Harlem Shuffle(21)

He attended Carney and Elizabeth’s wedding. The look in Alexander’s eyes when Carney shook his hand on the receiving line: still in love with her. Tough shit, buddy.

“Perhaps one day you’ll join, Raymond,” Alma said.

“Mommy,” Elizabeth said, glaring. The Dumas was a paper bag club, so this was a dig: Carney was too dark for admittance.

“The store keeps me pretty busy,” Carney said. “Though Leland makes it sound very enjoyable. From all his stories.” A bunch of stuck-up mummies, as far as he was concerned. Even if he had lighter skin, his family story was another barrier. Also his profession. His humble store wouldn’t cut it—he’d have to own a whole department store, a black Blumstein’s, to join their fraternity.

    The Jones family lineage was impeccable. By their own standards, anyway. The preacher grandfather had been one of the Seneca Village elders, ministering to the free Negro community downtown. Carney had never heard of the place before he met the Joneses, but they maintained the legend. Seneca had been a couple of hundred people, mostly colored with a bit of Irish—the mongrels always lived on top of one another. Landowning free black men and women staking out a life in the new city. Three churches, two schools, one cemetery. Nothing like it anywhere else in the country, Mr. Jones said, although Carney knew that wasn’t true. He’d read about thriving colored communities back then in Negro Digest. Pockets in Boston, Philadelphia. Black people always found a way in the most miserable circumstances. If we didn’t, we’d have been exterminated by the white man long ago.

Then someone came up with the idea for a grand park in the middle of Manhattan, an oasis inside the newly teeming metropolis. Various locations were proposed, rejected, reconsidered, until the white leaders decided on a vast, rectangular patch in the heart of the island. People already lived there; no matter. The colored citizens of Seneca were property owners, they voted, they had a voice. Not enough of one. The City of New York seized the land, razed the village, and that was that. The villagers dispersed to different neighborhoods, to different cities where they might start again, and the city got its Central Park.

You’ll find the bones. Dig under the playgrounds and meadows and silent groves, Carney supposed, you’ll find the bones.

Carney admired the story. Less so the haughty complacency of those who kept it alive. Alma came from similar stock: teachers and doctors for generations, an uncle who was the First Negro to attend this Ivy League college, a cousin who was the First Negro to graduate from that medical school. First this, First that other thing. Race-conscious and proud, up to a point—light enough to pass for white, but a little too eager to remind you that they could pass for white. Carney spooned Gerber baby food into May’s mouth, saw his hand against her cheek. She was dark, like him. He wondered if Alma still recoiled when she saw her granddaughter’s skin, felt dismayed that she hadn’t turned out light like Elizabeth. He saw her flinch in the hospital room after the delivery. All that hard work and then look at what her daughter marries. Did she stare at her daughter’s belly and wonder whose blood would win out this time?

    “Ray,” Elizabeth said. She noticed his mind had drifted. She raised her eyebrows and smiled, tugging him back. Elizabeth had seen straight through him during school, even when he sat next to her or walked her home in the rain, but he was grateful she saw him now. That night at Stacey Miller’s rent party, she offered a coy apology for not remembering him when he told her that they’d gone to school together. He’d finished college and had been putting in the hours as a stock boy in Blumstein’s furniture department. It was the first party he’d attended in a long time. Freddie tried to coax him out, to a night spot, a get-together, but he’d been too embroiled in his studies—Carver High School hadn’t prepared him for the rigors of Queens College—and once he started the department store job, he was too tired. He fell asleep nights to the news station as the whoops and laughter of uptown snuck in the windows.

But the night of the party he’d saved up for a new suit—a brown pinstripe number that fit perfectly off the rack. Freddie took him to the party and introduced him around. It was different than before, being out. The talk and interaction took less out of him; finishing his studies, his industry, had made him more confident. Currents plopped him next to Elizabeth in the line outside Stacey Miller’s bathroom. Someone smoking reefer in there. Freddie had told him to piss off the roof. Ignoring his cousin’s advice had always been a good policy; that night it placed him next to his future wife. He had not been one of those boys in his grade who’d had a crush on her. Those Alexander Oakeses with their ploys. She was out of his league so he never wasted a thought on it. “Of course!” Elizabeth said that night outside the bathroom, as if she suddenly remembered him. Lying. They spent two hours on the lumpy couch by the fire escape—apartment full, rent met—and he asked her out to dinner.

    She had been at Black Star Travel for two months. He liked the earnestness in her voice when she talked about work, the urgency of her mission. Black Star arranged tourist and business trips for black travelers, booking them into black-owned and desegregated hotels in America and abroad, mostly the Caribbean, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. The company provided entertainment options; tips on banks, tailors, and friendly restaurants; pamphlets on which theaters in New Orleans or some other destination provided colored seating and which ones wouldn’t let you in the door.