Also in attendance was also writer and poet Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston was covering the event for American Mercury magazine. An Episcopal priest and several reverends, including T.C. Stafford, were present. Others not in the VIP section were there representing Opportunity and The Nation, while Jessie Redmon Fauset, though no longer the literary editor of the NAACP’s The Crisis, was nonetheless covering the speech on special assignment for the magazine. Several photographers were there as well.
Hands outstretched, Daddy Paradise said into the microphone, “Please take your seats, beloved. You and I have a momentous journey to begin tonight. One that, I hope, will start us on the way to peace and prosperity. For surely not from City Hall or the White House, will our salvation come. No, my friends, only we can deliver us for us. Only we can do for ourselves because only we can rely on ourselves.” His voice had steadily risen, and he began to thump on the podium using his index finger, the sound picked up by the microphone.
“And don’t misunderstand, I’m not talking about negro for the negro businesses, though there is certainly nothing wrong with that. But I am talking about something more, far more. Something that will lead us to true financial fulfillment. But that is merely a fraction of the whole equation. For it is not a handout from the government or a free lunch in a bar that I’m talking about tonight. Neither Hoover nor Smith can get this for you. For you see, we all have it, that’s the beauty of it.” He dabbed at his forehead with a folded up monogrammed handkerchief even though he wasn’t perspiring yet. Toliver knew people liked to see their preachers working hard.
“That which we must tap into is within us. In the fabled East it’s referred to as chi, the universal essence, the life force that unites body, mind and spirit. But I’m not here tonight to get us lost in a bunch of mumbo jumbo and metaphysics. Oh no, I’m here tonight so that we can shake off the shackles of self-doubt and worry, of ‘I can’t’, and ‘the white man won’t let me’. Damn that.” He paused, scanning the audience, pacing back and forth behind the podium then returning to latch onto its sides like a drowning man onto a life preserver.
Grasping the microphone, Daddy Paradise leaned his mouth close to the instrument. “Dare I say, God damn that,” he blared into the microphone. His white-hot challenge echoed throughout the auditorium.
The crowd erupted gleefully, more than one pastor cringing.
The sound of those hoots and claps made their way to three men at an apartment building under construction that overlooked the facility. Liberty Hall, which tonight was filled to capacity, was a sprawling one-story building with catwalks and warrens in its upper reaches. From the vantage point where the three killers sat watch, they looked down on the rooftop section where the main auditorium was. The unexpected presence of the police had caused the plotters to reassess their plans, but they were still going forward with the job. Because really, what choice did they have? These men worked for Dutch Schultz. They’d brought with them a prototype of yet another way for human beings to destroy one another. But this method was unlike any other heretofore seen. It was a version of Tesla’s Electro-Pulsar. It was a death ray.
But different from Tesla’s design, this version looked more like a bazooka with cables connected to it leading to a squarish generator the size of a living room radio. Smartly, the generator had a built-in handle and wheels like a dolly. Tonight, the experimental device was to be used to slaughter a number of Harlemites, particularly the rivals of Schultz—Queenie St. Clair and Daddy Paradise being the number one and number two targets. Schultz would also not bat an eye given the ray would cause the death of a goodly number of notables and would serve as a lesson that he would brook no opposition. He knew that it wasn’t just Daddy Paradise who invested with Harlem’s gangsters to provide capital to those denied capital. Schultz also calculated should either of his main targets survive in the resulting devastation, either one of them would be seen as a pariah, a jinx. He’d be finished as a would-be black messiah and therefore the natural order of things would be secure.
“We just gonna blow up the roof with this thing?” one of the hoods had asked earlier. They knew from a supplied floorplan approximately where the main auditorium was located.
“It would bring down part of the building but that’s no guarantee we’d get Queenie,” another said. A side of his face was marked from a childhood bout with chicken pox. They had considered letting fly with a blast or two as people milled in. But a number of Klieg and other types of carbon arc lights, including some of Edison manufacture, were on, and they feared being spotted by the law. Now the lights were off and the police less concentrated. There were, however, lights illuminating the hall’s entrance and one of the men had a set of binoculars. The idea was the police would think a bomb went off inside the place giving the hoods time to clamber down from the construction site and disappear in the dark and the confusion.
“There’s either gonna be a break or we wait till it’s over,” the third one said. This was Eddie, the machine gunner Henson had
