actually inseparable partners.
It was at this time that I changed from my old numbers man, the one I'd used since I first worked
in Small's Paradise. He hated to lose a heavy player, but he readily understood why I would now
want to play with a runner of my own outfit. That was how I began placing my bets with West
Indian Archie. I've mentioned him before-one of Harlem's really bad Negroes; one of those
former Dutch Schultz strong-arm men around Harlem.
West Indian Archie had finished time in Sing Sing not long before I came to Harlem. But my
boss's wife had hired him not just because she knew him from the old days. West Indian Archie
had the kind of photographic memory that put him among the elite of numbers runners. He never
wrote down your number; even in the case of combination plays, he would just nod. He was able
to file all the numbers in his head, and write them down for the banker only when he turned in his
money. This made him the ideal runner because cops could never catch him with any betting
slips.
I've often reflected upon such black veteran numbers men as West Indian Archie. If they had lived
in another kind of society, their exceptional mathematical talents might have been better used.
But they were black.
Anyway, it was status just to be known as a client of West Indian Archie's, because he handled
only sizable bettors. He also required integrity and sound credit: it wasn't necessary that you pay
as you played; you could pay West Indian Archie by the week. He always carried a couple of
thousand dollars on him, his own money. If a client came up to him and said he'd hit for some
moderate amount, say a fifty-cent or one-dollar combination, West Indian Archiewould peel off the
three or six hundred dollars, and later get his money back from the banker.
Every weekend, I'd pay my bill-anywhere from fifty to even one hundred dollars, if I had really
plunged on some hunch. And when, once or twice, I did hit, always just some combination, as I've
described, West Indian Archie paid me off from his own roll.
The six months finally ended for my boss and his wife. They had done well. Their runners got nice
tips, and promptly were snatched up by other bankers. I continued working for my boss and his
wife in a gambling house they opened.
A Harlem madam I'd come to know-through having done a friend of hers a favor-introduced me to
a special facet of the Harlem night world, something which the riot had only interrupted. It was the
world where, behind locked doors, Negroes catered to monied white people's weird sexual tastes.
The whites I'd known loved to rub shoulders publicly with black folks in the after-hours clubs and
speakeasies. These, on the other hand, were whites who did not want it known that they had
been anywhere near Harlem. The riot had made these exclusive white customers nervous. Their
slipping into and about Harlem hadn't been so noticeable when other whites were also around.
But now they would be conspicuous; they also feared the recently aroused anger of Harlem
Negroes. So the madam was safeguarding her growing operation by offering me a steerer's job.
During the war, it was extremely difficult to get a telephone. One day the madam told me to stay
at my apartment the next morning. She talked to somebody. I don't know who it was, but before
the next noon, I dialed the madam from my own telephone-unlisted.
This madam was a specialist in her field. If her own girls could not-or would not-accommodate a
customer, she would send me to another place, usually an apartment somewhere else in Harlem,
where the requested "specialty" was done.