I called next door, and the kid picked up the phone; I was so wild, he dropped it. I went outside and saw the woman from the house going to work, and she came and took over.
At the funeral, Uncle Buddy sat at the end of the pew crying, tears seeping from under his glasses and staining his shirt like sweat. I can feel myself almost falling into this image, beaten up again and nearly blown over, stunned and stomped on, pushing against a gale force wind to close a door I never meant to open. But I remember as I turn away from the images and the barrel that I did not cry. Not that day.
I had run out of tears.
8
Up to that day in November 1960, my mother had seemed more like an aunt, just like her sisters, like Sammy was a tomboy aunt and Gloria was a bookworm aunt. But on that dingy gray morning my mother and I had been brought together like cymbals in some ill-coordinated band’s clanging climax. It wasn’t only that we were unprepared to be put together then, it was that we had both just lost our mother.
Immediately after my grandmother’s funeral, I spent six weeks in New York with Aunt Sammy and my Uncle William. New York City was as cold as a whore’s heart that December. Every fucking day. I couldn’t ever remember a day in Tennessee as cold as an average day in New York. And there was snow up to your ass, or at least well over the rubber overshoes I wore. At the school I attended for a few weeks, the teachers talked funny and I hardly knew what was going on because I came in on the offbeat. Since I knew I was going to be leaving again soon, there was no incentive to listen up and catch up.
Aunt Sammy, born Sam Ella Scott, had been a hell-raiser as a child, and was the biggest sports fan in the family. And no wonder, since she had played basketball through high school and college, and worked as a physical education teacher. On previous visits to New York, Sammy had taken me to my first live baseball games, to see the Dodgers play at Ebbets Field and to Yankee Stadium for a game against the Indians. She had taken me out on her motor scooter, not just around her neighborhood on 225th and White Plains Road in the Bronx, but out to Coney Island and to Yonkers Raceway. Sammy loved to gamble, and when she wasn’t on the rail watching trotters, she hosted all-night “rent party” poker games.
William was no shrinking violet either, though he was an obvious intellect. He had majored in math and graduated early from Lane College. Like his sisters, he had been anxious to leave the rural reality of Jackson behind. Unlike the three ladies, who headed first for Chicago and its booming postwar economy, William signed an agreement with the U.S. Air Force and was stationed in Wiesbaden, Germany, before settling in New York City and taking an upper-level position with the Social Security Administration. I’m not sure where the name William came from, but it didn’t matter because everybody called him “Baby Brother,” which got shortened to B.B. or just B.
I enjoyed hanging around with Sammy. The best thing about being with Aunt Sammy was that she liked to go places that I enjoyed. It was not like spending time with someone who would rather have been anywhere else. And when she talked to me, she looked directly at me, not faking interest. She talked to me as though I had a brain and could understand English. It was refreshing. Often she had to preface whatever we were doing with a conspiratorial, “Don’t tell yo’ mama where we went!” And I didn’t.
Back in Jackson, my mother, who moved back from Chicago, and I spent the next year on South Cumberland Street together like the first two people at the rail watching the life boats lowered as our lives took on water. Even if my mother cared to live in Jackson, where the roots of everything Scott were planted in the yard, and secure her teaching position at Lane College, notices were being served throughout that section of South Jackson: there was a four-lane highway coming through from the south that would connect to Interstate 70, and it would reach us by the end of 1962. Everybody had to go somewhere.
My mother and I stayed put and picked up our mail there, but my mother was already firming up plans, in touch with her brother, Uncle B., in New York. She and I lived together and I started eighth grade back at South Jackson primary school. But something else was happening, too. My mother, far more perceptive and far more committed to me than the other way around, was obviously making up her mind about her son. She knew she loved me because mothers do, but she had to decide whether she liked me. I think she decided we could be friends as long as I was honest. The best way to do that, she decided, was to let me see that she was honest. No hype and no hurry. What she showed me as time passed was that her faith was unshakable and her love unconditional.
There was a brand new junior high in town, an all-white public school called Tigrett, for students from the seventh to ninth grades. There was also a lot of talk about desegregation, as Brown v. Board of Education crept across the south and school boards started to understand the ramifications of what Brother Thurgood Marshall taught the Supreme Court. In November 1961, a petition circulated through South Jackson primary school, a list of “who’s willing to go to a white school?” or “who wants to go to a white school?” I signed up; so did a lot of other people. But the crackers down there still felt a certain obligation to the Confederacy, an inherited allegiance to the memory of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis—even though all they had to relate to were the names of highways and the battlefields that had been turned into tourist traps. I knew the list was just something that had to be done according to the law, to demonstrate a need for transfers to be approved. It’s possible that some folks only signed up because they thought the NAACP lawyer who was preparing a court case to challenge the segregated school system needed to demonstrate substantial numbers. I don’t think anyone thought it would happen anytime soon.
One night just after New Year’s Day 1962, when the second half of the school year was just starting, my mother came into my room. When something was serious, my mother would take a pen and twist it through a curl in her hair while her voice got deep and she said things very clearly. Loud enough to be heard, but soft enough that you had to listen. A tone of anti-panic, like she could be heard actively being calm. A kind of calmness that made the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. It used to really get on my nerves when I heard that tone of voice. But I was also still getting to know my mother—it had been only a year since my grandmother died—and I didn’t know how to interpret her tone of voice and how serious it was.
That’s how she sounded that night. And it sounded serious. It sounded like I was in trouble. Or somebody was. I waited for her to get to the point as she started to explain that the negotiations between the NAACP lawyer and the Jackson City Council had been settled. That is, settled in favor of the NAACP. Then my mother asked whether I still wanted to go to a white school. She never said I was going. She just asked whether I wanted to go. And if I wanted to, I had to start the next day.
She said forty students had signed the petition when it first went around in November, but now that they were ready to integrate the junior high school, there were just three making the switch. And that was if I decided to go.
I asked her who was going.
She said Madeline Walker, who I’d gone to St. Joseph’s with, and Glover, who was my man, were the other two students.
I think part of why her jaw was so tight that night was because she was upset that so many of the other kids had backed out. But she didn’t say anything more except that I should think about it, that nobody would look down on me for not going, that in fact no one would even know anything in particular. All they had ever announced publically was that there had been forty names.
Did she want me to go? I thought she did, but she also wanted to be fair. She knew when I signed up there had been a long line in front and behind me, a lot of people. I figured the city council was calling our bluff: “Okay, y’all coloreds, let’s see how many of these signatures are just autographs.”
I decided to go to Tigrett, and started the next day.
I didn’t know what to expect. All the books were the same, and the syllabus was the same, too. We we
re in approximately the same place in the syllabus as we’d been at South Jackson. They always said the schools were separate but equal, and the books weren’t the difference. The school was very different physically. Tigrett was departmental, and we went from classroom to classroom and had different classes with different people. That was new to me. At South Jackson we stayed in the same class with the same folks all day long.
It may sound strange, but I didn’t look ahead. If I had, I might have realized we would get to the Civil War in American history. That was going to come up. But I swear it snuck up on me, and the ramifications snuck up on the class. When we did get to the Civil War, it was like reviewing it from the loser’s locker room. I don’t know how many classes I’d had about the Civil War up to that point, but none of them had ever been from a point of sympathy with the South. Okay, so now the South was the home team.
We landed on a page with a picture of a Black man in chains, a slave. It was as if nobody knew it was coming. Everyone froze for a minute. Then this one guy, Stevie, who was a real pain in the ass, snickered. The teacher chastised him and took over again and we moved on.
I have come to the conclusion that “The Spirits” played a part in integrating Tigrett, in making it work so smoothly. I found out later that right after New Year’s Day the city council wanted to make a deal. It was a secret that stayed that way until we were already in classes, leaving no chance for opposition to build. If they could integrate the schools quietly, without confrontation, they could save money, avoid any bad publicity for the city, keep down the potential for rednecks to stir up trouble if the question had gotten into the news. The council had some specifics when striking the deal with the NAACP lawyer: only junior high students, and Tigrett would be the “test school,” in part, I’m sure, because of its location, far from Main Street. The council also wanted to go immediately, with as close to zero noise about it as possible.
I suppose they must have sat down and said, “Hey, it’s coming—like tomorrow morning, and judgment day, and color TVs you can afford,” and decided to get a jump on things. I don’t want to prop up the Jackson City Council as societal visionaries, but their plan worked pretty smoothly. And it was a move that advanced the city’s economic potential a thousand fold: it made clear that Jackson’s politicians knew the Civil War was over.
9
By the spring of 1962, as eighth grade at Tigrett finished up, the bulldozers and road graders working on the new highway were just over the rise to the south, only a few miles away. My uncle B.B. had organized a three-bedroom place for us to share with him in the Bronx. My mother and I were moving to New York.
The night before we were scheduled to leave Jackson, I went around to see some people one more time. I had known that we were going to New York for months, but held on to the hope that before we left something would come up, something that could save me from the big city. I didn’t think about what had happened to my grandmother. I didn’t consider what my mother wanted, or what my uncle had planned. Nobody else’s life mattered but mine. I realized what that was: it was terribly selfish.
I recognized my feelings for what they were. They were my sight, my hearing, my senses of taste and touch and smell, all together. They were my sum total and I didn’t look for this total to give me answers because somehow no single sense of what was happening to my life could make sense of it all. Only when I asked myself how I felt could I relax as though I knew something. I knew that “how do you feel?” wasn’t the right question to ask most people. It was rhetorical, irrelevant, a question as mundane as it was insignificant. To most people. But not to me.
I could blame it on geography. The move to New York wasn’t something that my mother or anyone else was responsible for. We had to move. Somewhere. If not to New York then to some other new somewhere. The “urban renewal” project that had been rumored for so long as part of Jackson’s future was literally just over the hill. From Church Street I could see the bulldozers. For years it had been vaguely rustling offstage like a coming storm, but now it was starting to rain.
Jackson’s urban had become renewal
Political concessions made things suddenly doable
A six lane highway paved the way with mass approval
And the house on Cumberland Street faced imminent removal
And all my old side streets were asphalt memory lanes
And in July of 1962 I left on a 4 a.m. train
I didn’t want to go. But I came to the conclusion that there was no villain, no one who should be the target of my disappointment. I was just one of a thousand people from South Jackson who had to get the hell out of the way. And I felt better about myself by the time the train reached Chicago, halfway to New York.
When we arrived in New York, we moved into the apartment my uncle had found on Hampden Place in the Bronx. Our street was only one block long, and just two blocks from the 207th Street Bridge just over Fordham Road. It was within walking distance to Uncle B.’s job at the Social Security office on Jerome Avenue, and only a fifteen-minute walk from what would be my new junior high, Creston. This new place seemed a long way from the place on 225th and White Plains Road where I had stayed a year and half before, after my grandmother’s funeral. Both addresses ended in Bronx, NY, but that’s all I knew that connected them. My six weeks at the other place were not long enough for me to have lost my rookie status.
The apartment was different, for sure. It was pretty nice: it was on the second floor, which was the top floor, and my room had plenty of room for all my junk and a window that let in a nice breeze. Our things from Jackson had arrived before us, and our black-and-white TV was in the living room. B.B. had a color set on a stand in his room. And I was allowed to watch his TV when he wasn’t there. That ended up being a couple of nights a week and most weekend nights. But I didn’t feel comfortable, that’s all. I felt stupid and awkward around my uncle and at the store and everywhere else. It was disquieting to move from a place where you knew every blade of grass to a place where there was no grass. And New Yorkers made you feel that you were beneath or beyond their notice. I wondered whether I could or should adjust to that, to try to be like that, or just to try to ignore it. That’s what they did, just ignored everything.
Living with my uncle was a great benefit for my mother. She had someone she trusted and respected to share the expenses with and, once school started, someone to challenge me on what had become a mediocre academic performance and question the silent hours I spent in my room writing short stories and essays. Beginning the year before, in eighth grade, I had wanted to write: stories, songs, poems, essays, whatever. I read and I wrote. But what I read was not my homework or lessons. And what I wrote was primarily practice for myself. The time I spent on it was nonnegotiable.
My uncle’s position was that there was no excuse for my doing less than excellent work in my classes, getting less than the straight As all the Scotts had worked for and gotten. The fact that I had finished Tigrett with no As was not up to his standards.
I remembered my mother reading to me from letters Uncle B. wrote us before the move, saying there were a lot of kids Scotty’s age in the neighborhood, that he saw them all the time. But either they had all moved away in the meantime or B.B. had been drinking too much. There didn’t seem to be any young people around. After going out every morning and afternoon and not seeing anybody younger than the hill that went up to the dead end at the end of our block, I was miserable.
I finally gave myself a break and started looking at the advantages. The main one seemed to be that I was returning to New York at the same time as National League baseball. The new New York team was a collection of old New York players from old New York teams that made the new New York team’s games like an old timer’s day every day. I became a follower, if not exactly a fanatic, of New York’s Metropolitans, who were slickly and quickly transformed, shortened, to the Mets, probably for back page headline convenience. There were thirteen letters in the long way to say Mets,
and sometimes the whole back page headline was thirteen letters. Something like METS LOSE AGAIN fit perfectly, and often, that first year. They were firmly ensconced in last place by the time I got to the Bronx, with no dream of advancing. I gloried in headlines like METS WIN 1 IN A ROW.
Eventually, I also found the kids my age B.B. had sworn were around. There was a small fry, a kid about eight years old, who I met one day when I was out throwing my rubber ball against a wall. I asked him if there were other kids around, any guys my age, any kids who played ball, real games. He said yes, yes, yes, and yes, and explained that games of stickball and softball were played at “the Deegan.” He was too young to have left the block, though, so he couldn’t tell me how to get to the Deegan. He headed home.
But the kid, the first New Yorker I’d met who didn’t know it all and admitted it, returned a little while later with a thin white guy in his early twenties, known as Jimbo to his friends on Hampden Place. Jimbo knew quite a bit. Within fifteen minutes I had told my mother, gone back out, and walked the five minutes it took to reach the Deegan.
It really only took the New York kids one quick look
From the time that I got in the game
They can tell right away if you can or cannot play
A player or just one more lame
After an inning or so when one kid had to go
The Last Holiday Page 5
