Shorty soon decided that my hair was finally long enough to be conked. He had promised to school me in how to beat the barbershops’ three- and four-dollar price by making up congolene, and then conking ourselves.
I took the little list of ingredients he had printed out for me, and went to a grocery store, where I got a can of Red Devil lye, two eggs, and two medium-sized white potatoes. Then at a drugstore near the poolroom, I asked for a large jar of vaseline, a large bar of soap, a large-toothed comb and a fine-toothed comb, one of those rubber hoses with a metal spray-head, a rubber apron and a pair of gloves.
“Going to lay on that first conk?” the drugstore man asked me. I proudly told him, grinning, “Right!”
Shorty paid six dollars a week for a room in his cousin’s shabby apartment. His cousin wasn’t at home. “It’s like the pad’s mine, he spends so much time with his woman,” Shorty said. “Now, you watch me—”
He peeled the potatoes and thin-sliced them into a quart-sized Mason fruit jar, then started stirring them with a wooden spoon as he gradually poured in a little over half the can of lye. “Never use a metal spoon; the lye will turn it black,” he told me.
A jelly-like, starchy-looking glop resulted from the lye and potatoes, and Shorty broke in the two eggs, stirring real fast—his own conk and dark face bent down close. The congolene turned pale-yellowish. “Feel the jar,” Shorty said. I cupped my hand against the outside, and snatched it away. “Damn right, it’s hot, that’s the lye,” he said. “So you know it’s going to burn when I comb it in—it burns bad. But the longer you can stand it, the straighter the hair.”
He made me sit down, and he tied the string of the new rubber apron tightly around my neck, and combed up my bush of hair. Then, from the big vaseline jar, he took a handful and massaged it hard all through my hair and into the scalp. He also thickly vaselined my neck, ears and forehead. “When I get to washing out your head, be sure to tell me anywhere you feel any little stinging,” Shorty warned me, washing his hands, then pulling on the rubber gloves, and tying on his own rubber apron. “You always got to remember that any congolene left in burns a sore into your head.”
The congolene just felt warm when Shorty started combing it in. But then my head caught fire.
I gritted my teeth and tried to pull the sides of the kitchen table together. The comb felt as if it was raking my skin off.
My eyes watered, my nose was running. I couldn’t stand it any longer; I bolted to the washbasin. I was cursing Shorty with every name I could think of when he got the spray going and started soap-lathering my head.
He lathered and spray-rinsed, lathered and spray-rinsed, maybe ten or twelve times, each time gradually closing the hot-water faucet, until the rinse was cold, and that helped some.
“You feel any stinging spots?”
“No,” I managed to say. My knees were trembling.
“Sit back down, then. I think we got it all out okay.”
The flame came back as Shorty, with a thick towel, started drying my head, rubbing hard. “Easy, man, easy!” I kept shouting.
“The first time’s always worst. You get used to it better before long. You took it real good, homeboy. You got a good conk.”
When Shorty let me stand up and see in the mirror, my hair hung down in limp, damp strings. My scalp still flamed, but not as badly; I could bear it. He draped the towel around my shoulders, over my rubber apron, and began again vaselining my hair.
I could feel him combing, straight back, first the big comb, then the fine-tooth one.
Then, he was using a razor, very delicately, on the back of my neck. Then, finally, shaping the sideburns.
My first view in the mirror blotted out the hurting. I’d seen some pretty conks, but when it’s the first time, on your own head, the transformation, after the lifetime of kinks, is staggering.
The mirror reflected Shorty behind me. We both were grinning and sweating. And on top of my head was this thick, smooth sheen of shining red hair—real red—as straight as any white man’s.
How ridiculous I was! Stupid enough to stand there simply lost in admiration of my hair now looking “white,” reflected in the mirror in Shorty’s room. I vowed that I’d never again be without a conk, and I never was for many years.
This was my first really big step toward self-degradation: when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are “inferior”—and white people “superior”—that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look “pretty” by white standards.
Look around today, in every small town and big city, from two-bit catfish and soda-pop joints into the “integrated” lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria, and you’ll see conks on black men. And you’ll see black women wearing these green and pink and purple and red and platinum-blonde wigs. They’re all more ridiculous than a slapstick comedy. It makes you wonder if the Negro has completely lost his sense of identity, lost touch with himself.
You’ll see the conk worn by many, many so-called “upper class” Negroes, and, as much as I hate to say it about them, on all too many Negro entertainers. One of the reasons that I’ve especially admired some of them, like Lionel Hampton and Sidney Poiter, among others, is that they have kept their natural hair and fought to the top. I admire any Negro man who has never had himself conked, or who has had the sense to get rid of it—as I finally did.
I don’t know which kind of self-defacing conk is the greater shame—the one you’ll see on the heads of the black so-called “middle class” and “upper class,” who ought to know better, or the one you’ll see on the heads of the poorest, most downtrodden, ignorant black men. I mean the legal-minimum-wage ghetto-dwelling kind of Negro, as I was when I got my first one. It’s generally among these poor fools that you’ll see a black kerchief over the man’s head, like Aunt Jemima; he’s trying to make his conk last longer, between trips to the barbershop. Only for special occasions is this kerchief-protected conk exposed—to show off how “sharp” and “hip” its owner is. The ironic thing is that I have never heard any woman, white or black, express any admiration for a conk. Of course, any white woman with a black man isn’t thinking about his hair. But I don’t see how on earth a black woman with any race pride could walk down the street with any black man wearing a conk—the emblem of his shame that he is black.
To my own shame, when I say all of this I’m talking first of all about myself—because you can’t show me any Negro who ever conked more faithfully than I did. I’m speaking from personal experience when I say of any black man who conks today, or any white-wigged black woman, that if they gave the brains in their heads just half as much attention as they do their hair, they would be a thousand times better off.
CHAPTER 4
LAURA
Shorty would take me to groovy, frantic scenes in different chicks’ and cats’ pads, where with the lights and juke down mellow, everybody blew gage and juiced back and jumped. I met chicks who were fine as May wine, and cats who were hip to all happenings.
That paragraph is deliberate, of course; it’s just to display a bit more of the slang that was used by everyone I respected as “hip” in those days. And in no time at all, I was talking the slang like a lifelong hipster.
Like hundreds of thousands of country-bred Negroes who had come to the Northern black ghetto before me, and have come since, I’d also acquired all the other fashionable ghetto adornments—the zoot suits and conk that I have described, liquor, cigarettes, then reefers—all to erase my embarrassing background. But I still harbored one secret humiliation: I couldn’t dance.
I can’t remember when it was that I actually learned how—that is to say, I can’t recall the specific night or nights. But dancing was the chief action at those “pad parties,” so I’ve no doubt about how and why my initiation into lindy-hopping came about. With alcoh
ol or marijuana lightening my head, and that wild music wailing away on those portable record players, it didn’t take long to loosen up the dancing instincts in my African heritage. All I remember is that during some party around this time, when nearly everyone but me was up dancing, some girl grabbed me—they often would take the initiative and grab a partner, for no girl at those parties ever would dream that anyone present couldn’t dance—and there I was out on the floor.
I was up in the jostling crowd—and suddenly, unexpectedly, I got the idea. It was as though somebody had clicked on a light. My long-suppressed African instincts broke through, and loose.
Having spent so much time in Mason’s white environment, I had always believed and feared that dancing involved a certain order or pattern of specific steps—as dancing is done by whites. But here among my own less-inhibited people, I discovered it was simply letting your feet, hands and body spontaneously act out whatever impulses were stirred by the music.
From then on, hardly a party took place without me turning up—inviting myself, if I had to—and lindy-hopping my head off.
I’d always been fast at picking up new things. I made up for lost time now so fast, that soon girls were asking me to dance with them. I worked my partners hard; that’s why they liked me so much.
When I was at work, up in the Roseland men’s room, I just couldn’t keep still. My shine rag popped with the rhythm of those great bands rocking the ballroom. White customers on the shine stand, especially, would laugh to see my feet suddenly break loose on their own and cut a few steps. Whites are correct in thinking that black people are natural dancers. Even little kids are—except for those Negroes today who are so “integrated,” as I had been, that their instincts are inhibited. You know those “dancing jibagoo” toys that you wind up? Well, I was like a live one—music just wound me up.
By the next dance for the Boston black folk—I remember that Lionel Hampton was coming in to play—I had given my notice to the Roseland’s manager.
When I told Ella why I had quit, she laughed aloud: I told her I couldn’t find time to shine shoes and dance, too. She was glad, because she had never liked the idea of my working at that no-prestige job. When I told Shorty, he said he’d known I’d soon outgrow it anyway.
Shorty could dance all right himself but, for his own reasons, he never cared about going to the big dances. He loved just the music-making end of it. He practiced his saxophone and listened to records. It astonished me that Shorty didn’t care to go and hear the big bands play. He had his alto sax idol, Johnny Hodges, with Duke Ellington’s band, but he said he thought too many young musicians were only carbon-copying the big-band names on the same instrument. Anyway, Shorty was really serious about nothing except his music, and about working for the day when he could start his own little group to gig around Boston.
The morning after I quit Roseland, I was down at the men’s clothing store bright and early. The salesman checked and found that I’d missed only one weekly payment: I had “A-1” credit. I told him I’d just quit my job, but he said that didn’t make any difference; I could miss paying them for a couple of weeks if I had to; he knew I’d get straight.
This time, I studied carefully everything in my size on the racks. And finally I picked out my second zoot. It was a sharkskin gray, with a big, long coat, and pants ballooning out at the knees and then tapering down to cuffs so narrow that I had to take off my shoes to get them on and off. With the salesman urging me on, I got another shirt, and a hat, and new shoes—the kind that were just coming into hipster style; dark orange colored, with paper-thin soles and knob style toes. It all added up to seventy or eighty dollars.
It was such a red-letter day that I even went and got my first barbershop conk. This time it didn’t hurt so much, just as Shorty had predicted.
That night, I timed myself to hit Roseland as the thick of the crowd was coming in. In the thronging lobby, I saw some of the real Roxbury hipsters eyeing my zoot, and some fine women were giving me that look. I sauntered up to the men’s room for a short drink from the pint in my inside coat-pocket. My replacement was there—a scared, narrow-faced, hungry-looking little brown-skinned fellow just in town from Kansas City. And when he recognized me, he couldn’t keep down his admiration and wonder. I told him to “keep cool,” that he’d soon catch on to the happenings. Everything felt right when I went into the ballroom.
Hamp’s band was working, and that big, waxed floor was packed with people lindy-hopping like crazy. I grabbed some girl I’d never seen, and the next thing I knew we were out there lindying away and grinning at each other. It couldn’t have been finer.
I’d been lindying previously only in cramped little apartment living rooms, and now I had room to maneuver. Once I really got myself warmed and loosened up, I was snatching partners from among the hundreds of unattached, free-lancing girls along the sidelines—almost every one of them could really dance—and I just about went wild! Hamp’s band wailing. I was whirling girls so fast their skirts were snapping. Black girls, brownskins, high yellows, even a couple of the white girls there. Boosting them over my hips, my shoulders, into the air. Though I wasn’t quite sixteen then, I was tall and rawboned and looked like twenty-one; I was also pretty strong for my age. Circling, tap-dancing, I was underneath them when they landed—doing the “flapping eagle,” “the kangaroo” and the “split.”
After that, I never missed a Roseland lindy-hop as long as I stayed in Boston.
—
The greatest lindy-dancing partner I had, everything considered, was a girl named Laura. I met her at my next job. When I quit shoeshining, Ella was so happy that she went around asking about a job for me—one she would approve. Just two blocks from her house, the Townsend Drug Store was about to replace its soda fountain clerk, a fellow who was leaving to go off to college.
When Ella told me, I didn’t like it. She knew I couldn’t stand those Hill characters. But speaking my mind right then would have made Ella mad. I didn’t want that to happen, so I put on the white jacket and started serving up sodas, sundaes, splits, shakes and all the rest of that fountain stuff to those fancy-acting Negroes.
Every evening when I got off at eight and came home, Ella would keep saying, “I hope you’ll meet some of these nice young people your age here in Roxbury.” But those penny-ante squares who came in there putting on their millionaires’ airs, the young ones and the old ones both, only annoyed me. People like the sleep-in maid for Beacon Hill white folks who used to come in with her “ooh, my deah” manners and order corn plasters in the Jew’s drugstore for black folks. Or the hospital cafeteria-line serving woman sitting there on her day off with a cat fur around her neck, telling the proprietor she was a “dietitian”—both of them knowing she was lying. Even the young ones, my age, whom Ella was always talking about. The soda fountain was one of their hang-outs. They soon had me ready to quit, with their accents so phonied up that if you just heard them and didn’t see them, you wouldn’t even know they were Negroes. I couldn’t wait for eight o’clock to get home to eat out of those soul-food pots of Ella’s, then get dressed in my zoot and head for some of my friends’ places in town, to lindy-hop and get high, or something, for relief from those Hill clowns.
Before long, I didn’t see how I was going to be able to stick it out there eight hours a day; and I nearly didn’t. I remember one night, I nearly quit because I had hit the numbers for ten cents—the first time I had ever hit—on one of the sideline bets that I’d made in the drugstore. (Yes, there were several runners on the Hill; even dignified Negroes played the numbers.) I won sixty dollars, and Shorty and I had a ball with it. I wished I had hit for the daily dollar that I played with my town man, paying him by the week. I would surely have quit the drugstore. I could have bought a car.
Anyway, Laura lived in a house that was catercorner across the street from the drugstore. After a while, as soon as I saw her coming in, I’d start making up a banana split. She was a real bug for them, and she came i
n late every afternoon—after school. I imagine I’d been shoving that ice cream dish under her nose for five or six weeks before somehow it began to sink in that she wasn’t like the rest. She was certainly the only Hill girl that came in there and acted in any way friendly and natural.
She always had some book with her, and poring over it, she would make a thirty-minute job of that daily dish of banana split. I began to notice the books she read. They were pretty heavy school stuff—Latin, algebra, things like that. Watching her made me reflect that I hadn’t read even a newspaper since leaving Mason.
Laura. I heard her name called by a few of the others who came in when she was there. But I could see they didn’t know her too well; they said “hello”—that was about the extent of it. She kept to herself, and she never said more than “Thank you” to me. Nice voice. Soft. Quiet. Never another word. But no airs like the others, no black Bostonese. She was just herself.
I liked that. Before too long, I struck up a conversation. Just what subject I got off on I don’t remember, but she readily opened up and began talking, and she was very friendly. I found out that she was a high school junior, an honor student. Her parents had split up when she was a baby, and she had been raised by her grandmother, an old lady on a pension, who was very strict and old-fashioned and religious. Laura had just one close friend, a girl who lived over in Cambridge, whom she had gone to school with. They talked on the telephone every day. Her grandmother scarcely ever let her go to the movies, let alone on dates.