The Walls of Jericho

Despite the objections of the dickties, who prefer to ignore the existence of so-called rats, it is of interest to consider Henry Patmore’s Pool Parlor on Fifth Avenue in New York.

The truth about Fifth Avenue has only half been told, that it harbors an aristocracy of residence already yielding to an aristocracy of commerce. Has any New Yorker confessed to the rest⁠—that when aristocratic Fifth Avenue crosses 110th Street, leaving Central Park behind, it leaves its aristocracy behind as well? Here are bargain-stores, babble, and kids, dinginess, odors, thick speech. Fallen from splendor and doubtless ashamed, the Avenue burrows into the ground⁠—plunges beneath a park which hides it from 116th to 125th Street. Here it emerges moving uncertainly northward a few more blocks; and now⁠—irony of ironies⁠—finds itself in Negro Harlem.

You can see the Avenue change expression⁠—blankness, horror, conviction. You can almost see it wag its head in self-commiseration. Not just because this is Harlem⁠—there are proud streets in Harlem: Seventh Avenue of a Sunday afternoon, Strivers’ Row, and The Hill. Fifth Avenue’s shame lies in having missed these so-called dickty sections, in having poked its head out into the dark kingdom’s backwoods. A city jungle this, if ever there was one, peopled largely by untamed creatures that live and die for the moment only. Accordingly, here strides melodrama, naked and unashamed.

Patmore’s Pool Parlor occupied the remodeled ground floor of a once elegant apartment-house: two long low adjacent rooms, with a smaller one in the rear. You could enter either of the larger two from the street, and a doorway joined them within.

Bubber, his round face gone ominously blank, drew slowly closer to Jinx, who, face thrust forward a little and scowling, stood with his back to the bar counter, on which both elbows rested.

“Mean⁠—my family?” inquired Bubber.

Jinx dared not recant. “All the way back to the apes,” he assured him “⁠—and that ain’t so awful far back.”

“The apes in yo’ family is still livin’,” said Bubber, “but they’s go’n’ be one daid in a minute.”

“Stay where you at, you little black balloon, or I’ll stick a pin in you, you hear?”

By this time Bubber was almost within range and an initial blow was imminent. Absorbed in the impending clash, no one had noticed the arrival of a newcomer. But now this newcomer spoke and his words, soft and low though they were, commanded immediate attention.

“Winner belongs to me.”

Everybody looked⁠—spectators holding their drinks, Bubber with his blank black face, Jinx with his murderous scowl. They saw a man at one end of the bar counter, one foot raised upon the brass rail, one elbow resting on the mahogany ledge; a young man so tall that, though he bent forward from the hips in a posture of easy nonchalance, he could still see over every intervening head between himself and the two opponents, and yet so broad that his height was not of itself noticeable; a supremely tranquil young Titan, with a face of bronze, hard, metallic, lustrous, profoundly serene. He repeated his remark in paraphrase:

“I am askin’ fo’ the winner. I am very humbly requestin’ a share in his hind-parts.”

It was apparent that the bristling antagonists bristled no longer, had limply lost interest in their quarrel.

Court Avenue is a straight, thin spinster of a street which even in July is cold. There is about it an air of arched eyebrows, of skirts drawn aside and comments made with a sniff. It is adorned in sparse, lean, scrawny maples, all suffering from malnutrition, and these tend to stress rather than relieve the hardness of dry, level pavements.

The dwellings are all the same pale gray and are all essentially alike, four stories tall, thin to gauntness, droop-eyed with drawn shapes, standing shoulder to shoulder in long, inhospitable rows. Stone stoops, well withdrawn from the sidewalk, lend an air of inaccessibility, and the tiny front yards that might dispel this illusion by only a bit of grass or a flower are instead uniformly laid away beneath slabs of expressionless concrete.

Twice a day, when sunlight touches the windows of this side in the morning and again of that side at night, Court Avenue smiles a chilly, crystalline smile. It is the sort of smile that goes with the words, “My dear! Can you imagine such a thing?” and you might suppose that the street was returning even the sun’s genial greeting and warm farewell with a disapproving sneer.

In short, Court Avenue is a snob of a street. Yet it is somewhat to be pitied in its pretense at ignoring the punishment that is at hand: the terribly sure approach of the swiftly spreading Negro colony.

Isaacs’ Transportation Company, which is to say old man Isadore Isaacs, would have trusted Joshua Jones with any moving job whatever. It was work that Shine loved because of the challenge it presented to his personal strength and skill.

Miss Agatha Cramp had, among other things, a sufficiently large store of wealth and a sufficiently small store of imagination to want to devote her entire life to Service; in fact, to Social Service on a large scale. And because Miss Cramp took very personal interest in her successive servants, it came about that this Social Service was directed towards definite racial groups. When her maid had been French, Miss Cramp had organized a club to assist rebuilding demolished French villages; when her maid had been Polish, she had taken up with a Society for the Aid of Starving Poland; and shortly after hiring a Russian girl, she became a member of the Russian Relief Committee.

Thus Miss Cramp had devoted the more recent years of her life to Service, and now, with a colored maid on hand, she had no outlet for her urge. For two weeks she had been idle, and idleness drove her to distraction. She felt worse and worse day by day, until at last her doctor said what she paid him to say: that she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and would simply have to go to bed and rest.

She rested three days; whereupon an ironic Court Avenue sun revealed to her something of which she had hitherto been unaware: her colored maid, bringing in her breakfast, looked somehow amazingly pretty. And although Miss Cramp had no very generous eye for beauty, she was so struck by the discovery of what hitherto had mysteriously escaped her that she was moved to exclaim: