by John Ridley
One in eight white men couldn't find work. For black men it was one in four.
On average a white man could expect to live sixty-one years. A black man, ten years fewer.
Per year, just about sixteen blacks were killed by lynching— hung or burned or beaten to death.
Officially.
That is the world I came into.
Early On
I don't think you can imagine the loneliness of a child born different. Not physically different, not handicapped, not deformed or marked. A child born different in a way you can't describe or recognize, but that's just as real as the kid with a bad leg or mangled hand—always the outcast, always the one standing in a corner, ghosdike, watching the rest of the world parade by. It's as if there's something about him, some odd and un-normal thing inside him, invisible but clearly advertising he's not the same as everyone else. The response from everyone else being laughs and ridicule because they don't know what to do with a kid born different except to mock it. And that feeling of not belonging, of lonely isolation in a world of people and the knowing that you will never ever be like them and will never ever be accepted by anyone … It's a feeling that lasts a lifetime. It's a scar that never fades.
I WAS BORN IN HARLEM. More than that, the specifics, the exact where and when of the event, are lost to me. By the time I was old enough to want to know those things about me I had no one to ask. My pop, Kenneth Mann, and I didn't talk much. My mother, Anna, I couldn't talk to at all. What I can say for certain is the fondest memory I have of my childhood is the day I was able to leave it all behind me.
I was an only child. The only child my mother would have, and the only child my father would want, and to say “want” is an assumption, as he often made my desirability questionable. My father was a big man, over six feet and carrying nearly two hundred pounds, and is best described as a combination of angry and pathetic. His anger was easy to understand. He was a black man, and being a black man in the early parts of the twentieth century would be enough to give the mildest of men some rage. He was a poor man, too. Even in the North, the industrial, progressive North, finding a steady, good-paying job was a trick he never got down to habit. My father took whatever work he could: a shoe shine, a bathroom attendant, a janitor in the subway system. A newsboy. A grown man, six feet plus, working as a newsie. “Don't Look” jobs, I heard my father call them. The people you serve don't look at you while you clean their shoes, pass them a towel to dry their hands. Just do your work, make change for their crisp new fives and tens, and give them a “Thanks yuh, suh” when you're done. To them you don't exist. You don't matter. I said before: Pop's anger I could understand.
What I couldn't understand was him being so pitiful. It had to do with, I guess, his accident. About as far back as I can remember my pop had been debilitated. At one point he had worked in construction. Not as any kind of skilled laborer or tradesman. Blacks didn't much get the education needed for that kind of work, and if they did they just plain didn't get that kind of work. So my father, like a lot of other black fathers, was a human pack-mule: lifting lumber, carrying bricks. Doing whatever kind of labor was too much or too hard or too far beneath the whites. One day, on the job, he'd injured himself, his back or hip lifting or hauling or doing whatever. I'm not exactly sure how. I'm not exactly sure how badly. He walked fine, without much of a limp I could see. Had no problem with stairs or heavy loads that I could tell. But he was hurt. So he'd say. He was hurt enough to stop working and start on the dole. Start, and never quit. Why should he? To his way of thinking, why should he slave; why shine shoes or shill newspapers when he could be handed money? Why try when not trying paid the same? With nothing else to do, he passed the hours with booze, and pretty soon, when a liquor buzz couldn't last him the day, he graduated to grass and pills. Pop became an equal-opportunity abuser. He would drink anything too thin to eat. He would smoke anything you could roll. In a tight spot, glue in a bag would do just fine. His highs expressed themselves with their own personalities. The speed high that kept him jittery and dancing, eager to get somewhere even though he had nowhere to be. His booze high was a sullen low that put heat to the anger he carried. It recognized no one, came at whoever crossed it with swinging fists looking to pay back the whole world for all the no-good it'd handed him. And there was the weed high that kept Pop laughing when there was nothing to laugh at. Didn't matter. Pop would make up things to laugh about, act a clown and laugh at himself if he had to. He would make noises, do big, broad pantomimes of people who lived in the building. Put on a whole little crazy act. Watching him was no different from watching a program on television. Better than that. A TV show didn't chase you around the apartment, tickle you to the ground when it caught you. A TV show didn't take you, lift you in the air, smile at you with a grin that was almost coonish but full of love, and tell you: “You my boy, Jackie. That's my boy.” And me and Mom would laugh along and play along, and bad as things were, even though we were laughing at a man lifted on dope, for a while Pop could make us forget the troubles we lived with. If I had to pick, without a doubt that was my favorite high. Thing of it was, the pop I left when I went to school in the morning was never the same one I returned to at night. That made going home real frightening, every step of the walk asking: Is there a hug waiting for me, or a slap? A story that won't end, or a whupping that'll go on and on? Sometimes I'd be too scared to climb the stairs to the apartment. Long after the other kids had gone home for dinner and there was no one to play with, I'd sit on the stoop of our building and try to listen through all the other noises that fought each other in the city. If I could hear laughing from our apartment, I'd go up. If I heard screaming, crashing dishes … Well, it got so I taught myself to sit on the stoop well into night when I had to.
But no matter the high, Pop was high. Always. The drink and drugs made him useless, and being useless—a father that was no good for his family—that's what made him pathetic. That left caring for the family, what the three of us had that passed for a family, to my mother.
My mother was beautiful. I remember that most about her. She was a very dark-skinned lady, from the Caribbean, or at least her family was. She had soft features and was a little plump, which made her face more round than angular. Her hair had no kink. It was wavy and near shoulder-length, what back then got called “good hair.” In my memory, my mother was without blemish.
What else I remember is Mom worked hard to give us what Pop's aid couldn't: decent food and wearable clothes. Our home, our apartment—a couple of rooms off three flights of stairs—was what you would call a “make-do” home. We made do with bread when there was no meat to stick between die slices. We made do with watery soup when there was no bread. We made do with the occasional rat because they ate the cockroaches that infected every dark corner. In the winters we were always cold, but we never froze. We were always hungry, but we never starved. Somehow, because of Mom, we always made do.
Mom was a domestic. Domestic was polite for maid. She was a cleaning woman for the white folks on the East Side and the Upper West Side, any side of town she could find a floor that needed to be scrubbed, a toilet that could use some polishing. Mom worked a lot. Work was easy for her to find. People liked her. She was honest. She was, I remember, cheerful. She would wake up mornings early and fix me breakfast, doing little extras like cutting strawberries and leaving them for me to put on my cereal, then go out into the dark before dawn to ride a subway to the first of four, five apartments or houses she would clean that day. She would come home again, late, tired, but not so tired that she couldn't make me a meal, wash me, then put me to bed. And every night after my mother turned out the light I would feel a butterfly kiss on my forehead. Then I would hear her voice in the dark whispering to me: “You're a special one, Jackie Mann. Don't let nobody ever tell you otherwise.”
Special, she would say. Different, I would think.
After that Mom would leave, but through the door, before I fell asleep, I could hear her
humming or whistling a tune. I could hear her laughing at something funny that must have come across her mind.
Sometimes I could hear her arguing with my pop. More than sometimes. Truth is, he did most of the arguing—about how we were broke because Mom didn't work hard enough, or about how no matter everything else she had to do she didn't keep our apartment straight enough, or about how she hadn't come home with his nightly bottle of booze soon enough. But with all that I never recall once hearing Mom cry with despair or sigh with the weight of the day that would only get added to tomorrow. I never heard her complain when my father would stumble in at all hours from a late-night binge, breath so strong it filled the apartment with a gin perfume, and pass out on the bed or the couch or, if his aim was off, the middle of the floor. Despite her life, my mother was without gripe. All I ever remember hearing from my mother were gentle songs she sang to herself late into the night.
MY HARLEM WAS NOT IN RENAISSANCE. My Harlem, the Harlem I grew up in, was no longer a colony of black culture—no longer home to Hughes and Barthe, Ellington and Webb—but had declined into a ghetto for the colored. Colored is what we were. Not yet Negro or black and a long way from being African American. In the day we were colored. At best. Mostly we were them, and those people when we weren't just plain old niggers. And while we had things better than blacks down South—easy on the Jim Crow, light on lynchings—being black in Harlem came with its own troubles.
The Depression had hurt everyone. Everyone was looking for a way to earn money. Out-of-work whites started taking menial jobs they'd previously thought worthy only of blacks. Blacks were left with no jobs at all. But still they kept coming to Harlem, blacks from other parts of New York. Southern blacks and Jamaican blacks and blacks from the West Indies. They crammed into tenement buildings and row housing, jammed themselves into apartments that were divided, then subdivided again, all in the belief that living in the black capital of the world would give them opportunities they wouldn't have anywhere else. They believed wrong. Harlem became one block after another of folks who couldn't get work enough to keep food on the table.
Mornings would find a string of humanity—weary-looking men, mothers with children, most in the po' folk's uniform of secondhand clothes worn threadbare—on a corner of 131st Street, stretched a block or more, waiting to rub a hand over the trunk of the Tree of Hope. The tree was just a tree, nothing special about it except that people believed with a blind desperation in a myth that had grown with the wood: that it had the power to bring good luck. The luck being whoever touched it would find a job. Any job. I don't know if I realized it then, or just felt it later: How sad it was to see so many black people, their belief in themselves so worn away, their only faith was superstition.
Into the decay, mix poor housing, poor facilities, poor schools and education. Add the heat of summer, and you've cooked yourself up a riot. It's what happens when you treat humans like animals and keep diem in a twenty-by-twenty-block cage. Riots are what happen when you take away a person's status, when the only voice you leave them is the self-expression of violence. Twice in my era Harlem burned. Once in 1934 after a white store-owner beat a black teenager for shoplifting maybe a nickel's worth of goods. The second came in 1943 when a white cop shot a black serviceman who'd come to the aid of a drunk woman. A drunk white woman. Didn't matter it was a northern city—New York City. A black man who mixed with a white woman could usually count on nothing better than a bullet for his trouble.
But Harlem, even in decline, had its own flavor. For most living there it never occurred to live anywhere else. Each street and building spilled with life. From any given fire escape came the sound of a young man working his sax or horn, while down below, girls would double-Dutch to his riffs. There was all manner of food cooking night and day: Jamaican food, Caribbean food, West Indian food. Soul food. The whole of Harlem was an open-air kitchen, and the smells would find their way into every inch of every block. Fire hydrants were for hot days, and parked cars were for dodging snowballs in winter. And beyond Harlem was New York City. New York City, with parks and trains and skyscraper canyons, was like a whole wide world unto itself. The world belonged to me and Li'l Mo, Li'l Mo being my best friend. Don't recall how we got to be friends. He lived in the building next to mine, but so did about a hundred other kids.
Other kids didn't get along with me.
Other kids didn't like me.
Other kids thought I was different.
Mo was and always would be short for his age. He was plump, but in years would burn off enough fat to pass for stocky. He had very dark skin, and sitting in the middle of his otherwise large, round head were very narrow eyelids. So narrow you'd think, from looking at him, his eyes were no good for seeing. Sometimes he would stand outside of five-and-dimes pretending to be blind just to get free candy. He got a lot of free candy. The other peculiar thing about Li'l Mo was his ears. They weren't all crinkled and curved like most people's. They were a solid mass of flesh, looking like a mold someone had filled with hot wax but forgot to scrape clean. A kid had teased Mo about his ears one time. Mo beat the boy silly. He got sent out of school for two weeks for that, but no one ever said anything about Li'l Mo's ears again.
Maybe because, same as me, he knew what it was like to be different, me and Mo took to each other. Together we took to the streets: The subway was an all-day roller coaster to be ridden from the Bronx to Brooklyn and back again. Central Park was always good to roam, a big Cracker Jack box with a daily surprise. It's where Mo and I saw our first naked woman, a lady bum, dirt caked, breasts stretched balloons, taking a bath in the lake. She was scaly and hideous. Even from a distance you could smell her stink. But same as with a carnival freak, as she washed, not me or Li'l Mo could peel our eyes from her. We stared long and hard. The peep show ended when a couple of beat pounders splashed out into the lake to get the woman. She gave them a good wrestling, but they finally got her out of the water. Me and Mo hooted the cops as they hauled our introduction to womanhood away.
There was an evening I came home from running the streets with Mo. We'd been playing for I don't know how long when we headed back to the apartment building where I lived. Outside on the stoop were a lot of people standing around and carrying on. I didn't think anything of it. New York, Harlem, a stoop was a social club where everything from Plessy vs. Ferguson to Bebop versus Traditional got discussed. I didn't think much, either, when all them people looked at me coming, then looked away, not wanting to catch my eye. They shuffled from my path, all quiet and nervous, as I walked into the lobby. By then an ill feeling was walking with me. I was a child, but old enough to know that when adults got quiet and nervous, there was always some badness around.
I was not hardly ready for the badness waiting for me.
At the bottom of the stairs that led to our apartment, sprawled among groceries that had spilled back down from the first landing with her, was my mother. Dead. Climbing the stairs to fix dinner, or wash clothes, or just do whatever it took to make it through another night before the next long day, her heart gave out. Quit, as if it had suddenly decided the hard and thankless life my mother lived wasn't worth the effort it took to pump her blood. So it let her off the hook. It let her die.
Alone.
I wasn't around. I'd been off playing when maybe I could've been home helping out, doing chores, doing something to lessen my mother's burden.
My father wasn't around. He'd been out lessening his own burden with liquor.
I stood for what seemed like a day short of forever, staring at my mother heaped right where she was. All those people around, and no one bothered to cover her or move her. No one came to take me away and lie to me about how everything was going to be all right and how my mother had just gone on to a better place.
I guess that part wouldn't have been a lie. Not by much.
But all those people, they did nothing. They just viewed the scene in confused quiet—an audience come to see a show, but disappointed with what they
got for their money.
In time Grandma Mae, who wasn't my grandma or anyone's grandma but just a nice old lady from up the block who everybody loved and everybody called Grandma, came and took me to her apartment. She gave me some moo juice to drink and told me it was all right to cry if I wanted.
So I cried.
Eventually Grandma Mae took me back to my apartment building. Mama's body was gone. So were the groceries that had spilled to the floor with her. We climbed the stairs, passing the landing that had ended my mother's life, and went inside.
Eventually my pop came home, his breath filling the space with its usual stink of booze. Grandma Mae told him what had happened to Mom.
He stood where he was for a second, looking shocked. Then he said: “Goddamn it. You know how much them caskets cost?”
WITH THE PASSING OF MOM life changed. Changed more than just me missing her every minute of every hour. Pop may have been the only adult in the house, but Mom being gone made him no more of a parent. Opposite of that, he became less of one. With the guilt he carried, that I hoped to God he carried, without Mom around to mellow him, or maybe just because he was free to live any way he wanted, Pop applied himself to being an addict of the lowest order, trading his many highs for one. The angry, sullen one. It's only variation: Either he was awake and in a mood to hit something, or plain passed out. If ever he was in no condition to work, to provide, he only got more that way. Relief bought his basic needs: drinking money to pay for his benders, rent money to pay for a roof to pass out under. Food money, clothes money, money for any other thing we needed to get by had to come from somewhere else.
Somewhere else was me.
And very instantly my days of being a kid—running the streets, playing—were over. Not even in my teens and I was working whatever job I could find for whatever money I could make. Mostly it was piece work, sympathy work: shop owners who knew my mom was dead and my pop was dead drunk and let me do what I could around their stores—washing dishes, washing windows, scrubbing floors. Between trying to go to school and whatever time I had on weekends, if there was something to be cleaned, brushed, swept, or polished, my little black hands were having at it. At too young an age I learned what labor was. Hard labor. I got an education in what it was like to come home every night, fingers cramped in the shape of a scrub brush and a hot ache in my stooped back.
