Bad Boy (7 page)

T
he seventh and eighth grades, which our Special Progress class did in one year, were remarkable only in that I had no major fights and for the depression of my father. I ended the year glad to be released from the hot classrooms but with few prospects for the summer. I had fewer friends than ever, having lost anything of common interest with the boys on my block who were my age. Boys slightly older were moving on to girls and dating and fitting in with the mores and restrictions of being in their mid teens, which meant, among other things, avoiding associations with younger boys. I was twelve and going into the ninth grade of what would today be called a “gifted” program, while many of the other kids my age were just going into the seventh. The only sport I was playing now was basketball,
often with guys four or five years older than I was.

Basketball was very satisfying. It gave me a chance to compete, which I loved, and it was highly respected in the community. A good basketball player would be known throughout Harlem. Beyond the idea of winning, which was important to me, I liked the physical aspects of playing ball. Going up for a rebound and snatching it off the backboard over an opponent was a thrill. To even get into one of the tough summer tournaments, with players coming from as far away as Philadelphia, was sheer delight.

My sister Imogene had come to Harlem to live with George Myers. She was bright, beautiful, and feisty, but, like Mickey, she was not allowed out of the house that much. I wanted her to see me play ball in the worst way, but she could never get to the better games that I managed to play in. I did show her some of my poetry, which she liked. I thought Jean, as we called her, was a lot like me and began wondering more often what my biological family was like.

Mr. Lasher had convinced me that I was bright, and by the time I approached the ninth grade, education had become very important to me. There was far less pretense in the New York City school system than there is today. High schools were divided into four general categories: vocational, commercial, general, and
academic. Only 25 percent of all male students attended academic high schools and were expected to go on to college. The rest, even if they did graduate from high school, were expected to take their place in the workforce immediately. The dropout rate was quite high, but it didn't seem to matter all that much. Most jobs could be handled by anyone with a willingness to work and some reading ability. But I knew that a poor education would probably land me in a “Negro” job, that lower level of employment in which so many of the neighborhood men seemed to be hopelessly stuck.

By this time there were two very distinct voices going on in my head, and I moved easily between them. One had to do with sports, street life, and establishing myself as a male. It was a fairly rough voice, the kind of in-your-face tone that said I wouldn't stand for too much nonsense either on the basketball courts or in the streets. The other voice, the one I hid from my street friends and teammates, was increasingly dealing with the vocabulary of literature. Harlem had a rich literary heritage of which I knew nothing. The so-called Harlem Renaissance, which produced writers such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen, had ended during the Depression of the thirties, and none of these writers
were taught in city schools. Moreover, there were few black librarians. I remember none in the George Bruce Branch who might have recommended any of these writers to me.

I spent the summer with my time divided between playing basketball and reading. In ball I was helped briefly by a thin black man called Fatty who was the coach of a team called the Comanches, one of the best teams in the city. He talked to me about the possibility of playing ball in college, and I was encouraged. When I wasn't playing ball, I read everything I could get my hands on. The reading was largely indiscriminate. At the library, I would pick up a novel, read a page or two, then make a quick decision as to whether or not I wanted to borrow it. When a librarian at the George Bruce commented that I probably wasn't reading all the books I took out, I began to space out my visits. I wanted her to think that I was a reader.

Mary Finley was our teacher in the ninth grade. Never have I seen a teacher with such high hopes or one who would be so bitterly disappointed. The class had been together for a year, and she was the outsider. The first week of the new term set the tone for the whole year. Leon Sadoff's father ran a kiosk on Amsterdam just off 125th Street, and we got nine plugs of chewing tobacco from him. The idea was
hatched during one morning, the plugs acquired at lunchtime, and the chewing began right after lunch. None of us had ever chewed tobacco before, and why we thought it was a good idea is beyond me to this day. I can't remember the first boy who threw up, but I do remember Mrs. Finley's face when the rest of us started spitting out our tobacco wads. The class, in the middle of a history lecture, broke down into a group of retching, spitting thirteen-year-old boys, with the girls retreating to the open windows for air. Mrs. Finley was on the verge of tears and absolutely speechless. Her dismay, along with the disgust of the girls, made the whole venture worthwhile even as we had to clean up the mess we made with rags and buckets of water brought up by the cleaning staff.

Mrs. Finley tried to minimize the damage by saying that one of the boys had become ill and made the others sick. But the next week there was a spitball fight in our typing class, which blew our cover. The girls, after the tobacco incident, were somewhat envious of our notoriety. When Mr. Goldstein, the typing teacher, left the room and the spitball fight started, the girls joined in with a vengeance. Mr. Goldstein was not amused when he returned to see the typing room, including his desk, covered with spitballs.

The word quickly got around the school that the
SP students were troublemakers, and Mr. Manley, our French teacher, explained to us in no little detail how disgusting we were and what an educational opportunity we were wasting. Mr. Manley was also the only black teacher we had.

Mrs. Finley was our homeroom teacher and also taught English. I thought she was boring. Boring, that is, until we came to the sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. We had read sonnets before, but Mrs. Finley, reading Browning's poems, gave them new meaning.

Mrs. Finley introduced us first to the life of Elizabeth Barrett. Here was a sickly woman who lived much of her life alone and who wrote poetry from the time she was a child. The poems we read in class were her expressions of love to Robert Browning, her husband. The poetry was personal, and I was able to understand it as a personal expression by the writer rather than as what had seemed to me to be the impersonal writing of the earlier poems I had read. Perhaps
someone could be so moved by a Grecian urn that he would instantly sit down and write a poem about it, but the idea of writing to someone you loved was immediately attractive to me. The poetry had come
from
Browning as well as being written by her.

Sonnets from the Portuguese
used form and meter with an ease and grace that I envied. I wanted to write like Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I wanted to sit by my window, my small dog on my lap, and write this intensely personal poetry. The sonnet form allowed me to make my poems look and feel like real poetry without being as distant as some of the other British poetry I had read.

Mrs. Finley assigned us the task of writing a sonnet. I wrote dozens of sonnets. Mrs. Finley told me to put them into a notebook, and I did, writing them first on scrap paper and then, when they were as perfect as I needed them to be, carefully copying them out into my poetry notebook.

She took us from the sonnets of Browning to the sonnets of Shakespeare, which I found difficult. Where Browning was straightforward and usually clear, Shakespeare was devious, never being quite where you wanted him to be. When the class complained about how difficult it was to read Shakespeare's sonnets, we were challenged to learn enough to understand his
references, and to be mentally alert enough to see his puns and his layers of ideas. I tried writing a few poems à la Shakespeare, but quickly returned to Browning.

That Christmas, Mrs. Finley gave me paperback copies of both the comedies and tragedies of Shakespeare.

As the holiday season neared, my dad seemed finally to shake his blues. On his payday we drove downtown to Division Street and brought presents for my sisters, and he actually kidded around with Mama. She pretended to be annoyed, but I knew she was greatly relieved. So was I.

After Christmas we read more British poetry. To many of my classmates Mrs. Finley's dramatic readings of the English poets were comical, and I went along with laughing at her, but secretly I wanted to be an English poet. I wrote more sonnets and odes to everything imaginable. “Ode to the Summer Rain.” “Ode to a Leafy Sycamore Tree.” “Ode to a Church Steeple.” I was filling more and more notebooks.

The prints we saw of Shelley and Byron were of ethereal young white men with flowing hair. Mrs. Finley made them sound as if they were naturally brilliant, and I studied the images, trying to discern who they were. It was clear they were like no one I had ever known.

Each class had to do an assembly program for the entire school. Our first effort was a Japanese play called
The Stolen Prince
. The play was in Noh form. A narrator told the story but the actors were silent. A property man, dressed in black, moved items around the stage, concealed by his dark clothing, lighting, and the imagination of the audience. In
The Stolen Prince
I was the property man, and I also played a pennywhistle, in an imitation of Japanese music, for atmosphere.

This was a class of fiendishly bright kids who knew just how bright they were. Mrs. Finley wanted us to behave like the young scholars she imagined us to be. We wouldn't. We behaved badly at every turn and received more class reprimands than any other class in the school's history. Kids wouldn't move to the right places during rehearsals, or would ad-lib wisecracks, which Mrs. Finley didn't think at all funny. On the day we were to perform the play, she was virtually in tears. The play she saw as a gentle incursion into another culture we played as a comic romp with great effect. The school principal, who knew of our bad behavior reports, had come to the play and loved it. We were asked to perform it two more times.

Sometime during the school year we had to choose which high school we wanted to attend. The only boy who had an idea of which school he wanted to go to
was Edward Norton, whose brother, John, went to Stuyvesant High School. The five guys on the class basketball team, including my friend Eric, took the test for Stuyvesant, and we all passed.

The next play we did for assembly was an enactment, totally adapted by Mrs. Finley, I believe, of
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
. The whole class had to memorize the poem, and we were all assigned roles. Roberto Lembo, who took dance classes after school, did the choreography.

The Coleridge poem gave me yet a new idea about writing.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
did not have the elegance of any of the sonnets we had read, nor did it have the soaring language of a poem by Shelley or Byron. It was poetry designed to tell a tale. When we were in the seventh/eighth grades, Mr. Siegfried had read with us some narrative poetry that told of historical events (most notably “The Charge of the Light Brigade”), but the Coleridge epic had something more. It had a symbolism that wasn't in the other poems, and it also involved the poet's ideas about the moral responsibility of the mariner. He was the one who had shot the albatross, and yet in the end we pitied him. I was learning how many ways poetry could have meaning.

A few years later, sailing in Arctic waters similar to the ones that Coleridge described, I was surprised
to find out that some of what I had considered to be merely fancy writing by Coleridge were actually fairly accurate descriptions of natural phenomena.

Mrs. Finley was one of the few teachers I felt sorry for. She was willing to give so much more than we were willing to take.

At the end of the year she reminded us of how bright we all were and how it was our responsibility to do something with that brightness. The school's opinion of the experiment with the special classes for bright kids was clearly negative, she explained. We had made light of all the advantages we had been given and had treated the school with disdain, or so it seemed. But I also think that all the kids in that SP class took away something very special, the notion that each of us had intellectual gifts to spend as we chose.

While I had moved more into writing, and into reading, I was moving further and further away from my parents. I did write some poems which I showed my parents. Mama said they were nice and asked me to explain one of them, which I did. She said that my dad had liked them too. I was disappointed. I think I wanted to hear him, in his kindness, say the words.

What I did not know about my father was that he couldn't read.

T
he idea of what it means to be poor changed in the late sixties, when American manufacturers began to import their products from overseas and we began to accumulate “things.” Prior to that, it seems to me, we thought about being well off or not well off in terms of personal comfort or distress. If your circumstances were such that you couldn't afford to eat, or have a home, or have clothes to wear, then you were poor. My dad worked as a laborer, and we didn't have much, but I was never hungry in my life. That was the case with most of my friends, and we didn't mind collecting cans of food to send to the starving kids of Wherever Starving Kids Were Hanging Out.

My family had burial insurance on all of us. We were on good terms with Mr. Richards, the landlord, so
even if we had to have him come back the next week for the rent, he didn't mind. Each year my parents would go across town to Household Finance and borrow money for Christmas. This, along with the annual Christmas bonus, would get us through the holidays in fine spirits, and throughout the year we would make weekly repayments. The holidays were important, and the discipline needed to pay for the pleasure of annual generosity was relatively painless. Mama always used to say that she would buy some needed thing “as soon as I can spell Able.” Because we had spent so little money during my father's mourning for his brother, we managed to clear up the Household Finance bill earlier than expected, and it truly looked as if we were on the verge of “spelling Able.” But like most families in Harlem we could not tolerate unexpected financial burdens, and in the summer of 1951 we experienced two. I was the first.

Most of my life until then had been divided between school, reading, and ball playing. School was free, as was reading when the books were from the library, and the only thing needed to play basketball in Harlem were sneakers and a game. I had both. But I had grown to six feet and had the appetite of a growing teenager. A head taller than my father, I was wearing clothing that would fit only a larger man. My
family had had to borrow the money for the suit in which I graduated from the ninth grade. There was little money to outfit me for high school, and there were few jobs available to a fourteen-year-old. On weekends I hustled in front of the A&P, carrying packages for women, and sometimes I ran errands for neighborhood people. I used the money I made just to have something in my pocket in case Eric or my brother Mickey wanted to go to the movies.

The second burden of that summer came in the form of my grandfather. The Department of Welfare in Baltimore contacted my father and said that William Dean, his father, had lost most of his sight and needed welfare assistance. But since he had a working son, he could receive only a small portion of what he would get if he had no living relatives. My father would have to send him money on a regular basis or send for him. My father decided that it would be better to bring his father to live with us.

William Dean was a tall, ramrod-straight man with mannerisms that seemed more appropriate for the nineteenth century than for 1951. His father had been born a slave in Virginia and had risen to the position of overseer. After the Civil War the former slave stayed on as plantation boss. His son William moved to Baltimore as a young man and did odd jobs until he could
establish himself in a hauling business, eventually owning his own company with several teams of horses and a number of wagons. It was typical of him, or at least I thought so, that he had made the decision that horses could never be replaced by the newfangled trucks.

When he arrived at 81 Morningside Avenue, he seemed in good health except for his eyes. He wore glasses, one of which was painted an opaque white. When he took them off, you could see that the eye beneath the painted glass was clouded over. He could see out of the other eye, but not well enough to get around. Legally, as well as for all practical purposes, he was blind. When he came to live with us, he took my room, to which Mama objected strenuously but in vain. For Dad, it was a matter of respect to give the better available room to his father. But what got to Mama most was that Pap, as we called him, had not had indoor plumbing in Baltimore and was used to using what he called a slop bucket in his room and then emptying it out in the outhouse. In our house he used a bucket in his room and took it to the bathroom.

Mama, with her mania for cleaning everything top to bottom, was mortified. Pap was also used to having women as subordinates in his life, and Mama was a woman. A quiet war erupted between the two of them.
It's easy enough for me to see now that I should have been Mama's ally, that she should have been able to talk with me easily, but I had already grown apart from her in so many ways that our conversations, instead of deepening, had become more and more guarded. I was fully absorbed in discovering who I was and had yet to take responsibility for even that process.

Pap liked to tell Bible stories, often to me, dramatizing them as he sat in our small kitchen. More often than not the stories were in response to some casual comment on my part or Mama's. An offhand remark about a bit of bad luck would prompt the entire story of how Job suffered but did not curse his Lord. As Pap told them, the stories were vital and powerful. It was the language of the King James version of the Bible that was both powerful and beautiful. Also a little scary. I thought of Pap's Bible recitations as God's-gonna-get-ya! stories. My relationship with God at this point was, at best, tenuous. “My lost saints” had not gone away, nor were they completely lost. Somewhere along the way I came up with the idea that I already had the ability to be the perfect being that God intended, and therefore I never needed to ask Him for anything additional.

Pap's coming to New York took from me the larger room, which Mama had redecorated, and put me into a
small, cramped space that had as its only advantage a door that closed securely. My dad made me a small bookcase, which I accepted grudgingly, but I wasn't happy with it.

Stuyvesant High School had everything wrong with it. It was an all-boys school, which I didn't know until after I arrived. Because I had liked the science teacher in junior high, I thought the emphasis on science would be all right. I didn't know the standards and couldn't imagine that I would have difficulty with them. Stuyvesant was in decrepit condition, tucked all the way downtown, nearly an hour's travel from Harlem. Friends were telling me how wonderful it was that I had made it into this wonderful school and how really smart I must be. I took a wait-and-see attitude.

The first year I attended Stuyvesant, I went from noon until five thirty. The time I would have had for a social life was completely taken up by my new school hours. Eric was free in the mornings, but that was when we did our homework, and there was gobs of homework.

In addition, things were seriously beginning to fall apart at home. Looking back, I can see that we were all trapped in our own unhappy circumstances. Pap didn't like living in his son's house. My father didn't want the burden that it placed on his relationship with
Mama, and Mama just hated that it seemed as if her life was being put on hold while Dad dealt badly with the economics of survival.

I don't know that he could have done more, and I feel rotten for having blamed him for being poor, and even more rotten for not realizing that I was doing it.

I would dream of meeting someone, a boy or girl who would be a secret reader as I was, who would feel the same sense of being alone as I did, who would want to meet me and be my friend. Together we would not be ashamed of being bright or liking poetry. The kids at Stuyvesant were all bright, among the brightest in the city, but my growing shyness made it hard for me to make connections. I longed to have a school sweater, a school jacket, the symbols of belonging. They were out of the question as we struggled just to make ends meet.

What Mama usually cooked was food with lots of dumplings or rich, heavy stews. She would often have me help her make desserts: fruit rolled in pastry, wrapped in cloth, tied and boiled, then taken out of the cloth, topped with icing, and baked. Delicious. When we had the money, we'd have bloodwurst or knockwurst and sauerkraut or sausages with baked potatoes and cabbage. One day, when Mama had made macaroni and cheese, Pap said that he never ate cheese, and that cheese was for poor white trash. That
really hurt Mama, and we spent hours thinking of recipes that included cheese and disguising it so Pap wouldn't know he was eating it.

My first year's grades at Stuyvesant were miserable, due partially to the fact that I never studied. I had never had to study before and didn't recognize the need at this time. Most of my spare time I spent reading in my room.

Sometimes there are landmarks along the way to doom and destruction, seemingly innocent paths along which we merrily tread, smiling as we go, into the pits of Deepest Hell. My path was the romp of the Brooklyn Dodgers through the National League. I don't know why I became so fanatical about the Dodgers that year. It seemed that when they won, somehow I won, too. My sister Viola once said that I was the poorest loser she had ever seen. I wasn't a poor loser. To me there were two possibilities: winning and nonexistence. If a team I was rooting for had a good chance of losing, I was upset. I've fought teammates who I thought didn't try hard enough. I hold lifetime grudges. In my first year at Stuyvesant I invested all my hopes and dreams in the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The team was awesome: Peewee Reese, George Shuba, Duke Snider, Don Newcombe, Jackie Robinson, Carl Furillo, Rex Barney, Ralph Branca, Gil Hodges,
and Billy Cox. They tore through the hot days of summer, knocking over all comers, winning with daring and flair. Then came the collapse of September. They couldn't buy a crucial win. The Giants, in the meantime, were surging. As the regular season's close drew nearer and nearer, the Brooklyn lead grew more and more narrow. Then it was over, and the Giants had caught the Dodgers. The season, my whole life really, was down to one crucial game.

Enough. No need to put myself through that agony again. The Dodgers lost. Bobby Thomson hit a home run off Ralph Branca to win the National League pennant at a time when I needed the Dodgers to win in the worst way. Kids from the Bronx were cheering throughout the school. I went home dejected. Mama was dejected, too, but she tried to comfort me.

Our English teacher, Mr. Brant, had us writing short fiction as well as reading Dickens's
A Tale of Two Cities.
How I suffered through that book. Dickens would not say anything in two words if he could substitute two hundred. But I loved writing short stories in Mr. Brant's class, and when we were assigned to write a longer piece, the class seemed to like the adventure story I wrote about a beautiful French noblewoman trying to escape from France after the French Revolution. Naturally, I had her captured by a
press gang and made to serve on a French ship until she was discovered to be a girl and then barely escaping with her life and…and…and…My class loved it.

I was also assigned to a speech therapy class in Stuyvesant but found that if I didn't attend, no one seemed to care. I didn't attend. Again, while others had great difficulty in understanding me, I couldn't hear myself mispronounce words.

The late-afternoon sessions at Stuyvesant added to my isolation. I didn't have the after-school time that was available with the morning schedule. On weekends I didn't have the money to do much of anything. I filled my time writing and reading—writing for my own amusement that year except for an essay contest run by
Life
magazine for “the book I would most like to see in Cinemascope.” I selected a book I had just read,
The Old Man and the Sea
. I wasn't in love with the book—I thought it was overly dramatic—but I liked Hemingway's writing, and I thought the scenes of the sea would look good on a wide screen.

My brother Mickey went to Textiles High, and that school was coed. I hardly ever saw him, but once, on my way home from Stuyvesant, I ran into him coming from 125th Street. We were walking down Morningside Avenue when we heard a woman scream.

“He's got my purse! He's got my purse!” she yelled, pointing to a dark figure running toward 121st Street.

Mickey went after the guy without a thought and caught him on 120th Street and Manhattan Avenue. A passing policeman recovered the purse and returned it to the woman. The boy was a member of a local and very notorious neighborhood gang.

We didn't have much in the way of gangs. There were a few fighting gangs that mostly just paraded about looking tough and maybe committing a few petty crimes like the purse snatching. Their usual weapons were sticks, short lengths of chain, and an occasional knife.

The school year finally ended, and I threw away my final report card resolving to do better the following year. At home things were getting worse. Eric and I still got along well, but I became nervous about our friendship. We were at an age to explore dating, or at least parties. And I knew that I would not be welcome, as a black, at many of the parties to which Eric would be invited. Racism existed as a backdrop to our relationship, and I did not want to experience the humiliation of being rejected because I was black. For the first time in my life I was faced with the notion that I would have to deal with the idea of race
as a central part of my life.

My parents had not prepared me to face the kind of racial issues that I was seeing. Mama, Native American on her father's side and German on her mother's, was sympathetic to the black cause. Her mother had been ostracized because she had married a Native American. She had heard stories about the horrors of slavery, which she passed on to me, and knew something about the slaughter of American Indians. When
The Lone Ranger
came to television, she would watch it just to see Jay Silverheels, the actor who played Tonto.

My dad's advice on race was very simple. “The white man won't give you anything, and the black man doesn't have anything to give you. If you want anything out of life, you have to get it for yourself.”