“Mama say Uncle Pone need two.”
The nun slipped a black hand into the folds of her gown, drew out two white cards, and gave them to the little girl. Printed on the cards were the words:
“These’ll take Uncle Pone to the bosom of the Lawd,” she promised. “ ‘And I saw heaven opened, and beheld a white horse.’ ”
“Amen,” the little girl said, and ran off with the two tickets to heaven.
“Shame on you, Goldy. Blaspheming the Lord like that,” Jackson whispered. “The police are going to get you for selling those tickets.”
“Ain’t no law against it,” Goldy whispered in reply. “They just say ‘Admit One.’ They don’t say to where. Might be to the Savoy Ballroom.”
“There’s a law against impersonating a female,” Jackson said disgustedly.
“You let the police take care of the law, Bruzz.”
A couple approached to enter the store. Goldy rattled his coin box.
“Give to the Lawd, give to the poor,” he begged prayerfully.
The woman stopped and dropped three pennies into the box.
Goldy’s saintly smile went sour.
“Bless you, Mother, bless you. If three little pennies is all the Lawd is worth to you, then bless you.”
The woman’s dark brown skin turned purple. She dug up a dime.
“Bless you, Mother. Praise be the Lawd,” Goldy whispered indifferently.
The woman went inside the store, but she could feel the eyes of the Lord pinned on her and the angels in heaven whispering among themselves, “What a cheapskate!” She was too ashamed to buy the dress she’d come for and she was unhappy all the rest of the day.
“I got to see you, Goldy,” Jackson said, looking at the nylons in the window.
Two teen-age girls were passing at the time and heard him. They had no idea he was speaking to the Sister of Mercy and there was no one else nearby. They began giggling.
“A stockin’ freak,” one said.
The other replied, “He calls them Goldy, too.”
Goldy brushed imaginary dust from his lap, took another look at Jackson’s face, then stood up slowly, moving like an elderly woman, and folded the campstool.
“Stay in back of me,” he whispered. “ ’Way back.”
He put the stool under one arm, jangled the coin box in the other hand, and trudged down the slushy sidewalk toward Seventh Avenue, blessing the colored folk who fed coins into the kitty. He looked like a tired, fat, saintly black woman, slaving in the service of the Lord.
He was a familiar sight. No one gave him a second look.
Seventh Avenue and 125th Street is the center of Harlem, the crossroads of Black America. On one corner was the largest hotel. Diagonally across from it was a big credit jewelry store with its windows filled with diamonds and watches selling for so much down and so much weekly. Next door was a book store with a big red-and-yellow sign reading: Books of 6,000,00 °Colored People. On the other corner was a mission church.
The people of Harlem take their religion seriously. If Goldy had taken off in a flaming chariot and galloped straight to heaven, they would have believed it — the godly and the sinners alike.
Goldy turned south on Seventh Avenue, past the Theresa Hotel entrance, past Sugar Ray’s Tavern, past the barber shop where the sharp cats got their nappy kinks straightened with a mixture of Vaseline and potash lye. He turned east on 121st Street into the Valley, climbed over piles of frozen garbage, kicked a mangy cur in the ribs, and entered a grimy tobacco-store which fronted for a numbers drop and reefer shop. Three teen-age boys had a fifteen-year-old girl inside, all blowing gage. They were trying to get her to undress.
“Go ahead, take ’em off, baby, take ’em off.”
“Ain’t nobody comin’. Go ahead and strip.”
“Why don’t you punks leave the girl alone,” the proprietor said half-heartedly. “You can see she’s ’shamed of her shape.”
“I ain’t ’shamed, neither,” she said. “I got a good shape and I know it.”
“Course you have,” the proprietor said, winking at her lecherously.
He was a tall, dirty-looking yellow man with a lumpy pockmarked face and swimming red eyes.
“Bless the Lawd, Soldier,” Goldy greeted him on entering. “Bless the Lawd, children.” He gave the teen-agers a confidential look and quoted, “ ‘By these three was the third part of men killed, by the fire and by the smoke and by the brimstone which issued out of their mouths.’ ”
“Amen, Sister,” the owner said, winking at Goldy.
The girl snickered. The boys fidgeted indecisively and shut up for a moment.
No one who noticed it thought it strange for a Sister of Mercy to kick a cur dog in the ribs, enter a dope den, and quote enigmatic Scripture to reefer-smoking delinquents.
In silence, Goldy waited for Jackson to catch up, then took him through the rear door, down a damp dark hallway, stinking of many varieties of excrement, and opened a padlocked door. He switched on a dim, fly-specked drop-lamp, slipped warily into a damp, cold, windowless room furnished with a scarred wooden table, two wobbly straight-backed chairs, a couch covered with dirty gray blankets. Against one wall, mildewed cardboard cartons were stacked one atop the other. The other dark-gray concrete walls sweated from the chill, damp air.
After Jackson had entered, Goldy padlocked the door on the inside and lit a rusty black kerosene stove which smoked and stank. He then threw the stool onto the couch, put his money box on the table, and sat down with a long sigh. He took off his white bonnet and gray wig.
Seen without his disguise, he was the spitting image of Jackson. White people in the South, where they had come from, had called them the Gold Dust Twins because of their resemblance to the twins pictured on the yellow boxes of God Dust soap powder.
“I don’t live here,” Goldy said. “This is just my office.”
“I don’t see how nobody could,” Jackson said as he eased his weight onto one of the wobbly chairs.
“There’s people lives in worse places,” Goldy said.
Jackson wouldn’t argue the point. “Goldy, there’s something I want to ask you.”
“I got to feed my monkey first.”
Jackson looked about for the monkey.
“He’s on my back,” Goldy explained.
Jackson watched him with silent disgust as Goldy took an alcohol lamp, teaspoon and a hypodermic needle from the table drawer. Goldy shook two small papers of crystal cocaine and morphine into the spoon and cooked a C and M speedball over the flame. He groaned as he banged himself in the arm while the mixture was still warm.
“It’s the same stuff as Saint John the Divine used,” Goldy said. “Did you know that, Bruzz? You’re a churchgoing man.”
Jackson was glad none of his acquaintances knew he had such a brother as Goldy, a dope-fiend crook impersonating a Sister of Mercy. Especially Imabelle. That’d be reason enough for her to quit him.
“I ain’t never going to own you as my brother,” he said.
“Well, Bruzz, that goes for me too. Now what’s on your mind?”
“What I wanted to ask is do you know a colored United States Marshal here in Harlem? He’s a tall, slim colored man, and he’s crooked too.”
Goldy’s ears perked up. “A colored U.S. marshal? And crooked? What you mean by crooked?”
“He’s always trying to get bribes out of people.”
Goldy smiled evilly. “What’s the matter, Bruzz? You get shook down by some colored marshal?”
“Well, it was like this. I was having some money raised—”
“Raised?” Goldy’s eyes popped.
“I was having ten-dollar bills raised into hundred-dollar bills.”
“How much?”
“To tell the truth, all I had in the world. Fifteen hundred dollars.”