Friends: A Love Story

by Angela Bassett

  Cecilie (I often call her Cec, pronounced “Cess”) and I were very close. She was the big sister, charged with looking out for me. I was her “little brother.” My mother would tell her, “Make sure you take care of your brother.” Most times that was cool, but, of course, sometimes she didn’t want to.

  “Just make sure to do it,” my mother would say.

  During the first few years of my life we moved around the Detroit area about every two years. We lived in a small house in Inkster, Michigan, across the street from a small park. Cecilie and I would play on the playground. One time Cecilie climbed feetfirst through the handrail at the top of a sliding board. Her lower body got through but her head got stuck.

  “Help me, Court!” she cried. I looked up. Her feet were dangling in the air and she was hanging by her hands. But I was too small to help her.

  “DADDY!” I screamed as I lit out for the house. When Daddy and I returned, Cecilie was barely hanging on and her hands were trembling. She couldn’t hold on anymore. He pushed her back through the bars and basically saved her life. He was so proud of me that day!

  I was a very curious child—I just liked to see how things worked. But Daddy wasn’t very happy with me when I put my blocks in the toilet to see what would happen. It stopped up the toilet on Fourth of July weekend so they had to pay a plumber triple double time to repair it. My mother and father took turns “beating” me. They were so hot they probably even let Cec get in a couple of licks! Then there was the time my father took Cec and me up into the attic. “Stay on the beams,” he told me. Curious about what would happen if I stepped off the planks, I ventured onto the pretty, pink insulation. It gave way. I grabbed onto Cec. Next thing you know, we were both falling through the ceiling. Cec landed first and “cushioned” my fall. Needless to say, she was very unhappy with me. My mother was mad at my father for taking us up there. Another time I sprayed Lysol on the concrete basement floor and lit a match. Whoosh! I just wanted to see what would happen.

  When I was about six, my parents moved into Detroit proper onto West Grand Boulevard, one of the main drags. We lived in a formerly all-white moneyed area that black folks had come to inhabit, where huge houses had been subdivided into two-family and four-family homes. If you had a two-family you had an entire floor. I think we lived in a four-family house. Still, to us it was really big. The lawns were fifty to eighty feet deep. “Hitsville,” the headquarters of Motown, was about eight doors down the street. We used to sit on the stairs of the house next door to Motown and watch the people come and go. We were too young to know who they were but old enough to know we should watch them.

  As long as I wasn’t causing minicatastrophes, my mother encouraged my curiosity. When I was six years old, she read me a book called Henry the Explorer. It was about a little boy who read a story about polar bears, then set off to explore his town with his dog, Laird Angus McAngus. I loved Henry the Explorer! It taught me to be curious about the world—that whatever I could read in a book or dream, I could go visit. When I was little, the only world I knew was my block, so I explored my block. My mother would make me a peanut-butter sandwich and tie it up in a bandanna. I’d tie the bandanna to the end of a long stick and carry it over my shoulder, just like Henry did. Then I’d go to the parking lot two doors down the street, where snowplows had created huge mountains of snow. She always kept a close eye on me. “Don’t look! Don’t watch me,” I would tell her. (Of course, she watched me through the window like a hawk.) When I got to the corner I would climb one of the mountains of snow, sit down and eat my sandwich, then go back home.

  Although Cec didn’t always feel like being bothered with me, she’d beat you up if you tried to mess with her “little brother!” I remember a time when we went trick-or-treating and some bad boys swooped down on us to take our candy. As I cried, “They stole my candy!” Cecilie took her flashlight and started hitting them to protect me. She gave them so many bumps from her big flashlight that they let her keep her candy and ran off. Daddy was so proud of her that night.

  But during the summer of 1967 life on West Grand Boulevard changed. I stood on the front porch of my family’s home as a long line of army tanks rolled down the street. I didn’t know what was going on—I was just excited because G.I. Joe was on my street. “G.I. Joe—there he is!” I’d shout as National Guard tanks rumbled by. G.I. Joe was my favorite toy—I loved G.I. Joe. I had all the G.I. Joe figures and stuff. The troops were headed toward the Twelfth Street area of Detroit, where black people were rising up against the lack of jobs, horrible housing and widespread police brutality. Their neighborhoods were being bulldozed to make way for I-75. The Detroit Riots changed the city—and our lives—forever.

  During the five-day uprising, I could feel the tension and apprehension in the air. Sometimes G.I. Joe would stand guard along our street. One day I walked up to one of the soldiers to say hi. He turned and pointed his bayonet at me! I was shocked and traumatized. That night, my parents powwowed and decided to get out. They didn’t want us in the middle of all the mess. Making matters worse, the riots deprived Daddy of his livelihood. The Bi-Lo grocery store he managed farther down West Grand was one of the businesses burned to the ground.

  As was his habit, my father rolled with it. He found a job as a foreman at the Chrysler plant. For the next eighteen months he and Mommy socked away money so they could buy a house. For a while we stayed in a very small apartment on Dundee Street, until June 1969, when we moved into our family’s new house, a five-bedroom dwelling on Appoline Street.

  Until that point we had lived in a segregated, all-black world. Racially, Appoline Street was mixed—predominately white and Catholic with a few black families. My parents were ecstatic and felt they had made an incredible move. They wanted to be a part of integration and to raise Cecilie and I in a multicultural environment where we could learn how to deal with living in a “white world.” Now we lived between two white families. To Cecilie and my delight, one of them had ten kids!

  The neighbors on Appoline Street were tight and looked after each other and all of us kids. Our house was in the perfect location. We were one block up and across the street from the public school we went to and the playground where we played “pom-pom touch.” Pom-pom was a game where you raced from one side of the fence in the schoolyard to the other side while you tried not to get tagged by whoever was “it.” If you got tagged you had to go to the center of the field with everyone else who got caught. The kids in the center would call “pom-pom” and everyone who hadn’t been tagged yet would race to the other side. The goal was to be the last one touched. On top of playing pom-pom, my friends Clarence, Greg and Darren and I played touch football in the street. The driveways were the first downs and two light poles were the touchdowns. You couldn’t keep me out of the street!

  We all played together without incident—black children and white. I don’t ever remember being called “nigger” or any other racial slur. But the adults around us were going through it. Black folks were all about “black power.” White folks were scared and moving out of the city in droves. That June, when we moved into the neighborhood, “white flight” wasn’t happening on our street. By the time we went to school in September, the neighborhood had “flipped.” The white folks who could get out, got out. By the first day of school the neighborhood had turned predominately black. Only a handful of whites remained. We couldn’t leave at that point. My parents thought, “What have we done?” They knew they’d never get their money out of the house. In just three months their dreams of raising us in a mixed neighborhood had gone up in smoke.

  But from my nine-year-old perspective, I didn’t see “white flight,” I just got new friends to play with. The neighborhood was still a great place for Cecilie and me to grow up in. The street stayed very neighborhoody, and black and white families looked after each other. Cecilie and I were the neighborhood’s little “stars”—everybody loved us. We were quick and could run fast, but we were also cool and got good grades.
When we played pom-pom we never got caught—and if we did end up in the middle, we were quick enough to catch everyone else.

  In spite of all the hard knocks he’d endured, my dad worked hard at his job at Chrysler. Daddy was wise. He liked to read though he didn’t have much time. He was also very gregarious—he was the center of attention in any room, a life-of-the-party type of guy. My father loved to talk and explain and debate and look at things five and six different ways. He really should have been a lawyer. I didn’t like all that debating and arguing. When I would try to keep up, he would talk me down. I would just get confused and get mad. Cecilie could hang with him; her mind was nimble like that. But while they were debating and arguing, I’d say, “This is boring. I’m gonna go play some ball.”

  On weekends my father hung out with his family and fixed things. Dad was very handy. He could fix anything. He’d read fix-it books and might take a couple of weeks to figure the thing out, but he would figure it out and then head to the hardware store. He was the kind of man who wanted to have the tools in the house just in case he needed to fix something. I was Daddy’s boy—he used to drag me all around. “Courtney, roll with me.” We’d go food shopping and run all kinds of errands, but we’d always end up hanging out in the hardware section at Sears. When he was ready to tune up the car or fix whatever, I was his helper. He didn’t show me how to fix anything myself, but I knew all the tools to hand him. He’d tell me, “Courtney, hand me the Allen wrench,” and I’d give it to him.

  My dad was also independent. He was one of those black men who, perhaps because of his life circumstances, was determined to do everything for himself. Most of the time he did—and did it right. But he could be independent to a fault. If he made a wrong turn or we got lost in the car, he hated to ask for directions. I remember driving around in circles, with my mother going, “Conroy, will you stop at the gas station, please?” Cec and I would be in the back seat. “Oh, gosh, Daddy, please stop.”

  My father and I hung out a lot together. But our interests were different. We didn’t have a lot of things in common, and emotionally we weren’t on the same page. I was rough-and-tumble on the outside, but I was also very sensitive. Daddy would laugh at my tenderness. I remember back in the days of the natural and Afro, he gave me an ultimatum: comb my hair or it all comes off. It hurt to comb my hair, so I didn’t like to do it. He told me I’d have to suffer the consequences: the dreaded “bald head.” I remember feeling embarrassed after getting all my hair cut off. I didn’t want anyone to see me just yet. As we rode our bikes home from the barbershop, I asked Dad if we could go down the side streets so my friends didn’t see me. My plan worked beautifully right until we reached the beginning of my block. One of the young twin boys a few doors down saw me. “Ooh, look at Courtney,” he hollered. “Look at the bald head.” I broke into tears. My father laughed so hard he just about peed himself. When I was older—I was in high school—my first girlfriend broke up with me. I was just destroyed. I ran into the house saying, “It’s over, it’s over!” Daddy burst out laughing again. I ran upstairs and into my room. He wasn’t very good at dealing with feelings. Between his insensitivity and the kids on the playground, I learned not to show my emotions often.

  Dad also didn’t know how to have one-on-one conversations about some of the more personal aspects of life. That included the birds and the bees. Beginning when I was about nine or ten, he would come into my bedroom on occasion and ask me if I liked girls. I would just say no—what kid wants to talk about the birds and the bees with his parents, especially at that age? It was territory that I certainly didn’t want to go into. But in reality my little buddies and I had been noticing girls since we were six or so. The first love of my life was a pretty little girl named Gina. She and I developed a crush on each other and everyone thought it was cute.

  Now I’m sure Mom sat Cecilie down on several occasions and went through the birds and the bees speech, but Dad never said, “Son, let’s sit down and talk.” Instead, he put the burden of whether or not we’d have “the talk” on my shoulders. Because I had no intention of bringing it up, I missed out. I effectively avoided that speech for my entire childhood.

  I had, however, stumbled onto my father’s stash of Playboy magazines back when I was six. Dad hid the magazines in the basement in his office. Back then, Playboy was soft-core porn—breasts, side views, hands strategically placed. But no genitalia. Still, the centerfold was enough to make me say, “Whoaaa… This is cool!” They were secret. Taboo. And they were in our house! Of course, the fact that I was secretly peeking at my father’s hidden pornography only made me feel more uncomfortable about talking about my sexuality. But today I realize that his difficulty getting below the surface was chiefly because of his background. There was an unspoken understanding when I was a child that certain questions about his childhood were off-limits. As I got older I became curious about finding his parents, but although I suspect Dad knew some things about them, he never expressed any interest in finding them.

  My mother was very nurturing and always took care of us. She was the family’s implementer, following up behind the scenes after my dad gave his directives or did his life-of-the-party thing. She made sure we did our homework and finished our chores. Mom was an educator and a librarian. She was always reading books. To this day she reads or listens to more books than anyone I know. We were always around books. In our home there was an unspoken rule that you’d better read and do well in school. After school, Cec and I would usually hang out at the library where she worked. The library was our touchstone, our sanctuary—and the place we went to bug her, especially after she transferred from the main library to a local branch five minutes from home.

  “Mommy, Cec is doing this…”

  “Mommy, Courtney’s doing that…”

  Physically and educationally, the library was huge in our lives. I used to explore the stacks and try to figure out where books on different topics were located. There were fun things to do there after school and on Saturdays. When I got older I’d write my school papers there. As a librarian, Mom was involved with all kinds of groups all over the city—literacy groups, homeless groups, Habitat for Humanity, book clubs. Long before publishers sold books on tape, Mom would read aloud and tape stories so people could hear them. A whole community of people in that library system supported each other and helped lift us up.

  Cecilie and I didn’t always go to the library after school. When we were younger, we might stay home with a babysitter. When we were older, we’d stay by ourselves. Sometimes when we didn’t go to the library, we would sneak and watch General Hospital and Dark Shadows. Cec was a TV junkie. But the only time we were actually allowed to watch TV was cartoons on Saturday morning and Jacques Cousteau, Wild Kingdom and Disney on Sunday nights. From the example my mother set, I learned the power of lifelong learning.

  Because my mom was so nurturing, I felt that I could always go to her and just talk about whatever was going on—I didn’t have to have a debate. If Cecilie didn’t do what she was told, I would go to Mom and tell on her. Cec was a little fireball. You couldn’t tell her or make her do nothin’. When I was eleven we got two dogs, Rana and Pepper. We were supposed to walk and feed them, but when it came time to get up in the morning, Cecilie would say, “I ain’t getting up, Court. You get them.” And I would.

  Although Cecilie could keep up with my father in debating, she and my mother were close, as well. They talked about everything. However, once Cec became a teenager they became like oil and vinegar. They would often bump heads, but always came back together.

  We were your typical lower-middle-class, black-American, slightly dysfunctional family. Our parents believed in kids having chores. On Saturdays, Cec and I cleaned the house. I would take the upstairs, she would take the downstairs and we would do the basement together. I might rake the leaves, mow the grass or help shovel a neighbor’s sidewalk for allowance money. Our parents also believed in discipline. We grew up with spankings and pun
ishments. We didn’t think of raising our voices. Sucking your teeth or rolling your eyes were grounds for Lava soap on the tongue, which has to be one of the worst punishments ever devised by parents! After a while, Cecilie and I were self-checking—our parents only had to look at us and we would fall in line.

  After our chores were done, my parents always had ways of keeping us busy. I would go to the boys’ club and play bumper pool or basketball or peewee football, and they would take us to museums and the theater and other safe environments where we could dream and learn. Sometimes we would go ice-skating at the Jack Adams Memorial Arena near our house. On Sundays we went to church, although when I was twelve we just stopped going. I never knew why, yet I missed it. We didn’t go on family vacations, probably because my dad worked all the time. Plus, traveling was expensive. But when I was a teenager, Pappy came and got us and took us out to Boston. There I met my extended family. We talked to my maternal grandparents on the phone three times a week and definitely on Sundays. I grew up in a family where my grandparents had the longest long-distance relationship I’ll ever know in my life. That’s what we knew—really keeping in touch. We were on the phone all the time.

  On the downside, my parents argued about money. They had this thing about “this is your money, this is my money.” As best I can tell, they never worked that out. Mom just chose to let Dad manage the family finances. And my dad always seemed to have a lot of secrets. He closed himself up in his office a lot. My mom would retreat upstairs.

  Other than that, we were a tight little unit—our family did everything together. Mom and Dad protected us and kept us close. They instilled in us the spirit that we could do what we wanted to do and be what we wanted to be. If we could think and dream it, we could do it. But that was tempered with a you’ve-gotta-work-it ethic. “Things are not going to come easy, but you can work for them.” They couldn’t protect me from the harsh realities of being a black boy, but my parents knew that if they armed me with education, knowing right from wrong and the knowledge that I was loved, I would do all right.