For love of Imabelle

5

Goldy lived with two other men on the Golden Ridge of Convent Avenue, north of City College and 140th Street. They had the ground floor of a brownstone private house that had been cut up into apartments.

All three impersonated females and lived by their wits. All were fat and black, which made it easy.

The biggest one, known as Big Kathy, was the land-prop of a house of prostitution in the Valley, on 131st Street east of Seventh Avenue. His house was known far and wide as The Circus.

The other had a flat on 116th Street where he worked the fortune-telling pitch, billing himself as Lady Gypsy. There was a card on his door that read:

An old woman known as Mother Goose cleaned and cooked for them. At home they always acted with decorum. All of them were on junk, but they never used it in their house. They never entertained. At night a shaded floor-lamp shone in the front window, but no one was ever seen. That was because no one was ever there. They had the reputation of being the most respectable women on a street where the colored folk were so respectable they’d phone the sanitation department to remove cat droppings from the sidewalk. People in the neighborhood knew them as the Three Black Widows.

Goldy had a wife who lived in a flat in Lenox Avenue next door to the Savoy Ballroom. But she worked in domestic service for a white family in White Plains, and was home only on Thursdays and every other Sunday afternoon. On those days Sister Gabriel was missing from his customary haunts.

When Goldy left Jackson he went home to have breakfast with Big Kathy and Lady Gypsy. They were having baked ham, lye hominy, stewed okra and corn, Southern biscuits, and finished with sweet-potato pie and muscatel wine. Mother Goose served them silently.

“How does it look ouside?” Big Kathy asked Goldy.

“Cool and clear,” Goldy said. “No one has been killed, carved up, robbed, or run over this morning, to my knowledge. But there’s some new studs in town cooking with The Blow.”

“That old hick-town pitch!” Lady Gypsy exclaimed. “Here in Harlem? Who’re they going to get with that?”

“There’s fools everywhere,” Goldy said. “It’s the Christians full of larceny who fall for that.”

“Hush man! Don’t I know it?”

“Well, if they’d made a sting I’m sure I would have seen them,” Big Kathy said.

“They made a sting all right,” Goldy said. “Fifteen C’s.”

“That’s strange,” Big Kathy said. “They ain’t been in my place yet to get their ashes hauled. They must be on the lam from somewhere.”

“I hadn’t thought of that angle,” Goldy said.

Before leaving, Goldy telephoned Jackson’s landlady.

“I’m the United States Federal Attorney, and I’d like some information about a couple who lived in your house by the name of Jackson and Imabelle Perkins.”

“You mean you is the DA?” she asked in an awed tone.

“No, I’m the FA.”

“Oh, you is the FA. Lawd Almighty, they’s in big trouble, ain’t they?” she said happily.

She told him everything she knew about them except where to find them.

But he got the name of Imabelle’s sister and telephoned her next.

“This is Rufus,” he said. “You don’t know me but I’m a friend of Imabelle’s husband back home.”

“I didn’t know she had a husband back home.”

“Sure you know she’s got a husband back home.”

“If he’s the same kind of husband she got here then she got two husbands.”

“I don’t want to argue about that. I just want to know if she’s still got the stuff in her trunk.”

“What stuff?”

“You know — the stuff.”

“I do not know what stuff you are talking about, whoever you might be. And I do not know anything about my sister’s husbands, wherever they might be,” she said, and hung up.

Next Goldy telephoned Imabelle’s white employers, but they said she hadn’t been to work for three days.

So he put on his gray wig and white bonnet and went down to the Harlem branch post-office on 125th Street to study the rogue’s gallery of wanted criminals.

There were pictures of three colored men wanted in Mississippi for murder. That meant they had killed a white man because killing a colored man wasn’t considered murder in Mississippi. Goldy studied the faces a long time. No one looked twice at the black-gowned Sister of Mercy studying the faces of wanted criminals.

Instead of returning to his stand beside the entrance to Blumstein’s Department Store, Goldy made a round of the bars and joints where they were most likely to hang out. He went up Seventh Avenue to 145th Street, east to Lenox Avenue, south on Lenox to 125th Street again. He jangled his coin box and murmured in his husky, prayerful voice, “Give to the Lord. Give to the poor.” Whenever anyone looked at him suspiciously he quoted from Revelation, “ ‘That ye may eat the flesh of kings.’ ”

“If that’s what you’re goin’ to buy with the money, Sister, here’s a half a dollar,” a colored woman said.

There were more bars on his itinerary than on any other comparable distance on earth. In every one the jukeboxes blared, honeysuckle-blues voices dripped stickily through jungle cries of wailing saxophones, screaming trumpets, and buckdancing piano-notes; someone was either fighting, or had just stopped fighting, or was just starting to fight, or drinking ruckus-juice and talking about fighting. Others were talking about numbers. “Man, I had twelve bones on two twenty-seven and two thirty-seven came out.” Or talking about hits and misses. “Man, I saw that chick and hit. Man, I struck solid gold.” Or talking about love. “That was when my love came down, sugar, and that was the bitter end.”

He stopped in the dice games, the bookie joints, the barbecue stands, the barber shops, professional offices, undertakers’, flea-heaven hotels, grocery stores, meat markets called “The Hog Maw,” “Chitterling Country,” “Pig Foot Heaven.” He questioned dope pushers whom he could trust.

“Have you picked up on a new team, Jack?”

“Pitching what?”

“The Blow.”

“Naw, Sister, that’s for the sticks.”

Some knew him as a man, others thought he was a hophead Sister. It didn’t make any difference to them either way.

He looked at all the faces everywhere he went.

When the coins dropped lightly into his box, he gave out a number, quoting from Revelation, “ ‘Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast... and his number is six hundred threescore and six.’ ” Jokers dropped quarters and half-dollars into his box and rushed to the nearest numbers drop to play six-six-six.

He was worn-out by the time he went home to eat supper. He hadn’t got a lead.

Big Kathy and Lady Gypsy were at business. He ate alone and had Mother Goose give him what was left in the pot to take to Jackson.