He wore a clean, wrinkled shirt with long sleeves and without a collar. It was buttoned at the neck as though the night were cool, whereas it had grown sultry during the day, and occasional thunder scraped across the low clouds that had sealed the city in during the late afternoon. I could not see the clouds, but caught occasional flares of lightning on the edge of my vision against the eyeholes of the mask.
I introduced Adam to the company, and I insisted upon clasping him by the hand. His was as hard and scuffed as lumber. His broad nose and grim mouth, his red-rimmed eyes, which put me in mind of M, and his bulky shoulders and thick thighs made him formidable as, particularly when we entered the Loin, a companion and an escort and something of a guard. He was dressed in cast-off trousers too short for his long legs, and a pair of cracked high shoes that looked uncomfortable as he walked, and yet he commanded respect, I thought; he looked as though he owned the stones on which he trod.
“You have the money I sent.”
He nodded. I regarded him, and he me, and finally he said, “Thank you.”
“You’ll earn it. You understand the errand?”
“Show these gentlemen the sights.”
“No, sir. This is not a gentlemen’s tour of darkest New York. I meant no humor. I want them to understand what it is to be poor and Negro and to struggle for a life in the city. I do not mean to entertain them.”
I heard him expel a breath and then I saw him smile. “I can do that.”
“And you will?”
“If that’s what you want.”
“No. You must want to as well — or at least be willing to.”
“I am, Mist Bartelmy.” M’s head turned as Adam said this last. “I said it: You ax. That’s what you did, and here I am. No money needed, tell you the truth.”
“Thank you, Adam. It should be a transaction, however. One man pays, the other man receives. Done, then?”
He nodded.
I said, “We ought to begin, gentlemen. Westward, then, and down a few streets. I am armed.”
Sam held up his notebook, as if it would defend us all.
M said, “I am beyond harming. I need no defense, thank you.”
Adam opened his mouth, then closed it, and we wheeled to cross the avenue. “Go ahead,” I told him. “Speak if you have words to tell us.”
“Sir,” he said, “isn’t anyone past being harmed. And in the Loin, be thinking of the lion’s den. People there, all kinds of colors, they would eat you up and swallow you down.”
Sam stood to open his notebook and then catch up.
“You correct me truly, shipmate. It was wishfulness you heard, and sorrow for the self. May we all take care.” Nevertheless, he trod on the toes of his boots and then lifted himself into the air to click his feet together and then, with equal grace, walk on.
“This gentleman’s a minstrel,” Adam said.
Sam made a sound of low pleasure, and he scribbled as he walked.
We entered the gaming house, set behind Seventh Avenue, through an alley off the street. It was narrow, and the bricks of the walls felt moist. Iron fire steps hung halfway down the wall to our left and then stopped: You would have to drop thirty feet, fleeing a fire, and then drive your broken anklebones up and into your shins. The light there was whatever fell from the dark sky or filtered through from the street. Adam opened a low door, perhaps five feet high, and we followed him in. Another door, of normal height, was opposite, in a gaslit vestibule. From outside came a sound as of grunting and then squealing and then a kind of high roar.
I heard M exclaim, and then I heard the squeal. Adam passed me as he returned to the alley, and soon enough he returned to say, “One of those pigs.”
“It was a giant hog,” M said. “Long and high and vicious.”
I had seen them from time to time. Sam, evidently, had not. “Is this a farming district?” he asked Adam.
“No, sir. They eat the refuse behind the houses. They clean the streets.”
“Then soil them, I take it,” Sam said.
“Nobody thought of that when it started. Now they can’t stop ’em, sir.”
“Shipmate, you have just heard the story of how nature won’t be tampered with or tamed. Great pigs roaming the streets like mako sharks in the sea.”
“Like … whales,” Sam ventured.
No one replied, and we entered the room. It was very long and brilliantly lighted and hot, from the massed bodies at the tables and the bar. Not all the girls were Negro, nor were all the customers white, but it was easy to see that a large measure of appeal was the color of the women’s skin; some, like Adam, were dark and they gleamed, while some were almost the color of Jessie — without the lemony glow that colored her, it seemed to me, from within — and others were tan, and even white with a bridge of freckles, often, that shaded the cheeks and the nose. Every one of them was escorted, or embraced, or fondled intimately by a man whose skin and manner were obviously white: They made it clear that they owned, or had recently hired, the darker women whose pleasure it must be to give them pleasure. A very fat and sweating black woman played the piano; at that moment, she gave an expert rendition, I thought, of “When You and I Were Young, Maggie.”
I smelled flesh and whiskey and cooked meats, the tallow of candles, hundreds of which bolstered the gas lamps above the huge circular bar. White men with large mustaches served at the bar, peering past its carved decorative lions and gryphons and bunches of grapes. The bar was of a very white marble, as was its rail, as were the decorations in the front of the bar. It was not possible to speak and be easily heard, so we stood in silence. We were not the only group of observers — each onlooker was white, I thought — beneath that vaulted, carved ceiling with its massed, glass-globed lights. Smoke hung between the lights and us, and it eddied and swayed as doors in the walls opened and closed.
Sometimes waiters — again, white men — entered, bearing circular trays of food, or bottles of wine or whiskey. Sometimes one of several black men in excellent suits entered or departed. I could tell that they were armed because their suits were fitted close to the body, and their pistols made a bulge. Once, a door across the room, past the gaming tables at which black men dealt to the gamblers white and black, opened out. One of the armed men came forward, followed by a child. He stopped for her to catch up with him once the door had closed. She took his arm with the gravity of an adult, and they made their way in our direction. She was perhaps eleven or twelve, I thought, with skin the color of new saddle leather. She wore kohl or some dark substance about her eyes, which were wide and striking. She wore rouge upon her lips. Her hair, very long and curly, was done up in a chignon held in place by ivory combs. What breasts she had were displayed in the gown cut square and low at the bosom and which went almost to the floor. Her escort wore a half smile, as if he enjoyed conveying such a striking attraction as this child.
When they passed near to us, in the fug of smoke and skin, in the loud chatter and the tinkle of piano keys, I made my way closer to M and said, “Watch this now.”
He had been watching her, I saw. Who would not?
The escort halted behind a man at the farthest table, where only two men gambled, apparently against one another. No one dealt them hands; it was a matter of direct competition, the earnings of which would be shaved for a payment to the house. A broad-backed fellow in a dove-colored suit turned as his shoulder was tapped. His face was pale and rectangular, expressionless. He had no hair on his head and none I could see on his face. He gleamed in the smoke-cloaked lighting of the room.