“Now just a minute, Sweetie,” he’d respond in a kind, gentle voice. “Let me get in the door.”
His routine was to check his messages, get his mail, and sit down. “What did the boy do now?” he’d finally ask.
As Mom ran down her list, I had my own secret list of things that I had gotten away with and didn’t get caught for. Truth is, ain’t no tellin’ what I had done, usually associated with fighting, staying gone, playing with fire, breaking windows, not doing homework, missing school assignments, and disobeying teachers. And worst of all, disobeying or disrespecting my mother.
He grabbed me firmly by my collar, almost lifting me from my feet. “Boy, don’chu eeevvvver! I mean neevvver! … let your mother hafta tell me nuthin’ ’bout chu disrespecting her ever again! You understand me, boy?”
It wasn’t gonna get no clearer than that. Well, yeah! What else was there to say but “Yes, Dad”?
He’d let go. “Go apologize to your mother now!”
No matter where Dad was working, Mom had a big hot three-course dinner ready at six most every day. The eight of us crowded around our small table. My seat was next to Dad in case I needed a good smackin’ off my chair. If Momma caught me kicking a sibling under the table, I knew better than to let him see it.
“Chick! Smack ’im, Chick!” (I never heard her call him Melvin.)
“What? Smack him? For what? Boy, what’d you do now?”
I’d exude the old innocent, puzzled, can’t-imagine-what-she’s-talkin’-about look.
“Chick, SMACK ’IM!” A slight tap would breeze across my forehead, barely making contact.
But as drama in our family continued much as always, it was different for Henry. His account of his mom and dad’s domestics had taken a turn for the worse, and my folks’ squabbles now sounded like patty-cake. His parents soon divorced, and he stayed with Aunt Rhoda.
That day we came up with a secret code word, vowing that what we said or committed to was a sacred oath. The code word was “FOR REAL.”
So at nine years old we made a pact vowing revenge in the event either of us was killed in a fight, also that neither of us would get married until after the age of twenty-five. We both vowed and promised to hog-tie, gag, and kidnap the other if necessary. “FOR REAL …”
“The cousins” became our identity. Our families celebrated every holiday together. After my family moved, our homes were just under a mile apart. We didn’t see each other or talk every day then, but we always experienced each other’s lives as an extension of our own. We savored every morsel of growing up, from cowboys to girls. (Once pretty girls moved in, most other topics got displaced.)
’Bout fourth grade: Mr. Roy Johnson, a white man I didn’t even know, had never met, decided to sponsor me and Jimmie, another neighborhood kid, to an annual membership in the YMCA and even paid for us to go to “the Y,” a white boy summer camp. We two were the first colored boys to do either.
The YMCA camp was way different from the Ober Club. These boys had real luggage instead of cardboard boxes. No one used ropes made of their momma’s old nylon stockings to hold up their pants. The first day, when they auctioned off special prizes and certain privileges, it was clear that these kids had money I couldn’t imagine.
Although me ’n’ Jimmie were the only colored boys, we were treated very well (except every now and then when somebody called one of us “nigger” and fighting became mandatory). Camp staff would break it up immediately, not like at the club.
But we had informal tag team wrestling matches every day at nap time when Gary, the counselor, left our cabin—me ’n’ Jimmie against whom-so-ever, however they matched themselves up. These guys were strong and athletic, and some of ’em could fight, but they lacked the advantage of pure raw desperation. After a few days, my cabinmates had talked it over and concluded that it was unfair and inappropriate that I fought so hard and for so long after I should have given up and tapped out. They were deeply sincere, and I fully tried to understand, but I couldn’t imagine how to fight any differently.
I loved swimming at camp, one of the first loves of my life, but no matter how much training I got, lesson after lesson, I just never got good at it, and never got any better than I had been, especially treading water. I could swim but had to muscle up every inch of the way in order not to sink fast. The St. Croix River at the YMCA camp was way different than the lake at Ober had been. But swimming out beyond the warning point, flirting with this amazing force called “the current,” and then diving for clams was my favorite adventure.
“Hang on, Melvin! Hang on for dear life!” someone shouted. I had grabbed onto a floating log and was going along for the ride, but I wasn’t in any real trouble.
When I was in fifth grade, Momma was eight-point-ninety-nine months pregnant with my baby brother. I had done something ridiculously terrible in class and was in deep trouble. Dad hadn’t been home, so Mom and I had to walk about three blocks to the convent so Sister Mary Five could tell Mom of my endless list of issues and dastardly classroom deeds.
Mom was sick and tired and had had it up to here! She listened to Sister carefully, then burst into one of those spurts of sudden laughing and crying at the same time. Then she got a grip on herself and apologized for the outburst. “Sister, I can see the effect he is having on you, but you’ve only had him a couple of months. I’ve had this boy all his life! How do you think I feel?”
After a few moments of laughing and crying together, the two women had won each other’s sympathy. I was grounded for a week, had to do a bunch of makeup work, and was taken off the football team.
“Their church is way different from ours!” My sister Terrie was just returning from visiting a Baptist church. “They yell and shout at God, so you can hear everything they say!” I trembled a bit at the thought of yelling at God, but was curious. “And they don’t speak any Latin, so you can understand all the words.”
What the heck kind of church could that be? At my church, the Catholic priest whispered in languages that no one could understand, just in case they could hear what he was saying. The biggest church mystery for me was how people knew when to stand, sit, or kneel.
Praise God for shining His glorious light! Multicolored rays shined through blue, red, and yellow stained glass windows. Oh, the rainbows, shapes, and colors! When I squinted my eyelids just so, fluttering and blinking, images appeared, changed, moved. Catholics were holier than everybody else because Jesus said St. Peter was “the Rock” upon which he’d build his church. So quite naturally, we St. Peter Claver Negroes were better than other heathen pagan-ass Negroes. The church’s location, almost at Lexington, would tell you that. St. Peter Claver was an extreme, absolute Catholic situation ironclad with “Thou Shalt Nots”—mainly “Thou shalt not worship false gods,” which really meant not visiting other churches. (Even though the letter “C” in YMCA stood for Christian, Sister Mary Five had forbidden me to go to YMCA camp, risking excommunication, which meant eternal damnation to hell. I risked it.)
Other than that, confession wiped the sin slate clean. You needn’t confess the lightweight patty-cake misdemeanor “venial sins,” just the heavy-duty felonious “mortal sins.” If you didn’t, the trapdoor gate of hell was gonna open up beneath your feet and the devil himself was gonna appear in person and take your damned ass straight to hell. “Oh, forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I had dirty impure filthy thoughts of doin’ it with a girl!”
Getting the courage to admit such evil wickedness to one so holy as Father Lugar was just about all I could bear. The anticipation was like rolling in a grenade and waiting for an explosion. I was cringing, expecting him to faint or fall out of the confessional—no, get up and point to the front door. “That’s it! Get up and get thee and thine evil wicked ass out of here and go straight to hell.” But he usually took it better than I thought he would, rarely flinched, buckled, or shook his head.
Slight boners always came and went, all my life. But about fifth grade, they started to come, invade,
and stay like uninvited guests at the worst times. Aww naw! Not in church walking back to the pew from Holy Communion! Oh no! Not in front of the classroom during a spelling bee! I hadn’t even realized it. It was just there, no reason, no explanation. Just BOING! Gradually all the skin on my body had retracted so tight I could hardly move my fingers, wiggle my toes, or even blink my eyes. It was too late! Ronnie, Mr. Popular, charisma and charm, the biggest mouth. “Melvin, WHAT-IS-THAT-IN-YOUR-POCKET?” pointing at my crotch as though genuinely shocked and concerned. “No, Melvin, turn back around! Move your hand! Melvin, are you okay?”
“Man, shut up, Ronnie!”
Red-hot flamin’ fireballs, the size of basketballs, crashed straight down from heaven above, plungin’ nowhere else but in my backyard. The skies and the ground were ablaze! I woke up sweating, trembling, huffin’ ’n’ puffin’, scared, confused, but mostly deeply ashamed. I was now in the possession of these boners and red dreams that would have me at any time, without my understanding, and especially against my will. This was too evil, too filthy, way beyond anything I could tell anyone, not even Henry.
Somebody coulda ’splained that adolescent male testosterone gets real active, and semen can build up and overflow. Coulda spared me incalculable, excruciating mental and emotional guilt, shame, agony. But no … ! Sin and demonic possession were the best I could make of it. I prayed and asked God for forgiveness, lived every second of the day terrified and “scared stiff” of sleep.
My school picture, 1961–62.
Then when I was fourteen years old and in a deep sleep, a strange commotion from deep in the earth kidnapped me and placed me in the midst of loud shouts, scuffling, and surrounding noises. I scurried around, trapped inside a corral with fourteen other Black boys my age. The scuffling feet of multiple skirmishes stirred the dirt into thin clouds of swirling dust.
We all ran in circles, trying to escape. Surrounding cowboys rounded us up with cracking whips, herding us like cattle. Shouts, threats, hollering voices echoed louder and louder. Near the entrance of a barn, we climbed a high chain-link fence. A single shot rang out. A boy who was just about to make it over the fence dropped hard to the ground, a limp piece of meat.
Everything stopped more suddenly than it had begun. I stood over him, trying to recognize his face as life raced from his body. I knew him well but didn’t know him at all. I watched every feature of his face distort and transform into that of every Black male I’d ever known. I didn’t recognize him because, while being all of them, he was none of them.
When he finally lay still and all his life had flickered out, his face remained with its light complexion, thick lips, and wide nostrils. Then I awakened, frightened and confused, knowing that this was no run-of-the-mill routine dream.
6
Free at Last
Central High School was a whole new adventurous universe. First of all, with my family having moved to a different neighborhood, me ’n’ Henry, my twin cousin, could seriously connect. For the first time, we went to the same school. We dressed alike, wore each other’s clothes, and spent the night at each other’s house about once a month, almost always staying awake until late, then talking ourselves to sleep. Henry’s friends became my closest companions.
Henry and I got our first jobs together in the basement of Mataway’s, the store up on University, assembling cardboard dividers for boxes, making one to two cents a divider. Two evenings a week, we’d be the only ones in the entire building. We spent most of the work time talking, playing, laughing, sharing secrets, throwing boxes and crates at each other, occasionally getting some work done, but mostly speculating on what the future would bring. The job lasted almost a year—but we got fired from our first job together.
“Don’t do it, Carter! Body-slam him against the wall, and you’re suspended from school!”
Gym was the only class I really enjoyed. This was the first class where I was in the upper echelon. But Mr. Wolfe was clear and up-front about almost never handing out As. Heck!
The class really didn’t teach me anything new. Besides, the way we grew up in my neighborhood, everyone was already athletic. So now in wrestling class, I snatched up my opponent, lifting him over my head, about to slam his body into a padded wall. Teachers and staff told me not to do it. Classmates dared me—“Do it!” I did it, making it look as real as I could without actually hurting him.
“That’s it, Carter—to the principal’s office! You’re suspended!”
Dad came to the principal’s office. Mr. Wolfe told him how no one could compete with me, that I’d already beaten current wrestling team members. I returned to class under the conditions of not body-slamming classmates—and joining the wrestling team. I did join the team and stuck with it for a couple of weeks, but I got bored and just stopped going.
Ronnie Reed, my grade school tormenter and dear friend, was a featured football running back, soon to be homecoming king. For me, football had been among my first loves, but my athleticism didn’t translate. Maybe I wasn’t as good as I thought I was.
I had allowed Dee Kay, another guy on the team, to bully me for a long time. I didn’t respond the day he hit me in my mouth with a shoe, but kickin’ his ass was high on my secret hit list. One late autumn afternoon, I took my time coming out of the locker room after football practice. Earlier that day, knowing full well that Dee Kay was in a rotten mood, I deliberately said something to trigger his retaliation, pretending it was innocent.
I stepped out of the building and saw a crowd had gathered directly along the path I needed to walk. Excitement hovered in the atmosphere.
“What’s goin’ on?” I asked, pretending not to know.
“There’s gonna be a fight!”
“Oh yeah? Who’s fighting?”
“YOU ARE!”
I continued walking, avoiding eye contact with everyone. A pregnant hush fell as the crowd made way for the upcoming human sacrifice. Dee Kay’s large slue-footed frame was directly in my line of travel, blocking my path.
Now, there was an unspoken, unwritten “Fair Fight” protocol in those days. The slightest rumor that there was “s’posed to be a fight” brought out a contagious festive occasion, the promise that a crowd would not be denied. It was as though each spectator had purchased a front-row ticket and was entitled to a command performance. But everyone had to get in on the act. Crowd members were the agitators, announcers, comedians, and officials. General rules were simple: it was to be one-on-one, with no weapons used, not even any kicking. After the fight had gone on long enough that the outcome had been determined, self-appointed officials broke it up and explained their decision.
“Let me hold your stuff.” Guff always had my back. Slowly I took off my white speckled sweater from last Christmas and went into a slow-folding act, somewhat playing to the crowd, but more importantly, getting inside Dee Kay’s head, as Mr. Nins had taught me.
Dee Kay’s problem was that the girls he liked, liked me, but I’d rather be his friend than his enemy. He had told me during football practice, “We gonna fight!” This fight was his idea, but I had always known that this fight was inevitable and this time I had baited him. Patiently, I had been waiting for the right place and the right time. This was it!
Dee Kay approached, overconfident, greatly overestimating himself while greatly underestimating me (exactly as I had expected). Technically the fight had been over-billed. After minimal contact, he was on the ground looking up at me, willing to forgive and forget the whole thing. I stopped, accepted his offer, helped him up, and we shook hands. I suffered slight bruises to the knuckles of my fist. He had a slightly blackened eye and a trickle-down nosebleed. We walked away friends.
From that day on, he became a most significant ally in the heat of battles to come.
But high school had stuff going on inside the classrooms as well as outside. It wasn’t that I became a better student so much as I didn’t want to get worse. I had been secretly checking Ronnie Reed’s report card. Most crucial was t
hat he didn’t get better grades than I did and find out about it. By this time, my complex embarrassment about flunking second and third grade was fully engaged. So I decided that I’d get whatever grade he got. Even if it meant studying for the first time in my life. I got some self-induced Cs and an occasional B.
Every teacher I ever had before ninth grade, in a Catholic private school, was a Black female nun. Public school teachers were a new and different experience. Classroom protocol was way more relaxed. We didn’t have to stand when an adult entered the room. We didn’t have to pray upon entering and exiting the classroom. The teachers didn’t know each student as intimately, and they couldn’t read our minds. Public schools had many, many more students than SPC, allowing me to get lost in the shuffle. Teachers couldn’t watch me as close. Assignments were up to the student. And public school teachers never kicked my ass. Those grade school Oblate Sisters from Baltimore proved to have been tougher than any athletic, military, martial art instructor or any specialized trainer yet to come. As a child I did stupid crummy stuff, but I had to get up early in the morning and really think about doing stupid crap in order to pull the wool over their eyes. They were always ready to kick your ass. Among their main impact on me was the terror of disrespecting Black women … or maybe any women. I wasn’t prepared for some of the high school experiences to come.
In ninth grade, everything was about girls. That “Baby Brother” nickname was long gone. I hadn’t originally liked my real name, because except for my dad, I had never heard of any other “Melvin.” But man! When those pretty girls said my name, it was poetic, melodious, harmonic music. “M-E-L-V-I-N!” Sweet sugarcoated candies flavored the taste buds, then oozed from their lips, dripped from their chops, licking their fingers! Oh! “M-E-L-V-I-N!” … a symphonic rhapsody!
Diesel Heart Page 5
