We stopped before a stone whose inscription read:
THOMAS WILLIAMS
AL MAJOR
1862–1928
“There used to be a rich old family down here named the Butlers,” Mr. Hunter said. “They were old, old Staten Islanders, and they had a big estate over on the outside shore, between Prince’s Bay and Tottenville, that they called Butler Manor. They even had a private race track. The last of the Butlers was Mr. Elmer T. Butler. Now, this fellow Thomas Williams was a Sandy Ground man who quit the oyster business and went to work for Mr. Elmer T. Butler. He worked for him many years, worked on the grounds, and Mr. Butler thought a lot of him. For some reason I never understood, Mr. Butler called him Al Major, a kind of nickname. And pretty soon everybody called him Al Major. In fact, as time went on and he got older, young people coming up took it for granted Al Major was his real name and called him Mr. Major. When he died, Mr. Butler buried him. And when he ordered the gravestone, he told the monument company to put both names on it, so there wouldn’t be any confusion. Of course, in a few years he’ll pass out of people’s memory under both names—Thomas Williams, Al Major, it’ll all be the same. To tell you the truth, I’m no great believer in gravestones. To a large extent, I think they come under the heading of what the old preacher called vanity—‘vanity of vanities, all is vanity’—and by the old preacher I mean Ecclesiastes. There’s stones in here that’ve only been up forty or fifty years, and you can’t read a thing it says on them, and what difference does it make? God keeps His eye on those that are dead and buried the same as He does on those that are alive and walking. When the time comes the dead are raised, He won’t need any directions where they’re lying. Their bones may be turned to dust, and weeds may be growing out of their dust, but they aren’t lost. He knows where they are; He knows the exact whereabouts of every speck of dust of every one of them. Stones rot the same as bones rot, and nothing endures but the spirit.”
Mr. Hunter turned and looked back over the rows of graves.
“It’s a small cemetery,” he said, “and we’ve been burying in it a long time, and it’s getting crowded, and there’s generations yet to come, and it worries me. Since I’m the chairman of the board of trustees, I’m in charge of selling graves in here, graves and plots, and I always try to encourage families to bury two to a grave. That’s perfectly legal, and a good many cemeteries are doing it nowadays. All the law says, it specifies that the top of the box containing the coffin shall be at least three feet below the level of the ground. To speak plainly, you dig the grave eight feet down, instead of six feet down, and that leaves room to lay a second coffin on top of the first. Let’s go to the end of this path, and I’ll show you my plot.”
Mr. Hunter’s plot was in the last row, next to the woods. There were only a few weeds on it. It was the cleanest plot in the cemetery.
“My mother’s buried in the first grave,” he said. “I never put up a stone for her. My first wife’s father, Jacob Finney, is buried in this one, and I didn’t put up a stone for him, either. He didn’t own a grave, so we buried him in our plot. My son Billy is buried in this grave. And this is my first wife’s grave. I put up a stone for her.”
The stone was small and plain, and the inscription on it read:
HUNTER
1877 CELIA 1928
“I should’ve had her full name put on it—Celia Ann,” Mr. Hunter said. “She was a little woman, and she had a low voice. She had the prettiest little hands; she wore size five-and-a-half gloves. She was little, but you’d be surprised at the work she done. Now, my second wife is buried over here, and I put up a stone for her, too. And I had my name carved on it, along with hers.”
This stone was the same size and shape as the other, and the inscription on it read:
HUNTER
1877 EDITH 1938
1869 GEORGE
“It was my plan to be buried in the same grave with my second wife,” Mr. Hunter said. “When she died, I was sick in bed, and the doctor wouldn’t let me get up, even to go to the funeral, and I couldn’t attend to things the way I wanted to. At that time, we had a gravedigger here named John Henman. He was an old man, an old oysterman. He’s dead now himself. I called John Henman to my bedside, and I specifically told him to dig the grave eight feet down. I told him I wanted to be buried in the same grave. ‘Go eight feet down,’ I said to him, ‘and that’ll leave room for me, when the time comes.’ And he promised to do so. And when I got well, and was up and about again, I ordered this stone and had it put up. Below my wife’s name and dates I had them put my name and my birth year. When it came time, all they’d have to put on it would be my death year, and everything would be in order. Well, one day about a year later I was talking to John Henman, and something told me he hadn’t done what he had promised to do, so I had another man come over here and sound the grave with a metal rod, and just as I had suspected, John Henman had crossed me up; he had only gone six feet down. He was a contrary old man, and set in his ways, and he had done the way he wanted, not the way I wanted. He had always dug graves six feet down, and he couldn’t change. That didn’t please me at all. It outraged me. So, I’ve got my name on the stone on this grave, and it’ll look like I’m buried in this grave.”
He took two long steps, and stood on the next grave in the plot.
“Instead of which,” he said, “I’ll be buried over here in this grave.”
He stooped down, and pulled up a weed. Then he stood up, and shook the dirt off the roots of the weed, and tossed it aside.
“Ah, well,” he said, “it won’t make any difference.”
FROM
Walter Bernstein
SEPTEMBER 21, 1957 (ON JUVENILE GANGS)
NE SATURDAY NIGHT a few weeks ago, I attended a dance at a Y.M.C.A. in Brooklyn given by the Cherubs, a street gang with about thirty-five members, all between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. The Cherubs are not good boys. They regard the police as their natural enemies, and most policemen who have come to know them reciprocate this attitude—with some justification. The Cherubs fight other gangs, using knives, baseball bats, and guns; they have been known to steal; they occasionally commit rape, though usually of the statutory kind; many of them are truants; a few of them take dope; and while they fear the law, they do not admire or respect it. The prospect that the Cherubs, if left to themselves, will grow into model citizens is not at all bright. Their normal activity, though organized, is rarely social, and for this reason I was interested to learn that they were about to give an organized social dance. I heard about it from a friend of mine named Vincent Riccio, who knows the Cherubs well. He lives in their neighborhood and teaches physical education at Manual Training High School, in South Brooklyn, where some of them are reluctant students. Before becoming a teacher, in 1955, Riccio spent five years as a street-club worker for the New York City Youth Board, an agency dealing with problems of juvenile delinquency. His job was to go into a neighborhood that had a street gang known for particularly vicious habits, try to win the confidence of its members, and then, if possible, guide them in the direction of healthier pursuits. He is generally considered to have been the most successful street-club worker the Youth Board has ever had. “In his day, the Youth Board in Brooklyn was Riccio,” a present Youth Board worker told me. Riccio has almost total empathy with young people—especially the delinquent kind—and they trust him. He speaks their language without patronizing them. Like most of the delinquents he has worked with, he comes from a rough, semi-slum background; his parents were immigrant Italians, and they had twenty-one children, six of whom have survived. As a boy, he did his share of gang fighting and thievery, though he claims to have been interested in stealing food rather than money. His specialty was looting the Mrs. Wagner pie trucks. His youthful experiences have convinced him that, except for the relatively rare psychotic cases, no delinquents are beyond help—that all are responsive to anyone they feel really cares for them. Riccio cares very deeply; he may even care too m
uch. He had good reasons for switching to teaching as a career—among other things, he had a family to support—but he has a strong sense of guilt about having quit the Youth Board, and feels that it was a betrayal of the boys he had been working with.
For all practical purposes, Riccio hasn’t quit. He has a name among the young people in his part of Brooklyn, and they are still likely to come to him for help with their problems, seeking him out either at home or at the school. He takes pride in this, and does what he can for them. He was particularly enthusiastic about the Cherubs’ dance—as I could see when he asked if I’d like to attend it with him—because one of the gangs he had worked with when he was employed by the Youth Board was the forerunner of the Cherubs. That gang was also called the Cherubs, while the gang now known as the Cherubs was called the Cherub Midgets. Today, although a few of Riccio’s former charges are in jail, most of them are respectable young men, gainfully employed and, in some cases, married. They are no longer bound together in a gang, but, Riccio explained, they take a collective avuncular interest in the current lot. In fact, they had helped organize the dance, and some of them were to act as chaperons. “They’re trying to steer the kids straight,” he said. “Show them they can get status by doing something besides breaking heads.”
· · ·
Riccio had asked me to meet him in front of the Y.M.C.A. at about nine o’clock on the night of the dance, and when I arrived he was already there, looking like an American Indian in a Brooks Brothers suit. A swarthy, handsome man of thirty-eight, he has a sharply angular face, with a prominent hooked nose and high cheekbones. He is not tall but he is very broad; his neck is so thick that his head seems small for his body, and his muscular development is awesome. He used to be a weight lifter, and still has a tendency to approach people as though they were bar bells. Whenever I shake hands with him, I have an uneasy feeling that I will find myself being raised slowly to the level of his chest and then, with a jerk and press, lifted effortlessly over his head. Actually, Riccio’s handshake, like that of many strong men, is soft and polite. He is essentially a polite man, anxious to please, and he has a quick, warm smile and a trust in people that might seem naïve in a less experienced person. I shook hands with him warily, then followed him inside the building and into an elevator. “The kids were lucky to get this place,” he said as the door slid closed. “The last club dance held here broke up in a riot.” We got out at the fourth floor and walked into a solid mass of music. It roared at us like water from a burst dam, and the elevator man hastily closed his door and plunged down again before he was flooded. A table stood by the elevator door. Seated importantly behind it was a boy of about sixteen, with long black hair carefully combed back in the style known as a ducktail and wearing a wide-shouldered double-breasted blue suit. He was a good-looking boy, with regular features, and he had an innocent look that did not seem quite genuine. His face lit up when he saw Riccio.
“Man, look who’s here!” he said. “It’s Rick!”
Riccio smiled and walked over to the table.
“Man, where you been keeping yourself?” the boy asked.
“You come to school once in a while, Benny, you’d know,” Riccio said. He introduced me as his friend, and I felt for my wallet to pay the admission fee of a dollar that was announced on a piece of paper tacked to the table.
Benny reached across and put his hand on mine. “You’re a friend of Rick’s,” he said reprovingly.
Riccio asked Benny how the dance was going. “Man, it’s crazy!” the boy replied. “We got two hundred people here. We got Red Hook, Gowanus, the Tigers, the Dragons.” He counted them on his fingers. “We got the Gremlins. We got a pack from Sands Street. We even got a couple of the Stompers.”
“I thought the Stompers and Red Hook were rumbling,” Riccio said.
“They called it off,” Benny said. “The cops were busting them all over the place. They were getting killed.” He laughed. “Man, the law busted more heads than they did.”
“Well, I’m glad it’s off,” Riccio said. “Whatever the reason, it’s better off than on. Nobody gets hurt that way.”
“It’ll be on again,” Benny said. “You don’t have to worry about that. Soon as the cops lay off, they’ll swing again.”
Leaving Benny, we went through a door into the room where the dance was being held. I was astonished to see that all the music came from four boys, about fifteen years old, who were seated on a bandstand at one end of the room. They were small but they looked fierce. They were playing trumpet, guitar, piano, and drums, and the room rocked to their efforts. It was a large room, gaily decorated with balloons and strips of crêpe paper. Tables and chairs ringed a dance floor that was crowded with teen-age boys and girls—including a few Negroes and Puerto Ricans—all wearing the same wise, sharp city expression. The usual complement of stags, most of them dressed in windbreakers or athletic jackets, stood self-consciously on the sidelines, pretending indifference.
I followed Riccio over to one corner, where two boys were selling sandwiches and soft drinks through an opening in the wall. Business appeared to be outstripping their ability to make change. As we came up, one of them bellowed to a customer, “Shut up a minute, or I’ll bust you right in the mouth!” Watching all this tolerantly were two husky young men—in their early twenties, I guessed—who greeted Riccio with delight. He introduced them to me as Cherub alumni, who were helping chaperon the dance. One was called Louie, and the other, who limped, was called Gimpy. We stood watching the dancers, who were doing the cha-cha. He seemed pleased with what he saw. “Notice the Negro kids and the Puerto Ricans?” he said. “Two years ago, they wouldn’t have dared come here. They’d have had their heads broken. Now when a club throws a dance any kid in the neighborhood can come—provided he can pay for a ticket.” A pretty little girl of about twelve danced by with a tall boy. “She’s Ellie Hanlon,” Riccio told me, nodding in her direction. “Her older brother was a Cherub—Tommy Hanlon. He was on narcotics, and I could never get him off. I was just starting to reach him when I left the Youth Board. Two weeks later, he was dead from an overdose. Seventeen years old.” Riccio had told me about Tommy Hanlon once before, and I had suspected that, in some way, he felt responsible for the boy’s death.
Benny, the boy who had been collecting admissions, pushed his way through the crowd to us, his eyes wide with excitement. “Hey, Louie!” he said. “The Gremlins are smoking pot in the toilet.”
“Excuse me,” Louie said, and hurried away to deal with the pot, or marijuana, smokers.
“Them stinking Gremlins!” Benny said. “They’re going to ruin our dance. We ought to bust their heads for them.”
“Then you’d really ruin your dance,” Riccio told him. “I thought you guys were smart. You start bopping, they’ll throw you right out of here.”
“Well, them Gremlins better not ruin our dance,” Benny said.
I asked Riccio if many of the boys he knew smoked marijuana. He said that he guessed quite a few of them did, and added that he was more concerned about those who were on heroin. One trouble, he explained, is that dope pushers flock to neighborhoods where two gangs are at war, knowing they will find buyers among members of the gangs who are so keyed up that they welcome any kind of relaxation or who are just plain afraid. “You take a kid who’s scared to fight,” Riccio said. “He may start taking narcotics because he knows the rest of the gang won’t want him around when he’s on dope. He’d be considered too undependable in a fight. So that way he can get out of it.” He paused, and then added, “You find pushers around after a fight, too, when the kids are let down but still looking for kicks.” Riccio nodded toward a boy across the floor and said, “See that kid? He’s on dope.” The boy was standing against a wall, staring vacantly at the dancers, his face fixed in a gentle, faraway smile. Every few seconds, he would wipe his nose with the back of his hand.
“Man, that Jo-Jo!” Benny said. “He’s stoned all the time.”
“What’s h
e on—horse?” Riccio asked, meaning heroin.
“Who knows with that creep?” Benny said.
I asked Benny if any special kind of boy went in for dope.
“The creeps,” he said. “You know, the goofballs.” He searched for a word. “The weak kids. Like Jo-Jo. There ain’t nothing the guys can’t do to him. Last week, we took his pants off and made him run right in the middle of the street without them.”
“You wouldn’t do that to Dutch,” Riccio said.
“Man, Dutch kicked the habit,” Benny said. “We told the guy he didn’t kick the habit, he was out of the crew. We were through with him. So he kicked it. Cold turkey.”
Louie returned, and Riccio asked him what he had done about the offending Gremlins. Louie said he had chased them the hell out of the men’s room.
I kept watching Jo-Jo. He never once moved from his position. The music beat against him, but his mind seemed to be on his own music, played softly and in very slow motion, and only for him.
As the dance continued, Louie and Gimpy and several other chaperons policed the room with unobtrusive menace, and there was no further trouble; everyone seemed to be having a good time. At eleven-thirty, Riccio said to me, “Now is when you sweat it out.” He explained that the last half hour of a gang dance is apt to be tricky. Boys who have smuggled in liquor suddenly find themselves drunk; disputes break out over which boy is going to leave with which girl; many of the boys simply don’t want to go home. But that evening the crucial minutes passed and it appeared that all was going well.
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