Harlem Shuffle(34)
They got to talking between the plans and appeals of uptown merchants, restaurant owners, and local pols. Hank Diggs, the president of the Diggs Pomade Company and originator of the slogan “Dig This Shine!,” took the podium. “With all the brain power we got in this room,” he said, “we could light up Times Square!” He spoke in a slow, rumbling voice that evoked his own low wattage and undercut his point. His hair looked great, though. Carney took the cynic’s view when it came to groups, specifically groups and results, but Elizabeth had pushed him to show up. It wouldn’t hurt to increase his profile, she told him. Even if nothing came of it, it was good to put a face to the name on the sign. The letters on the new sign he’d just paid for tilted upward like a jet taking to the sky.
Adam Clayton Powell Jr. even popped in toward the end to cheer on the crowd. Regal and dapper. Carney admired the man’s hustle; one of these days they were going to name a street after him, you watch. “It’s a new day in Harlem,” the congressman said. “We have President Kennedy down in D.C., promising a New Frontier—why can’t we have our own New Frontier in our own backyards, on the streets of Harlem, one the world has never seen before?” He’d used the same analogy last week, at the opening of a supermarket on Ninth. Carney’d read about it in the Harlem Gazette. An assistant materialized, whispered in Powell’s ear, and he left the merchants to foment economic revolution.
The association fizzled out after the third meeting—the treasurer running around with the vice president’s wife—but Pierce and Carney continued to meet for lunch at Chock Full o’Nuts. They were the first in their families to go to college, although Pierce’s father was a solid citizen, working the line instead of working people over, busting his ass for forty years at the Anheuser-Busch bottling plant in Newark. Pierce attended to his studies and got a scholarship to NYU, then graduated with honors from St. John’s Law School. “I wanted to be the Negro Clarence Darrow,” Pierce said, shrugging.
Franklin D. Shepard, the colorful uptown lawyer, gave him a desk. “Once I got in there, I was in there like a tick!” Shepard liked to see his name in the paper, and it turned out the boy from Newark had an affinity for civil rights cases, the kind that made headlines. The NAACP retained Pierce for crusades against discrimination in public housing, union jobs, and lending. He represented the Dyckman Six against the City of New York—brown water in the pipes and gray rats in the hallways—and lost the notorious Samuel Parker police brutality case, though it was “still good advertising.” By 1958, when Mayor Wagner announced the city’s antibias housing law and unveiled the Commission on Intergroup Relations, Pierce was a familiar sight in the newspapers, standing next to NAACP leadership with his dandy suit and steely smile.
Pierce could have been on the radio, the way he spoke. Over apple pie, Pierce recounted how a high-school English teacher had hipped him to elocution classes. “He told me, ‘You want to make it, you need to speak right. None of this Newark shit.’ Like Newark was a different language, but I knew what he meant.”
Carney nodded—his freshman-year economics professor Mr. Liebman had told him the same thing, substituting street for Newark. Liebman was a Lower East Side Jew who declaimed from behind the lectern like a Boston WASP and knew whereof he spoke. Carney couldn’t afford to take courses—he was on his own and where was he going to get that kind of scratch? Instead he studied CBS News Radio and William Holden double features. Step back and the world is a classroom if need be. He watched his mouth in the mirror as his jaw worked over white whale. Hard stop on the t, puff of breath on the w. Whenever he pronounced “Heywood-Wakefield” on the showroom floor, he saw those old reflections: his tongue pressed against his front teeth as the air-shaft light limped through the opaque glass of the bathroom window.
Unlikely characters: Pierce in the courtroom, and Carney running his store. “Neither us of is supposed to be where we are,” Carney told Elizabeth, “from where we came from. That’s why we get along.” Like Carney, the lawyer was a family man, joy quickening his features when he pulled out photos of his wife and kids. Carney didn’t have any pictures to share in turn, and made a note to pick up one of those new cameras. Finally get a few pics of May and John. Capture his son, with his ten-word vocabulary and two teeth, and his daughter, whose dark intelligence intensified behind her brown eyes every day.
Pierce putting him up for membership in the Dumas was a surprise. Guys like them didn’t belong to places like that.
Pierce had been in the club for two years, he said. Franklin D. Shepard put him up, despite his color and humble origins, and made a point of telling his fellow members that they lived in a new era. Didn’t have to spell out what he meant. For his part, Pierce had been pleased with his Dumas time so far. “Like that Harlem association meeting where we met. Some men only know how to talk about what they want to do—and then there are men who get it done. At the Dumas, these are the men who get shit done.”
Carney said no thanks.
His friend was a patient man. “Come to the mixer,” Pierce said. “Have a drink at least. You and me, we’ve been sticking our foot in the door our whole lives, because we know that’s the only way to get into the room. But getting in that room is everything. You get in the room and you will run that room.”