Growing Up (17 page)

One evening at home somebody asked to hear a little banjo music. Uncle Allen, who had a passion for the Grand Ole Opry, was especially persistent. I argued that it was too soon for a public performance, but my mother refused to listen. There was no getting out of it. I sat on a kitchen chair and began stabbing the banjo pick at the strings. Now and then I hit one.

When the performance was over, Aunt Pat, speaking very softly, murmured, “Sweet mother of God!”

Uncle Allen didn’t say anything, but his mouth was firmly locked in the shut position to keep him from bursting into laughter. My mother didn’t say anything either. For a long while she seemed to be thinking. Then she said, “Buddy, don’t feel bad. There’s more to life than playing the banjo.”

But what?

At this time I had decided the only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any. My mother didn’t try to discourage me, though writing was not a career just then that many ambitious parents encouraged their children to plan for.

“Writing runs in the family,” she said. And it seemed to. Her mother had written poetry in the manner of Tennyson. One of her
uncles had written for the
Baltimore American;
with a little more luck Uncle Charlie might have had a career on the
Brooklyn Eagle;
and Cousin Edwin was proof that writing, when done for newspapers, could make a man as rich as Midas.

“Look where Edwin James is today. If Edwin could do it, you can do it.” I heard those words again and again while we toiled together over seventh-grade English homework. She pounced like a tigress if she spotted an error in spelling or grammar, and she spotted many. I was not a sparkling writer. Once, assigned to write a composition about farm produce, I chose to write about wheat. In seventh grade they were always assigning you to write about things like farm produce. I chose to write about wheat, maybe because it seemed less boring than turnips and was easier to spell than rutabagas. My mother examined the finished product in despair.

“You can do better than this, Buddy,” she said.

I didn’t know how. Wheat was not Carl Hubbell pitching against Dizzy Dean at the Polo Grounds or James Cagney walking the last mile to the electric chair—subjects which fascinated me. Wheat was just—wheat. But she was insistent. She found an old geography book preserved from her teaching days for just such an emergency as this. It contained a fine discussion of wheat. I cribbed it furiously, but still failed to satisfy her. She scratched out lines, changed words, added a paragraph or two of her own, then had me rewrite it neatly. The result contained hardly a word or thought from my version.

The teacher was delighted with it. She read it aloud to my classmates. They were unmoved, but I preened shamelessly in the honor of having it read aloud as my own work. The teacher was so pleased she sent it to the
Belleville News
for possible publication as an example of the fine work being done in the school system. Several weeks later, buried inside the newspaper under the one-word headline
WHEAT
, this composition ran on for five or six paragraphs. At the top were the words “By Russell Baker.” It was my first appearance in print. It had been ghost-written by my mother. She bought several copies of the paper, clipped out “Wheat,” put
a few copies of it in the mail to distant relatives, and stored two in her trunk. She had produced a budding contender for Cousin Edwin’s crown of glory.

“Look where Edwin James is today—”

I did look now and then. Edwin was in New York, and from certain places in Belleville I could look out and see the top of the New York skyline piercing the far horizon. I lacked artistic inclination and had no eye for beauty, but, making my magazine rounds on roller skates, when I reached a hilltop vista which looked far out over the Hackensack Meadows, I loved to sit and stare at that fantasy rising miles and miles away through the mists. From that distance it seemed to me as dreamlike as the Emerald City of Oz. I was sitting there daydreaming late one autumn afternoon when Walter came along to beat me up.

I had been beaten up three or four times in the past by Walter for not being Irish. On the first occasion he’d caught me on St. Patrick’s Day not wearing a green necktie and bruised my ribs. Since then he’d fallen into the habit of beating me up whenever our paths crossed. The second time, figuring he hated me for not being Irish, I tried to buy peace by telling him my Aunt Pat was Irish, but it didn’t satisfy him. He seemed to feel a patriotic Hibernian duty to bully me whenever we accidentally met. The result was I hated Walter and had begun to hate everything Irish, though I made an exception for Aunt Pat.

The strange thing about Walter was that he was an absolute loner. Usually you didn’t have to worry about being beaten up unless you ran afoul of a whole gang. Gangs seemed to lust for battle, but a boy you didn’t know never gave any trouble if he was traveling alone. Except for Walter. Walter always traveled alone. He hadn’t a friend in the world so far as I could make out. I never saw him playing with a crowd on an empty lot or heading off to the movies with a pal. He went to the Catholic school in Belleville, and I had some friends there too, but I never saw them in company with Walter. Short, red-haired, not much taller than a fireplug but just as solid, he prowled the streets, taciturn and alone, looking for
blood. Now, finding me sitting on the hilltop admiring the Manhattan skyline, he said, “Get up and fight.”

It was no use trying to jolly Walter out of it. I’d tried that, too, but genial talk didn’t interest him. He didn’t seem to have any talk in him, just grunts and a few basic lines he’d picked up from movies about tough guys. Still, I didn’t get up off the ground. It was dishonorable to hit a man while he was on the ground.

I tried wheedling. “What’d’ya always want to fight for?”

“I don’t like your looks,” he said.

This was a line I recognized from many tough-guy movies.

“I got skates on,” I said. “You can’t fight with skates on.”

Walter bent over, grabbed me by my shirt, pulled me upright, and punched me in the stomach, and I went down again. Since he had now knocked me down from the standing position he was entitled to fall on me and pummel away, and he did, but only around my ribs and stomach. Walter had never punched me in the jaw, nose, or face, which was another strange thing about him. Most street fighters wanted to blacken your eye or bloody your nose. Not Walter. He preferred punishing the torso. I concentrated on trying to push him off me, but he was solid rock. Suddenly I felt his weight being lifted away.

Looking up, I saw my three best friends—Frankie, Nino, and Jerry—taking Walter in hand.

“What’s the idea hitting a guy with skates on?” Frankie demanded. “You ought to have your teeth knocked out for that kind of fighting.”

Any one of them could have done it, too, even to Walter. Or so I thought, for I envied their rippling muscularity. Sons of Italian immigrants, they’d befriended me in the classroom, taken me home to meet their parents, placed me under their protection in the schoolyard, and even engineered my election as president of our homeroom class. Aunt Pat referred to them when they weren’t around as “Russell’s beloved wops.” The slur angered me toward her, but it was true that the affection I felt for them was close to love. Their friendship had brought me to a love of all things
Italian, as Walter’s bullying had caused me to hate all things Irish.

Just now, though, I had a serious problem. Although they had Walter under restraint, there was no possibility they would do what I wished they’d do and beat him senseless. This would violate the code of honor, just as Walter had violated it by hitting me with my skates on. Frankie, Nino, and Jerry weren’t there to avenge me by pounding Walter black and blue but to see that the rules of honor were observed.

“We’ll hold him while you get your skates off, then we’ll see if he can fight clean,” Frankie announced.

This was grim news. I knew too well how effectively Walter could fight, even fighting clean. I didn’t mind being beaten, I was used to that with Walter, but I hated the idea of being humiliated in front of my friends. Still, Frankie was our leader, and his decision was law. I didn’t dare let him see I was too timid to fight Walter.

The truth was, I was always too timid to fight. I hated fighting and did it badly because I lacked the appetite for inflicting pain. I couldn’t bear to cause pain. This weakness went back to my earliest childhood in Morrisonville, when, climbing on the backyard fence one day, I stepped to the ground without looking and crushed a newborn chick under my foot. I’d screamed at the horror of it and wept for an hour in spite of my mother’s assurances that it was all right, I didn’t mean to do it, there were plenty of other new chicks, it happened all the time.

I’d developed a loathing for violence that made me an easy victim for the world’s Walters. Now Frankie’s interference meant I would have to go at Walter with the violence necessary to make it a good fight or be thought a sissy by my friends. Hating Walter’s taciturn Irish stupidity for getting me into this, I unstrapped my skates, got to my feet, and balled my hands into fists.

“You ready now?” Frankie asked.

“Yeah, let him loose.”

Frankie shoved Walter at me and stepped back. Freed, Walter raised his fists and started to circle as we’d seen actors do in movies about boxers. Then he dropped his fists.

“Not fair fighting four against one,” Walter said.

“We’re not fighting,” Nino said.

“We’re just watching,” Frankie said.

Walter looked at the three of them.

“It’s not fair watching,” he said.

“Fight!” Frankie commanded, and gave him another push.

“Watching’s not fair,” Walter howled.

“What’r’ya, yella?” Jerry shouted.

“Not yellow,” said Walter, and he got his fists up again and looked at me with an expression I’d never seen before when he was calmly beating me. Then we had been punisher and victim locked silently in idiot’s solitude. Now he was plainly scared as sick as I was.

We circled each other listlessly, and one of them—Nino or Jerry—yelled to me, “Hit him! He’s yellow!” and for the first time I knew the pleasure of feeling like the brute in battle. I lunged forward and swung as hard as I could at Walter’s face. My fist caught him across the mouth and nose. He cried out. There was blood on his mouth and chin.

“All right,” he shouted, “all right,” and dropped his fists in the recognized signal of surrender. Still, certain words had to be spoken.

“You give up?” I asked.

“Give up,” he said.

The code also required certain civilities once the fight was over.

“Somebody give him a handkerchief,” Frankie said. “His nose is bleeding.”

I gave him mine. Walter clamped it over his nose and walked off the field alone and silent. I didn’t tell Frankie, but I knew Walter could have whipped me easily if they hadn’t destroyed his solitude. After that, though, he never waylaid me again.

My mother didn’t like my being so close to Italian boys. For one thing, friendship with Italians wasn’t likely to help me make something of myself, since in Belleville Italians stood at the bottom of society. Their community, clustered on “The Hill” at the top
of the town, was made up mostly of poor immigrants from southern Italy and Sicily. Though most of my classmates were native-born Americans and spoke English in the streets, they spoke Italian in their homes to parents who clung to the dialects of Naples, Calabria, and Palermo. When I first began to be accepted on The Hill, I marveled that people could talk and understand each other in sounds as meaningless to me as hen cackles. It seemed wonderful that Frankie and Nino could shift so easily from English into a language that was totally beyond me. To my mother this was not a miracle but cause for alarm.

“My God, Russell, they don’t even speak the English language up there,” she said once when I told her I’d been visiting on The Hill.

We quarreled off and on about the Italian problem. She never forbade me to run with Frankie or Nino or Jerry or Carmen or Joe, but for the longest time she tried by wily arts to break those friendships.

If I was off to the Saturday movies with Frankie and Nino she might say, “Why don’t you ever go with any nice boys?”

I knew what she meant by “nice boys”—boys who were not Italian—and the sly knife-thrust of her bigotry infuriated me. Still, I was not cheeky enough to come back at her with the question that had formed in my mind: “How can you go to church every Sunday and talk about loving your neighbor when you hate my friends because they’re Italian?”

Instead I took the mild tack—“I’m sorry you don’t like my friends”—which produced another twist of the knife:

“I’m not saying I don’t like your friends, Buddy. You’ve got a right to pick your own friends, but remember—a man is known by the company he keeps.”

Most likely she didn’t actually hate my friends because they were Italian; she was probably just angry at me for choosing friends who couldn’t pass muster in the world of people who had made something of themselves. Maybe, in a way she didn’t understand, she was angry at them, too, for being as poor as we were and so far down on the social ladder. In this quarrel, though, I had
detected for the first time a flaw in her character. I didn’t know the word “hypocrisy,” but this was the crime I silently charged her with. She insisted we go to church to improve my character, and it angered me that she should slip disgracefully from the gospel of brotherly love after the Sunday singing and praying were over and brotherly love was put to the test of daily life. Until now she had done all the improving on me; now I tried my hand on her. Determined to bring her around on the Italian question, I found ways of luring my friends to the New Street house when I knew she’d be home. This was not easy, but gradually I persuaded Nino and Frankie to come by and sit on our porch steps, and after a while I got them to enter the house.

Their introduction to my mother was a triumph. Frankie, whose manly power to charm women was always impressive, received the highest accolade in my mother’s power. “He’s just like Tom Sawyer,” she said. Frankie had won her over by telling her I was the smartest person in school.