Daddy Was a Number Runner Read Free Page A

linoleum around it was worn so thin you couldn’t even see its pattern and there was a jagged hole in the floor near the pipe almost big enough to get your foot through. Daddy was always nailing cardboard and linoleum over that hole but it kept wearing out.
    â€œHenrietta,” Daddy called, “where are the boys?”
    Mother came to the kitchen door. “Sterling’s here eating, but James Junior ain’t come home yet.”
    Daddy’s fist hit the table with a suddenness which made me jump. “If that boy’s stayed out of school again it’s gonna be me and his behind. Sterling,” he shouted, “where’s your brother?”
    â€œI ain’t seen him since this morning,” Sterling answered from the kitchen.
    Daddy turned on Mother. “If that boy gets into any trouble I’m gonna let his butt rot in jail, you hear? I’m warning you. I’ve done told him time and time again to stop hanging out with those Ebony Earls, but his head is damned hard. All of them’s gonna end up in Sing Sing, you mark my words, and ain’t no Coffin ever been to jail before. Do you know that?”
    Mother nodded. She also knew, as I did, that Daddywould be the first one downtown to see about Junior if anything happened to him.
    Junior had started hanging around with the Ebony Earls a few months ago, together with his buddies Sonny and Maude’s brother Vallejo. Sterling didn’t belong to the gang. He said gangs were stupid and boys who hung out together like that were morons.
    Daddy started adding up the amounts of his number slips and counting the money. Mother sat down at the table beside him and said nervously that she heard Slim Jim had been arrested. He was a number runner like Daddy.
    â€œSlim Jim is a fool,” Daddy said. “His banker thinks he can operate outside the syndicate but nobody can buck Dutch Schultz. The cops will arrest anybody his boys finger, and they did just that. Fingered Slim Jim and his banker.”
    â€œMaybe you’d better stop collecting numbers now before …” Mother began nervously, but Daddy cut her off.
    â€œFor christsakes, Henrietta, let’s not go through that again. How many times I gotta tell you it ain’t much more dangerous collecting numbers than playing them. As long as the cops are paid off, which they are, they ain’t gonna bother me. Schultz even pays off that stupid ass, Dodge, we’ve got for a district attorney, so stop worrying.”
    Mother played the numbers like everyone else in Harlem but she was scared about Daddy being a number runner. Daddy started working for Jocko on commission about six months ago when he lost his house-painting job, which hadn’t been none too steady to begin with.
    Jocko’s name was really Jacques and he was a tall Creole from Haiti. He wore a blue beret cocked on the side of his head and had curly black hair and olive skin. Now, Jocko was handsome but he wasn’t beautiful. He ran a candy storeon Fifth Avenue and 117th Street as a front and everybody said he was real close to Big Boy Donatelli, his banker, who was real close to Dutch Schultz. Daddy said Jocko was as big a man in the syndicate as a colored man could get since the gangsters took over the numbers. Daddy said the gangsters controlled everything in Harlem—the numbers, the whores, and the pimps who brought them their white trade.
    Mother grumbled: “I thought Mayor La Guardia say he was gonna clean up all this mess.”
    â€œIf they really wanted to clean up this town,” Daddy said, “they would stop picking on the poor niggers trying to hit a number for a dime so they won’t starve to death. Where else a colored man gonna get six hundred dollars for one? What they need to do is snatch the gangsters banking the numbers, they’re the ones raking in the big money. But the cops ain’t about to cut off their gravy train. But you stop worrying now,