I have no recollection of the Depression. My parents were lucky enough to stay employed throughout the thirties, and we were never really in want. And I was only four when America entered World War II, almost ending hard times overnight. Young as I was, I have vivid memories of the war years. I remember assembling ten-cent model airplane kits of balsa wood and colored tissue paper. I deployed legions of lead soldiers and directed battles on the living-room rug. My pals and I scanned the skies from the rooftops looking for Messerschmitts or Heinkels that might get through to bomb Hunts Point. We sprayed imaginary enemies with imaginary weapons. “Bang! Bang! You’re dead!” “I am not!” One thrill of my childhood occurred when Uncle Vic, who had served in the 4th Armored Division, came home after the war and gave me a yellow German Afrika Korps helmet. I carried that helmet around for forty years until it finally disappeared on a move between Germany and Washington, liberated, I am sure, by the German movers. In 1950, when I entered high school, the country was at war again, in Korea this time. Warfare held a certain fascination for me, as it often does for boys who have not yet seen it up close.
World War II changed my name. Before, I was Cah-lin, the British pronunciation that Jamaicans used. One of the first American heroes of the war was Colin P. Kelly, Jr. (pronounced Coh-lin), an Air Corps flier who attacked the Japanese battleship Haruna two days after Pearl Harbor and won the Distinguished Service Cross posthumously. Colin Kelly’s name was on every boy’s lips, and so, to my friends, I became Coh-lin of Kelly Street. To my family, I remain Cah-lin to this day. I once asked my father why he had chosen the name, which I never liked. Was it for some illustrious ancestor? Pop said no, he had read it off a shipping ticket the day I was born.
As a boy, I took piano lessons; but the lessons did not take with me, and they soon ended. I later studied the flute. Marilyn thought the noises coming out of it were hilarious. I gave up the flute too. Apparently, I would not be a jock or a musician. Still, I was a contented kid, growing up in the warmth and security of the concentric circles my family formed. At the center stood my parents. In the next circle were my mother’s sisters and their families. My father’s only sibling in America, Aunt Beryl, formed the next circle by herself. These circles rippled out in diminishing degrees of kinship, but maintained considerable closeness. Family members looked out for, prodded, and propped up each other.
I sometimes felt as if I were half spectator and half participant in a play populated by character actors. We usually went to my Aunt Dot’s house in Queens on New Year’s Day for curried goat. Dinner was followed by much drinking of Appleton Estate rum, dancing of the chotisse and singing of calypso songs.
A note on the etiquette of Jamaican rum. Appleton Estate is the most famous. It comes in different colors, proofs, and ages. In my family, to serve anything else was considered an affront; to serve Puerto Rican rum, such as Bacardi, was an insult. Appleton Estate ninety proof golden was the most popular. A white version of 150 proof was used for punch. Real men drank the 150 proof neat. The smell stayed with them for a week, which is also about how long it took a drinker to recover. Rum to Jamaicans is like tea to an Oriental or coffee to an Arab, a sign of hospitality and graciousness, usually served over ice with ginger ale or Coke. The Coke version later became too Americanized for us because of the Andrews Sisters’ hit song “Rum and Coca-Cola.” Ladies, especially my mother, when offered a snort would respond with a demure “Just a touch.” My mother would then complain that I had made her “touch” too strong and had put it in too big a glass, just before she downed it.
As a kid, I did not understand the lyrics of the calypso songs I heard at family gatherings. But as I grew older I started to decode the sly double entendres. My favorite calypso singer was Slinger Francisco, a Trinidadian known as “the Mighty Sparrow,” a master of the naughty phrase. I played calypso tapes in my office even after I became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. My aides did not get the pidgin lyrics and missed most of the innuendo in such tunes as “The Big Bamboo” and “Come Water Me Garden.” But then, you do not hear much calypso music in the Pentagon’s E-Ring.
At family gatherings, talk would invariably turn to “goin’ home.” No matter how many years my aunts and uncles had been in America, when they said home, they meant Jamaica. “Hey, Osmond, you goin’ home this year?” “No, don’t have the money. Next year, for sure.” “Hey, Laurice, you goin’ home?” “No, but I’m packin’ a barrel to send to the folks.” They would slip into nostalgia, all but my godfather, Uncle Shirley, Aunt Dot’s husband, a dining-car waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Uncle Shirley was Jamaican too, but in their eyes, he had gone “American,” even shedding much of his West Indian accent after riding the rails for so many years with native-born blacks. “Goin’ home?” Uncle Shirley would say. “You damn fools sit around talking about ‘home.’ You forget why we left? Ain’t been home in twenty years, and I ain’t never going home.” At which point the kids would laugh uproariously, delighted to see Uncle Shirley provoked to heresy.
We liked to get Aunt Dot and Uncle Shirley into an argument, because their spats had the reliability of a Punch and Judy show. “Shirley, you come over here with the folks, instead of sitting in front of that TV all day,” Aunt Dot would begin. Shirley do this, and Shirley do that. It was like watching a fuse burn. Finally, Shirley would explode: “Woman! Mind your own damn business!” I later understood that the only way those two could fight like that for over forty years had to be out of deep love.
During summer vacations, I sometimes stayed with Aunt Dot and Uncle Shirley. I especially enjoyed my godfather’s idea of breakfast on his day off, steak, eggs, and ice cream. Dottie and Shirley are gone now; yet every time I spend an evening with their sons, my cousins, Vernon, Roger, and Sonny, we amuse ourselves by reenacting one of their parents’ long-ago tiffs. Sometimes these memories will strike me suddenly out of nowhere, and I start laughing all by myself.
Our family was a matriarchy. I loved my uncles—they were the sauce, the fun, and they provided the occasional rascal. But most were weaker personalities than their wives. The women set the standards, whipped the kids into shape, and pushed them ahead. The exception was my father. Luther Powell, maybe small, maybe unimposing in appearance, maybe somewhat comical, was nevertheless the ringmaster of this family circle.
In 1950, my sister transferred to an upstate New York college, and Marilyn’s send-off was pure Pop. We all went down to Grand Central Station to put Marilyn on the Empire State Express bound for Buffalo State Teachers College. My father strode into the station, overcoat flapping, smiling through his tears, tipping everybody in sight, the porter, the conductor, the trainman, telling them, “Take care of my little girl, make sure she gets there safe and sound.” I was embarrassed to see him doling out the money, but that was his way. Around the holidays, he would tip the mailman, the fuel man, the garbageman. When he was young, living in Harlem, Pop would dress up every Saturday in a vested suit, a checkbook with a zero balance stuffed into his pocket. He would start off the weekend at a shoeshine stand, where he also had a reputation as a heavy tipper. Afterward, as he strode down Morningside Avenue, the world was his oyster.
During football season, his son had to have the best helmet on the block, though I was far from the best player. My first two-wheeler bike had to be a Columbia Racer, with twenty-six-inch whitewall balloon tires. When I needed a suit, it was “Son, here’s the charge card—go to Macy’s and take care of yourself.” All this from a shipping room foreman who never earned more than $60 a week. One Christmas, my mother objected to my father’s inviting so many people over, which he did every year. The work was getting too much for her, she said. He went out and invited about fifty people and told Mom that if she could not handle it, he would hire a caterer.
His take-charge manner was reassuring. Luther Powell became the Godfather, the one people came to for advice, for domestic arbitration, for help in getting a job. He would bring home clothes, seconds and irregulars, end
bolts of fabric, from the Gaines Company, and sell them at wholesale or give them to anybody in need. Downtown, Pop was not always able to play this lordly role. Maybe that was why it meant so much to him on Kelly Street. When Gaines changed hands, he tried to buy a piece of the company, but he was turned down. He had given the firm twenty-three years of his life, and, in his view, had been unfairly frozen out. Whether or not Pop was a serious bidder, I never knew. But after this disappointment, he left Gaines and went to work in a similar position for Scheule and Company, dealers in wholesale cloth. And that is where he spent the rest of his working days until the firm folded, and he was too old to get another job.
Luther Powell never let his race or station affect his sense of self. West Indians like him had come to this country with nothing. Every morning they got on that subway, worked like dogs all day, got home at 8:00 at night, supported their families, and educated their children. If they could do that, how dare anyone think they were less than anybody’s equal? That was Pop’s attitude.
Of course, there was always the dream that it might not have to be earned by the sweat of your brow, that one day Dame Fortune might step in. I remember the morning ritual, my father on the phone talking confidentially to his sister: “Beryl, what you doing today? Four-three-one? Hmmm. Straight or combination? Okay. Let’s make it fifty cents.” Later, the numbers runner would come by to pick up the bet. Someday, they knew, they were going to strike it rich.
In 1950, I entered Morris High School. Instead of turning left when I went out of the house I turned right for a few blocks. Marilyn had gone to the elite Walton High School. And, at my parents prompting, I tried to get into Stuyvesant High, another prestigious school. I still have the report card with the guidance counselor’s decision: “We advise against it.” Morris High, on the other hand, was like Robert Frost’s definition of home, the place where, when you show up, they have to let you in.
I was still directionless. I was not fired by anything. My pleasures were hanging out with the guys, “making the walk” from Kelly Street, up 163rd Street around Southern Boulevard to Westchester Avenue, and back home. Our Saturday-morning rite was to go to the Tiffany Theater and watch the serial and then a double feature of cowboy movies.
Sundays meant attending St. Margaret’s Church, where we had our own family pew. Pop was senior warden, Mom headed the altar guild, and Marilyn played the piano at children’s services. I was an acolyte. My folks always worked on the bazaar, the bake sale, and the annual dance, where you could let your Episcopalian hair down, do the calypso, get a little tipsy, and even share a nip with the priest.
In our neighborhood, we also had Catholic churches, synagogues, and storefront churches. On Friday nights I earned a quarter by turning the lights on and off at the Orthodox synagogue, so that the worshipers could observe the sabbath ban on activity. I had definite ideas of what a church was supposed to be, like the high Anglican church in which my family was raised in Jamaica, with spires, altars, priests, vestments, incense, and the flock genuflecting and crossing itself all over the place. The higher the church, the closer to God; that was how I saw it. At Christmas, our priest, Father Weeden, turned St. Margaret’s into a magical place of candles, lights, ribbons, wreaths, and holly. The incense burning during the holidays almost asphyxiated Marilyn. I loved all of it.
I can still remember confirmation, watching those sweet, scrubbed children as the bishop seized them one by one by the head: “Defend, O Lord, this thy Child with thy heavenly grace; that he may continue thine forever; and daily increase in thy Holy Spirit more and more, until he come unto thy everlasting kingdom.” I would swing the incense burner, lustily chanting “Amen,” convinced that I was witnessing the spirit of God entering that child’s head like a bolt of lightning. St. Margaret’s was imagery, pageantry, drama, and poetry. Times change, and the liturgy has changed with the times. I suppose I have to yield to the wisdom of the bishops who believed the 1928 book of Common Prayer needed updating, just as it replaced its predecessor. But in the change, something was lost for me. Long years afterward, I buried my mother from St. Margaret’s Church at a time when the old liturgy had been displaced by the new. God now seemed earthbound and unisexed, not quite the magisterial, heavenly father figure of my youth. It saddened me. I miss the enchantment of the church in which I was raised.
I was a believer, but no saint. One summer, in the early fifties, Father Weeden selected me, the son of two pillars of St. Margaret’s, to go to a church camp near Peekskill. Once there, I promptly fell into bad company. One night, my newfound friends and I snuck out to buy beer. We hid it in the toilet tank to cool, but our cache was quickly discovered. The priest in charge summoned all campers to the meeting hall. He did not threaten or berate us. Instead, he asked who was ready to accept responsibility. Who would own up like a man? We could probably have gotten away with our transgression by saying nothing. But his words struck me. I stood up. “Father, I did it,” I said. When they heard me, two more budding hoodlums rose up and also confessed.
We were put on the next train back to New York. Word of our sinning preceded us. I dragged myself up Westchester Avenue and turned right onto Kelly Street like a felon mounting the gallows. As I reached number 952, there was Mom, her usually placid face twisted into a menacing scowl. When she finished laying into me, Pop began. Just about when I thought I was eternally damned, Father Weeden telephoned. Yes, the boys had behaved badly, he said. “But your Colin stood up and took responsibility. And his example spurred the other boys to admit their guilt.” My parents beamed. From juvenile delinquent, I had been catapulted to hero. Something from that boyhood experience, the rewards of honesty, hit home and stayed.
As for the neighborhood gang I traveled with, getting thrown out of church camp, plus having my father catch me playing poker in Sam Fiorino’s shoe repair shop—with off-duty cops, no less—boosted my image. Usually, the other guys looked on me, not quite as a sissy, but as a “nice” kid, even a bit of a mama’s boy.
One day when I was fourteen, my mother sent me to the post office to mail letters. I was passing Sickser’s, on the corner of Westchester and Fox, a baby furnishings and toy store, when a white-haired man crooked a finger at me. Did I want to earn a few bucks? he asked in a thick Yiddish accent. He led me to a truck backed up to the warehouse behind the store, where I proceeded to unload merchandise for the Christmas season. The man was Jay Sickser, the store owner. Later, when he came by to check on me, he seemed surprised that I had almost finished the job. “So you’re a worker,” he said. “You want to come back tomorrow?” That day began an association with Sickser’s that was to last throughout my youth.
Many of the store’s customers were Jewish, and after a while I started picking up Yiddish. Relatives of Jay’s would come in looking for a deal. Jay would call me over and say, “Collie, so take my cousins upstairs and show them the good carriages.” I would escort them to the second floor, where they would talk confidentially in Yiddish—which model they liked, how much they were ready to spend. This schwarz knabe, what could he understand? I’d excuse myself and go down and report to Mr. S., who would come up, armed with my intelligence, and close the deal.
After I had worked at Sickser’s for a few years, Jay took me aside one day. “Collie,” he said, “you got to understand, I got two daughters. I got a son-in-law. Get yourself an education someday. Don’t count too much on the store.” He evidently thought that I had worked out well enough to deserve being brought into the firm, which I had never considered. I took it as a compliment.
I have been asked when I first felt a sense of racial identity, when I first understood that I belonged to a minority. In those early years, I had no such sense, because on Banana Kelly there was no majority. Everybody was either a Jew, an Italian, a Pole, a Greek, a Puerto Rican, or, as we said in those days, a Negro. Among my boyhood friends were Victor Ramirez, Walter Schwartz, Manny Garcia, Melvin Klein. The Kleins were the first family in our building to have a television set.
Every Tuesday night, we crowded into Mel’s living room to watch Milton Berle. On Thursdays we watched Amos ‘n’ Andy. We thought the show was marvelous, the best thing on television. It was another age, and we did not know that we were not supposed to like Amos ’n’ Andy.
Racial epithets were hurled around Kelly Street. Sometimes they led to fistfights. But it was not “You’re inferior—I’m better.” The fighting was more like avenging an insult to your team. I was eventually to taste the poison of bigotry, but much later, and far from Banana Kelly.
The inseparable companion of my youth was Gene Alfred Warren Norman, also West Indian, a year or two older, a better athlete, and a more restless soul. A close white friend was Tony Grant. I remember their haste to get out of the neighborhood, to peer over the horizon, Gene via the Marine Corps and Tony via the Navy. Tony remembers two groups on Banana Kelly in our youth, “the drugged and the undrugged.” Among the latter were the three of us. Gene went on to become landmarks commissioner of New York City, and Tony corporation counsel for White Plains.
In February of 1954, thanks to an accelerated school program rather than any brilliance on my part, I graduated from Morris High School two months short of my seventeenth birthday. My picture in the Tower, the yearbook, shows a kid with an easygoing smile and few screen credits beside his name. My page in the yearbook also reflects the Hunts Point mix of that era, three blacks, one Hispanic, four Jewish kids, and two other whites.
My American Journey Page 3