Later in the evening, you head to the Lafayette Theater, also known as “The Beautiful House,” at 132nd Street and Seventh Avenue. Millie Adams and Rebecca Shosenburg are waiting for you under the theater’s marquee. Once everyone has arrived, Millie Adams ushers you into the smart lobby, past the ticket booths and cloakrooms, and through into the stalls. Various cleaners and other members of staff smile and greet Mrs. Adams as she passes. They also seem to know Miss Shosenburg. The house lights are fully up in the main auditorium as Millie shows you to seats in the center of the stalls.
Millie is an elegant African-American woman with fine features. She is, understandably, guarded when it comes to speaking with you. If asked why the meeting is taking place at the theater, she replies that she’s worked there since it opened, as a musician and singer, and until she got the measure of you, she wasn’t going to invite you into her home.
Although her husband didn’t confide everything he knew about the deaths and disappearances in Harlem over the last few years to her, he did tell her one or two of his suspicions. She has since attempted to confirm those for herself. Hilton has asked her not to do this, as he worries that Captain Robson may frame her for a crime as well, but Millie has refused to put her own safety ahead of that of her husband. This is what she tells you;
Hilton grew concerned when Harlem locals began to disappear several years ago. As the number of disappearances increased, Hilton turned to a group of friends from the saloon they all hung out at (Teddy’s, two blocks over from the Lafayette Theater), all of whom had served in the Harlem Hellfighters (an African-American infantry unit in the Great War who spent more time in combat than any other American unit). They began organizing patrols to try and protect members of the community, alongside trying to find out who was responsible, after the police at the 32nd Precinct refused to take the matter seriously.
Even after the mutilated bodies started appearing a couple of years back, the police still refused to do anything, claiming gang violence and street robberies gone wrong as the cause, despite the pronouncements regarding an African death cult by “some old crackpot with too much time on his hands” (Robson’s description of Mordecai Lemming).
Hilton and his friends focused on the death cult link and managed to turn up a reference in the New York Public Library about some long-dead cult from East Africa. Her husband didn’t tell her what it was called, and the police confiscated the journal in which he kept all his notes regarding the case. Millie remembers her husband using a strip of red cloth as a bookmark in the journal. She suspects it had some significance, but the police also confiscated it.
The group’s continued activities didn’t go down well with the police, who warned Hilton about the dangers of stirring up trouble. Pressure was also applied to a couple of Hilton’s friends by their employers; members of the conservative old guard who were concerned that the group’s activities would only bring Harlem into disrepute, especially all the cult nonsense, which (as far as they were concerned) just played into white perceptions of black people as uneducated savages. This was further backed up by their respective church elders in a series of pointed sermons.
Despite her husband’s reticence to include her in his inquiries, he did mention that he thought there was a cult operating in Harlem, and that they were probably paying the police to turn a blind eye to their activities, just like all the other criminal gangs did.
One night, shortly before his arrest, Millie overheard her husband mention the name “Ju-Ju House” to his friend, Needham Johnson, who works as a reporter at the New York Age.
Her husband was arrested in September 1924 after he was found standing over the body of a middle-aged white man in a dingy alley not far from the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library. The police, allegedly alerted by the dying man’s screams, claimed to have seen Hilton throw away a bloody knife when confronted. The knife—Hilton’s army-issue bolo knife—was reportedly recovered from the scene and formed the crux of the prosecution’s case against him, although Millie never remembers her husband taking the knife out with him when he went on patrol.
Their neighborhood and the patrons at Teddy’s raised money to help pay for Hilton Adams’ defense, as the New York Legal Aid Society judged that his case wasn’t worthy enough to qualify for one of their attorneys. They only had enough to pay for the trial and one appeal. The money’s all gone now, so it’s only a matter of time before her husband is escorted to the electric chair.
As she finishes telling her story, Millie offers you a deal: if you agree to try and exonerate her husband, she will provide you with information that may lead to the true killers. Now that Hilton’s friends have apparently given up the fight through fear and intimidation, she has no one else to turn to, and she knows the authorities don’t take her suspicions seriously.
This message was last edited by the GM at 15:48, Tue 28 Aug 2018.
