Bad Boy Read online

  “Why don’t you just marry Mama?” my sister Viola complained. “You always have something to say to her.”

  I asked Mama about that later, and she said no, she already had a husband, Herbert.

  Years later, when I had learned to use words better, I lost my ability to speak so freely with Mama.

  I didn’t want to learn to read so much as I wanted to be like Mama. I liked words and talking, and I wanted to be able to look at the magazines and tell her the stories as she did for me. I told her that I wanted to do this, and she rearranged our chairs so we were sitting side by side in the kitchen, with her pointing out the words as she read them. Slowly, with Mama’s help, I learned to read. Before long I could read well enough to read to Mama as she did the housework. What we had to read were Mama’s True Romance magazines and a few Classic comics. I didn’t understand much of what I was reading, but I was on my way.

  LET’S HEAR IT FOR THE FIRST GRADE!

  When I first started school, I could read on a second-grade level, and it was suggested that I be put into that grade. I was as big as most second graders, too. My first-grade teacher, Mrs. Dworkin, said that it was a very bad idea.

  “He can read on the second-grade level, but he can’t speak well enough to be in the second grade.”

  I didn’t know what she meant by that because I thought I spoke perfectly well. But I liked Mrs. Dworkin. She was a hugger, and whenever you did something good in her class, it ended up with her pulling you close and telling you just how good you were. I was in no hurry to leave her class.

  We used a thick white paste to glue leaves and picture cutouts onto heavy construction paper. My only trouble in the first grade came when I accidentally dumped a jar of the paste onto my lap. A boy laughed, and I took some of the paste from my lap and put it on his. Mrs. Dworkin made me stand in a corner for almost an hour. Despite the “accident,” I loved P.S. 125, and I loved school. It was a place where I could meet a lot of other kids my age, play games, and listen to the stories that Mrs. Dworkin would read to us. It wasn’t until I reached the second grade that I realized that I had a speech problem.

  “Dabba! Dabba! Dabba!” Manuel Bonilla taunted me, standing inches from my face and mimicking my poor speech as the rest of the class watched. “Dabba! Dabba! Dabba!”

  Manuel stopped the “dabba-dabba-dabba” when I hit him in the face. When Mrs. Bower, our second-grade teacher, came into the room, the class was standing around Manuel, who lay still on the floor.

  “Is he dead?” someone asked.

  Of course Manuel wasn’t anywhere near dead, but that didn’t stop Mrs. Bower from sending me directly to the principal’s office. Again.

  Actually, I liked the principal’s office. It was interesting to see the teachers come and go, talking about what they would have for lunch or what they had done the night before just as if they were normal people. I liked Mrs. Flynn, the principal, too. She was a tall, elegant woman who had a way of talking to pupils that made you feel good about yourself even if you were being punished.

  My punishment, on this occasion, was to write five hundred times, “I will never, never hit any student in Public School 125.”

  Public School 125 on LaSalle Street had once been a police station. There were rumors of cells in the basement where the souls of dead prisoners, prisoners who had died in jail, howled all night. Being put down there would have been bad, and writing anything was much easier. What jail meant to me at the time was that you had to get some money together to get out. My father’s brother, Leroy, called Lee, was in jail, and my father was constantly getting letters from lawyers asking for money for Uncle Lee’s “case.” I discovered that Uncle Lee had been in jail longer than I had been alive.

  The one truly bad thing about being punished in the principal’s office was that whenever Mrs. Bower was upset, she would stop teaching and read to us. She was in the middle of reading Little House in the Big Woods, and I was going to miss her reading because I was in the principal’s office. I imagined Laura in the small cabin, and all kinds of bears and creepy things just feet from the front door, waiting to get in. Mrs. Bower had shown us a picture of Indians. They were half naked, dark, and scowling. All the images of Indians I had seen were negative. I never thought of Mama as an Indian, but I did worry about her father.

  “Go to your class and ask for your homework assignment,” Mrs. Flynn said. “You have to do your homework plus the five hundred times.”

  I went to class just before school was let out.

  “Mrs. Bower said you were terrible,” a boy informed me.

  I didn’t think I was terrible and gave him a good kick under the desk to emphasize the point.

  At home, Mama asked me how school had been, and I told her it had been just fine.

  The first thing I did was to write all the numbers down, from one to five hundred, in my notebook. I didn’t believe how many pages it was going to take. Then I took a ruler and made a straight line down the left-hand side of each page. That straight line was going to be my “I” for each of the five hundred times. But when I wrote out the first “I will never, never…” I learned that I couldn’t fit the sentence on one line. Life was not fair.

  We had moved from 126th Street. Morningside Avenue, where our new apartment was located, was wide and beautiful. There were apartments on one side of the avenue and Morningside Park on the other. The park, I would learn later, was the western edge of Harlem. On the far side of the park were the Columbia University complex, Grant’s Tomb, and Riverside Church, all places I would come to know over the following years. The building we lived in was a five-floor walkup—we lived on the fourth floor. At the top of each landing there was a gaslight fixture that was no longer being used now that the building was wired for electricity. The entrance hall was wide, with a tile floor. The first stairway consisted of about nine steps, a sharp turn, and then seven more steps to the landing of the second floor. When you were being chased, that turn always gave you an extra second to escape.

  We lived between 121st and 122nd Streets, just three blocks from 125th Street, Harlem’s main thoroughfare. On the corner at 122nd Street was the Church of the Master, a fairly large Presbyterian church in which I would spend much of my early life. The church had a great old organ, with pipes that went from behind the organ to a point high overhead. The building next to the main part of the church had a gym and a stage. The ceiling in the gym was low, and you could tell which kid had learned to play basketball there by his flat jump shot.

  My own apartment was, I believe, originally designed as a one-bedroom flat with a dining room, kitchen, living room, and nursery. Five of us moved into apartment 4S, and Mama was thrilled with the spaciousness of the arrangements. As many as ten or eleven people lived in some of the apartments, but most had only four to six. The apartments weren’t designed for that many, but that was what Harlem was about, working people doing the best they could.

  Second grade was most notable in my mind for the adventures of Laura, but we also had World War II. The kids all brought newspapers to school and, once a month, cans of food. My father was drafted into the Navy, and Mama and my sisters all got jobs in the garment industry. It was decided that I was old enough not to have a baby-sitter after school, and I was given my own house key.

  “You’re a big boy now,” Mama said. “Make sure you lock the doors when you go out, and be sure to turn off the lights.”

  I was a big boy. At age eight I was bigger than most of my classmates and nearly as tall as Mama, who stood barely over five feet. In Bible school, which I attended summers at the Church of the Master, I had learned to weave a lanyard out of plastic strips. There was a clip at the end of the lanyard, and onto this I hooked the key ring. Almost all the kids in the neighborhood with working parents had their keys around their necks on either strings or plastic key chains made in Bible school.

  Having my own house key was absolutely magnificent for two reasons. The first had to do with the grown-up feeling I
got by unlocking and locking the door. The second reason had to do with Mrs. Dodson, the Wicked Witch of West Harlem. This woman worked very hard to ruin my life.

  “Mrs. Dean, you shouldn’t let that boy play with guns,” she had announced the year before.

  She had seen me chasing a friend down 121st Street, my Lone Ranger cap pistol blazing, and cornering him in front of 72 Morningside Avenue (the home of the Wicked Witch of West Harlem) before he could recock his Red Ryder carbine.

  Mama considered Mrs. Dodson an educated Negro and someone to whom she should listen. My cap pistol was taken from me and, despite my tears, put out with the garbage. The next thing upon which Mrs. Dodson cast her evil eye was comic books.

  “They’re a road map to the jailhouse,” she said.

  I was told I could no longer bring comic books into the house. The Wicked Witch said that one day I would thank her for saving me. She didn’t know me very well, and obviously she did not know about my next-door neighbor, Ralph “Roughie” Williams.

  Roughie had more comic books than anyone else in the whole world. He was three years older than me, and we rarely spoke. But once a month he discarded a small stack of comic books, sometimes as many as fifteen and at times even twice that number. There they would be, sitting in a neat pile outside his door, waiting for the super to pick them up and take them down to the basement. As soon as I got the house keys, I knew that I had found a way to get those comics into the house. I took them in immediately if Mama wasn’t home. If Mama was home, I would take the comics down to the first floor and hide them far underneath the stairs. Then, when Mama was safely off to work, I would sneak down and get them. Unlike Roughie, I saved my comics. Once I heard Mama tell a neighbor that I didn’t read comics, but I knew I had close to two hundred tucked safely away under my bed.

  I read well and I knew it, despite the fact that I never got the best marks in the class in reading. It seemed that whenever I got a C or a D in conduct, which was usual, it would drag down all my other marks as well. What I read away from school was comic books, as many as Roughie could afford.

  The idea that the comics were forbidden added to their appeal. They could also be reread and traded, and I was soon known as the comic-book king of my set. The radio serials were like an extension of the comics, and Mama liked to listen to them with me.

  In school I had started speech therapy. Once a week a speech specialist would come to the school and work with the students who had speech problems, and I was considered one of those who had problems. The therapist kept trying to get me to pronounce my words clearly, but apparently I did not. The trouble was that to me, the words seemed clear. I found it frustrating when a teacher would ask me to repeat a phrase over and over, or when a teacher said that I did not know a word because I did not pronounce it correctly. There were things I was good at in school, such as reading and spelling, but it seemed to me that my speech somehow became more important than anything else. I would become very angry if kids laughed at my speech, or even if I thought they were laughing. My first instinct would be to yell at them, quickly followed by punching them.

  Near the end of the year in the third grade, I slapped a kid, and my teacher, Mrs. Zeiss, slapped me. She slapped me at least once a day for the next week of schooldays until Dorothy Dodson (the daughter of the Wicked Witch) told her mother, who told my mother, who went to the school and told the teacher never to hit me again. Mrs. Zeiss didn’t hit me again, but she failed me in reading, math, conduct, and everything else except gym and attendance. My report card was a mess of brightly colored red marks and circled grades. I even received a C in reading.

  The one sure thing that would produce a beating in my house was a report card with a red mark in conduct. The idea that the teacher didn’t like me did not count as far as conduct was concerned. I was beaten that night and told that over the summer I would have to relearn all the lessons in which I had done poorly. Mama, the one doing the beating, was really mad and threatened even more punishment. I didn’t mind her threats because she never stayed mad. And, as my sister Gerry pointed out, I had been promoted to the fourth grade.

  ARITHMETIC SUMMER

  My sister Viola was married to a soldier, Frank Law, in 1944, and had a baby, Frank Stephen Law, in April 1945. When I brought home my report card at the end of the third grade, with all the bad marks circled in red, Mama was very upset. Frank, a graduate from a black college and a commercial artist, volunteered to help me with arithmetic, in which I had received my lowest mark. As I remember it, my arithmetic was as good as anyone’s in the class, if not better, but the teacher had hated me and reminded me of that when she filled out my report card.

  At first I was threatened with not being allowed to go to Bible school, which I loved, but eventually an arrangement was worked out. I would come directly home from Bible school and spend two hours working on math problems with Frank.

  Frank’s idea of arithmetic was rote learning. Every day I was given one hundred oral problems to solve. One miss meant that I would have to do another hundred. If he gave me a problem such as nine times seven, I would have to say “sixty-three” at once. “Uh, sixty-three” was considered a wrong answer. So was “Sixty, uh, three.” I learned to hate arithmetic.

  With Viola married and Gerry grown, I found myself sleeping on the couch in the living room. From where I lay, I could look out the window across Morningside Avenue all the way to the red light on top of Riverside Church. For some reason that red light was always a source of comfort to me, and many nights I fell asleep looking at it.

  When school started in September, I was looking forward to it. Mama warned me to be on my best behavior this year, and I fully intended to do just that. I wanted to be good and do God’s will, as I was being taught in church. I spent a lot of time in the church, and it meant a lot to me.

  The pastor, Reverend James H. Robinson, was nice but strict. If he caught you throwing candy wrappers on the sidewalk, he would give you a whack with his open hand on the bottom hard enough to lift you off the ground. Or if you played Chinese handball against the wall during a funeral, he would send Mrs. Bellinger, one of the big-bosomed matrons, out to yell at you. No one could yell quite like Mrs. Bellinger.

  School started in September, and I was going back to P.S. 125 on LaSalle Street in Harlem.

  I met Eric Leonhardt in the fourth grade. He was blond and blue-eyed and lived over a bakery on Amsterdam Avenue in Morningside Heights. Eric’s parents owned the bakery and worked in it as well. Mama had come to school for some kind of parents’ meeting and sat next to his mother. His mother was German and spoke with an accent. She sat next to my Mama, and the two women talked, and Eric and I talked a little. I don’t know how much German Mama spoke—I think she understood more than she could speak.

  During the first week of the fourth grade Mrs. Parker, our teacher, made the two tallest boys, Eric and me, the cookie monitors. It was our job to take the cookie orders and then go down to the first floor to get the cookies and milk from the teacher who had charge of them for the day. The Sunshine bakery was in the neighborhood, and the cookies would still be warm and delicious. Sometimes Eric and I would open the cookies with cream in them and lick off part of the cream.

  Mrs. Parker told me that she had heard all about me, and that if I did one thing wrong, she would make me sorry. She had white hair and a sharp nose and piercing gray eyes. I tried very hard to be good that year. On my first report card I got a C+ in overall conduct and a few Needs Improvement marks. But I also had more Satisfactorys than ever before. Then one fight, shortly after the Easter vacation, spoiled the whole year.

  Maurice Fleetwood, or Bunny, as we used to call him, was afraid of everything. We got into an argument, I pushed him into the closet, and he began to cry and sniffle. A little snot bubble came out of his nose, and every time he took a deep breath, the bubble went into his nose, and every time he breathed out, it formed a bubble.

  “Walter’s going to give you a bloody nose,” a
girl said.

  Bunny sniffled, the snot bubble grew large, and he swung at me. The punch was more out of fear than bravado, but it knocked me down.

  Now the gathering crowd of kids started telling Bunny to run before I killed him. Bunny couldn’t get his legs going and, in a panic, swung at me again. This time I saw stars as I went flying backward. As I tried to get my eyes open, a girl pushed Bunny toward the door and he went half stumbling, half running away.

  Mrs. Parker came in and called the class to order and asked what had happened. Naturally, she blamed me and told me that I had to bring my mother to school the next morning. Mrs. Parker couldn’t leave well enough alone and kept telling the class what a bully I was. My left eye was swollen almost shut from where Bunny had hit me, and my stomach was cramping. As bad as I felt, I didn’t need the extra burden of having the class turn and look at me while she made nasty remarks. I picked up my book and started looking at it.

  “Put that book down!” she shouted.

  I didn’t put it down. I threw it. I meant to throw it into the corner to show how mad I was. She saw me getting ready to throw the book and jumped to one side. The book hit her on the shoulder, and she screamed.

  “I want your mother here this afternoon, and when your mother gets here, I will have a police officer here to take you straight to reform school!” she screamed. “Put your head down on the desk at once. I don’t want to see your face!”

  I put my head down on the desk and tried hard not to cry. All year long I hadn’t been in one fight in school and in only one or two outside of the school. Now I was going to reform school.