football; he used to call his huge belly "the chippies' playground." Cadillac had a string of about a
dozen of the stringiest, scrawniest, black and white street prostitutes in Harlem. Afternoons
around the bar, the old-timers who knew Cadillac well enough would tease him about how women
who looked like his made enough to feed themselves, let alone him. He'd roar with laughter right
along with us; I can hear him now, "Bad-looking women work harder."
Just about the complete opposite of Cadillac was the young, smooth, independent-acting pimp,
"Sammy the Pimp." He could, as I have mentioned, pick out potential prostitutes by watching their
expressions in dance halls. Sammy and I became, in time, each other's closest friend. Sammy,
who was from Kentucky, was a cool, collected expert in his business, and his business was
women. Like Cadillac, he too had both black and white women out making his living, but Sammy's
women-who would come into Small's sometimes, looking for him, to give him money, and have
him buy them a drink-were about as beautiful as any prostitutes who operated anywhere, I'd
imagine.
One of his white women, known as "Alabama Peach," a blonde, could put everybody in stitches
with her drawl; even the several Negro women numbers controllers around Small's really liked
her. What made a lot of Negroes aroundthe bar laugh the hardest was the way she would take
three syllables to say "nigger." But what she usually was saying was "Ah jes' lu-uv ni-uh-guhs-."
Give her two drinks and she would tell her life story in a minute; how in whatever little Alabama
town it was she came from, the first thing she remembered being conscious of was that she was
supposed to "hate niggers." And then she started hearing older girls in grade school whispering
the hush-hush that "niggers" were such sexual giants and athletes, and she started growing up
secretly wanting to try one. Finally, right in her own house, with her family away, she threatened a
Negro man who worked for her father that if he didn't take her she would swear he tried rape. He
had no choice, except that he quit working for them. And from then until she finished high school,
she managed it several times with other Negroes-and she somehow came to New York, and went
straight to Harlem. Later on, Sammy told me how he had happened to spot her in the Savoy, not
even dancing with anybody, just standing on the sidelines, watching, and he could tell. And once
she really went for Negroes, the more the better, Sammy said, and wouldn't have a white man. I
have wondered what ever became of her.
There was a big, fat pimp we called "Dollarbill." He loved to flash his "Kansas City roll," probably
fifty one-dollar bills folded with a twenty on the inside and a one-hundred dollar bill on the outside.
We always wondered what Dollarbill would do if someone ever stole his hundred-dollar "cover."
A man who, in his prime, could have stolen Dollarbill's whole roll, blindfolded, was threadbare,
comic old "Fewclothes." Fewclothes had been one of the best pickpockets in Harlem, back when
the white people swarmed up every night in the 1920's, but then during the Depression, he had
contracted a bad case of arthritis in his hands. His finger joints were knotted and gnarled so that it
made people uncomfortable to look at them. Rain, sleet, or snow, every afternoon, about six,
Fewclothes would be at Small's, telling tall tales about the old days, and it was one of the day's
rituals for one or another regular customer to ask the bartender to give him drinks, and me to feed
him.
My heart goes out to all of us who in those afternoons at Small's enacted our scene with
Fewclothes. I wish you could have seen him, pleasantly "high" with drinks, take his seat with
dignity-no begging, not on anybody's Welfare-and open his napkin, and study the day's menu that
I gave nun, and place his order. I'd tell the cooks it was Fewclothes and he'd get the best in the
house. I'd go back and serve it as though he were a millionaire.
Many times since, I have thought about it, and what it really meant. In one sense, we were
huddled in there, bonded together in seeking security and warmth and comfort from each other,
and we didn't know it. All of us-who might have probed space, or cured cancer, or built industries-
were, instead, black victims of the white man's American social system. In another sense, the
tragedy of the once master pickpocket made him, for those brother old-timer hustlers, a "there but