Cotton Comes to Harlem Read Online Free PDF Page A

be ashamed of yourself tryna trick me out my money with what you calls a bale of cotton. Does I look like that kinda fool?”
    “No, ma’am, but if you was a Christian you wouldn’t carry on like that just ’cause an old man asked you to help him lift a bale of cotton.”
    “I is a Christian, you wicked bastard,” she shouted. “That’s why all you wicked bastards is tryna steal my money. But I ain’t the kind of Christian fool enough not to know there ain’t no bales of cotton lying in the street in New York City. If it weren’t for my hair, I’d beat your ass, you old con-man.”
    It had been a rough night for the old junk man. First he and a crony had found a half-filled whisky bottle with what they thought was whisky and had sat on a stoop to enjoy themselves, passing the bottle back and forth, when suddenly his crony had said, “Man, dis ain’t whisky; dis is piss.” Then after he’d spent his last money for a bottle of “smoke” to settle his stomach, it had started to rain. And here was this evil bitch calling him a con-man, as broke as he was.
    “You touch me and I’ll mark you,” he threatened, reaching in his pocket.
    She backed away from him and he turned his back to her, muttering to himself. He didn’t see her wet red buttocks above hershining black legs when she hurried down the street and disappeared into a tenement.
    Four minutes later, when the first of the police cruisers sent to bottle up the street screamed around the corner from Lexington Avenue, he was still struggling with the bale of cotton in the rain.
    The cruiser stopped for the white cops to put the routine question to a colored man: “Say, uncle, you didn’t see any suspicious-looking person pass this way, did you?”
    “Nawsuh, just an evil lady mad ’cause her hair got wet.”
    The driver grinned, but the cop beside him looked at the bale of cotton curiously and asked, “What you got there, uncle, a corpse bundled up?”
    “Cotton, suh.”
    Both cops straightened up and the driver leaned over to look at it too.
    “
Cotton?
”
    “Yassuh, this is cotton — a bale of cotton.”
    “Where the hell did you get a bale of cotton in this city?”
    “I found it, suh.”
    “Found it? What the hell kind of double-talk is that? Found it where?”
    “Right here, suh.”
    “Right here?” the cop repeated incredulously. Slowly and deliberately he got out of the car. His attitude was threatening. He looked closely at the bale of cotton. He bent over and felt the cotton poking through the seams of the burlap wrapping. “By God, it
is
cotton,” he said straightening up. “A bale of cotton! What the hell’s a bale of cotton doing here in the street?”
    “I dunno, boss, I just found it here is all.”
    “Probably fell from some truck,” the driver said from within the cruiser. “Let somebody else take care of it, it ain’t our business.”
    The cop in the street said, “Now, uncle, you take this cotton to the precinct station and turn it in. The owner will be looking for it.”
    “Yassuh, boss, but I can’t get it into my waggin.”
    “Here, I’ll help you,” the cop said, and together they got it onto the cart.
    The junk man set off in the direction of the precinct station, pushing the cart in the rain, and the cop got back into the cruiser and they went on down the street in the direction of the dead man.

4
    When Grave Digger and Coffin Ed arrived at the lot where the Back-to-Africa rally had taken place, they found it closed off by a police cordon and the desolate black people, surrounded by policemen, standing helpless in the rain. The police cruiser was still smoking in the barbecue pit and the white cops in their wet black slickers looked mean and dangerous. Coffin Ed’s acid-burned face developed a tic and Grave Digger’s neck began swelling with rage.
    The dead body of the young recruiting agent lay face up in the rain, waiting for the medical examiner to come and pronounce it dead so the men from