That evening I got one of the worst whippings my mama’s ever given me. The next day, Mama missed work and took me back to West Side Junior High. While waiting for the principal, I studied Mama’s stoic face. Her worried and tired eyes didn’t seem to blink, and she sat there as still as a statue. She seemed afraid, too, which I couldn’t understand since I was the one in trouble.
Weldon Faulk, the principal, was stern but polite. He was a handsome, middle-aged white man with onyx hair sprinkled with gray around the edges. When he explained to my mother the seriousness of my offense, I started to pay attention.
Mr. Faulk had a list of examples of my being a little too smart for my own good, and told her about my ban from the library. Mama said nothing. She didn’t show any emotion until he brought up my grades from Booker and the straight F’s I had received during my extended vacation. Suddenly my mama’s face scrunched up as if she were in pain. I knew she must have felt embarrassed and humiliated, but she continued to sit there in silence.
The principal explained that several of my teachers didn’t quite know what to do with me since my classroom performance prior to the suspension could best be described as erratic. He pointed out that my standardized test scores indicated that I was capable of making straight A’s, a theory supported by my brief moments of brilliance on some classroom tests and some English book reports. He indicated that something was seriously wrong with me, and he seemed to be placing the blame on my mama. I wanted to shout at Mr. Faulk to stop attacking her, that none of this was her fault. She was the best mama in the world, but he had broken her down.
I stopped looking at my mama and gazed out the open window. The office suddenly filled with Mama’s sniffles. I looked at the woman whom I loved more than anyone, as nickel-sized tears rolled down her face. She pulled a handkerchief from her black pocketbook and wiped away the tears. I used to think Ben was the only one who could make her cry, and now here I was causing her so much pain.
When she composed herself, Mr. Faulk asked if she had any questions about my reinstatement. She shook her head and then quietly asked him if he knew how hard it was to raise four children completely alone. Mr. Faulk looked down at his desk and tapped a pen on the folder that held my permanent records and politely said, “No, Mrs. Harris, I don’t.”
When Mama left my school to return to work, Mr. Faulk told me to remain in his office. After he walked my mother out, he came back and made me feel even worse, telling me how sorry he felt for my mother. He warned me that I had better get my act together unless I wanted to end up in reform school, a threat I thought only black parents used.
He asked me what I planned to do with my life; I choked back tears and sullenly told him, “I’m going to college.”
Mr. Faulk lifted a piece of paper from the folder on his desk and said, “Not with these grades you aren’t.”
He went on to explain that my dream was not impossible, but that it would be difficult if my tough-guy and class-clown actions continued. He told me colleges wanted only top students, but fortunately for me they wouldn’t see the horrible grades I had made since only grades beginning with the ninth grade were considered. He said my little vacation would probably mean that I would have to repeat the eighth grade, but that would give me a chance to get back on the right track.
Did he say repeat the eighth grade? Fail? I couldn’t do that. If I couldn’t pretend to be tough or funny, then being smart was the only thing I had left. If I failed the eighth grade I would be the laughingstock of my sisters and cousins, not to mention my former classmates from Booker Junior High, who probably believed that I thought I was too good for my neighborhood school. I still considered them friends, but I rarely saw them when I started going to West Side, because I left home so early and got home late.
I begged Mr. Faulk to suggest ways I could avoid repeating the eighth grade. He looked at me with dismay and told me I had gotten myself into a terrible mess, but said he would see what he could do because he felt I had potential. He warned me that if he heard I was giving any of my teachers any trouble whatsoever, I would be expelled so fast I would feel the door hitting my back on my way out. I promised to be the best student at West Side Junior High, and then I raced to the scene of my crime: math class with Mr. Ask.
MR. FAULK KEPT HIS PROMISE, and I was promoted to the ninth grade without summer school. I managed to pull up my grades during the last marking period, and I entered the ninth grade with excitement. I surprised myself and some of my classmates when I was selected to be on The Bear Chat, the school newspaper. I loved writing and wanted to be a sportswriter. I really didn’t think I had a chance, because the newspaper staff was always filled with Honor Society students, but I submitted a sample story anyway. It was rare when someone without those qualifications even applied.
My reputation had preceded me, and Mrs. Adams, a petite blonde, told me the first sign of trouble (she’d obviously heard of the Mr. Ask book incident) and I was off the newspaper staff. She then told me that my writing sample was one of the best she had seen in all of her years teaching. I was one of two black students selected for the usually all-white staff.
Things were getting better at home, as well. During the summer, Mama purchased our first home. How she saved the money was amazing to me, and I couldn’t wait to get out of the house of horror that 520 East Twenty-first represented to me. We moved to a large white frame house with a huge porch and yard, located on the corner of Sixteenth and Johnson Streets in the heart of the west end and about fifteen minutes’ walking distance to West Side. I was excited about living in the same neighborhood as the majority of my classmates, but I was even more excited about having my own room for the first time.
I couldn’t sleep the first night I spent in the twin bed in my own room. It didn’t matter a single bit that the furniture in my room was purchased from a secondhand furniture store. The only thing that mattered was that it was mine. And though I wasn’t known for my neatness, I was determined to keep my room spotless.
Besides moving and being on the newspaper staff, something else special happened before the school year began: I had my first real girlfriend. Beverly Rice was the younger sister of my classmate and good friend Valerie Rice. The Rices were a large family with nine children who lived on Allis Street, which was two blocks from my house.
NaNa, as everyone called Beverly, was a cute, big-legged, pigtailed girl with enchanting brown eyes. The first time she smiled at me I felt the hairs on my skinny arms lift like they were going to take my body to the sky. A couple of days later, Valerie told me NaNa liked me. About a week later, I finally got the courage to call her, and the first thing I said after she said hello was, “Will you go with me?”
“Yes,” she replied.
“Okay. Bye,” I said as I hung up the phone with a huge smile on my face. I was thinking how everything was going my way and maybe I didn’t need a father to show me how to become a man. I could figure it out on my own.
Our relationship lasted only about a month. One day, out of the blue, NaNa called me and said, “I’m quitting you.”
“Okay,” I replied. The circumstances of our breakup are no longer clear to me, and I don’t think I even understood back then. In our brief month together I had become a permanent fixture in the Rice household, showing up the first thing in the morning to walk to school with my girlfriend. After school we would sit on their porch until Mrs. Rice would tell me it was time for me to go home.
I didn’t have a clue what girlfriends and boyfriends did besides walk to school together and occasionally hold hands. I think this made NaNa’s mother and father very happy. Mrs. Rice especially loved me because I was always polite and wouldn’t look for a silver coin when I ran errands for her. They were like family, a second home, and this didn’t change after NaNa ended our relationship.
I share this story of my brief romance because NaNa and her family gave me something I desperately needed. Her affection for me made me feel like other boys in my peer group
for the first time. They all had girlfriends long before I did. NaNa was like a booster shot for my self-esteem. Living in the same neighborhood with the middle-class Rices made me feel like I was their equal, entitled to date their daughter.
I ENTERED THE NINTH GRADE determined not to let my mother or Mr. Faulk down. What he had told me about college and grades stuck. Even though I didn’t know anyone besides my teachers who had gone to college, I knew a post-high-school education was my ticket out of Little Rock.
I applied myself and my grades soared during the first grading period of the ninth grade, but because of my academic performance the prior year the school placed me in all remedial classes, one step above special education. But after my grades were reviewed, and I took another schoolwide standardized test, I was transferred into regular classes. Sometimes the classes were full. In the case of algebra, my remedial math teacher, Mrs. Ann Young, set up a desk in the back of the classroom and taught me what the honor students were learning. Mrs. Young, who was so beautiful with her silk chocolate skin, treated me at times like I was the only student she had.
My classroom accomplishments didn’t go unnoticed by Mr. Faulk. He was so impressed with my turnaround that he asked me to introduce a speaker to the student body at the Career Day Assembly. This was an honor usually reserved for the Student Council president and top students. Most of my friends who knew me as a cutup were shocked when I stepped to the podium to introduce Mr. Moise Seligman, president of Arkansas Paper Company, a former West Side student when the school was all white.
Mr. Seligman was a tall, distinguished-looking man with a bald head, who favored the actor Yul Brynner. I liked him immediately. He was very nice to me and really seemed interested in me. White people were still a big mystery to me. Most of the white people I came in contact with didn’t treat me with any disrespect but always maintained a superior air, like they knew they were better and felt sorry for me. Mr. Seligman didn’t act that way at all.
A couple of weeks after the assembly, I wrote Mr. Seligman a letter thanking him for the personal interest he took in me and then in a bold move asked him for a summer job. Three days after mailing the letter, I was called into the principal’s office to take a call from Mr. Seligman’s secretary, who informed me that Mr. Seligman wanted me to come and work at his company during the summer. I was so excited, I let out a loud scream. The school secretary smiled, and Mr. Faulk beamed like a proud father.
All my family and friends were impressed when I told them about my exciting new office position at Arkansas Paper Company. The majority of my friends would spend their summers competing for cleaning jobs at fast-food restaurants (very few blacks were offered service or cashier jobs in these establishments), and passed the summer either cutting grass or praying the government had a summer jobs program. Prior to my job at Arkansas Paper, all of my jobs had been manual labor, like washing dishes or cutting grass. The summer before, when I was thirteen, I had even worked as a houseboy for a brothel in North Little Rock.
One of my favorite cousins, Jacquelyn, helped me get the job, but she had no idea it was a brothel. She worked at the owner’s resale shop in downtown Little Rock and knew the owner was looking for someone to help take care of her yard and garden. The first couple of days I spent under the beat of the summer heat, but when I arrived on the third day I was told I was needed to help out in the house.
I was washing down the baseboards in the dining room, and so I was under the table when I saw one of the several white men who came to the house during the day rest his hand on the crotch of one of the attractive blond ladies who came to the house in the mornings and left each day when the news came on. All of the ladies wore lots of makeup and short-shorts with midriff blouses.
I didn’t know much about sex, yet I knew something was going on when after a few drinks the men would retire to one of the several bedrooms. I didn’t say anything to anyone and did what my mother often told me: “Mind your own business and leave grown folks’ business alone.” Some years later, my hunch proved correct when I saw on television the lady who paid me in cash daily being led out of her house in handcuffs, while the reporter spoke of the prostitution bust in North Little Rock. I never said anything to my mother or my cousin Jacquelyn about what I knew about that house.
My position at Arkansas Paper Company didn’t turn out to be the glamorous office job I had dreamed of, but it was better than the brothel or cutting grass all day. I was put into a huge warehouse, where I spent most of the time trying to keep out of the way of people with real jobs. It turned out Mr. Seligman really didn’t have a position for someone so young and small, so I ran errands for the secretaries and for the men who worked in the warehouse. Otherwise my eight-hour days were spent reading and attempting to look busy and stay out of trouble.
It seemed like everything was just too good to be true, and I set out in what now appears to have been a deliberate act of sabotage, or maybe my old book-throwing self was just rearing his dumb head one more time.
After my first two weeks at the paper company, I received my first paycheck—eighty-eight dollars after taxes. I decided I needed a wallet to protect my money from strangers, so I cashed my check at the downtown branch of Worthern Bank and walked a few doors to Woolworth’s.
Woolworth’s was one of my favorite stores. It wasn’t as expensive as most of the stores downtown, and the lunch counter sold fried chicken, cheeseburgers, and thick malted shakes. My plan was to buy the wallet first, then sit down at the lunch counter and treat myself to a fried chicken dinner or a cheeseburger—or maybe both, since I felt like a rich man.
A white saleslady with thick bifocals directed me to the aisle where the wallets were located, and my eyes immediately spotted a beautiful black imitation leather wallet. I picked it up and looked at the $5.95 price tag. I subtracted the money in my head from the amount that was bulging in my pocket and realized that almost ten dollars of my money would be depleted with the purchase of the wallet and lunch.
I looked around and noticed that the long aisle was completely empty, with the exception of an elderly black man pushing a broom in the opposite direction. I quickly removed the price tag from the wallet, balled it up, and put it into my front pants pocket. I placed the shiny wallet in my back pocket. I decided to abandon my lunch treat and walked briskly out the revolving doors near the bus stop. No sooner had I smelled the fresh summer air than a huge hand grabbed my arm so tight that I could feel fingernails digging into my flesh.
“You’re under arrest for shoplifting,” a deep male voice said. I turned around to face one of the meanest-looking white men I had ever seen. In one motion he lifted the wallet from my back pocket, pulled my arms behind my back, and placed silver handcuffs around my wrists. I was scared to death, and when he asked my name, who my folks were, and where I lived, I became mute. Three days would pass before I uttered another word.
MY TWO-NIGHT STAY IN THE Pulaski County Juvenile Detention Center taught me one crucial lesson: Jail was not for me. After being arrested, I was hauled off to the Little Rock police station, where I was photographed and fingerprinted and treated like all the other criminals, despite being only fourteen years old. My silence continued throughout this process. I decided that if I was going to be sent to reform school, then nobody would know, and that included my mother and sisters. If the policemen didn’t know who I was, then how could they tell anyone what I’d done?
When the officers continued their questioning, I just stared passively, as if I didn’t hear them, as if I were both mute and deaf. The officers talked among themselves about what they should do to me. After some debate, I was put in a police car and taken to Juvenile Hall.
Juvenile Hall was located in a huge redbrick building with barbed-wire fences all around it and a security guard posted in a tiny booth. On Sunday outings my family would sometimes pass this place, and Mama would remind my sisters and me that this was the place bad kids were sent and sometimes they threw away the keys. I felt like I was d
oomed to hell for yet again embarrassing my mother.
I was given a used pair of pajamas and placed in a small cell that looked just like the ones in prison movies on television. The space included an iron cot with dingy white sheets and a pancake-thin pillow. In the corner was a small washbowl and a steel bucket that I assumed was my toilet. The only illumination in the room was from the car headlights on the streets below and a single shaft of light from the hallway directly outside the cell.
Members of the staff tried to talk to me, asking me if I was hungry or if I was scared. Of course I was scared, but I didn’t know if I was more frightened of spending the rest of my life in jail, or the whipping Mama would give me once she found out what I had done. I figured I’d starve to death before I told them anything.
In my silence, I would scheme ways to escape and move to Michigan and search for my real father. I figured he lived in Flint, since that’s where I was born and we had a lot of relatives who lived there. I knew if I could just get out of the cell, adventures galore awaited me outside Arkansas.
My thoughts were constantly interrupted by guards who would bring food to my room on a steel tray and look at me and ask, “The cat still got your tongue?”
When the guards would leave, some of the other detainees tried to engage me in conversation by hollering out, “Hey, you in the middle cell. What did you do?” When I wouldn’t answer, they speculated on what crime I had committed and whether I was really deaf and dumb.
Early Saturday morning, I awoke and knew immediately that I wasn’t having a bad dream. To make matters worse, it was ridiculously hot for early June, even for Arkansas, making the cell feel like an oven.
I could hear birds twitter softly outside as I wiped summer sweat from my forehead and wrote my first story in my head—a script that I prayed would release me.
What Becomes of the Brokenhearted Page 5
