Despite whatever sparks this new friendship was generating, my mother was determined to move out of her tiny room in Bill Wright’s building to a larger apartment more appropriate for the three of us, and not just any would do. She wanted to live in a clean, well-kept complex at 130th and Amsterdam Avenue. The only catch was that blacks weren’t allowed. That didn’t stop my mother. To the rental agent, she presented herself as Spanish. Not Hispanic, from Puerto Rico or south of the border, but from Spain, by way of the West Indies. This, and twenty dollars, helped secure our new home. But now Dennis and I were Spanish, too.
So began my “passing” period. On the building’s front stoop the first day I hung out there, I got razzed by the Greek and Irish kids who lived in the complex. “Hey, you’re a nigger,” they said in amazement.
“No, I’m not,” I said. “I’m not a nigger.”
“You sure look like one.”
“I’m not.”
“You have hair like one.”
“Unless you’ve been caught in a fire like I was, shut your fucking face.” Attitude won that day. During the brief silence that followed, I stared them down, knowing that when you don’t have truth on your side, attitude is your best friend.
I stuck to my story—the name Belafonte helped flavor the dish, too—and they bought it. They soon nicknamed me “Frenchy,” since I told them that my grandfather on my father’s side came from Martinque and that my family had come originally from Europe. For the first time, I belonged—by not being black.
As Frenchy, I ranked above the few black students, in this largely Irish and Greek neighborhood, who attended P.S. 43, the local public junior high school. In the lunchroom, I sat with my new white pals. After school, I joined them for pickup games of stickball or basketball, and because of my moves, I invariably got chosen first. But this new camaraderie went only so far. I was accepted, but only as a visitor. I wasn’t a member of their tribe. When they had parties, I wasn’t invited. And I knew better than to try to date any of the white girls. I could chat them up in the corridors between classes, but had I asked any one of them out to the movies, I would have been met by a look of genuine astonishment, followed by one deceitful nervous excuse after another.
So I was a misfit, adrift somewhere between white and black, New York and the West Indies. The only thing I clearly was was poor. That, as much as my dubious skin tone and kinky hair, limited my social options. To any son or daughter of middle-class parents—from butchers to firemen to construction workers—I was of a lesser order, below which there might not be any other orders: the son of a single woman who worked as a maid.
It was a lonely time, of alienation and racial confusion, only made worse by my mother’s relentless efforts at monitoring me, which she soon gave up, now that I was a teenager. One thing she would not yield on, though, was having me accompany her to one political gathering after another.
She was frustrated by her failure, through the Depression, to better her lot, and her political views, always strongly held, had grown only more strident and bitter. One of her heroes was Marcus Garvey, the black nationalist, who was born in my mother’s own St. Ann Parish in Jamaica. Garvey had formed the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) with the bold vision of uniting blacks around the world and reconnecting them with their African roots. He’d gone so far as to promote a new African homeland in Liberia, with new colleges and industries, to knit the entire black diaspora together, as the state of Israel would for Jews a generation later. A young J. Edgar Hoover, head of the “anti-radical” division of what would become the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, had managed to get him deported in the year of my birth. At about the time I returned from Jamaica, Garvey died. But his image, and his dream, lived on. To me, Garvey was just a portly black man in a silly admiral’s hat, but to my mother, who went to meetings in Harlem held by his followers, he was a beacon of hope. Later I would realize that, in his own way, Garvey was a founder of the civil rights movement, and my mother’s admiration for him had a lasting influence on me.
At some point, my mother would marry Bill Wright. She had little choice, since she was pregnant with my brother Raymond, soon to be followed, a year later, by my sister, Shirley. Bill was a gentle man—quite a change from my father—and both Dennis and I liked him just fine. Bill had one flaw: He was an alcoholic. But he also had one saving grace. Unlike my father, he had no capacity for violence. I wasn’t particularly close to Raymond and Shirley, since I was so much older than they. (In later life, Shirley and I grew extremely close, once I rescued her from the Catholic Church.) I was happy for my mother; it was only she who seemed incapable of enjoying this new state of affairs. Ground down by poverty, she’d lost the capacity for happiness, if she’d ever had it. As loving as her new husband was, she seemed destined to remain a tortured character, seeking her only solace in church.
The surprise was my father. By the time I was fourteen, he’d become a different man. I could see that on Friday afternoons, when I took the subway down to lower Manhattan to pick up the weekly child-support money that a court had ordered him to pay my mother.
My father still worked as a cook, but a landlocked one now, overseeing the basement kitchen of a busy downtown restaurant on Union Square. There wasn’t much time for conversation—he was too busy barking orders to the men under him. But for all the stress of his job, he seemed much more relaxed. Even handing over the envelope with the child-support money didn’t ruin his mood. On the first of those visits, he introduced me to Edith, a solidly built waitress with very strong features—far from the beauty my mother was, but cheerful and kind, with a heavy New York accent. She was soon to be my father’s new wife.
After they married, I would visit them occasionally in the Bronx, where they lived in a neighborhood thick with Edith’s relatives, all of whom, to my further surprise, thought the world of Edith’s new husband. They could see, as I could, that he doted on her. When she asked him to do some small task, he did it with alacrity. When she voiced opinions at the dinner table, he listened and nodded; when she made jokes, he laughed. Who was this impostor? And what had they done with my father? For surely this was not the man who’d bristled at the smallest request my mother made, and beaten her bloody, and then beaten me, too. Yet he was, and that was the mystery for me. Why had this plain, strong German woman charmed my father when my sweet, loving, eternally right mother had not? I knew my mother’s nagging must have had a lot to do with it, and more than that, her deeply rooted certainty that men were feckless creatures destined to fail her. For my father, perhaps, that had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But also, I realized later, it was because both were alcoholics. Poverty, youth, and alcohol: It was a toxic combination, made more so by the fears involved in being illegal immigrants on the run.
At fourteen, I had no citizenship worries. I might be poor, but at least I’d been born on U.S. soil. It was just everything else I had to worry about, starting with who I was. By the time I started ninth grade at George Washington High School, my passing period had ended, not due to any dramatic turn of events, just the inexorable drift toward kinship with black students rather than white ones. Now the question was not which group to join, but which gang. The Midtown Midgets? The Scorpions? The Sharks? The Spiders? All of them fought with rocks, with knives, with chains, with brass knuckles and zip guns—anything they could get their hands on. Some were black and some were Hispanic, and I could go either way, but I didn’t want any of them. The constant awareness of race—and the daily challenges to fight based on race—only left me more alienated than ever. Schoolwork frustrated me, too. I still had so much trouble reading that I began to fear I might fail every one of my high school courses. I got through the first semester of ninth grade, but dropped out the next.
My mother was devastated when I told her my plan. I can remember exactly how her face fell at this latest disappointment in her life, the most crushing yet. I had failed her by skipping out on my piano lessons, and now I’d failed
her by dropping out of high school. She let me know it every day. I would never feel worse about myself than in the year or so that followed. Both to earn money and to be away from her, I did a number of odd jobs. I delivered groceries and moved produce from the cellar to the display floor for a local market. I worked a bit in the garment district, carting racks of clothes. I worked for an adopted uncle from the Caribbean named Vincent Newby, who ran a tailor shop. I delivered clothes for him, and learned to work the pressing machine. Ah, now I was moving up! I was a presser! Perhaps, with luck, I’d eventually even have my own little tailor shop. I couldn’t imagine anything better. I could imagine a whole lot worse.
One day, to escape these worries, I slipped into a showing of the new Humphrey Bogart movie Sahara. I’d gone in for Bogie, but I became transfixed by a black actor named Rex Ingram. Ingram played the part of a Sudanese soldier who’d fallen in with a group of Allied soldiers lost from their various regiments in North Africa. The story followed this motley crew across the Libyan desert until it encountered a German regiment. At one point in the story, Ingram gave chase to and tackled a Nazi officer and pushed the guy’s face into the sand. The camera zoomed in for a searing image of Ingram’s black hand, suffocating the Nazi soldier in the desert sand as the Germans riddled him with bullets. To me, Ingram’s scene of revenge was galvanizing. I’d never seen a film that showed a black character so heroic. Yes! I thought. This was the war for me!
Shortly after my seventeenth birthday—March 1, 1944—I told my mother I wanted to enlist in the U.S. Navy. A lot of other seventeen-year-olds were signing up, too; they just needed a parent’s written permission. It was a patriotic time, with the United States now fully involved in both theaters of World War II and the tide just beginning to turn for the Allies. To me, the navy seemed the best by far of the military branches; sailors never had to tramp through mud like army soldiers, they never got shot out of planes, and they got to go to sea, which I knew I liked from my trips to and from Jamaica.
My mother sat silently in the living room as I packed, and barely stirred herself to see me to the door. I told her I’d be back with lots of stories, and then I was gone. I had no idea what the future held, and certainly not an inkling that it might, in some circuitous way, lead me to a microphone and a stage.
4
I’d boarded a train for Chicago, journeying to the U.S. Navy’s largest training center, north of the city on Lake Michigan. Only later would I realize I’d embarked at the same time on another kind of journey. My days of passing as “Frenchy” were behind me. But as a New York–born son of West Indian immigrants, I had no idea how I fit into the mainstream of mid-twentieth-century American Negroes. And for all I’d experienced of urban poverty, I hadn’t yet felt the sting of segregation. The plight of southern Negroes was some distant problem, like that of Haile Selassie’s ragtag Ethiopians mowed down by the mechanized divisions of Italy’s Fascist army. Selassie was another of the black political leaders and causes my mother had embraced. I didn’t yet realize that southern poverty and prejudice affected me as a black man in America and simply as an American.
That realization came with my arrival at Naval Station Great Lakes, where I was put in an all-black camp, Robert Smalls, one of perhaps ten—the others all white—in this vast U.S. Navy complex. No surprise there: In 1944, all the armed forces were segregated. What astonished me was the sheer range of American blacks around me. I met rural southerners, farmers mostly, who spoke in such a deep, dense drawl that at times I needed a translator. A group of northern intellectuals seemed no less exotic to me. But I felt more drawn to them. At least I could understand what they were saying, and their political bull sessions intrigued me. The ongoing debate was whether or not Negroes should be in the war at all. Until recently, they’d been allowed to serve only as mess attendants, munitions loaders, and stevedores; they still had almost no chance to rise in the ranks. Some felt that if black companies fought with courage, racial prejudice in America would ebb, ushering in a postwar era of new opportunities. Others scoffed at that idea. The cynics, without exception, were draftees, dragged into the war against their will. So cutting were they about the black enlistees that I started adding years to my age and saying I, too, was a draftee. When I dared to ask questions, though, I showed how naïve I was. “Where did this Chihuahua come from?” one of the intellectuals asked. As if throwing bones to a dog, they tossed me political pamphlets, and I began to read.
The name W.E.B. Du Bois came up a lot in those pamphlets. I learned that as an educator and intellectual, Du Bois had helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909 to fight racial violence and discrimination. I was fascinated to read that he and my mother’s hero, Marcus Garvey, had become bitter rivals, Du Bois advocating integration, Garvey pushing for separatism. Du Bois, the first black student at Harvard ever to attain a Ph.D., envisioned a black elite class reaching the highest levels of politics, Wall Street, and academia with sheer brainpower: a “talented tenth,” he called it. Garvey’s appeal was to the working class; to him, Du Bois was a snob.
Along with the pamphlets, my new barracks-mates passed on Du Bois’s latest book, Dusk of Dawn, about African-Americans’ quest for freedom. As I devoured it and other books they let me leaf through, I noticed how often he footnoted other scholars and their works. One name came up more often than any of the others. Determined to impress those black intellectuals, I took the train into Chicago on my next leave and sought out the public library. My dog tags were all I needed to borrow books; servicemen could take them back to base and put them in a return bin there.
“Yes, how can I help you?”
The woman at the information desk appeared to be in her early sixties, with peppery hair, a ruddy complexion, and lovely big blue eyes. She might have been Mr. Pigou’s sister. When I showed her the list of books I wanted, she blanched. I’d written down close to a dozen titles. “That’s just too many,” she said gently.
“I’ll make it easy, ma’am,” I said. “Just give me everything you got by Ibid.”
She gave me a look. “There’s no such writer,” she said.
“Are you sure?” I bristled.
“No, I’m not sure,” she replied.
“Would you be so kind as to check it out?” I countered.
She paused and made a not-too-subtle display of visually noting the number of people standing behind me.
“I’d like to find out before the war’s over,” I said with attitude.
The librarian bowed her head and went back to the card file. She brought back the drawer marked IA–IC. “Look for yourself,” she said. “There’s no ‘Ibid’ in here.”
Incensed, I shot off a few more zingers and watched her shoulders sag. Before she could reply, I stormed out. Back at the base, I told my mates what had happened. To my mortification, they started howling with laughter. Finally they explained the enormity of my blunder. After an author listed a book as one of his sources, if he mentioned the book again, instead of giving the full title, he could just write “Ibid.” “It’s just a little literary shorthand,” one man said. I got it. That poor librarian!
On my next leave, I went back to the library in Chicago, but the little old lady was gone. She’d been a volunteer, I learned. I guess I’d cured her of that. I’d crushed her spirit with my angry rants. I hung around the area for her that day, but to no avail. From then on, whenever I saw someone from behind who looked like her—not just in Chicago, but anywhere I was—I’d speed up my walk and give her a sidelong glance, hoping at last I’d have the chance to apologize. But I never found her.
Toward the end of basic training, the navy’s newest recruits were given an I.Q. test. To my surprise, I did far better than my scholastic record suggested I should. I showed a special aptitude for organization, which qualified me for training as a navy storekeeper: an overseer of supplies. Off I went with a trainload of other black would-be storekeepers to Hampton, Virginia. We settled into makeshift
barracks on the campus of Hampton Institute, a college founded in 1868 on the site of an antebellum plantation to train former slaves as teachers. The college now offered a standard liberal arts education, but all its students were still black. Few were happy to see us. The presence of U.S. sailors, they felt, tainted Hampton’s academic atmosphere. The school’s administration no doubt agreed, but Hampton was getting a lot in return for hosting us “gobs.” For starters, the navy had built an Olympic-sized pool and a sports complex on campus that both students and sailors could use, plus multiple barracks, classroom facilities, and other structures that enhanced the school’s image.
The fall term hadn’t quite started in late August 1944 when we arrived on campus and marched smartly across the green, our duffels on our shoulders, our hats at just the right angle, our eyes straight ahead. Somehow, in our peripheral vision, all of us managed to notice the gorgeous coed, a senior, addressing a group of freshmen on a gentle slope. The freshmen had fanned out in a semicircle around her. She stood a few steps uphill, facing them—and us. The coed had a perfect figure and a lovely café au lait complexion. Even her hair was perfect. “Always marry a woman with good hair,” my mother had told me. Good hair meant straight hair. This coed had straight, glossy hair, and it was shoulder-length! As soon as I set eyes on her, I was in love. I vowed then and there to marry her. Only later would I learn that she was the leader of the anti-sailors contingent on campus.
It took me quite a while to get a first date with Frances Marguerite Byrd. Dating anyone was a challenge; sailors stayed in a special area fenced off from students, and our superior officers made it clear that relationships with coeds were strictly forbidden.
My next glimpse of her, like my first, was from afar. I attended a college football game—Hampton was on the black-college circuit—and peered down from the stands at a Chevrolet convertible rolling slowly along the track around the field. Perched on the folded-back ragtop, waving to the crowd, was the Hampton Institute beauty queen. Same girl! I probably learned her name that day, but I would have to wait for a campus social to meet her.
My Song Page 6