by Byron Pitts
While I was imagining my mother’s delight when I walked in the door before she had to yell BYYYY-RUUUN!—the kid guarding me stole the ball. Suddenly it was 8–6, then 8–7, and a moment later, 8–8. How awful. We were now in a tight game. Worse still, there was a chance I might not make it home before dark. Damn. Thank goodness Timmy Johnson had a jump shot. We won 10–8. No time for the customary hand slap and trash talk. I had to run. And run I did for about three blocks. It was already dark, so no chance I’d make it. Momma would be waiting, and she’d be angry. What was my excuse? Didn’t have one. So run faster. I cut across Mr. Frog’s yard (you never walk on anyone’s grass, but this was an emergency), jumped over the bush on the right corner of our porch, and slid all the way to the front door.
“Okay. Catch your breath, walk in quietly,” I whispered to myself. What did it matter? My mother could be in a room without windows, and she’d still know when the sun went down. It must be some microchip God places in all good mothers. What excuse could I use? That wouldn’t matter. It was dark and that meant “or else.” Well, at least we won the game. Going to bed early ain’t so bad. Getting a whooping, how long could that last? I was resigned to my fate, when much to my surprise, I entered the house and my mother was not waiting. Instead, I could hear her and my father arguing in their room. Profanity and anger. First, I felt great relief. Then I was overcome by a sense of loneliness. My parents had no idea whether I was at home or in the street. There was no “or else.” I listened to them fight for quite a while, and then I surprised myself. I went back outside and down the street. Slowly at first, assuming my mother would notice my absence and yell for me to come back. She never did. And soon I was beyond earshot or sight of home.
I’d never been out past dark. The street looked different. People I’d never seen before were on the street. My friends were the jock crowd. All we needed was daylight and a ball. But Timmy Johnson was nowhere in sight. These people were standing around. Men and a few women with bottles, beer cans, and bad attitudes inhabited the basketball court. “Hey, shorty, what are you doing?” Who was this stranger speaking to me? “Come here for a second. Come do me a favor.” Too scared to run, I walked closer. The guy reached in a pocket. Is this how my life ends? Boy shot, stabbed, hit in the head with a blackjack? My imagination had gotten the best of me. “Shorty, go to the store for me.” He’d pulled out a roll of cash thick as his fist. “So-so-so-sorry, sir. I sh-sh-sh-should be-be-be home.”
“What! Talk like you got some sense. You stupid or something?” I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. And I was angry. How dare this fool with liquor on his breath insult me?
He and his group laughed and turned back to their conversation. It was clear, at that moment, that this man was no better than I and I no better than he. He was, however, a cautionary tale. His world was not my world. Even as a boy, it was clear to me what his tomorrows might hold for him.
As for me, I returned home. I presumed my parents were still yelling, no one would be looking for me, but I at least had the choice of returning to my home. When I got to Federal Street, my parents were now silent and segregated in different parts of the house. That night, no one noticed I’d just come home after 10:00 P.M. I was a boy, but I felt like a thirty-year-old man. I’d just learned I was as much responsible for my own well-being as the adults in my life. I had to watch my own back.
It’s one of the phrases you hear growing up in an urban environment. Almost every city kid from eighteen to eighty-one has either used it or heard it: “Who’s got your back?” It’s part of the free education on the street, for which Ivy League schools require large sums of money. In a lot of ways, my neighborhood was just like corporate America. Take, for example, what the business world calls networking. You can’t move up in a corporation without a network of mentors and supporters. In the world of my youth, these were called Homeys or Uncle So and So or Auntie So and So. (The key is to make sure the people who’ve got your back are positive role models and not losers.)
Who had my back when I was growing up? Like any kid who loved sports, I adored my coaches, and they looked after me. There was George Cook, my first Pee Wee football coach. Mr. Cook worked a part-time job with my father and loved teaching kids the fine art of tackling and blocking. At first glance, this small knotty man of Irish German descent, who did shift work at Bethlehem Steel and tossed back Budweiser with his buddies at a watering hole in East Point, Maryland, would seem to have very little in common with a black kid from East Baltimore. Mr. Cook was my first hero who didn’t look like me. He was also a testament to something my mother always said: “Everyone your color is not your kind. There are some good white folk in this world.”
For four seasons (1969 to 1972), Mr. Cook helped shuttle me back and forth from home to football practice and games, and we got to know each other pretty well. I’m certain he never knew my struggles with literacy, but I’m convinced that if he had, he would have done his level best to help. For all that escaped me in the form of words, much of my early learning came in examples shown by people like Mr. Cook who set an example with actions and his words.
“Pitts, you like tacos?” Mr. Cook asked me once. He’d stuffed me and several of my teammates in his car after a game and wanted to treat us after a win.
“What’s a taco?” I asked him. At this point, my taste didn’t go much beyond my parent’s home cooking and an occasional cheeseburger. My teammates (all white) got a big laugh out of my ignorance.
“Shut up laughing,” Mr. Cook barked. “There’s no shame in asking what you don’t know, son.”
Coach Cook, besides my mother, was the first adult who encouraged me to push beyond familiar boundaries. It was enough that he took interest in ways my father never did or for which my father could never make time. In fact, it was during my last Pee Wee football season that my parents’ marriage finally came to a merciful end. As my father would explain several years later, “We grew apart. Clarice was no longer the woman I fell in love with.”
That statement is absolutely true. William Pitts was a full-time meat cutter and a part-time cab driver on the day he met my mother. He was a full-time meat cutter and a part-time cab driver on the day they separated. Clarice was a girl from the country with a tenth-grade education on their wedding day. When the marriage ended, she was a college graduate with a degree in sociology and a respected social worker, mostly helping single mothers find their way. My parents had indeed grown their separate ways. While William ultimately walked away from both his marriage and his children, Clarice swore, “When I leave, everything that eats goes with me.” That meant her stepson, Mac (my sister was away at college), me, and Butch, the mangy dog a stranger left in my father’s cab one night.
Clarice left William on Christmas Eve morning in 1972. He left for work and before his key could hit the ignition, his wife was up peeping through the curtains. When his car rounded the corner, she woke all of us up and called her brother. “He’s gone. Let’s go.” By sunset we had a new address, 4817 Truesdale Lane.
While the marriage was falling apart, there were no funds or inclination for babysitters, so I usually tagged along most places my mother would go: church, occasionally to work, night school, even bars. “Anywhere I can go, my children can go” was her motto. I met some really neat people playing Foosball and drinking a grape soda while my mother sat at the bar and had drinks with her friends. That’s also how I first met James Mack, barking instructions at my mother and others taking a swimming class at the Morgan State College swimming pool. He seemed rather impatient at the time. “I hope you people study better than you swim,” he crowed.
“What are you doing in my class” he snapped at me as I sat in the bleachers.
“Sir,” was my sheepish response. With a stern look, he approached me.
“Why are you sitting in my class? You a freshman?”
“No, sir” was my only response.
The frown melted from his face, and with a smile he said, “You look li
ke a freshman. What’s your name, champ?”
“My name is By . . . By . . . By . . . ron Pitts, sir. My mu . . . mu . . . mother is in your class.”
“Clarice Pitts is your mother? I hope she’s a better mother than she is a swimmer.” With that, he laughed and returned to yelling at his class.
James Mack coached the men’s swim team at Morgan State in the 1970s, as well as a recreational league wrestling team (so everyone called him Coach). By coincidence, he was also a revered deacon and taught Sunday school at my New Shiloh Baptist Church. There were deacons at church who could bring the congregation to tears and shouting. They spoke with such clarity and force it seemed even God would have to stop what He was doing and listen to their prayers.
For all his talents, praying was not Mr. Mack’s gift. I never saw a grown man so nervous or sweat so much in church as the rare occasion when Mr. Mack was called to pray. Once he got past “Dear Heavenly Father . . .” it was often downhill. But ask any young man whose life was touched by Mr. Mack, and you would know God uses all kinds of folks in many ways. There were countless boys, myself included, who wished we had a father like Coach Mack. Perhaps because he only had daughters, he was more than willing to step in when he saw a boy who needed a man’s influence.
Coach was a bulldog on stilts: a thick jawbone connected to a barrel chest stopping at the waist. If Coach weighed 200 pounds, he was 190 from the waist up, atop 10 pounds of bowlegged twisted steel. The only thing funnier than watching Coach Mack pray was watching him teach swim class in trunks and flip-flops (Adonis he was not). He always addressed me and every other kid as champ. (“Either you’re a champ or a chump, and you look like a champ to me,” he’d say.) He quickly joined the short list of adults I lived to please.
I don’t believe in luck or chance. It was God’s grace that brought Coach Mack into my life. I would never be the same. Over the years, Coach taught me to believe that there are no quick fixes. “Lottery tickets are for people looking for shortcuts,” he would say. “Shortcuts are for cowards. Cowards don’t know God.” To this day I have never purchased a lottery ticket, to honor the sentiments of Coach Mack. Success, he often reminded me, was an investment. That’s what I loved about Coach Mack. Big lessons in short definitive sentences. I’m sure he was wrong plenty of times, but he was never in doubt. There are probably dozens of cops, lawyers, teachers, counselors, probation officers, coaches, and at least one journalist from East Baltimore now living across the country who owe many of their core values and beliefs to Coach Mack. He helped to keep us all on the right side of trouble. In the neighborhood where I grew up, there was a line that must never be crossed. On one side was education and opportunity, on the other side was incarceration. It was all too easy to cross that line. It was why my mother fought so hard, and what Coach Mack understood so well. One misstep could change the course of a life forever. Coach Mack almost certainly changed that course one day when I was walking to school.
“Hey, champ, what’s in the bag?” The night before, I had purchased a pocketknife from the corner store and was on my way to school the next morning when I bumped into Coach Mack. He’s never told me how he knew, or maybe it was fate, but this was the one and only time I ever ran into Coach Mack on my way to school and he asked to see inside my book-bag. Respectfully, I pulled out my books, my lunch, my pencils, even the bubble gum I’d planned on chewing later.
“Anything else,” he asked. No, sir! I obviously answered too quickly.
“You sure?”
Perhaps it was the perspiration that gave me away? “Just this.” I raised the pocketknife to Coach, as if it was an eighty-pound bag of shame.
“What’s the knife for?”
Using the best reasoning available to an eleven-year-old on short notice, I explained to Coach that there was a bully at school who had tormented me for weeks. He’d taken my lunch, and on those rare occasions I had lunch money, he’d taken that too. Since I felt I had no options, the pocketknife would be the equalizer.
“So are you going to stab him or just scare him?” Coach asked. Coach was a real man. He understood my dilemma instinctively.
“Only if I have to, Coach.”
“Why don’t you practice on me?”
“No sir, Coach. I love you like a father.”
“Son, it’s not about loving me. It’s about loving yourself enough not to do something you know in your heart is wrong.” He did not ask. I handed him that brand-new knife. As best I know, he never told my mother and we never discussed it again.
“Love yourself enough,” he said. No one had ever told me that before. No one needed to tell me again. Once from Coach was enough.
I shudder to think where I might be without Coach Mack’s intervention. Where that knife might have landed, and landed me. He continued to be a part of my life well past college. He supported me in any way he could. Pocket money, on occasion, when I had a date. A sounding board on those frequent occasions my mother’s strict rules were enough to drive an adolescent crazy.
What motivates men like Coach Mack? Where does that desire to help come from? I never had the chance to ask him. The last time I saw him at a college basketball tournament, he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and he barely recognized me. The man who’d guided so many young boys to manhood was now being escorted around by a group of men, some his contemporaries and a few of them guys my age who likely have their own Coach Mack stories. The things he had taught me, all he meant to me, were my memories alone. That same smile was there, but this time it was me saying, “Hey, Champ, good to see you.”
At this point in my early teens, most of those watching my back had come from the ranks of my family, my parents’ friends, or my community. And with the exception of Coach Cook, they had all been African American, like me. But a culture shock awaited me when I stepped through the doors of my new high school in September of 1974.
Baltimore’s Archbishop Curley High School is where blue-collar kids could dream white-collar dreams, as a teacher once described my alma mater. Founded in 1962, it was one of the last all-boys Catholic high schools built in Baltimore, a modest three-story brick building run by Franciscan priests. Their parsonage was attached to one end of the building, next to the school chapel. The population was more than nine hundred boys, most of them Catholic, all but four of them white. So being black and Baptist made me stand out. It was a place that valued discipline, education, service, and physical fitness equally. Curley was, among other things, a jock school. We won championships in football, soccer, cross country, basketball, wrestling, baseball, lacrosse, and track. There was a dean of discipline, Mr. Murphy. His sole purpose in life, it seemed, was to scare teenage boys straight. It was a badge of honor to graduate from Curley without a single scare from Mr. Murphy.
There were a handful of lay teachers, but mostly there were Franciscans in their black robes, dark shoes or sandals, with a white rope around their waist. The three knots in the rope symbolized their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Just seeing those men each day in their black robes with the three white knots changed my perspective on life. Till this time I’d seen sacrifice only as one of the shackles of a modest upbringing. People did without because they had to. But these Franciscans did without by choice, a commitment to service to others. I found the whole concept liberating. It lifted a burden I often felt as the son of a single parent, who was forced to sacrifice so much in order to provide for her children. Now I saw nobility in sacrifice. At the same time, their lifestyle fit perfectly with my mother’s notion of hard work or building toward some greater goal. These men were sacrificing to serve God, and their reward would come in heaven. Perhaps if I sacrificed the sinful lures of adolescent life, like drugs and alcohol, then my reward would also come later. So, every day as I walked down the hallway, that concept beat in my brain and heart like a drum. Sacrifice was good. Sacrifice was honorable. I was no longer some poor kid with problems trying to do better. I was a child of God sacrificing now
for rewards later, hopefully long before heaven.
By the time I got to Curley, I was no longer functionally illiterate, but I still read well below grade level and was placed in a remedial reading class. Based purely on grades, I probably shouldn’t have even gotten into Curley. My admission was more a testament to the power of prayer and the force of my mother’s personality. For years teachers talked about my admissions interview. Not about my interview but about my mother’s interview. She pleaded, cajoled, and convinced. Thank God. I’ve often said those were the four best years of my life. I’ve never learned, laughed, or cried more in any four-year stretch since. Oddly enough, many people in my life thought Curley was a bad idea. A number of my mother’s friends, and even a few relatives, questioned the environment and the expense. (Tuition was nine hundred dollars per year, a steep sum on a social worker’s modest salary.)
“Why you send Byron to school with those white people?” one co-worker asked her.
Her answer was always the same. “When it comes to my children, I don’t have to justify my actions to anyone. I will do what I think is best for them, period.” There was rarely any follow-up comment.
She did explain her reasoning to me. “You need to see how white people think and work if you’re going to work and succeed in a predominantly white world.” That’s why Clarice sent me to Curley. “I want you to get the best education available, and Curley is a good school. Plus, they will whoop your ass as quickly as I will if you get out of line.” Regardless of the situation, discipline was never far from Clarice Pitts’s mind.