He had grown up in Central Scovill, the Bucket of Blood his backyard. Actually, he'd been born in a small South Carolina hamlet, but had no memories of it; his father and mother had moved north shortly after his birth. His parents had worked as domestics, in the South, and in Cleveland, Papa had got work as a waiter at a chi-chi hotel called Wade Park Manor, while mama worked as a housekeeper-cook for a wealthy white family in Shaker Heights. Both were God-fearing folks and had a Booker T. Washington advance-through-hard-work way of looking at things.
Young Toussaint had learned to read in his own home-a cramped one-room apartment in Central Scovill, at first, and later the top half of a frame duplex-and his primers had been everything from the Bible to W.E.B. Du Bois. He'd attended predominantly black Central High School and got high marks.
But Toussaint Johnson had never completely been able to buy into the Booker T. Washington philosophy. It sounded good on paper, but he saw too many folks of his race struggling and getting nowhere, his parents among them. What finally turned things around for Papa and Mama was when Papa won ten bucks in a dice game in the basement at the hotel, played it on 714 on the "money row" and hit for five thousand dollars.
Papa and Mama had then opened a little restaurant called Pappy's on Scovill and did very well after that-until Papa got robbed and killed in the restaurant, late one night just before closing.
Mama died the year after that. They called it a heart attack, but Toussaint knew that nothing had attacked her heart: It was flat-out broke in two.
What Toussaint Johnson had learned from all this was that life was a matter of luck, good and bad. But this was something he knew in his head; in his soul somewhere his mama had instilled enough of that Booker T. Washington work ethic that he kept trying hard, trying to get ahead, and his father's killing had given him a goaclass="underline" He wanted to be a cop. He had seen the white cops dismiss his papa's murder as just another "shine" killing. And he saw that there was a need for good Negro cops in this bad Negro district.
The best place to get trained for that, he figured, was the army, and there was a war on, so he enlisted in Company D of the Ninth Battalion of the 372nd Regiment, Cleveland's all-Negro militia unit. He left his younger brother Edward to take the restaurant over, and soon found himself in France in combat.
Even in the army, even in a black company, the white man's influence prevailed. Their Negro commanding officers, Major John A. Fulton and Captain William Green, fine leaders, were relieved of duty and discharged as "physically unfit" before the company was sent overseas. Maybe if they'd been left in charge, Johnson often thought, Company D wouldn't have lost so many men. Johnson, like the other Company D survivors of the Argorrne, came home wounded, and a recipient of France's highest military medal, the Croix de Guerre.
One of Johnson's fellow Company D survivors was Eustice N. Raney, who'd been a few years ahead of Toussaint at Central High. While they weren't close friends, Johnson and Raney liked and respected each other. They had both basked in the glow of the heroes' reception Company D received, including a parade in downtown Cleveland. Raney, however, had gone on to law school, while Johnson had found himself in deep shit.
Toussaint's brother Edward had lost the restaurant in a dice game. Edward had sold the family house and headed out for parts unknown. Toussaint never saw his brother again.
This left the Company D veteran-like so many others- without a job and with few prospects for one. Within weeks his sense of being a survivor, of being a hero and on top of the world, had faded back into the reality of being a young Negro hi an old, white world. He applied to the police department but was turned down. He kept re-applying with the same result, while working a variety of day labor jobs and, for half a year, shoveling coal at Republic Steel.
About the only good thing that happened in those days was meeting Maybelle, a waitress at Pappy's, which Toussaint had continued to frequent. She was a beautiful chocolate-brown talkative girl with a generous figure and a good sense of humor that even getting pregnant couldn't faze, particularly since Toussaint was amenable to marrying her.
By 1922 Johnson's Company D compatriot Eustice Raney was making a name for himself in the colored community; he had graduated law school and with the help of Negro businessmen and politicians got himself appointed the city's first black police prosecutor. Raney's backers included the east side policy kings, and he helped Toussaint Johnson and half a dozen other Company D vets get jobs with Rufus Murphy and others.
Johnson became a bouncer for a Murphy associate, Gus "Bunch Boy" Smith, at his gambling den on the second story of a house on Central Avenue. It was Johnson's job to collect the guns and shivs off players before they were allowed in, and to watch for police raids, pressing a loose nail in the door frame to blink the lights.
During this same period, Toussaint never stopped applying to the police department. He saw no irony in his situation, as certain rackets on the east side-the numbers in particular, gambling in general-seemed only technically illegal to him. He wanted on the force to nail evil bastards like the robber that killed his papa, like the con men that stole old people's money with words, like the muggers and purse-snatchers and other thieves who preyed on the innocent.
One day in 1927, Prosecutor Raney asked Toussaint to drop by his office at the Criminal Courts Building.
Raney, a stocky, pleasant-featured light-skinned Negro with sharp, dark eyes, had sat behind a big mahogany desk with his hands folded like a preacher. His smile was gentle and a touch self-satisfied as he said, "They tell me you apply to the police department about three times a week."
"They exaggerating," Johnson said. "Some."
"I want representatives of our race on the department. There are people in city government who agree with me. White people. And a hell of a lot of Negroes on the east side feel that way. We need Negro cops. You're going to be one of them."
"Good."
"You have a fine war record, and a high school education. Good grades, too. Why didn't you go to college, Toussaint?"
"Money."
"What about your family's restaurant?"
"Lost it."
"Oh. Well, your latest application is going to be approved. Needless to say, your affiliation with Mr. Rufus Murphy will come in handy."
"I ain't gonna roust Murphy…"
"You might on occasion, for appearance sake." Raney smiled slyly. "No, Toussaint, Mr. Murphy is a friend of mine and a campaign contributor. You'll still be working for him, in capacities that you and he will determine. This is the last you and I will speak of it, because there might be, in the eyes of some, a certain… conflict of interests."
"You won't take the fall," Johnson assured him, "if it comes to that. I'm willing to take the job and what comes with it."
"Good!" Raney stood behind the desk and smiled and the two men shook hands. In two days Johnson's application was officially accepted.
The years that followed had been rewarding ones, in just about every sense. With his cop's pay and certain compensations from Rufus Murphy, Johnson was able to move his wife and two kids to the white-frame house on Hough. And he had racked up an arrest and conviction record second to nobody in the crime-ridden Roaring Third. Commendations overflowed in his file.
The gravy train had slowed, though, when the policy kings got overthrown by those tally bastards from Murray Hill. Added to that was the pain and sorrow of losing Rufus Murphy, of having this second father shot right out from under his file-folder-full-of-commendations ass.