Then it was crunch time for the Republican posse that had formed for the lynching. They had been Mack-trucked in the November election. Angry blacks were massing on the Capitol steps. The DNA had gone to hell. Vernon Jordan was too sharp and could handle himself, but Betty Currie was a different matter. She had contradicted herself in her previous testimony. She had been vague. She had looked rattled. And she knew everything! But as the Ratwoman had said, she “had this hero worship shit” for Bill Clinton. As a black woman, Betty Currie admired him and was deeply loyal to him.
They’d have to cajole, threaten, force the truth out of Betty Currie. They’d have to beat her up in public. With millions of angry black people watching. With millions of angry black people watching a group of white men, many with southern accents, do that to a hardworking, responsible, deeply religious black woman.
Without calling Betty Currie as a live witness, the posse wouldn’t get its lynching. But calling Betty Currie might mean that the whole damn courthouse would burn down.
They forgot about raising the flag at Iwo Jima again. They rode out of town muttering “Oh Danny Boy” under their breath. The race card lay on the hallowed Senate floor . . . Bill Clinton’s lucky but well-earned ace of spades.
[2]
Al Gore and I Want to Be Black
Hunky” and “Greenhorn” and “D.P.” were the names I was called by many white Americans as I, a gawky, freckled-faced refugee from Hungary, grew up on Cleveland’s near West Side. They were names that gave me a lifelong understanding of another word that was a wound to others and, later, to me: nigger.
There weren’t a lot of black kids in my neighborhood, but there were some, and from the time I could barely speak the English language, I sought them out and played with them. I didn’t know why then, didn’t understand that I was naturally gravitating to other refugees, those who had fled the American South, fellow outsiders who knew in their hearts, as did I, that too many white Americans viewed us equally as trash. These black kids, too, wore clothes their moms had scrounged at the Salvation Army. Their moms, too, were down at the West Side Market early in the morning, seeking deals on fruit and vegetables that were almost but not quite spoiled. There was a line, though, drawn in the playground sand. We’d shoot hoops or play baseball together with our falling-apart balls, but we never saw the inside of one another’s homes. It was always, “Yeah, later” at the end of a game, never “Hey, you wanna come over and watch American Bandstand at my house?”
I went back to the upstairs apartment I shared with my parents, who spoke little English, and I turned my battered green portable radio on and listened nonstop to what my father, who wore a beret even inside the house, called “jungle music.” It was music that moved me like nothing had, music that seemed to reach into my core and upend my heart and soul. My parents were religious and told me stories about Jesus. I didn’t want to hear about Jesus. I wanted to hear Chuck Berry telling me about “Sweet Little Sixteen” and “Johnny B. Goode” and “Maybellene.” I wanted to hear Little Richard shriek about “Good Golly, Miss Molly” and “Tutti-Frutti.” I wanted to hear Jackie Wilson and Fats Domino and Sam Cooke and the Drifters, the Platters, and the Flamingos. I felt that the black music I loved so much had a rawness, a burn, that Elvis and Jerry Lee and Bill Haley and Carl Perkins and the other white rockers couldn’t match. I felt an inner turbulence, which only this music could soothe. My little green radio was a shelter from the juvenile trouble I was getting into in the alleys at night, where some of us carried zip guns and knives rubber-banded to our wrists, where others threw lighter fluid on cats, rolled bums, broke into grocery stores, and played games with neighborhood girls that they didn’t necessarily want to play.
Sports provided a shelter, too. I rooted for Larry Doby and Al Smith and Luke Easter and Minnie Minoso of the Indians and Marion Motley and Bobby Mitchell and, later, Jim Brown, whom Time magazine called “Supernigger” of the Browns. I prayed that the old mongoose, Archie Moore, would finally finish off Yvon Durelle and cried when my radio told me that Ingo’s thunderous right hand had put Floyd Patterson to sleep.
I went to high school on Cleveland’s predominantly black East Side and, although I hated this upper crust, nearly lily white Catholic school (it was the only scholarship I could get), I loved the neighborhood it was in. I prowled the coffee shops around 105th and Euclid, playing Stevie Wonder’s “Fingertips” and Cozy Cole’s “Topsy II” and Gary U.S. Bonds’s “Quarter to Three” and Ray Charles, the Marvelettes, and Ben E. King on the jukeboxes. One afternoon, heading for the bus that would take me back to the West Side, I heard a sound coming from a bar and it stopped me in my tracks. The door was open and I saw a young black woman on stage rehearsing with her band. She had a voice that was at the same time bluesy and operatic. A small sign on the door said TONIGHT! ARETHA FRANKLIN.
In my freshman year of college at Ohio University, I realized I was finally at a school where there were lots of black people. Many of them hung out at the Student Union at Baker Center, which is where I hung out, too. That’s where I first heard the Contours do “Do You Love Me” . . . and that’s where I met Delia. She was from Cleveland, too, a freshman, too, an English major, too, and she, too, loved Gary U.S. Bonds. She was black and I was white, she was from the East Side and I was from the West, her family had come from Mississippi and I had come from Hungary.
It was 1962 in southern Ohio and interracial relationships, even on a college campus, were taboo. Delia and I saw the looks in bartenders’ eyes when we bought the beers we’d saved our pennies for. We saw the grins and leers on the fancily dressed fraternity boys’ faces when we walked down the street holding hands. We didn’t care. We had fun. She was living in a dorm and had to be in by eleven each night, and as I kissed her outside the dorm doors, we pretended those gaping white faces around us weren’t there.
We talked a lot. I told her about Attila the Hun and how the Magyars fought the Turks, and she told me about her great-grandfather, who’d been a slave, and about the uncle whose eyes were beaten out because some white woman said he’d looked at her “in a dirty way.” She introduced me to Ellison and Richard Wright and Chester Himes and to W. E. B. Du Bois. We both loved Faulkner, although Delia felt he made her nervous sometimes: “He hits the nail on the head a little too much.”
Our initial sexual intimacies were more comic than passionate—we were both nervous kids—but we liked each other very much and nature took its course. We went back to Cleveland together. I went to her house in Cleveland’s Glenville District and she came to mine in the Hungarian “Strudel Ghetto” off Buckeye Road where my parents had moved. Her parents looked at me as if I were a Martian. But they were polite. My parents just stared at this beautiful, vibrant young black woman. But they were polite. We went to black clubs on the East Side to see Roland Kirk and Cannonball Adderley and an upstart white blues band with a wild keyboardist named Al Kooper. Delia loved the blues, and we spent hours listening to it.
But there was an increasing tension to our relationship. Her parents didn’t understand what she was doing with this white boy, and her older brother, she told me, was telling her this “honky” had no place in her life. (I smiled when she told me that. I’d been called a “hunky” as a kid; here was the same word, different spelling.) When her parents told her they couldn’t afford to send her to Ohio University anymore, that she’d have to go to school in the Cleveland area somewhere, both of us cried. We knew what it meant. We were young and adventurous and our burgeoning relationship wouldn’t withstand the distance.
It didn’t. We started dating others, still seeing each other occasionally, and then drifted apart. Years later, when I drove alone from Athens to Columbus to see the Muhammad Ali–Sonny Liston fight on a theater screen, I thought about how much Delia would have loved Ali, how we would have rejoiced together in the magnificence of Ali’s triumph. Suddenly missing her a lot, I called her parents’ home after the fight. Her mother told me Delia was married and liv
ing in Buffalo and had a little boy. She had married one of her brother’s friends.
My first job as a journalist was in Dayton, Ohio, which had the words CLEANEST TOWN IN AMERICA painted on its trash bins. It was also a racist town (though there was a bar owner there named Larry Flynt, who would shake things up a bit).
One day, my city editor wanted me to do a feature on a black man named “Hospital” Stewart, who had just died. The angle was that Stewart had gotten his nickname because most of the hospitals in Dayton knew him on sight. They knew him because his penis was allegedly so massive that it often got stuck inside his mates and both partners would have to be taken to the hospital to ease it out.
On another occasion, I wrote a human-interest feature about a little black kid who survived after being struck by lightning. The kid was articulate and cute and the story was the kind of heartwarming fluff that usually got special play on the front page. I was surprised when I saw my story about Casey Popo Jones, Jr., badly truncated and hidden on the obit page. I asked my city editor about it. “If you want front page,” he said, “find a white kid who gets hit by lightning.”
When Stokely Carmichael came to town, I was the only white face at a black Baptist church listening to him. “Black Power!” was the cry across the land, and during an interview with him, I was struck by Carmichael’s charisma and dynamism, and wrote a story about him. It, too, was buried, truncated, in the back pages. The same thing happened when I interviewed one of my early rock and roll heroes, Fats Domino.
I got to the Cleveland Plain Dealer not long after the city’s first racial upheaval—what became known as Cleveland’s “Hough Riots.” When I got there, the city’s East Side, made up of white ethnic “islands” scattered among mostly poor black neighborhoods, was a raw racial nerve. I was assigned to the late shift at the police beat, which meant sitting in a tiny office on the first floor of Central Police Station and waiting for something awful to happen.
When things were slow, there were always interesting people to share an illegal six-pack of beer with. One of my favorites was a big, beefy, friendly cop named Elmer Joseph, who’d always come by. He, too, was Hungarian, and we’d kibitz about the Indians or the quality of the chicken paprikas at Elizabeth’s restaurant on Buckeye Road or some tear-jerking story I’d written that Elmer decided to make fun of. Another of my favorites was Ahmed Evans, a dashiki-wearing black nationalist who led a houseful of young black militants who lived in the Glenville District, not far from where Delia had lived. Ahmed would come by my office late at night and go into a riff that included UFOs coming from Mars, murderous white police pigs, and the history of slavery in America. He quoted Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, as well as Edgar Cayce and Nostradamus. He’d always refuse my beer at first and then drink most of the six-pack. I asked one night if I could try his dashiki on, and when I put it over myself, Ahmed laughed so hard, I thought he’d burst.
I had just gotten home from vacation one summer night, when my city editor called to tell me to go to Glenville, where a “disturbance” had broken out. I drove straight from my home in my rusted, beat-up old car, and as I approached Glenville, I saw that it was a war zone. Smoke was everywhere. Houses were burning. Police cars and fire trucks, sirens screaming, screeched by me. I parked my car and, waving my press pass, dodged around police cars and through hundreds of policemen, their guns drawn. It was chaos. I heard heavy gunfire now, and as I ran toward it, crouched, policemen screamed at me to get down. One of them almost knocked me down, shoving me onto my back against a car tire.
As I huddled there, I heard the roar of automatic weapons. Bullets were zinging off and going through the car behind which I was huddled. I could hear someone moaning and screaming, “Help me!” I was shaking so badly, I couldn’t hold on to my press pass. I felt my pants wet between my legs. I peered around the tire as the gunfire continued. I saw a policeman out in the street, no more than twenty yards from me. I recognized him. It was my friend Elmer Joseph from the police beat. A pool of blood was around him as he screamed for help. He was caught in the cross fire, I saw. No one could get to him.
The automatic weapons’ fire was coming from a building across the street. Inside was my friend Ahmed Evans and his houseful of black militants. I was trapped behind that tire for more than an hour. When it was over, a lot of people were dead, including Elmer Joseph. Ahmed Evans would be sent to prison for life. Glenville burned for three days. Delia’s father’s house, I saw the next day, had survived.
. . .
The holocaust in Glenville led, finally, to a thorough investigation of Cleveland’s police department. Too many times had policemen claimed to see a “gleaming object” before they pulled the trigger on a young black man. Too many times had politicians blamed poor peoples’ rage on “outside agitators.” Martin Luther King, Jr., an outside peacemaker, came to town, and as I followed him around, I noted the man’s serenity, his sense of inner peace, as he worked with all sides to try to prevent yet another racial explosion.
The newspaper I worked for, the Plain Dealer, tried its best to serve as a responsible and progressive voice of the community. My feature stories about black people were on the front page here. I did a front-page series that showed statistically that the greatest victims of crime were black people. I went to Mississippi to do a follow-up on the Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner civil rights killings and found myself with a shotgun stuck into my gut by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, one of those accused of the killings. I was escorted by his deputies to the Neshoba County line.
Not that the newspaper staff itself was free of racism. An older investigative reporter, citing unnamed FBI sources, kept trying to talk the editors into digging dirt on Cleveland’s (and the nation’s) first black mayor, Carl Stokes. She first claimed that Carl had taken payoffs as a liquor agent. The story didn’t pan out. Then she claimed that Carl had fathered an illegitimate child in Tennessee. The story didn’t pan out. Then she claimed that Carl, married to a black woman, was having affairs with white women. (Shades of Kenneth W. Starr . . . that story did pan out and ultimately cost Carl reelection.)
The Plain Dealer gave me the freedom to cover civil rights rallies, racist and corrupt police unions, even Hungarian vigilantes who “patrolled” the Buckeye Road ethnic neighborhood where my parents lived. Hungarian vigilantes who drove or walked up and down the street carrying saps and Saturday Night Specials and who attacked or harassed black people in the old-world Nazi ways. Only the butcher store owners on Buckeye Road welcomed the influx of blacks into this old Hungarian neighborhood, happily noting that black people loved smoked paprikaed bacon and peppery sausage and head cheese, putting big signs on their windows that said soul food. My stories about the Hungarian vigilantes put them out of business. Many Hungarians on Buckeye hated me. I didn’t care about these honky, racist, anti-Semitic, anti-American, anti–jungle music, antediluvian Hungarians.
I took my newfound friend Jimi Hendrix into a Hungarian restaurant on Buckeye for some liver dumpling soup and smiled as the Hungarian owner and staff bug-eyed this astral cowboy with his Afro, his beads, and his flashing silver jewelry. I did the last interview with Otis Redding hours before his plane crashed. I tried James Brown’s cape on backstage after a show. (It fit.) I saw Chuck Berry before a concert, demanding his money in brown paper bags before he went onstage.
When I got to Rolling Stone magazine, I discovered that an awful lot of young white people felt as deeply about black people and black culture as I did. With most of us, it really had begun with the music. We had grown up listening to Chuck and Little Richard and Jackie and so had the Stones and the Beatles and the Doors and the Jefferson Airplane. That music, which my father had called “jungle music,” had changed us. We wanted to be black. The irony was that in the sixties and seventies, we were listening to white versions of that black sound—Janis and Mick and the Beatles—much more than to Muddy himself or Chuck himself.
We may have wanted to be black, but we couldn’t go all the way w
ith it. It was our kids, fittingly, who’d come much closer to it. By the nineties, rock and roll was aging like we were and our kids were captive to the lacerating, hypnotizing beat of hip-hop and rap and to lyrics so raw that many rock and roll parents, forgetting their own enjoyment of songs like the Stones’ “Starfucker” and much of Prince’s oeuvre, were demanding warnings on CD labels. Our kids weren’t interested in white artists knocking the real thing off—no Mick doing Muddy for them—they listened to the real, nonwhitewashed ebony black sound itself: to Tupac and Snoop and Dr. Dre and Wyclef Jean. My own son, in his early twenties, who’d grown up on Dylan and the Stones, was a hip-hop deejay calling himself D. J. Rogue. He listened only to black music, surrounded himself with black friends, and knew how to spin as well as some black deejays. He even turned his nose up at the Beastie Boys.
When I got to Hollywood, I found it easy to write about racial equality and the forces of white racism, and I wrote two movies from differing points of view—Big Shots, about a friendship between a white kid and a black one, and Betrayed, about the “mud-hunting” neo-Nazis.
I also found Hollywood frightened of certain areas as they related to black and white relations. Hollywood had never done a movie about the urban riots of the sixties, ideal and historically significant dramatic subject matter. Love stories between blacks and whites, especially movies showing sexual intimacy between black men and white women, were still taboo. (Although the love scenes between Richard Pryor and Margot Kidder in Some Kind of Hero, left on the cutting room floor, had become a collector’s item.) Some executives, I discovered, had a particular problem with Spike Lee. Spike, who wanted to direct a script of mine called Reliable Sources, never had a chance. An executive at Paramount sent other executives a Xerox copy of an article accusing Spike of making anti-Semitic remarks. When Spike showed up for a studio meeting with his Nation of Islam driver, the studio execs smiled, jived him, and then made him a financial offer so low, they knew he’d have to refuse.
American Rhapsody Page 35
