A Rage in Harlem Read Online Free Page A

help themselves, Brother Jackson,” Reverend Gaines said, hurrying off to dinner.
    Jackson felt a lot better. His panic had passed and he beganthinking with his head instead of his feet. The main thing was to have the Lord on his side. He had begun to think the Lord had quit him.
    He caught a taxi on Seventh Avenue, rode down to 125th Street and turned over to the Last Word, a shoe-shine parlor and record shop at the corner of Eighth Avenue.
    He put ninety dollars on numbers in the night house, playing five dollars on each. He played the
money row, lucky lady, happy days, true love, sun gonna shine, gold, silver, diamonds, dollars
and
whiskey
. Then to be on the safe side he also played
jail house, death row, lady come back, two-timing woman, pile of rocks, dark days
and
trouble
. He wasn’t taking any chances.
    While he was putting in his numbers behind blown-up pictures of Bach and Beethoven, the girl selling the real stuff played rock-and-roll records on request, and the shoe-shine boys were beating out the rhythm with their shine cloths. Jackson’s feet took out with the beat, cutting out the steps, as though they didn’t know about the trouble in his head.
    Suddenly Jackson began feeling lucky. He gave up on the hope of finding Hank. He stopped worrying about Imabelle. He felt as though he could throw four fours in a row.
    “Man, you know one thing, I feel good,” he said to the shoe-shine boy.
    “A good feeling is a sign of death, Daddy-o,” the boy said.
    Jackson put his faith in the Lord and headed for the dice game upstairs on 126th Street, around the corner.

3
    Jackson climbed three flights of stairs and rapped on a red door in a brightly lit hall.
    A metal disk moved from a round peephole. Jackson couldn’t see the face, but the lookout saw him.
    The door opened. Jackson went into an ordinary kitchen.
    “You want to roll ’em or roll with ’em?” the lookout asked.
    “Roll ’em,” Jackson said.
    The lookout searched him, took his fingernail knife and put iton the pantry shelf alongside several man-killing knives and hard-shooting pistols.
    “How can I hurt anybody with that?” Jackson protested.
    “You can jab out their eyes.”
    “The blade ain’t long enough to go through the eyelid.”
    “Don’t argue, man, just go down to the last door to the right,” the lookout said, leaning against the door frame.
    There were three loose nails in the door casing. By pressing them the lookout could blink the lights in the parlor, bedrooms, and dice room. One blink for a new customer, two for the law.
    Another lookout opened the door from the inside of the dice room, closed and locked it behind Jackson.
    There was a billiard table in the center of the room, and a rack holding billiard balls and cue sticks on one wall. The shooters were jammed about the table beneath a glare of light from a green-shaded drop lamp. The stick man stood on one side of the table, handling the dice and bets. Across from him sat the rack man on a high stool, changing greenbacks into silver dollars and banking the cuts. He cut a quarter on all bets up to five dollars, and fifty cents on bets over five dollars.
    The bookies sat at each end of the table. A squat, bald-headed, brown-skinned man called Stack of Dollars sat at one end; a gray-haired white man called Abie the Jew sat at the other. Stack of Dollars bet the dice to lose; took any bet to win. Abie the Jew bet the dice to win or lose, barring box cars and snake eyes.
    It was the biggest standing crap game in Harlem.
    Jackson knew all the famous shooters by sight. They were celebrities in Harlem. Red Horse, Four-Four and Coots were professional gamblers; Sweet Wine, Rock Candy, Chink and Beauty were pimps; Doc Henderson was a dentist; Mister Foot was a numbers banker.
    Red Horse was shooting. He shook the number eight bird’s eye dice loosely in his left hand, rolled them with his right hand. The dice rolled evenly down the green velvet cover, jumped the dog chain