Read Online Strivers Row by Kevin Baker - Free Book Online Page B

first.”
    â€œYeah, Small’s. That’s the place to get him his first drink in Harlem!”
    First they had the cab let them off at Mrs. Fisher’s boardinghouse, where they dropped off their train bags in the sliver-thin rooms where they would bunk for the layover. They clambered right back out onto the sidewalk—and it was then that Malcolm realized everything was moving even faster than it had looked from inside the taxi; as if the sidewalk itself had been set on some war-speed assembly line, activated the moment they put their feet to it.
    It caught them up immediately, rushing them past chicken restaurants and hamburger joints, and closed-up basement dance halls, and heat-dazed winos lying in the doorways. Past barbershops that advertised “Conk It Up! No Burning!” and more of the smoking beauty parlors where Malcolm could now make out the women in pink smocks pressing irons down on other women’s hair like it was so much laundry.
    They moved past all the squatting curb vendors selling used books, and carved African animals, and jewelry that shone a little too brightly. Past men with carts full of wilted daisies, and roses and violets, and men selling long, red-orange slices of cantaloupe and watermelon, with the glistening cut mouth of the remaining melon set just above their heads, so that they seemed to mimic their own red mouths and wagging tongues. There were men selling halves of oranges, and alligator pears, and rings of coconut slices floating in dishes of water and their own fragrance while they chanted ritually over them, “ Yo tengo guineos! Yo tengo cocoas! Yo tengo piñas , también!”—and the fish peddlers who made sudden, high-pitched, terrifying noises, shrieking “Wahoo! Wahoo! Wahoo!” before throwing back their heads and singing out their ditties to the sky, or at least to the upper stories of the tenements above them:
    Can’t go home till all my fish is gone,
    Stormy weather.
    Can’t keep my fish together Sellin’ ’em all the time—the time!
    Don’t see why
    You folks don’t come an’ buy—
    There were other people, men and women both, whom they could not walk past but who came straight at him, sticking their hands in the pocket of his coat. Grabbing for whatever they could find, or leaving small cards and flyers there before he struck their fingers away. One man coming up right behind his ear, whispering, “All kinds of women, Jack. Want a white woman?” so close and intimate that Malcolm was simultaneously startled, and repulsed, and intrigued.
    â€œI had a white woman, back in Michigan,” he announced loudly to the others in the crew. “No hype! Woman named Sally, fine as a ocean gull—”
    â€œYeah, Nome, tell us about that later!” Lionel said, taking him by the arm and pulling him, despite the potential alteration of luck involved, right through and under a stepladder that was set up on the corner.
    Malcolm looked up—and saw a short, beige-colored man standing on the top rung, wearing a small, round skullcap, and what looked like a magician’s robe. Both the fez and the robe were full of crescent moons and stars and ringed planets—not unlike the stars and moons the Comet wore on his crime-fighting costume, he thought idly. Most incongruous of all, there was a large freestanding American flag set up on the corner next to the ladder. The man haranguing the passersby in a voice of bottomless, righteous anger:
    â€œWhy should the so-called Negro have to shed his blood for Franklin Roosevelt’s America, for Cotton Ed Smith and Senator Bilbo. For the whole Jim Crow, so-called Negro-hating South, for the low-paid, dirty jobs for which we have to fight—”
    Malcolm stopped and gaped up at the little man, the words and the scornful, defiant certainty with which they were said striking a chord in him. They reminded him so much of something else he had