The Measure of a Man Page 7

  FOUR

  LIFE IN BLACK AND WHITE

  MY HAPHAZARD political education got underway in 1943. The school in which that education occurred was that district north of Central Park known as Harlem, New York.

  Now, the school of hard knocks provided no classes in political science, but long before I arrived, Harlem residents knew full well that politics was a deck stacked against them—an invisible force of exclusion expertly woven into the fabric of everyday life. In the school of hard knocks, politics was a name for the way white folks arranged things to their own advantage.

  Harlem residents had figured a good many things out. (1) They knew that for practical, economic reasons, there never was a time when downtown politics didn’t embrace Harlem as a cheap and handy labor pool. (2) In cultural terms, they knew of downtown politics’ insistence on a requisite distance being kept once the day’s work was done. (3) They knew that in matters of race, downtown politics had set in place rules and ways to enforce those rules, to ensure that all residents from Harlem were respectful of the “civilized traditions” that had been erected between themselves and the larger community over the preceding two hundred years. (4) They also knew that when need required, downtown politics would bombard Harlem with promises Harlem’s residents knew, from experience, would never materialize.

  The Harlem that I knew for fourteen years was an amazing place—a fabled destination well known in African-American communities throughout the country. Its dazzling power drew visitors of many races from many places to experience by taste, by smell, by touch its bewitching energies, its mysterious vibrations, and its signature rhythms, each of which was said to be in the very air a visitor breathed. And all of Harlem’s visitors were encouraged to believe that each breath they took would also contain spiritual blessings that came flowing out of the soul of its loving people through the gateways of their hearts.

  Harlem’s attractions beckoned with a wink and a smile. Jazz at Minton’s. Vaudeville at the Apollo. Floor shows at Smalls’ Paradise. Comedians and torch singers at the Baby Grand. Jitterbuggers at the Savoy and the Renaissance Casino. Soul food at Jennylou’s. Elegant late-night dining at Wells. The Palm. Frank’s. Sugar Ray Robinson’s. The Shalamar. Joe’s Barbecue. And after midnight, when the legitimate bars closed, the speakeasies would open. There was gambling at the Rhythm Club twenty-four hours a day. There were pleasure houses offering high-quality interludes at prices that guaranteed satisfaction. And then there was the Theresa Hotel—a symbol of community pride and joy—where visitors of big-time status would hold court. Dignitaries from the Caribbean, Africa, South America, and elsewhere. Showbiz heavyweights like the Duke of Ellington, the Count of Basie. Jimmie Lunceford. Louis Jordan. Billy Eckstine. Dinah Washington. Sarah Vaughan. Ruth Brown. And countless others. But the most memorable characters of all appeared suddenly out of another life, and just as suddenly disappeared again.

  Baron Smith, for example, was a tall, large-framed, brown-skinned man of some three hundred or more pounds who never failed to cut a most imposing figure when he entered or exited the lobby of the Theresa Hotel. Perhaps he would be impeccably done up in a white doeskin double-breasted suit, with a boutonniere in his lapel, a Panama hat sitting slightly forward on his head, two-toned black-and-white shoes on his feet, and an emerald-and-diamond ring on his left-hand pinkie finger—an ensemble that, taken together, served as perfect background for an elegant, black, custom-made shirt and the Savile Row necktie that completed the picture. Next day, perhaps an off-white linen suit, with equally arresting accessories. The following day, an entirely new look yet again.

  Each summer, this man of substance would return to be eagerly received by the hotel’s management and staff, as well as other establishments in Harlem, including certain ladies of the evening who had been graced by his presence and his wallet on previous visits.

  But Baron Smith’s image and presence were a tailor-made fabrication. A performance mounted for a week’s run on the stage of Harlem’s hot spots, with annual revivals scheduled for as many summers as the traffic would bear.

  The real life of the real Baron Smith was set in Nassau, Bahamas. There he was a barkeeper who sold rum to the locals. His barroom was of modest size, and so were his sales. His profit margin had to ignore other obligations in order to cover his seven-day pilgrimage to Harlem each summer. But dream-chasers and sacrifices are never strangers for long. My father used to make daily stops at Baron Smith’s barroom to sell cigars to the Baron’s customers. Life in Nassau was pretty routine and uneventful for Mr. Smith. It didn’t boogie. He yearned for a wild-side excitement, but all he could manage was a week of living on the edge in the ideal manner, in the perfect setting, in the flawless background of his dreams. Harlem, New York.

  I knew Mr. Smith quite well. When I was twelve or thereabouts, I used to sneak into the local movie house through a small ventilation window at the rear of the theater, behind the screen. The window was too high for me to reach from the outside, so an accomplice was necessary. I would stand on the shoulders of my friend Yorick, and once safely through the window, I would reach back, grab Yorick’s wrists, and haul him up and in. We then would slither under a thick curtain hanging over an entranceway that separated the backstage area from the theater itself, slither on under the first few rows of seats, and pop up innocently in the fourth or fifth row. There we would sit, doing our best to look like regular, paying customers. After roughly a dozen or so successes, one day we popped up, took our seats, and—guess what? Standing over us was Mr. Baron Smith. He was the manager of the movie house in those earlier days.

  He grabbed us by the back of our collars, lifted us to our feet, and marched us to his office as pictures of reform school flashed through our heads. We knew that if he called the cops, an example would be made of us as a warning to all young males of similar age and reckless persuasion. That would mean six years in the slammer for each of us.

  He sat us down in the privacy of his office. “I know your father,” he said to me. “What do you think he would say if he knew what you’ve been doing?”

  Yorick and I knew that the question wasn’t meant to be answered, so we sat quietly. The lecture was short, but it found its mark.

  “Now, get out of here,” he said, after letting us stew a few minutes. “If you try something like this again, you’ll regret it the rest of your lives. What you did is as bad as stealing. You don’t want to grow up to be thieves, do you? Thieves wind up in jail; remember that. Honesty really is the best policy.”

  We weren’t going to wind up as thieves. We were thieves already. But we weren’t going to compound our problems by being honest enough to divulge that information. Mr. Smith escorted us out to the street and let us fly away. Free as birds.

  Sixty years have passed since Mr. Smith let Yorick and me walk, but the generosity he displayed was a great lesson for me. Likewise, I learned much from Harlem’s generosity in welcoming Baron Smith with his image as a man of importance, wealth, generosity, and presence (all fashioned with clothing and pretense) and its generosity in keeping such dreams alive for Baron Smith and dreamers like him from all over the world.

  For Baron Smith the dreamer, Harlem was a stage-setting reflecting mere images of reality; but the fact is we the people of Harlem were real. Consequently, Harlem nourished another kind of dreamer to speak to our concerns. As a young man I began to ask myself, Who is speaking for me, and who is speaking to me? And as the saying goes, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

  From the pages of newspapers, from the radio, from newsreels in the movie houses, and from poems and sermons, teachers—men of vision and courage from all walks of life—began to appear. One by one they spoke to me, and they spoke for me. Paul Robeson, Dr. Ralph Bunche, A. Philip Randolph, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Roy Wilkins, Mary McCloud Bethune, Walter White, Whitney Young, Langston Hughes. And others. And in the course of time the voices of newfound friends from my generation, including William Garfield Greaves,
Harry Belafonte, Leon Bibb, Philip and Doris Rose, William Branch, William Marshall, Julian Mayfield, and others, would be added. Like me, they were young. Unlike me, they were not political greenhorns. These intelligent young people—Harry Belafonte, Leon Bibb, and Philip and Doris Rose most especially—would become and remain invaluable contributors to my political education. By their example and my own intense effort at reading the newspapers, I picked up useful bits of basic information every day.

  In 1945, at eighteen years of age and fresh out of the Army, I was unaware, for instance, what it meant to be a “Democrat,” a “Republican,” a “progressive,” a “socialist,” a “communist,” an “anarchist,” a “northern liberal,” a “southern conservative.” Nor had I a clue as to how people who earned those labels differed from one another. It took some time before I came to understand who among the spokespeople for these various positions were genuine allies of those who spoke for the men and women of Harlem, and for the youngsters of my generation. But by the age of twenty-one, I had grown familiar with the landscape and had acquired a general understanding of what was driving each major player philosophically.

  My teachers came in a wide variety of forms and in a great variety of locales. Louise, for example, lived in Brooklyn, and the trip from the American Negro Theatre on 127th Street in Harlem to her doorstep was a long ride. I offered to see her home one night after a late rehearsal at the theater, and I would wind up making that trip time after time.

  Saintly, volatile, edgy, raucous, bitchy, introspective, sensuous, a talented and daring taker of risks—that was Louise. In acting classes she was a riveting, hypnotic presence. As a nineteen-year-old black girl, she was often mistaken for Arabic, or Asian, or Native American. She was, in fact, a mixed-race person of African-American and white descent, but she claimed only her African-American heritage.

  Talking with her was a pleasure, mainly because I wasn’t interested as much in getting into her pants as getting into her mind. She seemed to know a little bit about everything, and I knew she could help me fill in the blanks in my own general knowledge. Her words touched familiar chords I had often heard inside myself, her voice lodging complaints we both held against the state.

  Her language, too, inspired me. For instance, the phrases “rhetorical bullshit” and “disingenuous motherfucker.” “Bullshit” and “motherfucker” I had heard before, of course, but what kind of bullshit gets to be “rhetorical,” and what need a motherfucker do to be considered a “disingenuous motherfucker”? “Bourgeoisie Negroes” was another. We got locked in a conversation once, I remember, about who she was and who I was, as individuals, in America. “How we see ourselves, how we see each other,” she said, “should be determined by us and not by people who generally don’t like us; people who pass laws certifying us as less than human. Too many of us see each other as ‘they’ see us,” she continued. “Time for that shit to stop. We’re going to have to decide for ourselves what we are and what we’re not. Create our own image of ourselves. And nurture it and feed it till it can stand on its own.”

  She looked through the plate-glass window of a coffee shop at snow falling on the Brooklyn street near where she lived. “I’ll tell you one thing,” she added. “If I have anything to say about it, by the time my grandchildren get here, this hypocrisy democracy is gonna do some changing.”

  More than a few times I asked myself if she was just regurgitating stuff she had heard at home from a father who was up on such things, or a mother who was book-smart, or some school she had attended. But then I would feel the passion behind her words and know that she spoke from conviction.

  “Things that get sandwiched in between ‘differing opinions,’ ‘opposite positions,’ ‘opposing views’—these are issues,” she explained. “All things social, political, religious, financial, personal or impersonal, objective or subjective, over which debates are held, fights are triggered, and wars are fought—these are issues.”

  Louise taught me much, not the least of which was to appreciate how much a greater command of the language can enrich one’s life.

  But our time was short. I soon was off to Broadway, then on the road for several years with the play Anna Lucasta, then off to Hollywood for three decades. I lost track of Louise. All my attempts to reconnect proved fruitless. If she survived, and if she had children, it’s not farfetched to imagine them as having been among those young African-Americans of the sixties who sat in at southern lunch counters. Who braved “Bull” Connor’s dogs. Who put themselves on the line to end segregation. Who worked at taking the “hypocrisy out of democracy,” as she was so fond of saying. If Louise is still here, she knows that the times have changed. If she’s not, then I’m here to witness for us both that the times indeed have changed.

  WHEN I WAS COMFORTABLE on Cat Island, I was pulled out and placed in Nassau. When I had gotten some comfort in Nassau, which took some adjusting to, I was pulled out and placed in a hostile environment called Florida. Again and again I found myself having to leave behind the comfort gained and move on. After a time it became a ritual.

  For a while it was New York, and then it was California. It was the various plays and movies and venues of the acting profession. It was the social friends that I would meet and develop at all the levels of my life. Most of these friends were eventually left behind. The moving on lifestyle I had adopted (though not initially by choice) placed all my friendships in perpetual jeopardy. I became a loner, a separate traveler.

  I always saw things differently than other people. I heard things differently. I viewed the future differently. Most times I asked of myself much more than I was able to give. I came close to self-destruction on any number of occasions. I unquestionably had to be lucky, since my struggle for survival was no more than a patchwork of trial-and-error. And I’ve got to tell you, there was a satisfaction, a pleasure—no, a thrill—in whatever successes happened as a result of dancing close to the flame and beating the odds. In just being lucky.

  Telling myself I would probably lose took the edge off being afraid to lose. “Prepare for the worst; hope for the best.” I did that a lot. That was the credo that enabled me to get from crisis to crisis.

  Survival pressed me into being more of a serious fellow than I would have liked. But not to the complete exclusion of some delight and some joy. Only in the Bahamas, however, was delight taken fully, without reservation.

  A survival tactic that worked well for me was one I had gotten from my mother: “Charm them, son,” she said, “into neutral.” Being charming bought me time by allowing me to at least temporarily deflect the jabs of a threatening society.

  You can see, within the context of how I lived and how I was beginning to work out a relationship between myself and this complex place, that I wasn’t free to indulge totally in delights. There were delights; there were indulgences. But I never lost sight of the fact that I had to cover my back, that I was always onstage.

  Society had created laws to keep me at a distance, or out of sight altogether. Learning to survive in that often-hostile world was trial-and-error, step-by-step; and just as when I was learning to pick fruit from the sapodilla trees. I often got stung.

  “Oh, so that’s how that works,” I would realize. So my closet is full of encounters and mistakes and tools and lessons learned truly the hard way.

  After I got out of the Army and started at the American Negro Theatre, I was more of an observer than most. I was from a black culture in the Caribbean, but it was wonderful being a part of the black culture of New York. Life had another rhythm there. Boundaries were emotional and physical, but they didn’t confine the spirit. There were so many places where one could find welcome and ease. Delight was plentiful. And fully taken by many, as far as I could tell from conversations overheard and behavior observed.

  I was, however, also involved in white society. That’s where I went to work. That’s where the movie houses were, for the most part. That’s where 42nd Street was. I was always going into t
hat world. The lights of Broadway kept drawing me. On a Saturday night you got dressed and you went downtown, you know?—drawn by the busyness of it. You just walked around and—well, you got addicted to the electricity.

  There was a multitude of things taken for granted by the city’s longtime residents that had to be learned, practiced, rehearsed. Like depositing a nickel and dialing a public pay-phone—though at the time I learned that I didn’t know one solitary person in the whole city, much less anyone who had a telephone. Learning street names and signs. Learning subway and bus routes. Learning where I was welcome and where I was not. Learning to listen harder, look deeper and further beyond that which first meets the eye. Especially since hustlers and pimps sometimes look like doctors and lawyers, no less than doctors and lawyers sometimes operate like hustlers and pimps.

  The workaday heads of families—blue-collar and professional, downtown and in Harlem—had to become as readable for me as their Bahamian counterparts had in the city of Nassau. Only quicker in this American city, where time itself seemed to be a currency—the only kind I would have enough of.

  By the time I had reached my early twenties, I had fought many battles, lost many wars, and lived many lives (unprepared for each of them). Life offered no auditions for the many roles I had to play. And nowhere along the roads I traveled can I recall ever hearing the word “outsider” applied to me. I had for years considered myself an old hand at the game of staying alive. But with failure walking in my shadow every minute, waiting for the misstep that could derail my whole existence, “survivor” seemed to me a more appropriate label under which my life should be filed.

  Over time, however, I began to notice the frequency with which “outsider” was applied to others. The term began to resonate with me, causing me to wonder who I was really, at the center of myself. Eventually, I came to see myself in the outsider, and the outsider in me. I knew that outsider and survivor often work as partners, but they’re not twins.