where a dollar was collected at the door for "membership."
Inside every after-hours spot, the smoke would hurt your eyes. Four white people to every Negro
would be in there drinking whisky from coffee cups and eating fried chicken. The generally flushfaced
white men and their makeup-masked, glittery-eyed women would be pounding each other's
backs and uproariously laughing and applauding the music. A lot of the whites, drunk,would go
staggering up to Negroes, the waiters, the owners, or Negroes at tables, wringing their hands,
even trying to hug them,
"You're just as good as I am-I want you to know that!" The most famous places drew both Negro
and white celebrities who enjoyed each other. A jam-packed four-thirty A.M. crowd at Jimmy's
Chicken Shack or Dickie Wells' might have such jam-session entertainment as Hazel Scott
playing the piano for Billie Holiday singing the blues. Jimmy's Chicken Shack, incidentally, was
where once, later on, I worked briefly as a waiter. That's where Redd Foxx was the dishwasher
who kept the kitchen crew in stitches.
After a while, my brother Reginald had to have a hustle, and I gave much thought to what would
be, for him, a good, safe hustle. After he'd learned his own way around, it would be up to him to
take risks for himself-if he wanted to make more and quicker money.
The hustle I got Reginald into really was very simple. It utilized the psychology of the ghetto
jungle. Downtown, he paid the two dollars, or whatever it was, for a regular city peddler's license.
Then I took him to a manufacturers' outlet where we bought a supply of cheap imperfect
"seconds"-shirts, underwear, cheap rings, watches, all kinds of quick-sale items.
Watching me work this hustle back in Harlem, Reginald quickly caught on to how to go into
barbershops, beauty parlors, and bars acting very nervous as he let the customers peep into his
small valise of "loot." With so many thieves around anxious to get rid of stolen good-quality
merchandise cheaply, many Haderoites, purely because of this conditioning, jumped to pay hot
prices for inferior goods whose sale was perfectly legitimate. It never took long to get rid of a
valiseful for at least twice what it had cost. And if any cop stopped Reginald, he had in his pocket
both the peddler's license and the manufacturers' outlet bills of sale. Reginald only had to be
certain that none of the customersto whom he sold ever saw that he was legitimate.
I assumed that Reginald, like most of the Negroes I knew, would go for a white woman. I'd point
out Negro-happy white women to him, and explain that a Negro with any brains could wrap these
women around his ringers. But I have to say this for Reginald: he never liked white women. I
remember the one time he met Sophia; he was so cool it upset Sophia, and it tickled me.
Reginald got himself a black woman. I'd guess she was pushing thirty; an "old settler," as we
called them back in those days. She was a waitress in an exclusive restaurant downtown. She
lavished on Reginald everything she had, she was so happy to get a young man. I mean she
bought him clothes, cooked and washed for him, and everything, as though he were a baby.
That was just another example of why my respect for my younger brother kept increasing.
Reginald showed, in often surprising ways, more sense than a lot of working hustlers twice his
age. Reginald then was only sixteen, but, a six-footer, he looked and acted much older than his
years.
All through the war, the Harlem racial picture never was too bright. Tension built to a pretty high
pitch. Old-timers told me that Harlem had never been the same since the 1935 riot, when millions
of dollars worth of damage was done by thousands of Negroes, infuriated chiefly by the white
merchants in Harlem refusing to hire a Negro even as their stores raked in Harlem's money.
During World War II, Mayor LaGuardia officially closed the Savoy Ballroom. Harlem said the real
reason was to stop Negroes from dancing with white women. Harlem said that no one dragged
the white women in there. Adam Clayton Powell made it a big fight. He had successfully fought
ConsolidatedEdison and the New York Telephone Company until they had hired Negroes. Then
he had helped to battle the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army about their segregating of uniformed
Negroes. But Powell couldn't win this battle. City Hall kept the Savoy closed for a long time. It was
just another one of the "liberal North" actions that didn't help Harlem to love the white man any.
Finally, rumor flashed that in the Braddock Hotel, white cops had shot a Negro soldier. I was