Maybe twenty people came to the early meetings, mostly women, led by Claudia Johnson, a three-hundred-pound black mother of nine children with a gift for talk, candor, and telling other people how to behave. But when Claudia’s words appeared in newspaper stories written by Quinn and others, Better Streets’ attendance rose — forty, fifty — which is when the ward-level politicians started their threats: Support those commies and you’re off welfare, out of a job, out of luck — and attendance plummeted. But some were immune to political threats and they were joined by uptown whites, and Protestant and Catholic clerics. The draw was Claudia — with her schemes of picketing City Hall on the garbage issue, or dumping garbage on the Mayor’s front lawn to make her point. After two months the city decided to haul a hundred truckloads of garbage and junk out of South End backyards and tear down twelve tumbledown houses.
“Hey, people,” Claudia preened, “the Mayor is listenin’!”
Feeling sassy, and with the 1967 election coming up, Claudia invited the state attorney general to come and tell Better Streets members about poll watching — how to check the voting machines, how to challenge any voter who signs the wrong name; and don’t let absentee ballots be counted till the polls close, and watch for people spying on the voters to see how they vote, or telling them how to vote. Gloria passed out mimeographed flyers on the subject. Quinn counted thirty-two attendees, including Mary Van Ort, the black seamstress and her wino husband Tremont, who never missed a meeting, and Lester Sugar, another regular, a white man whose oversize suitcoat hung on him like a poncho and who was famous for collecting four thousand bottles and cans for the Girl Scouts, and Father Matt Daugherty from Siena, and college students, and two newcomers who looked like narks.
“We’re talkin’ about poll watchin’,” Claudia said. “This gen’man don’t say it but we know we need to catch them cheaters votin’ dead people, and passin’ out five-dollar bills to buy your vote. They been stealin’ elections in this town since before this big mama was born. It’s gotta stop and we can stop ’em.”
“Whatayou mean we can stop ’em?” Tremont asked. He took off his hat and stood up. “And who is them?”
“Them is the politicians, honey. Them aldermen, them bosses, the Mayor and his scumsuckin’ gang. We gonna stop ’em from stealin’.”
“How we gonna do that?”
“We find us some volunteers who’ll go into those pollin’ places and check out who is exactly who. We see them passin’ out those fives we say, ‘Hey, mister, I seen that and it ain’t legal.’ And we call the attorney general and tell him.”
“You think they gonna do that passin’ out so’s you can see it?”
“They got to get the money to the voter, so you just keep lookin’ till you see ’em do it.”
“They prob’ly go around the corner and do it,” Tremont said.
“That’s exactly what they do,” said Lester Sugar. “I was there last year and I watched ’em go ’round the corner.”
“You watched ’em givin’ out five-dollar bills?” Tremont asked.
“I never saw the money, but I had a scrutiny on it.”
“That’s the problem,” Claudia said. “My mama used to say, ‘unless you in the bedroom standin’ over ’em with a candle, they’s no way you gonna know what they’re up to.’ This stuff might get nasty, so whoever signs up gotta be ready to stand up to those bozos. Now who’s gonna do it?”
No one responded.
“I’d sign up,” Mr. Sugar said, “but I did it last year.”
“I’d sign up,” said Mrs. Wilson, “but I broke my glasses and I can’t see what they be doin’.”
“Nobody in Better Streets ready to take a chance,” Claudia said.
After a silence Tremont said, “All right, where do I sign?”
Gloria passed a basket for donations, and cookies and soda followed.
After Quinn dropped his father at the Elks Club he headed into the South End with Matt Daugherty, destination Dongan Avenue, where Tremont Van Ort was lying ill on the stoop of the old three-story brick town house that had been his family home for thirty years. Quinn walked Dongan Avenue as a boy and had forgotten it until he began to write about Better Streets. Before Dongan Avenue became a street it was part of the Pastures, where the Dutch colonists grazed their livestock. Dutch, and then English homes rose on the Pastures greenery and so began the seething American panorama of occupation — swarms of Germans and Irish replacing the Dutch and English; and then Jews, Italians, and now southern blacks — who had The Gut largely to themselves these days — all replacing one another with serial hostility.
Quinn came to know The Gut with his father when its streets throbbed all day with commerce and all night with sin. George Quinn worked daylight hours out of a second-floor flat in an 1830s wooden house between Dongan and Green Street, the office of Joe Marcello, a numbers-game banker. The game was Policy, which Marcello called “nigger numbers” after the black Caribbean gamblers who brought it to America. White and pale pink Policy slips were published twice a day, six days a week, with twelve winning numbers. You could bet on combinations of numbers from 1 to 78, the odds ranging from 5-to-1 to 400-to-1. You could bet on a “flat” (two numbers) at 30-to-1 or a “gig” (three numbers) at 200-to-1 or a “horse” (four numbers) at 400-to-1.
George Quinn walked The Gut door-to-door, picking up the play, paying off winners; and when there was no school, Daniel made the rounds with him — the Turk’s grocery store, with a one-arm bandit on the counter, the Double-Dutch Tavern where girls worked the bar day and night, the soap factory, the Albany Water Works, Big Jimmy’s nightclub, the old Times Union where the journalism bug bit Daniel.
“Any candy for me?” George asked his customers, and they’d give him their numbers. If they couldn’t read or write, George would write their play and their bet on a notepad, take their nickel, quarter, dollar, and put the notepad in his shirt pocket, the money in his coat. When the weight started ruining the coat’s shape George would go to a grocery or a bar and change his coins for bills. Quinn helped count coins and could keep leftover pennies for candy, or the penny punchboard. He played the punchboard once and won fifty cents. Eight years old and already rich.
Now, thirty-two years later, Quinn, at the wheel of his ’59 Mercedes 220S, with Matt Daugherty beside him, moved through the streets of the old Gut, houses crumbling and boarded up, pavements pocked with potholes, sidewalks buckled, no people, only the heavy, black dust of a slum in its terminal stage. He drove down South Pearl to Herkimer, this the old Jewish neighborhood and this the street where Isaac Mayer Wise founded Reform Jewry with a fistfight in the old Bethel synagogue, still there, also the street where Claudia lived. He crossed Green and went on to Dongan Avenue, passed St. John’s, the oldest Catholic church in town, built by the Irish, and where Father Peter Young was now helping drunks dry out and get back in the game. Dongan, right there, was where Big Jimmy ran his nightclub, and three blocks south would be where Tremont was lying on his father’s old stoop.
“You said you came here as a kid,” Quinn said to Matt.
“I was seventeen,” Matt said. “Before the war, bar hopping, tryin’ to kick the habit.”
“Coke?”
“Pussy. Didn’t fit with the seminary. I figured I’d give it the big ride and then kiss it good-bye.”
“Did you?”
“I gave it the ride.”
“And kissed it good-bye?”
“Eventually.”
“Understood. You remember Big Jimmy’s club? That’s his old building.”
“I remember his name but I was never in the club.”