Hard west story of the four evangelists5/30/2023 ![]() ![]() Evangelists who on Sundays peddled Jesus, and mystics, would pray a lucky number for you, for a fee. Dream books that cost a dollar would say what number nearly any dream suggested. Others played their hunches: addresses, license numbers of passing cars, any numbers on letters, telegrams, laundry slips, numbers from anywhere. Many had lists of the daily hit numbers going back for years they figured reappearance odds, and used other systems. (And if you hit, you gave the runner a ten percent tip.) A controller might have as many as fifty runners working for him, and the controller got five percent of what he turned over to the banker, who paid off the hit, paid off the police, and got rich off the balance. The daily small army of runners each got ten percent of the money they turned in, along with the bet slips, to their controllers. ![]() The cops looked on no runner lasted long who didn't, out of his pocket, put in a free "figger" for his working area's foot cops, and it was generally known that the numbers bankers paid off at higher levels of the police department. Harlem's numbers industry hummed every morning and into the early afternoon, with the runners jotting down people's bets on slips of paper in apartment house hallways, bars, barbershops, stores, on the sidewalks. ![]() Most people tried to play a dollar a day, but split it up among different numbers and combinated. Hits generally were small a nickel, dime, or a quarter. Every day, someone you knew was likely to hit and of course it was neighborhood news if big enough a hit, neighborhood excitement. Practically everyone played every day in the poverty-ridden black ghetto of Harlem. Many players practiced what was called "combinating." For example six cents would put one penny on each of the six possible combinations of three digits. The chances of hitting were a thousand to one. Famous hits like that had bought controlling interests in lots of Harlem's bars and restaurants, or even bought some of them outright. With the odds at six hundred to one, a penny hit won $6, a dollar won $600, and so on. A hit meant duplicating the last three figures of the Stock Exchange's printed daily total of U.S. Hundreds of thousands of New York City Negroes, every day but Sunday, would play from a penny on up to large sums on three-digit numbers. I would have to pull two tables together into one, and they would be throwing me two- and three-dollar tips each time I came with my tray. Often they had bought a Cadillac, and sometimes for three and four days, they were setting up drinks and buying steaks for all their friends. I mean ordinary working people, the kind that we otherwise almost never saw in a bar like Small's, who, with a good enough hit, had quit their jobs working somewhere downtown for the white man. I don't mean just hustlers who always had some money. I saw people on their long, wild spending sprees, after big hits. Many sources cite other pigments such as the beautiful blue Lapis Lazuli as being present on the manuscript, but this seems to have been based on visual examination alone (fairly unreliable) and as far as I know the scientists who set out to find it could not.Every day, I would gamble all of my tips - as high as fifteen and twenty dollars - on the numbers, and dream of what I would do when I hit. ![]() However this information dates from 2003 and I think there has been further scientific examination and analysis of the manuscript since then, including Raman Microscopy. Gold was also used, either applied in very thin leaf form, or ground up to form a pigment and painted on. The whites are calcium carbonate, which could be chalk or ground up sea/egg shells. Green colours could either be made from mixtures of blue and yellow, or from the green corrosion product of copper (made by suspending copper metal over vinegar). It can also be made synthetically, but I'm not sure if it was at this early date. The yellow is orpiment, a naturally occurring sulphide of arsenic. The orange-red colour is Red Lead, made by roasting lead oxide. The blues, purples and crimsons are from plant extracts, such as woad, lichen or turnsole. The pigments came from a variety of mineral, plant and man-made processes. The paint used for the illumination was made by mixing coloured pigments with beaten egg white. The black or dark brown writing ink is a form of iron gall ink, made from a mixture of oak galls and iron salts. I found the following information on the British Library's website ( ): ![]()
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