My Song

by Harry Belafonte

  My mother did her best to stay out of Lenny’s business, but sometimes she’d bring him a package: the day’s bets from her building or block. She could hardly refuse, because almost every Sunday, Lenny gave us five or ten dollars to help us get through the week. In the 1930s, that bought a lot of groceries. When Lenny came in looking severe, we knew he was drunk. “You know how lucky you are, boy, that you got your mother?” he would say. “Don’t you ever disobey her no more!” And then Lenny would start to cry. “I don’t have my mother, I left her a long time ago in the islands—you should worship your mother.” Lenny did have a son, Lloyd, but he lived with his mother, from whom Lenny was estranged. Lenny always had this long, white silk handkerchief in his back pocket; he’d pull it out and snap it and blow his nose, and then stuff it back in. If he kept on like that, my mother would come over and seize him by the tie. “Get yourself together, man!” Lenny would be startled. She was the only one who could talk to him like that.

  Lenny was our family godfather, but he was the first to say I shouldn’t view him as a role model. “I don’t want any of you to grow up like me,” he’d drunkenly wail, and out would come the handkerchief again. There were plenty of others to choose from in Harlem, for most of the famous black Americans of the day lived there, rubbing shoulders with the rest of us; they certainly weren’t welcome in the fancy buildings south of Ninety-sixth Street. I could see Duke Ellington, coiffed in a do-rag, shopping for groceries, and Langston Hughes at a local bar. One of my heroes was A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph had founded the union and won a bitter struggle with the Pullman Company to get better pay and hours for his seven thousand members. I may not have known the details, but I knew, from my mother, that Randolph had dared to stage a strike, and won it. He was a hero. I just loved watching him lead his troops through Harlem on parade, with their red collars and shiny buttons and red caps tilted just so. Everyone admired the porters, not just for the handsome salaries that Randolph had negotiated for them, but because they were worldly—they traveled far and wide—and because most had college degrees. They were a workingman’s elite, one tier down from doctors and lawyers. I would have been thrilled to know, at age six or seven, that I’d be a sleeping-car porter one day. To learn instead that I would come to know Randolph in the heat of the civil rights movement through Martin Luther King, Jr.—that would have baffled me utterly.

  Ironically, by the time the movement became a reality, Hollywood had caricatured the proud railroad porters as smiling, servile “darkies.” The real ones, educated and proud, had engaged in long, late-night conversations with their passengers, black or white. Hollywood’s porters catered abjectly to the white leading men and ladies whose stories they bobbed in and out of, carrying their bags and catching tips with a grateful “Thank you, suh!”

  One film in particular—a short Mack Sennett silent movie—sealed the demeaning image of these proud men of service. It was the story of a rich, white adulterer getting on a Pullman train with his mistress of the week. Unbeknownst to them, the adulterer’s wife boards the same train. From this moment on, it’s a series of comedy routines of wife, mistress, and adulterer going in and out of staterooms, barely missing one another and causing the adulterer to narrowly avoid several heart attacks. The only person privy to the truth besides the adulterer is a groveling bug-eyed black Uncle Tom porter. As a reward for his silence and loyalty to the rich, white adulterer, the porter is tipped each time they pass each other in this supposedly comic routine. Every time this happens, the porter bows, grins, and bites the coin to make sure it is not counterfeit. So the routine goes. At the end of the trip, neither of the women is the wiser, and the adulterer is spared a tragic end for which he is eternally grateful to the porter, whom he rewards with one last tip and wink. This rather silly piece, at the dawning of Hollywood, forever changed the image of porters. A severe blow to a group of truly dignified men of color!

  I had white role models, too, for West Indians admired success whatever color it came in. My mother never missed a fireside chat by President Roosevelt; both he and Eleanor were her greatest heroes. I revered them, too, never imagining that one day Mrs. Roosevelt would call me on the phone, and that our meeting would mark the start of a life-changing friendship for me. I loved almost every actor I saw on the screen, but especially the hard-boiled ones: Jimmy Cagney, George Raft, Edward G. Robinson. They were our folk heroes—working-class heroes, fighting all the forces that threatened us, too: the cops, the FBI, the banks with their snooty white tellers who’d never cut us a break, either. We’d cheer them on as they stuck a gun in those tellers’ faces. They were our Robin Hoods. Take that money and run! Along with white actors, I admired white sports figures, too, like the battling boxer Jimmy Braddock. But for a black boy in the mid-1930s, all these were eclipsed by the great black god who would soon knock Braddock out—Joe Louis.

  Louis lived in Detroit, but he trained for his New York fights at a camp in Lakewood, New Jersey, and that got him to Harlem a lot. “Hey, I heard Joe Louis is over on One Hundred and Twenty-fifth and Lenox,” some street friend would say. “Let’s see if he’s still there.” So we’d run over and learn he was in a restaurant having lunch, and press our noses to the glass for a glimpse of this living legend.

  Lenny started promising me he’d take me to Lakewood to see the great champ train. But he had to wait until Louis’s next scheduled bout at Madison Square Garden, a once- or twice-a-year occurrence. For a few weeks before these historic spectacles, you could drive over on a Sunday and buy tickets; it was how Louis defrayed the costs of the camp. Finally, on a Sunday when my father happened to be home, Lenny came by to take us to Lakewood in his gleaming black Packard; Louis was in training across the river again at last. I had my little blue suit and blue tie on, all ready to go, but apparently I did something—I can’t recall what—to offend my mother. No training-camp trip for me—my punishment was to stay at home, alone, while the others went. My father tried to plead my case, but my mother held firm. Finally, to my astonishment, he said, “Well, then I’ll stay, too.” He changed out of his suit, and when Millie and Lenny had gone, he took me up on the roof of the building to play marbles.

  Almost seventy-five years later, I have to stop and blink back tears at the memory of his kindness that day—a rare kindness, but no less real for that. Which man was he, the one who beat me violently or the one who played marbles with me that day on the roof? Both, perhaps. Though to this day I don’t really know.

  When at last we got an arc-shaped RCA radio, I had a whole new gallery of heroes. The Green Hornet for one, the Lone Ranger, for another, and Amos and Andy, the white comics who sounded as black to us as they did to the rest of America. It was also through the radio that I learned I might have some musical ability. A favorite song would come on, and my mother and I would harmonize in the kitchen. That led to my mother prodding me to sing for relatives. All pretty corny stuff. I remember an old Irish tune about mothers that began, “M is for the million things she gave me, / O means only that she’s growing old, / T is for the tears she shed to save me, / H is for the heart as pure as gold …” And another set to the poem “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.” I took my voice for granted, but I know that in doing these little parlor turns, I got a lot of encouragement.

  There was more music—much better music—to be found a short walk away at the Apollo Theatre. I really loved going to the Apollo on a Sunday after mass, as young as seven years old, dressed in my best blue suit, to hear Cab Calloway or Count Basie or Duke Ellington or Lucky Millinder, Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald. As suffocating and interminable as mass seemed, I could endure it if I knew that a few short hours later I’d be in the real cathedral of spirituality. I heard them all at the Apollo, every last one, and somehow my mother managed to find the money to take me. Or, if she was working that day, to have my father or one of my relatives take me.

  She must have started nurturing the
hope that I might join that immortal pantheon, because one day I came home from school to see two men struggling up the four flights to our apartment with a rented stand-up roller piano. You could put in paper rolls and have it play itself, but you could also play it as a proper piano. To learn how, my mother informed me, I would enroll in Miss Shepherd’s classes for fifty cents a lesson.

  Miss Shepherd was a spinster, with a high-collared blouse and long dress, who kept her hair up in a bun and wore pince-nez glasses, and gave lessons to support herself and her mother. She was considered the best music instructor for blocks around. Also the strictest. Every time I made a mistake playing scales, she’d rap me across the fingers with a ruler, as hard as the nuns did. It was torture. Finally I started cutting her classes and hanging out on the street, playing marbles for purees with a few of the neighborhood toughs. To my horror, my mother happened to walk by and see me. Grimly, she hauled me off to Miss Shepherd’s to learn what was going on. The truth was that I hadn’t been in class for weeks. “Do you know what I had to do for all those lessons at fifty cents a lesson, Harry?”

  For the first time but not the last, I’d crushed her expectations for me, and the immigrant dream she’d had, to sacrifice herself for her children’s betterment, was crumbling, maybe already shattered.

  That week, my mother got rid of the piano. “You’re on your own now,” she said. And I was.

  3

  For all that my mother and father and Uncle Lenny tried to teach me, by the age of seven I’d become a difficult child. I gave back as good as I got, not just at home but on the way to school, where I passed a daily gauntlet of young Irish and Italians who liked nothing better than to pick a fight with a black kid on his own. School was P.S. 186 on 145th Street, a five-story redbrick building between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, where most of the students were white—which led to more fighting. I walked the halls ready to explode if another student so much as bumped me accidentally as he went by. And that happened a lot.

  To these fisticuffs, my mother had strong but contradictory reactions. Once, when I was in elementary school, she bought me a secondhand white shirt required for a class play. I was keenly aware of the sacrifices my mother made to give me the simplest things; that shirt meant a lot to me. The night before the play, I lay in bed listening to Amos ’n’ Andy and watching as she mended it and sewed on a needed button. The next day I felt really spiffy, and the play went well. That afternoon on the way home, however, I was set upon by a group of boys who cruelly taunted me. I was enraged, but not wanting anything to happen to my new shirt, I ignored them. Emboldened, they started shoving and then punching me. I took flight and ran several blocks to escape them. As fate would have it, I literally ran into my mother in front of our house. She demanded to know what was going on. As I told her, I watched her eyes narrow and her anger take hold. She marched me back to the scene to look for my tormentors. When we found them, she grabbed my books and jacket and said, “Go do what you got to do!” I was nonplussed. She pushed me in the direction of the biggest bully in the crowd. In a choked voice, she whispered, “Get him!” Elated by her encouragement, I proceeded to stomp the guy. When I got through, there was more than just a bloody nose. I couldn’t believe it when the others started scampering away. I turned and saw my mother smiling. Filling up with tears, I grabbed her around the waist in the biggest hug I’d ever given her. “Thanks for the help, Ma,” I said. She hugged me back. “Sometimes,” she told me, “there’s more to life than the shirt on your back.”

  After school, I roamed the neighborhood freely—too freely. One day I was playing in the streets and got hit by a car. I woke up in Harlem Hospital to find my leg broken, hanging in traction in a waist-high cast. My mother blamed my father, as usual. “If only he was an honorable man and held the home together.” But she also blamed herself, as she had when I stuck my eye with the scissors.

  The medicines I was given in the hospital left me thirsty all the time, and my lips were soon badly chapped. If I sucked them in a certain way, I found, it helped produce saliva. By the time I went home, I’d made such a habit of it that my lower lip on one side swelled up in a large lump. But now I couldn’t stop sucking it. My mother tried everything. She put tape on the lump; I pulled the tape off. She coated it with bitters or hot sauce; I kept sucking till the bad taste was gone. Finally she recruited my father.

  “Boy, if you suck that lip again you’ll regret it,” my father warned. But I did. And so came the punishment to fit this latest crime. First my father pushed me onto my bed and locked me between his very strong legs. Then he held me by the chin with one hand. With the other, he held his cigar out and blew the ash off it. Its burning red ember glowed brightly. “You want to suck your lip?” The ember came closer to the lump on my lip. “You want to suck it?” Again the ember came closer, an inch each time. Just as it was about to burn me—I could feel its heat—he moved it away. Then he flogged me with his belt.

  Better, my mother declared, to send this truant back to Jamaica; at least I wouldn’t get hit by a car there. While Dennis stayed with my mother in Harlem, I went down with my father on a United Fruit Company boat. When I wasn’t confined to his cabin, I was in the ship’s kitchen, watching him serve up three meals a day for the captain and crew. I saw a new side of him on that trip. He was the head chef, ordering the scullery cooks around with great dispatch. Much as I feared and hated him, for the first time I admired him, too.

  The mountain village my grandmother Jane lived in was called Aboukir, I now learned. Her wood-framed house stood on stilts, built into the hillside, with a roof of patchwork pieces of zinc and wood salvaged from construction projects in nearby Ocho Rios. There was no electricity; at dusk, Jane lit the oil lamps. No plumbing, either; the outhouse was in back. On her small plot of land, Jane grew plantains, yams, passion fruit, okra, callaloo, and ackee, a local fruit that you boiled (and boiled). Her relatives and grown children lived the same way. Everyone had a small cottage and an acre or two of land, on former plantations now broken up and parceled out. The colonial era was still just receding, and the islanders remembered all too well what life had been like before they owned their own land. They cherished those plots with all the passion and pride of a Lord Mountbatten surveying his large estate.

  All the warmth and love I’d felt as an infant from my grandmother I felt more keenly now. I adored her in return. Jane Love was matriarch to a large clan of children, grandchildren, and various other relatives, all of whose clothes she continued to mend, but I felt she carved out a special place for me. Perhaps part of it was that I was the one from far away. Perhaps she saw that I was troubled, and so tended to my every need with that much more concern. Perhaps her guilt at the scissors accident made her that much more solicitous. All I know is that never was a surname more appropriate, and more deserved, than hers.

  My relationship with her had a strong and particular effect. For the rest of my life, I would feel an unusual sense of ease in moving between races and classes—an ease that would help me as an entertainer, later as an activist, too, mediating between Martin Luther King and his southern Baptist followers on the one hand, and the Irish, patrician Kennedy clan on the other. I think that traces to the fact that Jane, who was as white and blue-eyed as a person can be, so enveloped me with love. “Where’s me Harry?” I can still hear her say. “Where’s me sweet boy Harry?”

  Almost every day, several of her flock would come by for dinner, both because they, too, loved Jane, and because Jane was a formidable cook. She had only her outdoor wood-burning stove, hand-hewn from local stones. And she didn’t have that much to work with; of the fruits and vegetables she harvested, only some were in season at any given time. For meat she mainly had chicken. But that she had year-round. Jane raised all the chickens she could manage, and then some; if we could have hatched more chickens by sleeping on eggs, she would have had us do that. While chicken was on the menu almost every night, no two dishes tasted the same, so clever was Jane with h
er spices, and the ways she varied her other ingredients, and by her choice to roast or boil or fry the chicken that night. Happily sated at the end of the evening, her guests wandered off on dark paths to their own cottages, and one by one their own oil lamps winked on in the surrounding hills.

  In the mornings I walked on my own to a one-room schoolhouse, where I struggled, with little success and a lot of resentment, to read. Afterward, Jane might send me on an errand to the next village. “Go to Mrs. Richards and tell her we need some yams, and don’t dillydally …” On the hilly paths from one village to another, I’d pass huge concrete tanks, open-topped, some aboveground, some below. The rain that collected in these tanks was our only source of drinking water. Zinc funnels protruded from the tanks to sluice the water into our bottles and barrels; to me they looked like giant arms, about to scoop me up, and I gave them a wide berth. My fear was soundly based. Sometimes people fell in, and if the water was low in the tank, they couldn’t climb out. They might drown—and once in a while did—if they weren’t discovered and rescued by rope.