Just as I Am: A Memoir Page 7

  For some, childhood innocence slips away in small increments, over years, with the steady ticktock of a metronome. I lost my wide-eyed naivete in one frightful pendulum swing, in the cadence of a single day. My space and spirit violated. My family irreparably broken.

  5

  The Other America

  I SAW two horror films as a child—one in a theater, another on a sidewalk in the Bronx. The first frightened the daylights out of me. The second vexed my spirit.

  The sanctified and the secular were not mixed in our home, so Hollywood films, as part of the latter world, were mostly absent during my upbringing. Emily, Melrose, and I did sometimes watch movies at church. In the basement, the youth leaders would string a sheet onto a wall, set up a small projector, and play films they felt were appropriate for us, like Little Rascals or any other show with Black children in the cast. They wanted to instill in us a pride in our heritage. Reflecting back to us, on the screen, those who shared our features was a way to affirm us, even if the characters available to us then sometimes reinforced racial stereotypes. (Little Rascals, for instance, was ahead of its time in featuring cross-cultural friendships, but the clueless Buckwheat, with his wildly spiked hair, spoke very little, and when he did, he often mumbled incoherently.) Church films aside, never once had my mom taken us to see a movie in a theater. That changed in 1935, the year I turned eleven.

  Though my mother and father had been separated for quite some time by then, they would occasionally still go at it, especially when Dad came by our apartment talking some nonsense. One Saturday during spring, Mom had heard enough and hastened my father out the door. Soon after, she blurted out a sentence that hadn’t ever passed her lips. “Children, we’re going to the movies,” she said matter-of-factly, as if we regularly took part in that activity. My sister, brother, and I exchanged looks of disbelief and scrambled to put on our shoes. Mom needed to lay down her burdens on this afternoon, and for reasons unknown to me, she chose to lower them in the aisles of a darkened theater.

  We walked to the Eagle Theatre, a movie house then at 102nd Street and Third Avenue. King Kong was playing. We settled into our seats as the lights dimmed and the curtains parted. The moment that massive gorilla pounded onto the screen, my throat closed. I eventually caught my breath, only to lose it again when Kong thrust his eight-foot hand into the apartment of the blond starlet (portrayed by Canadian actress Fay Wray). I gasped, burying my face in Mom’s shoulder.

  As the monster snatched the lady from her bed and pulled her from the window, she flailed her arms and screamed bloody hell—and for months after that, so did I. In all of my childhood, King Kong was the only film I saw at the cinema, and Mom regretted choosing that one. At nights, I’d wake up howling from a nightmare. I didn’t step foot in a theater again until the 1972 premiere of Sounder. That’s how disturbing I found that beast. I seem to recall my mother putting me between her and my father in bed, attempting but failing to pacify me, but I’m not sure how that could’ve been because they’d already split.

  The year of King Kong brought with it an even more frightful drama, this one from the real-life chronicle I call Being Poor and Black. After my parents separated, Mom took on more work. By then, she’d moved on from her nanny job but continued as a housekeeper. Between her permanent shifts, she also sought out daylong cleaning jobs. Her clients were well-to-do Jewish families. She’d come home loaded down with shoes and clothes, as well as food left over from the portions she’d made for her employers. That is how I came to enjoy matzo ball and borscht soups. Particularly with her regulars, Mom was embraced as a family member, though one of course not completely in the fold. Yes, she was treated with great kindness and felt strongly attached to these families, but at the end of the day, she was still “the help.” As long as she and others like her dared not stray outside the bounds of their status, love overflowed. Therein lies the dynamic in which Black people can be seen and even welcomed by whites, but seldom genuinely known by them, rarely viewed beyond the limited, one-dimensional role we play in their narrative—a saga in which a blond woman, not a Black one, is nearly always the beauty to be saved, the damsel in distress deserving of rescue from a monster like Kong.

  That same year, on a Saturday morning a few weeks before Easter, Mom said to me, “Take the train to the Bronx this afternoon and we’ll go to Alexander’s together.” Though she’d already made my dress for our most sacred religious holiday, Mom wanted me to pick out some new shoes and a pocketbook to complete my ensemble. She scribbled down the address where I was to meet her and handed me the paper. Nomad that I am, I couldn’t get myself out of our apartment fast enough.

  It was raining when I got off at my stop, near the busy shopping district where Third Avenue and East 149th Street intersect. In those days, Alexander’s, one of the city’s most prominent discount clothing store chains, was in a sprawling building called The Hub, which I spotted upon exiting the El. From there, I began searching for the address Mom had given me, checking the number on every building, pulling the hood of my raincoat down over my forehead to guard me from the drizzle. I finally glimpsed the street name Mom had given me. As I turned onto the block, I spotted a group of about twelve Black women along the sidewalk. What are these ladies doing here? I wondered, scanning the faces and recognizing none. My mom wouldn’t be here. She doesn’t know these women. I paced onward. And then suddenly, just as I was walking off, I heard someone say, “Sister.” I spun around and there, among the women, stood my mother.

  I looked again at the women surrounding Mom, struggling to make sense of why they’d all be gathered there in a group. Right then, a white woman approached. She tilted back her umbrella, scanned one of the Black women from head to toe, and said to her, “Can you start now?” The woman nodded and followed her. A few more white women strolled past and repeated a similar exchange. On the street, a couple of Buicks slowed down alongside us as motorists peered out their windows at Mom and the others.

  I took in the sight as an awareness jolted through me: these women were lined up to be considered for work, inspected as if on an auction block the way enslaved Africans once were. Who was the strongest? Whose teeth were cleanest? Who among these apes was least likely to stir up trouble? Which one was worthy of purchase? The scene was reminiscent of what Black people had experienced time and again during the most shameful chapter of America’s history. One by one, strangers waltzed up to survey them with a sweeping glance, hardly looking into the women’s eyes as they determined who seemed decent or tidy or docile enough to cross their thresholds and clean their homes.

  I obviously knew my mother worked as a domestic, but I’d grasped that fact only in concept, the way I’d theoretically understood, through reading, the ruthless brutality my ancestors withstood. But on that sidewalk, as onlookers stopped by to evaluate my mom, the agonizing truth of her situation settled over me. I’d never imagined that my own mother, a queen who wore her dignity as a splendorous, flowing silk cape, could be in such a position. I’d never imagined that someone so majestic would have to put up her labor for sale while casting her gaze downward in deference to white strangers.

  That reality cut me deeply, sliced through the raw flesh of my insides. It stung me in the same way that my Italian classmate’s words once had. And just as I’d done then, I shoved down the hurt, locked it behind an unmarked door in my heart where griefs unimaginable reside. The experience was yet another discovery of how my people were viewed. It was a reminder of our true position in this nation, like a map with an enormous red dot labeled “You are here.” Black children learn where they stand in this world by recognizing the spaces where our people can and cannot enter, and if granted access, whether our presence and humanity will be regarded as equal.

  Earlier that day, Mom had finished her usual work shift. She’d stopped on this street, the known pickup location for housekeepers, only in hopes of booking another job for after we’d shopped. But she didn’t linger on that sidewalk long enough to be
chosen. She’d noticed my disbelief, seen how I’d hesitated to walk toward her after she’d called to me. There was a flicker of shame in her eyes. Her embarrassment wasn’t about seeking out the kind of work she could get as a Black immigrant in 1930s America. It was about my reaction. “Come on,” she said, taking me by the hand and leading me from the huddle. “Alexander’s is over there.”

  “I don’t want to go anymore,” I mumbled.

  “What’s the matter with you, child?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, my expression betraying my claim. “I just don’t want to go.”

  We went anyway. And as we navigated the packed store in search of my Easter accessories, I replayed in my head the scene I’d witnessed. All of these years later, I have not gotten over the horror of what happened on that street. I may never.

  * * *

  The era I grew up in both deepened my racial wound and soothed it with the healing balm of the arts. My childhood spanned the 1920s and 1930s, two of the most economically memorable and culturally rich decades in US history—a period when Negro literature, music, and culture flourished. The Roaring Twenties rollicked joyously with jazz, decadence, and illegal whiskey, while the thunderous market crash of 1929 rattled nerves throughout the thirties. What these shifts meant to daily life, or whether they had any noticeable consequence at all, depended upon where you lived and how much you were able to earn—both of which were inextricably tied to the color of your skin.

  The United States has never been “one nation under God” but several nations gazing up at him, dissimilar faces huddled beneath a single flag. In white America, the twenties may have roared, but in my Black world—in what has been called the Other America—the decade also moaned. Then, when stock prices plummeted, catapulting the nation into its worst economic downturn, Black people knew what we still know: communities of color are always grappling with financial despair. The fact that the Great Depression was given a name just meant that enough whites were now suffering alongside us to warrant an official title.

  For the majority culture, the twenties can be summarized in two words: flamboyant excess. The First World War, then the bloodiest in human history, had at last come to an end, however unsatisfying its conclusion. Americans moved on from their sorrows by throwing a decade-long soiree. When I came along in 1924 (the same year, by the way, that the famous Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade began), the wartime economy had already ushered in unprecedented financial prosperity. In short, Americans had more money than ever, and it was burning a hole in their pockets. Materialism grabbed ahold of the zeitgeist and would not stop squeezing.

  Though the abundance mostly benefited middle- and upper-class workers, it lifted the tide for all, buoying spirits and replenishing bank accounts. Wall Streeters strutted through Manhattan with extra millions in their portfolios and greater confidence in their strides. In 1920, Prohibition banned the sale and import of liquor, giving rise to bootleggers who smuggled booze across borders and into speakeasies. As the good times shimmied, hemlines rose. Young flappers, with their bobbed hair and rebellious streaks, showcased their opulence with mink stoles at lavish parties in a Great Gatsby–style existence. During the architectural boom, skyscrapers soared in Midtown, with construction commencing on the Art Deco–style Chrysler Building in 1928. Affluence was the new American goal, and for many, the extended Bull Market put that aspiration within reach for the first time.

  As spending power increased, consumers laid out cash for all manner of luxuries and appliances: cars (Ford’s Model T had its heyday), automatic washing machines (however, those as poor as we were continued to rely on manual washboards—we never got a machine), electric refrigerators (we also never replaced our icebox with a fridge), and phonographs and radios (the day my father brought home a small RCA set and turned it on, I thought, Now why is there a voice coming out of that box?). Americans also had more to spend on leisure, flocking to see the rash of both silent films and “talkies” released during those years. The antics of Charlie Chaplin, with his mustache and baggy pants, drew millions to the box office. In 1927, the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, lured theatergoers into enormous movie palaces, as cinemas were then called. The movie business grew into big business.

  New York City earned its wings during the twenties. The five boroughs overflowed with more than five million residents, moving the city ahead of London as the world’s most populous. By boat and by rail, by foot and by any means necessary, immigrant families flooded in, carrying with them the same dreams my parents had clutched. During phase one of the Great Migration, millions of colored folks, as we were then called, moved from the rural South to New York City and other urban centers around the Northeast and Midwest. The Ku Klux Klan had raised its burning crosses with increasing height and frequency, signaling it was long past time for us to flee. Like Rebecca and Nathan in Sounder, many had worked as sharecroppers whose efforts and earnings were exploited. They escaped in search of civic and economic parity. Those who came to New York mostly settled in Harlem, then the largest Black community in the nation. Uptown West was the place to be—a cultural epicenter for the United States and the Western world.

  The nation began tapping its toes to bebop during the Jazz Age. If jazz was America’s first musical superstar, then Harlem was that star’s grand arena, the twenties its golden hour. The avenues and alleys vibrated with the sounds of improvisation, of trumpet and piano and syncopated rhythms seemingly delivered scattershot and yet masterfully arranged into a sophisticated whole. The nightclub scene was exactly that—a scene. Anyone eager to cut a step while relishing big-band brilliance stopped by the Savoy Ballroom (birthplace of the Lindy Hop and land of the Charleston and Fox Trot) or the Back Room (the speakeasy’s entrance was hidden behind a bookcase).

  The Cotton Club, then on 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue, was the ultimate hot spot. Night after night during that decade and beyond, greats such as Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, and Jelly Roll Morton delivered hankie-lifting performances, riveting audiences with their artistic genius. Hits like “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Sweet Georgia Brown” reverberated from nightclub venues and onto boulevards. Late-night jam sessions extended into the early morning hours, with revelers in zoot suits and feather boas stumbling home at daybreak. As Americans of all racial backgrounds fell under the irresistible spell of the hip new sound, jazz radically altered the musical landscape. The music’s electrifying spirit could not be contained, even amid a strictly religious upbringing like my own. The city pulsated with revival, and as a child, I could feel the fervor. Exuberance danced its way up and down 125th, Harlem’s bustling main street.

  Jazz stirred at the center of a broader cultural movement, the Harlem Renaissance—a profound social, intellectual, and artistic awakening in Black America that spilled over into all facets of society. Renowned philosopher Alain Locke, who penned the movement’s definitive text, The New Negro (1925), called the era “a spiritual emancipation.” James Weldon Johnson had his own description for it, “a flowering of Negro literature.” A historically shackled and voiceless community now demanded its full freedom and its say. It was our first opportunity in this country to define ourselves, to express our unique identity and declare our humanity.

  The chorus of gifted literary voices Locke gathered in The New Negro—which includes essays, poetry, and fiction by writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay—delivered the movement’s rallying cry for Black autonomy and self-respect. Locke—who earned his doctorate at Harvard University, was the first Black Rhodes Scholar, and served as a philosophy professor at Howard University—encouraged artists to look to Africa for inspiration. The path to Black progress, he understood, began with self-determination and a regard for our homeland heritage. “The question is no longer what whites think of the Negro,” he wrote in his anthology, “but of what the Negro wants to do, and what price he is willing
to pay to do it.”

  Locke and his contemporary W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the most distinguished scholars of the twentieth century and the author of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), held differing views about Black aesthetic expression and its role in the movement. And yet the two shared the conviction that the arts were essential to forging a new Black identity. Du Bois founded and edited The Crisis, the flagship publication of the NAACP that gave voice to artists and intellectuals during the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. With the Black elite at its helm, the Renaissance shined its light into every corner of the artistic community, from literature and music to the performing and visual arts. Shuffle Along, which was produced, written, and performed entirely by African Americans, debuted on Broadway in 1921, showcasing the talents of Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, and Adelaide Hall. Aaron Douglas, the eminent painter and graphic artist who produced the illustrations for The New Negro, created hundreds of images that evoked Black pride and captured the Renaissance spirit.

  When the financial markets collapsed on October 29, 1929, the Roaring Twenties sobered up and whimpered to a close. According to the Library of Congress, the unemployment rolls during the Great Depression swelled to 24 percent for white workers. Black workers sustained double that blow: in 1932, 50 percent of us were unemployed. “These white folks are jumping out of windows, falling out like paper in the wind,” my mother observed during that era. Bread lines and soup kitchens formed as Americans struggled for their next meals in a nation where, a few short years earlier, surplus had abounded. My own parents and thousands of others relied on government assistance to close the gap between what they could earn and what they needed for basic survival. Over and over in our world, we have witnessed how today’s riches can become tomorrow’s scarcity. We’d do well to heed the lesson. In times of plenty, paucity sits by, licking its lips and awaiting its next grand appearance.