“Hunch over! Grab your legs!” I shouted to Alma.
“Why?” she asked.
“Dammit! Just do it!” I yelled, as we continued to plummet. I saw the two pilots snatching at the controls, racing through emergency procedures. They shut off the engines, and the only sound now was the whopping of the blades as we continued to drop toward the bay. At the last moment, the pilots managed to nurse the helo over the shoreline for a hard landing, scarcely twenty feet from the water’s edge. I unhooked my seat belt, grabbed Alma, and dragged her away. This thing might still burst into flames.
“What happened?” she asked, when we were at a safe distance.
“We crashed,” I told her. I went over to the Jamaican pilots and congratulated them on an impressive piece of emergency flying.
Later, Michael Manley phoned me. “My dear Colin, do you know what is causing the rustling of the trees you hear? It is my immense sigh of relief.” Prose poetry, the language of my forebears. And the irony of the moment did not escape me. What had been the land of my folks’ birth had nearly become the site of their son’s death.
We boarded the Blackhawk and resumed the tour. We visited an Ohio National Guard unit that was helping the Jamaicans with a roadbuilding project and a U.S. Air Force drug-tracking radar site poised on a breathtaking bluff called Lover’s Leap. With these stops completed, the official visit was over. Now the sentimental journey began.
We piled into jeeps provided by the Jamaican government and headed north into the interior. We turned onto a dirt road that cut through the red earth like a gash. Handsome homes gave way to humble cottages. The road dwindled to a path, and we finally had to get out and walk. We had been on foot for about fifteen minutes when, out of nowhere, the “custos”—the local government head—and the police chief and several other officials appeared and greeted our party. We walked behind them across gently rising fields to a crest, then started down a rutted trail into a small valley where something quite magical happened. People seemed to emerge out of nowhere. Soon, about two hundred people surrounded us, young and old, some colorfully dressed, some in tatters, some with shoes, some barefoot. All at once, the air was filled with music. A band appeared, youngsters in black uniforms playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“The children are from the school your father attended,” the custos informed me. The musicians then shifted to calypso tunes as familiar to me as our national anthem. The crowd began clapping, reaching out to Alma and me, taking our hands, smiling and greeting us. From a distance, a smaller group started toward us. The crowd parted to let them pass. I was choked with emotion. This was my family. No one needed to tell me. Some I had met before. As for the others, it was in their faces, in their resemblance to each other, in their resemblance to me. We had arrived at Top Hill, land of my father’s birth. They embraced me and started introducing themselves, Aunt Ivie Ritchie, Cousin Muriel, Uncle Claude, Cousin Pat, in a blur of faces and family connections.
Alma and I were led to folding chairs and asked to sit in the place of honor while Joan Bent, a schoolteacher and the wife of one of my cousins, delivered a speech of welcome full of colorful flourishes. We started walking again past several comfortable houses, with porches painted a rich red earth color, to a tiny cottage. Its walls were made of rough stucco, the roof of rusted sheet metal, the eaves of hand-hewn boards. Brown shutters flanked six-over-six windows, giving this tropical dwelling an unlikely New England touch.
The cottage contained four cubicles, no running water, no electricity, no kitchen, no indoor plumbing. The entire house was smaller than an average American living room. My relatives had shooed the chickens out of the place, scrubbed it, and swept it, but that was all. I was standing in the house where my father had been born in 1898.
We went out back to the family burial plot, freshly weeded and tended. Once again the crowd surged around, waiting for me to say something. I thanked them for their welcome, and hoped to be left alone for a while. I wanted time to retrace my father’s footsteps through the fields, to roam among trees he must have known. I wanted to imagine what it was like to live here, scratching out a subsistence living from these austere patches of earth. But people kept pressing in on us. Alma and I said a prayer over the graves of my grandmother and grandfather. We exchanged a few simple gifts with members of the family; the women gave Alma lovely hand-embroidered linens. And then the visit was over.
We made our way back to the Blackhawk and flew over Westmoreland, the birthplace of Maud Ariel McKoy Powell, my mother. As we traveled along, I wondered what dreams or fears had prompted two young Jamaicans to cut the roots to their native soil, leave the people they loved, and emigrate to a land so foreign to what they knew. And I wondered if they could have imagined how much this act of courage and hope would shape the destiny of their son.
I was born on April 5, 1937, at a time when my family was living on Morningside Avenue in Harlem. My parents’ first child, my sister, Marilyn, had been born five and a half years before. I have no recollection of the Harlem years. They say our earliest memories usually involve a trauma, and mine does. I was four, and we had moved to the South Bronx. Gram Alice McKoy, my maternal grandmother, was taking care of me, since both my parents worked. I was playing on the floor and stuck a hairpin into an electrical outlet. I remember the blinding flash and the shock almost lifting me off the floor. And I still remember Gram scolding and hugging me at the same time. When my mother and father came home from work, much intense discussion occurred, followed by more scolding and fussing. My keenest memory of that day is not of the shock and pain, but of feeling important, being the center of attention, seeing how much they loved and cared about me.
The dominant figure of my youth was a small man, five feet two inches tall. In my mind’s eye, I am leaning out the window of our apartment, and I spot him coming down the street from the Intervale Avenue subway station. He wears a coat and tie, and a small fedora is perched on his head. He has a newspaper tucked under his arm. His overcoat is unbuttoned, and it flaps at his sides as he approaches with a brisk, toes-out stride. He is whistling and stops to greet the druggist, the baker, our building super, almost everybody he passes. To some kids on the block he is a faintly comical figure. Not to me. This jaunty, confident little man is Luther Powell, my father.
He emigrated from Jamaica in his early twenties, seventeen years before I was born. He left his family and some sort of menial job in a store to emigrate. He never discussed his life in Jamaica, and I regret that I never asked him about those years. I do know that he was the second of nine children born to poor folk in Top Hill. No doubt he came to this country for the reason that propelled millions before him, to become something more than he had been and to give his children a better start than he had known. He literally came to America on a banana boat, a United Fruit Company steamer that docked in Philadelphia.
Pop worked as a gardener on estates in Connecticut and then as a building superintendent in Manhattan. Finally, he found the job that was to provide the base of our family’s security and make him the patriarch of our clan. He went to work for Ginsburg’s (later elevated to the Gaines Company), manufacturers of women’s suits and coats at 500 Seventh Avenue in Manhattan’s garment district. He started out working in the stockroom, moved up to become a shipping clerk, and eventually became foreman of the shipping department.
My mother was the eldest of her generation—of nine children—and came from a slightly more elevated social station in Jamaica. She had a high school education, which my father lacked. (“Him who never finished high school,” she would mutter, when Pop pulled rank on family matters.) Before emigrating, Mom had worked as a stenographer in a lawyer’s office. Her mother, Gram McKoy, was a small, lovely woman whose English wedded African cadence to British inflection, the sound of which is still music to my soul. The McKoys and the Powells both had bloodlines common among Jamaicans, including African, English, Irish, Scotch, and probably Arawak Indian. My father’s side even added a
Jewish strain from a Broomfield ancestor.
Some of Gram’s nine children were grown, but most were still dependent on her alone when she separated from Edwin McKoy, a sugar plantation overseer who lent the Scottish line to our ethnic mix. To support her family, Gram left Jamaica in search of work, first in Panama, then in Cuba, finally in the United States. She sent for her eldest child, my mother, to help her. She labored as a maid and as a garment-district pieceworker and sent back to the children still in Jamaica every penny she could spare. She eventually sent for her youngest child, my Aunt Laurice, whom she had not seen for twelve years. To those of us spared dire poverty, such sacrifices and family separations are all but unimaginable.
Gram had named my mother Maud Ariel, but she was known all her life as Arie. She was small, five feet one, plump, with a beautiful face, soft brown eyes, and brown hair done in the forties style, and she had a melting smile. When I picture Mom, she is wearing an apron, bustling around our apartment, always in motion, cooking, washing, ironing, sewing, after working all day downtown in the garment district as a seamstress, sewing buttons and trim on clothing.
Mom was a staunch union supporter, a member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. My father, the shipping room foreman, considered himself part of management. Initially, they were both New Deal Democrats. We had that famous wartime photograph of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with the Capitol and the flag in the background, hanging in the foyer of our apartment for as long as I can remember. My mother remained a diehard Democrat. But Pop, by 1952, was supporting Dwight Eisenhower.
He was the eternal optimist, my mother the perennial worrier. That never changed, no matter how much our fortunes did. After my father died, I would come home on leave to visit Mom and she would say, “Colin, take the book to the bank so they can show my interest.”
And I would explain, “Mom, you don’t have to do that. The bank will post the interest on the statement they mail you. The interest isn’t going anywhere.”
“How do you know they won’t ‘tief’ me?” she would say, using an old Jamaican expression for stealing. She would go to her bedroom, fish out an old lace-covered pink candy box from under the bed, and hand me the bank book.
I would dutifully trot down to the bank, stand in line, and say, “Will you please post the interest on this account?”
“Of course, Colonel Powell. But we also show it on the statement. That can save you a trip down here.”
“No,” I would say. “My mother has to see those red numbers you print sideways to show her interest.” And, I wanted to add, to prove you didn’t “tief” her.
According to my Aunt Beryl, Pop’s sister, in her nineties as of this writing, my parents met at Gram McKoy’s apartment in Harlem. Besides raising her own children, Gram took in relatives and Jamaican immigrants as boarders to earn a few extra dollars. One such boarder was Luther Powell. Thus, my parents courted while living under the same roof.
After early years in Harlem and at a couple of other addresses, I grew up largely at 952 Kelly Street in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx, where my family had moved in 1943, when I was six. The 1981 movie Fort Apache, The Bronx, starring Paul Newman, takes place in the police precinct where I lived. In the movie, the neighborhood is depicted as an urban sinkhole, block after block of burned-out tenements, garbage-strewn streets, and weed-choked lots, populated by gangs, junkies, pimps, hookers, maniacs, cop killers, and third-generation welfare families—America’s inner-city nightmare come true. That is not quite the Hunts Point I was raised in, although it was hardly elm trees and picket fences. We kept our doors and windows locked. I remember a steel rod running from the back of our front door to a brace on the floor, so that no one could push in the door. Burglaries were common. Drug use was on the rise. Street fights and knifings occurred. Gangs armed with clubs, bottles, bricks, and homemade .22 caliber zip guns waged turf wars. Yet, crime and violence in those days did not begin to suggest the social breakdown depicted in Fort Apache, The Bronx. That was yet to come. When I was growing up in Hunts Point, a certain rough-edged racial tolerance prevailed. And, critically, most families were intact and secure.
We lived in a four-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a four-story brick tenement, two families on each floor, eight families in all. When I stepped out the door onto Kelly Street, I saw my whole world. You went left three blocks to my grade school, one more block to my junior high school; between the two was a sliver of land where stood St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church, our church. A few blocks in the opposite direction was the high school I would later attend. Across the street from us, at number 957, lived my Aunt Gytha and Uncle Alfred Coote. On my way to school, I passed 935 Kelly, where Aunt Laurice and Uncle Vic and their children lived. Farther down, at 932, my godmother, Mabel Evadne Brash, called Aunt Vads, and her family lived. And at 867 were Amy and Norman Brash, friends so close they were considered relatives. “Mammale and Pappale” we called them. Don’t ask me why the Jewish diminutives, since they were also Jamaicans. Most of the black families I knew had their roots in Jamaica, Trinidad, or Barbados, or other islands of the West Indies.
The Brashes’ nicknames may have reflected the fact that in those days Hunts Point was heavily Jewish, mixed with Irish, Polish, Italian, black, and Hispanic families. The block of Kelly Street next to ours was slightly curved, and the neighborhood had been known for years as “Banana Kelly.” We never used the word “ghetto.” Ghettos were somewhere in Europe. We lived in the tenements. Outsiders often have a sense of New York as big, overwhelming, impersonal, anonymous. Actually, even now it’s a collection of neighborhoods where everybody knows everybody’s business, the same as in a small town. Banana Kelly was like that.
There was a repeating pattern to the avenues that connected our streets. On almost every block you would find a candy store, usually owned by European Jews, selling the Daily News and the Post and the Mirror. No one in my neighborhood read the New York Times. These little stores also carried school supplies, penny candy, ice cream, and soft drinks. As every New Yorker knows, the specialty of the house was the egg cream, consisting of chocolate syrup, milk, and seltzer. If you did not have a dime for the egg cream, you could just get the seltzer—“two cents, plain.” Every few blocks you found a Jewish bakery and a Puerto Rican grocery store. Italians ran the shoe repair shops. Every ten blocks were big chain stores, clothing and appliance merchants, and movie houses. I do not recall any black-owned businesses. An exciting event of my boyhood was the arrival of laundromats after World War II. My mother no longer had to scrub our clothes on a washboard and hang them out the window on a clothesline. Pop, however, insisted on having his shirts done at the Chinese laundry.
The South Bronx was an exciting place when I was growing up, and I have never longed for those elms and picket fences.
My father adored my sister, Marilyn. Thanks to his job in the garment district, she was always well dressed, and she led a sheltered life by Kelly Street standards. She ran with the good girls. The Teitelbaum sisters, whose father owned the pharmacy on the corner, were Marilyn’s closest friends. I played the role of pesky little brother. Marilyn’s first serious boyfriend was John Stevens, whose family was also active in St. Margaret’s Church. John was an only child, and was being groomed to become a doctor (he made it). He and Marilyn were matched up by their parents. My idea of fun was to sneak up on them in amorous embrace and make a nuisance of myself. John would buy me off with a quarter. Marilyn would rage at her little brat brother. I thought of her in those days as a fink who turned me in for playing hooky, and I’m sure she found me a pain in the neck. On the whole, it was a normal sibling relationship.
One summer, when I was eight, my folks and some relatives rented cabins at Sag Harbor on Long Island. I was outside by myself playing mumblety-peg, trying to make the knife stick into the ground, when a piece of dirt flew up and lodged under my eyelid. I ran crying into the cabin, where my Aunt Laurice managed to get the irritant out, w
hile I continued bawling. When I went back outside, I overheard her say to Aunt Gytha, “I don’t know about that boy. He’s such a crybaby.” It stung me then, and the fact that I vividly remember the incident almost fifty years later suggests my youthful devastation. I remember thinking, nobody’s ever going to see me cry again. I did not always make it.
When I was nine, catastrophe struck the Powell family. As a student at P.S. 39, I passed from the third to the fourth grade, but into the bottom form, called “Four Up,” a euphemism meaning the kid is a little slow. This was the sort of secret to be whispered with shaking heads in our family circle. Education was the escape hatch, the way up and out for West Indians. My sister was already an excellent student, destined for college. And here I was, having difficulty in the fourth grade. I lacked drive, not ability. I was a happy-go-lucky kid, amenable, amiable, and aimless.
I was not much of an athlete either, though I enjoyed street games. One of my boyhood friends, Tony Grant, once counted thirty-six of them, stickball, stoopball, punchball, sluggo, and hot beans and butter among them. One day, I was playing baseball in an empty lot and saw my father coming down the street. I prayed he would keep on going, because I was having a bad day. But he stopped and watched. All the while Pop was there, I never connected. A swing and a miss, again and again, every time I was at bat. I can still feel the burning humiliation. It was always painful for me to disappoint my father. I imagined a pressure that probably was not there, since he rarely uttered a word of reproach to me.
I did enjoy kite fighting. We would smash up soda bottles in a big juice can and lay the can on the trolley tracks until the passing cars pulverized the glass. We then glued the powdered glass onto a kite string. We fixed double-edged razor blades at intervals on the kite’s tail. Then we flew our kites from the roofs of the tenements. By maneuvering the glass-coated string and razored tail, we tried to cut down the kites of kids on other roofs, sometimes a block away, and watch the kites flutter to earth—our version of World War II dogfights.
My American Journey Page 2