Nervous chuckles rippled through the gathered.
“You do know one of the reasons Garvey was brought down was by one of us, yes?” Toliver had walked to one of the carts to pour some tepid tea.
“That’s a fanciful rumor,” Blake said.
“Is it, now?”
“I know something about this so-called negro agent referred to as 800,” Blake noted. “I believe that he does exist and was used against us. Or that, like a reverse Walter Francis White, he is a Caucasian who passed for mulatto.” The ironically named White, a blue-eyed and blond-haired black man, assistant secretary of the NAACP, used his coloring to infiltrate southern towns after a lynching. He did this to find out the perpetrators of these crimes, and then the perpetrators’ names would be published in issues of the organization’s Crisis Magazine and elsewhere. More than once, whites had found out about a “yellow nigra” poking around and he’d have to get out of town ahead of a lynch mob out to string him up.
“My point was,” Toliver went on, “speaking out against inequality, seeding black enterprises as some of us in this room do, is enough to get us labeled subversives. We don’t have to be bowler hat-wearing bomb throwers of the type found in Mr. Conrad’s novel.”
He got blank looks save for Stafford who was familiar with the book he’d mentioned, The Secret Agent.
Toliver sat again and said, “While in some respects our collective plight as colored citizens keeps us invisible to the powers that be in this country, in other ways, we stick out too much. We can’t let that us paralyze us or push us to foolish and wasteful actions. I assure you, it is not my intention to blow hot air come Saturday night, inflame desires and drift away on the wind. I intend to deliver. More, I look forward to us working together for the betterment of our people and not at cross purposes.”
The men in the room murmured sagely. After the meeting broke up, several were now either invited to the event or asked to say a few words from the podium. The religious leaders went their separate ways, most returning to their respective houses of worship or to visit a sick and shut-in member of their church.
Reverend Stafford drove his four-year-old Cole sedan to Blumstein’s department store on 125th—which catered to black folk but didn’t employ any. He parked and entered and on the third floor, the furniture department, and used one of the phone booths in the back. In the booth, door closed, he asked the operator to dial a long distance number he’d committed to memory. The line was answered on the second ring.
“Hello,” said a quiet voice.
“This is Reverend Stafford.”
“Yes…how’d the meeting go?”
The clergyman proceeded to tell the quiet-voiced man on the other end of the line, a Bureau of Investigation contact, what had transpired. Particularly emphasizing the threat of Daddy Paradise expanding his reach and thereby his influence.
“And he’s hired that glory-hound Henson to be a kind of bodyguard,” Stafford added.
“Yes, I’m aware of Henson’s involvement. Go on,” said the voice.
As the unidentified Agent 800 was said to be the first negro agent of the Bureau of Investigation, T.C. Stafford was one of its first paid black informants, recruited by the previously mentioned 800 less than four years ago. Stafford had provided insider knowledge to aid in the political decapitation of Garvey. The authorities —J. Edgar Hoover playing a pivotal role, had concocted a mail fraud case against Garvey for selling his Black Star Line stock. He’d been imprisoned, but pardoned by President Coolidge after considerable efforts by the United Negro Improvement Association. He was deported back to his native Jamaica.
“Thank you, Reverend. Keep up the good work,” the government man said, severing the line.
Stafford went back outside. Whatever guilt he felt for informing on his peers under the guise of patriotism was offset by his jealousy of them and his desire to be the number one leader in Harlem. He would be the top dog, and the citizenry would turn to him for guidance and succor. Not to mention comforting widows and lonely housewives. There was a spring in his step as he walked away.
CHAPTER TEN
The three banjo players furiously strummed their instruments as the man on tom-toms beat out a wild rhythm with his padded mallets, his hands and arms a blur of motion and syncopation. As one, the musicians reached a crescendo and the tune climaxed with a resounding flourish. The studio audience applauded and cheered as the banjo players and the man on the drums, each costumed in big furs, stood and took a bow. Behind them, the rest of the orchestra remained seated, but nodded their heads in acknowledgement. The band was ensconced in what looked like a giant igloo, half of it cut away. There were also several penguin dolls, and a custom made polar bear prop on the stage. Numerous wires led to a control console at one side of the stage where an engineer sat.
The bandleader was a tallish slender man in a fur hat and fur-fashioned bow tie. He walked to the standing microphone and bent slightly to speak into it. He thanked the musicians then said, “And now we’re going to bring you a swinging rendition of ‘Baby, I Can’t Get Enough of You, Though I’ve Tried’.”
There was applause as the band went into its final number, and louder still when they finished. “Well, ladies and gentlefolk, that brings to a close another session of the Clicquot Club Eskimos Musical Variety show here on the Blue Network out of the RCA building in the one and only New York City. But before we go, we wanted to once again bring back to the mic
