Many of the remaining joints didn't put on their first shows until after 4 A.M., and they remained open as late as the last customer could lift a glass. Your authors remember often leaving such places at 10 or 11 o'clock next morning, climbing out of a smoke-filled and dingy basement into broad daylight, their eyes smarting.
It was in this period that the "ofays," Harlem's word for whites, began mixing openly. Several female name stars were soon notorious for such habits.
There are very few houses of commercial prostitution in Harlem. They are not needed. Women are too easy to pick up. And they don't have to be picked up.
A man of the world can spot a whore by instinct, no matter what her color. But the Harlem wenches refuse to credit so much intelligence. They have a hundred brazen approaches. One of the commonest is to lead a little dog on a leash, and as a white man comes within hearing, ostensibly addressing the dog, she says:
"You come on with me now. You come on right in the house with me."
If there is any doubt as to what or whom she means, she is dangling the key to her apartment in her other hand. From this up to the most ancient methods, straightforward or from the corner of the mouth, "How'd you like to have a good time, mister?" they fear neither daylight, nightlight nor darkness.
This of itself shocks no one, least of all those whose names are on the cover of this book.
But back of it is a great deal more than the danger of venereal disease, which is inordinately high in these regions, and a sense of having sinned.
The white man who falls for these lures will probably be robbed, perhaps beaten and possibly murdered.
On one morning, on the roof of a squalid walkup, four white men were found strangled and stripped, their bodies thrown behind a chimney. This was the work of one prostitute whose pimp and accomplice crouched in hiding, and when each man was least likely to have his wits and caution, came up over him and choked him to death with bare hands while the woman held him helpless.