Real Life
Real Life
Marsha Hunt
First published in 1986, "Real Life" gives the full background to Marsha Hunt's astonishing rise from Philadelphia ghetto girl to become the 'face' of the cult 60s rock musical "Hair" and the girlfriend of Mick Jagger, father of her daughter Karis.It is the story of Marsha's childhood, of her time at Berkeley University during the anti-war riots in the mid-60s and of her escape to London where she became involved in the music scene, singing (and living) with the likes of John Mayall and Elton John. This is a vivid account of life in the early 60s by one of the icons of "Swinging London". But as well as being a portrait of a culture and a generation, it is also the personal story of a warm, honest woman determined to bring up her daughter on her own according to her deeply-held principles. It is the story of a survivor who has struggled through turbulent love-affairs and the ups and downs of a varied and extraordinary career.
MARSHA HUNT
Real Life
Copyright (#ulink_34dc06c3-b517-5951-a295-9e3ea75f1b89)
Fourth Estate
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Published by Flamingo 1995
First published in Great Britain by Chatto and Windus 1986
Copyright © Marsha Hunt 1986
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780006548737
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007483105
Version: 2016-01-19
For Karis
Contents
Cover (#u79fcd4c4-65c9-56cc-9ce7-6b7d75bc98cb)
Title Page (#u3c3ddbbe-26e7-589a-abbe-a65688399558)
Copyright (#ulink_cbd56e97-510c-54d5-969d-29e00d83912a)
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_061c1910-c87c-5913-a474-915c31d72503)
1 MADE IN AMERICA (#ulink_4a561d00-d10e-5060-9536-85bbbe064bed)
2 CULTURED PEARLS (#ulink_32097dfb-969c-5c47-a35a-8cffb84876cf)
3 THE FRONT LINE (#ulink_f6e9091e-8170-594d-ba74-6f748abd343e)
4 INFANT DIPLOMACY (#ulink_b3ea9e38-e5d5-504f-a103-eb3ced330208)
5 MOUNT AIRY AND CHESTNUT HILL (#ulink_530adc08-28d8-50b0-9c1f-7d0459bafe7d)
6 THE DREAM MACHINE (#ulink_266e8706-38b2-5a0f-aff0-6b7b0d33c698)
7 EVERYTHING’S NOT EVERYTHING (#litres_trial_promo)
8 FREE AT LAST (#litres_trial_promo)
9 PURI NATURABILIS (#litres_trial_promo)
10 PRIORITIES (#litres_trial_promo)
11 SAVE THE TEARS (#litres_trial_promo)
12 THE PLEASURE ZONE (#litres_trial_promo)
13 SMOKED OUT (#litres_trial_promo)
14 WORDS WITHOUT MUSIC (#litres_trial_promo)
15 CHANGING FACES (#litres_trial_promo)
16 BEYOND THE BRIDGE (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Indent (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_06113c8e-f21b-58b5-a395-cd691d63a269)
Co Wicklow
Ireland
Wednesday, November 15, 1995
My dear Karis,
It’s 4 am. Can’t sleep. I’m in the middle of writing the new introduction to my autobiography and I keep thinking about things that were happening when I wrote it. Ten years have slipped by and a lot has changed. For one thing, you’re 25 and living in San Francisco whereas I’ve just moved to Ireland to be with Alan after completing my fourth book.
Although I’m pleased that Real Life is being republished, I dread the prospect of it giving journalists an excuse to ask about Mick. They hate to believe that we’ve been on friendly terms for years and that you have a good relationship with him, but nonetheless, I’m glad that through Real Life I had a chance to explain what had happened between us, because the details of the good times and the trials seem less real and less relevant with each passing year. It’s odd to think that you are already older than I was when your father and I were lovers and even older than I was when I gave birth to you at 24.
In 1985 when people heard that I’d been commissioned to write my autobiography, some said I was too young at 39. But by then I’d already had three careers, been a single parent and lived on three continents. Not to mention having survived the legal battles with Mick and the humiliating experience of dealing with his lawyers and the press. Writing this book changed my life. I had to recreate events and recall circumstances which were far more disturbing than I had admitted that they were when I’d actually experienced them. So by the time I’d completed my final draft, I was both stronger and weaker because of self-examination. I’ve had more than my share of luck and adventure and being identified as an icon of the 60s hasn’t stopped me from adventuring. But I’ve always believed that what made my life worth writing about was that as a woman and an African American my experiences reflected the changes in how we were perceived. Had I been born ten years earlier for instance, my years in rock bands could have never happened and rather than being hailed as a single parent I would have been tagged an ‘unwed mother’.
No doubt you laugh at my referring to myself as an African American because you know how I hate that label and resent the way that we Americans descended from slaves have had a name change far too often. Coloured. Negro. Black. And now African American which is not only a mouthful but relates us to a continent that for at least four generations our family has had no experience of. All I know of Africa is what I’ve read, been told or learned about through the media. But then who am I to complain when I had the audacity in Real Life to try to coin a label for us of my own. Melangian now seems an absurd word, but then who stuck us with African American and don’t we have a say in the matter?
Nonetheless when I was asked if I wanted to rewrite the autiobiography I declined, although I cringe when I see the word Melangian pop up. My pomposity is embarrassing but it should remain on the record. Real Life was my first attempt at writing a book and having written two novels and this most recent non-fiction, I could only make a mess of trying to adjust my first.
In 1985 I doubt that anybody would have believed that I would write another book. A review in Time Out said the one thing my readers would be certain of is that I would never write again and my editor for Real Life moaned, ‘How can you want to write when it takes you so long!’ She’d come to our flat on Marlborough Place and watched my slow pecking at a manual typewriter. I have to admit that there have been thousands of instances while I’ve been labouring over subsequent books when I’ve wondered if she didn’t have a point.
I didn’t become a weeper until I became a writer and it’s hard to tell whether it’s the craft which drives me to tears or the characters that I write about that I’m forced to live with daily. On the other hand the isolation I’ve imposed upon myself so that I could churn books out might make a lot of people emotional. Friends couldn’t understand why I moved to Folkestone in 1986 and then slipped off to a remote house in France in 1989. But I can hear myself telling them ‘I have to be alone to write.’ It also gave me the time and space to recreate myself as an author without anybody to challenge me with ‘But you’re a singer …’ or ‘But you’re an actress …’ or ‘You’re that girl from Hair who had Mick Jagger’s baby …’ Thank God I’ve never allowed other people’s perceptions of me to stop me from living my life, because I’d now probably be a bag lady toting tatty plastic carriers full of Hair press clippings circa 1969.
No doubt you think it’s crazy that I’ve now moved to the Irish countryside but this is no more bizarre than your buying a house in San Francisco, within a few miles of the very place I deserted when I tromped off for a European adventure nearly thirty years ago. But when I encouraged you to go to an American university so you could shed some of your public school ways, how could I foresee that you’d make the States your home? It seems these days that you see more of your father than you see of me. But I’m glad that you’re happy and surrounded by some of the friends you made at Yale.
By the way, thanks for Fed-Exing those set dressings to me in time for my performance of Joy last week. They arrived two hours before the play was starting and to see that little yellow party dress hanging on stage brought back endless memories of two summers ago when we got together in France to adapt my novel and prepare me to perform it at the Edinburgh Festival. God that was fun wasn’t it - like old times with just the two of us. I can still hear you asking me the first time I cried in rehearsal, ‘Mum, are you all right?’ So that I had to step out of my character to say, ‘I’m fine Miss Karis … just acting.’
I hope you’ll stage Joy in San Francisco, because there must be scores of older black actresses needing a good role, and if you can direct me, you can direct anybody.
I was sure last Monday that I’d forget my lines but somehow they came back to me. And at the end of my performance I was tempted to tell the audience, ‘My daughter produced and directed me in this play at last year’s Edinburgh Festival’ but I was scared it would reek of a mother’s pride. After 30 years in Britain you’d think some English modesty would have rubbed off on me, but it still feels unnatural … Speaking of which, next February 28th will mark the anniversary of my arrival in London from Berkeley. I’m not one for parties but maybe I should have one to coincide with the publication of Repossessing Ernestine which comes out two weeks earlier. Have you read the uncorrected proof yet? I think you should since you keep popping up in it. That picture Stefan sent me of you in France will be included amongst the photographs. Everybody says you look lovely.
It seems unbelievable that I finally finished writing Ernestine’s story. It’s taken four years in all from the beginning of my quest to find her, and it seems like a light year ago when I rang you at Yale to say, ‘Somebody claims that they’ve spotted my grandmother in Memphis’ and you told me I had to go see her and even beat me to it. Fifty-two years in a mental ward and still standing. What’s sad is that she’s not compos mentis enough to read her own story.
Anyway, Miss Karis, it’s now 6am and raining hard. I’m alone because Alan’s away working. The house is spectacularly quiet. So much so that I can hear the sound of the felt tip I’m writing with scratching on the page. A lot of people would hate this silence but I thrive on it after the years of being in France on my own … I have to keep reminding myself that I’m in Ireland, because unless I go into town, it seems I could be anywhere. The country’s like that somehow, especially when I’m indoors. But as soon as I hit Dublin I think, ‘Lord, woman, how have you ended up in Ireland!’ Of course Alan’s the answer and thank goodness he didn’t live somewhere weird. I love this house and there’s something in the air which says that I’m being afforded another new beginning.
I hope you don’t mind that this book has been republished. It’s not supposed to dredge up old wounds but merely stands as an account of the first thirty-nine years of my life. Thank you immensely for your part in it and trust that if I had to live it all again, I wouldn’t have missed you for the world.
I send endless hugs and love, Mama
1 MADE IN AMERICA (#ulink_30187b10-ff7f-5e8f-9b20-3eda8c1125ff)
The atomic age dawned on 16 July 1945 at 5.30 am in the New Mexican desert with the success of a bomb with 20,000 times the power of TNT. I was probably conceived around that time, as it happens.
I guess you could say I got my start in an airplane factory called Brewster’s, where my mother, Inez, and her sister, Thelma, worked at the time, just a commuter’s distance from Philadelphia. Women were establishing themselves as an invaluable factor in the US workforce. Trained to read the blueprints, to rivet, to run the drill press or drill gun and build planes which were a main instrument of war, they would never again believe that their usefulness was restricted to home and child-rearing.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been dead one year and three days when I arrived, on 15 April 1946.
My genetic make-up was to prove a disability, because it automatically meant that the equality and freedom that were supposed to be endemic elements of the American culture were not going to be mine.
I am only referred to as American when I am out of the country. My skin colour is oak with a hint of maple. Of the various races I know I comprise – African, American Indian, German Jew and Irish – only the African was acknowledged, and I was labelled ‘coloured’. This was changed to ‘Negro’ in more sophisticated circles. The less evolved would often call me ‘nigger’. Over the years, I would encounter a slew of nicknames and variations on the theme of my complexion. Being colour-coded was a determining factor in who or what I could become.
Americans of slave descent are not purely African. Though we are a combination of races, this fact is avoided by all. The consequent dilemma is that entire aspects of our heritage, attitudes and behaviour are never attributed to our genetic make-up. This seems short-sighted on everyone’s part, especially as Americans are so big on understanding human nature.
I am not merely what you see. I’m the total sum of my parts, and the dominant elements aren’t necessarily the most visibly apparent ones. One morning in Paris, I realized that to come to terms with myself meant that I would have to come to terms with my ancestral past. It was 5 July 1985, the day after America’s celebration of her independence.
While growing up in Philadelphia, the first capital of the United States, had enhanced my sense of the nation’s history, I had never examined my own. As it was cautiously overlooked by everyone else, it had been easy for me to carry on as if it didn’t exist.
I enthusiastically set out to trace my family tree. I took out a library book on genealogy. Tracing my family turned out to be impossible, since slave births and deaths were not recorded and marriage was not allowed. It’s as if my great-grandparents just fell out of the sky.
While history is what is written about the past, I accept that it’s drawn from deduction, supposition and conjecture, as well as some lies and deceptions motivated by politics, money and sex. No matter. It’s good reading and great soap opera, so I’m sorry that there is no history of my ancestors to share with you.
My geographical and cultural heritage is largely American, and it’s safe to say that my great-grandparents on both sides of the family were born there. I am not sure how my grandfather’s mother came to be half German Jew or whether the man, Shouse of Danville, Kentucky, who fathered her behaved like a father. It won’t change the fact that I am in part German Jew. My grandmother says that her grandmother was a Native American, but the rest of my ancestors must have come by sea.
Some were brought over against their will from Africa, and these ancestors weren’t allowed to bring their culture or even their language with them or share in American culture at that time. They were captive labourers. I can’t comprehend how these conditions must have stunted their emotional and intellectual growth, but that was probably the least of their worries.
A baby born to an African girl raped by an Englishman was half English as well as half African, but was considered a slave. Its development was restricted to the degradations of a slave’s environment. Its Englishness would be overlooked and denied for the benefit of plantation economy. Nobody bothered to challenge this convenient deception, but wasn’t the baby equally an enslaved Englishman? In this way, a new breed was born on American soil and forcibly chained to the American dream.
People see pictures of my father’s family and ask me what race they are. When I hear myself say, ‘They’re Black,’ it sounds ludicrous, because their skin is hardly brown. Since the sixties, the Black Power movement and radical chic, Black is what Americans of slave descent are called. Before that we were called Negroes, coloured, Nigras and niggers and Lord knows what else. As kids we used to say, ‘Sticks and stones can break my bones but names can never hurt me,’ but the naming of things is important. We rely on labels to identify and categorize everything around us.
The 26 million Americans that evolved out of the sexual abuse of the slave class never got a definitive name. Black is clearly inaccurate. Our appearances vary and represent the complete spectrum of facial features, skin colours, hair textures, eye colours and physical types. Even within a nuclear family unit there are those variations. As descendants of an enslaved people we developed socially and culturally in spite of our limited privileges. We were sustained by the promise that one day we might share in the freedom and equality that was talked about so much. One day it really should suffice to call us Americans.
On that 5 July in Paris, I decided that I wouldn’t wait any longer for someone else to come up with a suitable name, and picked up the nearest dictionary. It happened to be a French/English one, a bit weather-beaten but still useful. I hoped to find a word that would describe my being of mixed descent and also suggest my African heredity.
When I stumbled upon the French word mélange, which means a mixture and also contains part of the word ‘melanin’, dark pigment found in the skin, it hit me like fireworks. Melange. I repeated it over and over out loud and in my head. I wrote it big and wrote it small and tried different endings until I heard myself saying ‘Melangian’ (pronounced mi-lan-jian with the accent on the middle syllable). It sounded right, but I wanted to get a second opinion, so I called a Melangian friend in New York to ask him if he liked it and made quite a screeching row when he did. Then I hung up the phone and put headphones on and turned up the music so loud that it nearly deafened me and danced by myself.
So let me start this again … I am Melangian. I was born of war. I am of the race which evolved out of slavery. We have a distinct cultural history, and in spite of all the shit, we’ve survived.
In the Melangian family women are particularly important because for a long time family units weren’t lawfully permitted within the slave class. (If I said that during the first thirty years of the Victorian era, working-class people were not allowed to get married, you might get the picture and a sense of how recent it was.) I come from a long line of working women. They had no choice.
My grandmother, Edna Mae Graham, who helped raise me, was raised in Florida by her grandmother, Fannie Graham, who was born a slave. There’s no photograph of Fannie, she probably never had one taken, but my grandmother described her as ‘skinny and yella’ with a crook in her nose like mine. From what I gather, she must have been a hellraiser. I wish I could remember more of what my grandmother told me about her.
Before Fannie died, her granddaughter, Edna Mae, a lean ambitious nineteen-year-old, had already hotfooted to Philadelphia, where she married a handsome friend of her family’s, Henry Robinson. Within five years they had three children, Henry Jr, Inez and Thelma, all born before the Depression. Nobody is clear about Henry senior’s line of work but, for some suspect reason, he had enough money to keep them living in certain style. Thelma, the youngest, still remembers the big house with the piano in the parlour. For a Melangian man in the 1920s that was no mean feat. Unfortunately, he took his money when he left during the Depression. Edna still managed. She had a beautician’s licence and the family made do with the money she was paid for straightening women’s hair.
I used to long to hear Edna’s stories about her Southern childhood, but she rarely talked about it or her eleven brothers and sisters. Neither they nor her grandmother who raised her were enough to draw her back to Florida. She never went home again. She never talked about her home or her family except Fannie, and if you tried to pry, she’d shut you up pretty fast by saying that there was nothing to be gained from talking about that ‘slaverytime shit’. She had a way with words and wasn’t the kind of gentle little woman you could press into a discussion that she didn’t want to have.
Once, though, she told about the time her father carried her on his shoulders to meet his regiment which fought in a war that she was never able to specify. (Considering she was born in 1896, I assume it was the small skirmish America had with Spain in 1898 over Cuba’s independence.) I don’t remember what made her break her silence, but throughout my own childhood it was the only mental image I had of hers. There are no photographs of her apart from one large portrait taken when she was nineteen. I never liked the picture in its oval frame. It made her look too much like George Washington and didn’t show that her eyes were the colour of pale sienna set against her straw complexion, which was never marred by a pimple or a rash.
Edna’s son Henry Jr finished high school and enlisted in July 1938 and by 21 October, he was assigned to a recruit training regiment at a naval training centre in Norfolk, Virginia. Edna’s two teenage daughters, Inez and Thelma, were still at high school. Both girls were pretty and popular. After graduating, they joined in the war effort with jobs at Brewster’s airplane plant. Henry was stationed at Pearl Harbor – his fleet just missed Japan’s unexpected assault in December 1941. While he had to anticipate death like the rest of the fighting forces, Inez had created two new lives: my sister Pamala was born in 1942 and my brother Dennis in 1943. Edna was a devoted grandmother and Thelma a doting aunt, and a new generation fell under the command of the matriarch, which they maintained without male interference even after Inez’s marriage to a brilliant medical student from Boston named Blair Theodore Hunt Jr.
Blair and his two brothers, Ernest and Wilson, had the opportunity to finish their interrupted educations when the war ended. Blair had been on a scholarship to Harvard, but there were still a lot of college years ahead before he would become a psychiatrist. Nobody was crazy enough to let my arrival in 1946 stop him from returning to Boston and Harvard. We weren’t to see much of my father because of his medical studies. His appearances were rare but well received. Everybody was so busy surviving that I doubt they had much time to notice that I’d come and that he’d gone.
I had three mothers, with my grandmother Edna, my aunt Thelma and my mother, known as Ikey, sharing the load. It was taken for granted in our household that women were completely capable of everything from raising a family and bringing home a regular wage packet to self-defence. Edna’s motto was: ‘If you want something done, do it yourself.’ To shovel a snow-banked sidewalk, stoke the furnace and provide was considered women’s work. Edna had been raised in this tradition and it is likely that her grandmother was, too. I was very late to comprehend that elsewhere women were not ruling the roost, shovelling the shit and kicking ass.
What little I did hear about my ancestors was predominantly about the women, and it left me a lot of scope to elaborate on them in my imagination. They weren’t prominent, but I did have them tucked in all the corners of my mind. Subsequently, it was these who spurred my determination and whom I idolized.
All my grandmother told me of her Indian great-grandmother, simply known as Grandma Mary, was that ‘when an overseer came to mess with Mary in the kitchen, she rammed a knife in his gut’. It didn’t enter my head that this may only have been a tale. Mary’s courage was there for me to imitate and live up to. And when I heard that Fannie Graham ‘wouldn’t take no shit off nobody’ and could do anything a man could do, Fannie became a role model and was always there for reference.
So the tradition I hoped to live up to as a child was as much established by these heroic foremothers as it was by my mother, her sister and my grandmother.
I can’t see air, but I accept it’s there. In the same way, I accept that I’m influenced by the unseen parade of women who have gone before me. Sometimes I wonder if I inherited them or if they inherited me.
There are things about me
Which I can’t explain
There are longings in me
For which I make no claim
I feel a haunting
Which is infinite
For lives I can’t remember
Yet can’t forget
Soul upon soul
Stretching back in time
Stacked like a totem
Is my mother line
I am theirs
As they are mine
Within their trace
My life entwines
This mother load
Supports internally
Rooted deep in my heart
At the soul of me
I feel their pain
They laugh, now free
But in the mirror
There is only me
2 CULTURED PEARLS (#ulink_5991128b-8c38-5698-aabc-2a0da673e88b)
To be coloured in 1946 was to be economically confined and socially isolated. Segregation laws did not exist everywhere, but the fact that they were upheld in many states reminded everybody who was boss.
Something positive still managed to grow over on the ‘coloured’ side of the tracks, where I spent my early childhood. A culture developed.
These social isolation bases in America where large numbers of Melangians reside are referred to as ghettos, a word that evokes only negative imagery. They weren’t merely hellholes: they were cultural arenas. I’d like to call them reservations; as the dictionary says, ‘reservation’ can mean:
a limiting condition, or
an area of land reserved for occupation by a tribe, or
an area set aside as a secure breeding place.
In our section of the city, fear, poverty and restricted education were maintained by the promise that our patience and subservience would be rewarded by opportunities available to other Americans … maybe, eventually, somehow. While we were waiting, we made do with things as they were. Like some European working classes, in spite of poverty, we had a certain quality of life.
We had our own class system, language, religion and art forms. What we ate, how we dressed, and our manner of doing things were derived from the American culture which we imitated but could never have emulated.
America was a big beef-eating nation but on the reservation pork and chicken were favoured, because they were cheaper. No part of the pig was considered waste. This policy may have been a leftover from plantation days. Pig ears and feet, the lining of its stomach (called hog maws), the intestines (called chitlins), the hocks and the ribs were all gratefully received at the table. Chunks of pig fat called fat back were used to flavour the cooking. Most things were boiled or fried. Fried chicken was a mainstay (nobody had heard of Kentucky Fried). All kinds of beans were staples, along with rice and potatoes. Yams and sweet potatoes were favourites, although they weren’t available throughout the year. Cabbage and greens such as collards, turnips, mustard and kale were boiled and then simmered, with a piece of fat back thrown in if times were good.
In 1985 on my grandmother’s birthday, 27 March, I was home in London with my daughter Karis and spotted collard greens at my local greengrocer’s. I don’t rememer seeing this variety of green anywhere in England before. To commemorate my grandmother, I thought I’d cook some for Karis, who had never eaten them and only has a vague memory of Edna; I knew that the dreadful smell alone of the collards cooking would be nostalgic.
My grandmother would have cleaned them by soaking them first in her huge roasting pan that could hold our 30-pound Thanksgiving turkey. I plopped them into water in the kitchen sink. They were clogged with dirt and it took hours to get the damned things clean: I understood why my grandmother soaked them in such a big pot all day.
I decided to steam them rather than boil them to keep the vitamins in. I threw them in the Chinese bamboo steamers and slung a few strips of bacon in with them in place of fat back. The result was most unusual but I assumed they were cooked – they go a sort of mustard colour.
When I’d dished them out, Karis looked at them on her plate and then up at me. She didn’t see me catching her sneak that last sly glance. She can be as English as they come: the accent, the manner, the attitude and even her sensibilities are so British that it just kills me. You’d hardly know she’s mine sometimes.
She used her knife and fork to eat the collards, pressing them onto the back of her fork with her knife. I could hear some grit crunching on her braces when she tried to chew. I kept my eyes on my plate, so that I wouldn’t have to interrupt this solemn commemoration with an apology that the collards were most likely undercooked.
When my grandmother did them, they melted in the mouth. It was often a pretty testy time at our place when collards got cooked, because my mother hated the smell. They do have an unfortunate odour when they’ve been simmering for hours.
Sunday on the reservation was a day for culinary extravagance when it could be afforded. Edna made biscuits with flour, milk and lard (like scones without the sugar and currants). There might even be some bread made from cornmeal, but this was usually her Friday-night treat, served with fried mackerel which had been dipped in a mixture of flour and cornmeal before it sizzled in the big iron skillet full of smoking lard.
Hominy grits were generally reserved for breakfast, although you ate them at any time if you were hungry enough. Hominy is kernels of maize. Grits – ground hominy – were boiled in salted water to a porridge consistency and topped with butter or margarine. We also ate something called scrapple at breakfast which was scraps of meat and meal ground together and fried. The occasional dinner of hot dogs and baked beans was apologized for but indicated that we were Americans to the heart.
The socially sophisticated Melangian, more integrated into American society, wouldn’t eat like this today.
The American tradition of a free choice of worship found a zealous outlook on the reservation where store fronts, living rooms and any place big enough for a gathering of souls could serve as a place of worship. Faith kept people going and gave them hope. Evangelist, Holy Roller, Sanctified, Pentecostal, Seventh Day Adventist, Children of God, Jehovah’s Witness and many other denominations had committed followers just like larger denominations such as Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian and Catholic. I missed church culture on the reservation, because we were baptized Catholic with the intention of getting the advantage of a parochial school education. But the evidence and effect of the religious element in the community reached me on many levels.
Seeing a congregation socializing outside their church after a meeting was to see reservation fashion. All manner of hats were worn by men and women alike. The ladies’ were usually adorned with a bit of netting, maybe artificial flowers or fruit like grapes or cherries, ribbons of silk or velvet. Maybe the lot. Hat, shoes, bag and outfit did not have to coordinate. Bright colours predominated.
When I was young, there was a Holy Roller church a few doors from our house. Holy Rollers are very devout and put great stock in their own translation of the Bible. The corner building wasn’t a church by design, just the biggest house on the block owned and lived in by our landlady, Mrs White. Mrs White was ebony, and on meeting days she always wore a white dress and white hat indicating that she was an elder of the church, which was almost like being a minister. She was probably in her late sixties and she usually seemed disgruntled. I couldn’t call her attractive. (‘Yurgly’ is how my grandmother described her. Edna could hardly sing out the word before she’d start rolling about laughing till the tears streamed from her eyes.) Mrs White had a scrunched-up face with not enough chin to offset her very big mouth. Her pea-sized eyes were hidden behind steel-rimmed glasses. She was heavy set and wore an upper and lower plate which she never had in her mouth if we dropped by unexpectedly to pay the rent.
Nothing was more exciting than to sneak over to Elder White’s on a warm summer’s night when we suspected there would be a meeting; it was usually a Thursday. A couple of us would creep along her side yard and right up to the window of her big front room where with a bit of luck we’d find the curtain cracked. If we were too early, we’d only get to see the twenty or so chairs of mixed description lined up in rows and waiting for a warm behind. There was often a partial drum kit and a saxophone near the piano which was next to the pulpit, a raised stage at one corner of the room furthest from the window looking onto our street. The pulpit was probably the carpentry work of one of the members, which doesn’t imply that it was crude handiwork; every part of this place of worship was an extension of the members’ lives. Some of the chairs were the same ones you might be offered to sit on if you came to the elder’s for dinner.
Giving a testimony or bearing witness in the Holy Roller church was often a highly emotional and impassioned revelation that required a lot of energy. The testifier usually got so caught up with the spirit and in the spirit that not only would his or her testimony be sparked by jumping and shouting, but others might ‘feel’ the spirit of the testimony too. To ‘jump and shout’ was a religious experience which found its way into the blues, then into rhythm and blues, before it transcended into rock and roll.
‘Feeling the spirit’ and ‘getting happy’ must be experiences second to none, because perfectly healthy people would faint and have to be carried out in the midst of these revelations. Peeking through the crack in the curtains, we longed to see the sweaty heights of this excitement, but I usually got called home before the long meetings reached these emotional crescendos.
A good minister or preacher was not only versed in the Bible, he was able to stir his parishioners to a revelry that evoked their testimonies. ‘Preachin” was an art and a good preacher was a star in the community. While most religious services have some element of theatre about them, not many can claim the standard of performance exchanged between the minister and his congregation in some of the reservation churches. In addition, some of these churches boasted excellent choirs. A couple of the more renowned ones were broadcast on our local Sunday radio station. Long before I was considered old enough to plug the radio in, my brother and I used to sneak away to listen to these church services. We weren’t allowed to, because my mother thought we were making fun of them, but it was just a way to get a dose of good music.
Music was a survival tonic, and free. To hear my grandmother singing ‘Wade In The Water’ was sometimes a sign that she was mad as hell about something, like being left alone to wash the dishes, but she made music just the same.
You could sing your way out of the reservation just as you could box your way out. While this was not the ideal of Melangians like my family, who had aspirations to become the doctors and lawyers of the community, musical talent was a passport to another America. And the church was as good a place as any to get your musical experience. Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Chaka Khan, Donna Summer, the Pointer Sisters, Al Green and Billy Preston are among the singers who started in the church.
The best reservation music to my ears was the a capella singing of groups of boys on the street who would practise popular songs of the day and do their own special renditions, which they’d decorate with rhythmic little jabs of harmony thrown in here and there. These were casual groups of boys who happened to be socializing on the same street corner or sitting on the same stoop at the same time. Singing was an escape and a pastime, like playing a game of baseball in the middle of the street, especially for teenage boys who were too big to play marbles but not yet old enough to spend their time drinking in a beer garden, which was the grandiose name for a bar.
The boys who roamed the streets were usually pretty rough and rowdy, and while I thought it was divine to hear a few of them working out the harmonies for a song, they weren’t a very savoury-looking bunch. They wore brimmed hats or peaked caps that were cocked to one side or perched some weird way or even worn back to front. The effect was not too becoming, but they were trying to look tough.
A lot of them had a special way of walking, too. I can’t think what this particular habit grew out of. Most of them looked as if they had incorporated a simplified dance step with a stride which required a certain amount of rhythm and effort to look smooth. This was called ‘bopping’. My grandmother hated it. She said they ‘looked like overgrown simpletons loping up and down the street dragging one leg like a cripple’.
I didn’t mind the crazy way they walked, but I did mind them taunting my mother or aunt with catcalls and whistles when we had to pass a bunch of them occupying nearly the whole street corner. We couldn’t avoid them even by crossing over to the other side. If the catcalls and the whistles were only a temporary interruption to some song they were working out, it didn’t stop me loving their music when they went back to making it. I loved to hear them singing in an alley that had an echo.
My family disapproved of the language that was spoken on the reservation, because it wasn’t what the rest of the nation considered good English. To be fair, it was a dialect and should have been treated with a certain respect as Europeans treat their dialects. Instead, a lot of stigma was attached to it. How the children who had only ever heard and spoken this reservation dialect coped when they got to school is beyond me. Fun with Dick and Jane, which was the first primer, should have had a translation and a glossary.
Of all the versions of English I’ve learned to speak, Melangian is the most expressive and emotional. Maybe this is why it is the language of popular music today. Whether by Hall and Oates, the Stones or Michael McDonald, a lot of hits are written and recorded by non-Melangians in our dialect. It certainly says what it has to say and takes the most direct route. It has a flatness to its tone which is basically guttural and combines this with rhythm and a Southern American lilt.
When Charles Dickens wrote his American travelogue in 1846 after an extensive trip around the States, he said that the English that he heard spoken by women in the Southern states showed the influence of the mammies that raised them. So the Southern accent was affected by Melangian and vice versa. We picked up English how and when we could, as it was never formally taught us.
To hear it spoken, Melangian is like upper-class county English in that it’s full of diphthongs and open vowel sounds. Consonants at the end of words are often dropped, as in the Scots accent, and when they are sounded, they’re softened. This is probably why Melangian is so useful for modern singing. It lets the mouth hold open sounds for words like ‘don’t, ‘last’ and ‘morning’, to name but three.
Melangian was the language I relied upon to express myself on the reservation when my mother wasn’t within hearing distance. We weren’t allowed to speak it at home. I still enjoy using it when I get a chance. When an issue gets bogged down with unnecessary words, if I think in Melangian, I can keep a clearer picture of what’s really going on. Of all the English dialects, Melangian is the one that best expresses joy and ebullience.
The class system on the reservation was more like a caste system, related to physical appearance. I guess it evolved out of the plantation politics, when how you looked may have determined whether you worked in the house or the field. Skin colour, hair texture and facial features affected your social status. Hair that grew wavy and long, light-coloured eyes and skin, afforded you more opportunity.
In the 1940s, educational opportunity was too limited for Melangians to see education as an available route to a better life, although we had our own doctors, lawyers, teachers and professionals, most of whom were educated in small Melangian colleges in the South. There weren’t many of these graduates. My father’s chance to go to Harvard was not one to be taken lightly or interfered with. It compared with a boy from the Gorbals getting a scholarship to go to Christ Church College, Oxford. His academic achievements linked my family to the professional class even though we were struggling to eat, like everybody around us. Our mother worked especially hard to have us live up to our assumed identity and went to great pains to make sure that we spoke English as well as anyone else and that our education and ambitions weren’t stinted in any way. For this she was often accused of acting white and treating us as if we were. On the reservation, no accusation was more damning. She turned a deaf ear.
It would be misleading to paint only a glowing picture of the reservation. If you saw a photograph of one without a caption, you might mistake it for a war zone. Young men prepared for combat, patrolling and armed and waiting; a rubbled landscape; an atmosphere of torment, confusion or resignation on the faces of both young and old, highlighted by a queer sense of abandonment.
The work that was available wasn’t likely to improve your future status and crime seemed to pay.
3 THE FRONT LINE (#ulink_4030f04e-9b0f-57a6-8683-2933a97c858c)
Pearl Bailey’s mother lived across the road from us, but 23rd Street was on the fringe of what was later to be known as the Crime Belt. I grew perversely proud of this distinction, but in reality I doubt it was much worse than any other section of North Philly. It was like boot camp, and I was happy there even though every passageway seemed like an obstacle course. Whether it was the hallway to the communal toilet, or the staircase, or the few feet of pavement that led to dinky local stores, you might encourage something dangerous.
I wasn’t really allowed out much alone, so one of my favourite pastimes was to observe the world below by hanging my head a bit further than was allowed outside our third-floor window which overlooked the street.
Once, I happened to be looking out when I saw a thief riding off on my tricycle. It caught me off guard. ‘That son of a bitch is stealing my bicycle!’ is all I managed to squeal before my grandmother’s big yellow hand had whipped me out of the window to drag me to the kitchen sink where my mouth was washed out with soap and water. Resisting this punishment was worse than the punishment itself. Thankfully a few tears came to evoke my grandmother’s sympathy.
I could think bad words and no one would stop me, but whenever one would slip out before I could catch it and be overheard by my mother, aunt or grandmother, I’d get my mouth washed out. I cursed a lot although nobody knew it. I was only repeating what I heard, but since ‘Do as I say and not as I do’ was one of the house rules, cursing was considered to be very bad behaviour and what my grandmother termed ‘streety’.
With the six of us living in two rooms, nerves got frayed, and among the adults a lot of swearing and shouting went on, although they pretended after the dust settled that nothing unladylike had been said. None of them swore in front of anybody outside the family other than the ice man, whom Edna cursed if his great big chunks of ice dripped across her clean kitchen floor before he could lodge it in the refrigerator or before she could put some newspaper down.
I spent a lot of time with my grandmother, because my mother and aunt were at work all day at the Signal Corps and my brother and sister were at school. Edna let me do things like go down to Max Bender’s small food store and buy loose potato chips. Max scooped them from a big silver can into a brown paper bag. (They were cheaper if they were stale.) Max also sold margarine from a covered bowl. As part of your purchase, you’d get a little red capsule to stir into it to turn it yellow. Being allowed to stir was a reward for being good, and I tried to follow all the rules.
Once I’d started school, my mother told me to work hard, mind my own business and act like a lady, but I assumed ‘take no shit’ still applied. Easier said than done. As I was only five, combining those efforts required a political skill that I didn’t have. My mother expected me to talk my way out of trouble, but on the front line, talk can get you into a lot of trouble.
To survive our tough little neighbourhood, you had to be alert at all times. Even though I was little, I was mentally prepared to react and defend myself. Just as you’d imagine a real war zone, even the youngest must learn to anticipate danger, to think and react at the same time, and to let fear serve as a natural alarm to warn you of danger, fuel you with the adrenalin that may be your only protection.
When I started kindergarten at St Elizabeth’s Catholic School, I was worldly. I’d seen so many people in the streets with scars that I’d learned to distinguish how a wound had been inflicted: a jagged scar came from a knife cut and a smooth, thin, slightly raised scar came from a razor-blade slash. I was fully aware that people were getting beaten up, knifed, scalded and had lye thrown on them. Maybe what I heard was magnified in my mind and what I imagined was worse than what was going on for real.
A constant worry was that there seemed to be a vigilante street-level policy about what behaviour was bad and deserved punishment. Vanity was punishable and it wasn’t unusual to hear that somebody could be threatened with a beating for ‘thinking they were cute’. Appearing to ally yourself in any way to the other Americans, the white ones, was also taken as a serious offence and referred to as ‘acting white’ or ‘thinking you were white’. Trying to be too dignified or too genteel could be construed as part of this offence. Between my mother’s rules for my behaviour and the undeclared street laws, I sensed there was some discrepancy.
For me, the news of what was happening in Korea where my uncle Henry was at war hardly matched up to the gossip about frequent scuffles outside the beer garden where never a flower grew.
Growing up in this environment was not a tragic scenario for my childhood. I knew nothing else in those days before television and therefore couldn’t make comparisons. I was very content, and feel that I had a wonderful childhood.
I was never hungry even though there was no cupboard always stacked with food. Max Bender’s was open till six o’clock. My brother and sister and I were cherished by our three ‘mothers’, who bought us dolls and games for Christmas. There was always a cake on a birthday and the fairy godmother left a quarter when a tooth fell out. We were kept warm in winter even if it meant somebody had to throw their coat over us in our cots to supplement the available blankets. I can honestly say that I never wanted for anything and my heart had enough. My mother would play us a game of jacks or read me a story and if my brother and sister got their homework done, the three of us could always argue over a game of old maid or something.
You couldn’t call us spoiled, but I’d say we had everything, though it may have seemed to others like little. That everything included roaches in our apartment didn’t bother me a bit, and I even liked the mice and felt we saw too little of them. The hoo-ha that went on if a mouse was caught scuttling across the kitchen floor was an entertainment not to be believed. My mother and aunt would always jump on the kitchen table screeching and hollering the place down while my brother tried to swat the poor bitty thing with a broom before it would get away under the stove, which it always did.
The only misery in my life was a picture of my uncle Henry in his uniform. This photograph of him posed with a rifle was propped up in front of the only big mirror we owned, which was attached to the dressing table in the bedroom. I needed to use this mirror when I practised singing ‘If I Were a King (I’d be but a slave to you)’ or any song that I would make up. To see, I had to stand on the four-legged leather-seated stool that fitted neatly within this dresser, which was part of a mahogany bedroom suite left over from Edna’s better days. Unfortunately, my uncle’s picture scared me so much that I’d have to turn it face down on the lace doily, which was draped across the glass top, so I wouldn’t have to look at it while I was looking at myself. There was nothing scary about this picture except the rifle. It was more that my brother Dennis regularly used it to torment me or to make me do something I didn’t want to do. He always threatened that if I didn’t, Henry would come in the night and shoot me. This made me scream and cry until help came, which never took much time since we had only two rooms.
Otherwise, Dennis and Pamala were extremely well-behaved and no doubt deserved the praise they got on their perfect report cards from school. My brother was so reliable at arithmetic that Max Bender used to pay Dennis, at the age of eight, to tally people’s bills if the store got crowded.
Dennis and Pam (or Bubby and Dixie Peach, as they were nicknamed and known) were both shy, gentle children, so I can’t say how it happened that I was the wild Indian that my mother always accused me of being. Following their example, I got pleasure out of being well-behaved and exhibiting perfect manners. When I finally got old enough to sit outside on the top step alone, I would charm the passers-by that I knew with ‘How do you do’ and ‘How are you feeling?’ and invariably go upstairs rewarded for these salutations with a fist full of nickels.
While I could understand that to be good meant to keep your voice down, to share and be helpful, I was never to be convinced that it also meant to be polite or passive in the face of aggression. Anyhow, Grandma Mary and Fannie Graham would have expected otherwise, and so would Edna.
Ikey was gradually becoming the head of the household, being our mother and the elder of the working sisters. Being Edna’s child, Ikey was wilful or what Edna called ‘headstrong’. Edna said she had ‘a head like Connie’s old ram’. I never did know what this referred to. Some of Edna’s expressions didn’t make sense but I liked them all.
To have a young mother who was smart and very pretty gave me something else to worry about, because I knew that men liked to make passes at her in the street and that she sported an attitude which people on the block called superior. As far as Ikey was concerned, she was a doctor’s wife and the reservation was just a stopover. To her mind we were merely broke, which had nothing to do with being poor, and to my dismay she dressed us to prove as much.
Dennis and Pam got to wear a uniform to school, but I had to attend nursery in oxblood brogues, high argyle socks, a silly tam and a tailored coat because Ikey considered them in good taste. As the mother superior who ran the school said, we were not like the other children. Mrs Hunt’s children did not swear and fight and cause trouble like some of the other ‘coloured’ children until …
Thump went my balled-up fist when it whammed up against the side of the boy’s ugly head. I didn’t even know his name, because I’d been so busy in the playground minding my own business that a lot of faces went unnoticed. His nose started to bleed into the dribble of snot already drying above his lip. Usually I cried at the sight of blood even if it was somebody else’s, but I was too mad for tears. That he had the nerve to kiss me when I was off my guard was a liberty that I wasn’t going to let go unpunished. So I hauled back ready to wallop him once again, but he was saved by the bell which halted my second blow. The cardinal sin of my self-defence was that I had broken a rule: no fighting in the playground. Normally, I was grateful for this regulation, because it nearly made our school yard a neutral zone in the neighbourhood. It was the only safe space where kids and air and peace mixed, unlike the sidewalk, which was designated off limits for me most of the time because of the vagrants and the bad kids. I was ashamed that I had defiled my only piece of paradise and that I wasn’t living up to Pam and Dennis’s flawless reputation, which was my mother’s greatest glory.
My assailant cried so loud that the first nun to the rescue mistook him for the innocent injured party. The indignity of being considered the offender was worse than the punishment inflicted on me by this woman draped in black. Her polished black high-tops looked like army boots peeking out from beneath her heavy hem. I had to hold out my open palms while she cracked them with her wooden ruler.
My kindergarten class only lasted half a day. When the air-raid siren blared at noon, my grandmother was always waiting for me at the gate. She was mad that afternoon when she heard why my eyes were puffy from crying. She ground her teeth when she got mad and I could hear her doing this while she carried me home. I was too big to be carried, really, but I got a ride right up to Max Bender’s where Edna got us a penny Mary Jane as she always did so that we could share it after my lunch. A Mary Jane was two little individually wrapped toffees bound by a red cellophane band which I liked to look through and which my grandmother always let me have. The fact that I got my red cellophane band that afternoon indicated that my grandmother was not annoyed with me. She said that I should’ve beaten the hell out of the son of a bitch that was kissing me and said she should have wrapped that rosary around the nun’s neck. Afterwards she added that she wasn’t scared of a son of a bitch living and wasn’t scared to die. As we were living so near the notoriously dangerous Columbia Avenue, it was just as well.
It was another war cry to help her carry on. No doubt she’d seen enough injustices in her time so that even the featherweight significance of my little scrape jostled her memory and gave her a renewed excuse to convey her exasperation. But none of this stopped Edna singing ‘If I Knew You Were Coming I’d’ve Baked A Cake’.
She sat next to her big double bed where I took my afternoon naps and stroked my temple, careful not to scratch me with her long fingernails, till I’d fallen asleep. To this day I don’t know why the stolen kiss upset me so much. Edna said that anybody with the common sense they were born with could see that ‘it was wrong to let that boy think that he could “kiss on you” and get away with it’. Her conclusion was that Sister must have lost her mind.
In spite of all my grandmother’s comforting, Sister’s reaction to the incident confused me temporarily. Did I have a right to defend myself when I felt it was necessary? Being taunted by a couple of bullies put me back on the right track soon enough. I guess you could say self-defence came naturally.
But the stolen-kiss episode was a turning point for me. I’d obviously lost my halo at St Elizabeth’s after that. I endured the ruler punishment for the second time when a priest who’d come into my classroom claimed that I switched down the aisle when I was returning to my seat. ‘Switching’ was a term used for swinging your bum from side to side when you walked – the swagger of a sassy woman. The priest gave me a chance to walk down the aisle again, and when he said that I was still doing it, I was recalled to the front and punished in front of the whole class. The whack of the ruler on my outstretched palms wasn’t nearly as torturous as the teasing I got for it in the playground.
Not long after this humiliation, Mother Superior found me with my hands in the sink when she checked the girls’ lavatory on one of her rounds. Although I tried to explain that I was only washing my hands as my mother insisted that I must, Mother Superior hit me for playing in water when I was supposed to be using the toilet.
Like a criminal with a record, suddenly I became a suspect on other counts: guilty until proven innocent, which is how kids were usually treated on the reservation. Need I say that these false accusations by the holy purveyors of Catholicism made me suspicious of them and their teaching? They already looked pretty ominous in all that black and what with the stories circulating in the playground that the nuns shaved their heads (which I had earlier been willing to discount), I became a most reluctant Catholic. I enjoyed reciting a couple of the prayers, the ‘Hail Mary’ and the ‘Hail Holy Queen’, and continued to think that the picture of Mary and the statues of her with her baby were very nice, but I stopped believing in the priests and nuns, because they couldn’t be trusted. This was one child that the Catholic faith managed to lose by the age of five.
One of the saving graces of being so young was that no emotional injuries seemed to absorb me for very long. Unfortunately they probably burrowed themselves into the deep dark crevices of my brain.
The streets imposed a greater fear than the church. My instinct to defend myself came back fortified. ‘Take no shit’ is a policy that dies hard. I couldn’t stop being Goody Two-Shoes, though, because I enjoyed the role too much. And I can’t say that I was ever tempted to get up to more devilment at this stage than to use one of my grandmother’s elastic garters as a slingshot. It never crossed my mind to talk back to my elders, engrave PUSSY or FUCK on a school lavatory door, spit, or even take advantage of somebody smaller than me, although these were among the shenanigans that went on around me. I posed fearlessly in the face of threats and attacks but still tried to act like a lady most of the time for my mother’s benefit, if not for my own.
My mother made sure that all her children could read and write before we went to school. This was handy, because there were other important things to take in during out last year on 23rd Street: the sights and sounds of people struggling to stay on top of life while there was too little of everything from hope to money and living space. I won’t say that fear and frustration bring out the best in people or make them the nicest neighbours, but there was a lot to be learned from them.
The social isolation of the reservation was broken by an electrical device introducing the world outside, the other America where my mother and aunt worked each day. This device instantly became my best friend. Like my grandmother, it was always available. Television turned our sparse kitchen into an entertainment centre.
My family always laughed a lot anyway, and television gave us one thing after another to hoot about and something like a home fire to gather around in the evening. Whenever someone clicked the big right-hand knob that turned it on, we’d end up laughing. Everybody on it was white and really quite nice. They were always smiling when they told you about Bayer aspirins or Bromo Seltzer. People talked, sang and danced, and always wore lovely outfits and costumes.
I had enjoyed occasional visits from friends of Edna’s: Miss Ossie and Miss Deet, Miss Ophelia and Miss Myrtle, whose gold front tooth gleamed when she flashed me a smile. I was usually allowed to sit and listen to them chewing the fat at the white enamelled kitchen table. Miss Ophelia was my favourite, with her steel-grey hair pulled back severely in a chignon like Edna’s. But these visitors, who turned our kitchen into a parlour, couldn’t compete with television. Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson dancing a duet, Tom Mix or Hoot Gibson in a shoot-out, Gene Autry – the Singing cowboy – Kukla, Fran and Ollie, which was my favourite puppet show, and the cat-and-mouse cartoons changed life in our kitchen.
Outside, the streets remained the same.
4 INFANT DIPLOMACY (#ulink_c348de7f-b23d-543c-ae04-97d8fcb4b1ae)
Finally closing the door on those two rooms was not a sentimental experience for any of the family, but some of my sweetest early childhood memories will always be locked there, like the sight of my father in a soft lamplight as he showed me how to draw a ship with sails. That evening wasn’t diminished by our four barren walls. Once I looked out of our window and saw the Oscar Mayer man in his delivery van which was shaped like a hot dog. It pulled up outside Max Bender’s and parked there long enough for me to run down and get a close look at it with all the other children. For that moment, 23rd Street might have been a fantasy island. And I can still picture the store at the bad end of the street with a jukebox that played ‘The Glory Of Love’ for one nickel. For the pleasure it brought it could have been a corner of the ballroom in High Society. Still, the idea of us living in a house by ourselves made goodbye easy.
When we moved to Germantown in 1951, we only took the new television and my grandmother’s bedroom suite. My mother had hoped that she was leaving everything else behind – the cussing and swearing, the thugs on the street corners. She was even letting us off the harsh discipline of Catholic School.
Germantown is a district of Philadelphia that was originally settled 300 years ago by thirteen Quaker and Mennonite families from Krefeld, Germany. In those days it was 5700 acres of land to the northeast of Philadelphia. It was divided by an Indian trail which remains its main thoroughfare, Germantown Avenue. Who knows what happened to the amiable Indians? Like fallen leaves, they disappeared without mention or trace.
The Krefelders and their leader, Francis Daniel Pastorious, an aristocrat and scholar, were part of William Penn’s ‘holy experiment’. These Krefelders made the first public protest against slavery in 1688 when they declared that all human beings had the right to live as free men. At the time, this was considered too radical to be readily accepted by the Quakers.
For generations the community remained German. Both the Bible and a newspaper were printed there in German. The district didn’t begin to attract the English until 1750, when William Allen, the chief justice of Pennsylvania, built his country seat there, Mount Airy. As more English followed him, English architecture merged with German into a specific style called Anglo-German. The district was considered a German township until about 1830, when the English became dominant, setting up their own press and linking Germantown to Philadelphia by train. For the next hundred or so years, right up to the Second World War, Germantown was one of the more fashionable districts of Philadelphia.
By the time my family moved in, there were too many Melangians in the district for it to be considered fashionable any more. It wasn’t unusual in the summer months to hear the watermelon man hawking his wares in the street, selling watermelons for 25 cents or five cantaloupes for a dollar from his open-back pick-up truck. But some of the early historic residences and the Market Square with its Civil War monument were still standing, maintained by the Germantown Historical Society. They made impressions on me as permanent as 23rd Street. Germantown still had a decidedly German and English feeling about it. I didn’t know to what extent at the time.
Our small seven-room terraced house with a front and back garden made an immense difference to our lives.
To help my grandmother plant our first garden was to discover with great pride that she knew the names of the flowers and trees and how to tend the earth and things that grew from it. Marigolds and dahlias, hollyhocks and morning glories sprouted, and I checked their growth each day with awe and anticipation. She planted some seeds for me that would grow into cobs of corn for popping, so the packet said. I can’t remember if they did. She even bought the almanac to study planting times, but I discovered to my horror that her interest in what the moon and stars were doing was mostly astrological.
With her garden and her new sewing machine, Edna was nearly too busy for bad talk.
Our neighbours two doors away kept full-grown chickens in their back yard. Fluffy, our new cat, was often foolhardy enough to slip into their yard in the hope of a kill. He invariably returned pecked and injured, but he wouldn’t learn. Once he arrived home so much the worse for one of these chicken attacks that he succumbed to letting me bandage him and put him in my doll carriage to cart him about for an entire weekend.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but recently when I looked at a street map of Philadelphia, I noticed that North Philly couldn’t have been more than a twenty-minute trolley ride away from us, yet I don’t remember any one of us making the effort to go back.
There were a few odd characters in the neighbourhood, like Jet, the local hobo. He had a layer of grey whiskers covering his dark-brown skin, and his dishevelled clothes were various tones of grey, ill-fitting and dirty. He always wore a jacket and a brimmed hat as a formality, even in the hottest weather. He looked a mess. Some afternoons I’d see him shuffle along the street dragging his feet (the way Edna told us not to walk). His mangy-looking, nameless old dog was never far behind. They always moved at a deadly slow pace down the middle of the street, not on the sidewalk. He had a reputation for being regularly drunk, but I was afraid to get close enough to smell liquor on him. I used to run up to the porch and stand near the front door if I saw him coming up the street, more afraid of catching his dog’s mange than I was of Jet.
For me, the new thrill was to be allowed to play regularly with other children on the block. On 23rd Street, my mother had to be so particular about our playmates that we nearly only had each other. With Pam and Dennis at school all day, Edna was my best friend, even though I could tell when they came home that Pam was her favourite. I like to believe that it was because Pam was the first grandchild, but I suspected that it was also because Pam was beautiful with jet-black wavy hair and slanted chestnut-brown eyes. She was quiet and read most of the time, but I could never tell whether her passion for books was her own or her way of satisfying my mother’s ambition for us to excel at school.
Despite being Melangian, Ikey was the perfect Jewish mother. She didn’t feed us matzos but she was clannish, ambitious, competitive, guilt-provoking, adored her children and believed that a Ph.D. was the be-all and end-all of life.
I didn’t find this too hard to live with and was under less pressure than Pam to succeed, as she was the eldest. The four years’ difference in our ages meant that we never managed to be at the same school at the same time after St Elizabeth’s. She’d always graduated or moved on before I started a school, leaving a dazzling record behind her. When trouble started for her at school in Germantown, I wasn’t around to give her either help or moral support. The streets were littered with enough ammunition for me to have helped her stave off an attack even if I was too little to be of much use otherwise. I am ashamed to say that I considered sticks and stones and bricks fair play if the odds were stacked against me. It was my mother who taught us this line of defence in spite of all her talk about being dignified and ladylike.
In the early fifties, Germantown wasn’t generally rough like North Philly but it had its bad elements, who decided to make my sister their object of torment and agitation because she was pretty. At ten she wasn’t expected to defend herself against a gang of rowdy girls and had to be escorted back and forth to school until finally the police were called in.
I’d like to think that we Melangians have stopped persecuting our own for looking too African or not African enough. Appearance even had the potential to divide family loyalties.
It pains me to think of how often Pam suffered for being too pretty and too brainy. Her years on the reservation and certainly in Germantown were harsher than mine and, no doubt, if she gave you her version of our family’s life, it would be quite a different picture. Pam neither bothered anybody nor had that early lust for the mirror or physical praise which would have given her airs to make other girls dislike her. Maybe the fact that she got the answers right all the time provoked them. I couldn’t think why else they wanted to hurt her.
I don’t know if anybody realized how much her victimization troubled me, but I kept my worry to myself and daydreamed that I was Wonder Woman and Supergirl rolled into one, on hand to swoop down from the tallest building to destroy all the ruffians when they taunted her. Of course, I also needed to plan what to do if they attacked me.
At six, I was not at all pretty. I doubt that every time my mother looked at me, she wanted to send me back, but I was not the least bit exceptional-looking. I had a big space between my two front teeth, and eyes so dark that they merely reflected the light bulb when I was asked to hold them up to the light to have their colour checked. My hair was so unfortunately thick that my mother had to divide it into three sections which she then braided. The braid on top was wound into a bun and pinned down to keep it from dangling in my face. The hairpins usually felt as if they were sticking right into my brain, and I yearned for thin hair and only two braids, although this was not the sort of vanity that I would have been allowed to express.
Soon after we moved in, two of my new friends and I were playing at dressing up on a rainy afternoon. They were wearing high heels; I only put on some rouge and pinned my two loose braids up with the one on top so that it looked like an upsweep. As soon as the rain stopped, we paraded ourselves to the corner store to buy some penny candy. The air was scented with that delicious city smell of wet tarmac blending with the sweet smell of wet grass after a summer shower. We passed an old man sitting on a low porch, rocking slowly, his hat pulled down so that his face hardly showed. A woman was standing at the screen door and I heard him say to her how nice we looked and add that the one with the braids on top of her head looked just like Doris Day.
I wasn’t allowed to acknowledge strange men, so I kept walking and acted as though I hadn’t heard him. Doris Day. One of the other girls repeated what he’d said when we were out of earshot. Trying to be nonchalant, I cocked my head to the side and looked straight ahead of me. Doris Day. I would have preferred it if he’d said Jane Russell, but Doris Day would do. I wasn’t sure I’d look so much like her without the rouge.
Nobody could have conceived that my face would sneak its way onto a magazine cover. Anyhow, at that time Melangian girls didn’t appear on any covers but Ebony and Jet, the Melangian magazines. If I’d heard my mother say it once, I’d heard her repeat a thousand times that ‘looks will get you nowhere’. This seemed to contradict what little of life I’d observed, but maybe it was her way of making me feel less inadequate and it supported her conviction that college was our only hope of a good career. One thing was obvious, if being pretty attracted troublemakers, it was a quality hardly worth having and dangerous to flaunt if you did (as well as cheap, which was Edna’s final verdict on the subject). ‘Pretty is as pretty does,’ she stated.
I was about to lose Edna’s daily dose of homilies because as soon as I attended school for a full day, she got a job working for an Italian family who operated the local bakery. She probably got the job to help pay for the new fittings and furniture in every room. I knew better than to ask how we afforded it all, because it would have been considered none of my business and rude to enquire.
John Wister Elementary School was a three-storey brick building on Bringhurst Street not far from Germantown Avenue. It was a hundred years old and a big fuss was made over its wooden floors because they were the originals. John Wister was one of the early German settlers, and I was a very lucky girl, the principal told my mother before she carted me off to Miss Courtney’s class, to start first grade at a school that was so steeped in history. I was given my very own desk which had a sunken ink well, although we could only write in pencil. The desks were in rows with each attached to the bench in front and held together and supported by elaborate ironmongery. The writing surface was the hinged lid of an oblong wooden box so that you could lift it up and put your things inside. I was seated near Miss Courtney in the front of the room and though I dared not turn round to stare, I could have sworn that all the other children were white. Thank God I’d been watching a lot of television and knew how to act.
Television carted me off to places I had never dreamed existed. It took for granted that I was ready to share experiences quite foreign to my own. Mainly, it exposed those other Americans to me, the ones who didn’t live on the reservations. In 1952 the only ways that Melangians had of becoming familiar with white behaviour was by working with or for whites and by seeing movies and watching TV.
To me, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo and Fred and Ethel Mertz on the I Love Lucy show, Ralph, Alice, Trixie and Ed on The Honeymooners or George Burns and Gracie Allen were like neighbours I visited once a week. I saw what they did at breakfast or sat in their living room and overheard their conversations. Where else and how else could this have happened? While Max Bender and other white shopkeepers might have been genuinely cordial and exchanged a few niceties with a regular customer, I knew nothing about how people like Max lived or what he’d say to his wife. Radio and motion pictures didn’t give us a regular enough dose of exposure to create the familiarity, the insider’s view, that television gave us.
As liberal as Harry Truman was with his bills for public housing, socialized medicine, education as a federal, not a state, issue and his civil rights policy, there was never any suggestion that the races should mix socially. The GI Bill restored the interrupted education of men like my father and gave equal pensions to all Americans who had fought the war together, but nobody assumed that total integration would follow. Racial separation is part of American culture.
At six I wasn’t aware of this, but I was soon aware that many children in my class had never talked to a Melangian before and some of them definitely didn’t want to. Although John Wister school was close to our house, it was just beyond our local school-district boundary. Ikey got me enrolled there anyway. For the majority of my classmates and teachers, I might have been a visiting diplomat representing my whole race, because I soon learned that what I said and did was a reflection on other Melangians and if my classmates were going to overcome their assumption that they weren’t as clean, as good or as clever, the onus was on me. For a six-year-old this is a heavy burden, but on instructions from home I did what I could to be my best self and come first in all things.
In spite of this and of being called nigger and other such names when it suited somebody, I did love my school and most of what went with it, whether it was history or social studies, spinster teachers or spelling bees. There was always some national hero’s birthday or some impending holiday that gave us another excuse to hang up our pictures and create a display. Washington, Lincoln, Easter bunnies, Hallowe’en witches, Thanksgiving pilgrims, Christmas angels, fire-prevention week, keep-your-city-clean week, brotherly-love week. There was always something to celebrate and I wanted to be there.
I never felt as wonderful by the time I got to the school gate as I’d thought I was when I left home, and I was always uncertain if anybody would be brave enough to play with me in the school yard before the morning bell. I may have been the teacher’s pet, but my classmates were still wary of me before they’d have a few hours to get used to me in class. By recess, it was usually OK, and if it wasn’t, I’d stroll around with the teacher. Mainly, it taught me how to stand alone.
In 1952 when General Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson were running for president, I overheard talk in the house that the Republicans were terrible and would bring a lot of hardship, but almost all the children in my class wore I LIKE IKE buttons to show that their parents were voting for him and his running mate, Richard Nixon. Being for Stevenson set me apart.
I didn’t know much about the Republicans except that I’d heard they’d have us selling apples on the street corner. My mother bought me a grey jacket after the election which she said was an Eisenhower jacket. It nipped in at the waist and was of corduroy. It was a catastrophe and nearly made my life miserable, because it didn’t look a bit like anybody else’s jacket at school. I had enough trouble without it. Eisenhower had been a general, so I guess it was based on some army jacket of his.
Life seemed unaffected after Ike had won. I didn’t have to sell apples, and he didn’t make us go to school on Saturday, which was the other rumour I’d heard. Things at school were different but it had nothing to do with politics. I was often singled out to do special things like deliver a folded message to the principal, pass out the milk or read out loud when visitors came into our classroom. This made my classmates like me better. So, when Miss Courtney asked us to take a partner to file out in pairs holding hands, which we did going to assembly, recess or in fire drill, I no longer needed to pretend that it didn’t matter that nobody wanted to hold my hand. I had a couple of friends. Even walking into the school yard in the morning ceased to be a crisis in my school life.
Playing with these friends was easier when I spoke with the tone and rhythm of their speech, which was slightly different from mine and much higher pitched. I imitated their manners, too, their giggles and walk and the way they cocked their heads. I don’t think I did it consciously, it just happened. At close range, I could hear their drummer and marched to their beat. As soon as I got home, I’d automatically revert to the old me. I spoke the way I was spoken to, and my thinking and body language accommodated my speech.
It was the beginning of a pattern, because at six, I led two lives which required two separate personalities. It wasn’t a game or an act, though, it was more like a function. I lived between two nations – one Melangian and one American – and I adjusted to each.
During my first Christmas season at John Wister school I participated in the annual carol-singing at Grumblethorpe. Grumblethorpe was a house four blocks from school at 5267 Germantown Avenue, built by John Wister in 1744. (The year Johann Würster emigrated from a town near Heidelberg, Germany, he was nineteen and broke. Johann became a successful wine importer, anglicized his name and built a large summer house in Germantown. The three-storey house was originally known as Wister’s Big House but John’s grandson named the house Grumblethorpe after an English manor he’d read about in a novel. It has been refurbished to look as it did when John Wister and his family lived there.)
We sang our carols in the big front room. The blinds were drawn, so that the flickering light from the candles and the smell of Christmas pine and evergreens had a strange awesome effect, especially on a kid who’d not long been free of 23rd Street. I’d never seen anything like it and was dumbstruck.
Even though it was grand, Grumblethorpe was marked by Quaker simplicity. After carolling, we were shown around it in our usual file, holding hands in two lines. Our freshly shined shoes pattering across the floorboards made the only sound. We dared not whisper or touch the four-poster bed or the grandfather clocks. The drop-leaf tables and wooden chairs were less of a temptation. It looked as if nobody had sat in the winged armchair by the fireplace or eaten at the refectory table. The pastel-coloured walls were so quiet we were scared to cough.
Before we left, a white-haired lady chatted to us and gave us each a mug of hot chocolate with a marshmallow floating on the top. Another, similar lady passed out home-made Christmas cookies. I had never had chocolate to drink before. I stood as still as I could and was very glad my mother had put my hair in two ponytails even though I still had that silly braid on top. Edna had starched my grey and white dress which had a separate pinafore. The stillness there had a profound effect on me.
We had to walk past Grumblethorpe to get to the Band Box Theater, which wasn’t a theatre, it was a cinema. Dennis and Pam and I were allowed to go most Saturday afternoons. A few times I went with Dennis by myself and we’d sit in the back row and stuff ourselves with buttered popcorn, Jujy fruits and Neco wafers, which seemed more the purpose of going than the movie. I always felt safe when Dennis was with me, because apart from the fact that the bad boys liked him, he was bigger than most kids his age and looked like the sort of boy you shouldn’t mess with. I don’t recall that anyone ever did.
Dennis loved the movies and comic books, and after we got a record player, he used most of his allowance to buy records. One of his favourite TV shows was Amos ‘n Andy, which my mother thought should have been taken off the air for depicting ‘Negroes’ as ignorant. My brother used to provoke her by imitating the actors as soon as the programme ended. Dennis would pull faces, roll his eyes and speak an exaggerated Melangian dialect. Finally we were all banned from watching the show, but we loved Amos ‘n Andy so we would sneak and watch it anyway. He’d turn the volume down and I’d guard the door for him. The telly was in the back room on the second floor so it was easy to get away with this.
There were hardly any Melangians on TV other than the cast of Amos ‘n Andy and boxers like Sugar Ray Robinson. Once Richard Boone, who played the main doctor in a weekly hospital series called The Medic, had to treat a little Melangian girl. We all screamed with shock when she came on the screen. We’d never seen one of us in a television drama. Even the most regular police series, Dragnet, didn’t have one Melangian criminal. There was a character called Rochester on the Jack Benny show, but it was very rare to see us on TV unless singing and dancing.
Our first major media star came through on the news in 1953. Her name was Autherine Lucy. She was a young woman who wanted so much to be free to study at the college of her choice that she took on the whole city of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and finally the whole goddamn United States government so that President Eisenhower had no choice but to send her an army. I don’t know why there aren’t statues of her. She was our very own Joan of Arc and to see her on the television screen facing an avalanche of rednecks was unforgettable. For weeks after her appearance, our radio and television seemed to be tuned to nothing but newscasts from the moment Edna, Thelma or Ikey came home from work. Melangian neighbours who normally only exchanged hellos had a lot to talk to each other about.
I was stunned to see the hundreds of agitators jeering and spitting and name-calling while Autherine faced them. She never looked as if she was in a hurry; when the camera panned across her face she seemed neither angry nor anxious. She had that look of patience someone has when waiting for a bus they know is coming.
A couple of times since, when I’ve been up against bewildering odds and felt fear creeping up on me or dared feel sorry for myself, I’ve only had to think of Autherine facing the mob to put things in proper perspective.
As far as I could see, there was nothing uncommon about Autherine except her courage. The fact that she looked like most other girls of her age that ambled around the reservation on a Saturday afternoon made her confrontation all the more shocking. It could have been any one of us standing in her shoes when what looked like the whole city of Tuscaloosa was determined to keep her from entering the doors of a school which our taxes helped to keep open.
While this compelling national school drama played out, I’d start each school day like millions of American children by standing at attention after the bell rang to salute the flag. Led by the teachers, I’d recite the pledge with the whole class just as I’d been doing since my first day at school. I could say it in my sleep:
I pledge allegiance to the flag
of the United States of America
and to the republic for which it stands,
one nation* (#ulink_40dec0d0-6f8b-512d-817d-a0ae3bf90e95), invisible,
with liberty and justice for all.
Then we’d sit down and a passage was read from the Bible. I don’t know how old I was before I realized ‘invisible’ was supposed to be ‘indivisible’.
To salute you placed your right hand on your heart, although I was never sure I’d found my heart. The pledge said things that I knew weren’t true once I’d seen Autherine Lucy and heard all the talk at home about what rights we didn’t have.
I hoped nobody at school would ask what I thought about the Autherine thing because I wasn’t allowed to lie. The teacher usually asked our opinions about current events, but I could tell from the way nobody mentioned Autherine in class that it was something we could not talk about. Patriotism was running too high to challenge it. America was like God. People believed in it.
When I discovered there was no Santa Claus, I think I cried. Part of my hurt was being robbed of my favourite myth and the rest was realizing that I had believed with all my might in something that older people knew all along was fake. I remember being told that since younger kids still needed to believe in Santa, I wasn’t to tell them he didn’t exist. I became an accessory to promoting a continuing myth and assumed I was doing the littler kids a favour by letting them believe a bit longer.
The same applies after I realized we’d been pledging ourselves to a myth about America. Obviously nobody wanted to deal with the truth, so as a child of eight I became an accessory, never exposing the deception, which everybody needed to go on believing in.
* (#ulink_fb7f0db5-1a9d-5e96-b583-930aacfb9101)The words ‘under God’ were added by act of Congress in 1954.
5 MOUNT AIRY AND CHESTNUT HILL (#ulink_96bf74cd-dfff-5532-ae7b-7844b270988b)
John Wister school mysteriously caught fire one Sunday night when I was in the second half of second grade, and I never went back there. I was bused to another school for quite some time.
Gradually the rougher elements became the majority in Germantown. Crap-shooters monopolized a corner of the street where we had to walk past them to the neighbourhood store. Some of them used to make passes at Ikey and Thelma. My mother was unnerved and called them gangsters. Edna called them riffraff and dared them to lay their hands on her. I suppose they were jobless as they were always there, throwing dice, calling bets and making idle threats to each other. ‘Gimme a double, sir.’ ‘Come on baby, come on.’ ‘A five and a four.’ ‘Double or nothin’.’ ‘Take yo’ hands off the dice. I’ll shoot yo’ ass.’ ‘You jive-ass mothafucka.’ We could hear them halfway up the block.
Late one afternoon when Ikey and I were coming home from Charlie Chernoff’s grocery store, all of a sudden a couple of police cars swerved up to the corner. As the police spilled out on the sidewalk, there was a melee and a shot was fired. It was like something straight out of the movies and I was scared nearly to death by the guns going off. But no one was hurt and I never found out who fired.
After my father’s medical tenure at Boston State Hospital, he came to visit with his youngest brother, Ernest, and I was more worried about the two of them walking around the neighbourhood than I was about Edna, Thelma and Ikey. My father was so gentle. His soft voice always made me feel he needed protecting, whereas I imagined only a fool would dare lay hands on one of my mothers, who each had a wild temper.
The summer Blair and Ernest came to visit us in Germantown is the summer I remember there best. To sit next to him or pass him on the stairs was nearly too exciting. This was less because I had missed my father than because men rarely crossed our doorstep. Aside from the insurance broker who made a regular Friday collection of my grandmother’s insurance premium, a couple of doctors making house calls when we were too sick to go to their surgeries, and a friend of Thelma’s who took us on a family outing once to Bear Mountain, I can’t remember men coming to our house. In those days respectable women didn’t receive callers as they would today. In the 1940s and 1950s when I was growing up, the social and sexual role of women was entirely different. There was no parade of ‘uncles’ trooping through. The only uncles I had were blood relations like Henry, and he only made one whirlwind visit to see us after the Korean War ended before he moved to California.
Both Blair and Ernest had marked Bostonian accents. A Bostonian accent in the fifties was equivalent in American to speaking the Queen’s English in England. It held a class distinction as much as anything else. For some reason a Bostonian accent implied that you were educated, cultured and well bred.
Blair didn’t act as if he was at all impressed with himself, though. He made jokes which I didn’t understand but I laughed all the same, following him about like our puppy followed me. When he arrived he’d brought us each a Timex watch and a pair of turquoise slippers with bronco riders printed on them. He might just as well have given me diamonds.
He had a big grey Studebaker parked in front of the house behind our grey 1950 Chevrolet. I hated to see him go outside the front gate, because I thought it was dangerous and couldn’t conceive that somebody who never raised his voice could deal with danger. He’d been in the war, but fighting with guns I didn’t imagine had anything to do with ferocious street combat.
I adored my uncle Ernest and thought he looked like Louis Jourdan, whom I’d seen in a movie at the Band Box. My father had never brought him before. Ernest was young and would scramble about on the floor, demonstrating some of his war skirmishes, showing how he pulled out his trusty sword when the Japanese attacked. I never believed that they used swords in the Second World War but I didn’t tell him. To look out from the kitchen window and see him lazing in the blue hammock near the fat heads of Edna’s orange and yellow marigolds made me wish he would marry Thelma.
Blair and Ernest took us to Valley Forge so that we could see where George Washington engineered America’s victory against King George’s army. Then they rushed back to their studies. Blair was already specializing in psychiatry. Ernest still had to pass his Massachusetts bar exam to qualify as a lawyer. I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to have a father living in the house all the time.
By Blair’s next visit, we had moved to Mount Airy, which is the district beyond Germantown Avenue. In the late eighteenth century it originally attracted wealthy families who built country seats there, like Upsala, owned by the Johnson family descended from a German, Dirk Jensen, one of the original Krefelders who settled in the district. Like Cliveden House opposite Upsala, these local landmarks were always there to recall the past, those early European settlers and their struggle for freedom. The old buildings looked odd in a neighbourhood of 1930s terraced houses.
Cliveden House at 6401 Germantown Avenue was built between 1763 and 1767 and was turned into a fortress in 1777 during the Battle of Germantown when British soldiers used it to stave off George Washington’s advancing troops.
I walked around the Cliveden House gardens when I went back in the summer of 1985. This English-looking estate occupies an entire city block of a Melangian urban community. The design of the façade of this mid-Georgian house was based on an engraving entitled ‘A View of the Palace at Kew from the Lawn’, published in London in the Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle in 1763.
Edna, Thelma and Ikey continued to work as they did throughout my childhood and Blair sent regular contributions. As much as anything, I think that they willed our progressive moves which always bettered our circumstances and improved the environments that we were growing up in. Like the move from 23rd Street to Germantown, the move to Mount Airy when I was nine made a great improvement in our lives. There were trees and tended hedges everywhere and the nearly new apartment complex across the road had the lawn mown regularly. My mother liked the neighbours and the neighbourhood. It was peaceful and the Melangian families thereabouts were as concerned about their children and their children’s education as my mother was.
I was given more freedom when I started at John Story Jenks school in Chestnut Hill, and even though the Melangian children there could be counted on two hands, my classmates weren’t reluctant to be friendly. There were many Quaker children in the school. That breath of freedom came in the nick of time, because the discipline imposed by my family in addition to the fear invoked on the streets had been inhibiting. Street life was pretty convincing proof that my mother was right – a dignified academic career was the safest future. At nine, I clung like my sister and brother to the notion that I would go into medicine like my father and therefore tried to maintain a high standard in my school work, whatever temptations I came across.
I remember the first time I was asked to write my father’s occupation on a form at Jenks. I was confident that I could spell psychiatrist correctly. The teacher was more impressed with his occupation than my spelling and, like others then and since, she probably assumed that my home life reflected his professional rank. (In America, doctors make money. I was surprised when I came to London to discover that National Health doctors have the medical title but not the bank balance of their American counterpart.) I was a psychiatrist’s daughter and this gave people the wrong idea about my family’s income.
Times were visibly changing for Melangians in spite of the fact that Eisenhower made political apathy seem somehow respectable. The civil rights issue was like an eggshell that cracked after the Autherine Lucy case and segregation gradually continued to be challenged legally in the South and socially in the North, where habits rather than laws kept us isolated. Professional Melangian families moved to better neighbourhoods, although their white neighbours would make conspicuous attempts to keep them out and often moved out themselves if they failed.
As residential white areas got a few black families, the public school serving the vicinity reflected the neighbourhood’s mix, and a school like Jenks would end up with ten or twenty Melangian children from upper-middle-class Melangian households. Even though Jenks was still a predominantly white school, I think it was relieved to have a token number of Melangian kids because this showed it to be participating in a developing mood among liberal Americans that it was time to be nice to ‘Negroes’. People were getting more prosperous and more generous.
When I started at Jenks in the third grade, I made friends instantly with two little open-air girls who were top of the class and didn’t mind my competition. They befriended me in the classroom and never pretended not to see me in the school yard. They dragged me along to their Brownie meetings and had me join their ballet class, though I didn’t feel welcome there. They asked me to be part of their secret club, which was actually only the three of us. They were no less than best friends who invited me to their houses after school for tea, although they never came to mine. We did everything together except that I couldn’t join them in their violin recitals. I never understood why they called their mothers ‘Mummy’ instead of ‘Mommy’. I thought it was because they were Quakers. I tried to understand and imitate every nuance of their behaviour when I was with them. They spoke more precisely than my friends at Wister school. Soon I could talk exactly like them and I learned to find the humour in what they thought was funny, although it usually was corny.
Behind the surface of my polished manners of ‘excuse me, please’, ‘I beg your pardon’ and ‘no, thank you’ to virtually everything that was offered, there was a fanciful little girl who still knew the difference between a knife scar and a razor scar and was proud of knowing how to watch out for more than just the cars. But there was no need for my acquired street instinct at Jenks and no threats or fears lined the path to my house. The 23 trolley car picked me up from the corner of Southampton Avenue to cart me home in time for The Mickey Mouse Club and Rin Tin Tin on television.
Chestnut Hill was a solid white Anglo-Saxon Protestant community. The trees grew tall. The parks were beautiful. And the sun always seemed brighter there when I got off the trolley car. It was my neighbourhood during the school day.
Mount Airy didn’t feel graced like Chestnut Hill and didn’t have the village character of Germantown. The section we lived in near Mount Pleasant Avenue was very orderly with two-storey brick houses and canopied porches that displayed small flowerbeds and trimmed dark-green hedges. The big street-cleaning truck came once a week to spray the streets down. The neighbourhood looked well-tended but nondescript with block after block of these terraced houses, rather like certain areas of north London or north Manchester.
Occasionally, a kid pedalled down the sidewalk on a glossy two-wheeler bicycle or some toothless, brown-skinned, seven-year-old cowboys would bang-bang their way around a parked car. But there was never a baseball game played in the middle of the street and no one thought that opening a fire hydrant to let the water flood the street until the fire department came was a prodigious way to while away an evening. Dogs didn’t dawdle unleased on the streets, and no fathead alley cats whined away the nights.
The number 23 trolley-car depot was a block beyond our house on the other side of the road, and when we first moved to Musgrave Street, you couldn’t help noticing the rattle of the trolley cars on the track as they passed with their pole crackling against the overhead line. But this sound merely broke the silence. It didn’t disturb the peace.
Our family nearly belonged. Pam was openly admired for her studious appearance when she rushed off early to school first thing, looking as if her mind was on algebra instead of boys. She’d be wearing her new glasses and clutching her briefcase, which was always stuffed and overflowing with books and homework. She’d started at the Philadelphia High School for Girls at 17th Street and Spring Garden, which admitted girls from throughout the city on the basis of outstanding academic achievement. Pam studied the bass violin, and on Saturday morning she and Dennis went to special art classes that were given to children selected from all over Philadelphia who had exceptional artistic talent. I was just as proud of them as Edna, Ikey and Thelma were.
Once Edna had started her new job, at a factory that made children’s dresses, I was transformed from being starched and presentable to being ‘turned out’. I’d like to claim that I wasn’t made vain, merely extra confident in a wardrobe finer than anybody else’s at school. Edna bought me each new model that came off the factory floor.
Ikey was in her element working at the local library as a librarian. She walked home through rain and snow and once through a hurricane with her arms full of books for us, which gave her a reason to write her own poems and read other people’s, and I could get a reading of ‘Invictus’, ‘Crossing the Bar’ or ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ any time I wanted. They were my favourites, though neither my mother nor I knew that ‘gaol’ was pronounced ‘jail’.
Thelma remained our sweet unselfish aunt who cared about Ikey’s children as though they were her own. She enhanced her good looks to the fullest each morning with a little help from Maybelline cake mascara, a trace of eyebrow pencil and rouge with a hint of dark-red lipstick to finish it all off. She and Ikey wore straight skirts with cinched belts and stilettos that you could hear click-click-clicking on the cobblestone street in front of our house as Thelma returned from work around 5.30 pm. It was no wonder that she and Ikey got an intolerable dose of whistles, especially during the summer months.
I was free to bang the screen door going and coming with a shout to name which neighbour I was rushing off to visit. My personality still changed between home and school. The two environments were separate but equal in my head and heart.
We were a strange family in some ways, compared to the people on television. Love was not a thing we discussed. Though we liked each other, we didn’t call each other ‘darling’ and no one asked if you’d slept well when you stumbled down to the kitchen for a bowl of hominy grits or a fried egg. Sometimes we’d have a family pow-wow and decide that new resolutions were called for to make us practise at home on each other some of the good manners we exhibited outside. We could manage to adhere to the new rules for about a week, not raising our voices to each other, or speaking an unkind word, or leaping like Tarzan from the fourth stair into the living room.
There was a collection box to hold the penalty of a penny to be paid any time you used bad language or incorrect English or spoke dialect. It was always chock-full at the end of the week and went to the person who’d made the fewest faux-pas. My grandmother never played …
There was a certain amount of democracy in our house, although hard and fast rules for the children like no cursing were never allowed to be broken. There was an assumption that we had as much right to an opinion and a vote in matters as the women. The word fair was used a lot, perhaps too much. It only confused me into thinking that life was going to be fair.
Television continued to be my teacher. Family sitcoms like Ozzic and Harriet and Father Knows Best not only kept me amused, they made me informed and aware of things that I was not exposed to through my own experience. For instance, women on the television were always crying, but I don’t remember seeing my mother or grandmother cry through my childhood. For any upsets other than physical injuries, we were invariably told to ‘save the tears’. It was almost a relief to fall down and skin a knee, because I could wail the house down without the least reproach.
One of the things that set us apart from other kids in the neighbourhood is that we weren’t beaten. Even though people didn’t yell out of the windows in Mount Airy or curse each other so that it could be heard by passers-by, we often overheard the parental threat of the strap or the belt and the screams and cries that resulted from such punishment, which my mother considered uncivilized and inhumane. We were never punished in this way and were thought lucky by kids who were. Edna would threaten us with the strap if we incensed her while my mother was out, but it fell on deaf ears, even if she stomped off as far as the back yard to pull a switch from the stinkwood tree.
We couldn’t afford holidays, but I didn’t feel that we were missing much, and at that time, family holidays weren’t considered a necessity and planned with the feverish intensity that they are today. We had the odd day trip to Atlantic City or the Catskill Mountains, which broke the monotony. That we’d been somewhere and seen something was enough when school started and we had to write about our vacation. At Christmas we got enough presents to entertain us until a birthday brought some more. Most of the family’s birthdays fell within a week of each other in the spring.
Apart from these minor deviations, we carried on like a lot of other families. We were just noisier. Mornings were absolute chaos. Any kitchen would be busy in the morning with a family of six, but when three of them are women, there’s never enough space and our kitchen wasn’t particularly large. The radio didn’t blare as loudly as my grandmother claimed it did, but Dennis refused to switch it off so that Edna could think, and she refused to stop shouting about it so Ikey could think. There was always that beat in the background, for instance Bo Diddley singing ‘Down Yonder, Down On The Farm’ on the local Melangian station until it got switched to a station with Eddie Fisher or Tony Bennet crooning something above the din of the family rushing up and down the stairs trying to make their way to their separate lives. My mother developed the irritating habit of calling several wrong names before she hit upon the name of the person she really wanted to address. ‘Pamala, I mean Dennis, I mean Marsha.’ She did this so often that my aunt and grandmother caught the habit of it, too.
Fits and fights over whose turn it was in the only bathroom filtered downstairs into the kitchen through a crack in the floorboards to mix with the snitch of swearing that came with a last-minute touch-up with the straightening comb as one of the women singed her scalp in the rush of confusion.
‘Was the cat fed?’ ‘Have you got your milk money?’ ‘Who took my last piece of chewing gum?’ ‘Put your front-door key in your pocket …’ I can’t think how anybody arrived in one piece ready to start the day. Luckily the long journey to school on the trolley had a calming effect.
There was nothing that I thought I needed that I didn’t have except an atomic-bomb shelter stocked with neat little shelves of canned goods and folded army blankets and candles and a flashlight. Lots of people had converted their basements like this in case the Russians bombed us, a threat often implied in the Junior Scholastic and the Weekly Reader which we got at school. Instead, our basement was like an overstuffed attic with that oval portrait of my grandmother always in the way. Things were put down there when they had no other home and part of it was used as a laundry room. It was doubtful that it would ever become a bomb shelter, or even get a facelift of knotty pine walls and be called a den.
This is where my mother was one day, sorting out the coloureds from the whites to do a wash load, when I was called down to speak with her.
Ikey was standing on the platform near the washing machine when I bounded down the staircase. It was one of those old-fashioned washing machines that look a bit like a white pot-bellied stove with a separate wringer attached on top. No one ever went down to the basement unless they were doing the wash, and this made it the only place in the house you could be guaranteed a bit of privacy. It was lit by a bare bulb which hung down from the ceiling and cast spooky shadows.
When Ikey told me that Blair had been killed early that morning in a car accident, she wasn’t crying. She was just piling the clothes into the washing machine. (I’ve detested doing laundry ever since.) Because she didn’t really look up at me, I could tell that it was one of those times when I wasn’t allowed to ask questions. If I blinked fast I could always keep back the tears so I tried that while I stood by the bottom stair waiting to be told what to do.
My father had never written to me. I couldn’t rush upstairs to look at his handwriting.
There was no school that day because of a teachers’ meeting, so Dennis and I went to the little green next to the library. It wasn’t raining. The leaves had fallen.
Later that afternoon I was allowed to go to a friend’s house. She had a Persian cat that had its own birth certificate, which I thought was the most wonderfully chic thing I’d ever heard of. My friend’s mother must have found it very disarming when I looked up at her and said that my father had died that day. I didn’t make a big deal of it, because I didn’t want any sympathy. I just wanted to tell somebody.
No flowers arrived. And Blair wasn’t mentioned again until my mother had to go to Boston for the funeral.
The mornings came and went with nothing to mark the change. This was something else that I was to learn not to talk about. I got so good at keeping secrets that I eventually learned to keep them from myself.
Music rescued me from secrets and silences just around that period. My mother had taken me to see Johnnie Ray once when I was about five. He was performing in a cinema with the curtains drawn across the silver screen so that it could double as a live theatre. He was supported by the Four Aces or the Diamonds – one of those groups with a name like a suit of cards. They came on before the main attraction wearing blue iridescent suits and sang. Three of them gathered around one microphone singing harmonies to the melody and managed at the same time to snap their fingers, smile and do little dance steps in unison. The lead singer had his own microphone and spoke to us between the songs while one of the three in back clowned around a bit as part of the act. The other two just sang and I suppose they did that well enough or the audience wouldn’t have clapped so much.
Ikey had told me before Johnnie Ray appeared that he was deaf, so I felt very sorry for him when he came out with his hearing aid in his ear and sat down at the black baby grand piano. Our seats were in the balcony. It was dark everywhere except on the stage and we could see him perfectly, singing and swaying back and forth on his stool as he played the piano.
His blond hair was swept back and parted. Only one lock in the front moved, however much he threw himself around as he sang ‘The Little White Cloud That Cried’. A few women sitting near us were crying and so was Johnnie. I imagined he was crying because he was deaf, which did seem very sad to me, but I didn’t know what on earth those women were crying about.
The Uptown theatre in Philadelphia was rather famous for showcasing better-known Melangian performers. My mother said it was too dangerous to go there. Fights sometimes broke out in the audience, and on a few occasions gangs had scuffles outside after a show. So I didn’t go to any more concerts, but when people like Eddie Fisher, Dean Martin or Sammy Davis Jr sang on the radio, I imagined them appearing on a darkened stage just like Johnnie Ray.
I had to rely on radio, television and my brother’s collection of records for my music. When we moved to Mount Airy, it was not yet the kind of neighbourhood where people sang on the street corners, although we could often get within listening distance of the landlady’s Holy Roller meeting, as a few spirituals filtered out to the street.
Music seeped in and around me at home for as long as I can remember and this may have been the initial reason for my passion for it, but I can say without doubt that it was ‘seeing’ music that eventually made it stick to me like cement glue.
A stocky, rather ordinary man with slick dark hair named Bob Horn hosted the 3 pm music show from our local TV station – Bandstand. He played the latest single record releases and talked to an invited group of guests after they had mimed to their record. He also introduced the teenage studio audience.
If I rushed home from school I could catch all but the first half-hour of Bandstand. Tearing out of my fourth-grade class as soon as the final bell rang, I’d nearly get myself run over by the cars on Germantown Avenue because I’d spotted my trolley coming and couldn’t wait for the traffic lights to change.
Unfortunately, the programme time interfered with my friendship with the open-air girls and their after-school teas as well as my ballet practice at home to my scratchy 78 record of Chopin’s Polonaise. Watching Bandstand made me want to practise the mambo and the bunny hop instead, because that was what the fourteen- to eighteen-year-old audience was doing. That, and the bop. I’d been dancing since the hucklebuck, but never with the frenzied fever to get it right. I suppose that having a teenage brother and sister introduced me to teenage tastes early, but it was music that whipped me into my premature adolescence.
I was still wearing braids when I started bopping about the dining room in front of the television imitating teen attitudes with my head filling with notions about ‘earth angels’, ‘thrills on Blueberry Hill’ and other fairy-tale romances nailed to a four-four beat. I felt I was missing a ponytail, bobby socks, a cardigan sweater worn backwards and a felt skirt with a curly-haired poodle on it wearing a diamond-studded collar. I also had to find a partner to dance with as Dennis refused and Pam would arrive home loaded with homework and disappear straight upstairs to study.
Five afternoons a week for at least an hour each day I was mesmerized by Bandstand. I gave my undivided attention to the vision and sound of what they were calling rock and roll, which sounded like a pokier version of the rhythm and blues I’d heard on jukeboxes on the reservation and on the Melangian radio station. I don’t want to give the impression that I was getting lost in it, though. If anything, I found myself in the music, because somehow it satisfied all my secret needs.
Rock and roll’s simple childlike passion poetry had various smudges of joy, pathos and sentimentality which I felt or was starting to feel but couldn’t express. The lyrics were repetitive like the commercial jingles that regularly interrupted my favourite TV and radio shows. There was a throbbing rhythm which was sometimes almost menacing and had an element of the reservation about it. Melangian dialect was often used for the lyrics and Melangian groups like the Platters were as important to the music as white stars like Bill Haley and the Comets.
In the early days of Bandstand, Melangian teenagers used to participate. When the camera scanned the audience, which was invited to dance to each record that was played, the Melangian couples were by far the best dancers, doing the most intricate variations of spins, twirls and fancy footwork and never looking as if they’d just graduated from an Arthur Murray dance course.
As Bandstand was broadcast live from South Philadelphia, which was a rough part of the city that had more than its share of gangs, slums and delinquents, it attracted teenagers from that area, so the dancing audience didn’t look like a contrived showcase for middle-class kids. They had something of ‘the street’ about them.
The show was off the air before Ikey, Thelma and Edna got in from work, and they didn’t disapprove of my watching. My mother was only in her midthirties at the time, neither old enough nor old-fashioned enough to denounce rock and roll as a sinful or negative influence, which was a growing complaint about it among very conservative adults. She and Thelma liked the music in the house.
They were as enthralled as we kids were when Elvis Presley first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show one Sunday night, gyrating like a rhythm-and-blues singer. When his bumping and grinding below the waist was banned from the screen on a subsequent show, it made a tremendous stink, turning his censored performance into real box-office and TV-rating appeal. It made people talk about him. I can’t remember how many appearances he made on the show, but there were several at a time when Ed Sullivan had the most popular variety programme on nationwide television. The censorship made Elvis’s appearances newsworthy. The papers were full of reports and I guess it was the first time that television and journalism married their interests to make a rock idol.
Edna was a bit distressed by the newspapers’ claim that Elvis’s style was original, because she said rightly that it was really the Melangian rhythm-and-blues singers’ performing style. But she could have screamed about that until the cows came home and nobody would have taken a blind bit of notice. It was his white version of the form that made it provocative and caused white teenage girls to scream and want to pull out his hair and their own. Others imitated him and his style and helped his brand of rock and roll surpass teen-cult status to become a national phenomenon.
Bandstand was so influential to the promotion of this teen music phase that it was picked up by a big network and became a nationally broadcast television show. It was renamed American Bandstand and a young MC named Dick Clark replaced Bob Horn as the star presenter.
When the phase became a craze, Philadelphia was on the map again. Bandstand spotlighted a growing trend in America to recognize teenagers as a breed with their own style and culture, and the weekly allowance to be consumers. To say you were from Philadelphia in the mid-1950s was probably like saying that you were from Liverpool after the mid-1960s. The place name projected a certain teen-cult music status, not only because of Bandstand, but also because many of the popular teen idols like Frankie Avalon, Dion, Bobby Rydell, themselves teenagers, stepped out of Philadelphia city-centre high schools into the media frenzy building up in America about its teenagers.
Ten years after the Second World War, parents may have been relieved that they could afford and tolerate rock and roll, and regarded it as a minor cultural nuisance that was temporarily captivating their war babies. Even though I was a postwar baby, I was ready to be captured, too.
My passion for music and the culture that grew out of it was not my only interest. There were other elements of my life, like getting good grades at Jenks school, which held me back from becoming a wholehearted bobbysoxer. But I had no reluctance about putting my dolls and my roller skates in the basement to show that I wouldn’t be playing with them any more. And I found new friends in the neigbourhood who wanted to master the latest dance steps as I did.
I was nearly delirious when I spotted my first adolescent pimple and had to buy my first tube of Clearasil, which was new on the market and being advertised on television and in teen magazines.
Wasn’t there a whole generation going through it? I was just taking an early grab at the tail of pubescence. It pulled me into the pandemonium of teenage culture so fast that there wasn’t a chance for me to wave goodbye to childhood before it disappeared over the horizon with some of my more agreeable traits in tow, such as wanting to please adults. As can be expected, my mother wasn’t thrilled about my quick personality change. It made her nervous and angry to see me running up and down breathlessly while I chased the spirit of something that was invisible to her but galvanizing and hypnotic to me.
The teen cult was like the call of the wild. It beckoned me first through music. Rhythm and blues and rock and roll had an insidious penetration. Sometimes I’d hear a song that I couldn’t get enough of from hearing it a few times on the radio, so I’d buy the record and listen to the same song over and over and over again. It manipulated me like a mantra with the lyrics about puppy love and such, accompanying a beat that excited me to the point that I was either transfixed or transported to another zone.
I had become so good and convincing at marching to other people’s drummers that it was a shock to me and my family when music let me hear my own. I was a handful and couldn’t be constrained any more by a harsh word or criticism of how I looked or behaved. I didn’t want to look like a nice little girl and refused to wear clothes that didn’t have a look of flair and independence. I would have teetered around in stilettos if only I could have got away with it.
First it was music, then it was clothes, then it was boys. Or first it was music, then it was love, then it was boys. I’m not sure. All I know is that while I was jumping up and down dancing in the mirror to the beat, not being in love just didn’t seem good enough. I pulled my cinched belt tighter and waited. Falling in love with love came before falling in love with somebody.
It’s a wonder that I kept my studies up, but I did. One day the school principal called my mother to find out why I was wearing lipstick to my seventh-grade class. This came as a bit of a shock to poor Ikey, who sent me to school looking as refined and dignified as possible. She never realized that on my way to catch the trolley car in the morning I slipped into a telephone booth en route and made a few subtle alterations. Like Superman, my persona was transformed by my get-up. I’d come out of the telephone booth with my skirt hitched up by a belt to a much shorter length, my hair swept to the side in a winsome braid, and at least two thick layers of Westmore’s Oooh-La-La Orange on my lips. The iridescent lipstick cost 49 cents at Woolworth’s. I kept it in my briefcase.
My whole demeanour changed under the ‘Oooh-La-La’ spell. I wanted to be noisy and boisterous and saw nothing appealing in being dignified. I didn’t want to imitate open-air girls except in their occasional company. Instead I wanted to mimic the DJ on WDAS (the Melangian radio station), whose fast, hip monologues derived from the reservation dialect. The friends I made in the neighbourhood were happy to do the same thing and were impressed that I was good at it.
My musical preference reflected my love for music from the reservation and its dialect. I didn’t want to sing along with Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly or ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’. I wanted to moon about to Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Little Anthony and the Imperials, and the Flamingoes. Anybody with that sound of a cappella singing that I used to love to hear on 23rd Street was for me.
Dennis thought that I looked and acted a bit ridiculous but he did enjoy my departure from childhood. We didn’t have the same taste in music, unfortunately. Our allowances would have gone further if we’d wanted the same singles, but he was more into Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. They were all right but hardly made the kind of music that you could stand in a dark corner and do a slow stroll to, which was what I wanted to do.
I was a nightmare for my mother, and it was probably a shock as much as a relief that I qualified for entry into the Philadelphia High School for Girls when I was thirteen.
Pam was going to the University of California in Berkeley, where Uncle Henry lived, after her graduation from the Girls’ High. Ikey took the day off to go to Pam’s graduation, and took me. I hoped the fact that she graduated summa cum laude from the best school in the city made her trials in Germantown pale.
My sister and brother hadn’t been infected by the music craze the way I was. With Pam in the all-city orchestra and Dennis going out for football and track, I guess they didn’t have time. Dennis was going to Central, which was as scholastically competitive as Girls’ High. There was hardly time to think about much other than studying, although I kept boys and music high on the list of priorities after I started there.
The Bivins family lived across the street. Mr Bivins was a detective in the downtown police force and his daughter Lynn was my best friend, along with Jean and Gloria Scott who lived a few blocks away. Lynn was a beanpole and although being tall and thin was not considered a plus on the reservation, where having big legs was the great physical attribute, Lynn was very popular with the boys. She had a younger sister, Patsy, who was born with Down’s syndrome. When Lynn’s mother went out, we were often expected to baby-sit for Patsy, who at eight couldn’t converse or follow instructions. But she had the sweetest nature and was easier to mind than a baby as long as you didn’t leave her on her own for a minute.
As soon as Mrs Bivins went out, boys were invited in and invariably there would be some necking in the kitchen beside the refrigerator, shielded from view in case someone walked in unexpectedly. Patsy would sit patiently waiting and watching. We were sure that she couldn’t tell and she seemed a harmless enough voyeur. What we didn’t bargain on was that the sight of two adolescents kissing and groping next to the refrigerator would make such a lasting impression that she tried to imitate us in the presence of Lynn’s mother intermittently for months after. Mrs Bivins never quite figured out what Patsy was doing rubbing up next to the refrigerator.
Lynn, the two eldest Scott sisters and I never considered more than necking. We didn’t even deign to talk about anything else.
There were four children in the Scott family and Mr and Mrs Scott both worked to keep them all fed. It was the girls’ responsibility to take care of the house and even the youngest, Helen (who has since become one of the singers in the Three Degrees), was well trained to do the cleaning and cooking. The three girls and their younger brother Robert were all pretty, especially by Melangian standards, with their green-grey eyes, fair skin and tawny hair. Mrs Scott, whom they got their good looks from, suspected that boys would be endlessly banging on their door. What she didn’t imagine was that we would go out looking for them while all our parents were out at work.
Ikey probably hoped that if she was lenient and patient, my new personality would disappear as mysteriously as it had appeared. She tolerated new habits like smoking cigarettes as long as I restricted them to the house. I’d enjoyed sneaking a smoke with friends but didn’t find the experience half as gratifying when it came around to doing it at home.
I don’t know if the girlfriends I entertained found as much resistance from their parents to our fast noisy talk as I did, but it was certainly easier for me to get on with the life I was making for myself before Ikey, Edna and Thelma got home from work.
When Edna lambasted me for thinking that I was a woman, she wasn’t far off the mark. I’d put a wiggle in my walk and my head was full of love lust. My ‘fast’ ways were encouraged by my older friends but beneath the new, worldly exterior, my intentions were harmless. I didn’t really want to do any more than a bit of necking under a red light bulb in a darkened room with some new heart-throb of mine from the local playground who, I’d decided, was the beginning and the end of my life … for a week or two. We girls loved sauntering by the nearby playground where the teenage boys were always sweating in the heat of a basketball game or lolling about at the edge of the court waiting for a chance to play. We pretended not to notice them as we drifted past slowly enough to be seen in a pair of short shorts or a tight skirt, hoping to attract the attention of our latest forecourt fantasy. (That priest who accused me of switching down the aisle at St Elizabeth’s must have had a premonition.)
Suffice it to say that by the time I sat in front of the television watching John F. Kennedy win the nomination to run as the Democratic candidate in the 1960 presidential election against Richard M. Nixon, I was a fully fledged teenager. I felt terribly sophisticated while I chomped chewing gum and smoked an Alpine mentholated cigarette and waited for the party returns.
Dennis was ready for college that summer and had been accepted at the University of California at Berkeley like Pam the year before. My mother decided that with both of them at college on the other coast, we needed to leave Philadelphia and move west. I was horrified by the thought of being wrenched from my beloved city. I didn’t think I could cope without my favourite TV show and my favourite radio station.
Television, radio and the industry that manufactured teen culture had fashioned me far more than anything that was fed to me at school except the talk about freedom and equality, the principles of which I used as an argument against my mother’s protests that I didn’t have a right to do with my life as I wanted. After all, she said, wasn’t my life her life too? I didn’t think so.
She proved me wrong when she packed me onto a propeller plane and dragged me to the other side of America.
6 THE DREAM MACHINE (#ulink_30beef58-f236-5206-8610-102a094d88e8)
Although I didn’t want to go to California, my imagination painted a vivid image for me of Oakland, the city we were moving to. I expected it to look like the unidentified towns which were the backcloth of the family situation comedies I regularly watched while I grew up 3000 miles away. They usually depicted a pretty suburb: a mini Beverly Hills, divided by neat front lawns on quiet tree-lined streets with the splash of a freshly painted ranch-style house with a garage that had a basketball net conveniently attached to an overhead wall so that the kids could play.
I wasn’t an avid moviegoer, but I had enough beforehand knowledge of California to be wrong about it. In my head was the clichéd vision – blazing yellow sun, picturesque orange groves, palm trees against a blue sky. I could see a swimming pool and the languid masses of draped bodies slung across deck chairs as they browned like toast under the sun. An unspoken wealth supported the whole canvas.
California might just as well have been in another country. Our only connection to it was that each Christmas, Uncle Henry used to send Edna a voluptuous basket of fruit from California where he’d been living since he’d retired from the navy. The fruit was always a glamorous array of wrapped citrus with something exotic like a pineapple on top in coloured cellophane with a big bow around it. (Once a basket arrived with a dark green thing in it which I had never seen before. Edna claimed that she had in Florida, but I didn’t believe her. I was sure she was just saying this to impress us and that the avocado pear wasn’t a pear at all and was poison.)
The journey to San Francisco airport took about sixteen hours and we had to stop off once to refuel. At one point during the flight, the pilot told us to look at the Grand Canyon. I did so reluctantly. I’d never been on an airplane before, but I can’t say that I appreciated my first experience, because I was too caught up in sombre remorse: I was sick from the ache of leaving friends behind and believed that the only reason destiny was pulling me westwards was to help Ikey interfere with a budding romance between me and an eighteen-year-old boy. It was July 1960 and I was not a bit happy about the prospect of a future in California.
That first afternoon we drove through Oakland was sunny – too sunny for my liking. A heat of light burned the sidewalk. There was no imposing residential monument of history to interest me and no orderly strips of red brick houses with dark-green hedges to match. In fact, brick must have been at a premium, because every house and building seemed to be made of stucco.
I’d only been out of the North once, when the Bivins family took me on a weekend jaunt to visit some of their relatives in North Carolina. The flat dullness of the small nameless Southern towns we drove through left me with the same depressed feeling that I had when I looked at Oakland for the first time.
There wasn’t one lawn or ranch-style house to be seen as we drove down Grove Street. It looked like an architectural free-for-all. No building seemed planted in the sidewalk with solid old East Coast permanence. Instead the ticky-tacky greyish boxes with storm windows looked as if they’d been thrown on the pavement and designed with less imagination than my first Lego attempts.
More sky than I’d ever noticed before hung down. It was barely the palest blue and was dipped in dry heat. The air seemed no cleaner than the sidewalk.
I wanted to cry and probably would have if I’d thought that it would do any good. But the truth was that I was there to stay. I knew my grandmother had had the right idea when she ground her heels in and refused to join us for the move west. I longed to be back there with her, lounging around in big-city civilization.
I also felt Ikey’s disappointment and could see it registering in the dull glaze of her eyes as she stared from the car window listening to her brother explain how she, Thelma, Pam and I could temporarily cope with a one-bedroom apartment above some shops at the corner of 55th and Grove. He wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t so temporary.
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Marsha Hunt
First published in 1986, "Real Life" gives the full background to Marsha Hunt's astonishing rise from Philadelphia ghetto girl to become the 'face' of the cult 60s rock musical "Hair" and the girlfriend of Mick Jagger, father of her daughter Karis.It is the story of Marsha's childhood, of her time at Berkeley University during the anti-war riots in the mid-60s and of her escape to London where she became involved in the music scene, singing (and living) with the likes of John Mayall and Elton John. This is a vivid account of life in the early 60s by one of the icons of "Swinging London". But as well as being a portrait of a culture and a generation, it is also the personal story of a warm, honest woman determined to bring up her daughter on her own according to her deeply-held principles. It is the story of a survivor who has struggled through turbulent love-affairs and the ups and downs of a varied and extraordinary career.
MARSHA HUNT
Real Life
Copyright (#ulink_34dc06c3-b517-5951-a295-9e3ea75f1b89)
Fourth Estate
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Published by Flamingo 1995
First published in Great Britain by Chatto and Windus 1986
Copyright © Marsha Hunt 1986
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780006548737
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007483105
Version: 2016-01-19
For Karis
Contents
Cover (#u79fcd4c4-65c9-56cc-9ce7-6b7d75bc98cb)
Title Page (#u3c3ddbbe-26e7-589a-abbe-a65688399558)
Copyright (#ulink_cbd56e97-510c-54d5-969d-29e00d83912a)
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_061c1910-c87c-5913-a474-915c31d72503)
1 MADE IN AMERICA (#ulink_4a561d00-d10e-5060-9536-85bbbe064bed)
2 CULTURED PEARLS (#ulink_32097dfb-969c-5c47-a35a-8cffb84876cf)
3 THE FRONT LINE (#ulink_f6e9091e-8170-594d-ba74-6f748abd343e)
4 INFANT DIPLOMACY (#ulink_b3ea9e38-e5d5-504f-a103-eb3ced330208)
5 MOUNT AIRY AND CHESTNUT HILL (#ulink_530adc08-28d8-50b0-9c1f-7d0459bafe7d)
6 THE DREAM MACHINE (#ulink_266e8706-38b2-5a0f-aff0-6b7b0d33c698)
7 EVERYTHING’S NOT EVERYTHING (#litres_trial_promo)
8 FREE AT LAST (#litres_trial_promo)
9 PURI NATURABILIS (#litres_trial_promo)
10 PRIORITIES (#litres_trial_promo)
11 SAVE THE TEARS (#litres_trial_promo)
12 THE PLEASURE ZONE (#litres_trial_promo)
13 SMOKED OUT (#litres_trial_promo)
14 WORDS WITHOUT MUSIC (#litres_trial_promo)
15 CHANGING FACES (#litres_trial_promo)
16 BEYOND THE BRIDGE (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Indent (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_06113c8e-f21b-58b5-a395-cd691d63a269)
Co Wicklow
Ireland
Wednesday, November 15, 1995
My dear Karis,
It’s 4 am. Can’t sleep. I’m in the middle of writing the new introduction to my autobiography and I keep thinking about things that were happening when I wrote it. Ten years have slipped by and a lot has changed. For one thing, you’re 25 and living in San Francisco whereas I’ve just moved to Ireland to be with Alan after completing my fourth book.
Although I’m pleased that Real Life is being republished, I dread the prospect of it giving journalists an excuse to ask about Mick. They hate to believe that we’ve been on friendly terms for years and that you have a good relationship with him, but nonetheless, I’m glad that through Real Life I had a chance to explain what had happened between us, because the details of the good times and the trials seem less real and less relevant with each passing year. It’s odd to think that you are already older than I was when your father and I were lovers and even older than I was when I gave birth to you at 24.
In 1985 when people heard that I’d been commissioned to write my autobiography, some said I was too young at 39. But by then I’d already had three careers, been a single parent and lived on three continents. Not to mention having survived the legal battles with Mick and the humiliating experience of dealing with his lawyers and the press. Writing this book changed my life. I had to recreate events and recall circumstances which were far more disturbing than I had admitted that they were when I’d actually experienced them. So by the time I’d completed my final draft, I was both stronger and weaker because of self-examination. I’ve had more than my share of luck and adventure and being identified as an icon of the 60s hasn’t stopped me from adventuring. But I’ve always believed that what made my life worth writing about was that as a woman and an African American my experiences reflected the changes in how we were perceived. Had I been born ten years earlier for instance, my years in rock bands could have never happened and rather than being hailed as a single parent I would have been tagged an ‘unwed mother’.
No doubt you laugh at my referring to myself as an African American because you know how I hate that label and resent the way that we Americans descended from slaves have had a name change far too often. Coloured. Negro. Black. And now African American which is not only a mouthful but relates us to a continent that for at least four generations our family has had no experience of. All I know of Africa is what I’ve read, been told or learned about through the media. But then who am I to complain when I had the audacity in Real Life to try to coin a label for us of my own. Melangian now seems an absurd word, but then who stuck us with African American and don’t we have a say in the matter?
Nonetheless when I was asked if I wanted to rewrite the autiobiography I declined, although I cringe when I see the word Melangian pop up. My pomposity is embarrassing but it should remain on the record. Real Life was my first attempt at writing a book and having written two novels and this most recent non-fiction, I could only make a mess of trying to adjust my first.
In 1985 I doubt that anybody would have believed that I would write another book. A review in Time Out said the one thing my readers would be certain of is that I would never write again and my editor for Real Life moaned, ‘How can you want to write when it takes you so long!’ She’d come to our flat on Marlborough Place and watched my slow pecking at a manual typewriter. I have to admit that there have been thousands of instances while I’ve been labouring over subsequent books when I’ve wondered if she didn’t have a point.
I didn’t become a weeper until I became a writer and it’s hard to tell whether it’s the craft which drives me to tears or the characters that I write about that I’m forced to live with daily. On the other hand the isolation I’ve imposed upon myself so that I could churn books out might make a lot of people emotional. Friends couldn’t understand why I moved to Folkestone in 1986 and then slipped off to a remote house in France in 1989. But I can hear myself telling them ‘I have to be alone to write.’ It also gave me the time and space to recreate myself as an author without anybody to challenge me with ‘But you’re a singer …’ or ‘But you’re an actress …’ or ‘You’re that girl from Hair who had Mick Jagger’s baby …’ Thank God I’ve never allowed other people’s perceptions of me to stop me from living my life, because I’d now probably be a bag lady toting tatty plastic carriers full of Hair press clippings circa 1969.
No doubt you think it’s crazy that I’ve now moved to the Irish countryside but this is no more bizarre than your buying a house in San Francisco, within a few miles of the very place I deserted when I tromped off for a European adventure nearly thirty years ago. But when I encouraged you to go to an American university so you could shed some of your public school ways, how could I foresee that you’d make the States your home? It seems these days that you see more of your father than you see of me. But I’m glad that you’re happy and surrounded by some of the friends you made at Yale.
By the way, thanks for Fed-Exing those set dressings to me in time for my performance of Joy last week. They arrived two hours before the play was starting and to see that little yellow party dress hanging on stage brought back endless memories of two summers ago when we got together in France to adapt my novel and prepare me to perform it at the Edinburgh Festival. God that was fun wasn’t it - like old times with just the two of us. I can still hear you asking me the first time I cried in rehearsal, ‘Mum, are you all right?’ So that I had to step out of my character to say, ‘I’m fine Miss Karis … just acting.’
I hope you’ll stage Joy in San Francisco, because there must be scores of older black actresses needing a good role, and if you can direct me, you can direct anybody.
I was sure last Monday that I’d forget my lines but somehow they came back to me. And at the end of my performance I was tempted to tell the audience, ‘My daughter produced and directed me in this play at last year’s Edinburgh Festival’ but I was scared it would reek of a mother’s pride. After 30 years in Britain you’d think some English modesty would have rubbed off on me, but it still feels unnatural … Speaking of which, next February 28th will mark the anniversary of my arrival in London from Berkeley. I’m not one for parties but maybe I should have one to coincide with the publication of Repossessing Ernestine which comes out two weeks earlier. Have you read the uncorrected proof yet? I think you should since you keep popping up in it. That picture Stefan sent me of you in France will be included amongst the photographs. Everybody says you look lovely.
It seems unbelievable that I finally finished writing Ernestine’s story. It’s taken four years in all from the beginning of my quest to find her, and it seems like a light year ago when I rang you at Yale to say, ‘Somebody claims that they’ve spotted my grandmother in Memphis’ and you told me I had to go see her and even beat me to it. Fifty-two years in a mental ward and still standing. What’s sad is that she’s not compos mentis enough to read her own story.
Anyway, Miss Karis, it’s now 6am and raining hard. I’m alone because Alan’s away working. The house is spectacularly quiet. So much so that I can hear the sound of the felt tip I’m writing with scratching on the page. A lot of people would hate this silence but I thrive on it after the years of being in France on my own … I have to keep reminding myself that I’m in Ireland, because unless I go into town, it seems I could be anywhere. The country’s like that somehow, especially when I’m indoors. But as soon as I hit Dublin I think, ‘Lord, woman, how have you ended up in Ireland!’ Of course Alan’s the answer and thank goodness he didn’t live somewhere weird. I love this house and there’s something in the air which says that I’m being afforded another new beginning.
I hope you don’t mind that this book has been republished. It’s not supposed to dredge up old wounds but merely stands as an account of the first thirty-nine years of my life. Thank you immensely for your part in it and trust that if I had to live it all again, I wouldn’t have missed you for the world.
I send endless hugs and love, Mama
1 MADE IN AMERICA (#ulink_30187b10-ff7f-5e8f-9b20-3eda8c1125ff)
The atomic age dawned on 16 July 1945 at 5.30 am in the New Mexican desert with the success of a bomb with 20,000 times the power of TNT. I was probably conceived around that time, as it happens.
I guess you could say I got my start in an airplane factory called Brewster’s, where my mother, Inez, and her sister, Thelma, worked at the time, just a commuter’s distance from Philadelphia. Women were establishing themselves as an invaluable factor in the US workforce. Trained to read the blueprints, to rivet, to run the drill press or drill gun and build planes which were a main instrument of war, they would never again believe that their usefulness was restricted to home and child-rearing.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been dead one year and three days when I arrived, on 15 April 1946.
My genetic make-up was to prove a disability, because it automatically meant that the equality and freedom that were supposed to be endemic elements of the American culture were not going to be mine.
I am only referred to as American when I am out of the country. My skin colour is oak with a hint of maple. Of the various races I know I comprise – African, American Indian, German Jew and Irish – only the African was acknowledged, and I was labelled ‘coloured’. This was changed to ‘Negro’ in more sophisticated circles. The less evolved would often call me ‘nigger’. Over the years, I would encounter a slew of nicknames and variations on the theme of my complexion. Being colour-coded was a determining factor in who or what I could become.
Americans of slave descent are not purely African. Though we are a combination of races, this fact is avoided by all. The consequent dilemma is that entire aspects of our heritage, attitudes and behaviour are never attributed to our genetic make-up. This seems short-sighted on everyone’s part, especially as Americans are so big on understanding human nature.
I am not merely what you see. I’m the total sum of my parts, and the dominant elements aren’t necessarily the most visibly apparent ones. One morning in Paris, I realized that to come to terms with myself meant that I would have to come to terms with my ancestral past. It was 5 July 1985, the day after America’s celebration of her independence.
While growing up in Philadelphia, the first capital of the United States, had enhanced my sense of the nation’s history, I had never examined my own. As it was cautiously overlooked by everyone else, it had been easy for me to carry on as if it didn’t exist.
I enthusiastically set out to trace my family tree. I took out a library book on genealogy. Tracing my family turned out to be impossible, since slave births and deaths were not recorded and marriage was not allowed. It’s as if my great-grandparents just fell out of the sky.
While history is what is written about the past, I accept that it’s drawn from deduction, supposition and conjecture, as well as some lies and deceptions motivated by politics, money and sex. No matter. It’s good reading and great soap opera, so I’m sorry that there is no history of my ancestors to share with you.
My geographical and cultural heritage is largely American, and it’s safe to say that my great-grandparents on both sides of the family were born there. I am not sure how my grandfather’s mother came to be half German Jew or whether the man, Shouse of Danville, Kentucky, who fathered her behaved like a father. It won’t change the fact that I am in part German Jew. My grandmother says that her grandmother was a Native American, but the rest of my ancestors must have come by sea.
Some were brought over against their will from Africa, and these ancestors weren’t allowed to bring their culture or even their language with them or share in American culture at that time. They were captive labourers. I can’t comprehend how these conditions must have stunted their emotional and intellectual growth, but that was probably the least of their worries.
A baby born to an African girl raped by an Englishman was half English as well as half African, but was considered a slave. Its development was restricted to the degradations of a slave’s environment. Its Englishness would be overlooked and denied for the benefit of plantation economy. Nobody bothered to challenge this convenient deception, but wasn’t the baby equally an enslaved Englishman? In this way, a new breed was born on American soil and forcibly chained to the American dream.
People see pictures of my father’s family and ask me what race they are. When I hear myself say, ‘They’re Black,’ it sounds ludicrous, because their skin is hardly brown. Since the sixties, the Black Power movement and radical chic, Black is what Americans of slave descent are called. Before that we were called Negroes, coloured, Nigras and niggers and Lord knows what else. As kids we used to say, ‘Sticks and stones can break my bones but names can never hurt me,’ but the naming of things is important. We rely on labels to identify and categorize everything around us.
The 26 million Americans that evolved out of the sexual abuse of the slave class never got a definitive name. Black is clearly inaccurate. Our appearances vary and represent the complete spectrum of facial features, skin colours, hair textures, eye colours and physical types. Even within a nuclear family unit there are those variations. As descendants of an enslaved people we developed socially and culturally in spite of our limited privileges. We were sustained by the promise that one day we might share in the freedom and equality that was talked about so much. One day it really should suffice to call us Americans.
On that 5 July in Paris, I decided that I wouldn’t wait any longer for someone else to come up with a suitable name, and picked up the nearest dictionary. It happened to be a French/English one, a bit weather-beaten but still useful. I hoped to find a word that would describe my being of mixed descent and also suggest my African heredity.
When I stumbled upon the French word mélange, which means a mixture and also contains part of the word ‘melanin’, dark pigment found in the skin, it hit me like fireworks. Melange. I repeated it over and over out loud and in my head. I wrote it big and wrote it small and tried different endings until I heard myself saying ‘Melangian’ (pronounced mi-lan-jian with the accent on the middle syllable). It sounded right, but I wanted to get a second opinion, so I called a Melangian friend in New York to ask him if he liked it and made quite a screeching row when he did. Then I hung up the phone and put headphones on and turned up the music so loud that it nearly deafened me and danced by myself.
So let me start this again … I am Melangian. I was born of war. I am of the race which evolved out of slavery. We have a distinct cultural history, and in spite of all the shit, we’ve survived.
In the Melangian family women are particularly important because for a long time family units weren’t lawfully permitted within the slave class. (If I said that during the first thirty years of the Victorian era, working-class people were not allowed to get married, you might get the picture and a sense of how recent it was.) I come from a long line of working women. They had no choice.
My grandmother, Edna Mae Graham, who helped raise me, was raised in Florida by her grandmother, Fannie Graham, who was born a slave. There’s no photograph of Fannie, she probably never had one taken, but my grandmother described her as ‘skinny and yella’ with a crook in her nose like mine. From what I gather, she must have been a hellraiser. I wish I could remember more of what my grandmother told me about her.
Before Fannie died, her granddaughter, Edna Mae, a lean ambitious nineteen-year-old, had already hotfooted to Philadelphia, where she married a handsome friend of her family’s, Henry Robinson. Within five years they had three children, Henry Jr, Inez and Thelma, all born before the Depression. Nobody is clear about Henry senior’s line of work but, for some suspect reason, he had enough money to keep them living in certain style. Thelma, the youngest, still remembers the big house with the piano in the parlour. For a Melangian man in the 1920s that was no mean feat. Unfortunately, he took his money when he left during the Depression. Edna still managed. She had a beautician’s licence and the family made do with the money she was paid for straightening women’s hair.
I used to long to hear Edna’s stories about her Southern childhood, but she rarely talked about it or her eleven brothers and sisters. Neither they nor her grandmother who raised her were enough to draw her back to Florida. She never went home again. She never talked about her home or her family except Fannie, and if you tried to pry, she’d shut you up pretty fast by saying that there was nothing to be gained from talking about that ‘slaverytime shit’. She had a way with words and wasn’t the kind of gentle little woman you could press into a discussion that she didn’t want to have.
Once, though, she told about the time her father carried her on his shoulders to meet his regiment which fought in a war that she was never able to specify. (Considering she was born in 1896, I assume it was the small skirmish America had with Spain in 1898 over Cuba’s independence.) I don’t remember what made her break her silence, but throughout my own childhood it was the only mental image I had of hers. There are no photographs of her apart from one large portrait taken when she was nineteen. I never liked the picture in its oval frame. It made her look too much like George Washington and didn’t show that her eyes were the colour of pale sienna set against her straw complexion, which was never marred by a pimple or a rash.
Edna’s son Henry Jr finished high school and enlisted in July 1938 and by 21 October, he was assigned to a recruit training regiment at a naval training centre in Norfolk, Virginia. Edna’s two teenage daughters, Inez and Thelma, were still at high school. Both girls were pretty and popular. After graduating, they joined in the war effort with jobs at Brewster’s airplane plant. Henry was stationed at Pearl Harbor – his fleet just missed Japan’s unexpected assault in December 1941. While he had to anticipate death like the rest of the fighting forces, Inez had created two new lives: my sister Pamala was born in 1942 and my brother Dennis in 1943. Edna was a devoted grandmother and Thelma a doting aunt, and a new generation fell under the command of the matriarch, which they maintained without male interference even after Inez’s marriage to a brilliant medical student from Boston named Blair Theodore Hunt Jr.
Blair and his two brothers, Ernest and Wilson, had the opportunity to finish their interrupted educations when the war ended. Blair had been on a scholarship to Harvard, but there were still a lot of college years ahead before he would become a psychiatrist. Nobody was crazy enough to let my arrival in 1946 stop him from returning to Boston and Harvard. We weren’t to see much of my father because of his medical studies. His appearances were rare but well received. Everybody was so busy surviving that I doubt they had much time to notice that I’d come and that he’d gone.
I had three mothers, with my grandmother Edna, my aunt Thelma and my mother, known as Ikey, sharing the load. It was taken for granted in our household that women were completely capable of everything from raising a family and bringing home a regular wage packet to self-defence. Edna’s motto was: ‘If you want something done, do it yourself.’ To shovel a snow-banked sidewalk, stoke the furnace and provide was considered women’s work. Edna had been raised in this tradition and it is likely that her grandmother was, too. I was very late to comprehend that elsewhere women were not ruling the roost, shovelling the shit and kicking ass.
What little I did hear about my ancestors was predominantly about the women, and it left me a lot of scope to elaborate on them in my imagination. They weren’t prominent, but I did have them tucked in all the corners of my mind. Subsequently, it was these who spurred my determination and whom I idolized.
All my grandmother told me of her Indian great-grandmother, simply known as Grandma Mary, was that ‘when an overseer came to mess with Mary in the kitchen, she rammed a knife in his gut’. It didn’t enter my head that this may only have been a tale. Mary’s courage was there for me to imitate and live up to. And when I heard that Fannie Graham ‘wouldn’t take no shit off nobody’ and could do anything a man could do, Fannie became a role model and was always there for reference.
So the tradition I hoped to live up to as a child was as much established by these heroic foremothers as it was by my mother, her sister and my grandmother.
I can’t see air, but I accept it’s there. In the same way, I accept that I’m influenced by the unseen parade of women who have gone before me. Sometimes I wonder if I inherited them or if they inherited me.
There are things about me
Which I can’t explain
There are longings in me
For which I make no claim
I feel a haunting
Which is infinite
For lives I can’t remember
Yet can’t forget
Soul upon soul
Stretching back in time
Stacked like a totem
Is my mother line
I am theirs
As they are mine
Within their trace
My life entwines
This mother load
Supports internally
Rooted deep in my heart
At the soul of me
I feel their pain
They laugh, now free
But in the mirror
There is only me
2 CULTURED PEARLS (#ulink_5991128b-8c38-5698-aabc-2a0da673e88b)
To be coloured in 1946 was to be economically confined and socially isolated. Segregation laws did not exist everywhere, but the fact that they were upheld in many states reminded everybody who was boss.
Something positive still managed to grow over on the ‘coloured’ side of the tracks, where I spent my early childhood. A culture developed.
These social isolation bases in America where large numbers of Melangians reside are referred to as ghettos, a word that evokes only negative imagery. They weren’t merely hellholes: they were cultural arenas. I’d like to call them reservations; as the dictionary says, ‘reservation’ can mean:
a limiting condition, or
an area of land reserved for occupation by a tribe, or
an area set aside as a secure breeding place.
In our section of the city, fear, poverty and restricted education were maintained by the promise that our patience and subservience would be rewarded by opportunities available to other Americans … maybe, eventually, somehow. While we were waiting, we made do with things as they were. Like some European working classes, in spite of poverty, we had a certain quality of life.
We had our own class system, language, religion and art forms. What we ate, how we dressed, and our manner of doing things were derived from the American culture which we imitated but could never have emulated.
America was a big beef-eating nation but on the reservation pork and chicken were favoured, because they were cheaper. No part of the pig was considered waste. This policy may have been a leftover from plantation days. Pig ears and feet, the lining of its stomach (called hog maws), the intestines (called chitlins), the hocks and the ribs were all gratefully received at the table. Chunks of pig fat called fat back were used to flavour the cooking. Most things were boiled or fried. Fried chicken was a mainstay (nobody had heard of Kentucky Fried). All kinds of beans were staples, along with rice and potatoes. Yams and sweet potatoes were favourites, although they weren’t available throughout the year. Cabbage and greens such as collards, turnips, mustard and kale were boiled and then simmered, with a piece of fat back thrown in if times were good.
In 1985 on my grandmother’s birthday, 27 March, I was home in London with my daughter Karis and spotted collard greens at my local greengrocer’s. I don’t rememer seeing this variety of green anywhere in England before. To commemorate my grandmother, I thought I’d cook some for Karis, who had never eaten them and only has a vague memory of Edna; I knew that the dreadful smell alone of the collards cooking would be nostalgic.
My grandmother would have cleaned them by soaking them first in her huge roasting pan that could hold our 30-pound Thanksgiving turkey. I plopped them into water in the kitchen sink. They were clogged with dirt and it took hours to get the damned things clean: I understood why my grandmother soaked them in such a big pot all day.
I decided to steam them rather than boil them to keep the vitamins in. I threw them in the Chinese bamboo steamers and slung a few strips of bacon in with them in place of fat back. The result was most unusual but I assumed they were cooked – they go a sort of mustard colour.
When I’d dished them out, Karis looked at them on her plate and then up at me. She didn’t see me catching her sneak that last sly glance. She can be as English as they come: the accent, the manner, the attitude and even her sensibilities are so British that it just kills me. You’d hardly know she’s mine sometimes.
She used her knife and fork to eat the collards, pressing them onto the back of her fork with her knife. I could hear some grit crunching on her braces when she tried to chew. I kept my eyes on my plate, so that I wouldn’t have to interrupt this solemn commemoration with an apology that the collards were most likely undercooked.
When my grandmother did them, they melted in the mouth. It was often a pretty testy time at our place when collards got cooked, because my mother hated the smell. They do have an unfortunate odour when they’ve been simmering for hours.
Sunday on the reservation was a day for culinary extravagance when it could be afforded. Edna made biscuits with flour, milk and lard (like scones without the sugar and currants). There might even be some bread made from cornmeal, but this was usually her Friday-night treat, served with fried mackerel which had been dipped in a mixture of flour and cornmeal before it sizzled in the big iron skillet full of smoking lard.
Hominy grits were generally reserved for breakfast, although you ate them at any time if you were hungry enough. Hominy is kernels of maize. Grits – ground hominy – were boiled in salted water to a porridge consistency and topped with butter or margarine. We also ate something called scrapple at breakfast which was scraps of meat and meal ground together and fried. The occasional dinner of hot dogs and baked beans was apologized for but indicated that we were Americans to the heart.
The socially sophisticated Melangian, more integrated into American society, wouldn’t eat like this today.
The American tradition of a free choice of worship found a zealous outlook on the reservation where store fronts, living rooms and any place big enough for a gathering of souls could serve as a place of worship. Faith kept people going and gave them hope. Evangelist, Holy Roller, Sanctified, Pentecostal, Seventh Day Adventist, Children of God, Jehovah’s Witness and many other denominations had committed followers just like larger denominations such as Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian and Catholic. I missed church culture on the reservation, because we were baptized Catholic with the intention of getting the advantage of a parochial school education. But the evidence and effect of the religious element in the community reached me on many levels.
Seeing a congregation socializing outside their church after a meeting was to see reservation fashion. All manner of hats were worn by men and women alike. The ladies’ were usually adorned with a bit of netting, maybe artificial flowers or fruit like grapes or cherries, ribbons of silk or velvet. Maybe the lot. Hat, shoes, bag and outfit did not have to coordinate. Bright colours predominated.
When I was young, there was a Holy Roller church a few doors from our house. Holy Rollers are very devout and put great stock in their own translation of the Bible. The corner building wasn’t a church by design, just the biggest house on the block owned and lived in by our landlady, Mrs White. Mrs White was ebony, and on meeting days she always wore a white dress and white hat indicating that she was an elder of the church, which was almost like being a minister. She was probably in her late sixties and she usually seemed disgruntled. I couldn’t call her attractive. (‘Yurgly’ is how my grandmother described her. Edna could hardly sing out the word before she’d start rolling about laughing till the tears streamed from her eyes.) Mrs White had a scrunched-up face with not enough chin to offset her very big mouth. Her pea-sized eyes were hidden behind steel-rimmed glasses. She was heavy set and wore an upper and lower plate which she never had in her mouth if we dropped by unexpectedly to pay the rent.
Nothing was more exciting than to sneak over to Elder White’s on a warm summer’s night when we suspected there would be a meeting; it was usually a Thursday. A couple of us would creep along her side yard and right up to the window of her big front room where with a bit of luck we’d find the curtain cracked. If we were too early, we’d only get to see the twenty or so chairs of mixed description lined up in rows and waiting for a warm behind. There was often a partial drum kit and a saxophone near the piano which was next to the pulpit, a raised stage at one corner of the room furthest from the window looking onto our street. The pulpit was probably the carpentry work of one of the members, which doesn’t imply that it was crude handiwork; every part of this place of worship was an extension of the members’ lives. Some of the chairs were the same ones you might be offered to sit on if you came to the elder’s for dinner.
Giving a testimony or bearing witness in the Holy Roller church was often a highly emotional and impassioned revelation that required a lot of energy. The testifier usually got so caught up with the spirit and in the spirit that not only would his or her testimony be sparked by jumping and shouting, but others might ‘feel’ the spirit of the testimony too. To ‘jump and shout’ was a religious experience which found its way into the blues, then into rhythm and blues, before it transcended into rock and roll.
‘Feeling the spirit’ and ‘getting happy’ must be experiences second to none, because perfectly healthy people would faint and have to be carried out in the midst of these revelations. Peeking through the crack in the curtains, we longed to see the sweaty heights of this excitement, but I usually got called home before the long meetings reached these emotional crescendos.
A good minister or preacher was not only versed in the Bible, he was able to stir his parishioners to a revelry that evoked their testimonies. ‘Preachin” was an art and a good preacher was a star in the community. While most religious services have some element of theatre about them, not many can claim the standard of performance exchanged between the minister and his congregation in some of the reservation churches. In addition, some of these churches boasted excellent choirs. A couple of the more renowned ones were broadcast on our local Sunday radio station. Long before I was considered old enough to plug the radio in, my brother and I used to sneak away to listen to these church services. We weren’t allowed to, because my mother thought we were making fun of them, but it was just a way to get a dose of good music.
Music was a survival tonic, and free. To hear my grandmother singing ‘Wade In The Water’ was sometimes a sign that she was mad as hell about something, like being left alone to wash the dishes, but she made music just the same.
You could sing your way out of the reservation just as you could box your way out. While this was not the ideal of Melangians like my family, who had aspirations to become the doctors and lawyers of the community, musical talent was a passport to another America. And the church was as good a place as any to get your musical experience. Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Chaka Khan, Donna Summer, the Pointer Sisters, Al Green and Billy Preston are among the singers who started in the church.
The best reservation music to my ears was the a capella singing of groups of boys on the street who would practise popular songs of the day and do their own special renditions, which they’d decorate with rhythmic little jabs of harmony thrown in here and there. These were casual groups of boys who happened to be socializing on the same street corner or sitting on the same stoop at the same time. Singing was an escape and a pastime, like playing a game of baseball in the middle of the street, especially for teenage boys who were too big to play marbles but not yet old enough to spend their time drinking in a beer garden, which was the grandiose name for a bar.
The boys who roamed the streets were usually pretty rough and rowdy, and while I thought it was divine to hear a few of them working out the harmonies for a song, they weren’t a very savoury-looking bunch. They wore brimmed hats or peaked caps that were cocked to one side or perched some weird way or even worn back to front. The effect was not too becoming, but they were trying to look tough.
A lot of them had a special way of walking, too. I can’t think what this particular habit grew out of. Most of them looked as if they had incorporated a simplified dance step with a stride which required a certain amount of rhythm and effort to look smooth. This was called ‘bopping’. My grandmother hated it. She said they ‘looked like overgrown simpletons loping up and down the street dragging one leg like a cripple’.
I didn’t mind the crazy way they walked, but I did mind them taunting my mother or aunt with catcalls and whistles when we had to pass a bunch of them occupying nearly the whole street corner. We couldn’t avoid them even by crossing over to the other side. If the catcalls and the whistles were only a temporary interruption to some song they were working out, it didn’t stop me loving their music when they went back to making it. I loved to hear them singing in an alley that had an echo.
My family disapproved of the language that was spoken on the reservation, because it wasn’t what the rest of the nation considered good English. To be fair, it was a dialect and should have been treated with a certain respect as Europeans treat their dialects. Instead, a lot of stigma was attached to it. How the children who had only ever heard and spoken this reservation dialect coped when they got to school is beyond me. Fun with Dick and Jane, which was the first primer, should have had a translation and a glossary.
Of all the versions of English I’ve learned to speak, Melangian is the most expressive and emotional. Maybe this is why it is the language of popular music today. Whether by Hall and Oates, the Stones or Michael McDonald, a lot of hits are written and recorded by non-Melangians in our dialect. It certainly says what it has to say and takes the most direct route. It has a flatness to its tone which is basically guttural and combines this with rhythm and a Southern American lilt.
When Charles Dickens wrote his American travelogue in 1846 after an extensive trip around the States, he said that the English that he heard spoken by women in the Southern states showed the influence of the mammies that raised them. So the Southern accent was affected by Melangian and vice versa. We picked up English how and when we could, as it was never formally taught us.
To hear it spoken, Melangian is like upper-class county English in that it’s full of diphthongs and open vowel sounds. Consonants at the end of words are often dropped, as in the Scots accent, and when they are sounded, they’re softened. This is probably why Melangian is so useful for modern singing. It lets the mouth hold open sounds for words like ‘don’t, ‘last’ and ‘morning’, to name but three.
Melangian was the language I relied upon to express myself on the reservation when my mother wasn’t within hearing distance. We weren’t allowed to speak it at home. I still enjoy using it when I get a chance. When an issue gets bogged down with unnecessary words, if I think in Melangian, I can keep a clearer picture of what’s really going on. Of all the English dialects, Melangian is the one that best expresses joy and ebullience.
The class system on the reservation was more like a caste system, related to physical appearance. I guess it evolved out of the plantation politics, when how you looked may have determined whether you worked in the house or the field. Skin colour, hair texture and facial features affected your social status. Hair that grew wavy and long, light-coloured eyes and skin, afforded you more opportunity.
In the 1940s, educational opportunity was too limited for Melangians to see education as an available route to a better life, although we had our own doctors, lawyers, teachers and professionals, most of whom were educated in small Melangian colleges in the South. There weren’t many of these graduates. My father’s chance to go to Harvard was not one to be taken lightly or interfered with. It compared with a boy from the Gorbals getting a scholarship to go to Christ Church College, Oxford. His academic achievements linked my family to the professional class even though we were struggling to eat, like everybody around us. Our mother worked especially hard to have us live up to our assumed identity and went to great pains to make sure that we spoke English as well as anyone else and that our education and ambitions weren’t stinted in any way. For this she was often accused of acting white and treating us as if we were. On the reservation, no accusation was more damning. She turned a deaf ear.
It would be misleading to paint only a glowing picture of the reservation. If you saw a photograph of one without a caption, you might mistake it for a war zone. Young men prepared for combat, patrolling and armed and waiting; a rubbled landscape; an atmosphere of torment, confusion or resignation on the faces of both young and old, highlighted by a queer sense of abandonment.
The work that was available wasn’t likely to improve your future status and crime seemed to pay.
3 THE FRONT LINE (#ulink_4030f04e-9b0f-57a6-8683-2933a97c858c)
Pearl Bailey’s mother lived across the road from us, but 23rd Street was on the fringe of what was later to be known as the Crime Belt. I grew perversely proud of this distinction, but in reality I doubt it was much worse than any other section of North Philly. It was like boot camp, and I was happy there even though every passageway seemed like an obstacle course. Whether it was the hallway to the communal toilet, or the staircase, or the few feet of pavement that led to dinky local stores, you might encourage something dangerous.
I wasn’t really allowed out much alone, so one of my favourite pastimes was to observe the world below by hanging my head a bit further than was allowed outside our third-floor window which overlooked the street.
Once, I happened to be looking out when I saw a thief riding off on my tricycle. It caught me off guard. ‘That son of a bitch is stealing my bicycle!’ is all I managed to squeal before my grandmother’s big yellow hand had whipped me out of the window to drag me to the kitchen sink where my mouth was washed out with soap and water. Resisting this punishment was worse than the punishment itself. Thankfully a few tears came to evoke my grandmother’s sympathy.
I could think bad words and no one would stop me, but whenever one would slip out before I could catch it and be overheard by my mother, aunt or grandmother, I’d get my mouth washed out. I cursed a lot although nobody knew it. I was only repeating what I heard, but since ‘Do as I say and not as I do’ was one of the house rules, cursing was considered to be very bad behaviour and what my grandmother termed ‘streety’.
With the six of us living in two rooms, nerves got frayed, and among the adults a lot of swearing and shouting went on, although they pretended after the dust settled that nothing unladylike had been said. None of them swore in front of anybody outside the family other than the ice man, whom Edna cursed if his great big chunks of ice dripped across her clean kitchen floor before he could lodge it in the refrigerator or before she could put some newspaper down.
I spent a lot of time with my grandmother, because my mother and aunt were at work all day at the Signal Corps and my brother and sister were at school. Edna let me do things like go down to Max Bender’s small food store and buy loose potato chips. Max scooped them from a big silver can into a brown paper bag. (They were cheaper if they were stale.) Max also sold margarine from a covered bowl. As part of your purchase, you’d get a little red capsule to stir into it to turn it yellow. Being allowed to stir was a reward for being good, and I tried to follow all the rules.
Once I’d started school, my mother told me to work hard, mind my own business and act like a lady, but I assumed ‘take no shit’ still applied. Easier said than done. As I was only five, combining those efforts required a political skill that I didn’t have. My mother expected me to talk my way out of trouble, but on the front line, talk can get you into a lot of trouble.
To survive our tough little neighbourhood, you had to be alert at all times. Even though I was little, I was mentally prepared to react and defend myself. Just as you’d imagine a real war zone, even the youngest must learn to anticipate danger, to think and react at the same time, and to let fear serve as a natural alarm to warn you of danger, fuel you with the adrenalin that may be your only protection.
When I started kindergarten at St Elizabeth’s Catholic School, I was worldly. I’d seen so many people in the streets with scars that I’d learned to distinguish how a wound had been inflicted: a jagged scar came from a knife cut and a smooth, thin, slightly raised scar came from a razor-blade slash. I was fully aware that people were getting beaten up, knifed, scalded and had lye thrown on them. Maybe what I heard was magnified in my mind and what I imagined was worse than what was going on for real.
A constant worry was that there seemed to be a vigilante street-level policy about what behaviour was bad and deserved punishment. Vanity was punishable and it wasn’t unusual to hear that somebody could be threatened with a beating for ‘thinking they were cute’. Appearing to ally yourself in any way to the other Americans, the white ones, was also taken as a serious offence and referred to as ‘acting white’ or ‘thinking you were white’. Trying to be too dignified or too genteel could be construed as part of this offence. Between my mother’s rules for my behaviour and the undeclared street laws, I sensed there was some discrepancy.
For me, the news of what was happening in Korea where my uncle Henry was at war hardly matched up to the gossip about frequent scuffles outside the beer garden where never a flower grew.
Growing up in this environment was not a tragic scenario for my childhood. I knew nothing else in those days before television and therefore couldn’t make comparisons. I was very content, and feel that I had a wonderful childhood.
I was never hungry even though there was no cupboard always stacked with food. Max Bender’s was open till six o’clock. My brother and sister and I were cherished by our three ‘mothers’, who bought us dolls and games for Christmas. There was always a cake on a birthday and the fairy godmother left a quarter when a tooth fell out. We were kept warm in winter even if it meant somebody had to throw their coat over us in our cots to supplement the available blankets. I can honestly say that I never wanted for anything and my heart had enough. My mother would play us a game of jacks or read me a story and if my brother and sister got their homework done, the three of us could always argue over a game of old maid or something.
You couldn’t call us spoiled, but I’d say we had everything, though it may have seemed to others like little. That everything included roaches in our apartment didn’t bother me a bit, and I even liked the mice and felt we saw too little of them. The hoo-ha that went on if a mouse was caught scuttling across the kitchen floor was an entertainment not to be believed. My mother and aunt would always jump on the kitchen table screeching and hollering the place down while my brother tried to swat the poor bitty thing with a broom before it would get away under the stove, which it always did.
The only misery in my life was a picture of my uncle Henry in his uniform. This photograph of him posed with a rifle was propped up in front of the only big mirror we owned, which was attached to the dressing table in the bedroom. I needed to use this mirror when I practised singing ‘If I Were a King (I’d be but a slave to you)’ or any song that I would make up. To see, I had to stand on the four-legged leather-seated stool that fitted neatly within this dresser, which was part of a mahogany bedroom suite left over from Edna’s better days. Unfortunately, my uncle’s picture scared me so much that I’d have to turn it face down on the lace doily, which was draped across the glass top, so I wouldn’t have to look at it while I was looking at myself. There was nothing scary about this picture except the rifle. It was more that my brother Dennis regularly used it to torment me or to make me do something I didn’t want to do. He always threatened that if I didn’t, Henry would come in the night and shoot me. This made me scream and cry until help came, which never took much time since we had only two rooms.
Otherwise, Dennis and Pamala were extremely well-behaved and no doubt deserved the praise they got on their perfect report cards from school. My brother was so reliable at arithmetic that Max Bender used to pay Dennis, at the age of eight, to tally people’s bills if the store got crowded.
Dennis and Pam (or Bubby and Dixie Peach, as they were nicknamed and known) were both shy, gentle children, so I can’t say how it happened that I was the wild Indian that my mother always accused me of being. Following their example, I got pleasure out of being well-behaved and exhibiting perfect manners. When I finally got old enough to sit outside on the top step alone, I would charm the passers-by that I knew with ‘How do you do’ and ‘How are you feeling?’ and invariably go upstairs rewarded for these salutations with a fist full of nickels.
While I could understand that to be good meant to keep your voice down, to share and be helpful, I was never to be convinced that it also meant to be polite or passive in the face of aggression. Anyhow, Grandma Mary and Fannie Graham would have expected otherwise, and so would Edna.
Ikey was gradually becoming the head of the household, being our mother and the elder of the working sisters. Being Edna’s child, Ikey was wilful or what Edna called ‘headstrong’. Edna said she had ‘a head like Connie’s old ram’. I never did know what this referred to. Some of Edna’s expressions didn’t make sense but I liked them all.
To have a young mother who was smart and very pretty gave me something else to worry about, because I knew that men liked to make passes at her in the street and that she sported an attitude which people on the block called superior. As far as Ikey was concerned, she was a doctor’s wife and the reservation was just a stopover. To her mind we were merely broke, which had nothing to do with being poor, and to my dismay she dressed us to prove as much.
Dennis and Pam got to wear a uniform to school, but I had to attend nursery in oxblood brogues, high argyle socks, a silly tam and a tailored coat because Ikey considered them in good taste. As the mother superior who ran the school said, we were not like the other children. Mrs Hunt’s children did not swear and fight and cause trouble like some of the other ‘coloured’ children until …
Thump went my balled-up fist when it whammed up against the side of the boy’s ugly head. I didn’t even know his name, because I’d been so busy in the playground minding my own business that a lot of faces went unnoticed. His nose started to bleed into the dribble of snot already drying above his lip. Usually I cried at the sight of blood even if it was somebody else’s, but I was too mad for tears. That he had the nerve to kiss me when I was off my guard was a liberty that I wasn’t going to let go unpunished. So I hauled back ready to wallop him once again, but he was saved by the bell which halted my second blow. The cardinal sin of my self-defence was that I had broken a rule: no fighting in the playground. Normally, I was grateful for this regulation, because it nearly made our school yard a neutral zone in the neighbourhood. It was the only safe space where kids and air and peace mixed, unlike the sidewalk, which was designated off limits for me most of the time because of the vagrants and the bad kids. I was ashamed that I had defiled my only piece of paradise and that I wasn’t living up to Pam and Dennis’s flawless reputation, which was my mother’s greatest glory.
My assailant cried so loud that the first nun to the rescue mistook him for the innocent injured party. The indignity of being considered the offender was worse than the punishment inflicted on me by this woman draped in black. Her polished black high-tops looked like army boots peeking out from beneath her heavy hem. I had to hold out my open palms while she cracked them with her wooden ruler.
My kindergarten class only lasted half a day. When the air-raid siren blared at noon, my grandmother was always waiting for me at the gate. She was mad that afternoon when she heard why my eyes were puffy from crying. She ground her teeth when she got mad and I could hear her doing this while she carried me home. I was too big to be carried, really, but I got a ride right up to Max Bender’s where Edna got us a penny Mary Jane as she always did so that we could share it after my lunch. A Mary Jane was two little individually wrapped toffees bound by a red cellophane band which I liked to look through and which my grandmother always let me have. The fact that I got my red cellophane band that afternoon indicated that my grandmother was not annoyed with me. She said that I should’ve beaten the hell out of the son of a bitch that was kissing me and said she should have wrapped that rosary around the nun’s neck. Afterwards she added that she wasn’t scared of a son of a bitch living and wasn’t scared to die. As we were living so near the notoriously dangerous Columbia Avenue, it was just as well.
It was another war cry to help her carry on. No doubt she’d seen enough injustices in her time so that even the featherweight significance of my little scrape jostled her memory and gave her a renewed excuse to convey her exasperation. But none of this stopped Edna singing ‘If I Knew You Were Coming I’d’ve Baked A Cake’.
She sat next to her big double bed where I took my afternoon naps and stroked my temple, careful not to scratch me with her long fingernails, till I’d fallen asleep. To this day I don’t know why the stolen kiss upset me so much. Edna said that anybody with the common sense they were born with could see that ‘it was wrong to let that boy think that he could “kiss on you” and get away with it’. Her conclusion was that Sister must have lost her mind.
In spite of all my grandmother’s comforting, Sister’s reaction to the incident confused me temporarily. Did I have a right to defend myself when I felt it was necessary? Being taunted by a couple of bullies put me back on the right track soon enough. I guess you could say self-defence came naturally.
But the stolen-kiss episode was a turning point for me. I’d obviously lost my halo at St Elizabeth’s after that. I endured the ruler punishment for the second time when a priest who’d come into my classroom claimed that I switched down the aisle when I was returning to my seat. ‘Switching’ was a term used for swinging your bum from side to side when you walked – the swagger of a sassy woman. The priest gave me a chance to walk down the aisle again, and when he said that I was still doing it, I was recalled to the front and punished in front of the whole class. The whack of the ruler on my outstretched palms wasn’t nearly as torturous as the teasing I got for it in the playground.
Not long after this humiliation, Mother Superior found me with my hands in the sink when she checked the girls’ lavatory on one of her rounds. Although I tried to explain that I was only washing my hands as my mother insisted that I must, Mother Superior hit me for playing in water when I was supposed to be using the toilet.
Like a criminal with a record, suddenly I became a suspect on other counts: guilty until proven innocent, which is how kids were usually treated on the reservation. Need I say that these false accusations by the holy purveyors of Catholicism made me suspicious of them and their teaching? They already looked pretty ominous in all that black and what with the stories circulating in the playground that the nuns shaved their heads (which I had earlier been willing to discount), I became a most reluctant Catholic. I enjoyed reciting a couple of the prayers, the ‘Hail Mary’ and the ‘Hail Holy Queen’, and continued to think that the picture of Mary and the statues of her with her baby were very nice, but I stopped believing in the priests and nuns, because they couldn’t be trusted. This was one child that the Catholic faith managed to lose by the age of five.
One of the saving graces of being so young was that no emotional injuries seemed to absorb me for very long. Unfortunately they probably burrowed themselves into the deep dark crevices of my brain.
The streets imposed a greater fear than the church. My instinct to defend myself came back fortified. ‘Take no shit’ is a policy that dies hard. I couldn’t stop being Goody Two-Shoes, though, because I enjoyed the role too much. And I can’t say that I was ever tempted to get up to more devilment at this stage than to use one of my grandmother’s elastic garters as a slingshot. It never crossed my mind to talk back to my elders, engrave PUSSY or FUCK on a school lavatory door, spit, or even take advantage of somebody smaller than me, although these were among the shenanigans that went on around me. I posed fearlessly in the face of threats and attacks but still tried to act like a lady most of the time for my mother’s benefit, if not for my own.
My mother made sure that all her children could read and write before we went to school. This was handy, because there were other important things to take in during out last year on 23rd Street: the sights and sounds of people struggling to stay on top of life while there was too little of everything from hope to money and living space. I won’t say that fear and frustration bring out the best in people or make them the nicest neighbours, but there was a lot to be learned from them.
The social isolation of the reservation was broken by an electrical device introducing the world outside, the other America where my mother and aunt worked each day. This device instantly became my best friend. Like my grandmother, it was always available. Television turned our sparse kitchen into an entertainment centre.
My family always laughed a lot anyway, and television gave us one thing after another to hoot about and something like a home fire to gather around in the evening. Whenever someone clicked the big right-hand knob that turned it on, we’d end up laughing. Everybody on it was white and really quite nice. They were always smiling when they told you about Bayer aspirins or Bromo Seltzer. People talked, sang and danced, and always wore lovely outfits and costumes.
I had enjoyed occasional visits from friends of Edna’s: Miss Ossie and Miss Deet, Miss Ophelia and Miss Myrtle, whose gold front tooth gleamed when she flashed me a smile. I was usually allowed to sit and listen to them chewing the fat at the white enamelled kitchen table. Miss Ophelia was my favourite, with her steel-grey hair pulled back severely in a chignon like Edna’s. But these visitors, who turned our kitchen into a parlour, couldn’t compete with television. Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson dancing a duet, Tom Mix or Hoot Gibson in a shoot-out, Gene Autry – the Singing cowboy – Kukla, Fran and Ollie, which was my favourite puppet show, and the cat-and-mouse cartoons changed life in our kitchen.
Outside, the streets remained the same.
4 INFANT DIPLOMACY (#ulink_c348de7f-b23d-543c-ae04-97d8fcb4b1ae)
Finally closing the door on those two rooms was not a sentimental experience for any of the family, but some of my sweetest early childhood memories will always be locked there, like the sight of my father in a soft lamplight as he showed me how to draw a ship with sails. That evening wasn’t diminished by our four barren walls. Once I looked out of our window and saw the Oscar Mayer man in his delivery van which was shaped like a hot dog. It pulled up outside Max Bender’s and parked there long enough for me to run down and get a close look at it with all the other children. For that moment, 23rd Street might have been a fantasy island. And I can still picture the store at the bad end of the street with a jukebox that played ‘The Glory Of Love’ for one nickel. For the pleasure it brought it could have been a corner of the ballroom in High Society. Still, the idea of us living in a house by ourselves made goodbye easy.
When we moved to Germantown in 1951, we only took the new television and my grandmother’s bedroom suite. My mother had hoped that she was leaving everything else behind – the cussing and swearing, the thugs on the street corners. She was even letting us off the harsh discipline of Catholic School.
Germantown is a district of Philadelphia that was originally settled 300 years ago by thirteen Quaker and Mennonite families from Krefeld, Germany. In those days it was 5700 acres of land to the northeast of Philadelphia. It was divided by an Indian trail which remains its main thoroughfare, Germantown Avenue. Who knows what happened to the amiable Indians? Like fallen leaves, they disappeared without mention or trace.
The Krefelders and their leader, Francis Daniel Pastorious, an aristocrat and scholar, were part of William Penn’s ‘holy experiment’. These Krefelders made the first public protest against slavery in 1688 when they declared that all human beings had the right to live as free men. At the time, this was considered too radical to be readily accepted by the Quakers.
For generations the community remained German. Both the Bible and a newspaper were printed there in German. The district didn’t begin to attract the English until 1750, when William Allen, the chief justice of Pennsylvania, built his country seat there, Mount Airy. As more English followed him, English architecture merged with German into a specific style called Anglo-German. The district was considered a German township until about 1830, when the English became dominant, setting up their own press and linking Germantown to Philadelphia by train. For the next hundred or so years, right up to the Second World War, Germantown was one of the more fashionable districts of Philadelphia.
By the time my family moved in, there were too many Melangians in the district for it to be considered fashionable any more. It wasn’t unusual in the summer months to hear the watermelon man hawking his wares in the street, selling watermelons for 25 cents or five cantaloupes for a dollar from his open-back pick-up truck. But some of the early historic residences and the Market Square with its Civil War monument were still standing, maintained by the Germantown Historical Society. They made impressions on me as permanent as 23rd Street. Germantown still had a decidedly German and English feeling about it. I didn’t know to what extent at the time.
Our small seven-room terraced house with a front and back garden made an immense difference to our lives.
To help my grandmother plant our first garden was to discover with great pride that she knew the names of the flowers and trees and how to tend the earth and things that grew from it. Marigolds and dahlias, hollyhocks and morning glories sprouted, and I checked their growth each day with awe and anticipation. She planted some seeds for me that would grow into cobs of corn for popping, so the packet said. I can’t remember if they did. She even bought the almanac to study planting times, but I discovered to my horror that her interest in what the moon and stars were doing was mostly astrological.
With her garden and her new sewing machine, Edna was nearly too busy for bad talk.
Our neighbours two doors away kept full-grown chickens in their back yard. Fluffy, our new cat, was often foolhardy enough to slip into their yard in the hope of a kill. He invariably returned pecked and injured, but he wouldn’t learn. Once he arrived home so much the worse for one of these chicken attacks that he succumbed to letting me bandage him and put him in my doll carriage to cart him about for an entire weekend.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but recently when I looked at a street map of Philadelphia, I noticed that North Philly couldn’t have been more than a twenty-minute trolley ride away from us, yet I don’t remember any one of us making the effort to go back.
There were a few odd characters in the neighbourhood, like Jet, the local hobo. He had a layer of grey whiskers covering his dark-brown skin, and his dishevelled clothes were various tones of grey, ill-fitting and dirty. He always wore a jacket and a brimmed hat as a formality, even in the hottest weather. He looked a mess. Some afternoons I’d see him shuffle along the street dragging his feet (the way Edna told us not to walk). His mangy-looking, nameless old dog was never far behind. They always moved at a deadly slow pace down the middle of the street, not on the sidewalk. He had a reputation for being regularly drunk, but I was afraid to get close enough to smell liquor on him. I used to run up to the porch and stand near the front door if I saw him coming up the street, more afraid of catching his dog’s mange than I was of Jet.
For me, the new thrill was to be allowed to play regularly with other children on the block. On 23rd Street, my mother had to be so particular about our playmates that we nearly only had each other. With Pam and Dennis at school all day, Edna was my best friend, even though I could tell when they came home that Pam was her favourite. I like to believe that it was because Pam was the first grandchild, but I suspected that it was also because Pam was beautiful with jet-black wavy hair and slanted chestnut-brown eyes. She was quiet and read most of the time, but I could never tell whether her passion for books was her own or her way of satisfying my mother’s ambition for us to excel at school.
Despite being Melangian, Ikey was the perfect Jewish mother. She didn’t feed us matzos but she was clannish, ambitious, competitive, guilt-provoking, adored her children and believed that a Ph.D. was the be-all and end-all of life.
I didn’t find this too hard to live with and was under less pressure than Pam to succeed, as she was the eldest. The four years’ difference in our ages meant that we never managed to be at the same school at the same time after St Elizabeth’s. She’d always graduated or moved on before I started a school, leaving a dazzling record behind her. When trouble started for her at school in Germantown, I wasn’t around to give her either help or moral support. The streets were littered with enough ammunition for me to have helped her stave off an attack even if I was too little to be of much use otherwise. I am ashamed to say that I considered sticks and stones and bricks fair play if the odds were stacked against me. It was my mother who taught us this line of defence in spite of all her talk about being dignified and ladylike.
In the early fifties, Germantown wasn’t generally rough like North Philly but it had its bad elements, who decided to make my sister their object of torment and agitation because she was pretty. At ten she wasn’t expected to defend herself against a gang of rowdy girls and had to be escorted back and forth to school until finally the police were called in.
I’d like to think that we Melangians have stopped persecuting our own for looking too African or not African enough. Appearance even had the potential to divide family loyalties.
It pains me to think of how often Pam suffered for being too pretty and too brainy. Her years on the reservation and certainly in Germantown were harsher than mine and, no doubt, if she gave you her version of our family’s life, it would be quite a different picture. Pam neither bothered anybody nor had that early lust for the mirror or physical praise which would have given her airs to make other girls dislike her. Maybe the fact that she got the answers right all the time provoked them. I couldn’t think why else they wanted to hurt her.
I don’t know if anybody realized how much her victimization troubled me, but I kept my worry to myself and daydreamed that I was Wonder Woman and Supergirl rolled into one, on hand to swoop down from the tallest building to destroy all the ruffians when they taunted her. Of course, I also needed to plan what to do if they attacked me.
At six, I was not at all pretty. I doubt that every time my mother looked at me, she wanted to send me back, but I was not the least bit exceptional-looking. I had a big space between my two front teeth, and eyes so dark that they merely reflected the light bulb when I was asked to hold them up to the light to have their colour checked. My hair was so unfortunately thick that my mother had to divide it into three sections which she then braided. The braid on top was wound into a bun and pinned down to keep it from dangling in my face. The hairpins usually felt as if they were sticking right into my brain, and I yearned for thin hair and only two braids, although this was not the sort of vanity that I would have been allowed to express.
Soon after we moved in, two of my new friends and I were playing at dressing up on a rainy afternoon. They were wearing high heels; I only put on some rouge and pinned my two loose braids up with the one on top so that it looked like an upsweep. As soon as the rain stopped, we paraded ourselves to the corner store to buy some penny candy. The air was scented with that delicious city smell of wet tarmac blending with the sweet smell of wet grass after a summer shower. We passed an old man sitting on a low porch, rocking slowly, his hat pulled down so that his face hardly showed. A woman was standing at the screen door and I heard him say to her how nice we looked and add that the one with the braids on top of her head looked just like Doris Day.
I wasn’t allowed to acknowledge strange men, so I kept walking and acted as though I hadn’t heard him. Doris Day. One of the other girls repeated what he’d said when we were out of earshot. Trying to be nonchalant, I cocked my head to the side and looked straight ahead of me. Doris Day. I would have preferred it if he’d said Jane Russell, but Doris Day would do. I wasn’t sure I’d look so much like her without the rouge.
Nobody could have conceived that my face would sneak its way onto a magazine cover. Anyhow, at that time Melangian girls didn’t appear on any covers but Ebony and Jet, the Melangian magazines. If I’d heard my mother say it once, I’d heard her repeat a thousand times that ‘looks will get you nowhere’. This seemed to contradict what little of life I’d observed, but maybe it was her way of making me feel less inadequate and it supported her conviction that college was our only hope of a good career. One thing was obvious, if being pretty attracted troublemakers, it was a quality hardly worth having and dangerous to flaunt if you did (as well as cheap, which was Edna’s final verdict on the subject). ‘Pretty is as pretty does,’ she stated.
I was about to lose Edna’s daily dose of homilies because as soon as I attended school for a full day, she got a job working for an Italian family who operated the local bakery. She probably got the job to help pay for the new fittings and furniture in every room. I knew better than to ask how we afforded it all, because it would have been considered none of my business and rude to enquire.
John Wister Elementary School was a three-storey brick building on Bringhurst Street not far from Germantown Avenue. It was a hundred years old and a big fuss was made over its wooden floors because they were the originals. John Wister was one of the early German settlers, and I was a very lucky girl, the principal told my mother before she carted me off to Miss Courtney’s class, to start first grade at a school that was so steeped in history. I was given my very own desk which had a sunken ink well, although we could only write in pencil. The desks were in rows with each attached to the bench in front and held together and supported by elaborate ironmongery. The writing surface was the hinged lid of an oblong wooden box so that you could lift it up and put your things inside. I was seated near Miss Courtney in the front of the room and though I dared not turn round to stare, I could have sworn that all the other children were white. Thank God I’d been watching a lot of television and knew how to act.
Television carted me off to places I had never dreamed existed. It took for granted that I was ready to share experiences quite foreign to my own. Mainly, it exposed those other Americans to me, the ones who didn’t live on the reservations. In 1952 the only ways that Melangians had of becoming familiar with white behaviour was by working with or for whites and by seeing movies and watching TV.
To me, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo and Fred and Ethel Mertz on the I Love Lucy show, Ralph, Alice, Trixie and Ed on The Honeymooners or George Burns and Gracie Allen were like neighbours I visited once a week. I saw what they did at breakfast or sat in their living room and overheard their conversations. Where else and how else could this have happened? While Max Bender and other white shopkeepers might have been genuinely cordial and exchanged a few niceties with a regular customer, I knew nothing about how people like Max lived or what he’d say to his wife. Radio and motion pictures didn’t give us a regular enough dose of exposure to create the familiarity, the insider’s view, that television gave us.
As liberal as Harry Truman was with his bills for public housing, socialized medicine, education as a federal, not a state, issue and his civil rights policy, there was never any suggestion that the races should mix socially. The GI Bill restored the interrupted education of men like my father and gave equal pensions to all Americans who had fought the war together, but nobody assumed that total integration would follow. Racial separation is part of American culture.
At six I wasn’t aware of this, but I was soon aware that many children in my class had never talked to a Melangian before and some of them definitely didn’t want to. Although John Wister school was close to our house, it was just beyond our local school-district boundary. Ikey got me enrolled there anyway. For the majority of my classmates and teachers, I might have been a visiting diplomat representing my whole race, because I soon learned that what I said and did was a reflection on other Melangians and if my classmates were going to overcome their assumption that they weren’t as clean, as good or as clever, the onus was on me. For a six-year-old this is a heavy burden, but on instructions from home I did what I could to be my best self and come first in all things.
In spite of this and of being called nigger and other such names when it suited somebody, I did love my school and most of what went with it, whether it was history or social studies, spinster teachers or spelling bees. There was always some national hero’s birthday or some impending holiday that gave us another excuse to hang up our pictures and create a display. Washington, Lincoln, Easter bunnies, Hallowe’en witches, Thanksgiving pilgrims, Christmas angels, fire-prevention week, keep-your-city-clean week, brotherly-love week. There was always something to celebrate and I wanted to be there.
I never felt as wonderful by the time I got to the school gate as I’d thought I was when I left home, and I was always uncertain if anybody would be brave enough to play with me in the school yard before the morning bell. I may have been the teacher’s pet, but my classmates were still wary of me before they’d have a few hours to get used to me in class. By recess, it was usually OK, and if it wasn’t, I’d stroll around with the teacher. Mainly, it taught me how to stand alone.
In 1952 when General Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson were running for president, I overheard talk in the house that the Republicans were terrible and would bring a lot of hardship, but almost all the children in my class wore I LIKE IKE buttons to show that their parents were voting for him and his running mate, Richard Nixon. Being for Stevenson set me apart.
I didn’t know much about the Republicans except that I’d heard they’d have us selling apples on the street corner. My mother bought me a grey jacket after the election which she said was an Eisenhower jacket. It nipped in at the waist and was of corduroy. It was a catastrophe and nearly made my life miserable, because it didn’t look a bit like anybody else’s jacket at school. I had enough trouble without it. Eisenhower had been a general, so I guess it was based on some army jacket of his.
Life seemed unaffected after Ike had won. I didn’t have to sell apples, and he didn’t make us go to school on Saturday, which was the other rumour I’d heard. Things at school were different but it had nothing to do with politics. I was often singled out to do special things like deliver a folded message to the principal, pass out the milk or read out loud when visitors came into our classroom. This made my classmates like me better. So, when Miss Courtney asked us to take a partner to file out in pairs holding hands, which we did going to assembly, recess or in fire drill, I no longer needed to pretend that it didn’t matter that nobody wanted to hold my hand. I had a couple of friends. Even walking into the school yard in the morning ceased to be a crisis in my school life.
Playing with these friends was easier when I spoke with the tone and rhythm of their speech, which was slightly different from mine and much higher pitched. I imitated their manners, too, their giggles and walk and the way they cocked their heads. I don’t think I did it consciously, it just happened. At close range, I could hear their drummer and marched to their beat. As soon as I got home, I’d automatically revert to the old me. I spoke the way I was spoken to, and my thinking and body language accommodated my speech.
It was the beginning of a pattern, because at six, I led two lives which required two separate personalities. It wasn’t a game or an act, though, it was more like a function. I lived between two nations – one Melangian and one American – and I adjusted to each.
During my first Christmas season at John Wister school I participated in the annual carol-singing at Grumblethorpe. Grumblethorpe was a house four blocks from school at 5267 Germantown Avenue, built by John Wister in 1744. (The year Johann Würster emigrated from a town near Heidelberg, Germany, he was nineteen and broke. Johann became a successful wine importer, anglicized his name and built a large summer house in Germantown. The three-storey house was originally known as Wister’s Big House but John’s grandson named the house Grumblethorpe after an English manor he’d read about in a novel. It has been refurbished to look as it did when John Wister and his family lived there.)
We sang our carols in the big front room. The blinds were drawn, so that the flickering light from the candles and the smell of Christmas pine and evergreens had a strange awesome effect, especially on a kid who’d not long been free of 23rd Street. I’d never seen anything like it and was dumbstruck.
Even though it was grand, Grumblethorpe was marked by Quaker simplicity. After carolling, we were shown around it in our usual file, holding hands in two lines. Our freshly shined shoes pattering across the floorboards made the only sound. We dared not whisper or touch the four-poster bed or the grandfather clocks. The drop-leaf tables and wooden chairs were less of a temptation. It looked as if nobody had sat in the winged armchair by the fireplace or eaten at the refectory table. The pastel-coloured walls were so quiet we were scared to cough.
Before we left, a white-haired lady chatted to us and gave us each a mug of hot chocolate with a marshmallow floating on the top. Another, similar lady passed out home-made Christmas cookies. I had never had chocolate to drink before. I stood as still as I could and was very glad my mother had put my hair in two ponytails even though I still had that silly braid on top. Edna had starched my grey and white dress which had a separate pinafore. The stillness there had a profound effect on me.
We had to walk past Grumblethorpe to get to the Band Box Theater, which wasn’t a theatre, it was a cinema. Dennis and Pam and I were allowed to go most Saturday afternoons. A few times I went with Dennis by myself and we’d sit in the back row and stuff ourselves with buttered popcorn, Jujy fruits and Neco wafers, which seemed more the purpose of going than the movie. I always felt safe when Dennis was with me, because apart from the fact that the bad boys liked him, he was bigger than most kids his age and looked like the sort of boy you shouldn’t mess with. I don’t recall that anyone ever did.
Dennis loved the movies and comic books, and after we got a record player, he used most of his allowance to buy records. One of his favourite TV shows was Amos ‘n Andy, which my mother thought should have been taken off the air for depicting ‘Negroes’ as ignorant. My brother used to provoke her by imitating the actors as soon as the programme ended. Dennis would pull faces, roll his eyes and speak an exaggerated Melangian dialect. Finally we were all banned from watching the show, but we loved Amos ‘n Andy so we would sneak and watch it anyway. He’d turn the volume down and I’d guard the door for him. The telly was in the back room on the second floor so it was easy to get away with this.
There were hardly any Melangians on TV other than the cast of Amos ‘n Andy and boxers like Sugar Ray Robinson. Once Richard Boone, who played the main doctor in a weekly hospital series called The Medic, had to treat a little Melangian girl. We all screamed with shock when she came on the screen. We’d never seen one of us in a television drama. Even the most regular police series, Dragnet, didn’t have one Melangian criminal. There was a character called Rochester on the Jack Benny show, but it was very rare to see us on TV unless singing and dancing.
Our first major media star came through on the news in 1953. Her name was Autherine Lucy. She was a young woman who wanted so much to be free to study at the college of her choice that she took on the whole city of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and finally the whole goddamn United States government so that President Eisenhower had no choice but to send her an army. I don’t know why there aren’t statues of her. She was our very own Joan of Arc and to see her on the television screen facing an avalanche of rednecks was unforgettable. For weeks after her appearance, our radio and television seemed to be tuned to nothing but newscasts from the moment Edna, Thelma or Ikey came home from work. Melangian neighbours who normally only exchanged hellos had a lot to talk to each other about.
I was stunned to see the hundreds of agitators jeering and spitting and name-calling while Autherine faced them. She never looked as if she was in a hurry; when the camera panned across her face she seemed neither angry nor anxious. She had that look of patience someone has when waiting for a bus they know is coming.
A couple of times since, when I’ve been up against bewildering odds and felt fear creeping up on me or dared feel sorry for myself, I’ve only had to think of Autherine facing the mob to put things in proper perspective.
As far as I could see, there was nothing uncommon about Autherine except her courage. The fact that she looked like most other girls of her age that ambled around the reservation on a Saturday afternoon made her confrontation all the more shocking. It could have been any one of us standing in her shoes when what looked like the whole city of Tuscaloosa was determined to keep her from entering the doors of a school which our taxes helped to keep open.
While this compelling national school drama played out, I’d start each school day like millions of American children by standing at attention after the bell rang to salute the flag. Led by the teachers, I’d recite the pledge with the whole class just as I’d been doing since my first day at school. I could say it in my sleep:
I pledge allegiance to the flag
of the United States of America
and to the republic for which it stands,
one nation* (#ulink_40dec0d0-6f8b-512d-817d-a0ae3bf90e95), invisible,
with liberty and justice for all.
Then we’d sit down and a passage was read from the Bible. I don’t know how old I was before I realized ‘invisible’ was supposed to be ‘indivisible’.
To salute you placed your right hand on your heart, although I was never sure I’d found my heart. The pledge said things that I knew weren’t true once I’d seen Autherine Lucy and heard all the talk at home about what rights we didn’t have.
I hoped nobody at school would ask what I thought about the Autherine thing because I wasn’t allowed to lie. The teacher usually asked our opinions about current events, but I could tell from the way nobody mentioned Autherine in class that it was something we could not talk about. Patriotism was running too high to challenge it. America was like God. People believed in it.
When I discovered there was no Santa Claus, I think I cried. Part of my hurt was being robbed of my favourite myth and the rest was realizing that I had believed with all my might in something that older people knew all along was fake. I remember being told that since younger kids still needed to believe in Santa, I wasn’t to tell them he didn’t exist. I became an accessory to promoting a continuing myth and assumed I was doing the littler kids a favour by letting them believe a bit longer.
The same applies after I realized we’d been pledging ourselves to a myth about America. Obviously nobody wanted to deal with the truth, so as a child of eight I became an accessory, never exposing the deception, which everybody needed to go on believing in.
* (#ulink_fb7f0db5-1a9d-5e96-b583-930aacfb9101)The words ‘under God’ were added by act of Congress in 1954.
5 MOUNT AIRY AND CHESTNUT HILL (#ulink_96bf74cd-dfff-5532-ae7b-7844b270988b)
John Wister school mysteriously caught fire one Sunday night when I was in the second half of second grade, and I never went back there. I was bused to another school for quite some time.
Gradually the rougher elements became the majority in Germantown. Crap-shooters monopolized a corner of the street where we had to walk past them to the neighbourhood store. Some of them used to make passes at Ikey and Thelma. My mother was unnerved and called them gangsters. Edna called them riffraff and dared them to lay their hands on her. I suppose they were jobless as they were always there, throwing dice, calling bets and making idle threats to each other. ‘Gimme a double, sir.’ ‘Come on baby, come on.’ ‘A five and a four.’ ‘Double or nothin’.’ ‘Take yo’ hands off the dice. I’ll shoot yo’ ass.’ ‘You jive-ass mothafucka.’ We could hear them halfway up the block.
Late one afternoon when Ikey and I were coming home from Charlie Chernoff’s grocery store, all of a sudden a couple of police cars swerved up to the corner. As the police spilled out on the sidewalk, there was a melee and a shot was fired. It was like something straight out of the movies and I was scared nearly to death by the guns going off. But no one was hurt and I never found out who fired.
After my father’s medical tenure at Boston State Hospital, he came to visit with his youngest brother, Ernest, and I was more worried about the two of them walking around the neighbourhood than I was about Edna, Thelma and Ikey. My father was so gentle. His soft voice always made me feel he needed protecting, whereas I imagined only a fool would dare lay hands on one of my mothers, who each had a wild temper.
The summer Blair and Ernest came to visit us in Germantown is the summer I remember there best. To sit next to him or pass him on the stairs was nearly too exciting. This was less because I had missed my father than because men rarely crossed our doorstep. Aside from the insurance broker who made a regular Friday collection of my grandmother’s insurance premium, a couple of doctors making house calls when we were too sick to go to their surgeries, and a friend of Thelma’s who took us on a family outing once to Bear Mountain, I can’t remember men coming to our house. In those days respectable women didn’t receive callers as they would today. In the 1940s and 1950s when I was growing up, the social and sexual role of women was entirely different. There was no parade of ‘uncles’ trooping through. The only uncles I had were blood relations like Henry, and he only made one whirlwind visit to see us after the Korean War ended before he moved to California.
Both Blair and Ernest had marked Bostonian accents. A Bostonian accent in the fifties was equivalent in American to speaking the Queen’s English in England. It held a class distinction as much as anything else. For some reason a Bostonian accent implied that you were educated, cultured and well bred.
Blair didn’t act as if he was at all impressed with himself, though. He made jokes which I didn’t understand but I laughed all the same, following him about like our puppy followed me. When he arrived he’d brought us each a Timex watch and a pair of turquoise slippers with bronco riders printed on them. He might just as well have given me diamonds.
He had a big grey Studebaker parked in front of the house behind our grey 1950 Chevrolet. I hated to see him go outside the front gate, because I thought it was dangerous and couldn’t conceive that somebody who never raised his voice could deal with danger. He’d been in the war, but fighting with guns I didn’t imagine had anything to do with ferocious street combat.
I adored my uncle Ernest and thought he looked like Louis Jourdan, whom I’d seen in a movie at the Band Box. My father had never brought him before. Ernest was young and would scramble about on the floor, demonstrating some of his war skirmishes, showing how he pulled out his trusty sword when the Japanese attacked. I never believed that they used swords in the Second World War but I didn’t tell him. To look out from the kitchen window and see him lazing in the blue hammock near the fat heads of Edna’s orange and yellow marigolds made me wish he would marry Thelma.
Blair and Ernest took us to Valley Forge so that we could see where George Washington engineered America’s victory against King George’s army. Then they rushed back to their studies. Blair was already specializing in psychiatry. Ernest still had to pass his Massachusetts bar exam to qualify as a lawyer. I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to have a father living in the house all the time.
By Blair’s next visit, we had moved to Mount Airy, which is the district beyond Germantown Avenue. In the late eighteenth century it originally attracted wealthy families who built country seats there, like Upsala, owned by the Johnson family descended from a German, Dirk Jensen, one of the original Krefelders who settled in the district. Like Cliveden House opposite Upsala, these local landmarks were always there to recall the past, those early European settlers and their struggle for freedom. The old buildings looked odd in a neighbourhood of 1930s terraced houses.
Cliveden House at 6401 Germantown Avenue was built between 1763 and 1767 and was turned into a fortress in 1777 during the Battle of Germantown when British soldiers used it to stave off George Washington’s advancing troops.
I walked around the Cliveden House gardens when I went back in the summer of 1985. This English-looking estate occupies an entire city block of a Melangian urban community. The design of the façade of this mid-Georgian house was based on an engraving entitled ‘A View of the Palace at Kew from the Lawn’, published in London in the Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle in 1763.
Edna, Thelma and Ikey continued to work as they did throughout my childhood and Blair sent regular contributions. As much as anything, I think that they willed our progressive moves which always bettered our circumstances and improved the environments that we were growing up in. Like the move from 23rd Street to Germantown, the move to Mount Airy when I was nine made a great improvement in our lives. There were trees and tended hedges everywhere and the nearly new apartment complex across the road had the lawn mown regularly. My mother liked the neighbours and the neighbourhood. It was peaceful and the Melangian families thereabouts were as concerned about their children and their children’s education as my mother was.
I was given more freedom when I started at John Story Jenks school in Chestnut Hill, and even though the Melangian children there could be counted on two hands, my classmates weren’t reluctant to be friendly. There were many Quaker children in the school. That breath of freedom came in the nick of time, because the discipline imposed by my family in addition to the fear invoked on the streets had been inhibiting. Street life was pretty convincing proof that my mother was right – a dignified academic career was the safest future. At nine, I clung like my sister and brother to the notion that I would go into medicine like my father and therefore tried to maintain a high standard in my school work, whatever temptations I came across.
I remember the first time I was asked to write my father’s occupation on a form at Jenks. I was confident that I could spell psychiatrist correctly. The teacher was more impressed with his occupation than my spelling and, like others then and since, she probably assumed that my home life reflected his professional rank. (In America, doctors make money. I was surprised when I came to London to discover that National Health doctors have the medical title but not the bank balance of their American counterpart.) I was a psychiatrist’s daughter and this gave people the wrong idea about my family’s income.
Times were visibly changing for Melangians in spite of the fact that Eisenhower made political apathy seem somehow respectable. The civil rights issue was like an eggshell that cracked after the Autherine Lucy case and segregation gradually continued to be challenged legally in the South and socially in the North, where habits rather than laws kept us isolated. Professional Melangian families moved to better neighbourhoods, although their white neighbours would make conspicuous attempts to keep them out and often moved out themselves if they failed.
As residential white areas got a few black families, the public school serving the vicinity reflected the neighbourhood’s mix, and a school like Jenks would end up with ten or twenty Melangian children from upper-middle-class Melangian households. Even though Jenks was still a predominantly white school, I think it was relieved to have a token number of Melangian kids because this showed it to be participating in a developing mood among liberal Americans that it was time to be nice to ‘Negroes’. People were getting more prosperous and more generous.
When I started at Jenks in the third grade, I made friends instantly with two little open-air girls who were top of the class and didn’t mind my competition. They befriended me in the classroom and never pretended not to see me in the school yard. They dragged me along to their Brownie meetings and had me join their ballet class, though I didn’t feel welcome there. They asked me to be part of their secret club, which was actually only the three of us. They were no less than best friends who invited me to their houses after school for tea, although they never came to mine. We did everything together except that I couldn’t join them in their violin recitals. I never understood why they called their mothers ‘Mummy’ instead of ‘Mommy’. I thought it was because they were Quakers. I tried to understand and imitate every nuance of their behaviour when I was with them. They spoke more precisely than my friends at Wister school. Soon I could talk exactly like them and I learned to find the humour in what they thought was funny, although it usually was corny.
Behind the surface of my polished manners of ‘excuse me, please’, ‘I beg your pardon’ and ‘no, thank you’ to virtually everything that was offered, there was a fanciful little girl who still knew the difference between a knife scar and a razor scar and was proud of knowing how to watch out for more than just the cars. But there was no need for my acquired street instinct at Jenks and no threats or fears lined the path to my house. The 23 trolley car picked me up from the corner of Southampton Avenue to cart me home in time for The Mickey Mouse Club and Rin Tin Tin on television.
Chestnut Hill was a solid white Anglo-Saxon Protestant community. The trees grew tall. The parks were beautiful. And the sun always seemed brighter there when I got off the trolley car. It was my neighbourhood during the school day.
Mount Airy didn’t feel graced like Chestnut Hill and didn’t have the village character of Germantown. The section we lived in near Mount Pleasant Avenue was very orderly with two-storey brick houses and canopied porches that displayed small flowerbeds and trimmed dark-green hedges. The big street-cleaning truck came once a week to spray the streets down. The neighbourhood looked well-tended but nondescript with block after block of these terraced houses, rather like certain areas of north London or north Manchester.
Occasionally, a kid pedalled down the sidewalk on a glossy two-wheeler bicycle or some toothless, brown-skinned, seven-year-old cowboys would bang-bang their way around a parked car. But there was never a baseball game played in the middle of the street and no one thought that opening a fire hydrant to let the water flood the street until the fire department came was a prodigious way to while away an evening. Dogs didn’t dawdle unleased on the streets, and no fathead alley cats whined away the nights.
The number 23 trolley-car depot was a block beyond our house on the other side of the road, and when we first moved to Musgrave Street, you couldn’t help noticing the rattle of the trolley cars on the track as they passed with their pole crackling against the overhead line. But this sound merely broke the silence. It didn’t disturb the peace.
Our family nearly belonged. Pam was openly admired for her studious appearance when she rushed off early to school first thing, looking as if her mind was on algebra instead of boys. She’d be wearing her new glasses and clutching her briefcase, which was always stuffed and overflowing with books and homework. She’d started at the Philadelphia High School for Girls at 17th Street and Spring Garden, which admitted girls from throughout the city on the basis of outstanding academic achievement. Pam studied the bass violin, and on Saturday morning she and Dennis went to special art classes that were given to children selected from all over Philadelphia who had exceptional artistic talent. I was just as proud of them as Edna, Ikey and Thelma were.
Once Edna had started her new job, at a factory that made children’s dresses, I was transformed from being starched and presentable to being ‘turned out’. I’d like to claim that I wasn’t made vain, merely extra confident in a wardrobe finer than anybody else’s at school. Edna bought me each new model that came off the factory floor.
Ikey was in her element working at the local library as a librarian. She walked home through rain and snow and once through a hurricane with her arms full of books for us, which gave her a reason to write her own poems and read other people’s, and I could get a reading of ‘Invictus’, ‘Crossing the Bar’ or ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ any time I wanted. They were my favourites, though neither my mother nor I knew that ‘gaol’ was pronounced ‘jail’.
Thelma remained our sweet unselfish aunt who cared about Ikey’s children as though they were her own. She enhanced her good looks to the fullest each morning with a little help from Maybelline cake mascara, a trace of eyebrow pencil and rouge with a hint of dark-red lipstick to finish it all off. She and Ikey wore straight skirts with cinched belts and stilettos that you could hear click-click-clicking on the cobblestone street in front of our house as Thelma returned from work around 5.30 pm. It was no wonder that she and Ikey got an intolerable dose of whistles, especially during the summer months.
I was free to bang the screen door going and coming with a shout to name which neighbour I was rushing off to visit. My personality still changed between home and school. The two environments were separate but equal in my head and heart.
We were a strange family in some ways, compared to the people on television. Love was not a thing we discussed. Though we liked each other, we didn’t call each other ‘darling’ and no one asked if you’d slept well when you stumbled down to the kitchen for a bowl of hominy grits or a fried egg. Sometimes we’d have a family pow-wow and decide that new resolutions were called for to make us practise at home on each other some of the good manners we exhibited outside. We could manage to adhere to the new rules for about a week, not raising our voices to each other, or speaking an unkind word, or leaping like Tarzan from the fourth stair into the living room.
There was a collection box to hold the penalty of a penny to be paid any time you used bad language or incorrect English or spoke dialect. It was always chock-full at the end of the week and went to the person who’d made the fewest faux-pas. My grandmother never played …
There was a certain amount of democracy in our house, although hard and fast rules for the children like no cursing were never allowed to be broken. There was an assumption that we had as much right to an opinion and a vote in matters as the women. The word fair was used a lot, perhaps too much. It only confused me into thinking that life was going to be fair.
Television continued to be my teacher. Family sitcoms like Ozzic and Harriet and Father Knows Best not only kept me amused, they made me informed and aware of things that I was not exposed to through my own experience. For instance, women on the television were always crying, but I don’t remember seeing my mother or grandmother cry through my childhood. For any upsets other than physical injuries, we were invariably told to ‘save the tears’. It was almost a relief to fall down and skin a knee, because I could wail the house down without the least reproach.
One of the things that set us apart from other kids in the neighbourhood is that we weren’t beaten. Even though people didn’t yell out of the windows in Mount Airy or curse each other so that it could be heard by passers-by, we often overheard the parental threat of the strap or the belt and the screams and cries that resulted from such punishment, which my mother considered uncivilized and inhumane. We were never punished in this way and were thought lucky by kids who were. Edna would threaten us with the strap if we incensed her while my mother was out, but it fell on deaf ears, even if she stomped off as far as the back yard to pull a switch from the stinkwood tree.
We couldn’t afford holidays, but I didn’t feel that we were missing much, and at that time, family holidays weren’t considered a necessity and planned with the feverish intensity that they are today. We had the odd day trip to Atlantic City or the Catskill Mountains, which broke the monotony. That we’d been somewhere and seen something was enough when school started and we had to write about our vacation. At Christmas we got enough presents to entertain us until a birthday brought some more. Most of the family’s birthdays fell within a week of each other in the spring.
Apart from these minor deviations, we carried on like a lot of other families. We were just noisier. Mornings were absolute chaos. Any kitchen would be busy in the morning with a family of six, but when three of them are women, there’s never enough space and our kitchen wasn’t particularly large. The radio didn’t blare as loudly as my grandmother claimed it did, but Dennis refused to switch it off so that Edna could think, and she refused to stop shouting about it so Ikey could think. There was always that beat in the background, for instance Bo Diddley singing ‘Down Yonder, Down On The Farm’ on the local Melangian station until it got switched to a station with Eddie Fisher or Tony Bennet crooning something above the din of the family rushing up and down the stairs trying to make their way to their separate lives. My mother developed the irritating habit of calling several wrong names before she hit upon the name of the person she really wanted to address. ‘Pamala, I mean Dennis, I mean Marsha.’ She did this so often that my aunt and grandmother caught the habit of it, too.
Fits and fights over whose turn it was in the only bathroom filtered downstairs into the kitchen through a crack in the floorboards to mix with the snitch of swearing that came with a last-minute touch-up with the straightening comb as one of the women singed her scalp in the rush of confusion.
‘Was the cat fed?’ ‘Have you got your milk money?’ ‘Who took my last piece of chewing gum?’ ‘Put your front-door key in your pocket …’ I can’t think how anybody arrived in one piece ready to start the day. Luckily the long journey to school on the trolley had a calming effect.
There was nothing that I thought I needed that I didn’t have except an atomic-bomb shelter stocked with neat little shelves of canned goods and folded army blankets and candles and a flashlight. Lots of people had converted their basements like this in case the Russians bombed us, a threat often implied in the Junior Scholastic and the Weekly Reader which we got at school. Instead, our basement was like an overstuffed attic with that oval portrait of my grandmother always in the way. Things were put down there when they had no other home and part of it was used as a laundry room. It was doubtful that it would ever become a bomb shelter, or even get a facelift of knotty pine walls and be called a den.
This is where my mother was one day, sorting out the coloureds from the whites to do a wash load, when I was called down to speak with her.
Ikey was standing on the platform near the washing machine when I bounded down the staircase. It was one of those old-fashioned washing machines that look a bit like a white pot-bellied stove with a separate wringer attached on top. No one ever went down to the basement unless they were doing the wash, and this made it the only place in the house you could be guaranteed a bit of privacy. It was lit by a bare bulb which hung down from the ceiling and cast spooky shadows.
When Ikey told me that Blair had been killed early that morning in a car accident, she wasn’t crying. She was just piling the clothes into the washing machine. (I’ve detested doing laundry ever since.) Because she didn’t really look up at me, I could tell that it was one of those times when I wasn’t allowed to ask questions. If I blinked fast I could always keep back the tears so I tried that while I stood by the bottom stair waiting to be told what to do.
My father had never written to me. I couldn’t rush upstairs to look at his handwriting.
There was no school that day because of a teachers’ meeting, so Dennis and I went to the little green next to the library. It wasn’t raining. The leaves had fallen.
Later that afternoon I was allowed to go to a friend’s house. She had a Persian cat that had its own birth certificate, which I thought was the most wonderfully chic thing I’d ever heard of. My friend’s mother must have found it very disarming when I looked up at her and said that my father had died that day. I didn’t make a big deal of it, because I didn’t want any sympathy. I just wanted to tell somebody.
No flowers arrived. And Blair wasn’t mentioned again until my mother had to go to Boston for the funeral.
The mornings came and went with nothing to mark the change. This was something else that I was to learn not to talk about. I got so good at keeping secrets that I eventually learned to keep them from myself.
Music rescued me from secrets and silences just around that period. My mother had taken me to see Johnnie Ray once when I was about five. He was performing in a cinema with the curtains drawn across the silver screen so that it could double as a live theatre. He was supported by the Four Aces or the Diamonds – one of those groups with a name like a suit of cards. They came on before the main attraction wearing blue iridescent suits and sang. Three of them gathered around one microphone singing harmonies to the melody and managed at the same time to snap their fingers, smile and do little dance steps in unison. The lead singer had his own microphone and spoke to us between the songs while one of the three in back clowned around a bit as part of the act. The other two just sang and I suppose they did that well enough or the audience wouldn’t have clapped so much.
Ikey had told me before Johnnie Ray appeared that he was deaf, so I felt very sorry for him when he came out with his hearing aid in his ear and sat down at the black baby grand piano. Our seats were in the balcony. It was dark everywhere except on the stage and we could see him perfectly, singing and swaying back and forth on his stool as he played the piano.
His blond hair was swept back and parted. Only one lock in the front moved, however much he threw himself around as he sang ‘The Little White Cloud That Cried’. A few women sitting near us were crying and so was Johnnie. I imagined he was crying because he was deaf, which did seem very sad to me, but I didn’t know what on earth those women were crying about.
The Uptown theatre in Philadelphia was rather famous for showcasing better-known Melangian performers. My mother said it was too dangerous to go there. Fights sometimes broke out in the audience, and on a few occasions gangs had scuffles outside after a show. So I didn’t go to any more concerts, but when people like Eddie Fisher, Dean Martin or Sammy Davis Jr sang on the radio, I imagined them appearing on a darkened stage just like Johnnie Ray.
I had to rely on radio, television and my brother’s collection of records for my music. When we moved to Mount Airy, it was not yet the kind of neighbourhood where people sang on the street corners, although we could often get within listening distance of the landlady’s Holy Roller meeting, as a few spirituals filtered out to the street.
Music seeped in and around me at home for as long as I can remember and this may have been the initial reason for my passion for it, but I can say without doubt that it was ‘seeing’ music that eventually made it stick to me like cement glue.
A stocky, rather ordinary man with slick dark hair named Bob Horn hosted the 3 pm music show from our local TV station – Bandstand. He played the latest single record releases and talked to an invited group of guests after they had mimed to their record. He also introduced the teenage studio audience.
If I rushed home from school I could catch all but the first half-hour of Bandstand. Tearing out of my fourth-grade class as soon as the final bell rang, I’d nearly get myself run over by the cars on Germantown Avenue because I’d spotted my trolley coming and couldn’t wait for the traffic lights to change.
Unfortunately, the programme time interfered with my friendship with the open-air girls and their after-school teas as well as my ballet practice at home to my scratchy 78 record of Chopin’s Polonaise. Watching Bandstand made me want to practise the mambo and the bunny hop instead, because that was what the fourteen- to eighteen-year-old audience was doing. That, and the bop. I’d been dancing since the hucklebuck, but never with the frenzied fever to get it right. I suppose that having a teenage brother and sister introduced me to teenage tastes early, but it was music that whipped me into my premature adolescence.
I was still wearing braids when I started bopping about the dining room in front of the television imitating teen attitudes with my head filling with notions about ‘earth angels’, ‘thrills on Blueberry Hill’ and other fairy-tale romances nailed to a four-four beat. I felt I was missing a ponytail, bobby socks, a cardigan sweater worn backwards and a felt skirt with a curly-haired poodle on it wearing a diamond-studded collar. I also had to find a partner to dance with as Dennis refused and Pam would arrive home loaded with homework and disappear straight upstairs to study.
Five afternoons a week for at least an hour each day I was mesmerized by Bandstand. I gave my undivided attention to the vision and sound of what they were calling rock and roll, which sounded like a pokier version of the rhythm and blues I’d heard on jukeboxes on the reservation and on the Melangian radio station. I don’t want to give the impression that I was getting lost in it, though. If anything, I found myself in the music, because somehow it satisfied all my secret needs.
Rock and roll’s simple childlike passion poetry had various smudges of joy, pathos and sentimentality which I felt or was starting to feel but couldn’t express. The lyrics were repetitive like the commercial jingles that regularly interrupted my favourite TV and radio shows. There was a throbbing rhythm which was sometimes almost menacing and had an element of the reservation about it. Melangian dialect was often used for the lyrics and Melangian groups like the Platters were as important to the music as white stars like Bill Haley and the Comets.
In the early days of Bandstand, Melangian teenagers used to participate. When the camera scanned the audience, which was invited to dance to each record that was played, the Melangian couples were by far the best dancers, doing the most intricate variations of spins, twirls and fancy footwork and never looking as if they’d just graduated from an Arthur Murray dance course.
As Bandstand was broadcast live from South Philadelphia, which was a rough part of the city that had more than its share of gangs, slums and delinquents, it attracted teenagers from that area, so the dancing audience didn’t look like a contrived showcase for middle-class kids. They had something of ‘the street’ about them.
The show was off the air before Ikey, Thelma and Edna got in from work, and they didn’t disapprove of my watching. My mother was only in her midthirties at the time, neither old enough nor old-fashioned enough to denounce rock and roll as a sinful or negative influence, which was a growing complaint about it among very conservative adults. She and Thelma liked the music in the house.
They were as enthralled as we kids were when Elvis Presley first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show one Sunday night, gyrating like a rhythm-and-blues singer. When his bumping and grinding below the waist was banned from the screen on a subsequent show, it made a tremendous stink, turning his censored performance into real box-office and TV-rating appeal. It made people talk about him. I can’t remember how many appearances he made on the show, but there were several at a time when Ed Sullivan had the most popular variety programme on nationwide television. The censorship made Elvis’s appearances newsworthy. The papers were full of reports and I guess it was the first time that television and journalism married their interests to make a rock idol.
Edna was a bit distressed by the newspapers’ claim that Elvis’s style was original, because she said rightly that it was really the Melangian rhythm-and-blues singers’ performing style. But she could have screamed about that until the cows came home and nobody would have taken a blind bit of notice. It was his white version of the form that made it provocative and caused white teenage girls to scream and want to pull out his hair and their own. Others imitated him and his style and helped his brand of rock and roll surpass teen-cult status to become a national phenomenon.
Bandstand was so influential to the promotion of this teen music phase that it was picked up by a big network and became a nationally broadcast television show. It was renamed American Bandstand and a young MC named Dick Clark replaced Bob Horn as the star presenter.
When the phase became a craze, Philadelphia was on the map again. Bandstand spotlighted a growing trend in America to recognize teenagers as a breed with their own style and culture, and the weekly allowance to be consumers. To say you were from Philadelphia in the mid-1950s was probably like saying that you were from Liverpool after the mid-1960s. The place name projected a certain teen-cult music status, not only because of Bandstand, but also because many of the popular teen idols like Frankie Avalon, Dion, Bobby Rydell, themselves teenagers, stepped out of Philadelphia city-centre high schools into the media frenzy building up in America about its teenagers.
Ten years after the Second World War, parents may have been relieved that they could afford and tolerate rock and roll, and regarded it as a minor cultural nuisance that was temporarily captivating their war babies. Even though I was a postwar baby, I was ready to be captured, too.
My passion for music and the culture that grew out of it was not my only interest. There were other elements of my life, like getting good grades at Jenks school, which held me back from becoming a wholehearted bobbysoxer. But I had no reluctance about putting my dolls and my roller skates in the basement to show that I wouldn’t be playing with them any more. And I found new friends in the neigbourhood who wanted to master the latest dance steps as I did.
I was nearly delirious when I spotted my first adolescent pimple and had to buy my first tube of Clearasil, which was new on the market and being advertised on television and in teen magazines.
Wasn’t there a whole generation going through it? I was just taking an early grab at the tail of pubescence. It pulled me into the pandemonium of teenage culture so fast that there wasn’t a chance for me to wave goodbye to childhood before it disappeared over the horizon with some of my more agreeable traits in tow, such as wanting to please adults. As can be expected, my mother wasn’t thrilled about my quick personality change. It made her nervous and angry to see me running up and down breathlessly while I chased the spirit of something that was invisible to her but galvanizing and hypnotic to me.
The teen cult was like the call of the wild. It beckoned me first through music. Rhythm and blues and rock and roll had an insidious penetration. Sometimes I’d hear a song that I couldn’t get enough of from hearing it a few times on the radio, so I’d buy the record and listen to the same song over and over and over again. It manipulated me like a mantra with the lyrics about puppy love and such, accompanying a beat that excited me to the point that I was either transfixed or transported to another zone.
I had become so good and convincing at marching to other people’s drummers that it was a shock to me and my family when music let me hear my own. I was a handful and couldn’t be constrained any more by a harsh word or criticism of how I looked or behaved. I didn’t want to look like a nice little girl and refused to wear clothes that didn’t have a look of flair and independence. I would have teetered around in stilettos if only I could have got away with it.
First it was music, then it was clothes, then it was boys. Or first it was music, then it was love, then it was boys. I’m not sure. All I know is that while I was jumping up and down dancing in the mirror to the beat, not being in love just didn’t seem good enough. I pulled my cinched belt tighter and waited. Falling in love with love came before falling in love with somebody.
It’s a wonder that I kept my studies up, but I did. One day the school principal called my mother to find out why I was wearing lipstick to my seventh-grade class. This came as a bit of a shock to poor Ikey, who sent me to school looking as refined and dignified as possible. She never realized that on my way to catch the trolley car in the morning I slipped into a telephone booth en route and made a few subtle alterations. Like Superman, my persona was transformed by my get-up. I’d come out of the telephone booth with my skirt hitched up by a belt to a much shorter length, my hair swept to the side in a winsome braid, and at least two thick layers of Westmore’s Oooh-La-La Orange on my lips. The iridescent lipstick cost 49 cents at Woolworth’s. I kept it in my briefcase.
My whole demeanour changed under the ‘Oooh-La-La’ spell. I wanted to be noisy and boisterous and saw nothing appealing in being dignified. I didn’t want to imitate open-air girls except in their occasional company. Instead I wanted to mimic the DJ on WDAS (the Melangian radio station), whose fast, hip monologues derived from the reservation dialect. The friends I made in the neighbourhood were happy to do the same thing and were impressed that I was good at it.
My musical preference reflected my love for music from the reservation and its dialect. I didn’t want to sing along with Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly or ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’. I wanted to moon about to Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Little Anthony and the Imperials, and the Flamingoes. Anybody with that sound of a cappella singing that I used to love to hear on 23rd Street was for me.
Dennis thought that I looked and acted a bit ridiculous but he did enjoy my departure from childhood. We didn’t have the same taste in music, unfortunately. Our allowances would have gone further if we’d wanted the same singles, but he was more into Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. They were all right but hardly made the kind of music that you could stand in a dark corner and do a slow stroll to, which was what I wanted to do.
I was a nightmare for my mother, and it was probably a shock as much as a relief that I qualified for entry into the Philadelphia High School for Girls when I was thirteen.
Pam was going to the University of California in Berkeley, where Uncle Henry lived, after her graduation from the Girls’ High. Ikey took the day off to go to Pam’s graduation, and took me. I hoped the fact that she graduated summa cum laude from the best school in the city made her trials in Germantown pale.
My sister and brother hadn’t been infected by the music craze the way I was. With Pam in the all-city orchestra and Dennis going out for football and track, I guess they didn’t have time. Dennis was going to Central, which was as scholastically competitive as Girls’ High. There was hardly time to think about much other than studying, although I kept boys and music high on the list of priorities after I started there.
The Bivins family lived across the street. Mr Bivins was a detective in the downtown police force and his daughter Lynn was my best friend, along with Jean and Gloria Scott who lived a few blocks away. Lynn was a beanpole and although being tall and thin was not considered a plus on the reservation, where having big legs was the great physical attribute, Lynn was very popular with the boys. She had a younger sister, Patsy, who was born with Down’s syndrome. When Lynn’s mother went out, we were often expected to baby-sit for Patsy, who at eight couldn’t converse or follow instructions. But she had the sweetest nature and was easier to mind than a baby as long as you didn’t leave her on her own for a minute.
As soon as Mrs Bivins went out, boys were invited in and invariably there would be some necking in the kitchen beside the refrigerator, shielded from view in case someone walked in unexpectedly. Patsy would sit patiently waiting and watching. We were sure that she couldn’t tell and she seemed a harmless enough voyeur. What we didn’t bargain on was that the sight of two adolescents kissing and groping next to the refrigerator would make such a lasting impression that she tried to imitate us in the presence of Lynn’s mother intermittently for months after. Mrs Bivins never quite figured out what Patsy was doing rubbing up next to the refrigerator.
Lynn, the two eldest Scott sisters and I never considered more than necking. We didn’t even deign to talk about anything else.
There were four children in the Scott family and Mr and Mrs Scott both worked to keep them all fed. It was the girls’ responsibility to take care of the house and even the youngest, Helen (who has since become one of the singers in the Three Degrees), was well trained to do the cleaning and cooking. The three girls and their younger brother Robert were all pretty, especially by Melangian standards, with their green-grey eyes, fair skin and tawny hair. Mrs Scott, whom they got their good looks from, suspected that boys would be endlessly banging on their door. What she didn’t imagine was that we would go out looking for them while all our parents were out at work.
Ikey probably hoped that if she was lenient and patient, my new personality would disappear as mysteriously as it had appeared. She tolerated new habits like smoking cigarettes as long as I restricted them to the house. I’d enjoyed sneaking a smoke with friends but didn’t find the experience half as gratifying when it came around to doing it at home.
I don’t know if the girlfriends I entertained found as much resistance from their parents to our fast noisy talk as I did, but it was certainly easier for me to get on with the life I was making for myself before Ikey, Edna and Thelma got home from work.
When Edna lambasted me for thinking that I was a woman, she wasn’t far off the mark. I’d put a wiggle in my walk and my head was full of love lust. My ‘fast’ ways were encouraged by my older friends but beneath the new, worldly exterior, my intentions were harmless. I didn’t really want to do any more than a bit of necking under a red light bulb in a darkened room with some new heart-throb of mine from the local playground who, I’d decided, was the beginning and the end of my life … for a week or two. We girls loved sauntering by the nearby playground where the teenage boys were always sweating in the heat of a basketball game or lolling about at the edge of the court waiting for a chance to play. We pretended not to notice them as we drifted past slowly enough to be seen in a pair of short shorts or a tight skirt, hoping to attract the attention of our latest forecourt fantasy. (That priest who accused me of switching down the aisle at St Elizabeth’s must have had a premonition.)
Suffice it to say that by the time I sat in front of the television watching John F. Kennedy win the nomination to run as the Democratic candidate in the 1960 presidential election against Richard M. Nixon, I was a fully fledged teenager. I felt terribly sophisticated while I chomped chewing gum and smoked an Alpine mentholated cigarette and waited for the party returns.
Dennis was ready for college that summer and had been accepted at the University of California at Berkeley like Pam the year before. My mother decided that with both of them at college on the other coast, we needed to leave Philadelphia and move west. I was horrified by the thought of being wrenched from my beloved city. I didn’t think I could cope without my favourite TV show and my favourite radio station.
Television, radio and the industry that manufactured teen culture had fashioned me far more than anything that was fed to me at school except the talk about freedom and equality, the principles of which I used as an argument against my mother’s protests that I didn’t have a right to do with my life as I wanted. After all, she said, wasn’t my life her life too? I didn’t think so.
She proved me wrong when she packed me onto a propeller plane and dragged me to the other side of America.
6 THE DREAM MACHINE (#ulink_30beef58-f236-5206-8610-102a094d88e8)
Although I didn’t want to go to California, my imagination painted a vivid image for me of Oakland, the city we were moving to. I expected it to look like the unidentified towns which were the backcloth of the family situation comedies I regularly watched while I grew up 3000 miles away. They usually depicted a pretty suburb: a mini Beverly Hills, divided by neat front lawns on quiet tree-lined streets with the splash of a freshly painted ranch-style house with a garage that had a basketball net conveniently attached to an overhead wall so that the kids could play.
I wasn’t an avid moviegoer, but I had enough beforehand knowledge of California to be wrong about it. In my head was the clichéd vision – blazing yellow sun, picturesque orange groves, palm trees against a blue sky. I could see a swimming pool and the languid masses of draped bodies slung across deck chairs as they browned like toast under the sun. An unspoken wealth supported the whole canvas.
California might just as well have been in another country. Our only connection to it was that each Christmas, Uncle Henry used to send Edna a voluptuous basket of fruit from California where he’d been living since he’d retired from the navy. The fruit was always a glamorous array of wrapped citrus with something exotic like a pineapple on top in coloured cellophane with a big bow around it. (Once a basket arrived with a dark green thing in it which I had never seen before. Edna claimed that she had in Florida, but I didn’t believe her. I was sure she was just saying this to impress us and that the avocado pear wasn’t a pear at all and was poison.)
The journey to San Francisco airport took about sixteen hours and we had to stop off once to refuel. At one point during the flight, the pilot told us to look at the Grand Canyon. I did so reluctantly. I’d never been on an airplane before, but I can’t say that I appreciated my first experience, because I was too caught up in sombre remorse: I was sick from the ache of leaving friends behind and believed that the only reason destiny was pulling me westwards was to help Ikey interfere with a budding romance between me and an eighteen-year-old boy. It was July 1960 and I was not a bit happy about the prospect of a future in California.
That first afternoon we drove through Oakland was sunny – too sunny for my liking. A heat of light burned the sidewalk. There was no imposing residential monument of history to interest me and no orderly strips of red brick houses with dark-green hedges to match. In fact, brick must have been at a premium, because every house and building seemed to be made of stucco.
I’d only been out of the North once, when the Bivins family took me on a weekend jaunt to visit some of their relatives in North Carolina. The flat dullness of the small nameless Southern towns we drove through left me with the same depressed feeling that I had when I looked at Oakland for the first time.
There wasn’t one lawn or ranch-style house to be seen as we drove down Grove Street. It looked like an architectural free-for-all. No building seemed planted in the sidewalk with solid old East Coast permanence. Instead the ticky-tacky greyish boxes with storm windows looked as if they’d been thrown on the pavement and designed with less imagination than my first Lego attempts.
More sky than I’d ever noticed before hung down. It was barely the palest blue and was dipped in dry heat. The air seemed no cleaner than the sidewalk.
I wanted to cry and probably would have if I’d thought that it would do any good. But the truth was that I was there to stay. I knew my grandmother had had the right idea when she ground her heels in and refused to join us for the move west. I longed to be back there with her, lounging around in big-city civilization.
I also felt Ikey’s disappointment and could see it registering in the dull glaze of her eyes as she stared from the car window listening to her brother explain how she, Thelma, Pam and I could temporarily cope with a one-bedroom apartment above some shops at the corner of 55th and Grove. He wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t so temporary.
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Marsha Hunt
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Биографии и мемуары
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: First published in 1986, «Real Life» gives the full background to Marsha Hunt′s astonishing rise from Philadelphia ghetto girl to become the ′face′ of the cult 60s rock musical «Hair» and the girlfriend of Mick Jagger, father of her daughter Karis.It is the story of Marsha′s childhood, of her time at Berkeley University during the anti-war riots in the mid-60s and of her escape to London where she became involved in the music scene, singing (and living) with the likes of John Mayall and Elton John. This is a vivid account of life in the early 60s by one of the icons of «Swinging London». But as well as being a portrait of a culture and a generation, it is also the personal story of a warm, honest woman determined to bring up her daughter on her own according to her deeply-held principles. It is the story of a survivor who has struggled through turbulent love-affairs and the ups and downs of a varied and extraordinary career.