by Earl Monroe
Whitey lived around the corner from me, but I never knew why they called him “Whitey.” He was brown skinned and had scars all over his face and hands from gang fighting. He and his guys—some as old and dumb as him—used to catch me and some of my classmates in the bathroom and pee on us if we didn’t have any money to give them. One day, though, when I was a little older—not much older—things changed. I remember Whitey walked up and demanded my money, but I had had enough—I really don’t know why—and I said, “Naw.”
Well, he was shocked to hear this coming from me. So he looked real hard at me and asked, “What’s wrong, you ain’t got it?”
“Yeah, I got it,” I said, “but I ain’t giving it to you!”
He was stunned. But maybe because Jimmy and Joe were my cousins, he didn’t do anything. I will never know why he didn’t. He just turned around and walked away, saying, “Aw right, I’ll check you out next time. Later.”
I was stunned and relieved, because I was really shaking in my boots when I said “Naw.” I said it before I realized I was saying it! But I learned something from that incident. I understood that I had to stand up for myself in order to survive being picked on or losing my money to someone like Whitey. If I went around the block to avoid him and get to school, I just had to go through another crowd of tough guys like him. So I had to learn how to make my way through all that different kind of gangster stuff. Sometimes it was hell, you know what I mean? I found out that if you stood up for yourself, people stopped messing with you out of respect.
One time after I stood up to Whitey, when I was little older, I was playing stickball and there was a little guy we called “Meatball,” because he had a big, round head that looked like a meatball in a plate of spaghetti. Anyway, I hit a home run off of him. We were playing on the elementary school playground, and when I was running around the bases, Meatball retrieved the ball and hit me upside the head with it. Now, I always had a bad temper, even if I didn’t like to fight. So I chased Meatball until I finally caught him, and I beat his ass real bad. That’s the way I started making my statement as I grew older, by going crazy on people. After doing this a couple more times, it got around that I would stand up for myself, wasn’t scared, and might be a little bit crazy, too. People stopped messing with me after that, including Whitey.
One of the people I grew up with, Carroll Wilson, lived right across the street from me. I used to go over to his house and hang with him and his brothers and sister sometimes. Down the street was Poochie, my first “girlfriend,” who also went from G. S. Benson Elementary School to Charles Y. Audenried Junior High School. A couple of houses down from Poochie lived a boy named Billy. I can’t remember his last name, but I knew him because he would come around to Vacation Bible School in the summers to shoot baskets, and I remember him being a real nice kid. One day Billy drowned when he went with another boy named George down to the Schuylkill River. Billy must have been 10 or 11 when this happened, and I must have been around eight or nine. After Billy and George went swimming in the river and Billy drowned, George came back to the neighborhood and didn’t tell anyone that Billy had died. It was crazy!
When people found out Billy had drowned and that George had left him in the water and come back without telling anyone Billy was dead, everyone grew leery of him, and it stayed that way for a long, long time. I don’t know if it ever really changed. Billy and George were great friends, so people couldn’t figure out why he would do that, you know what I mean? Why would he leave Billy there like that and not tell anyone? After the police talked to him, George was never charged with anything, but there was always this lingering doubt about him in the backs of everyone’s minds from then on, because no one could understand how George could treat his best friend like he did. I tell this story here to illustrate how tight-knit the neighborhood was.
It was around this time that I started loving music, you know, all kinds of genres. But rock ’n’ roll and R&B became the focus of my attention. That music was me, it was what I heard in my heart and soul (although later on I did like some jazz—Miles Davis especially—and some pop music). But R&B had my heart. The great soul singer Solomon Burke used to come through the neighborhood because he knew my cousin Margie. She was from another part of the family and we called her Cousin Margie. She and my sister Ann were close. Solomon would come over to see Margie and Ann, and after I found out he was famous I would go around the neighborhood after he got there and tell people he was in our house. (I guess I knew about selling an image even back then.) Then, people would pay me a nickel to come in our house just to get a short glimpse of the great star. Burke was a nice guy who would speak to everyone. He must have thought I was a budding businessman, because he would smile at me and just shake his head when he saw me collecting my money. I must have been about eight or nine at the time.
It was around this age when I first had “sex” with my girlfriend, Poochie. She was nice looking, a little plump, with light skin and short, nice hair. We’d grind against each other standing up against a wall in the vestibule. I remember we were kissing heavily one night, and I guess we just decided to go the whole nine yards. After that we grinded a lot and I was hooked. All kinds of people from the neighborhood would be coming over to watch TV in our house, since there wasn’t another one around that I knew of. Poochie would be there a lot (she was a year younger than me). So when I was nine and while everyone else was watching TV, she and I would be out in the vestibule grinding up against the wall, which is the way I did it then—and I did it a lot—until I got to high school. I guess I was curious about what having sex was, what it felt like, why people like my cousins liked it so much. It wasn’t until I was around 11 that two sisters that lived down the street sort of took me under their wing and showed me real sex. It was strange because they were three and four years older than me and they had started to grow pubic hair. So while we were doing it standing up, their pubic hair kept sticking me because I didn’t have any.
Now, I don’t know why I didn’t lie down and have sex until I was in high school. And even in high school, I mostly did it standing up against walls: I guess I have always been a creature of habit. But I know one thing: Having sex made me feel good, and this feeling only increased as I grew older.
Chapter 2
COMING OF AGE, JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL, AND MY INTRODUCTION TO BASKETBALL: 1956 TO 1959
EVEN THOUGH I GREW UP IN A ROUGH NEIGHBORHOOD, I always did well with my studies in elementary school. I did my homework, read a lot, and didn’t ever get into any real trouble, except for little mischievous stuff that every little kid my age got into. When I graduated from G. S. Benson Elementary School in June 1956 and moved on to Audenried Junior High School in September of that year, all of a sudden school started getting very strange for me. Some of the strangeness came as a result of having to adjust to a situation different from elementary school, and it affected my studies and my life. When I came out of elementary school I was one of the top students academically and was voted one of those most likely to succeed. So I was placed in the good, top classes for smart kids when I got to my new school.
Everybody in my neighborhood went to Benson Elementary and Audenried Junior High. I started attending Audenried along with two of my longtime friends, “Leaping John” Anderson, who we later called “Leap” for short, and Ronald Reese. We played baseball out on the playground together (and basketball later), and after graduating from junior high school, the three of us went outside the neighborhood to attend John Bartram High School, which was in an all-white neighborhood.
Initially I was a good student at Audenried, because one of the things I prided myself on at the time was that I got good grades. I also wanted to become a poet. So in the seventh grade I got into the poetry class as an extracurricular activity and quickly started to write different poems. I worked on our school newspaper also and got involved with publishing poems in it, including one of mine called “Spring”:
Spring
I love the sp
ring
but it rains
when I go out to play
I always want to stay
the birds hum
the bells ring
the children play
and I sing
I look above in thankfulness
for this is the time
I love best
Spring
Publishing this poem spurred me on to really want to be an English major. (Later, when I went to college, I wanted to have two majors, English and history. But as it turned out, I ended up majoring in elementary education.)
What was different about going to Audenried was that there were more kids than there had been at Benson, and more of them were white kids, too, as the school was located in a racially mixed neighborhood. At Audenried I was in the top classes in the seventh and eighth grades, and in the ninth grade, too, but that was when somebody at the school decided they were going to experiment with some of the classes. This happened in 1958, when I was 13. I was put in an experimental class, which was supposed to have the school’s top pupils in it. But when they placed some of the worst-acting students in that class and transferred some of the good people into the worst classes to see what would happen, I didn’t like it. Because all of a sudden I was in classes with people who didn’t care about studying, or poetry, or art. It made me real mad. Once I started going to these classes, I knew right away that I wasn’t going to be getting the same education and attention that I had been getting, so I rebelled. It just didn’t set right with me and it caused me a lot of tension.
Up until this time I had been playing soccer and baseball at Audenried, but after they put me in those lower classes I just stopped really caring about school—and even playing those sports—because I was really pissed off about what had happened. Now, I have always been a little temperamental and stubborn when something happens to me that I don’t think is fair, and I definitely didn’t think this was right. So I withdrew from school activities and sulked from then on out.
Then this incident happened with one of my teachers, and it was all downhill after that. One day I came into Horatio Smith’s class late and I was sulking. I had steel taps on my shoes that were very loud as I walked in. So, here I am tapping loudly to my seat in the back and Mr. Smith said, “Vernon, that’s one E.”
Mr. Smith used to always call me by my first name, Vernon. Anyway, an E was like a demerit. And if you got three Es in a semester you were in big trouble. I’ve always had a little temper, so I kept on tapping to the back of the class.
“Vernon, that’s two more Es now,” Mr. Smith said.
So by the time I reached my seat, I had three Es for the semester. Being a very logical person (that’s another thing, I have always been very logical), I surmised that if I had three Es already and had ensured myself of a poor grade for the semester, there was no sense in working hard in Mr. Smith’s class, so I didn’t. That started a trend. And Mr. Smith’s class was an English class, which I really enjoyed. But after that incident I got it in my head that it didn’t make much sense to do anything, so I didn’t! In the end I got twenty Es for that semester and things kind of kept snowballing downhill from there. Even though I passed, it still wasn’t the same. I’d stopped studying. I’d lost interest in being an excellent student. I stopped doing all the things I had done in the past. Instead, I embraced a negative kind of behavior in terms of my academics and it kept rolling on over—snowballing, if you will—until I got into high school and I was left back in the 10th grade.
I must admit junior high was a problem for me, and some of it had to do with the fact that I was spoiled and immature. Still, I did have some fun outside of school during my years at Audenried, especially after I really started getting into music. I remember one song by the Flamingos, “I Only Have Eyes for You,” that was special to me in junior high school. I just loved it, especially the lyric “Our love must be a kind of blind love / I can’t see anyone but you.” After I heard the Flamingos sing this lyric, which kind of got stuck in my head, that’s when I started really getting involved with girls and I would use that lyric on them sometimes.
My mother worked at a factory down on Oakford Street for a long time when I was growing up. She was just a regular factory worker who worked the day shift. I don’t know how much she made, but obviously it couldn’t have been a whole lot. She used to walk to work. It was about seven blocks. I remember her getting up early and always being on time. Then she’d get me ready to go to school and Theresa ready for when Mom came over to watch her. She made sure I was on my way to school and sometimes, if she had time, she’d walk with me, because the way to school was the same route she took to go to work.
Sometimes, before Theresa was old enough to go to school, she would follow behind me and I wouldn’t know she had left home, where my grandmother was supposed to be watching her. She would just leave the house without our grandmother knowing it and walk to school. So there were times I’d hear that she was in school looking for me, because she was lost. It was weird! But growing up with my mother and sister was beautiful, even though I had to watch the stupid, violent stuff that was happening with my mother and stepfather at times, which caused me to start disliking him intensely. But despite what was happening in their lives around this time, my life and my sister’s life were pretty secure. Our mother was the driving force behind everything, and she was a saint in my eyes. Regardless of all the arguments between my stepfather and my mother, growing up in my neighborhood was always interesting.
There were a few new people I started hanging out with around this time, like Steve “Smitty” Smith (who would later become my best friend and change his name to Sahib Abdulkhabir). I met Smitty at Oakford playground—he attended another elementary school—where we played baseball, soccer, and, later, a few pickup games of basketball, though I wasn’t really into basketball at the time. I also met another longtime friend, George Clisby (who later became a policeman) there. Besides Smitty and Clisby and a few others, I have always stayed close to my immediate family, no matter what I did, or what happened for me; I was never too far from those in my Philadelphia family. I never really got into distant cousins, only the people who were right around me, those that affected my life on a daily basis. That was my family and that’s basically who I cared for, and that’s still the way I am today.
My mother hardly ever whipped me or anything like that, although one day I remember I made her so mad—I have forgotten what I did—that she told me to go and bring her an ironing cord so she could whip my ass with it. So I ran down to Aunt Nicey’s house—which is where all of my young relatives went whenever any of us got into trouble, because she didn’t have any children and was very nurturing to us. But after I got there, I was having such a good time I just stayed and didn’t go back home. Plus, I was scared of how bad Ma was gonna beat me with that ironing cord because of how angry she was with me! So I just stayed and went home the next day. It was just her and my godfather, Sam Jones, who everybody called “Mr. Sam.” Aunt Nicey was like my other mother and Mr. Sam was kind of like a father figure to me, as well as my godfather. So whenever anything happened I would run away from home and go to Aunt Nicey’s house, even though everybody knew exactly where I was going.
When I got home the next day I told my mother I had stayed at Aunt Nicey’s because I was having such a good time. She already knew this and wasn’t as angry with me as she had been the day before, so she just pinched up a piece of the flesh on my arm and twisted it—which was how she usually punished me when she was angry—until I screamed in pain. But her pinch wasn’t anywhere close to being as painful as an ironing cord would have been had Ma whipped me with one, and for that I was thankful.
Aunt Nicey was the oldest of my two aunts. Aunt Mary was next to her, and my mother was the youngest. Aunt Nicey was a very thin woman who drank a lot—mostly whiskey. And the interesting thing about her was that she would chew a lot of food, hold it in her mouth while she added some whiskey and Coke, and then s
wallow everything down. That used to amaze me, you know what I mean? That was something to watch. And she would do this every day, all day long. Aunt Nicey never worked as far as I know. Mr. Sam took good care of her.
Anyway, when he was young Mr. Sam traveled all over the United States working construction on tall buildings, walking those planks way up in the air, high off the ground, putting bricks and steel girders in buildings as they were being constructed. He was a very interesting guy. Mr. Sam used to talk about being down in South Carolina, living on Daufuskie Island with the Gullah people.
Mr. Sam said he worked on Hilton Head Island, which is just off the mainland of South Carolina to the north of Daufuskie, and that he took a boat from Daufuskie to Hilton Head every day, leaving early in the morning when the tide went out and coming back at night when the tide came in. Mr. Sam said he worked construction on Hilton Head, building up all those resorts located down there. He used to say all the islands along the South Carolina coast were basically filled with black people in those days—and still are even today—of pure African descent who spoke a funny strange kind of dialect called Geechee. I never went down there when I was young, but my sister Ann used to tell me about it because she went down south every summer. Aunt Nicey and Mr. Sam were really different from a lot of people, but I loved her—and Mr. Sam, too—very much and learned a lot from both of them.
In 1955 we moved from Alter Street to 1120 South 26th Street, at the corner of Alter Street, and we stayed there until around 1962, the year I graduated from high school, when we moved to 1217 South 26th Street at the corner of Manton Street; that was the three-story building we bought from Mr. Siegel. That building was not only our home, but also the grocery store my parents opened on the ground floor. My mother and stepfather bought the house at 1120 South 26th Street from an Italian family named Puncheanella, one of the very few white families that lived in my neighborhood.