A Conversation with the Mann (3 page)

After that Mom would leave, but through the door, before I fell asleep, I could hear her humming or whistling a tune. I could
hear her laughing at something funny that must have come across her mind.

Sometimes I could hear her arguing with my pop. More than sometimes. Truth is, he did most of the arguing—about how we were
broke because Mom didn't work hard enough, or about how no matter everything else she had to do she didn't keep our apartment
straight enough, or about how she hadn't come home with his nightly bottle of booze soon enough. But with all that I never
recall once hearing Mom cry with despair or sigh with the weight of the day that would only get added to tomorrow. I never
heard her complain when my father would stumble in at all hours from a late-night binge, breath so strong it filled the apartment
with a gin perfume, and pass out on the bed or the couch or, if his aim was off, the middle of the floor. Despite her life,
my mother was without gripe. All I ever remember hearing from my mother were gentle songs she sang to herself late into the
night.

M
Y
H
ARLEM WAS NOT IN RENAISSANCE.
My Harlem, the Harlem I grew up in, was no longer a colony of black culture—no longer home to Hughes and Barthe, Ellington
and Webb—but had declined into a ghetto for the colored. Colored is what we were. Not yet Negro or black and a long way from
being African American. In the day we were colored. At best. Mostly we were
them
, and
those people
when we weren't just plain old niggers. And while we had things better than blacks down South—easy on the Jim Crow, light
on lynchings—being black in Harlem came with its own troubles.

The Depression had hurt everyone. Everyone was looking for a way to earn money. Out-of-work whites started taking menial jobs
they'd previously thought worthy only of blacks. Blacks were left with no jobs at all. But still they kept coming to Harlem,
blacks from other parts of New York. Southern blacks and Jamaican blacks and blacks from the West Indies. They crammed into
tenement buildings and row housing, jammed themselves into apartments that were divided, then subdivided again, all in the
belief that living in the black capital of the world would give them opportunities they wouldn't have anywhere else. They
believed wrong. Harlem became one block after another of folks who couldn't get work enough to keep food on the table.

Mornings would find a string of humanity—weary-looking men, mothers with children, most in the po' folk's uniform of secondhand
clothes worn threadbare—on a corner of 131st Street, stretched a block or more, waiting to rub a hand over the trunk of the
Tree of Hope. The tree was just a tree, nothing special about it except that people believed with a blind desperation in a
myth that had grown with the wood: that it had the power to bring good luck. The luck being whoever touched it would find
a job. Any job. I don't know if I realized it then, or just felt it later: How sad it was to see so many black people, their
belief in themselves so worn away, their only faith was superstition.

Into the decay, mix poor housing, poor facilities, poor schools and education. Add the heat of summer, and you've cooked yourself
up a riot. It's what happens when you treat humans like animals and keep diem in a twenty-by-twenty-block cage. Riots are
what happen when you take away a person's status, when the only voice you leave them is the self-expression of violence. Twice
in my era Harlem burned. Once in 1934 after a white store-owner beat a black teenager for shoplifting maybe a nickel's worth
of goods. The second came in 1943 when a white cop shot a black serviceman who'd come to the aid of a drunk woman. A drunk
white woman. Didn't matter it was a northern city—New York City. A black man who mixed with a white woman could usually count
on nothing better than a bullet for his trouble.

But Harlem, even in decline, had its own flavor. For most living there it never occurred to live anywhere else. Each street
and building spilled with life. From any given fire escape came the sound of a young man working his sax or horn, while down
below, girls would double-Dutch to his riffs. There was all manner of food cooking night and day: Jamaican food, Caribbean
food, West Indian food. Soul food. The whole of Harlem was an open-air kitchen, and the smells would find their way into every
inch of every block. Fire hydrants were for hot days, and parked cars were for dodging snowballs in winter. And beyond Harlem
was New York City. New York City, with parks and trains and skyscraper canyons, was like a whole wide world unto itself. The
world belonged to me and Li'l Mo, Li'l Mo being my best friend. Don't recall how we got to be friends. He lived in the building
next to mine, but so did about a hundred other kids.

Other kids didn't get along with me.

Other kids didn't like me.

Other kids thought I was different.

Mo was and always would be short for his age. He was plump, but in years would burn off enough fat to pass for stocky. He
had very dark skin, and sitting in the middle of his otherwise large, round head were very narrow eyelids. So narrow you'd
think, from looking at him, his eyes were no good for seeing. Sometimes he would stand outside of five-and-dimes pretending
to be blind just to get free candy. He got a lot of free candy. The other peculiar thing about Li'l Mo was his ears. They
weren't all crinkled and curved like most people's. They were a solid mass of flesh, looking like a mold someone had filled
with hot wax but forgot to scrape clean. A kid had teased Mo about his ears one time. Mo beat the boy silly. He got sent out
of school for two weeks for that, but no one ever said anything about Li'l Mo's ears again.

Maybe because, same as me, he knew what it was like to be different, me and Mo took to each other. Together we took to the
streets: The subway was an all-day roller coaster to be ridden from the Bronx to Brooklyn and back again. Central Park was
always good to roam, a big Cracker Jack box with a daily surprise. It's where Mo and I saw our first naked woman, a lady bum,
dirt caked, breasts stretched balloons, taking a bath in the lake. She was scaly and hideous. Even from a distance you could
smell her stink. But same as with a carnival freak, as she washed, not me or Li'l Mo could peel our eyes from her. We stared
long and hard. The peep show ended when a couple of beat pounders splashed out into the lake to get the woman. She gave them
a good wrestling, but they finally got her out of the water. Me and Mo hooted the cops as they hauled our introduction to
womanhood away.

There was an evening I came home from running the streets with Mo. We'd been playing for I don't know how long when we headed
back to the apartment building where I lived. Outside on the stoop were a lot of people standing around and carrying on. I
didn't think anything of it. New York, Harlem, a stoop was a social club where everything from Plessy vs. Ferguson to Bebop
versus Traditional got discussed. I didn't think much, either, when all them people looked at me coming, then looked away,
not wanting to catch my eye. They shuffled from my path, all quiet and nervous, as I walked into the lobby. By then an ill
feeling was walking with me. I was a child, but old enough to know that when adults got quiet and nervous, there was always
some badness around.

I was not hardly ready for the badness waiting for me.

At the bottom of the stairs that led to our apartment, sprawled among groceries that had spilled back down from the first
landing with her, was my mother. Dead. Climbing the stairs to fix dinner, or wash clothes, or just do whatever it took to
make it through another night before the next long day, her heart gave out. Quit, as if it had suddenly decided the hard and
thankless life my mother lived wasn't worth the effort it took to pump her blood. So it let her off the hook. It let her die.

Alone.

I wasn't around. I'd been off playing when maybe I could've been home helping out, doing chores, doing something to lessen
my mother's burden.

My father wasn't around. He'd been out lessening his own burden with liquor.

I stood for what seemed like a day short of forever, staring at my mother heaped right where she was. All those people around,
and no one bothered to cover her or move her. No one came to take me away and lie to me about how everything was going to
be all right and how my mother had just gone on to a better place.

I guess that part wouldn't have been a lie. Not by much.

But all those people, they did nothing. They just viewed the scene in confused quiet—an audience come to see a show, but disappointed
with what they got for their money.

In time Grandma Mae, who wasn't my grandma or anyone's grandma but just a nice old lady from up the block who everybody loved
and everybody called Grandma, came and took me to her apartment. She gave me some moo juice to drink and told me it was all
right to cry if I wanted.

So I cried.

Eventually Grandma Mae took me back to my apartment building. Mama's body was gone. So were the groceries that had spilled
to the floor with her. We climbed the stairs, passing the landing that had ended my mother's life, and went inside.

Eventually my pop came home, his breath filling the space with its usual stink of booze. Grandma Mae told him what had happened
to Mom.

He stood where he was for a second, looking shocked. Then he said: “Goddamn it. You know how much them caskets cost?”

W
ITH THE PASSING OF
M
OM
life changed. Changed more than just me missing her every minute of every hour. Pop may have been the only adult in the house,
but Mom being gone made him no more of a parent. Opposite of that, he became less of one. With the guilt he carried, that
I hoped to God he carried, without Mom around to mellow him, or maybe just because he was free to live any way he wanted,
Pop applied himself to being an addict of the lowest order, trading his many highs for one. The angry, sullen one. It's only
variation: Either he was awake and in a mood to hit something, or plain passed out. If ever he was in no condition to work,
to provide, he only got more that way. Relief bought
his
basic needs: drinking money to pay for his benders, rent money to pay for a roof to pass out under. Food money, clothes money,
money for any other thing
we
needed to get by had to come from somewhere else.

Somewhere else was me.

And very instantly my days of being a kid—running the streets, playing—were over. Not even in my teens and I was working whatever
job I could find for whatever money I could make. Mostly it was piece work, sympathy work: shop owners who knew my mom was
dead and my pop was dead drunk and let me do what I could around their stores—washing dishes, washing windows, scrubbing floors.
Between trying to go to school and whatever time I had on weekends, if there was something to be cleaned, brushed, swept,
or polished, my little black hands were having at it. At too young an age I learned what labor was. Hard labor. I got an education
in what it was like to come home every night, fingers cramped in the shape of a scrub brush and a hot ache in my stooped back.

At the end of the first week of what felt like a month of slaving, I counted the money I'd earned. I counted the nickels and
the pennies, the two quarters I'd been given. Three dollars in total. Not even. All together it was something near thirty
cents short of that. One week. How many hours? Three dollars. Not even.

I started to cry. I cried for myself and my youth that was gone. I cried for my mother, for the life I now knew—knew by experience—she'd
lived; empty work muled through from morning deep into night. I cried for my future—in sudden, sharp focus—of me being no
better, no different than a poor dumb animal that labored only for the sake of living to labor another day.

When I got done crying, I took my almost three dollars and put it in ajar that got hidden in a drawer. I put myself to bed
and slept. I got up to work again.

Eventually I found steady work with Sergeant Kolawole, who ran a reclamation shop. A junk dealer is what he was. He'd find
busted fans and radios and clocks, fix them up, sell them again. In an area where buying things new was strictly a luxury,
Sergeant Kolawole did himself a good business. But the straight-from-the-garbage scrap made his shop filthy. Cleaning it was
hard work. Harder was sitting through the sergeant's stories. According to him, he had been a resistance fighter in Ethiopia
and had been forced to flee to America just ahead of the Italian army. That was basically the tale. The details were always
changing, and never interesting. But the sergeant paid good, so I listened like I cared.