Bad Boy

  Eight days before graduation. We were playing stickball on 122nd Street, and a foul ball went up on the flat roof over the church vestibule. There was a drainpipe that came from the main roof and down the side of the church. Reverend Abbott, when he had been at the church the summer before, had put barbed wire on the pipe to keep us from climbing it to get balls that went up there. We had ripped the wire down, and every kid on the block, girls included, could climb onto that roof. Up I went after the foul ball. Enter Crazy Johnny.

  “Get down from there!” he half yelled, half growled in his Crazy Johnny kind of way.

  I threw the ball down, but I didn’t come down. What I did instead was taunt Crazy Johnny from my perch. Johnny knew about the drainpipe and started climbing up after me. What Johnny didn’t know was that I had a plan.

  Eric and I had watched enough war movies to know that if we ever got into the army, we were going to go airborne. Jumping out of a plane was fairly easy. You jumped, your parachute opened, and you floated down. In order not to hurt yourself on landing, you bent your knees, landed on your heels, and fell to one side.

  Up came Crazy Johnny. My friends below screamed. I waited by the edge of the roof of the one-story building. I let Johnny get halfway across the roof before I jumped, my legs together and slightly bent. I landed on my heels, and the pain was unbearable.

  Patty Lee and John Lightbourne, friends who lived on Morningside Avenue, helped me to the church steps, where I sat for a while before going home. I wanted desperately to tell somebody about the pain in my heels, but what could I say so soon after lying about the first incident? Oh, yes, I jumped off a roof? Mama beat me on the heels with a stick? I suffered in silence for the next two weeks. Years later I found out I had sustained minor fractures to both feet.

  I AM NOT THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE

  By the summer of 1949 both Viola and Geraldine had moved out. Viola worked in electronics, and she and her husband, Frank, had bought a house in Queens. Geraldine moved up to 147th Street, within walking distance, with her husband, a Navy veteran named Norman, and I got my own room. I had begun to sense that there was a way for people to live, and that it was our individual responsibility to find that way. I sensed this, and I didn’t see a need to think it through fully. I had already been given a set of rules to follow that assured me, at the very least, that I would somehow get into heaven. The basis of my beliefs was the conviction that there was a God in heaven who looked down on us with infinite concern. His son, Jesus, had taken us from the Old Testament’s hellfire and given us a very cool way of living best summed up by the idea of doing unto others as you would have others do unto you.

  Next, I believed in a certain fairness. Over the long haul things would have a way of working themselves out toward an essentially good position.

  I was also convinced that those values I was being offered in school were right in the truest sense of rightness, that they were what both the world and God wanted. By accepting those values, I imagined, I would move into a society that would find me as wonderful as I found it, and together we would have achieved the state of being good. But there was something else going on, and that was the idea that while I wanted to be good—and my idea of being good was a very tolerant one—I also wanted to be like other kids so I would have friends.

  As I approached my twelfth birthday, I was nearly six feet tall and physically aggressive. I loved to run, to jump, to test my strength and speed against other boys. I didn’t at all mind fighting, if necessary. I was very close to moving to the next level of athletic ability, a level at which I would be better than most kids my age and ready to play against older kids. But this also would move me away from the kids most likely to be in the same social circles I was in. If we had had more organized sports, this would have worked itself out, but we didn’t, and so I had to find my own place in sports. Mr. Reese, who lived on the first floor in my building and managed a Negro team, thought I might be able to play baseball in a few years if the Negro Leagues were still around.

  I was also a reader. Not just a reader, but someone hungry for books. I was completely comfortable alone in my room with a book, more comfortable than in any other situation. If the other boys on the block were now smaller than me physically and somewhat behind in their athletic ability, they were far behind in their literary skills. They might have been as good in math, or mechanical skills, but they were not even close in reading or in exploring new ideas. Those values that I was accepting in school—being a good reader, being a person willing to explore the great ideas—were actually serving to separate me from other kids my age. I didn’t want to be apart from them. I wanted, needed, to connect with people who were close to my own age, and to be accepted by them. I didn’t think much of how my moving into a world of books was also moving me away from my parents.

  “What do you want for your birthday?” my mother asked as the summer drifted into August.

  “A glove,” I said. “Or a ball.”

  Either one would have done. We played sandlot baseball and rarely had a ball that was not taped, or resewn so that it had a lump in it that gave it a natural curve when you threw it. Mr. Reese would always lend us a couple of old bats if we wanted to play, but balls were something else, because we kept knocking them out of the sandlot. Once the balls left the lot, they would, as if by design, search for a sewer to go down. My birthday, the twelfth of August, fell on a Friday, and the plan was to have a party for me on the next day. It was to be my first birthday party, and I was looking forward to it.

  What could Mama have thought of me that year? She had been through so much because of me. I had lied about her hitting me after the taxi incident. I had been involved in a few fights (duly reported by Mrs. Dodson) that upset her. But I had also graduated from the sixth grade at the top of my class and had been put into the special class for bright kids, and somehow Mr. Lasher had convinced the school officials that I deserved the award for Outstanding Boy.

  “I was so proud of you carrying the flag,” Mama had said after my graduation exercises. “You looked like you were walking on your toes down the aisles.”

  Of course, I had been walking on my toes because walking on my heels was impossibly painful due to my jump off the church roof. Mama wanted to reward me for doing well and had saved what money she could to pull together a party. It was with great anticipation that I went to sleep on Friday, knowing that I was now twelve and that the next day I would have both the party and the presents. I went to bed dreaming of getting a glove and a ball and perhaps a bat as well. Who knew?

  I was awakened early in the morning by my mother.

  “Walter, get up,” she said. “I’ve got bad news. Your uncle Lee was killed last night.”

  We piled into the old Buick and made our way to the Bronx, where Aunt Nancy now lived. The apartment was cluttered with little porcelain figures, decorative plates, and ashtrays from various nightclubs. When we arrived, my aunt was crying loudly, her face contorted with grief. I had never seen that much sadness before, and the smells that permeated the apartment—liniment smells, stale tobacco, a pot of pepper rice and cloves on the stove—added a heavy weight to the atmosphere. My dad wanted to know if they were sure, and Aunt Nancy said she had been to the hospital. They were sure it was Uncle Lee. My father wanted to go and see for himself. I stayed behind as Dad, Mama, and several cousins went to the morgue.

  I hadn’t been that close to Uncle Lee, and in truth his death didn’t mean that much to me. My father, however, was devastated. Uncle Lee hadn’t been out of jail that long, and although he came to the house on more or less a regular basis, I never saw evidence of the closeness between them. They had lived together in Baltimore as kids, had struggled to survive, and had achieved a physical and emotional toughness that seemed to fit them well.

  When Dad got back from the morgue, he looked like a stranger to me, wild-eyed and nearly incoherent. A cousin lit some incense in a brass holder, and the new scent drifted in thin wisps of smoke toward
the yellowed ceiling. I learned that Uncle Lee had been drinking in a bar, had probably been drunk, and was robbed and beaten in an alley. He had been literally stomped to death, dying of internal injuries. My father cried openly, and I saw that Mama kept a short distance from him, almost as if she were afraid of his crying, as if the sudden grief had turned her husband into a stranger. In many ways it would do exactly that.

  The funeral was filled with pain, open and naked and shared by my father and his sisters. Cousins and nephews and nieces prepared food and moved silently through the apartment in which the funeral was staged. The trip to the cemetery, the family praying, a strange woman singing “Precious Lord,” were unfamiliar rituals. I had never seen adults crying before, their faces distorted and strained with emotion, their hurt pushing them awkwardly from the cars to the graveside and back, and then back to the Bronx, where they sat around the table, thinking tortured thoughts of what might have been if Uncle Lee had only had a few more years.

  On the way home from the Bronx to Harlem, I saw that life went on. Kids were playing ball on 122nd Street, the iceman was delivering ice, women sat in the windows watching the world go by. Someone died, and life went on. Only Uncle Lee would not be a part of it.

  The following Sunday morning, when I came out of my room and started talking, Dad put his fingers to his lips. “This is Sunday,” he said. “The Lord’s day.”

  I looked at Mama, and she looked away. There was a woman preacher, Miss Anna Tuell, on the radio. Dad sat listening to her, and sometimes he nodded his head as if he were agreeing with what she had to say. He did this all day Sunday and the following Sundays for the rest of the year. At night when he came home from work, he hardly spoke. He would eat and then listen to some church program—there seemed always to be one on the radio—until it was time to go to bed. The mourning depressed Mama something terrible and disrupted our lives. There were no longer just the three of us in the house. Dad’s grief for his brother was as real as if it were a stranger who lived with us, a stranger who had taken my place in the center of the universe.

  Dad’s depression affected Mama a great deal, and I thought she became distant even when he wasn’t around. Now, looking back, I think that it might have been I who had become distant as well. Death was new to me, an uncomfortable event that I did not fully understand. But my father was nearly impossible. Sometimes at night when I woke, I would hear him praying aloud as he knelt by the bed. I remember that once I heard my parents argue in the morning before Dad went to work. When he left, the door slammed. I asked Mama what had happened. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and she told me she couldn’t stand my dad’s sadness.

  “Lee’s dead,” she said. “Not all of us.”

  Suddenly the world had stopped revolving around me. I was still a part of it all, playing ball, eating, reading, experiencing the death of a family member, and the sadness. But I was only a small part.

  My father’s depression lasted for an entire year. He turned to religion in a way that I had never seen before. He didn’t speak much, and never went out. Christmas came and went that year with me and Mama sitting in the living room with the Christmas tree and Dad sitting in the kitchen by himself. What I missed most about him was his offbeat sense of humor. Before Uncle Lee’s death my dad could find humor in almost any situation. Now there was nothing funny, nothing without the heavy shadow of his brother’s death.

  The term before, Mr. Lasher had recommended that I be put into a newly formed rapid advancement class, and I had taken the test to get in. Tests were always easy for me. I saw them as games, saw myself as being in a contest against a mythical adversary, and welcomed the challenge. Dorothy Dodson and Eric were also going to be in the class. The other kids came from all over the city, some from as far away as Brooklyn.

  We were going to do the seventh and eighth grades in one year and were then going to do the ninth grade the next year, making up any work we needed along the way. The school we were going to was Junior High School 43, now Adam Clayton Powell Academy, on 128th Street. The class initially consisted of fourteen girls and eleven boys, a small class for the time. I was officially going to be considered “smart.”

  I liked the rapid advancement class, also called SP. SP stood for Special Progress, and all the kids in the class were indeed smart. For most of the year we spent our time studying each other. None of us had been around that many other kids who were so smart. It was a class in which everyone got a ninety on every test, and an eighty was a source of derision. But I also noticed, for the first time, a sense of being alone. While part of the feeling was because of my home situation, there was more to it than that.

  In school we studied American history including, for the first time, slavery. Our discussion was the usual one for the time. Slavery, we were taught, was a distant and unfortunate period in American history and had led to the Civil War. In the history book there was an image of scantily clad Africans, their heads down, being marched off a boat under the watchful eyes of white men armed only with walking sticks. I was glad to get past the abbreviated reference to slavery. No one spoke the words, but I believe that every black kid in the class who, like me, thought that life was fundamentally fair must have felt on some level that those enslaved blacks had somehow deserved to be enslaved.

  Mama, despite her being half German, half Indian, knew a lot about slavery. She had heard stories about the cruelties of slavery from the older black people around Martinsburg, West Virginia.

  “They dug a hole when they wanted to beat a pregnant woman,” Mama said. “They put her belly in the hole so they wouldn’t hurt the baby.”

  When we had passed the two pages on which slavery was mentioned in the textbook, I moved away from it mentally as well. I remember noticing that Robert E. Lee’s horse was named Traveller, the same name as my bicycle. The black kids in the class wanted to identify with the values we were being taught, and the concept of being slaves was a clear deflection of those values. The teachers didn’t seem to notice that the black kids weren’t comfortable with the textbook. They also didn’t seem to notice anything wrong in our music class when we we sang “My Old Kentucky Home,” the version with the “darkies” being gay.

  Ivanhoe, The Prince and the Pauper, and some poems by Kipling and Tennyson were among the things I read in school the first year in the special class. On my own I found Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and my sister Geraldine gave me a copy of Little Men. I didn’t like Ivanhoe, hated The Prince and the Pauper, tolerated the poems, and loved Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. I also loved Little Men and, after reading it twice, got Little Women from the library. I thought Little Women was quite possibly the worst book ever written.

  Although I was a reader, I did not associate books with writing. I liked to look at pictures of writers, and none of the writers whom I was studying in school had any relation to anything I knew as being real. They were all, as far as I knew, dead. Those who weren’t dead were probably English, which meant about the same thing to me. That year I also discovered a book that alluded to sex. It was one of my better finds for the year.

  When my mom was home, I would come home for lunch. When she was back working in the factory or cleaning apartments, she gave me money for lunch. I would use the money to buy adult paperbacks with girls on the cover. There weren’t any real girls whom I particularly liked, although Dorothy Dodson was becoming interesting, but the idea of having a girlfriend appealed to me. So when, after a few months, the girls in the class made a ranking of all the boys according to which ones were “hunks,” I was hopeful. The class had shrunk to ten boys, and I came out eighth. So much for girls. My grades were good, and our class basketball team, with Eddie Norton as captain, was the second best in the school. I was still taking speech therapy classes, but I wasn’t fighting anymore.

  What I was doing was spending more and more time alone in my room, reading or writing. Mama started playing the numbers, and I learned how to get the winning number from the radio by adding up the race resu
lts. Sometimes we watched television together, but more and more we did so in silence.

  As the year wore on, my father made an effort to come out of his depression. Occasionally we would go out to Rockaway Beach, and he would fish off a jetty. Mama and I had no interest in fishing, and so we would walk along the beach. I liked the smell of the sea and the mystery of crabs scrambling onto the shore. Mama was just glad to get out of the apartment.

  A WRITER OBSERVES

  Harlem. As I grew older, I began to see things differently. At thirteen I wanted to see the world around me the way I thought a real writer would have seen it, full of magic and marvels and breathtaking beauty, which would inspire me to write the kinds of poetry I had read in school. I wanted to look at the world through the eyes of a Shelley or a Byron, to feel the inspiration that guided their pens. I didn’t have a typewriter, and so I wrote everything in black-and-white-covered composition books.

  I had traveled to other parts of New York City, but my world, of course, was Harlem. Physically, Harlem was one of the most beautiful areas in the world. Bounded by Central Park to the south, and lying between the Hudson and East Rivers, it was built up in the 1890s as an ultramodern urban environment for middle-and upper-class whites. The expansion northward from the center of the city was too rapid, and the new housing, including elegant brownstones and magnificent apartments designed by the country’s leading architects, was soon a money-losing proposition for the many investors. Soon apartments originally designed for one family were being cut up into two-and three-family dwellings, and blacks, who had been confined previously to the West Forties, were allowed to move in. By the First World War, the community was a ghetto in the making. Its residents’ struggle to maintain their dignity despite absentee landlords and poor city services was intense and ongoing.