He took her to the fish market with him, bought mullet wrapped in a giant page of newsprint. At the grocery store he bought Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, and at Idrie’s he bought bean pies, a specialty that had its origins in New York’s Black Muslim community. At the intersection, a black cop with white gloves and sunglasses directed traffic; the butcher stood in his shop window between dangling sides of meat; the Italian hatmaker smoked under his awning. If he was lucky he’d see a showgirl from one of the clubs, catch sight of the sequin shorts she wore under her coat. Back home, he’d put on Ethel Waters, “Stormy Weather” or “Georgia on My Mind.” He had seen Ethel Waters once on Lexington. Tall and regal—and even though she was already a star, she returned his smile.

One day his friend Arthur had suggested that they build a radio. For days and weeks they sat together, taking turns reading from the books they’d bought. They painted a cardboard tube with paraffin, wound wire around a spool, sketched out circuit diagrams, cut wires. The smell of oil and burnt metal, a pile of screws, wires, and electrical tape on the table in front of them, and Arthur twisting his strawberry-blond Charlie Chaplin mustache, when suddenly—he’ll never forget it—a sound came out. A faint, squealing sound, a bit like chirping. They turned the tuning knob, and out came a sound like wind and the beating of rain, and as they continued turning there were sounds he had never heard before, electronic sounds, whistling, sliding, leaping, bending. It sparked a tingling feeling inside him, a feeling of happiness. Then they started picking up voices. The voices crackled like leaves in winter. “CQ, CQ”—come quick. A shaky, warbling man’s voice singing, “Sweet Sally, Sally of my dreams.”

They looked at each other as if they had summoned God.

“Voices everywhere.”

“People can tell each other everything now. What’s really going on in the world. Soon there won’t be any secrets at all anymore.”

Arthur’s face lit up. He had just joined a group that was engaged in the fight against social injustice and for the Christian faith. Arthur was the son of Irish immigrants, but not at all devout. He only believed in friendship. And in German work ethic. As far as the latter went, he’d picked the wrong German, and soon realized it, but he still let Josef work at his print shop and live with him those first few years. When Arthur got married, Josef moved to East Harlem. The bars there served alcohol, despite Prohibition, for which reason Arthur often came to visit him and was soon bemoaning married life. “She comments on everything I do. Says I slice an avocado the wrong way, crossways down the middle instead of longways. I’d have been better off marrying you.”