Carney wore his new lightweight tan suit. He checked once more to see if he was sweating through it. Judging from this week’s torments, it was going to be another punishing summer. At the end of the block, an old man shaved off ice for yelping children, bottles of bright syrup dancing in his hands like juggling pins. A teenager in a black suit and tails waited at the top of the club’s steps and beckoned with white gloves.
To the right of the front hall, the parlor room was full of Dumas men running herd over those they’d put up for membership. The piano player at the baby grand in the corner banged out ragtime, the hectic rhythms a nervous commentary on all the glad-handing. Pierce retrieved Carney and introduced him around. Carney knew Abraham Frye from the newspapers—one of the few Negro judges in the city. Was that a city councilman lingering by the bar, pointing at his preferred gin? Carney couldn’t remember the last time he voted, but he’d doubtless voted for the man, the way the machine had everything locked up. Dick Thompson of Thompson TV and Radio, the Lenox Avenue electronics store, traded dirty jokes with Ellis Gray, who ran the biggest Negro-owned construction company in the city. Sable Construction had performed the recent work on Carney’s store, so he figured he’d paid for Gray’s tie or pocket square at the very least.
Members wore their club rings on their pinkies. With letters that tiny, you had to own one yourself to make out the seal. Or get real, real close—which Carney had. One of the guys, Louie the Turtle, had brought one to the office for him to get rid of, along with a motley bunch of loot. Louie the Turtle grazed inscrutably and showed up with the oddest things. The words on the ring were Latin and Carney had been incurious as to their meaning. He could’ve gotten something for the gold, but out of spite tossed it back at the Turtle and told him no, too traceable.
Carney shook the hand of Denmark Gibson, whom he recognized as the owner of the oldest funeral home in Harlem. Gibson had cremated his mother and father.
“How’s business?” Carney asked.
“Business is always good,” Denmark Gibson said.
And Elizabeth’s childhood friend Alexander Oakes, of course, experimenting with muttonchops. Oakes nodded from across the room. It was a Strivers’ Row crowd, no doubt, and Carney the only representative from ’round Crooked Way. Politicians, insurance men at the big-time colored firms, and more than a few lawyers and bankers, such as Wilfred Duke, whose new venture kept coming up in conversation. He’d been a muckety-muck at Carver Federal Savings, overseeing most of the neighborhood’s loans for twenty years. If a Negro wanted to get something going, he had to go through Wilfred Duke sooner or later. It was his new venture that had everybody talking, putting together the charter for a new black-owned bank to compete with his former employer: Liberty National, or simply Liberty, if you were in the know. Mortgages, small-business loans, community development. According to Pierce, half the room was trying to get their mitts in as board members or investors.
“Just water?” the bartender asked.
“And ice if you have it,” Carney said.
Someone touched his elbow. It was Leland, with the smile usually reserved for his grandchildren. “It’s good to see you, Raymond,” he said, and jetted to one of his cronies.
There was an hour of the typical jockeying, appraisals, and brinksmanship, and then Wilfred Duke stood before the windows overlooking 120th Street and addressed the group. He recognized those who’d stepped down from club leadership, as well as their successors. Those who had recently passed, such as Clement Landford, who’d advised four mayors on the Negro point of view. He announced the endowment drive for a scholarship in Landford’s name, full ride at Morehouse for a gifted New York City student. Everyone clapped. Pierce tapped a Chesterfield on his cigarette case.
Certainly Carney was not the only one who saw Napoleon. The Harlem Gazette, a Duke antagonist going back to some dispute before Carney started reading the paper, had an editorial cartoonist who liked to portray the banker as the famous general, hand inside jacket, propeller beanie on his head in the place of the military chapeau. Bull’s-eye. Duke was short and slightly built and spoke in a staccato, dictatorial style. Thirty years ago, he would have been a rare bird in Young Negro Harlem, a harbinger of the changing city, it was not difficult to see how he’d clambered to his place of influence. Or how he’d gathered enemies. The Gazette covered Duke’s bank plan as a Barnum-style con.
Duke smoothed his pencil mustache, those rat whiskers. He welcomed the prospective members. The club was named after Alexandre Dumas, the banker reminded them, son of a French army officer and a Haitian slave, who rose to the top of the literary world. “If you remember the story of the Count of Monte Cristo—and I realize it’s been a long time since some of you were in school”—there was some chuckling—“he was a man who got things done once he decided on a course of action. And that’s the spirit we strive for in our fraternity. The bootstrap spirit that delivered our ancestors from bondage, and now inspires all of us as we try to make a better Harlem.” Hear, hear.