Strivers Row Read Online Free PDF Page A

the troop trains finally pulling past, but he didn’t want it to end just yet. To go back to peddling sandwiches and cigarettes, collecting his nickels and dimes.
    Tom it up—
    Just down the spit of beach they were on there was a little platform, some rickety wooden structure built to convey mail or water or something in the old days. Malcolm ran the few yards down the beach and swung himself up on it. Still in full view of all the watching, wondering faces on the train.
    He gave them his widest grin, then flung out his arms. Then he bowed, and turned his backside to them, and flung himself out into the waters of Buzzards Bay.

CHAPTER THREE
    JONAH
    He couldn’t understand why the boy had jumped into the water. Until then he had taken it almost as a visitation—that sandwich boy, looking so young and innocent one moment, and literally Satanic the next. That ridiculous red conk sticking out from under his trainman’s cap, his mouth turned up in a sardonic, V-shaped leer. Coming upon them just as the whole situation was out of hand and he was about to be shamed in front of Amanda.
    He had tried to ignore the soldiers, then he had tried to stand up to them. He had attempted to overawe them with his authority, his solemn Christian dignity. But that hadn’t happened. They were about to work him over—when that boy had shown up. Seemingly fearless, taking them all on, hauling the drunken sergeant off the train as if endowed with the strength of ten men.
    But then there had been that dive, right into the bay. The other passengers gawking, thinking he had drowned himself for some reason. Instead he had surfaced quickly, and climbed back up on the platform, his white trainman’s uniform dripping wet. Bowing again and again for all of them in the car, strutting and grinning before all the white faces that turned away from the spectacle as abruptly as they had from Jonah’s own humiliation. The Nigger Triumphant, something no more to be looked upon than a lynching—
    He tried to banish that last thought from his head. It was unworthy, he thought—even uncivilized. How uncivilized everything had become, as soon as they had gotten off the island.
    â€œ He cut off her head! ” Adam Powell’s voice boomed out through the summer evening.
    â€œAdam!”
    There had been the sound of laughter, the tinkling of ice in a glass. Adam held his hands out wide, in self-absolution.
    â€œHe did! I didn’t make it up! It’s right there in the book!”
    Only the night before, they had been sitting out on Adam’s front porch in Oak Bluffs, watching the sun set over the trees and the Ink Well down below. Sipping highballs with Adam and his wife, Isabel, and their show business friend, Hycie. Amanda and he both still a little dazed, although they had been there for two weeks. In part it was the drinks themselves: gins-and-tonics served in tall, sweating glasses with a slice of lime. Amanda came from a temperance family, and neither of them were much used to drinking. In part it was everything else—the sheer, casual opulence of their surroundings; the risqué, irreverent talk, right down to the offhanded sophistication of referring to the strip of colored beach by the steamship landing as “the Ink Well.”
    All evening Amanda had shot him wide-eyed, incredulous, slightly delighted looks over the lip of her glass. As if to ask, just as she had for the past two weeks —What are we doing here? They had never gone anywhere more adventurous before than the Shinnecock Arms or Wright’s Cottage, or maybe The Notch. They had heard about Oak Bluffs, of course, living on Strivers Row as they did, but Amanda’s conservative, newly middle-class family was thoroughly intimidated by anything to do with Harlem society, and Jonah’s father had never paid any mind to such pretensions. The immaculately dressed couples promenading, or cruising their big cars down the