I assumed that Reginald, like most of the Negroes I knew, would go for a white woman. I’d point out Negro-happy white women to him, and explain that a Negro with any brains could wrap these women around his fingers. But I have to say this for Reginald: he never liked white women. I remember the one time he met Sophia; he was so cool it upset Sophia, and it tickled me.
Reginald got himself a black woman. I’d guess she was pushing thirty; an “old settler,” as we called them back in those days. She was a waitress in an exclusive restaurant downtown. She lavished on Reginald everything she had, she was so happy to get a young man. I mean she bought him clothes, cooked and washed for him, and everything, as though he were a baby.
That was just another example of why my respect for my younger brother kept increasing. Reginald showed, in often surprising ways, more sense than a lot of working hustlers twice his age. Reginald then was only sixteen, but, a six-footer, he looked and acted much older than his years.
—
All through the war, the Harlem racial picture never was too bright. Tension built to a pretty high pitch. Old-timers told me that Harlem had never been the same since the 1935 riot, when millions of dollars worth of damage was done by thousands of Negroes, infuriated chiefly by the white merchants in Harlem refusing to hire a Negro even as their stores raked in Harlem’s money.
During World War II, Mayor LaGuardia officially closed the Savoy Ballroom. Harlem said the real reason was to stop Negroes from dancing with white women. Harlem said that no one dragged the white women in there. Adam Clayton Powell made it a big fight. He had successfully fought Consolidated Edison and the New York Telephone Company until they had hired Negroes. Then he had helped to battle the U. S. Navy and the U. S. Army about their segregating of uniformed Negroes. But Powell couldn’t win this battle. City Hall kept the Savoy closed for a long time. It was just another one of the “liberal North” actions that didn’t help Harlem to love the white man any.
Finally, rumor flashed that in the Braddock Hotel, white cops had shot a Negro soldier. I was walking down St. Nicholas Avenue; I saw all of these Negroes hollering and running north from 125th Street. Some of them were loaded down with armfuls of stuff. I remember it was the bandleader Fletcher Henderson’s nephew “Shorty” Henderson who told me what had happened. Negroes were smashing store windows, and taking everything they could grab and carry—furniture, food, jewelry, clothes, whisky. Within an hour, every New York City cop seemed to be in Harlem. Mayor LaGuardia and the NAACP’s then Secretary, the famed late Walter White, were in a red fire-car, riding around pleading over a loudspeaker to all of those shouting, milling, angry Negroes to please go home and stay inside.
Just recently I ran into Shorty Henderson on Seventh Avenue. We were laughing about a fellow whom the riot had left with the nickname of “Left Feet.” In a scramble in a women’s shoe store, somehow he’d grabbed five shoes, all of them for left feet! And we laughed about the scared little Chinese whose restaurant didn’t have a hand laid on it, because the rioters just about convulsed laughing when they saw the sign the Chinese had hastily stuck on his front door: “Me Colored Too.”
After the riot, things got very tight in Harlem. It was terrible for the night-life people, and for those hustlers whose main income had been the white man’s money. The 1935 riot had left only a relative trickle of the money which had poured into Harlem during the 1920’s. And now this new riot ended even that trickle.
Today the white people who visit Harlem, and this mostly on weekend nights, are hardly more than a few dozen who do the twist, the frug, the Watusi, and all the rest of the current dance crazes in Small’s Paradise, owned now by the great basketball champion “Wilt the Stilt” Chamberlain, who draws crowds with his big, clean, All-American-athlete image. Most white people today are physically afraid to come to Harlem—and it’s for good reasons, too. Even for Negroes, Harlem night life is about finished. Most of the Negroes who have money to spend are spending it downtown somewhere in this hypocritical “integration,” in places where previously the police would have been called to haul off any Negro insane enough to try and get in. The already Croesus-rich white man can’t get another skyscraper hotel finished and opened before all these integration-mad Negroes, who themselves don’t own a tool shed, are booking the swanky new hotel for “cotillions” and “conventions.” Those rich whites could afford it when they used to throw away their money in Harlem. But Negroes can’t afford to be taking their money downtown to the white man.
—
Sammy and I, on a robbery job, got a bad scare, a very close call.
Things had grown so tight in Harlem that some hustlers had been forced to go to work. Even some prostitutes had gotten jobs as domestics, and cleaning office buildings at night. The pimping was so poor, Sammy had gone on the job with me. We had selected one of those situations considered “impossible.” But wherever people think that, the guards will unconsciously grow gradually more relaxed, until sometimes those can be the easiest jobs of all.
But right in the middle of the act, we had some bad luck. A bullet grazed Sammy. We just barely escaped.
Sammy fortunately wasn’t really hurt. We split up, which was always wise to do.
Just before daybreak, I went to Sammy’s apartment. His newest woman, one of those beautiful but hot-headed Spanish Negroes, was in there crying and carrying on over Sammy. She went for me, screaming and clawing; she knew I’d been in on it with him. I fended her off. Not able to figure out why Sammy didn’t shut her up, I did…and from the corner of my eye, I saw Sammy going for his gun.
Sammy’s reaction that way to my hitting his woman—close as he and I were—was the only weak spot I’d ever glimpsed. The woman screamed and dove for him. She knew as I did that when your best friend draws a gun on you, he usually has lost all control of his emotions, and he intends to shoot. She distracted Sammy long enough for me to bolt through the door. Sammy chased me, about a block.
We soon made up—on the surface. But things never are fully right again with anyone you have seen trying to kill you.
Intuition told us that we had better lay low for a good while. The worst thing was that we’d been seen. The police in that nearby town had surely circulated our general descriptions.
I just couldn’t forget that incident over Sammy’s woman. I came to rely more and more upon my brother Reginald as the only one in my world I could completely trust.
Reginald was lazy, I’d discovered that. He had quit his hustle altogether. But I didn’t mind that, really, because one could be as lazy as he wanted, if he would only use his head, as Reginald was doing. He had left my apartment by now. He was living off his “old settler” woman—when he was in town. I had also taught Reginald how he could work a little while for a railroad, then use his identification card to travel for nothing—and Reginald loved to travel. Several times, he had gone visiting all around, among our brothers and sisters. They had now begun to scatter to different cities. In Boston, Reginald was closer to our sister Mary than to Ella, who had been my favorite. Both Reginald and Mary were quiet types, and Ella and I were extroverts. And Shorty in Boston had given my brother a royal time.
Because of my reputation, it was easy for me to get into the numbers racket. That was probably Harlem’s only hustle which hadn’t slumped in business. In return for a favor to some white mobster, my new boss and his wife had just been given a six-months numbers banking privilege for the Bronx railroad area called Motthaven Yards. The white mobsters had the numbers racket split into specific areas. A designated area would be assigned to someone for a specified period of time. My boss’s wife had been Dutch Schultz’s secretary in the 1930’s, during the time when Schultz had strong-armed his way into control of the Harlem numbers business.
My job now was to ride a bus across the George Washington Bridge where a fellow was waiting for me to hand him a bag of numbers betting slips. We never spoke. I’d cross the street and catch the next bus back to Harlem. I never knew who
that fellow was. I never knew who picked up the betting mcney for the slips that I handled. You didn’t ask questions in the rackets.
My boss’s wife and Gladys Hampton were the only two women I ever met in Harlem whose business ability I really respected. My boss’s wife, when she had the time and the inclination to talk, would tell me many interesting things. She would talk to me about the Dutch Schultz days—about deals that she had known, about graft paid to officials—rookie cops and shyster lawyers right on up into the top levels of police and politics. She knew from personal experience how crime existed only to the degree that the law cooperated with it. She showed me how, in the country’s entire social, political and economic structure, the criminal, the law, and the politicians were actually inseparable partners.
It was at this time that I changed from my old numbers man, the one I’d used since I first worked in Small’s Paradise. He hated to lose a heavy player, but he readily understood why I would now want to play with a runner of my own outfit. That was how I began placing my bets with West Indian Archie. I’ve mentioned him before—one of Harlem’s really bad Negroes; one of those former Dutch Schultz strong-arm men around Harlem.
West Indian Archie had finished time in Sing Sing not long before I came to Harlem. But my boss’s wife had hired him not just because she knew him from the old days. West Indian Archie had the kind of photographic memory that put him among the elite of numbers runners. He never wrote down your number; even in the case of combination plays, he would just nod. He was able to file all the numbers in his head, and write them down for the banker only when he turned in his money. This made him the ideal runner because cops could never catch him with any betting slips.
I’ve often reflected upon such black veteran numbers men as West Indian Archie. If they had lived in another kind of society, their exceptional mathematical talents might have been better used. But they were black.
Anyway, it was status just to be known as a client of West Indian Archie’s, because he handled only sizable bettors. He also required integrity and sound credit: it wasn’t necessary that you pay as you played; you could pay West Indian Archie by the week. He always carried a couple of thousand dollars on him, his own money. If a client came up to him and said he’d hit for some moderate amount, say a fifty-cent or one dollar combination, West Indian Archie would peel off the three or six hundred dollars, and later get his money back from the banker.
Every weekend, I’d pay my bill—anywhere from fifty to even one hundred dollars, if I had really plunged on some hunch. And when, once or twice, I did hit, always just some combination, as I’ve described, West Indian Archie paid me off from his own roll.
The six months finally ended for my boss and his wife. They had done well. Their runners got nice tips, and promptly were snatched up by other bankers. I continued working for my boss and his wife in a gambling house they opened.
—
A Harlem madam I’d come to know—through having done a friend of hers a favor—introduced me to a special facet of the Harlem night world, something which the riot had only interrupted. It was the world where, behind locked doors, Negroes catered to monied white people’s weird sexual tastes.
The whites I’d known loved to rub shoulders publicly with black folks in the after-hours clubs and speakeasies. These, on the other hand, were whites who did not want it known that they had been anywhere near Harlem. The riot had made these exclusive white customers nervous. Their slipping into and about Harlem hadn’t been so noticeable when other whites were also around. But now they would be conspicuous; they also feared the recently aroused anger of Harlem Negroes. So the madam was safeguarding her growing operation by offering me a steerer’s job.
During the war, it was extremely difficult to get a telephone. One day the madam told me to stay at my apartment the next morning. She talked to somebody. I don’t know who it was, but before the next noon, I dialed the madam from my own telephone—unlisted.
This madam was a specialist in her field. If her own girls could not—or would not—accommodate a customer, she would send me to another place, usually an apartment somewhere else in Harlem, where the requested “specialty” was done.
My post for picking up the customers was right outside the Astor Hotel, that always-busy northwest corner of 45th Street and Broadway. Watching the moving traffic, I was soon able to spot the taxi, car, or limousine—even before it slowed down—with the anxious white faces peering out for the tall, reddish-brown-complexioned Negro wearing a dark suit, or raincoat, with a white flower in his lapel.
If they were in a private car, unless it was chauffeured I would take the wheel and drive where we were going. But if they were in a taxi, I would always tell the cabbie, “The Apollo Theater in Harlem, please,” since among New York City taxis a certain percentage are driven by cops. We would get another cab—driven by a black man—and I’d give him the right address.
As soon as I got that party settled, I’d telephone the madam. She would generally have me rush by taxi right back downtown to be on the 45th Street and Broadway corner at a specified time. Appointments were strictly punctual; rarely was I on the corner as much as five minutes. And I knew how to keep moving about so as not to attract the attention of any vice squad plainclothesmen or uniformed cops.
With tips, which were often heavy, sometimes I would make over a hundred dollars a night steering up to ten customers in a party—to see anything, to do anything, to have anything done to them, that they wanted. I hardly ever knew the identities of my customers, but the few I did recognize, or whose names I happened to hear, remind me now of the Profumo case in England. The English are not far ahead of rich and influential Americans when it comes to seeking rarities and oddities.
Rich men, middle-aged and beyond, men well past their prime: these weren’t college boys, these were their Ivy League fathers. Even grandfathers, I guess. Society leaders. Big politicians. Tycoons. Important friends from out of town. City government big shots. All kinds of professional people. Star performing artists. Theatrical and Hollywood celebrities. And, of course, racketeers.
Harlem was their sin-den, their fleshpot. They stole off among taboo black people, and took off whatever antiseptic, important, dignified masks they wore in their white world. These were men who could afford to spend large amounts of money for two, three, or four hours indulging their strange appetites.
But in this black-white nether world, nobody judged the customers. Anything they could name, anything they could imagine, anything they could describe, they could do, or could have done to them, just as long as they paid.
In the Profumo case in England, Christine Keeler’s friend testified that some of her customers wanted to be whipped. One of my main steers to one specialty address away from the madam’s house was the apartment of a big, coal-black girl, strong as an ox, with muscles like a dockworker’s. A funny thing, it generally was the oldest of these white men—in their sixties, I know, some maybe in their seventies—they couldn’t seem to recover quickly enough from their last whipping so they could have me meet them again at 45th and Broadway to take them back to that apartment, to cringe on their knees and beg and cry out for mercy under that black girl’s whip. Some of them would pay me extra to come and watch them being beaten. That girl greased her big Amazon body all over to look shinier and blacker. She used small, plaited whips, she would draw blood, and she was making herself a small fortune off those old white men.
I wouldn’t tell all the things I’ve seen. I used to wonder, later on, when I was in prison, what a psychiatrist would make of it all. And so many of these men held responsible positions; they exercised guidance, influence, and authority over others.
In prison later, I’d think, too, about another thing. Just about all of those whites specifically expressed as their preference black, black, “the blacker the better!” The madam, having long since learned this, had in her house nothing but the blackest accommodating women she could find.
In all of
my time in Harlem, I never saw a white prostitute touched by a white man. White girls were in some of the various Harlem specialty places. They would participate in customers’ most frequent exhibition requests—a sleek, black Negro male having a white woman. Was this the white man wanting to witness his deepest sexual fear? A few times, I even had parties that included white women whom the men had brought with them to watch this. I never steered any white women other than in these instances, brought by their own men, or who had been put into contact with me by a white Lesbian whom I knew, who was another variety of specialty madam.
This Lesbian, a beautiful white woman, had a male Negro stable. Her vocabulary was all profanity. She supplied Negro males, on order, to well-to-do white women.
I’d seen this Lesbian and her blonde girl friend around Harlem, drinking and talking at bars, always with young Negroes. No one who didn’t know would ever guess that the Lesbian was recruiting. But one night I gave her and her girl friend some reefers which they said were the best they’d ever smoked. They lived in a hotel downtown, and after that, now and then, they would call me, and I would bring them some reefers, and we’d talk.
She told me how she had accidentally gotten started in her specialty. As a Harlem habitué, she had known Harlem Negroes who liked white women. Her role developed from a pattern of talk she often heard from bored, well-to-do white women where she worked, in an East Side beauty salon. Hearing the women complain about sexually inadequate mates, she would tell what she’d “heard” about Negro men. Observing how excited some of the women seemed to become, she finally arranged some dates with some of the Harlem Negroes she knew at her own apartment.