Homey Don't Play That!

by David Peisner

  The racial melting pot of the Fulton Houses was a change for Keenen and his family. The Wayanses had moved from Harlem, which, since the early part of the century, had been the spiritual center for black cultural life in America and home to a population that was, by the midsixties, more than 95 percent black.

  Keenen spent the first six years of his life living in a tenement at the corner of 145th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, at the southwest corner of the historic neighborhood of Sugar Hill. From the 1920s through the 1950s, Sugar Hill had been an address of choice for wealthy, prominent African-Americans, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Willie Mays, Frankie Lymon, and W. C. Handy.

  Keenen’s mom, born Elvira Green in 1938, had grown up in Harlem. Though she was born just after the Harlem Renaissance, its ideas—about the arts, literature, music, politics, and black identity—still coursed through the veins of the community. Known then as the “New Negro Movement,” Renaissance writers, poets, musicians, and political leaders embraced an assertive, progressive vision for African-American public life. The cultural mix in Harlem included writers such as Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston, future congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., back-to-Africa crusader Marcus Garvey, comedian Jackie “Moms” Mabley, and jazz greats Ellington, Calloway, and Count Basie.

  Elvira grew up awash in the Renaissance’s legacy. The legendary Apollo Theater opened on West 125th Street in 1934, joining an already robust theater scene that included the Lafayette—the first integrated theater in the city—and the Lincoln, on West 135th Street, next door to the offices of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. The neighborhood remained a locus of the jazz world for decades. In fact, two months after Keenen was born, Esquire magazine managed to gather together fifty-seven of the world’s most prominent jazz musicians, including Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, and Thelonious Monk, in front a brownstone on 126th Street for a famous photograph that became known as “A Great Day in Harlem.”

  Following Garvey’s example, Harlem became a magnet for black nationalist and civil rights groups through the middle of the century. In 1954, Malcolm X began preaching out of a storefront mosque on 116th Street known as Temple Number 7. In the fall of 1958, Martin Luther King Jr. was signing books at a department store a little over a mile from the Wayans family’s apartment, when he was stabbed with a letter opener by a mentally ill black woman named Izola Curry. King’s life was saved by a team of surgeons at the same hospital where Keenen had been born a few months earlier.

  Elvira was, in many ways, a product of the crosscurrents sweeping through Harlem. Speaking about her to an interviewer for the Archive of American Television in 2013, Keenen described her as “a radical.”

  “She was all about civil rights and black power and black is beautiful,” he said. Once, when Keenen was in elementary school, he brought home an assignment to make a collage and his mother enthusiastically pitched in. She told him he needed a theme for his collage and she had an idea. In the family’s apartment was a framed picture of the children’s fable character Little Boy Blue. She took it out of the frame and laid it on the table. Then she and Keenen began cutting out photos from Ebony magazine and pasting them on the Little Boy Blue picture.

  “We covered everything but his eye,” Keenen said. He took his collage into school and presented it to the class. His teacher was pleased. “Miss Jackson goes, ‘Oh, that’s really nice, Keenen.’ I said, ‘You know, it got a theme!’ And she said, ‘Well, what’s your theme? Tell the class.’ ” He held up the collage of black faces surrounding the large eye. “I said, ‘Look out, black world, because Whitey got his eye on you!’ ”

  That was Elvira. She taught her children to challenge prevailing wisdom. “My mom would say, ‘Of the ghetto doesn’t mean you are ghetto.’ ” As Keenen told Henry Louis Gates Jr. in a 2015 interview, “That kind of stuff stays in your head and teaches you to think a certain way.”

  As a child, Keenen went to see a performance featuring the famed conductor Leonard Bernstein. “I was a little boy,” he said. “My mother got tickets but couldn’t go because she couldn’t afford a babysitter. She gave me the tickets and said, ‘You may not understand this but Mama wants you to go.’ So she dressed me as best she could—I had on a plaid shirt and some corduroy pants and everybody else [had] on tuxedos—but she wanted me to have that experience.”

  Life in Harlem for the young Wayans family was hardly idyllic. Keenen’s father, Howell, a diligent Jehovah’s Witness born and raised in New York, always had a job, often more than one, but the growing family struggled to make ends meet. Their apartment building was little more than a slum, infested with rats and junkies. A heroin addict that the Wayans kids nicknamed Sleepy used to hang out in front of the building. Keenen and his siblings occasionally enlisted Sleepy to help them cross the street, but Sleepy, true to his moniker, had a habit of nodding off halfway across Amsterdam Avenue. “My mother would look out the window, see us and yell, ‘I told you not to go across the street with him!’ ”

  The family’s living conditions weren’t unique. A series of rent strikes in Harlem, beginning in November of 1963, brought attention to the problems—broken windows, crumbling ceilings, roaches, intermittent heat and water, and in the words of one tenant back then, “rats so big they can open up your refrigerator without you”—but didn’t necessarily alleviate them.

  Poverty was endemic, unemployment was double that of the rest of the city, and the schools were awful. Around the time that Keenen and his older brother Dwayne were in elementary school, more than three-quarters of Harlem students tested below grade level in reading and math. In 1964, Harlem residents protested by staging two separate school boycotts in which more than 90 percent of students participated.

  The racial undertones to Harlem’s problems were undeniable, and also a pretty accurate reflection of the state of affairs nationwide. The country often seemed as if it were being ripped apart along color lines. In June of 1963, hours after John F. Kennedy had proposed the Civil Rights Act on national television, NAACP activist Medgar Evers was gunned down in Jackson, Mississippi, by a member of the White Citizens’ Council. Three months later—and just a couple of weeks after Martin Luther King Jr. led the March on Washington—a Ku Klux Klan–planted bomb ripped through the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young black girls. Nine weeks later, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

  In Harlem, the gravely substandard living conditions and the rising tide of radical politics created a potent brew. In the summer of 1964—two weeks after new president Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law—that brew boiled over, when a fifteen-year-old black teenager was shot and killed by a white NYPD officer in front of about a dozen witnesses. Six days of angry rioting consumed Harlem, with protestors looting stores and attacking police officers with bricks, bottles, and Molotov cocktails, and the cops responding first with batons, tear gas, and hoses, and then, later, with live ammunition. The chaos eventually spread to Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn and kicked off a summer of rage that ignited similar uprisings across the river in Jersey City, Paterson, and Elizabeth, New Jersey, and even farther afield in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Rochester. Race riots became an enduring feature of urban strife in the sixties, as violent demonstrations shook Watts, Cleveland, Omaha, Newark, Detroit, Minneapolis, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore before the decade was out. When all was said and done in Harlem that summer of 1964, one protestor was dead, more than five hundred had been injured, nearly another five hundred had been arrested, and there was close to a million dollars in property damage.

  Clearly, the Wayanses picked a good time to get the hell out.

  The Fulton Houses were a step up for the Wayans family. In contrast to the popular image that the phrase “public housing projects” sometimes conjures, these particular projects were a relatively safe, family-oriented community. Most of the kids atte
nded the same elementary school, PS 11, or junior high, IS 70, and after a few years, many of the families knew each other.

  Although the Wayanses were a large family, in a community heavily populated with Irish, Puerto Rican, and African-American families, that didn’t necessarily distinguish them. The Fulton Houses were overflowing with children and had been built with them in mind. In the courtyard between the Wayans family’s building and the one next door there was a small playground with cement turtles and whales, where younger kids would chase each other, and older ones might play “spin the bottle.” In a covered area near the playground and the building’s front door was a spot for four square and hopscotch. A block north on 17th was Kelly Park, and a block past that, between 18th and 19th, a basketball court.

  The Wayanses’ apartment was brand new, and although the four-bedroom unit was cramped for a family that would grow to twelve members by the early seventies, they learned how to use every inch of it. Rooms were crowded with beds—Shawn and Marlon slept head to toe in the same bed for nearly sixteen years—and the two bathrooms were hardly ever empty. Howell seemed to nearly always be occupying one of them; it was his personal refuge from the everyday insanity of the crowded apartment. If any of his children wanted to find a similar serenity, the best option was a closet.

  “Each room had a closet,” Keenen recalled. “The closet was like our office. We could go there for privacy. At dinner, my mother would count us, and if one was missing she’d go into the closet and see who’d fallen asleep.”

  Poverty was pretty much the norm throughout the Fulton Houses, but the Wayanses, according to Keenen, were “the poorest of the poor.” Breakfast was often puffed rice, bought in bulk. Lunch might be grilled cheese sandwiches with, as Shawn described it, “government cheese where the cheese don’t melt.” Dinner was, occasionally, nonexistent.

  As Damon wrote in his book of comic essays, Bootleg, “My mother would look at us and say, ‘Look, babies, there ain’t no food in the house. We’re having sleep for dinner. Now brush your teeth and get ready for bed. Keenen, you make sure everyone gets a little extra toothpaste tonight.’ ”

  There was a phone in the apartment, but it was often disconnected because the family couldn’t pay the bill, so anyone who wanted to make or receive a call would have to use the pay phone on the corner across the street. Despite the struggles, the family never went on welfare. Elvira was a proud, resourceful woman and wouldn’t think of it.

  Their financial problems weren’t a result of laziness or apathy, just math. Keenen and his siblings worked from a young age—collecting bottles, shining shoes, delivering groceries—and their father always worked too. There were just too many kids and too little money. For a time, Howell worked as a supermarket manager, as a sales representative for Guinness/Harp, and for Drake’s Cakes, but eventually, he quit to go into business for himself.

  “My dad wanted to be his own man and have his own business,” Keenen said.

  What that meant in practice was he would go to the post office and buy whatever surplus items hadn’t been picked up—condoms, hair beads, sunglasses, costume jewelry, whatever—and sell them. On occasion, he’d enlist his children to hawk the items door to door. Neighbors referred to the family as the “Haneys,” after the junk merchants on the then popular television comedy Green Acres. It wasn’t exactly a gold mine. As Marlon put it, “My dad had a job at Drake’s Cakes and made good money. Then he decided he didn’t want to work for the Man. My mother was like, ‘You stupid asshole—work for the Man! He gives you benefits!’ ”

  Elvira, who sometimes went by Vi, had been a singer in her youth—she and her sisters sang as “the Green Sisters,” and even performed at the Apollo once—and then became a social worker. As the family grew, raising the kids became a full-time job and then some. Many say she was the funniest one in the whole family—but only when she was angry. Nothing could make her angry as reliably as her husband.

  Marlon recalled, “My dad would annoy the shit out of my mother and she’d curse him out. When my mom cursed my dad out, she was like Richard Pryor with titties. I thought his name was Motherfucker until I was nineteen.” They argued about money, about religion—he was a Jehovah’s Witness, she was not—about pretty much anything. She used to mock Howell’s inability to grow a mustache by calling him “Horse Lip.”

  “We got to watch the best buddy comedy ever,” Marlon said. “Fuck Tom and Jerry. Fuck Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny. We got to watch Elvira and Howell.”

  Shawn and Marlon, in particular, delighted in riling their mother up. Keenen recalled a time when his youngest brothers found a bell that sounded just like their telephone. The two hid under their mother’s bed, repeatedly ringing the bell. Their mother came running in from the kitchen to answer the phone, over and over, only to pick it up and hear a dial tone. Eventually, she was convinced it was a woman calling her husband and hanging up, which set off the expletive-laced verbal tirade they were hoping for all along. Getting mad and getting laughs were inextricably linked in the Wayans household.

  But it wasn’t all fun and games. Howell was a strict, hardworking man. According to Marlon, he started his day at three in the morning. “I used to watch my dad wake up, put his hand on his head, read his Bible for a little while, look up to the sky, take a deep breath, and go, ‘How the fuck am I going to feed these ten motherfuckers today?’ He’d somehow magically go out and bring dinner home.” Besides work, he also went door to door as a Jehovah’s Witness. “This is where he gets his work ethic,” Marlon said. “He got so many doors slammed in his face.”

  He tried to impose the same discipline on his children. The kids were supposed to be up at five every morning and back in the apartment before the streetlights came on at night. “We had to be accounted for, and if we weren’t, we were going to answer to an ass-whipping,” said Marlon.

  In fact, ass-whippings became occasions for public amusement in the household.

  “If you were getting a whipping from my father, there would be five of us in the room laughing about how you were getting hit,” Damon said.

  The siblings reacted in different ways to their father’s restrictive rules. Kim was a proverbial “good girl” who fell in line, worked hard, got good grades. Keenen didn’t rock the boat either.

  “I never rebelled, I just developed a plan,” he said. “One of my favorite kid stories was ‘The Tortoise and the Hare.’ I really related to the tortoise. I never looked for immediate results. I always paced things.” So Keenen got jobs. Took on more responsibility. Made himself indispensable.

  Dwayne and Damon revolted. Damon remembered a night when Dwayne decided that the nighttime curfew was bullshit. He was going out whether his father liked it or not. Howell guarded the door, armed with a belt, and challenged Dwayne, “You want to go outside, you gotta go through me.” The other siblings watched the confrontation with nervous, if somewhat gleeful, anticipation.

  “My brother took my father, body-slammed him, and went outside,” Damon said. “We followed him.”

  Being home by early evening introduced most of the Wayans siblings to their first comedy workshop: the dinner table. It was a raucous, ruthless, and unforgiving venue. “Anything that happened that day, that’s what the jokes were about,” said Keenen. “We’d start snappin’ on each other. Everybody had a twisted sense of humor. We cracked jokes about your most painful experiences.”

  Damon remembered a game he and his siblings called, “Make Me Laugh or Die.” “Everybody would sit down and then one of us would have to get up and make everybody laugh,” he said. They’d do impressions, funny dances, sketches. “You couldn’t just make one laugh—you had to make everyone laugh at the same time, in unison. If you didn’t, we all thought about what your ‘die’ is. We’d pick something like ‘You’ve got to go drink Daddy’s last beer in front of him.’ ‘Go fart in Mama’s face.’ ”

  The idea was to forestall laughing as long as possible, to not laugh so as to make your sibling hav
e to endure the “Die” task. (Years later, Keenen’s stinginess with laughs became well known among In Living Color writers and cast members. Even when he liked something, he was far more apt to offer a straight-faced “That’s funny” than to actually break.)

  Clowning around aside, the close quarters in the apartment created, at times, an almost uncomfortably intimate relationship between siblings. There were no private conversations. If you took too long in the bathroom, everyone knew about it. If someone had a date, everyone had an opinion. When Keenen lost his virginity, he did so with Shawn and Marlon watching.

  “I was babysitting,” Keenen said. “I thought, ‘This is the perfect time. I’m gonna have my girl come over.’ ” But every time he’d look over his shoulder, he’d see his two brothers in the doorway of his room, quickly scampering down the hallway.

  On the not infrequent occasions when friction between brothers boiled over into an actual fistfight, their mother insisted they make up with a kiss.

  “My mother used to make us kiss on the mouth,” said Damon. This went on until the boys were well into their teenage years. “We left home because we didn’t want to kiss each other on the mouth,” he joked.

  Growing up, Damon and Keenen were very close but very different from each other. Damon was born with a clubfoot—a birth defect where a foot is bent inward at an acute angle—and underwent several surgeries and wore corrective shoes as a child. As a result, his mother showered him with extra attention, which didn’t exactly endear him to Keenen and Dwayne.

  “Dwayne hated me,” Damon said. “He used to beat me up. When my mother made him babysit, he’d hang me on the door hook. If I tried to get down, he’d hit me.”

  The orthopedic shoes also meant that Damon walked with a severe limp—he later joked that his “crip walk” made people in the neighborhood think he was in a gang—and wasn’t allowed to play sports. In gym class, he sat on the side, lest his special shoes scuff up the gym floor. “That’s where the comedy started,” Damon told the St. Louis Dispatch in 1990, “from me heckling the kids that were playing.”