A Rage in Harlem (Harlem Detectives Book 1)

by Chester Himes

“As evil a woman as God ever made,” Jackson muttered. “He must have made her by mistake.”

“You call yourself a Christian,” Jackson said angrily. “Here we are in trouble and –” “Who’s any worse Christian than you!” she shouted. “A thief and a liar! Living in sin! Busting my stove! Robbin’ the dead! The Lawd don’t even know you, I tell you that!”

A man couldn’t be a Christian on Sunday and sin six days a week. Such a man must take God for a fool.

“You must have got broke in that crap game.” “I did,” Jackson confessed. “Looks like it. They say a rich man can’t sleep, but a broke man can’t get enough to eat.”

Goldy realized instantly his mistake. Somebody had had to help him bring down the trunk, it was too heavy to handle alone. “Ain’t nobody but—” Jodie reached down with a violent motion, clutched him over the face with the palm of his left hand, put his right knee in Goldy’s back between the shoulder blades, jerked Goldy’s head back against the pressure of his knee, and cut Goldy’s taut black throat from ear to ear, straight down to the bone. Goldy’s scream mingled with the scream of the locomotive as the train thundered past overhead, shaking the entire tenement city. Shaking the sleeping black people in their lice-ridden beds. Shaking the ancient bones and the aching muscles and the t.b. lungs and the uneasy foetuses of unwed girls. Shaking plaster from the ceilings, mortar from between the bricks of the building walls. Shaking the rats between the walls, the cockroaches crawling over kitchen sinks and leftover food; shaking the sleeping flies hibernating in lumps like bees behind the casings of the windows. Shaking the fat, blood-filled bedbugs crawling over black skin. Shaking the fleas, making them hop. Shaking the sleeping dogs in their filthy pallets, the sleeping cats, the clogged toilets, loosening the filth. Hank jumped aside just in time. The blood spurted from Goldy’s cut throat in a shower, spraying the black street, the front fender and front wheel of the hearse. It gleamed for an instant with a luminous red sheen on the black pavement. It dulled the next insta...

Jodie bent down and wiped his knife blade on the hem of Goldy’s black gown. The stroke had been executed so quickly there was blood only on the knife blade.

“Just why did you come here, Brother Jackson? Why did you come to me?” “I just wanted to kneel here beside you, Reverend Gaines, and give myself up to the Lord.” “What!” Reverend Gaines started as though Jackson had uttered blasphemy. “Give yourself up to the Lord? Jesus Christ, man, what do you take the Lord for? You have to go and give yourself up to the police. The Lord won’t get you out of that kind of mess.”

His head flew about to look at her as he cried, “Mother-raping—” She put her whole weight in a down-chopping blow and sank the sharp blade of the axe into the side of his neck with such force it hewed through the spinal column and left his head dangling over his left shoulder on a thin strip of flesh, the epithet still on his lips. Blood geysered from red stump of neck over the fainting girl as Billie dropped the axe, picked her bodily in her arms, and showered her with kisses.