Third Part
XIX
Spring in Harlem
The lovely trees of Seventh Avenue were a vivid flame-green. Children, lightly clad, skipped on the pavement. Light open coats prevailed and the smooth bare throats of brown girls were a token as charming as the first pussy-willows. Far and high over all, the sky was a grand blue benediction, and beneath it the wonderful air of New York tasted like fine dry champagne.
Jake loitered along Seventh Avenue. Crossing to Lenox, he lazied northward and over the 149th Street bridge into the near neighborhood of the Bronx. Here, just a step from compactly-built, teeming Harlem, were frame houses and open lots and people digging. A colored couple dawdled by, their arms fondly caressing each other’s hips. A white man forking a bit of ground stopped and stared expressively after them.
Jake sat down upon a mound thick-covered with dandelions. They glittered in the sun away down to the rear of a rusty-gray shack. They filled all the green spaces. Oh, the common little things were glorious there under the sun in the tender spring grass. Oh, sweet to be alive in that sun beneath that sky! And to be in love—even for one hour of such rare hours! One day! One night! Somebody with spring charm, like a dandelion, seasonal and haunting like a lovely dream that never repeats itself. … There are hours, there are days, and nights whose sheer beauty overwhem us with happiness, that we seek to make even more beautiful by comparing them with rare human contacts. … It was a day like this we romped in the grass … a night as soft and intimate as this on which we forgot the world and ourselves. … Hours of pagan abandon, celebrating ourselves. …
And Jake felt as all men who love love for love’s sake can feel. He thought of the surging of desire in his boy’s body and of his curious pure nectarine beginnings, without pain, without disgust, down home in Virginia, Of his adolescent breaking-through when the fever-and-pain of passion gave him a wonderful strange-sweet taste of love that he had never known again. Of rude contacts and swift satisfactions in Norfolk, Baltimore, and other coast ports. … Havre. … The West India Dock districts of London. …
“Only that cute heartbreaking brown of the Baltimore,” he mused. “A day like this sure feels like her. Didn’t even get her name. O Lawdy! what a night that theah night was. Her and I could sure make a hallelujah picnic outa a day like this.” …
Jake and Billy Biasse, leaving Dixie Red’s poolroom together, shuffled into a big excited ring of people at the angle of Fifth Avenue and 133rd Street. In the ring three bad actors were staging a rough play—a yellow youth, a chocolate youth, and a brown girl.
The girl had worked herself up to the highest pitch of obscene frenzy and was sicking the dark strutter on to the yellow with all the filthiest phrases at her command. The two fellows pranced round, menacing each other with comic gestures.
“Why, ef it ain’t Yaller Prince!” said Jake.
“Him sure enough,” responded Billy Biasse. “Guess him done laid off from that black gal why she’s shooting her stinking mouth off at him.”
“Is she one of his producing goods?”
“She was. But I heard she done beat up anether gal of hisn—a fair-brown that useta hand over moh change than her and Yaller turn’ her loose foh it.” …
“You lowest-down face-artist!” the girl shrieked at Yaller Prince. “I’ll bawl it out so all a Harlem kain know what you is.” And ravished by the fact that she was humiliating her onetime lover, she gesticulated wildly.
“Hit him, Obadiah!” she yelled to the chocolate chap. “Hit him I tell you. Beat his mug up foh him, beat his mug and bleed his mouf.” Over and over again she yelled: “Bleed his mouf!” As if that was the thing in Yaller Prince she had desired most. For it she had given herself up to the most unthinkable acts of degradation. Nothing had been impossible to do. And now she would cut and bruise and bleed that mouth that had once loved her so well so that he should not smile upon her rivals for many a day.
“Two-faced yaller nigger, you does ebery low-down thing, but you nevah done a lick of work in you lifetime. Show him, Obadiah. Beat his face and bleed his mouf.”
“Yaller nigger,” cried the extremely bandy-legged and grim-faced Obadiah, “Ise gwine kick you pants.”
“I ain’t scared a you, black buzzard,” Yaller Prince replied in a thin, breathless voice, and down he went on his back, no one knowing whether he fell or was tripped up. Obadiah lifted a bottle and swung it down upon his opponent. Yaller Prince moaned and blood bubbled from his nose and his mouth.
“He’s a sweet-back, all right, but he ain’t a strong one,” said someone in the crowd. The police had been conspicuously absent during the fracas, but now a baton tap-tapped upon the pavement and two of them hurried up. The crowd melted away.
Jake had pulled Yaller Prince against the wall and squatted to rest the bleeding head against his knee.
“What’s matter here now? What’s matter?” the first policeman, with revolver drawn, asked harshly.
“Nigger done beat this one up and gone away from heah, tha’s whatsmat,” said Billy Biasse.
They carried Yaller Prince into a drugstore for first aid, and the policeman telephoned for an ambulance. …
“We gotta look out foh him in hospital. He was a pretty good skate for a sweetman,” Billy Biasse said.
“Poor Yaller!” Jake, shaking his head, commented; “it’s a bad business.”
“He’s plumb crazy gwine around without a gun when he’s a-playing that theah game,” said Billy, “with all these cut-thwoat niggers in Harlem ready to carve up one another foh a li’l insisnificant humpy.”
“It’s the same ole life everywhere,” responded Jake. “In white man’s town or nigger town. Same bloody-sweet life across the pond. I done lived through the same blood-battling foh womens ovah
