“Nor did he refuse to play five stones with the boys,” says Montaigne of his hero, Socrates, “nor to run about with them astride a hobby horse. And he did it with good grace: for Philosophy says that all actions are equally becoming in a wise man, all equally honor him.” To be fair, Socrates was a reasonably accomplished athlete; he’d been a soldier of some repute. He’d have known how to throw much better than Lears did. But there was Franklin Lears, running gamely enough in Socrates’ tracks, doing the most undignified and childish thing and thereby enhancing his dignity no end.
In ten minutes it is over and Lears and all of us are bending over panting, panting and laughing. It’s the first time in a long time at school that I’ve had something that you could call fun, the first time I’ve laughed this hard without someone being humiliated.
Does Lears see how much he’s triumphed today? Does he understand what it meant when the class refused to take this chance—for he had offered it—to smash him, like those poor bus drivers and B&N Corkum guys of yore, to run the scapegoat number? With those snowballs, we could have done much more than erode Lears’ dignity. There was a hospital not far away.
When the time had come, when Buller had started out to initiate the big payback, things had worked out much differently. It was Lears, really, who had taken out a little aggression on us. As to our aggression toward him, well, Buller aside, we didn’t really seem to have much. We had, or were beginning to have, a dose of gratitude and affection for the strange little man in the padre’s hat. Cap and Rick, Nora and Carolyn, and I and Dubby, too (Sandra, true to herself, pretty much stayed out of the missile blizzard), had expressed that gratitude as well as we could.
And from that point, the class began turning around.
Chapter Nine
BLACK AND WHITE
"Hey, what you lookin’ at, boy?” This question is issued by the guy sitting across from me on the bus. His tone is not friendly.
The answer to his question is in one sense obvious. What I’m looking at is his outfit—his pants, yellow as a plastic sun, and his shoes, pink, with ribbons on them. I’m also checking out his cape, which is trimmed in velvet. He’s William Billings; he is seventeen years old and in my class at Medford High. He is black.
It’s Saturday night and we’re on the West Medford bus, heading to Medford Square. I’ll be stopping there to shoot pool at Stag’s and hang out in the parking lot of Brigham’s ice cream parlor, maybe sit around in my friend Ryan’s new car, a gold Plymouth Duster with all the trimmings, and demolish a few Schlitz Tall Boys. William, I suspect, is going farther down the Mass Transit line, to Roxbury probably, for what looks like a party.
William’s face is almost spectacularly ugly. He’s got an enormous nose, unformed, like a smooshed fruit, and a vast mouth full of huge, widely spaced teeth. But the face is also somehow very appealing, the calm, easily bemused face of someone who has figured himself out early, said yes to the whole eccentric package, and doesn’t much care what the rest of the world thinks. He was a kind of male version of what the French call a jolie laide, a beautiful ugly woman.
Beside William is his best friend, Edgar Lincoln, also black, a little less flamboyantly attired, serene in presence, courtly in his movements. Both are very thin, refined-looking. The two of them together outweigh me, but not by much. I could massacre them both at once, with little effort. But that is not where things would end. They know this, and wait with suppressed glee for my reply. “What you lookin’ at, boy?”
“Nothing” is not a wise response. It incites a standard Medford comeback: “Callin’ me nothin’?” Matters degenerated from there.
I have a history with Billings and Lincoln, and it is not bright. Once, in ninth grade, when I first moved to Medford, we had an unfortunate run-in on the playground. Billings and Lincoln were in my gym class, and that day we’d played softball. I had struck out twice, hit a double, made a bad fielding play.
“You good at softball,” Billings said.
“Very good, very good, I hafta say,” Lincoln added. Both had all they could do to lift the bat; they were more swung by it than swinging. But they joked about the game and made the best of things.
Their intonation sounded nasty, carping. What to them was a playful tone, campy and a little affectionate, was to me aggressive. I had no ear for their art. I got mad and told them to fuck off or something equally original. They tried to explain themselves and preserve their dignity, too. I got madder. They left in what seemed to me an embarrassing, purse-swishing huff.
The next day after school, I had a compulsory chat with a representative of theirs named Johnny Malloy. Johnny was in no way similar to William and Edgar, and I’m not even sure he liked them much. What he did like was trouble. I was new to the school, unconnected to the tough Italian kids who ran it, at least on the playground, and thus fair game.
Johnny was the kind of guy who only has to fill in a few of the bubbles on the psychology test before he wins the sociopath rating. He was wiry, very quick, underweight, and dangerous. He had well-sculpted, handsome features; he’d have looked like African royalty if not for the leering expression he generally wore. On the second day of school, in ancient-history class, he took the time to inform me that he always carried a blade and that he was very, very good with it.
During the conversation about Billings and Lincoln, I was pretty sure I saw the switchblade open and down by Johnny’s thigh. I listened to him tell me what would happen if I messed with his “boys” again. I agreed with everything Johnny had to say.
Later, on a basketball court—we both were going out for the school team; neither of us made it—I drove into the lane for a layup with habitual Humvee grace, saw Johnny, and laid my shoulder into him, catching him squarely above the sternum. He fell away and skidded off on his butt toward the basket, not without some style, like a pat of butter sliding across a hot griddle. He grinned the psycho-kid grin and did a knife-across-the-throat gesture.
I walked around in terror for a few weeks, but ultimately nothing came of it. By then I was partway connected to the Italians. I was semi-friends with Paul Vincenzo, probably the toughest kid in the school. On the offensive line, I played guard next to Paul, who was in the tackle slot. By rights I should have been the tackle, since I outweighed Paul by thirty pounds and he had about twice my mobility. (Guards need to pull out of the line and head upfield to block.) But he insisted that he was going to be the tackle and the coaches went along with him. Why he needed to be tackle I’m not sure. It might simply have been that the word “guard” sounded too passive, too stand-around-at-the-palace-gates-and-salute, for someone of Paul’s temperament. Anyway, with Paul and a few others of his ilk as semi-friends, if Johnny had done something to me, there would have been an echo.
My last run-in with William had been fairly recent. Walking to Medford Square, I’d met up with him; he was with another guy this time, not Edgar. I, too, was with a friend, who got along okay with William. Still, it was not what you would call a cordial encounter. William had a dog, a German shepherd, which he said was a trained attack dog. I suppose experience should have told me to listen carefully to what William had to say. But no, I expressed doubt about the dog’s credentials. William whispered a phrase to the dog—it sounded like German as intoned on the TV show Combat—and the shepherd flew at me, straining the chain, yellow eyes popping, staring lovingly at my throat. “Do you believe me now? Or shall I let him go?” I confessed full credence.
Supposedly—but this was white kids’ lore; I never got it confirmed—William did the same thing a while later to a guy named Dickie McGuire, a weight lifter and star hockey player, who went to Boston College High. When William asked the signal question about whether he should let the dog loose, Dickie said, “Sure.” Purportedly, Dickie caught the German shepherd in full flight, one hand wrapped around the jaw, one arm around his belly, and threw him—the dog was a scrawny, mangy version of the breed—into a passing bus. No more dog.
So there
sat William, dogless, on the West Medford bus, staring me down and waiting for my reply. “What you lookin’ at, boy?”
“William,” I said. “How you been?”
Silence. Slow time passes. I’m conscious of the dingy, tired smell of the bus, acquired from carrying too many people too often to places they do not wish to go, and back to places they’ve no desire to return to. I begin reading the UNICEF poster across from me to calm myself down.
Then from nowhere a grin and a laugh. “I been good,” William says. “In fact I been very fine.” Then he and Edgar go off in a storm of giggles, falling all over each other, goofing on the straight white guy in his football jacket and white track shoes. (I had unscrewed the cleats from the bottoms of my sprinter’s shoes—I ran the quarter-mile occasionally on the track team, though I was mainly a shot-putter—and when I walked, the metal cleat-holders played an ungodly tattoo on the pavement. But I took the shoes to be the epitome of jock cool.) William and Edgar were high and jittery as bats, pleased with themselves, and having a very good time. The mood shifted. We talked a little. No big deal.
But it could have been a big deal, at least to me. If you went to Medford High, and particularly if you lived in West Medford, where the city’s black section was, your life was likely to be punctuated by this sort of black-to-white, white-to-black exchange. From time to time, one of these encounters blossomed, and you’d hear about how one of the South Medford Bears, the city’s premier Italian street gang, had gotten jumped by a crew of blacks. Then the Bears would get into their cars and drive to West Medford and something large-scale and bad would go down. But usually things stayed on the level of petty annoyance, petty squabble, scuffle, intimidation, and retreat.
Blacks made up about 10 percent of the high school. And all of them, without any exception that I knew, lived in West Medford, in about a ten-block area, of modest, well kept up houses. In a way, it was the most solid neighborhood in the city, surely the most long-standing. A lot of the Italians, for instance, the parents of my classmates, were first-generation Medfordites; they had made enough money to leave the North End of Boston, get out of their triple-decker houses in a neighborhood where, whatever the culinary attractions and general high spirits, the candy store was owned by a bookie-loan shark and Mob enforcers recently brought in from Sicily slept two to a bed in fetid rooming houses. The children of these North End expatriates, my classmates, would, if all went well, make a few more dollars than their parents and move away to Winchester or Newton or Melrose, places where people walked their dogs on leashes and Republicans occasionally got elected to the city council.
For the blacks, things were much different. Blacks started settling in West Medford at the beginning of the Civil War, around 1860. At first it was just a few families, headed by carpenters, blacksmiths, skilled laborers of various sorts. Over time the neighborhood grew and became a haven for enterprising, churchgoing black people who seem to have looked out for each other pretty well and sustained dignified, slightly aloof relations with the mass of whites around them. Among the parents and grandparents of my classmates were a lot of “firsts”—the first black man to get a dental degree from Tufts, the first black to work in management at General Electric, Raytheon, or some other major corporation. They were people who won one quiet victory after another, often well before the civil rights movement got into full swing.
The history of this neighborhood, and a good deal more besides, is set down in a strange and marvelous volume called This Is Your Heritage, a Newspaperman’s Research, Sketches, Views & Comment/ United States, Hometown, and World History, by Mabe “Doc” Kountze. In seven hundred or so pages, Doc Kountze, who seems to have been black West Medford’s griot, its resident poet and wise man, narrates the history of nearly every family in the neighborhood, from slavery to the present. Prefacing this ungainly, slightly disordered, generous, and often moving story, there is what amounts to a history of black contributions to American and world history—a section that takes a wide sweep, at top velocity, as though one were being blown over the major events of Afro-centric history in a shakily designed balloon. The idea, from Doc Kountze’s point of view, seems to have been to connect the young people of black West Medford circa 1970 to their own parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, as well as with early black notables—Cleopatra, Aesop, and (maybe) Jesus of Nazareth.
The black section of Medford was a reasonably prosperous working-class neighborhood, in many ways not unlike mine. But by 1969 the reigning style, at least among the boys and young men who lived on Jerome Street and Sharon Street and hung at Dugger Park, a strip of grass that bordered the Mystic River, was more than a little disconcerting to the elders at the Shiloh Baptist Church and, I assume, to Doc Kountze. (His general concern about the rising generation was, it’s pretty clear, one motive for his writing the book.) It was a style by and large imported from Roxbury, the black ghetto in Boston. The boys and young men wore their hair conked, in do-rags on Friday and Saturday afternoons and at night in gorgeous, often hennaed rolls. They affected tight pants in luxurious colors, the whole Life Saver pack, high-heeled shoes, and silky shirts with flowerlike ruffles on the front, the kind of thing an eighteenth-century French nobleman, a dandy out of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, might have put his tailor to work on. They walked with a cocky, bantam-rooster stride. It was the pimp aesthetic in high vogue.
The black girls were very much a society unto themselves. They laughed together uproariously on the bus, goofing on one thing or another. They wore tight skirts and danced, occasionally, in the aisles. They virtually never looked at or talked to a white boy. They referred to us as honkies and ofays, in a high-hearted, rambunctious way, talking loudly and simultaneously among themselves so that we could hear the insult, though never quite be sure who had uttered it.
Johnny Pearl, an enormous black kid with a gimpy leg, once dropped his lit cigarette butt on a bus seat as Dubby was sitting down. Predictable results. I wound up to swat Johnny—friend defense being all in Medford—but pulled back at the last minute. There was probably enough weaponry on the bus to have ended me that morning.
On the day after Martin Luther King’s assassination, a day when the elders of West Medford’s black neighborhood were in church, many in tears, lamenting the death of the greatest man of their lifetimes, the black kids at Medford High took a different tack. I was walking down the New Corridor with Dubby when a phalanx of tough black kids, maybe fifteen of them, came roaring through the other way. When they saw someone white, large or small, bad or not, they simply grabbed him and tossed him against the wall. No fists, no blades, just a ferocious grab-and-heave, done with furious, adrenaline-pumped strength, so relatively diminutive blacks were tossing big white kids with ease. I saw it coming, forced my back against the shiny pine boards, and stood at terrified attention.
Dubby got the toss. Ronny Jensen, who told all and sundry that he was going to become a pimp of some standing in not too long, an estimable figure in Boston’s “Combat Zone,” sent Dubby flying. Dubby caromed, then got tossed by another kid, rebounded, and got flipped by yet another.
When it was over, the cyclone passed, Dubby looked at me and, never at a loss, said, “What are they so pissed off at us for? We didn’t kill him.” This observation, which I found penetrating in the extreme, was about representative of our thinking on racial matters.
There were two worlds at Medford High, black and white, and they lived, on the most immediate level, in tension and remove from each other. It was a kind of small-city adolescent apartheid. But that’s only the superficial side of the story. There was also a fair amount of commerce. The phrase that William had accosted me with, “Hey, boy,” was a common mode of salutation between whites. It was often followed by the return remark “Who you callin’ boy?” which is what a black guy would be likely to say if so addressed. And some white kids did—I did on occasion—provided that the black guy was a friend. But even then, you were playing with fire and knew it. Bad black kids al
most always called the whites “boy,” sometimes with affectionate intonation, sometimes not. Then, occasionally, they got it back in return. What happened next was unpredictable.
Many white kids took style cues from the blacks (though none of them would have put William’s bows on their shoes), affected the pimp roll, and listened, as I did, for a while almost exclusively, to music from Motown. For three or so months, I abandoned Arnie “the Woo” Ginsberg and his Night Train Show, where he spun hits by Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys and Herman’s Hermits, and listened strictly to WILD, to catch the Temptations and the Four Tops. What many of us white kids knew about love and loss, albeit at second hand, was in the idiom of blacks. We sang Temps songs to ourselves as we walked down the halls. I never heard a black kid whistling anything by Lennon and McCartney.
The Elvis phenomenon was everywhere. The King had, without ever saying as much, probably without knowing as much, repackaged himself as a black man, or, as some would say, a White Negro. And a considerable proportion of the white guys at Medford High were involved in a similar reprocessing job, talking black talk, walking the walk, wearing some of the clothes, laughing the boisterous seen-the-world, done-the-world Afro-Am laugh, sometimes with a sense of self-parody, most often not. At the same time, of course, they sustained themselves as dutiful Irish or Italian racists, who would no more use the word Negro than the word phenomenology.
Some days, when the atmosphere on the bus was low-static, I’d plunk myself down beside Jackie Lane or one of the Bronson twins and yack about one thing and another. Jackie was a cornerback on the football team, a barracuda-style hitter. But he had a beatific smile and was easy and blithe about all things under the sun. Sometimes we sat on the bus and talked about the sorrows of wind sprints and of Alabama Quick-Cals, those exercises that our semi-cracked backfield coach enforced on us, where we made synchronized robotic motions and chanted little war chants about ruining the opposition. Often we sat in the middle of the black section—the back—and I felt like a cool enough white guy indeed. But at other times the smog was too heavy, and Jackie would indicate that this simply wasn’t a good time for me to sit myself down in the midst of what could erupt into mild to moderate ugliness.
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