Most of these tough ones had worked as strongarm men for Dutch Schultz back when he
muscled into the Harlem numbers industry after white gangsters had awakened to the fortunes
being made in what they had previously considered "nigger pennies"; and the numbers game was
referred to by the white racketeers as "nigger pool."
Those tough Negroes' heyday had been before the big 1931 Seabury Investigation that started
Dutch Schultz on the way out, until his career ended with his 1934 assassination. I heard stories
of how they had "persuaded" people with lead pipes, wet cement, baseball bats, brass knuckles,
fists, feet, and blackjacks.
Nearly every one of them had done some time, and had come back on the scene, and since had
worked as top runners for the biggest bankers who specialized in large bettors.
There seemed to be an understanding that these Negroes and the tough blackcops never
clashed; I guess both knew that someone would die. They had some bad black cops in Harlem,
too. The Four Horsemen that worked Sugar Hill-I remember the worst one had freckles-there was
a tough quartet. The biggest, blackest, worst cop of them all in Harlem was the West Indian,
Brisbane. Negroes crossed the street to avoid him when he walked his 125th Street and Seventh
Avenue beat. When I was in prison, someone brought me a story that Brisbane had been shot to
death by a scared, nervous young kid who hadn't been up from the South long enough to realize
how bad Brisbane was.
The world's most unlikely pimp was "Cadillac" Drake. He was shiny baldheaded, built like a
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
darsice
(darsice)
#1