Cotton Comes to Harlem Read Online Free PDF Page B

fallen into his barbecue pit. His eyes were bright red and he took it as a personal insult when they asked about the provision company.
    “I don’t know where the ribs come from after they left the hog,” he said angrily. “I was just hired to superintend the cooking. I ain’t had nothing to do with them white folks and I don’t know how many they was — ’cept too many.”
    “Leave this soul-brother go,” Coffin Ed said. “Pretty soon he wouldn’t have been here.”
    Grave Digger wrote down O’Malley’s official address, which he already knew, then as a last question asked, “What was your connection with the original Back-to-Africa movement, the one headed by Mr Michaux?”
    “None at all. Reverend O’Malley didn’t have anything at all to do with Mr Michaux’s group. In fact he didn’t even like Lewis Michaux; I don’t think he ever spoke to him.”
    “Did it ever occur to you that Mr Michaux might not have had anything to do with Reverend O’Malley? Did you ever think that he might have known something about O’Malley that made him distrust O’Malley?”
    “I don’t think it was anything like that,” Bill contended. “What reason could he have to distrust O’Malley? I just think he was envious, that’s all. Reverend O’Malley thought he was too slow; he didn’t see any reason for waiting any longer; we’ve waited long enough.”
    “And you were intending to go back to Africa too?”
    “Yes, sir, still intend to — as soon as we get the money back. You’ll get the money back for us, won’t you?”
    “Son, if we don’t, we’re gonna raise so much hell they’re gonna send us all back to Africa.”
    “And for free, too,” Coffin Ed added grimly.
    The young man thanked them and went back to stand with the others in the rain.
    “Well, Ed, what do you think about it?” Grave Digger asked.
    “One thing is for sure, it wasn’t the syndicate pulled this caper — not the crime syndicate, anyway.”
    “What other kinds of syndicates are there?”
    “Don’t ask me, I ain’t the F.B.I.”
    They were silent for a moment with the rain pouring over them, thinking of these eighty-seven families who had put down their thousand-dollar grubstakes on a dream. They knew that these families had come by their money the hard way. To many, it represented the savings of a lifetime. To most it represented long hours of hard work at menial jobs. None could afford to lose it.
    They didn’t consider these victims as squares or suckers. They understood them. These people were seeking a home — just the same as the Pilgrim Fathers. Harlem is a city of the homeless. These people had deserted the South because it could never be considered their home. Many had been sent north by the white southerners in revenge for the desegregation ruling. Others had fled, thinking the North was better. But they had not found a home in the North. They had not found a home in America. So they looked across the sea to Africa, where other black people were both the ruled and the rulers. Africa to them was a big free land which they could proudly call home, for there were buried the bones of their ancestors, there lay the roots of their families, and it was inhabited by the descendants of those same ancestors — which made them related by both blood and race. Everyone has to believe in something; and the white people of America had left them nothing to believe in. But that didn’t make a black man any less criminal than a white; and they had to find the criminals who hijacked the money, black or white.
    “Anyway, the first thing is to find Deke,” Grave Digger put voice to their thoughts. “If he ain’t responsible for this caper he’ll sure as hell know who is.”
    “He had better know,” Coffin Ed said grimly.
    But Deke didn’t know any more than they did. He had worked a long time to set up his movement and it had been expensive. At first he had turned to the church to hide from the syndicate. He had figured if