PARTISAN REVIEW
45
The Harlem Gallery.
Further, Uncle Rufus staunchl} maintains that he
knew the real John Henry who, by the way, was an excellent bare–
knuckle fighter.
The day after the Ali-Frazier fight, I met him uptown at a little
spot in Harlem called My Bar. The bar is a very hip joint. It's
run
by
a tall yellow guy named Julian May. It's a good place to talk all kinds of
sports. Julian's got himself a brand new color TV in the back room.
And there's a bartender there, Ray, who is a statistical and historical
expert on all sports, especially the ones in which we dominate, or the
ones in which we have determined the stylistic mode and strategy. But
Ray would never speak in these terms, he absorbs his data on sports
because he loves them and sees them as significant encounter with the
unknowable nature of the world. Ray's attitude towards sports like
boxing, football and basketball is a healthy blend of the mysterious and
scientific.
I am sitting at the bar, discussing with Ray the function of energy
in
athletics when Uncle Rufus bops into the door. He peacocks in a
pearl gray Homburg. The coat is blue cashmere. He sports a golden–
headed serpent cane; the shoes, French, Shriner and Urner, contrast
exquisitely with his spats which are the same pearl gray color as the
Homburg.
I order him a Jack Daniels, and introduce him to Ray. A dis–
cussion ensues concerning the geometry of basketball. I feel shut out of
the conversation; and besides, I didn't invite my Uncle here to talk
about basketball. I was really getting irritated with the whole thing
when some customers finally worked into the bar.
So now that I had Uncle Rufus to myself, I asked him his opinion
of the Ali-Frazier fight. He began the discussion with some commentary
on a few of the events that transpired in the aftermath of Jack John–
son's victory over Jim Jefferies back in Reno on July 4th, 1910.
"It was during the days of the steamboat, and after that famous
bout," he said, "there was fighting going on between the blacks and
the whites. This happened because the whites were so infuriated by
Jack's victory that they began beating up on the colored. A man got
lynched in Cape Giradeau when he tried to collect a bet he had made
with a white farmer by the name of Cyrus Compton.
"I was working on a show called Stall's Minstrels. Now this show
was out of Cairo, Illinois, which is smack on the Mississippi River.
But we was working in a dance hall in Henderson, Kentucky. I
think
they called that hall The Stomp. All the great troupes had worked it.
The Creole Show
and
Black Patti's Troubadours
had also been through
