Often in the days after I got home to my wife and children, I asked myself why I had taken on the civil rights movement as my personal crusade. I knew the reason I’d gotten involved in general—any black American with a pulse and a conscience had done that by the summer of 1964, at least to the extent of writing the occasional check. A lot of white Americans had, too. All of us sensed this was a point at which history simply had to turn. We couldn’t tolerate more lynchings and beatings. We couldn’t abide more “whites-only” signs on the hotels and restaurants and gas stations and water fountains and bus stations of the segregated South. We couldn’t let black Americans be treated as slaves in all but name anymore. This we knew. But why did I feel so personally offended, sitting in my twenty-one-room apartment on West End Avenue, when I saw news pictures of student protesters beaten by truncheon-wielding state police and bitten by police attack dogs? What deep wellspring of anger did those images bring up, and why had I felt so angry, for so long, about so many other related issues of freedom, and democracy, and equality, as if the perpetrators of these grave indignities—from the president to the FBI to the military to the man in the street—had set out to do me wrong? And why, when I also cared so much about making a success of myself as an actor and singer, had I jeopardized—in some ways damaged—a career trajectory that had made me, at thirty, the world’s first so-called black matinee idol?
My mother had a lot to do with it. To a lesser degree my father, but he was in there. I also knew that from childhood, I’d occupied a lonely place, not just between West Indian and American culture, but between black and white. And in both the actual worlds I’d balanced between as a kid—Kingston and Harlem—I was as poor as poor could be. I was definitely angry about that.
Long after I’d immersed myself in the civil rights movement, I would still be trying to understand that anger and make it melt away. With Martin Luther King, Jr., to guide me, I would embrace nonviolence—not just as an organizing tactic, but as a way of life. Half a century of Freudian analysis would help, too. But as I began to set down the story of my life, I would still be piecing the parts together. I know more now than when I started this book. I see the little boy I was, in all his complexities, angry and hurt, almost always alone. Yet why this little boy, among all others, should use his anger to push himself up, make a name for himself, and then make it his mission to smash racial barriers and injustice with such grim determination, I’m not sure I can say.
Perhaps, in the end, where your anger comes from is less important than what you do with it.
2
I was born into poverty, grew up in poverty, and for a long time poverty was all I thought I’d know. It defined me; in the depths of my soul I think it defines me still. I felt not just angry but somewhat afraid, and vulnerable. All of this my mother felt, too, from the moment she stepped off a steamer called the Cananova onto Ellis Island on July 20, 1926. But at first, she also felt hope.
My mother, Melvine Love, was a true Jamaican beauty of twenty-one, with dark eyes, high cheekbones, and a trim figure she held so straight that no one ever failed to note her sense of pride and purpose. She was one of thirteen children born to a farming family up in the mountains of St. Ann Parish, on the island’s north coast, her café au lait skin the telltale sign of her interracial roots. Her father was a black sharecropper, her mother the white daughter of a Scottish father who’d come to Jamaica to oversee a plantation for an absentee owner. It was a common story in the islands. So were large families, with not all the children necessarily born of the same two parents. A few of my mother’s siblings probably had different fathers, and darker or lighter skin to show for it; I’m fairly sure my grandfather had a few offspring sprinkled among the surrounding hills. Millie, as my mother was known, was one of the ten children of her family who survived childhood. Jamaica held nothing for them but a hardscrabble farming life, so four of Millie’s siblings had already come to New York; two were waiting for her in the reception area. My aunt Liz was dressed in a fancy hat and tightly tailored wool suit. The suit was meant to impress, and it did. With her was my uncle Castel, who probably looked like her driver; in fact, he had a car he operated as a taxi, taking Harlem fares no self-respecting white cabbie would touch—they never came to Harlem.
As a girl who’d grown up in a two-room shack in rural Jamaica, Millie was awed by the jostling crowds and honking automobiles around her when she took her first steps in Manhattan, clinging to Liz’s arm. Awed and overwhelmed. But there was no going back. If she had any doubts, Millie had only to remember why she’d come. With her mother’s help, she’d learned how to read and write on a slate board, and dared to imagine she might become an educated woman. At eight years old, she’d proudly shown the slate to her father, her heart filled with great expectations. “Fine, that’s all you need,” her father had said. “Now, in the mornings, you can teach your younger brother to do as good as you, and in the afternoons you can lend a hand in the fields.” What craziness was she thinking—an education? Years later, I would marvel at the perfect curves and strokes of my mother’s penmanship, all that remained of her girlish dreams.
Millie’s first taxi ride took her to 145th Street and Seventh Avenue, in Harlem’s West Indian community. Liz’s apartment was in one of the better buildings on the block. When she led her younger sister inside, a neighbor called out a cheery greeting, “Hello, Miz Hines.” Millie gave her a curious look, but said nothing as they passed upstairs to a tastefully decorated six-room apartment with four bedrooms. “It’s beautiful,” Millie managed to say. “Does everybody in New York live like this?” Liz explained she had tenants for three of the four bedrooms; they helped with the rent. She’d made one of the bedrooms available for Millie, which was, as Liz hardly needed to add, a financial sacrifice. Millie could stay there, Liz said, until she got something going. From the way Liz laughed when she said it, even Millie realized what she meant: Until you find a man.
Millie was the newest member of an immigrant group within a larger immigrant group. A white New Yorker in 1926 might see no distinction between Harlem’s American and Caribbean blacks, except for the islanders’ lilting accents. But the differences were profound. American blacks bore the burden of two hundred years of pre–Civil War slavery and postwar segregation. Most had lived in poverty so long they’d lost all hope. They still fought to escape its pain and indignities, but they’d learned how to accommodate them. The islanders in Harlem in the early twentieth century weren’t like that. They were first-generation immigrants, fired with ambition to better their lots. Their ancestors had been slaves in conditions often more brutal than those in the American South—worked to death like mules—but precisely because of that, they’d staged more rebellions and escapes; they didn’t have the choice of groveling for slightly better treatment, as some slaves in the American South did. In part because of those rebellions, by the mid-nineteenth century Spain, France, and England were forced to abolish slavery in their colonies. Though they went on to train a skillful class of civil servants as overseers for their absentee landowners, that was not enough to contain the islanders’ rebellious spirit. So independence had been doled out, bit by bit, until, by the mid-1920s, blacks on the islands could even aspire to be landowners, lawyers, or doctors. On most of the islands, they also composed the majority. Most were still poor, but they had pride and ambition.
A lot of those who made their way to Harlem came first to the Gulfport area in Mississippi, drawn by promises of steady work that turned into a new kind of slavery: indentured servitude. Contractors whisked these people off to the interior, where they found themselves cutting sugarcane, picking cotton, and living in crude barracks, earning only enough to fall into debt at the company store. The toughest and most determined of them had escaped—no less runaway slaves than their forebears in the islands—to head up north.
As a result, Harlem’s West Indians were going to let nothing stop them from making their way. Not for them the institutional, dead-end poverty of American blacks
. For their part, American blacks called the islanders the “Jews” of their community. It was a knock tinged with anti-Semitism, but there was more than a little truth to it. Like the Jews who’d colonized other pockets of Harlem, the islanders prized education, both in itself and as a means of escaping poverty. Like Jews, their aspirations were high. And like some American Jews of the 1920s, if they couldn’t succeed within the law, they’d succeed outside it. Many islanders in those Prohibition days were rumrunners, working routes from the West Indies up along the East Coast. In Harlem, they ran the numbers games. Millie must have learned that early on, because Liz ran a numbers operation with her part-time boyfriend, Jimmy Hines.
A few West Indians had invented the numbers game not long before, brought it to Harlem, and by the mid-1920s made it a hugely profitable—and illegal—syndicate. The idea was brilliantly simple. People bet on what the last three digits would be that day for any of various publicly toted-up figures. The stock market’s closing price would do fine. So would the U.S. Treasury balance. The most popular was the total of what winning horses paid that afternoon at one of the tracks. All these totals were more than three digits when the cents as well as the dollars were included, so the last three digits—the most random ones—were those that bettors tried to guess. If the total for what a slate of winning horses paid that day was $264.64, the “full number” would be 464. Guessing all three in order was so unlikely that the odds were a thousand to one. But you could bet on a single digit or double digits, too—what the first number would be, say, or the first two—for a far more modest return.
As a numbers operator, Liz had her own bank, which meant she took in the bets from blocks around. Every morning, her runners would fan out through the neighborhood, knocking on every door. “What are you playing today, Mrs. Davis?” “Oh, give me three-forty-one for twenty-five cents.” It cost so little to play that almost everyone did. And everyone had a “dream book” dictionary, with numbers written in beside telltale words. So Mrs. Davis might be betting on 341 because she’d had a dream about fire the night before—and there, by the definition of fire in her dream book, were the numerals 341. At the end of the day, someone always won, and the bankers, like Liz, always paid out—that was what kept the game going. That, and an absolutely scrupulous honesty on the part of the bankers: Any runner caught pocketing bets would pay a terrible price. Honesty was what kept Mrs. Davis and her neighbors betting; nothing could interfere with that process. Of course, there was a lot left over, too, which was why Liz had such a nice apartment and such finely tailored clothes.
Liz couldn’t run a numbers game by herself. She needed a partner with muscle and political clout. For that, she had Jimmy Hines, who, to Millie’s shock, wasn’t an islander at all: He was an Irish politician, a Tammany Hall boss in the corrupt administration of Mayor Jimmy Walker. Hines was charming and ruthless. He’d started in his father’s stable, ingratiating himself with the city’s political machine by shoeing the city’s police and fire horses. Soon he’d become a district captain. By 1926, he had his hands in all sorts of pies. The numbers operation he ran with Liz was just one of them: He was extracting another $30,000 a year in protection money from the other numbers bosses by bribing the local police to stay away. Hines had a wife and three sons downtown. But for his uptown rounds, he had Liz.
Almost every Sunday night, Jimmy and “Miz Hines” threw a boisterous dinner. Politicians mixed freely with numbers bosses and various underworld types to eat Liz’s Caribbean food. One regular was Dutch Schultz, the so-called Beer Baron, who controlled the Prohibition beer business in Harlem; another was Schultz’s partner at the time, Lucky Luciano. In the mid-twenties, the white gangsters viewed the numbers game with scorn; to them it was nickels and dimes compared to the rackets they were running. That would change with the Depression, and the end of Prohibition. For now the gangsters socialized cheerfully with the numbers operators they met at Miz Hines’s, and graciously supplied the liquor. The more the liquor flowed, the looser everyone got. In that spirit, at one of the Sunday dinners, Liz introduced Millie to an eligible bachelor named Harold Bellanfanti.
Harold was Jamaican and, like Millie, the child of a mixed-race union. His mother was a black Jamaican, his father a white Dutch Jew who’d drifted over to the islands after chasing gold and diamonds, with no luck at all, in the newly formed colonies of West Africa. Harold had grown up just as poor as Millie, but he was making a career for himself as a cook, sometimes in New York restaurants, more often on United Fruit Company boats—banana boats—between New York and various Caribbean and South American ports.
By the second or third Sunday dinner, Liz was nudging her younger sister to take Harold on as a boyfriend. He was, after all, quite a looker. She even encouraged Millie to use the little bedroom down the hall to consummate the romance. Not long after that, my mother got pregnant with me. I don’t know that her pregnancy was the only reason she married Harold; she also wanted to escape Liz’s world, and even without a child on the way, she would have seen Harold as her best opportunity, her quickest way out.
Whatever role love played in the process, it was pushed aside, soon enough, by the daily hardships and humiliations of being inescapably poor.
Millie knew one thing: She didn’t want a job in Liz and Hines’s numbers racket. Her values were much too different for that. So on most days, with or without morning sickness, she made her way over to Park Avenue and Ninety-seventh Street. There she stood with a loose-knit group of other women, hoping to be chosen by the white folk who made the daring drive north, across the divide of Ninety-sixth Street, to find their domestic servants.
Ninety-seventh Street was where the Park Avenue train tracks emerged from their subterranean tunnel, turning the wide street of white-gloved doorman buildings into one of tenements shadowed by the tracks overhead, with gloomy stone arches at each intersection. The women gathered under one of those arches. Later, when I was old enough, I’d wait there with my mother. She would sit me off to the side, perhaps with one or two other children, where she could keep an eye on me. She didn’t want me close, because then the people driving by wouldn’t hire her. When she did get chosen, she’d ask the white woman in the car if it was all right for me to come, too. If her new employer grudgingly agreed, I’d slide into the backseat with her. If the woman shook her head no, I’d be passed off to my aunt Mabel, who’d come down to the arches, too, or to one of our many other friends from the community.
Millie could clean and iron and sew. She was also a terrific cook, which got her jobs for fancy Saturday-night dinner parties. Usually those evenings went well. But one time, I remember going with her to cook for a rich Jewish family on Central Park West. While she sweated in the kitchen, I sat in the pantry. Somehow, one of the entrees got burned. The hostess swept through the swinging door into the kitchen, stormed up to my mother, and slapped her in the face. Thank God my aunt Mabel had come with her that night. Seeing the rage in my mother’s face, Mabel threw her arms around her and kept her from going for the butcher knife that lay nearby. The evening was over: My mother left furious and humiliated, and I left quite terrified.
All that was later. While Millie was pregnant with me, she worked right up until the day her water broke—she had no choice. It happened on one of her Upper East Side day jobs. The closest hospital was Lying-In Hospital in the Jewish section of the East Side, so that’s where I was born, on March 1, 1927, as Harold George Bellanfanti, Jr.
The twenties were still roaring south of Ninety-sixth Street on the Upper East Side, but up in Caribbean Harlem, to which Millie soon returned with me, the Depression had come early. Or, more accurately, never left. The apartments that Millie and Harold lived in after I was born were shared by four or five families: one in each bedroom, usually with a bathroom down the hall shared by all. Some of my earliest memories are of the perpetual smells of Caribbean food cooking. Not just ours but our neighbors’. Usually the families shared the kitchen as well as the bathroom, and cooked
their meals in shifts, though the poorest of the poor rented rooms with no kitchen privileges—all you had was a room to sleep in.
Grim as these arrangements were, they fostered a real generosity among the tenants. Leftovers were passed along; meals were shared. “Listen, Millie, I left some ackee and saltfish, I don’t want it to spoil, so use it, darling”—said, of course, in the West Indian lilt that made such offers all the sweeter. Food went bad fast, even in the iceboxes cooled by a big dripping block of ice. But more than practicality prompted these gestures. Poor people help one another; they always have. As I would see growing up, theirs is a world of shared vulnerabilities, of understanding, and of sympathy that the rich can never know. I never forgot the camaraderie of poverty, and never stopped feeling I was a member of that tribe. Years later, when I’d talk to the black waiters at the Palmer House in Chicago, or to a proud, poor farmer in Senegal, I wouldn’t just be saying hello. It always felt more like I was checking in.
One of my other earliest memories is of my father yelling and the absolute terror that went along with it. Almost certainly he was drunk when I heard him. Almost certainly there was blood on his hands, and on the bedsheets, as the yelling always led to the violence he brutally visited on my mother. But all I sensed as an infant was a terrible claustrophobic closet of fear.
I was eighteen months old when my mother took me to Jamaica for the first time. In New York, Millie had more than enough relatives to babysit me while she went to work. But Harold was gone more and more often as an onboard cook, and Millie simply couldn’t keep caring for me on her own during a grueling day. Grudgingly, Harold took us along on one of his banana boat trips to Jamaica and deposited me in the warm embrace of my grandmother Jane, on the porch of the two-room mountain shack where my mother had been raised.
Millie’s father—the stern one who’d turned her out in the fields—had died by now, and nearly all the children were grown and gone. I can’t swear that any of my memories of Jane are from that first year I lived with her, but I can say that my first memories of her are her warm and comforting voice, and the wonderful smells of food as she cooked at the stone stove outside. I slept on a tiny bed, on a mattress stuffed with soft grass and swatches of discarded cloth. When I opened my eyes I saw rough-wood beams and calico curtains waving at the open windows. Outside were cultivated fields, as far as I could see. On the porch sat Jane—my white grandmother, whose skin I never noticed as any color other than what it should be—eternally darning clothes for one grandchild or another.
My Song Page 2