Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (25 page)

was a second-semester freshman at Bard College and Alex, every other week, came for her in his Cadillac to take her to lunch. Renata and Quinn had wanted her to go to the State University where Renata was taking art history and literature courses to finish her degree, cut short when Batista closed Havana University as a revolutionary hotbed.

But Gloria chose Bard because it was out of the city and she would live apart from family, but still close to Albany, and Alex. She was a scholarly and intense youth, undistracted by the common teenage fixation on romance. The school offered a focus on her potential career: social work and political science, an outgrowth of the awe she felt for her Aunt Renata, the political rebel. Renata, soon after she and Quinn moved to Albany in 1963, took Gloria to the civil rights protest March on Washington, and being with the vast black throng as Martin Luther King delivered his Dream speech was Gloria’s baptism in racial politics.

Alex’s political life also seemed unorthodox but fascinating. His lunches with her in Rhinebeck turned into something beyond dining one day when he took her to a rural apartment for a rest, he said. But there was no rest, which was why she asked Renata for guidance into the unknown. She absorbed the counseling but continued wavering on the great yes that Alex was seeking. She finally abandoned her virginity when she walked in on two of her classmates doing it with their boyfriends, all in the same room. They laughed at her virginity, couldn’t believe it. Her own “boyfriend,” which was all she could think to call him even though he was fifty-four, talked her into staying in Albany for the summer instead of going to Cuba to be with her mother.

She lived with Renata and Quinn, and Alex found her a summer job at City Hall in the office of Public Housing, but she left it after a week, bristling at the city’s official condescension toward tenants. Quinn found her more compatible work at Holy Cross Institution, a former Episcopal settlement house, now a nonsectarian social agency that was overseeing the Kennedy-Johnson war on poverty as waged in Albany’s worst slum, The Gut. Quinn brought her to see Baron Roland, the wild-eyed, mercurial, black college professor who directed Holy Cross, and he put her to work with Better Streets and Homes, joining social workers, white volunteers from uptown, and street-savvy nuns unlike any she’d ever met, all these workers coaxing the have-nots of the neighborhood into coping publicly with the social ills that contaminated their lives.

Gloria was suddenly a friend of lumpen youths, of women who shoplifted by day and whored by night, of winos with nothing better to do once they woke up and found they were still alive, of matrons with children but no husbands, scraping a life together, battling their rotting houses, of widows and retirees looking for an alternative to solitude. Many of them came to Better Streets meetings at the Gethsemane Baptist Church on Franklin Street to voice their grievances to slum landlords and politicians—fix our leaky roofs, kill our rats, pick up our garbage, get us a health clinic, close the brothels, tear down those empty houses. Gloria heard Albany described as a social and political sewer, a city without a soul, ruled by plundering, racist titans. And public titan number one was always Mayor Alex Fitzgibbon, her wonderful lover.

Maybe twenty people came to the early meetings, mostly women, led by Claudia Johnson, a three-hundred-pound black mother of nine children with a gift for talk, candor, and telling other people how to behave. But when Claudia’s words appeared in newspaper stories written by Quinn and others, Better Streets’ attendance rose—forty, fifty—which is when the ward-level politicians started their threats: Support those commies and you’re off welfare, out of a job, out of luck—and attendance plummeted. But some were immune to political threats and they were joined by uptown whites, and Protestant and Catholic clerics. The draw was Claudia—with her schemes of picketing City Hall on the garbage issue, or dumping garbage on the Mayor’s front lawn to make her point. After two months the city decided to haul a hundred truckloads of garbage and junk out of South End backyards and tear down twelve tumbledown houses.

“Hey, people,” Claudia preened, “the Mayor is listenin’!”

Feeling sassy, and with the 1967 election coming up, Claudia invited the state attorney general to come and tell Better Streets members about poll watching—how to check the voting machines, how to challenge any voter who signs the wrong name; and don’t let absentee ballots be counted till the polls close, and watch for people spying on the voters to see how they vote, or telling them how to vote. Gloria passed out mimeographed flyers on the subject. Quinn counted thirty-two attendees, including Mary Van Ort, the black seamstress and her wino husband Tremont, who never missed a meeting, and Lester Sugar, another regular, a white man whose oversize suitcoat hung on him like a poncho and who was famous for collecting four thousand bottles and cans for the Girl Scouts, and Father Matt Daugherty from Siena, and college students, and two newcomers who looked like narks.

“We’re talkin’ about poll watchin’,” Claudia said. “This gen’man don’t say it but we know we need to catch them cheaters votin’ dead people, and passin’ out five-dollar bills to buy your vote. They been stealin’ elections in this town since before this big mama was born. It’s gotta stop and we can stop ’em.”

“Whatayou mean we can stop ’em?” Tremont asked. He took off his hat and stood up. “And who is them?”

“Them is the politicians, honey. Them aldermen, them bosses, the Mayor and his scumsuckin’ gang. We gonna stop ’em from stealin’.”

“How we gonna do that?”

“We find us some volunteers who’ll go into those pollin’ places and check out who is exactly who. We see them passin’ out those fives we say, ‘Hey, mister, I seen that and it ain’t legal.’ And we call the attorney general and tell him.”

“You think they gonna do that passin’ out so’s you can see it?”

“They got to get the money to the voter, so you just keep lookin’ till you see ’em do it.”

“They prob’ly go around the corner and do it,” Tremont said.

“That’s exactly what they do,” said Lester Sugar. “I was there last year and I watched ’em go ’round the corner.”

“You watched ’em givin’ out five-dollar bills?” Tremont asked.

“I never saw the money, but I had a scrutiny on it.”

“That’s the problem,” Claudia said. “My mama used to say, ‘unless you in the bedroom standin’ over ’em with a candle, they’s no way you gonna know what they’re up to.’ This stuff might get nasty, so whoever signs up gotta be ready to stand up to those bozos. Now who’s gonna do it?”

No one responded.

“I’d sign up,” Mr. Sugar said, “but I did it last year.”

“I’d sign up,” said Mrs. Wilson, “but I broke my glasses and I can’t see what they be doin’.”

“Nobody in Better Streets ready to take a chance,” Claudia said.

After a silence Tremont said, “All right, where do I sign?”

Gloria passed a basket for donations, and cookies and soda followed.

After Quinn dropped his father at the Elks Club he headed into the South End with Matt Daugherty, destination Dongan Avenue, where Tremont Van Ort was lying ill on the stoop of the old three-story brick town house that had been his family home for thirty years. Quinn walked Dongan Avenue as a boy and had forgotten it until he began to write about Better Streets. Before Dongan Avenue became a street it was part of the Pastures, where the Dutch colonists grazed their livestock. Dutch, and then English homes rose on the Pastures greenery and so began the seething American panorama of occupation—swarms of Germans and Irish replacing the Dutch and English; and then Jews, Italians, and now southern blacks—who had The Gut largely to themselves these days—all replacing one another with serial hostility.

Quinn came to know The Gut with his father when its streets throbbed all day with commerce and all night with sin. George Quinn worked daylight hours out of a second-floor flat in an 1830s wooden house between Dongan and Green Street, the office of Joe Marcello, a numbers-game banker. The game was Policy, which Marcello called “nigger numbers” after the black Caribbean gamblers who brought it to America. White and pale pink Policy slips were published twice a day, six days a week, with twelve winning numbers. You could bet on combinations of numbers from 1 to 78, the odds ranging from 5-to-1 to 400-to-1. You could bet on a “flat” (two numbers) at 30-to-1 or a “gig” (three numbers) at 200-to-1 or a “horse” (four numbers) at 400-to-1.

George Quinn walked The Gut door-to-door, picking up the play, paying off winners; and when there was no school, Daniel made the rounds with him—the Turk’s grocery store, with a one-arm bandit on the counter, the Double-Dutch Tavern where girls worked the bar day and night, the soap factory, the Albany Water Works, Big Jimmy’s nightclub, the old
Times Union
where the journalism bug bit Daniel.

“Any candy for me?” George asked his customers, and they’d give him their numbers. If they couldn’t read or write, George would write their play and their bet on a notepad, take their nickel, quarter, dollar, and put the notepad in his shirt pocket, the money in his coat. When the weight started ruining the coat’s shape George would go to a grocery or a bar and change his coins for bills. Quinn helped count coins and could keep leftover pennies for candy, or the penny punchboard. He played the punchboard once and won fifty cents. Eight years old and already rich.

Now, thirty-two years later, Quinn, at the wheel of his ’59 Mercedes 220S, with Matt Daugherty beside him, moved through the streets of the old Gut, houses crumbling and boarded up, pavements pocked with potholes, sidewalks buckled, no people, only the heavy, black dust of a slum in its terminal stage. He drove down South Pearl to Herkimer, this the old Jewish neighborhood and this the street where Isaac Mayer Wise founded Reform Jewry with a fistfight in the old Bethel synagogue, still there, also the street where Claudia lived. He crossed Green and went on to Dongan Avenue, passed St. John’s, the oldest Catholic church in town, built by the Irish, and where Father Peter Young was now helping drunks dry out and get back in the game. Dongan, right there, was where Big Jimmy ran his nightclub, and three blocks south would be where Tremont was lying on his father’s old stoop.

“You said you came here as a kid,” Quinn said to Matt.

“I was seventeen,” Matt said. “Before the war, bar hopping, tryin’ to kick the habit.”

“Coke?”

“Pussy. Didn’t fit with the seminary. I figured I’d give it the big ride and then kiss it good-bye.”

“Did you?”

“I gave it the ride.”

“And kissed it good-bye?”

“Eventually.”

“Understood. You remember Big Jimmy’s club? That’s his old building.”

“I remember his name but I was never in the club.”

“Famous guy, Jimmy Van Ort, maybe seven feet tall, wore a fedora and a vest with a gold pocket watch and chain, best known black man in Albany. One of his ancestors had been a servant to the Good Patroon. Jimmy bet fifty on a number one morning, around 1936, and hit it. In the afternoon he rolled over his payoff on another number and he hit that. He won like eleven thousand, a fortune in ’36. My father wrote Jimmy’s bet.”

Quinn had heard the story eleven thousand times from George Quinn: how news of Jimmy’s hit spread so quickly George insisted on a bodyguard to deliver the winnings. And there came George through the swinging screen doors of Big Jimmy’s—small stage to the right of the doors with an upright piano and jazz till sunrise, where Cody first played when he came to Albany, and, to the left, a room where a card game went on and on. George carried a suitcase and had his cousin with him, Timmy Ryan, a uniformed cop from the Second Precinct. George put the suitcase on the bar.

“You want to count it, Jimmy?”

“What do you think, Georgie?”

“I think you want to count it.”

“You count it.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

George opened the suitcase on the bar, and he sang: