My Song

by Harry Belafonte

  One day I sat watching her work, and as my curiosity grew, I decided to investigate the sewing basket beside her rocking chair. I took out a pair of scissors, and then a rag, and began cutting. I came to the edge of the fabric, which had a thick border, hard to cut. Frustrated, I started pulling up at it with the scissors. Finally I cut through—and one of the scissor points stuck me in the right eye.

  I screamed, and my grandmother leaped up in horror to see my eye bleeding. Outside of cleaning the eye and putting a patch on, there wasn’t anything she could do that day; we were up in the mountains, far from medical help. I remember Jane’s endless grief, and hand-wringing, and guilt, but it was all for naught. I had essentially blinded myself. From that day on, I would see only flashes of light in that eye, flashes that diminished over time as the ocular muscles deteriorated, until at last I saw nothing at all.

  Later, when I had such terrible problems learning to read, I assumed the blind eye was to blame. Not for some decades would I come to realize that I was almost certainly dyslexic, and that all my anger and frustration at doing so poorly in school, and my dropping out halfway through ninth grade, had more to do with that disability than my self-inflicted wound that long-ago day on my grandmother’s porch.

  My mother came to snatch me as soon as she heard about the scissors, though it took a while; she had to come by banana boat. Back in Harlem, she’d moved to a new apartment, and soon would move again. There were lots of apartments. Sometimes my mother fled because she couldn’t pay the rent, sometimes because my father had made her life a living hell. And sometimes she swept me off into the maze of other immigrants’ homes because she’d heard the immigration agents might be on her trail. My uncle Castel, in addition to owning a livery cab, had a moving truck and moved all the Caribbeans on the run to their new places of momentary anonymity. It was a very profitable business. He’d come with two other guys in the middle of the night, pack us up, and we’d be gone, on to the next place.

  The agents were on Millie’s trail because she had long since overstayed her visa. Both she and Harold were illegal immigrants. Harold at least had working papers that let him go from job to job, but technically he was illegal, too. Neither of my parents would be legal until they divorced and married U.S. citizens—in my mother’s case, not until I was seventeen.

  This meant that throughout my childhood we lived an underground life, as criminals of a sort, on the run. We had almost no family pictures, because no one would permit him- or herself to be photographed. When I was old enough to play outside, my mother taught me never, ever to speak to strangers. On weekends, she and a girlfriend would go off on domestic jobs, and I would be left alone in the apartment—I couldn’t have been more than four years old—but only after she’d made me promise, on fear of death, not to answer the door no matter who knocked. More than once, when my mother feared the jig might be up, she changed her name and bought forged papers. Bellanfanti became Belanfonte, and then, after another variation or two, Belafonte.

  We shook the agents, but poverty always found us wherever we landed. Often my mother would bring me dinner and say she’d been fed on the job. I knew she hadn’t. The bare necessities were food and rent and coal; even clothes were a luxury. Winter was hell. By the time I went to school, my mother had come to the conclusion that there was no deal she could make with God or the Devil to ease the sting of poverty. The best she could hope for was to instill strong goals and values in me—and later, my younger brother, Dennis—and push us to excel. It was the classic immigrant story.

  And yet she didn’t quite buy into it. Somehow, no matter how much I triumphed later as a singer and actor, my mother could never bask in my success. She just kept working, set on elevating herself above her station, but growing ever more bitter as she stayed where she was, stubbornly reluctant to accept any of the luxuries I tried to confer on her.

  In one effort to pull herself up, my mother forged a friendship with a Jewish tailor whose shop she passed on the way to that Park Avenue gathering place for domestics. The tailor taught her how to sew and mend clothes, skills that helped her earn a little extra money. He sold clothes, too. One day, Millie noticed that some of his clothes had been in his window so long that the sun had bleached the fabric in certain spots. So these were damaged goods, yes? Well, yes, the tailor admitted. But could they be dyed a different color and made to look new? Certainly, the tailor said, if anyone wanted to do the job. Millie did. She negotiated a good price with the tailor, who told her what packet of dye to use. Back in her apartment, Millie filled a tin tub with hot water, mixed the dye in, and dipped the clothes in until they became one new color—dark blue. Invariably the process was successful. Either my mother sold the clothes or, if they failed to sell, she gave them to me. Before long, I had a fine wardrobe of little boy’s suits—nearly all of them blue. In one of our few family pictures, I’m wearing a blue-dyed tie; my mother is in fancy clothes borrowed from one of her more kindly employers. That tailor gave me my first sense of kinship with Jews, which would deepen over time. But for all that entrepreneurship, and all that blue dye, my mother stayed just as poor as she’d been before.

  Years later, I told that story, and others about my mother, to a psychiatrist, who asked if I could arrange for him to meet her. I did. Afterward he told me that Millie was one of the most remarkable people he’d ever met. How clever she was in how she met life and overcame her challenges, he said, what a genius for survival she had. And somehow, though the struggle made her hard, she never let go of a certain innate sweetness—the sweetness of her youthful hopes. She would tell my brother and me stories, and listen to us talk, and help us with our homework. Always she told us to be aware of the decisions we were making, and to be sure they helped us extricate ourselves from the hard life we’d been dealt. Raising ourselves from poverty wasn’t enough, she would add. We would have to help others.

  Limited as her means were, my mother was determined to give me a nice present for my fourth Christmas. She did: It was a secondhand tricycle.

  All morning I waited eagerly for my father to take me out so I could ride it. Finally, at midday, we left our apartment and walked over to a park at 145th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue—today the site of a housing project. From there I could look down a hill and see the Polo Grounds, where the New York Giants played. “Don’t ever ride away on your own,” my father instructed me. “Always have a grown-up with you.”

  I remember the view, and the walkway that sloped down from where we were. My father got to talking to someone as I waited for him to guide me down. As he kept talking, he seemed to forget that he’d been holding the handlebar to keep the tricycle from rolling. He started gesturing with both hands to his friend. Suddenly the tricycle started rolling downhill. I felt a whoosh of exhilaration in my stomach. Perhaps in those first few seconds I could have stopped, but the ride was too much fun. Then I heard my father scream my name at the top of his voice. When I looked back, I thought I was watching the giant from “Jack and the Beanstalk” chase after me. I pedaled as fast as I could to escape him. Not fast enough. At the bottom of the hill, he caught me and yanked me off the tricycle. My feet were still pedaling in the air. Then he dragged me over to some bushes, broke off a thin branch, and proceeded to beat me with it.

  Again and again he beat me, until I bled through my shirt and pants. Then he stopped. The blood seemed to shock him back to his senses.

  “You must never tell your mother what happened,” he told me hoarsely. “Say some boys tried to steal your bike, and then they beat you up … and I saved you.”

  On the way home we passed a little corner store, the kind that used to sell candy and stationery and cigars. In the window was a white model sailboat, with beautiful white trim. I had always admired that boat. Only weeks before, I’d asked to have it for Christmas. When we got to that window, my father said into my ear, “If you don’t tell your mother, I’ll buy you that boat.”

  As soon as my mother saw me, she screamed. “
Oh, my God, what happened!” She looked at my father, half sure he’d beaten me, half disbelieving that even he could do such a thing. He told her the story. She looked at me. I nodded weakly, corroborating what he’d said. Distraught, my mother filled a tub of warm water and shook in a generous portion of CN, a disinfectant of the day similar to iodine. Carefully she peeled my bloody clothes off me, sat me in the tub, and cleaned my wounds.

  For days she kept up this regimen as the lash marks slowly healed. At some point, my father left, as usual, off on his next shipboard job. He gave me a knowing look as he left, and I looked away. I wanted to tell my mother what had happened. But I didn’t, not then, not even after he’d left for good.

  I remember many, many years later telling my psychiatrist, Peter Neubauer, this story. When I said, “Until this day I never got that boat,” Peter asked if I was still expecting it. By then I’d been seeing him for some time. “Yes,” I said at last, and realized how much longer I would be lying on his couch!

  I often wondered later how my father could have terrorized me this way. Not just once, but many, many times. He had a cruel streak, that much was for sure. But I know my mother helped bring it out.

  What a tragic, tangled-up marriage my parents had. In those small apartments, my father would grope my mother provocatively, especially when he’d just returned from a trip and the two of them had had a few drinks. She’d slap his hand, but even I could see she liked his touch. When they disappeared behind the bedroom door or a drawn makeshift curtain, I’d hear moaning, and when they appeared again, both my parents would look pleased. Sex was a powerful thing, I could see; it changed people. But not completely, and not for long. Alcohol was an integral part of it, so one thing I learned, subconsciously, was that sex wasn’t about two people with real feelings communicating; it was a strange and rather alarming exercise in unreality in which both participants were drunk: a bacchanal. As the alcohol wore off, my mother would start railing at him again—for his drinking and philandering, for being an absent husband and father and not providing enough. I think she’d learned from her own father’s philandering, and from his cruelty in dashing her dreams, not to trust men—any of them—very much. And when she started in on my father, she let the zingers fly. I think she castrated him, in a way, made him doubt his manhood, and that one of the ways he coped was to take out his frustrations on me—an object of his failure as a father and as a man.

  Even at four and a half years old, I could see that my father’s rages grew worse after my mother brought home my baby brother, Dennis. I would have to get a year or two older before I understood that it might have something to do with the fact that Dennis was much lighter skinned than any of us, very sandy haired and gray eyed. My father seemed to disapprove.

  That confused me, because I understood that, to my parents and their friends, the lighter someone’s skin tone, the better. In the West Indian caste system, wavy hair was better than kinky hair, and blue eyes were better than brown or black. But the differences with Dennis were too marked. Later, my mother would confide in me that my father had decided the child wasn’t his own. That drove my mother into a depth of anger and hurt from which she never entirely returned. My father ought to have known that in interracial families, traits from one generation often appear two or three generations later. In the islands, the genetic mix was all the more muddled by parents’ or grandparents’ polygamy. A child might well have the pale blue eyes of his mother’s lover—or not. If you suspected your partner was to blame, and said so, you not only risked ruining your marriage; you risked being wrong. But my father would not be swayed, and so my parents’ marriage, such as it was, endured on the tenuous strength of a very thin string, which eventually snapped.

  Now, when my mother went off to work on summer days or weekends, I was assigned to care for Dennis. She had no one else to help, after all. What was she to do? That, at any rate, was how I viewed the job until long afterward, when my psychiatrist held up a hand. “Let’s back up a bit,” he said. “You had a certain responsibility for your brother.”

  I nodded.

  “You were always told you should take care of him, look out for him, babysit, make him dinner sometimes.”

  Yes, I said, that was right.

  “How old were you?” the psychiatrist asked quietly.

  As the realization set in, I felt like gasping for air. “Five or six,” I said at last. With that, something unlocked, and the tears came flooding out. Tears of anger, disappointment, frustration. Resentment at my mother, for whom, until that point, I’d always made excuses. Anger at my brother as well, for entrapping me in this role that I had to uphold, no matter how scared I was. At five years old, I knew only that my mother was out in the world doing that grueling, soul-deadening work, and with my father gone most of the time, I was the one who had to help her, somehow, to escape or at least withstand her penury. I felt I had no right to resent my mother for the position in which I found myself, no right to complain about the responsibility that now sat on my shoulders. Above all I had to prove to her—and to myself—that I wouldn’t abandon her as my father had. The worst thing she could say to me was, “You’re just like your father.” Whenever she did, I just wilted.

  Now, for the first time, I felt all that five-year-old boy’s fear and hurt, as if a drawer kept closed for decades had opened at last.

  In that drawer was a memory, like an old black-and-white snapshot, that I’d all but forgotten. I knew the day of the week and the time: a winter Saturday, late afternoon, the sky already dark. I’d taken care of Dennis all that day while my mother worked. I was hungry and tired, but more than anything else, I wanted my mother to praise me—for being such a good older son, the man of the house. Instead, she walked slowly over to the bed of our small apartment and sat down without saying a word. In a state of great melancholy, she gazed into what seemed endless space. After a while I asked her what was the matter. As she fought back tears that would not be denied, she began to remove her hat and, as she methodically stuck her hat pin into place, said, “When you grow up, son, never ever go to bed at night knowing that there was something you could have done during the day to strike a blow against injustice and you didn’t do it.” She fell back into silence, leaving me to wrestle with what that simple direction meant.

  It was my Rosebud—the moment that imprinted itself on me more lastingly, and meaningfully, than any other.

  As my parents drifted apart, my mother grew more religious, which had direct implications for me.

  Growing up in the hills of St. Ann Parish, Millie had heard her share of self-taught, self-appointed evangelical preachers, holding forth from simple shacks. They’d done nothing for her. “Too niggerish,” my mother would sniff: all that Holy Roller stuff. But Catholicism was something else altogether. My mother loved its majesty, its incense and mystery. Father, son, and especially holy ghost—the ghost was her favorite. As her immigrant’s dreams fell more out of reach, and her marriage evaporated, she slipped more and more into the folds of the church, and her daily reliance on Jesus grew more intense. My mother’s religion became everybody’s burden, especially my father’s. Trying his best to be worthy of her, he became more Catholic than the Pope. When I grew too big for him to brutalize, I would on occasion utter blasphemies that truly rattled him. He would furiously finger-stab himself with three or four signs of the cross in an attempt to exempt himself from any curse that might be on the way. If these dramas took place outdoors, he would move several paces away from me to assure that God’s wrath, wrapped in a bolt of lightning, would not miss its intended target.

  As for me, I had no choice in the matter. Every Sunday I went with my mother to Catholic services, dressed in one of my little blue suits. I went to Catholic school, too: St. Charles Borromeo, on West 142nd Street off Seventh Avenue. The nuns rapped my knuckles hard, especially when I fared poorly at reading. I’d look in their faces for some sign of forgiveness, but saw none. They seemed to take no joy in teaching or learning.
I could see that to them, their jobs in this dreadful Harlem outpost were just a trial to be endured. Every day I trudged miserably to that school, knowing that no pleasure of any kind awaited me there—only, as for the nuns, the grim victory of passing time in penance.

  With my father gone so much of the time now, I needed a surrogate, and I found one in Uncle Lenny, one of my mother’s many siblings. Uncle Lenny was, like Hines, a numbers boss, with his own bank. He was a huge, barrel-chested, handsome man—and very tough. No one messed with Uncle Lenny, except perhaps my mother. When he strolled into a local bar, a circle of admirers and lieutenants would gather ’round. Once, I remember, my mother sent me to the bar to find him. As I was sitting with him, a big black cop in full uniform came in and confronted him about something. An argument ensued, and suddenly Lenny reared back and cold-cocked him. One punch! I’ve watched sacks of yams come off ships. This cop went down harder than that. Lenny looked down at him, said to me, “Come on, boy,” stepped over him, and out we went. No look back—and, unbelievably, no repercussions, probably because the cop was contesting the size of his payoff.

  I loved seeing Lenny on the street and having him say, “Harry, come with me.” It meant I’d get a lollipop or maybe even a nickel, and on occasion get to follow him on his numbers rounds. We’d go into the Cuban cigar stores, which almost always had numbers operations in back. But you could play the numbers at markets, too, as you bought your yams, and pawpaws, and gingerroot. Lenny’s runners collected the cash and bets, but Lenny liked to pay social calls to the various merchants. “Good for business, you know, Harry.” Often we’d end up at the barbershop, where the men of the neighborhood traded gossip, and the sweet smells of aftershave and cheap cologne hung in the air. I’d curl up in one of the red leather chairs by the wall, sucking my lollipop, and take in the stories of last night’s boxing match at Madison Square Garden. Joe Louis had done it again! Was there anyone that black man couldn’t beat?