got down to the crucial point, when I came to sign up. "Age, Little?" When I told him "Twenty-one,"
he never lifted his eyes from his pencil. I knew I had the job.
I was promised the first available Boston-to-New York fourth-cook job. But for a while, I worked
there in the Dover Street Yard, helping to load food requisitions onto the trains. Fourth cook, I
knew, was just a glorified name for dishwasher, but it wouldn't be my first time, and just as long as
I traveled where I wanted, it didn't make any difference to me. Temporarily though, they put me on
"The Colonial" that ran to Washington, D.C.
The kitchen crew, headed by a West Indian chef named Duke Vaughn, worked with almost
unbelievable efficiency in the cramped quarters. Against the sound of the train clacking along, the
waiters were jabbering the customers' orders, the cooks operated like machines, and five
hundred miles of dirty pots and dishes and silverware rattled back to me. Then, on the overnight
layover, I naturally went sightseeing in downtown Washington. I was astounded to find in the
nation's capital, just a few blocks from Capitol Hill, thousands of Negroes living worse than any I'd
ever seen in the poorest sections of Roxbury; in dirt-floor shacks along unspeakably filthy lanes
with names like Pig Alley and Goat Alley. I had seen a lot, but never such a dense concentration
of stumblebums, pushers, hookers, public crap-shooters, even little kids running around at
midnight begging for pennies, half-naked and barefooted. Some of the railroad cooks and waiters
had told me to be very careful, because muggings, knifings and robberies went on every night
among these Negroes... just a few blocks from the White House.
But I saw other Negroes better off; they lived in blocks of rundown red brick houses. The old
"Colonial" railroaders had told me about Washington having a lot of "middle-class" Negroes with
Howard University degrees, who were working as laborers, janitors, porters, guards, taxi-drivers,
and the like. For the Negro in Washington, mail-carrying was a prestige job.
After a few of the Washington runs, I snatched the chance when one day personnel said I could
temporarily replace a sandwich man on the "Yankee Clipper" to New York. I was into my zoot suit
before the first passenger got off.
The cooks took me up to Harlem in a cab. White New York passed by like a movie set, then
abruptly, when we left Central Park at the upper end, at 110th Street, the people's complexion
began to change.
Busy Seventh Avenue ran along in front of a place called Small's Paradise. The crew had told me
before we left Boston that it was their favorite night spot in Harlem, and not to miss it. No Negro
place of business had ever impressed me so much. Around the big, luxurious-looking, circular bar
were thirty or forty Negroes, mostly men, drinking and talking.
I was hit first, I think, by their conservative clothes and manners. Wherever I'd seen as many as
ten Boston Negroes-let alone Lansing Negroes-drinking, there had been a big noise.
But with all of these Harlemites drinking and talking, there was just a low murmur of sound.
Customers came and went. The bartenders knew what most of them drank and automatically
fixed it. A bottle was set on the bar before some.
Every Negro I'd ever known had made a point of flashing whatever money he had. But these
Harlem Negroes quietly laid a bill on the bar. They drank. They nonchalantly nodded to the
bartender to pour a drink for some friend, while the bartenders, smooth as any of the customers,
kept making change from the money on the bar.
Their manners seemed natural; they were not putting on any airs. I was awed. Within the first five
minutes in Small's, I had left Boston and Roxbury forever.
I didn't yet know that these weren't what you might call everyday or average Harlem Negroes.
Later on, even later that night, I would find out that Harlem contained hundreds of thousands of
my people who were just as loud and gaudy as Negroes anywhere else. But these were the
cream of the older, more mature operators in Harlem. The day's "numbers" business was done.
The night's gambling and other forms of hustling hadn't yet begun. The usual night-life crowd,
who worked on regular jobs all day, were at home eating their dinners. The hustlers at this time
were in the daily six o'clock congregation, having their favorite bars all over Harlem largely to
themselves.
From Small's, I taxied over to the Apollo Theater. (I remember so well that Jay McShann's band
darsice
(darsice)
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