The two men shook hands again.
'You had supper?' Johnson said, getting up. He shambled out of the bar, climbing into a rumpled brown topcoat as he did, and Ness and Curry followed him.
'No,' Ness said.
Curry shook his head, no.
'They serve up a mean gumbo down the street,' Johnson said, pointing with a thumb. The street was dark, now, neon standing out starkly in the night.
'What's gumbo?' Curry asked.
'New Orleans dish, isn't it?' Ness asked.
'That's right,' Johnson said. 'Made outa pork, chicken gizzards, okra, sweet potatoes, shrimp, spices, herbs… but Pappy's down the street has got a secret ingredient.'
'What's that?' Curry asked.
'Goat testicles,' Johnson said.
The two white men, whiter than usual, thanked the Negro cop for his offer but tactfully declined.
As they left in the EN-1 sedan, Ness thought he heard roaring laughter behind him.
CHAPTER 9
Toussaint Johnson was well aware that Al Curry was ill at ease, riding around the colored east side in Johnson's used Chevy sedan. Johnson did nothing in particular to add to the young detective's uneasiness; neither did he do anything in particular to lessen it. Toussaint Johnson had spent going on forty years as a black man in a white-ruled world, and he didn't mind seeing any white man get a sample of what it was like to be the minority.
This was their first day on the east side, in their attempt to gather witnesses for Ness, and Johnson had met Curry's attempts at making conversation with polite but terse and sometimes sardonic responses.
'What's it like working this side of town?' Curry had asked, as the sedan bumped over the ruts of Scovill Avenue.
'Lively,' Johnson had replied.
'How can these people stand living like this?' Curry had later asked, with no condescension and with considerable sympathy.
'Day a time,' Johnson had replied.
So it had gone for a while, and now Curry had lapsed into a morose silence.
That was fine with Johnson. He didn't like conversation for the sake of conversation with anybody, color aside. His wife, Maybelle, was a chatterbox, God bless her, and he had learned how to have lengthy conversations with her without listening to anything she-or for that matter, he himself- said.
He lived with Maybelle and their two boys and one daughter in a white frame house in a mixed neighborhood off Hough Avenue, near League Park, where the Cleveland Indians had played till the Municipal Stadium was built a few years back. His son Clarence was the star quarterback at East High, and his younger son William was an honor student. Johnson felt no guilt about living in a better neighborhood than the colored citizens of the Roaring Third who he served and protected. But he didn't feel superior to those people. Just luckier.
He had grown up in Central Scovill, the Bucket of Blood his backyard. Actually, he'd been born in a small South Carolina hamlet, but had no memories of it; his father and mother had moved north shortly after his birth. His parents had worked as domestics, in the South, and in Cleveland, Papa had got work as a waiter at a chi-chi hotel called Wade Park Manor, while mama worked as a housekeeper-cook for a wealthy white family in Shaker Heights. Both were God-fearing folks and had a Booker T. Washington advance-through-hard-work way of looking at things.
Young Toussaint had learned to read in his own home-a cramped one-room apartment in Central Scovill, at first, and later the top half of a frame duplex-and his primers had been everything from the Bible to W.E.B. Du Bois. He'd attended predominantly black Central High School and got high marks.
But Toussaint Johnson had never completely been able to buy into the Booker T. Washington philosophy. It sounded good on paper, but he saw too many folks of his race struggling and getting nowhere, his parents among them. What finally turned things around for Papa and Mama was when Papa won ten bucks in a dice game in the basement at the hotel, played it on 714 on the 'money row' and hit for five thousand dollars.
Papa and Mama had then opened a little restaurant called Pappy's on Scovill and did very well after that-until Papa got robbed and killed in the restaurant, late one night just before closing.
Mama died the year after that. They called it a heart attack, but Toussaint knew that nothing had attacked her heart: It was flat-out broke in two.
What Toussaint Johnson had learned from all this was that life was a matter of luck, good and bad. But this was something he knew in his head; in his soul somewhere his mama had instilled enough of that Booker T. Washington work ethic that he kept trying hard, trying to get ahead, and his father's killing had given him a goal: He wanted to be a cop. He had seen the white cops dismiss his papa's murder as just another 'shine' killing. And he saw that there was a need for good Negro cops in this bad Negro district.
The best place to get trained for that, he figured, was the army, and there was a war on, so he enlisted in Company D of the Ninth Battalion of the 372nd Regiment, Cleveland's all-Negro militia unit. He left his younger brother Edward to take the restaurant over, and soon found himself in France in combat.
Even in the army, even in a black company, the white man's influence prevailed. Their Negro commanding officers, Major John A. Fulton and Captain William Green, fine leaders, were relieved of duty and discharged as 'physically unfit' before the company was sent overseas. Maybe if they'd been left in charge, Johnson often thought, Company D wouldn't have lost so many men. Johnson, like the other Company D survivors of the Argorrne, came home wounded, and a recipient of France's highest military medal, the Croix de Guerre.
One of Johnson's fellow Company D survivors was Eustice N. Raney, who'd been a few years ahead of Toussaint at Central High. While they weren't close friends, Johnson and Raney liked and respected each other. They had both basked in the glow of the heroes' reception Company D received, including a parade in downtown Cleveland. Raney, however, had gone on to law school, while Johnson had found himself in deep shit.
Toussaint's brother Edward had lost the restaurant in a dice game. Edward had sold the family house and headed out for parts unknown. Toussaint never saw his brother again.
This left the Company D veteran-like so many others- without a job and with few prospects for one. Within weeks his sense of being a survivor, of being a hero and on top of the world, had faded back into the reality of being a young Negro hi an old, white world. He applied to the police department but was turned down. He kept re- applying with the same result, while working a variety of day labor jobs and, for half a year, shoveling coal at Republic Steel.
About the only good thing that happened in those days was meeting Maybelle, a waitress at Pappy's, which Toussaint had continued to frequent. She was a beautiful chocolate-brown talkative girl with a generous figure and a good sense of humor that even getting pregnant couldn't faze, particularly since Toussaint was amenable to marrying her.
By 1922 Johnson's Company D compatriot Eustice Raney was making a name for himself in the colored community; he had graduated law school and with the help of Negro businessmen and politicians got himself appointed the city's first black police prosecutor. Raney's backers included the east side policy kings, and he helped Toussaint Johnson and half a dozen other Company D vets get jobs with Rufus Murphy and others.
Johnson became a bouncer for a Murphy associate, Gus 'Bunch Boy' Smith, at his gambling den on the second story of a house on Central Avenue. It was Johnson's job to collect the guns and shivs off players before they were allowed in, and to watch for police raids, pressing a loose nail in the door frame to blink the lights.
During this same period, Toussaint never stopped applying to the police department. He saw no irony in his situation, as certain rackets on the east side-the numbers in particular, gambling in general-seemed only technically illegal to him. He wanted on the force to nail evil bastards like the robber that killed his papa, like the con men that stole old people's money with words, like the muggers and purse-snatchers and other thieves who preyed on the innocent.
