William Kennedy - Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

“Yeah, Tremont shootin’ people.”

“Can you handle us till I get a car down here?”

“Do it fast. Get him and his gun on the road.”

Trixie went to the parlor and sat next to the gun. “Tremont,” she said, “how come you goin’ around savin’ women with a machine gun?”

“It’s an AR-15, Trix, and I’d be doin’ five to ten wasn’t for Rosie.”

He told her about the night he’s walking on Quay Street, goin’ here to there, and sees a woman facedown near the dock, looks close and it’s Jolene. He goes to talk to her but she ain’t much to talk to, dead drunk and wet. Then the cops turn up and take ’em both in and write up a charge says Tremont is Jolene’s pimp and he strangled her, raped her, and threw her in the river. When Jolene comes to she agrees with the cop and swears yeah, that’s how it was, Tremont did it. When Rosie hears Tremont’s in jail she calls the Night Squad detective sergeant she snitches for and tells him Tremont’s no pimp, he never went that direction. Jolene was bangin’ sixteen guys on a freighter and got so drunk she fell outa the little boat goin’ back to the dock and one of them sailors had to jump in and pull her out. Cop asks how Rosie knows this and Rose says I was with her. So the heavy steam woozled out of that rape charge against Tremont and he walked.

“Why they want to put you away, Tremont?” Trixie asked.

“That cop’s been down on me since Election when a Democrat give me five to vote the right way and I took it. I was broke, Mary was sick as hell and five’s five. I told Roy and he says you gotta give it back, but go public with a lawyer and tell ’em who gave it to you and the Brothers’ll go with you for support.”

Tremont did but they busted him, and his lawyer was useless. Patsy’s D.A. had called a press conference about vote buying and said he’d prosecute anybody who gave a five, or took a five. So who’s gonna admit taking one, and did you ever hear of anybody giving one back? The committeeman who slipped Tremont the fiver had a sudden heart attack, also a stroke, not to mention six or seven malignant brain tumors, so his family flew him someplace, nobody knew where, for emergency treatment; and unfortunately he couldn’t be subpoenaed. Quinn wrote the story for the paper and it got a laugh, the Brothers advanced their crusade against election fraud, and the five-dollar vote was news for five minutes. Tremont walked again and now the cops were hovering, waiting for him to make a mistake. One cop decided Jolene was his mistake, but Rosie begged to differ. “Jolene was no good,” Rosie said. “She didn’t even know how to fuck right. She already dead, somebody got her, or maybe she fell in again.”

“Buying votes, Big Jimmy used to buy votes,” George said.

“That’s right, he did,” Tremont said.

“It’s what got him in thick with the Democrats,” George said. “There was a big run by coloreds coming up from Alabama and living in the South End and spending their money at Jimmy’s club, seven-foot-two colored fella singing and you had jazz music day and night. Patsy McCall saw all those newcomers in Jim’s place and got the idea to make Jim a ward leader. But you can’t make a colored fella a real ward leader — those people are all Irish. So Patsy invented a ward that floated and he put Jim in charge. Jim rounded up coloreds no matter where they lived and fixed it so they voted in one of the wards down here. Jim saw the prostitutes weren’t voting so he had the cops arrest them all and bring them to the polls in the paddy wagon.”

“I voted twice that year,” Trixie said.

“Jim paid four bucks a pop,” George said, “and he’d do favors for anybody who asked. In the windup he got one hell of a bunch of voters for Patsy, who was so happy that he fixed it so Jim hit the numbers twice in one day. I wrote Jim’s play that day, a Wednesday, but I didn’t know it was fixed. Jim won thousands and poured free beer for a week. What a great fella. He’d give you the hat off his head and tell you what to do with it. I can see him at the bar in his brocade vest and pocket watch, and that size eight-and-a-half top hat he got from London. Remember his songs, Trixie?”

“A hundred of ’em.”

And George sang: “Just because my hair is curly,

Just because my teeth are pearly,”

“I hated that one,” Trixie said.

“You can’t hate that. It was Jimmy’s tune. He’d get encores.”

“I hated that shufflin’ stuff.”

“Coon songs,” Tremont said.

And George sang: “Just because my color’s shady,

That’s the reason maybe. .”

“I used to wonder how could my daddy sing those tunes,” Tremont said. “I told him people didn’t want no more coon songs. He set me down right then and he talked like he never talked to me before:

“‘Boy, you gotta know this,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t for coon songs I wouldn’ta worked. Nobody hires giants, especially colored giants, but two summers the sideshow up at Al-Tro Park billed me as the Albany Giant — tap dances while he sings coon songs. Then His Honor the Barber come to town from Chicago and Seely Hawkins was singin’ in it and she brought Mr. Dudley to see my act. He asked did I want to be in his show, and he put me in doin’ a reprise of ‘Shine.’ That was Ada Walker’s tune and she owns it, but I did it late in the show and some nights I got six encores. Show went to Harlem, two weeks on Broadway, then down to Virginia, Georgia, even Texas, and people loved that song and a whole lot of others, with Big Jimmy Van singin’ ’em, and I got me a name in colored theater. I jumped into vaudeville when the show closed, played some theaters on Mr. Dudley’s circuit, then came north and did the white circuits, and people all over this country got to know Big Jimmy Van. I made good money for years and come home and opened a club, got married and had a son I called Tremont. And he grew up to hate coon songs.’

“That stuff,” Tremont said, “suckin’ us into the lowdown — coon funny, coon foolish, wind him up and he smile, he shuffle. When I was a kid I said nothin’ ever gonna make me do that. But it made Jim somebody. He always said the Barber was a new thing in colored theater. Mr. Dudley played the barber who dreams he wants to shave the president in the White House and then he gets to do it, even though it’s just a dream. And Big Jim said to me, ‘Havin’ a story to go with the ragtime and the cakewalk, that was a different kind of show. We made a little bit of history and we got on Broadway and pretty soon a lot of colored shows had stories and they quit doin’ the old minstrel stuff.’”

“I used to be a barber,” George said. “I shaved the Mayor.”

“The Mayor,” Tremont said. “Big Jim knew all the Mayors, all the politicians. He was the most famous black man in this town, flush and connected, ask Jim and he’ll fix it, if you’re on his side. Hot time in the old town tonight, if Jim says so, and he never had no shame, other people had shame. Jim sang ‘Shine’ so much it got in my brain and now it don’t matter what it means. Means Big Jim to me.”

“Politics,” Trixie said. “Tremont, why you foolin’ with that five-dollar vote? If you needed money you shoulda voted twice and got two fives, not give it back. You ain’t cut out for politics.”

“Never could get into it like Big Jim,” Tremont said. “He got me two, three city jobs but those paychecks wasn’t enough to buy a pair of shoes.”

So Tremont worked his own way, shoveling coal in a South End steam laundry, warehouse helper, short order cook in Chloe’s diner. At night he dressed up, a dude like Big Jim, and played in the Skin game that Rabbit ran in the basement of his pool room on Madison Avenue, a lucky player, Tremont. After a while Rabbit hired him to play for the house and that was very fine until too many players lost too much too fast, fastest card game there is, and Patsy McCall sent the cops in — no more Skin in Albany. Small loss for Tremont. His hand and his eye, they were real quick, but he wasn’t cut out to be a hustler any more than he was cut out for politics. Something direct about Tremont. He never understood it but it kept him straight. He got to be a broiler man in a new French restaurant, okay money.