numbers business, and was doing well. Sammy even had married. Some fast young girl. But then
shortly after his wedding one morning he was found lying dead across his bed-they said with
twenty-five thousand dollars in his pockets. (People don't want to believe the sums that even the
minor underworld handles. Why, listen: in March 1964, a Chicago nickel-and-dime bets Wheel of
Fortune man, Lawrence Wakefield, died, and over $760, 000 in cash was in his apartment, in
sacks and bags... all taken from poor Negroes... and we wonder why we stay so poor. )
Sick about Sammy, I queried from bar to bar among old-timers for West Indian Archie. The wire
hadn't reported him dead, or living somewhere else, but none seemed to know where he was. I
heard the usual hustler fates of so many others. Bullets, knives, prison, dope, diseases, insanity,
alcoholism. I imagine it was about in that order. And so many of the survivors whom I knew as
tough hyenas and wolves of the streets in the old days now were so pitiful. They had known all
the angles, but beneath that surface they were poor, ignorant, untrained black men; life had
eased up on them and hyped them. I ran across close to twenty-five of these old-timers I had
known pretty well, who in the space of nine years had been reduced to the ghetto's minor,
scavenger hustles to scratch up room rent and food money. Some now worked downtown,
messengers, janitors, things like that. I was thankful to Allah that I had become a Muslim and
escaped their fate.
There was Cadillac Drake. He was a big jolly, cigar-smoking, fat, black, gaudy-dressing pimp, a
regular afternoon character when I was waiting on tables in Small's Paradise. Well, I recognized
him shuffling toward me on the street. He had gotten hooked on heroin; I'd heard that. He was the
dirtiest, sloppiest bum you ever laid eyes on. I hurried past because we would both have been
embarrassed if he recognized me, the kid he used to toss a dollar tip.
The wire worked to locate West Indian Archie for me. The wire of the streets, when it wants to, is
something like Western Union with the F.B.I. for messengers. At one of my early services at
Temple Seven, an old scavenger hustler, to whom I gave a few dollars, came up when services
were dismissed. He told me that West Indian Archie was sick, living up in a rented room in the
Bronx.
I took a taxi to the address. West Indian Archie opened the door. He stood there in rumpled
pajamas and barefooted, squinting at me.
Have you ever seen someone who seemed a ghost of the person you remembered? It took him a
few seconds to fix me in his memory. He claimed, hoarsely, "Red! I'm so glad to see you!"
I all but hugged the old man. He was sick in that weak way. I helped him back. He sat down on
the edge of his bed. I sat in his one chair, and I told him how his forcing me out of Harlem had
saved my life by turning me in the direction of Islam.
He said, "I always liked you, Red," and he said that he had never really wanted to kill me. I told
him it had made me shudder many times to think how close we had come to killing each other. I
told him I had sincerely thought I had hit that combinated six-way number for the three hundred
dollars he had paid me. Archie said that he had later wondered if he had made some mistake,
since I was so ready to die about it. And then we agreed that it wasn't worth even talking about, it
didn't mean anything anymore. He kept saying, over and over,in between other things, that he
was so glad to see me.
I went into a little of Mr. Muhammad's teaching with Archie. I told him how I had found out that all
of us who had been in the streets were victims of the white man's society I told Archie what I had
thought in prison about him; that his brain, which could tape-record hundreds of number
combinations a day, should have been put at the sendee of mathematics or science. "Red, that
sure is something to think about," I can remember him saying.
But neither of us would say that it was not too late. I have the feeling that he knew, as I could see,