Victor Lavalle: The Ballad of Black Tom

Buckeye left an open invitation for Tommy at the Victoria Society. It was on 137th Street. The walk was a mere seven blocks, but because of his father’s health, it took them half an hour to arrive.

The Victoria Society consisted of three modest rooms on the second floor of an apartment building. It was a Caribbean social club. Down on the street Tommy and Otis were in black Harlem; in the Victoria Society they entered the British West Indies. The flags of every Caribbean nation were fixed to the walls of a long hallway. A much larger Union Jack hung at the far end. At the doorway to the warren of rooms, Tommy Tester had to give Buckeye’s name three times. The greeter at the door remained unmoved until Tommy used Buckeye’s given name, George Hurley. That worked like a spell.

Tommy and Otis followed the greeter at a distance. One of the society’s rooms was reserved for men playing card games or bones; the second showed men in lounge chairs smoking and listening to music played at a respectable volume; and the third had card tables set out with tablecloths and chairs, for meals. Buckeye had invited Tommy to the Victoria Society many times in the years since they’d made friends, but Tommy had never come until now. He felt a sting, like a slap, across his face. This was the place he’d described to Ma Att? The shorthand for a den of crime and sin? The place where Harlem’s worst criminals were too afraid to go?

He’d assumed he knew what kind of place this would be. Buckeye ran numbers for the most famous female gangster in New York City, so why wouldn’t the Victoria Society be like those legendary opium dens? Or had Tommy simply assumed terrible things about this wave of West Indian immigrants? The American Negroes in Harlem got up to awful gossip about those newcomers. And now he’d come to find the Victoria Society might as well be a British tearoom. He felt slightly disappointed. He’d brought his father because he’d meant to show his dad a scandalous night. He’d heard women danced in nearly nothing, so close they practically sat in your lap. Being inside now, seeing this place truly, was like learning another world existed within — or alongside — the world he’d always known. Worse, all this time he’d been too ignorant to realize it. The idea troubled him like a pinched nerve.

Tommy and his dad sat, and the older man blew out a deep breath. Otis spent a long time adjusting himself in the chair to minimize his back pain. He moved like someone ancient. Otis Tester was forty-one years old.

A thin woman came to the table offering dinner she’d made in her kitchen, then brought here to sell. She was Trinidadian. Her dinner plates were already prepared, and she rolled them through the dining room on a cart. Saheena, pineapple chow, and macaroni pie. A bowl of cow heel soup. Tall cups of passion fruit juice. The whole meal, for both men, came to a dollar. Tommy paid.

“I don’t know what any of this mess is,” Otis said, watching the plate in front of him like it might strike. “Why didn’t we go down to Bo’s place?”

Tommy found himself watching the Trinidadian woman because she reminded him of his own mother. That wiry frame and splay-footed walk. Irene Tester, gone four years now. People who knew her well used to call her Michigan because she never could stop talking about the place where her parents came from. She collapsed on a bus, died thirty-seven years old among strangers. Life as a domestic wore her out just as surely as construction did Otis. Tommy looked to his father, wondering if he’d also been thinking the Trinidadian woman looked like Irene, but the old man only stared down at the plates, mystified.

“Come on, now,” Tommy said. “There’s something here you’re going to like.”

Otis scanned the table looking for something he recognized. He lifted a fork and poked at the macaroni pie. “This is just cheese and noodles, yes?”

Tommy Tester sank a fork and knife into his serving. He brought a portion to his mouth and chewed. After swallowing, he nodded, but his father prodded at it anyway, as if he didn’t trust his son. He set the fork down without eating.

“Now, you say this white man is going to pay you how much?”

“Four hundred dollars.”

“All that just to play at his party?” Otis asked. He grabbed the cup of passion fruit juice, brought it to his nose, sniffed, set the drink back down. “All that for you to play at his party?”

Tommy chewed at a bite of the pineapple chow. It was sweet, but the kick of lime juice and hot pepper followed soon after. He gulped his juice to cool his throat.

“That’s what he said.”

Otis raised his hands in the air, held them as far apart as he could.

“That’s the distance between what a white man says to a Negro and what he really means.”

Tommy knew this, of course. Hadn’t he lived twenty years in America already? His whole hustle— entertainment —was predicated on the idea that people had ulterior motives for hiring him.

When he dressed in those frayed clothes and played at the blues man or the jazz man or even the docile Negro, he knew the role bestowed a kind of power upon him. Give people what they expect and you can take from them all that you need. They won’t realize you’ve juiced them until they’re dry. Ma Att had essentially paid him to deliver a worthless item, hadn’t she? If he had to play the role of quasi-gangster to get paid, then so be it. He played the roles needed to enrich his bank account. But all this would sound criminal to Otis. Or demeaning. The man had an outsized opinion of dignity. Nobility didn’t pay well enough to make Tommy want the job.

“I’ll be real careful, Daddy.”

Otis Tester watched his son quietly. The rest of the dining room grew louder as more tables filled, but a kind of quiet, a bubble of reserve, surrounded their table. Otis was father to a twenty-year-old black boy who’d blithely explained he’d be going out to Flatbush, in the middle of the night, into the home of a white man. He might as well have told his father he planned to go wrestle a bear.

“When I left Oklahoma City,” Otis Tester said, “I rode on the railroads. Hobo’d all the way east.”

Not the first time, nor the five-hundredth time, Tommy Tester had heard this story. Tommy ate to keep from expressing his disappointment. Hadn’t Otis heard the most vital detail? Four hundred dollars.

“I avoided crossing Arkansas,” Otis continued. “Whether you were Negro, white, or a red man they were pretty rough on hoboing in Arkansas. They had chain gangs, you know. I went to East St. Louis, over to Evansville. I got taken off the train once in Decatur. I wasn’t making a direct route here. I was real young so I had the need to see much more than my final destination.”

Finally Otis Tester ate the macaroni pie, as if storytelling had sparked his appetite. He took one bite, chewed cautiously, but after he swallowed the first, he chomped down two more.

“Like I said, they took me off the train in Decatur. And that’s when it turned out I had to use my head.” Now he took the risk of a drink. The passion fruit juice clearly pleased him. He sipped slowly, then set the drink down. “I had to use this.”

Otis Tester unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt right there in the dining room. Tommy stiffened, feeling like a five-year-old whose daddy was about to shame him in public. But before he could scold his father, or reach over and try to cover Otis’s exposed skin, the old man pulled something from around his neck. It was hanging there on a coarse string. He slipped it off and clutched it in one rough hand while he buttoned his shirt again. Tommy leaned forward trying to see what his dad held. Otis Tester extended his hand, opened it.