Cotton comes to Harlem

8

The next morning, at eight o'clock, an open bed truck pulled up before a store on Seventh Avenue that was being remodeled. Formerly, there had been a notion goods store with a shoeshine parlor serving as a numbers drop on the site. But it had been taken over by a new tenant and a high board wall covering the entire front had been erected during the remodeling.

There had been much speculation in the neighborhood concerning the new business. Some said it would be a bar, others a night club. But Small's Paradise Inn was only a short distance away, and the cognoscenti ruled those out. Others said it was an ideal spot for a barbershop or a hairdresser, or even a bowling alley; some half-wits opted for another funeral parlor, as though colored folks weren't dying fast enough as it is. Those in the know claimed they had seen office furnishings moved in during the night and they had it at first hand that it was going to be the headquarters for the Harlem political committee of the Republican Party. But those with the last word said that Big Wilt Chamberlain, the professional basketball player who had bought Small's Cabaret, was going to open a bank to store all the money he was making hand over fist.

By the time the workmen began taking down the wall, a small crowd had collected. But when they had finished, the crowd overflowed into the street. Harlemites, big and little, old and young, strong and feeble, the halt and the blind, male and female, boys and girls, stared in pop-eyed amazement.

"Great leaping Jesus!" said the fat black barber from down the street, expressing the opinion of all.

Plate-glass windows, trimmed with stainless steel, formed a glass front above a strip of shining steel along the sidewalk. Across the top, above the glass, was a big wooden sign glistening with spotless white paint upon which big, bold, black letters announced:

HEADQUARTERS OF B.T.S. BACK-TO-THE-SOUTHLAND MOVEMENT B.T.S.

Sign Up Now!!! Be a "FIRST NEGRO!" $1,000 Bonus to First Families Signing!

The entire glass front was plastered with bright-colored paintings of conk-haired black cotton-pickers, clad in overalls that resembled Italian-tailored suits, delicately lifting enormous snowwhite balls of cotton from rose-colored cotton bolls that looked for all the world like great cones of ice cream, and grinning happily with even whiter teeth; others showed darkies, clad in the same Italian fashion, hoeing corn as though doing the cakewalk, their heads lifted in song that must surely be spirituals. One scene showed these happy darkies at the end of the day celebrating in a clearing in front of ranch-type cabins, dancing the twist, their teeth gleaming in the setting sun, their hips rolling in the playful shadows to the music of a banjo player in a candy-striped suit; while the elders looked on with approval, bobbing their nappy white heads and clapping their manicured hands. Another showed a tall white man with a white mane of hair, a white moustache and white goatee, wearing a black frock coat and shoestring tie, his pink face bubbling with brotherly love, passing out fantastic bundles of bank notes to a row of grinning darkies, above the caption: Paid by the week. Lodged between the larger scenes were smaller paintings identified as ALL GOOD THINGS TO EAT: grotesquely oversized animals and edibles with the accompanying captions: Big-legged Chickens… Chitterling Bred Shoats… Yams! What Am… O! Possum!.. Lasses In The Jug… Grits and Gravy… Pappy's Bar-B-Q and Mammy's Hog Maw Stew… Corn Whisky

… Buttermilk… Hop pin John.

In the center of all this jubilation of good food, good times and good pay, were a blown-up photomontage beside a similarly sized drawing: one showing pictures of famine in the Congo, tribal wars, mutilations, depravities, hunger and disease, above the caption, Unhappy Africa; the other depicting fat, grinning colored people sitting at tables laden with food, driving about in cars as big as Pullman coaches, black children entering modernistic schools equipped with stadiums and swimming-pools, elderly people clad in Brooks Brothers suits and Saks Fifth Avenue dresses filing into a church that looked astonishingly like Saint Peter's Cathedral in Rome, with its caption: The Happy South.

At the bottom was another big white-painted, black-lettered banner reading:

FARE PAID… HIGH WAGES… ACCOMMODATIONS FOR COTTON PICKERS $1,000 Bonus for Each Family of Five Able-Bodied Persons

The small notice in one lower corner which read, Wanted, a bale of cotton, went unnoticed.

On the inside, the walls were decorated with more slogans and pictures of the same papier-mache cotton plants and bamboo corn stalks were scattered about the floor, in the center of which was an artificial bale of cotton bearing the etched brass legend: Our Front Line of Defense.

At the front to one side was a large flat-topped desk with a nameplate stating: Colonel Robert L. Calhoun. Colonel Calhoun in the flesh sat behind the desk, smoking a long, thin cheroot and looking out the window at the crowd of Harlemites with a benign expression. He looked like the model who had posed for the portrait of the colonel in the window, paying off the happy darkies. He had the same narrow, hawklike face crowned by the same mane of snow-white hair, the same wide, drooping white moustache, the same white goatee. There the resemblance stopped. His narrow-set eyes were ice-cold blue and his back was ramrod straight. But he was clad in a similar black frock coat and black shoestring tie, and on the ring finger of his long pale hand was a solid gold signet ring with the letters CSA.

A young blond white man in a seersucker suit, who looked as though he might be an alumnus of Ole Miss, sat on the edge of the Colonel's desk, swinging his leg.

"Are you going to talk to them?" he asked in a college-trained voice with a slight southern accent.

The Colonel removed his cheroot and studied the ash on the tip. His actions were deliberate; his expression impassive. He spoke in a voice that was slow and calculated, with a southern accent as thick as molasses in the winter.

"Not yet, son, let's let it simmer a bit. You can't rush these darkies; they'll come around in their own good time."

The young man peered through a clear crack in the plastered window. He looked anxious. "We haven't got all the time in the world," he said.

The Colonel looked up at him, smiling with perfect white dentures, but his eyes remained cold. "What's your hurry, son, you got a gal waiting?"

The young man blushed and looked down sullenly. "All these niggers make me nervous," he confessed.

"Now don't start feeling guilty, son," the Colonel said. "Remember it's for their own good. You got to learn to think of niggers with love and charity."

The young man smiled sardonically and remained silent.

At the back of the room were two desks side by side, bearing the legends: Applications. They were presided over by two neat young colored men who shuffled application forms to look occupied. From time to time the Colonel looked at them approvingly, as though to say, "See how far you've come." But they had the expressions of guilty fathers who've been caught robbing their babies' banks.

Outside, on the sidewalk and in the street, black people were expressing righteous indignation.

"Ain't it a scandal, Lord, right up here in Harlem?"

"God ought to strike 'em daid, that's whut."

"These peckerwoods don't know what they want. One day they's sending us north to get rid of us, and the next they's up here tryna con us into going back."

"Man, trust white folks and go from Cadillacs to cotton sacks."

"Ain't it the truth! I'd sooner trust a white-mouthed moccasin sucking at my tiddy."

"Man, I ought to go in there and say to that ol' colonel, 'You wants me to go back south, eh?' and he says, 'That's right, boy,' and I says, 'You gonna let me vote?' arid he says, 'That's right, boy, vote all you want, just so long you don't cast no ballots,' and I says, 'You gonna let me marry yo' daughter-' "

His audience fell out laughing. But one joker didn't think it was funny; he said, "There he is, what's stopping you?"

Everyone stopped laughing.

The comedian said shamefacedly, "Hell, man, I don't do everything I oughta do, you knows that."

A big matronly woman said, "Just you wait 'til Reverend O'Malley hears 'bout all this, and then you'll see some action."

Reverend O'Malley had already heard. Barry Waterfield, the phoney detective in his employ, had telephoned him and given him the lowdown. Reverend O'Malley had sent him to see the Colonel with implicit instructions.

Barry was a big, clean-shaven man with hair cropped short and a nose flattened in the ring. His dark brown face bore other lumps it had taken during his career as bodyguard, bouncer, mugger and finally killer. He had small brown eyes partly obscured by scar tissue, and two gold teeth in front. He was easily identifiable, which limited his usefulness, but Deke didn't have any other choice.

Barry shaved, carefully brushed his hair, dressed in a dark business suit, but couldn't resist the hand-painted tie depicting an orange sunset on a green background.

When he pushed through the crowd and entered the office of the Back-to-the-Southland movement, talk stopped momentarily and people stared at him. No one knew him, but no one would forget him.

He walked straight to the colonel's desk and said, "Colonel Calhoun, I'm Mr Waterfield from the Back-to-Africa movement."

Colonel Calhoun looked up through cold blue eyes and appraised him from head to foot. Colonel Calhoun dug him instantly. The Colonel removed the cheroot from his white moustache and his dentures gleamed whitely.

"What can I do for you… er… what did you say your name was?"

"Barry Waterfield."

"Barry. What can I do for you, boy?"

"Well, you see, we have a group of good people we're going to send back to Africa."

"Back to Africa!" the Colonel exclaimed in horror. "My boy, you must be raving mad. Uprooting these people from their native land. Don't do it, boy, don't do it."

"Well, sir, you see, it's going to cost a lot — " He remained standing, as the Colonel had not invited him to be seated.

"A fortune, my boy, a veritable fortune," the Colonel agreed, rearing back in his chair. "And who's going to pay for this costly nonsense?"

"Well, sir, you see, that's the trouble. You see, last night we were having a big rally to sign up the families who were going to leave first, and then some bandits robbed us of their money. Eighty-seven thousand dollars."

The Colonel whistled softly.

"You must have heard about it, sir."

"No, I can't say that I have, my boy; but I've been pretty busy with this philanthropy of ours. But I'm sorry for those misguided people, even though their misfortune might turn out to be a blessing in disguise. I'm ashamed of you, my boy, an honest-looking American nigra like you, leading your people astray. If you knew what we know, you wouldn't dream of sending your poor people to Africa. Only pestilence and starvation await them there, in those foreign lands. The South is the place for them, the good old reliable Southland. We love and take care of our darkies."

"Well, you see, sir, that's what I want to talk to you about. These poor people have got ready to go somewhere, and now since they can't go back to Africa it might be best they go back south."

"Right you are, my boy. You just send them to me and we'll do right by them. The Happy Southland is the only home of your people."

The two young colored clerks who had been eavesdropping on the conversation were downright shocked to hear Barry say, "Well, sir, I'm inclined to agree with you, sir."

The blond young man was standing at the front window, peering out at the milling black mob which he now began to see in a different light. They didn't look dangerous any longer; now they appeared innocent and gullible and he could barely suppress a smile as he thought of how easy it was going to be. Then he frowned at a sudden memory and turned back to stare at Barry with searching suspicion. This nigger sounded too good to be true, he thought.

But the Colonel didn't seem to entertain a doubt. "You just trust me, my boy," he went on, "and we'll take care of your people."

"Well, you see, sir, I trust you," Barry said. "I know you'll do the right thing by us. But our leader, Reverend O'Malley, won't like it, my giving you my confidence. You see, sir, he's a dangerous man."

A line of white dentures peeped from beneath the Colonel's white moustache, and Barry had a fleeting thought that this mother-raping white man looked too mother-raping white. But the Colonel continued unsuspectingly, "Don't worry about that nigra, my boy, we're going to take care of him and put an end to his un-American activities."

Barry leaned a little forward and lowered his voice. "You see, sir, the point is we have the eighty-seven families of able-bodied people all packed and ready to go; and I've got to tell them if you're ready to pay them their bonuses."

"My boy, their bonuses is as good as in the bank. You tell them that," the Colonel said and rolled the cheroot between his lips only to find it had gone out.

He tossed it carelessly on the floor and carefully selected another from a silver case in his breast pocket. Then he clipped the end with a cigar cutter from his vest pocket, stuck the clipped cheroot between his lips and rolled it over and over until the outer leaves of the lip-end were agreeably wet. Both Barry and the blond young man snapped their lighters to offer a light, but the Colonel preferred Barry's flame.

Barry said, "Well, that is fine of you, sir, that's all I want to know. We got more than a thousand families recruited and I'll sell you the whole list."

For an instant both the Colonel and the blond young man became immobile. Then the Colonel's dentures showed. "If I heard you correctly, my boy," he said smoothly, "you said sell."

"Well, sir, you see, sir, it's like this," Barry began, his voice pitched low and grown husky. "Naturally I would want a little something for myself, taking all this risk. You see, sir, the list is highly confidential and it has taken us months to select and recruit all these able-bodied people. And if they knew I was turning this list over to you, they might make trouble, sir — even though it is for their own good. And I'd want to be able to get away for a while, sir. You understand, sir."

"My boy, nothing could be plainer," the Colonel said and puffed his cheroot. "Plain talk suits me fine. Now how much do you want for your list?"

"Well, sir. I was thinking fifty dollars a family would be about fair, sir."

"You're a boy after my own heart, even though you do belong to the nigra race," the Colonel said. The blond young man frowned and opened his mouth as though to speak, but the Colonel ignored him. "Now, my boy, I understand your predicament and I don't want to jeopardize your position and usefulness by permitting you to come back here and be seen and suspected by all your people. So I'm going to tell you what I want you to do. You bring the list to me at midnight. I'll be waiting down by the Harlem River underneath the subway extension to the Polo Grounds in my cah, and I'll pay you right then and there. It will be dark and deserted at that time of night and nobody'll see you."

Barry hesitated, looking torn between fear and greed. "Well, frankly, sir, that's a good sound idea, but I'm scared of the dark, sir," he confessed.

The Colonel chuckled. "There's nothing about the dark to fear, my boy. That's just nigra superstition. The dark never hurt anyone. You'll be as safe as in the arms of Jesus. I give you my word."

Barry looked relieved at this. "Well, sir, if you give me your word I know can't nothing happen to me. I'll be there at midnight sharp."

Without further ado, the Colonel waved a hand, dismissing him.

"Are you going to trust that — " the blond young man began.

For the first time the Colonel showed displeasure in a frown. The blond young man shut up.

As he was leaving, Barry noticed the small sign in the window through the corners of his eyes: Wanted, a bale of cotton. What for? he wondered.