Now, the four hak gui children came running down the stairs to stand under the tenement window. Maybe they thought if they stood there, the marshals would not continue to throw furniture out the apartment window for fear of injuring them—but still, a lamp shot out the window and one of the little girls ducked.
The furious crowd, mostly Jewish bak gui, appeared to be on the side of the hak gui girls. One older Jewish woman mounted the front steps of the tenement and turned to face the crowd.
“Comrades!” she bellowed. “Hear what this slum landlord does! He gets a Negro family in there, charges them double the going rent! Just to line his pockets, twice the going rent! The father of the family, Mr. Philips—he’s been waiting years for a WPA job. And now the landlord wants to throw them to the streets! We can’t let the Philipses be put on the streets. We must fight!”
The Jewish workers raised their fists, and together, they picked up the cracked cabinet and hauled it back through the tenement door.
But what was the use of that? Koon Lai thought. The marshal would just throw it out the window again.
He felt bad for the hak gui family, but he had enough to worry about.
Koon Lai looked for Richard in the candy store. His son, thankfully, was not there. He hiked up to Pitkin Avenue, but the shoeshineboys had left, the shopkeepers had locked their stores, and only a few knish vendors remained.
Hours went by—Richard stumbling around with his head down, scouring the streets for pennies. At a loss, he sat on the curb and watched the men on the rooftops calling home their pigeons.
And then, in the glow of the streetlamp: a dead body.
Richard made out the leather shoes first, then the crooked legs, the rise of a rump. The corpse lay in the middle of an alleyway crisscrossed by clothing lines. He moved toward it, wondering if it could still be alive. There were dark stains on the back of the jacket and on the concrete, and he thought of the Spring Festival slaughter, ribbons of rooster blood flying across the coop.
Richard prodded the body with his shoe. Nothing happened. He bent beside the corpse, listening. He tapped the body with the tip of his finger. And then he wiggled his whole hand into a jacket pocket and pried out a pack of cigarettes.
In the other pocket, there was fifty cents. He noticed three golden rings on the doughy white fingers and tried to tug them off, but the pinkie was as swollen as a frankfurter, so he took the two other rings and hurried back to the street.
They’ll know, Richard thought. In a panic, he scampered back to the alley, yanked a blanket off a nearby clothing line and draped it across the body, then surrounded the mound with bags of trash.
“You little shegetz!” the dead man snapped, rolling over and throwing off the blanket. His chest was riddled with holes that spouted blood like a fancy fountain. “You think you can take my rings?”
Richard tore down the sidewalk as fast as he could, past the drunks clinging to paper bags, the night-shift workers awaiting the streetcar, stuffing his pockets with the coins and rings and cigarettes as he ran, and the dead man trudged after him, using his fist to plug the holes in his stomach.
Koon Lai saw the little boy racing down Blake Avenue.
“Chin Dun Ho!” he cried, catching him by the arm. Instead of yanking himself free, Richard wrapped his arms around Koon Lai’s waist.
“There’s a ghost! A ghost!”
Koon Lai could nearly have cried with relief.
“There are no ghosts in Brooklyn.” He rubbed Richard’s head. “The bak gui don’t allow ghosts.”
In fact, there had been ghosts in Brooklyn. When Brooklyn held the maize meadows of the Munsee-speaking. When whales still swam up the river. Like the Chinese, the Munsee-speakers prepared their dead for the afterlife, offering food and burying them with jewelry, arrowheads, and red-tailed hawk feathers. And even after the ancestors departed for the spirit world, they would continue to guide the living. At least those living willing to listen.
But that had been a different Brooklyn—Brooklyn before the Dutch dredged the oysters and slayed the fish; before enslaved Akan people, Senegambians, and Malagasy toiled on the plantations of Kings County.
When the new century dawned, the city-turned-borough grew thick with people. You had your Irish in Red Hook and your Italians in Bensonhurst and your Scandinavians by Green-Wood Cemetery and your Freedmen in Weeksville. And then all the way east there was Brownsville, a little Jewish factory town booming up in the middle of nowhere.
Every tribe of Brooklyn had its own leaders, its own tits for tats. At least that was how things had been until the crash. Then the assembly lines halted, and the ships in the bay disappeared. Overnight, Brooklyn was reduced to a scrabbling place, a borough of tin towns and breadlines, of frostbite and men drunk on paint-spiked milk. Some cried for revolt, raised the red flag with its hammer and sickle.
But all that was past, Mayor La Guardia had promised. He would pull the city back from the brink, put the fathers back to work, teardown the rotting tenements. Progress, the American way, would be steely and tangible: highways, airports, tunnels. Didn’t matter if you were Jewish, Italian, Irish, Polish—all would participate in the realization of this vision, and all would prosper.
Coney Island was the epitome of such hope. It was the everyday man’s playground, where the everyday man could indulge his desires. If he didn’t like franks, then maybe he went for soft-shell crab. If he wasn’t a horseback riding, Steeplechase guy, he might be a nut for the Tilt-A-Whirl. A man had to find out for himself.
As soon as his father had left for the Belmont fruit market the next morning, Richard crawled out the window onto the fire escape, skittered down the ladder, ran up the station steps, and ducked under the turnstile. Up on the El platform, the boys were scratching mustaches onto movie posters.
“It’s the Chinaman,” one announced.
“No tickee no shirtee! No tickee no shirtee!” said another, imitating the Chinese man who ran the neighborhood laundry.
“Look.” Richard showed them the rings and cigarettes.
