University of Georgia

Terry College of Business
 
 

VINTAGE BOOKS, 1994 A Division of Random House, Inc. New York
 

Chapter 1 GET - BACK
 

The fellas and I were hanging out on our corner one afternoon when the strangest thing happened. A white boy, who appeared to be about eighteen or nineteen years old, came pedaling a bicycle casually through the neighborhood. I don't know if he was lost or just confused, but he was definitely in the wrong place to be doing the tourist bit. Somebody spotted him and pointed him out to the rest of us. "Look! What's that motherfucka doin' ridin' through here?! Is he crraaaazy?!"

It was automatic. We all took off after him. We caught him on Cavalier Boulevard and knocked him off the bike. He fell to the ground and it was all over. We were on him like white on rice. Ignoring the passing cars, we stomped him and kicked him. My stick partners kicked him in the head and face and watched the blood gush from his mouth. I kicked him in the stomach and nuts, where I knew it would hurt. Every time I drove my foot into his balls, I felt better; with each blow delivered, I gritted my teeth as I remembered some recent racial slight:

THIS is for all the times you followed me round in stores....

And THIS is for the times you treated me like a nigger....

And THIS is for G.P.--General Principle--just 'cause you white.

While we kicked, he lay there, curled up in the fetal position, trying to use his hands to cover his head. We bloodied him so badly that I got a little scared and backed off. The others, seeing how badly he was messed up, moved away too. But one dude kept stomping, like he'd gone berserk. He seemed crazed and consumed in the pleasure of kicking that white boy's ass. When he finished, he reached down and picked up the white dude's bike, lifted it as high as he could above his head, and slammed it down on him hard. The white guy didn't even flinch. H e was out cold. I feared he might be dead until I saw him breathing.

We walked away, laughing, boasting, competing for bragging rights about who'd done the most damage. "Man, did you see how red that cracker's face turned when I busted his lip? I almost broke my hand on that ugly motherfucka!"

Fucking up white boys like that made us feel good inside. I guess we must have been fourteen or fifteen by then, and it felt so good that we stumbled over each other sometimes trying to get in extra kicks and punches. When we bum-rushed white boys, it made me feel like we were beating all white people on behalf of all blacks. We called it "gettin' some get-back," securing revenge for all the shit they'd heaped on blacks all these years. They were still heaping hell on us, and especially on our parents. The difference was, cats in my generation weren't taking it lying down.

After my older brother Dwight got his driver's license, a group of us would pile into my stepfather's car some evenings and cruise through a nearby white neighborhood, searching for people walking the streets. We'd spot some whites, get out, rush over, and, using sticks and fists, try to beat them to within an inch of their lives.

Sometimes, when I sit back and think about the crazy things the fellas and I did and remember the hate and violence that we unleashed, it's hard to believe I was once part of all that--I feel so removed from it now that I've left the streets. Yet when I consider white America and the way it's treated blacks, our random rage in the old days makes perfect sense to me. Looking back, it's easy to understand how it all got started....
 

Chapter 2 CAVALIER MANOR
 
 
 

For as long as I can remember, it seems that there was no aspect of my family's reality that wasn't affected by whites, right on down to the creation of the neighborhood I grew up in. Known as Cavalier Manor, it was located in Portsmouth, Virginia. Most of Cavalier Manor was built in the early 1960s by a local construction bigwig named George T. McClean. Neighborhood lore had it that he was a white liberal do-gooder who felt blacks in Portsmouth needed a community that would inspire pride and help improve their lot. But just as many, people thought McClean was a racist who got alarmed by the civil rights movement and built Cavalier .Manor to encourage blacks to move there rather than into white neighborhoods.

McClean started building from the edge of an older, low-income black neighborhood and went southward, making the houses larger and more elegant with each successive phase. He named the streets after U.S. presidents and prominent blacks, particularly entertainers. The streets had names such as Belafonte Drive, Basie Crescent, Eckstine Drive, and Horne Avenue. To add to the sense of optimism that the neighborhood was supposed to reflect, they even named one street Freedom Avenue.

Although some folks there liked to think of themselves as middle-class, Cavalier Manor was a working-class neighborhood. Most of those who moved there were active or retired military personnel. Few had completed high school or gone to college. The retirees usually found blue-collar jobs at one of the massive military installations in the area, which is home to some of the world's largest shipyards. Many others who moved there were uneducated working-class folks who had scrimped and saved enough money to move from public housing.

By the time the bulk of it was finished, Cavalier Manor had come to be one of the largest black neighborhoods in the Southeast. In terms of political power, this meant that our neighborhood emerged as a potentially influential voting bloc. In terms of street power, it meant that Cavalier Manor surfaced as a helluva gang force throughout the Tidewater area, which spans several Virginia cities. The neighborhood was so big that dudes formed distinct gangs in different sections of the community. These gangs fought each other sometimes and united when fighting downtown boys.

But I was unaware of all that street action when we first came to Cavalier Manor. I was only nine years old then, in 1964, the year my family moved to Portsmouth from Key West, Florida, where my stepfather had served a three-year tour of duty in the Navy. We'd also lived in Morocco and Norfolk, Virginia, and Portsmouth was to be my stepfather's last duty station before he retired after giving Uncle Sam twenty years.

I still remember how excited my brothers and I were about moving into our first real house. When we drove into our new neighborhood, our eyes and mouths flew wide open. We saw impressive homes with freshly sprouted lawns, broad sidewalks, and newly paved streets. On each side of the street that led to our section of the community were two sets of stately white brick pillars with black cast-iron bars flowing regally through their tops. A huge sign printed in Old English lettering was mounted on each set of pillars: "Welcome to Cavalier Manor." My brothers and I thought we had died and gone to heaven.

It wasn't the kind of neighborhood I associated with black people then. We'd always lived in drab apartment buildings that looked like public housing. All the black people we knew had lived that way.

In Cavalier Manor, we pulled into our very own driveway, which led to a garage where we could park our ride. When we walked into the house, the sun shone brightly through the windows, bringing out every wonderful detail of the place. It was a single-story structure with three bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a formal dining room.

I could feel its newness and smell the freshness of the recently painted walls and ceilings. The hardwood floors had been sanded and buffed. Tiny mounds of sawdust remained in corners, as if construction workers had left only hours before we arrived.

My brothers and I ran outside to inspect our front and back yards. The air was filled with the steady hum of lawn mowers and the sweet smell of freshly cut grass. Pine needles that had fallen from the many tall trees out back were scattered everywhere. We learned to hate raking those pine needles, but our initial reaction to our new home and neighborhood was that we loved everything.

Located in a cul-de-sac named Vaughn Court, ours was one of several streets that the white folks misspelled in their haste. There were twelve homes in the court. We lived in number 6. Several blocks away, a large lake, Crystal Lake, wound through a portion of the neighborhood.

We got that house just in time to accommodate the expansion of our family. Along with my parents, there were my two brothers, Dwight and Billy, who were two and four years older than me respectively. A short time after we arrived, my mother gave birth to another boy, the first child born to her and my stepfather. They named him Bryan Keith Alvin, after Brian Keith, the white actor. As she had in the past, my maternal grandmother, whom we called Bampoose, came to live with us. Then my stepfather took in Junnie, a son of his from a previous marriage who was three years older than me. So within the first year we were living there, our family nearly doubled in size. It was crowded and we were broke as hell, but it felt like we were livin' large.

In those first few years, Cavalier .Manor offered a Huck Finn kind of existence for my brothers and me. I hung with Dwight and Grey, an only child who lived across the street. They were my initial tickets into the world beyond our street. They were both two years older than me and were often forced by my parents to let me hang with them. (Billy and Junnie, who considered themselves bona fide teenagers, developed their own circles of friends.)

We did everything, mostly innocent mischief. We skipped Sunday services at the neighborhood Presbyterian church to explore construction sites, climb on house frames, and throw dirt bombs at each other until construction supervisors came and chased us off. We went on expeditions into the nearby woods and played cowboys and Indians with cherry poppers, reeds that we hollowed and used to shoot berries at each other. We even ventured to Crystal Lake and skinny-dipped whenever we could evade grown-ups scouting there to keep children away. We delivered newspapers and mowed neighbors' lawns for spending change, rode our bicycles through the streets, and fought and made up at least twice a week. On weekends, we went to the movies or took turns spending the night at each other's homes.

And we massacred frogs. Because Cavalier Manor had once been a mass of woods and marsh, the place was crawling with them. We tossed frogs as high in the air as we could and watched them descend, spreading their limbs as though parachuting from an airplane. Then they'd splatter in the street and cough up their guts. We'd walk over to see how a splattered frog's intestines look.

We used those frogs for informal biology experiments. What would happen if you put a black widow spider or twenty red ants in a jar with a frog? How long can a frog float in a jar filled with Kool-Aid without drowning? What would happen if you put a frog in a jar, poured in gasoline, and torched it? We answered all those questions, and more.

We also hopped the back of the candy truck. In those days, every southern black neighborhood had a candy man and a candy lady. The candy lady was usually a housewife who lived in the neighborhood and sold sweets, potato chips, sodas, and other stuff out of her house to earn extra cash. The candy man was a traveling salesman who packed a truck with everything from collard greens, fish, and grocery items to candy, cakes, potato chips, and other children's delights, and drove slowly through neighborhoods, ringing a bell. The candy man came through the neighborhood most evenings or nights. We'd wait until he pulled away from the curb after making a stop, then we'd run and hop onto the back or running board as he picked up speed. It reminded me of TV westerns, where courageous cowboys hopped from their white horses onto the running boards of runaway stagecoaches and rescued screaming white ladies inside.

At first, we rode for a block or so before leaping off. Then we chanced longer distances, dangling off the back of the truck and holding on for dear life. Once, we rode all the way across town. It hadn't occurred to us that the candy man didn't live in Cavalier Manor until he pulled up to a house and turned off the engine. We hopped off the truck and had to walk miles to get back home.

There was only so much trouble we could get into in those early days. Cavalier Manor was a neighborhood filled with surrogate parents, people who would punish you like your mama and daddy if they caught you doing wrong. The worst among them were Grace, an ornery old woman who always fussed at us about walking on her grass, and Mrs. Patterson, who seemed to live at her front picture window, where she always peered out and caught us throwing rocks on Roosevelt Boulevard. By the time we got home, she would have already called Mama and given her a full report.

School was also part of that surrogate system Most of the teachers at Cavalier Manor Elementary, where I went to fourth and fifth grades, lived in the neighborhood. Those teachers spanked us like we were their own when we acted up in class. If a disciplinary note didn't reach home, teachers were sure to update parents in church or while standing in the checkout line at Earle's supermarket on Victory Boulevard. Some of the parents even took it upon themselves to patrol the neighborhood on school days to make sure we were where we were supposed to be.

We kids hated that surrogate system. It seemed that everybody was so nosy and bent on making sure we didn't get away with anything. It was only years later, when black communities as we knew them started falling apart, that I came to understand the system for the hidden blessings it contained: It had built-in mechanisms for reinforcing values and trying to prevent us from becoming the hellions some of us turned out to be.

Despite our sense of well-being in Cavalier Manor there were two things that reminded us of our shaky place in the world. One was the poor whites who lived nearby in Academy Park. Cavalier Manor was separated from Academic Park by the commercial strip of Victory Boulevard. Blacks in Cavalier Manor lived on one side of Victory Boulevard, and whites in Academy Park lived on the other. It was a poetic twist of fate that well-off blacks lived so close to the poorest, scruffiest-looking whites in the city. It looked like there was something wrong with that picture, seeing blacks turn their dark, wide noses up at the whites the way they did.

Academy Park whites were mad as hell about that, and they made it known. It was rumored that white squadrons sometimes stole into Cavalier Manor at night to terrorize. It was fact that they hurled bottles and bricks when we drove through their neighborhood. The main street through Academy Park offered the shortest route to other parts of the city. Sometimes blacks gave in to the temptation to take the shortcut through there to get downtown. Shortly after we moved in, a neighbor warned my parents, "Be careful not to drive through Academy Park. Them is some mean crackers over there. They'll stone your car and shoot at you for driving through there."

One night, when I was about ten years old, a little girl my age was shot to death while sitting near a picture window in her living room on Freedom Avenue. Nobody was arrested, but people in the neighborhood said they were sure it was the work of one of the "jealous crackers" from Academy Park. The killing brought home the fact that, nice neighborhood or not, we still weren't safe in Cavalier Manor. My mother had trained my brothers and me to be leery of white folks, but she stepped up precautions after the murder. Mama told us not to answer the front door for white folks or Jehovah's Witnesses when she and my stepfather were away. Whenever either came to the door, we just peeked through the curtains and kept quiet until they left.

Our friends and neighbors were cautious, too. We all regarded the sight of white people in the neighborhood as an ominous sign, like rain clouds forming overhead. Whenever a white man came into the culde-sac and got out of his car, people who were outdoors working in their yards stopped what they were doing and watched to see which house he'd go to. They watched when he left, too, then looked at the house he had visited for signs of bad news.

Another reminder of the tenuousness of our lives was a big, ugly ditch. It stood prominently in the main thoroughfare as an embarrassing monument to our blackness. That weedy eyesore, which bred snakes and all kinds of rodents, cut straight through the middle of the neighborhood, on Cavalier Boulevard. That ditch stood out like a grotesque open wound. The city never completely closed it, despite vigorous campaigns by homeowners to get it covered. It was as if the city fathers purposely left it open to make a statement, to remind blacks that the community would be only so nice and that, no matter how uppin we got in Cavalier Manor, the white folks downtown still called the shots.
 
 
 

Chapter 3 NIGGER
 
 
 

The folks in my neighborhood were resolute about trying to protect our physical safety, but seemed confused when confronted with more subtle racial hazards, such as our fixation on color. I was a product of that confusion.

My enchantment with whiteness dated at least as far back as Key West, where our family got our first television set. I'd spend hours in front of that black-and--white set, gazing spellbound at whites on TV, drinking in the beauty of their ivory skin, which seemed purer, cleaner, than my own. I was no more than seven or eight years old, but I still recall the Clairol hair-coloring commercial where they zoomed the camera in for a close-up on some saucy white broad who sensually tossed her blond mane backward and forward all over her face. Near the end of the commercial, a throaty voice chimed in and asked, "Is it true blondes have more fun?"

I thought of that ad every time I saw a blonde in real life or on TV. It also came to mind one day when I noticed a group of young whites riding down the street in a convertible ahead of our family car. The convertible's top was down, and the white people's long hair fluttered in the wind, like the TV blonde's. I thought, White people have more fun.

One sunny afternoon around that time, I was playing at the beach with my brothers when a little white girl standing nearby began covering her body with the pale, paste-like clay that blankets the Key West ocean floor. I imitated her, rubbing clay on my upper body. The girl looked at me and said, kindly, "If you let the clay dry, maybe you'll be white like me." For a moment, I considered that it might just work. It seemed a grand idea to let the clay dry on my body and turn me chalky white: After all, White people have more fun.

It's funny how the memory works. You can forget the name of someone you were introduced to yesterday, yet recall minor details of incidents that took place in your life years ago. For some reason, I always remembered that exchange. When I reflected on it years later, it occurred to me that even at that young age a little black boy and a little white girl had already begun to learn their place in this race-obsessed country. The girl knew she was a member of the favored race, and understood that my color would be a burden to me.

In Cavalier Manor, I sensed that other blacks struggled with variations of my racial affliction (though I didn't recognize it as such). Even some of the grown-ups who set out to arm their young with racial pride seemed haunted by contradictions, which their children absorbed. Whenever we were going to restaurants or other public places where a lot of white folks would be around, my mother insisted that we get meticulously groomed and pressed beforehand, and when we got there she reminded us (it was more of a threat) to sit, stiff as soldiers, and be quiet. Every now and then, if one of us dared to cut up in public, Mama would yank him firmly by one arm, pull him to within an inch of her face, and whisper through clenched teeth, "Stop showing your color. Stop acting like a nigger!"

My brothers and I would sit solemnly and watch as rowdy white kids entered those same public places, shirtless, barefoot, and grimy. Their parents gave them the run of the joint, allowing them to stomp, shout, scream, do virtually anything they wanted, including tear up the place. I envied their freedom and craved the specialness that excluded them from our self-defeating burden: It seemed we were niggers by birthright and destined to spend our entire lives striving in vain to shed that rap. But white people could never be niggers, even when they acted like niggers with a capital N.

Without knowing what they were doing, a lot of adults in black families passed along notions to their young about white folks' superiority. Even Bampoose, my grandmother, did her part to condition us. Her husband--my grandfather died of mysterious causes before I was born. Bampoose lived with our family for most of the time after that and worked as a domestic for white folks, cleaning their homes, cooking their meals, and raising their children. When we moved to Cavalier Manor, Bampoose began working for an affluent Jewish family, the Diamondsteins, who lived in Norfolk. Every morning, she rose before daybreak and caught several buses to get to their house, ten miles away.

The daily trips to the Diamondstems provided Bampoose her only diversion away from our home. She was shy and never socialized outside the family. About the most exciting thing going in Bampoose's life was the fierce games of checkers she played with my brothers and me; during those games, Bampooseoften told us what the Diamondsteins' children had done that day.

The daily trips to the Diamondstein children, Richard and Jamie, were about my age. Bampoose told us every detail about them--their habits, their likes and dislikes, and how well they were doing in school. She also told us about the fine dinner parties their parents threw and the elaborate actions the family took. It was our first glimpse into the world of white people beyond My Three Sons and Leave It to Beaver on TV.

To me, Richard and Jamie took on the flawless, larger-than-life quality of storybook characters. I decided I wanted to be just like them. When Bampoose brought us clothes that Richard and Jamie's parents were throwing away, I relished those threads like they were store-bought, and nourished a secret pride that they made me look like their former owners. Once, when Bampoose was helping me get dressed she said, "Richard and Jamie tuck their T-shirts inside their underwear." I began tucking my T-shirt inside my Fruit of the Loom briefs, just like them.

Bampoose saw how much I admired Richard and Jamie, and used it to gain advantage when she was unable to catch me to lay on a spanking for some misdeed of mine. All she needed to do to regain control of me was mention my white child idols. "Boy, why don't you stop actin' up like that! I don't have to tell Richard and Jamie more than once to stop doing' something. They are nice boys. They do everything I tell them to." It worked, too. I'd straighten up and try to behave like the gentlemen I imagined Richard and Jamie to be.

I had often tried to imagine how that family looked. One evening, when my brothers and I were sitting in the den, watching TV, Bumps brought home a picture of herself taken at the Diamondsteins' home. When she handed me the picture, I studied long and hard the faces of the white people I'd heard so much about. In the picture, Bampoose, dressed in a maid's uniform, stood in the Diamondsteins' kitchen with an apron tied around her waist. Jamie, the younger boy, stood directly in front of her, clasping her wrinkled, caramel-colored hands. Richard stood beside his brother, in front of Bampoose. The boys had a scrubbed, well-attended look about them. They were dressed in fine clothes, and their hair was neatly combed. Bampoose, a short, petite woman who usually maintained a poker face, stood there smiling, like she was the proud mother of those two white boys. Looking at that picture, I didn't help but feel jealous. It seemed Richard and Jamie had laid claim to attentions and affections from my grandmother that should have been reserved for me.

I also noticed in the picture that Jamie had dark, straight hair, which he parted and combed sideways on top, like Beaver Cleaver's. I wondered why my thick, unyielding naps couldn't be straight and supple so I could jerk my head back to sling my hair out of my eyes the way white folks constantly did. One day, I got a can of my stepfather's pomade and set out to change my steel wool into "good" hair. I packed the thick, heavy grease into my hair and brushed it until the naps began to unfurl and lie down on my head in perfect submission, just like Jamie's. Minutes later, my hair started to shrivel. It went from straight, to curly, and back to nappy. Nappy and greasy.

My parents were preparing to take us to church that morning. Just as I was about to climb into the car, my mother took one look at my glistening head and got mad as hell. "Boy, what did you do to your hair?!"

"I only put some grease in it, Mama!"

Mama yanked me away from the car and slapped me in the back of the head. Whack! "Get your butt back in that house and wash that mess outta your head, boy!"

I went inside, wailing, grabbed a bar of soap, and began scouring my greasy head in the bathroom sink, like dirty clothes on a washboard. I nearly scalded my scalp trying to rinse out that gummy pomade. Worse than the blistering water was the painful realization that no matter how hard I tried I could never make my hair straight like white people's hair.

After retiring from the Navy in 1966, my stepfather held two jobs to make ends meet. He worked in the shipyard, and on weekends he went to do gardening work for white people in a neighborhood called Sterling Point.

Initially, my parents decided I was too young to go to Sterling Point, but Billy, Dwight, and Junnic went almost from the start. They hated it and bitched all the time. It wasn't clear to me what they were so annoyed about. Our stepfather paid them by the hour for working with him, so I figured they should feel grateful. My brothers used the money they earned to buy schools clothes. They always had spending change in their pockets. What more did they want? I had big-time dreams of what I'd do with the money I made when I got old enough to go to Sterling Point. Finally, when I turned thirteen, I got my chance.

Sterling Point was the most affluent neighborhood in Portsmouth. Not only were its white residents set apart from everybody else in the city by their wealth and status, they were physically separated from the rest by the James River and the Churchland Bridge. I remember that when we cruised down High Street toward the bridge, my stepfather slowed the car at the incline to avoid rattling the garden tools sticking out from the back of the opened trunk. I sat in the backseat, sandwiched between Dwight and Billy. who were staring quietly out their window. We reached the top of the high-arcing bridge and I looked over unto the river and saw hordes of colorful sailboats drifting lazily along in the water. I nudged Billy. "Look at all those sailboats in the river!"

He yanked his elbow away from my hand, gritted his teeth, and growled in a whisper, "Leave me alone, boy!"

Dwight, likewise, and Junnie, who was sitting up front, ignored the dazzling sight of the boats with their brilliantly colored sails. I didn't know specifically why my brothers had an attitude that Saturday morning, but it was clear that our destination had a lot to do with it.

When we reached the other side of the bridge, Dad turned left into the elegant neighborhood and I saw shady streets and sprawling, two-story brick estates with antebellum-style columns, expansive yards, and wrought-iron fences. Despite its elegance, the neighborhood had a ghostly. antiseptic air about it. People didn't socialize outdoors or walk down the streets like they did in Cavalier Manor. The only people visible in the placid streets were groups of black women who trudged slowly up the curbless lanes into winding driveways and stately mansions. I nudged Dwight and asked, "Who are they?"

"They worked for white people out here. They do the same kind of work Bampoose does for the Diamondsteins."

In those first few weekends, I learned to mow the grounds of the large estates, trim the hedges, prune the shrubs, and tend the flower beds. We gave the places the manicured look that you see in House and Garden magazine. It seemed just like working at home--until, that is, three white boys about my age reminded me one day where I was. My stepfather and I were down on our knees, pulling up crabgrass, when they bolted out the front door of the house we were tending to and began bouncing a ball in the spiraling driveway, a few feet away from where we were working. Every now and then, I looked up and waited for them to acknowledge my stepfather's presence in the way that my parents had taught my brothers and me to speak to grown-ups when entering their company. But the boys never said a word. They didn't even look his way. They kept on bouncing the ball and ran around us as if we were trees, shrubs, or some other inanimate part of the: scenery. Any other time, my stepfather would've gotten on the children's cases for forgetting their manners. But this day, he looked up whenever the ball bounced close by, flashed the three boys a fixed smile, and kept working.

Those kids' arrogance made me self-conscious. It occurred to me how docile my stepfather and I must have looked there on our knees, working on their yard while they played, carefreely, about. They were as self-assured about their exalted place in the world as my stepfather was certain of how contained his life was. To them, he was no more than a fucking utility, a faceless gardener. To him, they were important people, children of some of the most powerful white folks in Portsmouth.

One of these powerful white folks--and one of my father's best clients--was Richard Davis, who eventually became mayor of Portsmouth. We saw him occasionally, buttoned down in suit and tie, rushing to his car. Always, he dashed out, waved, then hurriedly drove off. I saw more of his wife, an attractive young blonde who busied herself supervising domestic matters. One hot day, she came outside to talk with my stepfather. "Bonnie, I brought you and your boys some lemonade to help cool you off. It sure is hot out here!"

"Yeah, it really is hot," he said, straining to make small talk.

We took a break and gulped down the lemonade. Mrs. Davis looked at us and smiled a contented smile, then issued more instructions for the day. "Bonnie, I want you to do the flower beds for me today, and pull up the grass around the back of the house. I don't want it to build up too much because it might attract snakes."

When she had finished, Mrs. Davis pranced back into her spacious, air-conditioned house and closed the door. My stepfather glanced uneasily at me. I turned away, embarrassed that I had seen the humiliating exchange. I set down my unfinished drink, returned to work, and thought about what I'd just heard. Bonnie? That was the first time I'd heard anybody, including my mother, call my stepfather by his first name. He disliked the name anyway because it was a girl's name, but most important was the issue of respect. He addressed Mrs. Davis by her last name, but she called him Bonnie. The sound of the name rolling so casually off that white woman's lips stabbed me like a knife in the chest. It sounded like she was talkingto a child. A boy.

At school, it was commonly understood that white folks considered grown black men to be boys. "Boy" was a fighting word, one of the most detested, disrespectful things somebody could call someone else. More fights started over one person calling another "boy" than over anything else. To counter that indignity, we addressed each other respectfully as "man," even though we were not adults:

"Hey, man, you goin' to play basketball today?"

"Naw, man, I got too much homework to do."

In the following weeks, I began to pay close attention to other racial nuances in my stepfather's interactions with people in Sterling Point. I didn't like what I saw. I didn't like the way he humbled himself and smiled when white folks were around. I grew to hate the sight of his big six-foot two-inch frame kneeling, with a wide-brimmed straw hat on his head, pulling up crabgrass while one of those privileged white people stood over him, supervising the menial work. It looked too much like pictures of downtrodden sharecroppers and field slaves I'd seen in books.

It is difficult sometimes to pinpoint defining moments in a life. But I'm certain that that period marked my realization of something it seemed white folks had been trying to get across to me for most of my young life--that there were two distinct worlds in America, and a different set of rules for each: The white one was full of the possibilities of life. The dark one was just that--dark and limited.

Over time, I shared my brothers' resentment when my stepfather made us go with him to Sterling Point, even though I knew our family badly needed the extra money. When we drove through Cavalier Manor during our rides to Sterling Point, I slumped down in the seat so my friends wouldn't see me riding in a car with a lawn mower and gardening tools sticking out of the trunk. I joined my brothers' silent brooding during the rides back home and, like them, became sullen, even when we crossed the scenic Churchland Bridge overlooking the colorful sailboats below.

My harshest introduction to the world of white folks came in September 1966, when my parents sent me to Alford J. Mapp, a white school across town. It was the beginning of my sixth-grade school year, and I was walking down the hall, searching for my new class, when a white boy timed my steps, extended his foot, and tripped me. The boy and his friends nudged each other and laughed as I stumbled into a locker, spelling books and papers everywhere. "Hey, nigger," the boy said. "You dropped something."

The word sounded vile coming from his :white mouth. When I regained my footing, I tore into that cat and tried to take his head off. Pinning him against a locker, I punched him in the face and kept on punchinghim until his two buddies jumped in to help him out. While other white students crowded around and cheered them on, we scuffled there in the hall until the bell rang, signaling the start of the next class period. Like combatants in a prizefight, we automatically stopped throwing punches and separated at the sound of the bell. The white boys went their way down the hall, calling me names along the way and threatening to retaliate. I gathered my papers, straightened my clothes, and reeled toward my next class, dazed, trying to figure out what had just happened to me.

My parents sent me to Mapp in 1966 because that was the first year that blacks in Portsmouth were able to attend school wherever they wanted. The U.S. Supreme Court had long before ruled against the notion of separate but equal schools; still, Virginia, one of the states that had resisted desegregation, was slow in putting together a busing plan. Without a plan to ship black students to schools across town, over the years blacks and whites in Portsmouth had simply remained in separate schools. I could have gone to W. E. Waters, a junior high school that had just been built in our neighborhood, but, like many blacks then, my parents figured I could get a better education at the white school across town.

I was proud of their decision and held it out teasingly to my brothers as proof that I was the smart one in the family, that I held more academic promise than them. Billy had flunked the second grade, and Dwight and Junnie never showed much interest in books. My less studious brothers would attend their regular, all-black high school, but I was going to a white school , which made me feel special.

My parents didn't talk with me beforehand about the challenge I would face as one in the first wave of blacks to integrate Mapp. We had all seen TV news footage of police in riot gear escorting black students through hostile, jeering crowds to enroll in all-white high schools and colleges across the country but hut for various reasons my parents saw no cause for alarm at Mapp. It was only a junior high school, which seemed far less menacing than the racially torn high schools and college campuses we heard about. Besides, there were no warning signals in Portsmouth to tip off my parents, no public protests by white citizens or high-profile white supremacist politicians like Alabama governor George Wallace threatening to buck the school integration plan.

At Mapp, I was the only African American in most of my classes. When I walked into one room and sat down, the students near me would get up and move away, as if my dark skin were dirty and hideous to them. Nobody talked directly to me. Instead, they shot daggers to each other that were intended for me. "You know, I hate niggers," they would say. "I don't understand why they're always following white people everywhere. We can't seem to get away from them. Why don't they just stay in their own schools?"

It wasn't much better dealing with white teachers. They avoided eye contact with me as much as possible and pretended not to see or hear white student hecklers. It was too much for an eleven-year-old to challenge, and I didn't try. Instead, I tried to become invisible. I kept to myself, remained quiet during class discussions, and never asked questions in or after class. I kept my eyes glued to my desk or looked straight ahead to avoid drawing attention to myself I staggered, numb and withdrawn, through each school day and hurried from my last class, gym, without showering so that I wouldn't miss the only bus headed home. Students who missed the first school bus had to walk through the white neighborhood to the main street to catch the city bus. Mapp was located in a middle-class section of town called Craddock, where the whites were as hateful as the poor whites in Academy Park.

The daily bus ride home brought its own set of fears. A group of white boys got on our bus regularly for the sole purpose, it seemed, of picking fights. I was scared to death of them. With older brothers to fight at home, I was confident I could whip any white boy my age and size, but many of the white guys who got on that bus were eighth graders, and they looked like giants to me. Others were older, white, leather-jacket-wearing hoods who I was certain were high school dropouts.

When we boarded the bus, blacks automatically moved to the rear, as if Jim Crow laws were still in effect. The white boys would board last, crowd into the aisles, and start making racial slurs when the bus pulled away from school. "I hate the smell of niggers. They sure do stink. Don't you think niggers stink, Larry?"

"They sure do, man. They smell bad."

Before long, fists flew, girls screamed, and people tussled in the aisles. Few of the black guys on the bus were big and bad enough to beat the tough white boys, who outnumbered us seven to one. I never joined in to help the black guys out. I huddled in the far corner at the rear the bus, tense, scared as hell, hoping the fighting wouldn't reach that far before the driver broke it up.

Children have an enormous capacity to adapt to lumps in school and tried as much as possible to shrug it off when I went home. Billy, Dwight, and Junnie came home most days full of stories about the fun they were having at pep rallies and football games at their all-black high school. I envied them because I couldn't match their stories with tales of my own about fun times at Mapp. I savored every minute of my weeknights at home and used weekends to gather the heart to face Mapp again. Monday mornings, I rose and dutifully caught the school bus back to hell.

The harassment never let up. Once, when my English teacher left the room, a girl sitting near me drew a picture of a stickman on a piece of paper, colored it black, scribbled my name below it, and passed it around the classroom for others to see. I lost my temper, snatched it from her, and ripped it up. She hit me. I hit her back, then the whole class jumped in. When the teacher returned, I was standing up, punching one guy while another one was riding my back and hitting me in the head. The teacher demanded, "What's going on here?"

The white kids cried out in unison, "That black boy started a fight with us!"

Without another word, the teacher sent me to the principal's office and I was dismissed from school. The week-long suspension alerted my parents that something was wrong. Mama sat me down and tried to talk to me about it. "Why were you fighting in school?"

"It wasn't my fault, Mama. That girl drew a picture of me and colored it black."

"That's no reason to fight. What's the matter with you? Your grades are falling and now you get into a fight. Don't you like your school?"

I tried to explain, then choked up and broke down in tears. Seeing that, my parents sought and got approval to transfer me to the neighborhood school, W. E. Waters.

But it wasn't over yet. One day, before the transfer went through, I was sitting on the gym floor with the rest of the student body, watching a school assembly program, when a group of rowdy white upperclassmen began pluckily my head and ridiculing me. I got confused. What should I do? To turn around and say something to them would start another fight. To get up and leave would require me to wade through a sea of hostile white students to reach the nearest exit. With nowhere to go, I sat there and took the humiliation until I broke. Tears welled in my eyes and started running, uncontrollably, down my face. I sat silently through the remainder of the assembly program with my vision blurred and my spirit broken. That was the only time, then or since, that I've been crushed so completely. When it was over, I collected myself, went to the boys' bathroom, and boohooed some more.

There was no greater joy than that last bus ride home from Mapp. I sat near a window and stared out, trying to make sense of those past few months. Everything that had happened to me was so contrary to all I'd been taught about right and wrong. Before Mapp, every grudge I had ever held against a person could be traced to some specific deed. I couldn't understand someone hating me simply for being black and alive. I wondered, Where did those white people learn to hate so deeply at such a young age? I didn't know. But, over time, I learned to hate as blindly and viciously as any of them.
 

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