And I dropped over to Mason to see Mrs. Swerlin, the woman at the detention home who had
kept me those couple of years. Her mouth flew open when shecame to the door. My sharkskin
gray "Cab Calloway" zoot suit, the long, narrow, knob-toed shoes, and the four-inch-brimmed
pearl-gray hat over my conked fire-red hair; it was just about too much for Mrs. Swerlin. She just
managed to pull herself together enough to invite me in. Between the way I looked and my style
of talk, I made her so nervous and uncomfortable that we were both glad when I left.
The night before I left, a dance was given in the Lincoln School gymnasium. (I've since learned
that in a strange city, to find the Negroes without asking where, you just check in the phone book
for a "Lincoln School." It's always located in the segregated black ghetto-at least it was, in those
days.) I'd left Lansing unable to dance, but now I went around the gymnasium floor flinging little
girls over my shoulders and hips, showing my most startling steps. Several times, the little band
nearly stopped, and nearly everybody left the floor, watching with their eyes like saucers. That
night, I even signed autographs-"Harlem Red"-and I left Lansing shocked and rocked.
Back in New York, stone broke and without any means of support, I realized that the railroad was
all that I actually knew anything about. So I went over to the Seaboard Line's hiring office. The
railroads needed men so badly that all I had to do was tell them I had worked on the New Haven,
and two days later I was on the "Silver Meteor" to St. Petersburg and Miami. Renting pillows and
keeping the coaches clean and the white passengers happy, I made about as much as I had with
sandwiches.
I soon ran afoul of the Florida cracker who was assistant conductor. Back in New York, they told
me to find another job. But that afternoon, when I walked into Small's Paradise, one of the
bartenders, knowing how much I loved New York, called me aside and said that if I were wilting to
quit the railroad, I might be able to replace a day waiter who was about to go into the Army.
The owner of the bar was Ed Small. He and his brother Charlie were inseparable, and I guess
Harlem didn't have two more popular and respected people. They knew I was a railroad man,
which, for a waiter, was the best kind of recommendation. Charlie Small was the one I actually
talked with in their office. I was afraid he'd want to wait to ask some of his old-timer railroad
friends for their opinion. Charlie wouldn't have gone for anybody he heard was wild. But he
decided on the basis of his own impression, having seen me in his place so many times, sitting
quietly, almost in awe, observing the hustling set. I told him, when he asked, that I'd never been in
trouble with the police-and up to then, that was the truth. Charlie told me their rules for
employees: no lateness, no laziness, no stealing, no kind of hustling off any customers, especially
men in uniform. And I was hired.
This was in 1942.I had just turned seventeen.
With Small's practically in the center of everything, waiting tables there was Seventh Heaven
seven times over. Charlie Small had no need to caution me against being late; I was so anxious
to be there, I'd arrive an hour early. I relieved the morning waiter. As far as he was concerned,
mine was the slowest, most no-tips time of day, and sometimes he'd stick around most of that
hour teaching me things, for he didn't want to see me fired.
Thanks to him, I learned very quickly dozens of little things that could really ingratiate a new
waiter with the cooks and bartenders. Both of these, depending on how they liked the waiter,
could make his job miserable or pleasant-and I meant to become indispensable. Inside of a week,
I had succeeded with both. And the customers who had seen me among them around the bar,
recognizing me now in the waiter's jacket, were pleased and surprised; and they couldn't have
been more friendly. And I couldn't have been more solicitous.
"Another drink?... Right away, sir... Would you like dinner?... It's very good... Could I get
you a menu, sir?... Well, maybe a sandwich?"
Not only the bartenders and cooks, who knew everything about everything, it seemed to me, but
even the customers, also began to school me, in little conversations by the bar when I wasn't
busy. Sometimes a customer would talk to me as he ate. Sometimes I'd have long talksabsorbing
everything-with the real old-timers, who had been around Harlem since Negroes first
came there.