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Charles Johnson won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1991 for Middle Passage. He is the author of several novels, including Oxherding Tale and Faith and the Good Thing, a collection of stories, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, and Being and Race: Black Writing since 1970 (Indiana University Press).John McCluskey, Jr. teaches African American literature and fiction writing at Indiana University--Bloomington. He is the author of two novels, Look What They Done to My Song and Mr. America's Last Season Blues, and is the editor of The City of Refuge: Collected Stories of Rudolph Fisher.
| Preface | |
| Introduction | |
| Making a Way Out of No Way | p. 1 |
| Harlem Montage: A Group Interview | p. 29 |
| Five Friends | p. 73 |
| Testimony of a Good Nigger | p. 89 |
| Voodoo for Charles | p. 101 |
| Singular Voice, Several Sounds | p. 117 |
| Four Poems | p. 137 |
| The Real Deal | p. 149 |
| What It Feels Like to Be a Problem | p. 167 |
| The Second Front: A Reflection on Milk Bottles, Male Elders, the Enemy Within, Bar Mitzvahs, and Martin Luther King, Jr. | p. 177 |
| Contributors | p. 189 |
| Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved. |
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CHAPTER ONE
JOSEPH W. SCOTT
1. Making a Way Out of No Way
DADDY WAS PLAIN SCARED OF WHITE FOLKS
My Daddy was a soft-spoken gentle diminutive man, a little too gentle for my liking. He would rather pray for than beat up white people who called him names and denied him service. Instead of cursing them, he'd say to us, "Dem white folks will kill you if you don't watch yo mouth."
After he saw us talking to white people just any kind of way, he'd tell us stories about how white mobs used to maul and lynch young black men even if they only raised their hands to strike back in self-defense. He talked about men he'd known when he was growing up in rural Georgia who had been lynched, and he'd tell us he knew his "place" and that we had to learn "our place." This wasn't our experience, so we thought that he was just plain scared of white people. He could not convince us to show deference to white people just because they were white. They didn't have to be honest or morally respectable. No, they just had to be white and they were due our respect. Racial respect.
We lived in a Polish ghetto in Detroit, Michigan. We couldn't fathom this "our place" stuff. Virtually all of our schoolmates were white. And for a long time, all of our neighbors were white. We were not going to concede honor and rank to any white peers just because they were white.
"That don't make any sense to me," I'd say. "You da one who ain't got no sense," he'd say.
My Daddy lived before Martin Luther King was known, so My Daddy was the first advocate of nonviolence and passive resistance I knew. Martin Luther King could not compare to him; My Daddy was the ultimate pacifist in the face of white people. I was not proud of My Daddy for either his philosophy or his behavior.
My Daddy said, "Yes Suh" and "No Suh" to all white males, old and young. They could call him "nigger" or "darky," but he would just tip his hat and say, "Yes Suh."
When my older brothers' and my white friends came to our house after football practice or after playing basketball in the alley behind the house, My Daddy would say, "Yes Suh" and "No Suh" to them. We were embarrassed and they were embarrassed by such displays of racial deference, since we kicked their butts regularly. My brothers' response was to warn their white friends not to insist on such archaic racial etiquette from them. If they insisted, they had better be prepared for a very rude physical awakening. As far as my brothers and I were concerned, the racial etiquette of the South was ancient history, and the North was a new day.
Not surprisingly, My Daddy never took any one of us "Down South" after we grew up and wore knee pants. Emmett Till's lynching distressed him so much that he'd just look at us after that with sad, wet eyes all the time.
From watching My Daddy deal with white people for the first ten years of my life, I concluded that he was just plain scared of white folks.
NOT SEEING EYE TO EYE
"Boy, you cain't see where you headed? You headed for no good. Don't you know that white folks will kill you? You talk to white folks like you white. Don't you know yo place? You gonna learn the hard way--someday." Shaking his head, "You so damn hardheaded."
Sometimes he glared at me so hard and long that tears would well up in his eyes, causing him to blink as fast as he could in order to use up the tears before they dropped over the rims of his eyes.
As he stared at me, he seemed to be trying to see inside my head. And the more he saw, the more hurt and frustrated he became. I could see in his grimaces that he could not fathom my thinking, my reasoning. I was his lucky son--his seventh son. But I was acting in some unlucky ways.
From my standpoint, My Daddy had to be wrong about this "white place"/"black place" stuff. My school and neighborhood experiences had taught me that blacks had the same rights as white people. My face-to-face experiences of kicking white playmates' butts had also told me that whites were not innately superior. In fact, my experiences had taught me that many of them were not even equal to me or to the average street "bro" I knew. What I saw was that more whites than blacks needed protection. What I saw was that my school grades had also told me that in head-to-head competition, I was getting better grades than the majority of white boys or girls my age.
But My Daddy's experiences were different. During his lifetime, he had seen that whites owned and controlled virtually everything that could be owned, and that they determined black people's choices and opportunities, and not the other way around.
But my growing up in this little Polish ghetto, playing football against white boys and beating them on the playing field and courts, taught me that whites were not as omnipotent as My Daddy described them. So I continued to be defiant of the racial customs and courtesies to which My Daddy wanted me to conform. I could not see the world through his eyes, and he could not see the world through mine. And so I continued to believe that My Daddy was congenitally scared of white people.
HIS TURNING POINT
One day when I was about eleven years old, a group of us children were playing baseball in the alley behind our garages. Tempers flared as they sometimes do among children, but we started no fights. Someone hit a ball over my head, and I went running down the alley to chase the rolling baseball. All of a sudden I heard my younger brother screaming and crying, and I turned around to see a boy who was my age and size on top of my smaller brother beating him unmercifully. I ran back, pulled the boy off my brother, and began to beat him up. He broke away and ran into his yard, across the alley from our house, and called his father in a panic. His father came running out, and the boy told him that the "niggers" had beaten him up. His father immediately ran over to me and started swinging his fist at me. I dodged the blows, and at the same time told my little brother to run and get one of my older brothers. I picked up the baseball bat and held the man at a distance, waiting to hear one of my brothers coming. To my surprise, My Daddy came out of the gate first, and when I saw him, I knew I was in trouble. From everything I knew up to that time, My Daddy would rather whip me than confront a white man. My stomach sank with the feeling of defeat, and I felt that now I was facing both a beating from the white man and a beating from My Daddy.
However, much to my surprise, My Daddy came out not with a belt but with a little tiny pocketknife that he used for cleaning his nails. His fists seemed so tight, his posturing so bold and aggressive, that our white neighbor forgot that all My Daddy had was a penknife, and the white man started pleading, apologizing, and backing away into his yard.
About then, Monda (we called my mother that) came out--a minute or so behind my father. She was even more angry and aggressive. Her mother-hen protectiveness was exceedingly pronounced. She pushed my father aside, grabbed this man by his shirt collar, pulled him back into the alley, pushed him up against his garage, and held him there with all of her 225 pounds. She instructed my sister who was two years older than I to jump over the fence, run down this man's son, bring him back out in the alley, and beat him up in front of his father. My sister obeyed without hesitation, as we were all trained to do.
Now, as I look back, I do not know whether My Daddy would have used that little knife, but I learned that this fervently nonviolent Christian man had his limits with white men. In the past, he had revealed only his fears of white men, never his pent-up rage. I did not know that in all of his praying for white people, he was praying away tons of rage.
I believe that he was distressed about having to confront a white man in such a manner, but I think he was also distressed at the thought of having to live with himself and my mother had he not defended his children in this situation. I also believe with all my heart that his love for us overcame his fear of white people at that moment.
OUR NEIGHBORHOOD
The Polish ghetto in which I was raised consisted mostly of newly arrived immigrants and their children. It was a separately incorporated city, but an island within the geographical perimeter of Detroit.
Pole Town had its own schools and government, its own family culture and communal organization. It had donut shops, butcher shops, bakeries, delicatessens, and haberdasheries, nearly all owned and/or controlled by Poles. The private schools, the Catholic churches, the social clubs, the community hospitals, the radio stations, and the newspaper were mostly Polish too. And on the streets of this little Polish village, mostly Polish could be heard.
The Poles prepared different but wonderful-tasting foods. Within the array of little mom-and-pop stores were barrels of imported Polish hams, sour dill pickles, pickled herring, smoked herring, sauerkraut, and other Polish delicacies with powerfully pungent smells. The smoked garlic-studded sausages, brown and black rye breads, purple eggplant, and green tomatoes were uncommonly delicious. The signs on the foods and produce in the stores were in Polish, necessitating that we learn some Polish words to survive. We learned the Polish word for "nigger" first. But few black men learned enough Polish to speak it fluently. I used to see them standing on the corners with Polish men, talking a mile a minute, laughing with gusto, and joking with nuance and subtlety. I grew up wanting to be just like these black men--ordinary garbage men, factory workers, construction workers--who had taken the time and effort to master the spoken Polish language. They were role models to me, and I tried to imitate them. As fate would have it, I became a better garbage man than a Polish-language speaker.
Our family was the first black family to move onto our block; in fact, we were the first black people to move into this entire area. On the blocks immediately to the south, north, and east, there were no other black families. We were surrounded on three sides by European peoples--mostly Polish--and on the fourth side we were hemmed in by a Chevrolet factory--the gears and axle and foundry divisions.
Ironically, even though these new immigrants were not even citizens yet, they thought that we should not be living in this area. And even though they knew very little English, they held enough prejudice in their hearts to actively oppose our moving in. My three oldest brothers told me how the Polish boys ran them home from school during the first few days after our family moved in. But my mother, who had little patience with disrespectful white people, tired of that quickly.
One day she stood on the porch, her massive arms folded high across her chest and the ironing cord in her right hand, as my three eldest brothers came running down the street out of breath and started up the steps. They said that they "skidded" to a stop. Well, I don't know how you skid on bare wood in rubber tennis shoes, unless you are really streaking, but "skidded" is how they described it. My mother stood rock firm, unfolded her arms, drew back the ironing cord as if to snap a whip, and said, "You can take a beatin' from me or you can fight 'em and beat 'em real good." Knowing my mother's ironing-cord whippings, they didn't even see that as a choice. My mother was one of those "Big Mamas." She was short, stocky, broad-shouldered, and much stronger than the average factory man. She could do anything a southern rural black man could do: She could chop down trees, hunt rabbits with a shotgun, ride mules bareback, make whiskey, lay bricks, do carpentry and plumbing, and lift heavy logs. She absolutely never said to us children, "Wait 'til yo fatha comes home" to repair something. She just told us to go to the hardware store to get the supplies, and together we fixed whatever had to be fixed, or lifted whatever had to be moved.
She was only 5'4", but she was an intimidating woman of such will and strength that we were convinced she was eager to do battle. She could grab us by the collar and hold on without our being able to pull away, even though we were strong, growing teenage boys who played junior high and high school football.
So my brothers said that they jumped back down the stairs and kicked "white butts" in all directions, up and down the street. The next day and all the days after, they went to school and came home unmolested, not even challenged. They had won the right to live in peace in this Polish neighborhood, but more important, they had also learned a little manhood--from my mother.
OUR HOUSE
I was born during the Great Depression. At that time in Pole Town, no one had to be unemployed to see his toes even with shoes on.
Our tiny wood frame cottage was not much shelter during the Michigan winters. The winds came into our living rooms and bedrooms any time they wanted and stayed there as long as they wanted without paying any rent.
Five of us brothers slept in the same bedroom, three of us in one bed and two in another, and each night I had to fight for my twelve inches of space on our sagging tattered mattress, which was a family heirloom. With such wear and tear, the chinches visited us often.
Huge Norway rats resided inside the walls, and three of the regulars lived inside the wall right next to our bed. These rats thought they were entitled to bed space, too. They played tag in the walls every night, waiting for us to go to sleep. Then they could push the rag out of the hole above our bed and play tag on us--on their way to the kitchen to look for anything we might have dropped on the floor or left unlocked. Because spare food was hard to find at our house, night after night they came back across the bed angry, probably wondering how human beings could live with such scarcity and wanting even more after this kind of visit to take a bite out of us.
One night we decided to stop the rats' bold trekking. We tied one string from the light bulb hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the room to the doorknob, and we tied a second string from that string to our bed. All we had to do was pull this last string, and the light would come on and the door would close at the same time. We put newspaper on the floor leading out the door so that we could hear the rats leaving and returning. We waited with brooms, mops, and sticks until they went out to the kitchen and came running back in across the paper. When they came in, we pulled the string. The light came on, the door closed behind them, and the rumble was on. We fought for an hour or so, with the rats jumping up into the bedsprings so that we wouldn't be able to trap them on the floor or in a corner. We finally rolled up the mattresses and used them and the corner to trap the rats one at a time. But they fought bravely--they did not give up without a helluva fight. They stood up on their hind legs as if to box with the broom and mop handles being swung at them. We were victorious that night.
DADDY'S HANDS AND GLOVES
When I was growing up, My Daddy's hands and work gloves spoke volumes to me. More often than not, his gloves were just patches of rags and cowhide held together by steel-like threads which refused to let go even if you tried to pull the gloves apart. Blackened by a combination of thick axle grease and black foundry sand, they were as stiff as cardboard when he left our house on cold mornings to go to work at the hammer shop. These gloves exposed as much of his hands as they covered even after he warmed them up on his furnace.
The automobile industry is an up-and-down business. During the up times, My Daddy crossed the street every workday morning to go to the hammer shop across from our tiny woodframed house. He went through the watchman's search, then entered the hammer shop, where he pounded out gears and axles for Chevrolet cars and trucks.
I once saw his hammer, and it was as big as our house. Every one of its downward blows shook the ground below and even shook our house across the street. I saw the furnaces that heated the raw steel before it was pounded into a gear or axle. The air around the hammer had to be over 120 degrees. The steel itself was indescribably hot; when the heat-treat man opened the furnace to pull out the glowing steel, even he grimaced at the blast of heat coming out of it. Even his tongs seemed to protest and writhe at having to grasp that red-hot steel.
My Daddy's only protection against this skin-searing, hair-singeing heat was his ragged gloves. Because they were worn threadbare, he flinched each time he grasped the giant tongs to turn and twist the steel until the right shape appeared under the repeated earthshaking blows. As I watched him hold on blow after blow, with sparks of steel chips flying everywhere, absorbing the heat and the shock, I imagined that hell must be kind of like this place.
My Daddy and his gloves were on the one end of those tongs, and the red-hot steel was on the other. And if the tongs were having such a hard time, My Daddy had to be in even more pain. The gloves had to be only psychological help, because they were more gone than there.
His callused hands showed the evidence. His skin wore away wherever it was exposed and came into contact with the tongs. Where my hands had the normal creases at each joint, his hands had thick, hardened, discolored, jagged-edged calluses, with bloody cracks in the calluses where normal creases would be.
Every morning at daybreak before he left the house to go to his hammer, he fell down upon his knees and closed his bruised and battered hands in prayer, thanking the Lord for "anotha day's jo'rney." He'd say, "I thank you for wakin' me up this mornin' closed in my right mind, wit' duh blood runnin' warm in my veins, and duh use and aktividies of ma limbs. I thank you for watchin' ova me yestaday whilst I was on my job. You kep' one han' ova me and one han' unda me, and you kep' me from faintin' and fallin' by the wayside. And I'm thankin' you for it. I'm askin' you to go wit' me t'day whilst I'm on my job. Keep yo strong armor of patection around me. Keep me outa all hurt, harm, and danga." After praying loudly and fervently for about thirty minutes, he would raise himself up and walk across the street, carrying those ragged gloves for protection--such as it was.
Lifting skin-cooking steel with good gloves would have been punishment, but lifting that steel with the gloves My Daddy had was torture, at least to me. When he came home, he sat down at the head of the table, closed his callused, cracked hand, blessed the food, and blessed "the ones who p'pared the food." I felt a special feeling whenever those rough hands touched me gently.
As I grew, I became aware that the cost of work gloves competed with the cost of feeding, sheltering, and keeping warm ten children and a wife. My Daddy's ragged gloves symbolized too much for me to completely fathom, but I did understand that they represented high sacrifices.
SHOE REPAIR
My Daddy was a "doing" kind of man. He believed that a "real" man should be a doer. When I told him I was studying sociology, he asked, "What can you do with it?" I said, "Well, I don't know yet, but I know a lot." He asked, "Can you fix shoes with it? Can you do the washing, ironing, cooking, sewing, painting, or anything like that with it?" My answer was, "No, sir." Again, he walked away shaking his head.
With ten children to feed, shelter, and clothe, My Daddy always had to be doing odd jobs to make a few dollars. His side occupation was fixing shoes. He repaired the work shoes of fellow workers.
On his way home from the factory, he stopped by the trash bin and looked in. If he found pieces of discarded leather pulley belts about six inches wide and a half-inch thick and two or three feet long, he brought them home. The leather was jet black from old engine oil that had spilled on it over the months, and it made great waterproof soles, which is what the hammer shop workers needed, since the hammers were water-cooled and leaked water which stood in puddles on the factory floor around these machines.
My Daddy had an old shoe last with interchangeable "feet" of various sizes for holding the shoes, which came to him in sizes ranging from six to fourteen. The shoes he brought home to fix were always old and tattered, with holes worn in the soles. I used to think that My Daddy would have to be a magician to repair those shoes. With his special leather-cutting knife he cut out the soles and the heels to the exact sizes, then tacked them in place using hundreds of tacks in perfect rows. He finished each shoe by hand-sanding the leather edges until they were smooth as new leather. Finally, he put shoe polish on these dirty, greasy worn shoe tops and brushed them until some semblance of a shine appeared. After three hours of work on these shoes, he took them to the owner and collected maybe $1.50 a pair. This money could buy some work gloves to protect his hands from the searing heat, or some rubbing alcohol or liniment to soothe his aching arms, legs, feet, or back. Or the money could be used for food or utilities--and usually was.
FINDING A WAY OUT OF NO WAY
What does a black ex-sharecropper with ten children to feed do when he is "up North," far away from his brothers and sisters, and the foreman at the automobile plant where he works gives him the dreaded layoff slip just as winter snow is coming on strong? Does he desert his hungry children, so the children can go on public aid? Or steal some food from the corner grocery store knowing that he will surely be identified if caught, and knowing that the whole family's honor could go down the toilet with one desperate act?
Or does he mope around the house feeling sorry for himself and in a rage slap his children to cover his embarrassment when he sees them fighting over a single piece of day-old hard cornbread? Or does he pickle his brain with alcohol at a bar down the block in an attempt to escape momentarily the angry eyes of his wife and the saddened eyes of his toddlers? Or does he come home from the bar and attempt to whip everyone in his little corner of the world?
During times such as these, My Daddy committed none of these affronts. My Daddy got down on his knees and stayed down on his knees a mighty long time, praying as fervently and as plaintively as he could.
"You said when we need you, to call yo name. Well, Lord, I need you right now. I know you busy, Lord, But whilst you on yo rounds, Stop by here, O Lord, and see about your servant right here. I'm down here in this world, with trouble on every side, And I have to go along with an aching heart sometimes. I have to shed tears sometimes. I know you know all about it. You know all things. I need you right now, Lord, right now, And I am depending on yo word. You told me a long time ago that your word would never fail. So please have mercy on me, Lord. Yo mercy will solve all my problems. I do believe that all power is in yo hands: You a doctor who can heal sick wounds. You a lawyer who never lost a case. You can open doors no man can open. You can close doors no man can close. You can speak, and man lives. You can speak, and man dies. You bread in the time of hunger. You water in the time of thirst. You light in the time of darkness. You shelter in the time of storms. You a shield in the time of battle. I do believe you can make a way out of no way."
My Daddy prayed an improvised prayer like this one for twenty or thirty minutes, his pain and grief so evident that a hush would fall over the house so completely that even the rats in the walls grew quiet. After praying, he would get up from his knees, slowly lifting one knee at a time, and straighten up his back so very deliberately that I used to think he might fall forward on his face again. He would put on his moth-eaten felt hat and leave the house. In a few hours, he would come back with two or three loaves of bread, or a sack of white potatoes, or a five-pound bag of cornmeal and a bucket of Alaga syrup, or a box of ends of lunch meats, or something else he had scraped up by sure honest effort.
His faith in God caused him to sublimate his destructive potential into positive presentations of his God-directed self.
MY FIRST RITE OF PASSAGE
At the tender age of nine, I experienced the first of many rites of passage to manhood through work. Both my father and my mother had more than subtly intimated on more than one occasion that I should go out and get a job to help support the family.
The Great Depression was still in full force in our family, and for that matter in our whole neighborhood. The need for money to cover the family's necessities was the suppertime topic each day. Even when my father worked full-time, and seven days a week, he earned a poverty-level income only. We were not living at the poverty level just because he now had ten children. Even when he had only one child, his wages were poverty-level wages. So with twelve mouths to feed, his meager wages made more noticeable the income that was needed to survive at or above the poverty line. Our collective family needs were greater than our collective family income, and his income alone was never enough to supply us with all of the shoes, rubber boots, caps, sweaters, trousers, scarves, socks, coats, heat, electricity, burial insurance, and bedrooms we needed. Notwithstanding that fact, My Daddy always put food on the table.
Still, no maker how long and how hard my father worked (and he worked as hard as it was humanly possible to do and not die), his paycheck from Chevrolet was never large enough in any week even to cover the cost of the quantity of food we ten children ate. Our daily bread was literally bought on credit at a little corner grocery store owned and run by "Polish Joe," but our grocery bill was so large and our money so short, we could make only partial payments on the bill, as some people today pay for purchases in installments.
During the first eighteen years of my life, we never paid off our food bill; we only paid on it. We were able to pay it off only after I had finished high school and several of us were working in the auto plants, all contributing 40 percent of our income to our parents.
Even though Polish Joe's prices were higher than those at the A&P supermarket, we had no other choice but to shop at his store. He and he alone was kind enough to extend us credit. During my childhood, we seldom shopped for our daily food on a cash-and-carry basis because my parents continued to buy overpriced food on credit, and continued to pray to God to make a way for us to pay this grocery bill which was sometimes growing faster than our collective income. With a promise and a prayer, and with pride and penny-pinching during these depressing times, my parents religiously avoided and aggressively refused welfare. They were too proud to live on "commodities" even though they "qualified" for them as both "the truly needy" and "the deserving poor." The welfare people said that we were not lazy, not willfully idle, and not poor from self neglect.
JUNKING
Rather than go on welfare, even though we needed to go on it and qualified for it, My Daddy taught all of us boys how to go "junking." He built a large pushcart out of discarded automobile wheels, an automobile axle, and old lumber. This box-like contraption served as an oversized buggy, with which we went up and down alleys picking through rubbish and garbage for anything that could be recycled. Recycling centers bought tin cans, newspapers, pop bottles, zinc lids, aluminum pots and pans, copper tubing, and old rags by the pound. After days and days of "junking" and days and days of sorting and accumulating, we would sell the items and make a few nickels here and a few nickels there--enough to buy a couple of loaves of bread, or a peck of potatoes, or five pounds of flour or white cornmeal, or an electric bulb, or the like.
I did not know it at the age of six when I started "junking," but My Daddy was teaching us how to "make a way out of no way." By the time I went to college, I felt that once I was accepted, I would finish because I knew how to scuffle--that is, how to make a way out of no apparent visible means of acquiring an income. No stealing, no snatching of purses, no dice playing, no other forms of gambling. Just plain honest work was the way My Daddy represented "making it" in life to us.
THE MEASURE OF MANHOOD IN MY FAMILY
My father gently started encouraging me to look for a job to help the family out, and he did it in a most extraordinary way. It was a cold winter day. The snow was knee-deep for a boy of my size (I was undersized at nine). We had run out of the chunks of coal which we fed to our potbellied stove in order to heat the house. My Daddy told me to find a burlap sack and follow him. We left the house and went out into the deep snow, walking down the alley toward the railroad yard. We trudged quite a long way until we came to eight or ten sets of railroad tracks. He started walking up one set of tracks and down another, with me literally following in his footsteps. Every once in a while, he would spot some black coal--invisible to my untrained eye--hidden by snow, and his face would fill up with glee. With each precious piece we went through the ritual of dusting off the snow and putting it into our burlap sacks. "Kinda like fin'ing money," he would say. We walked and walked for miles, it seemed, until we had two sacks full of coal.
The coal had fallen off the overfilled boxcars which passed this way en route to the steel-treating and foundry furnaces at the Chevrolet plant. All year long My Daddy had noticed that the boxcars were overloaded and that pieces of coal occasionally fell off on the ground. Now it was winter and we had come back to find the "nigger's gold."
For the longest time, I did not understand this term, "nigger's gold," in its full meaning. But as I came of age and learned to recognize and know racism, I also came to understand that the "yellow gold" was reserved for white people, and coal, "nigger's gold," if we could find it, was reserved for black people. In this way I learned that everything in this world had a class or race meaning attached to it. Nothing was just neutral in this society.
From repeated days and cold, dark winter evenings of scavenging like this with My Daddy, the family needs became more and more apparent. The need for more family income, and thus the need for me to find a job to help support the family, became slap-in-the-face clear.
My Daddy did not explain in long and dramatic words; men of his time were men of few words. They were men of action. They showed the way. They led. After leading me on so many trips to hunt and gather coal, he did not have to "explain" anything. Our family's need for money was great, and my need for my parents' esteem was just as great.
I would no longer be just an income consumer; I would also become an income producer. I would now go out and find an afterschool job and work on Saturdays or Sundays too if I could. But at the age of nine, how does a 4'9" black boy in a "foreign country," wearing mismatched socks and patched trousers, interview for a job and be acceptable when he looks like a ragamuffin?
Well, my parents told me, "You wander from sto to sto, from houst to houst, and garage to garage, and you axe them folks for work, and you'll fine a Good Samaritan on yo road."
And so, at the age of nine, I went out in the streets and alleys of Pole Town looking for work. I don't remember how long it took, but one day I wandered down an alley and walked past an auto repair operation in a garage. I asked if they needed a boy to clean up the garage. They said yes and hired me on the spot. (My Daddy's prayers had been answered once again.) One of my tasks was to pick up tools and clean the dirt and grease off of them, then hang them on the tool board in their pre-marked places so the mechanics could begin each workday without the delay of having to look for any equipment. Another of my tasks was to sweep the garage each evening. For this work I was paid twenty-five cents a day, which was enough to pay for my socks, some soap, and even my shoes after six or seven months of work. When my playmates were about roller skating, or playing baseball, or standing on the corners joking around, I was on my job thinking of my family's survival, and knowing that I was indeed making a difference.
But there was another lesson I had to learn in all of this success: None of my earnings was mine to keep or to use at my discretion. Another custom in my family was that the youngest children did not keep any of what they earned. All of our income was turned over to my mother, who used the money for the common welfare of all. "One for all and all for one" was the norm. The family as a whole was more important than any one individual. Income was not individualized or privatized. Income was familial, even communal if need be. My Daddy did not even cash his own paychecks: He brought them home to my mother. But I had a hard time with this norm, so I had to learn this value of familism the hard way: I protested once that my parents were not spending my earnings on me. My mother said to me, "You da mose selfish chile I have." It hurt me so badly, I gasped for something to say, but what could I say? I had been working for weeks without once keeping anything. Calling me "selfish" knocked nearly all the wind out of me. But in the face of overwhelming needs, where our collective income never exceeded outgo, what could I say in defense of myself? I guess I was being selfish. I never protested aloud again. I dutifully worked and gave all of my earnings to my mother. She decided when and what to buy me; she decided what shoes, socks, trousers, shirts, or boots I needed and when I needed them. Sometimes I was leaving my toeprints in the sand, but I got new shoes on her time, not mine. At other times I went to school wearing mismatched socks or socks so long I had to fold them underneath my feet inside my shoes, but I got new socks on her time as well. No matter how dire my personal needs were, I never asked again.
There were not many direct material rewards from earning money, but there were other, more intrinsic rewards. In our family, manhood was partly measured by our personal contributions to the family income. By this norm, I became as much a man as some of my older brothers after I secured a job earning money for the family. For example, my parents began to treat me more like an adult. They shared with me more confidential information about family finances. They asked my opinions about important family matters. They allowed me to read official notices and letters. They sent me on diplomatic errands to lawyers and other important people. My Daddy sent me to Polish Joe's with important messages such as "Tell Polish Joe I cannot pay on the groc'y bill this week. Tell him I'll pay on it next payday." My mother sent me to uncles with messages like "Tell Uncle Lonnie I need ten dollars right now," or "Go over to Uncle Joe's and tell him to send me a piece of cured hog jowl for my supper today." I was rewarded with insider status in family matters for my financial contributions.
Another custom was that the older you were, the higher up on the hog or the chicken you ate. "Eating low" meant that you ate the feet, the necks, the backs, the heads, or the tails, whether it was the hog or the chicken. "Eating high up" meant eating the other parts. In our family, chronological age in and of itself carried with it both privileges and obligations, and one of the privileges was eating higher on the hog and chicken. But contributing income to the family pool also earned one the right to eat higher. My material reward for contributing to my family's income was that I was given slices of hog shoulder or slices of ham, chicken thighs, wishbones, and breast pieces.
In sum, contributing to my family's income earned me a special place in my parents' hearts and new status in our family system. Nevertheless, when I look back on it, I had to grow up much too fast, and miss out on the innocence of childhood. I was already a manchild at nine.
HOMEWORK TIME
My Daddy set an example for homework. After supper, especially on long winter evenings, he took out his Bible and sat and read near the potbellied stove in our dining room. He vocalized as he read, and he struggled with every word. But he pressed on and persevered and read those passages over and over again, to memorize each word of each passage. He read them aloud to himself, and he sang them aloud to himself in what is called Down South "long meter." He used his Bible study at home to enable him to get up in church and recite Bible verses and sayings, and through those acts he gained recognition and esteem from his peers for his literacy. For his generation, he was the exception. Not many men of his origin and age had his degree of "edication."
Most of the time the dining room had a single light bulb, hanging from an electric cord in the middle of the room. It was turned on by a string hanging down, out of the reach of the small children. Quite often we could not afford lights for each room, so we moved the light bulb from room to room. We had to compete with one another for the bulb, and God bless the person who dropped it. Most of the time I did not assume the risk of handling the bulb, so I went to bed and used whatever light was showing through the bedroom doorway from the dining room.
My Daddy had only the most basic education, just rudimentary skills and knowledge. Nevertheless, he publicly displayed to us children how important learning was, and how one had to daily dedicate oneself to the endless pursuit of self-improvement. He showed us that institutional deprivation was no excuse for not teaching oneself the skills, knowledge, and conduct that one needs in life.
My Daddy impressed upon me the importance of formal education in another way. He had gone to school for only a part of three years in rural Georgia, where harvest time took precedence over school time when the plantation owners called for labor to work in the cotton fields. Still, during his three partial years, he had learned some dirties, rhymes, and jubilee. He recited them hundreds of times, to impress us with his learning and to show us he was "edicated." He also recited one or two lines of a skit he had been taught as a child to display his pride in his "edication."
After I went to college, My Daddy became a kind of hero for me. He gave me a telescoped view of my future as an "educated" black man and showed me how to become one.
MY DADDY, AN EDUCATIONAL ROLE MODEL
Combined, My Daddy and my mother had about a sixth-grade education, and my mother had most of that. Their rural Georgia elementary education was not as good as my Michigan elementary education, and my Michigan education did not prepare me for college.
Each evening, My Daddy struggled as he read aloud from his Bible. Each utterance rolled off his lips in a slow, deliberate, torturous cadence. He vocalized each word as though he were chewing rocks as he read.
He also often spoke what seemed to be a foreign language: "thee," "thou," "woe," and "ye." The biblical language was his idea of standard English. So when he read from my books, he pronounced "the" as "thee." We soon stopped reading near each other. I could neither read nor understand his Bible, and he could neither read nor understand my books.
For reasons unfathomed by me back then, by the time I was eight my parents were not able to help me much with my homework Even though I was eager to achieve in school, I soon discovered that my father and my mother could not help me. As I got older, I became aware that my mother was having baby after baby and was doing her homemaking chores by hand without any labor-saving devices. And by the time I had finished the first grade, I had as much formal school knowledge as my father.
Early on, I was naive and egoistic and resentful of My Daddy's not being able to tutor me. I felt deprived by his not giving me help with my homework. By the end of the third grade, not only could I read better than My Daddy could, but I could write better too, and I began to feel some false pride about my new formal education.
Despite his lack of formal schooling, in time My Daddy became an educational role model for me. As limited as their educations were, my parents taught me two very important values: how to learn and why to learn.
Through all of his stumbling and bumbling through his readings, My Daddy was still modeling for me that personal edification and educational betterment were essential. He also modeled for me that formal knowledge made individuals more capable of solving life's problems. Moreover, he showed me that those who could neither read nor write well had continuous trouble in their lives, especially in understanding what they were signing.
Notwithstanding my parents' lack of formal education and their inability to tutor me, I was promoted from 1A to 1B in the first grade.
My achieving a Ph.D. cannot be explained by the amount of tutorial help my parents gave me. My parents (particularly My Daddy) taught me something qualitatively different from formal educational skills and knowledge. My Daddy particularly modeled for me that extraordinary determination was required for effective learning. He modeled for me that struggle and perseverance day after day and night after night were required for any serious acquisition of knowledge. And most important, he modeled for me that intelligence was acquired through hard work and was not an innate "gift."
HUSBAND/WIFE AND FAMILY RELATIONS
Whenever one of us boys failed to do our household chores, or whenever we showed any inkling of laziness, my mother used to say, "You'll never be the man yo fatha is." Being "smart" beyond our ages, we had figured out that My Daddy was uneducated, unsophisticated, and uncultured by middle-class standards, and we did not want to be like that anyway.
My Daddy was a master hammer man and a pretty good shoe cobbler. He took pride in living by the Divine Plan and being a Complete Man.
When he had to, My Daddy used to sew the whole evening long, stopping occasionally on winter evenings to put some wood and coal in the potbellied stove. He would sit next to the red-hot stove and mend his socks, coveralls, and longjohns.
He did not like doing "women's work," and he could have refused, but he didn't. He took considerable pride in being able "to do" for himself and his children, if necessary, whether my mother was incapacitated or not.
He expressed approval when my mother forced us boys to learn how to wash, iron, cook, sew, and feed and bathe babies. And he was glad when my mother could sit in a rocking chair and direct all of us through the household chores from there. Under her direction, we cooked the meals, washed the clothes, scrubbed the floors, and fed and bathed the younger children.
My Daddy wasn't as skilled as my mother, but he created the right rationales for us boys to feel okay about doing housework. He taught us by example that doing housework was more than a matter of pride and politics. It was about personal competency and self-sufficiency.
He used to say, "When you cain't do dese thangs for yoself, womens will control you." He took pride in the fact that he was not like some of his peers who were dependent on their wives for cooked meals and clean and ironed clothes.
He told us that his workmates sometimes made their wives angry, and their wives would stop performing services for them, thereby coercing the men into conforming to their wishes. My Daddy's situation was different. "When yo mama stops doin' fo me, I don't pay her no mind, cause I can do fo myself."
From My Daddy, I learned that husband-wife relations were both emotional and political, and that knowledge of housework was power. I learned that husbands and wives played power games with housework, yardwork, and driving the car. I also learned that when either a husband or a wife knows how to perform tasks that the other cannot perform, the knowledgeable person has power over the other.
By his examples writ large, My Daddy taught me that personal competency is the wisest policy. Skills, knowledge, and conduct acquired in everyday life are sources of power and pride.
To this day I measure my personal autonomy by my personal competency.
BEING RIGHTEOUS
My Daddy used to quote the Bible to my mother about a wife's place. He used to tell Ma how it was a wife's place to obey her husband. He would say, "Wife, submit yourself unto your own husband, as unto the Lord." Ma would simply say in a calm voice, "But the husband's got to be righteous."
Money was always in short supply with ten children to provide for; so they often disagreed about the little money they had. They argued over how it was to be used: Was it to be used to pay on the gas bill ? the water bill? the grocery bill? the rent? Or what? And what about those little personal necessities like work gloves? Time after time as they argued about money, he'd say to my mother, "You call yourself a Christian? Well, the husband is head of the wife, even as Christ is head of the church." But as always, Monda would say, "The husband's got to be righteous."
I do know when he started bringing home his check. By the time I became aware, My Daddy was already bringing home his paycheck without even cashing it and without taking out any money for personal things such as pipe tobacco or work gloves. My mother sent me to the store to cash his check and instructed me carefully to bring all of the money back to her. Coming from one of those Big Mamas, her words were so authoritative that they struck fear in my heart even as I thought about possibly bringing the money back to My Daddy.
After I brought the money home, Monda divided it for the bills. If there was any left over, she would give My Daddy some coins for either gloves or tobacco. Most of the time, it seemed, there was no money left after the bills were paid. My Daddy would look so sad and hurt at these times. But he didn't force his way. He would just start reading those same passages again and again, and quoting the Bible again and again. "The husband is head of the home, as Christ is head of the church."
My Daddy worked in the Chevrolet hammer shop in front of a huge fiery furnace spewing life-threatening heat. His job was to use a large pair of tongs and put in cold steel rods and turn them until they were red, then take them out and put them into a giant press for shaping. My Daddy needed rawhide gloves as much for the protection against the jagged steel as for the searing heat, but he did not always have a pair that completely covered his hands. On those days when he didn't have protection, he came home with bleeding fingers cracked wide open. Rather than ball up his fists and fight my mother, he'd just soak them in warm salty water, then read his Bible aloud.
Those were the times I felt most angry with my mother for not giving him money for gloves. I used to think that if I had ten children and worked as hard as he did to clothe, feed, and shelter them, I would cash my own check, take out the money I wanted, and then give the rest to my wife. I used to feel the anger My Daddy did not openly express.
Every morning before dawn, My Daddy prayed aloud, and again at the supper meal, and again at bedtime. He was a praying man, our religious leader. Sometimes, though, his patience wore thin, and he would question why only my mother decided how his check was to be spent. His anger would show, but he still would not use force to get his way. He would insist, however, that a wife is supposed to be subject to the will of her husband. But my mother was having none of that now that she was the chief cook, bottle washer, and money manager.
And so it was all of his working days while I was still at home. And during all of those years I used to think of My Daddy as weak. I used to tell myself that he was letting my mother boss him around.
After I became a father of three children under the age of five at the same time, I started to see him and his behavior differently. I believe with all my heart that he was just trying to be righteous, and the way of the righteous is pretty darn hard.
COMING TO SEE EYE TO EYE WITH MY DADDY
My Daddy dramatized in quite vivid terms that each nickel I earned would be "hard to come by." By the sheer force of his example, he taught me that it was going to take much more than hard work and self-denial to make a nickel or two. Just being black, in and of itself, was punishable as a crime in America.
When I could not eat or drink at the Holiday Inn in Georgia, or sleep in that or any other motel even with money with which to pay, it was then that I saw the world through My Daddy's eyes. When I walked a mile in his shoes in the same Georgia he had known as a child and young man and saw blacks get off the sidewalks for whites, and saw blacks drink at fountains labeled "colored," then My Daddy's reality became my reality. I truly could see eye to eye with My Daddy now.
But one night after attending an NAACP civil rights meeting and then going to bed, I awoke in the dark hours of the morning, then woke up my wife and infant children and led them outside because our house was on fire.
It was then that I understood My Daddy's admonition: "Boy, don't you know white folks will kill you."
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