Bad Boy

  What did all the definitions really mean? How could I know what I wanted to be as an adult when I had never been an adult and did not know any adults who were doing anything I wanted to do? I was a male and did not know what that meant other than in terms of anatomy. But these two definitions, career and maleness, were a lot clearer to me than the idea of race. Someday I would have to make a living, so I needed some kind of career. I had a penis, and therefore I had to figure out what being male meant. The confusion in my mind existed because I heard, read, and saw different definitions of both career and maleness. In my Harlem community, career was defined as having a “good” job versus what my dad called “bull” work. I understood that by “bull” work he meant jobs that took little more than brute strength to perform. To me, this meant working in the garment center or its equivalent. It also meant my father’s janitor job.

  At Stuyvesant, career meant something entirely different. For most of my classmates it meant choosing a branch of science that they somehow knew about and would pursue. It meant choosing a major in college, getting grades, passing tests, and knowing where you wanted to go.

  Being a man also seemed to mean something different in Harlem from what it meant in the rest of the world. I understood being a man as having some kind of power. In Harlem that power was expressed in muscle, in being someone who wouldn’t take any nonsense or who was good at athletics. It was also defined as someone who had a lot of money or at least the trappings of money: a big car, an expensive watch, or expensive clothes. There was a sexual component as well. A real man paid a lot of attention to women.

  I didn’t see anybody talking about being a poet, or a short-story writer, as a career. Nor did I see anybody defining a real man as somebody who paid a lot of attention to books.

  But it seemed to me that both of these concepts, career and maleness, were only subdivisions of the larger idea of race. When I thought of the major careers, I thought of whites, not blacks. When I thought of maleness, I thought of whites with political or economic power and blacks with muscle. My definition of a black man was, except for the rare instance, a man without an outstanding career, and a man who had to define his maleness by how muscular he was.

  These definitions were reinforced everywhere I looked. The history of the United States had been offered to me as consisting of the accomplishments of white people, mostly men, and the enslavement of black people. The great statesmen, the great writers, the great composers, as taught in schools, were all white. I knew that my own ancestors had been slaves in Virginia. But was what happened so long ago to my great-great-grandparents going to define me?

  I wasn’t born with a hyphen linking me to Africa, any more than I was born with a desire to dribble a basketball or to write. These were interests that I worked on developing. These were activities I chose. Being Afro-American, or black, was being imposed on me by people who had their own ideas of what those terms meant.

  In the Harlem home in which I was raised, the binding forces were love and survival, not race. Herbert Dean looked forward to buying his own home one day and spoke of land in the South that his family had lost. When Pearl Harbor was attacked and the Second World War broke out, my family was properly outraged. We bought small American flags to hang in the window to show our patriotism. I remember that one year during the war, my dad was away in the Navy, and the trees were coming down after Christmas. Johnny Lightbourne and I found a discarded Christmas wreath consisting of a red fuzzy material wrapped around newspaper, which in turn was wrapped around a wire frame. Johnny and I unwrapped the fuzzy red material and discovered that the paper was printed in Japanese! We immediately took the paper and wreath to the police station, along with information as to what obviously subversive family had discarded the offending decoration. We were Americans.

  I had certainly heard the epithet “nigger” by the time I was ten. But that kind of language was not, in my mind, ever uttered by anyone except those who were unique in their meanness. It wasn’t until my friend Eric was invited to parties that I couldn’t attend, because I was black, that the idea of being a “Negro” began to have real meaning to me. Later, when I began to see how blacks were used in the workplace, which colleges accepted blacks and which did not, I began to think about race in purely negative terms. Blacks were the ones who were lynched, blacks were the ones who were barred from hotels, who had to drink from dirty fountains, who had to look for signs that told them if their race was welcome.

  I had never sat down and said, “Let me think about being black.” But somehow all the language of race, the history of what it meant to be black in America, all the “niggers” and all the images of slaves, and all the stories about my people being lynched and beaten, and having to sit in the backs of buses, had piled up in the corners of my soul like so much debris that I had to carry around with me. Being black had become, at best, the absence of being white. The clearest thing I knew was that there was no advantage in being black.

  My answer to the question of race was to reject my identity as a black and take another identity. I could not identify myself as white, or as any other race. I could identify myself as an intellectual, and this is what I did, telling myself over and over again what white teachers so often told me, that race didn’t matter if you were bright. When I came to the painful realization that my family could hardly afford to keep me in high school, and that college was out of the question, I knew also that I had lost even this adopted identity.

  “Do you like being black?” Dr. Holiday asked.

  “Yes,” I answered. “Of course I do.”

  1954

  The year started in a panic. January began my last term at Stuyvesant, and I wanted desperately to make it important even as the other students were just as eager to say that the senior year was not at all significant. All their college applications had been sent in, and many had already been admitted to schools. Their grade point averages counted only for bragging rights. I was still hoping for a miracle.

  The newspapers were already revving up for the coming baseball season. Black newspapers were claiming that the Negro Leagues were dead, and that seemed to be the case. I read about the Dodgers, how Jackie Robinson’s legs were doing, and what Gil Hodges thought about the coming season. Sports were still attractive to me. You can love a baseball team without worrying about not being loved back, or about being awkward in your approach. Baseball teams will allow you to love them and to show emotion when people turn away from you. And when the team wins, when the team gets the needed hits and the runs flood across home plate, the love is returned, and there is satisfaction. I read about the Dodgers’ chances, and that they looked strong. I hoped, but I didn’t believe, not even in my beloved Dodgers.

  The radical newspapers were full of stories about Vietnam. The war was clearly going badly for the French, and commentators were warning that the United States needed to avoid involvement.

  Frank came to my apartment, and Mama was afraid of him. I showed Frank my room, and he was impressed with how many books I had. My small bookcase was jammed with books, and there were books in piles all over the small room. Frank told me that the same fellow on 123rd Street who had hired him to deliver a package had offered him money to beat up a junkie who owed him money. He said he had not made up his mind yet if he wanted to do it. I asked him to let me know.

  “He looks so strange,” Mama said after he left.

  Frank looked the way I felt. He was an alien on this planet, and I was drawn to him for that reason. I wanted to think of myself as someone different. Different meant that you were not responsible for the normal things in life.

  What I wanted to do was create a world to replace the one that I felt had failed me. I had spent fifteen years of my life trying to expand my universe because I had been told that was what I should do, but there was no breadth to my world, no experience that would tell me what to do now that I was in trouble. Dr. Holiday said that she wanted to help me see my strengths, but I thought I did see them. My
growing understanding of literature was a strength, even if my intense interest in it isolated me from people around me. My ambition to make things right, to mediate between God and man to bring fairness and justice to the world, was a strength, even if it isolated me from the guys I played ball with. I thought that my seriousness was a strength, even as it isolated me from the teenagers around me who were busily discovering the importance of their own sexuality and how much fun their lives could be. I knew my strengths well, and they were killing me.

  Although I wanted a miracle in school, and knew full well that the miracle should somehow involve academic study, in reality I spent my time reading. I found a socialist bookstore and read a history of the labor movement. There was a week of reading François Villon and not liking him at all. There was a week of reading Siegfried Sassoon’s war poems and being deeply touched by them. It was not the language of Sassoon but the violence of war that attracted me. Wars, I believed, were fought for noble causes, and it was easy to imagine myself lying in the trenches, weighing my words against the pain of dying, thinking that death could be a satisfactory answer to failed promise. I imagined people asking whatever had happened to me. Did he simply fall by the wayside? Was all his brightness really just a charade, a pose he had affected before the spotlight fell upon him and revealed how much of a nothing he really was? Or did he simply become a Negro, sweating and straining through the streets of the garment center with all the other Negroes? Did he simply sit in the park, a book propped on his lap, pretending to read as the real world passed him by?

  Surely, if the answer to the question was that I had died in some glorious adventure, I would have, at least, not failed.

  At Dr. Holiday’s office she asked me what I had been thinking about during the week. I told her that I thought that dying in battle was not a bad thing. She called Mama and asked if I had ever tried to kill myself.

  As spring approached and the end of the school year neared, my anxieties increased. Even the books I loved were becoming harder and harder for me to deal with. Stuyvesant was impossible. The successful members of the senior class were merely going through the motions. On one of my rare visits to school a teacher who taken an interest in me gave me a book by André Gide and asked what I had been reading. I was reading some poems of Gabriela Mistral and told her so.

  “Are you writing?” she asked.

  Yes, I was still writing, but the marks on paper made less and less sense to me. I was removed from the logic that had once made my stories and poems easily accessible. Now much of my writing contained remnants of too many thoughts and had too many obscure references. I was having difficulty understanding material I had written only days before.

  There was another encounter with the gang that had attacked Frank in the park. About fifteen of them were walking down 121st Street when I suddenly found myself walking just yards from them. One of them recognized me, and they started to chase me down the street and onto Morningside Avenue. I was fast and moved away from them. Two of them caught up with me in the hallway of my building, and I fought them. One had a small length of chain, which he swung. I caught it and jerked it away from him and swung it myself. They backed off and ran outside to call the others. I ran up the stairs to the roof, and across the rooftops to a building on the corner.

  Later that evening, lying on my bed, I thought about what had happened. I hated the gang thing with a passion. They were idiots intruding on my life, but, like the idiocy of racism, there seemed to be nothing that I could do about it. The gang exerted its power over its turf, and I was living on what the gang members considered their turf. It was what they valued, and they needed to deal with me. I imagined myself fighting them, inflicting far more violence on them than they ever could on me. I knew I could hurt any of them in a fight, but more than that I wanted to hurt them.

  On the 17th of May the Supreme Court announced the decision to condemn the “separate but equal” philosophy of education. Brown vs. Board of Education had been won by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Blacks were cautiously hopeful that this might be the end of segregation.

  There were more letters to my house from school. I intercepted them and read them and even called the school to tell them why I wasn’t coming. I told a counselor that Dr. Holiday wanted me to stay out for a few weeks to get myself together. They asked me to have Mama call and tell them that, and I told them that she would. Naturally I didn’t tell Mama.

  I knew I had to do something about school, that eventually there would be the phone call that would reveal how many weeks I hadn’t attended, and I would be in trouble all over again. One day I got up my nerve to go to school and see what was going on. If there were a confrontation, I thought, I would assume my new persona of “disturbed” student and use it to bluff my way through.

  On the A train I rehearsed my story in my head. I hoped I wouldn’t see Eric or any of the other guys who had gone to junior high school with me. I had kept away from them as much as possible over the last year, and they didn’t know what was going on with me. At 14th Street I almost chickened out again. It was not the trouble that I was in, or could be in—I didn’t think they would send me to reform school even though that had been a threat—but I didn’t want my humiliation put on public display.

  It was a sunny day, and 15th Street was nearly empty. Usually there were one or two latecomers rushing to school a half hour late. I looked at my watch. The homeroom period would be over, but I was only fifteen minutes late for the first class. I tucked my books under my arm and went to the door and tried it. It was locked. I went to a second door. It was also locked.

  “What are you looking for?” A voice behind me spoke.

  I turned and saw a man in overalls, a paper cup of coffee in his hand, a ring of keys hanging from his belt.

  “I go to this school,” I said.

  “Well, they’re closed for the year,” he said. “If you left clothes or books in there, you’re going to have to wait until it opens in September to get them out.”

  It was over. Quite simply over. The school year had ended. The graduation exercises had been held, and the senior class of Stuyvesant High School had moved on with their lives.

  “Oh,” I said. “They’ll be open in September?”

  “Yeah, the regular time,” came the suspicious answer.

  I left, walking slowly uptown, crying. It was so far from what I wanted for my life.

  SWEET SIXTEEN

  I was sixteen and adrift. I had no ideas, no plans, and little hope. I didn’t tell my parents what had happened. For the next week I got up each morning and left as if I were going to school, carrying my notebook and something to read in the park. I didn’t read. I didn’t write. The words on the pages had stopped making sense, and nothing I could write was adequate to express the despair I felt.

  Eric called and left a message with Mama. He wanted to see me. I imagined his mother looking for me at the graduation ceremony, asking him where I was. I was too embarrassed to see him and didn’t call back.

  Things that had been so familiar just days before my last visit to Stuyvesant became strange, and I felt I was losing the mental faculty for making sense of the world around me. My father kept a careful distance between us. He didn’t know me. My guess was that he didn’t really think much of what I had become. One time, when I was leaving the house around midnight, he stopped me and asked me where I was going.

  “Out,” I said.

  He told me to stay home. I said no, and walked out of the house. I spent the night walking through Central Park, not coming home until dawn.

  Often I would lock myself in my room, and I could hear him asking Mama what I was doing. Mama would always give him some answer, and sometimes, loud enough for me to hear him, he would say that it wasn’t right for anybody to stay in his room as much as I did. Mama would just tell him to leave me alone.

  It was years before I discovered the shame that hid him from me. My father couldn’t read. He h
ad no idea how to reach the person I had become and was too embarrassed to let me know. When, a lifetime later, he lay, a fragile remainder of the powerful man he had been, in the veterans’ hospital in East Orange, New Jersey, I brought him the only gift that had meaning to me, a book I had written. He looked at it and put it down on the white hospital table next to the bed and smiled. I wanted to beg him to pick it up and look at my words, to tell him that it was all I had and all I was. I think he knew, but there was nothing he could do about it. The printed words were a code that forever separated us.

  Frank called. He had agreed to make another delivery and wanted to know if I wanted to come along.

  I met Frank at the entrance to the park and asked him what was up. He didn’t trust the man we thought was a dope dealer. He wondered what I thought of him doing the job. I thought he wanted me to talk him out of it, to say that it was too risky, but I wanted to do it.

  As soon as we arrived at the apartment on 123rd Street, the man cursed Frank a lot, which angered me. Frank was quiet, taking the verbal abuse, looking down at his hands. We made the arrangements, and I was glad to get out of the filthy apartment again.

  We were supposed to pick up a package from a man in the subway at 96th Street. He was white and would be wearing a blue blazer. Frank got five dollars with the promise of another five when he brought back the package. Outside, Frank asked me if it was still all right with me. Yes, it was.

  We took the local down to 96th Street, and I told Frank to walk ahead. I would follow him. There weren’t many passengers getting off at 96th and only a handful getting on. I knelt and fooled around with my shoelaces as the train left the station. There was a blond guy wearing a blue jacket. He didn’t look like much, and I relaxed as Frank went up to him. The bathrooms in the subways were open in those days, and the guy nodded toward the men’s room. Frank followed him in.