by Bobby Love
The probation officer stood up and introduced himself. And then he launched right into the purpose of his visit. While he told my mother about my “outburst” at the concert, subsequent arrest, and then my failure to show up for the court date, I sat on the couch with my head hanging down, wishing I could just melt into the floor.
“Buddy, I hope you learned your lesson. I told you not to use that kind of language and now look what you’ve done,” Mama said when the officer was done explaining.
“I’m sorry, Mama,” I squeaked.
“You need to be saying sorry to the officer,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated, not looking up.
“Well, that’s not really going to help now,” the officer said. “Since you didn’t show up for that court date, you have to serve your time for the crime you committed.”
“You’re not sending him to jail!” my mother shrieked.
“No, ma’am,” the officer reassured her. “But he will be put on probation for the next two years.”
My mother sat down next to me and started to cry.
I was only thirteen years old, but I knew this was an outsized punishment for the “crime.” I glared at the man but didn’t say anything. He left a slip of paper with instructions on the table and showed himself out the door.
As I expected, after the officer left, my mother had my brother whip me with a switch, but later that evening she told me I was too big to beat anymore. “I don’t know what to do with you, Buddy,” she said. “I tried to keep you out of trouble.”
“I can stay out of trouble,” I said, not liking the sound of resignation in her voice.
She shook her head like she didn’t believe me. “Buddy, I don’t want to see you end up like your brothers, but that’s exactly how you’re fixin’ to end up.”
“No I won’t, Mama,” I said. “You’ll see.”
“I hope so, Buddy,” she said. “But I don’t know what else to do. All I can do now is give you to God.”
My probation officer’s name was Mr. Allen. He was a middle-aged Black man who thought the way Black people were going to survive was to play by the white man’s rules. When we met for the first time, he told me, “This is their world we’re living in so follow their rules and don’t make them mad.”
Mr. Allen assured me that probation was no big deal. All I had to do was stay out of trouble.
“What do you mean stay out of trouble?” I asked.
“Three strikes and they’ll send you to some kind of juvenile detention center,” he said.
“What counts as a strike?” I wanted to know.
Mr. Allen narrowed his eyes and leaned in close. “Stay out of trouble, Walter. No trouble at school, no trouble with girls, no trouble with the law. Keep yourself clean. Don’t give them a single reason to come find you.”
“Okay,” I said, thinking I had to stop cutting classes. Stop playing cards. Stay away from trouble. I knew I could do that. I wanted to prove my mother wrong about turning out like my older brothers. The last thing I wanted was to end up in jail.
Throughout ninth grade, I continued working at the golf course and cutting grass to earn money, and I played basketball whenever I could. My big brother Raymond told me if I kept it up, I might get a college scholarship. At school I did my best to avoid getting sent to the principal’s office, but I wasn’t able to manage that completely.
I got sent to the principal for telling Mr. Morgan to stop calling us nigrunts. For that incident I got a beating from the assistant principal and found myself officially one strike closer to being sent to a juvenile facility.
After that, I doubled down on following all of the rules and stayed out of trouble for several months. I even got a job washing dishes at K&W Cafeteria. It was a real job, so I had to apply for my working papers and my Social Security card before I could be hired. Even though I knew I could make more money hustling on the golf course than they paid me for washing dishes, I was trying to show my mother and my probation officer that I could do the right thing.
But then, one afternoon in the spring, I was sitting in my English class and the teacher, Mrs. Bell, was writing the day’s assignment on the board.
“Hey, Cotton Foot,” one of my friends called out to me. “Cotton Foot” was the nickname I’d picked up the past summer when I stepped on a rusty nail that pierced the sole of my foot right through my sneaker. “I don’t have any money to take you to the doctor, Buddy,” my mother had said to me when I showed her my red, swollen heel the next day.
Mama left me in my bed and came back with her medicine kit and a slab of fatback that she usually used to season the greens. As she dug around in her kit, I watched her get a bunch of cotton and douse it in white vinegar before cleaning off my foot. Then she took a copper penny and the fatback and wrapped the two things around my foot with another big wad of cotton. She told me I couldn’t put any weight on my foot for a week. When my friends saw me sitting on the porch with my foot propped up covered in cotton, they started calling me Cotton Foot. The name stuck and I liked it. Because anything was better than Walter.
“Hey, Cotton Foot,” my friend said again, a little louder.
I turned in my seat. “Yeah?”
Mrs. Bell turned around from the board and said, “Mr. Miller, you’re talking out of turn. Get out of my classroom.”
“I didn’t say anything, Mrs. Bell,” I said.
She pointed at the door. “I heard your voice and I don’t like what you said,” she insisted.
I didn’t know what she thought she heard, so I pleaded my case. “Mrs. Bell, I didn’t do nothing. My friend just called my name and I said ‘Yeah?’ ”
“Do not argue with me, Walter. I know what I heard. Now go downstairs to the principal’s office and he can deal with you.”
She turned back to face the chalkboard and I gathered my things and slunk out of the classroom. “Sorry, Cotton Foot,” my friend whispered as I walked past his desk.
Before I went to the principal’s office, I left the school grounds and bought a soda at the store across the street. I knew I wasn’t supposed to leave the building, but I was so mad I needed to cool off. I drank my soda and headed back to face the principal.
“Walter, why did you think you could go buy a soda in the middle of the school day?” the principal asked with a frown when I finally showed up in his office about fifteen minutes later and told him where I’d been.
I wanted to say “Because I was thirsty,” but I just shrugged my shoulders, looked at Mr. Dean, and waited for him to tell me what my punishment was.
“Walter, you just can’t stay out of trouble, can you?” Mr. Dean said.
Again, I didn’t answer.
Mr. Dean pulled his eyes away from mine and turned his attention to a piece of paper. He signed the bottom and handed it to me.
“Walter Miller, you are suspended until the end of the school year. Don’t come back.”
He handed me the paper and told me I could leave his office. He had washed his hands of me.
I scanned the paper. Usually a suspension lasted a few days, but Mr. Dean had written that my suspension would last for six weeks, until the very last day of school.
That sounded crazy to me, but I just took the letter and headed out the school doors.
The school contacted my probation officer, Mr. Allen, and told him I had been suspended. When he heard the news, he called my mother and told her he would come by the house to talk to me.
On the day Mr. Allen arrived, I was nervous.
“What happened, Walter?” Mr. Allen asked me as we sat at the kitchen table.
My mother stood in the doorway and watched what was going on but didn’t interrupt.
“I honestly didn’t do anything wrong,” I started to explain. “I wish you could go in there and ask all the other kids. I don’t know what Mrs. Bell thought she heard.”
“Walter, you’re not being suspended because of what happened in the classroom. You’re being su
spended because you left the school grounds and bought you a soda. That’s against school policy,” Mr. Allen said.
“But Mrs. Bell didn’t have the right to throw me out of the class!” I protested. “I didn’t do nothing!”
Mr. Allen looked at me like I was stupid. “Didn’t I tell you, son, that you have to play by their rules?”
“But their rules aren’t fair,” I said, scowling.
Mr. Allen sighed, and I watched him crack the joints in his neck.
“Walter, the sooner you learn how to do what you’re told, the better off you’ll be.”
Then he pulled a paper out of his bag and told my mother she needed to sign it. She wrote her name on the line where he indicated and then went back to standing in the kitchen doorway.
“As for you, young man,” Mr. Allen said, turning his attention back to me. “Your job now is to stay in this house during school hours. You cannot be out in the streets because you will be picked up for truancy and then it will be all over for you. You got that?” he said.
“I got it,” I said, but I was still seething that I was in this situation.
Mr. Allen picked up on my mood and said, “Listen, Walter, don’t let them beat you down. Just stay out of trouble. Remember, it will be all over before you know it.”
“Okay,” I said, but I didn’t feel very confident.
More and more I was starting to feel that trouble was going to find me whether I went looking for it or not. Maybe it wasn’t worth trying so hard to avoid it.
Word got out that I was stuck at home on suspension, so my old card-playing friends decided my house was the perfect place to gamble, drink beer, and party during the school day. I figured since I wasn’t on the streets, like Mr. Allen said, I wasn’t breaking any rules. My reputation was starting to grow as a guy who knew how to make the good times roll, and I enjoyed the attention from the older kids, especially the girls.
I started sneaking out at night to go meet up with girls and to party with my friends. When I’d get home after midnight, Jean would yell at me, but she’d also open a window for me to sneak through so Mama wouldn’t find out. I wasn’t exactly avoiding trouble, but the fun I was having seemed harmless. Plus I was getting away with it.
Meanwhile, Gillespie Junior High gave me passing grades at the end of the year. Even though I was out of the classroom for the last six weeks of school, they allowed me to graduate without having to go to summer school. I wasn’t a stellar student, but I wasn’t failing, either. I got the idea that Gillespie just wanted to get rid of me and that’s why I was passed. I didn’t dwell on it, though. I was just happy to leave junior high behind and start a new chapter of my life in high school.
* * *
People assumed that after being a guinea pig in Greensboro’s school desegregation experiment, I would want to go back to an all-Black high school. But there was a new option for us Black kids—a high school called Ben L. Smith. Formerly an all-white school, Smith was one of the latest schools to desegregate. Some of my friends were going to Smith, and I wanted to go too. Jean told me that I should go to Dudley, where she went, where I would be safe and surrounded by other Black kids and teachers, but I had made up my mind. If Smith was the new, better school where all the white kids were going to go, then I wanted to go there too. At that point in my life, I was interested in doing the things that nobody expected of me. My instinct very early on was not to be afraid to step into new experiences. I had a full-sized imagination and always wanted to push the limits of what was possible, even though the rules and laws of the time were meant to curtail my freedoms, right along with my imagination. My mother allowed those restrictions to rule her life. She was motivated by fear. But I was the opposite. If I knew something was off limits, I was even more determined to get a taste.
Technically Mama had the final word about where I attended high school, because she had to sign the registration forms for me, but she didn’t have a strong opinion about where I went. She just said, “Wherever you decide to go, just go there and do your best.”
For me, part of doing my best in high school was looking my best. The summer before the school year started, I began saving my money to put together a new wardrobe so I could start the year in style. I wanted to project a high-end look from day one, a look that would command respect and admiration. I wanted slacks from a store called The Slacks Shop. I wanted Italian shoes from Ralph Johns. And as an accessory, I wanted a London Fog hat. My goal was to have enough clothing combinations that I never had to repeat the same outfit in a week. My mother had bought me a new trench coat and I got “Cotton Foot” embroidered on the collar and that was going to be my signature piece. I was only fourteen years old, but I took fashion very seriously.
The problem was, my love of fashion was an expensive hobby, so I started looking for new ways to get money, because washing dishes, caddying, and mowing the occasional lawn didn’t provide enough funding for the clothes I wanted. Playing cards for money was an option, but that was never a guaranteed payout. So I started stealing. At first I’d just take some cash from my sister’s purse or off my mother’s dresser. Then I moved on to stealing from people I didn’t know. I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I justified it in my mind by telling myself that white people could afford to lose a few dollars. I didn’t set out specifically to steal only from white people, but in my experience, white people were the ones who had money. And from where I sat, it was easy for them to get more. All my life I had witnessed white people being given the better version of everything—from water fountains to schools to neighborhoods—so stealing from them somehow felt justified in my teenage brain.
One night I rolled a drunk guy for almost three hundred dollars. I stole a lady’s purse at the fairgrounds with more than five hundred dollars in it. Being that young with more than five hundred dollars in my pocket was exhilarating to me. I didn’t tell anybody what I’d done. I just went downtown and bought myself a new velour sweater, some new shoes, and some records. And that’s how the thief in me was born. Every time I stole something, I told myself that I had just taken advantage of an opportunity that had presented itself. I didn’t plan on stealing. But if I saw some money unattended, I didn’t resist grabbing it. My mama would ask me sometimes where I was getting the money to buy all my nice clothes, because she knew my little jobs couldn’t be the source of such wealth. I would tell her I had just put things on layaway, and she’d leave me alone.
I quickly went from petty thievery to stealing cars. The first car I took without permission was my sister’s, just joyriding. Jean threatened to call the police if I did it again. So I never stole her car again, but soon after, I did steal two other cars in a one-month period. By then I had given up any notion of being strictly law-abiding. It never seemed to get me anywhere, and I liked the thrill of breaking the rules and having fun. I didn’t want to get caught, but I also didn’t have any intention of curtailing my new habits.
My mother witnessed my increasingly bad behavior and became all but resigned to the fact that I was going to mess up. Without her riding me to do better, I felt no compulsion to do the right thing. Two of my older brothers were in jail, my aunt who’d lived across the street was incarcerated, and two of my sisters had babies as teenagers. In other words, there just wasn’t anyone in my life modeling this “good behavior” I was supposed to exhibit. Except my mother, of course. And what good was it doing her, following the rules? She worked like a dog every single day and we were still poor. While I wanted to make my mother happy, I didn’t see her logic when it came to “honest work.” Working a legitimate job was no guarantee you’d have enough money in your pocket for the things you needed and wanted. The trick, I decided, was finding the right hustle and playing by my own rules. So I quit my dishwashing job, and hustling became my focus. I was getting better and better at it.
Going to high school with white kids provided endless opportunities for me to steal. When I started tenth grade at Ben L. Smith, I had no pl
ans to rob my fellow classmates, but I noticed right away how many of them carried cash on them all the time. When we’d be in the locker room changing for gym class, I’d see their wallets hanging out of their pants pockets with ten- and twenty-dollar bills stuffed inside. I couldn’t help but think how easy it would be for me to linger while everyone else hustled into the gym and then steal some of those bills before going to class myself.
Right before homecoming weekend, I spotted another “opportunity.” My friend was in the band, and I tagged along with him to the band room while he got ready for practice. Everybody in that room was changing their clothes, getting their instruments ready, and then heading outside to rehearse for the big weekend performances. I noticed that a lot of the kids hadn’t locked their lockers, so I made some excuse to hang back and then waited until everybody was gone. I quickly went to work and grabbed about sixty dollars from four or five different wallets, and then trotted out to the field to catch up with my friend.
Two days later I got greedy and returned to the band room after school to see if I could get lucky again. The thought of having extra money to spend on homecoming weekend spurred me on. I was dating a girl at the time and wanted to be able to take her out to a nice dinner before the football game on Saturday night.
I quickly got to work opening lockers that had been left unlocked and rustling through the backpacks sitting on the floor. I started to worry that I was going to get caught, so after pocketing about forty dollars, I scurried toward the door. Before I could open it, a voice shouted, “Freeze! Police! You’re under arrest!”
My heart leapt into my throat. This was strike number three. I put my hands up in the air, and a police officer, who had been hiding in a closet in the band room the whole time, grabbed me by the arm and dragged me to the principal’s office.
“We caught your thief!” he announced to everyone in the office.
The principal, his assistant, and the secretary all looked at me with thinly veiled disgust.