Indian Summers

By Nashid Al-Amin

See how it was for a talented African American boy growing up in New York City in the 1950s, coming of age in the 1960s, in a neighborhood called Spanish Harlem. Television was still a novelty, school was a necessity and, having abusive parents, whippings were a part of growing up. Having to fight was also sometimes necessary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harper Partners LLC
• Release date: Jun 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781088037126

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INDIAN SUMMERS

A MEMOIR OF OLD SPANISH HARLEM

by

Nashid Al-Amin

For my parents, family, people who lived

in Spanish Harlem when I did...

and for Nandy.

INTRODUCTION

Some of the people mentioned this memoir are no longer around, but I hope those who are find it or it finds them. I’m not a famous African American athlete or entertainer, so you’ve never heard of me—an early baby boomer born when black people were called Negroes and "colored," the way my birth certificate designated my race when I was born. I’ve accomplished a few things I’m proud of in my time, but I wish I could have written this memoir earlier. But the need to work has long dominated my life, and I’ve never been able to escape it.

I was born and raised in East Harlem—Spanish Harlem—in New York City, growing up in the James Weldon Johnson Housing Projects during a time when old tenements were being torn down around the city to be replaced by tall, sturdy housing projects to accommodate the increasing mostly black and Hispanic population. Unlike what you may have seen or heard in recent TV news reports, there were no rats in project apartments back then, no peeling paint, mold on walls and ceilings, no prolonged periods without heat and hot water. Heat came regularly during winter months, and on rare occasions when radiators went cold, banging loudly on bedroom pipes with metal objects brought heat up to apartments within five or ten minutes. It used to work every time.

In the early days, housing projects had no gangs, drugs or shootings, and project police used to walk the grounds a couple times a day. Sadly, times have changed. Amid reports of vermin infestation, apartments in disrepair and tenants waiting months to get problems rectified, people get assaulted and robbed in elevators, gangs make housing projects their territory, and gang related shootings occur in the most dangerous ones. But this memoir details more than project life. I want to take you back to Spanish Harlem, an older Spanish Harlem in a long-lost New York City, an exotic, vibrant place where young people played in the streets and pursued dreams, most understanding that graduating high school was a necessary step toward man- and womanhood, where I first thought about becoming an artist, then a major league baseball player.

Like most kids back then, I had two parents in the house. It was a time when men went out to work and wives stayed home. I was encouraged to do well in school but had little encouragement about anything else from parents who communicated their displeasure through beatings with a leather belt. Beatings were common back then, and most kids got them. I remember a couple of occasions when mothers whomped their children in the back of the classroom after speaking with the teachers about their kid’s conduct. The teachers stood by and watched, and no one ever called the practice abuse. Still, young people showed more respect for parents, teachers and elders than is seen today.

Like Harlem generally, Spanish Harlem had its share violence but nowhere near the violence

that exists today. Yes, people occasionally got robbed or assaulted. Guys got stabbed at late-night craps games. I heard of two or three gangs that were around when I was growing up—the Viceroys and the Baldies—although I never saw any of them. And in rare gang battles, zip-guns and switch-blades were the most feared weapons.

More often, boys had to contend with bullies in their neighborhood or project development. Back then, kids fought with fists if they had to fight. If they lost, they didn’t run off to get a gun and shoot the kid who had bested them. There were hardly any guns around then. Losers took their ass-whippings, sometimes laying low until they could face the world again.

When I was an adult and my reading interest turned to American Indians, I realized that I was born only 56 years after the last major Indian battle— actually a massacre of American Indians at Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1890. It hadn’t been that long ago—like someone being born today, less than sixty years after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. An American Indian milieu still hung over the country, Hollywood movies and television westerns most responsible. But Indian coins were still in circulation. Buffalo or Indian-head nickels and Indian pennies were often found in pocket change or the change people got from the grocery or candy store. In school we learned that Indians greeted the Pilgrims and Dutch when they arrived on American shores around 1620, the Dutch said to have purchased Manhattan for $24 in trinkets. We learned about the Thirteen Colonies and the Revolutionary War; pioneers; the Civil War and Custer’s Last Stand. Only much later did those who contemplated it realize that this entire country was taken from its original inhabitants, American Indians, and that we had rooted for the wrong side in the ubiquitous cavalry vs. Indians westerns we watched growing up.

Indian summer signifies a few days of warm weather after the first frost in the fall, usually in late October or November. The title of this memoir is meant to convey that as well as how we kids continued playing our usual summer games until Halloween, when our minds turned briefly to ghosts and monsters, before we resumed our usual pastimes into November when cold weather arrived. I often used to daydream I was an American Indian, even before I learned I actually had an Indian ancestor. In a big park, I liked to leave the beaten path to climb hills or walk tree-shaded trails trying to make myself invisible to anyone looking in my direction, just as an Indian might have done in times past if he happened to trespass on land that once belonged to his tribe. Although it may be difficult to imagine now, the specter of Indians still haunted the United States when I was growing up.

I’m sure there are still people alive who played cowboys and Indians and other long forgotten games in the streets of Spanish Harlem, Brooklyn and other areas of New York City. Most of us strove to follow our dreams as far as we could—as did the children of immigrants adapting to American culture as they learned

to speak English and do well in school. Today’s youth seem to show no interest in life before their time—before PlayStations, DVDs, iPhones and other diversions became popular. They never contemplate how their grandparents lived, what their lives were like. They live in the now, ignore any music genre before Hip Hop or Rap; read almost nothing beyond what they are assigned in school. Most never even read a newspaper. However, should a young person have an interest in the way things were before their time, this memoir might benefit them.

I would not have said this growing up, but Spanish Harlem was really a golden place. I can easily recall streets ablaze in sunshine and colors, people moving about with purpose and vitality. Its residents were mostly black and Puerto Rican, but all kinds of people lived there. There was a sizable Italian section on its easternmost edge, and there were smatterings of Jews, Irish, Germans and other Whites still living there or in Harlem, generally. But the steady influx of Puerto Ricans and a sprinkle of other Hispanics lead to East Harlem being designated Spanish Harlem when I was growing up, and it was only when I was an adult, looking back from the perspicuity of age, that I have come to regard it as a golden place. So, I would like to take the reader back to a long-lost Spanish Harlem and an older New York City in this season-to-season personal story.

Much of the first part concerns what the projects and Spanish Harlem were like; my advancement through school; starting to work at 14 and my athletic pursuits. As a teenager, I was mostly seeking love in a city that seemed to offer none. I enlisted in the Army at 18 to set out on my own. The second part becomes an odyssey of adventure as I take the reader to a number of European locales as I recount my two-and-a-half-year sojourn there which, I believe, the reader will find bewitching. When I return home, it is to an America in turmoil. The memoir is laced with historical particulars of the period it covers and includes two or three revelations the reader might find hard to believe.

My chapters are generally comprised of two, three or more events separated by asterisks and page breaks to distinguish them—otherwise this memoir would have twice as many chapters of varying lengths. Mostly, it’s a narrative of a boy who embraced what he learned early in life about being a good American and treating people fairly. Please excuse my use of the term colored in the early part of the book, but that is how Blacks usually referred to themselves and how others referred to us. Let me emphasize that what you read is true. Nothing is enhanced or exaggerated for dramatic effect. That said, please come with me on a tour of old Spanish Harlem and an older New York City.

PART I

CHAPTER 1

EARLY YEARS

It was spring and, at 9-years-old, I was aware that daylight hours were getting longer. When I got home from school, I did my homework, pulled on my dungarees and sneakers and went downstairs to play. I saw four or five boys I knew on one of the two long benches outside my building, When I joined the small group, we began talking about what game we might play. Although one guy had a rubber ball and stickball bat, there were not enough of us to play a pick-up stickball game like we sometimes did in the mock ballfield between the benches. Shortly, a tough looking kid named Jerome walked over with Reggie, a kid who lived in my building.

I had only seen Jerome a couple of times but had never played with him. He was either Reggie’s best buddy or his cousin.

They sauntered over to the group I was standing with. After a few seconds, for no reason I could think of, Jerome hit me or pushed me. I hit him back, not knowing if he was serious or playing. They were both my age but half a head shorter than I was, and I was surprised that a short kid would start something with a taller kid. Just at that moment, I was surprised to see my father walk over and sit on the end of the long bench, having just come home from work. He had witnessed Jerome hit me and my hitting him back. Jerome hit me again and I hit him back again, the back-and-forth open hand hitting kids engaged in before a true fight broke out.

Hit him! my father said from where he sat a half-dozen feet away.

But I had hit Jerome last and was waiting for a return hit before I opened up.

Hit him! my father repeated.

I stood conflicted. Height was a factor back then. I had been taught that you didn’t beat up kids who were shorter than you were, didn’t start fights, didn’t want to be branded a bully. I know I could have beaten Jerome if he had thrown an actual punch; I had hit him last and was waiting for a retaliatory response.

You’re a coward! my father barked suddenly, his words stinging me.

The kids standing around heard this, too, and I was embarrassed, shamed. But I wouldn’t throw the first punch.

You’re a coward! my father said again, the sting of his words bringing a sharp pang to my stomach. Jerome and I just stared at each other, but I was determined to go at it if he hit me again, even if it wasn’t an actual punch. I felt uncomfortable being goaded to open up, conflicted between my own sense of right and wrong and simply acting on my father’s directive to strike a kid much shorter than I was.

My father suddenly got up and walked around the back of the bench toward the building entrance, not bothering to look back. Jerome and I moved a little apart, and our fight was over.

An hour later when I went upstairs, embarrassment engulfed me again.

Did you fight him? my father asked from his perch on the sofa.

No…we just walked away, I mumbled.

He turned his attention back to the TV and said nothing more to me, and almost nothing else for the rest of the evening.

My father, by his and his relatives’ accounts, was a real tough guy growing up, however I heard about most of his early fighting accomplishments from him, often hearing these stories two or three times. One tale I remember hearing more than once was of him being beaten up by a boy in school when he was nine or ten years-old. He came home bloody and crying. When he told his mother about the fight, his mother told him to fight the boy the next day. The next day he fought the boy again and lost. That day, his mother told him to fight the boy again and not to come home if the boy beat him again. His uncle Richard also gave him some pointers. The next day after school they fought again, and he beat the boy soundly. That was the beginning of his fighting life, and in his teens, he would be leader of a small gang

I know my father never forgot that late afternoon when I didn’t fight, didn’t live up to his youthful pugilistic feats, confirmed by several of his relatives even after I was an adult and my father had passed. ("Your father wasn’t scared of nobody! Nobody!" his cousin Woolamina would tell me years later.) I got over the shame I felt that day and never wanted to be hurt by such stinging words again. But I also didn’t want to be hurt by punches to my face or eyes, or be beaten up by someone older or stronger, did not want to feel pain. There was nothing I could do about the whippings I had already begun receiving from my parents, but in street confrontations I thought it best to ease my way out of any fights if I could before actually fighting. I knew I was not a coward, but I had to survive this place called Harlem, which began to feel like a small region of hell to me from that day on.

The incident with Jerome was my first fight, such as it was, but wouldn’t be the last. Fighting would remain a backdrop to my life growing up in East Harlem, or Spanish Harlem, as I would learn the particular part of New York City I lived in was already being called. Despite what a kid learned in school or in church, fighting would remain a part of the fabric of growing up—something a boy had to do, become good at on his journey to manhood. Many boys were told not to fight by their parents, that

fighting was bad, but most were also told that fighting was necessary when it came to protecting mothers, sisters or other family members. Some boys took fighting to the extreme, becoming outright bullies who started fights for the simple pleasure of tormenting others to feed their own sense of worth.

If a boy was bigger or taller than other boys, it was expected he would be ready and willing to fight. I was taller than most boys my age, but I did not believe that my young existence should be focused on hurting others or getting hurt. By 9- years-old, I already believed that there was more to my life than fighting in the street, that my life had some kind of value and that I should learn as much as I could—though at the time I would not have been able to express this to anyone who might have asked. But I think I already understood what death was and that dying would end life and the few dreams and longings I had. So, fear and the need to stay out of trouble would haunt much of my youth in this place I had been born in, a place I had to survive.

The oldest memory I have is when I was four-years-old and my grandmother’s dog, King,

scared the hell out of me. It was mid-afternoon. I was in the shady bedroom at the front of her apartment, leaning against a daybed, King sitting calmly next to me just to my left. I could hear my grandmother and Aunt Lo talking in the kitchen down the hall. Something made me look to my left just as King began a wide yawn, baring long white teeth and shiny, wet pink gums. I let out a loud shriek as I turned and ran for my life out of the room, screaming down the hallway toward the kitchen and safety. My grandmother and Aunt Lo asked me what happened. Between snivels, I told them that King had tried to bite me.

King was a large, gentle collie with a good disposition and had followed me into the kitchen. I’m sure he didn’t know what he had done. Mom and Aunt Lo reassured me that I was safe, and Aunt Lo encouraged me to pet him, which I did tentatively, gently rubbing the light-brown fur on his back. I calmed down when King nuzzled my cheek with his cold nose, after which Mom—how we referred to my mother’s mother—smiled and said, See, he wasn’t trying to bite you.

Mom, my maternal grandmother, lived on 112th Street off St. Nicholas Avenue, two short blocks from the entrance to what seemed to be a green jungle—Central Park. I remember colors everywhere in that part of Harlem. Striped blue or green awnings hung over the windows of stately brownstones in the area; women wore bright dresses, some wearing colorful scarves on their heads; men wore slacks and white, short-sleeved shirts,

some wearing wide-brimmed hats; and there were shiny, big two-toned colored cars lining the streets. That’s how I remember Harlem in my earliest years—bathed in sunshine, streets a blur of colors and activity.

Some of my early recollections are of walking with my mother and brother to my grandmother’s building or to nearby Central Park on sunny, color-splashed days. On a couple walks to Central Park, I remember my mother stopping inside a small fish ‘n chips store two or three blocks away, buying Larry and me a 5-cent bag of french fries—not the kind of fries you get today at Mc Donald’s or White Castle, but chunky, half-moon shaped fries with horizontal ridges on each side in small brown paper bags with salt shaken over them. We dug out each fry with a round toothpick or small wooden, double-pronged forks, and we’d munch on the delicious fries as we walked the two or three remaining blocks to the park.

Inside, the lake was the park’s prominent feature at its northern end. There were usually at least a half-dozen rowboats tooling around the lake—one or two dozen on weekend days. On Sundays, I remember women wearing wide-brimmed bonnets and men at the oars in unbuttoned suit jackets or white shirts, one or two kids dipping their hands in the water—families enjoying a leisurely afternoon after church or just enjoying the sunny weather. On weekdays, maybe a half-dozen boats would be on the water. Unused rowboats, painted red, blue, yellow or green, lay upside-down along a sandy portion of the lake where the boat-rental shack was—a one-hundred-foot-long line of idle watercraft. A vendor or two would have an umbrellaed cart on the pavement near the lake’s shore with helium-filled balloons on strings bobbing over them. The vendors sold bags of peanuts, boxes of Crackerjacks, oversized lollipops and taffy bars. My mother usually treated us to a small box of Crackerjacks. Then we’d sit on a bench or grassy knoll near the lake or walk along the pathway surrounding it. Sometimes we’d walk to the small botanical garden south of the lake where there were rows of colorful flowers. People sitting on benches fed pigeons that scuttled between passersby, pecking at the ground for morsels of food. Walking by the high, green-leafed bushes along either side of the main pathway, I’d stop to follow the erratic flights of white, yellow or black butterflies.

Then, too soon, we’d begin retracing our steps north out of the park. At a break in the tall trees lining the nearby 5th Avenue side of the park, my mother pointed out Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital across the street, telling Larry and me that that was where we were born. Leaving the park, we’d walk along 5th Avenue to 115th Street where we turned east and soon saw the elevated New Haven Railroad trestle and the familiar buildings of our immediate neighborhood. When we crossed Park Avenue underneath the tracks of the

railroad, we stepped onto the grounds of the Johnson Projects where we lived.

When I was four, maybe five, I remember sitting on the stoop outside Mom’s brownstone watching activities on the street. I remember seeing two uniformed policemen riding huge brown horses in the middle of the street, horses a fairly common sight in those days. Crossing a street back then, one would have to avoid stepping in brownish-yellow horse manure that had dropped from a policeman’s horse or horses pulling wagons. Sometimes a shabbily dressed junk-man would steer a horse-drawn wagon down the street calling for any junk people might want to discard—old mattresses, furniture, clothing—the clip-clopping of the horse’s hooves on the asphalt melodious as the wagon moved slowly along. More often, an iceman steered a horse-drawn wagon along the street, stopping two or three times in the block to deliver a chunk of ice into a building when someone shouted down at him from a window.

One late morning I was sitting on the building’s stoop when my grandmother heard the iceman shouting up the block. She yelled down at me from her third floor window, telling me to call the iceman when he approached the building. I think I was five and was surprised that she assigned me this intimidating task. I was not used to talking to strangers. I saw the iceman exit a building a few houses up the street and, after a minute, start his wagon down the block until he was almost in front of my grandmother’s stoop. I stood up and shouted, Hey? or Ice, shouting again a little louder when it seemed he wasn’t going to stop. But he brought the wagon to a lazy halt, then I heard my grandmother above me yell down how much ice she wanted—maybe a quarter’s or 50 cent’s worth. The man threw back a portion of partly wet, khaki-colored canvas covering large rectangular chunks of ice, jabbed his ice-pick or knife into a chunk several times breaking it off of a larger chunk. Then he stabbed his grappling-hook into the chunk he had separated and slung the block of ice over his shoulder so that it hung over the upper part of his back as he stepped down from the wagon. As he mounted the curb and began climbing the steps of the stoop, he said, Watch my wagon for me, kid, as he passed where I was sitting and opened the entrance door of the building. I stood up dutifully and descended the three or four steps to the curb, eyeing the iceman’s tired-looking horse that turned its head laconically to gaze over at me from between its blinders. In three or four minutes the iceman was back, saying a quick Thanks, as he passed me. He climbed back onto his wagon, made a couple of clicking sounds and started the horse down the street toward St. Nicholas Avenue.

While the kitchen in our Johnson Projects apartment had a refrigerator, Mom had an icebox, as I imagine a lot of people living in old houses or brownstones in Harlem and the rest of the city still had. Mom’s kitchen also had a dumbwaiter on the wall next to the icebox to deposit garbage into. The dumbwaiter door, maybe 18x18, opened into a dark, grimy vertical cavern with two or three grimy vertical ropes hanging inside. The person wanting to deposit garbage would have to pull one of the ropes to haul the greasy, three-sided garbage compartment up or down until it reached the apartment’s dumbwaiter opening. Garbage was put into the cruddy compartment and the door would be closed. A few minutes later one might suddenly hear squeaking as the cruddy compartment was hauled up or down to another apartment where another load of garbage would be put in with the one already in the compartment.

In the winter or when it was cool outside, I remember items like butter or a bottle of milk on the ledge outside the kitchen window to keep them cold until needed. A clothesline outside the kitchen window was strung across the back alley to the back of another brownstone kitchen window. A number of clotheslines from other windows crisscrossed the back alley. On sunny days, the clotheslines were usually lined with hanging items—sheets, diapers (Pampers wouldn’t appear until 1961), underwear, pants, drapery—fastened to the ropes by wooden clothespins, twisting and flowing in the breeze. When the sky threatened rain or rain actually began to fall, windows would be noisily raised and women would begin hurriedly pulling clothesline ropes to take in their laundry, a chorus of short, rapid squeaks accompanying the frantic activity.

Mom’s apartment might have been more spacious than our project apartment—at least the living room was larger. There was a large piano in the middle of the living room that I never heard anyone actually play. There was no sofa, but there were two or three fluffy chairs, pictures on the walls and a couple of floor-vases that always had tall-stemmed flowers in them. The two windows looking out onto 112th Street always had flowered drapes hanging to the floor, and the room always looked clean and airy. King had always been a fixture in the house ever since I could remember, and I felt sad a few years later when I heard he had been stabbed by Aunt Lo’s husband, Sydney, during a fight with my aunt that had spilled into the hallway outside the apartment. My mother took us to visit Mom a couple of weeks after the incident. I remember seeing King with a large bandage on his left shoulder. I petted him where I could, being careful not to touch him near his wound. The way he quietly looked at me and at the other people

sitting in Mom’s kitchen gave me the impression that he was confused, as if he no longer had faith in people. He would die a year or two later when I was eight or nine.

Mom had a seamstress shop around the corner of 112th Street on St. Nicholas Avenue. It was a basement affair, a walk-down from the street with a front window next to the wrought-iron entrance gate beneath the steps leading up to the entranceway of the apartment building above. I remember going down there at least twice, once, maybe, just to be introduced to the women working there. The seamstress shop was maybe 20’x25’, with maybe four sewing machines along one side of a wall and three more along another. I don’t recall more than three or four women sitting at machines who smiled at me when my grandmother introduced me to them, maybe just to show me off.

Mom’s brother, Uncle Freddy, had a small candy store on 116th Street between Park and Madison Avenues. Now and then my mother stopped in to visit him with me and Larry in tow. We would usually spend a half-hour in the place as my mother talked with Uncle Freddy, who wore eyeglasses and always wore a white apron. He always gave Larry and me lollipops or other small candy treats. He’d ask, You want some candy? in a voice that seemed deep and menacing—although he was slim and unassuming. We gladly took the candy and lolled about as Uncle Freddy tended to an occasional customer or came out from behind the counter to step outside and check the street. Then we would leave, Uncle Freddy giving us a few more candies before escorting us outside and bidding us goodbye.

I remember a quiet Sunday morning when my mother took Larry and me to Uncle Freddy’s candy store. I was six years-old, Larry five. We were only in Uncle Freddy’s place five minutes when my mother led us out and we walked toward Madison Avenue. An old, dark-skinned, slightly stooped woman had just crossed the street to the corner we were on. My mother had a few quiet words with her, Larry and I standing a few feet off. My mother only spoke to the woman for two minutes or so before we left, the woman smiling at me and Larry without speaking to us. When we crossed Madison Avenue, I turned to see the old woman approaching Uncle Freddy, who was standing outside the candy store. As we continued walking west along 116th Street, my mother told us that the old woman was her grandmother, explaining that she was my great-grandmother. I turned around again and saw the woman still talking with Uncle Freddy outside his store. I didn’t understand family relationships at the age I was, and I wouldn’t figure out until years later that the slightly stooped black woman was Mom’s and Uncle Freddy’s mother—the only

great-grandparent I ever saw, and never saw again.

* * * *

Grandma, my paternal grandmother, lived in a second-floor apartment in a building on East 99th Street, which I remember visiting no more than twice, the last time when I was still six. The tenements on Grandma’s street were shabby looking, lacking the awnings, upkeep and relative sedateness of the buildings on my maternal grandmother’s block. The last time I was at Grandma’s house it was summer and the street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, was ablaze in sunshine and teeming with sweaty black kids screaming as they ran in the street playing rough looking games. Someone had sent me down to play, but I merely stood at the bottom steps of the stoop watching kids running wild and tussling with each other. I didn’t know any of them and was afraid to join the rough-looking activities. After watching for ten minutes, I was relieved when I was called back upstairs.

Many of my father’s relatives lived in the same building—his aunt, Amy, his mother’s brother, Uncle Richard, and various cousins—in apartments on different floors. I must have been in one or two of these, but I don’t remember. Grandma lived in a two-room apartment—a large living room-kitchen, a bedroom and a bathroom. The apartment was shabby looking and I don’t recall it having any real furniture—only a sleeping-cot against the wall and a shabby chair against another wall. An old-fashioned stove was across the room from the cot, and there was a small, square dining table between them against the wall whose two windows looked out onto 99th Street. The stove stood on four curved legs, holding it a foot off the floor, so I could see underneath it. I don’t remember what the bedroom looked like, if I’d ever even been in it.

Shortly after the last time I was in Grandma’s apartment—a month or two later when I was still six—Grandma moved to a project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, around 6th Street near the East River Drive. The East River was just beyond the East River Drive, and Brooklyn was a mile or so across the green-looking water. I and an older cousin on my father’s side named Pinky helped her move in, unpacking cardboard boxes after they had been deposited into the one-bedroom apartment, much nicer than

her former one. I remember I dropped and broke two dishes while I helped with the unpacking. I expected Grandma to be angry, but she wasn’t. She just looked at me with a quizzical expression on her face, while Pinky laughed when I broke the second plate and made fun of my clumsiness the rest of the time we were there. I was not normally clumsy and couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me that day.

When we were done, I remember eating delicious lamb chops my grandmother had cooked while we were working. When we finished eating, Pinky and I took the subway back uptown, Pinky telling little jokes that made me laugh. He delivered me safely home, then left for his house on 99th Street. Later that year or the year after, my father’s cousin, Woolamina, her daughter, Marie, her mother, Aunt Amy, Pinky (who I think was Aunt Amy’s son, but I’m not sure) and most of my father’s many relatives would leave 99th Street and move to 118th Street between Madison and Park Avenues, only a three block walk from where we lived in the Johnson Projects. A couple of times, my father sent me there to borrow $5 from Woolamina.

It perplexed me that my father had to borrow money from her. Woolamina’s apartment (it may have been Aunt Amy’s, then) was always shabby looking—beat up looking furniture, clothes left here and there on the floor, younger kids than I happily screaming and running around in underwear. Woolamina’s mother, Aunt Amy, (Grandma’s sister) was a stern looking woman, usually standing in the kitchen cooking or washing dishes, and I think Woolamina’s eldest daughter, Marie, a teenager, might already have had her first child, but I may be wrong. I was always glad to take the money and leave. I remember seeing Pinky there once, him smiling and cheering me up. Four or five years later, I was shocked when I heard that Pinky had died. I asked my parents, but don’t remember if I was told the circumstances of his death—how or why. His death would be the first mystery of my youth.

CHAPTER 2

FOUR PENNIES

When I was nine or ten, I learned that all my grandparents arrived in New York City from different West Indian or Caribbean islands with the numbers of West Indians then immigrating to the United States in the early 1900s. Both my parents were born in New York City. My mother’s mother was from Barbados, her father from Jamaica; my father’s mother was from Antigua, his father, I first heard, from Barbados—but I’m not absolutely sure. My father didn’t grow up with him but always said that his father was an Indian. Although he told me he saw his father two or three times, years later when I was an adult, his cousin, Woolamina, would tell me emphatically in her often too loud voice, "He never saw his father! He never saw his father!"

Then, when I was a little older, my father told me that his father was a Cherokee Indian, making me wonder if this grandfather had been born in the United States and not Barbados, as I’d first heard. Reading extensively about American Indians as an adult, I read in a book I’d bought that the most recalcitrant American Indians—even those from tribes out west—were sometimes relocated to West Indian islands, most of which had their own Indian populations when they were originally colonized by several European countries. So, it’s possible this now supposedly Cherokee Indian grandfather actually did arrive from Barbados. But I have no doubt that he was an Indian, West Indian or American. My father had silk-like, curly, black hair that stayed down smoothly and in place with a little water. He was dark-skinned with a reddish tint to his complexion, which was passed on to Larry and me, although we were much lighter, reddish-brown complected—our mother being very light-skinned.

My maternal grandmother, my mother and her family had no West Indian accents when they spoke, but some of my father’s relatives still did. But Grandma’s—my paternal grandmother’s—accent was especially thick, and I didn’t always understand what she said—her clearest utterance being, "Oh, Lordee! when she laughed or when I said something she thought was cute. Most of the time, however, I asked, What?" whenever she said anything to me, and she would patiently repeat what she had said more slowly. Sometimes I would get what she said, but half the time I still didn’t. Neither of my parents had accents, but they would make us laugh when they spoke to each other imitating West Indian speech. Such moments occurred in good times, which would become rare as the years went by. But I never met or saw my paternal grandfather, the Indian—not even a photograph. My father had a stepfather, a light-skinned West Indian gent, but I don’t know if he actually grew up with him.

My mother’s parents were divorced, but I knew her father, Grandpa, seeing him now and then growing up. Mom was now married to a man named Brus, and they had had one child together, my mother’s youngest sister, Aunt Bobbi, only nine years older than I was. Ironically, Mom would come to live right around the corner from her ex-husband, Grandpa, my maternal grandfather, when she moved from 112th Street and bought a brownstone on 121st Street between Lenox and Mount Morris Avenues, a minute’s walk from where Grandpa lived in a rooming house.

In my earliest years, my father drove a yellow cab. Now and then, until I was nine, he’d arrive home in the evening to say he had driven some celebrity in his cab that day—Judy Garland, Dorothy Malone and

singer Dorothy Collins are names I remember. He had a photo of himself standing next to one of those big 1950 Dodge or De Soto taxis that usually had two fold-out seats in the back so that four or five passengers could sit in the rear passenger area. Checker cabs also trolled the streets of New York City, although I don’t know if he ever drove them. But I remember riding in Checker cabs, which also had two rear fold-out seats. I remember riding in Checker cabs a couple of times with six people sitting in back. They had the roomiest rear passenger areas of all.

My father had one of those money-changers that hook onto a belt that I would play with on the dining table sometimes, dropping a few pennies into the nickel slot and pushing down the small lever on the side to watch them fall out. Also, in the house was one of those contraptions that you might see in a dentist’s office, a set of teeth and gums that you could open and close, although it was much too large to fit into anyone’s mouth. My father told me he had gone to a dental school for a while as part of a G.I. benefit after he left the army after World War II. He said he also attended an art school under the G.I. Bill, and he would often tell me stories about his World War II experiences in England and France. At the time, though, he wasn’t going to any school that I know of—just driving a cab.

I heard a few stories from my mother, too, mostly about New York City. I remember her telling Larry and me about the Great Depression and how people had to stand on soup and bread lines; the Shirtwaist Fire, when young female factory workers leaped to their deaths from a burning building because exit doors were locked and firemen didn’t have ladders tall enough to reach the upper floors where the factory was located; about how common streetcars and trolleys had been when she was growing up. The subway system had finally made trolleys obsolete around the time I was born, but remnants of trolleys were still evident on many streets in the city, like the trolley tracks still running along cobble-stoned 3rd Avenue, a block away underneath the still running 3rd Avenue El (elevated train). From my mother I first heard about Charles Lindburgh’s solo flight across the Atlantic; parades, colored parades, in Harlem; how people flooded the streets at night after Joe Louis won fights; people doing the Lindy Hop and other dance crazes in Harlem nightclubs that were in vogue in her youth.

My mother had thick brown hair that barely reached her shoulders which she sometimes smoothed out with a straightening iron on the rare occasions she went out someplace with my father. My mother might have been pretty, although I never thought of her being so. She was just my mother. But her eyes

would brighten when she told Larry and me old New York City tales or stories about her youth, her usually somewhat gloomy expression disappearing. But her moments of gaiety and warmth were infrequent, after which her usual glum expression returned.

My sister, Livi (for Olivia), was born when I was six and Larry five. Once a month during that period a white nurse used to make monthly visits to our apartment to check Larry’s leg brace. He was born with one leg shorter than the other, his right leg longer and slimmer than his left and not as strong. The brace was meant to keep his right leg straight, and the nurse would readjust it if needed and give my mother advice. But his leg was never fully corrected, and he grew up having to add a three-quarter inch heel and sole to his left shoe.

Outside of moments when they reminisced about the past, my parents never seemed to get along and there were often arguments. The threat of violence was often in the air of our apartment, although I never saw or heard any physical violence between my parents. Threats and physical violence were mostly directed toward us—me, Larry and Livi when she got older—and these would come from both my parents.

Since I was the oldest and most able-bodied, I ran errands to the corner store or deli on the corner of 115th Street and Lexington Avenue for groceries or cigarettes for my parents or to Mr. Newman’s candy store on Lexington Avenue between 115th and 116th Streets for newspapers, or to the Jewish bakery next door to Mr. Newman’s for challah bread or a half-dozen buns. Once or twice I went to the bakery for a dozen buns and get a baker’s dozen—thirteen buns for the price of a dozen—since the proprietors knew my father.

We usually bought two newspapers, the Daily News and New York Mirror. I remember when they both cost 4 cents on weekdays, 7 cents on Sundays—the thickish Sunday papers with a color comics section enwrapping them. These newspapers, the Daily News and New York Mirror, remained the same price for a couple of years until they went to a nickel during the week and 8 cents on Sundays. Back then, there were seven or eight daily newspapers in New York City: The Daily News, New York Mirror, New York Post, New York Times, Herald-Tribune, Journal-American, World Telegraph and Sun—all for about the same price.

The Daily News and New York Mirror (I’m not sure about the New York Post) published five

editions each day, from one to five small stars on the top front page designating the editions. The next day’s Daily News or New York Mirror would arrive on newsstands as a one-star edition around 6 p.m. the evening before. Around 8 p.m., a two-star edition would arrive. A couple hours later, a three-star edition would arrive and so on, until a final five-star edition would hit the stands around 5 or 6 a.m. the next morning, sometimes with a new headline and new stories. If someone were following his favorite baseball team playing out of town, the three-star edition might have the box score up to 4 ½ innings; the four-star edition might show 7 ½ innings, and the five-star edition would have the full box score and an article describing the whole game. There might also be additional stories and want-ads in the final editions.

Just outside and perpendicular to Mr. Newman’s candy store was a thick, wooden weather-worn green kiosk upon which the various newspapers would be stacked, the less purchased newspapers folded in half and stuffed behind horizontal slats above the stacks of the more popular newspapers. When I was older I would learn that there was a daily Italian newspaper, a Gaelic newspaper and a Yiddish newspaper sold at Mr. Newman’s newsstand. There were two wooden telephone booths inside, and the store had a small window that people grabbing a newspaper from the kiosk outside could pay through on their way to the subway. Mr. Newman or his assistant (or wife) Katy, would give change through the window if needed while serving customers who came inside the small place. A striped awning overhung the entrance and covered the newsstand outside. But when it rained or snowed, the papers on top of their respective stacks often got partially wet. On such days, people took the third or fourth paper down in a stack to avoid purchasing a wet one.

* * * *

Most of tenants in the Johnson Projects were colored. Latinos, mostly Puerto Ricans, made up only about five to ten percent of the families living there in my youth. There were even several white families living there whose kids played outside sometimes. However, white people were often seen in the Johnson Projects—nurses coming to check on kids with disabilities; salesmen selling various products; television repairmen, insurance salesmen, and there was an old Jewish man with a wheeled contraption for sharpening knives who came around every month or two. An old white man regularly came through Johnson Projects with a pony, hoisting kids up into the saddle and leading them in a short ride in front of their buildings for a dime. My mother took a photo of me and Larry mounted on the pony when I was about five, Larry four.

The old man-made weekly visits to our project grounds until I was about ten, after which I never saw him again.

In the surrounding neighborhood, most of the store owners were white—those along Lexington Avenue from 115th to 116th Streets, like Mr. Newman, the bakery owners, the men in the shoe-repair shop and the owners of the stationery and drug stores on either corner of 116th Street and Lexington Avenue. On the corner of 3rd Avenue and 115th Street was a Chinese laundry where my father occasionally took shirts to have cleaned and starched, each shirt coming back folded over a gray, rectangular piece of cardboard to reduce wrinkling. In the middle of the block, heading to 116th and 3rd, was a sporting goods store. Between 116th and 117th was a big hardware store, and on both sides of 3rd Avenue all the way to 125th Street were a couple of furniture outlets; shoe stores; a couple of bars and small restaurants; a dry cleaner, and a Woolworth’s around 120th Street, which my mother always called the 5 and 10.

The elevated New Haven Railroad ran overhead along Park Avenue above The Market. The Market ran from 111th to 116th Streets, each section running street to street, the streets between them with a large archway for cars and trucks to pass underneath the elevated tracks. On either side of the large archway were two smaller ones for pedestrians. Each section of The Market had two- or three-dozen booths inside them lining both sides of the long corridors where one could buy almost anything—clothes for children and adults, lamps, umbrellas, cloths and materials for dresses or drapes, children’s toys, cans of paint, shovels, greeting cards, shoes and sneakers, belts and hats, scarves, rugs and linoleum, dining room tables and chairs—almost anything anyone might need.

At least three buildings had mostly fruit and vegetable stands where one could buy bananas, oranges, potatoes, avocados, string beans, plantains, coconuts and other food items. Several vendors would have burlap bags filled with different rices and beans for sale. The merchant would jab a metal scoop into the bag and spill the contents into a hanging, metal scale. When the desired weight was reached, the merchant would tip the scale’s tray, sliding the contents into a brown paper bag and ask if the customer wanted something else. Then one might hear the approach of a train growing louder until it rumbled loudly directly overhead along the New Haven Railroad tracks above, drowning out what a customer was saying for ten seconds so that he or she would have to repeat what they wanted after the train passed and the rumbling died away.

The last section or building of The Market was the fish and meat section, running uphill from 115th Street to 116th. Because this section of The Market was on a steep hill, there were steps in the middle creating a lower and upper section. Inside reeked of fish, and there was the constant sound of chopping as butcher-knives hit chopping blocks cutting off fish heads and cutting meat into desired portions. Fish or meat purchases would be wrapped in a sheet or two of newspaper then put into brown paper bags. When it was raining outside, the fish stench inside this section was overpowering. On such days, people would leave almost immediately after making a purchase, fanning their hands in front of their faces as they opened the doors to the outside.

The Market boasted cheaper prices on foods and other items sold there, so its sections were always busy and most people left contented, often going from one section into another to find whatever they were looking for. The merchants in the market stalls were of various ethnicities—Jews, Irishmen and other Whites. I never saw Puerto Ricans working in any stalls until I was in my early teens. And I don’t remember seeing any colored people ever manning a stall.

One afternoon three of my father’s female cousins came to our apartment when my father was out, announcing to my mother, "Winfield made records! Winfield made records! I didn’t understand what they meant, but they were excited and smiling, handing my mother two or three jacketed 78rpm records before seating their plump behinds on the sofa and one of the chairs. I didn’t know it then, but in those days, one could go to a record shop and make a recording inside a booth for a quarter. My father’s cousins remained for half an hour, exuding bubbles and gaiety, not saying much to Larry and me. I was 6-years-old at the time, but thinking about their visit many, many years later, I concluded that my father must have made the records (three disks on which he sang) because he had messed up, cheated on my mother and she had found out. One song I remember was This Love of Mine, another, I’ll Walk Alone." The records remained with us for many years.

After my father’s cousins left, Larry and I put our noses to the seat cushions, smelling them and making funny noises over the imagined stenches coming from where my father’s big-butted cousins had sat. My mother came from the kitchen and told us to cut it out.

Soon afterwards, she left the apartment for fifteen or twenty minutes, probably to go to the corner store. Larry went into our bedroom, and I was alone in the living room sitting on the sofa. There was a newspaper on the coffee table. I could read a little by then and read Korea on the front page in bold print, the Korean War still going on at the time. I noticed four pennies laying atop the newspaper. I stared at the pennies, wondering why they were on the newspaper and who had left them. Then I wondered if my mother had seen them and would she notice if I swiped them.

My mother in 1942 at 24-years-old several years

before she met my father when she did secretarial

work in Washington, D.C.

At six-years-old, I knew stealing was wrong, but I thought about slipping them into my dungaree pocket, anyway. Then I wondered what they would taste like. I wasn’t hungry, but for some reason, I put a penny in my mouth and swallowed it, then swallowed the remaining three one by one. My mother didn’t notice the pennies missing when she returned. I do remember telling her that I had swallowed them, maybe to let her know how daring I was. However, I don’t remember anything that happened immediately after. The next thing I do remember was waking up in the hospital, having no recollection of how I got there. I

felt very sick and had a high fever. A nurse was at my bedside, and through a nearby window I saw that it was nighttime.

The next morning a different nurse brought me breakfast, asking me if I wanted to look out the window. When I said yes, she pulled the bed a foot closer to the window so I could see a little more of the outside. I recognized a portion of the East River Drive and part of the river just beyond it, realizing that the hospital was in the vicinity of the projects that I had recently helped Grandma move into.

The nurses I saw moving in and out of the room were all white, in white uniforms and white nurses’ caps. The ward had maybe a dozen occupied beds and a lot of windows. I remember telling one of the nurses who came to check on me later that I had swallowed four pennies, expecting her to reprimand me for the act, which she didn’t. She just spoke to me calmly, smiling the whole time, informing me that I had some malady called the chicken pox. I had pimples all over my body and a high fever for a couple of days. I used to suck my thumb and located a pimple between my eyebrows that I stroked with my index finger as I savored my thumb. The pimple would never go away, and an oblong scar would remain between my eyebrows for many years. However, my stay in the hospital was a welcome respite from the tension I often felt at home.

I don’t recall having any kind of surgery, don’t have any scars other than the one that remained between my eyebrows, so I never learned what became of the four pennies I had swallowed. I remember daily eating pleasant tasting oatmeal, which I later came to find out was peaches and cream flavored. We only ate plain oatmeal in the house, and I didn’t like the stuff. But the hospital oatmeal was delicious, and once or twice I got a second helping when I asked. After a few days, I could sit up and see a partial view of boats in the East River and cars zooming along the East River Drive six or seven storeys below. I remained in the hospital for a week, eating that delicious oatmeal, being treated pleasantly by the caring white nurses, looking at picture books or magazines and, as I began getting better, wondering how Larry and my baby sister, Livi, were doing.

After a week in the hospital, my father