by Jerrold Ladd
But for now she looked to her mother for guidance, to shape her into the fine woman she was destined to be. Gloria was enduring the projects the way my brother had when he first arrived: remaining quiet, sweet, and sensitive, even to her mother. No need to worry about Gloria, her loveliness would see her through.
Toward the end of the year 1978, however, I let Biggun and his sister Scootie peer-pressure me into picking a fight with Gloria. I wanted to be accepted by the bully, even at the cost of my love. I figured this was the better long-term investment, an example of those self-reliance skills. After he dared me, I walked up to Gloria, her knowing all along what was going on, and blackened her eye.
Biggun and Scootie oohed and aawed and giggled. But Gloria, devastated, was crying softly. When she walked away from me that day, I saw the pain and hurt in her eyes. She wouldn’t speak to me for weeks; and Biggun still chased me home. I felt terrible for months afterward. But Gloria eventually forgave me. She stopped me one day as I walked in front of her house and told me I was wrong for doing that. But when I apologized, she smiled. Regardless, we would never become close friends again. Gloria and her family would soon leave the projects. Her mother was about to have a nervous breakdown.
After apologizing to Gloria that day, I went home and found a small crowd gathered across from my window. They were watching as a black man was being wheeled from the Deadman units by paramedics. A sheet hid his face. He was Gloria’s father.
4
SCHOOL TORTURE
Wake up, Jerrold and Junior,” Sherrie screamed early one Monday morning. There was no need to wake up. Too nervous to get some sleep, I had lain awake half the night. I forced myself out of bed and moved the broken closet door aside. A pile of dirty clothes lay just inside the closet. Sifting through the pile, I managed to find an outfit that wasn’t so abhorrent. The shirt was from the early sixties, the pants dirt-packed. And my mother, she didn’t even get out of bed to bid us a horrible good-bye.
That morning, Junior and Sherrie were being bussed to middle school in a white neighborhood. I had attended George Washington Carver but was being transferred to John J. Pershing. At Carver, the teachers would come and get me out of class to give me reading and spelling tests, though it didn’t dawn on me until years later why they never made the other kids take so many tests. They were detecting things.
I walked reluctantly to the corner of Fishtrap and Morris, across from the graveyard. Eric wasn’t out here, as I expected. He probably didn’t have the nerve to put up with this mess on the first day, the hardest day. I understood him all too well. I made a mental note to tell him how things went.
On the corner, a few young kids were decent, well dressed, and from the minimum-wage group, just slightly more fortunate than I was. But all of us looked as if we had spent the night battling: drained and lifeless. Maybe the bus would have a wreck, I hoped. Maybe it would forget our street. The big yellow machine rounding the corner spoiled that idea. We children formed a single line as the bus lurched to a stop in front of us. I was nervous and embarrassed as I boarded. I was on my own.
The bus turned right on Goldman and left on Bickers, then left from Bickers onto Hampton Road. Hampton led to the long bridge. Some of the children marveled at the deep valley of grass, shrubbery, and trees alongside the Trinity River, which flowed out of sight on both sides. Others kids remained deathly quiet as they rode across the bridge. Hampton turned into Inwood Road. As we descended on this end of the bridge, a remarkable change took place.
I had heard rumors of the place we now headed toward, about all the luxury. Yet no foreknowledge could have prepared me, or any of the children, for what lay ahead. We were being bussed to the heart of the white neighborhoods, the heart of white America. They were making us go to school there.
Farther down Inwood, I noticed that the buildings were all pleasant and new. There were a lot of pretty cars. We drove farther. Nice, new, and clean houses, though not very large, started appearing along clean streets and parks, parks lush with green and healthy trees. And to my amazement, I saw tennis courts in a public park.
We came around a curve. I saw the biggest house. You could have placed half a project block on its front yard alone. It resembled a castle. There was a long, curved road leading up to its front door and circling back out the other side. Who could have lived in that place? It was unlike anything I had ever seen.
Some of the houses were monumental, spacious, and sculptured, unlike the shack units back home in the Hitler camp. For three project units, which could hold twenty-four families, north Dallas had one house.
The kids lit up like Christmas trees when they saw the homes. They exchanged awed expressions and pointed at the castles. I was overcome, too, because I could not believe that only one family would occupy one of these large houses. For as long as I was bussed across the bridge, through white luxury, I would never fail to be amazed by the homes.
John J. Pershing was a small public school. It was surrounded by forested lots and more castle homes. In the back was a large playground area. After the school buses parked along the curb at the front, I went inside to enroll in the fourth grade.
As everyone was ushered into the school auditorium to be sorted out, the blacks and whites avoided one another as if the opposite had smallpox. During the day, everyone filled out forms and free lunch papers and learned his classes. I tried to stay alone in a corner. And for the first time, over the busy, yapping schoolchildren, I missed being back home in the projects. I didn’t want to be here, among all these strange people and humiliation. I thanked God when, after doing the paperwork, they let us go home early.
The first day after school, walking around the corner of my brick project unit felt like wandering on the plains of heaven. I would continue to feel this solace after leaving the white schools each day, all year long. The same pattern every year, pressure in the morning, relief in the evening. I seriously was smiling that day, happy to be back among the madness, until I saw a red-eyed dope fiend come running around the corner with an armful of clothes. Another one soon followed him, carrying a lamp. I knew this meant that only one thing was in progress, and according to the direction from which the fiends had come, it was happening to somebody I knew. Only one thing left to do: go see which poor family the project authorities were evicting this time.
Leading there, clothes and cheap furnishings littered the path. There was something peculiar about these articles of clothing. But I couldn’t quite put things together, not until I arrived in back of the unit where the tree grew to the rooftop, where I had sat on the concrete porch and talked with the first girl who kissed me, who touched me, even though it was only a small, undetectable fire. What had they done to Gloria?
They had sent ten big authority workers inside Gloria’s house to get her family’s possessions and set them on the street curb. That was how the operation went: If a family, for whatever reason, was required to move, and if they hadn’t met the deadline, big black gorilla men, authority workers, would put them out. This was all too customary in the projects.
Gloria had already left, sent to live with a relative. Small Mark was standing nearby, smirking. Gloria’s family dilemma was funny to him. Mark should have known better, having had gunmen surround his house before, forcing him to jump from his window. But this was sad to me and other project people, who were trying to help load Gloria’s and her family’s stuff onto a truck. Yeah, Mark thought this disaster was really a laugh, a major joke. But the other news he later shared with me—about which he didn’t feel so humorous—wiped that dumb smile from his face. Probably hit too close to home. Eric’s parents had been murdered.
The dope dealing had caught up with them. They had turned in only half the money and couldn’t come up with the rest. And that very morning, two men had kicked down their project door and killed. They had shot at little Eric, too, as he ran out the back door. Later, one of Eric’s relatives had come and taken him away, which explained why he didn’t show for sc
hool. I felt sorry for Eric. Though it was a terrible price to pay, he had finally gotten out.
A week later, I had settled in at John J. Pershing Elementary, become immune to the name calling and the word nigger, and met a handful of so-called middle-class blacks. I learned most of them merely lived in mediocre apartments near the white colonies. They dressed nicely, seemed okay, but talked more white than the white children. Immediately I, and most other project blacks, believed they tried to walk, talk, and breathe like white kids. “Get real, Scott. Gosh, Sue. Gee-whiz, Jeff.” I don’t see how they had time for anything else because they concentrated so hard on trying to mimic the white kids. Often, if I had not looked to see who was talking, I would have sworn it was one of those ultrawhite kids babbling—and not a black boy whose skin was more chocolate than mine. Some of them wouldn’t have anything to do with us project blacks, either.
Like other project blacks, I never had time to concentrate on studies. My morale stayed low. My diet was terrible—when I had a diet. The lack of food probably caused more problems than I ever discovered. The last thing I wanted to think about was studying when I had a three-day-old hunger headache. I had no family support—my mother was too busy battling her own culture shock to assist me. And I never got proper rest in that oven unit. As every day went on, I slipped farther and farther behind the white kids, widening the already huge gap I would have to close. Every day I felt overwhelmed.
During my schooling at John J. Pershing, I was still evaluated all the time. Mrs. Nancy Raines, a white school counselor, would take me into her office and give me aptitude tests in math, reading, logic, and other subjects. Soon she tapped into some of the same signs the teachers at George Washington Carver had. My grasp of these skills was far advanced for my age, Mrs. Raines said, and she recommended me for advanced classes. Before long, I was taken out of “regular classes” and placed in the all-white, talented and gifted class, otherwise known as the TAG program.
My first day there, all the white children sat in a circle with the teacher and handed a box around. I was asked to join in, so I took a seat. The object of the exercise was to guess what was in the box by using methods other than sight. Many kids had asked questions, but when the box was handed to me, I closed my eyes and shook the box several times. Then I asked the teacher if the object had plastic on it. She said yes, and one white kid said it was about time someone got a right answer. Later, a girl guessed that it was a plastic flower lying hidden in the box. For reasons unknown to me, that event really impresssed the white kids.
When news spread around the school that I was in TAG, I earned the admiration of some of my project peers. They would smile at me with pride gleaming in their eyes. I represented them, the children from the projects. I was their man in TAG, their man downtown, so to speak. And TAG helped to distract attention away from my smelly, dirty clothes.
My mother was extremely proud when she finally heard the good report. She had shared the news with her dope fiend friends, about how smart her baby boy was. The dope dealers had given me extra money and scolded my mother for not supporting the potential of her son. Junior and Sherrie weren’t surprised. I had been doing Sherrie’s high school homework and Junior had been consulting me on his middle-school work.
In the TAG classes, students were exposed to a wide curriculum: logic exercises, foreign languages, reasoning, and business management skills. In regular classes, a kid only learned basic reading and writing. On the days I came to school, I looked forward to TAG. I was mostly left alone and allowed to read. I enjoyed the challenges of trying, along with other students, to figure out a business budget, locate Italy on a world map, or say “Good morning” in French.
The teacher astonished all of us one day when she held up a book as thick as a dictionary and said she had read it last night. None of us could believe that she had read that book in so short a time. I had no idea this would become a common practice for me.
At Pershing, I had been missing school as much as I attended, because I was either ashamed of being dirty, was too hungry or too sick, or was required by my mother to miss school. Still, over the months I had become an eager student, wanting to participate in all the class activities. But I didn’t even have pencil and paper. Though I had gotten a little praise from my mother, the children, and the dope dealers in the beginning, all of them went back to their respective routines. Furthermore, my happiness didn’t last, because TAG didn’t change the Hitler camp. I was eventually placed back in regular classes. I hated that.
Seeing my disappointment, Mrs. Raines kept me around for a short while. I even started writing a book. I would come into her office and longhand my story; then she would type it for me. It was about a young boy who sneaked out of his house on a rainy night to play tennis, when a spaceship caught and beamed him aboard.
One day in Mrs. Raines’s office, when I was taking a make-up test, roaches ran from my book bag. Mrs. Raines smashed them hard with her hand, as if she had never seen one. The other students in the room laughed at me. My relationship with Mrs. Raines was never the same. Not that she rejected me. I was just too ashamed to have anything else to do with her. And I believed she felt my case was hopeless. So I stopped coming around.
Afterward, school became more unpleasant. For example, in the lunch room they made the paying students go through one line and the free lunch kids go through another. It was so humiliating. Mr. Holley, the PE teacher, called me into his office one day and made me show him my once white but now brown socks. He did the same with my underwear. He encouraged me to wash out my clothes by hand and to bathe myself, and he offered to take me to get a haircut. But I refused. Most of us boys wanted to keep our thick hair. And I wasn’t concerned with bathing and cleaning clothes.
Attending school at Pershing offered me my first exposure to a wide variety of books. I believe my desire for understanding at that time got me into reading—since there were few human sources. I read my history and reading books the first week of school, from beginning to end. I would sit in class and, instead of participating, read books: I read everything I could get my hands on, even several encyclopedias. I even skipped recreation, to read in the library or alone in the field. The reading wasn’t focused, but simply a random, indiscriminate process.
Over the spring of 1980, after my first year in the white school, I began visiting the West Dallas Public Library to satisfy my new love. Before, I didn’t even know we had a library. I began to skip school and read at the library all day, for ten and twelve hours, sometimes until closing. I read books on hypnosis, psychic powers, and thinking, and encyclopedias to get information about specific subjects. I read a lot of science fiction, too, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien. In addition, I read plenty of “how to” books, on training dogs, camping, designing paper airplanes, or whatever interested me that day. Books became my teacher and my escape. I read voraciously, unmethodically, at the public library for days and years.
Around the house, activity was changing again. Another man was staying around more than usual. He would sit in our living room after he had been upstairs with my mother and smoke his tobacco pipe. If my mother let a man spend several nights, this meant she had plans to keep him. I figured it was time to get to know him after a week.
This one’s name was Henry. He was tall, light-skinned, quiet, and simple. In his thirties, he was content just to have a young woman let him stay with her. Henry was also on heroin. But as he stayed with us, I realized he wasn’t so bad.
Early each morning Henry would walk across the long Hampton bridge to the truck docks, to load and unload the semis for a small fee. With the money, he and my mother got high or occasionally bought some lunch meat and bread or a chicken to eat.
Henry took an interest in me and would advise me about putting my God-given intelligence to use. “Jerrold, you have a lot of sense. I hope you grow up and make something out of yourself.” A lot of people would make this comment, but none of them ever said how to do it. And Henry was a
bit of a coward to me. He wouldn’t help Sherrie or me when we had to fight, wouldn’t even come out of the house. Because he helped my mother supply her heroin, he became more important to her than we were: He ate before us, and we would receive a savage beating if she detected the slightest disrespect of him.
After school one evening, Henry introduced me to fishing. He took me down to the pond with two rod and reels and a bucket of worms he had dug up from his mother’s backyard. We sat very close to the cattails, where he schooled me about fishing. First, he pointed at a long water moccasin that was relaxing in the cattails. “Don’t disturb it,” he said. Just beyond the cattails he cast the lines into the water. He propped them up in the air using a Y stick and twisted the reels until the lines were tight. We sat for a few minutes. I was told to watch the movement of the tip of the rod, which would signal a fish nibbling or nudging the bait. I sat with little interest, paying no attention to the rod I should have been watching. I heard Henry say, “There he goes.” I turned around in time to see the rod bend almost to the water. As suddenly as it had tightened, the line slackened. “There are carps in this lake as long as a man’s leg,” Henry lectured. I went on to love the activity and to catch fish as big as Henry described, some so enormous we had to go into the water and drag them out by their gills.
Although I believe the fishing time was special for Henry and my mother, I stayed detached during our time together. As long as Henry or I cast the line, she would sit there and haul in the fish. Her skin had darkened from sitting in the sun all day. I believed my mom unconsciously used the activity to combat her drug habit, though it never worked.