One

Young

Growing up was a maze of light and darkness to me. I never fully understood the purpose of childhood. Baby pictures nonplussed me. It looks like me a little, I thought. But what the hell, I didn’t know nuthin’. It ain’t that cute. Falling back like that, toothless grimace, mouth bare, legs bent, fat with diapers. And them probably wet.

Growing has obsessed me, maybe because I reached a certain point and stopped. My feeling is that I was always short. Maybe that’s why people like those baby pictures, because you couldn’t tell I was short then. Later, it became obvious and people started to rub it in.

I was not only short, little, a runt. But skinny too. Short and skinny. But as a laughing contrast I got these big bulbous eyes. Big eyes. And it was no secret where they came from: my old man. Actually, you could say I got my whole “built” from him (Coyette Leroy Jones). But I don’t want to slander him, because he is my father and I love him.

But people always would be sliding up to me saying, “You look just like your father,” or to him, “Roy, he look just like you,” or to my mother or some other hopeless “responsible” in whose charge I was placed, “Hey, he look just like Roy” — “He look just like his father.” It made you wonder (even then) why they put so much insistence on this. Was this a miracle? Wasn’t I spose’ to look like him? What was this wonder at creation? (Later, I would make up other implications of this charge.)

And today people take my second son, Ras, through the same bizness. And to a lesser extent his three brothers and sister. But this was a stamp or some stamps of Young: that I was short and skinny with big eyes and looked just like my father. These were the most indelible. My earliest identity.

I knew, too, rather early, that I was brown. Brown with a round face and sometimes wavy hair. These were later dissociations. Brown, round, and wavy. OK.

I thought I looked OK. Sometimes better than other times. When I had on what I wanted and wasn’t too sparkly from my brown mom’s Vaseline aspirations, I didn’t look bad. Shit, I was just short! That’s all. (Even the “skinny” shit was a secondary harassment.)

Another thing is that we were always in motion. It seemed that way. But why or how or even the supposed chaos of such a situation never registered. It certainly was never explained to me by anyone. Though I guess you could get some word from these Johnny-come-lately sociologists, if you got the time to be bored with their chauvinism. But it was our way, is what etched itself somewhere.

From Barclay Street, a “luxury” project we had to move out of, $24 a month was too much even though my ol’ man had just got a good job at the Post Office. But he couldn’t cut those prices, so we had to space. But I have some early memories of that place. Its park, its fire escapes (I nearly fell off and ended the saga right here), its red bricks and some light browns and yellows flittin’ round.

Earlier than this is a blank, though I have “memories” produced by later conversations. Like being hit by a car — banged in the head (or do I remember the steel grille smacking my face, trying to wake me up!?).

A dude hit me in the head with a big rock. And I still carry the scar. I think I remember that sharp pain. A cold blue day. A brown corduroy jacket. And the whiz of wind as I broke round the corner to our crib.

I pulled a big brown radio down, also on my head. (Ah, these multiple head injuries — is something beginning to occur to you? Spit it out!) Another scar, still there. The radio had a knob missing and the metal rod sunk into my skull just left of my eye.

Tolchinskie’s Pickle Works across the street. A smell and taste so wonderful I been hooked ever since (every sense). Hey, man, in a wooden barrel, with them big green pimples on ’em. And good shit floatin’ around in the barrel with ’em.

A guy who flashed around and tried to teach us to play tennis. That’s how “horizontal” our community was then. Almost all of us right there, flattened out by the big NO. Later, more would “escape,” rise up a trifle by our collective push. PUSHy niggers. That’s later a verticality rises, so we know. The vicissitudes of NO.

But I never learned how to play tennis. That yellowness never got in. But it was different in my house than out in the street. Different conventions. Like gatherings — of folks and their histories. Different accumulations of life. So those references and their enforcement.

You see, I come from brown niggers from way back. Yeh. But some yellow niggers — let’s say color notwithstanding — some yellow and even some factual, a factual, white motherfucker or fatherfucker in there.

I was secure in most ways. My father and mother I knew and related to every which way I can remember. They were the definers of my world. My guides. My standards. (So any “nut-outs” y’all claim got to begin there!)

I was a little brown boy on my mother’s hand. A little brown big-eyed boy with my father. With a blue watch cap with Nordic design. At the World’s Fair (1939) eyes stretched trying to soak up the days and their lessons.

But the motion was constant. And that is a standard as well. From Barclay to Boston (Street) and the halfdark of my grandmother’s oil lamp across the street. They had me stretched out one night, buddeeee, and this redfreckle-face nigger was pickin’ glass outta my knee. There were shadows everywhere. And mystery.

My grandfather had had a grocery store on that same street earlier, but that was washed away in the ’30s with a bunch of other stuff. My grandfather didn’t shoot himself, or jump off a building. But after that, we was brown for sure!

And so for that branch of the family, there was a steep descent. My mother’s folks, the Russes. In Alabama the old man owned two grocery stores and a funeral parlor. First grocery stores burned down by “jealous crackers” (my grandmother’s explanation). After the second arson, they had to hat. First, to Pennsylvania (Beaver Falls) and then finally to Newark.

My father was running from dee white folkz too. He had bopped some dude side the head in a movie he ushered in. The dude was an ofay. (Naturlich!) And so, again, the hat was called for.

To arrive, out of breath, in a place you thought was The Apple but turned out to be the prune (Newark) or the raisin. Jobless, detached from the yellow streak of the Jones’s (nee Johns’s) upward mobility, even there inside the brown. A part-time barber, for mostly white folks, with a high school diploma — though three of his sisters were bound for college. Projected from a teeny brown white-haired widow lady, daughter of another teeny brown white-haired widow lady, who shot the distaffs through on sewing for white folks and a blissful irony that smiled the bittersweet recognition of the place and its inhabitants. Its mores and morons.

So that’s where we was coming from. The church of specific reality. Inside the general (flight) our Johns-Jones/Russ lives merging. But see, they had sent my mother to Tuskegee (when it was a high school) and then to Fisk. I used to look at both yearbooks full of brown and yellow folks. She had one flick poised at the starting line, butt up, large eyes catching the whole world, about to take off. Her name then was “Woco-Pep,” a Southern gasoline. She was that fast.

Where she was going to in her parents’ heads, I ain’t exactly hip. Except it’s safe to say it was up. Storekeeper father, mother and brother assistants in the joint, and whatnot. But somehow she ran into this big-eyed skinny dude. (MF) My father. A tipsy part-time barber or a barber who occasionally got deep in his cups. The story goes he flipped his little Ford on top of his drunk self on 13th Avenue and come out from under swearing off.

You see an irony here? No? A split-off from the upwardly mobile somehow molests (with permission) the scioness of the nigger rich. Except by 1929 all them fireworks was put out by Ugly Sissy’s fatal flaw — capitalismus. And so the new day dawned with a pregnant coed who did not get to go to the Olympics and a new member of the family who didn’t come from “bad stock” (!aagh hopeless!) but what the hell was his thoroughly brown ass going to do now?

Marrying your mama, Jim. What else? And so flow the streams together. (But wasn’t one of the first Negroes to read in South Carolina, complete with plaque and multiple modest legend, your old man’s Uncle Enoch? Yaas — that’s affirmative — over. And them slender and fat sisters of his, wasn’t they all got to be teachers and shit? Affirmative — J.A.M.F. So couldink you say they was all in the same shit — anyway?)

You see, you doesink understand colored people or color peepas either. My mother’s folks was in business. Them funeral parlor dudes was and is the actual colored rich guys. The bourgeoisie, dig? Them teachers and shit (his old man [MF’s] was a preacher part-time and chef, also bricklayed a taste. Got the flu and it took him off), they just the petty bourgeoisie. And hell, they even had food smells and brick dust on ’em and some sew-for-white-ladies thread on ’em. Whew!

Later, it really cracked up. They was drug down! That’s what the scuttlebutt was. Arguments in our weird orange house years later. My uncle called my father a “nincompoop.” What is that? Because these Russes had been drug down, Jim! Outta they funeral parlors, outta they stores, Granddaddy to be a night watchman, his wife on the bus to Essex Fells to curl up some white ladies’ hairs, and wouldn’t ya know it, MF “had” MM in a dusty-ass Jew factory doing piecework. (But he did make a breakthrough, you got to admit. He wasn’t jes’ a dum’ nigger. He did get in the Post Office!) Thass rumblings all up in there as part of the collective psyche. On the X spot of the altar. The forebodings and nigger history. All stuffed into me gourd unrapped on arrival. But ye gets used to hearing tumblings in the wind and words the leaves make spinning in the air like that.

But would ya tell from me mischievous ways the stuffings inside me round peapicker knot? A trained eye, ye say? Oh?

So, Boston Street. And “Bunny” and “Princess” across the street. His mother tortured him in the bathtub with green water. I couldn’t help him — he was weeping and shit. I was froze and puzzled, standing there. What was in that water? Or was it just he didn’t want no bath?

Boston Street.

Ellie the painter raved in them parts. Crawling over the fences in spotted coveralls, drunk as the social system. We lived in two houses on that street — at one address I tumbled off the stone porch and busted my collarbone. And a preacher blew his wife to smithereens around the corner. It was a spooky house with a narrow path. And Miss Rhapsody across the street gettin’ ready for evening so she could put on her purple flower and go out and sing the blues. (She had a fine-ass daughter. Blue, stiff, and beautiful!)

But all that soon was in the wind. We moved, ya see? Looked up and we were way cross town near the Italian border. I was born in the center of the city (New Ark) in a hospital named for a yellow doctor, Kinney Memorial. But by age five or six we’d spaced — dot-dot-dash-dot, communications — going somewhere. Wound up on a little street the other side of nowhere.

And we were all in there. Mama Daddy Nana Granddaddy Uncle Elaine and me. On Dey Street. The niggers were so cynical they called it die — the white folks so full of shit they called it day. Take your pick!

Orange house with a porch you sit on, or crawl under and plot shit. Living room, dining room, kitchen, left turn, bathroom. Back door and little yard, edged by cement and a two-car garage. Second floor: narrow bedroom (Uncle), middle bedroom with big oak bed with a back tall as a man and footpost taller than a six-year-old (Nana and Granddaddy). Front bedroom (Mama and Daddy and little kids, us).

A red-nosed Irishman (Ol’ Man Doyle) and his wife on one side next to a vacant lot and right next door Angel Domenica Cordasca (female), a little nonromantic Italian playmate. Next to Doyle, the playground at the edge of which sat Central Avenue School. Next to Angel, a factory. Across the street from Central Avenue School, a row of brown houses. Clarence P. (funny), his older brother (weird), his mother (church stalker). Danny W., a confederate, short and curly-haired. Fast but plump. Another lot for an auto parts store. (They got the whole block now.) Then Pooky, a little Italian troublemaker, his twin sisters, snotty-nosed midgets. The Davises next, eight black curly-headed all-sized colored kids — actually light brown in color, black in socio-eco terms. Who knew Mr. D.? Mrs. D. was always called Ms. as far as I know. And she ran that bunch, literally, up and down the street. Frank, big and away soon to the army, never to return. Evelyn, big and fine with that wavy, straightish hair them kinda folks had, but way outta my generation. Sam called Lon-nell. It was Lionel. Orlando called “Board,” meaning Bud. Algernon called “Algy.” Jerome, real name “Fat.” “Rookie,” given name unknown, and Will, the pee wee. The D’s always seemed like more than they were. At least ten or twelve. They were a standard of measure around those parts. Their name called by my mother meant “many” or “dirty” or “wild” or something like that. Algy and Board were running buddies of ours. Board was a desperado. And my mother didn’t dig us running together. Nutty as he was, I didn’t dig it too much. Algy was wild too, but cooler. Lon-nell you liked to have on your team as one of the “big boys.”

Next to the Davises, Dominick, an Italian iceman, and his brood. Some more Italians, a couple, next to him, with a red and white very clean house. Dominick’s house was yellow and brown. The red and white house had cherries in the back of it and you know we hit on them whenever our ass stopped aching from the last hit reported to the mama authorities. But those cherries, and I think some hard green knot peaches, like that cause we never let ’em stay there long enough to ripen, were cause for much adventure and repeated instruction in cause and effect.

There was also contrast in that and all along this one-block center (Central Avenue to Sussex Avenue) there was a similar contrast from a similar dissimilarity — mixture. For now we’d (Jones/Russ) flashed into a mixed neighborhood. I was about six now. And already a veteran of three different abodes. This made the fourth. (Barclay Street, two on Boston Street, and now Dey.) But all those other places had been the Central Ward — or at that time the Third Ward — near round “The Hill,” center of black life. But this last move took us into the West (literally the West Ward) and a place where the black community trailed off in a sputter of Italians. Or likewise where the Italian community thinned and more and more blacks had moved in. So that in our block and all around in that area, there was a kind of standoff. Central Avenue School, it seems to me, was heavier black. The life there more controlled in the playground, in the hallways, by the black students. And the year the Warren Street contingent came in it was “The Hill” for sure pouring in. So that even in that part of the West headed North, the ambassadors from Central and even South brought those places to us. And so the Black Belt South — and so Africa.

But that mixture carried contradictions in it far beyond we youth, hey — even beyond many of the grown folks. We were friends and enemies in the non-final cauldron of growing up. We said things — did things — were things — and even became some other things that maybe could be understood on those streets, ca. 1940s.

So next to the red and white clean cherry and peach house, a lot with brown-grey gravel. A useless rusty lot that ended with a brick wall to no-where. The back of some factory. And like a miniature boundary line, that twenty feet of lot separated the lower-middle-class Italian Cleaney from Eddie Clay’s brown and tan rundown clapboard shack.

And in that shack, like a ghost of the black South — a drunken building — it had some living ghosts, poverty struck and mad. Old toothless snuff-chumping ladies. Staring old men. People with hard rusty hands. A woman named Miss Ada (I always thought it was ATOR, a weird radio drama monster name) who wandered and staggered and stared and got outrageous drunk and cursed out history.

We made up stories about Eddie and teased Eddie. A veil hung over the house. A food like musk — an oldness strangeness. Yet Eddie was one of The Secret Seven (the kids who hung with us sometimes, my sister and I, Board, Algy, Norman, Danny, Eddie). We were The Secret Seven, which met under our porch at 19 Dey Street to plot the destruction of packs of Kits and jars of Kool-Aid.

And we’d all tease Eddie about his weird house. It was old and poor-looking, full of old country Negroes usually drunk. And sometimes Eddie’d chase one or a bunch of us when we talked about his creepy old house. Yet across the hard gravel were the anonymous cherry-growing Italians in their white, spotless, red-trimmed number. The best-looking house on the block.

Our orangish brown clapboard number seemed merely like “headquarters.” It seemed like it sagged a bit or leaned. Especially after a hurricane blew a big tree down on the bathroom and tore off the bathroom roof. It was on the street doing something, looking like something (to others), but what that was I really can’t say. It was headquarters. Where I came out of and had to go back to — after school — after playground — after sneaking off — or after any stuff I’d got into — that leaning orangish brown house was my center, and my fate.

Next to Eddie’s was my fake cousin Lorraine’s red job. Red shingles and short brick steps. Her name was Jones so we could play cousins, though I liked her, from time to time, as a girlfriend, but that never went anywhere. But some older dudes thought she was my cousin on the real side and they would be trying to program me to drop their names on her. Some really vulgar types would tease me about what they was going to do to my cousin, like it mattered to me. (Though it did in the sense that I was jealous — not outraged like a relative, but the whole thing was so unreal that it was a very minor thing.)

Lorraine’s house was short and squat, though it was three stories. Lorraine’s mother looked just like her, chain smoking. A factory worker going back and forth during the war years like Rosie the Riveter. When we all had house keys tied on strings around our necks.

Then Mattie’s narrow tall porched brown joint. I guess like Mattie herself. Tall narrow brown with glasses she’d be peering through. In street-wide gatherings when young and old kids big and little were together for some reason. Some summers, happenings or chance gatherings, Mattie would be there, a big stringbean girl (no matter what age). She had a kind of horsiness to her face that set the boys to razzing her about it when they were in that frame of mind. Sometimes they’d be saying some other things and Mattie’d turn on her long narrow heel.

A fence next to Mattie’s, then Joycee’s yard (her family shared it with the New Hope Baptist church). And that was the end of the block. On my side, across the street, after Angel’s house, there was a factory that made boxes. They took up the rest of the block. The loading platform was the only interest, otherwise I remember wondering why they wanted to make our block dull with their grey building business.

And the block was, it seemed to me, fairly quiet. The scrambles of kids ran up and down and around the corner and around the other corner. I guess since Central Avenue School and playground sat on the block, it obviously couldn’t have been quiet on school days, when those children ran screaming up and down the street. But Dey Street and, on either side, Newark Street to the west and Lock Street to the east, were like a swath of mixtures. Black heavy but still mixed, Italian and black. In fact, all the way to Orange Street, this mixture persisted. On the north side of Orange, you jumped into the Italian neighborhood. The old First Ward, now North Ward.

There was a mixture at the little-kid level which we carried most times successfully and at the tops of our voices. Adults fed us various poisons that pushed us apart as we grew, naturally. And by high school, almost miraculously, the relationships we’d had on the street level and in grammar school had disappeared. So quickly, I was startled. And I remember consciously taking note that this is what had happened. When I was a sophomore in high school I could see very clearly what had happened. That we had reached another stage, and those previous relationships were ended. And that while nobody spoke openly about this, we all, from our opposite sides of the nationality wall, knew what it meant, and acted accordingly. But that was a later stage; the open door onto it.

You wonder thinking back to Young, reflecting on memories of all that passed. What is left that coheres and brings it back, what does it mean now really? What it did mean then I guess is beyond us or we can glimpse occasionally an actual relationship, an actuality of that earlier life that gives deep recognition. I guess we understand ourselves better for today’s steps and pauses.

So much does come back, flicks and flitting images. Faces and voices. A walk, a way of turning, a laugh, a silhouette just before darkness. We remember games, gangs, houses people lived in, general relationships and tales about all these. And from this we try to get an outline of we then. We try to understand who we’re talking about. We’re like snakes with billions of skins falling off like the blinks of an eye. And each skin a sensitivity that makes a certain specific identity. Though generally we’re who we are, we’re even who we were, though we learn different things, some of us go different places. Some of us don’t go anywhere. We can be screamed at, locked up, beaten, almost killed. We can read books or look at plays and films. We can be talked to a long time by people who shape us in some ways. In a school, an outfit, a bar — some place. Mostly factories — cold in winter, hot in summer. And we do change. Sometimes we grow. On the real side.

For me the slow whiz of my life is full of sparkling pictures, glittering sequin images that speak of times and places, people and feeling. I register these impressions in the polymedium of my life and now try to recall a pattern, an overview without overviewer (except myself, years later).

Of earlier historical family scuttlebutt ya knows what I tolt ya. The three previous places we lived, that is, a we that included me, we had left by the time I was about six. At six we were on Dey, Russes and Joneses together. (It seemed normal to me but maybe it wasn’t. In the end there was loudness and tension — it seemed bad feeling and we went our separate ways.) But it seemed normal to me. What dry types call “the extended family” and whatnot.

Those were the war years, so my youth has one told-to-me background of the Depression and another background that I was conscious of, World War Two. The Dey Street years are the World War Two years — the Joe Louis years, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt years (those were my maximum heroes!).

So I think I remember the Sunday the news of Pearl Harbor came. I didn’t fully understand, then. But everything was heightened. There was excitement and fast talking. And I began to see obvious changes and as I understood more (reading the daily news everyday) I could see how the war moved things and changed things.

For one thing my mother, who’d been a college dropout because of my birth, now got a better, a college-type, job. Where before she had done piecework in various sweatshops she used to describe — on Beacon Street and Rankin Street — where there were sewing machines and dress patterns. A kind of Newark garment district. When the war came she got a job with the ODB (Office of Dependency Benefits) doing some of the administrative work that had to be done to see that the GIs’ allotment checks got sent home to wives, parents, or whoever. And my mother got a job downtown, in a big flat red building they built in the center of town very swiftly. (Prudential insurance uses it as one of their ripoff points nowadays.)

So now she could dress up as an office worker and go off to do office work. It was better money, better surroundings, easier work, my mother said. Plus, you know, she could dig it with her background. My father was still on the mail truck then, delivering packages. He’d come home winter times and stand on the grating the hot air came up through from the furnace, the “registers” we called them, and stand there trying to get warm. He was almost frozen stiff. (Before I got to high school he’d got inside the P.O., and by time of college he was a supervisor.)

So the war brought that change to us as it probably brought some kind of change to a great many people. One thing it meant now was that my grandmother was raising my sister and me almost exclusively. And sometimes when my grandmother was taking that long ride up to Essex Fells, where the rich white folks lived, to curl up somebody’s hair or cook or clean for the Fortes, my sister and I went real wartime and had to get our own lunches in a lunchroom across the street from the school. My mother paid in advance and we’d come in and get our sandwich and milk. Tuna fish salad or bacon lettuce and tomato or bologna and cheese. We used to crack up over this one big four-eyed white boy — Ralphie — who everyday, without fail, got the same sandwich, grilled cheese. Somehow I thought he was being tortured or something. (Just like my friend Bunny, who I saw bathing in green smoking water and crying. I thought his mother was torturing him or something, it looked so out to me.) God-Lee, Ralphie is having to eat grilled cheese sandwiches everyday. Ga-uhd-Lee, and my sister and I laughed at him, but still I suspected some grimmer motivation.

But the war against the Germanies and the Japaneses, the Germans and the Japs we came to call them, took up much of my time, and was the background panorama of my young life. At one point some genius on our block had offered the hypothesis that since the Japanese were “yellow” the Germans must be green. (Was it me?) But that was quickly disproven. We’d go to movies and see Germans doing they evil shit. They looked like white people to us, though that didn’t register as such, what with those wild uniforms.

The difference between Germans and Nazis was not outlined for us. It was just Germans that was doing the shit — all of ’em. Somehow the Italian fascist participation in the war was muted and muffled in that neighborhood. But we never connected our Italian running partners with Mussolini and Co. They had different uniforms. Plus we weren’t clear on what an “Italian” was. The kids we knew were Augie, Anthony, Thomas, Angel, Pookie, Dolores, Marian, and they were white kids first but even that was muted. We ran with some and didn’t run with others, that was final enough for us then.

But they were the contrasting shape of our environment. Augie D. was my closest white friend. Him and Anthony Arlotta. Anthony, a school friend, lived over in Baxter Terrace, the white side. Augie D. was around the corner on Newark Street. And while The Secret Seven was the main force of my daily young life of shaping, the whites like dots and dashes or points of contrast doing what they did completed the whole. They were not “us” though they were close enough to us — we lived on the same streets, went to the same schools. But the adult world held us apart in ways we didn’t even understand.

Actually we most times were in different groups, gangs, had different white and black friends we were most intimate with, but then we criss-crossed at points, came together at times around whatever. I often wonder what those guys and girls carried away from that experience with us and what they make of it. (I know one guy, Tommy R., a pretty advanced white dude, an engineer, who comes back to Newark to see his mother, who still lives in Baxter Terrace, though there’s no more white side; it, like most other things in town, is very very black. But I’ve yet to talk to him and try to find out what he got, what he found out about all that, and what it means to him.)

I’m not totally clear what I got out of all that. All those experiences and impressions. All that touching and going. For instance, what was elementary school? Then? Now it’s, as I mentioned, a shuffling of shadows and images. Odd textures and fragments. Names and the lies memory tells.

But what was it then? What did I think it was? School was what? I knew I went because that’s why my mother waked me up and got me dressed. Going to Central Avenue School, I could hear the first bell from my house and still get there on time, so close we lived. A vacant lot and one house, the playground (you could go through there) or the green door on the Dey Street side.

I went to school because I was supposed to go. Nothing in grammar school was hard (to me). Except keeping quiet. Otherwise it was just something you did because, well, you did it. I didn’t think I was “learning” or anything like that. I just went cause I was supposed to go. In fact I never had any pretensions ever about “learning” till I’d gotten run out of college and was in the air force. Then I started to appreciate the “learning” process. And actually did, then, become attached to that activity. I mean it was then I fell in love with learning. But only after I’d come out of school.

School was classes and faces and teachers. And sometimes trouble. School was as much the playground as the classroom. For me it was more the playground than the classroom. One grew, one had major confrontations with real life in the playground, only rarely in the classroom. Though I had some terrible confrontations in the classroom I can remember. Around discipline and whatnot. The only black teacher in the school at that time, Mrs. Powell, a tall statuesque powder brown lady with glasses, beat me damn near to death in full view of her and my 7B class because I was acting the fool and she went off on me (which apparently was sanctioned by my mother — it probably had something to do with conflicting with the only black teacher in the whole school and that had to be revenged full blood flowingly at once as an example to any other interlopers). But Mrs. Powell was one of the only teachers to take us on frequent trips to New York. And she had us publish a monthly newspaper that I was one of the cartoonists for. But apparently I did something “out” and she took me “out.”

But in school when I was in kindergarten I got sick (went off with the whooping cough, then the measles). And I learned to read away from school — my first text Targeteer Comics — and when I came back I was reading — and haven’t stopped since.

I skipped 3B a few years later — I can’t tell you why. But the 3A teacher was drugged for some reason or more likely I drugged her with my perpetual motion mouth and she made me skip around the room. (For some reason it makes me think of my son, Amiri!)

I have distorted in various books and stories and plays and whatnot iron confrontations in the school with the various aspects recalled at various different times. The seventh grade beating by Mrs. Powell. The weird comic strip I created/semiplagiarized, called The Crime Wave, which consisted of a hand with a gun sticking out of strange places holding people up. For instance, as a dude dived off the diving board the ubiquitous hand would be thrust up out of the water holding a gun and in the conversation balloon the words “Your money!” A series of those all over the goddam place and only “Your money!”

I think I saw the concept somewhere else but I was attracted to it and borrowed it and changed it to fit my head. But why “Your money!”? No cabeesh.

When the curious old Miss Day, the white-haired liberal of my early youth, shuffled off into retirement as principal there came Mr. Van Ness, hair parted down the middle and sometimes seeming about to smile but sterner seeming than Miss Day. We loved Miss Day, we seemed to fear Mr. Van Ness, probably because he seemed so dressed up and stiff. (The irony of this is that I just had drinks with old man Van Ness two months ago, up at his apartment with my wife and a lady friend of his — a black woman! — and we went over some of these things. Because, as it turns out, Van Ness was an open investigating sort, actually a rather progressive person!)

Van Ness even took some interest in the fact that my mother had been to Fisk and Tuskegee. And based on these startling credentials he could ask me what was proper, “Negro” or “Colored.” I said “Negro” and Van Ness told the students, “Remember, there’s a right and a wrong way of saying that.” You bet!

In the eighth grade we had a race riot. Not in the eighth grade but in Newark. And in them days race riot meant that black and white “citizens” fought each other. And that’s exactly what happened in Newark. It was supposed to have jumped off when two white boys stopped a guy in my class named Haley (big for his age, one of the Southern blacks put back in school when he reached “Norf”) and asked him if he was one of the niggers who’d won the races. He answered yes and they shot him. They were sixteen, Haley about the same age even though he was only in 8B and most of us in our earlier teens — I was about twelve.

The races they’d talked about were part of the citywide elementary school track meet. The black-majority schools had won most of those races and this was the apparent payoff. So rumbles raged for a couple weeks on and off. Especially in my neighborhood, which confronted the Italian section. The Black Stompers confronted the Romans — a black girl was stripped naked and made to walk home through Branch Brook Park (rumor had it). A white girl got the same treatment (the same playground rumor said). But two loud stone and bottle throwing groups of Americans did meet on the bridge overpassing the railroad tracks near Orange Street. The RR tracks separating the sho-nuff Italian streets from the last thrust of then black Newark. The big boys said preachers tried to break it up and got run off with stones. It was the battle of the bridge.

Beneath that fabric of rumor and movement, the bright lights of adventure flashing in my young eyes and the actual tension I could see, the same tensions had rose up cross this land now the war was over and blacks expected the wartime gains to be maintained and this was resisted. Probably what came up on the streets of Newark was merely a reflection of the Dixiecrats who declared that year for the separation of the races. But whatever, New Jersey became the first state to declare that year a statute against all discrimination — (I just found that out a few seconds ago, you see a cold vector from out my past illuminating itself and the present where I sit) so maybe it was connected and it’s all connected to me. I to it.

But the whys of any life propel it, the hows it forms and means. We want to know why we got to here, why we was where we was (our parents), why we thought and think the way we did and do now. Why we changed our thinking, if we did. When we did.

As a child the world was mysterious, wondrous, terrible, dangerous, sweet in so many ways. I loved to run. Short bursts, medium cruises, even long stretched-out rhythm-smooth trips. I’d get it in my head to run somewhere — a few blocks, a mile or so, a few miles through the city streets. Maybe I’d be going somewhere, I wouldn’t take the bus, I’d just suddenly get it in my head and take off. And I dug that, the way running made you feel. And it was a prestigious activity around my way, if you was fast you had some note. The street consensus.

I only knew what was in my parents’ minds through their practice. And children can’t ever sufficiently “sum that up,” that’s why or because they’re children. You deal with them on a perceptual level — later you know what they’ll do in given situations (but many of their constant activities you know absolutely nothing about). Later, maybe, deadhead intellectuals will try to look back and sum their parents up, sometimes pay them back for them having been that, one’s parents. Now that we are old we know so much. But we never know what it was like to have ourselves to put up with.

My family, as I’ve tried to tell, was a lower-middle-class family finally. For all the bourgeois underpinnings on my mother’s side, the Depression settled the hash of this one black bourgeois family. And those tensions were always with us. My mother always had one view, based on being conscious and taking advantage of any opening. I cannot even begin to describe the love factor in my mother and father’s relationship, what brought them together aside from their bodies and some kind of conversation.

My father from the widowed wing of the lower middle class, a handsome high school graduate from the South, a barber, a postal worker, who tells the old traditional black lie that he thought Newark was New York and it wasn’t until much later that. His family was upwardly mobile, of course, that’s the ideological characteristic of the class. But what if the ruined sector of the black bourgeoisie and the bottom shadow of the petty bourgeois come together? The feudings in that, the fumings, the I-used-to-be’s and We-woulda-been’s and the many many If-it-wasn’t-for’s oh boy oh boy all such as that. The damaged aristocracy of ruined dreams. The open barn door of monopoly capitalism. What a laugh. I mean, if some big-eyed dude was to step in and give a lecture, no, if suddenly there in the darkness of my bedroom I (or whoever could pull this off sleeping in my bed) could have stepped forward into the back and forth of sharp voices trying to deal with their lives, in our accepted confusion of what life is, and say, “Look, the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation always faces a tenuous existence, the petty bourgeoisie of any nation is always shaky. And yeh they can get thrown down, like in a fixed rasslin match, thrown down among that black bubbling mass. Yeh, they can get thrown down and all lit-up fantasies of Sunday School picnics in the light-skinned church of yellow dreams could get thrown down, by the short trip home, to the vacant lots and thousands of dirty Davises, and what you-all is doin’ is class struggle of a sort, yeh, it’s only that, translated as it has to be through the specifics of your life, the particular paths, crossroads and barricades, but that’s all it is ya know?”

I guess their, my parents, eyes would’ve lit up, for a second, and then a terrible hard loss would’ve settled there, because they would’ve figured the goddam kid is crazy, he’s babbling outta his wits. What? And they’d look at each other in the halfdark, and exchange looks about what to do. I’m glad I wasn’t that smashed up. What I did do, with a taste of Krueger’s beer in my mouth my mother had let me sip out of her glass earlier that night when they had friends over, I just opened my eyes so they glowed softly bigly in the dark and said nothing. I heard my sister’s slow deep breathing in the bed under mine.

I went through school because I had to. Going where? I didn’t know. I don’t know if my parents did either. At one point later I pretended they wanted me to be a doctor. But my mother claims this wasn’t true. My father says, “Hey, we didn’t care what you did. You could do what you wanted.” Graduating from grammar school, I was the third or fourth from the shortest of the boys. And it was a two-way track, I guess, the actuality of being a black kid in Newark in a public school in the West Ward in the 1940s United States. Son of a postal worker and an office worker. (My mother had got away from the piecework in the dress factories and her smart turned-down fedora and neat-cut suit let you know she wasn’t thinking about going back. Though we were always back in the sense of the flatness, the horizontal character of our community and nationality — we were not laid back, we were held back. Black. I think we were colored and Negroes then.) But also remember the flashy zoom projection of the inside black bourgeois mind, the lockstep black middle class frantic not to be totally connected with the flat-out black majority. Brain sweat and soul shivers would come, my mother’s waking nightmare, perhaps, that you would be only invisible, only connected to the mass pain, an atom of suffering, that you would not amount to anything. Whew! (How much??)

We were we surrounded by the world. A world I thought I knew better than I did. The playground taught me. The black running masses there. Even the poetic line of speech comes from my heart is theirs, so purely, the cutting edge of life description, was once simple dozens. The cynicism, the echoing blues, hollow laughter, bright and distance-filled, kids around my way would hear everyday, from a little big-eyed dude in short pants and a blue shirt, cutting across the playground.

I had the sense of a Jones-Russ life/universe that was an extension of everybody’s. All the bloods mostly. The others I didn’t understand, except as I could describe them and make some differentiation or make some similarity. As for instance when I went to my mother and asked, because Anthony Ar and I got picked out of Miss Hill (a terrible old bitch)’s art class to go down to Bamberger’s and build the boat we’d put together out of clay and painted. I asked if Catholics was the same as Baptists. Anthony had said they were. My mother disagreed. I kept this to myself. Shit, it didn’t really matter to me.

It didn’t really matter that the whites lived in the white part of Baxter Terrace. Where else would whites live? It didn’t matter at the top that the Davises lived like they lived or Eddie or Norman or the Hills or the colored people on Newark Street, which was our metaphor then for very poor. It didn’t matter to me on the top, they was just people, phenomena to my wheeling big space-eating image-making eyes.

But the Jones-Russ orangish brown house was one secure reality and the scrambling moving changing colors and smells and sounds and emotions world at my eye and fingertips was something connected but something else. I knew that many of the kids I ran with did not have the same bulk of bodies and history and words and articulation to deal with what kept coming up every morning when I’d rise. There was a security to my home life. That’s the only way I can describe it. A security that let me know that all, finally, was well. That I’d be all right, if I could just survive the crazy shit I thought up to do. And the wild shit some wildass people thought up to drop on you.

It never occurred to me that my mother and father would be anything or anywhere but where they were and who they were. For that matter, it never occurred to me that my grandmother (my mother’s mother, Nana) could be anywhere or do anything but what I depended on for my understanding of life and reality. My uncle and grandfather were the most questionable parts of my household. My uncle because he was always on the road. A big tall brawny Pullman porter on the Pennsylvania Railroad. And my grandfather because I never knew much about him except what came from my mother or grandmother’s mouth. He was big and distinguished looking. A black businessman in a boater hat and three-piece suit and cane. He was a Republican, the legacy of Lincoln, and known as a “race man,” i.e., something of a Nationalist. I found One Hundred Amazing Facts about the Negro, with Complete Proof by J. A. Rogers in his drawer, while “plundering,” as my grandmother would say. I also found Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, a book on the Masonic mysteries, and a revolver. All of them were beyond me, at the time. Though the Rogers made some impact, I couldn’t figure out the point Rogers was making hooking up black people with so many wild things. Plus I didn’t think I could really use an idea like “Beethoven was black.” I wasn’t sure he was, but then even if he was, so what? I was very young.

My grandfather was big in black Republican politics and after his grocery store folded in the Depression he got a patronage job as night watchman in the election machine warehouse for Essex County, on Wilsey Street in Newark. It was within walking distance of our house, right down the street from the Newark Street Jail. There was a big vacant lot across from the jail and I played baseball when I got up into high school as part of the Newark Cubs, complete with uniforms. A hundred years later I was locked up in that same jail during the Newark Rebellions and saw the National Guard shoot up a black couple’s car from that same vacant lot.

My sister and I would accompany my grandmother with her slow rocking stride over to the warehouse where she would go with my grandfather’s dinner packed in a picnic hamper with big folding handles. The food was hot, complete with a thermos of coffee and cornbread or biscuits. And while “Old Miss” and “E’rett” talked back and forth as he ate, my sister and I would range up and down the long rows of election machines in a virtual frenzy of ecstasy. We could run down down the rows, in and out. We could flash as hard and fast as we could. We could hide, we could catch each other. And the best treat of all, we could climb up on top of the machines and run from one end of the warehouse, which ran an entire city block, to the other, streaking on top of the padded machines, leaping from one machine to the other, without stopping, playing war games and hero games and simply using up some of our boundless energy.

As I said, my grandfather was a big important man in that community or in middle-class black Newark. He was president of the Sunday School at the yellow and brown folks’ Bethany Baptist Church and a trustee. The trustees, after those collections, would rise up and file into the back. It was a kind of dignified swagger. It was as important as any position in our world, it was at least as heavy as a civil service job. And I could go through there and see them counting that money, the respected elder gents of the church. And a preacher white as God himself!

But Tom Russ was a name to conjure with in those times. Important in the church, politically connected, but the failed business could not help but have lowered him in those folks’ eyes. Those yellow and browns he was ranked among. But he was the head of that house, in those early days. No doubt about it. And I think its stabilizing center.

One night there was terror in our house, there was pain on everyone’s face, weeping and shouted unknown words — negative passion flaring. And then it was said my grandfather had been hurt, he had got struck down on a street corner — where Springfield meets South Orange just down from the Essex theater. They told me a streetlight dropped out of the fixture onto his head! They did. That’s what they said. I repeated it but somehow never (to this day) believed it. A streetlight? From way up at the top of the pole with perfect random accidental accuracy smashing him right in the center of the head? Yeh, that’s what they said.

And it all but destroyed Tom Russ. From the tall striding dignified family patriarch who swept my lil’ plump grandma up when she was fifteen (his second bride) and left a trail of funeral parlors, general stores, and colored productive force, he finally came home paralyzed and silent. In fact I never heard him utter another sentence. He merely sat in a chair, smoking his cigars and spitting, spitting, into a tin can. There was some money in a pension, but I never understood why the city wasn’t sued if that’s what had happened, an accident. They even took him up to Overbrook for a minute, a hospital for the insane and mentally incompetent. But they brought him back in a little while. Perhaps my grandmother just wouldn’t go for that. And she tended him the rest of his life. Frustration now shot out all the way into tragedy! And the pain in those stopped eyes, stopped from vision and transformation, was horrible, like death alive and sitting in a chair completely dominated by reality.

My grandfather’s last years were all like that. Stopped motion, frustration turned all the way to tragedy. And the old image of Tom Russ slowly evaporated from our young minds and we cruel kids, my sister and I, would whisper to each other like savages about “Spitto” sitting there. We mocked him. But why could we create such ugliness in ourselves? How did it come to replace the awe and respect? Was it just the grossness and crudity of children or was there some impulse we picked up from the adults around us?

But it didn’t come from my grandmother. His “Old Miss.” She was with him, close by him, waiting on him, even to her own detriment, until he died. Until they cut down one of his black coats so I could wear it to his funeral.

Now my grandmother was my heart and soul. She carried sunshine around with her, almost in her smile. She’d have some little hat cocked to one side and she strutted when she walked. Rocked when she was a little weary. But full of fun, her eyes sparkled. You cross her, you were gonna get at least pinched. Like mess up in church, be talking, or fidgeting, she’d cop your flesh between her fingers and rival the inquisition with their more complicated shit. And she had to do that to me quite often in church because I would go completely out, like some kind of menace. A little big eyed monster, yapping, running up and down stairs, giggling and laughing. One time I turned off the electricity down in the basement for the whole church and the organist (another Miss Ada) was pushing on the keys and people rushed to her thinking she was having another stroke. They caught me just as I came up out of the basement. Even the special policeman, Mr. Butler, wanted to smash me. But I got ate up when I got home.

My grandmother was deeply and completely religious. Her life was defined by Jesus and the holy ghost. Every aspect of her life either had God in it or she hooked him up in some way. And the church was her world. She was head of the Ladies Aid Society, an usherette, and a teacher in the Sunday School. And now and again she’d get “happy” in church and start fanning and weeping, rocking back and forth, but most times she’d just sing and listen and amen, under her little flat-top hat trying to see God from behind her rimless glasses.

It was my grandmother who most times fed us and kept us, and her spirit is always with us as part of our own personality (I hope). I loved my grandmother so much because she was Good. If that had any meaning in the world. She’d tell you, “Do Unto Others as You’d Have Them Do Unto You,” and you knew that’s what she believed and that’s what she practiced. She’d tell me when I was doing something she approved of, “Practice makes perfect!” Maybe it was being polite, emptying the garbage like I was supposed to, or having shined shoes, or even getting good grades in grammar school. “Practice Makes Perfect.”

And she was funny, really. Like all those various “teams” on radio and later television whose names she’d turn around. I’m not sure why — was it intentional or why she had to twist it up — but it always cracked my sister and me up. Like she’d talk about Abner and Lum or Costello and Abbott. And when she came out with Andy and Amos I thought she was putting us on, but she would pull it with a straight sincere look and it cracked us up.

And she dug The Road of Life, Life Can Be Beautiful, Ma Perkins, Young Widder Brown, Our Gal Sunday, Stella Dallas, Lorenzo Jones (and his wife, Belle). She’d be listening when we came in and then the kid adventure stuff would come on and she’d fade to do her dinner, preparing stuff, though sometimes she listened with me. Hop Harrigan, Jack Armstrong, Captainnnnnnn Midnight, Tom Mix (and Wash White). And then later she’d be into Beulah, Andy and Amos, and them. When I was sick and had to stay in bed I heard all those soaps along with her while I sprawled. All had organ music and a voice-over telling you what was up. It was a crazy world of villains in civilian clothes.

Plus when my grandmother was working up at those Fortes’ house and the other rich white folks’, when she’d come back, Jim, she’d have a bundle of goodies. Clothes, books, I got the collected works of Dickens, H. Rider Haggard, and random books of Pooh Bear, Sherlock Holmes, and even an almost whole set of Rudyard Kipling, if you can get to that! They were gifts, is what she told us. The white folks was just giving stuff away. I guess they had better stuff, or they needed room. Some of the stuff she brought my sister would have “Anna Marie Forte” sewn on labels in the collars. I always wondered about those goddam Fortes, how they could have all that stuff up there in Essex Fells, how they looked and what they had to say. But I never found out.

My grandmother also had gone to Poro beauty school and she talked about that. She was a hairdresser. The shop she worked in in Newark still sits there on Norfolk Street. So sometimes Elaine and I would be out in front of the beauty parlor, weekends, running around, but connected to the hot curling irons and pressing combs of Ora’s beauty parlor and our grandmother sitting there talking and straightening hair with that hunk of grease on the back of her hand.

If I have ever thought seriously about “Heaven” it was when my grandmother died because I wanted her to have that since she believed so strongly. I wrote a poem saying that. I’d been writing for a while when she died, mostly poems in magazines, and I always regretted that she never got to see a book of mine. I had the dust jacket of Blues People in my hand around the time she died, a few weeks later it came out. And I wanted her to see that all the dreams and words she’d known me by had some reality, but it was too late. She’d already gone.

I wrote a story about my grandfather in a magazine my first wife and I published called Zazen. It was called “Suppose Sorrow Was a Time Machine?” She’d seen that and my mother told me she’d liked it. But it wasn’t a book. I wanted my Nana to see that I’d learned Practice Makes Perfect. But she was gone.

My uncle was the exotic personality in our house. On the road, and when he came home in checked sports coats. He was a man about town, like they say. And once he took me downtown Newark to a quality restaurant on Market Street, the Novelty Bar & Grill (so you see how long ago this was). And I felt slick and knowledgeable walking with him, and with that pastrami sandwich on the plate, I was dressed up myself, that was a new high in my life.

G.L. was my uncle’s name, he didn’t have any other. But pressure from Americans made my grandfather come up with George as a name to cool out various institutions who defied Southern mores with their chromeplated cold shit.

They tell me my uncle got married once, to some light-skinned babe, but I don’t know anything about that. But, whatever, it didn’t hold and he was a bachelor when I started knowin’ him. Uncle had his own stuff and it had a certain aura to it, of strangeness and sophistication. He had some quality things he had and he was no stranger to money, he just didn’t believe he could take it with him.

The railroad job let him travel and gave him that air of urbanity and sophistication. He had a porkpie hat he wore sometimes with the brim snapped down. He went to New York and did his shopping and spent a lot of time over there. Plus he thought up a scam that seemed like a hip idea the more I got to understand it. G.L. sold the sandwiches on the Pullman, those flat, dry sandwiches the railroad sold. But G.L. figured that he could sell some sandwiches too, for G.L., since it was free enterprise and whatnot. So he had my grandmother (and we helped too) make spiced ham sandwiches with cheese and mayonnaise, modest but colored-good. The whole kitchen table would be laid out with “G.L.’s sandwiches.” My grandmother turned it into a real cottage industry, and it was the focus of many family discussions. As to what and why I ain’t entirely clear, sometimes there seemed like there was some conflict about “G.L.’s sandwiches” but I can’t say. I just ate some. And figured as I got older that it was a hell of a good idea. Cause when the dry old RR sammiches give out (or before they give out) G.L. would slide Nana’s sammiches in there and take down the bux. I thought it was hip.

One day much later there was a heated argument, evening to late evening, and stomping around and actual bad words. And my uncle was calling my father “a nincompoop.” It shocked me. “A nincompoop.” Goddam. Why he have to be all that? And not much later we had broke up, the Russ-Jones family connection had broke up and for a while we went different ways. That really turned me around, but that was later.

Mao points out how we move from perception to rational knowledge to changing our practice, like the three levels of knowledge. And for much of our lives we are at the mostly perceptual level. We see and react, are touched by, moved, cry, scream, pout, taste, but that is all. So much moves just above us and we might call it anything. A lotta stuff go by we don’t even comment on, just turn our head or miss it as it moves, we are fundamentally baffled or it’s just too much too much what with the other stuff we got to walk with and be practically responsible for.

But then we try to make theories out of our perception. We try to explain what was or is making repeated indents upon our senses, life. We rationalize and give something a name, a number, try to recognize a persistent quality to some element of sorrow, distance, feeling.

Then we do something if we can. Based on that step up opening into higher consciousness, when this does come. Quiet desperation could sum up far too many in this sliver of world this sliver of time, passing, this dot of organism, part of the immensity of coming into being, development, going out of being, transformation. Ah well. From time to time we do reorder our lives.

The world has changed so much since my youth, and I could lay it out to what degree in many surface ways. Even some important fundamental ways. And I want, more than anything, to chart this change within myself. This constant mutability in the face of the changing world.

Childhood is like a mist in so many ways. A mist in which a you is moving to become another you.

What the school says you learned and were responsible for is way off far away from what you came away with in a practical sense. The reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, social studies, shop, history, penmanship, gym we got was one thing. But learning about dicks and pussies and fags and bulldaggers. Seeing the reaction to cocksuckers and motherfuckers and sonafabitches and bastards. Understanding what fucking was and what it had to do with sucking. All these things and such as that.

The games and sports of the playground and streets was one registration carried with us as long as we live. Our conduct, strategies, and tactics, our ranking and comradeship. Our wins and losses. (Like I was a terrible terrible loser and still am.) I would fight, do anything to stop losing. I would play superhard, attacking, with endless energy to stop a loss. I would shout and drive my team on. Stick my hands in the opponents’ faces, guard them chest to chest, or slash through the line from the backfield and catch them as they got the pass back from center. Or take the passes and cut around end and streak for the goal. Or double step, skip, stop, leap, jump back, ram, twist, hop, back up, duck, get away, hustle, and rush into the end zone. I could leap and catch passes one-handed, backwards, on my back, on the run, over someone’s shoulders, and take it in. And mostly I never got hurt. I had a fearlessness in games and sports. A feeling that I could win, that I could outrun or outhustle or outscramble or rassel or whatever to pull it out. I would slide head first into home, even first. On tar and cement. I would turn bunts into homeruns, by just putting my head down and raging around the bases.

And we learned in our own gatherings, like The Secret Seven, our youngest collective, led, I guess, by me, with Board as the official outlaw. We’d roam those streets getting into things, climbing over roofs, “exploring,” going around the corner two or three blocks — strange places. Confronting mysteries daily and giving childish explanations or shrugging our shoulders and pulling off the leaves of a “poverty tree” to play “sord fighting” like Tyrone Power in The Black Swan. Our thing was roaming and registering, laughing and eating candy when we were lucky. Board, the bad one, Algy, his younger skinny brother, fast and usually snotty-nosed, who got my baseball suit cause I went off and stayed in the movies all day till dark and said the devil made me do it.

Norman, long-head colored Norman was our designation so as to distinguish him from white Norman. Norman was fast, a good ring-a-leerio man, and would go off with you anytime you wanted to do some serious exploring. Eddie, of the tilted old smelly house, was strong and fast and very recent. Like so many of us he had just come up from the black belt a few minutes ago.

My sister, a tomboy, dogged my tracks. I was always looking over my shoulder as I scaled another fence, when we took it in our minds to try and “duck” her. I would get furious when we couldn’t and she would get furious when we could. I know we had begun to get older when I began to be able to beat her running, I guess from the added weight of hips and breasts. But in them early days it was hell getting loose. Her job, it seemed to me, in The Secret Seven was to see that I didn’t get too far out.

Board liked to fight and steal. He was a little bit of a bully, a big bit on the real side. And people at one age were afraid of him. But he lived across the street, so we got tight in a standoffish kind of way. (I think he liked my sister.) Running with him finally got me in trouble cause we started lifting stuff out of cars. I watched him get popped in a trap set up by the local company. He’d got the stuff out the car window (simple shit glove compartment stuff). But this time they were waiting for him/us and they caught him as he climbed on his bicycle and tried to pull away. I was standing in S’s yard in back of the playground watching it from behind a billboard. It scared me as much as anything in my life.

Also we’d gone into the school a couple of times and lifted silly shit. Pitch pipes, school materials, but then played vandal and threw shit every which way. I was deeply paranoid after that and thought any minute we were sure to get busted. But Board must’ve squealed when they got him at the car because in a few weeks I had to go down to police headquarters. My father and mother sat by my side and the white man gave me some vague lecture. Afterwards my father said that he and my mother had “decided to stick by me.” (I’d figured that, it surprised me to hear him say that and it sounded a little artificial to me. So I wondered why had he said that. But sometimes my father could be curiously formal. My mother would usually just bop me in the head.)

And Danny whose brother was gay in those days when we called them “sissies.” And that carried a weight then, Jim. “He’s a sissy.” Wow. And the dude did pitch and switch when he walked and his hair was done up rococo and curled up, his eyes and mouth were pornography. Danny was dusty and slightly off speed, a little plump. He was kept by his grandmother, a lowdown church lady. She was always dragging Danny off to church and since it was sanctified they went every other day, it seemed to us, and we giggled and teased him to distraction. One great cap on Danny was imitating his speech, as for instance he would tell us he was going to his sister’s “wettin’.” He had a cousin just a little older than us who also was “funny,” who fanned up and down the street like he was on his way to mind the seraglio. So Dan had to hear about that. But there was calmness and loyalty in Danny and a quiet palship you always counted on. But he was a great source of merriment, as for instance when his grandmother had him by the ear pulling him toward Sanctified Heaven. We fell off the stairs and rolled on the sidewalk.

The radio, I’ve told over and again, was always another school for my mind. I listened to the radio all my young life, seriously and continuously, changing my focus, I guess, as I changed. The TV must serve the same purpose now for kids. The daily adventure stories after school and before dinner. And the later night shows like The Lone Ranger and Inner Sanctum (the creaking door), Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, I Love a Mystery, Mr. District Attorney. The weekend shows like Sam Spade and Gangbusters. But two of the most meaningful to me were The Shadow and Escape. My father even took me to see The Shadow over there in Radio City. I got to see the actors, with scripts in their hands, saw them make the sound effects, and saw the guy who played the Shadow go into a booth when he “became invisible” (so his voice sounded weird and spooky). “The Hypnotic Power to Cloud Men’s Minds So They Cannot See Him.” That seemed deep. Or “The Weed of Crime Bears Bitter Fruit!” Wow. Or the laugh. “Eh-eh-eh-eh-eheh-eh The Shadow Knows” was deep.

Escape came on later after we had left Dey Street. They did more literary stories. Tales by H. Rider Haggard, H. G. Wells, F. Scott Fitzgerald, tales of the fantastic, the strange, science fiction. It came on late at night but I would play the radio soft in my room in the dark and listen, fantasizing the most strange and spooky world that could fit in that room and my head. One night I heard Fitzgerald’s “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” Another time “Leiningen and the Ants.” Wells’s “The Valley of the Blind” and “The Man Who Would Be King.” And one strange story about people who lived in department stores after closing who buried their dead by turning them into display dummies. They were changed by people in the store called the Dark Men and the story was found on a note outside a department store left by a guy who had been trapped in there and grabbed by the Dark Men because he wanted to leave and give away their secret. The guy reading the note looked up as he finished reading and a dummy in the window fitting the writer’s description stared out from behind the glass with unseeing horror-fixed eyes! Scared the shit out of me!

Saturday stories from the little kids’ Land of the Lost, with Red Lantern, a fish who led kids down below the sea to find their lost toys. (He was not to be confused with Green Lantern, a caped crusader from the comic books I also dug. I put his incantatory dedication to fight against evil in my book The Dead Lecturer. To wit: “In Blackest Day/In Blackest Night/No Evil Shall Escape My Sight!/Let Those Who Worship Evil’s Might/Beware My Power/Green Lantern’s Light.” A green ring he recharged in front of a green lantern which gave him all kinds of powers. Powers, I guess, to reach the absolute.)

I heard Let’s Pretend, when younger, the Grimms’ fairy tales dramatized for radio. And later Grand Central Station, which came on when it was “high noon on Broadway.” That was exciting and somehow even then described New York to me with its anonymous dramas in a way that I wanted to check out. And Junior Miss with Peggy Ann Garner, who lived in the story in an apartment high up, on West 87th Street or nearabouts, and lived the life of the bright middle-class New York kid in those days before white flight.

I heard heroes and saw them in my mind and imagined what evil was and cheered at its destruction. In the movies too, in film after film, evil could be destroyed. By Errol Flynn — Robin Hood will probably be ruled subversive by Strom Thurmond in a minute — and Tyrone Power, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Gregory Peck, Jimmy Stewart, John Garfield, Humphrey Bogart, Gene Kelly, Stewart Granger, John Wayne, Alan Ladd, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda. They taught us that evil needed to be destroyed. I saw it every weekend. I heard it on almost every radio show I listened to. That evil needed to be destroyed. And I believed that — impressionable as I was at those young ages — but the trick is that I still believe it! (And this, I was later to find out, can get you killed!)

In ring-a-leerio, I was always with the little guys and I actually liked that. There was always more of us allowed on the team, cause we were little. But our secret was that we were fast and shifty. I had one move where just as the big boy would be about to snatch me after the run, I’d stop short very suddenly and duck down, and this would send this big dude literally flying over my shoulders. Me, Johnny Boy Holmes, Skippy, and a few others patented that move. So they had to be wary and not run so hard after us and instead try to hem us in and get a couple or three of them to run us down. So we were the dangerous ringy players. And sometimes we’d even break loose and slide into the box and free the others already caught. Streaking into the box, which was marked on the ground, and against the fence of one side of the playground, “RINGALEERIO,” we’d scream, whoever got that honor of charging through the ring of big boys to free the others. Sometimes we’d form a kind of flying wedge and come barreling in. But some other times them big dudes would smash us, block us, knock us down. Or if we didn’t have our thing together, some of the really fast and shifty dudes wasn’t playing for instance, they’d chop us off one by one and you had a hell of a time if it was the big boys’ time to run out to stop those dudes. But we could and did. If there was enough of us we’d roam in twos and threes and tackle them suckers and sit on them. But you also had to get them back to the box, and they’d be struggling and pulling and that could be worse than just catching them.

But ringy was the top game for my money. It involved all the senses and all the skills and might and main of little-boydom. We played everything, baseball, basketball, football, all day every day, according to what season it was (though we’d play basketball all the time, regardless of what the big leagues was doing) but ringy was something else again. I’d like to see a big league ringy game and league. It’s just war pursuit and liberation without weapons. Imagine a ringy game in Yankee Stadium, with karate, boxing, wrestling, great speed, evasion tactics, plus the overall military strategy and tactics that would have to be used, that would really be something.

Ringy got you so you could get away from any assault and at the same time fear no one in terms of running directly against big odds trying to free your brothers in the box. And sometimes if you were the only one left, and could keep the bigs darting and running and twisting, and outspeeding them, with the whole playground watching, that was really something, really gratifying.

Another teaching experience I had was the game Morning. It had its variations, Afternoon, and perhaps there was also an Evening, though I don’t think so. Morning happened in the mornings. The first time we came in contact with each other the first one to see the other could hit him, saying, Morning. And though the other variations probably could be played, Morning was most happening I guess because at that time it was the first confrontation of the day and folks just getting up could be unawares and thus bashed.

And these suckers who most liked to play Morning were not kidding. When they hit they was trying to tear your shoulder off. The shoulder was the place most often hit. The real killers like this dude Big Shot would sneak up on you and hit you in the small of the back and that would take most people down and rolling on the ground in pain. Sometimes actual tears.

Close friends wouldn’t actually play it or they wouldn’t actually hit each other and if they did it wouldn’t be a crushing blow. They’d just make believe they were playing it to keep you on your toes. But killers like Shot and some other dudes, little ugly Diddy and dudes like that, would actually try to take you off the planet.

If there was a slight tension, an outdoing or competitive thing, between dudes they would use Morning as an excuse to get off. But then the only thing that meant is that the other guy would come creeping around looking for an opening to bash the other one. I got hit a couple times, most times not hard — these were my main men who did it, cause I’d be watching, Jim. I was not going to get Morninged too often. And I caught a couple of them terrible snake-ass niggers a couple times and tried to tear ’em up, though they were taller and huskier, so my mashing punch was more embarrassment and aggravation than physical wipeout. I got Shot one time and jumped off my feet punching this sucker in his back and he got mad (which was supposed to be against the “rules”) and he started chasing me around the playground. But then he really got embarrassed, because his ass was too heavy to catch me. I motored away from him, ducking and twisting, just like in ringy. And finally he got tired and people was laid out on the fence of the playground laughing at his sorry ass.

But then he runs over to my main man Love and catches him. You see, you were supposed to say, “Morning,” then the other dude couldn’t hit you. So Shot zooms over and catches Love right between the shoulder blades and damn near kills him. Love and Shot were always on the verge of going around anyway. Love had a close-cut haircut and a funny, bony-looking head, according to us. And we called him Bonehead or Saddlehead or some such. But it was the usual joke time. With Shot it was some kind of bitter rebuke, cause Love could play ball — any kind of ball — Shot couldn’t do nothing but terrorize people with his ugly-ass self.

Love was hurt but when he come up a fight almost started, and then goddam Shot wanted to talk about the “rules.” “Like how come Love wanna fight he just don’t know how to play the goddam game. If you a sissie you can’t play.”

“How come you can play then, Shot?” And people cracked up, knowing he could not catch me. But from then on I had to watch Shot very close.

The “rules.” And he had just broke ’em himself. People like that I knew about early. And also I learned how to terrorize the terrorizers.

The Dozens. You know the African Recrimination Songs!! Yeh yeh, see, I gotta anthropological tip for you as well. But Dozens always floated around every whichaway, around my way, when you was small. Or with close friends, half lit, when you got big. But that was either fun, for fun connected folks, or the sign that soon somebody’s blood would be spilt.

The lesson? The importance of language and invention. The place of innovation. The heaviness of “high speech” and rhythm. And their USE. Not in abstract literary intaglios but on the sidewalk (or tar) in the playground, with everything at stake, even your ass. How to rhyme. How to reach in your head to its outermost reaches. How to invent and create. Your mother’s a man — Your father’s a woman. Your mother drink her own bathwater — Your mother drink other people’s. Your mother wear combat boots — Your mother don’t wear no shoes at all with her country ass. She just come up here last week playin’ a goddam harmonica. Or the rhymed variations. I fucked your mama under a tree, she told everybody she wanted to marry me. I fucked your mama in the corner saloon, people want to know was I fucking a baboon. Or Your mother got a dick — Your mother got a dick bigger than your father’s! Point and Counterpoint. Shot and Countershot. Up and One Up.

(In the late ’60s when I was going through some usual state harassment — to wit, I had supposedly cussed out a policeman in a bank. The truth being that this dude had been harassing us every few evenings, riding by the house, making remarks to the women, creep gestures at us, etc. So he comes in this bank with a shotgun out on “bank patrol” and starts talking loudly about George Wallace, who was running for president. Hooking him up with some local creep, Imperiale, and saying he was voting for Wallace. I said, “You should, it’s your brother!” Or something like that. There was an ensuing baiting, a scuffle, more cops summoned, and three of us who’d been in this bank talking bad to the cop, then cops, got taken away. But it was later thrown out because the prosecution said I’d baited the cop by talking about his father. My attorney and I pointed out that while that might be the mores of Irish Americans (the prosecutor) African Americans focused on de mama, so it was an obvious frame. The judge blinked, hmmm, case dismissed. Some street anthropology. And if you coulda been there, judge, in them playgrounds, and heard it, you’d see my point. But, miraculously, he did.)

I learned that you could keep people off you if you were mouth-dangerous as well as physically capable. But being Ebony Streak also helped just in case you had to express some physical adroitness. Cause your mouth might get your ass into a situation it could not handle! In which case it was the best thing to rapidly change your landscape.

Fighting, avoiding fights, observing fights, knowing when and when not to fight, were all part of our open-air playground street-side education. And fights were so constant, a kind of staged event of varying seriousness. Sometimes very serious. Sometimes just a diversion, for everyone. Like two dudes or girls woofing. Woof woof woof woof woof. They’d be standing somewhere, maybe the hands on the hips, the chicks especially, hands on hips. Maybe one hand gesturing. Or each with one hand on the hip and one hand gesturing. Or they’d get closer and closer. In the purely jive fights the audience would get drugged and push the would-be combatants into each other and that could either start a real fight or it would reveal the totally jive nature of the contest.

And these girls, the black ones, in Central would really get down. There were a couple, Edna, Charlene, plus Laverne and some others, who was so bad that dudes seriously didn’t want to get into nothing with them. (Last time I saw Edna years later she was giving some white folks hell in Irvington about them trying to jack her kids up in that school near the Newark city line which was now heavy black so the concocted tensions of the racist system were provoking. I thought, when I saw her, shit, these motherfuckers just do not know what they are about to get into. I saw Edna kick so many little girls’ asses when she was a not so little girl — she wasn’t never really little when I was knowin’ her! She even jumped on some dudes and run ’em up Central Avenue with they eyes rollin’.)

And they would fight. After school every day. The famous ones every other day. The corner of Newark Street and Central Avenue, a rumble. And when it was female, hey man, skirts rolling up, drawers in the wind. Dudes would press close up on that just to peep the flesh. But there were some terrible rumbles — clash and noise and conflict — eyes on fire. And the gathering of kids in motion to see, themselves a wild event. But we never got to the outer edge with the chicks’ struggles. We thought they were serious, some even scary — as to the violence — but none we perceived as deadly, as when the dudes would get down. And then when a couple of famous knucklers and especially when they were representing some clear faction in the broader community, yeh, then that would seem deadly, deadly, like indeed death was easing close to our faces and our eyes would be propped open like at a horror movie with our favorites sounded loud, only if we were with one of the factions.

Yet, compared to today’s constant communications of outright death in the streets every day, especially from the gangs, our clashes of yesterday seem tame. But then, death in those times was mostly unthinkable, though it happened. But when you fought you did not expect anybody to have a knife, let alone a piece. When today the pulling of shanks is normal, and guns, just about.

There were the gang clashes later that I knew about and almost got mashed up in several times. The story “The Screamers” talks about this, and in The System of Dante’s Hell. I was caught between a small war inside a party between The Dukes (and I capitalize their names from leftover respect, not just grammar shit) and The North Newark Dudes. Hey, there was meat cleavers flying around in that one (during my teenage hip bluelight party roamings), the thing smacked my green Tyrolean lid off my head and sent me scrambling into the prone bodies. And there was a gang named The Geeks, uh uhm uhmp, the name itself could freeze you in your thirteen-year-old pimples. And those were titanic to us then, but the memory gets blunted by today’s horrific reality, the projection of the dying monster trying to kill all life as it books.

But we had more experience day by day with individual confrontations. Gangs rose up in my experience more directly in my later teenage times.

Matthew Holden of the Central Avenues vs. Baxter Terrace’s color bearer, Larry Thomas, was one standout of fixed tension and underlying terror. Matthew was known around Central Avenue as about the baddest of the big boys. He’d been kept back in school because he came up out of the South, so he was sixteen and in the eighth grade, just like the dead Haley. Matthew was big lean fast and strong. He excelled at all sports and was a likable kind of guy but took absolutely no shit. We littler ones laughed with him sometimes and he might get upset if we said some off the wall stuff, like made mock of his Southern speech, and what’s more, if you did you’d take two or three steps and he’d have your ass by the collar and punch you in your shoulder paralyzing you. But he didn’t “take tech” as some of the monsters like Shot or Diddy might. He was a straight-ahead dude, only you couldn’t mess with him.

Thomas I knew only vaguely by rep. He was from Baxter Terrace, and about the same age as Matthew, only he had been born, I guess, up North, so he was already in high school. He was shorter than Matthew, stocky, built up, already playing high school football. And the Baxters relied on him as their baddest dude.

Baxter Terrace was actually in our neighborhood and most of the younger kids went to Central Avenue with us. But they had a Baxter Terrace playground in those projects where they played after school. And they had teams in another league, so there was some distance, though they played with us and around us often enough.

The fight was almost like some passion play. It happened in the middle of the playground, a crowd had formed and the two moved around inside that thick crowd armed and slowed with tension. The crowd itself had ranged around like two halves of some giant organic creature, with much leering and balling of fists and the shouting somehow strained and shallow. Each half connected itself from the inside with its champion. For one thing, I didn’t understand how this dude Larry expected he could seriously take on Matthew. That seemed dumb, but the fact that he did do that seemed to breach something important, it seemed a nasty corny affront and I thought he should be made to disappear.

Actually not much went on, there was much scrambling and twisting. Some blows got struck, none decisive. I think before it went too far both sides had somehow intervened. Perhaps neither the Baxter Terraces nor we Central Avenues wanted this conflict to go full up. It would have been too damaging. There was such fire in the preliminaries, and the feeling that this was it. That an Armageddon lurked in this conflict for us. Perhaps the world would blow up or split into pieces.

But for all that playground diplomacy, that tiff was deep. I know I kept some tension and distance with regards to Baxter Terrace after that, though I certainly had friends, even a couple girlfriends, over there. But the feeling that the place and the people were other remained. And when we played their teams baseball or basketball that tension and resentment always partially surfaced.

So despite our various lives somehow there was a collective passion, a collective life, generated by our presence together on those streets, in that playground, and in that school. A collective description of us (whatever it was) that we had internalized. There were no real gangs at my age group (turning thirteen) but under that generalized dome of our youth there were indeed factions that could be mobilized more tightly by some threatened hostility. And that existed as a loose collage of sees and dos.

I did belong to a basketball team, actually it was an ASC (Athletic Social Club) — most of the clubs and teams were termed such. Ours was the Cavaliers. This was junior high and early high school, when we were tightest. Really from late grammar school to middle high school, I guess. We won trophies in the junior league inside Central Avenue (which was an elementary school). Some of us had been in school together for some time. There was Love, Hines, Johnny Boy, Snooky, Skippy, Barry, J.D., and me at one time. Later, Johnny Boy, Skippy, and J.D. dropped out and Bob and Earl Early came in, then Leon and Dick plus Sess and Ray and toward the end even big Sleepy, who coulda been a pro. We gave a couple dances through the years. When we got into high school we gave a few sets at Club Harold and made a little money. (Also most of us were on a baseball team called the Newark Cubs and with our country manager with big ideas we thought we were semipro and still in high school.)

But we could play ball and we had a good reputation, as ballplayers. We never came on like fighters. We were ballplayers and a couple dudes thought they was lovers.

We got our name from a group of older boys, also athletes, that we admired, called the Caballeros. And we picked out Cavaliers because it sounded like Caballeros, and now I know it’s the same word. And that was our sense of ourselves, Knights, gentlemen of a certain kind. Later we even got some way-out jackets — red, white, and blue — reversible jackets with a white satin side and a blue wool side, both with the head of a Cavalier, slightly cross-eyed and staring off into space. I wanted hoods on the jacket, but that was voted down in some strange manner I have never been able to fathom. I thought we had decided to get hoods but when we got to the store that Saturday afternoon after we had paid all our money and the guy brought out the jackets, there were no hoods. I said, “Where’s the hoods?” And everybody laughed. I was embarrassed and dropped the subject, but I never understood what happened to the hoods. But probably somebody undermined that idea behind my back.

I treasured that jacket, and would probably wear it today if it didn’t get lost or stolen. I spilt ink on the satin side (which I am still doing today). But otherwise, until I got deep into high school and got a letter jacket, my Cavalier jacket was me in my high street style.

Basketball was our maximum game. In elementary school I was number 6 man, in junior high I got moved down, by high school I was about 8, definitely not a starter. But I almost never minded because we had a great team within our limitations (which we occasionally were well exposed to) and a great street rep that made you strut just to be a Cavalier, Jim. I was a playmaker, a guard, me and Barry would bring the ball down and set up the plays. I was never a great shooter, but I could move the ball and connect with those passes. I got big off assists. But if I got matched with a small man I would go into my scoring act — such as it was.

Sometimes, in those games, in those various leagues we played in, even in some neighboring towns, as we got older, there was some element of violence, like we thought we might have to fight. And we would if pressed but we was, like gentlemen, athletes and lovers, not no head beaters.

We’d even tease each other after such encounters about how we knew we was going to fade. Especially we’d get on Love, everybody always teased him, because he was such a great player but so totally unsophisticated and country-like off the court. We’d say, “Love’s ass was already down the street when this other dude was looking to fight. He’d have to be Rocket Man to catch Love’s ass.” But, in reality, we would do whatever the moment called for but we never fancied ourselves pugs.

I had the most mouth on the court. Constantly talking to the other team, harassing them, face-guarding them, stealing the ball. I guess to make up for my light shot. And that could stir up the other team where they wanted to “kick that little nigger’s ass” but that never happened. Once we did get run out of this “country” town just west of Newark called Vaux Hall. We played baseball up there in what looked like a cow pasture. And we always had stories about the Negroes in Vaux Hall. But one night we played basketball up there and at the end of the game, because of some kind of encounter, we had to motor on down Springfield Avenue for several blocks until we got out of harm’s way. We blamed that on Love, too.

The focus of that club changed as we got older. Love and Hines, who were best friends, both went on to Central High School, and they were the emotional and spiritual center of our group, especially as an athletic team. And they began to gather dudes from Central High onto the squad. There was a heavy social underpinning to the club/team and when we were all in Central Avenue that was the focus. I went off to McKinley Junior High and later Barringer, which was almost all Italian, so I couldn’t bring too many onto the squad or into the social circle that formed the basis for our team. So my influence, such as it was, lessened. Though Sess, who was a high school star, did come in from Barringer and he brought Ray, who went to South Side (now Malcolm X Shabazz), because they lived in the same project on Waverly Avenue cross town. Later I moved back cross town, onto The Hill again, around my junior year in high school, so Sess and Ray and I got tight. But Leon, Bobby, Earl, Dick, Barry (plus Love, Hines, and Snooky) were all Central High dudes, so that was the social and athletic center of the team when we were in our early high school days.

From time to time I see some of the old Cavaliers, and there is still that bond of fondness held high by memory. I know now that the club/team was a mixture of the lower middle class and the workers (and a couple of peasants turned workers just a couple minutes ago). But by high school the winnowing process had seriously begun. Central was a technical and commercial high school, Barringer supposedly college prep. And we had a couple dudes from West Side and South Side (a mixture of both, plus business) and so we got sprayed out into auto plants, utilities, electronic tube factories, mechanics, white-collar paper shuffling, teachers, small businessmen, security guards, commercial artists, and even a goddam poet.

For us, athletics was art, a high expression of culture. And as athletes the only expression of that, within the other framework of society, was as cool, dignified, profilin’ dudes, self-sustaining and collective, but individually distinctive. That was at our best. At our worst, wow, we would mess with people. Especially egged on by one dude Love and Hines hooked up with later. Although we was all mischievous and even at times, from the narrow perch of that limited collectivity, somewhat arbitrary and cruel. I mean sometimes we would tap old dudes on the shoulder walking down the street, or say out of the way things to women minding their business, or flip somebody’s hat off they head, and shoot up the street laughing. We were great agitators. And mostly we agitated among ourselves. We would throw each other’s hats and bags, flip each other’s sneakers and run off with them. Talk about each other like dogs and about each other’s mamas even worse. But we were comrades most of us — as it went on, some gaps grew in that fabric, because of the different social situations we got into, but at its strongest it was something to be treasured and now looked back at with great feeling.

By high school I’d gotten into several different sectors of community or social life that complicated my life somewhat, even more than I knew. But that was a constant in my life I recognized, change. And though sometimes it saddened me and I regretted it, I saw after a while that that was what was happening.

So there was a mist-life while very young on Barclay Street in the Douglass-Harrison apartments (And I always, for a long time, dug those small red buildings and park in the back with green slat benches. And even the people that seemed to live there. Sometimes I longed for those people, in some not totally explained to me way), but we had to cut out. And then Boston Street, two sites, one near South Orange Avenue and then for a minute in my grandparents’ house up the street, near West Market. (I had a late-night knee operation in the last house. Under oil lamps my knee formed a silhouette against the greenish wall and a baldhead doctor with a red wig — a blood with red freckles — meticulously picked the glass out of my messed up knee while the family stood in one corner and watched.) That was right down the street from my grandfather’s store which had closed in the Depression, though the tale persisted in our family that it was because my grandfather gave out too much credit — it was implied — to ungrateful niggers. Which meant simply that that is the myth they wanted to invest their lives with, not understanding the actual political economy of this United Snakes. And how depression always kills off the petty and small bourgeoisie rat away!

But the bias of that description is to put down both Tom Russ and black people, but not the ugly thang that actual did de damage! And so the twist you inherit of seeing from who teaches you to see. I guess I carried the obvious putdown, of the bloods, on the top, cause that is what was most directly given. I carried less consciously the putdown of Tom which could then come full out when he was stricken and sat dying staring off into space. But the whole I came only much later to see and only now to sum up.

From there we went to Dey Street and the orange-red casa of my coming to little-boy consciousness. That was the center of my little-boy life. Central Avenue School, the playground, the evening recreation program we called “the Court” for some reason, The Secret Seven, wild fights, my athletic training, the Cavaliers, some of the remembered paths and lessons and teachers of whatever style, and even my first full-up meeting with white folks, though on my turf.

There was some other heavy stuff I found out and got into in them Dey Street days, a little romance, the church, and the Newark Eagles, and they need to be talked about. Why? Because they had something to do with it — the shaping, the answering — of the question How did you get to be you?

For one thing, the whites, almost all Italians and a few Irish and a German or two around somewhere, were definitely at the fringe, as I said before, of most of the Dey Street world. Not that they were sealed off by us in any way. It was just how we related, the deep cultural connects and the invisible and not so invisible antecedents in all directions even then. And our West Ward thrust was some kind of frontier. We were aware that a few blocks away the world changed and Italians lived in growing numbers.

And though they were on the fringe of the Dey Street life there were some distinct and concrete effects of their existence among us, and out beyond us. A couple of them could play ball, like Augie D., for instance, but we thought in the main their game was baseball. As little boys we played mixed teams, but at another point the teams were mostly black, and then you could get a black vs. white game, which was still not much until we got older and it began to reflect and take on the tension of the whole society.

By the time we were teenagers we were playing all-white baseball teams and those games were for something other than little-boy note. The baseball team we put together always talked about playing the white teams for cases of beer, but most of us were teetotalers and that didn’t mean much to us.

Then there was the weird situation in which we actually by time of seventh grade or so began to take certain liberties with the white girls that we did not would not had better not take with the black ones. Like a couple big ol’ (for seventh grade) white girls I knew, we would “feel up” in the cloakroom. (I remember a couple of names but will graciously refrain.) It never dawned on me to delve into why, or maybe it did and I couldn’t. But we certainly liked quite a few of the little black girls we went to school with but we would no more think of feeling any of them except certain rogues I’m told did feel on certain of the wilder-repped sisters and that would cause a small shooting war in most cases. Maybe the other cases where that meant something else were kept from me young gourd by the benevolent moralists of me age. But some dudes later as we got into junior high would brag about women. What they did. But none of that was too clear to me anyway. That was real mystery. And there were a couple of these white girls who’d giggle and push you away, like they dug it. My god, what would they Italian fathers and brothers have said at seeing that. Wow, it makes me shudder even now.

And Augie was the first in the neighborhood I knew about to get a TV. (I remember clear as a bell when we got our first telephone — on Dey Street. MI2-5921. Our first electric refrigerator — a Kelvinator, and we called it that, exchanging the brand name for the genre. We had to put quarters in it to keep it going. We didn’t get our first TV until I was about thirteen or fourteen, one year I came back from summer boy scout camp and walked into the house and there was a 14-inch Motorola, later we got a 17-inch, we never had a really big screen when it was hip to brag about that.) But we would, some of us, pile up in Augie’s house to watch the TV. Augie’s father was some kind of worker, a medium-sized guy with black hair grey at the edges. He never said much, just nodded to us. I wonder what he thought about the crowd of colored kids that would push in there to watch that early tube.

But later I could tell that something was happening in the whole of that Dey Street/Newark Street/Lock Street world, bounded by Central and Sussex Avenues, when Augie began to say certain things. Like one time we were sitting on the auditorium steps in the playground bullshitting about something and he was combing his hair. Augie loved to comb his goddam hair, and I think his little brother was with him and fat (white) Norman and maybe staring Johnny, who had the weird disease that made him go into trances at odd times. So I says to Augie to lemme use the comb. My hair was always cut very close, we called them “Germans” the way our hair was cut. And later a little longer on the top and front was called a “German bush.” But Augie nixes me and says, “Don’t mix the breeds.”

I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, “Don’t mix the breeds.” Huh? I said. Huh? Whatta you talking about, ol’ bean, don’t mix the breeds? (Not exactly in those words, ya know?) But he says it again. And I did get the meaning. I got it the first fucking time, not literally but generally and emotionally and psychologically I understood exactly what he meant. And hey, I didn’t even get mad. It didn’t even faze me. Actually it confirmed some upside-down shit I had in my head. That we were white and black. And I knew the abstract social history of that. I also knew what I saw everyday in various ways that manifested some meaning and connection with what Augie was saying.

Shit, I saw Mantan Moreland and Amos ’n’ Andy and Beulah and Stepin Fetchit. I knew what “Feets, don’t fail me now” meant. And who Birmingham really was. And why Ellic in the Bob Hope picture Ghost Breakers had got so scared in the clock that when it opened he stood there shivering and turned completely white. I had seen Butterfly McQueen and Hattie McDaniel and Louise Beavers. I had seen the wild-eyed woogies in Tarzan and how knowledgeable Tarzan was. I had seen Al Jolson do his bullshit — hey and most of that was funny. HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa HaHaHaHaHaHa (except Al Jolson, he wasn’t shit). But still, anyway, down beneath that actual laughter there was something else. Besides the embarrassment and even shame for the feeble-minded, beneath all that, boys and girls, there was something else that it took me a long time to fully dig. (I’ll tell you about it later!)

Sure, I knew exactly what my best white friend Augie was saying, and I knew instinctively that his mother had probably put that shit in his head. What could have been the expression on my little round brown face with the big comical eyes? But what does it mean then, on the actual sidewalks and playgrounds of our lives? Whatever I said, it could only have been an acknowledgment of the time, the place, the condition. Like a fucking flag salute.

Another time, I’m hiking Augie, like his mother had all this grey hair and I’m calling her the Grey Terror, like we did. But Augie, then, pauses and asks me what color my mother’s hair is. And I, like a sap, say black, which it was. And Augie looks half-eyed at I donno who, Normie or somebody, and says, “The Black Terror.” It was a good hike, I guess. I ain’t gonna be an objectivity freak — it’s my funking memoirs — but more than the hike qua hike was the thing it really raised, that Augie really was putting into the game that which could not have been kept out in any real take on the world. But it let you know that all that was abstract to you, about black and white and all that, was not really abstract, that it all could not be waved away, or laughed away, or forgot or not known about. It meant to me that there was real shit over which I did not have total control, that I did not even properly understand. And I could be, on such occasions, quietly stunned. Turned inward and set adrift in a world of my feelings I couldn’t yet deal with.

Those were some of the steps, the paths, of our divergence. And I told you how in high school (at least for me) the old relationships completely fell apart. For one thing, it was an Italian high school and junior high I went to. (Heading for college prep in my jumbled-up but crystal-clear head.) And so all things were openly reversed. The Italians now sat in center stage and controlled the social life of those two institutions. And year after year (only four, really), I went through various kinds of bullshit and humiliation that actually made me feel at one point that I hated Italians straight out.

(Earlier, in the seventh grade, we’d gone to the Bronx Zoo, and I’m lagging behind in the elephant house, holding my nose but wanting to check close up on the elephants. So I see this guy, he’s cleaning up or something in there, and I ask him, “Wow, how do you stand it in here?” Meaning the terrible odor of elephant shit. So he says to me, “I don’t mind it. I live in Harlem.” Yeh, a white guy said this, and it went through me like a frozen knife. And I knew exactly what he meant. Except I also wondered, even right then at that ugly moment, why he wanted to drop that kind of shit on me. I knew he was attacking me, saying a bad thing to me, my big eyes must have wheeled and caught his face for a second, then dropped down into the zoo dirt, and carried the rest of me out of there. But what did that do, I wonder, for Mr. Elephant Shit Shoveler to say that? Did it make him feel good or heroic or like he wasn’t really shoveling elephant shit? And all that was nestled tightly in me gourd by time I got out of grammar school. And Augie’s words and news of “race riots” and even a couple runins my mother had with cut-rate racists, one in a candy store downtown — the lady wanted to sell her some “nigger toes” and my mother says, “Those are Brazil nuts, lady,” grabs my hand, and stalks out. Later she had a near-rumble with a bus driver who wanted to talk to her funny. I took all that in, and carried it, carried it with me — who knows when you need such experiences? I felt subconsciously.)

But I was totally unprepared for the McKinley and Barringer experiences in which the whites ran the social and going to school/academic part of that institutional life. And I put up with many nigger callings and off the wall comments and intimidations, even getting cussed out regularly in Italian. I even learned Italian curse words (though not many precise meanings) and would fling them back sometimes. But I tried to hold my own. For instance, when a big schizophrenic white boy — a blond dude named Joe S. — threw a ball at me in the McKinley playground not long after I got there, I flung the bat at his head. The other white dudes kept him off me.

And later in school I developed an interior life that was split obviously like the exterior life. One half-tied to Dey Street while we still lived there and the black life of the playground and streets. And the other tied to the school experiences of McKinley and Barringer. It must be true, maybe obvious, that the schizophrenic tenor of some of my life gets fueled from these initial sources (and farther back with words whispered into the little boy’s ear, from mouths and radios). But the white thing was only periphery in me young days, a fringe thing I didn’t even recognize. And then to go into McKinley and then Barringer and be in a white world ruled by white Italians whose most consistent emotion regarding me was unconcern, that took me up by the ankles and dangled me in nospace and put not’s in my head and not me’s.

The life of emotion, which is historical, like anything else, gets warped in high school I’m certain now. And to understand I must go back now several years to give a picture of one side of my life, feelings, mind, head, and then come back to this threshold of pain, then we can draw conclusions together!

One emotional center of my earlier life was my special relationship with my father. My father loved sports, and playing sports was the prerequisite for being part of the community of youth I ran with. I’d read the Daily News sports pages from way back in grammar school. And he’d take me to football games, baseball games, I mean the pros.

And, as I’ve said, there was a special grandeur to going someplace with my father and having all the “you look just like your father” folks identify us as such. There was a pride in that, I mean for the persons saying that, not just for my old man and me. But in the people it seemed to be a kind of high joy that such a genetic miracle could be produced. And that it was a sleek brown kid that had been produced — Eureka! — down to the sky-drinking eyes.

But the specialest feeling was when my father took me down to Ruppert Stadium some Sundays to see the Newark Eagles, the black pro team. Very little in my life was as heightened (in anticipation and reward) for me as that. What was that? Some black men playing baseball? No, but beyond that, so deep in fact it carried and carries memories and even a politics with it that still makes me shudder.

Ruppert Stadium was “Down ’Eck,” down below the station, in the heavy industrial section, and then mostly whites, including the Portuguese, lived down there. But we were never really thinking about that when we went there. The smell or smells, and I always associate them with Newark, could be any wild thing. Sometimes straight-out rotten eggs, fart odor, or stuff for which there was no known identification. Just terrible Newark Down Neck smell.

But coming down through that would heighten my sense because I could dig I would soon be standing in that line to get in, with my old man. But lines of all black people! Dressed up like they would for going to the game, in those bright lost summers. Full of noise and identification slapped greetings over and around folks. Cause after all in that town of 300,000 that 20 to 30 percent of the population (then) had a high recognition rate for each other. They worked together, lived in the same neighborhoods, went to church (if they did) together, and all the rest of it, even played together.

The Newark Eagles would have your heart there on the field, from what they was doing. From how they looked. But these were professional ballplayers. Legitimate black heroes. And we were intimate with them in a way and they were extensions of all of us, there, in a way that the Yankees and Dodgers and whatnot could never be!

We knew that they were us — raised up to another, higher degree. Shit, and the Eagles, people knew, talked to us before and after the game. That fabulous year they were World Champs of the black leagues (two years later they were gone!). The Negro National League. We was there opening day, Jim, and Leon Day pitched a no-hitter! Opening Day! And the bloods threw those seat cushions all over Ruppert Stadium and the white folks (also owners of the New York Yankees) who owned that stadium wouldn’t let us have the things after that. We noted it (I know I did) but it didn’t stop nothin’.

That was the year they had Doby and Irvin and Pearson and Harvey and Pat Patterson, a schoolteacher, on third base, and Leon Day was the star pitcher, and he showed out Opening Day! But coming into that stadium those Sunday afternoons carried a sweetness with it. The hot dogs and root beers! (They have never tasted that good again.) A little big-eyed boy holding his father’s hand.

There was a sense of completion in all that. The black men (and the women) sitting there all participated in those games at a much higher level than anything else I knew. In the sense that they were not excluded from either identification with or knowledge of what the Eagles did and were. It was like we all communicated with each other and possessed ourselves at a more human level than was usually possible out in cold whitey land.

Coming in that stadium with dudes and ladies calling out, “Hey, Roy, boy he look just like you.” Or “You look just like your father.” Besides that note and attention, the Eagles there were something we possessed. It was not us as George Washington Carver or Marian Anderson, some figment of white people’s lack of imagination, it was us as we wanted to be and how we wanted to be seen being looked at by ourselves in some kind of loud communion.

And we knew, despite the newspapers, radios, Babe Ruth candy bars, who that was tearing around those bases. When we saw Mule Suttles or Josh Gibson or Buck Leonard or Satchel Paige and dug the Homestead Grays, Philadelphia Stars, New York Black Yankees (yes!), Baltimore Elite (pronounced E-Light) Giants, Kansas City Monarchs, Birmingham Black Barons, and even the Indianapolis Clowns! We knew who that was and what they (we) could do. Those other Yankees and Giants and Dodgers we followed just to keep up with being in America. We had our likes and our dislikes. “Our” teams. But for the black teams, and for us Newarkers, the Newark Eagles was pure love.

We were wilder and calmer there. Louder and happier, without hysteria. Just digging ourselves stretch out is what, and all that love and noise and color and excitement surrounded me like a garment of feeling. I know I thought that’s the way life was supposed to be.

And my father was a part of that in a way that he was part of nothing else I knew. The easy comradeship among the spectators, but he even knew some of the players. And sometimes after the games he’d take me around to the Grand Hotel (used to be on West Market Street), right down the street from our church. Right next to the barbershop my father took me to. (And going to that barbershop was almost as hip as going to the Grand or the games. Them niggers was arguin’ in there one day about something and one guy mentions something that MacArthur had said and another dude, some old black man, said there wasn’t no such thing as MacArthur! That has always blown my mind, what that meant!)

At the Grand Hotel, the ballplayers and the slick people could meet. (That was when Baba, Russell Bingham, was in his high-up thing with the digits and whatnot — clean as the Board of Health.) Everybody super-clean and highlifin’, glasses jingling with ice, black people’s eyes sparklin’ and showin’ their teeth in the hippest way possible.

You could see Doby and Lennie Pearson and Pat Patterson or somebody there and I’d be wearin’ my eyes and ears out drinking a co-cola, checking everything out.

The movies I dearly dug but you never got to go behind the screen and shake hands with the heroes. But at the Grand Hotel you could and my old man saw that I did.

It was black life that was celebrated by being itself at its most unencumbered. Mrs. Effa Manley, who owned the team, would even come through and Baba or somebody would buy her a drink. Or my father would push me forward for an introduction and Monte Irvin would bend down and take my little hand in his and, Jim, I’d be all the way out.

In the laughter and noise and colors and easy hot dogs there was something of us celebrating ourselves. In the flying around the bases and sliding and home runs and arguments and triumphs there was more of ourselves in celebration than we were normally ever permitted. It was ours. (Not just the ownership of the teams, the Negro National League, though that had to be in it too.) But our expression unleashed for our and its own sake. It made us know that the Mantans and Birminghams were clowns — funny, but obviously used against us for some reason. Was it a big creep in a white hood somewhere in charge of trying to make black people feel bad? I thought so. But the clowns we knew were scarecrows, cardboard figures somebody was putting out trying to make us feel bad. Cause we knew, and we knew, that they wasn’t us. Just clowns. Somebody got hooked up. We was out on the field at Ruppert Stadium, Jim. And we was even up in the stands diggin’ it. Laid back in a yellow shirt with the collar open and white pencil-stripe pants. We was in the sun with a hot dog and a root beer having our hands shook by one of our father’s friends. We was cheering for Mule Suttles or seeing Larry Doby make a double play. We was not clowns and the Newark Eagles laid that out clear for anyone to see!

But you know, they can slip in on you another way, Bro. Sell you some hand magic, or not sell you, but sell somebody somewhere some. And you be standin’ there and all of a sudden you hear about — what? — Jeckie Rawbeanson. I could tell right away, really, that the dude in the hood had been at work. No, really, it was like I heard the wheels and metal wires in his voice, the imperfected humanoid, his first words “Moy nayhme is Jeckie Rawbeanson.” Some Ray Bradbury shit they had mashed on us. I knew it. A skin-covered humanoid to bust up our shit.

I don want to get political and talk bad about “integration.” Like what a straight-out trick it was. To rip off what you had in the name of what you ain’t never gonna get. So the destruction of the Negro National League. The destruction of the Eagles, Grays, Black Yankees, Elite Giants, Cuban Stars, Clowns, Monarchs, Black Barons, to what must we attribute that? We’re going to the big leagues. Is that what the cry was on those Afric’ shores when the European capitalists and African feudal lords got together and palmed our future? “We’re going to the big leagues!”

So out of the California laboratories of USC, a synthetic colored guy was imperfected and soon we would be trooping back into the holy see of racist approbation. So that we could sit next to drunken racists by and by. And watch our heroes put down by slimy cocksuckers who are so stupid they would uphold Henry and his Ford and be put in chains by both while helping to tighten ours.

Can you dig that red-faced backwardness that would question whether Satchel Paige could pitch in the same league with who?

The Dodgers could take out some of the sting for those who thought it really meant we was getting in America. (But that cooled out. A definition of pathology in blackface would be exactly that, someone, some Nigra, who thunk they was in this! Owow!) But the scarecrow J.R. for all his ersatz “blackness” could represent the shadow world of the Negro integrating into America. A farce. But many of us fell for that and felt for him, really. Even though a lot of us knew the wholly artificial disconnected thing that Jackie Robinson was. Still when the backward crackers would drop black cats on the field or idiots like Dixie Walker (who wouldn’t even a made the team if Josh Gibson or Buck Leonard was on the scene) would mumble some of his unpatented ku klux dumbness, we got uptight, for us, not just for J.R.

I remained a Giant “fan,” cause me fadder was, even when J.R. came on the scene. I resisted that First shit (though in secret, you know, I had to uphold my own face, alone among a sea of hostile jerks!).

(So what? So Jackie came on down to D.C. town and they got his ass to put Paul Robeson down!! I remember that, out of the side of my head I checked that. I wondered. What did it mean? What was he saying? And was it supposed to represent me? And who was that other guy — Paul Robeson? I heard that name somewhere.)

The Negro League’s like a light somewhere. Back over your shoulder. As you go away. A warmth still, connected to laughter and self-love. The collective black aura that can only be duplicated with black conversation or music.

The road, the path, now I’m graduated out of grammar school (in the photograph the fourth from the end, next to Bruce Miller and little Sylvester who said quite accurately, “You’ll never be no doctor”). And I’m in McKinley, with all these white dudes. When we Cavaliers came down there for one a those street carnivals, we didn’t even know what they was. A big fat 400-pound dude, a nasty motherfucker I never really met but saw quite a bit in high school. A team manager. Water boy, really. He says to us out the side of his mouth — hissing it like a fat snake — “Get out! Get out!” But there was seven or eight of us, so we looked around a little while longer then we got out. But I had to come back to those parts to school in a day or two. And so it goes. So it went!

The Russ-Jones combine broke up about then as well. As I said, accompanied by loud declarations of still unclear resentment and perhaps rage. Certainly I heard frustration in that too, as you must whenever you are listening to African Americans.

The Jones section moved even further north, away from Dey Street, across the invisible borders down all the way into Italian land. That was short-lived and boy was I glad about that. But for a minute we lived on 8th Avenue, with some other strange person. We were boarders in her little house, down below Broad Street. So I went right up the hill to McKinley and even went to this nearly all-Italian Boys Club. Egad, they even had metal chains instead of nets on the baskets. I’d never seen that. So that instead of “swish” as the term of success it was “ching.” So much for cultural pluralism.

It was all spread out and vague and alien for me now. The old Dey Street/Newark Street/Lock Street breakdown had broke down. The Central Avenue playground crowd had vanished as far as I was concerned. And certainly some of that was subjective. You feel once you leave a place it’s literally “not there” anymore. But “the fates” had sent large sectors of my own age group scattering to the winds of high school.

I felt totally alone and isolated living down there on 8th Avenue. I felt totally alone and isolated going to McKinley Junior High. And I was contemptuous, frightened, and awed by the tons of white students I had to see everyday. But this was not a fancy private school, this was a largely Italian public school in the old First Ward (somebody could give you a list of the people that came out of there and some of them would be some wellknown gangsters as well as movie stars, singers, boxers, police, businessmen, etc.). A lot of these same kinds of students today would be in Catholic school way out in the suburbs. But quite a few would still be there — dealing with those Mean Streets.

In McKinley and in the 8th Avenue Boys Club I related only to what was inside my head. You want to know what alienation is? That was it. I had Italian teachers who told inside jokes to the Italian students and even knew them after school. One teacher even had the kids bring him Hershey bars, and they loved to do it. But it was intimidation to me. Especially since this dude one time denounced me — I mean made a class-stopping pronouncement — for having my sneakers sitting on top of the desk. Like they were some all-time PeeUuus! That was more than just funny, at least for me.

I was “Jones” then, to the teachers and to the students. And from a familiar figure appreciated and denigrated for my actualities, as had been the case on Dey Street, I was now all but invisible, and when not that, the butt of something unpleasant. Plus I was completely contemptuous of them as far as athletics, though for certain there were some good players there, in all the sports. But part of my defense, the defense of my psyche, was found in silently denouncing these dudes for their lack of athletic skill and art. I mean, even if a dude could shoot, most of ’em looked funny to me (I said) and it cracked me up.

And I would get out in the playground and wear some unsuspecting turkeys out, though if I ran into some quality players, which I did, I would get cooled out. But the sense in myself was of some wall — some dull and wholly uninteresting wall — between myself and the life and persons of the place. And I wondered often what I was doing there. Except there had come into my head and out of my mouth some vague “decision” to go to Barringer.

At the beginning of the tenth grade I did go on to Barringer. They had some junior high school system consisting of the ninth grade for some of the high schools and that’s what my sojourn at McKinley had been. (These days, the ’80s, McKinley, now named 7th Avenue, is like a New York City school jammed up with blacks and Latinos in the advanced stages of ghettofication.)

Barringer was larger and if possible an even more foreign place. It was larger and on the other side of Branch Brook Park. There was less of the narrow ghetto First Ward feeling to it because it was larger and up toward the more middle-class Italian areas. But that was another world. McKinley was ugly and baroque and teeming and narrow and ghetto Italian. Barringer was larger and more open but it seemed even more completely separated from my Dey Street life.

And we had moved again, around this time of my life. We had moved all the way back across town into the Central Ward. The old Third Ward. And right on top of The Hill. So this meant that I had to take a bus everyday all the way crosstown to school. Coming out of the geographical lookout post of the growing black ghetto, on Belmont Avenue and Spruce Street. What they called the Four Corners. And during them days everybody and everything black passed across or under or over or around those streets either day or night. It was like X marked the spot of another kind of black life. Back over not far from where I was born and spent my earliest days, down the hill in Douglass-Harrison, but underneath my Belmont Avenue windows I began to be aware of the Fast Life.

It was like a sociologist’s joke. Up in the morning, come down from our third-floor apartment. (My grandmother and uncle were with us again, but in much smaller space.) Down into the street, to the corner of Belmont (beautiful mountain?) to wait for the 9 Clifton bus. Hey, and there were quite a few other refugees and cutouts from the mostly black (and a trifle Jewish) high school at the edge of the Central Ward, South Side. It was in my head, as well, to flee South Side. (How did that get in my head? The talk among friends? Overhearing adults? I donno. But it came out of my mouth, “I don’t wanna go to South Side. I wanna go to Barringer.”) And there were kids on that wild 9 Clifton. Some coming from even further south going to West Side and Central, even Vo-Tech, and the last stop, way cross town in another world, Barringer. There were a few of us made that long trip every day, back and forth, from the Central Ward and even the South Ward, all the way to Rome. (And yes, just below the school sat the Vatican. The still unfinished Sacred Heart Cathedral, that towers now, and towered then with a useless romanticism wasted on most of us black kids who went to Barringer who saw it simply as a hated landmark.)

The joke? From the Four Corners to Rome and back. And now I was completely disoriented (though calmer now, at home, because of less hostile surroundings). Because I didn’t know anybody at Barringer and I didn’t know anybody on Belmont Avenue. My friends, at that time, still lived around Central Avenue School, Baxter Terrace, on Norfolk and Sussex and Lock and Jay and Hudson and Warren. And for a time it was a drag at both ends.

At Barringer it was the amazingly dull process of being an outsider that I was involved with. Though there were a few black students there I got tight with. At least to joke with in school and release some of the tension built up by our being black in Italian Antarctica. (Of the two closest joke-time buddies in my homeroom in Barringer — that is, we would jive and put each other down and bump each other and grin in the hallways and maybe the lunchroom — one, Ken, is a detective lieutenant, the other a career navy man. And even these dudes, black though they was, called me “Jones.”)

Two of my other friends for other kinds of talk, they were in some of my other classes, the college-prep-oriented ones, were white. And they were outsiders too. We must a made a weird trio, Jim. One guy, J., was tall and skinny and talked incessantly of sports. But he wasn’t Italian, could not play any sports worth a damn, plus when he was in grammar school (he went to Central Avenue too!) he had a kind of strange odor about him — oh, look, it was urine — that set him off from most of us then. I talked to him in Central but with another relationship. In Barringer we got tight and the pee smell had mostly gone, but he had pimples all over his face and his lack of coordination made him the brunt of much bullshit (as it had in Central — but that was a mostly black school). I didn’t really like the way people acted toward J. in high school, though I guess I had heaped plenty of bullshit on him myself in grammar school. But now there was, I guess, some kind of half kinship. Since now I was on the outside, on the fringe of this social focus, and so was J., as usual. And hell, we both liked sports. And every morning he’d come to high school with the local newspaper and we’d discuss whatever was going down in the pros or high school or college, it made no difference to us. We rapped on it.

V., my other walking buddy, was also completely uncoordinated and a silent (though super-opinionated, egoistic, and talky with us) shy lonertype figure. He had a potbelly and looked middle-aged at sixteen and thought about smoking a pipe. V. fancied himself an intellectual and he was. But that was his defense against the mainstream life of Barringer. That he was other because his head was somewhere else.

He was Italian but totally disconnected from the Italian life of that place. Plus he wanted to be a writer and it was with V. that I first exchanged young vague ideas about writing. V. had read some books. He liked The Red Badge of Courage (I think because he lived in a place named after Stephen Crane) and he wrote short stories and poems like Crane’s.

J., I think because of V.’s influence, later began to say that he wanted to be a sportswriter. All three of us went to a writing class in Barringer our senior year given by a hard-faced unsmiling teacher named Miss Stewart (but she turned out to be a caring human being).

So in my homeroom I swung with two bloods and in my other classes with two white intellectuals. Maybe all three of us were and came on like intellectuals. I know I didn’t feel like no goddam intellectual. I just felt drugged being isolated and alienated and surrounded by such bullshit in white Barringer.

Swinging down off that 9 Clifton, on the other side, at the Four Corners, I faced an entirely different reality. On the corner a liquor store (still there), the Foxes, and next to that, coming toward my house, a black frozen custard and hot dog place; next was a black cleaner’s, a Polish tin-smith, a house, then our house, 154 Belmont Avenue. On the top floor, the Joneses and Russes, and on the second floor, Dr. Bell, a young black dentist who had just got out of school. (He lived there a hot minute but this was his office mostly. He was also the building’s landlord.) On the first floor, a Polish oil stove place run by this Polish man and woman who must have been a hundred.

When we got to Belmont there were still a few Poles there, mostly stores. And you could get some good kielbasy — Polish sausage. And down the street in the other direction there was still a good sprinkling of Jews, probably Polish, too. But the Poles lived mostly in that one block between Spruce and 17th Avenue. The remains of a larger community, just as was the sprinkling of Jews, but centered by a huge church, which is still there, for the Polish Catholics. I went to boy scout camp with some of the Polish kids because even though most of them had moved out of Newark their troop was located at St. Stanislaus on Belmont Avenue and so they belonged to the Robert Treat Council, which covered Newark. One of the funniest dudes from that Polish troop who regularly used to crack us up at camp was Sigmund Pilch, who was like a nonstop wisecracking slapstick artist, who I never saw once we came back into Newark after camp.

Across the street, on the corner, was the Four Kegs, where you could stand outside and peep into and see the highlife going on thick and fast on the weekends but happening at top speed any night. And down Spruce Street the straight-out ghetto, which I still had to investigate with my teenage legs and eyes and ears. And that came in on time. But early in my Barringer days and the horrible incarceration at McKinley I was stretched out like some despairing quiet animal not even sure what was wrong. But I knew.

I grew up on one side of town and part of my head was shaped by that ice and alienation, that hostility and silence in the face of adversity. And I grew up on the other side of town too and that is something else.

I was run home a few times from Barringer by the warring white boys. Tricked and insulted any number of times. Looked at funny by teachers (one of whom now in black Newark is trying to grin and skin his way past that old arrogance — whoa!). I looked at the white girls and their boyfriends and tried to see through the wall of our separation at what that would be like. But I never went with a white girl in high school (shit, that couldn’t happen in Barringer). But I didn’t go with any black girl either who went to the school. I just looked and fantasized about all of ’em.

The awards and the honors, the straight-out teenage joys, the simple concern, was never mine and I thought that I existed in that place in a separate piece of space where I thought my thoughts and had my resentments. And I openly did not like it. That separation and white-out. I did not like it. And it did not like me. I think it did something to me too. Like how could some nonstop sardonic-mouthed joker and quick-start artist like me be banned to an island of noninterest and overlook and uncomprehending babble. Perhaps I lusted after the life of the real inhabitants of that place. In my weakest moments I must have. But most of the time I was just passing through, even as words were coming out of my mouth or doing whatever I was doing. I was not wholly there, I felt, but the part of me that was, suffered.