THAT YEAR THERE were five of them. There were Jim Randolph and Monty Bellamy, a South Carolina boy named Harvey Williams and a friend of his named Perce Smead, and then Monk Webber. They were all living together in an apartment they had rented up at 123rd Street. It was on the down slope of the hill that leads from Morningside towards Harlem, the place was on the very fringes of the great Black Belt, so near, in fact, that borders interwove—the pattern of the streets was white and black. It was one of the cheap apartment houses that crowd the district, a six-story structure of caked yellow, rather grimy brick. The entrance hall flourished a show of ornate gaudiness. The floors were tile, the walls were covered halfway up with sheets of streaky-looking marble. On either side, doors opened off into apartments, the doors a kind of composition of dark-painted tin, resembling wood but deceiving no one, stamped with small numerals in dry gilt. There was an elevator at the end, and, by night, a sullen, sleepy-looking negro man; by day, the “superintendent”—an Italian in shirt-sleeves, a hardworking and good-humored factotum who made repairs and tended furnaces and mended plumbing and knew where to buy gin and was argumentative, protesting, and obliging. He was a tireless disputant with whom they wrangled constantly, just for the joy his lingo gave them, because they liked him very much. His name—“Watta the hell!”—was Joe. They liked him as the South likes people, and likes language, and likes personalities, and likes jesting and protesting and good-humored bicker—as the South likes earth and its humanity, which is one of the best things in the South.
So there were the five of them—five younglings from the South, all here together for the first time in the thrilling catacomb, all eager, passionate, aspiring—they had a merry time.
The place, which opened from the right as one went in that marble hall, ran front to rear, and was of the type known as a railroad flat. There were, if counted carefully, five rooms, a living room, three bedrooms, and kitchen. The whole place was traversed from end to end by a dark and narrow hall. It was a kind of tunnel, a sort of alleyway of graduated light. The living room was at the front and had two good windows opening on the street; it was really the only room that had any decent light at all. From there on, one advanced progressively into Stygian depths. The first bedroom had a narrow window opening on a narrow passageway two feet in width that gave on the grimy brick wall of the tenement next door. This place was favored with a kind of murky gloom, reminiscent of those atmospheres one sees in motion pictures showing Tarzan in the jungle with his friends, the apes; or, better still, in those pictures showing the first stages in the ancient world of prehistoric man, at about the time he first crawled out of the primeval ooze. Just beyond this was a bathroom, whose Stygian darkness had never been broken by any ray of outer light; beyond this, another bedroom, identical with the first in all respects, even to the properties of light; beyond this, the kitchen, a little lighter, since it was larger and had two windows; and, at the end, the last and best bedroom, since it was at the corner and had a window on each wall. This room, of course, as fitted a prince of royal blood, was by common and tacit agreement allotted to Jim Randolph. Monty Bellamy and Monk had the next one, and Harvey and his friend Perce shared the other. The rent was $80 a month, which they divided equally.
In the bathroom, when the electric light was not burning, the illusion of midnight was complete. This illusion was enhanced in a rather sinister and clammy fashion by the constant dripping of the bathtub faucet and the perpetual rattling leakage of the toilet. They tried to cure these evils a dozen times; each of them made his own private experiments on the plumbing. The results, while indicative of their ingenuity, were not any particular tribute to their efficiency. It used to worry them at first when they tried to go to sleep at night. The clammy rattling of the toilet and the punctual large drip of the faucet would get on someone’s nerves at last, and they would hear him curse and hit the floor, saying:
“God-damn it! How do you expect a man to get to sleep with that damn toilet going all night long!”