Free New Boy by Julian Houston Page A

a sign, will work for food. Little children holding up a piece of cardboard. It was painful to watch, but people managed to get through it. Prohibition was over so the bootleggers were not as prevalent, but the numbers runners were around and there was plenty of good music in the clubs. Harlem has always been a lively place."
    "Who was Garvey?" I said, peeling the red skin from an apple. Cousin Gwen had rolled out the pie crust and folded it carefully, and was unfolding it in the pie pan. I remembered Garvey's picture on the sign in front of Michaux's bookstore.

    Cousin Gwen began to crimp the edges of the pastry in the pie pan. "I guess you don't hear that much about Garvey in the South. Garvey was a West Indian, a black nationalist. Heavyset, dapper, and black as coal. He believed we should all go back to Africa and he started his own organization, with a steamship line to take us back. He called it the Universal Negro Improvement Association. It had a newspaper and it would hold parades with people marching up and down the street in uniforms, and Garvey himself would ride in the back of a big convertible like the biggest politicians—FDR and La Guardia—used to ride in, and he would be all dressed up in a military uniform like Napoleon, with gold braids and medals on his chest and a plumed hat. It was all for show, but he could give quite a speech and, of course, the West Indians loved it. Everybody loved it. Oh, he was something, chastising the white man, spinning out his dream of taking everybody back to Africa to a packed hall with that singsong voice of his. He knew how to draw a crowd." Cousin Gwen began to core and peel the last apple and then she sliced it into the big bowl with the others. "But when Dr. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson and the leaders of the NAACP saw how big Garvey's audiences were, they had a fit. They publicly attacked him for leading the race down the path of destruction. Of course, they were advocates of integration, and Garvey didn't want to have anything to do with integration. Unfortunately. Garvey wasn't much of a businessman. The steamship failed and the prosecutors got involved and Garvey ended up
going to prison for fraud." Cousin Gwen stopped slicing the apple for a moment and looked at me. "Why is it our people always fall for these charlatans?" she said, and she shook her head and resumed slicing. "Anyway, that was the end of him, although there are still a lot of people in Harlem who admire Garvey and what he stood for."

    Cousin Gwen mixed the sliced apples with sugar and spices and then poured them into the pastry shell. She dotted the apples with butter and carefully placed a covering of pastry on top, fitting the edges into the grooves of the crimped pastry already in the pan. There," she said, admiring her handiwork. "I'll just put this in the oven. It'll be ready in about an hour." She opened the oven door and a gust of warm air enveloped us as she put the pie in the oven. "I'm going to stay up and wait for this pie to finish. The collards won't be done by then, but they'll have a good start." The heavy odor of the collards hung in the air.
    "You must be tired," said Cousin Gwen, walking into the living room. I followed her and walked over to the front window. The immense darkness was spread before me, studded with lights, as though all of Harlem was awake. I wanted to linger at the window even though Cousin Gwen had suggested that I turn in. "There's a clean towel and a washcloth on the day bed in the study," she said. "That's where you will sleep. You know where the bathroom is. Now don't stay up too late. We've got a full day tomorrow." To my surprise, she gave me an affectionate pat on the arm and smiled. Cousin Gwen rarely displayed physical affection, and her manner was often so sharp that I sometimes wondered whether she liked me at all or merely tolerated me to preserve her relationship with my parents. But this gesture was so spontaneous, so natural that it