His thoughts wandered away back to his mysterious little brown of the Baltimore. She was not elegant and educated, but she was nice. Maybe if he found her again—it would be better than just running wild around like that! Thinking honestly about it, after all, he was never satisfied, flopping here and sleeping there. It gave him a little cocky pleasure to brag of his conquests to the fellows around the bar. But after all the swilling and boasting, it would be a thousand times nicer to have a little brown woman of his own to whom he could go home and be his simple self with. Lay his curly head between her brown breasts and be fondled and be the spoiled child that every man loves sometimes to be when he is all alone with a woman. That he could never be with the Madame Lauras. They expected him always to be the prancing he-man. Maybe it was the lack of a steady girl that kept him running crazy around. Boozing and poking and rooting around, jolly enough all right, but not altogether contented.
The landlady did not appear with Jake’s dinner.
“Guess she is somewhere rocking soft with gin,” he thought. “Ise feeling all right enough to go out, anyhow. Guess I’ll drop in at Uncle Doc’s and have a good feed of spareribs. Hm! but the stuff coming out of these heah Harlem kitchens is enough to knock me down. They smell so good.”
He dressed and went out. “Oh, Lenox Avenue, but you look good to me, now. Lawdy! though, how the brown-skin babies am humping it along! Strutting the joy-stuff! Invitation for a shimmy. O Lawdy! Pills and pisen, you gotta turn me loose, quick.”
Billy Biasse was drinking at the bar of Uncle Doc’s when Jake entered.
“Come on, you, and have a drink,” Billy cried. “Which hole in Harlem youse been burying you’self in all this time?”
“Which you figure? There is holes outside of Harlem too, boh,” Jake ordered a beer.
“Beer!” exclaimed Billy. “Quit you fooling and take some real liquor, nigger. Ise paying foh it. Order that theah ovah-water liquor you useter be so dippy about. That theah Scotch.”
“I ain’t quite all right, Billy. Gotta go slow on the booze.”
“Whasmat? … Oh, foh Gawd’s sakel Don’t let the li’l beauty break you’ heart. Fix her up with gin.”
“Might as well, and then a royal feed o’ spareribs,” agreed Jake.
He asked for Zeddy.
“Missing sence all the new moon done bless mah luck that you is, too. Last news I heard ’bout him, the gen’man was Yonkers anchored.”
“And Strawberry Lips?”
“That nigger’s back home in Harlem where he belongs. He done long ago quit that ugly yaller razorback. And you, boh. Who’s providing foh you’ wants sence you done turn Congo Rose down?”
“Been running wild in the paddock of the Pennsy.”
“Oh, boh, you sure did breaks the sweet-loving haht of Congo Rose. One night she stahted to sing ‘You broke mah haht and went away’ and she jest bust out crying theah in the cabaret and couldn’t sing no moh. She hauled harself whimpering out there, and she laid off o’ the Congo foh moh than a week. That li’l goosey boy had to do the strutting all by himse’f.”
“She was hot stuff all right.” Jake laughed richly. “But I had to quit her or she would have made me either a no-’count or a bad nigger.”
Warmed up by meeting an old pal and hearing all the intimate news of the dives, Jake tossed off he knew not how many gins. He told Billy Biasse of the places he had nosed out in Baltimore and Philadelphia. The gossip was good. Jake changed to Scotch and asked for the siphon.
He had finished the first Scotch and asked for another, when a pain gripped his belly with a wrench that almost tore him apart. Jake groaned and doubled over, staggered into a corner, and crumpled up on the floor. Perspiration stood in beads on his forehead, trickled down his rigid, chiseled features. He heard the word “ambulance” repeated several times. He thought first of his mother. His sister. The little frame house in Petersburg. The backyard of bleached clothes on the line, the large lilac tree and the little forked lot that yielded red tomatoes and green peas in spring.
“No hospital foh me,” he muttered. “Mah room is jest next doh. Take me theah.”
Uncle Doc told his bar man to help Billy Biasse lift Jake.
“Kain you move you’ laigs any at all, boh?” Billy asked.
Jake groaned: “I kain try.”
The men took him home. …
Jake’s landlady had been invited to a fried-chicken feed in the basement lodging of an Ebenezer sister and friend on Fifth Avenue. The sister friend had rented the basement of the old-fashioned house and appropriated the large backyard for her laundry work. She went out and collected soiled linen every Monday. Her wealthiest patrons sent their chauffeurs round with their linen. And the laundress was very proud of white chauffeurs standing their automobiles in front of her humble basement. She noticed with heaving chest that the female residents of the block rubbernecked. Her vocation was very profitable. And it was her pleasure sometimes to invite a sister of her church to dinner. …
The fried chicken, with sweet potatoes, was excellent. Over it the sisters chinned and ginned, recounting all the contemporary scandals of the Negro churches. …
At last Jake’s landlady remembered him and staggered home to prepare his beef broth. But when she took it up to him she found that Jake was out. Returning to the kitchen, she stumbled and
