City Kid (5 page)

On one level I experienced the social upheaval of the sixties just like most Americans did—via television. I was a single-digit child most of those indelible ten years, so I was well removed from all the marching and chanting I watched via Walter Cronkite and the evening news. I remember seeing John F. Kennedy's funeral on a black-and-white TV, and watching John-John salute his father's coffin before I went outside to play. I recall the sad night of Dr. King's assassination with only a fleeting understanding of his work. I was transfixed by the violent battles between brutal police and boisterous protesters at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.

Yet the many movements that shaped the sixties and seventies truly rippled down to me through how they affected my mother, her friends, and the other adults I encountered. The most direct impact was that the era's heightened sense of possibility inspired Arizona B. George to change her life.

In 1961 she was a pregnant mother of one, not yet in New York four years, married to a Korean War vet, and living in a ghetto public housing project. My mother was stressed about the marriage during her pregnancy, and things didn't get any better after the arrival of my sister, Andrea Patrice George. Yet when Nelson Elmer began spending less time at his post office job, and more at Harlem bars, Arizona mustered the courage to kick him out. Single black mother with two kids in PJs—we were just a living, breathing statistic from the infamous Moynihan report on dysfunctional black families.

My mother was a small, plucky, determined woman, not unlike one of the characters Cicely Tyson later played in 1970s' made-for-TV movies like
Miss Jane Pittman
and
A Woman Called Moses
, black women who persevered in the face of racism, sexism, and poverty. Her family nickname may have been “Doll” but she wasn't fragile or childlike. In the early sixties Ma juggled and struggled through a series of odd jobs—grocery store clerk, bank teller, seller of Prince Matchabelli perfume at the Abraham & Strauss department store downtown—all the while nurturing the dream of becoming a schoolteacher.

Back then black parents possessed a very conscious memory of the evil efforts made to deny us even the most elementary schooling. Unlike today, when many folks labor under the illusion that hip-hop will feed the black masses, people took the need for education very seriously. For her, becoming a teacher was very much a political act to fight years of institutional racism.

One of the catalysts for pushing my mother from dream to action was my first-grade teacher. She was a middle-aged white woman with a very loud red wig and a disinterested attitude toward her students. It wasn't until after the semester started that the parents were informed that she was just a few months short of retirement, and that she was working only to secure her pension. The lady had mentally retired years beforehand so for the first couple of months, our days were spent writing Xs and Os in block letters in our black-and-white composition books. Furthermore, my class was composed predominantly of black children who were being bused to predominantly white P.S. 189 from Brownsville, so we were being given a grossly inadequate start to our education.

My mother had already taught me how to read simple sentences before kindergarten, so for her to see me writing Xs and Os in the first grade made her mad as hell. She, and other parents, complained, and our teacher upped her activities slightly. Sometime before Christmas our red-wig-wearing instructor left to a hopefully restless retirement and was replaced, to my mother's shock, by a black teacher. Mrs. Harper was a matronly looking woman who wore her hair in a bun, angular glasses, and muted red lipstick. Mrs. Harper had been in the school system for years, primarily as a substitute, and actually lived very close to the school. My mother struck up a friendship with Mrs. Harper that endured.

For a while during the second grade I took piano lessons at Mrs. Harper's house, a lovely brownstone on Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights. It was my first time in such a well-appointed black abode, and I spent more time marveling at the wood floors and floral sofa than practicing my scales. While my mother drank coffee with Mrs. Harper I was supposed to be practicing, but, invariably, I found myself poring through the many copies of the Curious George books Mrs. Harper had collected. I never did master the piano (or anything else musical), but the contact with Mrs. Harper was a tonic for Ma and me.

In the late sixties my mother became a paraprofessional, a kind of teacher's aide, while also taking night classes at Brooklyn College in pursuit of a degree in education. So while righteous brothers and sisters were marching for their rights down South, and angry black folk were rioting for respect up North, my mother was engaged in her own battle for advancement.

She worked all day, came home, cooked dinner, and then either took two buses or two trains out to Flatbush to attend Brooklyn College classes. On school nights she was rarely home before ten. I was responsible for watching over my sister, helping her do her homework, and doing mine. We had to be in bed before eight but often stretched our bedtime so we could catch adult fare on TV, like
Peyton Place
.

Getting into bed was just a formality, anyway. I couldn't sleep until I heard her key enter the door. Often I'd stand by the window and look down Livonia Avenue to the area under the elevated subway tracks, hoping to see Mommy coming home, schoolbooks under her arm, with her eyes peeled for muggers.

We were both anxious and vigilant, with good reason. As Ma pursued her bit of the American dream, Brownsville was growing nastier and more predatory. In the hideous drug culture of the sixties that destroyed lives and, to a great degree, sapped the vigor out of the civil rights movement, a poor neighborhood like Brownsville was ground zero. I gauged the change by the growing danger I felt taking out the garbage.

To get to the garbage disposal I walked down one straight hallway, made a left turn past two elevator doors, two stairway doors, and one window. When we first moved into the projects this had seemed more irritating than dangerous. My first inkling that this wouldn't always be the case came from the glue sniffers. One or two guys would be standing by the window with small bags under their noses, inhaling from open bottles of Elmer's glue till their eyes glazed over. They'd look over their shoulders at me, chuckling at my pajamas and house shoes. Unlike the later drug users of America, the glue sniffers weren't very violent, since their high could be purchased for a dollar alongside a model of the Mercury spaceship.

When heroin flooded the streets in the midsixties, it felt like a shroud fell over Brownsville. Everything got a little darker and more desperate as the glue sniffers gave way to a new kind of drug user—the junkie. Junkies would stand by the corner of Rockaway and Livonia, right by the subway exits Ma took at night, sometimes asking for money, but too often snatching purses, and occasionally taking lives. “Mugging” and “ripped off ” entered our urban vocabulary. People were getting beaten up, raped, and murdered all over Brownsville, as heroin escalated the brutality that poverty inspires.

In 315 Livonia, junkies found haven in the stairways and elevators. They'd go into a nod, piss on themselves, and befoul the air. Our mailboxes, little metal coffins drilled into the lobby walls, were regularly either picked or pulled off their hinges. Mailmen became reluctant to come into project buildings. The day welfare checks were due for arrival became a time of high anxiety, as mailboxes, mail carriers, and welfare recipients became targets for addicts and muggers.

But for me, the most psychologically damaging thing the junkies did (often in concert with plain old juvenile delinquents) was to either break or unscrew the lightbulbs on stairway landings. So walking up or down those stairs, you often had to walk up into pitch-black staircases. Obviously the elevators were the best option, though the lights on them could be broken too. The elevators were easily sabotaged if you pressed too many buttons at one time, something any kid could do, much less a determined mugger. Often, a dark stairwell was the only way up.

For years Ma braved the junkies at the train station, the muggers on the streets, and the cretins in the stairway to make a better life for my sister and me. I used to look at the ceiling of the bedroom my sister and I shared and wonder what would happen to us if she was murdered. Who would take us? Perhaps my father's family in the Bronx? Would we be sent down to Virginia to be with my ma's family? Or would we be split up and get lost in an orphanage? Plan for the worst and hope the best—this remains my motto, and it comes from those long nights anticipating my mother's return.

Even as a child I was very aware that our future hung by a slender thread—the ability of our mother to survive the dangers of New York. Her obstacles weren't all external. That injury she suffered as a little girl haunted her many nights in Brooklyn. I'd often walk into her bedroom and see a heating pad on her leg. I tried not to look too hard, because she had horrible scars on the inside of that leg that had never truly healed. On two occasions the swelling in her leg became so severe that she had to be hospitalized. I remember a male family friend carrying her out of our apartment, past our bedroom door, as we watched with moist eyes.

Always, though, she came back home. Past the muggers and away from the doctors, Arizona came home, and we'd survive the latest crisis. For years our family was able to rise above the tide of tragedy that always seemed just outside our door, but not always by very much.

There's a picture of my sister and me that sat framed over my fireplace for years. It's a black-and-white, and was taken when I was three or four, and my sister still had only a few teeth in her mouth. The photographer, a balding white man with swatches of hair on either side of his head, set up in the living room and placed a white drop cloth on Ma's Motorola hi-fi. My mother placed me on top of the hi-fi, and then my baby sister next to me. She was a yellow gal, same complexion as her father, and had slightly slanted “Chinese eyes.”

Unlike me, Andrea Patrice George was a demonstrative child, with a loud voice and an intense disposition. On that day, though, it didn't take much for the photographer, using funny faces and a big smile, to get our attention. Ma stood next to him, encouraging us both to smile. In the picture Andrea is reacting to the offer of candy, reaching out for it with a palpable sense of joy. I'm smiling too, looking as bright eyed as any happy little boy should. It's the only picture I have of us looking that happy together, and the earliest document of a relationship that would go wrong at some point, and stay wrong for too many years.

I loved Andrea from the moment my mother brought her home. I didn't know until decades later that my father had been very slow in coming to the hospital to see her. It was a big blow in the battle between my parents that was slowly coming to an end. Maybe some of my mother's anger found its way into the womb, because Andrea was willful from the word go, both stubborn and tough, vulnerable and sensitive. Reading her rhythms was never the easiest thing to do.

For some reason, when we first moved into 315 Ma stored all the cereal in floor-level cabinets in the kitchen. Andrea, not satisfied with just having cereal for breakfast, would pull open the cabinets, pry open the boxes, and gleefully spill the Cheerios on the linoleum. Then, laughing, squash the cereal with her hands. When truly inspired, baby Andrea, who was as fascinated with cigarette butts as with cereal, would dump out the ashtray onto the floor, creating a mess of crushed cereal and ground-up ash that drove Ma crazy.

Once the boxes had been shifted to higher cabinets, Andrea moved on to more practical toys, but always with her own peculiar spin on their purposes. I had a Mickey Mouse telephone made of metal, and it had a string cord that connected it to a hard, black receiver. It was all hard edges and rough surfaces, the kind of toy that would never make Toys “R” Us's shelves today.

I loved imitating Ma on the phone. Andrea quickly picked up the habit too, except she had no interest in sharing the toy with me. One day, right around the time of the photo, we were crawling around on the floor, and a battle over the Mickey Mouse phone ensued. I wanted to play with it too, and she wouldn't let me. I pulled at the receiver and, with surprising force and quickness, she slammed me between the eyes, nearly knocking me out. Then Andrea laughed triumphantly.

I've never forgotten the Mickey Mouse battle, not because of the small knot I received, but because I felt it spoke to the dynamic of our childhood relationship. I was the older brother, trying to be in control, and failing, while my sister was bold, had little fear, and was often reckless.

When I was around seven or eight, and just beginning to understand that I was growing up in a tough neighborhood, bullies would try to intimidate me. They'd try to steal my Pensy Pinky rubber ball, cheat me at games, and ask for money. Out of nowhere my little sister would show up and challenge them. “Don't mess with my brother!” she'd demand. After chuckling a bit, they'd either leave me alone or mock me, saying that my sister had more balls than I did. I told her to stop; I could fight my own battles. Sure it was a sign of real love, but it was damned embarrassing, and it made me seem more bookish than I already did in a neighborhood where that was perceived as weakness. Maybe I was just more than a little jealous of her fierceness.

But she could be playful, too. Christmas 1970 is one of my favorite memories of our childhood. We were Jackson 5 fanatics, and for the holiday season Ma had bought us
The Jackson 5 Christmas Album
. Bonded by the Jacksons singing “Little Drummer Boy” and “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” we danced around our living room with giddy energy. We were just in the moment together. She didn't try to act cool. I didn't try to boss her around. We were equal in the joy of those records. It was funny, in retrospect, that we both loved “Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” so much because, despite its candy apple cuteness, there was something melancholy about the notion of our single mother getting kissed in our living room.