When Bethel A.M.E.’s move to Harlem was just talk, Elma had dragged Raymond to the church on 15th Street. During the fellowship after the service, Elma mentioned to her pastor that Raymond had studied the building trades in college. “Near the top of his class, you know.” The intercession had led to an introduction to Arthur Landry, founder of Landry and Sons, one of only three Negro architectural firms in the city. Mr. Landry sat on the church board. “I know of your uncle,” Landry had said to Raymond, “a fine teacher and scholar.”
It was the break that Raymond needed, that she had prayed for. Though she had prodded him to accompany her to the service and guided him through the songs in the hymnal, Ray had needed no prompting to talk up his ideas. Landry had been so impressed that he offered Ray an associate position. Now, after all the false starts, in less than a year, Ray was poised to take on the premiere assignment of supervising the construction of the church’s new home in Harlem. Elma straightened the doily on the armchair where Miss Tavineer had sat earlier. I can’t wait to offer that old biddy some good news for a change. Once construction was under way, she was sure her family could relocate to an uptown address like the respectable people were doing. The anticipation filled her with a joy that verged on the devilish. The Lord works in mysterious ways! Elma laughed to herself. If only the congregation knew that Raymond had actually gotten his ideas for their new House of God from his stint in burlesque.
“Run-down, no-count, secondhand place fulluh nigguhs!” he would fume. The few months she had shared with him on the road, she often huddled in a cold-water flat, awaiting his return, only to endure his fussing about the construction of the colored circuit houses where he and Jolly most often played. He would bluster and pace. “Wing space, the place had no wing space! Dressing room’s a broom closet.” He often complained that people who built the theaters didn’t have to work in them. “No depth of stage, and those seats! No room for your knees. Aisles on the outside! Every latecomer makes a bigger scene than me and Jolly put together. Complete parallel walls. The sound bounced around like a pool shark’s eight ball.”
“Raymond, the things you say!”
While Raymond was speaking with Landry at the fellowship dinner, Elma fluttered and hovered nearby, praying Ray would just talk about his ideas and not where they came from. And her husband had ideas! “Harlem has promise,” he said. “Harlem could be that great invention,” he went on, “the showplace of the Negro people!” Elma was filled with hope that he had finally found his stride. Each step, a bit closer. A little bit higher, a little bit higher . . .
They had taken the whole family to the spring groundbreaking ceremony, Elma’s face shielded by a broad summer hat. Gabby and Benna raced down the small hills in the cleared corner lot while Jesse squawked loudly in her arms. She watched proudly as Raymond, with his dark brows glowering in the sun, stood with the design team of Harlem’s only colored architect, his foot on the shovel next to the assistant pastor. After the ceremony, Mr. Landry invited the family for a private toast “for a few close associates” at his home around the corner.
Elma gathered their brood. Raymond bounced Jesse, already wanting to catch up to his sisters gaily skipping ahead of them. They strolled onto a block lined with carefully potted young trees. The row of neat, connected brownstones looked unassuming and small, but Ray explained they were Stanford White’s, brilliant in simplicity and line, deceptive in size. When she entered the mahogany vestibule, as the stained glass inlays caught the last rays of the morning sun, the housewife from a fourth-floor Hell’s Kitchen walk-up felt herself delivered to heaven. Brass sconces lined the intricately carved, wood-paneled halls. Chandelier crystals danced in the light. Elma couldn’t wait to move to Harlem! She took Jesse from Raymond and watched their two little daughters shadow their father around the gathering. Though she had not been able to afford a new dress, she wore her hair in a crown, wound into spiral coils over each ear like Guinevere, the garnet-drop earrings Raymond had given her just visible. Mr. Landry approached her and gushed, “My dear, I don’t believe you realize you’re the most beautiful woman in the room.”
“My husband is due far greater compliments than I, sir.”
“Yes, but he’s not my type,” Landry quipped mischievously. To her look of bewilderment, he chuckled, “Call me Arthur, please.”
On the subway ride home, while her cheeks were still warm from the sip of sherry she allowed herself, Raymond paced the car. “What did you call yourself doing?”
“I was just singing your praises.”
That was spring, a world ago. Elma gazed out the kitchen window at the darkening twilight, crystal veins of frost forming on the panes.
Early turns of fortune in his Chesapeake childhood created in Raymond Minor a fundamental imbalance that made him prone to pendulum swings of action most of his life. While his grandfather had held a lesser federal Reconstruction office, Raymond’s mother was a Baltimore whore. She died when he was seven and he was brought to Washington to live with his high-toned colored relatives, the Minors—respectable, high-class folks descended of Reconstruction legislators, freedmen and mechanics, scholars and teachers, men of letters and breeding and ladies of class and culture. “All refined, all free people of color,” his grandmother would say as she stooped to hang her own wash in the brown grass backyard, “not a slave among them!” All the while covering her barely brown arms with long white gloves so as never to darken.
The whole family, a guarded people within the narrow range from taupe to alabaster, could not accept, refused to discuss, didn’t dare imagine his parents’ union. However brief and whatever the circumstances, which he never came to know, it had shaken the very foundation upon which their reality was built. Raymond’s grandmother took every opportunity to berate him for his father’s “shackin’ up with that low-bred, street-walkin’ mother of yours,” as if the fall from grace were a disease he had brought upon the whole family, tree rot down to the root.
By the time Raymond was twelve, his grandfather had shrunk in stature as well. The old man squandered his pennies in drink and golden tales of olden days, bewailing the Jim Crow squeeze that had removed even peripheral government jobs from colored hands, even as his had given over to tremors. Reduced to managing a neighborhood burlesque house that featured dames just like Raymond’s mother, his grandpap could be found most often by the stage door, a soused and passed-out sentry.
His uncle, who had matriculated through a small Southern college and remained there as professor of music, rescued him. Childless himself, his uncle, Professor Minor, sought to steer Raymond away from his forebears’ profligate course toward the next generation of Negro leadership, but Ray chafed under the insular rigidity, the pastoral setting, and the chasms of caste and class between the light-skinned self-designated Talented Tenth and their darker-hued brethren demanding autonomy and a share of authority. He discovered in the small land grant colored college the same pretentious posturing of his grandparents, the same small-minded, narrow vision, the same pattern of mistrust and betrayal that had so bedeviled his youth. “Nigguhs in a haystack, crabs in a barrel.”
He was invited to join the No Nations Club, those so fair-skinned that their racial path required decision. Every year a dozen or so disappeared into whiteness. Instead, Ray quit the college, thumbed his nose at his uncle’s expectation that he would become a builder for a fling at a life in song and dance, staving off his ambivalence with a lacquer treatment of burnt cork, cavalierly aiming to travel, a white-faced fraud by day, a black-faced clown by night, following the rambling path of his confusion, a drunkard sailor stumbling along from one strange foreign port to another. Then he saw Elma, then he heard her sing, a melody like a breeze across his face. That damned singing.
They lost their first child in stillbirth, on a stopover in Cleveland. Raymond came back to the boarding house to find Elma sitting in a tub of cold crimson water. He had not even realized. Clearly she was too fragile for the road. His commitment to show b
usiness being faint, when his partner Jolly decided to pull out—“Got myself this brownstone,” he said, “gon’ turn the bottom floor into a saloon, a men’s drinking joint”—Raymond followed and settled in New York, letting the upstairs flat. Then Gabriela was born with rich purple curls and golden Benna, named after his grandfather. Then Jesse, who would peek out the window, already trying to stand up.
At the funeral, Elma sat on the side of the bed, her crying incessant, her face unrecognizable. He tried as he knew to reach her, to help her get dressed. “We should make another child,” he said as he held her by the shoulders. She fell upon the ground, her body quaking, her back arched, hands distended till the bones nearly popped from her skin. “Another, a-nuth-er ch-child!” she stuttered. “Don’t touch me! Lord! Don’t! Leave me be!” then curled up like a stone and never cried again. The loss of iron, they said, had turned Elma’s once warm skin to a sallow bruised hue, deep circles under her wide dry eyes. Like the sirens offering rescue, then dashing mariners to their deaths, the passion that she riled in him had brought only misery, guilt, and anger.
As he walked home from Landry’s office in Harlem, traces of her melody teased him through the howling January winds. Iced wind-shears cracked his skin. White breath caps punctuated his heavy stride. Ray crossed the near abandoned intersection of 52nd and Eighth, the neighborhood gypsters, whores, gypsies, garage attendants, and pushcart owners having taken shelter in the ubiquitous taverns and saloons, and arrived at Jolly’s Place.
His nostrils reluctantly breathed in the familiar, warm, musky tavern air. Jolly was telling one of his stories, looking for a chorus. “Face the orchestra, damn it! I’d say,” he hollered above the din. “Never used to understand it. He’d stand there with that big old silver head of wiry hair of his and conduct just as graceful.” Jolly waved his arms above his head in pert comical curlicues. Beckoning Ray with two middle fingers, he continued one of his standard tales of the “World’s worst pit conductor! Facing the audience, his back to the band, like he was the star!” Laughter sidled through the chain of men, punctuated with clicks and taps and shouting.
Ray eased his way through the crowd. The narrow galley could neatly accommodate fifty customers. They were two and three deep tonight, leaning over the counter. It was January 1920. The Volstead Act was due to take effect in a few days. Both regulars and newcomers were guzzling mugs of beer and throwing down shots as if their bodies could stock up. The joint was bulging. The room had the loud boisterous gaiety of a blue-collar wake. “Another round?! — Aye! — Drink up, boys! Make room for my partner, so’s he can catch up!”
“Man’s gotta right,” a regular halfheartedly argued. “It’s interfering with the states. New York got rights.” He hiccupped. “Won’t hold.”
“Damn hillbillies,” Jolly snapped as he mopped down the mahogany bar top and slapped a shot on the counter for Ray, “moonshinin’ for a hunnud years, now gonna dictate to the nation! Just got the joint goin’ and here they come, pullin’ the rug right from under me like a bad comedy routine.”
In their show act, Ray, the straight man, had always followed the wisecracking Jolly onto the stage. When Jolly gave up the life, Ray did likewise. Ray told himself it was for Elma’s sake. For Jolly the reason was simpler. Between road feuds and living hand to mouth, he couldn’t take the food. “Hospital stay in Cincinnati and some bad barbecue in Denver, after that, took my earnings and bought me something steady,” he would tell anybody. He ran a saloon with regular eats at 52nd, between Seventh and Eighth. Jolly contentedly cooked for himself and the small world of show people, mostly musicians, who often stopped by. Bookended by Marshall’s and the Clef Club on 53rd Street, his tavern was becoming the hub of the colored music scene until Irish dives like Bucket of Blood moving up from the Five Points and the push south from San Juan Hill started squeezing out the colored from the Tenderloin. “Colored feelin’ unwelcome, even in the slum,” Jolly joked. The old German Jewish neighborhood of Harlem on the Upper West Side had begun to lure the upscale folk, their churches, and the few remaining high rollers. Still, Jolly owned his building square and was reluctant to leave. Always a realist, he kept a billy club and a shotgun behind the counter and a pistol in the garter of his sock.
“Fellah from Rothsteins’ come in yestiddy, say could keep me in supply—told me tuh serve it in teacups. Say cops, city already hooked up. Trucks loaded and routes mapped out. Business as usual.”
His wife, Lille, looked up, frowning.
“What you looking at, missy?” he joked. “Can’t you see we got customers here?” He leaned into Ray, “Gotta treat em like that to keep em sassy,” then reared back and bellowed, “When my illustrious colleagues go to Tin Pan Alley to get fleeced, here in Hell’s Kitchen, we got eats which they can still afford. Call it Ten-der-loin!” He elongated the word with relish and laughed so that his shoulders shook. Jolly, who was stocky and muscular, walked on his toes, not so much to compensate for his height, but more to demonstrate a quickness and sharpness. He was tight. Even with his protruding belly, you could still see the curve of his haunch through his pants.
Lille methodically rinsed glasses and mugs, then just as methodically dried them, then turned to dish up plates of Jolly’s famous rib-tips. Tall, with a turned-up nose, she talked little. To her consternation, her common-law husband Asa “Ace” Jolly used to play a decent stride piano, and even then talked all the time.
“You gonna take the offer?” Ray asked.
“Don’t much think so. Considering opening up a little grocery store, though. Say, you could design it for me! Drawing it up and such . . . Last round before supper, everybody! Last round, Last Supper!” he shouted down the galley. He slapped Ray on the side of the arm and served him a sympathy shot on the house. “Drink up, my friend. Two more days of freedom, then we all got to think another game.”
Ray slugged down the shot in one angry motion. “Got fired today.”
Jolly rolled his eyes. “Again?” Jolly, who presumed all people were cutthroat and out to destroy, seemed to contradict himself with his loyalty to Ray. He stuck by his old partner—“Rubbing shoulders with the aristocracy,” he called it, “the golden days of Reconstruction, first taste of liberty, schools, gov’ment, and all that, when black folks walked the halls of Congress as lawmakers, not as butlers”—while he secretly delighted in Ray’s floundering. The dependency seemed a marker of his own increased capacity.
But then there was Elma, rare and delicate as an orchid. Raymond had no appreciation, he was sure. “College man ain’t got a clue what to do with that.” When she started losing the children, Asa’s envy turned to pity. Everybody lost children, especially in the Tenderloin, but the couple’s inability to recover he attributed to a weakness in their blood, an inherited self-absorption he found fascinating.
Ray huddled over the bar; his long legs straddled the corner seat. “What am I going to tell Elle?”
“Fuck that. What you gonna do?” Jolly retorted, his dishrag balled up in his fist. Jolly looked over toward his wife, then palmed Ray some cash. “Just till you get straight. Consider it a down payment on the build. My new grocery store.” He threw up his hands to Ray’s refusal. “I’m good, I’m good. Till it goes into effect, Prohibition’s the best thing ever happened to me.”
The Tenderloin, despite its poverty and reputation, or maybe because of it, offered mobility. During the war, with immigration down and single men on the front, Ray got work easily. With his swarthy looks and his knack for capturing accents, he could fall in with various pick-up crews. He spoke a few phrases of Italian and a lovely Irish brogue. Black Irish, they called him, not knowing the half. Redeploying his theatrical skills, he navigated around the unions’ barring of blacks and the clannishness of the trade guilds, inventing characters and backgrounds to suit the moment. The masquerade worked beautifully when work was plentiful and the skilled labor pool scarce.
A wave of great inventions—electric lights, moving pictures, telephones, pho
nographs, human flight, automobiles for the common man—had made the world suddenly exhilarated and confusing, wide-eyed with hope and an unconditional faith in possibility, speeding into the future. Intoxicated by these new ways of thinking, Raymond chose experiences that gave him the best exposure, new ways of seeing space and structure—subway tunneling, bridge construction, skyscrapers. While others quaked at the thought of working the tall girders, arms akimbo, Ray stood flat-footed on the steel beams, breathing in the light atmospheric clouds like ether. His dream of becoming an architect rekindled, Raymond volunteered to make the blueprint copies and change orders, listening, observing, asking questions, practicing his drafting. He had ideas, but invariably he would undercut himself and irritate the wrong guy, threaten with the wrong question, challenge at the wrong time. Man of No Nation, when he got to the portal of choice, he would freeze or fold or turn trickster on himself, a skyscraper worker who could trip up a flight of stairs.
Harlem was Elma’s choice, not his, but Landry’s firm, one of three Negro architects in the city, had appeared to be the opportunity he was seeking.
The construction of A.M.E. Bethel was well ahead of schedule. Even unfinished it had become a showplace. Standing in the frame of the steeple, Ray had watched Landry take a group of church and city representatives on a tour of the construction site. He could tell from the hand gestures that Landry clearly had absorbed some of Raymond’s ideas. He was even using Raymond’s language. “The pulpit will be extended to thirty feet, and the audience will have a center aisle and two to each side. Notice how the walls are beveled to improve acoustics.” As winter set in, work on the plans had given Raymond grounding, a focus outside the mourning. Breath.