Jeffery Deaver - Hell's Kitchen

Oh, everyone had been full of praise and enthusiasm for West of Eighth: An Oral History of Hell’s Kitchen . But not a single dollar from big studio was forthcoming to back it.

As he’d pitched the idea he explained that the neighborhood offered a wonderful mix of crime, heroism, corruption, beauty.

“Those are all capitalized words, Pellam,” a friend, a VP for development at Warner Brothers, had told him. “Capitalized words do not good movies make.”

Only Alan Lefkowitz had expressed any interest and he didn’t have the foggiest notion what the film was about.

Still, Pellam had great hopes for the flick and believed it had a shot at an Oscar – confidence founded largely on an encounter that had occurred on West Thirty-Sixth Street last June.

“Excuse me,” he’d asked, “you live in this building?”

“Yes, I do, young man,” the elderly black woman had answered, eyes confident, amused. Not wary.

He’d looked up and down the street. “This is the last tenement on this block.”

“Used to be nothing but tenements. Place I lived in for forty years was right there, see that vacant lot? There? I lived here for, lessee, five years or so. How about that? Almost half a century on the same block. God damn , that’s a scary thought.”

“Your family lived in the neighborhood all your life?”

The woman had set down the thin plastic grocery bag, containing two cans, two oranges and a half gallon jug of wine.

“You bet I have. My Grandpa Ledbetter came up from Raleigh in 1862. His train, it came in at ten at night and he walked out of the station and saw these boys, dozens of ’em, in a alley and said, ‘Lord, why ain’t you home?’ and they said, ‘What’re you talking? This is our home. Go on with you, old man.’ He felt so bad for those boys. Sleeping outside was called ‘carrying the banner,’ and thousands of children had to do it. They had no home otherwise.”

She’d spoken without a trace of accent, a deep, melodious voice – a singer’s voice as he would later learn.

“Was it a nice building?” Pellam had asked, gazing at the vacant lot, overgrown with weeds, where apparently the woman’s old tenement had once stood.

“Where I lived? That old thing?” She’d laughed. “Falling down ug- ly ! You know something interesting though. I thought it was interesting, anyway. When they tore it down there was a big crowd of people came to complain. You know, protestor sorts. ‘Don’t take our homes,’ they were yelling. ‘Don’t take our homes.’ Course I didn’t recognize most of ’em from the neighborhood. I think they were students come down from Morningside Heights or the Village ’cause they smelled a good protest. Get the picture? Those sorts.

“Anyway, who’d I meet but a woman I knew long, long time ago. Many years. She was close to ninety then, been married to a man much older run a livery stable and sold horses to the army. Hell’s Kitchen used to be the stable of New York. Still have the hansom cab stables here. Anyway, this woman, she’d been born in that very building they were tearing down. Ineeda Jones. Not Anita, like you’re thinking. Ineeda. Like I need a . That was a southern name, a Carolina name. She was up in Harlem for years then she came back to the Kitchen and was poor as me. Cradle to grave, cradle to grave. Say, mister, I don’t take any offense but what exactly’re you smiling at?”

“Can I ask your name?”

“I’m Ettie Washington.”

“Well, Ms. Washington, my name’s John Pellam. How’d you like to be in a movie?”

“A movie? Hell. Say, why don’t you come on upstairs? Have some wine.”

The interviews had begun the next week. Pellam would climb the six flights to her apartment and turn on the recorder and let Ettie Washington talk.

And talk she did. About her family, her childhood, her life.

Age six, sitting on a scrap of purloined Sears Roebuck carpet beside a window, listening to her mother and grandmother swap stories about turn-of-the-century Hell’s Kitchen, Owney Madden, the Gophers – the most notorious gang in the city.

“… My Grandpa Ledbetter, he used a lot of slang he heard on the street when he was a young man. He’d say ‘booly dog’ for a policeman. A ‘flat’ was a man you could fool, like at a card game. ‘Blue ruin’ was gin. And ‘chips’ was money. My brother Ben’d laugh and say, ‘Grandpa, don’t nobody use those words no more.’ But he was wrong. Grandpa always said ‘crib’ for where you live, your home, you know? And people’re saying that again nowadays.”

Ettie at age ten, working her first job, sweeping sawdust and wrapping meat in a butcher store.

Age twelve, in school, numbers easy and words hard, but getting mostly As. Stealing scraps from restaurant bins for lunch. Classmates vanishing as the need for money edged out the need for learning.

Age fourteen, her beloved and feared Grandma Ledbetter dying as she sat on the couch at Ettie’s side one hot Sunday afternoon a week before her 99th birthday.

Age fifteen, Ettie herself finally leaving school, working for twenty cents an hour, sharpening knives and chisels in a paperboard factory, stropping blades on long, speeding bands of leather. Some of the men gave her extra pennies because she worked hard. Some would call her back into the stock room and touch her chest and say don’t tell. One touched her between her legs and before he could say don’t tell he received his own knife deep in his thigh. He was bandaged up and given the day off with pay. Ettie was fired.

Age seventeen, sneaking into clubs to hear Bessie Smith on Fifty-second Street.

“… Wasn’t much in the way of entertainment in the Kitchen. But if Mama and Papa had an extra dollar or two, they’d go down to the Bowery on the East Side, where they had what they called ‘museums,’ which weren’t what you think. They were arcades – freak shows and varieties and dancers. Vaudeville. For a really good time Mama and Papa’d go to Marshall’s on Fifty-third. You never heard of that but it was a hotel and nightclub for blacks. That was the big time, none better. Ada Overton Walker sung there. Will Dixon too.”

Age thirty eight, a decade of cabaret jobs behind her, the singing work drying up. Ettie, falling for a handsome Irishman. Billy Doyle, a charmer, a man with, apparently, a criminal record (Pellam was still waiting to hear the end of that story).

Age forty-two, the marriage not working. She was restless, still wanting to sing. Billy was restless too. Wanting to succeed, looking for his own niche. Finally he told her he was going off to find a better job and would send for her. Of course he never returned and that broke her heart. All she ever heard from him was a short note that accompanied the Nevada divorce decree.

At forty-four, marrying Harold Washington, who died drunk in the Hudson River some years later. A good man in many ways, a hard worker, he still left more debt than seemed fair for a man who never played the horses.

Tape after tape of these stories. Five hours, ten, twenty.

“You can’t really be interested in all of this, can you?” Ettie had asked Pellam.

“Keep going, Ettie. You’re on a roll.” Pellam had told himself to get outside and interview other residents of the infamous neighborhood. And he had – some of them. But Ettie Washington remained the heart of West of Eighth . Billie Doyle, the Ledbetters, the Wilkeses, the Washingtons, Prohibition, the unions, gangs, epidemics, the Depression, World War Two, the stockyards, the ocean liners, apartments, landlords.

Ettie was on a roll. And the roll never stopped.

Until her arrest for murder and arson.

Now, a blistering afternoon, a uniformed guard handed John Pellam pass and ushered him through the dank halls, where the scent of Lysol ran neck and neck with that of urine. He passed through the metal detector then stepped into the visiting room to wait.