Family lore had it that to start a new life for her family, Zonia Wilson walked all the way from North Carolina to Pittsburgh. That story was surely apocryphal, but by the late 1930s, she and her children had settled alongside the other black migrants and white immigrants in the Hill District. In her late teens, Daisy had a round, freckled face, slightly buck teeth, and an already womanly figure. While she was shopping at a grocery store one day, a trim white man with a high forehead and a German accent began chatting with her. Daisy shyly turned away, but a few days later, when she saw him again, she smiled and answered back. His name was Frederick August Kittel, and he went by “Fritz.” Born in Bohemia, Austria, he had moved to Pittsburgh after World War I. Now, in his early forties, he was a baker by trade. Soon they became lovers and moved together into a cold-water flat above a store on Bedford Avenue and started a family. First came a girl they named Freda and then another, Linda Jean. But Fritz Kittel sorely wanted a male child, and when a third girl, Donna, arrived next, he didn’t hide his disappointment. “Another split-ass,” he sneared.
Finally, on April 27, 1945, Daisy gave birth to a boy. Fritz insisted on giving him his name—Frederick August Kittel Jr.—and the family nicknamed him “Freddy.” He had his mother’s broad face, freckles, and light mocha skin, and she doted on him. By the time Freddy was four, Daisy had taught him to read. By the time he was five, she had taken him to the Carnegie Library on Wylie Avenue to get his first library card. The first book he read by himself was Curious George. Before long, he had devoured all of the Hardy Boys books and his sisters’ Nancy Drews. At ten, he started to read the Bible, resolving to finish the entire Old and New Testaments by the time he was grown.
Although Daisy wasn’t Catholic, she wanted Freddy to be educated by nuns. She enrolled him in the Holy Trinity School at the corner of Crawford Street and Centre Avenue for third grade. In sixth grade, Sister Catherine encouraged Freddy to try his hand at poetry. Before the year was out, he was writing romantic odes to the girls in his class. He also delighted in infuriating the nuns with his precocious curiosity. “When they said no one could figure out the Holy Trinity, I was like, ‘Why not?’ ” he later recalled. “I instantly wanted to prove that it could be done.”
Freddy’s experience of his father was far less happy. By the time his first son was born, Fritz Kittel’s chronic drinking had curdled his relationship with Daisy Wilson. He had moved into a hotel and visited the family only for days or nights at a time. When he showed up, it was usually with flour-covered sacks stuffed with fragrant rolls and doughnuts to appease his wife and entice his children. But then Fritz would retreat with a newspaper and a gallon jug of Muscatel, demanding silence and drinking himself into a stupor. In the temper tantrums that sometimes ensued, baked goods were hurled across the apartment, and bricks thrown at the second-floor windows. Asked later to cite a warm memory of his father, his namesake recalled the day they went downtown together to shop for a pair of Gene Autry cowboy boots that Freddy coveted. But then as they entered the shopping district, his father handed him some coins to put in his pocket. “Jingle it!” Fritz said—to let the white folks know he had money.
Left to raise six children on her own—two more boys, Richard and Edwin, came after Freddy—Daisy did her best to steer them away from trouble while keeping their minds and bellies full. She ceased working as a cleaning lady and made do with welfare payments so that she wouldn’t have to leave home. Every Monday evening at seven, she gathered the family around the radio for the weekly reading of the Rosary. Daisy encouraged her children to listen to Art Linkletter’s People Are Funny show and the Top Forty music countdown, promising a nickel to the child who guessed which song would be Number One. At the time, their block of Bedford Avenue, on the border between the Lower and Middle Hill, was still mixed, and the Kittel children made friends with white neighbors as well as black. The girls sometimes helped out Bella Siger, the Jewish lady who ran Bella’s Market, the store in front of their building. The boys played with the sons of the Italian shoe repairman next door, Mr. Butera, in a tiny backyard as Daisy kept watch from the kitchen window.
Daisy’s closest friends were a black couple who lived across the street, Charley and Julie Burley. With his muscular build, thick eyebrows, and smartly parted hair, Charley was a well-known figure on the Hill, a former boxer who had almost gone all the way to the top. As a teen, he had worked his way up the city ranks to a national Golden Gloves title. As a professional, he had defeated the Cocoa Kid to win the World Colored Welterweight Championship. But Burley had never earned a shot at a non-Negro title. Some said it was because contenders from Billy Conn to Sugar Ray Robinson ducked him; others whispered that it was because he was too proud to play the game and throw fights. A gifted baseball player, Charley had also tried out for the Homestead Grays but never made the team. By the late 1940s, he was working as a garbage collector for the city of Pittsburgh. But he still dressed the part of a champion, with his Stetson hats and Florsheim shoes, and exuded the toughness that had kept him from ever being knocked out in almost a hundred pro bouts. Disappointed by his white father, Freddy Kittel came to idolize Charley Burley and see him as a model of the kind of man he wanted to be.
Around this time, Freddy received another lesson in standing tall from his mother. One night, the family was listening to the radio when a contest was announced. A Speed Queen washing machine would go to the first person to call the station and correctly identify a popular advertising jingle. As a single mother who did laundry for six children by hand, scrubbing their clothes on a washboard and hanging them out to dry, Daisy could have used the help. And when the announcer read the slogan—“When it rains, it pours”—she recognized it immediately. There was no phone in the house, so she handed a dime to one of her daughters and told her to go to a pay phone outside and call in the answer: Morton’s Salt.
Daisy won the contest, but she never got the Speed Queen. When Morton’s discovered that she was black, the company sent her a certificate to buy a used washing machine at the Salvation Army instead.
Julie Burley urged her friend to use it. “Daisy, you got all them kids, what difference does it make?” Julie said. “Take the washing machine.”
But Daisy refused, and she gave her son a prideful explanation he would never forget. “Something is not always better than nothing,” she told him.
By the time Freddy was finishing grade school, Daisy had met and married a new man. David Bedford was a laborer for the Pittsburgh sewer department. He was black, and a book reader like Freddy, and at first the boy welcomed the new relationship. Like Charley Burley, Bedford was a man who carried the heavy weight of disappointment. A football star in high school, he hoped to get an athletic scholarship to college and study to become a doctor. But colleges didn’t recruit black players at the time, and Bedford was too poor to afford tuition. So he foolishly tried to rob a store and shot a man in the attempt. He was found guilty of murder and spent the next twenty-three years in prison before emerging to salvage what he could from the rest of his life. But Bedford never spoke of his past, and Freddy only learned of it after his stepfather had passed away.
In the mid-1950s, as Freddy was nearing his teens, an alarming rumor swept through the Holy Trinity school: the Hill District was going to be torn to the ground, and everyone who lived there would have to move. Sam Howze, an older black student who had befriended Freddy, recalled the impact the news had on them and their classmates. “To kids, this was frightening,” he said. “Will I have a new school? Will I have to find new friends? Why are they tearing our neighborhood down?” One day, Howze’s parents announced that they were moving their eleven children from Fullerton Street to Bedford Dwellings, the housing project that had been built on the site of the old Greenlee Field, where the Pittsburgh Crawfords once played. Soon afterward, Freddy learned that his family was relocating even further away, to a neighborhood called Hazelwood along the Monongahela River to the south.
For Freddy, accustomed
to the friendly mixing on the Hill, the move would bring his first experience of being singled out for the color of his skin. Hazelwood was home to a Jones & Laughlin steel mill and the European immigrants who worked there, and they were not happy about the sudden influx of black families from the Hill. One day, a brick was hurled through the window of Freddy’s new home. When it came time for high school, his mother sent him to Central Catholic High, the huge parochial school run by the Christian Brothers three miles away in the Oakland neighborhood. As a freshman, Freddy was placed in a homeroom class in which he was the only black student. On many mornings, he would arrive at school to find the words “Go home, nigger!” and other hostile messages scrawled on his desk.
Beginning to grow into the broad-chested physique he would have as a man, Freddy tried out for the football team. But he soon quit, infuriating his stepfather and chilling their relationship. Instead, Freddy began to study the art of boxing, to survive his daily brawls on the way to and from school. The Christian Brothers sometimes had to send him home in a taxicab, but that did him no good in the mornings, when bullies awaited him along the route from Hazelwood. One day, his homeroom class was reciting the Pledge of Allegiance when Freddy heard the student in front call him “nigger.” As soon as the words “with liberty and justice for all” were out of his mouth, he recalled, Freddy decked the boy. The two students were taken to the principal’s office, and when Brother Martin told Freddy he was being sent home, Freddy responded that wouldn’t be coming back.
He transferred to Connelly Trade School, a vocational academy for students from across the city. Even though the school was near his old home, on Bedford Avenue on the edge of the Hill, Freddy was even more miserable than he had been at Central Catholic. The reading assignments were at a fifth-grade level. Making tin cups out of sheet metal bored him to death. He treated his instructors with contempt, and they returned it. The breaking point came one day in shop class, when Freddy used a T-square to hammer a thumbtack. Furious at the indifference to his tools, the teacher punched Freddy and knocked him to the ground. Rising to his feet, Freddy shoved the instructor against the blackboard. “Give me a pink slip,” he said. “I’m leaving this school.”
Next Freddy enrolled in Gladstone High, the local school across the street from his home in Hazelwood. He was placed in the tenth grade but forced to repeat ninth-grade subjects he had never finished. More bored than ever, he sat in the back of his classes, doodling and daydreaming. The one subject that held his attention was history, which happened to be taught by a black man called “Mr. B.” by his students. Freddy became particularly engaged when Mr. B assigned the class to write a paper about a foreign leader. Freddy had always had a fascination with Napoleon, identifying with the story of the self-made soldier who rose to become an emperor. He threw himself into researching the subject, checking out dozens of books from the library and paying his sister to type up a twenty-page paper with quarters he had earned cutting the lawn of a neighbor.
The day after Freddy turned in the assignment, Mr. B asked him to stay after class. On the title page of the Napoleon paper, the teacher had written two letters: an “A+” and an “E” (which at the time was sometimes used to indicate a failing grade, because it came after “D.”) “I’m going to give you one of these grades,” Mr. B said. Then the teacher asked Freddy to prove that one of his older sisters hadn’t written the paper for him. Insulted, Freddy pointed out that the paper had a bibliography, and that Mr. B. never asked white students to prove their authorship. “Unless you call everybody in here . . . even the ones that went and copied out of the encyclopedia word for word, I don’t feel I should have to prove anything,” Freddy said. Mr. B circled the “E” and handed the paper back to Freddy, who promptly ripped it apart, threw the tattered pages into a trash can, and stormed out of the school, vowing never to return.
That night, however, Freddy had second thoughts. He dreaded breaking the news that he had dropped out of yet another school to his stepfather, who was still furious with him for quitting the football team at Central Catholic, and to his mother, who dreamed of his becoming a lawyer. So the next day, Freddy went back to the school with a basketball and spent the morning dribbling outside the principal’s office. Perhaps, he imagined, the principal would have heard about the injustice that had been done and would rectify it by inviting him back to school. But the principal never appeared, and Freddy eventually picked up the basketball and left Gladstone High for good.
Freddy had run out of places to go—except one. A year earlier, on another walk home from playing basketball, he had wandered into the Hazelwood branch of the Carnegie Library. In a corner he had found a shelf marked “Negro,” stacked with some thirty books. He picked out one entitled the The Collected Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar and became so fascinated with the poet’s unusual use of black dialect that he took the copy home and forgot to return it. He browsed a sociology text and came upon a phrase that captivated him: “the Negro’s power of hard work.” Freddy had never thought of sheer industriousness as being a special power, but the idea captivated him, and the next time he went to mow his neighbor’s lawn he did so with a proud fury.
At Gladstone High, Freddy had made the acquaintance of an elderly drunkard who hung around outside the school. Usually they just traded playful insults, but one day the man pulled a novel out of his coat and recommended it to Freddy. On his next trip to the Hazelwood library, Freddy found a copy of the book—Invisible Man—and became instantly engrossed in Ralph Ellison’s haunting tale of a promising black valedictorian led astray by bigoted white authority figures and selfish black militants.
Without telling his mother that he had quit school, Freddy began going to the library instead. He took the long walk each morning to the main branch of the Carnegie Library in Oakland, the massive marble building that was one of the very first of the more than ten thousand libraries that Andrew Carnegie funded with the fortune derived from Pittsburgh’s steel mills. Day after day, until the hour at which he would have come home from school, Freddy wandered the stacks picking up volumes that caught his eye. He read the poems of Langston Hughes and the novels of Richard Wright. He read the autobiography of the playwright Moss Hart. He read accounts of the Civil War. He read the Constitution of the United States and the Emancipation Proclamation. He read academic textbooks on theology and anthropology; instruction manuals for automobiles, airplanes, trains, and boats; guides for pottery-making and table manners—more than three hundred books in all.
Eventually Daisy discovered that Freddy was no longer in school, and she was furious. She saw it as a betrayal of all the sacrifices she had made for her talented son, and she turned against him with a vengeance. She banished Freddy to the basement of the house in Hazelwood and told him that he would never amount to anything. She announced that he was no longer welcome at the dinner table, and locked groceries in her room so that he would have to forage for himself. Eventually the atmosphere grew so tense that Freddy decided to escape by enlisting in the Army. Setting his sights on becoming an officer, he took the test for Officer Candidate School and got the second highest score in his battalion. But when he was informed that he would have to wait two years to start the program—officers had to be at least nineteen, and Freddy was still only seventeen—he lost interest in the military. Although the circumstances aren’t clear, he managed to get himself discharged after only one year.
Freddy traveled across the country to California and worked in a pharmacy until, in early 1964, he learned that his father was gravely ill. By then, Daisy Wilson had divorced David Bedford and returned to Fritz Kittel, finally marrying him and taking his name. But when Freddy returned to Pittsburgh to help his mother and sisters look after his father, he discovered that Fritz’s mind was gone. He could tell vivid stories of fighting in the Argonne forest during World War I but no longer recognized his own son. Fritz’s death would come within a year, and it was then that his namesake rented a room in a boardinghouse on Crawford Stree
t on the Hill and decided that it was time to get serious about the calling that he had chosen for himself.
Freda, the oldest of his sisters, was in college now, at Fordham University in New York, and she sometimes paid Freddy to write English papers for her. She had just sent him $20 for a paper he had entitled “Two Violent Poets: Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg.” On the first of April, three weeks before his birthday, Freddy took the money to McFerran’s, a typewriter store in downtown Pittsburgh. He picked out a Royal Standard typewriter advertised in the window for $20 and persuaded the salesman to sell it to him without adding tax. With no change for a cab or the trolley, he walked the heavy piece of metal all the way to Crawford Street. As soon as he was back in his room, he put the typewriter on a small table, fed a sheet of paper into the platen roller, and poked out his name: “Frederick A. Kittel.”
It didn’t sound much like a writer’s name, he thought, so he started to play with other variations. He shortened his name to “Fred. A. Kittel.” He substituted his mother’s maiden name: “Frederick A. Wilson.” Finally he dropped the first name and inserted the middle name he had inherited from his father: “August Wilson.”
He liked how that sounded and the way it looked on the page. So it was settled. For everyone but his family and his oldest friends, to whom he would remain “Freddy,” Frederick August Kittel Jr. would now be known as August Wilson. And with that name, he set out to make his way as a writer on the Hill, the once proud neighborhood whose bottom half had just been torn down and whose middle heart would soon be burned out.
• • •
RICHARD KING MELLON LIKED to say that it was his wife, Connie, who gave him the resolve to remake Pittsburgh. World War II had just ended, and the heir to the Mellon banking fortune had brought his bride of eight years, a banker’s daughter and equestrienne from New York, back to his birthplace after spending several years working for the War Department in Washington. On their first night in town, they checked into the penthouse suite at the William Penn Hotel downtown. As Connie looked out the window, the sky was so dark with smoke and ash from the steel plants along the river that she could barely make out the lit silhouette of the Mellon National Bank just down the block.
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