Palace Council Read Free Page A

with Eddie and Aurelia, then directing the driver to drop his friends in Harlem first and only then head to Gary’s own place in the Village. Everybody knew that a New York cabbie would otherwise never go north of Columbia University. Eddie, always a proud man, would never have cooperated with this nonsense had Aurelia not been present; and Gary probably would not have tried. White friends were important, Wesley Senior had long preached to his children: That is where the power lies, he warned them, and where, for the foreseeable future, it will. Eddie and Aurelia sat together on the bench. Gary folded down the jump seat, and clutched the handle as the driver bumped angrily uptown. He lectured them about revolutionary politics. He was red-haired and gentle and certain. He said Eddie’s short story showed the glimmering of consciousness, but only the glimmering. Aurelia, feigning a cold, giggled behind her white-gloved hands. Even back in college, where the three of them first met, everybody had known that Eddie was entirely unpolitical.
    Eddie did not consider his short story revolutionary. He did not consider it anything, except finished. Entitled “Evening Prayer,” the tale had been published in
The Saturday Evening Post.
It was expected to win prizes. The story recounted a single day of segregation, viewed through the eyes of a small boy watching the daylong humiliation of his proud father, a stern deacon of the church who worked as a hotel doorman. At the end, the boy got down on his knees, folded his hands, and vowed that, whatever he turned out to be when he grew up, he would never be a Negro. Eddie’s mother wrote to say she cried for an hour when she read it. Aurelia had praised the story in the
Sentinel,
referring to its author as “Harlem’s most eligible bachelor”: her way of teasing from afar. Eddie’s literary agent was negotiating a deal for his first novel. This was the story in which Eddie invented the term “darker nation” to describe Negro America—capturing, he thought, a sense of solidarity and distinctiveness. And although later the term “black” would come into wider usage, for a time “darker nation” was on upper-crust Harlem’s lips.
    Eddie, however, even if on their lips, had just barely scratched his way onto their lists. In those days, everything in Harlem was divided into tiers. Prestige mattered, and multiple layers separated the top from the middle, to say nothing of the bottom. Some addresses were better than others. So were some clubs, some spouses, some friends, and some parties. The social distinctions mattered little to the great mass of Negroes, but Eddie had been raised, in spite of himself, to an awareness of who was who. Although his father, the great preacher, pretended not to care about such trivialities, his mother had filled Eddie’s head with stories, and he supposed some of them must be true. All through his childhood, Marie Wesley had spoken of Harlem drawing rooms so exclusive that it would not be unusual to see George Gershwin and Duke Ellington playing a piano duet. Of homes as expensively furnished as the high-rise apartments on Park Avenue. Once his short story began to open doors, Eddie could not bear the thought of not walking through them. Given the chance, thanks to his erudition, he glittered. He traveled upward. He could quote Shakespeare and Dante by the yard, but also Douglass and Du Bois. He could tease. He could charm. He could flatter. On a frigid evening in February of 1955, he attended a grand party at a palatial townhouse on Jumel Terrace, a fancy little cobblestone enclave near Saint Nicholas Avenue between 160th and 162nd streets. The party had been called to announce a royal engagement. The prince of one of the senior Harlem clans was to wed the princess of one of the darker nation’s Midwestern kingdoms. Everyone who mattered was there, including several white politicians, and a