One morning I started my formal observations, beginning at 125th Street and the Hudson River. The Harlem part of the river was dotted with ancient wooden piers. Some older men were fishing off the end of the pier I went down, and a heavyset woman was lowering crab baskets over the side. I had brought romantic images of Mark Twain’s Mississippi River with me when I went to the Hudson, but it wasn’t to be. There were a few old boats moored on the next pier, one that looked like a coal scow, but nothing even vaguely romantic. I moved on eastward along 125th Street.
There was a milk-bottling plant, and I watched the rows of milk bottles move relentlessly along a conveyor belt and tried to make a big deal of that. Not much there for the budding writer either. I was beginning to wonder what authors like Byron and Shelley were seeing, or if they were really just more sensitive to beauty and interest than I was. I moved on.
Still walking along 125th Street, I was seeing what I had seen all my life. I didn’t know how to look at the sights with fresh eyes. The funeral parlor on the corner looked like the funeral parlor on the corner, the West End Theater, with its “THREE, 3, THREE BIG FEATURES, and a SERIAL,” looked the same, as did the small stores along Harlem’s central byway. It was early, and there were a few musicians with their instruments talking outside the Apollo. I tried to match them with the faces on the show cards outside the theater. Pegleg Bates, the one-legged tap dancer, was appearing, along with a band and a comedian.
I continued across 125th until I reached the building where Unity Insurance was located. Unity was where I went once every three months to make insurance payments for my parents. It was called life insurance but it was really burial insurance, to make sure that when the insurance holders died, they would at least have a decent funeral. One of the worst things that could be said about someone from Harlem was that he was buried in potter’s field. It was as if his whole life was being summed up in those two words.
Harlem had wonderful rooftops, and sometimes I would take the stairs to ours to sit near the edge overlooking Morningside Avenue and read. When I got home after making my rather scanty “observations,” I went up to the roof and decided to record what I saw on the street below. My aim, as I remember it, was to write something wonderfully dramatic. When it was warm, the sun would soften the tar, which gave off a distinctive odor. Sometimes people would barbecue on the roof, and more than once I had heard of parties where someone actually fell off, although I don’t remember this ever being verified. Some roofs had clotheslines with white sheets flapping in the summer breeze. I liked being high above the world, and I spent a lot of time either on the roof or sitting in a tree in the park.
Across from me, on the park side, there were women with small children sitting on the park benches. I recognized some of the women, big-hipped and solid, whom I had seen sitting on those same benches since we had moved to the neighborhood. In the park, men were playing checkers. There were more children, running in seemingly aimless patterns while sparrows flew overhead, tracing the same pathways through the air.
When a Fifth Avenue bus passed, it was a double-decker, and I made notes comparing it to a huge yellow-and-green dragon, which it did not look like at all. A Studebaker passed, and I tried to make something of the fact that it looked the same from the front or back. That didn’t work either. Maybe, I thought, I would have to move to the country, or at least to another part of the city. Harlem was not exotic, or special. Harlem was just home.
I decided to write about people I saw in the neighborhood.
Mrs. Dodson, the Wicked Witch of the West. Mrs. Dodson was a tall, brown-skinned woman with an intelligent, pleasant face anchored by a resolute lower lip that signaled that she would put up with no nonsense whatsoever. She had opinions, and if you dealt with her, you would deal with those opinions in no uncertain terms. Her husband, a big handsome man just slightly shorter than his wife, worked on the railroad and was gone for days at a time. Working on the railroad was considered a good job, and A. Philip Randolph, perhaps the most important figure in the civil rights movement, was making it a better job. But it was Mrs. Dodson, WW of the W, who ran that family. Her three children, Robert, Dorothy, and Helen, were going to do the right thing, and no one knew the right thing better than Mrs. Dodson. My only real quarrel with her was that she also thought she knew the right thing for me. Which she didn’t.
Melba Valle lived above us and was a part-time model and dancer. She did flamenco dancing, and we could hear her heels pounding on the ceiling and the distinct clicking of castanets. My mom hated her. She would get a broom and bang on the ceiling. I secretly bought a pair of castanets and taught myself at least to emulate some of the sounds I heard from above. Melba made the cover of Jet magazine, a really big deal in the black community, and at least once was in a dance program with Geoffrey Holder. Years later, at Geoffrey’s house, I asked him if he remembered her, and he said yes, but there was no obvious recognition on his face, and I wondered if he was just being polite. Melba had ambitions to be more than just someone who lived on the Avenue, and that attracted me to her. I also liked her warmth and openness, even to the kid who lived on the floor below. But there was a sadness to her as well. Many of the people in the building didn’t like her, claiming that she tried to make herself different from the others. It was the first time I had heard about people trying to be “not just another Negro.”
Bodie Jones was something else. I’m not even sure how to spell his first name. It could have been Bo “D” or some other variation. His dad or uncle played with Count Basie’s band, and Bodie played trumpet as well. He was older than me and would make remarks about how I spoke. I always wanted to fight him, but he would back off (even though I’m sure he would have punched my lights out). One time he said, in front of Light Billy, Binky, and some other guys, that he was going to kick my tail. He put one hand in his pocket, suggesting that he had a knife. I wasn’t afraid of his knife for two reasons; the first was that my brother Mickey was standing behind him holding a baseball bat, and the second was that I was kind of stupid.
Mickey and I had become friends. My adoptive parents gave me better circumstances than he had, at least to my way of thinking. Our biggest problem was that where he was laid-back, almost passive, I was very aggressive. Small disagreements for Mickey were reasons to move on to another subject; to me they were reasons to fight. He was also more constricted than I was. Mickey, for some reason, had to stay in our Harlem neighborhood. I would travel down to the Riverside Park boat basin, at 79th Street, on my bike, or up to the International House on Riverside Drive.
What impressed me most as an observer was the entrance to the A train on 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. There were constant streams of people going down those stairs in the mornings and coming up them in the evenings. They were going downtown to jobs I knew about—jobs as laborers, cleaning people, messengers. I knew there were exceptions. The Amsterdam News and Ebony always printed pictures of blacks who worked in downtown offices or who had achieved some small recognition. But next to the accomplishments of whites, the stories about blacks in the Amsterdam News were almost silly. The white newspapers would have a story about some white senator making a speech, or some white businessman opening a branch office somewhere, and the black paper would have a story about a man who was given a certificate for having a job as elevator operator for twenty years. White singers performed at Carnegie Hall. If a black singer appeared at Carnegie Hall, it wouldn’t be in an opera but in a recital, which would include Negro spirituals.
The idea that race played a large part in the life process was becoming clear to me. I knew that blacks did not have the same chances as whites, and I did not want to do something that was commendable only as a Negro accomplishment. I wanted whatever I managed to do in my life to reflect the core values I was learning in school, in my church, and in my community. What I was doing, without knowing it, was accepting the idea that whites were more valuable than blacks. I knew I would never be white, and therefore I
wanted to be without a race.
My role models for writing were the ones we learned about in school. If an Englishman could appreciate beauty, why couldn’t I? If Shakespeare could write about love and jealousy and hatreds, why couldn’t I? At thirteen I had never read a book by a Negro writer. Perhaps they had some at the George Bruce Branch, but I didn’t want to identify myself as a Negro by asking.
After my frustrating time of trying to write about my neighborhood the way I had seen other published authors write about theirs, I stopped writing for a while. I had never thought much about just being a Negro, or what that meant. I began to suspect that, if I were not careful, in all likelihood I would one day be relegated to taking the A train downtown, as my father did and as occasionally Mama did, to clean up for some white person.
In school the boys in my class started a club. The idea of the club was to be as macho as possible and to establish once and for all that we were something special. Across the street from the school was a bus terminal. They printed transfer pads at the terminal, and it was no problem for us to sneak into the terminal past the old man whose job it was to keep us out, and get a few transfers, or even a whole pad of them, from the printing-room floor. Then we would wait for the bus that stopped in front of the school, present the transfers, and ride the few blocks to the subway. It was a very small but very gratifying triumph. One afternoon at lunchtime five of us made our way into the terminal and up to the roof garage. For some reason, instead of looking for transfers, we were going to sit in a bus. Then it was decided, I think by James Williams, that we would see if we could start the bus. Getting the bus started was easy, and we decided to take it for a spin around the garage roof. James, our designated driver, got the bus out of its space and a quarter of the way past the rows of parked vehicles when we heard the police whistle.
James stopped the bus, and the guys bolted toward an exit. I was sitting in the back of the bus, feet up and over the back of the seat in front of me, and so I was the last one out. I saw my classmates run through the exit and make a sharp right. Knowing that if the police did chase us, they would probably chase the largest segment, I broke off and turned left, right into the arms of the first police officer.
We were all rounded up and put against the wall. The old man who had called the police was the same one whom we had constantly bedeviled as we snatched transfer pads earlier that week.
“Yes, that’s them!” he shouted gleefully, “Where’s the big white one?”
He was looking for Eric, who had gone home for lunch. The police took our names and classroom number and said they would pick us up that afternoon.
Back in class we were obviously upset and told the girls what had happened. Every time the door opened, five hearts nearly stopped beating. Stephanie Bena, the smartest person I had ever met in my entire life, asked to go to the bathroom. Ten minutes later she returned, opened the door, and shook her head sadly.
“Here they are, officer,” she announced in a loud voice as she looked down the hallway.
If Jonathan Willingham hadn’t started crying on the spot, I would have. Our teacher, Mr. Siegfried, turned to see what was going on, and Stephanie, having properly scared every one of the guilty five to death, smiled, closed the door, and took her seat.
At the end of the year there was another incident, this time away from the school, that was to have a major effect on me. An Irish kid named Eddie was having a party. He asked Eric to come and told Eric that he could bring anyone he wanted. Eric asked me in front of Eddie if I wanted to come to the party. I said yes. Later Eddie told Eric that I couldn’t come because I wasn’t white.
Eric was mad and told me that I should beat the crap out of Eddie. I wanted to do just that, but I was more hurt than I was mad.
SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE
The seventh and eighth grades, which our Special Progress class did in one year, were remarkable only in that I had no major fights and for the depression of my father. I ended the year glad to be released from the hot classrooms but with few prospects for the summer. I had fewer friends than ever, having lost anything of common interest with the boys on my block who were my age. Boys slightly older were moving on to girls and dating and fitting in with the mores and restrictions of being in their mid teens, which meant, among other things, avoiding associations with younger boys. I was twelve and going into the ninth grade of what would today be called a “gifted” program, while many of the other kids my age were just going into the seventh. The only sport I was playing now was basketball, often with guys four or five years older than I was.
Basketball was very satisfying. It gave me a chance to compete, which I loved, and it was highly respected in the community. A good basketball player would be known throughout Harlem. Beyond the idea of winning, which was important to me, I liked the physical aspects of playing ball. Going up for a rebound and snatching it off the backboard over an opponent was a thrill. To even get into one of the tough summer tournaments, with players coming from as far away as Philadelphia, was sheer delight.
My sister Imogene had come to Harlem to live with George Myers. She was bright, beautiful, and feisty, but, like Mickey, she was not allowed out of the house that much. I wanted her to see me play ball in the worst way, but she could never get to the better games that I managed to play in. I did show her some of my poetry, which she liked. I thought Jean, as we called her, was a lot like me and began wondering more often what my biological family was like.
Mr. Lasher had convinced me that I was bright, and by the time I approached the ninth grade, education had become very important to me. There was far less pretense in the New York City school system than there is today. High schools were divided into four general categories: vocational, commercial, general, and academic. Only 25 percent of all male students attended academic high schools and were expected to go on to college. The rest, even if they did graduate from high school, were expected to take their place in the workforce immediately. The dropout rate was quite high, but it didn’t seem to matter all that much. Most jobs could be handled by anyone with a willingness to work and some reading ability. But I knew that a poor education would probably land me in a “Negro” job, that lower level of employment in which so many of the neighborhood men seemed to be hopelessly stuck.
By this time there were two very distinct voices going on in my head, and I moved easily between them. One had to do with sports, street life, and establishing myself as a male. It was a fairly rough voice, the kind of in-your-face tone that said I wouldn’t stand for too much nonsense either on the basketball courts or in the streets. The other voice, the one I hid from my street friends and teammates, was increasingly dealing with the vocabulary of literature. Harlem had a rich literary heritage of which I knew nothing. The so-called Harlem Renaissance, which produced writers such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen, had ended during the Depression of the thirties, and none of these writers were taught in city schools. Moreover, there were few black librarians. I remember none in the George Bruce Branch who might have recommended any of these writers to me.
I spent the summer with my time divided between playing basketball and reading. In ball I was helped briefly by a thin black man called Fatty who was the coach of a team called the Comanches, one of the best teams in the city. He talked to me about the possibility of playing ball in college, and I was encouraged. When I wasn’t playing ball, I read everything I could get my hands on. The reading was largely indiscriminate. At the library, I would pick up a novel, read a page or two, then make a quick decision as to whether or not I wanted to borrow it. When a librarian at the George Bruce commented that I probably wasn’t reading all the books I took out, I began to space out my visits. I wanted her to think that I was a reader.
Mary Finley was our teacher in the ninth grade. Never have I seen a teacher with such high hopes or one who would be so bitterly disappointed. The class had been together for a year, and she was the outsider. The fir
st week of the new term set the tone for the whole year. Leon Sadoff’s father ran a kiosk on Amsterdam just off 125th Street, and we got nine plugs of chewing tobacco from him. The idea was hatched during one morning, the plugs acquired at lunchtime, and the chewing began right after lunch. None of us had ever chewed tobacco before, and why we thought it was a good idea is beyond me to this day. I can’t remember the first boy who threw up, but I do remember Mrs. Finley’s face when the rest of us started spitting out our tobacco wads. The class, in the middle of a history lecture, broke down into a group of retching, spitting thirteen-year-old boys, with the girls retreating to the open windows for air. Mrs. Finley was on the verge of tears and absolutely speechless. Her dismay, along with the disgust of the girls, made the whole venture worthwhile even as we had to clean up the mess we made with rags and buckets of water brought up by the cleaning staff.
Mrs. Finley tried to minimize the damage by saying that one of the boys had become ill and made the others sick. But the next week there was a spitball fight in our typing class, which blew our cover. The girls, after the tobacco incident, were somewhat envious of our notoriety. When Mr. Goldstein, the typing teacher, left the room and the spitball fight started, the girls joined in with a vengeance. Mr. Goldstein was not amused when he returned to see the typing room, including his desk, covered with spitballs.
The word quickly got around the school that the SP students were troublemakers, and Mr. Manley, our French teacher, explained to us in no little detail how disgusting we were and what an educational opportunity we were wasting. Mr. Manley was also the only black teacher we had.
Mrs. Finley was our homeroom teacher and also taught English. I thought she was boring. Boring, that is, until we came to the sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. We had read sonnets before, but Mrs. Finley, reading Browning’s poems, gave them new meaning.
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