Hell's Kitchen (17 page)

A cold feeling pierced her. It was just like the feeling that sliced through her when the two policemen showed up at her door and asked, grim-faced, if her son was Billy Washington. Could they come inside? There was something they had to tell her.

Hatake continued in a calm voice, “You feeling good?”

“I’m okay,” Ettie said, looking uneasily from one woman to another.

“Bet you feeling better than that boy, Mother.”

“What boy?”

“That little boy you killed. Juan Torres.”

“I didn’t do it,” Ettie whispered. She drew back, against the wall. “No, I didn’t do it.”

She looked again toward the door but she was completely hidden by the line of women.

“I
know
you done it, bitch. You kill that little boy.”

“I didn’t!”

“An eye for an eye.” The large woman stepped closer. She had a cigarette lighter in her hand. The woman next to her, Dannette, had one too. Where had they gotten those? Then understood. Dannette had purposely gotten arrested again and smuggled in the lighters.

Hatake stepped close.

Ettie shrank away then suddenly lunged forward, swinging her cast into Hatake’s face. It connected with her nose, a loud thud. The woman screeched and fell back. The other women gasped. No one moved for a moment.

Then Ettie took a deep breath to scream for help and found herself tasting sour cloth. Someone had come up behind her and flipped the gag over her face. Hatake was on her feet, wiping blood from her nose, smiling cruelly.

“Okay, Mother, Okay.” She nodded to Dannette, who lit a cigarette and tossed it onto Ettie’s shift. She tried to kick it off but two other women held her down. She couldn’t move. The ember began to burn through the dress.

Hatake said, “You shouldn’t be smokin’ in here. ’Gainst the rules, Mother. An’ accidents happen. Them lighters, they spill sometimes. Get that stuff inside, that gas, all over you. Burn up yo hair, burn up you face. Sometime it kill you, sometime it don’t.”

Hatake stepped closer and Ettie felt the icy spray of the butane on her scalp and cheek. She closed her eyes, trying to twist away from the women who held her.

“Lemme,” Hatake snapped, snatching the lighter out
of Dannette’s hands. She muttered something else but Ettie couldn’t hear it over her own squealing and muttered pleas. There was a snap and a hiss and the huge woman walked closer and closer, holding the lighter like a beacon.

A star can make a movie open.

Open.

The classic, revered Hollywood verb defined as: “to make enough people plunk down their hard-earned bucks on opening weekend so film company execs don’t have to spend all Monday thinking up excuses for their wives, mistresses, bosses and
Daily Variety
reporters to explain why they’ve just spent millions of other people’s dollars to make a flop.”

Bankable stars can make a movie open.

So can a drop-dead story line.

Nowadays even special effects can do it, particularly if they involve explosions.

But nothing in the universe can make a documentary open. Documentaries might be enlightening or touching or inspiring. They can represent the highest form of movie-making art. But they don’t do what people go to feature films for.

To escape from their lives, to enjoy themselves for a few hours.

Walking through downtown Manhattan, toward the
sooty carnival of the courts and prisons, Pellam was reflecting: He had directed four independent films, all of them cult classics, two of them award winners. He had degrees in film making from NYU and UCLA. He’d written dozens of articles for
Cineaste
and
Independent Film Monthly
and he could recite the dialog from most of Hitchcock’s films. His credentials were impeccable.

Of the eighteen studios and production companies he’d approached with the idea for this documentary all had rejected him.

Oh, everyone had been full of praise and enthusiasm for
West of Eighth: An Oral History of Hell’s Kitchen.
But not a single dollar from a big studio was forthcoming to back it.

As he’d pitched the idea he explained that the neighborhood offered a wonderful mix of crime, heroism, corruption, beauty.

“Those are all capitalized words, Pellam,” a friend, a VP for development at Warner Brothers, had told him. “Capitalized words do not good movies make.”

Only Alan Lefkowitz had expressed any interest and he didn’t have the foggiest notion what the film was about.

Still, Pellam had great hopes for the flick and believed it had a shot at an Oscar—confidence founded largely on an encounter that had occurred on West Thirty-Sixth Street last June.

“Excuse me,” he’d asked, “you live in this building?”

“Yes, I do, young man,” the elderly black woman had answered, eyes confident, amused. Not wary.

He’d looked up and down the street. “This is the last tenement on this block.”

“Used to be nothing but tenements. Place I lived in for forty years was right there, see that vacant lot? There? I lived here for, lessee, five years or so. How about that? Almost half a century on the same block. God
damn,
that’s a scary thought.”

“Your family lived in the neighborhood all your life?”

The woman had set down the thin plastic grocery bag, containing two cans, two oranges and a half gallon jug of wine.

“You bet I have. My Grandpa Ledbetter came up from Raleigh in 1862. His train, it came in at ten at night and he walked out of the station and saw these boys, dozens of ’em, in a alley and said, ‘Lord, why ain’t you home?’ and they said, ‘What’re you talking? This
is
our home. Go on with you, old man.’ He felt so bad for those boys. Sleeping outside was called ‘carrying the banner,’ and thousands of children had to do it. They had no home otherwise.”

She’d spoken without a trace of accent, a deep, melodious voice—a singer’s voice as he would later learn.

“Was it a nice building?” Pellam had asked, gazing at the vacant lot, overgrown with weeds, where apparently the woman’s old tenement had once stood.

“Where I lived? That old thing?” She’d laughed. “Falling down ug
-ly!
You know something interesting though.
I
thought it was interesting, anyway. When they tore it down there was a big crowd of people came to complain. You know, protestor sorts. ‘Don’t take our homes,’ they were yelling. ‘Don’t take our homes.’ Course I didn’t recognize most of ’em from the neighborhood. I think they were students come down from Morningside Heights or the Village ’cause they smelled a good protest. Get the picture?
Those
sorts.

“Anyway, who’d I meet but a woman I knew a long, long time ago. Many years. She was close to ninety then, been married to a man much older run a livery stable and sold horses to the army. Hell’s Kitchen used to be the stable of New York. Still have the hansom cab stables here. Anyway, this woman, she’d been born in that very building they were tearing down. Ineeda Jones. Not Anita, like you’re thinking. Ineeda. Like
I need a.
That was a southern name, a Carolina name. She was up in Harlem for years then she came back to the Kitchen and was poor as me. Cradle to grave, cradle to grave. Say, mister, I don’t take any offense but what exactly’re you smiling at?”

“Can I ask your name?”

“I’m Ettie Washington.”

“Well, Ms. Washington, my name’s John Pellam. How’d you like to be in a movie?”

“A movie? Hell. Say, why don’t you come on upstairs? Have some wine.”

The interviews had begun the next week. Pellam would climb the six flights to her apartment and turn on the recorder and let Ettie Washington talk.

And talk she did. About her family, her childhood, her life.

Age six, sitting on a scrap of purloined Sears Roebuck carpet beside a window, listening to her mother and grandmother swap stories about turn-of-the-century Hell’s Kitchen, Owney Madden, the Gophers—the most notorious gang in the city.

“. . . My Grandpa Ledbetter, he used a lot of slang he heard on the street when he was a young man. He’d say ‘booly dog’ for a policeman. A ‘flat’ was a man you could fool, like at a card game. ‘Blue ruin’ was gin. And ‘chips’
was money. My brother Ben’d laugh and say, ‘Grandpa, don’t nobody use those words no more.’ But he was wrong. Grandpa always said ‘crib’ for where you live, your home, you know? And people’re saying that again nowadays.”

Ettie at age ten, working her first job, sweeping sawdust and wrapping meat in a butcher store.

Age twelve, in school, numbers easy and words hard, but getting mostly As. Stealing scraps from restaurant bins for lunch. Classmates vanishing as the need for money edged out the need for learning.

Age fourteen, her beloved and feared Grandma Ledbetter dying as she sat on the couch at Ettie’s side one hot Sunday afternoon a week before her 99th birthday.

Age fifteen, Ettie herself finally leaving school, working for twenty cents an hour, sharpening knives and chisels in a paperboard factory, stropping blades on long, speeding bands of leather. Some of the men gave her extra pennies because she worked hard. Some would call her back into the stock room and touch her chest and say don’t tell. One touched her between her legs and before he could say don’t tell he received his own knife deep in his thigh. He was bandaged up and given the day off with pay. Ettie was fired.

Age seventeen, sneaking into clubs to hear Bessie Smith on Fifty-second Street.

“. . . Wasn’t much in the way of entertainment in the Kitchen. But if Mama and Papa had an extra dollar or two, they’d go down to the Bowery on the East Side, where they had what they called ‘museums,’ which weren’t what you think. They were arcades—freak shows and varieties and dancers. Vaudeville. For a really
good time Mama and Papa’d go to Marshall’s on Fifty-third. You never heard of that but it was a hotel and nightclub for blacks. That was the big time, none better. Ada Overton Walker sung there. Will Dixon too.”

Age thirty eight, a decade of cabaret jobs behind her, the singing work drying up. Ettie, falling for a handsome Irishman. Billy Doyle, a charmer, a man with, apparently, a criminal record (Pellam was still waiting to hear the end of that story).

Age forty-two, the marriage not working. She was restless, still wanting to sing. Billy was restless too. Wanting to succeed, looking for his own niche. Finally he told her he was going off to find a better job and would send for her. Of course he never returned and that broke her heart. All she ever heard from him was a short note that accompanied the Nevada divorce decree.

At forty-four, marrying Harold Washington, who died drunk in the Hudson River some years later. A good man in many ways, a hard worker, he still left more debt than seemed fair for a man who never played the horses.

Tape after tape of these stories. Five hours, ten, twenty.

“You
can’t
really be interested in all of this, can you?” Ettie had asked Pellam.

“Keep going, Ettie. You’re on a roll.” Pellam had told himself to get outside and interview other residents of the infamous neighborhood. And he had—some of them. But Ettie Washington remained the heart of
West of Eighth.
Billie Doyle, the Ledbetters, the Wilkeses, the Washingtons, Prohibition, the unions, gangs, epidemics, the Depression, World War Two, the stockyards, the ocean liners, apartments, landlords.

Ettie
was
on a roll. And the roll never stopped.

Until her arrest for murder and arson.

Now, a blistering afternoon, a uniformed guard handed John Pellam a pass and ushered him through the dank halls, where the scent of Lysol ran neck and neck with that of urine. He passed through the metal detector then stepped into the visiting room to wait.

The Detention Center was chaotic today. Shouts in the distance. A wailing voice or two.

“Me duele la garganta!”

“Yo, bitch—”

“Estoy enferma!”

“Yo, bitch, I’ma come over there and shut you up fo’ good.”

Five minutes later the green metal door opened, with a two-note creak. A guard came in, glanced at him. “You here for Washington? She’s not here.”

Pellam asked where she was.

“You better go to the second floor.”

“Is she all right?”

“Second floor.”

“You didn’t answer me.”

But the guard was gone.

He walked through the bleak corridors until he came to the dark alcove where he’d been directed. It was no less dirty but it was cooler and quieter. A guard glanced at his pass and let him through another door. He pushed inside and was surprised to see Ettie sitting at a table, hands clasped together. There was a bandage on her face.

“Ettie, what happened? Why’re you up here?”

“Isolation,” she whispered. “They were going to kill me.”

“Who?”

“Some girls. In the cell downstairs. They heard about the Torres boy dying. They fooled me pretty good. I thought they were my friends but they were planning all along to kill me. Louis got some court order or another to move me. The guards came just as those girls were about to burn me. They sprayed stuff on me and were gonna burn my face, John. The stuff, it hurt my skin.”

“How’re you feeling now?”

She didn’t answer. She said, “Oh, I never thought that boy’d die. That gave me a turn. Oh, the poor thing. He was such a sweet little one. If he’d been at his grandmother’s like he was supposed to be he’d still be alive. . . . I prayed for him. I did! And you know me—I don’t waste
any
time on religion.”

Pellam put his hand on Ettie’s good arm. He thought about saying, ‘He wasn’t in any pain,’ or ‘He went quickly,’ but of course he had no idea how much pain the boy had experienced or how quickly he’d died.

Finally she glanced at his unsmiling face. “I saw you in court. When you heard ’bout that time I got myself arrested. . . . You want to know about that, I’ll bet.”

“What happened?”

“Remember the time Priscilla Cabot and me were working at that factory? The clothing place?”

“They fired you. A few years ago.”