MR. IRWIN LASHER
Harlem in the summer was and is an experience that will always live with me. I traveled, mostly with Mama, to other parts of the city, but nothing matched Harlem. Mama and I would occasionally go downtown to Macy’s and Gimbel’s or to the many stores along 14th Street, then a big shopping area. But neither 14th Street nor any other area had the colors of 125th Street. In Harlem the precise accents of northern-born blacks mixed with the slow drawls of recent southern immigrants and the lilting accents from the islands. Downtown, white people wore suits and white shirts to jobs in offices and stores. In Harlem, where the laborers lived, people wore the bright colors deemed inappropriate for offices.
Adam Clayton Powell, the pastor of Abyssinian Baptist, had led a protest that resulted in more black people working in the stores on 125th Street. Before his protests black people shopped on Harlem’s main street but did not work there. As more and more blacks found jobs in the stores, the character of the street changed. It became common to hear loudspeakers in the music stores fill the area with the sounds of jazz and to see strollers adjust their rhythms to the beat set down by Count Basie or even some gospel group.
Black businessmen walked side by side with black orthodox Jews. Uniformed members of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association could be seen outside Micheaux’s bookstore. White-dressed women, followers of the charismatic religious leader Father Divine, might be giving out leaflets. Even the white people who came to Harlem were colorful. In Smilen Brothers a bearded white man bent nails with his teeth and talked about the poisons in our foods. White nuns from St. Joseph’s jostled with fat black women in Blumstein’s for bargains, and the butchers in Raphael’s meat market pushed slices of cold cuts across the counter for black children to nibble on while their mamas shopped.
The chief entertainment available to young people was the movies, and there were three major theaters along 125th Street. The Loew’s showed first-run movies, as did the Alhambra. The Apollo, of course, was the showpiece of the community, with live entertainment as well as movies. Farther down the street the Harlem Opera House, which had once shown live performances when Harlem was mostly white, showed older films. The West End and Sunset each ran three movies and a number of shorts. Sometimes the West End would show a “colored” movie, one of the films made by black producers. There was also an arcade in which you could play games, have your picture taken, or even make a cheap plastic record of your voice. It was common for people just to walk along 125th Street as their evening’s entertainment. What I knew about black people—or Negroes, which was the preferred term at that time—was primarily what I saw on 125th Street, in the newspapers, and in church. Blacks were entertainers, or churchgoers, or athletes. I decided I wanted to be an athlete.
There were two categories of friends in my life: those with whom I played ball and everyone else. Athletes were highly respected in the black community, and boys my age were encouraged to play some sport. I loved playing ball. I would play basketball in the mornings with the boys who were just reaching their teens, and then stoop ball or punchball on the block with boys my age. Sometimes Eric and I would go down to the courts on Riverside Drive and play there. And I was a bad, bad loser. Most of my prayers, when they weren’t for the Dodgers, were quick ones in the middle of a game, asking God to let me win. I liked other sports as well and even followed the New York Rangers hockey team in the papers for a while until I found out that all the references to ice meant just that, that they were skating on ice. There wasn’t any ice to skate on in Harlem, so I gave up following hockey.
With school out and me not having access to Mrs. Conway’s cache of books, I rediscovered the George Bruce Branch of the public library on 125th Street. Sometimes on rainy days I would sit in the library and read. The librarians always suggested books that were too young for me, but I still went on a regular basis. I could never have afforded to buy the books and was pleased to have the library with its free supply.
Being a boy meant to me that I was not to particularly like girls. Most of the girls I knew couldn’t play ball, and that excluded them from most of what I wanted to do with my life. Dorothy Dodson, daughter of the Wicked Witch, read books, and I knew she did, but she couldn’t stand me and was more than happy to tell me so on a number of occasions. Sometimes I would see other children on the trolley with books under their arms and suspected that they were like me somehow. I felt a connection with these readers but didn’t know what that connection was. I knew there were things going on in my head, a fantasy life, that somehow corresponded to the books I read. I also felt a kind of comfort with books that I did not experience when I was away from them. Away from books I was, at times, almost desperate to fill up the spaces of my life. Books filled those spaces for me.
As much as I enjoyed reading, in the world in which I was living it had to be a secret vice. When I brought books home from the library, I would sometimes run into older kids who would tease me about my reading. It was, they made it clear, not what boys did. And though by now I was fighting older boys and didn’t mind that one bit, for some reason I didn’t want to fight about books. Books were special and said something about me that I didn’t want to reveal. I began taking a brown paper bag to the library to bring my books home in.
That year I learned that being a boy meant that I was supposed to do certain things and act in a certain way. I was very comfortable being a boy, but there were times when the role was uncomfortable. We often played ball in the church gym, and one rainy day, along with my brother Mickey and some of “my guys,” I went to the gym, only to find a bevy of girls exercising on one half of the court. We wanted to run a full-court game, so we directed a few nasty remarks to the other side of the small gym. Then we saw that the girls were doing some kind of dance, so we imitated them, cracking ourselves up.
When the girls had finished their dancing, they went through some stretching exercises. A teenager, Lorelle Henry, was leading the group, and she was pretty, so we sent a few woo-woos her way.
“I bet you guys can’t even do these stretching exercises,” Lorelle challenged.
We scoffed, as expected.
“If you can do the exercises, we’ll get off the court,” Lorelle said. “If not, you go through the whole dance routine with us.”
It was a way to get rid of the girls, and we went over to do the exercises. Not one of us was limber enough to do the stretching exercises, and soon we were all trying to look as disgusted as we could while we hopped around the floor to the music.
They danced to music as a poem was being read. I liked the poem, which turned out to be “The Creation” by James Weldon Johnson. I liked dancing, too, but I had to pretend that I didn’t like it. No big deal. I was already keeping reading and writing poems a secret; I would just add dancing.
The poems I wrote were mostly about finding rhymes to put on the ends of sentences, but I liked manipulating words, and I was doing it on a more-or-less regular basis. I read the poem I had published over and over. It was the first time I had seen my name in print, and it made me feel important. Mama had been so pleased, I wrote her a number of new poems, but none of them turned out as well as the first one had. I was disappointed, but I kept trying.
The summer between the fifth and sixth grades was going very well. Eric and I had become firm best friends. One of the local theaters put show cards in the window of his bakery and gave his father free passes. We went to all the movies and saw Battleground at least five times. He also told me a lot about the female anatomy. Apparently an older boy had given him the scoop, and he was only too eager to pass it on to me. For years I thought a girl might get pregnant if you touched her breasts. This was partially confirmed by my sister Gerry. Once, when she was chasing me with a chicken head, I turned and took a swing at her, hitting her on the breast. She told Mama, who told me never to hit a girl there. When Eric told me about girls getting pregnant, I figured that was what Gerry was worried about.
When L
orelle Henry and her group finally put on the dance recital, dancing and acting out “The Creation,” with me in a central role as Adam and my brother, who couldn’t dance, as a stiff-legged God, my father wouldn’t come to see it. He didn’t think young boys should be dancing around a stage in skimpy outfits. Mama came, and she said I did just fine.
Dad wasn’t doing that well at U.S. Radium. I suspect the pay was just a bit over minimum wage, and I didn’t get an allowance. If I wanted money, I would ask Mama, and she would give it to me if she had it. Then, on Saturday mornings, I began carrying packages for women at the A&P, sometimes earning as much as three dollars in a single day. When I earned that much, I could go to the movies or go to a candy shop on 125th and buy a bag of stale candy for a dime. Also, there was a Chinese laundry on Eighth Avenue that sold used comics for a nickel, and I bought my share, sneaking them into the house rolled into my sock under a pants leg.
Except for the comics I spent most of the summer on the straight and narrow. Viola gave me a used book of Bible stories with dramatic illustrations. A librarian recommended some John R. Tunis books, mostly about baseball, which I liked.
My new school, the new P.S. 125, was quite close to my house. It was located on 123rd Street, right across from Morningside Park between Morningside and Amsterdam Avenues. The school was ultramodern for the day, with tables and chairs that could be arranged any way the teacher wanted instead of the rigid desks nailed to the floor we had been used to having. I was in class 6-2 and had my first male teacher, Mr. Irwin Lasher.
“You’re in my class for a reason,” he said as I sat at the side of his desk. “Do you know what the reason is?”
“Because I was promoted to the sixth grade?” I asked.
“Because you have a history of fighting your teachers,” he said. “And I’m telling you right now, I won’t tolerate any fighting in my class for any reason. Do you understand that?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a bright boy, and that’s what you’re going to be in this class.”
My fight with Mr. Lasher didn’t happen until the third day, and in a way it wasn’t really my fault. We were going up the stairs, and I decided that, when his back was turned, I would pretend that I was trying to kick him. All right, he paused on the staircase landing before leading us to our floor, and the kick that was supposed to delight my classmates by just missing the teacher hit him squarely in the backside. He turned quickly and started toward me. Before I realized it, I was swinging at him wildly.
Mr. Lasher had been in World War II and had fought in the Battle of the Bulge. He didn’t have much trouble handling me. He sat me in a corner of the classroom and said that he would see me after class. I imagined he would send a note home, and that my mother would have to come to school. I was already practicing what I would say to her when I gave her the note. But instead of sending a note home, he came home with me! Down the street we came, my white teacher and me, with all my friends looking at me and a few asking if it meant I was going to get a beating. I thought it probably would, but I didn’t give them the satisfaction of an answer. Mama was sitting on the park bench across from our house when I came down the street with Mr. Lasher firmly holding my hand.
“Mrs. Myers, I had a little problem with Walter today that I think you should know about,” he said, sitting next to her on the bench.
He called Mama by my last name, not knowing that I was an informal adoptee. Her last name was Dean, of course, but she didn’t go into it. Mr. Lasher quietly explained to my mother that all the tests I had taken indicated that I was quite smart, but that I was going to throw it all away because of my behavior.
“We need more smart Negro boys,” he said. “We don’t need tough Negro boys.”
Mr. Lasher did two important things that year. The first was that he took me out of class one day per week and put me in speech therapy for the entire day. The second thing he did was to convince me that my good reading ability and good test scores made me special.
He put me in charge of anything that needed a leader and made me coach the slower kids in reading. At the end of the year I was the one student in his class whom he recommended for placement in a rapid advancement class in junior high school.
With Mr. Lasher my grades improved significantly. I was either first or second in every subject, and he even gave me a satisfactory in conduct. As the tallest boy in the sixth grade, I was on the honor guard and was scheduled to carry the flag at the graduation exercises, an honor I almost missed because of God’s revenge.
I firmly believed that God saw everything and duly noted all transgressions, big and small. It was never my intention to do wrong, and so generally I thought I was in good stead with the Almighty. But as spring rolled around that year, I found myself barely hanging on to that side of the ledger.
I lived on Morningside Avenue, but I played mostly on the side streets because that’s where the sewers were. The sewers were bases if you played stickball, they were the goal lines if you played football, they were the base if you played tag, they were the spot you made your first shot from if you played skullies. The side street between Morningside Avenue and Manhattan Avenue was a pleasant block, lined with brownstones that had been converted into either single-room occupancies with community bathrooms or, at least, apartment dwellings that contained between four and six families.
Few families on the side streets had refrigerators, and halfway down the block was a wooden pallet on which sat kegs of ice. You could ask the iceman for a fifteen-cent piece up to a dollar piece of ice (a dollar piece being absolutely huge). A thirty-five cent piece was big enough for a man with an ice shaver to buy and sell “icies,” shaved ice with flavored syrup, and make a day’s wage.
The whole block was guarded by Crazy Johnny, who had returned from the war shell-shocked. If anything went wrong, Crazy Johnny would try to set it right. This usually meant trying to stop fights between kids and sweeping up broken bottles.
We didn’t get many yellow cabs coming to the street, because downtown cabs didn’t stop for black people and you didn’t need to use a cab when the A train came directly to Harlem. One day in May there weren’t any kids on the block to play with except Clyde Johnson, who was too young to play with. A yellow cab pulled up in front of a building, and a fairly elegant looking lady got out. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to hitch a ride on the back bumper of the cab. The cab started off with a jerk, and I was thrown off the bumper, but the sleeve of my shirt was caught. I was dragged the entire length of the block, bouncing along behind the cab, past the sewers, past parked cars, and all the way to the corner, where the cab was stopped by a light. It was there that I unhooked my sleeve and managed to get to my feet.
The agony was excruciating. Clyde asked me if I was hurt, and I said no.
“Your pants are torn,” he said.
My jeans were in shreds at the knees, and the blood from my scraped knees was showing through. I tried to sit on the church steps, but the pain was too great. Stiff-leggedly I made my way around the corner and over to my building.
When I got home, Mama was on the phone and I went into the bathroom and got the iodine. Then I went to my room, stopping only to answer my mother’s inquiry as to whether or not I was hungry.
“No, ma’am.”
The iodine had a stopper and a glass rod applicator. I touched some iodine to my scraped leg. Yow! Enough of that. I went directly to bed.
When Mama called me for supper that evening, I called back that I wasn’t hungry. She called me a second time and told me to come to the kitchen, where my father now sat at the table, his dinner before him. By that time my legs had stiffened so I could hardly walk.
“What’s wrong with you, boy?” my father asked.
“Nothing.” My universal answer.
“What’s wrong with you, boy?” My father’s voice again, deeper, more resolute.
“My legs hurt,” I said.
“Take your pants down.”
Right there at the dinner table. I had changed pants and now undid my belt and gingerly let the changed pants down. My mother gasped when she saw my legs—a mass of bruises, swelling, and dried blood.
“What happened to you?” my father demanded.
I knew that hitching a ride on the back of a cab was wrong. And I had been trying so hard all year to be good. Maybe all these things were swimming around in my head too quickly. I honestly don’t know what made me answer the way I did.
“Mama beat me with a stick,” I said, the tears already flowing.
I think that if my mama hadn’t been so shocked at the condition of my legs, she might have been able to respond. As it was, I don’t think that she could really believe what she was hearing. First, there was her darling boy come home a bruised and bloody mess, in itself enough to send her into a blind panic, and then the same darling boy claiming to have suffered his injuries at her hand.
Maybe I could have reversed myself, admitted what had really happened, if my father had not gone absolutely crazy with anger. He bellowed, “If you ever…how…why…If you ever touch him again I’ll…” My father sputtered on and on. At this point Mama was crying. I was gingerly put into a hot bath to let my legs soak. I sat in the hot water and listened as my father berated Mama. It never occurred to him that I could be lying about such a thing. I went to bed and told God I was sorry.
The next two days I couldn’t go to school. Mama brought me food and put it on a chair near my bed. She didn’t say anything to me, just looked at me as if she had never seen me before.
Two weeks later I was as good as new. Mama had been instructed by my dad not to touch me, and by the redness in his eyes she knew he meant it. I avoided her eyes when she asked how I could do such a thing to her. When she asked me what had really happened, I didn’t answer. But Mama forgave me as usual, and I focused instead on the coming graduation from the sixth grade. My father checked my legs once a week because he hadn’t forgotten the incident. Neither had God.