by Paul Mooney
Maybe it’s only fitting. The first time I hear the word nigger, it’s out of the mouth of a parrot. All my life, I hear that word parroted mindlessly, and I think of Feathers.
Mama hates on that parrot. Really hates the bird. No one ever calls her “nigger.” Not to her face. Nobody even thinks it. They are either too scared, too much in awe, or too loving. Them white folks she works for, they take care of her like she is pure gold.
We stay in Louisiana until I am seven. A whole lotta black folks move North at the end of the 1940s to find better jobs. We are among them. No discussion. Mama just announces it.
“Let’s pack our bags,” she says. “We’re moving to Oakland.”
I’m wondering, Oakland? Where’s that?
Oak Land. That’s how I pronounce it. Like it’s two words.
Mama sends Daddy on ahead. He rents us a house. So we get on the train, all our belongings packed with us, and embark on our new life.
As soon as we leave the station, Mama leans over to me. “Well, we’re never gonna have to hear that parrot say ‘nigger’ no more. You know why?”
“’Cause we’re going to Oak Land, Mama?”
“Nope,” she says, grinning. “Because I poisoned it!”
We laugh at that as we leave Louisiana behind. Looking out the train windows is like watching a movie for me. I sit on Mama’s lap and watch the countryside roll past.
I have a fantasy as a child about what would happen if the black people take over and run things. Mostly it involves me having all the candy I want, a bigger house, a nicer car, Mama retired at her ease, and Daddy wearing a nice suit.
But as that train travels through East Texas and then hits the plains, I think, This country is too big for black people to run. The train goes a little farther, and now we’re in the grasslands that never end. I think, This country is too big for white people to run, too.
Why don’t we just run it together? Nice fantasy, child. I fall asleep to the clickety-clack of the train wheels.
CHAPTER 7
I never much realize I am a Negro until we move to Oakland. My Shreveport life is such a warm cocoon that even if we are in the racist South, I don’t see myself as anything but loved. The whole Ealy clan, friends and family both, eventually relocates to California.
In Oakland, Daddy Preston rents the family a two-story house on 18th Street, in the middle of the ghetto. But the Oakland ghetto back then isn’t all black. Our neighbors on one side are Portuguese, and Mexican on the other. Across the street from our house is Gilmore Steel, owned by a Jewish family.
Italians, Jews, Irish, all cram in side by side. It’s not all black, but it is all poor. It’s the first time I hear the word nigger used both ways—as a slur and as a term of affection. Mama can kill the parrot, but she can’t stop all the people in the Oakland ghetto who toss around that word as if it’s nothing.
On the first floor of our house is a storefront, and to bring in cash, Mama opens up a little convenience store, selling eggs, bread, milk, and the kind of small, everyday sundries that people in the neighborhood forever need. She sells cold Coca-Cola in ten-ounce bottles for five cents.
It’s odd, but though we are in the middle of the most built-up part of Oakland, it’s as though I have a rural childhood. For pets, I raise the wild animals that Daddy Preston captures and brings home. I keep a whole menagerie: a red fox, a bantam-tailed rooster, a rabbit, and a chicken that I call Turkey. Daddy brings me a baby raccoon that I name Sam. Turkey chases Sam until he grows up and gets a little bigger. From then on, Sam chases Turkey. Turnabout is fair play.
Even living in the ghetto, Daddy Preston still manages to hunt. He goes up into the Oakland hills and shoots possum, raccoons, rabbits, and snakes, and drives farther up into the mountains after black bear.
Mama stews up everything he kills. I eat it all. My favorite dish is beef neck bones and butter beans. You can take the family out of the South, but you can’t take the South out of the family.
Mama can cook her ass off. She knows her way around a kitchen. She grows her own herbs and has a vegetable garden in the backyard. She makes her own butter. Everything in her house is fresh.
It’s on 18th Street that Mama first calls me Mooney. She never says why. Maybe I am a sloe-eyed, moony child, dreamy-looking. Mama starts calling me Mooney, and then suddenly everyone else is calling me that, too. Pretty soon that’s how I think of myself. I am not Paul Ealy or Paul Gadney. I am Paul Mooney.
Nicknames are a thing with us. Everyone has one. We all have celebrity look-alikes, too. My mother LaVoya’s nickname is Didaree. She has the makings of Dorothy Dandridge and Diahann Carroll. Her older sister Katherine, my aunt Katie, looks like Tina Turner. My mother’s baby sister Pressie is a dead ringer for Eartha Kitt. She’s a hoofer, a tap dancer, and I get my dancing skills from her. My mother’s brother, my uncle Buddy, looks just like Sidney Poitier. There are also my other uncles, Tip and Shank.
Nicknames and look-alikes are running jokes. They create the world of my childhood. “Look at Sidney Poitier, running off to the john!” somebody calls out, as Uncle Buddy hotfoots it to the bathroom. Everyone cracks up. I get a lot of my comedy from the Ealy family.
All the time I am in Oakland, I can feel change coming. I am at DeFremery Park, just down the street from our house, and there’s some sort of political rally there. This handsome white man is grabbing everybody by the hand, and he’s got the mayor of San Francisco with him. He’s somebody. He looks like a movie star and he carries himself as though he thinks everybody else should know that he’s somebody. He’s got better hair than Elvis.
It’s the first time I see a white man that black people love so much. I hear other people in the crowd say over and over, he is going to be president. I don’t believe them. The white man is too young. Presidents are old, saggy-faced white men, like Eisenhower. Then I hear Mama say it, too. “That man is going to be president some day.”
So when he comes around to me, I move up front in the crowd and reach out. I say, “You are going to be president.” JFK flashes that big toothy Boston Irish grin at me and shakes my hand.
In Oakland, I see LaVoya, my real mother, more than I ever did in Shreveport. My father George Gladney stayed in Shreveport and faded out of my life, but my mother is always in and out of the Oakland house with my aunt Katie. The two women are fast. Aunt Pressie can’t keep up with them. At one time, they are both playing softball on an all-girl’s team and are members of a motorcycle club.
Later days: My mother, LaVoya Ealy, and me in front of my cherry red Caddy
I only slowly wake up to what is going on with Mother and Aunt Katie. They are riding back and forth to L.A. on motorcycles. They bring back furs, designer clothes, jewelry. I think, well, we’re rich. Then I realize that my aunt and mother know all the boosters in the neighborhood.
“Can I get a quarter?” I ask my mother one afternoon.
She looks at me as though she is about to cry. “Oh, honey,” she says, “I don’t have a quarter—I don’t even have a dime.”
She does burst into tears then, and brings me into her arms and hugs me. “I’m sorry,” she says over and over.
I realize just how poor we are. Money comes in waves, but sometimes the tide stays out a long time. We get flush once when I am thirteen, when LaVoya works at a jazz club. At first she’s a cleaning lady, but there’s a push on to integrate jobs. The management suddenly realizes how pretty my mama is, and they make her a waitress.
When she comes in at three or four in the morning, I help her count her tips. The dollar bills smell like beer. Even though my mother lives a very risqué lifestyle, she never lets a man stay overnight at our house.
My mother’s always sorry about something, but not sorry enough to stop taking money from her son. I’m working in the cucumber fields that summer, and I get a few bills and some coins for pay—and all the cucumbers I can lug home.
Mom waits for me. “Darling,” she says as soon as I come in the door
, hot and sweaty from working in the fields. “Where’s your money? Give it here quick!”
I am naive. I see all the men in my family giving money to their girlfriends. Since I am always giving my mom money, I figure she is my girlfriend.
Mama catches wind of this and wises me up. We decide to keep all of my money in Mama’s bra, since that’s her equivalent of hiding it under the mattress. There’s a lot of room in there. My money goes into the left cup. I always know where it is. I do my business at the Bank of Mama’s Left Tit.
Mama doesn’t trust banks. She never goes to a bank except to add money to our Christmas fund. Even if it is only two dollars, she puts money in every week so we have something under the tree.
Under Mama’s stern influence, my mother slowly turns her life around. She’s approaching thirty, and she can’t go around with bikers and ballplayers forever. She goes back to school to get her nursing degree. She does real estate. LaVoya loses her wild ways and becomes a respected person in the community.
All along I cling to Mama, my rock.
Mama has the greatest expressions. “A dog that will bring a bone will take a bone.” Meaning don’t trust anyone who’s too subservient. “A new broom knows how to sweep the floor, but an old broom knows where the dirt is.” “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, but don’t forget what they have to put on that grass to keep it green.” “Birds fly high, but they have to come to the ground to get water.”
When scammers come around the house trying to borrow money, Mama tells everyone, “A cow always knows where the weak fence is.” She never wants people to take advantage of us or treat us badly.
Some of her phrases are adults-only, directed toward the women of the family. “A hard dick knows no names.” “Never buy a man shoes—he’ll walk away from you.” My favorite is what she says to the women when they come home after staying out all night or being gone a few days.
“You dumb bitches!” she yells at them. “I don’t fatten frogs to feed snakes. Are you stupid? I taught you better than that. A wet pussy and a dry purse don’t match.”
Solid wisdom.
My own introduction to sex comes soon after we move to Oakland. My two best friends are some Portuguese kids from the neighborhood, a brother and sister. We go to Cole Elementary School, a few blocks away from my house, on 10th Street. Every morning the sister screams from outside my bedroom window. She yells, “Wake up, Mooney, wake up!”
I come to the window and scream out, “I’ll be right down!” Because I don’t wear pajamas but sleep in my birthday suit, I always show up at the window naked as a jaybird. This might be what gives her ideas. One afternoon in my bedroom, when Mama and Daddy aren’t at home, she rapes me.
There is nothing else to call it. I am eight, she is twelve years old. She has a movie magazine. She opens it to show me the pictures. We start out by imitating the kissing she sees in one photograph.
She rubs herself all over me. I don’t know what is happening, but it feels good. She pulls her shirt down and her skirt up, jumps on top of me, and wriggles and bucks until I come.
Unlike other people who are raped, I like it. Because she and I have sex, I believe that I am automatically in love. I want so badly to marry her. I go to her parents and ask solemnly for their approval.
Her mom and dad say no. Of course, I think it is because I am black. Or the fact that I am eight years old. To my surprise, they say no because I am not Catholic.
For her sake (and for the sake of the feeling I get when she rubs up against me), I try to become Catholic. I study the catechism. I get stickers of the saints. But marrying her becomes a problem. The one day I go to Mass, I have sore knees. I conclude that I can’t become a Catholic because I can’t kneel in church.
Her brother is still my best friend. The Christmas before I turn ten, Mama uses her bank money to buy me a Lone Ranger and Tonto costume set.
“Let’s play,” I say to him. “I want to be the Lone Ranger.”
He says, “No, I’m white and you’re not. You look more like the Indian. You be Tonto.”
Right about then is when I start to hate him.
CHAPTER 8
When I am fourteen years old, my mother moves us out of Oakland, north across the freeway to Berkeley. She’s trying to straighten out her life and get away from the crowd she runs with.
This is the first time in my young life that I am away from the constant loving atmosphere that surrounds Mama. Even though she and Daddy live only ten miles away, I feel as though I have been shoved out of the nest.
So what do I do? I try desperately to find that same level of love elsewhere—and that’s when I discover a truth that changes my life. I find out that applause equals love.
I become the hambone king of Berkeley, California. It’s a popular song and a dance craze at the time.
That year, 1955, a lot of bands, both white and black, come out with versions of the hambone song, which is basically an old minstrel tune with a lot of different variations. “Hambone, hambone, have you heard? Papa’s gonna buy me a mockingbird.”
More than anything, hambone is a beat, done with palms hitting your chest or leg: slap-lacka-lacka-slap-slap. The Milwaukee drummer Red Saunders and his orchestra have a hit with his version, the whiter-than-white Bell Sisters, too, and the country singer Tennessee Ernie Ford. Everybody is doing it. Later on, Bo Diddley takes it over and makes it rock and roll. Johnny Otis’s rock hit “Willie and the Hand Jive” is just another version of the song.
All the local movie theaters have hambone dance contests before the shows. Grand prize, ten dollars, sometimes fifteen or twenty-five.
My best friends, Brother and Sammy, get me up onstage for the first time at the Oakland Paramount when we get to the theater early for the matinee one Saturday afternoon. I still recall the feature: Mister Roberts with Henry Fonda.
“Sign up, kids!” announces the movie emcee. “Dance for the prize!”
“Come on, Mooney,” Sammy says. “I seen you do it. You can win!”
I know I can hambone with the best of them. You pop your fingers and twist out your knees. I hear that beat in the cradle. I’ve been doing hambone for Mama since I learn how to walk. Nobody’s got anything on me.
So I get up onstage at the Oakland Paramount and win the whole contest.
I don’t realize it back then, but the hambone is juba, a slave rhythm brought from West Africa. The reason they slap their bodies is that the masters don’t allow them to have drums. Too dangerous. The darkies might be passing messages to one another. They might be plotting to kill us in our sleep. No drums allowed.
There are just a few hundred kids in the Paramount audience that afternoon, and a lot of popcorn flying around, and not everybody is paying attention, but I’m bitten by the performance bug, and bitten good.
Applause is love. I’m up there, and I know it. I feel that the audience is loving me, they are with me all the way, with Sammy laughing and the faces of the girls in the front row shining up at me.
Slap-lacka-lacka-slap-slap.
It all starts at that moment.
I like the way the sawbuck feels in my hand when the emcee slips me the first-prize money afterward. I like the way people look at me when I come off the stage. I like Brother and Sammy pounding me on the back, celebrating my triumph.
I like it all. I want to do it again and again. But the lights in the theater go down, the movie starts, and Henry Fonda comes on the screen. To this day, I hate that movie, Mister Roberts.
We all go to Luther Burbank Junior High in Berkeley. Sammy, Brother, and I laugh about Luther Burbank’s last words: “I don’t feel good.” We are always saying that to one another and then fake dying. Even though the students are mostly white, the school has a few black teachers, so I feel comfortable there.
The Monday after I win the hambone contest, I can tell my popularity in school has skyrocketed. Students, especially girls, talk about me in the halls. I see my path in life. I will
be the Hambone King. Brother and Sammy act as my managers. They scout around for movie theaters holding hambone contests. We go to the Orinda, the Shattuck, the California, and the Oaks. Sometimes Sammy and Brother come up onstage and back me up. We have a routine.
I always win, time after time. Brother, Sammy, and I get real excited. We’re going to make thousands of dollars by taking our act out on the road. We plot our moves in my bedroom at the 18th Street house in Oakland. We’re going to run away from home. We think we’re doing our secret planning on the downlow, but of course, Mama knows all, sees all.
“Circus broke down, did you hear?” she says casually, as we come downstairs to the kitchen to raid the fridge.
“Yeah?” I say, cautious. Something’s up, I can tell from Mama’s tone.
“Black panther escaped,” she says.
“A panther?” Sammy says. His eyes go wide.
“You know why they call ’em black panthers, don’t you?” Mama says. “Them cats just loves to eat young black children.”
Brother and Sammy stare at her. I laugh nervously. “Mama, you’re joking us!”
“Yum,” Mama says, smacking her lips. “Tasty black kids.”
By unspoken agreement, Brother, Sammy, and I immediately abandon our plans to leave home. We decide it’s better to stay right where we are.
It turns out I don’t have to go anywhere. Fame, celebrity, and show business come to hunt me down where I live.
CHAPTER 9
It’s 1955, the height of the boring, bland, and white Eisenhower years. Marian Anderson is the first black singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera. Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till is murdered in Money, Mississippi, for allegedly whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryan. Rosa Parks is arrested in Montgomery, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., organizes a boycott of city buses.