Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? (3 page)

Sam Cooper had little tolerance for racism. Shortly after Lewis was born, he thumbed his nose at the firmly entrenched Jim Crow policies of Baltimore by marching into a downtown department store to buy his new grandson a blanket. When he felt like it, he would also “dare” to watch movies in segregated theaters, his self-assurance and fair complexion overcoming any indecision on the part of the cashier who might not be sure if he was white or black.

Despite some early childhood clashes with his grandfather, Reginald Lewis always looked up to Sam and Sue Cooper, who he always referred to as Grandpop and Grandmom. On his periodic visits to Baltimore, he would invariably make it a point to visit them. Years later, he would confide to friends that one of his proudest moments was when, as a successful tycoon, he was able to take his grandfather to lunch at the elegant Harvard Club in New York. Lewis truly valued the years he lived with the Coopers.

I behaved and had a knack for being a real boy but one who also respected his elders. Everybody in the Cooper family worked and went to school. We were sort of a first family of the block. My grandmother always had a helping hand for others, whether the need was advice or food.

The Coopers were also known as a tough family. If you fought one, you had to fight all, including the women. I remember several men getting their heads busted bloody for picking on one of the younger members of our clan. Sometimes injustices were done. Once when I was about 7, my best friend’s brother, who was about 14, knocked me around for no reason. I told my uncle, who rounded up a couple of his henchmen to search out the culprit. Unable to find him, they grabbed
his brother—my best friend—and kicked his ass instead. I didn’t have a best friend for a few days, although I did speak out as he got slapped around. My uncles said the guilty brother would get the message. He did.

Early on, Lewis displayed a talent for sports. He was extraordinarily competitive, and it was important to him to get on the playing field, even if most of the time he was much younger and smaller than the other players.

Dallas Street also served as an athletic field, where all the boys played a brand of touch football that made tackle seem mild by comparison. We skinned our knees and elbows as a matter of course. For the big games, usually around the end of fall, we’d go to the park with makeshift helmets; some of us had them and some didn’t. There were also second-hand shoulder pads and assorted equipment that left you feeling unbalanced until the first hit. All my friends were about 12 or 13 and sometimes in those games I would not get to play a lot. The boys were afraid I might get hurt, meaning they would have to answer to my uncles and aunts or even disappoint my grandmother, Mrs. Cooper.

On those occasions when the football in play happened to belong to Lewis and he was on the sidelines, the game was abruptly terminated. If neither team picked him, he would instantly snatch up his ball and leave, oblivious to the angry stares—and comments—of the other children.

By the time he was seven, Lewis’s mother enrolled him in a nearby Catholic school.

I went to St. Francis Xavier, a Catholic elementary school about five blocks from Dallas Street. A couple of my younger aunts went there before me and my youngest uncle tried, but was thrown out on his ear for being too advanced. The Oblate Sisters were the teachers, and they were rough. My mother, who had gone to public school, always bragged about her son going to “parochial school.
”

As I think back on it, the place left a lot to be desired, but the discipline was good and the sports programs, though ragtag, were
pretty good. The nuns would slap you around at the drop of a hat, sometimes for nothing. I really hated this, and let a few know it early with terrible tantrums when I was in the right. So they generally left me alone, especially since the priests liked me a lot because of my grandmother’s work for the church and my sports ability. Science programs were virtually nonexistent at the school, but social studies were very strong. I was about a B or B+ student in later years, but did not feel real strong academically.

St. Francis Xavier was located on Central Avenue in East Baltimore, inside an imposing four-story brick building surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence. It had kindergarten through eighth grade. Before leaving for school, little Reginald Lewis would don a pair of blue pants, white shirt, blue tie, and thick-soled black-and-white leather shoes.

The Oblate Sisters of Providence ran the school and are an Afrocentric order founded in Baltimore in 1829 by Elizabeth Lange, a Haitian immigrant who courageously educated African-American children in her own home during a time when enslaved blacks were forbidden to read and write. The Sisters wore black and white habits with silver crucifixes dangling from their necks. They practiced what has come to be known as “tough love.” Lewis’s aunt, Elaine, recalls that “if you did the wrong thing, you got cracked on the hands with a ruler. You didn’t fool around too much there—some of those nuns were pretty big.”

The mischievous and strong-willed Lewis had several run-ins with the nuns. His lasting impression of Catholic schools was influenced by a put-down he received from a nun who told him that he would never amount to anything more than a carpenter. Years later, Lewis swore to his wife that their children would never set foot in a Catholic school.

Meanwhile, because of his mother’s many jobs, Lewis wasn’t seeing much of her. His aunt Elaine would often babysit him until his mother came home. “I was supposed to watch over him and that was it. He used to get mad, though, when his mother wasn’t home. He used to say to himself, ‘Yeah, she’ll be home when the moon turns blue.’”

Carolyn Lewis was a working mother with a demanding schedule, but she always found time for her son and remained a major influence in his life. “I wanted him to look a certain way at all times. I was really hard on the poor child. When I came home from work, I always wanted him to look spiffy. The poor child used to get around three baths a day.
My mother would bathe him and he would get his clothes changed. So when five o’clock came and I came home, he would greet me. He’d look really great. He wanted dungarees so bad and I said no, you just can’t have them. I think it was on his seventh or eighth birthday, my mother bought him a pair of jeans and he thought that was the greatest thing. I think my mother went up on a shrine when she bought him those jeans!”

One time, Lewis lost several buttons from his shirt while horsing around with a friend. Frantically searching for a quick fix, he ran to the home of a neighbor. “Miss Isabelle,” Lewis implored, “Miss Isabelle, you’re gonna have to sew these buttons on before my mother gets home. My mother is not going to like this.” He was eventually rescued by his grandmother, who changed his shirt.

Lewis revered his mother and he wouldn’t tolerate anyone bad-mouthing her. Dan Henson, a high school friend of Lewis’s, recalls one day when he was playing what’s known as “the dozens,” a timeless game of oneupmanship played in the black community where insults were hurled back and forth between verbal combatants.

Lewis didn’t play the dozens. But one day as he was heading home, Henson goaded a friend of his into taunting Lewis about his mother. “I put him up to talking about Reggie’s mama, because I knew what was going to happen to him,” Henson recounts. At first, Lewis kept on walking and ignored the insults. So Henson whispered to his friend, “Come on man, he didn’t hear you. He didn’t hear you.”

Henson’s friend obliged by shouting something like, “Your mama wears combat boots,” whereupon Lewis turned around and hit him in the throat. “The guy went down and started crying,” Henson recalls with a chuckle.

Lewis generally lived a happy, relatively care-free existence in East Baltimore. He was the center of attention and never lacked for playmates, affection or life’s necessities. Best of all, he had no rivals for the woman he adored the most in life, his mother.

The last part of that equation was about to change dramatically reordering Reginald Lewis’s universe. His mother had met Jean Fugett,
a young soldier based at the Edgewood Arsenal, an Army installation north of Baltimore. Two years later, in February 1951, they were married.

His mother did her best to prepare Lewis. She had always told him, “Through thick and thin, it’s the two of us. You can depend on the Lord, yourself, and me.” She assured him that her marriage “would not diminish my love, because there’s a certain love you have for a child and there’s a certain love you have for a husband. It’s like comparing apples and oranges. I was not asking him for instantaneous love for Butch (Jean Fugett’s nickname), but for respect. And in time, see what it brings. I said, ‘You’re gaining—you’re gaining your own room, you’re gaining the friendship of another person. You haven’t lost anything. You’ve gained a whole lot.’” Years later, Lewis would look back on the era when a new man entered his mother’s life.

My mother remarried when I was about 9 and moved from Grandmom’s to West Baltimore. My stepfather, Jean S. Fugett, Sr., was a terrific man who worked two jobs and also went to college to finish his degree. He taught me that sometimes what appears to be a complicated problem can have a simple solution. After they were married, he could tell for about a month that I was very intense and uneasy around him. Finally, one day we were alone and he asked, “What’s the problem?” I said something like, “I don’t know what to call you!” He said, “That’s simple. Call me Butch, and don’t worry so much.” It was a terrific lesson and we got along great. There is no person I respect more than him.

Fugett remembers Lewis as a typical youngster. “He’d be out in the street playing catch with his uncles or other guys his age or a little older. He always believed in playing with people older than himself. He thought he improved himself faster that way.”

Originally from Westchester, Pa., Fugett felt at ease around Carolyn’s big clan. He left the Army after Carolyn told him that she was “not going to marry anybody who stays in the Army.” He began working at the post office at night and going to school at Morgan State College in Baltimore during the day.

Carolyn Lewis made it clear that her son would always be a major priority in her life. “Butch knew that Reginald would be my main
consideration, along with him, because there were certain things that were due to Reginald—there were certain things that I had placed on my drawing board before I met Butch. Reginald would have the best that I could afford: he would have a good education and he’d be able to go to college wherever he wanted to go. That’s what I had worked toward when I met Butch. He had no problem with that.”

The family left East Baltimore and moved to the West Side, which was more upscale. Fugett used the GI bill to buy a row house at 2802 Mosher Street.

Soon I had a younger brother named Jean Jr. Well, for me this was a big event. I felt a special responsibility toward him and began to plan his future right away. I was about 9 or 10. The other brothers and sisters came rapidly: next Anthony, then the twins, Joseph and Rosalyn, and finally Sharon. They were all about a year and a half apart. These were tough years for my mother. I am very proud that she did not have to worry about taking care of me. I could, and did, take care of myself.

Lewis’s fierce pride and independence sometimes proved problematic. He and his mother possessed strong personalities and occasionally butted heads. “We had plenty of disagreements,” Carolyn says. “My ideas and his ideas didn’t always coincide on how we should do things. He had a strong will and so did I.”

Fed up after one disagreement, a seething Lewis stalked to his room on the second floor of the Fugett home. One of the Fugett children rushed down to tell his mother that Lewis was packing a bag. She went upstairs and asked him what he was doing.

“Well, maybe this is not the place for me,” he replied.

“That may be true, but let’s think about it for a minute. Here, you have your own room and, I would say, a lot of freedom. If you went with your grandmother, you would not have your own room and no freedom. If you went with your father, you would have plenty of freedom, but no privacy. So where does it leave you to go? The only alternative I see is the Baltimore City Jail, where you have nothing. So those are your options. You decide what you want from me, decide what you want from yourself, then you’ll decide where you want to live,” Carolyn Fugett said. She then left the room and went back downstairs.

“I went to my kitchen window and looked out to my garden, because I loved my garden. I was very prayerful that I had said the right thing and left it on the altar of the Lord as to which way it was going to go,” she remembers.

In time, Lewis came downstairs and said, “I’m going out for a while,” and stepped out. “It was never discussed after that,” his mother says.

Early on, Lewis seems to have decided he was on his own in life, perhaps feeling left out as the family increased and his mother had less time for him.

Years later, many of Lewis’s classmates at school and his colleagues at work would view him as a loner. He took on a number of jobs to ensure that no one would ever have to worry about Reginald Lewis being a financial burden.

At 10 he got his first job selling the local black newspaper, the
Baltimore Afro-American.
Displaying unusual discipline and responsibility for someone so young, he increased the route from 10 customers to more than 100. Along with nasty dogs and bad weather, Lewis had to contend with deadbeat subscribers. The task of handling delinquent accounts fell not to him, but to someone more formidable—his mother.