The Ballad of Black Tom- by Victor LaValle

3

Tommy’s best friend, Buckeye, arrived in Harlem in 1920 when he was sixteen years old. At fourteen he’d left the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat to work on the Panama Canal, and from Panama made his way to the United States, to Harlem. He arrived expecting to do the same work as he’d done on the canal—construction—but soon found out what Otis Tester had long known: Negroes had no protection. Buckeye broke an ankle at the age of seventeen and found himself out of day labor for two months. When he was ready to return, the job had been filled, and besides that, the ankle never healed well. He couldn’t be on it for long hours, couldn’t tote much weight without it giving out. Soon he found his way to Madame St. Clair and her famous numbers game. She hired him because she needed men from the Caribbean, who knew and would be trusted by the recent West Indian immigrants. Madame St. Clair evolved in changing times, and because of this she thrived. The regular kickbacks to local police also helped. Buckeye met Tommy Tester in this milieu. Tommy played a club where Buckeye made business. One evening Buckeye sidled next to Tommy at the bar and asked where he’d learned to sing so badly. Did he take lessons or was it a natural gift? They became fast friends.

Now Tommy Tester led his father out of their building and down the block. He’d returned home from the encounter with Robert Suydam, with Malone and the private detective, and felt himself in need of a night out. It took time to convince Otis to step out. Otis never left the apartment, hardly left his bedroom. He’d become like a dog gone into the dark so he could die alone, but Tommy had different plans. Or maybe he needed his father too much to let him go easily.

Buckeye left an open invitation for Tommy at the Victoria Society. It was on 137th Street. The walk was a mere seven blocks, but because of his father’s health, it took them half an hour to arrive.

The Victoria Society consisted of three modest rooms on the second floor of an apartment building. It was a Caribbean social club. Down on the street Tommy and Otis were in black Harlem; in the Victoria Society they entered the British West Indies. The flags of every Caribbean nation were fixed to the walls of a long hallway. A much larger Union Jack hung at the far end. At the doorway to the warren of rooms, Tommy Tester had to give Buckeye’s name three times. The greeter at the door remained unmoved until Tommy used Buckeye’s given name, George Hurley. That worked like a spell.

Tommy and Otis followed the greeter at a distance. One of the society’s rooms was reserved for men playing card games or bones; the second showed men in lounge chairs smoking and listening to music played at a respectable volume; and the third had card tables set out with tablecloths and chairs, for meals. Buckeye had invited Tommy to the Victoria Society many times in the years since they’d made friends, but Tommy had never come until now. He felt a sting, like a slap, across his face. This was the place he’d described to Ma Att? The shorthand for a den of crime and sin? The place where Harlem’s worst criminals were too afraid to go?

He’d assumed he knew what kind of place this would be. Buckeye ran numbers for the most famous female gangster in New York City, so why wouldn’t the Victoria Society be like those legendary opium dens? Or had Tommy simply assumed terrible things about this wave of West Indian immigrants? The American Negroes in Harlem got up to awful gossip about those newcomers. And now he’d come to find the Victoria Society might as well be a British tearoom. He felt slightly disappointed. He’d brought his father because he’d meant to show his dad a scandalous night. He’d heard women danced in nearly nothing, so close they practically sat in your lap. Being inside now, seeing this place truly, was like learning another world existed within—or alongside—the world he’d always known. Worse, all this time he’d been too ignorant to realize it. The idea troubled him like a pinched nerve.

Tommy and his dad sat, and the older man blew out a deep breath. Otis spent a long time adjusting himself in the chair to minimize his back pain. He moved like someone ancient. Otis Tester was forty-one years old.

A thin woman came to the table offering dinner she’d made in her kitchen, then brought here to sell. She was Trinidadian. Her dinner plates were already prepared, and she rolled them through the dining room on a cart. Saheena, pineapple chow, and macaroni pie. A bowl of cow heel soup. Tall cups of passion fruit juice. The whole meal, for both men, came to a dollar. Tommy paid.

“I don’t know what any of this mess is,” Otis said, watching the plate in front of him like it might strike. “Why didn’t we go down to Bo’s place?”

Tommy found himself watching the Trinidadian woman because she reminded him of his own mother. That wiry frame and splay-footed walk. Irene Tester, gone four years now. People who knew her well used to call her Michigan because she never could stop talking about the place where her parents came from. She collapsed on a bus, died thirty-seven years old among strangers. Life as a domestic wore her out just as surely as construction did Otis. Tommy looked to his father, wondering if he’d also been thinking the Trinidadian woman looked like Irene, but the old man only stared down at the plates, mystified.

“Come on, now,” Tommy said. “There’s something here you’re going to like.”

Otis scanned the table looking for something he recognized. He lifted a fork and poked at the macaroni pie. “This is just cheese and noodles, yes?”

Tommy Tester sank a fork and knife into his serving. He brought a portion to his mouth and chewed. After swallowing, he nodded, but his father prodded at it anyway, as if he didn’t trust his son. He set the fork down without eating.

“Now, you say this white man is going to pay you how much?”

“Four hundred dollars.”

“All that just to play at his party?” Otis asked. He grabbed the cup of passion fruit juice, brought it to his nose, sniffed, set the drink back down. “All that for you to play at his party?”

Tommy chewed at a bite of the pineapple chow. It was sweet, but the kick of lime juice and hot pepper followed soon after. He gulped his juice to cool his throat.

“That’s what he said.”

Otis raised his hands in the air, held them as far apart as he could.

“That’s the distance between what a white man says to a Negro and what he really means.”

Tommy knew this, of course. Hadn’t he lived twenty years in America already? His whole hustle—entertainment—was predicated on the idea that people had ulterior motives for hiring him.

When he dressed in those frayed clothes and played at the blues man or the jazz man or even the docile Negro, he knew the role bestowed a kind of power upon him. Give people what they expect and you can take from them all that you need. They won’t realize you’ve juiced them until they’re dry. Ma Att had essentially paid him to deliver a worthless item, hadn’t she? If he had to play the role of quasi-gangster to get paid, then so be it. He played the roles needed to enrich his bank account. But all this would sound criminal to Otis. Or demeaning. The man had an outsized opinion of dignity. Nobility didn’t pay well enough to make Tommy want the job.

“I’ll be real careful, Daddy.”

Otis Tester watched his son quietly. The rest of the dining room grew louder as more tables filled, but a kind of quiet, a bubble of reserve, surrounded their table. Otis was father to a twenty-year-old black boy who’d blithely explained he’d be going out to Flatbush, in the middle of the night, into the home of a white man. He might as well have told his father he planned to go wrestle a bear.

“When I left Oklahoma City,” Otis Tester said, “I rode on the railroads. Hobo’d all the way east.”

Not the first time, nor the five-hundredth time, Tommy Tester had heard this story. Tommy ate to keep from expressing his disappointment. Hadn’t Otis heard the most vital detail? Four hundred dollars.

“I avoided crossing Arkansas,” Otis continued. “Whether you were Negro, white, or a red man they were pretty rough on hoboing in Arkansas. They had chain gangs, you know. I went to East St. Louis, over to Evansville. I got taken off the train once in Decatur. I wasn’t making a direct route here. I was real young so I had the need to see much more than my final destination.”

Finally Otis Tester ate the macaroni pie, as if storytelling had sparked his appetite. He took one bite, chewed cautiously, but after he swallowed the first, he chomped down two more.

“Like I said, they took me off the train in Decatur. And that’s when it turned out I had to use my head.” Now he took the risk of a drink. The passion fruit juice clearly pleased him. He sipped slowly, then set the drink down. “I had to use this.”

Otis Tester unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt right there in the dining room. Tommy stiffened, feeling like a five-year-old whose daddy was about to shame him in public. But before he could scold his father, or reach over and try to cover Otis’s exposed skin, the old man pulled something from around his neck. It was hanging there on a coarse string. He slipped it off and clutched it in one rough hand while he buttoned his shirt again. Tommy leaned forward trying to see what his dad held. Otis Tester extended his hand, opened it.

A straight razor lay in his palm.

“I carried this with me the whole time I rode the trains,” Otis said. “White man, Negro, or Red Indian was not going to get an easy shot at me.”

He knocked one end of the razor on the table loudly.

“In Decatur, I made some people understand this,” Otis said.

Tommy looked from the razor to his father. All his life he’d known his dad and mom as pillars that solidly, stolidly, held up the roof of Tommy’s world. Reliable, supportive, but not particularly remarkable people. To think of Otis now, suddenly, as a teenage boy who’d defended himself with this weapon . . . That past became yet another world, a new dimension, of which Tommy had just become aware. Again, the pinch, the pain, of such a revelation.

Tommy Tester took the straight razor from his father’s hand. When he did, he could see the man’s thick fingers trembling.

“You’re a grown man and I can’t stop you from making your way,” Otis said. “I wouldn’t even want to. But you don’t walk into that white man’s house unarmed or unaware. Anything goes bad, you get out, and you get back to me.”

Tommy Tester nodded but didn’t speak. He simply couldn’t right then.

“I don’t care if you’ve got to spill blood to do it, but you get out of that house at the end of the job and you get back to me.”

Otis meant to sound stern, determined, commanding, but Tommy realized he’d never before seen his father look so scared.

“You hear me?” Otis asked.

“Yes, sir,” Tommy finally said.

They ate quietly, and when the food was done, they left the Victoria Society. Down a flight of stairs and back to Harlem. In three nights Tommy would visit Robert Suydam’s mansion. He understood the journey now as travel to another universe. No wonder his father felt fear; his son was about go so far.

“Why’d you bring that razor with you tonight?” Tommy said. “I never knew you owned the thing.”

“Told me you was taking me to that damn Victoria Society,” Otis said, almost laughing. “Thought I might need the strop if those Caribbeans got wild. But I think you and me was the most dangerous Negroes in the place!”

Tommy had one arm looped through his father’s to help the old man walk. His other hand was in his slacks clutching the weapon.

“If you’re going to play at that party,” Otis Tester said as they ambled back uptown, “I’ve got one more song you should learn. It’s old, but it’s got something to it. You understand what I’m trying to tell you? The razor is one way I want to arm you. This song is the other. Your mother taught it to me. Conjure music. We’ll practice for the next three days till you’ve got it.”

“Yes, Pop,” Tommy Tester said.

Late night in Harlem on a Friday and the streets more full than at rush hour. Tommy Tester cherished the closeness, to his father and to all the bodies on the sidewalks, in their cars, riding buses, perched on stoops. The traffic and human voices merged into a terrific buzzing that seemed to lift Tommy and Otis, a song that accompanied them—carried them—all the way home.

 

 

4

Three days had passed, and this was the third night, and Tommy Tester left the safety of Harlem. He rode the same route out to Flatbush as he’d done when he met Robert Suydam, but now the journey felt more threatening because the sun was down. If he’d stood out among the train riders in the early morning, he might as well have been carrying a star in one hand rather than his guitar case now. Throughout the train car people squinted at him. At four different times white men asked him exactly where he was going. These weren’t offers to help him get there. If he didn’t have an exact location—Robert Suydam’s mansion on Martense Street—he believed he would’ve been thrown off the train. Or under it.

When he arrived at the station, he was trailed by three loud-talking young men. The loud talk concerned Tommy. Tommy tried his best not to listen to it because he knew they were trying to scare him. If he shouted back, turned to fight, that would be the end of the night, no money earned, just a trip to jail. The streets of Flatbush became less crowded, more residential, and the young men quickened their pace. Tommy wore his father’s razor around his neck like an amulet, but even that wouldn’t help against three men.

By the time Tommy reached the grove of trees surrounding Suydam’s house, the three young men were near enough that Tommy felt them at his heels. One walked so close the toes of one foot repeatedly kicked at the back of Tommy’s guitar case. Tommy saw the mansion now, two stories and dimly lit, glowing from within the trees. If he’d been alone, he would’ve found the sight frightening, but because of his escorts, Tommy ran toward it. He crossed onto Robert Suydam’s property; if he made it to the door, he might be let in before the white boys landed any blows. He didn’t understand he was running until he was out of breath.

When he looked back, the three young men no longer followed. They remained at the fence line of the property. Even stranger, they no longer watched him. Instead they watched the Suydam home. They cowered before it. Tommy finally saw that these boys were younger than him. Maybe fifteen or sixteen. Children. Studying the Suydam home with fear.

Relief played from Tommy’s eyes to his heels. Tommy crouched, looking for a stone. He found one the size of a baseball and weighed it in his palm. He set down the guitar. He wanted to hit the biggest of the three young men. They still hadn’t returned their gazes to him. It was as if the house had mesmerized them. No better moment than this to take aim. He made a wish that the rock take out one of their eyes.

Then the door of the mansion opened. Barely a squeak behind Tommy but enough to make all three boys literally hop. They bolted like kittens, wriggly and mewling. Behind Tommy there was a groan as someone stepped out the front door and onto the boards of the mansion’s wraparound porch.

“If you blind one of them, the police will be called.”

This wasn’t said sternly, almost with amusement. Tommy Tester turned to find Robert Suydam coming down the steps, one hand out. Tommy gave him the rock and Robert Suydam weighed it in his hand as Tommy had done. Rather than throwing it back into the dirt he slipped the stone into the pocket of his coat. Now he looked at Tommy expectantly. The moment lingered. Suydam waited. Tommy took a full minute to remember the word he’d been instructed to use.

“Ashmodai,” Tommy finally said quietly.

Robert Suydam nodded and turned and walked back up the porch steps. When he entered the mansion, he left the front door open for Tommy to follow.

 

 

5

The cloak of trees around the mansion did a great deal to hide its age, its infirmity, but inside there was no cover. The floorboards were old and poorly maintained; they looked splintered and parched. When Tommy entered the home, the entryway was lit by a single electric lamp, and he found the same in all three rooms on the first floor. This caused the edges of each room to lie in shadows, and it became difficult for Tommy to really understand the dimensions of each space. As if the mansion’s interior was larger than its exterior. The smell of age, meaning undifferentiated time, had settled throughout the home, a musty odor, as if the winds of the present never blew through here.

Robert Suydam led Tommy down the long first-floor hallway, and Tommy clutched the handle of his guitar case as if it were a guideline leading back to the front door, down the steps, out the yard, out of Flatbush, back onto the train, to Harlem, and by his father’s side. While they walked, the old man almost trotting, Tommy felt his guitar case jiggling as it had when the white boys had been kicking at it as they followed him. This spurred a suspicion that someone else—something else—was following him now. Twice the case almost flew out of his grip, but Tommy couldn’t make himself look back into the darkness of the long hall. Instead he only followed faster.

Suydam opened a set of double doors and entered a room so brightly lit Tommy squinted as he followed. As soon as he was inside, Suydam pushed one of the doors shut, then the other. Just before he shut the second, Suydam peeked into the hall. Tommy felt, distinctly, there’d been another presence trailing behind him. Then Suydam actually spoke—a single mumbled word, a command?—before the old man shut door and locked it.

Only then could Tommy turn to take in this room with its high ceilings. It had to be the size of the entire apartment Tommy and Otis shared. It might be larger. It had three towering walls of inset shelving, every one full of books. In addition to the books on the shelves, there were others spread across the floor, towers of tomes stacked as high as Tommy’s shoulder.

“I’ve read them all,” Suydam said. “And yet there’s still so much I must learn.”

Tommy stood the guitar case by his side like an upright rifle. “I’d say you earned yourself a break.”

Suydam shook his head faintly. “If only there were time for rest.”

Suydam walked to the far end of the room, toward the high windows running along one wall. A single great chair stood by the sill. Suydam sat in it. His feet dangled, not touching the floor. A strange sight because he wasn’t a short man. The chair didn’t appear oversized, either. The old man’s shoes swayed, three inches from the floorboards, and Tommy watched them, confused by the incongruity. Then, as if Suydam had noticed Tommy’s interest, the feet lowered to the ground. But Suydam hadn’t moved the rest of his body. Instead it was as if the old man had, by some power, made his legs grow at will. It was so odd, visually, Tommy actually became nauseated. Tommy looked away and back again and, sure enough, Suydam’s feet were flat on the floor. He waved a hand to catch Tommy’s attention.

“Won’t you play now?” he asked. There was an edge to his tone, as if trying to get Tommy’s mind onto something other than the strangeness—shape-shifting—he swore he’d just seen.

Tommy looked around the library. The only other guests seemed to be the books.

“The party is tomorrow night,” Suydam said. “But I felt like meeting with you tonight first. You didn’t think I was paying you that much money to play for one evening, did you?”

“No, sir,” Tommy said. “Whatever you like.” He opened the guitar case and took out the instrument.

He had, in fact, expected to be paid to play for one evening because that’s exactly what the man promised three days earlier. But a wealthy man’s reality is remade at will.