They were still in the bathroom when the next train came and left, and I wondered what was going on. When the train cleared the station, I went to the bathroom, opening the door as if I were just a casual user. Frank and the guy were in one of the booths, fighting. Frank was struggling, making whimpering noises as the other guy tried to pin him to the back of the booth.
I hit the guy in the back of the neck twice, and he slumped forward, sliding down Frank’s body. I pulled Frank out of the booth, and we ran out of the bathroom.
“What happened?” I asked.
“He jumped me,” Frank said. He was trembling and panting for breath.
We were almost to the exit when the guy came out of the bathroom. He had a gun in his hand. We jumped on the tracks and ran the distance from 96th Street to 86th, where we climbed up, rushed past a group of startled people waiting for the train, and made our way out of the station and into Central Park.
“He set us up,” Frank said, his voice incredibly high. “He set us up!”
Frank went on about what he wanted to do to the guy. I knew that if Frank became upset enough, he could kill the guy, but he probably wouldn’t reach that state. He would probably get beaten up himself, or maybe worse.
Frank’s arm was raw from being scraped against the booth when he was struggling with the guy in the bathroom, and we put some water on it. Then we walked downtown to the Automat. We both had coffee and donuts.
“Did you like doing that?” Frank asked me.
No, I didn’t. It was brutally physical, and ugly—although in some small way there was a sense of excitement to the incident in the subway, a sense of being, if not powerful, then less weak. And it was something I could somehow emotionally manage with ease. There was a danger, I instantly knew, that the feeling of power, even temporary, could possibly draw me in, could trap me the way that the temporary relief of drugs trapped people.
The garment center and fighting were connected in my mind, and I couldn’t sort them out. I hadn’t been nervous in the bathroom. I wasn’t nervous until I got home that evening. I wrote down what happened, making it seem more an intellectual exercise than it was, then tearing the paper out of the machine and throwing it away. It had not been an intellectual exercise, no matter how I tried to push it in that direction. I was not walking down a beach and encountering a stranger. This was a possible reality, a kind of life that existed all around me. It was calling my name.
Frank had spoken of going to 123rd Street and killing the man he thought had set us up. He was trying to be as macho as he thought I was.
Dr. Holiday had said that nothing I told her would ever be repeated. When I told her what had happened in the subway, she was shocked and wanted details. I was instantly sorry I had told her anything. She asked me more questions about Frank. Did my mother know that he was my friend? Did I think I was going to be involved with this Frank person anymore? I honestly didn’t know. I think she called my house, because Mama later asked me if I was in any trouble and was I still hanging around with Frank. I told her to stay out of my business. I didn’t know what Dr. Holiday had found out about Frank, or what she had told Mama, but I knew that Mama was really upset for the next few days.
The French were losing the war in Vietnam, and the papers carried a story about a French nurse they called “The Angel of Dien Bien Phu” who had cared for French soldiers when that village fell to the Communist troops. I had read the dramatic poetry of Wilfred Owen, who had been killed in the first world war, and took to filling pages with my own romantic poetry about the nurse, war, and heroic deaths.
A week later Frank was beaten up badly by two men who had followed him in the park. They were older guys, so he assumed they were from 123rd Street. I was surprised. I thought that if someone really was beating him up, he would have killed them.
Frank wasn’t supposed to leave New York City without permission, but he decided to go to Philadelphia, where he thought a friend of his father’s might live. It was risky. He was still involved with the legal system and was always under the threat of being institutionalized again if somebody bothered to check on him. Also, he couldn’t get his medication if he was in Philadelphia. It was better than being beaten up, though, and I went downtown with him to the Port Authority bus terminal on 42nd Street. He told me he would come back when things cooled down a little. If he got settled in Philadelphia, he said, he would send for me.
I had attached myself to Frank. I felt he was living on the edge of being out of control, of not being responsible for who he was or what he was. I also liked him. I liked sitting with him and hearing his stories of life with his father, even though I thought he had made a lot of it up. I liked hearing him sing sad songs in his gentle baritone voice. With Frank leaving, the world I had thought could not get worse was suddenly worse. I was being chased by the gang that had attacked him, and now I was worried about Frank and whoever it was who had beaten him up.
When Frank’s bus left, I thought about walking home. I was tired, but lying down to sleep wouldn’t help. It never did. Before leaving the bus terminal, I stopped at an army recruiting stand and asked how old you had to be to join the army.
“Eighteen,” I was told. “Seventeen if you have your parents’ permission.”
“Suppose your parents are dead?”
The neatly dressed soldier shrugged and asked the noncom who worked with him. I was told that if your parents were dead, you could probably join the army at seventeen.
I was sixteen, but I would be seventeen on the twelfth of August.
I was at the recruiting office in the Bishop Building on 125th Street at nine o’clock on the morning of my birthday. I was seventeen and ready to join the army. There was an entrance test to pass. I took it, and the black sergeant said it was the highest score he had ever seen. He gave me an application, and I filled it out. He looked it over and asked me if I really wanted to be in the army. I said yes, and he tore up my application.
“You sign the form,” he said. “I’ll fill it out.”
I signed the form and watched as he filled in the blanks. He handed me the form and told me to look it over. He had given me a squeaky-clean background, with dead parents, and had even taken out the fact that I had become a vegetarian. He told me to call him in three days. I did, and I found I had been accepted into the army. I would enter on the following Monday.
I waited until the weekend to tell my parents. Mama cried and asked me why. I didn’t know what to say to her. I hadn’t yet sorted out the shame I felt for having squandered my life, which, at seventeen, I thought was nearly over anyway. Nor was I, with all my reading and writing skills, articulate enough to express my sense of being lost. I didn’t know enough about life or even about the ideals I was chasing to know what I was lost from. What I did know was that I wanted to get away from home, away from Harlem, away from anyone in the world who might care to ask what I would be doing with my life.
My dad said that it was a good thing that I had entered the army, that I would be all right there. I heard him say to Mama that it would make a man out of me. He wanted me to hear him say that, and I don’t think he meant it in a bad way. He wanted to somehow reassure me that I could be a man, whatever that was supposed to mean.
I told my brother Mickey, and he wanted to join, too, but for some reason did not. My other half brothers, Buddy, Sonny, and Robert, asked me what being a soldier was like, and I made something up that sounded vaguely heroic.
On the day I left, Mama was up early, sitting at the place at the kitchen table where she always sat, the ashtray in front of her already half filled with partially smoked butts.
“Take care of yourself, boy,” my father said. He gave me a New Testament that he had carried when he was in the Navy, and a money belt. It was what he had to give me.
Mama couldn’t speak. We looked away from each other. I needed to be strong enough to walk away, to invent a new life for myself without her, and she needed to look inside herself to see what truth in he
r life had allowed her to lose her son. We looked away from each other, but I knew she was crying.
The early-morning station at 125th Street had the first of the army of black workers headed downtown to sort mail, to carry bags, to push racks through the busy New York streets. I had a small bag with an extra pair of pants, some underwear, an extra shirt, and a notebook. I took out the notebook and began to write as the train jerked its way out of the station, out of Harlem. I had just ended the first part of my life.
THE TYPIST
As a child I wrote, but I never considered writing as a job or career. It would have been, I believe, considered sacrilegious for any of my early English teachers to mention that a Shakespeare, a Shelley, or a Keats even considered accepting money for the words. None of my acquaintances and no one in my family wrote, and yet I have become a professional writer. When I look at what seemed at first a highly improbable circumstance, it all seems so amazingly logical. I am doing what I should be doing.
To begin with, I have been an excellent reader for most of my life. Long before I knew the meanings of all the words I encountered, I was able to approach books with confidence. All those conversations with Mama in that sunny Harlem apartment, conversations meaningless to anyone but us, prepared me to use language in special ways, making it my own. This opened wide vistas of scenes and locales that I did not so much visit in my reading, but rather possessed. I rode on the back of the South Wind in search of the handsome prince. I trembled when I heard the voice of the Giant Troll under the bridge. The more I was able to absorb in this process, the more I wanted to absorb. I was like an archaeologist, in a state of constant discovery.
I found, stumbled upon, was led to, or was given great literature. Reading this literature, these books, led me to the canvas of my own humanity. Along the way I encountered values that I accepted, primarily those that reinforced my early religious and community mores. My reading ability led me to books, which led me to ideas, which led to more books and more ideas. The slow dance through the ideas led to writing.
I was also lucky. Lucky that I wasn’t killed in my encounters as a teenager, or did not end up in jail. I left home on a Monday, the twentieth of August, 1954. Within days of my departure for the army the police were at my parents’ apartment, looking for me.
The army. Numbing years. Years of learning to kill efficiently. Years of teaching others to kill efficiently. Years of nongrowing, from being a seventeen-year-old, smooth-faced idealist hunched over a book in his Harlem apartment, to becoming a smooth-faced veteran of twenty hunched over a beer in a post exchange.
All the poetry of war had left me upon my first scenting of decaying flesh. The atmosphere of non-thinking had been a godsend when it allowed me to forget my own failures as a teenager. It became a curse when it was all that I saw around me and before me. As glad as I was to have my entrance into the military rescue me from the dangers of the street, I was doubly glad to be released.
During the years following my army experience I found myself in a series of low-paying jobs. I worked in a factory in Morristown, New Jersey, where my parents had moved. I worked in a Wall Street mailroom and finally found a job in the post office from which I was fired because I could no longer stand the stultifying work. From the post office I found a job as an interoffice messenger just blocks from Stuyvesant High School.
I continued to read at a good pace, but I had all but given up on the writing. Then, one day, while I was working on a construction job in midtown Manhattan, I found myself at low point in my life. I had spent the morning knocking down interior walls with a sledgehammer and was covered with dirt and debris as I ate my lunch on the curb. A fellow worker nudged me as a young, pretty girl passed. He made some remark, and I looked up in time to see the absolute disgust in her face. I knew this was not what I wanted to do with my life, and I remembered my high school writing teacher’s advice: “Whatever you do, don’t stop writing.”
I decided, then and there, to start again. I didn’t need to get published, or to make money from my writing; I just needed to be able to think of myself as a person with a brain as well as a body. I bought a composition book on the way home, and that night, after bathing, I began once again to make marks on paper.
It was refreshing to write again. It was as if I were suddenly back in my element, searching for the right words, hearing the music of language once again. My poetry was all vanity, the gathering around me of the accoutrements of an inner life. I would send my poems out, to literary quarterlies or magazines, and wait for their return. While they were out, I would dream of their appearing in the pages of some magazine, of a stranger musing over my words, of a phrase that I had written wandering through the mind of a subway rider. The poems almost always came back, and I would send them out again, asking no more than that by their absence they would offer the promise of immortality.
Once I began writing again, I couldn’t stop. I produced poems, short stories, articles, even ideas for advertising campaigns. I would save my rejection slips, and every six months or so I would put them into a neat pile to check my progress. Then I would throw away the pile and start a new one. Eventually a few of the poems were published, and then a few of the stories, mostly in small literary magazines that paid in contributors’ copies.
A turning point in my writing was the discovery of a short story by James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues.” It was a beautifully written story, but, more important, it was a story about the black urban experience. Baldwin, in writing and publishing that story, gave me permission to write about my own experiences. I was playing a lot of ball at the time, and my next story, about basketball, was accepted the first time I sent it out. When my half-brother Wayne was killed in Vietnam, I was able to handle the grief of his loss by writing about it for Essence magazine.
I found other black writers, in particular the journalist Chuck Stone, and I met John O. Killens, who in turn introduced me to James Baldwin. I tried to explain to Baldwin, who had grown up just blocks from me in Harlem, all that “Sonny’s Blues” had meant to me, but I couldn’t.
“It’s a shame we all have to go through that process, isn’t it?” Baldwin said knowingly.
Killens, the author of Youngblood, And Then We Heard the Thunder, and other novels, also brought me into the Harlem Writer’s Guild, an organization of black writers. He counseled me always to think of my body of work rather than to concentrate too heavily on a particular book. It was, I believe, good advice.
In the interim, despite my lack of college, my reading skills had allowed me to get better jobs. I wasn’t making a lot of money, but I realized that my ability to handle any written material gave me a versatility that many of my friends looking for jobs did not have.
I also began making some money from writing articles and fiction for men’s magazines. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was enough for me to call myself a writer. Then, in 1968, I entered a contest for black writers run by the Council on Interracial Books for Children. I won the contest, and the book was published the following season. I have been publishing books for young people ever since.
In putting together the memories for this book, lining them up and trying to make sense of them, I’ve come to the conclusion that I had a marvelous start in life. The love and attention I received as a toddler allowed me to acquire skills beyond those that my parents enjoyed, and in some ways to grow beyond the point at which my relationship with them was easily managed. I was fortunate to be raised in a church and community that gave me an appreciation of values that I have, from time to time, bent somewhat, but that have always brought me back to a core in which I am satisfied. It was in my childhood community that I was first exposed to the cultural substance that is so much a part of my writing today. Through those early years, the years of halted speech in which fists flew faster than words, I was able, with the love of my family, to claim ownership of the language I would spend my life enjoying.
In my heart I’ve always wanted to do the right thing and
be thought of as a good person. Even here I see that I’ve excluded many of the discipline problems I had in school. By today’s standards I might have been described as hyperactive. I like to think of myself as having been “busy.”
One weekend I was visiting my parents in Morristown, New Jersey, and had taken a new book to show them. I stayed overnight, and when I came down in the morning, I found my parents at the kitchen table. They had obviously been talking about me.
“What is it that you do again?” Mama asked. She had the book on the table in front of her.
“I write stories for children,” I said.
“You wrote stories when you were a boy,” my father said, emphasizing boy. “You’re a man, now.”
“How do you go about doing it?” Mama asked, interposing herself between me and Dad.
I explained how I would think of an idea, would make an outline of the story, and then type it up and do whatever revisions were necessary. I tried to make the process sound as impressive as I could. I could see in their body language that my father wasn’t convinced and that Mama was as pleased as she could be. Later in the day I heard her proudly explaining to a friend on the phone that her son “types stories for a living.” I was very pleased.
But my dad, in a way, was right. I had returned to that period of innocence in my life, that period of exploration of the human condition. And I was loving it.
Writing has let me into a world in which I am respected, where the skills I have are respected for themselves. I am in a world of book lovers and people eager to rise to the music of language and ideas. All in all it has been a great journey and not at all shabby for a bad boy.
BOOKS I'VE TYPED
FICTION
THE BLUES OF FLATS BROWN
illustrated by Nina Laden (Holiday House, 2000)