Always, every now and then, I had given her a hard time, just to keep her in line. Every once in a
while a woman seems to need, in fact wants this, too. But now, I would feel evil and slap her
around worse than ever, some of the nights when Shorty was away. She would cry, curse me,
and swear that she would never be back. But I knew she wasn't even thinking about not coming
back.
Sophia's being around was one of Shorty's greatest pleasures about my homecoming. I have said
it before, I never in my life have seen a black man that desired white women as sincerely as
Shorty did. Since I had known him, he had had several. He had never been able to keep a white
woman any length oftime, though, because he was too good to them, and, as I have said, any
woman, white or black, seems to get bored with that.
It happened that Shorty was between white women when one night Sophia brought to the house
her seventeen-year-old sister. I never saw anything like the way that she and Shorty nearly
jumped for each other. For him, she wasn't only a white girl, but a young white girl. For her, he
wasn't only a Negro, but a Negro musician. In looks, she was a younger version of Sophia, who
still turned heads. Sometimes I'd take the two girls to Negro places where Shorty played. Negroes
showed thirty-two teeth apiece as soon as they saw the white girls. They would come over to your
booth, or your table; they would stand there and drool. And Shorty was no better. He'd stand up
there playing and watching that young girl waiting for him, and waving at him, and winking. As
soon as the set was over, he'd practically run over people getting down to our table.
I didn't lindy-hop any more now, I wouldn't even have thought of it now, just as I wouldn't have
been caught in a zoot suit now. All of my suits were conservative. A banker might have worn my
shoes.
I met Laura again. We were really glad to see each other. She was a lot more like me now, a
good-time girl. We talked and laughed. She looked a lot older than she really was. She had no
one man, she free-lanced around. She had long since moved away from her grandmother. Laura
told me she had finished school, but then she gave up the college idea. Laura was high whenever
I saw her, now, too; we smoked some reefers together.
After about a month of "laying dead," as inactivity was called, I knew I had to get some kind of
hustle going.
A hustler, broke, needs a stake. Some nights when Shorty was playing, I would take whatever
Sophia had been able to get for me, and I'd try to run it up into something, playing stud poker at
John Hughes' gambling house.
When I had lived in Roxbury before, John Hughes had been a big gambler who wouldn't have
spoken to me. But during the war the Roxbury "wire" had carried a lot about things I was doing in
Harlem, and now the New York name magic was on me. That was the feeling that hustlers
everywhere else had: if you could hustle and make it in New York, they were well off to know you;
it gave them prestige. Anyway, through the same flush war years, John Hughes had hustled
profitably enough to be able to open a pretty good gambling house.
John, one night, was playing in a game I was in. After the first two cards were dealt around the
table, I had an ace showing. I looked beneath it at my hole card; another ace-a pair, back-to-back.
My ace showing made it my turn to bet.
But I didn't rush. I sat there and studied.
Finally, I knocked my knuckles on the table, passing, leaving the betting to the next man. My
action implied that beneath my ace was some "nothing" card that I didn't care to risk my money
on.
The player sitting next to me took the bait. He bet pretty heavily. And the next man raised him.
Possibly each of them had small pairs. Maybe they just wanted to scare me out before I drew
another ace. Finally, the bet reached John, who had a queen showing; he raised everybody.
Now, there was no telling what John had. John truly was a clever gambler. Hecould gamble as
well as anybody I had gambled with in New York.
So the bet came back to me. It was going to cost me a lot of money to call all the raises. Some of
them obviously had good cards but I knew I had every one of them beat. But again I studied, and