I saw my name, “Everette Lynn,” and then my eyes scanned over the rest of my document. In the place where it said “Last name,” I saw “Williams.” I thought, That’s not my last name. I knew it was my mother’s maiden name and the last name of my Uncle James, my mother’s older brother, and my cousins. I continued to look over the document, when suddenly Jean said, “Look here.”
“Look where?”
“Where it says ‘father’s name,’ ” Jean instructed as she pointed to a box on the document.
My eyes followed her slender finger to the spot labeled “Father’s last name,” and I saw the name “Jeter.” My eyes moved in amazement to the “First name” slot and saw “James.” My father was James Jeter and not Ben Harris. But who was James Jeter? I wanted to cry, but I felt a happiness inside that I had never known. The man I called Daddy was not responsible for my birth.
“He’s not your daddy,” I heard Jean say as I stared in silence at the document. I read that my father was born in Union, South Carolina, and that I had actually been born in Michigan, and not Arkansas as I’d always thought.
“Uncle Ben’s not your daddy. Now we know why he treats you the way he does.”
Yes, I thought in the stillness that covered our house. I continued to sit cross-legged on the floor, not worrying anymore about Daddy returning as the later afternoon gave way to early evening. I sat for a long time holding the document tight, and then studying it and thinking, Yes, now we know.
CHAPTER 2
My discovery that Ben Harris wasn’t my biological father didn’t stop the beatings and verbal abuse. But with my newfound knowledge, neither Ben’s words nor his hands had the same power over me. When he did whip me, it was as if I magically detached myself from my body. My secret information provided me with an omnipotent shield that protected me.
In early 1969, when I was thirteen, my mother divorced Ben. The beatings had finally become too much to bear even for someone as strong-willed as my mother. Maybe she realized the beatings could eventually become fatal. After a lengthy separation during which Ben spent time in Los Angeles, California, he returned one afternoon and pulled a butcher knife on her as she hung up clothes in our backyard. My mother’s screams had brought not only me, but many of our neighbors, to her rescue as Ben ran away in fear of the police.
Looking back, I realize how brave my mother was in deciding in the 1960s to live without a man in her life to help raise four children. Divorce was a rare occurrence in our community and was considered grown folks’ business. There were separations, but most times the husbands came back. I couldn’t count the number of times Ben would leave for days and sometimes for weeks after he and Mama had serious knock-down-drag-out fights. Still, I never heard either one of them mention the word divorce.
All I knew about divorce was what I had seen on the ’60s version of the television show Divorce Court, but all the people on the show were white and had what sounded like all sorts of crazy antics going on in their families behind the scenes. It seemed very different from the beatings that occurred in our house.
The only way I knew for certain that Mama was divorcing Ben was by eavesdropping on her phone conversations with my grandma, whom she was always very close to, or her best friend at the time, Mrs. Bertha Vault, who lived directly across the street from us.
My suspicions were confirmed when I saw “Etta Mae Harris versus Ben Odis Harris” listed under divorce proceedings in the Arkansas Gazette. I was probably the only child in my age group who regularly read the court proceedings and the obituaries, checking to see if any young children had gotten a free ride to heaven. I read them immediately after the comics and sports.
The day the divorce became final was a strange one for me and Mama. I was filled with tremendous relief, but I knew it was the beginning of a difficult time for her and my sisters. I would be just fine spending my days dreaming about my perfect father who loved me and lived in Michigan. Still, I realized that, despite Ben’s many faults, my mother and sisters loved him. I had to admit that even I loved him and in some way would even miss him, since he was the only Daddy I had ever known.
When Mama came home after the court proceeding, she didn’t come into the house like she normally did after a long day’s work. She sat on the front porch in a rusty metal chair in silence for hours.
I sat close by on the concrete porch as my mother gently rubbed the top of my head. There was a threat of tears in her eyes, but she didn’t cry. I looked away at the pumpkin-colored sun, half hidden by a heavy silhouette of clouds, until I suddenly felt my mama’s body move. As she stood and let out a sigh, I looked up at her and said, “Don’t worry, Mommy. I’ll take care of you.”
“I know, baby,” she murmured softly as she walked into the house for the first time as a single mother of four. I sat on the porch until darkness covered our block, thinking of ways I was going to keep my promise.
WITH BEN OUT OF MY LIFE FOR GOOD, I naturally assumed my life would become better, and for the most part it did. I became the man of the house, helping my mother take care of our home and my sisters.
I got a paper route to earn extra money. Perhaps I should say that Mama and I got a paper route, since it was she who woke me up every morning at five to drive me around our neighborhood delivering the Arkansas Gazette. Most of the other carriers I knew delivered the paper on foot in the early darkness of the morning.
As the man of the house, I experienced several unexpected emotions and a set of new problems. The biggest fear was that Ben would return in the middle of the night and hurt Mama and me. I was never worried about him doing anything to my sisters, because I knew how much he loved them. This fear was lifted when I heard Mama tell someone on the phone that Ben had moved to Los Angeles, California.
I also felt a sense of guilt, because I felt Mama had divorced Ben not because she had fallen out of love with him but because she had finally become aware of his treatment of me. I felt it was my fault that my mother didn’t have a man in her life while all her close friends and my Aunt Gee had the support and love of a husband. Several times I overheard my mother’s friends ask her when she was going to marry again, and Mama would always reply, “Honey, I’m married to my kids.”
Junior high was more challenging than I had ever imagined. The challenge didn’t come from academics. Even though my grades started to slip, I was still scoring at the top on standardized tests. In the seventh grade, I was told I was reading on a twelfth-grade level.
It was my socialization as a young black man that suffered, and the realization that maybe Ben was right about me, that I was a sissy. I was a small child physically, all legs and teeth. All the boys at the modern, split-level Booker Junior High seemed bigger and more manly than me. It didn’t matter that most of the boys who made me feel that way were in the eighth and ninth grades.
I tried out for football as Ben would have wanted. I was cut the first day. I will never forget how small I felt the first time I was in the locker room with the other boys and how they looked at me as though I didn’t belong. I didn’t even know how to put on a jockstrap. At first I tried to blame it on being bookish, but deep down I knew that was not the reason for their smirks. It was most likely in that locker room that I realized I was different from other boys.
So instead of becoming a star football player, I became the class clown to get in with the cool crowd. Sometimes when my talking got me put out of class, I would stand in the hallway and recite word for word the television special Charlie Brown’s Christmas. I loved that show as much as The Wizard of Oz.
While my popularity soared, my grades plummeted. Besides, tough, cool black boys weren’t supposed to make only A’s and B’s unless it was in gym or industrial arts. I even became good friends with my secret crush, Rose Crater, because she thought I was so funny and made her laugh. My bad grades didn’t really bother me, because I knew I could do the work if I took the time. I stole one of the pens the teachers used for report cards and learned how to cha
nge F’s to B’s and C’s to fancy A’s. When I lost my prized pen, I simply forged my mother’s signature when report cards went out. Mama was too busy working two jobs and trying to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads to notice.
It was while I was at Booker that I became aware of the class difference among black people in Little Rock and the importance of your family’s background and skin color. There were several students at Booker Junior High who lived in Granite Heights, a middle-class housing development north of the lower-class housing project called Granite Mountain. Kids from Granite Heights were dropped off in fancy cars, while students from Granite Mountain took the bus. I lived within walking distance of both neighborhoods. The most popular girls, including Rose, were light-skinned and had the most handsome members of the football team vying for their attention.
In my view, the children from the Heights had it made. They dressed nicely every day, never brought their lunch from home, and always seemed to have money in their blue jean pockets or leather purses. And they all seemed to have both a mother and a father.
I envied my classmates and secretly desired to be not only close friends with them but a member of their families as well. I suddenly longed to be a part of a family that included two parents. Even if one of the parents was Ben.
CHAPTER 3
The following year I chose not to return to Booker Junior High for my eighth-grade year. Instead I transferred to the integrated West Side Junior High, located about thirteen miles from my home. The reason was simple: At a new school I could start my journey toward manhood over. I would make new friends and forget the way I was beginning to feel about myself.
There was also another reason: I was curious about white people. West Side reportedly was one of the few schools that was about half white and half black in its racial composition. The only white people I knew were the ones I saw on television and the owners of the neighborhood drug and grocery stores.
When I enrolled at West Side, I was surprised to learn that the school was now about 70 percent black. White students had begun to transfer in big numbers to Pulaski Heights and Southwest Junior High. The remaining white students didn’t seem any better off than the black ones. In fact, the blacks appeared to come from the better families. I was shocked when I found out that one of my classmates, Tammie, a beautiful blond girl, actually lived in a mobile home. At West Side, one thing was different: All my teachers were white, which was a first for me.
Mama didn’t understand why I wanted to go to another school when there was a practically new school only six blocks from our house, so I didn’t have her full support. Busing had not started in 1968, so it was my responsibility to get to school the best way I knew how, which meant walking. Each morning around seven o’clock, I would start my trek from the east side to the more thriving west end, where nobody knew the real Lynn Harris.
My solitary walks were great, and may have marked my beginnings as a writer. My walks were a time for thinking and dreaming about how my life would be once I left Little Rock. I felt that my hometown was too small for my grand dreams of living in a high-rise apartment, like the kids from the television show Family Affair, or becoming a Soul Train dancer. On a more realistic level, I dreamed of having my own room and having pen pals from different states and countries.
Every day I’d feel a rush of anticipation when I would cross Main Street and walk past the Governor’s Mansion. I always wondered what it was like to live in a house that big. The Stewart family home marked the halfway point of my trip. They had recently moved from our neighborhood to a nice brick-front between West Side and Dunbar Junior High, the other black junior high school.
For the most part, I enjoyed West Side and my new teachers and friends. Still there were problems. As it was at Booker, the boys at West Side seemed so much bigger than I was, so much more self-assured when it came to girls. But I still made friends by using my smarts and quick wit. At West Side, being a little smarter than the other kids had its advantages. But that was not always enough to become firmly entrenched with the cool kids.
To prove yourself, you either had to bully other kids or challenge authority—which at West Side meant testing the mostly white teaching staff. I welcomed it. In my adolescent insecurity I needed people to know who I was, or who I wanted them to think I was—a cool boy without fear.
I had become such a terror in the school’s library that the librarian, Miss Lowery, had me permanently banned for always talking too loud and then ignoring her when she asked me to be quiet. Somehow I avoided getting into fights with my classmates.
One day in math class, I was reading an Archie comic book that was neatly tucked in my math book. The teacher, Mr. Ask, was explaining new math problems on the board. I was bored and thought I knew everything there was to know about math. Besides, the adventures of my favorite comic-book characters, Archie, Betty, Veronica, and Jughead, were far more interesting. More so than any of my school books, Archie and Richie Rich comic books had become my windows to the white world I was so curious about.
Mr. Ask, a young-looking, lanky white man, evidently called my name to answer a question, but since I was so deep in my comic book, I didn’t hear him. I did hear him when he screamed my name, obviously annoyed. Startled by the increased volume in his voice, I jerked upright and my comic book fell from inside the aqua-colored math book onto the maple plywood floor. When I reached down to retrieve it, I spotted shiny black shoes.
“Lynn, put away the comic book,” Mr. Ask barked. All of my classmates’ eyes were on me. I could hear giggles. My time had come to prove how tough I was. Mr. Ask had called me out and embarrassed me in front of my peers, so I had to respond in an aggressive manner. If I didn’t, my popularity, such as it was, would be sacrificed, and it would take more than letting the cool people cheat off my exams to restore it. I knew what I had to do.
“I will when I finish,” I said with a smart-assed tone.
“Now!” Mr. Ask shouted at the top of his lungs. His narrow face turned beet red. The class giggles turned to loud laughter. Without taking his eyes off me, Mr. Ask ordered the class to return to their math books.
“Put the comic book away,” he repeated.
When I was slow to respond, he grabbed the comic book. Now I was pissed. My sisters often played games like this with me, and if I couldn’t stand them doing it, I certainly wasn’t going to let Mr. Ask get away with it.
Without thinking, I took my heavy math book and fired it at Mr. Ask, hitting him right above the left eye. I couldn’t believe what I had done. Neither could my classmates. They started to laugh and clap, and several were banging their desks with balled fists.
“Did you see that shit? Lynn popped Mr. Ask,” Billy Ray, one of the school’s tough boys, said. I felt powerful. Other than my sisters and a cousin here and there, I had never hit anyone, and now I had hit a grown man—and a white man at that.
As I sat at my desk with a cocky smirk on my face, Mr. Ask became so enraged that he grabbed me by my shirt collar and literally dragged me to the principal’s office. Not only was I promptly suspended for three days, I was also informed that I would be reinstated only when my mother or father returned with me. My troubles had only just begun.
Since my mother left home for her new factory job before dawn each morning, she had no idea if my sisters and I ever went to school. She assumed we did, which was usually correct, but she never checked up on us because we never gave her a reason. My suspension initially didn’t seem that bad. I figured I would take my three-day vacation and then figure out some way to get back into school without my mother knowing what I had done.
My first step was to convince the principal that my mother couldn’t come back to school with me. I thought of disguising my voice, which hadn’t changed and was still soft and girllike, and coming up with some dreaded illness that would prevent my mother from escorting me back to school. But the day I mustered up the courage to try, the principal’s secretary started asking lots of ques
tions, so I quickly hung up. I think she realized it was me.
I easily fell into the routine of staying at home all day watching soap operas, daydreaming, and planning adventures. Since all the grown folks in my neighborhood worked, I didn’t worry about being seen going in and out of the house during the time when children were supposed to be in school. The only adults I saw were the white store owners when I would go to the store to spend my lunch money on candy and gum. On the rare occasion when they would question why I wasn’t in school, I would tell them my baby sister was sick and I was the only one big enough to take care of her while my mother worked. Since I had the reputation of being a pretty good kid, everyone in the neighborhood bought my story.
I was having a great time at home all by myself. The tiny house was suddenly like having my own big room. I didn’t miss going to school all that much. I realized that the only reason I had liked school in the past was that it got me away from Ben. Even though I loved to read, now that he was gone, there was no need for school.
I imagined I had become quite a legend at school since I was kicked out for hitting a teacher. If anybody ever doubted my toughness, they couldn’t possibly now. Since none of my classmates lived near me, I didn’t have to worry about someone opening their big mouth and telling my sisters—or even worse, my mama—what I had done.
Everything was going fine until day forty-four, when my vacation came to an abrupt end. My mother came home one day at her usual six o’clock hour. Everything appeared normal until she casually asked me if I had been to school. I knew something was wrong by the tone of her voice, but I said “Yes” anyway. My mother went into a screaming rage, telling me that I was lying, that she knew I had been suspended. She told me about a white man (a truant officer) showing up at her job wanting to know why I hadn’t been to school for weeks and weeks.
What Becomes of the Brokenhearted Page 4
