The Big Fight (3 page)

Violence was nothing new to me. I saw it in my home as well, whenever my dad taught my brothers a lesson for acting up, which was quite often, though it didn't keep them in line for very long. His methods of discipline included an extension cord and making us bend down and put our heads between his legs while he hit us with his belt. As a shy kid who mostly stayed out of trouble, I wasn't punished nearly as frequently as my brothers. Yet as much as I detested the violence, I was drawn to it. I admired the power and control held by those who resorted to it.

Worse than the cord or the belt was the stare Daddy gave us whenever we let him down.

The time I remember too well was when he bought some battery-operated race cars for me as a special present. I pestered him every day for weeks, not giving any consideration to how much they might cost for a family squeezing by from paycheck to paycheck. Sick of my nagging, he went to a jar and poured out a large pile of silver dollars. He was as excited to buy the cars as I was to play with them. The fascination didn't last, however, because by the end of the next day, after breaking the tracks, I left the cars scattered throughout the living room as I went to play outside. Daddy did not say a word. He gave me that familiar stare and walked off. I can still see the disappointment on his face and it makes me feel horrible all over again.

Money worries were a constant throughout my childhood. I wore my brothers' hand-me-down clothes and stayed home from school when my class went on field trips to the famous landmarks in D.C. The lack of any savings also prevented me from becoming a member of the local Boy Scout troop. But I wasn't to be denied. I went to the Goodwill shop and purchased an official uniform for fifty cents, a rather significant amount for a kid my age. For weeks, I wore the uniform everywhere, beaming with pride. Pretending was better than nothing. We felt the impact of our situation most acutely during the holidays with the absence of any expensive gifts under the tree.

On one particularly grim Christmas, we received only the apples and oranges Daddy managed to pry away from the S&R stockroom. We didn't complain. We were grateful for anything, understanding that, as African Americans in a white-dominated culture, we were different.

It was not until one hot summer afternoon, when I was eight or nine years old, that I realized
how
different.

I was walking with several friends to the Washington Monument a few miles away when we pulled up to a bar on the city's predominantly white northwest side. The others stayed outside in the shade while I went in to ask for a glass of water.

“Get the fuck out of here,
nigger,
” the bartender said.

I wasn't naïve. I knew what the
N
word meant, but it had come up only in casual conversation with other kids in the hood when we chatted about how the “honkies” took advantage of black folks. Now, for the first time, I heard the word from the lips of a white man.

For some reason, I didn't tell my friends, but when I got home that night I could not wait to share the experience with my parents. They would surely sit me down and explain the long, painful history of racial prejudice in the United States, and how I should cope with similar insults in the future. No explanation, though, came then or ever. Momma shrugged the incident off. She and Daddy believed, as many blacks did who grew up back then, that “if you're white you're right, if you're black step back.”

In her defense, I am certain she was merely trying to protect me from the suffering her generation endured. Still, I've always wished she and my father could have spoken about their anguish. We were living in the America of the mid-1960s and, despite the inspiring words from Dr. King and the courage of the marchers, black and white, who placed their lives on the line in the Deep South, our less-than-perfect country was not going to be less divisive anytime soon.

M
y parents, however, had no trouble confronting each other.

Week after week, they fought, and it normally started after one, or both, had been drinking, and often quite heavily. Nothing was as terrifying as the transformation Momma went through after she had a few drinks. She never drank in front of the children. Instead, she would disappear into her bedroom as the strong leader we depended on and come out an hour or two later angry with the whole world. There was no telling what Momma might say or do, and who might get hurt.

For years, I told myself lies, that my parents fought about money, the root of the conflict between many marriages, black and white. Only in recent years, freed from my own indulgences in alcohol and drugs, and owning up, at last, to the pain I caused my wife and two children from my first marriage, have I been able to examine the full, ugly truth: The fights between my mom and dad were about other women. My dad couldn't get enough of them.

I began to remember scenes from my childhood that I had long buried, of catching him in town with a woman I did not recognize. And I was not the only witness; Daddy did not try to keep these affairs a secret. It was almost as if he wanted Momma to find out or didn't care. The worst part, and I know I will seem racist, was that some of the women he fooled around with were white. Adultery is adultery: What difference should it make what color they were? Plenty, I felt at the time. By dating white women, he was not only hurting Momma and the family; he was altering my whole perception of race relations. I had grown up believing black men dated only black women and now I didn't know what to think.

The pushing and shoving between my parents was intense, with Momma the more aggressive one, tossing pots and pans. For a Godfearing, devout member of the church choir, Getha Leonard was one tough lady. People assume that I inherited my fighting spirit from my dad. It actually came from her. I have never met anyone with more determination, and that includes Roberto Duran, Tommy Hearns, and Marvin Hagler.

As a kid, I felt that it was my responsibility to keep my parents from killing each other. I often threw my scrawny little body between them, as a ref does, to break them up. Daddy at least knew enough to never hit Momma back.

In calmer moments, he showed her how to use a switchblade. The lessons did not go to waste. When Momma was eight months pregnant with me, according to my brother Kenny, she was walking up the steps in front of our apartment in Wilmington when a woman from the same building, for some unknown reason, started to slap her around.

“As long as I live, I will get you,” Momma supposedly said.

It took only a few months. Momma saw the woman about to enter the complex one day, got her knife and went after her. The woman fell down and screamed, but survived. Momma, I was told, went back upstairs as if nothing happened. On a different occasion, she attacked another woman who kept demanding the money she owed her.

Then there was the time she used the knife on Daddy.

I was six or seven, and we were still living in D.C. The noise coming from the kitchen was louder than usual, but when I made it to the living room, he was already on his way out the door. With a knife in his back.

I followed him outside as he slowly climbed the stairs to a neighbor's apartment on the third floor.

“Can you pull this out?” he asked. The neighbor did.

The wounds were not severe enough for him to seek medical attention. Knowing my dad, he would have had to be on his deathbed to go to the hospital.

He never lost control, except when he thought someone was trying to steal his wife. One day, a stranger followed Momma home from the store. She was an extremely attractive woman, with jet-black hair down to her shoulders. The man was downstairs in front of our apartment complex. Daddy grabbed the man and threw him out into the street. When he tried to hide under a car, Daddy kicked him and pulled him out. The man started running, Daddy chasing him.

“Don't kill him,” people shouted.

The man was lucky Daddy listened. I saw the entire beating and came away proud of my father. I must have told the story to everyone in school the next day.

Through the years, the two of them managed to remain together, although fresh new disputes would occasionally tear us all apart.

The most memorable one occurred one night in the early seventies, when Momma hurriedly packed our Ford LTD around midnight to take me, my sisters Sharon and Sandy, and my two-year-old niece, Ting, to my grandmother Nettie's home in South Carolina, while my other siblings stayed behind in Maryland with Daddy. Momma was exhausted, but determined, as only she could be, to get out of town. It wasn't long before everyone fell asleep, including her. At around two A.M., sitting in the front seat, I was woken up by the sound of the car careening off the road, rocking back and forth, its lights flashing on one object after another, all of us screaming. Then came the crash. I don't know if I was ever unconscious. The next thing I recall was seeing blood on the windshield, the steering wheel bent, and the jack from the trunk cutting right through the backseat. It was a miracle the jack didn't stab my sisters or my niece and that we suffered only minor injuries.

Momma, her whole lip split and looking as if it were about to peel off, took over, ordering everyone out of the car, now tipped in a ditch. She grabbed my sisters and Ting and we started walking in the dark down a dirt road, knocking on doors, scared to death. No one was home at the first place we stopped, or they didn't bother to answer. At the next place, a nice couple let us in and an ambulance arrived to take everyone to the hospital. From there, we called Kenny, who drove Roger, my sister Bunny, and my dad in his Volkswagen to take us home. How nine of us squeezed into Kenny's bug remains a mystery.

The car accident, along with the fights between my parents, gave me nightmares for decades. Forty years later, I still can't cope with any yelling and screaming, though I was unable to avoid it during my own doomed marriage. My ex-wife, Juanita, and I were no different from my mother and father.

 

 

 

I
hadn't reached puberty and yet felt like I had seen enough violence to last a lifetime, from the fighting in the hood to the fighting at home. Nowhere did I feel completely safe, knowing the next sign of danger could arise anytime. The only escape was the fictional world I read about in comic books or invented in my head.

One spring afternoon, my survival was more at stake than ever, and it was my own fault. I went for a walk with a few friends along the creek near our house in Seat Pleasant when I slipped on the rocks and fell into the freezing water, which was at a higher level than normal after a week of heavy storms.

Unable to swim, and in a state of panic, I grabbed on to whatever objects I could—branches, logs, anything. It did no good. The current was too powerful, dragging me downstream with alarming speed toward a hole about fifty yards away where I might have easily drowned. Somehow, I clawed my way to the edge, walked through the woods, and was soon carried off by a friend's older brother to safety, to the relief of family members who had gathered in a nearby field after word spread through the neighborhood. I was brought home, where my mother put cold towels on my head. My lungs filled with water, I threw up for the rest of the day. We didn't go to the hospital because we couldn't afford to. Looking back, the experience taught me I could overcome any challenge, which was to prove vital in the years ahead.

 

 

 

I
t was six or seven years after the beating I took at the No. 2 Boys Club in D.C. when Roger convinced me to give boxing another try.

At first, I didn't see the point of beating up another human being, and I could not imagine I'd be any good at it. But Roger, three years older, did not stop nagging me, and besides, I was sick of him being the bully in our family. He used to hit me whenever I wasn't prepared for it, not terribly hard, but hard enough to make me cry. Learning how to fight, I figured, might be the way to stop him. I was also encouraged by my best friend, Derrik Holmes, who took up the sport a few months earlier. Derrik was the coolest kid I knew in school, a tremendous athlete, and a stud with the girls. If Derrik thought boxing was a worthwhile pursuit, there must be something to it. I joined the new program at the rec center a few blocks from our house.

The program was not exactly state-of-the-art. There was no actual ring and there would not be one until 1976. Our practices were held on four mats spread out on a hard wooden floor, which made maintaining a proper balance important, and they were cut short to make room for basketball. We used only one speed bag, two heavy bags, and a cracked dresser mirror for shadowboxing. The next Joe Louis wasn't coming out of this dive. Of course, the way I appeared on that first day, it would not have made a difference if I showed up at the famous Stillman's Gym in New York. I held my hands close together in front of my face in the familiar fighting pose of John L. Sullivan, the heavyweight champion from the late 1800s. I looked ridiculous.