find.
In all of my time in Harlem, I never saw a white prostitute touched by a white man. White girls
were in some of the various Harlem specialty places. They would participate in customers' most
frequent exhibition requests-a sleek, black Negro male having a white woman. Was this the white
man wanting to witness his deepest sexual fear? A few times, I even had parties that included
white women whom the men had brought with them to watch this. I never steered any white
women other than in these instances, brought by their own men, or who had been put into contact
with me by a white Lesbian whom I knew, who was another variety of specialty madam.
This Lesbian, a beautiful white woman, had a mate Negro stable. Her vocabulary was all
profanity. She supplied Negro males, on order, to well-to-do white women.
I'd seen this Lesbian and her blonde girl friend around Harlem, drinking and talking at bars,
always with young Negroes. No one who didn't know would ever guess that the Lesbian was
recruiting. But one night I gave her and her girl friend some reefers which they said were the best
they'd ever smoked. They lived in a hotel downtown, and after that, now and then, they would call
me,and I would bring them some reefers, and we'd talk.
She told me how she had accidentally gotten started in her specialty. As a Harlem habitu‚, she
had known Harlem Negroes who liked white women. Her role developed from a pattern of talk
she often heard from bored, well-to-do white women where she worked, in an East Side beauty
salon. Hearing the women complain about sexually inadequate mates, she would tell what she'd
"heard" about Negro men. Observing how excited some of the women seemed to become, she
finally arranged some dates with some of the Harlem Negroes she knew at her own apartment.
Eventually, she rented three midtown apartments where a woman customer could meet a Negro
by appointment. Her customers recommended her service to their friends. She quit the beauty
salon, set up a messenger service as an operating front, and ran all of her business by telephone.
She had also noticed the color preference. I never could substitute in an emergency, she would
tell me with a laugh, because I was too light. She told me that nearly every white woman in her
clientele would specify "a black one"; sometimes they would say "a real one," meaning black,
no brown Negroes, no red Negroes.
The Lesbian thought up her messenger service idea because some of her trade wanted the
Negroes to come to their homes, at times carefully arranged by telephone. These women lived in
neighborhoods of swank brownstones and exclusive apartment houses, with doormen dressed
like admirals. But white society never thinks about challenging any Negro in a servant role.
Doormen would telephone up and hear "Oh, yes, send him right up, James"; service elevators
would speed those neatly dressed Negro messenger boys right up-so that they could "deliver"
what had been ordered by some of the most privileged white women in Manhattan.
The irony is that those white women had no more respect for those Negroes than white men have
had for the Negro women they have been "using" since slavery times. And, in turn, Negroes have
no respect for the whites they get into bed with. I know the way I felt about Sophia, who still came
to New York whenever I called her.
The West Indian boy friend of the Profumo scandal's Christine Keeler, Lucky Gordon, and his
friends must have felt the same way. After England's leaders had been with those white girls,
those girls, for their satisfaction, went to Negroes, to smoke reefers and make fun of some of
England's greatest peers as cuckolds and fools. I don't doubt that Lucky Gordon knows the
identity of "the man in the mask" and much more. If Gordon told everything those white girls told
him, he would give England a new scandal.
It's no different from what happens in some of America's topmost white circles. Twenty years ago,
I saw them nightly, with my own eyes, I heard them with my own ears.