God will
not be mocked!”
The
people gathered there laughed some more. The Harlem of the simmering
anger, of all the strange curbside congregations he had noticed,
gone for the moment, between Sunday, and the rain. Just in front
of him, at the perimeter of the crowd, Jonah watched a young man,
still wearing the sports shirt and slacks he had no doubt put
on the night before, smiling sheepishly. Telling the woman with
him, “Man, that old lady is sure steppin’ on my
toes! Gosh, that one hit my pet corn awful hard!”
After
a little while he had become almost mesmerized by the drizzle
and that steady beat of his windshield wipers, the every changing
street scene before him. Making wider and wider loops around the
neighborhood, swinging down past the Harlem Defense Center, where
he watched the happy, smiling young men on leave, walking out
with pretty, slim brown women on their arms. Driving past a group
of sailor messmen, who stood and squatted on their haunches outside
Jock’s Place—pulling on cigarette butts, their faces
blank and desolate, while they listened to the jukebox blasting
“Don’t Stop Now” through the open door. Still
more families, still plodding their way toward church—his,
or someone else’s. Walking with immense, careful dignity,
trying to avoid stepping into puddles or being splattered by the
passing cars, waiting every few yards for the children to catch
up.
And
watching them, Jonah was filled with a surpassing love, For the
churchgoing families—but also for the high-stepping soldiers
and the blue sailors, and the Mutt-and-Jeff evangelists, and the
insecure young man. Even for the working girls, soaked to the
skin out on the pavement. He was almost dizzy with it, in that
moment. Feeling his love encompass all of it, here where he lived
in Harlem, this little enclave of so much sin, and despair, and
hopelessness, but also of such immeasurable beauty. At 125th Street,
he noticed the Checker cabs already taking the more optimistic
fans up for the doubleheader scheduled that afternoon at the Polo
Grounds—each of them with enough empty seats to carry an
entire family to church. The white faces in the back windows staring
out alertly, awash in apprehension and distaste. Jonah was in
turn filled with nothing but pity for them, to be passing through
this wondrous place but to know it so little. Thinking of a verse
from Lamentations—“Is it nothing to you, all ye
who pass by?”
