We lived in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem, and I welcomed the move with open arms, since it put me back together with the person who had such a profound influence in my life, my mother.
Once I arrived in the Big Apple, one of the first things I did was pawn off for $12 those beautiful CCM skates my mother had sent me from New York because, as it turned out, not too many kids in New York were into skating, particularly black kids. My mother must have had a hell of a time finding them in the first place, because even at that time I wore a size 14.
Girlie, my mother’s sister. She was a nurse in Jamaica, then later nursed in New York. The note on this photo postcard says, “to dear Mae Rose from Con,” one of my mother’s three sisters.
My Uncle Ernest, my mom’s brother, in Kingston, Jamaica, in, I believe, the 1920s.
One of my mother’s sisters, Dolly, also known as Girlie. My mom’s other siblings were sisters Con and Iris and brother Ernest.
I enrolled at DeWitt Clinton high school in the Bronx, and I have to say the school has turned out a roster of impressive grads: playwrights Paddy Chayefsky and Neil Simon, actors Don Adams, Judd Hirsch, Burt Lancaster, and Tracy Morgan, composer Richard Rodgers, jazz musician Fats Waller, comic Robert Klein, and designer Ralph Lauren. In my time, I was about the only member of my gang to go to high school and, given the message about education that had been pounded into my head since I was a young child, the fact those kids didn’t go to school was an eye-opener for me. In my mind, going to school was what you did; it was the right thing.
Beyond my studies, being in Harlem at that time turned out to be an incredible learning experience for me, although not all my experiences were positive. I had moved from a city where, as a black, I was the exception rather than the rule to a place where the exact opposite was the case. Black was everywhere, and it was important for me to see that. In all professions, in all walks of life, blacks were fully represented, and that was a stark difference from the limited career opportunities I’d come to expect in Canada. Mind you, much of that advancement was still primarily within the black community, largely insulated or isolated from the wider New York and American mainstream. Regardless, the sight of what all these blacks were accomplishing stiffened my resolve to be more than a porter.
At that time, my mom got me my first part-time job, moving around the clothing carts in the laundry where she worked. Then I got another life lesson. I was doing well and working hard when after two weeks, out of the blue, I was fired. It made no sense. I was devastated because I considered it a significant job and it enabled me to help my mother out financially. It was my first job, and I was a proud son of a gun, and then this guy up and fired me. I asked my mother how that could happen, and she said, “Well, the boss wanted to go to bed with me and I said no.” I’ve never forgotten that. It affected me. It taught me that life wasn’t fair. You can work as hard as you can, and then all of a sudden almost on a whim something can come upon you and you’re gone, through no fault of your own.
I’ll never forget that slimy excuse for a boss. I was getting used to seeing hustlers, con men, pimps, prostitutes, and rounders of all sorts taking advantage of people … but when it affected me personally, and my mother, I was shocked and hurt. My mother took me aside and explained the facts of life to me with respect to the boss’s request. I felt awful for her that she had to put up with things like that. She was a decent, moral woman.
I got my next job setting up pins in a bowling alley in the Bronx. As a relatively new arrival from Canada, I was really discouraged and disillusioned by the blatant racism in the United States. I remember saying to another black pin boy from Georgia how awful it was that in his home state, for instance, blacks couldn’t go into restaurants or get work, and at that time blacks were even still being hung from trees in that part of the South. Incredibly, that young guy protested that I was insulting his home state, one of the worst states for racism in the United States of America. The reaction shocked me. It was hard to understand, and it taught me a couple of lessons. One, it’s important to be proud of your birthplace, and two, get all the facts before you open your mouth.
Nevertheless, I got the New York experience, which is a very broad one when you are young. Those streets require you to mature very quickly and come to terms with what life is all about. You see how people are forced to live, often in the direst of circumstances. Back then in Harlem, you would regularly see a pimp beat one of his women for not turning over all her money. There were drunks lying on the sidewalks, knife fights, and many other illegal activities going on all over the place. When I hear people describe such settings as jungles, I have to agree. I feel safe in saying Harlem boys and girls of ten and twelve have seen and know more about the hard facts of life and suffering than young boys and girls in Canada in their late teens or even early twenties. That was true in the 1930s, and I am convinced it is the case today. There was no city in Canada to compare with Harlem before the Second World War. It was gruelling and grinding, it eroded your humanity, and it consumed your dignity. From that sense of personal emptiness, you begin to develop admiration for people who fight their way through that and have learned to hold their heads high.
Harlem, notwithstanding certain good points, faced a lot of poverty, crime, and despair, and there was little opportunity for the majority of black people to crawl out of that.
On top of it all, nobody — and by that I mean civic, social, and government people, those who could do something about it — gave a damn. It was debilitating. Life for black youth was bleak, and of course they didn’t hang around on the streets out of choice. They were there because there was nothing else to do. And I will tell you that there were a lot of brilliant people on those streets. Given the opportunity, they would have been leaders in business, in politics, in government. That’s proven by the fact that some, somehow, escaped the horrors of Harlem by becoming lawyers, judges, community leaders, politicians, professors, doctors, business leaders, and sports superstars.
They got out because of their own strong character, their determination, and their will, which made them able to sacrifice and not fall prey to the easy ways of life — crime or welfare. Seeing that was a very important lesson for me, and it reinforced much of the direction and encouragement I was getting from my mother.
My mother was a decent woman who always insisted on living a decent life. We lived in the relatively better part of Harlem, and I ended up being a regular, good student at DeWitt Clinton. Mae Rose had a lot of influence on me, and it was always clear her expectations of me were high. In turn, I had a great deal of love and respect for her and I realized how deeply it would hurt her if I let her down. Because of her I have always set my sights high. The fact that I was one of the few people from my gang attending school alone helped minimize my time on the streets. For as long as I can remember, I always wanted to be something, somebody.
My mother, Mae Rose, photographed around the time she left for New York. As I have pointed out, and as is obvious, she was a beautiful woman. The note says, “With much love to Linny, Mom.”
After I went to New York, I really didn’t go to church much, although I visited the church of Father Devine, the black American religious leader. Born George Baker in 1875 near Savannah, Georgia, he began preaching in the South in around 1900, and in around 1915 he moved to New York. There he founded his Peace Mission Movement and adopted the name