The American world of the radio was so different from the daily Italian world she usually occupied. She worked in the Ferraro Coat Factory on River Street where all the women workers were Italian; while they sewed, they chattered all day in their own language. Then at night, after dinner, we visited our aunts and uncles and my parents’ friends. Since Italian was the only language they knew, my mother did not get much practice in American conversation. Her spoken English remained limited even after she had lived in America for fifty years, though she understood a lot more words than she could say. We’d talk to each other in a mixture of Italian and English so blended together that I couldn’t say where one language ended and the other began. My mother had trouble saying English words, the sounds too hard and clipped for her Italian tongue. She even called Bernard Meltzer “Bohnarulza,” and it took awhile for me to figure out that she was referring to Meltzer, her favorite of all the gurus who kept her company through her days.
Despite her seeming deafness to our correction of her pronunciation, I know she was ashamed of her illiteracy. Once when I was in college, my father was driving us home from the Farmer’s Market and she saw a store that said “Package Goods” in big letters across its window. “What is that?” she asked. “It says package goods, Ma,” I answered. “We’ll have to go there to buy material one day,” she said, and I laughed. “Ma, package goods doesn’t mean material. It’s a liquor store!” “Oh,” she said, turning her face away from mine, but not before I saw the shame that colored it.
Twenty-five years after I left home to get married, my daughter graduated from the kind of college I would like to have attended—ivy-covered buildings, brick paths, archways, towers. My mother sat with my daughter’s huge yearbook with its brightly colored photographs in her lap. She gazed at the pictures of the beautiful, upper-class young men and women with their vitamin-enriched skin, their straight teeth, their shining hair. Seemingly amazed by the lavish photos spread before her, she kept saying, over and over, “Look how beautiful they are! Can you believe it? Look!” I understood that to my mother these young people represented a world she could not have imagined twenty years ago, a world of lush grass and gracious buildings where the sun seemed to shine only for these privileged people as it had never shone for her. She was amazed that her granddaughter, only two generations from San Mauro, could go to a place like this one and actually look as though she belonged. She rubbed her small hand across the faces in the glossy pages as though she had discovered something miraculous. She kept shaking her head, and proclaiming, “Oh, how beautiful!”
She turned suddenly to me then, and said, “Ah, I was so proud of you when you graduated from college. The first one in our family. I was so proud, I thought I’d burst.” “But Ma,” I stammered, “You never said anything. I didn’t know.” All this time I thought she was angry with me for choosing a different path, for leaving her behind. “Ah,” she declared, “it wasn’t for me to say. I’m your mother. I didn’t want to bring bad luck on you.”
She smoothed the yearbook one last time, and then she tied her apron tighter and automatically flipped on the radio. She half-listened to her secondhand information, pleased when she’d hear some tidbit she could share with us. How many hours of her life had she listened to those radio voices and followed the clues they offered to her, cut off as she was from the world of America, the world her children inhabited with such ease? “Ah,” she said, “I love America. There’s no place like it in the world,” and smiled at us, her children and grandchildren, American to the bone.
Honey Boy
AFAA MICHAEL WEAVER
Honey Boy was our cousin. When we was growing up in Baltimore, me, Pigmeat, Jimmy Edward, and Honey Boy was all cousins, but Honey Boy could eat more hot dogs than all of us put together, no matter how much he had done already ate or how much his mama, our Aunt Lois, told him not to. Honey Boy was big and dark-skinned like his mama, and they had the same kind of hair that just fell down on their heads without no grease or nothing. They got their hair from Big Mama, our grandmama, and she was born down in that part of Virginia where there was some Cherokees because that’s where white folk put the Cherokees after they chased them off the land what belonged to nobody. Anyway Big Mama told us her father was a Cherokee, and she showed us his picture. He looked like Big Mama a whole lot, and he had his hair spilling out of this hat. We all knew we was black, but that man, our Great-Grandpa Willy Little Bear, was what made Honey Boy and his mama’s hair black and falling down.
Aunt Grace used to cook hot dogs for us in the summertime when we went swimming in Clifton Park swimming pool. She made them a special way. Aunt Grace was Jimmy Edward’s mama, and he used to brag about how good her hot dogs was. One day me and Jimmy Edward got into a fight ‘cause I said her hot dogs wasn’t all that great. Shit, I had made some myself that was just as damn good, and we got to punching each other and tussling and rolling around and down the hill in front of Aunt Grace’s house. We was always fighting each other ‘cause we was growing up to be men. Our Uncle Richard told us he didn’t want no sissies for no nephews. Uncle Richard used to walk everywhere he went, and he always carried two knives. He said one was to take your attention off the other. If you went for the first one, then you was a dead nigger ‘cause he was gonna cut you for sure with the one you ain’t figured on. Baltimore was a rough town in those days, back in the early sixties, but it’s down-right deadly now that I done got old. People from Baltimore can be so vicious that they kill you and follow your soul to wherever it goes so it can kick its ass, too, and the Good Lord or Satan had better just get the hell out the way.
Aunt Grace’s hot dogs was good, truth be told. She put them in the oven with cheese and bacon on them and let them cook awhile, and then she stuck them on rolls and let the rolls get a little brown, but she waited until we came in from the swimming pool before she did the rolls. The houses we lived in there in Baltimore was like castles to us. The kitchens was in the basement part with a back room like a club room, some of them with paneling. Aunt Grace would look out the windows of her kitchen, peeping through the curtains to see if we was coming, and once she saw us dragging down the street with our wet towels and swimming trunks, trying to pop each other with our towels, she would throw them hot dogs on those rolls so they would be just right when we got in from Clifton Park swimming pool, where all the black boys went to go swimming and feel the girls underwater. Honey Boy was always the first to get his hot dogs ‘cause he was the oldest and biggest, and we all knew he could kick all our asses at one time. Honey Boy was our hero, our stone, sure ‘nough hero. He could eat twenty-two hot dogs.
Pigmeat was Honey Boy’s brother, and he tried to outdo Honey Boy. One day when we came back from the pool, Pigmeat tried his best to eat twenty-two hot dogs. Aunt Grace was cooking them as fast as we could put them down. She kept the refrigerator loaded with hot dogs and frozen french fries, and she could cook and talk on the phone at the same time. With the receiver on her shoulder, she lined those hot dogs with bacon and cheese, while Pigmeat and Honey Boy put them down. Me and Jimmy Edward just had five each and sat over in the corner by the television ‘cause we knew somebody’s gut was gonna bust wide open. Damn if Pigmeat didn’t get up and try to make it for the bathroom, but he slumped down against the wall, holding his stomach and crying. Aunt Grace started laughing and tried to push another hot dog in his mouth.
Aunt Lois came in a few minutes later from the market, and Pigmeat was rolling around.
“Boy, why are you always cutting the fool?”
“Ma,” Pigmeat cried, “I was just trying to keep up with Honey Boy. He always showing off.”
“Honey Boy near ‘bout a man. You can’t outdo him, and you can’t outdo me. Can you?”
“No ma’am.”
Aunt Lois was three hundred fifty pounds if she was anything, and that day she sat on Pigmeat. He thought he was gonna die. We thought he was gonna die. Aunt Lois had made herself the angel of death and come down on Pigmeat
in a serious way. He was like a bug, squirming and wiggling under her. At first he thought it was a joke, but then she wouldn’t move. She was like a granite statue sitting right on his back, posed there like a African queen sitting on her short throne, except this throne was about to crumple like a doll-house chair does when you mash it with your finger. Pigmeat wailed and wailed and said he couldn’t breathe.
“Mama, I’m gonna die!”
“Lois, maybe you oughta let the boy go,” Aunt Grace said half chuckling.
“I pushed his little behind into the world, and I’ll push it out,” Aunt Lois said, as she looked down at Pigmeat, whose tears were thick and flowing.
“Please, Ma, please,” he said.
Honey Boy interceded. “Mama, I’ll make sure he don’t eat himself sick no more. I’ll watch him.”
Aunt Lois was tired anyway, so she told me and Jimmy Edward to help her up, and we got ahold of her arms and pulled until we got her to her feet. Pigmeat was so embarrassed he got up and went in the backyard and ran out into the alley and disappeared until it got dark. Honey Boy had to go look for him. They came back together, with Honey Boy holding his arm around Pigmeat’s shoulders. Pigmeat loved his big brother, and he really wanted to be like him. Maybe he just wanted to have Honey Boy’s place, the place of being a young lord in the neighborhood, somebody the girls all liked, somebody even the serious hoodlums gave respect to ‘cause we wasn’t no hoodlums. We could fight and all, but we wasn’t no tough-time criminals. The criminals was all around us, but so was the girls, every girl from smooth, downtown brown Wanda to long-legged redbone Marsha, with everything in between, and most of them went to Clifton Park swimming pool in the summertime, with us right behind them. We used to hear our mamas say men and boys was dogs because of the way a bunch of boy dogs follow a girl dog around. Well, we was a pack of serious hounds, even though we didn’t know a clitoris from a vulva and would have gone into shock if the girl got an orgasm.
We knew one word—pussy. We thought that was the name of all that a girl had up there. It was just one place, a place we tried desperately to get to once we started growing the things that make you look like a man, even though you a long way from it, a long way. Honey Boy was the oldest, and he got to that famous place between a girl’s legs long before we did.
It was Janice. She was a pretty girl. The reason we all knew it was ‘cause she and Honey Boy did it in Aunt Lois’s house while wasn’t no grownups there, and me and Pigmeat and Jimmy Edwards sneaked in and got quiet and listened at the bedroom door. They was on Aunt Lois’s bed, and it had a hole in the middle ‘cause Aunt Lois was so big. Janice kept saying she was falling in the hole. We didn’t know what hole they was talking about. Was there some part of the pussy that a woman could fall into herself? Was Honey Boy gonna fall into the hole? Was falling in the hole a way of saying she couldn’t keep up with Honey Boy? That had to be it. She couldn’t keep up with Honey Boy ‘cause he was our hero. Then we heard her scream real loud, and Honey Boy grunted. Did she kill him, we wondered as we crouched outside the closed door, but then they spoke.
“Honey,” Janice sang, “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” Honey Boy said.
We got away without them hearing us, and we didn’t dare ever tell Honey Boy that we heard him. We was wondering if things was gonna change because of this love business. We didn’t trust that love.
Honey Boy stayed with us. We still went to Clifton Park swimming pool, and he was still our warrior hero. That never changed, although he and Janice sat out on the steps many a summer night and up until it was too cold. But in the summer, we was still at the pool. Clifton Park was all black and mighty, mighty tough. There was some dudes in there that had rocks for fists, monster masks for faces, and daggers for hearts. Walking up Sinclair Lane from the Goetze meatpacking plant, we could see the dark mass in the water splashing and carrying on, a thick web of black skin like ours cooling out in the hot summer heat. It made me think of Africa, although I had never been to Africa and had only seen the foolish way white folk made us look in Tarzan movies. But here we were, walking down Sinclair Lane with our little change in our pockets, little folding knives we bought from the hardware store and hid from our mothers, our towels wrapped up with clean underwear on the inside because everybody’s mama in Baltimore told you to have clean underwear in case something happened. We didn’t know what they was talking about. We didn’t know a whole bunch of people could lose their minds at one time. We didn’t really understand the television news where police dogs were chewing up black people. We knew hate, but we didn’t understand nothing about how hate was a whole big world to itself, with all kinds of hate, even the hate that have you hating your own black self.
At Clifton Park, Honey Boy protected us. You got into the swimming pool by going into this stone pavilion that sorta looked like the Greek and Roman buildings we studied in school, no windows or nothing, just these high stone pillars all around so you could see in any direction by just standing in one spot. We went in there and went down the stairs to pay our money and get into the pool. It wasn’t but a little bit of money, thirty-five cents or something. Things was cheap back then. Thirty cents could buy you a pack of smokes. We paid our way and went into the locker room, where you put your stuff in a basket and give it to this man, and he gave you a tag on a rubber bracelet that you put on your leg. That way you didn’t lose your clothes and knife and stuff. You had to run through the cold shower to clean yourself off before you got into the pool, and Honey Boy always told us to go on ahead ‘cause the locker room was where the serious hoodlums hung out and tried to take stuff from you while you was undressing.
One day we was undressing and these two stocky-looking boys came over to us. They was short, but they was like four feet thick. Honey Boy ignored them, as they eased on over to us.
“Who you muthas think you are,” they asked.
Honey Boy looked at me and Pigmeat and Jimmy Edward and said, “Y’all go on and get in the water.”
Pigmeat said, “I got your back, Honey.”
Honey shouted at us, and it almost scared me ‘cause his voice was getting so deep, deeper than ours, and I was scared, scared for Honey Boy.
The short, thick sonofabitches said, “These your children? What you do, your mother? She black and ugly like you?”
It must have been faster than the speed of sound that Honey Boy hit that one what was talking, and he hit him three times in what was so short a time we hardly saw it. We did see blood gushing from the boy’s face. Honey Boy hollered to us, “Y’all go on and get in the pool. Go on!”
The man what used to take the baskets and give us those rubber bracelets told Honey Boy and those short dudes to cut it out, but the other short dude jumped on Honey Boy like a cat. Honey Boy wrestled him off, and started backhanding the boy across the locker room, while the other one got up and ran.
“Didn’t I tell y’all to get in the pool,” Honey Boy screamed at us.
We ran through the cold shower, splashed through the wading pool, and then hauled ass into the water. Pretty soon we was in the five foot deep section, our heads just above the water. Honey Boy wasn’t long after us. He came striding out from the locker room, looking jet black like he was with his thin, curly hair falling down all over his head from the shower. The girls turned around and started giggling and fidgeting ‘cause a lot of them liked Honey Boy. He even made the lifeguards jealous ‘cause they thought they had all the women, but Honey Boy could swim just as good as they could. He went over to the deep water and got on the low diving board and dived into the water. When Honey Boy was in the air and heading for the water, he looked like one of those black panthers in Africa, so dark and shiny he made you think you could see yourself just by looking into him. Girls used to ask me and Pigmeat and Jimmy Edward if we was with Honey Boy, and we would say he was our partner. Honey Boy was our king, and we was his young lords. That was the truth of us being cousins and all.
The Clifton Park
swimming pool wasn’t as clean as it used to be. When we was real little, the water was clear and even tasted clean if a little bit got in your mouth. But something happened. A different group of children moved in, and the ones that was going there all the time started acting different over the years so that by the time we was teenagers, by the time Honey Boy was with Janice, things got real dirty at Clifton Park. Janice used to go with us once in a while, but Honey Boy told her to stay home. People pissed in the pool all the time. One day I was swimming, and my hand caught onto something like stringy cloth it seemed. I pulled my hand up, and there was a Kotex on it. People wasn’t taking the cold shower no more. They was just getting in the pool with mean looks on their faces. Girls started fighting right there on the side of the pool. It was like some kind of fever had taken over the black folk around East Baltimore. They were getting short on patience and long on anger, and they took it out on everything. It was the time after they killed Malcolm X and before they killed Martin Luther King, and I guess the children what changed Clifton Park came out of what I called The Purple Funk, a disease that made people want to tear up everything all around them, and a disease that made people who had what they wanted, mostly white folk, as tight and protective of their shit as Pigmeat used to be when he had a plate of ham and candied sweets and biscuits. If you got too close to him, he would growl. Seemed like everybody was growling. The Purple Funk killed Malcolm X.
Honey Boy decided we should go on down to Patterson Park, the white pool. Some other friends of ours had been down there. They said it was clean, nothing in the water. Some of our friends was talking about how pretty the white girls was, but that didn’t faze Honey Boy. He was in love with Janice, but me and Pigmeat and Jimmy Edward wanted to see these blondes, brunettes, and redheads in skimpy bathing suits. We was curious and ready to go when Honey Boy first said something about it, but it seemed like he wasn’t really sure about going where things was supposed to be clean just ‘cause they was white. One night we went on up to the garage where Uncle Richard and some of our other uncles used to work on cars. Uncle Richard was sitting there sipping on some bourbon. He gave us a little taste as we was getting to be men. Uncle Richard loved all of us, but he was really proud of Honey ‘cause he saw himself in Honey Boy. Uncle Richard was born and raised in Baltimore, and he was in the gangs back in the time of World War II when gangs ruled Baltimore. Uncle Richard killed two men, and he didn’t do one day of time. Honey Boy stood up there on the hill and looked over to where the Clifton Park swimming pool was and heaved a big sigh in his chest. He was eighteen years old.
Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American Page 26
