Dreams Bigger Than the Night Read Online Free Page A

lunch hour. Jay looked forward to his legends and laughter. T usually found a way to win at checkers, though not at B-ball, which admittedly was not his game.
    “You ever play baseball?” asked T-Bone.
    “Just stickball in the streets with a Spaldeen.”
    Slowly, T-Bone shook his head and positioned his checkers. “Great game. I’d still be playin’ if I hadn’t hurt my ankle slidin’ into second base ’gainst the Pittsburgh Crawfords.”
    “You played pro?”
    “Yeah, for the Kansas City Monarchs. The hot corner. I had an arm like a rifle and could one hop the ball better than any white boy in the majors.”
    Having started in 1920, the Monarchs were the New York Yankees of the Negro leagues.
    “How old are you, T-Bone?”
    “Thirty-six . . . twenty-eight when I got injured and started swingin’ a pick and a shovel. If the Man upstairs had made me white, maybe my name would be right up there with Ruth and Gehrig and Lefty Gomez. But that can be said about a lotta black ballplayers, ’specially Satchel Paige and James ‘Cool Papa’ Bell.”
    One evening, Jay accompanied T back to his digs at the Douglas-Harrison Apartments, a long row of redbrick buildings, and sat next to him on the couch leafing through his scrapbook. The living room had few amenities: a wooden cable spool that held a radio topped with a lace doily and a porcelain figurine of Mary cradling Jesus, a rocker, some chairs missing spindles, a couch that had given up the fight to support any weight, and a framed needlepoint expressing the hopes of an oppressed people: “When all is done, there is God.”
    T-Bone’s mother, bedridden with emphysema, asked to meet her son’s newfound friend. A white-haired handsome woman, she shook Jay’s hand and apologized for not getting out of bed.
    “Too many cigarettes,” she wheezed.
    “You gonna be all right, Mamma, you just wait and see.”
    “In heaven, maybe, but not here.”
    “Everything happens for the best, Mamma. Trust in God.”
    She took her son’s hand and beamed. “I do. And you also.”
    Shortly after T-Bone’s work crew transferred to another ward, she died. Jay attended the funeral out of respect, the only white person present. Held in the basement of a church, the funeral took place in a room that had about twenty folding chairs, a table with crackers and cheese, and two pitchers of nonalcoholic punch. The mourners, in their frayed Sunday best, sat with hands folded through the service. Then two brass players—trombone and trumpet—played “Amazing Grace” as T-Bone, whose real name was Randall, wiped the tears from his cheeks.

    On Saturday, March 17, 1934, around eight p.m., Puddy and Jay drove to a party in West Orange. It was a date Jay would never forget. Puddy had said a pal of his wanted friends to join him for a festive occasion.
    “Who is this guy?”
    “You’ll meet him, just hold your horses.”
    “He doesn’t know me from Adam.”
    “Relax, Spider. He said to bring friends. You’re a friend, ain’t you?”
    “Yeah.”
    They drove down Beverly Road, and pulled up at a Tudor mansion with decorated half timbering, tall narrow windows, massive chimneys, and a roof pitched steeper than a ski jump. Dozens of cars had spilled over from the street onto the expansive lawn. Just outside the front door stood two Cadillacs, one red and the other an all-weather black phaeton.
    A butler led them into the house, which was overflowing with raucous guests and booze. A rainbow of balloons floated overhead; three musicians on piano, trombone, and sax played swing. Ladies wore fur stoles and beaded evening gowns that reflected the lamps glowing like golden apples, their necks and wrists dripping diamonds and pearls and rubies, with gents in dark English suits and silk shirts—white on white, black, silver, blue—sporting bloated pinky rings and smoking foot-long Habana cigars that they lit from platinum Ronson lighters. Two priests and a man wearing a white satin yarmulke