walking down St. Nicholas Avenue; I saw all of these Negroes hollering and running north from
125th Street. Some of them were loaded down with armfuls of stuff. I remember it was the
bandleader Fletcher Henderson's nephew "Shorty" Henderson who told me what had happened.
Negroes were smashing store windows, and taking everything they could grab and carryfurniture,
food, jewelry, clothes, whisky. Within an hour, every New York City cop seemed to be in
Harlem. Mayor LaGuardia and the NAACP's then Secretary, the famed late Walter White, were in
a red firecar, riding around pleading over a loudspeaker to all of those shouting, muling, angry
Negroes to please go home and stay inside.
Just recently I ran into Shorty Henderson on Seventh Avenue. We were laughing about a fellow
whom the riot had left with the nickname of "Left Feet." In a scramble in a women's shoe store,
somehow he'd grabbed five shoes, all of them for left feet! And we laughed about the scared little
Chinese whose restaurant didn't have a hand laid on it, because the rioters just about convulsed
laughing when they saw the sign the Chinese had hastily stuck on his front door: "Me Colored
Too."
After the riot, things got very tight in Harlem. It was terrible for the night-life people, and for those
hustlers whose main income had been the white man's money. The 1935 riot had left only a
relative trickle of the money which had poured into Harlem during the 1920's. And now this new
riot ended even that trickle.
Today the white people who visit Harlem, and this mostly on weekend nights, are hardly more
than a few dozen who do the twist, the frug, the Watusi, and all the rest of the current dance
crazes in Small's Paradise, owned now by the great basketball champion "Wilt the Stilt"
Chamberlain, who draws crowds with his big, clean, All-American-athlete image. Most white
people today are physically afraid to come to Harlem-and it's for good reasons, too. Even for
Negroes, Harlem night life is about finished. Most of the Negroes who have money to spend are
spending it downtown somewhere in this hypocritical "integration," in places where previously the
police would have been called to haul off any Negro insane enough to try and get in. The already
Croesus-rich white man can't get another skyscraper hotel finished and opened before all these
integration-mad Negroes, who themselves don't own a tool shed, are booking the swanky new
hotel for "cotillions" and "conventions." Those rich whites could afford it when they used to throw
away their money in Harlem. But Negroes can't afford to be taking their money downtown to the
white man.
Sammy and I, on a robbery job, got a bad scare, a very close call.
Things had grown so tight in Harlem that some hustlers had been forced to go to work. Even
some prostitutes had gotten jobs as domestics, and cleaning office buildings at night. The
pimping was so poor, Sammy had gone on the job with me. We had selected one of those
situations considered "impossible." But wherever people think that, the guards will unconsciously
grow gradually more relaxed, until sometimes those can be the easiest jobs of all.
But right in the middle of the act, we had some bad luck. A bullet grazed Sammy. We just barely
escaped.
Sammy fortunately wasn't really hurt. We split up, which was always wise to do.
Just before daybreak, I went to Sammy's apartment. His newest woman, one of those beautiful
but hot-headed Spanish Negroes, was in there crying and carrying on over Sammy. She went for
me, screaming and clawing; she knew I'd been in on it with him. I fended her off. Not able to
figure out why Sammy didn't shut her up, I did... and from the corner of my eye, I saw Sammy
going for his gun.
Sammy's reaction that way to my hitting his woman-close as he and I were-was the only weak
spot I'd ever glimpsed. The woman screamed and dove for him. She knew as I did that when your
best friend draws a gun on you, he usually has lost all control of his emotions, and he intends to
shoot. She distracted Sammy long enough for me to bolt through the door. Sammy chased me,
about a block.
We soon made up-on the surface. But things never are fully right again with anyone you have
seen trying to kill you.