My brother Mickey went to Textiles High, and that school was coed. I hardly ever saw him, but once, on my way home from Stuyvesant, I ran into him coming from 125th Street. We were walking down Morningside Avenue when we heard a woman scream.
“He’s got my purse! He’s got my purse!” she yelled, pointing to a dark figure running toward 121st Street.
Mickey went after the guy without a thought and caught him on 120th Street and Manhattan Avenue. A passing policeman recovered the purse and returned it to the woman. The boy was a member of a local and very notorious neighborhood gang.
We didn’t have much in the way of gangs. There were a few fighting gangs that mostly just paraded about looking tough and maybe committing a few petty crimes like the purse snatching. Their usual weapons were sticks, short lengths of chain, and an occasional knife.
The school year finally ended, and I threw away my final report card resolving to do better the following year. At home things were getting worse. Eric and I still got along well, but I became nervous about our friendship. We were at an age to explore dating, or at least parties. And I knew that I would not be welcome, as a black, at many of the parties to which Eric would be invited. Racism existed as a backdrop to our relationship, and I did not want to experience the humiliation of being rejected because I was black. For the first time in my life I was faced with the notion that I would have to deal with the idea of race as a central part of my life.
My parents had not prepared me to face the kind of racial issues that I was seeing. Mama, Native American on her father’s side and German on her mother’s, was sympathetic to the black cause. Her mother had been ostracized because she had married a Native American. She had heard stories about the horrors of slavery, which she passed on to me, and knew something about the slaughter of American Indians. When The Lone Ranger came to television, she would watch it just to see Jay Silverheels, the actor who played Tonto.
My dad’s advice on race was very simple. “The white man won’t give you anything, and the black man doesn’t have anything to give you. If you want anything out of life, you have to get it for yourself.”
This was Herbert Dean’s counsel on race relations. Actually, getting and doing for oneself was his advice on everything. He talked constantly about having two lists. One list consisted of things you wanted, the other of things you were willing to work for. I don’t think that, having being raised in a segregated Baltimore, he ever imagined I would need to learn interaction with whites, or to deal with being black in any but a defensive manner.
In truth, everything in my life in 1951 that was personal and had value was white. All the authors I studied, all the historical figures, with the exception of George Washington Carver, and all those figures I looked upon as having importance were white men. I didn’t mind that they were men, or even white men. What I did mind was that being white seemed to play so important a part in the assigning of values. I knew that the vague thought I had had earlier, that goodness and intelligence could somehow lift a person above the idea of race, was wrong. I wondered where and how I would fit in to a society that basically didn’t like me.
THE GARMENT CENTER
I was fifteen, starting my junior year at Stuyvesant, and I was lost. I didn’t know where I was going or even where I should have been going. The other boys in the school began the term talking about college. There was an excitement in the air, as some were applying to a program at Yale that allowed them to skip their senior year in high school. There was quite a lot of talk about jobs. Future engineers, physicists, doctors, all sat around me while we waited for the beginning of the annual “Beat Clinton” rally. We wouldn’t beat DeWitt Clinton’s football team, but the rally was fun. A new friend, Stuart Miller, wanted to run a sporting goods shop. I could only think of him as the best writer in the school.
“I can get you a part-time job, man,” my cousin Joseph had promised once when we met at my aunt’s house. “Come on down to my place.”
“I have to get a job through the school,” I lied. I knew Joseph worked in the garment center, pushing a hand truck through the busy streets.
“Well, if they can’t get you anything, come on by my place.”
He wrote down the name of the company he worked for in the garment district. His handwriting was crude, childish. I took the paper and put it in my pocket, intending to discard it as soon as I could.
The garment center was once one of the busiest places in New York City. Located largely on Seventh Avenue between 28th and 41st Streets, it was where America’s clothing was made and assembled. Successive waves of immigrants filled its factories, working for little above minimum wage as they cut, sewed, and hustled the garments into trucks to carry across the country. Mama had sometimes worked in the garment center, and so did my sister Geraldine. Gerry had a good job as a color matcher in a button factory, mixing dyes to any color a retailer wanted to make his dresses distinctive.
There were indoor jobs in the garment center, and outdoor jobs. The indoor jobs were represented by every race under the sun. People who spoke little or no English, but who could do one of the many jobs associated with putting a garment together, flooded into the buildings each morning and out again each night. On the edge of the garment district was the fur district, where the pay was somewhat higher.
The outdoor jobs, the men hustling through the streets with huge racks of dresses, or pushing hand trucks taller than they were, were largely black. Later, in their turn, Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics would move into these outdoor jobs. No, I didn’t want a part-time job in the garment center.
The junior and senior years at Stuyvesant were morning sessions, beginning around eight and ending at one without a lunch break. It was possible to work after school, and many of the needier kids did. I heard about kids working in private offices in the neighborhood or at one of the insurance companies on 23rd Street. There was a job placement center, part of the guidance counselor’s office, I believe, and I planned to go there looking for a job.
Jobs were, by and large, a mystery to me. My dad spoke of “good” jobs in the post office or on the police force. My sister Viola was working at an electronics factory on Long Island. I didn’t know what she was doing at the time, but I knew she had once assembled television sets. Her husband, Frank, made signs. He had helped to make the Chesterfield cigarette sign at the Polo Grounds. The “h” in the sign would light up when a player got a hit and an “e” would light up when an error was made.
My aunt Nancy, Joseph’s mother, the large woman who had run a bakery on the Lower East Side, now had a marriage brokerage business. She brought immigrant women together with American men and helped them marry. This allowed the immigrant to apply for citizenship as the wife of a citizen. All this was done, of course, for a fee. She had once arranged for my cousin Sterling to marry a black woman from Brazil. The woman was young and beautiful and seemed nice, but when the marriage got into trouble—and with her speaking only Portuguese it didn’t have much of a chance not to—she changed. Sterling started to roam and stay out nights. The girl—I can’t remember her name—went to a root shop in East Harlem, bought a number of herbs and roots, cooked them up, and dropped his picture into the boiling mess. He became deathly ill and had to beg her forgiveness. She left for Brazil within a year, hopefully somewhat wiser and surely less rich than when she arrived.
I applied for a job at school and was told there were none available but was also given the address of the New York State employment service. At the grimy state offices on 54th Street I was given a referral to Friedsam Coats.
“It’s in the garment center,” the clerk at the counter said. “Do you think you can find it?”
At Friedsam I was told that I would be packing garments for shipments and, if I worked out, I would be taught how to use the ticketing machine to put the sizes and prices on garments. There were two other blacks on the job, a girl who packed with me and the shipping clerk who took stuff to the post office. The pay was ju
st above minimum wage, which suited me fine. I could walk from Stuyvesant to the job and stop, if I had the time, at any one of a dozen used-book stores along Fourth Avenue.
What Stuyvesant did, and did very well, was to prepare students to continue their education. If you were in the upper quarter of the graduating class at Stuyvesant, you were virtually assured of being able to get into a highly ranked college. The only question was which highly ranked college you would attend.
But it was the early fifties, and options for black students were limited. Some of the black kids gathered in the small soda shop across the street and discussed their options. Many colleges in the South did not accept black students. The brochures didn’t state it as much, but that was the reality. Guidance counselors and teachers would quietly pull a student aside and say that William and Mary, for example, did not accept blacks, so there was no need for you to apply. Many of the Jews were also worried about being accepted in Southern schools, and rumors of quotas for Jews in some other schools were also a worry.
There were always the Negro schools, such as Howard, Hampton, Morehouse, and Spelman. What they offered was an essentially segregated learning environment that not only taught skills but also brought accomplished blacks together in a way that reinforced racial confidence. The idea of voluntary segregation went against every value I had been taught. What did being born black have to do with excellence? The idealism I still nurtured as a fifteen-year-old did not have a racial component. Was life really about what restrictions I could accept or avoid?
In thinking about what college I might apply to, I ran into another problem. Stuyvesant High School was ideally suited to the student interested in science or math. I didn’t have a clue about what I wanted to do with my life. When I was nine I briefly wanted to be a lawyer. I can’t remember what gave me the notion or even if I really knew what a lawyer was. At a party I got into a conversation with an adult I didn’t know. The man asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.
“I want to be a lawyer,” I said.
“You can’t be a lawyer,” the man said. “You don’t speak well enough. You’re pretty bright, so maybe you could be a law clerk and help other lawyers.”
That brief conversation not only ended my law career but placed my speech problems in the center of my consciousness. The black man, a family friend, probably thought he was doing me a favor by pointing out that I had a speech defect.
I knew in my heart that I would have some difficulties in life because of my speech problems, and I also knew that I wouldn’t always be able to solve them by punching somebody out. But I didn’t want to make my speech the focus of my life. If I couldn’t speak well, I could still communicate by writing. If the words didn’t come easily from my mouth, they would, I hoped, eventually come from my writing.
I never understood my speech problem. The words I spoke sounded clear to me. When a teacher or classmate asked me to say something more clearly, I didn’t know what to do. Reading aloud in front of an audience was especially difficult for me. After a while I dreaded reading even a sports page to my friends. My stomach would tighten up, and I would become so nervous I could hardly read at all. On more than one occasion, if I had to read in front of a class, I simply memorized a passage and recited it.
In my mind I eliminated any job that might involve public speaking. Still, as an immature fifteen-year-old, I was being asked to make life-defining decisions. What college did I want to attend, and what did I want to do with the rest of my life?
The idea that creative writing could be anyone’s job never entered my mind. Did the dude who wrote
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
—Lord Byron—just do it for the bucks? I didn’t think so. What’s more, I didn’t know of any living person who made money as a writer. The few articles I had read dealing with writers spoke about how they had conceived their ideas, or what they were currently writing, never about money.
But even more important than picking an area of study, I desperately needed a way to continue my education. My family had no money to spend on anything but necessities. I sent away only for catalogs to schools that didn’t charge for them. When the catalogs came, I would take them to my room and map out plans for four years of study. First, I would take all the basic courses; then I would specialize in English literature or philosophy. I kept the catalogs in my drawer and pulled them out to compare buildings in the photos, trying to decide if I wanted to go to a school with modern buildings or if I preferred a more traditional building.
My reality was that it was more and more difficult for my parents to clothe and feed me in high school. Even with my part-time job I didn’t have clothes to change on a regular basis or money for sports equipment. A coach who had seen me run asked me to come out for the track team. I wanted to do that, but I didn’t have money for track shoes or sweats, and I was ashamed to admit it. There was no way I was going to show up, and I knew it even as I said I would be there. If I couldn’t afford sweats and shoes to try out for a track team, it was obvious that I wouldn’t be able to afford to go to college—not even City College. I heard about full scholarships, but they seemed few and far between. To me, not going to college meant that I would join the army of black laborers sweating and grunting their way through midtown New York. It also meant giving up all those values that I had been taught would make me a worthwhile person.
At fifteen I was interested in girls but considered myself too geeky to even approach one. My height, which was now slightly over six feet, had become a handicap in my mind. Instead of feeling tall, I felt merely incapable of not being seen. I didn’t have the money for dating anyway.
Mama was struggling too. The numbers, the equivalent of today’s lottery, were the dreams of Harlem and Mama’s only hope to do more with the little money Dad gave her each week. In Harlem hundreds of poor people invested their pennies, nickels, and sometimes dollars in the hope that they would hit it big. A nickel hit paid twenty-seven dollars, half of the month’s rent. A dollar hit was worth two months of hard work. Mama sometimes hit for two or three cents and sometimes for a nickel, but rarely did she make a larger hit. Still, every morning she would examine Ching Chow, a daily cartoon that supposedly gave lucky numbers. Any dream would bring out the Black Cat dream book for an interpretation and the accompanying lucky number. But even the occasional hit would mean, at best, a minor respite from the daily grind of barely making ends meet. Pap’s medical bills added to the burden. We were never hungry or threatened with eviction, because when things got really bad, Dad could go down to the docks after he finished his regular job and work the night shift for a week or so.
I was notified that I had won a year’s subscription to Life magazine as a result of the essay I had written on the book I would most like to see in Cinemascope. It felt good to be acknowledged for my writing talent outside school. Mama was happy for me, and Dad, as usual, didn’t acknowledge it.
An event at my part-time job seemed to emphasize my predicament. One day when I arrived at work, I found they had hired a white kid to work after school. He would take my place packing, I was told, and would learn the ticketing machine.
“You’re a big, strong kid,” the boss said. “You can start on the hand truck.”
What he meant was that I could become one of the bodies pushing packages through the streets of the garment center. The boss dismissed my protests with a wave of the hand.
It was a done deal. The black shipping clerk loaded the hand cart that I would be pushing through the streets of the garment center. This meant to me that the white boy was being given the ticketing job because that’s what they saw when they looked at him. They saw me as just another one of the hundreds of blacks who were fit only for manual labor.
I told the boss I didn’t want to take the cart to the post office. He said I would, or I wouldn’t have a job. The black shipping clerk looked away from me as he stammered something about the trip to the post office not really being so bad. What I really wanted to do was to hit the boss, and, I think, the shipping clerk understood that. He found an excuse to step between us, and I turned away. I walked out feeling small inside, and very much ashamed that I couldn’t have been more articulate about how I felt.
Hurt, I buried myself in my reading. One book, The Gay Genius, by Lin Yutang, told the story of Su Tung Po, the Chinese poet, artist, philosopher, and civil servant. What attracted me especially to the book was that the poet rose through the ranks of civil servant by taking tests and was appreciated as a poet at the same time that he was a civil servant. Race was taken out of the equation. It seemed a civilized way of conducting one’s life.
I needed to work and found another job. L. Einstein & Co. sold costume jewelry, and I worked there through the Christmas holidays and into the spring. I wrapped, logged, and put the postage on packages of jewelry, which went to stores throughout the country. I read The Foxes of Harrow, a novel by Frank Yerby (at the time I didn’t know he was black) and The Well of Loneliness, a novel given me by a shopkeeper on Fourth Avenue. I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on with the sex in either book, but the conflict and longing between the women in The Well of Loneliness were interesting.
My response to my problems was to immerse myself in literature. Books are often touted by librarians as vehicles to carry you far away. I most often saw them as a way of hiding one self inside the other. What I had to hide was the self who was a reader, who loved poetry. This self was not the real me but was a very important part of the real me. And this was an idea that people around me could not seem to easily accept. People wanted to look at me and make a quick and simple decision as to who I was. I was big and I played ball and I fought, and those qualities meant, to a lot of people, that I must have a very limited intellectual life. Others were satisfied to label me as a black person and attach to the label any definition they might have as to what that meant. There were those who accepted me as a reader but then would separate me, in their thinking, from anything they accepted as black. But my life was filled with the cultural substance of blackness. I lived in a Harlem I truly loved. I went to church there, and grew up in the richness of Harlem’s colors and smells and the seductive rhythms of its energy. Books, on the other hand, provided a dialog between me and the authors who had written them. They spoke to me, and I responded, not in words but in appreciation and consideration of their thoughts. More and more, I would respond with my own writing.
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