With his knee upon Nije’s chest and his left hand on his windpipe, Zeddy flashed the deadly-gleaming blade out of his back pocket. The proprietress let loose a bloodcurdling scream, but before Zeddy’s hand could achieve its purpose, Jake aimed a swift kick at his elbow.
The razor flew spinning upward and fell chopping through a glass of gin on the pianola.
The proprietress fell upon Zeddy and clawed at him. “Wha’s the matter all you bums trying to ruin mah place?” she cried. “Ain’t I been a good spoht with you all, making everything here nice and respectable?”
Jake took charge of Zeddy. Two men hustled Nije off away out of the flat.
“Who was it put the krimp on me?” asked Zeddy.
“You ought to praise the Lawd you was saved from Sing Sing and don’t ask no questions,” the woman replied.
Everybody was talking.
“How did that long, tall, blood-suckin’ nigger get in heah?”
“Soon as this heah kind a business stahts, the dicks will sartain sure git on to us.”
“It ain’t no moh than last week they done raided Madame Jerkin’s, the niftiest buffet flat in Harlem. O Lawdy!”
“That ole black cock,” growled Zeddy, “he wouldn’a’ crowed round Harlem no moh after I’d done made that theah fine blade talk in his throat.”
“Shut up you,” the proprietress said, “or I’ll throw you out.” And Zeddy, the ape, who was scared of no man in the place, became humble before the woman. She began setting the room to order, helped by the two cocoa-brown girls. A man shuffling a pack of cards called to Zeddy and Jake.
But the woman held up her hand. “No more card-playing tonight. I feel too nervous.”
“Let’s dance, then,” suggested the smaller cocoa-brown girl.
A “blues” came trotting out of the pianola. The proprietress bounced into Jake’s arms. The men sprang at the two girls. The unlucky ones paired off with each other.
Oh, “blues,” “blues,” “blues.” Black-framed white grinning. Finger-snapping. Undertone singing. The three men with women teasing the stags. Zeddy’s gorilla feet dancing down the dark death lurking in his heart. Zeddy dancing with a pal. “Blues,” “blues,” “blues.” Red moods, black moods, golden moods. Curious, syncopated slipping-over into one mood, backsliding back to the first mood. Humming in harmony, barbaric harmony, joy-drunk, chasing out the shadow of the moment before.
VI
Myrtle Avenue
Zeddy was excited over Jake’s success in love. He thought how often he had tried to make up to Rose, without succeeding. He was crazy about finding a woman to love him for himself.
He had been married when he was quite a lad to a crust-yellow girl in Petersburg. Zeddy’s wife, after deceiving him with white men, had run away from him to live an easier life. That was before Zeddy came North. Since then he had had many other alliances. But none had been successful.
It was true that no Black Belt beauty would never call Zeddy “mah han’some brown.” But there were sweetmen of the Belt more repulsive than he, that women would fight and murder each other for. Zeddy did not seem to possess any of that magic that charms and holds women for a long time. All his attempts at homemaking had failed. The women left him when he could not furnish the cash to meet the bills. They never saw his wages. For it was gobbled up by his voracious passion for poker and crap games. Zeddy gambled in Harlem. He gambled with white men down by the piers. And he was always losing.
“If only I could get those kinda gals that falls foh Jake,” Zeddy mused. “And Jake is such a fool spade. Don’t know how to handle the womens.”
Zeddy’s chance came at last. One Saturday a yellow-skinned youth, whose days and nights were wholly spent between poolrooms and Negro speakeasies, invited Zeddy to a sociable at a grass-widow’s who lived in Brooklyn and worked as a cook downtown in New York. She was called Gin-head Susy. She had a little apartment in Myrtle Avenue near Prince Street.
Susy was wonderfully created. She was of the complexion known among Negroes as spade or chocolate-to-the-bone. Her eyes shone like big white stars. Her chest was majestic and the general effect like a mountain. And that mountain was overgrand because Susy never wore any other but extremely French-heeled shoes. Even over the range she always stood poised in them and blazing in bright-hued clothes.
The burning passion of Susy’s life was the yellow youth of her race. Susy came from South Carolina. A yellow youngster married her when she was fifteen and left her before she was eighteen. Since then she had lived with a yellow complex at the core of her heart.
Civilization had brought strikingly exotic types into Susy’s race. And like many, many Negroes, she was a victim to that. … Ancient black life rooted upon its base with all its fascinating new layers of brown, low-brown, high-brown, nut-brown, lemon, maroon, olive, mauve, gold. Yellow balancing between black and white. Black reaching out beyond yellow. Almost-white on the brink of a change. Sucked back down into the current of black by the terribly sweet rhythm of black blood. …
Susy’s life of yellow complexity was surcharged with gin. There were whisky and beer also at her sociable evenings, but gin was the drink of drinks. Except for herself, her parties were all-male. Like so many of her sex, she had a congenital contempt for women. All-male were her parties and as yellow as she could make them. A lemon-colored or paper-brown poolroom youngster from Harlem’s Fifth Avenue or from Prince Street. A bellboy or railroad waiter or porter. Sometimes a chocolate who was a quick, nondiscriminating lover and not remote of attitude like the pampered high-browns. But chocolates were always a rarity among Susy’s front-roomful of gin-lovers.
Yet for all of her wages drowned in gin, Susy carried a hive of discontents in her majestic breast. She desired a lover, something like
