My Song

by Harry Belafonte

  He looked at me in stupefaction. “Harry, what’re you talking about? You’re making five bills a week here. What, the money’s not good enough? You want another fifty? Okay, fine.”

  I shook my head. “Nope,” I said. “It’s not the money.” I told him one week in the segregated South was enough for me.

  Later that night, in my room in Colored Town, I realized I’d had enough of the whole thing: of singing mushy lyrics I didn’t believe in, of being a lounge lizard for lonely women. The next day I called Monte to tell him my career as a pop singer had come to an end. No more club dates, no more singing about moons in June. For almost two years since that fateful night at the Roost, I’d made the best of my big chance, and I knew that Monte had done everything he could to help me along, but the simple truth was that I’d taken a wrong turn. I still had time to go back to New York and throw myself into acting once again. I might well fail, but I would set my course by Paul Robeson, and do what mattered, both onstage and off, whether I succeeded or not.

  6

  Back on West 156th Street, I broke the news of my latest career change with no small amount of guilt. I didn’t want Marguerite to be the breadwinner; I wanted her to pursue her studies without worrying about money. I just couldn’t do it as a moon-in-June crooner anymore, and I sure didn’t want to do it as a businessman or real estate sharpie. Nor did I want to stop working for causes I cared passionately about.

  Marguerite had a different perspective. Wary as she was of having a pop singer as a husband, she’d come to enjoy the good and steady cash my club dates brought in. And she had no interest in living again with an out-of-work actor, even one with some jingle saved up. She thought a suit-and-tie job was exactly what I needed, now that I’d outgrown my childish stage dreams. As for my causes, Marguerite saw them as mere distractions. “You want to save the world—how about saving yourself?” she’d say. “How can you keep struggling for all these causes that take you away from your child—and me?” I didn’t intend, with my politicking, to put space between Marguerite and me. But that was the result.

  I did appreciate that the less I saw of my ever-present mother-in-law, Mrs. Byrd, and the less she saw of me, the better. In her eyes, I was a dangerous bohemian, a no-account without a high school diploma, and the friends I brought by were worse—especially the white ones. Her deepest resentment she reserved for Virginia Wicks, my publicist, who happened to be a tall, very pretty Scandinavian blonde.

  One night soon after my return from Miami, I brought Virginia back to the apartment to give her a parcel she needed. She’d started a fan club for me, and to help that along, I’d signed a stack of glossy head shots she could send out. Adrienne was asleep in her crib, in the first bedroom off the hall. Marguerite was asleep, too. But not Mrs. Byrd. I got Virginia the photos, saw her to the door, and gave her a sociable peck on the cheek. When I came back down the hall to the kitchen, Mrs. Byrd was waiting for me. She slapped me with her full force and fury, clearly hoping to take my head off. Then, without a word, she turned on her heel and strode down to her room. I stood there in shock, my face stinging, my ears ringing. By now I knew her well enough to know that she wasn’t just angry at what she perceived as flirting on the part of her son-in-law. She was at least as angry because Virginia was white. It was neither the first nor last time I encountered racism in blacks toward whites just as strong and implacable as its reverse.

  I could have demanded, the next day, that Mrs. Byrd pack her bags and go back to Washington, but with Marguerite still working at the Bethany Day Nursery, we needed her to help care for Adrienne. I’m not sure my mother-in-law would have left even if we did ask her: She wasn’t going to leave her daughter in the hands of a dropout she held in such low esteem. She was on guard! I was the one who would have to change. I needed to make myself scarce, to find a new place where I could meet friends and hang out between auditions. Also, perhaps, a place to earn money. That very week, I came up with an idea over drinks with two of my best friends.

  I’d known Bill Attaway since my days at the American Negro Theatre. He was a writer, a bit older than I, very smart and political, who’d written a play called Carnival that got produced, and two novels that got published—proletarian literature, the critics called it. Blood on the Forge, the more successful of the two, told a story of southern blacks drawn north to work at a Pittsburgh steel mill, only to be exploited in a new way there. Bill had drawn a lot of his material from his two years as a hobo, knocking around in the early 1930s. He still had more he wanted to do as a writer—and he would, soon enough. But in January 1951, he and I and a mutual friend of ours, a black actor named Ferman Phillips, who’d appeared with me in Sojourner Truth, hit on a humbler way for the three of us to make a buck while pursuing our artistic interests—by opening a hamburger joint in Greenwich Village.

  I thought Marguerite would appreciate all the angles here. Starting a business, making money, getting me out of the house. In fact, she saw it as a comedown from the club circuit, and a baffling one at that. Perhaps it was, but for three artistically minded black men, opening a joint was one of the few ways—maybe the only way—we could make steady pay and pursue our careers without taking menial jobs in the white world. It even put us in charge of our own gig, rarer still for black men of any age. Sidney Poitier was thinking along the same lines; his place, in Harlem, would be called Ribs in the Ruff.

  I was the only one of the three of us with any money, so I bankrolled the scheme with about $2,000—nearly all I had. We found a tiny place for rent on the east side of Seventh Avenue, just below the juncture of Grove and West Fourth streets, Christopher and Waverly. We put a grill in the window, built a narrow counter with about ten stools, and added a few small tables against the far wall. We kept it open all day and much of the night, alternating in eight-hour shifts. One of the three of us would work the grill in the front window, flipping burgers and browning the potatoes and onions. Another would man the counter and tables, while the third went off, exhausted, to sleep. Aside from a kitchen man to peel the potatoes and chop the onions, we were the whole staff. We could have called our new place Harry’s Hash Joint or Bill’s Burger Grill, but no—the name had to be more literary than that. Bill was the one who came up with “the Sage.” It was a double entendre, indicating both wisdom and the spice, though financially, the Sage was anything but a wise move, and I’m not sure we ever used sage in our short-order cooking.

  Artists, actors, and writers in the Village found us right away. For them, the Sage became a little nest, a refuge where you could strum your guitar at a back table and write lyrics over a long cup of coffee, while two guys from the labor movement argued the finer points of socialism at the counter. Maybe the food wasn’t that good. But the talk was, and so was the ambience—like that saloon in William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life. And the girls! Pretty soon, we had a regular chorus of them, stopping in to flirt with one or another of the Mighty Three. Ferman, especially, cultivated as many new female fans as any man could handle.

  Before long, all these beautiful girls draped over the counter began to cause some resentment among the Italians who ran most of the other coffeehouses and restaurants in the neighborhood. We started hearing mutters, and caught some dirty looks. When a posse came in to announce we needed “protection,” we got a little worried. Bill was the one who defused the situation. In his knocking-around days, he’d worked as a seaman, and a lot of the sailors he’d come to know were Italian. A number of them now lived in the city, working waterfront jobs or waiting to ship out. A half dozen or so joined him for dinner one night at one of the key establishments in Little Italy, within sight of a don or two who witnessed the Italians treating Bill as one of their own. They nodded, gave their blessing, and the “protection” threats melted away.

  To dispel any lingering tension, Bill proposed a basketball game at the courts on Sixth Avenue at West Third Street: Little Italy’s best against the Sage short-order men. The three of us were pretty serious pic
kup players; to round out our team, we put the word out in Harlem, and recruited two other guys whom we presented as our cooks. Both were just a tad short of pro. By game day, word had gone around, and half of Little Italy came out to watch. The Sage Five romped, but everyone had such fun that it became a weekly ritual. In between, even the Italians started coming by the Sage for coffee—and to try their luck with the girls.

  The Sage was always hopping. It just didn’t make money. Any customer with a hard-luck story ate for free, or got his dinner with a promise to pay later, and only rarely did. Others who did pay but turned out to have lousy politics—railing at socialism or defending anti-communists—we’d basically shoo out the door. We had no sense of how to run the Sage as a business. We didn’t even know what the word wholesale meant; we bought all our groceries at the A&P down the street. Soon enough, the debt side of the ledger began to outweigh the profits.

  To meet the next month’s rent, we started fanning out to Saturday night poker games to make up the shortfall, each of us sitting in on a different game to maximize our prospects. That worked pretty well … until it didn’t. Desperate, we asked some of our customers for loans. We gravitated toward ladies who had a crush on one or another of us. They had button-down day jobs—one worked as a fact-checker at Time magazine—but they let their hair down at night. I’m loath to call it pimping, because there wasn’t any quid pro quo; they just helped us meet our monthly credit crises, and we always paid them back—eventually. But we did play on their heartstrings and, perhaps even more, on their liberal proclivities; they were, with few exceptions, white. For that matter, the whole Village scene was mostly white, except for the three outposts where blacks were part of the mix: the Village Vanguard, Café Society, and now us.

  However dire our finances, we’d take Sundays off, to play basketball at the local YMCA or, in warm weather, to play baseball with a crowd of actors and musicians at the fields near the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin in Riverside Park. Along with Attaway and Phillips, one of my closest friends from that time was Tony Scott, the great jazz clarinetist. Tony had discovered the Sage early on, and among the pretty girls who hung out at the counter he found his future first wife. After the Sunday games, he and Fran would have us all down to Tony’s loft on Jones Street. We’d get a conga drummer and a piano player, and Tony would take out his clarinet. I didn’t sing—this was strictly bebop jazz riffing—but as the spliffs went around, we all talked and talked: art, politics, life …

  In those marathon talkfests, we always circled back to racial issues. Now that the Progressive party had fallen apart, we anguished over how best to fight segregation. Passions ran pretty high; one night they ran right over the top. Tony, who was white, was playing with a Latino conga drummer—I think his name was Lopez. When it came time for Lopez to solo, he just took off, playing with such inspiration that all of us stopped talking. Tony was riveted, too. Instead of coming back in with his clarinet, he just sat there, tears rolling down his face. Puzzled, the drummer stopped playing. “Look at what you just played,” Tony burst out, and with that he stretched out a hand to include me. “What would have happened if you hadn’t been slaves … just think what you all could have done…. Lopez, what do you think would have happened?”

  Lopez thought about that. “You’d be playing the drums,” he said, “and I’d be playing the clarinet.”

  When he wasn’t wallowing in racial guilt, we all agreed, Tony was the best clarinetist in the world. I still think that. He’d played with Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, and Billie Holiday, among many others. Later, he would play backup for me, too, and be the band’s conductor, as well as my musical arranger on my first big breakthrough albums. By the end of the decade, though, Tony would move to Italy—both of his parents had come from Sicily; the family name was Sciacca—and perform mostly in Europe from then on. The move would be good for his music, exposing him to African and Far Eastern influences, even turning him into a New Age pioneer, but it would end his marriage to Fran. And when it did, she would marry … Bill Attaway! In those still-bohemian Greenwich Village days, that was about par for the course. All of us stayed close, and Bill, too, came to play an important, recurring role in my career—many roles, really—beginning, in that year of The Sage, by helping me forge a new identity, this time as a folksinger.

  All through the winter and spring of 1951, I went to acting classes at the Dramatic Workshop, paying for them out of my last savings now. I took classes at the Actors Studio, too; the actress Shelley Winters became a good friend that way. But when I went on auditions, I struck out again and again. “Nothing we’re doing has any Negro roles,” each casting director would tell me. “If we do The Hasty Heart, though, we’ll give you a call.” The Hasty Heart was a wartime play about wounded Allied soldiers in a Burmese hospital, one of whom, known as Blossom, was an African who had about two lines.

  I knew I had a better shot with singing; I just couldn’t stand the thought of going back to those mushy pop standards. What did excite me was folk music: raw, gritty, American songs of hope, heartbreak—and protest. Pete Seeger had galvanized me at those political sing-alongs for Henry Wallace. He’d started a movement called People’s Songs to force social change through folk songs—a mind-blowing idea for me. Songs weren’t just entertainment. They could move people to action. They had political power. People’s Songs had hooked up with the unions; at the top of their agenda was using folk music to fight racism. Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives, Josh White, and Tom Glazer were just some of the folksingers who’d joined People’s Songs. That had a powerful appeal for me.

  Paul Robeson, too, had turned to folk music as a tool for social change. I’d heard him sing southern spirituals in that unforgettable basso profundo. But I’d also heard him sing folk songs from Wales, after establishing his bond of solidarity with the Welsh coal miners, and Russian folk songs, from his trips to Moscow, before his passport was seized by the U.S. government for “un-American” activities. Along with Pete Seeger, he made me think I might find, in folk music, a way to fuse my passions for politics and art.

  The Village Vanguard was just down the street from the Sage, so I’d go down to hear Woody there, and Leadbelly, the two men whose songs gave me my glory moment in Of Mice and Men at the Dramatic Workshop, and Josh White. At that time, the Vanguard was a folk place; only later would it become famous for jazz. The lyric power of the songs they sang mesmerized me. “Tol’ da captin ma hans was col’ / Said damn yo’ hans boy let da wheelin’ roll.” What Tin Pan Alley tune could compete with that? Often at the Sage, a customer would take out his guitar and, urged on by me, launch into one of those powerful folk songs; I’d supply harmony, and before long, others would join in.

  John Henry said to his captain:

  “Oh a man ain’t nothin’ but a man,

  An’ before I let that steam drill beat me down,

  I’ll die with my hammer in my hand.”

  I got a lot of positive words for those renditions, and I started harboring the hope that I might land a gig at one of the folk clubs nearby—if not at the Vanguard, then one of the others.

  There was just one problem. I hadn’t hung out in the Dust Bowl with Woody Guthrie, or played banjo around hobo campfires. I wasn’t from the American South, like Leadbelly; I couldn’t play a six-string guitar, much less a twelve-string, as he did. I’d never done the fieldwork that inspired field hollers; I’d never been on a chain gang, from which some of the most powerful folk songs had come. I wasn’t even a full-fledged Jamaican, or a black from Harlem with full Afro-American roots. All of this mattered, deeply, in the burgeoning folk movement of the early 1950s, because authenticity was what the songs were about, and an inauthentic singer, which was what I appeared to be, had no right to sing them.

  Bill Attaway, a serious student of folk music and its traditions from his hobo days, did a lot to help me put those fears aside. He introduced me to Tony Schwartz, a great collector of folk music, who’d gathered hundreds of bl
ack folk songs from the American South, the Caribbean, and Africa. (One of his great finds was the African song “Wimoweh,” which he introduced to Pete Seeger; later it would be reconfigured as the Lion King song.) With Bill’s encouragement, I also started going down to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to delve into the thousands of folk songs compiled by Alan Lomax.

  Everyone in the folk movement knew about Lomax. A folk-music historian, he’d spent decades collecting songs on his travels, recording local artists in obscure roadhouses and scribbling lyrics in notebooks, then typing them up for the library’s Folkways series. It was a family effort—Alan’s brothers and father helped, too—but Alan was the main force. Lomax wasn’t quite the saintly figure he was portrayed as; on more than one occasion, he insisted his name be included on the copyright for folk songs he’d only recorded, not written, and profited accordingly. The Weavers, with Pete Seeger, were about to have a huge hit with Leadbelly’s “Goodnight, Irene,” and Lomax, who’d brought the song to light but played no part in writing it, demanded copyright co-credit, taking significant royalties from Leadbelly’s impoverished family when the song became a hit. Nevertheless, thanks to Lomax, the Library of Congress now had an astonishing repository of songs from all over. I would come back from Washington, D.C., with dozens at a time, and spend my spare hours working on arrangements and fine-tuning the lyrics with a guitarist and Sage regular named Craig Work. Craig would come up with the chords, and together we’d test out our versions after hours for a throng of regulars who enjoyed them almost as much as they did the free late-night fare.

  One customer who listened was a small-time theater producer named Jack Rollins. Later generations would know him as the co-producer, with Charles H. Joffe, of nearly all of Woody Allen’s films, perhaps also as the manager of various well-known comics (Elaine May and Mike Nichols, Robert Klein) and television personalities (Dick Cavett and David Letterman). When I met him at the Sage, though, he was a thirty-five-year-old in search of a manager’s career. We found him a fairly anxious, uptight guy, and pretty humorless for an agent who would come to represent comics. But he saw how eagerly I was taking up folk music, and when he mentioned he knew Max Gordon, I listened. Max was the founder and manager of the Village Vanguard. Jack felt sure he could get me an audition with Max.