The Ballad of Black Tom

“As Charles Thomas Tester left the apartment on West 144th Street, he heard his father plucking at the strings in the back bedroom.” 

Tommy spends most of the story outside the apartment moving between different neighborhoods, while his father spends most of his time at home. Tommy’s traveling becomes his undoing. At the end of the novella, he wonders why he wasn’t content to stay at home in Harlem, which would have prevented his father’s death.

“Robert Suydam wasn’t paying five hundred dollars for Tommy’s voice. For what, then?” 

Tommy assumes the wealthy old man he meets in Flatbush will be an easy mark, but Robert Suydam plans to use Tommy for his own ends, which at this point Tommy cannot even imagine. This quote represents Suydam’s strategy of stringing Tommy along with large sums of money until he can convince Tommy to join his undertaking.

“Buckeye ran numbers for the most famous female gangster in New York City, so why wouldn’t the Victoria Society be like those legendary opium dens? Or had Tommy simply assumed terrible things about this wave of West Indian immigrants?” 

The Victoria Society becomes a place of solace for Tommy after he overcomes his prejudices. When Suydam hosts the rowdy criminals from Red Hook at his home, Tommy realizes that he imagined such dubious characters filled the tearoom. Ironically, Suydam’s seemingly respectable mansion is the place where Tommy faces the greatest danger, representing that judging people by race or socio-economic status often leads to mischaracterizing those who are truly dangerous.