The Dirty Side of Midnight

Beauty’s Only Skin-Deep, Oh Yeah!

Show me the doll that you like best or that you’d like to play with.

       the little black girl quickly picks up the white doll.

Show me the doll that is the ‘nice’ doll.

       the little black girl quickly picks up the white doll.

Show me the doll that looks ‘bad’.

       the little black girl quickly picks up the black doll.

Why does that doll look bad?

       the little black girl says, because it’s black.

Give me the doll that looks like a white child.

       the little black girl quickly picks up the white doll.

Give me the doll that looks like a colored child.

       the little black girl picks up the black doll.

Give me the doll that looks like a Negro child.

       the little black girl picks up the black doll.

Give me the doll that looks like you.

       the little black girl deliberately picks up the white doll

       and hands her to Dr. Clark.

The Clark Doll Experiment (1939)

Dr. Kenneth Clark and his wife Mamie

Delta Is

Plain and simple, Delta Cotton is beautiful. Plain and simple, she’s the most splendid woman I’ve ever seen or would ever want to see, cross my heart and kiss her up to God. I’ve only seen one to rival her, and even that woman was a distant second. Men stroke out at Delta Cotton’s glance; even women had to admit they took a second look at her as she strolled her thunderous hips down Lenox Avenue. I know I did, but then I fell in love with Miss Delta on sight.

Who am I? Nobody. A lonely woman, not too bad looking. I clean up pretty well when need be, when Delta needed me to do. Yes, I’m not that bad but Miss Delta is plump of hip, thin of waist, with perfectly shaped breasts and nipples that protrude when she wears that strapless red dress with the hidden zipper up the side. Her hair is spun red-gold and hangs down her back to her waist. Her eyes are large and green as an alley cat’s, her lips are naturally outlined, full, and full of promise. Her sun-kissed skin is golden-rod, a complement to her hair. She is graceful at the dance, witty with stories, intelligent as a cat, and accomplished at music, literature and sexual intercourse, knowing, as she does, a thousand ways to satisfy a man.

Delta is now 19 years old. Her story, sketchy. Years ago it seemed that her mother, Zenobia, and her father, Joe, a dark-skinned, husky buck who could fill more bales with cotton than any other slave on the plantation, had escaped the South, leaving little Delta behind. Zenobia was a foolish, selfish woman who refused to see that her mother had been forced into a sexual liaison with her married master, the man who was her father. After Zenobia was born, Master moved Delta’s grandmother and their daughter into a cabin of their own, not far from the big house. Her mistress knew of Delta’s grandmother’s existence but preferred to keep her husband and her lifestyle in place than lose him to his niggress.

The other slaves were disgusted by this relationship, by light-skinned Zenobia who they and their children shunned. Zenobia hated her own skin and was constantly cutting and scratching at it, making it bleed. But Delta’s grandmother held her head up high as she swept the clay dust in front of their cabin. Although this illicit relationship continued for years and down the line produced Delta, her grandmother was never officially freed. But even though Delta’s grandmother was kept under lock and key she was able to conjure notions among the living and the dead, concoct elixirs the field hands sought from her late in the dirty midnight hour. And it was this power that kept her full of living blood in the insane world of slavery.

Zenobia was a belligerent child and a fast teen. At sixteen, the first night she bedded herself to Joe, she became pregnant and prayed for a dark-skinned child who would wipe out the memories of her slave mother and rapist father. But Delta was born a light-complected throw-back to the master. Zenobia hated her child, detested Joe for his weak genes, and left Delta (named so by her grandmother) in the hands of her mother to raise and care for.

Although master never forgave Zenobia and beat her half to death for having Delta by one of the field niggers, the master doted on his granddaughter. He worked hard to make her worldly and sophisticated. By the time she was four she’d learned to dance, could play the piano and read passages from the Bible. But her grandfather also extolled the pleasures of hedonism and taught Delta lessons unnatural between a grandfather and granddaughter. And Delta learned these immoral lessons painfully well.

It’s not sure when Delta’s grandmother learned of the master’s education of Delta, but the gates of heaven shut and all hell broke loose when she did. According to Delta the story went that Delta’s grandmother fixed her master a potion that she told him would cure his ills, for he had fallen sick of late. The master, having no reason to doubt, drank it straight-away, and died in agony fourteen hours later. On the fifteenth day following, as she herself lay dying, Delta’s grandmother told her to look inside her mattress, take the money that the master had given her over the years, and run off to the North, maybe find Zenobia and Joe in New York. But her grandmother had no idea of the span and scope, the expense of the place she’d heard about as though it were a fable, a fairy tale. So when Delta arrived in New York, she had just enough to rent a small room, then sit in the barren space and think of what to do next. She had only a little money, and that body that her grandfather trained her to believe that grown men would die for.

Even though the women who admired her thought Delta was aloof, men found her to be passionate, noting that she came alive with sex. Not able to see themselves as worthy of her charms, they fucked without courting her. She didn’t care, her grandfather had taught her that sex was as natural as breathing, an art to be paid for with trinkets and music boxes and beautiful hand-sewn clothes. But Johnny Hamilton was cut from a different cloth. And for a while he’d brought out the best in her.

Johnny Hamilton was a big, fine, tornado of a black man from Jacksonville, Florida. He’d been in New York fifteen years when he met Delta. Johnny wasn’t perfect. He had a weakness for light-skinned chicks with finely spun hair, a hankering for tragic mulattoes. And his choices got him in trouble. Sometimes after work he’d go to the gin mills, buy King Kong, pick up a woman, take her to a rented room and fuck her for the next few hours for he was thick-dicked and long-winded. Sometimes, after drinking too much, he’d wake up in another city, all of his money gone. Then he’d have to tell Delta a lie she didn’t believe. One time he gave her a disease, and that had been enough for him to stop his ways. He began to give Delta most of his money, then put the rest on numbers. Harlem had no shortage of light-skinned Southern girls, but when he saw them now he told them they had to go away. He didn’t want to lose Delta. He married her.

Whether he ran around on her or not, Johnny thought that Delta was the most some-some something he’d ever seen. For all his tom-catting, Johnny was a rather conservative man when it came to sex and his women: he preferred being on top, preferred that she lay perfectly still while he pumped inside her, preferred her pregnant because having come from a large family of unruly brothers and boisterous sisters he wanted an even larger family of his own. For that reason, even though Delta had lost one baby, he was willing to work harder and get himself and Delta a two-bedroom apartment for $75 a month on Lenox Avenue. Lenox Avenue: home to the spiritualists whose side-lines were the peddling of herbs and the brewing of voodoo concoctions veiled in mystery, passed down from the jungles of Africa and the tropics of Haiti and the West Indies. No matter your ailment, there was an herb somewhere in Harlem to cure it. Johnny paid for a potion to keep Delta pregnant the next time that he slipped into her food. But Delta lost that child, too.

Johnny should have bought a John the Conqueror root because $75 a month was a crunch on his salary, but he refused to let Delta take on domestic work. No wife of his would ever be on her knees scrubbing someone else’s floor, scrubbing their toilets, catching their children’s runny noses. There were times when Delta felt smothered by Johnny’s rules and whims. She’d raised herself after her grandmother died, and resented anyone telling her what to do now that she was grown. But she had come to love Johnny in a fashion and so sublimated her desires to his.

When Johnny Hamilton left Delta by hitching a slow moving train—for no good reason that he’d say—she learned how, like every other colored woman, to work during the week as a domestic on the Upper East Side. That’s where we met, I cleaned the apartment next to the one she scrubbed. I knew this wasn’t the life for me, so it definitely wasn’t the life for her. We began to talk a little after work. We talked a little more until I felt I could jump feet first into her business. I told her: we’re fools to go out and break our backs scrubbing floors, washing, ironing, and cooking, when you could earn three day’s pay if you threw Saturday night rent parties.

What are you talking about? she said.

I took a chance. Well, I could move in with you, we could split expenses, and I’d show you how to throw the parties. You’d be the perfect hostess, the men and women would love you.

As I explained what a rent party was to her, Delta’s eyes widened. After years of Johnny squelching her natural rhythm, she was anxious to explore the other dimensions of her life. She wanted money of her own and with rent parties there was money to be made. Who came? There were good-looking young men who sat in the back of gin mills looking as if they had nowhere to go, and nobody to take with them. And since they had money to burn, I told Delta that we could capitalize on these boys’ proclivities as much as possible and began advertising her rent parties on sky-blue business cards. She wrote the cards because even though I had imagination, I couldn’t spell, elegant words didn’t roll off my tongue. So Delta wrote:

There’ll be high yella mammas

Chocolate ladies, too

So if you’re feelin’ blue

You know just what to do

Come to Delta’s, 145th Street and Lenox Avenue,

Sat. Night, July 24th

There’ll be plenty of chicken

And lots of gin

Lots of pig feet

So come on in.

In the beginning, Delta didn’t want to give out our address because prohibition was still the name of the game and the police loved to raid apartments moreso than the gin mills that sprouted on almost every corner. But Delta trusted me. She trusted me as much as any woman trusted another, and I was careful to give out these cards to only the right people. These cards drew in the men, yes. But it was Delta who stayed on top of the latest fashions, knowing that to attract the right kind of men you had to look like the right kind of woman. I could squeeze into a black cotton dress and make it look sexy, but the dress wore me; and I could pull off wearing too much eyeshadow and mascara. But for Delta nothing cut and looked better than pure silk, and it was still the best fabric to capture the folds and drapes of thirties couture. And so she wore a hip-hugging red silk dress that zipped up the side with matching stiletto heels. She’d place rose water and jasmine across her bosom, behind her ears, and behind her knees before she slid into stockings.

Delta did all her own cooking for the parties. Her specialties were corn fritters, greens and ham hocks, and chitterlings. Among other things Delta became known for was the down-home flavor of her food. Someone was always asking for her recipes, but she cooked from lessons learned at her grandmother’s apron-strings. Giving in to the begging, Delta had once tried to jot down the recipes, but how much is a pinch of this, how do you season to taste if your palate has no sophistication? She could tell you that she carefully plucked the kernels off the cob and mixed them in with her special batter for fritters, along with some chopped green chiles. With chitterlings, as for greens, the proof was in the washing. There’d better not be any grit in either one. Delta’d let the ham hocks cook down before adding the greens. Chitterlings are a little more difficult, and not everyone’s hands were shaped to wrestle with them. Delta soaked hers in warm water for 30 minutes, cut each one into 12-inch pieces, slit them open, and removed all fat particles and debris. She’d wash them in warm to hot water 3-5 times. Place them in a large heavy pot. To cut the odor, she’d also drop two white potatoes in. Onions, celery, small hot peppers, garlic, salt and pepper, cider vinegar, a little sugar. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat. Cook on medium-low heat. That’s all there was to it, really. The rest of cooking was love.

While Delta was adding the last of the spices to the food, and I was putting the finishing touches on the bar, Harry B, a man she’d hired to take care of the band, make corn liquor, and run the gambling, would roll back the living room carpets, turn on the pink lights, and give bottles of King Kong to the drummer, pianist and saxophone player. Once their mouths were satiated, the musicians began hitting rhythms as partygoers shuffled into Delta’s apartment. Besides the door-take, Delta started making money in other ways. Under my tutelage, because, yes, I knew how to make a dollar or three, Delta partitioned the apartment into individual rooms and rented them by the night or just for a little while during the parties. Now what the men and women did in these rooms was not her business. And Delta never called herself what she was becoming. I didn’t call her out either because it would mean acknowledging who I was. All this dilly-dallying meant extra money, and extra money was what Delta wanted.

Harry B would bring some of his freewheeling friends to the parties and after they had a few drinks, he’d leave them alone in the room with me. Some nights an extra man came along, one who hadn’t been accounted for, and I got nerve from somewhere to ask Delta if she would service him. You could see it in her eyes, you could hear her brain ticking. Then she looked at his hardened thing and took it in her mouth. By the fifth man in three nights Delta had compartmentalized her body so that these men couldn’t touch her soul. Even at an early age her grandfather hadn’t been able to touch her soul.

Money draws its own. Our landlord had been pitching woo to Delta ever since Johnny left, and though she’d always ignored him, now she figured that we could get around, should get around, paying rent. So she rubbed his bald-head and called him Sweetness. She let him wind her long hair around his hands and ride her bareback. He was not the only big baller Delta kept in her stable of rich men. She fucked the best and finest. But still that didn’t stop us from giving rent parties. Delta wanted to be wealthy, not carelessly rich.

Delta ran the parties with a firm hand. Whereas before she’d been lenient, now she stopped girls from going into the rooms with men unless the split was seventy-thirty. Men had to pay through the nose for the rooms and as for the girls, well, some of them, the most adventurous ones, made enough on Saturday night to buy themselves a closet full of silk from 125th Street on Monday afternoons. Harry B’d cleaned out the gamblers before the night was over, not nar a penny to their names, and naturally Delta took a huge percentage of Harry B’s take. Money stays in the house because the house always wins.

Now don’t think Delta didn’t have competition. Small-time pimps and skanky madams operated rent parties, too, that were no more than covers for certain illegitimate activities that catered to traveling salesmen, pullman porters, and inter-state truckers. Small-time pimps and skanky madams banked on the loneliness of the single men and women who cruised Lenox Avenue at twilight looking for love and excitement. When, on the dirty side of midnight, these lonesome creepers saw a soft light in a window, they would walk up the stairs to the apartment, be greeted by the hostess, and introduced to the other guests who were also living without love.

Once a john bought a couple of rounds of drinks, things begin to jump off in earnest. The musicians improvised as the dancers reached a religious frenzy. Their wildness mimicked the hoops and hollers of the church sisters who had been captured by the spirit, only these dancers were moved by the ghost of something less than holy. Arms and legs would twist and turn around their partners arms and legs, women’s hips would sway, sweat would pour off men’s bodies. As the band played on, the dancers went wild and wilder still; they weren’t speaking in tongues, their guttural vocabulary was that of sexual pursuit. And their requests weren’t subtle. Love me baby, love me all night long, love me baby, love me all night long, cause if you don’t love me baby, I’ll just shoot myself and be gone.

By day, Delta and I strolled the streets of Harlem arm-in-arm pondering where life was leading us. During a mild December, when I was under the weather, Delta’s daily constitution was interrupted by a man named Burt Hanley, a moth-like man as intimated by her beauty as he was drawn to it. Burt Hanley was raised in the church. From the age of five he believed that one day he would minister to his own flock with a strong but obedient first lady at his side. Seventy-two hours after meeting her, after seventy-two hours of Delta’s special kind of loving, Burt was convinced he had found his help-meet. Delta was impressed with his prowess in the bedroom, a complement she gave rarely, but she had no intention of marrying again, particularly not to a 72-hour lover. However, she bought into his policy when he asked her to accompany him to church because she’d heard about the evangelist who led it and wanted to see her for herself.

When Delta and Burt walked in the church, they were amazed at how packed it was. Sister Abbott’s followers were full of the Holy Spirit, and it rubbed off on the congregation. Even Burt stood up, and it was rare for a man to testify, confession being the providence of women, and Delta was embarrassed. Here she was sitting next to a standing, weeping man she’d known thirty minutes and three days. She told me all about it when she returned home. She said that when Burt started to speak a hush fell over the parishioners. I want to tell you what happened to me in the past three days, he’d said. I’ve been praying to the Lord to send me a real woman, strong and true. A woman of child-bearing years, a woman who wants to settle down with a loving man. And then I met this woman here, said Burt. Delta said he took hold of her hand and pulled her to her feet. She said that she turned three shades of red as Burt continued.

I want to spend what’s left of my life with this woman. And so I’m asking her in front of God and these witnesses to be my wife.

Delta said she’d burst into hot tears of anger. How dare he embarrass her! She would have given him a piece of her mind if they hadn’t been in a church. She shook free of his hand and ran to the church door. But huge brown hands stopped her by grabbing hold to her shoulders. A big, healthy sister, who didn’t appear to have missed any meals even during the depression, spun Delta around. My young sister, the woman began, the man is talking to you. Trying to make you a honest woman.

Delta’s said her first instinct was to flail out against the church sister, but again that was trumped by location. Several of the steady sisters wagged their heads from side to side. Answer him chile.

My answer is no. No.

She told me that, next, an older woman jumped to her feet and played to the crowd. Her testimony was a painful truth and she carried the crowd with her tearful telling. I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see. Yes, sisters, I once was what this chile is now—a high-classed whore. Mary Magdalene had nothing on me. But then one day I looked at myself in a full-length mirror. I realized I was tired of johns, tired of lies, tired of holding questions in, trying to answer them in different men’s arms. I was sick of pretending to be someone I wasn’t. I asked the Lord to wipe away my sins, and he freed me from prostitution, from drugs and alcohol. So my sister, give your life over to God and everything is gonna be alright."

Delta said the church became peppered with Amens, Hallelujahs, and Speak on Its. Then, as if on cue, an older sister dressed all in white started to hum. Others joined in and soon the church became a heartbeat. The older woman was flush with the Holy Ghost and everyone inhaled as she leapt on the back of the pew and glided as if she was walking on water. The church sisters were in shock. Some raised their hands toward the ceiling. One fainted clean away and the other saints covered her with a flannel blanket.

There were visitors in the church that Sunday, white tourists anxious to watch a primitive service as old as time that they’d heard happened within the hallowed walls of Sister Abbott’s church. But the visitors weren’t prepared for miracles. So they did the only thing they knew how to do which was to pay for their entertainments. So they put large sums of money into the collection plate, then stood with the rest of the congregation to sing.

At the conclusion of the song, a bourbon-skinned man who was seated to the right of the pulpit jumped up and lifted both hands, saying in a booming voice, Evah-body say Amen.

"Amen!

Evah-body say Amen.

Amen!

He looked more like a retired pimp than a man of God who’d started preaching in his old age because he was still interested in owning women’s souls.

Evah body say amen, again, he repeated.

Amen!

Alright, he said, then raised his hands for silence. We’ll now introduce the speaker of de evenin! Dis is rev’n B.J. Reynolds.

Reverend B.J. Reynolds was fat and fine in a black shiny suit. On his fingers were two diamond solitaire rings. His straightened hair was rolled out in finger waves. He strutted to the center of the pulpit and began speaking in cadence.

On this precious night, we’re going to talk about loose women and traveling men. Praise God.

Amen.

He anchored himself to the podium and pointed a diamond encrusted finger at the congregation saying: "You know, brothers an’ sisters, there’s some sisters that put a ring through they man’s nose and lead him around on a chain.

Amen!

Gawd don’t like that, praise His name! said Reverend B.J. Reynolds. Woman was made from de man. He ’posed to be de leader. He ’posed to run the home on the straight an narrow.

Preach on, yelled