Home To Harlem

XI. SNOWSTORM IN PITTSBURGH

SNOWSTORM IN PITTSBURGH XI THE middle of the little bridge built over the railroad crossing he was suddenly enveloped in a thick mass of smoke spouted out by an in-rushing train. That was Jake's first impression of Pittsburgh. He stepped off the bridge into a saloon. From there along a dullgray street of grocery and fruit shops and piddling South-European children. Then he was on Wiley Avenue, the long, gray, uphill street. Brawny bronze men in coal-blackened and oil:spotted blue overalls shadowed the doorways of saloons, pool-rooms, and little basement restaurants. The street was animated with dark figures going up, going down. Houses and men, women, and squinting cats and slinking dogs, everything seemed touched with soot and steel dust. "So this heah is the niggers' run," said Jake. [140] Snowstorm in Pittsburgh "I don't like its 'pearance, nohow." He walked down the street and remarked a bouncing little chestnut-brown standing smartly in the entrance of a basement eating-joint. She wore a knee-length yellow-patterned muslin frock and a white-dotted blue apron. The apron was a little longer than the frock. Her sleeves were rolled up. Her arms were beautiful , like smooth burninshed bars of copper. Jake stopped and said, "Howdy!" "Howdy again!" the girl flashed a row of perfect teeth at him. "Got a bite of anything good?" "I should say so, Mister Ma-an." She rolled her eyes and worked her hips into delightful free-and-easy motions. Jake went in. He was not hungry for food. He looked at a large dish half filled with tapioca pudding. He turned to the pie-case on the counter. "The peach pie is the best," said the girl, her bare elbow on the counter; "it's fresh." She looked straight in his eyes. "All right, [141] Home to Harlem I'll try peach," he said, and, magnetically, his long, shining fingers touched her hand. . . • In the evening he found the Haytian waiter at the big Wiley Avenue pool-room. Quite different from the pool-rooms in Harlem, it was a sort of social center for the railroad men and the more intelligent black workmen of the quarter. Tobacco, stationery, and odds and ends were sold in the front part of the store. There was a table where customers sat and wrote letters. And there were pretty chocolate dolls and pictures of Negroid types on sale. Curious, pathetic pictures; black Madonna and child; a kinky-haired mulatto angel with African lips and Nordic nose, soaring on a white cloud up to heaven; Jesus blessing a black child and a white one; a black shepherd carrying a white lamb—all queerly reminiscent of the crude prints of the great Christian paintings that are so common in poor religious homes. "Here he is!" Jake greeted the waiter. "What's the new?" [142] Snowstorm in Pittsburgh "Nothing new in Soot-hill; always the same." The railroad men hated the Pittsburgh run. They hated the town, they hated Wiley Avenue and their wretched free quarters that were in it. . . . "What're you going to do?" "Ahm gwine to the colored show with a liT brown piece," said Jake. "You find something already? My me! You're a fast-working one." "Always the same whenever I hits a new town. Always in cock-tail luck, chappie." "Which one? Manhattan or Bronx?" "It's Harlem-Pittsburgh thisanight," Jake grinned. "Wachyu gwine make?" "Don't know. There's nothing ever in Pittsburgh for me. I'm in no mood for the leg-show tonight, and the colored show is bum. Guess I'll go sleep if I can." "Awright, I'll see you liT later, chappie." Jake gripped his hand. "Say—whyn't you tell a fellow you' name? Youse sure more'n [143] Home to Harlem second waiter as Ise more'n third cook. Ev'body calls me Jake. And you?" "Raymond, but everybody calls me Ray." Jake heaved off. Ray bought some weekly Negro newspapers: The Pittsburgh Courier, The Baltimore American, The Negro World, The Chicago Defender. Here he found a big assortment of all the Negro publications that he never could find in Harlem. In a nextdoor saloon he drank a glass of sherry and started off for the waiters' and cooks' quarters. It was long after midnight when Jake returned to quarters. He had to pass through the Western men's...