My Soul Looks Back

by Jessica B. Harris

  – Serves six –

  1 chicken (31/2 to 4 pounds)

  4 tablespoons butter

  2 tablespoons olive oil

  11/2 tablespoons Bell’s Poultry Seasoning

  2 teaspoons finely ground sea salt

  1/2 teaspoon finely ground black pepper

  1 medium onion, peeled

  Preheat the oven to 450°F. Remove the bag of giblets from the cavity of the chicken and wash the bird thoroughly inside and out. Pat dry.

  Place half the butter in a small saucepan and melt it. Add the olive oil. Cut the remaining butter into small pieces and insert it under the breast and leg skin of the chicken.

  Mix the poultry seasoning, sea salt, and pepper together in a small bowl. Roll the onion in the butter and oil and then roll it in the seasoning mixture and place it in the cavity of the chicken. Pour the remaining butter over the chicken and rub the remaining seasonings into it.

  Place the chicken in a roasting pan in the preheated oven. After 15 minutes, lower the heat to 350°F and roast, checking occasionally, for 1 hour and 15 minutes, or until the chicken juices run clear when pricked with a fork at the leg joint. Serve hot.

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  Chapter Three

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  BANTAM SAM WAS THE MAN

  Samuel Clemens Floyd III had been right in front of me at the SEEK Program from my first days there. His story began fifteen years earlier than mine and more than five hundred miles away in the South at the height of the Depression in 1933. He was the youngest of four children born to Samuel Floyd and his wife, Zula, in Durham, North Carolina. Like all other southern cities of the period, Durham was segregated; Blacks lived in the south and southeastern quadrants of the city in an area known as Little Hayti (pronounced Hay-tie in an erudite if mispronounced reference to the hemisphere’s first Black republic). But Durham was different. From the turn of the twentieth century onward, Durham had a unique place in the history of Black America because it was, in the words of no less than W.E.B. DuBois, “the business Mecca of the South.” He proclaimed, “There is in this small city a group of five thousand or more colored people whose social and economic development is perhaps more striking than that of any similar group in the nation.” Durham and its role as an incubator for Black success was so striking that it is one of the few things that DuBois and Booker T. Washington could agree on, with Washington adding that the race relations were cordial and evidenced “the sanest attitude [among] white people toward the blacks.”

  Durham’s special position as a southern Black bastion of aspiration and attainment meant that the city had long been an incubator for business. North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, the epicenter of Durham’s business community, was the largest Black-owned business in the United States, and its founders, with names like Merrick, Moore, and Spaulding, were those at the pinnacle of Durham’s Black social hierarchy. North Carolina Mutual and other similar businesses spawned a middle class and even an upper class that created a rich cultural life that defined the city. Parrish Street, Black Durham’s main drag, boasted a section of Black-owned banks, insurance companies, and other businesses. There were a Black-owned hotel, two theaters, and numerous restaurants, clothing stores, and other businesses. It was known as the Black Wall Street.

  Not only was Durham a town that was filled with thriving Black businesses (although they certainly felt the pinch of the Depression), it was also a town that boasted one of the country’s few tax-supported Black institutions of higher learning: North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University). Established in 1910, it was a thriving academic center and another cultural hub in the city. Social success in the town was marked by the distance between the railroad tracks and the college, and the Floyd household was closer to the railroad tracks and farther down from North Carolina Central than Sam probably would have liked. It was certainly not on Fayetteville Street, where the Spauldings and the Moores lived, but it was pleasant and it was home.

  By his own account, Sam had an ordinary childhood attending local parties given in private homes and indulging in the myriad activities that the community provided for its youth. His older sisters, Shirley and Bernice, had preceded him into high school, and, as some of the most beautiful girls in Durham with their copper skin and their light eyes, had garnered more than their fair share of beaus. Younger brother Sam dutifully chaperoned, tagging along and basking in their glow. Many years later, when maundering in his cups, he’d moan about the opportunities dashed by an early, unmarried pregnancy of one of them. (I’ve long forgotten which sister.) He made sure that his sister got her prenatal exercise by walking her up and down the railroad tracks and recounted how he’d loved her fiercely and unreservedly, but the experience particularized him and set him off from others in a way that he didn’t like and would never forget.

  Sam attended North Carolina College and majored in English and later became a teaching assistant there. He somehow made his way to New York as an English major and fledgling writer. He ended up in the Village and in the same apartment building as James Baldwin, with whom he became friends, and had a variety of jobs, including being one of the first Black writers at Newsweek magazine. By the late 1960s, though, he’d returned to academe and become the director of faculty and curriculum at the fledgling SEEK Program at Queens College.

  The church was in his blood. He used to joke about his mother’s father, a minister, who fathered eighteen children. “Like a golf course!” he’d whoop. His mother was, as he put it, in the “back nine” among the younger children. So was his uncle William Taylor, who lived with them in Durham. He attended the deeply historic White Rock Baptist Church, where musicologist and slave song expert Miles Mark Fisher was the pastor, and Sam’s musical talents allowed him to make some extra cash playing the organ for St. Titus Episcopal Church.

  I wasn’t any better at asking questions of Sam than I had been of my first beau, so much of Sam’s life before I met him remained a mystery to me. I gleaned information about it from observation and from meeting his friends in all walks of life and overheard snippets of conversation or from his repeated waves of remembrances after too much J&B. My deepest knowledge of him and his background came from the trip that we made together to Durham, where he introduced me to his mother and some of his childhood friends.

  Durham was an adventure. The tree-shaded front porch of his mother’s Craftsman bungalow reminded me of the one in which my maternal grandmother lived, and his friends the Warrens seemed like some of my distant relatives, with lifestyles and manners that were familiar. Elizabeth Ann, the daughter of the family, was about my age, and we remained in touch for a good while. Sam clearly deemed me presentable and suitable as a potential life’s companion. I was taken around to meet the friends of his aspirational youth. He took me for tea with his favorite teacher. When she, with the exacting precision of an old-school English professor, informed us over the fine china cups of Earl Grey tea that she’d been to the dentist for some prophylaxis, I called on my Bryn Mawr–honed social skills and did not giggle or guffaw. Durham presented another side of Sam, one that was far removed from the sophistication of his New York persona and revealed that there was yet another valent to his personality. Sam revered Durham as home and as the place that had formed him, and he dearly loved it.

  But even in Durham, Sam had his haunts and his hiding spots. One night, after a day of fine Durham propriety, he revealed some of that. He decided that we should head off to Minnie Hester’s, an after-hours joint that was located in someone’s kitchen and was clearly illegal. The only picture I have of the two of us together shows us sitting at a table, lips greasy with barbecue and surrounded by glasses that contained my first taste of white lightning. We’re both grinning like Cheshire cats and savoring the moment. I’m looking besotted with drink and with Sam, and he’s looking cat-that-got-the-cream-pleased that he had conquered a Durham that had wounded him in some unspoken wa
y as a child. Little did I know that my trip to Durham had been a true gift; it gave me another Sam, a view of him that few others saw, a side he shared with none of his college colleagues or his famous friends.

  By the time I met him, Samuel Clemens Floyd III was a subtly captivating man in his early forties with smooth copper skin (Angelou’s black golden amber) and silky dark brown hair frothed into what my mother called an egg-beater Afro. Brown eyes that twinkled with mischievous glee and a bewitching smile made him quite handsome, and he had an aura that filled the room wherever he went. The Elizabethans would have described his temper as choleric: his fits of temperament could be excoriating, yet they would pass like a southern squall and his choir-boy-with-a-secret smile charmed everyone back. He was as pugnacious as a young James Cagney and left more than one restaurant in a huff after some slight real or imagined, threatening to turn over the tables and shoot the owners, but when he sat stroking Blues in the apartment/sanctuary that he had created for himself, he was at peace, and none of this was apparent.

  He had just enough magnolia and honeysuckle in his mouth to charm the world, and his conversation dripped with witty southernisms like sorghum syrup on a biscuit. Listening and watching, I could hear the country boy from Durham, North Carolina, in his speech and see it in the old-style gold-rimmed crown on one of his front teeth until he had it removed. But Sam was big-city dapper in his dress with tailored suits that made him “sharp as a rat’s turd,” he would crow gleefully in one of the southernisms he cultivated.

  He wasn’t tall or flashy, but he commanded any room he entered simply by crossing the threshold. This was his gift and his curse, for it made him catnip for any woman who had half a gram of estrogen. He attracted women unconsciously. He was a bantam rooster—a cock of the walk—who was clearly aware of and reveled in his position. He would, on occasion, crow about a litany of the famous and the near famous who had been his paramours. He’d recount how Diana Sands had fallen under his sway and he’d squired Maya Angelou around and was friends with Nina Simone, and more. The folks he could summon with a telephone call ranged from educators to media stars. How this rare bird ended up at the SEEK Program in Queens College was a mystery, but one for which we were all thankful.

  I got to know him better and better as our friendship grew, but Sam remained to me and to most other folks who knew him a bit of a cipher. He wasn’t secretive or silent. Quite the contrary; he had no problem with reminding folks about whom he knew and what he had done. The term walker had not yet been created to define men whose role is to dress up and squire certain women about town. Sam’s qualities as an eloquent and attractive man who could hang upscale, downtown, or even down home with the best of them made him a much-coveted escort among the ladies of his circle of friends. He responded with his usual flair and finesse, squiring them to openings and book parties, operas and theatrical events.

  For most of them, Sam was more than a walker. He was a combination of big brother and confidant, lover and man, as in “My man.” I was certainly too naive and without a sense of belonging in the same club as his famous women friends to question, and I didn’t want to risk what were his very real and, to me, very frightening rages that could erupt from nowhere, triggered by a word or a gesture or the remembrance of some past slight. While I reveled in the excitement of the group, I also cowered internally more often than not, never knowing exactly what word or gesture might take the evening from pleasurable to problematic. I never knew just who was who or, for that matter, what was what, but I did know that his ladies always had more than a hint of possessiveness about him that kept me on guard. They cherished his presence and his wit and vied with one another for his friendship like hens circling a prize rooster. I was fifteen to twenty years younger than most of them, green for my age, foolish, and playing waaaay over my weight class.

  The ladies paraded and occasionally gave me the side eye, but gradually, I came to understand that being with Sam was being with someone who was a major part of a twentieth-century literary court: that of James Baldwin. Their proximity as neighbors had led to Sam becoming what David Leeming, one of Baldwin’s biographers, described as one of Baldwin’s “closest and most trusted friends.” If Jimmy, as I learned to call Baldwin, was the sun king, the roi soleil, around whom the court revolved, Sam was in many ways its master of the revels and depended on by all of the members. No king’s fool, Sam; rather, he was a good friend, sensitive to Jimmy’s needs, and able to understand the inadvertent sequester that fame places on some lives. He made Jimmy’s life with fame easier, told him the truth and argued with him, and treated him like a friend, not an icon. Trusting Sam, Jimmy accepted me without questioning.

  Club 81, Sam’s small one-bedroom roost, on the parlor floor front, was the frequent locus for encounters and boasted a coveted Village attribute: a fireplace. It was furnished simply in what has been described as professorial disarray, with shelves overflowing with books and papers, a couch, coffee table, dining table, and straight ladder-back armchair with a woven rush seat by the window in which Sam would sit and observe the world. The art was nondescript. A print on the wall over the monastic twin bed in the tiny bedroom and overflowing bookshelves in the entrance and in the living room pretty much took up all of the wall space. One year at Christmas, he did receive a small Beauford Delaney oil painting of a sad clown that he cherished. It was on an easel on a table next to the couch.

  Aside from his speech patterns, Sam also retained some of his southern behaviors in his northern space. A lover of golf, no doubt an affection he’d acquired as a child in Durham, caddying as many southern Black boys did to make some extra money, he’d haul his clubs on the subway and play the municipal courses around the city on sunny days or ride the Long Island Rail Road to one of the championship courses nearby. He goaded me into taking golf lessons, playing on my obvious desire to be his “partner” and declaring loudly that no one would ever be Mrs. Sam Floyd who couldn’t hit a decent golf ball. I tried. Oh Lord, did I try, but I am so nearsighted that I could never tell where the ball went. I dutifully took my golf lessons and bought golf clubs. (Used! I wasn’t a complete fool.) The upshot was that although he complimented me earnestly on my abilities and encouraged me at every turn, taking me to driving ranges and putting greens, I never really fell in love with the game as he had.

  I kept trying. It didn’t work with the golf, but I knew that golf wasn’t really the problem; we’d connect on other things. I was ready to be molded into something and desperately wanted to be someone’s helpmate, to use the old-fashioned Baptist term that my grandmother’s minister liked. I wanted to share something with someone and to cultivate that “you and me against the world thing” that I saw in my parents. I was more than willing to make some adaptations for that.

  I fared a little better with singing lessons, which he also encouraged me to take. One of his favorite compliments for me was to lean in while I was saying something, smile his devastating smile, and say, “Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low, an excellent thing in a woman.” That line from Act 5, Scene 3 of King Lear would always make my liver quiver and undo me. Folks often praised my speaking voice, and several said that I should try singing although I cannot carry a tune in a bucket. But for Sam, I’d give it a try, and so I’d somehow managed to find a used baby grand piano, have it transported to my fourth-floor walk-up, and get it tuned. A protégée of Martina Arroyo—another friend of Sam—was persuaded to give me singing lessons. I’d had voice and diction courses in high school and could project my voice from my diaphragm. At one point, my childhood piano teacher thought I might have perfect pitch, so I do-re-mi’d with the best of them but somehow never could get the hang of that either. The lessons stopped after a few months, but the piano remained for several years until I gave it away to someone who would carry it down those four flights of stairs.

  My Galatea period ended with the singing lessons. Sam had better luck with me and alcohol. My parents were not teetotal by any means; they had an
occasional whiskey sour or a martini, and our home had a full range of alcoholic beverages that we offered to guests. I’d become a wine aficionado while studying in France but never had developed a taste for brown liquor. (This was in the days before vodka became the rage.) I tried scotch, the preferred tipple of Sam’s group, but I couldn’t hack it. Bourbon and ginger ale was Sam’s suggestion for an adult drink for me, and Jack and ginger (Jack Daniels and ginger ale) seemed to roll off my tongue nicely. Sam also taught me bar etiquette, like how to tent a twenty-dollar bill and place it in front of me on the bar to let the bartender know to run a tab—this in the days of the three-dollar drink. I learned how to scope out a bar and know when it was wiser, and easier on my palate, to order bourbon and ginger ale as opposed to the red wine that was my usual tipple. He schooled me that Jack Daniels was not bourbon but Tennessee sipping whiskey and that too much Old Crow could make you ’shamed (allegedly the reason the crow on the front had his head averted). It’s knowledge that still stands me in good stead.

  Drinking seemed to be a part of what we did back in the 1970s and 1980s, and drinking outside of someone’s house usually meant the hard stuff. Sure, there was wine at folks’ homes, usually qualified as either red or white—no grape varietal names or appellations were used. Mercifully, I stayed out of the Cream White Concord and Boone’s Farm Apple Wine zone; Fazzi Battaglia Verdicchio was one of the whites that I remember more for its distinctively shaped bottle than for its taste. Usually the wine came in half-gallon jugs. The reds consumed ran to Beaujolais or whatever was in the bin at the local liquor store but were mainly for dinner and brought as hostess gifts. Whites were the only wines considered for bar drinking. There were also the rosés: Mateus and Lancers were hostess gift standbys because they “went with everything” and made one appear a wine maven. I had the added ability of being able to pronounce the wine of choice in French (or faked Italian), thereby conveying a sophistication that was not evidenced by my palate. I could wow my own friends and age-mates with my choices, but with Sam and the crowd from Club 81, I needed all of the props I could get in the alcohol department, where I was something of a laggard and a piker.