'em feel it."
When things slowed a little, he said, "You ain't seen nothing tonight. You wait until you see a
spooks' dance! Man, our people carry on!" Whenever he had a moment, he kept schooling me.
"Shoelaces, this drawer here. You just startingout, I'm going to make these to you as a present.
Buy them for a nickel a pair, tell cats they need laces if they do, and charge two bits."
Every Benny Goodman record I'd ever heard in my life, it seemed, was filtering faintly into where
we were. During another customer lull, Freddie let me slip back outside again to listen. Peggy Lee
was at the mike singing. Beautiful! She had just joined the band and she was from North Dakota
and had been singing with a group in Chicago when Mrs. Benny Goodman discovered her, we
had heard some customers say. She finished the song and the crowd burst into applause. She
was a big hit.
"It knocked me out, too, when I first broke in here," Freddie said, grinning, when I went back in
there. "But, look, you ever shined any shoes?" He laughed when I said I hadn't, excepting my
own. "Well, let's get to work. I never had neither." Freddie got on the stand and went to work on
his own shoes. Brush, liquid polish, brush, paste wax, shine rag, lacquer sole dressing... step
by step, Freddie showed me what to do.
"But you got to get a whole lot faster. You can't waste time!" Freddie showed me how fast on my
own shoes. Then, because business was tapering off, he had time to give me a demonstration of
how to make the shine rag pop like a firecracker. "Dig the action?" he asked. He did it in slow
motion. I got down and tried it on his shoes. I had the principle of it. "Just got to do it faster,"
Freddie said. "It's a jive noise, that's all. Cats tip better, they figure you're knocking yourself out!"
By the end of the dance, Freddie had let me shine the shoes of three or four stray drunks he
talked into having shines, and I had practiced picking up my speed on Freddie's shoes until they
looked like mirrors. After we had helped the janitors to clean up the ballroom after the dance,
throwing out all the paper and cigarette butts and empty liquor bottles, Freddie was nice enough
to driveme all the way home to Ella's on the Hill in the secondhand maroon Buick he said he was
going to trade in on his Cadillac. He talked to me all the way. "I guess it's all right if I tell you, pick
up a couple of dozen packs of rubbers, two-bits apiece. You notice some of those cats that came
up to me around the end of the dance? Well, when some have new chicks going right, they'll
come asking you for rubbers. Charge a dollar, generally you'll get an extra tip."
He looked across at me. "Some hustles you're too new for. Cats will ask you for liquor, some will
want reefers. But you don't need to have nothing except rubbers-until you can dig who's a cop."
"You can make ten, twelve dollars a dance for yourself if you work everything right," Freddie said,
before I got out of me car in front of Ella's. "The main thing you got to remember is that everything
in the world is a hustle. So long, Red."
The next time I ran into Freddie I was downtown one night a few weeks later. He was parked in
his pearl-gray Cadillac, sharp as a tack, "cooling it."
"Man, you sure schooled me!" I said, and he laughed; he knew what I meant. It hadn't taken me
long on the job to find out that Freddie had done less shoeshining and towel-hustling than selling
liquor and reefers, and putting white "Johns" in touch with Negro whores. I also learned that white
girls always flocked to the Negro dances-some of them whores whose pimps brought them to mix
business and pleasure, others who came with their black boy friends, and some who came in
alone, for a little freelance lusting among a plentiful availability of enthusiastic Negro men.
At the white dances, of course, nothing black was allowed, and that's where the black whores'
pimps soon showed a new shoeshine boy what he could pick up on the side by slipping a phone