People can’t even walk the streets.
Because they never know who in the world
They’re gonna meet.
For that mean, green, almighty dollar.
For the love of money
People will lie and they will cheat.
For the love of money
People don’t care who they hurt or beat.
For the love of money
A woman will sell her precious body.
For a small piece of paper
It carries a lot of weight.
For that mean, mean, green almighty dollar.
Money is the root of all evil.
Do funny things to some people.
Give me a nickel, brother.
Can you spare a dime?
Money can drive some people wild.
The mean green was all around them then, fluttering in the breeze, ripe for the plucking. It was over on Boylston and Newbury streets, where the rich folks did their shopping at those cute little boo-tiques. It was up at the Sheraton-Boston, where conventioneers waddled through the lobby, wallets bulging in their pockets. It was along Massachusetts Avenue, where white Johns came looking for a little black action. And it was just across Columbus Avenue, where white couples had bought up the old rooming houses, pushed poor folks into the streets, then built their own little suburb in the heart of the city. Everywhere they looked, Richard and his friends saw money, white money, just waiting to be ripped off by bad dudes who knew how to hustle.
The gang which began on Holyoke Street and later hung out in the Soul Center was never closely knit. Around a core of four or five regulars assembled another dozen or so teenagers, from as far afield as the Castle Square housing project. Rarely operating as a unit, they split into two-man teams for their forays into the white community.
Richard and his partner prowled the white perimeter, seeking targets of opportunity. They might trail a likely looking mark for several blocks, waiting for a dark, deserted stretch, only to have him enter a crowded store or restaurant. Once, as they were about to strike, their target turned and glared at them as if he knew exactly what they were up to. Startled, they abandoned the chase.
One cold November evening on the Prudential Center plaza, they pulled off their first successful holdup. Lurking in the darkened shopping arcade, they noticed a white businessman gazing into a store window. They were so nervous they shouted simultaneously, “Give me your money!” Fortunately, the businessman was even more terrified than they were. His voice quavered as he begged them not to hurt him, his hands shook as he handed over a wallet containing eighty dollars. It was all so absurdly easy the boys had to laugh.
Once they got the hang of it, they realized they had everything working in their favor. Like the Vietnamese jungles to the Vietcong, the streets of the South End were their natural habitat, a tangled wilderness from which they could launch deadly ambushes, in which they could quickly take refuge. Fleeing from the Back Bay into the South End, for example, they knew which streets dead-ended at the railroad tracks, creating perilous cul-de-sacs, and which led to pedestrian footbridges, providing ideal escape hatches. Or, coming from the other direction, they knew which doors of Methunion Manor were usually left open, leading to a friendly apartment. They knew every corner and alley, fence and fire escape, for blocks around, while their white victims, like a clumsy army of occupation, stuck to the floodlit thoroughfares.
Again, like guerrillas, they kept their prospective targets under observation, learning their habits, and patterns of movement. Priding themselves on knowing far more about the interloper than he did about them, they cased the liquor and fancy food stores, watching the routes that whites took coming and going. They watched for men who drove foreign sports cars, wore suits, and carried briefcases, women with fur coats and gold bracelets. They kept an eye out for Chinese, who were said to carry lots of cash because they distrusted banks; they shunned Italians, who might be tied to the Mafia; they scoured the alleys for winos, whom they called “Irish,” as in “Let’s go rob Irish.”
Of all the whites who strayed onto their turf, the wealthiest were the season ticket holders at the Boston Symphony. Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday night during the winter season, they paraded through the Greek portico of Symphony Hall in their Chesterfield coats and pearl necklaces. Extra police patrolled Massachusetts and Huntington avenues on those occasions, but Richard and his pals learned to linger in the deserted side streets, waiting for the concertgoers to return to their cars. You could strike it rich back there, as Richard and David did one evening when they relieved an aging music lover of his elegant gold watch and a butter-soft calfskin billfold containing $350.
Richard didn’t suffer greatly from remorse. Whites could always get more money, he reckoned; the guy he took $100 from probably had $50,000 stashed away in his safe-deposit box. Anyway, as every merchant knew, you couldn’t afford to have a heart in business. If ripping off white folks was your business, that’s what you did, you ripped off white folks.
The easiest targets of all were the white hunters who cruised Massachusetts Avenue looking for black prostitutes. Afraid to draw attention to themselves, they invariably surrendered their money with little protest. But the pimps on the avenue resented the holdup men, fearing they would drive away the white trade. One night, after Richard and his partner had moved in on a meek little hunter with a fat wallet, a pimp named Sweet Lou started hollering at them, “Hey, don’t do that shit around here!”
“What the hell you talkin’ about, man?” shouted Richard, who loathed pimps for selling black girls to white men. “Look at the stuff you’re doing out here. Don’t tell us what to do!”
“I’ll kick your ass,” blustered Sweet Lou.
“Kick whose ass?” Richard said, advancing on the pimp. “We do all the ass-kicking round here.”
“Hey, brother,” the pimp hollered, retreating down the sidewalk, “I didn’t mean nothing. Okay? No offense.”
Richard never carried a gun—that was for the professionals—but he often came armed with a fruit knife, a sharp little shiv that scared the hell out of his victims. Working the side streets off Columbus Avenue, his partner would grab the mark around the neck, yoking him with his elbow, while Richard advanced on him with the fruit knife, whispering, “Give it up, man, give it up.” People usually complied with alacrity.
He had to be very careful, though. If the cops ever caught him with a weapon like that, his chances of a felony conviction would double or triple. One night, they’d held up a guy on Worcester Square and were sauntering down Massachusetts Avenue when a policeman yelled, “Hey you two, stop right there!”
With a reflexive jerk, Richard tossed the knife onto a grocery store roof.
The cop never noticed. “Okay,” he bellowed. “You know what to do. Up against the car. Spread those goddamn legs.”
Finding nothing, the cop let them go with a grudging apology. “Funny,” he growled. “You look just like some guys we’re out to get.”
As they stalked the South End in search of appropriate targets, their attention was inevitably drawn to the town houses which had recently replaced the rooming houses along many of its side streets. From the darkened sidewalks on a winter’s evening, their bay windows blazed with light, warmth, and un-imagined luxury: chandeliers, oil paintings, African carvings, French tapestries, Chinese vases, ivory chess sets, leather couches, marble fireplaces topped with silver candelabra, all the insignia of the new urban middle class. Richard and his friends had never glimpsed such finery before, except in the movies. It stirred complicated feelings—envy, resentment, anger, and desire. Before long, they set out to get some of it for themselves.
Having graduated from purse snatching to mugging, Richard now specialized in burglary. The gang’s best “B and E” man, he prided himself on his spiderlike agility and deft touch. Strictly a second-story man, he let the chumps have the first floor, where you ran the greatest risk of setting off a burglar alarm or being s
potted from the street. He’d go up a fire escape or over a rooftop, jimmy a window or break through a skylight, and be in and out in five minutes, taking anything he could get into his canvas bag—cash, jewelry, silver, a television set, or radio. Occasionally, he and his friends pulled off something more ambitious. Once, they broke into a burned-out building and, with ropes and pulleys, removed an air conditioner from an upstairs window. Later, they even tried their hand at burglaries in the western suburbs. They’d borrow a friend’s car, ride into a preselected neighborhood, and break into a house which looked promising. Occasionally, somebody would be home and they’d have to run for it. On the streets of such overwhelmingly white communities, their black faces often drew curious stares and once a motorcycle cop demanded their driver’s license and registration. But, incredibly enough, Richard was never arrested.
His younger brother wasn’t so fortunate. George had a talent for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In July 1972, he was caught in a South End riot triggered when police waded into a disturbance at the Puerto Rican Day celebration. Early that evening, he was standing with friends on Washington Street when a police car pulled to the curb. The rest of the crowd scattered, but the police arrested George, charging him with being a disorderly person and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon—for allegedly throwing a beer can at a policeman’s chest. George insisted he’d never thrown anything, the officer failed to show up in court, and the charges were dismissed.
Quieter and more studious than his older brother, George had come under the influence of an extraordinary teacher. Harriet Schwartz, a veteran of the Boston public schools, had escaped the corrosive cynicism that afflicted many of her colleagues. Appalled by the fruitless treadmill of Boston’s black schools, she was determined to find some way out for her most promising students. Every day after school, and all through one February vacation, she tutored six of them in math and English, helping to prepare them for private, suburban, or special city schools. In September 1970, George was admitted to West Roxbury’s predominantly white Robert Gould Shaw School, named after the white colonel who had led Massachusetts’ black regiment in the Civil War. From there he moved automatically into Roslindale High, another predominantly white school, where he compiled a satisfactory record in the college preparatory program.
But every day he came home from school to the raw realities of Methunion Manor, and soon he was hanging out with Richard’s crowd. Before long, he too was a street hustler—snatching purses, picking pockets, later graduating to car theft and mugging. The brothers rarely pulled off a job together—Richard considered George unreliable, less committed to the street life, more likely to make a mistake. So George paired off with another kid, operating much as Richard and his friend did, waiting until their victim was alone on a deserted street, moving in from front and rear, grabbing a wallet, a handbag, or jewelry, then fleeing back to the refuge of Methunion Manor. Like Richard, George never used a gun, but, after several of his marks put up a struggle, he began brandishing a knife to great effect.
He might have gone on from there to more serious crimes had he not been arrested in October 1973. He was running that day with the best known of the South End hustlers, a hood named Anthony Black, who was de facto leader of the Soul Center gang. Anthony’s father, Vernon, lived in Methunion Manor, where he ran a “trick pad,” an apartment to which prostitutes took their customers. At an early age, when Vernon was running a similar establishment on Durham Street, Anthony had learned to prey on his father’s customers. He’d watch as the prostitutes pulled up to the building in the customer’s car, wait until they’d gone inside, then break into the car and take anything he could find. Afraid of being mugged, the white hunters invariably stashed their wallets under a seat or in the glove compartment and Anthony would make off with a fistful of bills. From that he graduated to mugging and armed robbery. Though barely five feet four and only a hundred pounds, he was a tough, cocky bantam, known to police as “the little Napoleon.” Already a legend up and down Columbus Avenue, he had earned a faithful following among the neighborhood kids.
On October 21, 1973, one of Anthony’s gang stole a pocketbook from a woman at the Midtown Motor Inn. In it they found the key to her car parked in the motel lot and they decided to take that too. As the oldest member along that day, George was delegated to drive. Rolling along Huntington Avenue near Copley Square, he failed to see a red light suspended high above the intersection and at once a police car pulled him over. George didn’t have a license, but he was doing a pretty good job of bluffing when one of the policemen glanced in the back seat and spotted Anthony Black. “Oh, Mr. Black,” he said. “We know Mr. Black quite well. Do you gentlemen mind stepping out here?” George was booked on auto theft. After the Reverend Bobby McClain testified on his behalf, the judge suspended sentence and gave him two years’ probation.
By then, Rachel’s third-oldest son, Freddie, was giving signs of becoming the family’s most dedicated hustler. At the age of fifteen, he was already spending a lot of time around the Paradise Lounge on Tremont Street. The South End’s most notorious bar, the Paradise was a hangout for drug pushers, gamblers, numbers runners, pimps, prostitutes, stickup men, enforcers, and fugitives of all sorts. Day and night, it was the place to get a fix, pick up a woman, make a bet, buy a weapon, fence some loot, exchange information on upcoming jobs, or get into a brawl. It was no place for a fifteen-year-old boy to be hanging out.
A social worker visiting Rachel in November 1973 reported that she had been “somewhat upset and depressed lately because her children are getting into all sorts of trouble.”
If the boys were in trouble with the law, the girls were in trouble with boys. All through those teenage years, Cassandra and Little Rachel energetically experimented with sex. On spring and summer evenings, they hung out with a crowd of neighborhood kids at the corner of Carleton and Holyoke streets—smoking pot, drinking beer, “foolin’ around.” Night after night, Big Rachel angrily hauled them home.
On Thanksgiving Day 1974, after dinner at the home of Rachel’s sister Alva, the family cleared the living room, put a stack of rhythm and blues on the stereo, and began to dance. As Big Rachel watched her daughters strut the floor, she noticed how heavy Little Rachel had grown. Suddenly she thought: That girl is pregnant, my thirteen-year-old daughter is pregnant! Rushing to Alva’s room, she flung herself on the bed, where Alva found her an hour later. The sisters summoned Little Rachel, who reluctantly confessed her condition.
Big Rachel had often discussed sex and its consequences with her daughters and had cautioned them against fooling around, but knowing they would do it anyway, she also had instructed them in contraception and urged them to pay regular visits to a gynecologist. If, despite all these precautions, they got pregnant anyway, they’d better be ready to care for their baby. All that winter, a family debate raged over what to do with Little Rachel’s child. The girl insisted she was ready and willing to raise it. Her mother dismissed that notion with scorn. “You’re thirteen years old,” she told her daughter. “You’re a baby having a baby. And I can’t take care of it for you. I got enough on my hands. We got to do something.”
Little Rachel was already six months pregnant, too late for an abortion, so Big Rachel called the Boston Children’s Service Association to arrange for adoption. When Alva heard that she rushed down to Methunion Manor to confront her sister. “You’re giving away your own flesh and blood,” she said. “Nobody in our family has ever done that before. It’s a damn disgrace.”
Big Rachel wasn’t taking that. “You’re not my mother,” she said. “You’re not my father. You’re not my keeper. I don’t have to tell you nothing.”
Alva stormed out, but she was back a few weeks later. “Before you give that child away to strangers,” she demanded, “I want you to give it to me.” Rachel just stared at her. “You’re not even going to answer me?” asked Alva.
“You mind everybody’s business but your own,” Rachel shot back.
“I got nothing to say to you.”
Little Rachel’s baby was born in April 1975. For three days, she nursed her infant; then, with her reluctant permission, it was put up for adoption. For years to come, Little Rachel grieved for her child and never quite forgave her mother. And the quarrel left a legacy of bitterness between Rachel and Alva—never again were the sisters more than coldly civil toward each other.
Rachel was heartsick over her children’s troubles. She’d done her best to make a good home for them, and God knew she loved them! They were all she had in life. They meant so much to her that maybe she loved them too much. But children couldn’t live on love alone. They needed discipline. They needed a man around the house to provide a firm hand, even a razor strap if necessary. Her brother Arnold had tried to be a surrogate father to her kids, but he lacked the authority a real father would have had, and some of them had angrily repudiated him. Bobby McClain had helped too with advice and guidance, but increasingly he was preoccupied with his own problems. As the years went by, Rachel realized she would have to be both mother and father to her kids.
She became a rigid disciplinarian, setting tight curfews for them, insisting that they perform chores around the house before they went out, demanding that they tell her where they’d been and whom they’d been with. But the more she cracked down, the more they seemed to resent her. Nearly every evening there was some kind of shouting match in the Twymon household, Rachel accusing her children of being lazy and irresponsible, they denouncing her for being meddlesome and domineering. “Get off my back,” George shouted at her one night. “Stop trying to run my life!” After his arrest for auto theft, George resolved to change his life, dropping out of the gang and setting his mind to school. But he and his mother remained temperamentally irreconcilable. Night after night they were at each other’s throat. During one particularly bitter spat, Rachel hit him behind the ear with her cane. As soon as he graduated from Roslindale High, George left home, enrolling at Draughns Business College in Nashville, Tennessee.
Common Ground Page 67