by John Ridley
At the end of the first week of what felt like a month of slaving, I counted the money I'd earned. I counted the nickels and the pennies, the two quarters I'd been given. Three dollars in total. Not even. All together it was something near thirty cents short of that. One week. How many hours? Three dollars. Not even.
I started to cry. I cried for myself and my youth that was gone. I cried for my mother, for the life I now knew—knew by experience—she'd lived; empty work muled through from morning deep into night. I cried for my future—in sudden, sharp focus—of me being no better, no different than a poor dumb animal that labored only for the sake of living to labor another day.
When I got done crying, I took my almost three dollars and put it in ajar that got hidden in a drawer. I put myself to bed and slept. I got up to work again.
Eventually I found steady work with Sergeant Kolawole, who ran a reclamation shop. A junk dealer is what he was. He'd find busted fans and radios and clocks, fix them up, sell them again. In an area where buying things new was strictly a luxury, Sergeant Kolawole did himself a good business. But the straight-from-the-garbage scrap made his shop filthy. Cleaning it was hard work. Harder was sitting through the sergeant's stories. According to him, he had been a resistance fighter in Ethiopia and had been forced to flee to America just ahead of the Italian army. That was basically the tale. The details were always changing, and never interesting. But the sergeant paid good, so I listened like I cared.
When I wasn't odd-jobbing it, I was in school. School being no more pleasure than work. Besides being whipped from scraping and scrubbing, besides falling behind because I didn't have any time to study—no one at home to help me study—I was very quickly becoming the target of every wise-cracking kid there was. With the little money we had, the little I made and the little my father didn't drink or shoot or sniff away, there wasn't much for new clothes or shoes. As raggedy as most every other Harlem kid might have been, with my too-short pants and ventilated shirts I looked as if I'd just made a break from the poor farm. Kids aren't kids until they've got someone to pick on—the fat kid or the kid with glasses. Now they had a new one: po' boy Jackie.
I was an easy target.
I was different.
I got hit with every sharp remark there was: “Just come in from the cotton fields, Jackie?” “Jackie, don't you know Lincoln done freed the slaves?” “You ain't foolin' us, Jackie. You ain't colored; you just dirty.” Bad as all that was, worse was when, time to time, some of the kids would give me pennies and tell me to polish up their shoes or fetch them something like I was their nigger. That hurt the most—getting treated like a nobody. It made me angry they didn't respect me, didn't care how hard I had to work to provide for me and my father. But hurt as I was, angry as I was, I wasn't so much of either that I didn't take their pennies. The shame, the humiliation I felt, was my own. But so was their money. Every little bit helped.
I saved up what I didn't spend, always making very sure I had enough money to go out and buy my father a high if he was too strung out to do the job himself. In Harlem, highs were easy to come by. Everywhere else in the city the police might've been cracking down on pushers and addicts, but across 125th Street it was just coloreds getting lifted. Coloreds robbing coloreds to get lifted. Coloreds killing coloreds because they were lifted. So what? Coloreds? Let 'em bleed.
Not that there's any right age for it, but I was far too young to be buying liquor and such. I brought that up to my father once, the fact that a kid had no business running down to a corner or dark alley and copping dope. He smacked me in the head so hard it made my ear bleed. We never discussed my age and his drugs again.
SUNDAYS WERE GOOD DAYS, about the only decent time clinging to the skeleton of my childhood. Sundays were when I used to go to Grandma Mae's for dinner. I would make the walk of a couple of blocks around five o'clock in the evening, my father not much caring if I was going to see her or going to play on the third rail of the IRT line. Not caring so long as I'd remembered to leave him a bottle of booze or a bag of grass.
More than a block from Mae's and already you could smell her cooking: glazed ham, apple fritters, bread fresh made and hot. The aromas alone would have just about floated you to her door if you didn't know the way. Sometimes it would be only me and Mae for dinner. Most times she would invite others from the neighborhood. Maybe a single mother who didn't have much to feed her kid. Maybe a widower who would otherwise be sitting alone, again, eating some of whatever out of a can. So on and so forth like that. If there was a soul in the neighborhood who was in need, Mae was there to provide.
While Mae finished making dinner I would do chores for her around the apartment; clean or scrub whatever needed it. If she had a leg loose on a chair I'd nail it, a rusty hinge would get oiled. All the other work I did during the week was just warm-up for the kind of muscle I'd put into what Grandma Mae needed done. Everyone else, no matter how well meaning, just gave me money in exchange for my labor. Mae gave me love.
Dinner conversation stretched for hours, Mae with endless stories about life as a girl growing up in Indiana. It was, it seemed, never very good and always very hard, but often filled with little pleasures: picking fresh apples from a tree while walking to school. Having an open field for a church because the local congregation couldn't afford building wood or the nails to hold it together. Learning to cook everything from corn bread to collard greens alongside her mother and grandmother. That was a pleasure I could taste with every forkful of what was sitting on my plate.
And as long as the stories seemed to go on, they stopped promptly at five minutes to eight o'clock. It was right then that bowls of ice cream were handed out and chairs were gathered around Mae's Philco. At two minutes to eight the television was turned on, giving it plenty of time to warm up, and at eight o'clock it happened. For us, for almost everyone in America, Toast of the Town was on.
Ed Sullivan was on the air.
Satellite television, cable television, before all that there was only regular television. And on television there were only three networks. And on those networks there was only one Ed Sullivan. From some seventy city blocks and a universe away, from Studio 50 on Seventh Avenue and Fifty-third Street came a flood of glamour and spectacle, song and dance. For one hour me and Mae, whoever else might be with us, whoever else was watching all over the country, would sit and stare trance-style while Ed held forth with the biggest actors from Hollywood and Broadway, the best singers and musicians, variety acts from all over the globe—countries I'd never even heard of before.
And comedians.
From as early as I can remember, I loved most watching the comedians. There was something about them, about what they did: one person standing out on that stage, alone—no orchestra backing them, no magic tricks—talking. Just talking. But by way of what they said, making an audience full of people they didn't know, strangers to each other even, laugh. There was just something about the whole idea of it that fascinated me like nothing else.
In an hour, what felt like the shortest hour of the week, Toast of the Town would be over. Me and Mae and whoever else would sit and talk about the program, maybe carry on about taking a trip to Hollywood to see how the stars live, or maybe riding down to Times Square to catch one of the Broadway shows we'd just seen a number from. We couldn't, of course. We couldn't afford a trip to California or a Broadway ticket any more than we could afford to buy a brick of gold resting on a bed of diamonds. In our hearts we knew we'd most likely never visit any of those places or see any of those things for real. But that's what Toast of the Town and Ed Sullivan were for. They were for dreaming.
After cleaning the dishes and straightening some, I would leave Grandma Mae and go back home to find my father actively involved in a pass out from a binge. Booze, or smoke, or pills. Besides the dope, my father had picked up the habit of going days without washing, weeks without a shave or haircut. On good days he looked like something that'd just come from hopping freight trains. On bad ones
, he looked more animal than man.
In our apartment, in the living room, on the mantel above the never-used fireplace, was a picture of my mom. My father's guilt kept it standing there. There was no time when I came in for the evening when I would not kiss the picture, say good night to my mom. As I would go off to bed, in my head or in my heart, I could hear her giving me the same good night she did when she was alive: “You're a special one, Jackie Mann. Don't let nobody ever tell you otherwise.”
I knew my mom meant well. I wished I could've believed her.
NADINE RUSSELL WAS THE FIRST GIRL I'd ever noticed. The first I'd noticed as being something besides, something more than just another kid. I was approaching twelve years old, an age when boys realized girls—once naturally disliked—were real quickly becoming a source of fascination. Still too young to understand sexual attraction, my feelings for Nadine were of the same variety as my as-of-yet un-understandable desire to stop at newsstands and stare at pictures of Joan Bennett and Veronica Lake and Lauren Bacall as they glamoured at me from the covers of movie magazines.
Black women never shone from the covers of movie magazines. Black women didn't get to be movie stars.
Although Nadine had been attending school with me for as long as I could recall, there was just suddenly a day when I felt a creeping need to be in her presence, to see her big doe eyes and pudgy cheeks that for some reason I couldn't stare at long enough or hard enough. Just knowing I would see her each day at school juiced me with anticipation. She made me want to wash properly, brush my teeth, and make sure my hair was well groomed. She made me want to do things that previously, with all the love in the world, not even my mother could get me to do. She also made me feel very ashamed. Her father had a civil-service job—good, steady pay, at good government wages. Around my way, that made their family equal to uptown royalty. In her eyes, my raggedy clothes and worn shoes must have made me look like the poorest of the poor. And when the other kids would joke at me, call me names, what hurt bad only hurt worse if Nadine was around to hear their abuse and witness my crying. Her watching me break down cut deeper than anything the kids had to say. She would watch, but Nadine never joined in, never name-called, never so much as laughed. Sometimes, even, she looked very sad about what was happening.
And those times, when Nadine was showing a little sympathy for me, whatever it was a grade school boy feels for a girl, I felt for her.
I WAS COMING HOME after doing chores at Sergeant Kolawole's. Like every night when I came home from working, I was coming home tired with just enough energy to eat before sleeping. Inside the apartment my pop was where he always seemed to be: taking up space on the couch. Hunched over the coffee table, his body was trembling and he moaned some. Experience told me he was coming down off whatever high had given him altitude. I left him to work things out with himself and went for my room, moving quietly, as most times Pop was an emotional minefield. Trouble was all a misstep ever got me.
As I passed him I caught Pop's face in the shine of the lamplight, his cheeks marked up with the slickness of tears. The shakes, the moans; Pop wasn't crashing, he was crying—his tears dripping down onto a photo album spread across the table. I went cautiously closer, curious the way you're curious at a car wreck, flinching every time my father made a move. But that night he was harmless, clean of liquor but high on memories fed to him by the photographs.
Pop lifted his head, looked up at me, his eyes as weak as the rest of him. “Jackie?” he asked as if not quite recognizing his own son. Then, “Jackie,” he cried at me. His hand came up, stretched out. “Come here, boy. Come to your pop.”
I did as told. Fear, not compassion, driving me to the man.
Pop took me in his arms, hugged and held me.
He stank. His clothes, gone days without change, reeking of the Thunderbird he sweated, were a pandemonium of odors. The closest I'd been to my father in years. All I could think of were his smells.
“Look here, Jackie. Look at this.” A shaky hand sort of pointed at a picture of a man barely familiar to me—young, strong, handsome, and smiling. Fifteen years earlier? More?—standing on a beach somewhere tropical.
Pop started to ramble a story to me. He told me how he used to work on a transport, how he used to sail all over the world. South America, the Caribbean, and the Orient. As he dragged his fingers over picture after picture, literally trying to touch his past, he told me of all the things he'd seen, all the faraway countries he'd traveled to, each more spectacular or mysterious than the last. Maybe they'd been that way. Maybe the years, or the drugs, or the oppressiveness of his present life made them seem better than they ever really were.
He told me of the women he'd had. Sparing little detail, my father told me of the exotic beauties he'd sexed at apparently every port of call. I did not blush with shame at his stories. I smiled with pride for the man my father used to be.
He turned the page of the photo book. There was a picture of my mother. No matter that it was black and white, aged and faded, as beautiful as I remembered her, I never recalled seeing her so beautiful. I had never seen her so young and alive as she was in the photograph.
My father told me how he met her, and how once he had, all the other women he'd ever known could find no traction in his head or in his heart. He told me how much he loved my mother.
Love.
Coming from Pop the word sounded as foreign as Chinese.
He spoke it with no difficulty.
And then he told me how he'd promised to give my mother a house, a home, a family, and a decent life. But in those days, for a black man, making such promises was just telling lies. After he quit the boat to settle down, with what little education he had, he couldn't find good work. During the Depression he could barely find work at all. After his accident he didn't want to work, couldn't bring himself to try. That's when he started taking Relief.
I never thought my father as being much of a man, but every man has pride. He took aid, but every time the money crossed his palm it tore him up inside just a little bit more—the knowing that he had become so much nothing, he couldn't do the one single thing a man is truly supposed to do: He couldn't provide for his family. The shame made him run to the bottle, and the drinking made him need his relief all the more. A snake eating its own tail. It wasn't his body that was broken as much as his spirit. The world had ground and ground and ground him down until a drunk, an addict, and an abuser was all that was left of the young and smiling man in the pictures in the photo book that were on the coffee table Pop cried over.
For the first time, I understood my father. I didn't forgive him for the things he'd done to himself and to me, or for letting his wife—my mother—scrape and scrub herself six feet underground. But I understood him.
And I cried for him.
My father gathered me up in his arms, his grip weak. “It's all right, little Jackie,” he told me. “You'll see. You'll see; everything's gonna be all right.”
We sat, huddled close, until Pop fell asleep. Or passed out. I got up and went to bed but lay awake thinking of what my father had shown me of his life and of himself.
I woke up the next morning early, believing what Pop had told me: that somehow, from now on, everything for us was going to be all right. To celebrate that, I made breakfast. I didn't just pour cereal into a bowl. I made up some pancakes as best I could, scrambled eggs, fried some ham. Imitating Grandma Mae, I did it all up right. The first meal of the first day of everything being better.
I laid out the food on the table just as my dad walked in.
I looked at him and smiled.
He looked at me and screamed: “What you doin'! What the hell you doin' makin' all that goddamn noise first in the mornin'?”
I had to dodge flying plates and utensils, my father's swinging fists as I cut from the kitchen. I ran from the apartment, outside, not wearing a coat in the cold, but not wearing any bruises either. At the moment that had become my main, my only concern.
I we
nt to school and after that I went to work at Sergeant Kolawole's and after that I went around the neighborhood doing whatever I could to keep myself from going home.
Eventually I had to.
Inside the apartment: Pop on the couch as always. Shaking and moaning. Not from memories this time. This time from whatever jag he was riding. He didn't notice me when I came in. He just sat and shook and moaned. Whatever was left of that man in the pictures in the photo album—young and strong and happy—was gone for good.
THERE ARE A COUPLE OF TRUTHS I came to know at an early age and have kept close my entire life. The first I learned one time, one of many times; I was getting made fun of at school over my clothes, or how poor I was, or about my pop and his drinking, or one of a hundred other things wrong with my life. Out on the playground, kids crowded around me, forming a wall of snarling and laughing voices as their fingers pointed in my direction, a group sign in case anyone had any doubts: Yeah, it was me they were mocking. Their laughing did the double chore of making me feel both hurt and angry. But I was too scared to so much as take a swing at any of them for the things they were saying. Standing up for myself was liable to get myself beat down. Standing there and taking what they were giving me was the safe bet.
Li'l Mo stuck close and tried to get the other kids to back off. Unlike me, Li'l Mo never had a problem getting scrappy if a little scrappiness was required. But Li'l Mo was just one against a whole mob of kids. They ignored him and taunted on.
