In A Death in Harlem, famed scholar Karla FC Holloway weaves a mystery in the bon vivant world of the Harlem Renaissance. Taking as her point of departure the tantalizingly ambiguous "death by misadventure" at the climax of Nella Larsen's Passing, Holloway accompanies readers to the sunlit boulevards and shaded sidestreets of Jazz Age New York. A murder there will test the mettle, resourcefulness, and intuition of Harlem's first "colored" policeman, Weldon Haynie Thomas.
Clear glass towers rising in Manhattan belie a city where people are often not what they seem. For some here, identity is a performance of passing-passing for another race, for another class, for someone safe to trust. Thomas's investigation illuminates the societies and secret societies, the intricate code of manners, the world of letters, and the broad social currents of 1920s Harlem. A Death in Harlem is an exquisitely crafted, briskly paced, and impeccably stylish journey back to a time still remembered as a peak of American glamour. It introduces Holloway as a fresh voice in storytelling, and Weldon Haynie Thomas as an endearing and unforgettable detective.In A Death in Harlem, famed scholar Karla FC Holloway weaves a mystery in the bon vivant world of the Harlem Renaissance. Taking as her point of departure the tantalizingly ambiguous "death by misadventure" at the climax of Nella Larsen's Passing, Holloway accompanies readers to the sunlit boulevards and shaded sidestreets of Jazz Age New York. A murder there will test the mettle, resourcefulness, and intuition of Harlem's first "colored" policeman, Weldon Haynie Thomas.
Clear glass towers rising in Manhattan belie a city where people are often not what they seem. For some here, identity is a performance of passing-passing for another race, for another class, for someone safe to trust. Thomas's investigation illuminates the societies and secret societies, the intricate code of manners, the world of letters, and the broad social currents of 1920s Harlem. A Death in Harlem is an exquisitely crafted, briskly paced, and impeccably stylish journey back to a time still remembered as a peak of American glamour. It introduces Holloway as a fresh voice in storytelling, and Weldon Haynie Thomas as an endearing and unforgettable detective.
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Overview
In A Death in Harlem, famed scholar Karla FC Holloway weaves a mystery in the bon vivant world of the Harlem Renaissance. Taking as her point of departure the tantalizingly ambiguous "death by misadventure" at the climax of Nella Larsen's Passing, Holloway accompanies readers to the sunlit boulevards and shaded sidestreets of Jazz Age New York. A murder there will test the mettle, resourcefulness, and intuition of Harlem's first "colored" policeman, Weldon Haynie Thomas.
Clear glass towers rising in Manhattan belie a city where people are often not what they seem. For some here, identity is a performance of passing-passing for another race, for another class, for someone safe to trust. Thomas's investigation illuminates the societies and secret societies, the intricate code of manners, the world of letters, and the broad social currents of 1920s Harlem. A Death in Harlem is an exquisitely crafted, briskly paced, and impeccably stylish journey back to a time still remembered as a peak of American glamour. It introduces Holloway as a fresh voice in storytelling, and Weldon Haynie Thomas as an endearing and unforgettable detective.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810140813 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2019 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 248 |
| Sales rank: | 1,058,505 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
| Age Range: | 13 - 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Weldon Haynie Thomas
IN LATE MIDWINTER OF 1927, WHEN THAT LADY THEY THOUGHT WAS white jumped, or fell, or got pushed out the window of the Hotel Theresa, Harlem's first colored policeman was assigned the night watch.
Slender tributaries of blood from her broken body soaked the snow and matched the color of her evening gown. Where her head hit between the pavement and the street, steaming vermilion paths sliced through the snowy drifts that had blown up against the curb. As the night edged toward day, her body, the blood, and patches of frozen snow — seemed a crystallized etching that the streetlamp selectively illumined.
Officer Weldon Thomas later recalled it had been one of those days when he got that feeling. It was like a push or nudge. Something wanted attention. There was no use in sitting around trying to figure out what it was about beforehand, no matter how hard he tried. He would have no idea whatever it was until it was over and done with. Months would pass before he could say with clear-eyed certainty that the dead lady was what triggered that December morning's mo-nition. He pushed his chair back from the kitchen table in the rooms he let from Darnell Zenobia and shook his head. "Umph. So that's what it was."
When he was a boy, the old lady who lived in the brownstone's basement apartment told his mother that he had the "mo-nition ... He's gonna know things before they happen." Weldon had put his head down on the table. The cracks in the wood surface looked like a branch creek. His tiny finger followed their routes. She was small and wiry and her appearance didn't match the strong gravelly voice she directed at him. "Boy, I see you." She tittered. "You go on with tracing out my river." Weldon wanted to ask his mother how the lady knew there were rivers on her table. He met her bleary eyes with his bright ones. "Sweet boy," she said. "There ain't no hiding the kind of seeing you got." He tried to read her eyes. Their blur of bright specks looked like a map. She spoke over him to his mother. "Mrs. Thomas, your boy got a kind of mo-nition that don't show more than what it wants." She put both hands on the table to push herself up. Weldon's mother put the warm bag of rolls on the lady's table and reached into her coat pocket for a case quarter.
"When's this thing you say he got gonna show itself?"
"I just said it ain't nothing he can see." She sucked her teeth. "Sth. You listening at all? It's about what he's gonna know." She paused, searching for the words to say it. "It's more like, well, it's like he's gonna know he don't know something that could use knowing." His mother leaned toward her, trying not to show her own frustration with the old lady's circular speech. "But here's what you need to understand." She leaned in. "You got you a sensitive boy. The kind of boy where knowing there's something he don't know will bother him mightily unless you find him something to do that can sidestep this thing."
"How do I do that? Just tell me. We'll do for our boy."
"That's clear. You here aren't you? You came down here; you knocked politely and too, you brought me these just-made rolls." She opened the bag and let the yeasty scent escape. After a while she said, "Here's what. You gonna have to give him things to know about. Things sure and certain. Things that he can learn and go back and learn some more. So he don't frustrate hisownself." The two women and the boy sat still in the quiet. Even now Weldon remembered the quiet, the river-shaped ridges on the tabletop, and the smell of oven-fresh rolls as if they always went together. Not long afterwards, his mother took to bringing him to the Harlem Branch Library on 135th. Books could offer him a focus, she thought. And too, she never heard of anybody getting in trouble over some reading.
December 1927
By the time the awards program upstairs started, it was late. It seems like the ones amongst my people that got to be the élite — elights, my moms calls them — haven't any better a handle on the clock than regular coloreds. I'd finished patrolling the lobby, keeping the outside crowds outside and under some manner of control. Earlier on in the night, you couldn't tell which set of folks was more trouble than the others — the ones coming into the banquet or the ones outside looking them over. I knew when I got assigned to this affair that my real job would be to stand around and look like a first colored policeman ought to look. I've got to represent the race no different than the siditty folks prancing their fine selves through the Hotel Theresa lobby.
By the time I decided it was okay to take myself to the chair between the shifty-eyed bellhop and the grand staircase, it wasn't a good fifteen minutes before all hell broke loose.
I'd chosen the straight-backed chair so nobody could think I was goofing off by sitting even though I was still officially on duty. There were others, all plush and soft, with deep tufts and edged up with fringe and velvet; but they weren't appropriate. I chose a chair that was as near to being business-like as the lobby had available. It faced the grand staircase, so anybody could see I was more than ready to be attentive. When I sat down good and had my book out and turned to the right page, the bellhop decided he wanted to conversate and find out about being a police. Seemed like he was thinking he could just carry himself down to the station house and exchange the uniform he had on for a cop's uniform. Like I wasn't the only one who got selected, tested, interviewed, and inspected and only after all that became the experiment in colored police. There was no kind of line waiting for me. I was the line — its beginning, and if I didn't turn out right, its end.
Me, I was trying to get into my book. Anybody who knows me knows that Weldon Haynie Thomas always has a book. Moms says, "That boy always has got some book about his person," like me and my person are different. Other kids stop whatever reading they do with their McGuffies. I didn't know it then, but reading was the key to the whole business.
I like to use the words from my books. That's one of the things you get from reading I tell folks who try to call me on what they call my high-talking ways. The ones who are always asking me where do I think I live, up in Sugar Hill? A book doesn't cost a thing but the effort to carry yourself down to the library. And at the library, they are sincerely happy to see you show up, unlike some places my people have taken a fancy to — like this particular hotel that doesn't even let overnight rooms to coloreds but will be more than happy to take their money for a fancy banquet long as they are disappeared from "the public areas" by daybreak. At the library, you don't have to worry about who you know, or who might drop a black ball into somebody's bowl and keep you out. By the way, whichever one of us thought up that nonsense (or copied it from white folks) needs to do some rethinking about the symbolics of the matter.
On this particular night, I'd opened the book to my favorite page and was just about settled into it when the kid decides he wants to make small talk. I tell him "no it's not a police manual" and "no I didn't need for him to hold on to it while I took a necessary." That's what he called it. It made me wonder who had raised him up not to be able to say the word "toilet." He either had some strange home training or none at all. I couldn't tell which.
Still and all, it didn't look like he was going to let me get back to my reading. He starts going on with some story that would show me how much he knew about these affairs and the whys and wherefores of when "our folks" can be up in the hotel and when we couldn't; but I wasn't about to get in a conversation right there about race can dos and can'ts.
That's not to say that things aren't changing to some degree. Nobody coulda bet on this development here that a uniformed officer of the law of Harlem, New York, could be colored. And too, even this kid is a sign of race progress. Between the both of us, it could look like uplift come uptown. So it wasn't going to be me who would ruin the potential evolution of the race.
I was thinking on all these things while I tried to settle into the chair. It wasn't particularly comfortable. I'm a big guy — not stocky, but not what anybody could call thin either. Straight-backed furniture seems to be made for littler butts than mine. Still and all, this one chair amongst all of them in the lobby would keep me looking alert and vigilant. I under- stood symbolics.
I came knowing it was going to be a long and drawn-out affair. The clock on the lobby wall verified it. Seemed like each swing of the pendulum took longer to get to the other side. Added to all this, a bleak and blistering freeze had taken hold. "Long and cold as a witch's tit," my daddy woulda said.
Come to think on it, the night Miss Olivia died was the same kind of dry brittle cold the night my daddy put that too big jacket on me and the flannel cap with the flaps that come down over my ears. Moms wouldn't let me go out before she wrapped a scarf around my neck enough times to strangle me and then pulled some of it up over my face to my nose. She always said "cover your mouth" when it's cold. But soon as we get outside, Daddy took it off, did one loose loop at my neck, and let the rest lay down the front of my jacket. He grabbed hold to my hand. That was warm enough for me. I don't remember if I asked him where we were going. It didn't much matter since I was with my daddy. We came back home dragging a scraggly Christmas tree. Mr. Chasen had it propped up against the side window of his grocery store. I got to choose it when Daddy asked me which one we should bring home.
"That's your decision?" Daddy asked.
"Yes sir! That one is my preferential."
"Preference," Daddy said.
He never teased me about my words, just helped me get them right. He always said getting things right was the hardest and best thing that anybody could do. I remember that to this day. It didn't make me feel bad at all that he fixed my words. He could fix about anything, except when it came to hisownself. That took me a long time to understand. It was a conundrum. Everything was not as it seemed. The puzzle mattered.
On that night when we was standing outside the grocery, I looked from my daddy and then over to the tree that was already lit up with lights and colored with the paper chains we pasted together at school. Chasen didn't have Christmas, so we kids felt like we were doing something generous when we left extra pieces of chains from our school art class draped on his trees.
Daddy turned to Mr. Chasen. "This the one my son choose," he told the grocer. Daddy said "son" like it mattered. Daddy pulled the tree with one hand and held mine in his other. There was a soft snow, just enough to change the streets from just dark and wet to dark with a feather-light promise of winter. And, it was freezing. Frigid, in fact. In the distance glimmered the bleary light of an alley barrel meeting where men who didn't have a place to stay got together. Daddy said there were rules for these gatherings, that these men wasn't bums. They had ways if not means.
There's rules for an alley barrel group. You had to take time during the day to follow behind the coal trucks, and when the coal man wheeled the full barrel back behind the store or apartment building to fill up the bins, you get just a few minutes to pick up some of whatever falls in the street and pocket it real quick before he comes back from his dump. Whatever coal you get is your ticket into the alley. Sometimes you got several pieces, other times just one or two. Didn't matter, you just had to contribute. It put me in mind of that folk story we read in school, "Stone Soup."
By the time we got down to the alley, we didn't stop much more than time for my daddy to give a polite nod to the group all huddled around the barrel. The fire inside was bright and hot and sparks were flitting up into the air like fireworks do in July. They stopped talking and watched us. I held my daddy's hand tighter, but I didn't say nothing. One of the men spoke up.
"All y'all look at that right there." It was the man with no gloves and no hat that was the one talking. "Y'all look what we got right here." The rest of them moved a bit so they could see us. "What you got here is a real man. He done got his boy a Christmas tree." Their soft grumbling sounded smooth and warm. Then he said it again. "Don't none of y'all miss this right here. It's a real man right here by us tonight and he got his boy with him. This a real man." I felt his voice as warm as fire. Now sure, it coulda been some heat from the fire barrel; but I bet it wasn't. My daddy didn't say a thing. Me neither. And I never asked him how come he knew the rules.
Miss my daddy. God rest his soul. Don't know why he had to die like he did. Don't know now whether I remember it on its own or I remember it because it was the first time I put together that feeling I get when something is going to happen.
Any other day I woulda been hanging out with my friends or finishing up my chores down to the grocery. But for some reason I stayed home with Moms. Annoying her. I didn't want to be there, I was hot and edgy and I was mad all day long.
I can get mad quick. Which they don't know about down to the station house. My temper comes out in the same way that I always can find something to say; but still and all I'm nobody's fool. When Reverend Charleston told me to apply for this police job, that they were going to take one of us to experiment with, he knew me enough to sit me down and give me a good talking to. "Boy you keeps to yourself, keep what you hear to yourself, keep your person to yourself."
I said "yessir," like I was supposed to. Reverend Charleston was close to preachifying.
"Keep things close. Don't go mouthin off or sharing what you think about the race oughta do and ought not to do. These folks, they your work not your people. Don't let them get inside your head. Not one iota. Because the truth is, they don't give a rat's ass about what you think about something." My eyes got big when Reverend Charleston said "rat's ass," but I was smart enough not to say anything about it. He stopped for a minute and breathed out deep and long. Like he wasn't even standing there in the church vestibule with his hands on my shoulder but someplace else. He came back, though, just soon enough before I had to figure whether to reach up and put my hand up on top of his. His hands felt heavy. He squeezed my shoulders. Now Reverend Charleston, he had some of the biggest hands I'd ever seen. But I didn't think for one second, If he don't let me go now, this is going to hurt. Instead I felt grateful for his laying his hands on me. And safe.
I said, "Yes sir." But I was really thinking about looking up the word "iota" in the big dictionary at the Harlem Branch Library. I didn't know you could use it like that. Like "one iota."
On that day Daddy died, Moms could tell I was not in a good mood and she kept on telling me, "Go on and get on out of here, it's another day the Lord has made and you don't need to be wasting it acting all ugly around here."
But I was sitting right in the same place I had been sitting all morning when the two men came to the door to tell us about the man who had gone and jumped from the Willis Avenue Bridge. Or maybe he fell. "Ma'am," the first stranger spoke up. "I seen the whole thing. He just stood up there on the top railing, took off this cap here, and threw it behind him. Then he fell over into the water, all the while shouting something fierce and pitiful. Hollerin straight on till he hit the river." The man's eyes watered, the other man just stood there like he didn't have a thing to add until it looked like his friend had said all he could. Then he spoke what they had come to say.
"Mrs. Thomas, ma'am, I'm real sorry to bring this news to you and yours, but one of the mens that works on the bridge with your, with Mr. Thomas, founded the cap we got right here an we seen these initials sewed right there into the lining, 'M. T.,' an so somebody said shouldn't one of us go over to that family and find out was he at home and maybe it wasn't him. And that's why I am so sorry to be standing here on your doorstep on this day."
I looked at the cap and knew right away that it was my daddy's. It went quiet for what seemed a long time. And then there came a sound like I hope to God never to have to hear again. It was long and slow and seemed like it worked its way up from her insides till it came out of my mother's mouth. A queer high sound that shattered the heart of everyone left standing in the room. Me too. Broke it full on.
So because it was me at home waiting for something that I didn't know what it was going to be, it was me who went down to the morgue with Moms and held on to her hand while she looked to Daddy's body laid out on a metal table with just a sheet over him. It was wet — damp from his river-soaked clothes. Moms looked down to the end of him. First it was him by the bootstrap that had lost its buckle and then it was him because of the mismatched buttons on his waistcoat, dark blue and olive green, and finally it was him because of the wedding band that was her own daddy's — the one he gave them just before they headed up to New York.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Death in Harlem"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Karla FC Holloway.
Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Author's NotePart I - The Fall
- Weldon Haynie Thomas6
- Harlem Night19
- Bound North Blues23
- Political Parties28
- The 9th Annual Opportunity Awards Banquet34
- The Morning After54
- Downtown—Upper East59
- Harlem, In Between68
Part II—After the Fall
- The 30th Precinct—Harlem71
- Rumor, Gossip, & Innuendo76
- Indictment and Arrest83
- The Omada111
- Police Court122
- The Brothers’ Law126
- Waiting for Weldon130
Part III—Before the Fall
- The Harlem Branch Library141
- Rooms With a View158
- Cinnamon and Salt169
- Color Struck176
Part IV—Just Spring
- Office Visit194
- Eyes on the Prize203
- The Palmer Method213
- Vermilion Parish225
- Blood Will Out234
- One Too Many245
- Without Sanctuary259
- Minding the Gap265
- The Omada Collection270
- Common Ground274