IV

By way of contrast, it is of further interest to drop in on a little group of dickties, superiorly self-named the Litter Rats, who were assembled informally this evening in the dwelling of one J. Pennington Potter, their current president.

This particular meeting of the Litter Rats’ Club had been set apart for the discussion of The Negro’s Contribution to Art and The Lost Sciences of Ethiopia. But when Fred Merrit announced that he had bought a house on Court Avenue, most exclusive of the residential streets adjacent to Negro Harlem, scheduled discussions were for the moment forgotten; and when he added that he intended to live in the house, and to do so whether a riot resulted or not, the dozen men about the room came promptly to the edges of their chairs.

“Preposterous!” said J. Pennington Potter, a plump little sausage of a man, whose skin seemed stuffed to the limit with the importance of what it contained.

“Why so?” inquired Merrit.

“This colony,” Potter pronounced, “should extend itself naturally and gradually⁠—not by violence and bloodshed.”

“The extension of territory by violence and bloodshed strikes me as natural enough,” Merrit grinned. “I haven’t much of a memory, but I seem to recall one or two instances⁠—”

“Progress is by evolution, not revolution,” expostulated J. Pennington Potter. “And you may be sure that race progress is no exception.”

“Who the deuce said anything about race progress or about extending the colony?” asked Tod Bruce, the young and far from fundamentalist rector of St. Augustine’s. “Why is it that a shine can never do anything except as a shine?”

“Well,” commented Langdon, an innocent looking youngster who was at heart a prime rascal and who compensated by writing poetry, “if Fred will just keep his hat on, none of his neighbors will know he’s a shine.”

“Or he could try Stay-Straight for those kinks⁠—” someone suggested.

“My point,” said Bruce, “is that Fred probably isn’t concerned primarily with the racial aspect of the thing⁠—”

“He ought to be!” exploded Potter.

“I am,” said Merrit coolly. “All of you know where I stand on things racial⁠—I’m downright rabid. And even though, as Tod suggests, I’d enjoy this house, if they let me alone, purely as an individual, just the same I’m entering it as a Negro. I hate fays. Always have. Always will. Chief joy in life is making them uncomfortable. And if this doesn’t do it⁠—I’ll quit the bar.”

“Well, Fred,” said Langdon, “don’t forget the revenue. They’ll pay you double the value of the place just to get you out, you know.”

“I had that in mind, but hell⁠—what’s money? They won’t pay me what I’ll ask anyhow, and I won’t sell for less.”

There was a certain grimness about Merrit, for all his rosy cheeks and cherubic grin. He was anomalous in certain important particulars. Fair as the northernmost Nordic, his sandy hair was yet as kinky as that of any pure blooded African; and not the blackest of Negroes could have hated the dominant race more thoroughly.

“You know,” he said, “I especially wanted my mother to live there. How she would have queened it⁠—it would have been part compensation⁠—”

It was another of Merrit’s anomalies that, though he hated his lineage in general, he had been especially devoted to his mother. She had always seemed to him a symbol of sexual martyrdom, a bearer of the cross, as he put it, which fair manhood universally placed on dark womanhood’s shoulders. Of all those whom he blamed and cursed for his own mongrel heritage, she was the one exception; for her, the only one he had actually known, he had only racial pity and filial devotion. She had recently died, late enough in her own life, but too early in his, to enjoy the luxuries he had just become able to give her. And so in addition to what she already represented, she had now become a symbol of motherhood unrewarded, idealized in memory far beyond what had been true in life.

“I think,” he added, “my housekeeper’ll give the neighbors enough of a shock, though. She’s as colored as they come.”

“There’ll be a riot!” exclaimed J. Pennington Potter.

“Good!” grinned the cherubic Fred.

“They’ll set fire to the place⁠—they’ll blow it up⁠—the way they did Morris and Peters.”

“Insurance is a marvelous invention, isn’t it?”

“Uncalled for distress. I thoroughly disapprove of deliberate, intentional havoc. It’s just what we’re trying to prevent.” This was to be expected of the extremely proper J. Pennington Potter, a “social worker” with a windy, pompous voice and a deep devotion to convention.

“Well,” moderated Bruce, “Harlem began its growth by riots. I remember when I was a youngster, I used to be scared to stay out after dark. It was pretty bad then⁠—either a crowd of fay boys would catch a jig and beat him up or else a crowd of jigs would get a fay boy and teach him the fear of the Lord. In either case the thing would be the first skirmish of a pitched battle somewhere on the frontier. The shines tricked a half dozen Irish lads into 134th Street one night, I remember, and two of them never came out. Cops⁠—there weren’t any black cops then⁠—always went in threes at least. And I recall one day when twelve mounted policemen came galloping up 134th Street after one little West Indian iceman⁠—and galloped back without him. It was really comical.”

The others gave Bruce attention, watching him as he spoke. He too was fair, but less so than Merrit, and his skin was uniformly pallid. His face was lean, his features prominent and severe to the point of austerity, the nose large and narrow, the chin advancing, the mouth wide, straight, and thin-lipped. As if to offset the ascetic in this countenance, his eyes were deep-set and black, and in them some curious passion gleamed constantly like a flame. As he spoke these eyes engaged everything that might hold a drop of interest, comprehended it, drained it, left it; swiftly flashed from this to that, paused, penetrated, abandoned; sought further, halted, penetrated again, departed⁠—a pair of black wasps.

“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.