The Rat That Got Away: A Bronx Memoir

By Allen Jones and Mark D. Naison

The Rat That Got Away is an inspiring story of one man’s odyssey from the streets of the Bronx to a life as a professional athlete and banker in Europe, but it is also provides a unique vantage point on the history of the Bronx and sheds new light on a neglected period in American urban history.

Allen Jones grew up in a public housing project in the South Bronx at a time—the 1950s—when that neighborhood was a place of optimism and hope for upwardly mobile Black and Latino families. Brought up in a two-parent household, with many neighborhood mentors, Jones led an almost charmed life as a budding basketball star until his teen years, when his once peaceful neighborhood was torn by job losses, white flight, and a crippling drug epidemic. Drawn into the heroin trade, first as a user, then as a dealer, Jones spent four months on Rikers Island, where he experienced a crisis of conscience and a determination to turn his life around. Sent to a New England prep school upon his release, Jones used his basketball skills and street smarts
to forge a life outside the Bronx, first as a college athlete in the South, then as a professional basketball player, radio personality, and banker in Europe.

A brilliant storyteller with a gift for dialogue, Jones brings Bronx streets and housing projects to life as places of possibility as well as tragedy, where racism and economic hardship never completely suppressed the resilient spirit of its residents. A book that will change the way people view the South Bronx.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Empire State Editions
• Release date: Aug 25, 2009
• ISBN: 9780823231041

Book preview

1

Bronx Beginnings

To tell this story right, I have to go back to the very beginning, back to my earliest memory.

The year is 1955. I am 5 years old, and I’ve just awakened alone in my bed by the window. The morning light is drifting in, and I shiver a little as I realize that my pajamas and the sheet underneath me are wet. I call for my mother. When she doesn’t respond, I crawl up toward the window sill, hoping to see her outside. Everybody seems very far away from my perch up on the 11th floor, but I can see a woman sitting on the bench talking to some people. I think she might be my mother. I cry out to her, but she stays there, talking, and does not look up. In my desperation, I stand on my tiptoes. Then I swing one leg and then the other through the open window and put my two feet on the ledge. I am sitting on the window frame, but the woman still can’t see me. The only thing keeping me from climbing out the window entirely is the fact that it is secured to the sill by a chain; it’s going to be difficult—though maybe not impossible—for me to squeeze through the narrow space.

I am more than one hundred feet above the street when a strange thing happens—something that I am still not able to understand or explain fully—yet somehow the memory of it seems important, because it has stayed with me all these years. When I look to the right of me, I see the next-door apartment building with its many windows, and standing outside one of them on another window ledge is a tiny woman with long gray hair tied in a pony tail. Even from a distance, I can see that she is wearing a white apron trimmed in red. She seems to be the size of a baby doll, and she does not move. But I don’t see her clearly; she may be white, but she also looks like my Aunt Mary from my father’s side, who is Cherokee Indian. (Another strange fact: Aunt Mary is a woman whom I had not yet met but who will come to visit us soon after, her long gray Indian hair in a pony tail, wearing the same white apron.)

Meanwhile (as the story has been retold to me many times), my mother, who left the apartment briefly, comes back to the building to find police officers and firefighters running inside. She gets into the elevator with them and, concerned, asks one of the firefighters about the location of the fire. When he informs her that there is no fire, only a child hanging out a window of one of the apartments, she freezes and asks, Which one? A police officer answers her, saying Apartment 11F, and my mother begins wailing, That’s my baby! That’s my baby!

The police and firefighters try to calm my mother. When the elevator doors open, they lead her down the hall and into our apartment, warning her that any sudden movement might startle me and cause me to fall. In an act of amazing self-control, my mother slowly and calmly walks into my room with the police officer, opens her arms, and asks me to come away from the window. I pull my legs inside and stand on my bed, and she folds me in her arms. It takes a long time for her to stop crying and hugging me. She seems to think I will disappear if she lets me go.

This story of my early brush with death has come back to me, over and over, in the course of my life. It was part of what defined me in my family and in my neighborhood—identified me both as a fearless risk taker and as a crazy man who often acted without assessing the consequences. Whether this is true or not I don’t know. What I do know is that this event was the first of many narrow escapes from disaster in my life, times when I put myself in life-threatening situations and somehow walked away. The story in this book tells of these encounters and, more, of promising beginnings and false starts, of mentors bad and good, of uplifting victories and humbling failures. It is a story of a boy torn between a loving family and the lure of the streets, between basketball and drugs, between respect for God and the blind pursuit of pleasure. It is my story, and it is also the story of thousands of young men and women who grew up in that particular time and place, many of whom were not lucky enough to be pulled away from the window, to land on their feet, or even to live into middle age. Even as I write these words, I wonder what saved me and has allowed me to be here to recount these events.

This book also tells the story of a neighborhood—the streets and alleyways, the schools and churches, the kitchens and living rooms of the small corner of the Bronx where my life began and where I learned some of the most important lessons of my life.

The Lester Patterson Houses is a public housing complex built for war veterans and their children in the heart of the South Bronx. But, by the time I was an adult, what was designed as an ideal community for people of different races and nationalities became a kind of war zone.

Built in 1950, the year of my birth, this was one of the first public Housing Projects in the South Bronx, part of a huge urban renewal project extending from 139th Street to 145th Street between 3rd and Morris Avenues. The area—once extremely rundown, full of old businesses and tenements—was gradually transformed in the 1950s into a thriving urban community. The new housing in the neighborhood was modern, attractive, and safe. For a child growing up there, the Patterson Houses were more than just buildings. Each was a community in itself, and you were defined by the building you grew up in: Your building determined who your friends—and your enemies—were, who looked out for you and who didn’t, and, to a certain extent, who you would become.

Right across the street from the Projects, the city built two new schools: Clark Junior High and John Peter Zenger Public School (PS) 18 (an elementary school). PS 18 was an inviting place. It had a glass window so big you could stand outside and see everyone in the cafeteria. There was a sandbox in the school yard we called The Little Park because of the swings and the wooden seesaw. Both schools had big concrete school yards with softball diamonds, basketball courts, and handball courts, in addition to playgrounds with swings and monkey bars. The school yards were surrounded by trees and park benches with tables whose tops were painted with checkerboards, where people could sit outside and play a few rounds while enjoying the weather and the scenery. All these amenities were within easy walking distance of the Projects.

Directly across the street from the PS 18 school yard was another important building. St. Rita’s Catholic Church took up almost an entire block of College Avenue. To the left of the church was the rectory and the parish school, and to the right was the convent where the nuns lived. I was brought up Catholic and sent to Catholic school, and St. Rita’s would play a key role in shaping my character and my imagination, even when I seemed to be rebelling against everything it stood for.

Our neighborhood enjoyed many of the same amenities that wealthier communities in the city had had access to for a long time. Transportation from the Projects was excellent. Bus lines ran from 138th Street up to Fordham Road, and you could travel by subway from 138th Street to almost anyplace in the city. And right until the early ’70s, we had an elevated train that ran up 3rd Avenue all the way to the North Bronx. The shopping was as good as the transportation. Up on 149th Street and 3rd Avenue, you could find major store chains and supermarkets, plus big department stores like Hearns and Alexander’s. You could take a bus from 149th Street across a bridge over the Harlem River all the way to 145th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, passing right through Harlem on your ride. We felt safe in our neighborhood, in part because the Projects had its own police force, which operated out of the management office where we went to pay our rent. The streets and buildings were cleaned by the Project’s maintenance men every day, and they also made repairs in the apartments and in public areas.

In the Patterson Houses, we had a mixture of Irish-American, Jewish-American, African-American, Puerto Rican—American, and Italian-American families living and working together, many of them families of veterans who fought in World War II and the Korean War. The hallways and lobby were filled with the mingled aromas of fresh coffee, fried chicken, chitlins, garlic and olive oil, fish, apple pie, and rice and beans. Each nationality had its own cooking smell, and people shared their food with one another in the same way they shared records, swapped sports equipment, and watched one another’s kids.

Along with good food, music and laughter were fixtures of life in the Patterson Houses. The decade of the ’50s was the time of Elvis Presley, and black people, like everyone else, listened to him. But Brook Benton, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday—those great African-American singers—were the main groove. When it came to humor, we listened to Moms Mabley, a 60-year-old black woman without a tooth in her head who talked about life like a woman who had seen plenty of it. If Moms Mabley was the queen of black humor, then Redd Foxx, a raucous, red-haired man whose jokes ranged between R- and X-rated, was the king. They were the best black stand-up comics who ever lived, with no disrespect intended to Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor, both of whom learned many of their best routines from these legendary figures.

All in all, our neighborhood was an enviable place to live. On weekends, people would come from all over the city, especially Harlem, which was only a short subway ride away, just to walk around and marvel at all the trees and beautiful flowers and to soak up the community atmosphere. None of us who lived there thought of ourselves as poor or underprivileged. I was lucky enough to be born into that small world on November 30, 1950, as Allen Christopher Jones, Jr., in Morrisania Hospital. The building my family lived in was 281 East 143rd Street, and, as you already know, our apartment was high up on the 11th floor.

2

Oil and Water: An Unlikely Marriage

When I try to trace the strange and unexpected paths my life has taken, I find myself going back to my parents. They are not with me now in body, but they remain with me in spirit, guiding me in all the mysterious ways that parents do as the Lord maps out our lives. My history begins with theirs.

My mother was a woman of striking appearance. Nearly 6’ tall, she was slender, with light skin, brown eyes, jet-black hair, and a hint of African features in her lips and nose. I always remember my favorite photograph of her, wearing a velour dress that comes down just below the knees with matching shoes and stockings. The dress has three large buttons down the front, and around her neck is a pearl necklace. The beauty of her features is set off by red lipstick, and the expression on her face is as dignified and as elegant as her clothing.

My father, too, was impressive-looking, though in a very different way. A physically imposing man, he was 6’4 with an athletic body, high cheekbones, black hair, and a distinctive Indian nose, a legacy of his Cherokee heritage. In the early days when my mother first met him, he was a stylish dresser, wore his hair slicked back in what was then called a conk," and his nails were long and manicured. His expression, as I remember it, was full of pride, cynicism, and barely suppressed anger, the look of someone you did not want to mess with.

Their physical attractiveness, however, was about the only thing my parents had in common. In terms of their blood, background, temperament, and attitude toward life, they were about as different as two people could be.

My mother, Anna Mae Adams, was born in New York City and raised as a God- fearing woman meant to live the American dream. Her mother was African with French blood and came from the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean. St. Lucia was a French colony when the English attempted to take it over during the 1600s, but the people of the island managed to resist them for 200 years. As a result, they were understandably proud of their French heritage. My grandmother Nazilta Purchase still had her French passport when she died at the wonderful age of 104 in 2002, a year after the 9/11 attacks. She then lived right down the street from the World Trade Center, and in her last months she witnessed one of her adopted country’s worst ordeals. She was as proud and as independent on the day she died as she had been as a young mother trying to guide her daughter on the path to a righteous life.

After my mother was born, my grandmother took her back to St. Lucia, where she lived until she was 5 years old. When my mother returned to New York, she was enrolled in a Catholic school, where she made her first communion and confirmation. She took piano and dance lessons and was schooled in all the social graces expected of a young woman of that era. My mother always dressed beautifully and had excellent table manners, even as a young child.

In addition to the exposure to European and American culture my mother enjoyed in her homes, both in the United States and abroad, she also bore the imprint of her African heritage. Like most Caribbean islanders, the people of St. Lucia believed that the visible world was infused with good and evil spirits, and they were trained to tap into the power of those spirits by looking for signs of their presence, working roots to put curses on people, and casting spells to help them get through the travails of life. It was said that my mother was born with a veil, or caul, over her face, and in the Caribbean tradition that rare anomaly of birth meant that the child could see spirits. She discovered that she had this gift early in life, an otherworldly quality that set her apart from ordinary people.

When my mother first moved into the family’s new apartment in Harlem after returning from St. Lucia, she dreamed that she saw a man wearing a uniform walking through her room. When she told her mother the next morning what she had seen, my grandmother panicked. My mother, a 5-year-old mystic, had somehow divined that a police officer had been shot dead in the very apartment her family was then living in. Once my grandmother discovered this to be true, she wasted no time in moving; she knew living with ghosts would bring nothing but bad luck.

Unfortunately, soon after, my mother’s gift disappeared as mysteriously as it had come. She could not explain how she had become blocked and felt bad about losing her ability to see visions. Still, she fully expected the gift to be passed along to her children. She looked for it in her two daughters, Patricia, who is four years older than I am, and Jeannette, who is four years younger. But I am the only one of her children who ever saw visions. When I was young, I had frequent fevers and would tell my mother I was seeing strange, supernatural beings. Instead of attributing it to merely physiological causes, she saw this as proof of the power she had had. My mother was a deeply religious woman who believed in her Catholic faith and in a world of spirits. She saw no contradiction between these two spiritual practices and, in fact, believed they complemented one another. She always kept a small statue of the Virgin Mary beside a white candle lit in her bedroom. I am sure it was there to ward off evil as much as to signify her belief in the communion of saints.

How this deeply spiritual woman ended up with my streetwise father is something I have never really understood, but I will do the best to shed some light on the mystery of their powerful, if inexplicable, love.

My father, Allen Jones, was born in Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, on March 15, 1921, in a part of the South where the Ku Klux Klan had control over the lives of every black person in the community. The members of the KKK, then as now, were those upstanding men of the neighborhood—the doctor, the lawyer, the judge, the minister—who would dress themselves in white and ride around at night terrorizing black men, women, and children, lynching them, raping them, and burning their homes and churches, in order to send the South’s age-old message: If you are white, you are all right, and if you are black . . . stay back! Many of the KKK went to church every Sunday and flew American flags in front of their homes but felt not a shred of Christian compassion toward a black person who refused to live by their rules.

This is the atmosphere in which my father was raised. His father, who was Irish or Scottish but may have had some African blood mixed in, and his mother, who was Cherokee Indian, both died when he was very young. He was raised by his mother’s sister, my Great-Aunt Mary, who was 100 percent Cherokee Indian. He had a half-brother, Bob, who was Mary’s biological son, and the two boys grew up together. Despite their ambiguous racial ancestry, both boys were treated as colored by the people in their local community and subjected to the segregation and abuse that came with that status, an experience that scarred my father for the rest of his life.

As my father used to tell his story, he was in trouble almost from the time he was born. When he was of school age, the local white kids would throw rocks at him and Bob and call them coon and nigger. At home, my Aunt Mary, who was a strict disciplinarian, would whip him with the branch of a tree at the slightest infraction of her household rules. He once ran away from home to join the circus when he was still in elementary school, though he never told us what he did there or how long he stayed. At some point after that, he played baseball in a minor league version of the Negro League. During World War II, he ended up in the Navy, where he worked as a cook and traveled the world. Despite his lack of education, my father gradually became a very worldly young man. He also cultivated artistic interests. He got to know a lot of jazz musicians, like Kenny Burrell, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Freddie McCoy, and, like many blacks at that time and even now, he was a talented singer and dancer.

As with so many couples of that era, the war brought my parents together. By all accounts, 1944 was a great year to be black and living in New York City. Though the war was not yet over, blacks were feeling that they would soon have a chance to rebuild their lives in a better economy and social atmosphere. This was the time when the Brown Bomber, Joe Louis, reigned as the long-term heavyweight champion of the world. His enormous popularity and success gave black people hope, and they expressed their new-found optimism in many ways. My mother decided to volunteer for the Harlem Red Cross, the organization that sponsored parties and dinners for black soldiers when they returned home on leave.

My father was stationed in Hawaii for most of the war, but on one of his leaves he decided to come to New York and see how a country boy would fare in the Big Apple. He went to a Red Cross dance in Harlem looking for fun, and it was there that this most unlikely pair met. Although my mother had been brought up by my grandmother with the expectation that she would marry into the upper class—preferably to a doctor, a lawyer, or successful businessman—it was hard to shelter her from men of all types and classes in a community like Harlem, where people from every social and economic bracket lived together. And because my mother was beautiful, she attracted the attention of many men, including my father. That fateful night, he asked my mother to dance and showed her all his best moves—ones that most would-be lawyers and doctors and dentists just didn’t have—and my mother fell in love with him right then and there.

My father knew a good thing when he saw it and must have felt lucky when my mother let him walk her home. But when my grandmother laid eyes on him, she was appalled. She told him point-blank that he looked like a pimp and that he should leave her daughter alone and never come back to her door. After he left, she told my mother, I didn’t raise you to marry a street man. I will buy you a man before I let you go with someone like him.

Of course, my mother didn’t listen. She had never met anyone like my father, and she was completely charmed by him. So after a longdistance courtship that continued until the war was over, they were married in City Hall. Despite my mother’s strict Catholic upbringing, there was no church wedding because my grandmother would not condone their marriage. Two years later, my mother gave birth to my sister Pat. Soon the whole family would move into the Patterson Houses, that beautiful new community that started as a dream but that, for many of its residents, would turn into a nightmare.

3

Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child: Family

When I was growing up in the Patterson Houses, what today would be called child abuse was the almost universally practiced form of discipline among families in the Projects. Any child who was out of line could be smacked upside the head or kicked in the pants by a parent, friend, or neighbor with no questions asked and no apologies needed, thank you. I remember my upstairs neighbor in particular, Mrs. Johnson, who could throw a mean slipper at warp speed and hit her target every time.

But my mother, who was a gentle soul, hated to give us a beating, and her three kids knew it. On those rare occasions when she really got angry, she would use that threat meant to terrify every wayward child—Wait till your father gets home!—and we would be scared to death. My father, with his military background, expected us to obey like soldiers, but we were typical kids, always choosing mischief over obedience. My older sister Pat was particularly resistant to my father’s violent disciplinary methods: Even as young as 12, she had a sharp tongue and would make faces and roll her eyes while he was yelling at her. My father would smack her face one or twice, but, no matter what he did, she would not submit.

I, on the other hand, was constantly in trouble for more serious things than talking back. When I was about 8 years old, I would ask my father if I could go outside and play. He would usually give me permission, as long as I stayed in front of the building. But I hardly ever listened to him. I would go with my friends—Mike and Ron and Bobby and TC—to ride the subway and go up and down the escalators we’d find on stops like 59th Street on the IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit). When we got home, my friends would say, Allen, your father’s going to fuck you up! Sure enough, when I turned the key to the door of our apartment, the horror would begin.

Even when I wasn’t misbehaving, I hated to be around my father because he always scared me. He had a heavy voice and a terrible temper that he directed not only at me, but at anyone else who crossed him. I remember one time when I was with him near the car showroom at the Grand Concourse and 139th Street. We stood outside looking at the new cars when a salesman came out and said something to my father that he didn’t like. My father punched him hard and sent him right through the showroom window, showering broken glass flying everywhere.

You never knew when my father was going to explode or who was going to be the target of his rage. I remember one day, when I was about 11 years old, he was sleeping on the living room couch while my sister and I were having an argument in the kitchen. Boom! Before I knew it, he had leaped off the couch and smacked me twice in the face. Didn’t I tell you to keep it down when I am sleeping? he shouted. My vision blurred from the force of the slap, and I heard my mother screaming, Allen, use the belt! In his rage, my father then turned and hit my mother. At that point, my sister Pat ran into the living room and cursed him out good, calling him names that would chill any parent’s soul. Then my father turned toward me,