That sandwich man I'd replaced had little chance of getting his job back. I went bellowing up and
down those train aisles. I sold sandwiches, coffee, candy, cake, and ice cream as fast as the
railroad's commissary department could supply them. It didn't take me a week to learn that all you
had to do was give white people a show and they'd buy anything you offered them. It was like
popping your shoeshine rag. The dining car waiters and Pullman porters knew it too, and they
faked their Uncle Tomming to get bigger tips. We were in that world of Negroes who are both
servants and psychologists, aware that white people are so obsessed with their own importance
that they will pay liberally, even dearly, for the impression of being catered to and entertained.
Every layover night in Harlem, I ran and explored new places. I first got a room at the Harlem
YMCA, because it was less than a block from Small's Paradise. Then, I got a cheaper room at
Mrs. Fisher's rooming house which was close to the YMCA. Most of the railroad men stayed at
Mrs. Fisher's. I combed not only the bright-light areas, but Harlem's residential areas from best to
worst, from Sugar Hill up near the Polo Grounds, where many famous celebrities lived, down to
the slum blocks of old rat-trap apartment houses, just crawling with everything you could mention
that was illegal and immoral. Dirt, garbage cans overflowing or kicked over; drunks, dope addicts,
beggars. Sleazy bars, store-front churches with gospels being shouted inside, "bargain" stores,
hockshops, undertaking parlors. Greasy "home-cooking" restaurants, beauty shops smoky inside
from Negro women's hair getting fried, barbershops advertising conk experts. Cadillacs,
secondhand and new, conspicuous among the cars on the streets.
All of it was Lansing's West Side or Roxbury's South End magnified a thousand times. Little
basement dance halls with "For Rent" signs on them. People offering you little cards advertising
"rent-raising parties." I went to one of these-thirty or forty Negroes sweating, eating, drinking,
dancing, and gamblingin a jammed, beat-up apartment, the record player going full blast, the fried
chicken or chitlins with potato salad and collard greens for a dollar a plate, and cans of beer or
shots of liquor for fifty cents. Negro and white canvassers sidled up alongside you, talking fast as
they tried to get you to buy a copy of the Daily Worker: "This paper's trying to keep your rent
controlled... Make that greedy landlord kill them rats in your apartment... This paper
represents the only political party that ever ran a black man for the Vice Presidency of the United
States... Just want you to read, won't take but a little of your time... Who do you think fought
the hardest to help free those Scottsboro boys?" Things I overheard among Negroes when the
salesmen were around let me know that the paper somehow was tied in with the Russians, but to
my sterile mind in those early days, it didn't mean much; the radio broadcasts and the
newspapers were then full of our-ally-Russia, a strong, muscular people, peasants, with their
backs to the wall helping America to fight Hitler and Mussolini.
But New York was heaven to me. And Harlem was Seventh Heaven! I hung around in Small's and
the Braddock bar so much that the bartenders began to pour a shot of bourbon, my favorite brand
of it, when they saw me walk in the door. And the steady customers in both places, the hustlers in
Small's and the entertainers in the Braddock, began to call me "Red," a natural enough nickname
in view of my bright red conk. I now had my conk done in Boston at the shop of Abbott and
Fogey; it was the best conk shop on the East Coast, according to the musical greats who had
recommended it to me.
My friends now included musicians like Duke Ellington's great drummer, Sonny Greer, and that
great personality with the violin, Ray Nance. He's the one who used to stag in that wild "scat"
style: "Blip-blip-de-blop-de-blam-blam-" And people like Cootie Williams, and Eddie "Cleanhead"
Vinson, who'd kid me about his conk-he had nothing up there but skin. He was hitting the heights
then with his song, "Hey, PrettyMama, Chunk Me In Your Big Brass Bed." I also knew Sy Oliver;
he was married to a red-complexioned girl, and they lived up on Sugar Hill; Sy did a lot of
arranging for Tommy Dorsey in those days. His most famous tune, I believe, was "Yes, Indeed!"
The regular "Yankee Clipper" sandwich man, when he came back, was put on another train. He
complained about seniority, but my sales record made them placate him some other way. The
waiters and cooks had begun to call me "Sandwich Red."
By that time, they had a laughing bet going that I wasn't going to last, sales or not, because I had
so rapidly become such an uncouth, wild young Negro. Profanity had become my language. I'd
darsice
(darsice)
#1