We must have collected some two hundred histories during this period, really driving ourselves, but thus far the research was skewed by the fact that the majority of our histories were predominantly upper-level — that is, from college students and professionals. We’d begun to branch out, as I’ve mentioned, and we did make trips to collect histories among the denizens of the homosexual underground in Indianapolis and Chicago, as well as at least one prison and the state work farm where Prok had made so many of his most valuable contacts — and one contact invariably gave rise to another, and another, ad infinitum, so that now we were determined to pursue as many of these lower-level histories as we could. What we lacked above all were black histories, and so we decided to mount a second expedition to Gary, Indiana, and the aforementioned Negro neighborhood there.
We left Bloomington on a drizzly Saturday morning in mid-April (we were still working around Prok’s teaching schedule then — though the marriage course was dead, he was nonetheless committed to his biology classes, one of which met at eight o’clock on Saturday mornings, a cruel hour for any undergraduate to have to bend over a dissecting pan or distinguish between mono- and dicotyledons). We drove straight through, going as fast as the roads, the Nash and the state police would abide, arriving just after dark. We had an indifferent meal at a poorly lit diner, and sat there over coffee and pie as the drizzle solidified into a gray intermittent rain that wasn’t going to make our work — outdoor work, on the streets — any easier. Prok looked grim. He kept checking his watch, as if that could somehow stop the rain and accelerate the coming of the hour at which we were to meet our contact. He had good reason to be anxious. Our first expedition to Gary, in the deep-freeze of February, had been a failure. We’d spent endless hours circling one block after another, peering hopefully through the windshield any time a figure appeared on the deserted streets, but Prok’s contact failed to show up, and we didn’t get a single history. Neither of us mentioned it now. We just finished our coffee, shrugged into our rain gear and climbed back into the car, heading six blocks south, into the Negro neighborhood.
Prok parked on a side street around the corner from a bar called Shorty’s Paradise, in a neighborhood of modest storefronts (HAIR-DRESSER, SANDWICHES MADE TO ORDER, BUTCHER SHOP) with walkup apartments above them and the smokestacks of the factories looming up in the near distance like the battlements of a degraded castle. The street was littered with sodden newspaper, bottles, discarded food wrappers. Rain streaked the windshield and painted a sheen of reflected light on the pavement. There was no sign of life. We got out of the car and the doors slammed behind us like a cannonade.
My first surprise came when we turned the corner — the street outside Shorty’s Paradise was thronged with people despite the rain, a whole mob spilling from the open door of the saloon and fanning out in both directions under the tattered awning. But these were black people, exclusively black, and I have to confess that I’d never to this point had much contact with Negroes, aside from the occasional pleasantry—“Nice day, isn’t it?”—I exchanged with the odd maid or cook who came into the market where I’d worked summers. There was music drifting out the open door, a gaggle of voices, the smell of tobacco, marijuana, alcohol. I didn’t know what to do. I hesitated.
But Prok. Prok was the second surprise. Though he detested bars, cigarettes and, especially, what he termed the “jungle beat” of popular music, he strode right past the crowd and though the front door as if he’d been going there every Saturday night of his life. He was dressed, as always, in his dark suit, white shirt and bow tie, over which he’d casually slung a yellow rain slicker that seemed always to hitch up in back as if it had been sewn together from two mismatching bolts of oilcloth. I was dressed in a dark suit and tie as well, though my overcoat — a thing my grandmother had picked out for me — was gray with black flecks and hung to my ankles. I could feel the hair prickling under the band of my hat, ready to spring loose the minute I stepped inside. I ducked my head and followed Prok through the door.
A long, trailing mahogany-topped bar dominated the place, and it was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with chattering people, all of whom glanced up as we stepped through the door, then turned away as if they hadn’t seen us at all. The jukebox was playing “Minnie the Moocher” at a dynamic volume and everyone in the place seemed to be shouting to be heard above it. Prok went straight to the bar, elbowed his way in and immediately started up a conversation with a towering man in an electric-blue double-breasted suit. And this was the third thing, the oddest of alclass="underline" Prok began to speak in dialect. I was stunned. As you may know, Prok was a real stickler for standard English, and he wasn’t at all shy about correcting grammatical mistakes — he could be brutally sarcastic about it too — but here he was, switching to the vernacular like a ventriloquist. The conversation went something like this:
“Evenin’, friend,” Prok said, fastening on the man with the blue talons of his eyes. “I’m lookin’ for Rufus Morganfeld. You know him?”
The man in the electric-blue suit took his time, regarding Prok from eyes drawn down to slits. He had a cigarette in one hand, a not-quite-empty glass in the other. “You the law?”
“Uh-uh.”
“What then? Sellin’ Bibles?”
“Who I am is Doctor Alfred C. Kinsey, Professor of Zoology at Indiana University, and Rufus — brother Rufus — say he gone meet me here.”
“That’s somethin’,” the man said softly. “Doctor, huh? What, you come to cure my hemorrhoids?”
Prok’s face never changed. No one laughed. “You wouldn’t be needin’ a cocktail there by any chance, would you?” he asked.
There was a long interval, Prok remaining absolutely motionless, his eyes never wavering, and then the man in the blue suit let a smile creep out of the furrows at the corners of his mouth. “Crown Royal and soda,” he said.
The drink was ordered, the drink came, the drink was handed over. By this time Prok was deep in conversation with the man in the blue suit and a group of four or five others who were nearest him at the bar, and Rufus Morganfeld himself — our contact, who had been down at the other end of the bar to this point, waiting to see how things sorted out — came up and introduced himself. Prok greeted him warmly, and I thought he was going to offer Rufus a drink as well, but instead he shook hands all around, took Rufus in one arm and me in the other and shepherded us out into the street. Immediately Prok went back to being Prok, as there was no need to coddle Rufus, whom he’d met at the work farm, whose history he’d recorded and who was being paid fifty cents for every history he helped us collect among the prostitutes who worked the neighborhood. (I should say that Prok was intensely interested in prostitutes, at least in the beginning, because their experience was so much wider than most — this was before we actually got to observe them at work — but ultimately, they weren’t as useful as you might imagine in regard to the physiology of various sex acts because of their propensity to counterfeit response.)