Eat the City(20)

Harlem, circa 1947: People fleeing southern racism and low wages would show up hauling suitcases filled with fresh peaches and snap peas, fig preserves, and country hams that they had packed in southern kitchens to bolster their new lives. You could follow the smell of Saturday-afternoon cooking to nighttime rent parties, where the guests would make cash contributions toward rent and the hosts would offer music, dancing, homemade gin, and southern victuals. “Music too tight. Refreshments just right,” promised one old announcement. “There’ll be plenty of pig feet/An lots of gin/Jus ring the bell/An come on in,” read another.

One block in Harlem, 138th and 139th streets between Lenox and Eighth avenues, was said to be the most densely populated in the country. Still, a Harlem man might travel out of the city to the woods to hunt possum or venison or wild duck. A woman might wander her way through the local park, picking mint and leafy greens, cherries, blackberries, little nuts, and wild onions. Southern food made in Harlem came to symbolize both a fondness for and a triumph over the past. Thelonious Monk wore southern food like a badge, playing New York clubs with a collard in his lapel.

But by the 1950s, old, ill-maintained buildings were crumbling, and banks refused to lend money to Harlem landlords for repairs. Uptown manufacturing jobs were evaporating—two-thirds were lost in the 1960s. In that same decade, heroin coursed through the neighborhood, and about 14 percent of Harlem residents used the drug. Desegregation was skimming the top off Harlem society, as black people with means moved to the previously all-white suburbs. Racism was alive and well in Harlem’s white-owned companies, where a white candidate could beat a black candidate for most any job.

The Times estimated that more than half of Harlem’s economy hinged on the policy numbers, the illegal lottery that employed about 100,000 people and used its cash flow to bankroll local bars, restaurants, corner groceries, and apartment houses, as well as any political campaign that had a hope of winning. You put in your numbers on the way to work, and in an area with few legitimate banks, you turned to the numbers man if you needed a loan or wanted a partner for your business. The game was simple. Victories at the local horse races generated three numbers. Pick the winning three and you could make six hundred dollars for every one dollar you put in. Hitting the numbers big could mean making rent, or even, in one sweep, enough money to buy an apartment. All of Harlem seemed to live by dream books, privately published guides to lucky betting that listed events, activities, and even words that might appear in dreams, with corresponding three-digit numbers.

After high school, Willie became a singer. His R&B band traveled to North Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Soon he also took a night job labeling packages at UPS. People told him, “Be smart, keep your job.” But it was a short leap from singing to hanging out in bars and clubs—and from there to the numbers.

“I saw these guys were making all this money,” said Willie. “I got me a couple good people, and said, I can do this thing.” While his little sister worked in the child welfare department and his younger brother became an architect, Willie started as a runner, the person to take the bets for a small commission. Then he decided to chance it as a controller, the middle manager who runs the operation but is still subservient to an Italian mobster banker from the East Side.

Running a numbers spot meant hearing about Bumpy Johnson, an early numbers lord who branched out into other enterprises. Bumpy was the kind of gentleman pimp, or philanthropist thief, who would buy thousands of dollars of Christmas presents for needy children even as he introduced the heroin that might someday addict them. Willie rubbed shoulders with the likes of Frank Lucas, the heroin dealer who subverted the Mob by importing the raw product direct from Southeast Asia, and then having his staff of women wearing nothing but surgical masks process it in Harlem. Willie and his Italian bankers would drink Courvoisier at Thursday-night meetings in a private room at the legendary Patsy’s Pizzeria, the place Francis Ford Coppola visited to find models for the mobsters of The Godfather.

But Willie’s great innovation was his own. Other numbers men gave their customers a dozen eggs, or a chicken for the weekend. Willie cleared a rubble-filled lot next to his new ninety-dollar-a-month storefront on 118th Street with an eye to growing a vegetable garden. It was not voluptuous land, not the sweet and fertile red soil of his Georgia childhood—but flat, dry, and cracked, with broken glass and bricks he had to clear out. For three hundred dollars, he brought two dump truck loads of soil from Long Island and shoveled them over the yard. Then he slipped corn, collard, and tomato seeds under the earth. It felt good to work the dirt—“I was a kid again,” he said. In midsummer, as his harvest began, he drove up to the Hunts Point market in the Bronx to bulk buy wholesale treats he couldn’t grow, such as oranges and green bananas. After that, his yield was steady. Once a week, to sweeten the bets, he could offer his customers a brown paper bag full of groceries.

Early on, he understood the importance of marketing to women. Many of his first customers were mothers playing the numbers to put food on the table. A bit of fresh, free produce could certainly make the difference when such a woman decided where to gamble. With the guys, Willie would pull up the vegetables and someone else would bring some meat. The men would place their bets, fire up the barbecue in the yard, eat together, and take home leftovers.

So it came to pass that Willie Morgan fed his bit of gambling Harlem. His heavily fertilized, rapidly grown, unusually large vegetables filled people’s stews and soups and sides, their dinners and lunch bags and party spreads, as their bets filled his pockets.