Part Two: Dorvay | 1961

DORVAY

1961

“An envelope is an envelope.

Disrespect the order and the

whole system breaks down.”

ONE

Five hundred dollars, onetime payment. As far as bribes and payoffs went, the onetime nature argued in its favor. Detective Munson came knocking for his weekly envelope, every Friday Delroy and Yea Big came to the store to pick up Chink Montague’s—Carney didn’t have the heart to calculate how much he’d paid out to those crooks the last two years. Operating expenses.

The price of doing business, like rent and insurance and Ma Bell. Squint at it, the five hundred to Duke was an investment.

“It’ll pay off down the road.” That’s how Pierce had pitched membership to Carney, when the lawyer caught his reaction to the words Dumas Club.

Carney’s expression: a braid of disdain and revulsion. “I’m not the right color,” Carney said.

“It’s not that bad anymore,” Pierce said. He grinned. “Look at me.”

It was true that Pierce was a blacker variety of berry than the average Dumas member. Certainly the lawyer wasn’t as stuffy or stuck-up as, say, Leland Jones.

“That’s your father-in-law?”

“Yes,” Carney said.

“Sorry, brother.”

They first met at the inaugural meeting of the Harlem Small Business Association. Basement of the St. Nicholas AME Zion Church. Terrance Pierce was on hand to lend his legal expertise, pro bono. “We’re not going to rise unless we all rise, right?”

Carney sat in the front row, as he had as a student. Pierce arrived five minutes late and took the only seat left, next to him. Instead of clapping for the speakers, Pierce tapped a Chesterfield on a monogrammed silver cigarette case. He was a tall man, with wavy black hair that focused his features into something eagle-like. His suit was expensive, gray with silvery

pinstripes; Carney had been mulling a wardrobe upgrade and later inquired about his tailor.

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.”

Carney called his father-in-law to give him a heads-up. Here was the rug peddler, barging in again—first his daughter, now his club. Alma handed Leland the phone and he said, “When Wilfred said you were coming, I told him I was thrilled.”

* * *

The Dumas Club, according to the brass plaque on the black gate of the townhouse, was founded in 1925. The names of the founders were familiar to Carney; they’d lectured him in high-school assemblies on the value of good work and moral health, were the masters of ceremonies at Fourth of July picnics and Labor Day dances in Mount Morris Park. The building dated back to 1898, when the neighborhood belonged to Italians and Irish.

New blood in, old blood out—this Dumas visit marked Carney’s turn as the new guy disturbing the way things are.

Carney wore his new lightweight tan suit. He checked once more to see if he was sweating through it. Judging from this week’s torments, it was going to be another punishing summer. At the end of the block, an old man shaved off ice for yelping children, bottles of bright syrup dancing in his hands like juggling pins. A teenager in a black suit and tails waited at the top of the club’s steps and beckoned with white gloves.

To the right of the front hall, the parlor room was full of Dumas men running herd over those they’d put up for membership. The piano player at the baby grand in the corner banged out ragtime, the hectic rhythms a nervous commentary on all the glad-handing. Pierce retrieved Carney and introduced him around. Carney knew Abraham Frye from the newspapers

—one of the few Negro judges in the city. Was that a city councilman lingering by the bar, pointing at his preferred gin? Carney couldn’t remember the last time he voted, but he’d doubtless voted for the man, the way the machine had everything locked up. Dick Thompson of Thompson TV and Radio, the Lenox Avenue electronics store, traded dirty jokes with Ellis Gray, who ran the biggest Negro-owned construction company in the city. Sable Construction had performed the recent work on Carney’s store, so he figured he’d paid for Gray’s tie or pocket square at the very least.

Members wore their club rings on their pinkies. With letters that tiny, you had to own one yourself to make out the seal. Or get real, real close—which Carney had. One of the guys, Louie the Turtle, had brought one to the office for him to get rid of, along with a motley bunch of loot. Louie the Turtle grazed inscrutably and showed up with the oddest things. The words on the ring were Latin and Carney had been incurious as to their meaning. He could’ve gotten something for the gold, but out of spite tossed it back at the Turtle and told him no, too traceable.

Carney shook the hand of Denmark Gibson, whom he recognized as the owner of the oldest funeral home in Harlem. Gibson had cremated his mother and father.

“How’s business?” Carney asked.

“Business is always good,” Denmark Gibson said.

And Elizabeth’s childhood friend Alexander Oakes, of course, experimenting with muttonchops. Oakes nodded from across the room. It was a Strivers’ Row crowd, no doubt, and Carney the only representative from ’round Crooked Way. Politicians, insurance men at the big-time colored firms, and more than a few lawyers and bankers, such as Wilfred Duke, whose new venture kept coming up in conversation. He’d been a muckety-muck at Carver Federal Savings, overseeing most of the neighborhood’s loans for twenty years. If a Negro wanted to get something going, he had to go through Wilfred Duke sooner or later. It was his new venture that had everybody talking, putting together the charter for a new black-owned bank to compete with his former employer: Liberty National, or simply Liberty, if you were in the know. Mortgages, small-business loans, community development. According to Pierce, half the room was trying to get their mitts in as board members or investors.

“Just water?” the bartender asked.

“And ice if you have it,” Carney said.

Someone touched his elbow. It was Leland, with the smile usually reserved for his grandchildren. “It’s good to see you, Raymond,” he said, and jetted to one of his cronies.

There was an hour of the typical jockeying, appraisals, and brinksmanship, and then Wilfred Duke stood before the windows overlooking 120th Street and addressed the group. He recognized those who’d stepped down from club leadership, as well as their successors.

Those who had recently passed, such as Clement Landford, who’d advised four mayors on the Negro point of view. He announced the endowment drive for a scholarship in Landford’s name, full ride at Morehouse for a gifted New York City student. Everyone clapped. Pierce tapped a Chesterfield on his cigarette case.

Certainly Carney was not the only one who saw Napoleon. The Harlem Gazette, a Duke antagonist going back to some dispute before Carney started reading the paper, had an editorial cartoonist who liked to portray the banker as the famous general, hand inside jacket, propeller beanie on his

head in the place of the military chapeau. Bull’s-eye. Duke was short and slightly built and spoke in a staccato, dictatorial style. Thirty years ago, he would have been a rare bird in Young Negro Harlem, a harbinger of the changing city, it was not difficult to see how he’d clambered to his place of influence. Or how he’d gathered enemies. The Gazette covered Duke’s bank plan as a Barnum-style con.

Duke smoothed his pencil mustache, those rat whiskers. He welcomed the prospective members. The club was named after Alexandre Dumas, the banker reminded them, son of a French army officer and a Haitian slave, who rose to the top of the literary world. “If you remember the story of the Count of Monte Cristo—and I realize it’s been a long time since some of you were in school”—there was some chuckling—“he was a man who got things done once he decided on a course of action. And that’s the spirit we strive for in our fraternity. The bootstrap spirit that delivered our ancestors from bondage, and now inspires all of us as we try to make a better Harlem.” Hear, hear.

Duke told everybody to have a drink and he wound his way through the room to commence his inspection of the applicants. Carney was one of the last to be collared. Pierce gave Carney a wink and slinked off.

They were next to the window, which allowed a slight cross ventilation.

“Raymond!” Duke said. “It’s hard to believe we haven’t met before.” The hand was clammy and the cologne first-rate. “How’s Elizabeth—and you have two children?”

“Great.”

“You tell that lady of yours her uncle Willie says hello.”

The street caught his attention. “That’s terrible.” He nodded below, where a disheveled young man staggered and patted his pockets in a grotesque pantomime. The Junkie Shake, that new dance, all the rage. “It’s a scourge,”

Duke said. “Some places, lots where I used to play handball as a kid, I wouldn’t walk past at night.”

“Wagner’s talking about that drug task force,” Carney said. He didn’t believe it, but it was something to say.

“That fool’s looking to get himself reelected. Against those Tammany hacks? He’ll say anything.”

“It’s a mess,” Carney said, and reminded himself to call Freddie.

Duke put his back to 120th Street and asked after the furniture store.

Carney assumed the banker already knew all he needed to know about him, but he told him about the expansion into the old bakery next door, just completed. His new secretary was working out fine, although he found it hard to give up tasks he’d been doing on his own for so long.

“You say goodbye to old challenges and welcome new ones.”

“That’s being an entrepreneur,” Carney said.

“Giving that old Jew Blumstein a run for his money, I hope.” Duke had had plenty of dealings with the big department store over the years, starting back with the protests in ’31 over the lack of Negro clerks and cashiers. He was a young man during the Buy Where You Can Work boycott, but even then he knew the importance of the long game. “Blumstein’s wasn’t going nowhere, and neither were we!” he told Carney. It had the ring of a well-used line.

Duke checked over Carney’s shoulder and adopted a tone of confidence.

“I’m glad you’re here, Raymond. We’re trying to broaden our ranks around here—so it’s not the same type. We can only accept a few men each year, that’s what’s hard about it.”

Carney got a feeling.

“Being that selective, sometimes a man, if he wants to head to the front of the line, he’ll add a sweetener. So he doesn’t get overlooked.”

“How sweet?”

“That depends on the man and how front of the line. Last year we had a fellow—I won’t say his name, I’m discreet, you have to be in banking—

arrived at the number five.”

After having bona fide criminals put the bite on him—dirty cops, dudes who cut people’s faces off—Duke’s genteel shakedown almost made him chuckle. Like last week when May got mad because he wouldn’t let her jump on the couch and she punched him in the arm—was that supposed to

hurt? There was pain and then there was pain. Different magnitudes you could stand or not stand. Wetting your beak and wetting your beak.

Carney asked for Duke’s card. The banker had leased an office in the Mill Building, on Madison, after he resigned from Carver Federal to start the community bank. The forces in the room changed vector and Duke was carried to another part of the room. To put the bite on someone else. Or were sweeteners only for the sons of crooks?

Five hundred dollars. Crooked world, straight world, same rules—

everybody had a hand out for the envelope. A five-hundred-dollar investment in the future of Carney’s Furniture if business kept rolling in like it was. A second store, a third? The members of the Dumas Club circulated around him in the room: whiskey in hand, elbows in ribs. They were a collection of chumps, but he’d need these Dumas chumps for permits, loans, to keep the city off his back. To give the okay one day down the line, or as bagmen for kickbacks to inspectors, to men in departments downtown he’d never heard of. Department of Skimming a Little Off the Top, Office of the Occasional Shakedown.

John wasn’t even two yet. By the time his son was old enough to help out with the family business—in a real way, not as a stock boy, as Carney’d gotten his start—the seeds of what he planted with the Dumas Club will have blossomed. It was a betrayal of certain principles, sure, a philosophy about achieving success despite—and to spite—men like these.

Condescending Leland types, Alexander Oakes and his lapdog buddies. But these were new times. The city is ever-changing, everything and everyone must keep up or fall behind. The Dumas Club had to adapt, and so did Carney.

* * *

When he told Elizabeth about Pierce’s invitation, she said, “Hmm.” The Dumas was out of character, as any survey of his comments about the club over the years would attest. Part of him thought she’d be pleased. Surely it was a sign of maturity to set aside cherished animosities in the name of

pragmatism. To shed some armor. No New Frontier stretched before him, endless and bountiful—that was for white folks—but this new land was a few blocks at least and in Harlem a few blocks was everything. A few blocks was the difference between strivers and crooks, between opportunity and the hard scrabble.

She had more to share when Carney returned from the mixer and told her that he was going for one of those rings.

“Why in the world would you do that? Those men are terrible.”

“You said raise my profile.” He tugged his tie loose. “This is raising.”

“Not like that. There are some real SOBs in that club, I’ve been around them my whole life.”

“Like Uncle Willie?”

“He’s the worst of those shitheels,” she said.

Elizabeth’s vocabulary was saltier these days. She’d returned to Black Star Travel six months after John was born and the work had changed in her absence. They still served their old client pool, but now the company handled bookings for civil rights groups, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality, navigating safe travel and lodging for their excursions into the most hostile and backward places. The stakes were different. One of their mainstay hotels in Mississippi had been firebombed. It was a warning—nobody got hurt. But they could have been. Just last month, the Klan stopped a bus of Freedom Riders in Anniston, Alabama, and tried to burn them alive inside. An undercover cop on board waved his gun around and scared the mob off before the gas tanks exploded. The pictures were in the papers, testimony to the pure white madness she’d sent people into. Black Star hadn’t set up that Anniston trip, but they’d organized plenty others like it. Yes, she was saltier now. It suited her.

“It’ll be good to have some of them in my corner,” Carney said.

“Hmm,” Elizabeth said. “Should I ask my father to put in a good word?

Have you told him?”

“Said he was glad to see me there.” He told her she didn’t need to bother him with it. Then one of the kids started wailing, and that was that.

At their next Chock Full o’Nuts lunch, Pierce said he hadn’t heard of anyone handing over an envelope before. “I’d say it was a test of whether or not you’d do it, but I know that nigger likes money too much.” He shrugged. “We’ve been to the circus enough times to know how people do

—even ‘Mr. Community’ Dukes.” Pierce didn’t say pay it. And he didn’t say not to. They hailed Sandra for another cup of joe.

Carney scraped the money together. Put a dent in the apartment fund, on top of the recent expansion costs, but he’d replenish it. The savings account devoted to the new apartment—no more hiding cash in boots under his bed

—waxed and waned. Knocking out the wall between his store and the bakery cost more than the estimate. Every extra dollar extracted by Gray he experienced as a pain. Plus Marie’s salary every other Friday. Elizabeth wasn’t up to a move when she was pregnant, then John’s arrival made it complicated, and things kept coming up. Maybe wait until Elizabeth gets settled back at work. Maybe best to hold off until construction is done.

Whenever the fund shrank, so did their apartment: The hallway pressed on him, the living room squeezed. Elizabeth thought the kids’ room was plenty big, but Carney could barely fit between May’s and John’s twin beds, stepping over those damn toys. And the bathroom, he felt like a crowbar every time he went take a piss.

The money from the fencing side kicked in when he needed it, though.

Business was doing nicely there, with his new contact. More crooked in one direction and more legit in the other—careful you don’t split yourself in half, Carney. He tucked the five bills into a manila envelope, wrapped the string around the button, and folded it over three times.

* * *

Carney visited the Mill Building twice that month. The first time was to drop off the envelope, and the second was to get it back.

The Mill, on the corner of Madison and 125th, was where respectable Negro gentlemen hung their shingle these days. Names in gold paint on frosted glass. Doctors had their floor, dentists another, and Duke installed

himself in a corridor of lawyers, corner office. Carney had to imagine the view, as he only made it as far as the small reception room. The secretary Candace was a perky young gal in a red-and-white-checked dress, bouffant hairdo like an extra Supreme. Duke was married—his wife was a bigwig in Negro society, summoning the usual crowd for charity events that got written up in gossip pages—but he had a reputation as a ladies’ man.

Carney made an assumption.

Candace poked her head into her boss’s office. Carney didn’t catch the exchange.

“Mr. Duke says you can leave it with me,” she said, closing the door as if sneaking out after putting a baby to sleep.

“He did?”

She nodded. Carney understood a predilection for middlemen, being one himself. He gave her the envelope.

A week later, a messenger appeared at the door of Carney’s office.

Carney recognized him from the mixer, one of the young bartenders, paying dues. He took the envelope and tipped the kid a dollar for his trouble.

Sometimes you order something from a Sears catalog and when it arrives, it’s not what you paid for. He had not paid for what he held in his hands: a letter from the Dumas Club expressing regret that they could not extend an offer of admission.

Carney spent the next hour in his office. When the phone rang, Rusty answered it and told him Pierce was on the line. He waved his hand in dismissal.

He walked to the Mill. Candace answered his knock with a “Come on in.” They’d finished lunch, sandwiches, empty wax-paper squares open like sunflowers. Duke sat on the corner of Candace’s desk, eating jelly candies from a glass jar she kept next to a small brass lamp. He gestured to his mouth—can’t talk—and brought Carney along into his office.

Fifth floor, Duke did indeed have a nice view of the Bronx. On the other side of the Harlem River, industrial buildings and warehouses and then sturdy tenements steamed in the heat, poking into the yellowish smog that got worse every year.

Framed on one wall, centered among numerous diplomas and citations and testaments to his character, hung a large drawing of Duke as Napoleon, one too large to have run in the Gazette. He must have commissioned it from the newspaper cartoonist himself. Godzilla-sized, George Washington Bridge behind him as he forded the Hudson with one big foot poised to stomp the West Side Highway. French general’s hat in its proper place instead of the beanie.

“Sorry I couldn’t help you, Raymond,” Duke said when they were seated.

“In the end, I’m only one voice of many.”

“You ripped me off.”

“How’d you expect it to turn out, Raymond?”

“For you to respect the terms.”

“I said I’d move your name to the front and that’s what I did.”

“You take a sweetener, it’s a guarantee.” The yellow smog—it was like you saw everybody’s bad thoughts lurking in the air.

“Where you from, man?”

“127th Street.”

“One of those places. How’d you think it was going to go?” Duke was practiced in conversations like this. At the bank snatching back loans, foreclosing on hope. Here were passionless statements of fact.

Carney said, “I’ll take my money.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Like I said.” He stood.

Duke regarded the visitor on the other side of his desk as if peering over the parapet of a castle. His eyes sparkled. Since he left the bank, it was only once or twice a day that the world handed him such opportunities for malice. Three times if he was lucky. He barked at the front office.

“Candace, can you call the precinct?”

“Call the police on me?” Carney said.

Candace cracked the door. “Are you all right, Mr. Duke?”

Carney’s father was the one you called police on, not him.

Duke stared at Carney and slowly opened the top drawer of his desk. He slipped his hand inside as if a pistol waited. Harlem bankers, they are

prepared.

Out on the pavement, Carney could barely see. The people on the street were shadow-shapes moving around him. It was a normal afternoon and he’d been shunted outside it. A cabbie pounded on his horn at an old biddy jaywalking and she cursed him out, dragging a battered green suitcase. One of the street preachers yelled, “I’m saving souls here!” and raised his arms as if parting seas. Down the block, two newsboys from rival papers fought over the turf in front of a cigar store. Their dropped tabloids fanned out on the sidewalk and trembled in the exhaust of a city bus. Carney squinted.

Here was every street corner in this city, populated by noisy, furious characters who were all salesmen, delivering dead pitches for bum products to customers who didn’t have a fucking nickel anyway. He moved one foot then the other.

Sucker. The mistake was to believe he’d become someone else. That the circumstances that shaped him had been otherwise, or that to outrun those circumstances was as easy as moving to a better building or learning to speak right. Hard stop on the t. He knew where he stood now, had always known, even if he’d gotten confused; there was the matter of redress.

His father—how would he have phrased it? “I’ll burn that nigger’s house down while he sleeps.” In more innocent days, Carney preferred to think of that as a figure of speech; it was more than likely that his father had done that thing once or twice. Wilfred Duke lived in a fine and stately eight-story building on Riverside Drive, the Cumberland, and the complexities of burning it down were numerous and varied, even if Carney had arson in his repertoire. Which he did not.

No. Fire was too quick. And Carney by nature was more of the biding type.