A Rage in Harlem (Harlem Detectives Book 1)

by Chester Himes

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...