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 industrieswere,
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
for the grace of God" symbol. To wolves who still were able to catch some rabbits, it had meaning
that an old wolf who had lost his fangs was still eating.
Then there was the burglar, "Jumpsteady." In the ghettoes the white man has built for us, he has
forced us not to aspire to greater things, but to view everyday living as survival-and in that kind of
a community, survival is what is respected. In any average white neighborhood bar, you couldn't
imagine a known cat-man thief regularly exposing himself, as one of the most popular people in
there. But if Jumpsteady missed a few days running in Small's, we would begin inquiring for him.
Jumpsteady was called that because, it was said, when he worked in white residential areas
downtown, he jumped from roof to roof and was so steady that he maneuvered along window
ledges, leaning, balancing, edging with his toes. If he fell, he'd have been dead. He got into
apartments through windows. It wassaid that he was so cool that he had stolen even with people
in the next room. I later found out that Jumpsteady always keyed himself up high on dope when
he worked. He taught me some things that I was to employ in later years when hard times would
force me to have my own burglary ring.
I should stress that Small's wasn't any nest of criminals. I dwell upon the hustlers because it was
their world that fascinated me. Actually, for the night-life crowd, Small's was one of Harlem's two
or three most decorous nightspots. In fact, the New York City police department recommended
Small's to white people who would ask for a "safe" place in Harlem.
The first room I got after I left the railroad (half of Harlem roomed) was in the 800 block of St.
Nicholas Avenue. You could walk into one or another room in this house and get a hot fur coat, a
good camera, fine perfume, a gun, anything from hot women to hot cars, even hot ice. I was one
of the very few males in this rooming house. This was during the war, when you couldn't turn on
the radio and not hear about Guadalcanal or North Africa. In several of the apartments the
women tenants were prostitutes. The minority were in some other racket or hustle-boosters,
numbers runners, or dope-peddlers-and I'd guess that everyone who lived in the house used
dope of some kind. This shouldn't reflect too badly on that particular building, because almost
everyone in Harlem needed some kind of hustle to survive, and needed to stay high in some way
to forget what they had to do to survive.
It was in this house that I learned more about women than I ever did in any other single place. It
was these working prostitutes who schooled me to things that every wife and every husband
should know. Later on, it was chiefly the women who weren't prostitutes who taught me to be very
distrustful of most women; there seemed to be a higher code of ethics and sisterliness among
those prostitutes than among numerous ladies of the church who have more men for kicks than
the prostitutes have for pay. And I am talking about both black andwhite. Many of the black ones
in those wartime days were right in step with the white ones in having husbands fighting overseas
while they were laying up with other men, even giving them their husbands' money. And many
women just faked as mothers and wives, while playing the field as hand as prostitutes-with their
darsice
(darsice)
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