Free Strivers Row by Kevin Baker Page B

approval.
    â€œDamned straight! This ain’t Georgia, you know—”
    â€œThe young lane showed ’em. Those days are over .”
    Telling them everything but the last, when he jumped into the bay in his trainman’s uniform. Not wanting them to think he was a fool, a boy. Not sure yet himself just why he had done it. Jumped into the water before all those people—
    Yet after an hour or so he noticed that more and more of the old hustlers had drifted away, slipping off their stools and out of the barroom as stealthily as cats. They were replaced by a flashier crowd, women as well as men, well-dressed and already smelling heavily of alcohol—none of them interested in hearing his story. A gaggle of white sailors burst in, having somehow avoided the MPs and the police for the moment, arguing and laughing loudly among themselves, and Lionel and Willard hauled him toward the door. Before they left, though, Charlie Small came out through all the commotion around the bar, and shook his hand.
    â€œYou come on back, son, sometime when it’s quieter,” he told him. “You ever get tired of the railroad an’ need another slave, I fix you up.”
    Out on the sidewalk, Lionel and Paddy were pounding his arms with their fists.
    â€œOh, man, Charlie Small his own self !”
    â€œHey, quit that!”
    â€œOh, Nome! Your first time in Harlem! Man, that’s enough for a whole night!”
    But out on the street it wasn’t even dark yet. The sun was just setting, in cinematic striations of purple and orange flung across the broad evening sky. Looking south he could see all the way down to the dimmed, yellow tops of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, peering up like periscopes over the vague blocks of the City.
    â€œWhere we goin’ now?”
    â€œHow ’bout the Savoy? Hamp’s band is there, with Dinah Washington—”
    â€œGo to The Track? On Kitchen Mechanics’ Night?”
    Lionel shrugged.
    â€œCouldn’t hurt to try!”
    The crowd was backed up half a block from the front door by the time they got to 140th Street. A skinny, drunken whore sat on the curb before them with her dress curled back over her knees and her legs apart, cursing disgustedly.
    â€œGoddammit, but a pro don’t have no play tonight, they’s so many amateurs out givin’ it away!”
    He could see what she meant. The crowd around him made up almost entirely of women, wearing next to nothing in the heat, and standing so close to him Malcolm wanted to reach out and touch their cheeks and arms, their bare backs. Their skin so smooth, so brown and sable, and coal black, and mariny red like his own, and even white, at least under the distant light of the Savoy marquee. Giddy and impatient to get on the dance floor, squealing and laughing and swearing lustily with each tremor of movement through the crowd.
    â€œGoddammit, we ain’t nevah gonna get in!”
    â€œI ain’t goin’ back to work fo’ I get one dance in—”
    After twenty minutes they were about to give it up, the immense dance hall, an entire block long itself, never seeming to draw any closer. But just then the MPs and the police extracted another mob of white soldiers, arguing and throwing punches wildly. The crowd lunged forward as one, Malcolm and the rest of the kitchen crew laughing out loud as they pushed and shoved, and were pushed and shoved right through the front doors.
    The lobby looked nearly as huge as the waiting rooms in Pennsylvania Station and even more colorful than the Harlem streets, a blur of brilliant reds and greens, oranges and blues. Half a dozen of the most beautiful women Malcolm had ever seen stood amidst the milling throng with their noses in the air. All of them café au lait, dressed in long, formal gowns and elbow-length gloves, gesturing imperiously toward a marble staircase under a cut-glass chandelier. They climbed on