There is one point is wrong, however, I want to point it out It is the Harlem in Havana Show which is here again. Who is pretending there is anything to Havana, Cuba anymore than Castro’s Communism?
It is the same thing when we let Negro mammies be the raiser of our white babies while we are at a cocktail party not knowing what is being whispered in the infant’s ear.
Thus Harlem in Havana is here, girls of mulatto breed undressing themselves to the eyes and to the tune of rock and roll and other Negroid music. They are a mockery and a accusation on the white race that they have bred with a black woman. That is what the Liberal Press loves. To point out hypocrisy.
Let us boycott Harlem in Havana and close it down as a loss to Royal American. Tell them to carry it back home to the millionaire of the North that is having a “ball” seeing us pay money for an idea that deep in our hearts we hate. I myself will be enjoying the Fair, but Friday night, the night it is well known the high yellow girl stands all the way nude, I wonder if you readers knew this has been going on, some people pay two dollars to see this? But I am one who will be looking in the face of the people who go in and come out of it. I wonder what those peoples faces are going to look like? Can they look me in the face?
Gillis Lock
Pearl, Miss.
“Like a sophomore in Whitfield Peter’s Academy of Letters,” I told Fleece. “Do you remember this son of a bitch? He was at Hedermansever shortly. The one who was beating my time with Catherine, you know.”
“Yes, I know, but I don’t know who he is. I’il tell you one thing. Peter has talked to his boy. You know he has. Is he right?”
“What?”
“Does the girl take off all her clothes?”
“Yes, she does. She was doing it years ago in the same show at Dream of Pines. My first glimpse of a real nude, in fact”
“Let’s go. I need the fun.”
I thought I might see Catherine with Lock, if he was standing where he said he would be. And really, I wanted to leave the house without my gun, but once on with the old reptilian coat, looking at my bare shaved face in the mirror, I was back with Geronimo again, and when I reached in the drawer for the pistol, the scarf was lying right by it, and I tied it on. I felt silly, but at home and warm too. When Fleece saw me, he said, “You got the pistol too, don’t you?” I nodded.
“That’s perfectly all right with me,” he said.
The sand gullies behind Mother Rooney’s were full of ledges under the kudzu vines, and you could feel for them and climb down as if on a ladder with every fourth rung in-tact, and even if you missed the place to put your foot you would land in a soft obliging mass of kudzu which would drag you to the next ledge with no harm. You just had to forget the idea that there were snakes sleeping underneath, grip on to what you could, and actually it was easy, landing, hanging on the vines and putting down foot softly as the vines broke. Fleece was above me, inching down. When I was at the bottom, I looked up and saw him forty feet up, missing every foothold and stripping off leaves and falling, all of a sudden, with the benevolent vines he held on to, and smacking back first on the ground beside me. It could have been worse. I looked up the mean hundred-foot drop of the cliff. But he didn’t land that easy, either, with his arms full of vines and leaves like some aeronaut who had bailed out of a flying watermelon. He lay horrified a moment, then found his glasses.
“We got in free,” I consoled him.
“Lead on. I’m all right.”
We talked through the shadows of the truck trailers. Walked over the flattened dusty grass, made it to the saw-dust. The Fair was just an expanded version of the Royal American in Dream of Pines years ago. Now they had the Astro-this and Astro-that, and the World War Two Atroci-ties show was no longer around, but Stalin’s Rolls Royce was, and the barkers, hating everybody, on the microphones with Yankee accents made of tin and cinders. Puerto Rican hoods stared at you like they would kill you if you passed by their skill-booth and would cheat your fanny off if you did stop. The air was cool, you could smell the Pronto Pups — wieners in batter — frying, and the sawdust by its nature gave you a soft falling and rising sense under your feet, tempting you to walk on air. I fell down.
“What was that? Get up!” said Fleece.
I brushed the sawdust off, and we walked on toward the midnight show of “Harlem in Havana.” It was down at the end of the fairgrounds beside the giant ferris wheel, as usual, and the crowd got thicker and thicker. I saw they still had the freak shows, with the big flapping cartoon murals of what you might find inside. I was a little surprised. I thought the freaks wouldn’t have made it this long as an attraction. I thought some law might have been passed. But then I realized that for the real freaks there can never be any laws. You cannot prevent the man who swallows snakes, you cannot deny employment to the world’s tiniest cow, you can make no law either for or against the lady with hairs growing on her gums, and the same goes for the limbless soprano and the Siamese twins, who are engaged to be married, one wearing a diamond ring on its finger. You can’t, any more than pass a law for or against death. Especially not when the people who pay to see them — I remember all the creeps at Heder man sever who loved the freak show and saw nothing else — come away feeling like crowned wonders in comparison.
The band on the balcony of “Harlem in Havana” was careless and shrill, playing the Beatles’ “I Want To Hold Your Hand” while three girls in wraps and brassy sandal highheels shuffled in unison on the stage below, to warm up the crowd for the midnight show. The crowd below the stage was so thick I couldn’t see anybody in particular. When the barker announced that tickets were now on sale, you had to move with the mass, up the steps toward the ticket counter. A quiet mob, is what Fleece and I were in. Buying my ticket, I saw a face close to the right edge of the stage. This was Lock. It was the man who had been run over by the float last Christmas. I had thought that was probably who Lock was. I searched the space around him for Catherine as I walked on the stage into the show. Lock pushed back from the stage and took me in. We were six feet apart All I saw was his head and his hands on the edge of the stage.
“I know who you are!” he yelled.
“Where’s your sweetheart?” I yelled back. Then Fleece pressed me from behind; people were waiting behind him.
“That was Lock. I have seen him before,” he said.
We sat down next to a man and his wife, a young married couple. The wife was complaining about the seats, which were simply planks bolted to supports, sawdust underneath. It was the same long tent, maybe bigger, of the Harlem in Havana show back in Dream of Pines. The lights went down, the spotlight centered on the meeting of the curtains, and a master of ceremonies, who was white, darted out of the curtain, took the mike, and straightaway told the filthiest joke I’ve ever heard. ‘There was a girl from Seattle/ Who loved to fellatio cattle” and worse. The wife next to us stood up and pulled her husband along, and they found their way out.
Then there appeared a line of yellow girls in these sort of tinsel bathing suits. They danced well and seemed to know about the extra price of the tickets. You could see their navels jump out from under the tinsel. They were so smooth as a group, it was impossible to pick out the one who aroused you the most. The band was also good, playing on a stand to the right of the stage — a big deep band of some twenty Negroes. When the girls left the stage, the spot raced to one side and planted on this man standing up, taking the solo on trumpet.
“He’s good, isn’t he?” asked Fleece.