IV Another White Friend
I had already bought my ticket, when a few days before the date of sailing I received a letter containing a soiled scrap bearing one of my poems, which had been reprinted in the New York Tribune. The letter was from another white friend, quite different from those before mentioned.
Ours was a curious friendship and this was the way it came about. Coming off the dining car one night, I went with another waiter to his home in one of the West Forties. His wife had company and we played cards until a late hour.
When I left I went to eat in a Greek place on Sixth Avenue. While I was waiting for the steak and looking at a newspaper, a young fellow came in, sat down at my table, and taking my cap from the chair, put it on. Before I could say a word about such a surprising thing, he said in a low, nervous voice: “It’s all right, let me wear your cap. The bulls are right after me and I am trying to fool them. They won’t recognize me sitting here with you, for I was bareheaded.”
The Greek came with my steak and asked what the fellow wanted. He said, “A cup of coffee.” He was twenty-three, of average height and size, and his kitelike face was decent enough. I saw no bulls, but didn’t mind his hiding against me at all if he could get away that way. Naturally, I was curious. So I asked where the bulls had got after him, and why. He said it was down in the subway lavatory, when he was attempting to pick a man’s pocket. He was refreshingly frank about it. There were three of them and he had escaped by a ruse that cannot be told.
He was hungry and I told him to order food. He became confidential. His name was Michael. He was a little pickpocket and did his tricks most of the time in the subways and parks. He got at his victims while they were asleep in the park or by getting friendly with them. He told me some illuminating things about the bulls, and so realistically that I saw them like wild bulls driving their horns into any object.
When I was leaving the restaurant, Michael asked if he could come up to Harlem, just to get away from downtown. I said that it was all right with me. Thus Michael came to Harlem.
The next morning when Manda, my girl friend, pushed the door open and saw Michael on the couch she exclaimed: “Foh the land’s sake! I wonder what will happen next!” That was the most excitable state I had ever seen her in since our friendship began. I told her Michael was a friend in trouble and I was helping him out for awhile. She accepted the explanation and was not curious to know what the trouble was about. Like most colored southerners, she was hostile to “poor white trash,” and the situation must not have been to her liking, but she took it as she did me. There was always a certain strangeness between Manda and me. Perhaps that helped our getting along comfortably together.
Manda was a pleasant placid girl from the Virginia country. She also was the result of a strange meeting. One late evening, when I got off the train, I ran into two of the fellows (an elevator runner and a waiter) who had worked with me at the women’s club. We decided to give an impromptu party. It was too late to get any nice girls. So we said, “Let’s go down to Leroy’s and pick up some.” Leroy’s was the famous cellar cabaret at the corner of One Hundred Thirty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue, and Harlem called it “The Jungle.” Leroy’s was one of the cabarets where you could make friends. Fellows could flirt with girls and change tables to sit with them. In those days the more decorous cabarets would not allow visiting between tables.
We knew the kind of girls to approach. In the Harlem cabaret of that time (before Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven and prohibition made the colored intelligentsia cabaret-minded) there were generally three types of girls. There were the lady entertainers who flirted with the fellows impersonally to obtain nice tips and get them to buy extra drinks to promote the business of the house. Some of them were respectably married and had husbands who worked in the cabarets as waiters or musicians.
Another class of girls was more personally business-like in flirting. They didn’t make the fellows spend too much in the cabaret, and had a preference for beer as a treat, for they expected them to spend on the outside. They were easily distinguishable by the confederate looks that passed between them and their protectors, who usually sat at separate tables.
And there were the lonely girls, the kitchen maids, laundresses and general day workers for New York’s lower middle classes, who came for entertainment and hoping to make a friend from some casual acquaintance they might pick up.
Five of us went down to Leroy’s. We noticed three girls of the last-mentioned type sitting together, chummy over large glasses of beer. We got their eyes. They were friendly, and we went over to their table. A waiter brought more chairs. We ordered a round of drinks, and, without palavering, we told the girls that we were seeking partners for a party. They were willing to join us. As we got up to go, we noticed at a neighboring table another girl all alone and smiling at us. She had heard our overtures. She was different from the girls who were going with us, not chic, brown with a plump figure, and there was a domestic something about her which created the impression of a good hen.
The elevator operator, who was a prankish fellow, challenged the girl’s smile with a big grin and said: “Let’s ask her too.” The three girls giggled. The other girl was so odd—her clothes were dated and the colors didn’t match. But she wanted to come, and that astonished them. We thought she was a West Indian, and were surprised to find out that she was from the South.
We all went to my room in One Hundred Thirty-first Street, where we had a breakdown. In the party Manda was as different as she looked. She lacked vivacity, and since the other fellows preferred the nimbler girls, I had to dance with her most of the time. As host, I did not want her to feel out of the fun. She made herself useful, though, washing the glasses when they got soiled and mixed up, and squeezing lemons for the gin.
By dawn we were tired and everybody was leaving. But Manda said she would stay awhile and clean up. She wasn’t going to work that day and I wasn’t either. From then on we became intimate friends. She was a real peasant type and worked as a laundress in a boarding house. She always came to look me up when I got in from a trip. She had a room in One Hundred Thirty-third Street near Fifth Avenue, but I went there only once. I didn’t like its lacey and frilly baby-ribboned things and the pink counterpane on the bed.
We didn’t have a lot to say to each other. When she tidied the room she was careful about the sheets of paper on which I was writing. And if she came when I was writing or reading she would leave me alone and go into the basement to cook. There is always an unfamiliar something between people of different countries and nationalities, however intimate they may become. And that something between me and Manda helped rather than hindered our relationship. It made her accept little eccentricities on my part—such as the friendship with Michael, for instance. And so we sailed smoothly along for a couple of years. Manda was a good balance to my nervous self.
The cabarets of Harlem in those days enthralled me more than any theater downtown. They were so intimate. If they were lacking in variety they were rich in warmth and native excitement. At that time the hub of Harlem was One Hundred Thirty-fifth Street between Fifth Avenue and Seventh. Between Seventh Avenue and Eighth the population was still white. The saloons were run by the Irish, the restaurants by the Greeks, the ice and fruit stands by the Italians, the grocery and haberdashery stores by the Jews. The only Negro businesses, excepting barber shops, were the churches and the cabarets. And Negro Harlem extended from One Hundred Thirtieth to One Hundred Forty-fifth Streets, bounded on the East by Madison Avenue and on the West by Seventh Avenue. There, coming off the road like homing birds, we trainmen came to rest awhile and fraternize with our friends in the city—elevator runners and porters—and snatch from saloon and cabaret and home a few brief moments of pleasure, of friendship and of love.
On the morning after my meeting with Michael, Manda said she had been to see me twice the night before. She had telephoned the commissary and was told that my dining car was in. She went to the kitchen in the basement and prepared a big breakfast of ham and eggs and fried potatoes with coffee. I asked Mr. Morris, my landlord, to join us, for I wanted to introduce Michael to him.
He, too, had no liking for “poor white trash.” He was a strapping light-brown man and doing well with the lease of two private houses and an interest in one of the few Negro-owned saloons. He came from the South, but had been living many years in the North. When he was a young man in the South, he had “sassed” a white man. And for that he was struck. He struck back, and barely escaped with his life. He was a kind landlord and a pleasant mixer, especially in saloons. But he could be bitter when he got to talking about the South. He was decent to Michael, who was a northerner, for my sake. I had been his tenant for a long time and I exercised the freedom of a friend in that house. We drank together and I got my friends sometimes to patronize his saloon (thus contributing my little to help Negro business).
So Michael came to make Harlem his hideout, while he performed his petty tricks downtown. I told Mr. Morris and Manda that he was the ne’er-do-well son of a former boss, and had taken a liking to me. Whatever they really thought of him I never knew, for they never said. But they were aware that our relationship was not a literary one; they knew that he was not one of those white folks who were interested in the pattern of words I was always making. For Michael made no pretense of being intellectual. However, they liked him, for there was a disarming cleanliness and wholesomeness about his appearance, so that they never imagined that he was what he was. And it would never have occurred to them that I could be friendly with a crook. One never can tell about appearances, and so we all make mistakes by it. For example, when some of my strutting railroad friends came to know Manda, they couldn’t believe their eyes: seeing is less penetrating than feeling.
When I was away on the railroad, Michael used my place if he needed it. He did not have a key, but I instructed Morris to let him in. I never felt any concern about anything, although I had some dandy suits in my closet and three Liberty Bonds in my trunk. Michael was profoundly sentimental about friendship, the friends of his friend, and anyone who had befriended him. He could even feel a little sorry for some of his victims after he had robbed them. That was evident from the manner in which he talked about their embarrassment. His deep hatred was directed against the bulls, and his mind was always occupied with outwitting and playing tricks on them. There were two classes of them, he said: the burly-brute, heavy-jawed type, which was easy to pick out, and the dapper college-student type, which was the more dangerous. He said that the best victims to single out were men in spectacles, but that sometimes the bulls disguised themselves and looked Harold Lloydish.
When Michael had no money he ate at the house. The landlord and Manda were sympathetic. At least they could understand that a wild and perhaps disinherited scion might be reduced to a state of hunger. The tabloids often carried sentimental stuff about such personages. When Michael had something he was extravagant. I remember one day when he brought in a fine ham. Manda cooked it in delicious Virginia style, thinking, as she said, that Michael’s father had relented and that we were eating a slice of his inheritance. Michael and I exchanged looks. I felt like saying something impish to stir up Manda’s suspicion. But Michael was now well established as a disinherited son instead of a “poor white trash” and I decided not to risk upsetting his position.
Also I was fond of Manda and had no desire to disturb her black Baptist conscience. She was a good woman. When she did my shirt and things in the laundry of the house where she worked, she bought her own soap and utilized her own spare time. And she would never take home any discarded rags or scraps of food that were not actually given to her.
Michael didn’t hit it off so well with the fellows from the railroad, though, except for the lackadaisical one, who liked everybody. Michael was not a boozer, nor hard-boiled. In appearance he was like a nice college student. He was brought up in a Catholic home for boys which was located somewhere in Pennsylvania. He was put in there when he was about nine and kept there for twelve years.... Oh yes, and besides bulls, he hated priests and the Catholic Church.
I liked him most when he was telling about his escapades. There was that big-time representative of an ancient business who had his bags checked in the Grand Central Terminal. Michael managed to get the ticket away from him and refused to give it back unless the man paid twenty-five dollars. The man did not have the money on him and was afraid of a scandal. He had to telephone a friend for it and was even ashamed to do that. He walked along Broadway with Michael until they found a drugstore from which he could telephone. And he begged the lad to remain out of sight, so that his friend should not think the money was for him. “Gee!” Michael said. “And I was scared crazy all the time, thinking he would call a cop and have me arrested. But I faced it out and got the dough. The big stiff.”
And there was the circus performer who had all his money at home. So Michael went along with him to get his. But when the actor got in, he sent his wife out, and she chased Michael with a rolling pin.
One afternoon, as I was dressing to go to work, I was suddenly made self-conscious by Michael remarking: “If I had your physique, I wouldn’t work.”
“What would you be, then,” I asked, “a boxer?”
“Hell, no, that’s too much bruising work, and only the big fists are in the money.”
“Well, you should worry,” I said, “if you haven’t a swell physique. You don’t work anyway.”
“Oh, I’m different; but you—well, it’s queer, you liking a woman like Manda.”
“Why, I thought you liked her,” I said. “She’s nice to you.”
“I know she is, and she’s a fine one all right; but that’s not what I mean. I mean she’s so homely, she couldn’t do any hustling to help you out. See what I mean?”
“Ugly is but lovely does,” I said.
“That’s nothing,” he said.
“A whole lot more than you think,” I said.
“Money is everything,” he said. “When I have money I get me a pretty woman.”
“Every man has his style and his limit,” I said. “I prefer my way to yours.”
“I know that without your saying so. Say, you don’t like the way I live, eh? Be frank.”
“I never said anything about that,” I said.
“But you wouldn’t live the way I do, would you?”
“Perhaps because I can’t. One must find a way somehow between the possible and the impossible.”
“But ain’t it hell to be a slave on a lousy job?”
When I made no answer he went on: “Do you think you’ll ever get a raise out of your writing?”
“I don’t know. I might. Anyway, my writing makes it possible for me to stand being a slave on a lousy job.”
Weeks passed sometimes and I never saw Michael, although he was often in Harlem, for usually when I was in he was out. He was as busy at his job as I was on mine, with shiploads of soldiers returning from Europe and the railroad service engaged to its utmost capacity. Doubling-out became like a part of the regular schedule, there was so much of it.
One day when I was in the city Michael dropped in. Seeing a revolver on the table, he asked what was the meaning of it. I said that the revolver had been in my possession for some years, ever since I used to manage an eating place in a tough district of Brooklyn. But why was I carrying it, he asked, when it might get me into trouble with the police? He never carried one himself, although his was a dangerous trade, for he was safer without it if he were picked up by the bulls.
I explained that I, like the rest of my crew, was carrying the revolver for self-defense, because of the tightened tension between the colored and the white population all over the country. Stopping-over in strange cities, we trainmen were obliged to pass through some of the toughest quarters and we had to be on guard against the suddenly aroused hostility of the mob. There had been bloody outbreak after outbreak in Omaha, Chicago, and Washington, and any crazy bomb might blow up New York even. I walked over to a window and looked out on the back yard.
Michael said: “And if a riot broke in Harlem and I got caught up here, I guess I’d get killed maybe.”
“And if it were downtown and I was caught in it?” said I, turning round.
Michael said: “And if there were trouble here like that in Chicago between colored and white, I on my side and you on yours, we might both be shooting at one another, eh?”
“It was like that during the war that’s just ended,” I said, “brother against brother and friend against friend. They were all flapped in it and they were all helpless.”
I turned my back again and leaned out of the window, thinking how in times of acute crisis the finest individual thoughts and feelings may be reduced to nothing before the blind brute forces of tigerish tribalism which remain at the core of civilized society.
When I looked up Michael was gone.
There was nearly three months’ silence between us after that. It was broken at last by the pencilled scrawl and newspaper clipping which I mentioned earlier. Immediately I wrote to Michael, telling him that I had quit the railroad and was going abroad and that I would like to see him before leaving.
He came one evening. Manda made a mess of fried chicken, and we had a reunion with my landlord and Hubert Harrison, who was accompanied by a European person, a radical or bohemian, or perhaps both.
Hubert Harrison entertained us with a little monologue on going abroad. He was sure the trip would do me good, although it would have been wiser for me to accept the original proposal, he said. He asked me to send him articles from abroad for the Negro World (the organ of the Back-to-Africa Movement) which he was editing.
At first Michael was uneasy, listening to our literary conversation. He had never heard me being intellectual. And he was quite awed by the fact that it was pure poetry and not a fine physique that had given me a raise so quickly. He thought that that poem in the New York Tribune had had something to do with it. And with a little more liquor he relaxed and amused us by telling of his sensations when he saw that poem over my name in the newspaper. And then he surprised me by saying that he was thinking about getting a job.
The European woman was charmed by the novel environment and she idealized Michael as an American proletarian. She thought that Michael was significant as a symbol of the unity of the white and black proletariat. But when she asked Michael what division of the working class he belonged to, he appeared embarrassed. After dinner we went for awhile to Connor’s Cabaret, which was the most entertaining colored cabaret in Harlem at that time.
Michael came down to the boat the day I sailed. Mr. Gray also was at the pier. I introduced them. Mr. Gray was aware that Michael was poor, and whispered to me, asking if he might give him something. I said, “Sure.” He gave Michael ten dollars.
As the boat moved away from the pier, they were standing together. And suddenly I felt alarmed about Mr. Gray and wondered if I should not have warned him about Michael. I thought that if I were not on the scene, Michael might not consider himself bound by our friendship not to prey upon Mr. Gray. But my fear was merely a wild scare. Michael was perfect all the way through and nothing untoward happened.