It was now eating-time in Harlem. They were hungry. They washed and dressed.
“If you’ll be mah man always, you won’t have to work,” she said.
“Me?” responded Jake. “I’ve never been a sweetman yet. Never lived off no womens and never will. I always works.”
“I don’t care what you do whilst you is mah man. But hard work’s no good for a sweet-loving pa-pa.”
V
On the Job Again
Jake stayed on in Rose’s room. He could not feel about her as he did for his little lost maroon-brown of the Baltimore. He went frequently to the Baltimore, but he never saw her again. Then he grew to hate that cabaret and stopped going there.
The mulattress was charged with tireless activity and Jake was her big, good slave. But her spirit lacked the charm and verve, the infectious joy, of his little lost brown. He sometimes felt that she had no spirit at all—that strange, elusive something that he felt in himself, sometimes here, sometimes there, roaming away from him, going back to London, to Brest, Le Havre, wandering to some unknown new port, caught a moment by some romantic rhythm, color, face, passing through cabarets, saloons, speakeasies, and returning to him. … The little brown had something of that in her, too. That night he had felt a reaching out and marriage of spirits. … But the mulattress was all a wonderful tissue of throbbing flesh. He had never once felt in her any tenderness or timidity or aloofness. …
Jake was working longshore. Hooking barrels and boxes, wrestling with chains and cranes. He didn’t have a little-boss job this time. But that didn’t worry him. He was one blackamoor that nourished a perfect contempt for place. There were times when he divided his days between Rose and Uncle Doc’s saloon and Dixie Red’s poolroom.
He never took money from her. If he gambled away his own and was short, he borrowed from Nije Gridley, the longshoreman broker. Nije Gridley was a tall, thin, shiny black man. His long eyelashes gave his sharp eyes a sleepy appearance, but he was always wide awake. Before Jake was shipped to France, Nije had a rooming-house in Harlem’s Fifth Avenue, worked a little at long-shoring himself, and lent money on the checks of the hard-gambling boys. Now he had three rooming-houses, one of which, free of mortgage, he owned. His lean belly bore a heavy gold chain and he strutted Fifth and Lenox in a ministerial crow-black suit. With the war boom of wages, the boys had gambled heavily and borrowed recklessly.
Ordinarily, Nije lent money at the rate of a dollar on four and two on eight per week. He complained bitterly of losses. Twenty-five dollars loaned on a check which, presented, brought only a day’s pay. There were tough fellows that played him that game sometimes. They went and never returned to borrow again. But Nije’s interest covered up such gaps. And sometimes he gave ten dollars on a forty-dollar check, drew the wages, and never saw his customer again, who had vanished entirely out of that phase of Harlem life.
One week when they were not working, Zeddy came to Jake with wonderful news. Men were wanted at a certain pier to unload pineapples at eight dollars a day. Eight dollars was exceptional wages, but the fruit was spoiling.
Jake went with Zeddy and worked the first day with a group of Negroes and a few white men. The white men were not regular dock workers. The only thing that seemed strange to Jake was that all the men ate inside and were not allowed outside the gates for lunch. But, on the second day, his primitive passion for going against regulation urged him to go out in the street after lunch.
Heaving casually along West Street, he was hailed by a white man. “Hello, fellow-worker!”
“Hello, there! What’s up?” Jake asked.
“You working in there?”
“Sure I is. Since yestidday.”
The man told Jake that there was a strike on and he was scabbing. Jake asked him why there were no pickets if there was a strike. The man replied that there were no pickets because the union leaders were against the strike, and had connived with the police to beat up and jail the pickets.
“Well, pardner,” Jake said, “I’ve done worked through a tur’ble assortaments o’ jobs in mah lifetime, but I ain’t nevah yet scabbed it on any man. I done work in this heah country, and I works good and hard over there in France. I works in London and I nevah was a blackleg, although I been the only black man in mah gang.”
“Fine, fellow-worker; that’s a real man’s talk,” said the white man. He took a little red book out of his pocket and asked Jake to let him sign him up in his union.
“It’s the only one in the country for a red-blooded worker, no matter what race or nation he belongs to.”
“Nope, I won’t scab, but I ain’t a joiner kind of a fellah,” said Jake. “I ain’t no white folks’ nigger and I ain’t no poah white’s fool. When I longshored in Philly I was a good union man. But when I made New York I done finds out that they gived the colored mens the worser piers and holds the bes’n a’ them foh the Irishmen. No, pardner, keep you’ card. I take the best I k’n get as I goes mah way. But I tells you, things ain’t none at all lovely between white and black in this heah Gawd’s own country.”
“We take all men in our union regardless—” But Jake was haunching along out of hearing down West Street. … Suddenly he heard sharp, deep, distressful grunts, and saw behind some barrels a black man down and being kicked perilously in the rear end by two white men. Jake drew his hook from his belt and, waving it in the air, he rushed them. The white men shot like rats to cover. The down man scrambled to his feet. One
