“Those were the happy days,” he went on. “People kept kettles of hot lye on the stoves and carried them to their doors whenever the bell rang. And you could go upon the roof of your house and not see a chimney within four blocks: they’d all been knocked down and the bricks stacked at front room windows for ammunition. And say—one night a bunch of bad jigs—like those over on Fifth Avenue now—mistook me for a fay, and I had a devil of a time proving I was a Negro, too!”
“I had the same experience,” said Merrit. “You should’ve seen me exhibiting my kinky head.”
“It was probably straight for a while,” grinned Langdon.
“It’s the old, old story,” said Bruce. “War—conquest of territory. But our side of the thing isn’t all there is to it. The fays have a side too, you know.”
“I know,” Merrit protested, like the lawyer he was, “but we aren’t supposed to see that.”
“Well, I don’t know. It’s easy to laugh now. But the fact is, it was tragedy. Black triumph is always white tragedy. We won—we won territory. All the fays had to get out, make way, make room for us. What did they do? Resist, of course—why the devil shouldn’t they? Clung to their district, tried to recover. And we broke their heads with chimney bricks and bathed their bodies in hot lye. How do you suppose they felt about it?”
“Best thing that ever happened to ’em,” grinned Fred.
“But tough on them, you’ll admit.”
“What of it?”
“Only this—that when you move up there on Court Avenue, you’re opening up all those old scars. Just as Pott says, they’ll resist. They’ll warn you with threatening notes. They’ll try to buy you out. If these don’t work, they will probably dynamite you.”
“I’ve received one warning already.”
“You have?”
“You heard about Gamby, last month,” said someone. “They had a gang of toughs on hand and they wouldn’t even let the movers land his stuff on the sidewalk. Had to get the police.”
“Glad you mentioned that,” said Merrit. “I’ll send my worst stuff first, and I’ll get the toughest furniture-movers in Harlem.”
“Nowadays,” Bruce observed, “we grow by—well—a sort of passive conquest. The fays move out, and the jigs are so close no more fays will move in. So the landlord has to rent to jigs and the colony keeps extending. But if Fred wants to return to the older method, I don’t think it will do any great harm to the rest of us. He’s taking all the risk. And even though he claims a racial interest, he has admitted that the chief motive is personal after all. It’s his business.”
“There is absolutely no excuse for it,” was J. Pennington Potter’s final dictum.
“Who the hell asked for an excuse, Pott?” was all that Merrit answered.
V
Court Avenue is a straight, thin spinster of a street which even in July is cold. There is about it an air of arched eyebrows, of skirts drawn aside and comments made with a sniff. It is adorned in sparse, lean, scrawny maples, all suffering from malnutrition, and these tend to stress rather than relieve the hardness of dry, level pavements.
The dwellings are all the same pale gray and are all essentially alike, four stories tall, thin to gauntness, droop-eyed with drawn shapes, standing shoulder to shoulder in long, inhospitable rows. Stone stoops, well withdrawn from the sidewalk, lend an air of inaccessibility, and the tiny front yards that might dispel this illusion by only a bit of grass or a flower are instead uniformly laid away beneath slabs of expressionless concrete.
Twice a day, when sunlight touches the windows of this side in the morning and again of that side at night, Court Avenue smiles a chilly, crystalline smile. It is the sort of smile that goes with the words, “My dear! Can you imagine such a thing?” and you might suppose that the street was returning even the sun’s genial greeting and warm farewell with a disapproving sneer.
In short, Court Avenue is a snob of a street. Yet it is somewhat to be pitied in its pretense at ignoring the punishment that is at hand: the terribly sure approach of the swiftly spreading Negro colony.
Isaacs’ Transportation Company, which is to say old man Isadore Isaacs, would have trusted Joshua Jones with any moving job whatever. It was work that Shine loved because of the challenge it presented to his personal strength and skill. He took charge, accepted responsibility, helped execute the orders he gave. Whenever a staircase or hallway presented a difficult turn or an insufficient dimension, he was at hand to decide just how the problem should be solved. Whenever a valuable piece of ungainly size had to be dismembered, and afterwards reconstructed, his knowledge of the mysterious anatomy of furniture was wholly adequate. Whenever a piano was to be hoisted, he saw to each important item: himself selected and anchored the tackle and guided the instrument through the window that was chosen to admit it.
Pianos indeed, were his particular prey, his almost living archenemies. He personified them, and out of controlling them, handling them, directing them helpless through midair, he derived a satisfaction comparable to that of a tamer of beasts. There was a superstition that a piano would “get” a man one time or another. Jinx and Bubber had both suffered injuries from instruments that slipped from their grips. But Shine laughed at this superstition, not because it was a superstition, but
