Kitabı oku: «Real Life»

MARSHA HUNT

Real Life

Copyright

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

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780006548737

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007483105

Version: 2016-01-19

For Karis

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

1 MADE IN AMERICA

2 CULTURED PEARLS

3 THE FRONT LINE

4 INFANT DIPLOMACY

5 MOUNT AIRY AND CHESTNUT HILL

6 THE DREAM MACHINE

7 EVERYTHING’S NOT EVERYTHING

8 FREE AT LAST

9 PURI NATURABILIS

10 PRIORITIES

11 SAVE THE TEARS

12 THE PLEASURE ZONE

13 SMOKED OUT

14 WORDS WITHOUT MUSIC

15 CHANGING FACES

16 BEYOND THE BRIDGE

EPILOGUE

Keep Reading

Indent

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

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

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

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

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.