Back in North Carolina Gillis had shot a white man and, with the aid of prayer and automobile, probably escaped a lynching.
King Solomon Gillis has arrived in the big city, on the run from possible vengeance for the death of a white man at his hands. He claims it was an accident, but even if true if still won’t matter. Not to a black man in North Carolina before anyone has ever heard the name Martin Luther King. For Gillis, what Harlem represents to a man under such circumstances is put in form of metaphor when he muses shortly after getting his first sight of all the black faces in the town that he’s died and woke up in Heaven.
Presently, as he proceeded, a pair of bright green stockings caught and held his attention. Tony, the storekeeper, was crossing the sidewalk with a bushel of apples. There was a collision; the apples rolled, Tony exploded; King Solomon apologized.
Watching all this is the man who is the first person Gillis has met in Harlem: Mouse Uggam. Mouse helps him with directions to an address he brought him, but he’s no good Samaritan. The entire episode unfolds before Mouse’s greedy eyes like a dream come to life. Gillis is, as he thinks to himself, “the shine I been waitin’ for.” This incident only takes a paragraph and moves quickly but introduces two important characters—the girl in the green stockings and Tony the grocer—as well as the concept of black on black racism and prejudice. That is not to mention how it is also the revelation that Mouse isn’t quite as nice as he seems nor is Gillis the tough killer the narration originally presented.
“Even got cullud police-mans.”
Among the many sights in Harlem which stun and astound Gillis is that of a black uniformed police directing traffic in a busy street with the confidence and authority to stop not just blacks, but white people as well. The very idea of a black man telling white men when to stop and watching as they actually obeyed his order burrows into the head of Gillis and lays eggs there. “Even got cullud police-mans” becomes something of a mantra recurring through the course of the narrative until its last appearance as the thematic climax to the action.
“Ain’t but two things in dis world, Mouse, I really wants. One is to be a policeman. Been wantin dat ev’y sence I see dat cullud traffic cop dat day. Other is to get myse’f a gal lak that one over yonder.”
This quote is significant for several reasons. One is fairly obvious: the dialogue is written as spoke dialect. This can make the story a little difficult for readers not familiar with words spelled out phonetically rather than in proper English. The upside is that it is not narrated as a dialect story so only the dialogue rather than the entire narrative must be parsed for understanding. And the dialogue is easy enough to interpret. Beyond that, this quite also points yet again to the obsessive quality of Gillis whose mind is focused almost at all times, it sometimes seems, upon those two desires he mentions. His first day—his very first minutes—in Harlem have registered upon his mind just two images: the black policeman and the girl in the green stockings. And these two obsessions do ultimately collide in the end, revealing the thematic unity of the story and the author’s powers of efficiency.
