Cover image for Title

CHESTER HIMES

Cotton Comes to Harlem

With an introduction by Will Self

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

Cotton Comes to Harlem

Chester Himes was born in 1909 in Jefferson City, Missouri. After being expelled from university he was convicted of armed robbery at the age of nineteen and sentenced to twenty to twenty-five years’ hard labour. It was while in jail (he was eventually released on parole after seven and a half years) that Himes started to write, publishing stories in a number of magazines, including Esquire. He then took a series of manual jobs while still writing. He published his first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go, in 1945. A humiliating stint as a Hollywood scriptwriter ended in his being fired on racial grounds – as he wrote later, he felt he survived undamaged the earlier disasters in his life but it was ‘under the mental corrosion of race prejudice in Los Angeles I became bitter and saturated with hate’.

Himes moved to Paris in 1953: a city that he – like many African-American writers of his generation – found sympathetic and stimulating. He lived much of the rest of his life first in France and then in Spain, where he moved in 1969. A meeting with Marcel Duhamel, the editor of Gallimard’s crime list, ‘La Série Noire’, resulted in Himes being commissioned to write what became La Reine des pommes, published in English in 1957 as For Love of Imabelle or A Rage in Harlem, and which won the Grand Prix de la Littérature Policière. This was the first of the Harlem novels that were to make Himes famous and was followed by further titles, each translated first into French and then published in English, including The Real Cool Killers, All Shot Up, The Heat’s On and Cotton Comes to Harlem. Himes was married twice. He died in Spain in 1984.

Will Self’s most recent books are The Butt, Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes and Psycho Too.

Introduction

Somewhere in the strange and dusty melting pot of my family’s book collection – my father was a Trollopian Englishman, my mother a Bellovian New Yorker – there were a number of Chester Himes’s Harlem novels. I read them all, but the one I remember best you now hold in your hand. I suspect Cotton Comes to Harlem stayed with me partly because the copy we had was an old paperback edition with a lurid photographic cover showing a semi-naked mixed-race woman draping her long arms around the neck of a man whose head is incongruously sheathed in a brown paper bag – the kind used in American grocery stores. A nickel-plated automatic was somewhere in the frame as well – I like to think it was loaded.

There were also mouth- and eye-holes cut in the brown paper which were large enough to reveal the race of the bagged man; not that these were required, because he was also naked from the neck down – for, once the text was read, the bagged man was revealed to be none other than the hapless detective assigned to guard Iris O’Hara, the beautiful ‘high-yellow’ wife of Deke O’Hara (aka Reverend Deke O’Malley), the fraudster at the boiling eye of this cyclone of a thriller. The scene in which Iris strips naked to taunt her guard, then forces him to disrobe before donning a paper bag to hide his face if he wants to have sex with her, is written in Himes’s characteristically phantasmagorical prose, and has the titillating elements any teenage boy – black, white or otherwise – would find compelling: a sexually knowing, lustful woman humiliating an ugly and incompetent male.

When I first read Cotton Comes to Harlem I thought, what? The sex scenes aroused me, the violence thrilled me, the jive-talk amused me – but I was decades away from appreciating the exact mapping of racial politics that Himes had threaded through the apparently haphazard labyrinth of its plot. True, I was already a precocious reader of American noir: the affectless psychopathy of Richard Stark and Jim Thomson, the maudlin weltschmerz of Raymond Chandler and the crypto-communist mysticism of Dashiell Hammett – but while I could see that Himes’s Harlem had affinities with these other fictional landscapes, I lacked the elevation to grasp that the northernmost tip of Manhattan was no island cut off from the main, but rather integral to an understanding of twentieth-century America. Rereading the novel over thirty years later I am struck by the wild disjunction between its form and its function.

The parental paperback was probably published to coincide with the blaxploitation movie adaptation of Cotton Comes to Harlem released in 1972; certainly its cover graphic implied a certain joyful ease to interracial coupling; the woman’s expression was happily seductive rather than manipulative, the paper bag could’ve been a kinky prop. Actually, the seven years that separated book from film had seen a convulsion in US race relations, and while it would be ridiculous to say that the US of the early seventies was an integrated society, African-American enfranchisement south of the Mason–Dixon Line and school integration countrywide were facts achieved on the ground.

But the America in which Deke O’Hara perpetrates his ‘Back-to-Africa’ scam, and Colonel Calhoun attempts to lure ‘nigras’ back to the cotton plantations of the Southland is recognizably the same place where Marcus Garvey was fitted up by the FBI for mail fraud and the trees along the Alabama turnpikes were hung with Billie Holiday’s strange and putrescent fruit. When Himes chooses to humiliate a white man by stripping him naked and putting a paper bag on his head, the unmistakeable evocation is of Ralph Ellison’s anti-antihero, the eponymous Invisible Man (1952). See how you like it? Himes seems to be saying, See how you like it when your race – upon which you rely for your specious sense of superiority – is taken from you and replaced by something as featureless as a brown paper bag.

Himes was undoubtedly an important writer when it came to crime – after all, he knew a great deal more about the sharp end of criminality than his peers (with the exception of Hammett, who had worked as a Pinkerton detective). Himes was the original prison writer; his first stories were published in Esquire in 1934 when he was serving a twenty to twenty-five year sentence for armed robbery, and appeared under his prison number – 59623 – but his was a curious kind of gutter love: he reverenced the street, but was by no means of it. The child of academic parents, Himes was being university educated until he dropped out into petty crime. He famously led his fellow students from a celebratory dinner for their – all-black – fraternity at the University of Ohio to a nearby brothel.

As a member of the very small African-American middle class of the early twentieth century, Himes was caught in the absurd position of looking down on the masses from a great height, while simultaneously being looked down on from an even greater one. He may have finished with crime after his arrest at the age of nineteen, but like many other black American intellectuals of the first half of the era – Richard Wright, James Baldwin – he remained an outsider, and after the frustrating war years in Los Angeles, where he was debarred from screenwriting by the endemic racism of the industry, he opted for geographical exile in France, and it was here that he spent much of the 1950s, and here too, aged forty-seven, that he began work on the Harlem series of novels that made his name.

Himes had already published five other books, but while some might argue that these conformed to what James Baldwin dismissively termed ‘sociology’ (when attacking Himes’s mentor, Wright, in his essay ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’), the elements of his mature Harlem style were already in evidence: the juxtapositions of kaleidoscopic, polychromatic fantasy and harshly monochrome reality; the wiseacre repartee and the dialectics of desperation. (Himes had been on the fringes of the Communist Party during his time in California.) However, it’s only when Himes’s ace detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, came on stage that his ability to block out the danse macabre of racism took on a new and troubling vigour. As Himes said himself in the second of his two soul-searching memoirs, My Life of Absurdity, ‘I thought I was writing realism. It never occurred to me that I was writing absurdity. Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference.’

I think we should take Himes’s Harlem novels at their author’s own estimation: the brilliance of the books – and of Cotton Comes to Harlem in particular – lies in their pinpoint realism: the details of clothing, food and cars – the accuracy with which the characters move around the city, and the intensely evoked sensorium of impoverished urban life: ‘The first thing that hit the detectives when they entered the dimly lit downstairs hallway was the smell of urine. “What American slums need is toilets,” Coffin Ed said.’ That this realism should take on the character of a nightmare is purely a function of the emotional landscape these physical objects and sensations occupy, one in which a few gradations of skin pigmentation either this way or that could determine a man or woman’s entire fate. Coffin Ed and Grave Digger embody the starkness of this chromatic destiny: they are upholders of the law, and respected as such by the black Harlemites, but at the same time they are working for the Man – and so deeply suspect. Of course, this Janus-faced position (one chillingly emphasized by their actual physiognomies – Coffin Ed’s acid-burned face, Grave Digger’s scarred and lumpy head) is mirrored by the attitude of the white authorities who depend on them to keep order. Thus his protagonists’ situation is a recapitulation of Himes’s own – and this, too, gives the books an additional vérité bite; Raymond Chandler hymned the crime-fighting antiheroes of American noir as men who ‘must walk these mean streets alone’; men whose ambiguous class position allowed them to reject a corrupt institutional morality – in Cotton Comes to Harlem Himes states his version of this job description with characteristic pith: ‘Everyone has to believe in something; and the white people of America had left them nothing to believe in. But that didn’t make a black man any less criminal than a white.’

But while Chandler never got much beyond a cod-anarchic griping at the plutocracy of Southern California, Himes’s writing has acute political savvy. As I said, Cotton Comes to Harlem occupies recognizably the same milieu as Ellison’s Invisible Man – or for that matter Black Like Me (1961), that bizarre exercise in reportage in which a white journalist, John Howard Griffin, disguised himself as a black man and travelled the byways of the American South in order to experience racism at first hand. But Himes’s Harlem, while a microcosm of America, is also a city in its own right, with its own class gradations and political tendencies. The Reverend O’Malley’s ‘Back-to-Africa’ movement may be modelled on Marcus Garvey’s ‘Black Star Line’ of the 1900s, but a half-century on Himes seems to be saying that the fissiparous implications of Garveyite separatism have come to full fruition.

One of the most politically savvy moments in Cotton Comes to Harlem occurs when the two detectives face down a riot mounted by Black Muslim separatists against the racist Calhoun’s Southland movement. Himes describes the banners lofted by the Muslims: ‘WHITE PEOPLE EAT DOG … ALLAH IS GOD … BLACK MEN UNITE’, and then beside a platform set up for speakers there was ‘an open black coffin with a legend: The Remains of Lumumba. The coffin contained pictures of Lumumba in life and in death; a black suit said to have been worn by him when he was killed; and other mementoes said to have belonged to him in life. Bordering the sidewalk on removable flagstaffs were the flags of all the nations of black Africa.’

There is so much subtlety and ambiguity bound up in this one paragraph: like the nascent Nation of Islam, Garvey’s separatism had more strategic common ground with the Ku Klux Klan (he personally met with the Grand Wizard on more than one occasion) than it did with the integrationist NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People). Lumumba, the leader of independent Congo, had been assassinated by Congolese proxies of Belgium, the former colonial power – although this was not fully known at the time Himes was writing. Overall, there is a profound scepticism here: in the future of a decolonized Africa, in the comity of black people in general; all political aspiration – Himes seems to be saying – ends in base populism, while all political careers, no matter how principled, end in failure, corruption, or – which is possibly worse – martyrdom and its cheesy hagiographic afterlife.

And if Himes is politically astute, then he is equally sexually politicised – albeit not in a very correct fashion. The omnivorous and vain Iris O’Malley expresses both the rage and the self-hatred of African Americans whose ‘othering’ by whites consisted in large part in the equation of their sexuality with the animalistic. At one point in Cotton Comes to Harlem Iris expresses a desire to rape a violent hoodlum; at another juncture she experiences a spontaneous orgasm when held at gunpoint; then there’s her humiliation of the nameless white detective who is left floundering, naked and bagged under the mocking eyes of his colleagues. Surely this is a considered inversion on Himes’s part, a lustful man lynched by ridicule, just as Iris’s overpowering sexuality and homicidal jealousy represent her absorption of all the calumnies heaped on her and her people then ejaculated back.

In the final shootout at the Star of Ham, Deke O’Malley’s church on 121st Street, Grave Digger fires tracer bullets at black thugs setting the pulpits aflame – and this Götterdämmerung can serve as representative of Himes’s fictional method whereby streaks of searing illumination lead unstoppably to satiric immolation. Himes may have denied the absurdism of his work, yet he belongs with those great demented realists – with Jonathan Swift, with Nathanael West, with Samuel Beckett – whose writing pitilessly exposes the ridiculousness of the human condition.

Wilf Self

1

The voice from the sound truck said:

‘Each family, no matter how big it is, will be asked to put up one thousand dollars. You will get your transportation free, five acres of fertile land in Africa, a mule and a plow and all the seed you need, free. Cows, pigs and chickens cost extra, but at the minimum. No profit on this deal.’

A sea of dark faces wavered before the speaker’s long table, rapturous and intent.

‘Ain’t it wonderful, honey?’ said a big black woman with eyes like stars. ‘We’re going back to Africa.’

Her tall lean husband shook his head in awe. ‘After all these four hundred years.’

‘Here I is been cooking in white folk’s kitchens for more than thirty years. Lord, can it be true?’ A stooped old woman voiced a lingering doubt.

The smooth brown speaker with the honest eyes and earnest face heard her. ‘It’s true all right,’ he said. ‘Just step right up and give us the particulars and deposit your thousand dollars and you’ll have a place on the first boat going over.’

A grumpy old man with a head of white hair shuffled forward to fill out a form and deposit his thousand dollars, muttering to himself, ‘It sure took long enough.’

The two pretty black girls taking applications looked up with dazzling smiles.

‘Look how long it took the Jews to get out of Egypt,’ one said.

‘The hand of God is slow but sure,’ said the other.

It was a big night in the lives of all these assembled colored people. Now at last, after months of flaming denouncements of the injustice and hypocrisy of white people, hurled from the pulpit of his church; after months of eulogy heaped upon the holy land of Africa, young Reverend Deke O’Malley was at last putting words into action. Tonight he was signing up the people to go on his three ships back to Africa. Huge hand-drawings of the ships stood in prominent view behind the speaker’s table, appearing to have the size and design of the SS Queen Elizabeth. Before them stood Reverend O’Malley, his tall lithe body clad in dark summer worsted, his fresh handsome face exuding benign authority and inspiring total confidence, flanked by his secretaries and the two young men most active in recruiting applicants.

A vacant lot in the ‘Valley’ of Harlem near the railroad tracks, where slum tenements had been razed for a new housing development, had been taken over for the occasion. More than a thousand people milled about the patches of old, uneven concrete amid the baked, cindery earth littered with stones, piles of rubbish, dog droppings, broken glass, scattered rags and clusters of stinkweed.

The hot summer night was lit by flashes of sheet lightning, threatening rain, and the air was oppressive with dust, density and motor fumes. Stink drifted from the surrounding slums, now more overcrowded than ever due to the relocation of families from the site of the new buildings to be erected to relieve the overcrowding. But nothing troubled the jubilance of these dark people filled with faith and hope.

The meeting was well organized. The speaker’s table stood at one end, draped with a banner reading: BACK TO AFRICA – LAST CHANCE!!! Behind it, beside the drawings of the ships, stood an armored truck, its back doors open, flanked by two black guards wearing khaki uniforms and side arms. To the other side stood the sound truck with amplifiers atop. Tee-shirted young men in tight-fitting jeans roamed about with solemn, unsmiling expressions, swelled with a sense of importance ready to eject any doubters.

But for many of these true-believers it was also a picnic. Bottles of wine, beer and whisky were passed about. Here and there a soul-brother cut a dance step. White teeth flashed in black, laughing faces. Eyes spoke. Bodies promised. They were all charged with anticipation.

A pit had been dug in the center of the lot, housing a charcoal fire covered with an iron grill. Rows of pork ribs were slowly cooking on the grill, dripping fat into the hot coals with a sizzling of pungent smoke, turned from time to time by four ‘hook-men’ with long iron hooks. A white-uniformed chef with a long-handled ladle basted the ribs with hot sauce as they cooked, supervising the turning, his tall white chef’s cap bobbing over his sweating black face. Two matronly women clad in white nurses’ uniforms sat at a kitchen table, placing the cooked ribs into paper plates, adding bread and potato salad, and selling them for one dollar a serving.

The tempting, tantalizing smell of barbecued ribs rose in the air above the stink. Shirt-sleeved men, thinly clad women and half-naked children jostled each other good-naturedly, eating the spicy meat and dropping the bones underfoot.

Above the din of transistor radios broadcasting the night’s baseball games, and the bursts of laughter, the sudden shrieks, the other loud voices, came the blaring voice of Reverend Deke O’Malley from the sound truck: ‘Africa is our native land and we are going back. No more picking cotton for the white folks and living on fatback and corn pone …’

‘Yea, baby, yea.’

‘See that sign,’ Reverend O’Malley shouted, pointing to a large wooden sign against the wire fence which proclaimed that the low-rent housing development to be erected on that site would be completed within two and one half years, and listed the prices of the apartments, which no family among those assembled there could afford to pay. ‘Two years you have to wait to move into some boxes – if you can get in, and if you can pay the high rent after you get in. By that time you will be harvesting your second crop in Africa, living in warm sunny houses where the only fire you’ll ever need will be for cooking, where we’ll have our own governments and our own rulers – black, like us –’

‘I hear you, baby, I hear you.’

The thousand-dollar subscriptions poured in. The starry-eyed black people were putting their chips on hope. One after another they went forward solemnly and put down their thousand dollars and signed on the dotted line. The armed guards took the money and stacked it carefully into an open safe in the armored truck.

‘How many?’ Reverend O’Malley asked one of his secretaries in a whisper.

‘Eighty-seven,’ she whispered in reply.

‘Tonight might be your last chance,’ Reverend O’Malley said over the amplifiers. ‘Next week I must go elsewhere and give all of our brothers a chance to return to our native land. God said the meek shall inherit the earth; we have been meek long enough; now we shall come into our inheritance.’

‘Amen, Reverend! Amen!’

Sad-eyed Puerto Ricans from nearby Spanish Harlem and the lost and hungry black people from black Harlem who didn’t have the thousand dollars to return to their native land congregated outside the high wire fence, smelling the tantalizing barbecue, dreaming of the day when they could also go back home in triumph and contentment.

‘Who’s that man?’ one of them asked.

‘Child, he’s the young Communist Christian preacher who’s going to take our folks back to Africa.’

A police cruiser was parked at the curb. Two white cops in the front seat cast sour looks over the assemblage.

‘Where you think they got a permit for this meeting?’

‘Search me. Lieutenant Anderson said leave them alone.’

‘This country is being run by niggers.’

They lit cigarettes and smoked in sullen silence.

Inside the fence, three colored cops patrolled the assemblage, swapping jokes with their soul-brothers, exchanging grins, relaxed and friendly.

During a lull in the speaker’s voice, two big colored men in dark rumpled suits approached the speaker’s table. Bulges from pistols in shoulder slings showed beneath their coats. The guards of the armored truck became alert. The two young recruiting agents, flanking the table, pushed back their chairs.

But the two big men were polite and smiled easily.

‘We’re detectives from the D.A.’s office,’ one said to O’Malley apologetically, as both presented their identifications. ‘We have orders to bring you in for questioning.’

The two young recruiting agents came to their feet, tense and angry.

‘These white mothers can’t let us alone,’ one said. ‘Now they’re using our brothers against us.’

Reverend O’Malley waved them down and spoke to the detectives, ‘Have you got a warrant?’

‘No, but it would save you a lot of trouble if you came peacefully.’

The second detective added, ‘You can take your time and finish with your people, but I’d advise you to talk to the D.A.’

‘All right,’ Reverend O’Malley said calmly. ‘Later.’

The detectives moved to one side. Everyone relaxed. One of the recruiting agents ordered a serving of barbecue.

For a moment attention was centered on a meat delivery truck which had entered the lot. It had been passed by the zealous volunteers guarding the gate.

‘You’re just in time, boy,’ the black chef called to the white driver as the truck approached. ‘We’re running out of ribs.’

A flash of lightning spotlighted the grinning faces of the two white men on the front seat.

‘Wait ’til we turn around, boss,’ the driver’s helper called in a southern voice.

The truck went forward towards the speaker’s table. Eyes watched it indifferently. The truck turned, backed, gently plowing a path through the milling mob.

Ignoring the slight commotion, Reverend O’Malley continued speaking from the amplifiers: ‘These damn southern white folks have worked us like dogs for four hundred years and when we ask them to pay off, they ship us up to the North …’

‘Ain’t it the truth!’ a sister shouted.

‘And these damn northern white folks don’t want us –’ But he never finished. He broke off in mid-sentence at the sight of two masked white men stepping from the back of the meat delivery truck with two black deadly-looking submachine guns in their hands. ‘Unh!!!’ he grunted as though someone had hit him in the stomach.

For the brief instant following, silence reigned. The scene became a tableau of suspended motion. Eyes were riveted on the black holes of death at the front ends of the machine guns. Muscles became paralysed. Brains stopped thinking.

Then a voice that sounded as though it had come from the backwoods of Mississippi said thickly: ‘Everybody freeze an’ nobody’ll git hurt.’

The black men guarding the armored truck raised their hands in reflex action. Black faces broke out with a rash of white eyes. Reverend Deke O’Malley slid quickly beneath the table. The two big colored detectives froze as ordered.

But the young recruiting agent at the left end of the table, who was taking a bite of barbecue, saw his dream vanishing and reached towards his hip pocket for his pistol.

There was a burst from a machine gun. A mixture of teeth, barbecued pork ribs, and human brains flew through the air like macabre birds. A woman screamed. The young man, with half a head gone, sank down out of sight.

The Mississippi voice said furiously: ‘Goddamn stupid mother-raper!’

The softer southern voice of the gunner said defensively, ‘He was drawing.’

‘Mother-rape it! Git the money, let’s git going.’ The big heavy white man with his black mask slowly moved the black-holed muzzle of his submachine gun over the crowd like the nozzle of a fire hose, saying, ‘Doan git daid.’

Bodies remained rigid, eyes riveted, necks frozen, heads stationary, but there was a general movement away from the gun as though the earth itself were moving. Behind, among the people at the rear, panic began exploding like Chinese firecrackers.

The driver’s helper got out from the front seat, waving another submachine gun, and the black people melted away.

The two sullen cops in the police cruiser jumped out and rushed to the fence, trying to see what was happening. But all they could see was a strange milling movement of black people.

The three colored cops inside, pistols drawn, were struggling forward against a tide of human flesh, but being slowly washed away.

The second machine-gunner, who had fired the burst, slung his gun over his shoulder, rushed towards the armored truck and began scooping money into a ‘gunny-sack’.

‘Merciful Jesus,’ a woman wailed.

The black guards backed away, arms elevated, and let the white men take the money. Deke remained unseen beneath the table. All that was seen of the dead young man were some teeth still bleeding on the table, before the horrified eyes of the two young secretaries. The colored detectives hadn’t breathed.

Outside the fence the cops rushed back to their cruiser. The motor caught, roared; the siren coughed, groaned, began screaming as the car went into a U-turn in the middle of the block heading back towards the gate.

The colored cops on the inside began shooting into the air, trying to clear a path, but only increased the pandemonium. A black tidal wave went over them as from a hurricane.

The white machine-gunner got all of the money – all $87,000 – and jumped into the back of the delivery truck. The motor roared. The other machine-gunner followed the first and slammed shut the back door. The driver’s helper climbed in just as the car took off.

The police cruiser came in through the gate, siren screaming, as though black people were invisible. A fat black man flew through the air like an over-inflated football. A fender bumped a woman’s bottom and started her spinning like a whirling dervish. People scattered, split, diving, jumping, running to get out of the cruiser’s path, colliding and knocking one another down.

But a path was made for the rapidly accelerating meat delivery truck. The cops looked at the driver and his helper as they passed. The two white men looked back, exchanging white looks. The cops went ahead, looking for colored criminals. The white machine-gunners got away.

The two black guards climbed into the front seat of the armored truck. The two colored detectives jumped on the running-boards, pistols in their hands. Deke came out from underneath the table and climbed into the back, beside the empty safe. The motor came instantly to life, sounding for all the world like a big Cadillac engine with four hundred horse-power. The armored truck backed, filled, pointed towards the gate, then hesitated.

‘You want I should follow them?’ the driver asked.

‘Get ’em, goddammit. Run ’em down!’ one of the colored detectives grated.

The driver hesitated a moment longer. ‘They’re armed for bear.’

‘Bear ass!’ the detective shouted. ‘They’re getting away, mother!’

There was a glimpse of gray paint as the meat delivery truck went past a taxi on Lexington Avenue, headed north.

The big engine of the armored truck roared; the truck jumped. The police cruiser wheeled to head it off. A woman wild with fright ran in front of it. The car slewed to miss her and ran head-on into the barbecue pit. Steam rose from the bursted radiator pouring on to the hot coals. A sudden flash of lightning lit the wild stampede of running people, seen through the cloud of steam.

‘Great Godamighty, the earth’s busted open,’ a voice cried.

‘An’ let out all hell,’ came the reply.

‘Halt or I’ll shoot,’ a cop cried, climbing from the smoking ruins.

It was the same as talking to the lightning.

The armored truck bulldozed a path to the gate, urged on by a voice shouting, ‘Go get ’em, go get ’em.’

It turned into Lexington on screaming tyres. The off-side detective fell off to the street, but they didn’t stop for him. A roll of thunder blended with the motor sound as the big engine gathered speed, and another police cruiser fell in behind.

O’Malley tapped on the window separating the front seat from the rear compartment and passed an automatic rifle and a sawed-off shotgun to the guard. The remaining detective on the inside running-board was squatting low, holding on with his left hand and gripping a Colt .45 automatic in his right.

The armored truck was going faster than any armored truck ever seen before or since. The red light showed at 125th Street and a big diesel truck was coming from the west. The armored truck went through the red and passed in front of that big truck as close as a barber’s shave.

A joker standing on the corner shouted jubilantly,

‘Gawawwwed damn! Them mothers got it.’

The police cruiser stopped for the truck to pass.

‘And gone!’ the joker added.

The driver urged greater speed from the big laboring motor, ‘Get your ass to moving.’ But the meat delivery truck had got out of sight. The scream of the police siren was fading in the past.

The meat delivery truck turned left on 137th Street. In turning the back door was flung open and a bale of cotton slid slowly from the clutching hands of the two white machine-gunners and fell into the street. The truck dragged to a screaming sidewise stop and began backing up. But at that moment the armored truck came roaring around the corner like destiny coming on. The meat delivery truck reversed directions without a break in motion and took off again as though it had wings.

From inside the delivery truck came a red burst of machinegun fire and the bullet-proof windshield of the armored truck was suddenly filled with stars, partly obscuring the driver’s vision. He narrowly missed the bale of cotton, thinking he must have d.t.’s.

The guard was trying to get the muzzle of his rifle through a gun slot in the windshield when another burst of machine-gun fire came from the delivery truck and its back doors were slammed shut. No one noticed the detective on the running-board of the armored truck suddenly disappear. One moment he was there, the next he was gone.

The colored people on the tenement stoops, seeking relief from the hot night, began running over one another to get indoors. Some dove into the basement entrances beneath the stairs.

One loudmouthed comic shouted from the safety below the level of the sidewalk, ‘Harlem Hospital straight ahead.’

From across the street another loudmouth shouted back, ‘Morgue comes first.’

The meat delivery truck was gaining on the armored truck. It must have been powered to keep meat fresh from Texas.

From far behind came the faint sound of the scream of the siren from the police cruiser, seeming to cry, ‘Wait for me!’

Lightning flashed. Before the sound of thunder was heard, rain came down in torrents.

2

‘Well, kiss my foot if it isn’t Jones,’ Lieutenant Anderson exclaimed, rising from behind the captain’s desk to extend his hand to his ace detectives. Slang sounded as phony as a copper’s smile coming from his lips, but the warm smile lighting his thin pale face and the twinkle in his deep-set blue eyes squared it. ‘Welcome home.’

Grave Digger Jones squeezed the small white hand in his own big, calloused paw and grinned. ‘You need to get out in the sun, Lieutenant, ’fore someone takes you for a ghost,’ he said as though continuing a conversation from the night before instead of a six months’ interim.

The lieutenant eased back into his seat and stared at Grave Digger appraisingly. The upward glow from the green-shaded desk lamp gave his face a gangrenous hue.

‘Same old Jones,’ he said. ‘We’ve been missing you, man.’

‘Can’t keep a good man down,’ Coffin Ed Johnson said from behind.

It was Grave Digger’s first night back on duty since he had been shot up by one of Benny Mason’s hired guns in the caper resulting from the loss of a shipment of heroin. He had been in the hospital for three months fighting a running battle with death, and he had spent three months at home convalescing. Other than for the bullet scars hidden beneath his clothes and the finger-size scar obliterating the hairline at the base of his skull where the first bullet had burned off the hair, he looked much the same. Same dark brown lumpy face with the slowly smoldering reddish-brown eyes; same big, rugged, loosely knit frame of a day laborer in a steel mill; same dark, battered felt hat worn summer and winter perched on the back of his head; same rusty black alpaca suit showing the bulge of the long-barreled, nickel-plated, brasslined .38 revolver on a .44 frame made to his own specifications resting in its left-side shoulder sling. As far back as Lieutenant Anderson could remember, both of them, his two ace detectives with their identical big hard-shooting, head-whipping pistols, had always looked like two hog farmers on a weekend in the Big Town.

‘I just hope it hasn’t left you on the quick side,’ Lieutenant Anderson said softly.

Coffin Ed’s acid-scarred face twitched slightly, the patches of grafted skin changing shape. ‘I dig you, Lieutenant,’ he said gruffly. ‘You mean on the quick side like me.’ His jaw knotted as he paused to swallow. ‘Better to be quick than dead.’

The lieutenant turned to stare at him, but Grave Digger looked straight ahead. Four years previous a hoodlum had thrown a glass of acid into Coffin Ed’s face. Afterwards he had earned the reputation of being quick on the trigger.

‘You don’t have to apologize,’ Grave Digger said roughly. ‘You’re not getting paid to get killed.’

In the green light Lieutenant Anderson’s face turned slightly purple. ‘Well, hell,’ he said defensively. ‘I’m on your side. I know what you’re up against here in Harlem. I know your beat. It’s my beat too. But the commissioner feels you’ve killed too many people in this area –’ He held up his hand to ward off an interruption. ‘Hoodlums, I know – dangerous hoodlums – and you killed in self-defence. But you’ve been on the carpet a number of times and a short time ago you had three months’ suspensions. Newspapers have been yapping about police brutality in Harlem and now various civic bodies have taken up the cry.’

‘It’s the white men on the force who commit the pointless brutality,’ Coffin Ed grated. ‘Digger and me ain’t trying to play tough.’

‘We are tough,’ Grave Digger said.

Lieutenant Anderson shifted the papers on the desk and looked down at his hands. ‘Yes, I know, but they’re going to drop it on you two – if they can. You know that as well as I do. All I’m asking is to play it safe, from the police side. Don’t take any chances, don’t make any arrests until you have the evidence, don’t use force unless in self-defence, and above all don’t shoot anyone unless it’s the last resort.’

‘And let the criminals go,’ Coffin Ed said.