New Boy

by Julian Houston

  As I stood on the subway platform waiting for the train, I thought about the old man outside the bookstore. I still had his card, and I reached into my pocket and took it out. It said LEWIS MICHAUX, FOUNDER AND PROPRIETOR, NATIONAL MEMORIAL AFRICAN BOOKSTORE. And then I unfolded the newspaper he had given me. The masthead at the top of the front page said MUHAMMAD SPEAKS, oddly printed in prim, Old English type, but the headline underneath was bold and unmistakable, like the signs in front of Michaux's store. It read, we must have justice! and at the bottom of the page was an article about a Negro who had been beaten by the police and a photograph of a light-skinned colored man with a boy's skinny haircut. He was wearing a suit and tie and he was looking directly at the camera with an expression of barely contained fury, and he wore eyeglasses with dark plastic frames and metal around the bottom of the lenses, but his eyes were so magnetic, so intense, the demure eyeglasses seemed like a mere prop, like the eyeglasses Clark Kent used to wear to disguise a much more powerful being behind them. The caption underneath the photograph said "Malcolm X, Minister, Muhammad's Mosque No. 7." "We're not interested in white justice," read the quotation under the caption. "We want justice for the black man. If this sort of thing doesn't stop, we'll have to stop it ourselves."

  The train arrived, stuffed with Negroes, and I squeezed myself on. The doors shut and I held on to a pole with several other passengers as the train accelerated, and I thought of my encounter with Michaux and his exhortations of Africa. The anger he expressed was not unfamiliar to me. At some point, every Negro wants to scare the wits out of the white man, but I had never heard the anger expressed so openly. As the train hurtled forward, it occurred to me that Michaux had no interest in the integration of the races, which I had been brought up to believe was the ideal for every Negro, the same ideal that Jackie Robinson and Dr. Du Bois and the NAACP had fought for. For Michaux, integration was not an ideal at all, but rather a threat to the future of our people.

  Chapter Six

  When I reached Cousin Gwen's apartment, she immediately took me to task. "Boy, where have you been? I been worried sick about you. I called the school and the train station. What took you so long?"

  I was ready for her. "I decided to walk over to Times Square to look around," I said, trying to appear as unruffled as possible. "I must have lost track of the time." After admonishing me to remember to call if I was going to be late again, she told me to put down my bag and come into the kitchen.

  "Are you hungry?" she said.

  "I could use a little something," I said, glancing at my watch. It was almost five o'clock.

  "How about a ham sandwich? When you finish it, you can help me get dinner ready for tomorrow." Cousin Gwen took a large baked ham and a jar of mayonnaise from the refrigerator and put them on the kitchen table, and with a big carving knife she sliced several thick slices of ham from the bone, spread mayonnaise on two slices of Sunbeam bread, and made my sandwich. With the wrinkled brown hands that had made the ham sandwich with such care, she placed it on a plate and presented it to me. "Here. Don't eat too fast."

  "Thank you." I took the sandwich and began to devour it.

  "Would you like a glass of milk to go with that?" said Cousin Gwen.

  "Yes, m'am," I said. When she placed the glass of milk next to my plate, I felt a warmth and security I had not felt in many months. I could have been seated in the kitchen at home.

  "Well, how are things going," asked Cousin Gwen, in her familiar coy voice, "now that you've been up there for a while?" There was something about her tone that made me uncomfortable, as though she already knew the answer to her question and just wanted me to confirm it. She sounded like a gossip columnist for a newspaper.

  "It's okay," I said. "I almost made the honor roll last marking period."

  "Well, now that's a pretty good start," she said. I was sure she wanted to know more. "How are you getting along socially?" It sounded as though she wanted to hear about Vinnie's travails, which I suspected she had learned about from my parents, but I was in no mood to talk about them.

  "I've met a few fellows," I said, "but mostly I've kept to myself. Like you told me to do."

  Having taught for many years, she must have sensed my reluctance, because she abruptly changed the subject. "Well, we'd better get started on this dinner for tomorrow. Your parents should be here by three o'clock, and I'm sure your father will be hungry."

  As much as I looked forward to seeing my parents, I still felt the same sense of distance from them that I had felt in September when they were about to leave me at Draper, and I felt it at that moment in the kitchen with Cousin Gwen. They were all residing in the past, living with their memories of encounters with white people that had accumulated over the years, encounters still tainted with humiliation and bitterness, with insults and intimidation. I had already discovered that Draper was not immune from bigotry, and I wasn't certain what my own future would be like. But I knew that I did not want it to be divided by race like my life in the South had been.

  I thought about my encounter with old man Michaux and my fleeting introduction to Malcolm X on the subway. The starkness of their vision of the future was like the negative print of a photograph, a vision of racial separation in reverse, but one that also seemed to be rooted in the past. I wondered if that vision would be my future, if I could ever escape history. I was intrigued by Michaux's exhortations to study our African heritage. I didn't know much about Africa and I wanted to know more, but I was not prepared to drop all of my courses to concentrate on an area of study that Draper didn't offer. And the tone of belligerence both Michaux and Malcolm X adopted seemed hopelessly self-defeating, although reminiscent of language I had heard before, used by angry colored men at home on street corners or at sporting events or in parking lots, arguing with each other about a woman or the result of a ball game or the meaning of a passage of Scripture. It was the voice of anger at the cards that life had dealt.

  I got up from the kitchen table and walked over to a window. The sun was setting and the sky was bright red, but below the streets were dark, the paths of the maze deep in shadow. The globes of streetlights, the lighted windows of shabby tenements, the neon signs of shops and bars and the lights of cars and trucks were beginning to illuminate the darkened streets. And I felt once more the urge to wander through that maze, to understand why, in the largest Negro community in the world, there were so few white people. Harlem was in the North, not the South, but when I walked down 125th Street earlier in the day, it seemed like a bigger version of home.

  "Can you chop me some onions?" said Cousin Gwen. She removed my empty plate and replaced it with a wooden cutting board, a carving knife, and a bowl with three large yellow onions. I had not been assigned a task like this since leaving home.

  "Sure," I said. "I'll just wash my hands." I washed up quickly in the kitchen sink and returned to the table. "What's this for?" I said as I began to peel the onions.

  "Collards," said Cousin Gwen. "Collards are tough, so I cook them for a long time over a low flame with onions and smoked ham hocks and water. I'll cook them for a while tonight and finish 'em off tomorrow morning." Cousin Gwen's thin arms were covered with flour and buried in an enormous blue mixing bowl.

  "Are you making bread?" I said as she kneaded a pale ball of dough in the bowl.

  "Rolls. I'll let this rise overnight and they'll be ready for the oven in the morning."

  I started to chop the onions and, as I did, I remembered why I always hated the job. My eyes were filling with tears from the onion fumes. "This is killing me," I said.

  Cousin Gwen looked at me and smiled. "You look like you just got a whipping. Take that cutting board with the onions over to the sink and keep the water running while you finish chopping." I was ready to try anything, so I did what she said and it worked.

  When I finished chopping the onions, Cousin Gwen put them into a pot with the smoked hocks and the collards that were sitting on the stove, and turned on the burner underneath.
"How about peeling and coring some apples for an apple pie?" she asked, handing me a big blue bowl of red apples. She had already begun to make the crust, so I got right to work. As we worked in silence at the kitchen table, I began to think about Harlem. I wondered how much it had changed since Cousin Gwen had arrived. She had lived there for more than forty years, so I asked her, "What was Harlem like when you moved here?"

  At first she didn't answer. I thought maybe she didn't hear me, but when I looked at her, I could see that she was concentrating on the pie crust, folding ice water and pieces of lard into the flour. Then she mixed it into a ball and started to roll it out with a rolling pin.

  "It was wild. The streets were ruled by bootleggers and racketeers who were paying everybody off. I wasn't twenty-five at the time. I had finished college and managed to find a job teaching school, and I thought I was pretty hot stuff. You could walk down 125th Street and see James Weldon Johnson and Dr. Du Bois and Langston Hughes all on the same afternoon. And Garvey's people would be out, dressed up in those fancy military uniforms and marching up and down Seventh Avenue like they were about to take over the world. I tell you, it was wild." She shook her head slowly, smiling as she recalled the days. "Of course, during the Depression, there was a lot of suffering. I was lucky enough to have a job, so people would come to my door begging for food and I'd give them what I could. Everybody did. You'd see them dressed in rags out on the street holding a sign, will work for food. Little children holding up a piece of cardboard. It was painful to watch, but people managed to get through it. Prohibition was over so the bootleggers were not as prevalent, but the numbers runners were around and there was plenty of good music in the clubs. Harlem has always been a lively place."

  "Who was Garvey?" I said, peeling the red skin from an apple. Cousin Gwen had rolled out the pie crust and folded it carefully, and was unfolding it in the pie pan. I remembered Garvey's picture on the sign in front of Michaux's bookstore.

  Cousin Gwen began to crimp the edges of the pastry in the pie pan. "I guess you don't hear that much about Garvey in the South. Garvey was a West Indian, a black nationalist. Heavyset, dapper, and black as coal. He believed we should all go back to Africa and he started his own organization, with a steamship line to take us back. He called it the Universal Negro Improvement Association. It had a newspaper and it would hold parades with people marching up and down the street in uniforms, and Garvey himself would ride in the back of a big convertible like the biggest politicians—FDR and La Guardia—used to ride in, and he would be all dressed up in a military uniform like Napoleon, with gold braids and medals on his chest and a plumed hat. It was all for show, but he could give quite a speech and, of course, the West Indians loved it. Everybody loved it. Oh, he was something, chastising the white man, spinning out his dream of taking everybody back to Africa to a packed hall with that singsong voice of his. He knew how to draw a crowd." Cousin Gwen began to core and peel the last apple and then she sliced it into the big bowl with the others. "But when Dr. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson and the leaders of the NAACP saw how big Garvey's audiences were, they had a fit. They publicly attacked him for leading the race down the path of destruction. Of course, they were advocates of integration, and Garvey didn't want to have anything to do with integration. Unfortunately. Garvey wasn't much of a businessman. The steamship failed and the prosecutors got involved and Garvey ended up going to prison for fraud." Cousin Gwen stopped slicing the apple for a moment and looked at me. "Why is it our people always fall for these charlatans?" she said, and she shook her head and resumed slicing. "Anyway, that was the end of him, although there are still a lot of people in Harlem who admire Garvey and what he stood for."

  Cousin Gwen mixed the sliced apples with sugar and spices and then poured them into the pastry shell. She dotted the apples with butter and carefully placed a covering of pastry on top, fitting the edges into the grooves of the crimped pastry already in the pan. There," she said, admiring her handiwork. "I'll just put this in the oven. It'll be ready in about an hour." She opened the oven door and a gust of warm air enveloped us as she put the pie in the oven. "I'm going to stay up and wait for this pie to finish. The collards won't be done by then, but they'll have a good start." The heavy odor of the collards hung in the air.

  "You must be tired," said Cousin Gwen, walking into the living room. I followed her and walked over to the front window. The immense darkness was spread before me, studded with lights, as though all of Harlem was awake. I wanted to linger at the window even though Cousin Gwen had suggested that I turn in. "There's a clean towel and a washcloth on the day bed in the study," she said. "That's where you will sleep. You know where the bathroom is. Now don't stay up too late. We've got a full day tomorrow." To my surprise, she gave me an affectionate pat on the arm and smiled. Cousin Gwen rarely displayed physical affection, and her manner was often so sharp that I sometimes wondered whether she liked me at all or merely tolerated me to preserve her relationship with my parents. But this gesture was so spontaneous, so natural that it caught me by surprise, and I was forced to reconsider how I felt about her and what she had to say.

  I said good night, washed up in Cousin Gwen's spotless white tile bathroom, and retreated to the study. It had indeed been a long day, and my mind was spinning as I thought again about the day's events. At last I had seen Harlem with my own eyes, but I wondered what more there was to the place, beyond the huge buildings and the wide streets and the sidewalks flooded with Negroes. There was danger here, I knew from talking to Willie Maurice and reading the newspaper, but I had yet to encounter it. I thought about Garvey, and I wondered if he had been flawed like Joe Louis, losing his way perhaps as only a colored man can. Both were tragic figures, but it seemed odd that Harlem, for all its grandeur and presumed sympathy, could not save them. I was exhausted. In Cousin Gwen's study, I was surrounded by bookcases stuffed with books I was too tired to examine, so I put on my pajamas, switched off the light, and slipped between the covers of the day bed, where I instantly fell asleep in the darkness.

  Chapter Seven

  On Thanksgiving, my parents arrived at Cousin Gwen's early in the afternoon. They had left Virginia in the Roadmaster the day before and stopped to visit friends in Delaware, where they spent the night, arising early the next morning to begin the last leg of the trip. By the time they arrived, dinner was almost ready. Cousin Gwen had made candied sweet potatoes, assigning me the responsibility of placing marshmallows on top of the dish and running it into the oven just before serving. Basted, browned, and swollen with stuffing, the glistening turkey rested on top of the stove as Cousin Gwen was busy making the gravy. I had already set the dining room table with Cousin Gwen's finest tableware, long-stem crystal water glasses, Copeland china, and silver flatware she had inherited from her mother, everything arranged according to her precise instructions on a lace tablecloth of white Irish linen. Outside there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and sunlight was pouring in through the dining room windows.

  "Well, well, well," said my father with a grin as he shook my hand and threw his arm around my shoulder. "You're looking pretty good, I'd say."

  "I'm doing okay," I replied. I didn't want to say any more. I wasn't prepared, at that time, to discuss the details of my experience at Draper with Vinnie or the events of the day before, even though I knew they wanted very much to hear about them. As far as I was concerned, these were private matters, like my decision to go to a nightclub with Burns, and the less my parents knew about them, the better.

  "You mean you're not ready to come home?" said my mother in mock surprise, wrapping her arms around me. I knew she was kidding, but I wondered if there was something more to her question. Since I had arrived at Draper, the thought of returning home had occurred to me more than once, but I had clung to my resolve to remain. Despite moments of great uncertainty, I was determined to finish what I had begun, to prove that I had the will to survive and find my way through the wilderness.

  Cousin Gwen's Thanksgivin
g dinner was predictably sumptuous. The turkey was moist and perfectly done, and she had stuffed it with cornbread, grated orange peel, and country sausage, which gave it a wonderful aroma. The giblet gravy she had put together made the turkey even more succulent. The collards were tender and smoky from the ham hocks. I had put the sweet potatoes in the oven at the last minute and they were now on the table with the marshmallows, crispy brown and puffed. There were slices of baked ham, and homemade cranberry sauce, and, of course, Cousin Gwen's incomparable hot rolls. It was a feast, and as the deep blue sky began to take on a rosy hue, we ate ourselves silly, helping ourselves to seconds, and in my father's case, to thirds. And to top it off, when dinner was finished, Cousin Gwen brought out the apple pie, which she had warmed in the oven.

  "My goodness, Cousin Gwen," said my father when he finished dessert. "If you keep feeding us like this, the boy won't want to go back to school."

  "Oh, he's going back, all right. Nothing would stop that." She looked at me with a knowing smile. Even though I hadn't discussed my reservations about Draper with her, I had the feeling that somehow she knew my initiation had not been without incident.

  "Well, there's a lot going on back home," said my father. "After that big Supreme Court case the NAACP won in 1954, all the schools were supposed to open right up for us, but the whites have been resisting it bitterly. They say they will fight it to the last man, just like the Civil War. People are starting to wonder if we'll ever get integration." My father leaned back in his chair. "I guess it just proves that we made the right decision in sending you to school up here."

  I let my father's words hover over the dining room table, and I thought about old man Michaux and his distaste for integration. I wondered if what was happening at home was simply a confirmation of his view of the world.