A Conversation with the Mann (4 page)

When I wasn't odd-jobbing it, I was in school. School being no more pleasure than work. Besides being whipped from scraping
and scrubbing, besides falling behind because I didn't have any time to study—no one at home to help me study—I was very quickly
becoming the target of every wise-cracking kid there was. With the little money we had, the little I made and the little my
father didn't drink or shoot or sniff away, there wasn't much for new clothes or shoes. As raggedy as most every other Harlem
kid might have been, with my too-short pants and ventilated shirts I looked as if I'd just made a break from the poor farm.
Kids aren't kids until they've got someone to pick on—the fat kid or the kid with glasses. Now they had a new one: po' boy
Jackie.

I was an easy target.

I was different.

I got hit with every sharp remark there was: “Just come in from the cotton fields, Jackie?” “Jackie, don't you know Lincoln
done freed the slaves?” “You ain't foolin' us, Jackie. You ain't colored; you just dirty.” Bad as all that was, worse was
when, time to time, some of the kids would give me pennies and tell me to polish up their shoes or fetch them something like
I was their nigger. That hurt the most—getting treated like a nobody. It made me angry they didn't respect me, didn't care
how hard I had to work to provide for me and my father. But hurt as I was, angry as I was, I wasn't so much of either that
I didn't take their pennies. The shame, the humiliation I felt, was my own. But so was their money. Every little bit helped.

I saved up what I didn't spend, always making very sure I had enough money to go out and buy my father a high if he was too
strung out to do the job himself. In Harlem, highs were easy to come by. Everywhere else in the city the police might've been
cracking down on pushers and addicts, but across 125th Street it was just coloreds getting lifted. Coloreds robbing coloreds
to get lifted. Coloreds killing coloreds because they were lifted. So what? Coloreds? Let 'em bleed.

Not that there's any right age for it, but I was far too young to be buying liquor and such. I brought that up to my father
once, the fact that a kid had no business running down to a corner or dark alley and copping dope. He smacked me in the head
so hard it made my ear bleed. We never discussed my age and his drugs again.

S
UNDAYS WERE GOOD DAYS
, about the only decent time clinging to the skeleton of my childhood. Sundays were when I used to go to Grandma Mae's for
dinner. I would make the walk of a couple of blocks around five o'clock in the evening, my father not much caring if I was
going to see her or going to play on the third rail of the IRT line. Not caring so long as I'd remembered to leave him a bottle
of booze or a bag of grass.

More than a block from Mae's and already you could smell her cooking: glazed ham, apple fritters, bread fresh made and hot.
The aromas alone would have just about floated you to her door if you didn't know the way. Sometimes it would be only me and
Mae for dinner. Most times she would invite others from the neighborhood. Maybe a single mother who didn't have much to feed
her kid. Maybe a widower who would otherwise be sitting alone, again, eating some of whatever out of a can. So on and so forth
like that. If there was a soul in the neighborhood who was in need, Mae was there to provide.

While Mae finished making dinner I would do chores for her around the apartment; clean or scrub whatever needed it. If she
had a leg loose on a chair I'd nail it, a rusty hinge would get oiled. All the other work I did during the week was just warm-up
for the kind of muscle I'd put into what Grandma Mae needed done. Everyone else, no matter how well meaning, just gave me
money in exchange for my labor. Mae gave me love.

Dinner conversation stretched for hours, Mae with endless stories about life as a girl growing up in Indiana. It was, it seemed,
never very good and always very hard, but often filled with little pleasures: picking fresh apples from a tree while walking
to school. Having an open field for a church because the local congregation couldn't afford building wood or the nails to
hold it together. Learning to cook everything from corn bread to collard greens alongside her mother and grandmother. That
was a pleasure I could taste with every forkful of what was sitting on my plate.

And as long as the stories seemed to go on, they stopped promptly at five minutes to eight o'clock. It was right then that
bowls of ice cream were handed out and chairs were gathered around Mae's Philco. At two minutes to eight the television was
turned on, giving it plenty of time to warm up, and at eight o'clock it happened. For us, for almost everyone in America,
Toast of the Town
was on.

Ed Sullivan was on the air.

Satellite television, cable television, before all that there was only regular television. And on television there were only
three networks. And on those networks there was only one Ed Sullivan. From some seventy city blocks and a universe away, from
Studio 50 on Seventh Avenue and Fifty-third Street came a flood of glamour and spectacle, song and dance. For one hour me
and Mae, whoever else might be with us, whoever else was watching all over the country, would sit and stare trance-style while
Ed held forth with the biggest actors from Hollywood and Broadway, the best singers and musicians, variety acts from all over
the globe—countries I'd never even heard of before.

And comedians.

From as early as I can remember, I loved most watching the comedians. There was something about them, about what they did:
one person standing out on that stage, alone—no orchestra backing them, no magic tricks—talking. Just talking. But by way
of what they said, making an audience full of people they didn't know, strangers to each other even, laugh. There was just
something about the whole idea of it that fascinated me like nothing else.

In an hour, what felt like the shortest hour of the week,
Toast of the Town
would be over. Me and Mae and whoever else would sit and talk about the program, maybe carry on about taking a trip to Hollywood
to see how the stars live, or maybe riding down to Times Square to catch one of the Broadway shows we'd just seen a number
from. We couldn't, of course. We couldn't afford a trip to California or a Broadway ticket any more than we could afford to
buy a brick of gold resting on a bed of diamonds. In our hearts we knew we'd most likely never visit any of those places or
see any of those things for real. But that's what
Toast of the Town
and Ed Sullivan were for. They were for dreaming.

After cleaning the dishes and straightening some, I would leave Grandma Mae and go back home to find my father actively involved
in a pass out from a binge. Booze, or smoke, or pills. Besides the dope, my father had picked up the habit of going days without
washing, weeks without a shave or haircut. On good days he looked like something that'd just come from hopping freight trains.
On bad ones, he looked more animal than man.

In our apartment, in the living room, on the mantel above the never-used fireplace, was a picture of my mom. My father's guilt
kept it standing there. There was no time when I came in for the evening when I would not kiss the picture, say good night
to my mom. As I would go off to bed, in my head or in my heart, I could hear her giving me the same good night she did when
she was alive: “You're a special one, Jackie Mann. Don't let nobody ever tell you otherwise.”

I knew my mom meant well. I wished I could've believed her.

N
ADINE
R
USSELL WAS THE FIRST GIRL
I'd ever noticed. The first I'd noticed as being something besides, something more than just another kid. I was approaching
twelve years old, an age when boys realized girls—once naturally disliked—were real quickly becoming a source of fascination.
Still too young to understand sexual attraction, my feelings for Nadine were of the same variety as my as-of-yet un-understandable
desire to stop at newsstands and stare at pictures of Joan Bennett and Veronica Lake and Lauren Bacall as they glamoured at
me from the covers of movie magazines.

Black women never shone from the covers of movie magazines. Black women didn't get to be movie stars.

Although Nadine had been attending school with me for as long as I could recall, there was just suddenly a day when I felt
a creeping need to be in her presence, to see her big doe eyes and pudgy cheeks that for some reason I couldn't stare at long
enough or hard enough. Just knowing I would see her each day at school juiced me with anticipation. She made me want to wash
properly, brush my teeth, and make sure my hair was well groomed. She made me want to do things that previously, with all
the love in the world, not even my mother could get me to do. She also made me feel very ashamed. Her father had a civil-service
job—good, steady pay, at good government wages. Around my way, that made their family equal to uptown royalty. In her eyes,
my raggedy clothes and worn shoes must have made me look like the poorest of the poor. And when the other kids would joke
at me, call me names, what hurt bad only hurt worse if Nadine was around to hear their abuse and witness my crying. Her watching
me break down cut deeper than anything the kids had to say. She would watch, but Nadine never joined in, never name-called,
never so much as laughed. Sometimes, even, she looked very sad about what was happening.

And those times, when Nadine was showing a little sympathy for me, whatever it was a grade school boy feels for a girl, I
felt for her.

I
WAS COMING HOME
after doing chores at Sergeant Kolawole's. Like every night when I came home from working, I was coming home tired with just
enough energy to eat before sleeping. Inside the apartment my pop was where he always seemed to be: taking up space on the
couch. Hunched over the coffee table, his body was trembling and he moaned some. Experience told me he was coming down off
whatever high had given him altitude. I left him to work things out with himself and went for my room, moving quietly, as
most times Pop was an emotional minefield. Trouble was all a misstep ever got me.

As I passed him I caught Pop's face in the shine of the lamplight, his cheeks marked up with the slickness of tears. The shakes,
the moans; Pop wasn't crashing, he was crying—his tears dripping down onto a photo album spread across the table. I went cautiously
closer, curious the way you're curious at a car wreck, flinching every time my father made a move. But that night he was harmless,
clean of liquor but high on memories fed to him by the photographs.

Pop lifted his head, looked up at me, his eyes as weak as the rest of him. “Jackie?” he asked as if not quite recognizing
his own son. Then, “Jackie,” he cried at me. His hand came up, stretched out. “Come here, boy. Come to your pop.”

I did as told. Fear, not compassion, driving me to the man.

Pop took me in his arms, hugged and held me.

He stank. His clothes, gone days without change, reeking of the Thunderbird he sweated, were a pandemonium of odors. The closest
I'd been to my father in years. All I could think of were his smells.