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Jersey City Runaway

The spotlight stung his eyes. Clerow Wilson groaned. He twitched. Lying on a stretcher on the gymnasium stage, Clerow was playing a soldier in the school play at P.S. 14, a redbrick hulk on a trash-strewn block in Jersey City, New Jersey. He had no lines in the play; in fact he was lucky to be in it at all. Mrs. Davis, the director, had chosen a blond-haired white girl to play the heroine, Civil War nurse Clara Barton, and filled out the cast with older children. “Sorry, Clerow,” she’d said. “You didn’t make it.”

“Pleeeeeze, Miz Davis. I’ll play a tree,” he’d said. “Or a dead guy.”

She relented. Little Clerow, the smallest, jumpiest kid in his class, got to play a wounded soldier, basically a prop. His job was to lie on his stretcher wrapped in ketchup-stained bandages while Clara pranced around talking about tourniquets and the Battle of Bull Run. But under Clerow’s bandages lay sixty pounds of ham. During dress rehearsal he moaned, rolled over and loudly, foot-shakingly, died.

“Thank you for that heartfelt contribution,” Mrs. Davis said. “Please remember that our play is called Clara Barton of the Red Cross, not Wounded Soldier.”

Clerow didn’t answer. He was still twitching and winking, getting laughs from the kids.

The next night, with more than a hundred parents, teachers, and students waiting for the curtain, the girl playing Clara got stage fright. She couldn’t move or speak. Mrs. Davis was about to send everyone home when Clerow piped up. “I can do her part!” Lying on his stretcher during rehearsals, he had memorized the whole play.

They found a blond wig. Eight-year-old Clerow put it on along with Clara’s white smock, bonnet, and high-button shoes, and, as he remembered years later, “Clara Barton became a little black chick. People laughed when they saw me, so I started ad-libbing. Hello, Manassas!” That night’s crowd caught the first public glimpse of Clerow “Flip” Wilson, who would grow up to be one of America’s favorite comedians. His journey out of a Jersey City slum would take him to Air Force bases in the South Pacific, nightclubs on the segregated Chitlin’ Circuit, and Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in its heyday; from drug dens and flophouses to his own top-rated TV show, the pinnacle of pop culture. It started that night in 1942, in a smelly gym at P.S. 14.

“That was my first gig—playing a girl. The play became a comedy, and it was a smash.”

*   *   *

Clerow Wilson Jr. was born on December 8, 1933, a drab day in Jersey City, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York. Like Frank Sinatra twenty years before him, Clerow could look across the river at the Manhattan skyline and dream of making it there. Like Sinatra before him, he saw the Statue of Liberty standing at the mouth of the Hudson with her back to New Jersey. Unlike Sinatra, who grew up in working-class Hoboken, the next town to the north, Clerow couldn’t afford a ferry ticket to Liberty Island.

His parents—Clerow Sr., a handyman and janitor, and his wife, Cornelia—shared a four-room apartment in The Hill, one of the poorest parts of a deteriorating city, with their fast-growing family. The Wilsons’ windows looked out at the funeral home across Clinton Avenue, a street few white citizens walked except by accident. Clerow Sr. and Cornelia had had nine children before Clerow came along. Soon there were two more, making him the tenth of a dozen Wilson kids spilling into streets jammed with trolley cars and buses, soldiers and sailors, church bells, glad and angry and prayerful voices, soapbox evangelists, flying Spaldeens, dogs, cats and rats, junkies and numbers runners. In an era when light skin meant status and many blacks dreamed of passing for white, Clerow Jr. had the darkest skin in the family. “You’re black as burnt toast. Black as a bad banana,” his father said. “I ought to throw you out with the garbage.” Clerow was ashamed to be so black until he decided it made him special. When Mrs. Davis at P.S. 14 pointed out the window at the Statue of Liberty and said, “If one of you lazybones ever did something worthwhile, maybe she’d turn back around this way,” he thought he might be the one.

At the age of seven or eight Clerow fell for a girl from “the neatest family on the block.” Her name was Geraldine. Her skin, as he remembered it, was “so black it was almost blue.” Her mother dressed Geraldine in starched pink dresses and rubbed her legs with Vaseline to make them shine. “I asked her to be my girlfriend, but Geraldine said no because I was a ragamuffin. Then she said she might be my girl if I got her some fake fingernails at Woolworth’s.” Without a penny in his pocket, he shoplifted the nails. They were the wrong size. He sneaked back into the store only to get caught in the act, “and then Geraldine wouldn’t talk to me because I was a criminal.”

One day he went home to find his brothers and sisters huddling in an empty apartment. Their mother was gone. “She ran off with a man. Took my baby brother and all the furniture, too. My pops went to the bank and his money was gone. She’d been there with a certificate of his death and withdrawn it.” Unable to pay rent, Clerow Sr. lost the apartment. He herded his kids into a coal cellar, where they huddled on the floor while he slept sitting up on the stairs. After they got kicked out of there, Clerow Sr. spent his nights in other basements or tool sheds while the children fended for themselves. Some wound up in foster homes. Clerow Jr. moved in with his older sister Eleanor, who had married a long-haul truck driver. Eleanor and her husband had three children of their own. “They always ate first,” he remembered. “I had to wait. I got what their kids didn’t eat, and they resented me being there, so they’d slop their food around and play with it, just to show me who was who.”

Life in Jersey City’s slums was chaotic and often violent. When a relative raped one of the Wilsons’ cousins, a girl of eleven, nobody reported it. When a man pitched his wife out a second-story window, she spent a night in the hospital and then climbed back up the stairs to her husband. Clerow’s sister Eleanor slept with other men when her husband was on the road. When her man came home, she hosted house parties for him and his trucker friends, charging the other truckers a couple dollars’ admission at the door. The men drank and gambled straight through to breakfast. They were used to driving through the night. One night Eleanor’s husband amused his friends by having little Clerow serve as their craps table. The boy sat in a kitchen chair with the dice board on his lap. He had to sit up straight so they could use his stomach as a backstop for the dice. Clerow stayed up long after Eleanor’s kids went to bed, holding still while the truckers threw dice and money, hooting and yelling. He was earning his keep: “I had to stay awake or get out.” If he nodded off, Eleanor’s husband, a street fighter known for knocking men out by head-butting them, leaned over and banged heads with him.

“There’s your wake-up call,” he’d say.

Clerow stayed in touch with his father, who haunted The Hill looking for any work he could get as a janitor, painter, carpenter, plumber, or handyman. His pops would stand on the curb for hours in all weather, wearing his work boots, tool belt, and canvas gloves, waiting for someone to hire him. He’d work a plug of Red Man tobacco in his cheek for hours, spitting the juice into a paper cup. Men with steady jobs earned fifty cents an hour in those days; Pops settled for less. He hauled trash for restaurants and food stands, and sometimes the proprietors let him keep some of their unsold fruits and vegetables. He’d sit in a restaurant basement with Clerow, dividing the contents of a string bag full of apples, bananas, potatoes, carrots, onions, cabbages, and heads of lettuce, half of it spoiled. They cut out the rotten parts and ate the rest.

After the sun went down, Pops rode Jackson Avenue bar stools. He introduced Clerow to drinkers and bartenders as “my boy, the one named after me, and I’m very proud of him.” Nobody remarked on the fact that Clerow Jr. was darker-skinned than Clerow Sr., closer to the skin tone of another man who took an interest in him. Leroy Taylor, who drank in the same taverns as Pops, was a friend of the family, an old boyfriend of Cornelia’s. A high-school graduate, Taylor was the first black electrical foreman in Jersey City, highly regarded up and down the avenue. “Come here, my boy,” Taylor would say, calling Clerow down to his bar stool. “You working hard in school? You got enough to eat?” Taylor gave the boy more money than his pops did. Why?

“Why?” Eleanor thought that was funny. “Because he’s your real father. Pops don’t even know,” she said.

Taylor took him for a drive in his Model T Ford, Clerow’s first ride in a car. They went to the zoo and the circus and one day to a stage show at the grand old Mosque Theater in Newark. After Count Basie and His Barons of Rhythm played a set, a comedian came out. Dressed in spats, a top hat, and white gloves, the comic performed an old blackface routine called “Open the Door, Richard.” Playing a drunk pitched out of a fine restaurant, he said, “I’m goin’ keep drinkin’ to everybody’s health until I ruin my own.” Wobbling back to the restaurant, he bawled, “Open the dooo-oo-oor, Richard!” Clerow would never forget the laughter and cheers that filled the theater. “I thought, ‘Wow, they all love that guy. That’s what I want to do. That’s what I want to be.’”

*   *   *

Watching the world wobble around him, Clerow saw grown-ups lie, cheat, and steal while their kids went hungry. Eleanor cheated on her husband. She picked her boyfriends’ pockets while they were sleeping. She demanded money from Pops for Clerow’s “room and board” and used it to play the numbers. But of all the double-dealing adults in the world, Clerow thought, his mother was the worst. “What a dirty trick—this woman has a son by her boyfriend and names it Clerow. Her husband’s name! And then she leaves us, but she takes my baby brother with her. Why not take me, too?”

Sitting on the curb with his cuckolded pops, he parroted the word that Pops, Eleanor, Leroy Taylor, and probably Frank Sinatra all used to name his mother. Bitch. And that gave him an advantage when the neighborhood boys played the dozens.

The dozens was a talking game. You insult another kid, and he insults you back, harder. The game’s name dated back at least a century to slave auctions when the “worst” slaves, broken down by hard labor or rape, some with hands or limbs cut off for disobedience, were sold in lots, twelve at a time. They were cheaper by the dozen. Nothing was more insulting. By Clerow’s time the insults were strictly verbal, often describing in detail how fat or ugly somebody’s mother was. As in rap battles of later decades, the attacks escalated until somebody lost his train of thought or his nerve.

“I fucked your momma.”

“A gang of guys fucked your momma.”

“A busload of guys fucked yours, and the bitch was so fat the bus got a flat.”

Most boys had limits. When dogs and leprechauns, Captain Marvel and mule teams of double-dicked donkeys started fucking people’s mommas, they backed off. Not Clerow. “I always won. I could beat anybody talking that shit because they couldn’t hurt my feelings about my momma. I hated the bitch.”

*   *   *

Not long after Clerow’s stage debut as Clara Barton, a neighbor filed a complaint about the Wilson kids running the streets. The New Jersey Board of Children’s Guardians rounded them up and placed them in foster homes. Clerow wound up with a black family in Bayonne, just south of Jersey City. The Lewises, devout Catholics who prayed morning and night, kissing the shiny black beads of their rosaries, had two other foster children as well as a son of their own. The state gave them sixty dollars a month plus a ration of canned milk for each foster child, a tidy sum at a time when a loaf of bread cost a dime and gas was fifteen cents a gallon. As at Eleanor’s apartment, the “real” family ate first. Clerow sat in a corner watching the Lewises’ real son drink the milk the state sent for Clerow, watching the boy smile and wipe off his milk mustache.

Clerow began wetting his bed. He was nervous. Homesick. “Mrs. Lewis woke me up every morning and beat my ass for wetting the bed. I’d change clothes and watch them eat breakfast.”

He played alone in the Lewises’ backyard. The white kids next door watched through a knothole in the fence, jeering at him. “Nigger! Look at the little nigger. Eeny meeny miny moe, catch a nigger by the toe, if he hollers let him go . . .” It stopped when Clerow poked a rake handle through the knothole and hit one of them in the eye.

The neighbor kid’s mother complained, and Mrs. Lewis whipped Clerow with a belt. That night he ran away. It was seven miles from the Lewis house back to Jackson Avenue. Picking his way through a garbage dump, he found a weather-beaten wooden sled. He’d always wanted a sled. He was dragging it behind him when the police picked him up, laughing to see a boy pulling a sled in June. “Don’t send me back,” he pleaded with them. “That lady beats me.” But the cops said they had no choice. They took him back to Mrs. Lewis, who smiled and thanked them and whipped him as soon as they left. Between blows he distracted himself by hatching a plan: he would keep running away until the Board of Children’s Guardians sent him to reform school, where his brother Clifford was.

He ran away eight times in a year. The social workers responded by transferring him from one foster home to another. One was lorded over by a loud, theatrical preacher, a finger-snapping, slide-stepping, Cadillac-driving reverend who would serve as the model for one of Flip Wilson’s most popular characters. Clerow ran away. Another foster family ran a turkey farm where the skinny eight-year-old, not much taller than the poultry, vaccinated the birds by the hundred, giving each one a shot in its plump, mottled thigh. He fed them, too, tossing grain from a bucket while the turkeys mobbed him. They liked him so much that they gobbled like crazy the night he ran away, almost foiling his escape.

Finally the state gave up on him. The Board of Children’s Guardians assigned Clerow Wilson to the New Jersey Reform School at Jamesburg, forty miles southwest of Jersey City. He was eight and a half.

Surrounded by fences topped with barbed wire, the notorious Jamesburg school provided beds and a rudimentary education for more than four hundred boys deemed too wild for the foster-care system. The barracks were crowded, discipline strict, meals sloppy and cold. Clerow loved the place. “I was the smartest kid there. And Sundays we got tapioca pudding.” Before dawn one morning a couple of guards drove him to a clinic where a doctor took his tonsils out and circumcised him. Armed with two bags of ice, Clerow was back at the reformatory in time for lunch.

A white teacher named Alice Jones felt sorry for the nervous runt who talked a blue streak once you got him going on about his favorite stuff: jokes, radio serials, clean clothes, rhythm and blues music, penny candy, tapioca, comic books. Mrs. Jones gave him Bugs Bunny and Little Orphan Annie comics. Clerow loved wise guy Bugs and plucky Annie, saved from an orphanage by wealthy Daddy Warbucks, though some of Orphan Annie’s stories upset him. He skipped the parts where Annie got bullied or kidnapped, and picked up where she got rescued.

Mr. Herman, Jamesburg’s night watchman, ate his lunch at midnight. Every night, just before opening the waxed-paper bag his wife had packed, he woke Clerow. “We need to stop you from wetting the bed,” he said. “Go pee.” After the boy peed and washed and rewashed his hands, they shared Mr. Herman’s lunch—a jar of peaches and a sandwich. Soon the watchman was bringing a late lunch for Clerow, too. They sat up late talking about what a boy could do with his life if he stayed out of trouble and worked hard every day, like being a lawyer or an airplane pilot, or even a man in a top hat entertaining cheering crowds at the Mosque Theater in Newark.

With World War II roaring in Europe and the South Pacific, Little Orphan Annie and a band of cartoon kids called the Junior Commandos collected newspapers and scrap metal to aid the war effort. One of the Junior Commandos was black, which led some newspapers to drop the comic strip. President Roosevelt announced gasoline rationing to aid the war effort as the Air Force bombed Germany and Italy, and physicist Enrico Fermi split atoms in a cyclotron under the football field at the University of Chicago, the first step toward an atomic bomb. Clerow Wilson celebrated his ninth birthday in December 1942. Mrs. Jones and Mr. Herman, two white grown-ups who owed him nothing, sang “Happy Birthday.” “It’s my happiest memory of childhood,” he remembered. “They gave me the first birthday presents I ever got—a can of shoe polish and a box of Cracker Jack.”

*   *   *

After six months at Jamesburg, he was reunited with three of his older brothers and sisters in a foster home near Atlantic City. His new foster father worked as a chef in a hotel on the boardwalk. The hotel threw out the heels of bread loaves, so the man brought home bags full of them. His wife, a fortune teller, fed them the heels with hot tea. In the evenings they all sat around a tall wooden radio listening to serials—The Green Hornet, The Shadow, the scary Inner Sanctum. In the mornings Clerow helped his teenage brother Clifford with his newspaper route, which he inherited when Clifford moved on to burglary and armed robbery. After that, Clifford was always in trouble. One day he took Clerow along on one of his mandatory visits to the police station, figuring his probation officer wouldn’t hit him if his little brother was standing there. He was wrong. “The probation officer made Clifford lie on a bench. He whipped his ass with a rubber hose. Then he looked over at me. He said, ‘Look here, little nigger, I want to show you what happens if you do like your brother.’ He picked me up, slammed me against some lockers, and hit me a couple times with the rubber hose. That was ‘just in case,’ he said.”

The chef’s house was comfortable enough, but the arrangement ended when social workers discovered that the lady of the house was reading palms and holding séances. The Wilson kids were transferred to all-black Whitesboro, New Jersey. Their new foster parents, the Townsends, were members of the Sanctified Church, a black revivalist congregation that looked down on radio dramas, movies, jokes, dancing, and comic books. To fit in, Clerow agreed to be saved. Dressed in a brand-new suit and tie, he stood up in church, raised his arms, spun around, and swore he’d let Jesus into his heart. Soon he was the Townsends’ favorite, testifying at churches all over South Jersey. Every weekday before school, Mrs. Townsend gave the children sweet potatoes right out of the oven; on cold mornings they warmed their hands with them while they waited for the school bus, then ate them when the bus arrived. After he was saved, Clerow was given an extra sweet potato.

While the children vied for “Mother” Townsend’s attention, she made money off them. Clerow and the other boys got summer jobs working on nearby farms, making ten dollars a week. She took eight and left them two dollars apiece. “On Saturdays she’d take us to an amusement park. We’d spend a dollar on rides, but you had to keep something back for the church collection, and you had to buy a gift for Mother. Once I spent my whole two dollars on a great big card for her.” Years later he could still recite the verse on the card: Mother—to one who bears the sweetest name and adds luster to the same, who shares my joys and tears when sad, the greatest friend I ever had, no other could take the place of my mother. “And that made me her pet, but it made me mad. I was resentful of women, starting with my real mother. I never saw how she could leave me, or why my sister fucked around and stole, or how Mrs. Lewis could give my milk to her kid, or how Mrs. Townsend could take her sixty dollars a month from the state and still cheat us—chicks always using motherfuckers for their money.” He could almost understand why his pops started wearing a gold chain around his neck after Clerow’s mother left him. When he asked about the chain, Pops said he wore it because of his runaway wife. If he saw her again, he said, he’d take off that chain and strangle her with it.

Clerow told himself he could do without a mother. He had eyes that saw everything going on around him, and a mind that spun so fast sometimes it scared him. If he could hold on until he was old enough to fend for himself, he’d find his way out of the lying, cheating, stealing, ass-whipping world he was born into.

*   *   *

He kept running away from foster homes—thirteen times in all—until the state sent him back to The Hill to live with Pops. Still a runt at fourteen, Clerow bore scars on his bottom from beatings his last foster mother had given him with a double loop of copper electrical wire. He was thrilled to be back with Pops, who was working as custodian of a building in a white neighborhood. As a perk of the job, he got a four-room apartment in the building, rent-free. They shared the place with a shifting set of relatives, including Lemuel Brown, who found the whole world amusing. A brother of Clerow’s mother, Uncle Lemuel was a bartender and painter. Some of his paintings sold for $100 and up, including a few that got him arrested: vivid oils of boxing champ Joe Louis in action, naked, swinging a heavyweight penis any man would be proud of.

When Clerow brought his first girlfriend around, Uncle Lemuel whistled. “That’s a cute gal you got there.”

“Thank you, Unc,” Clerow said.

“You get her little fruit cup yet?”

“C’mon, Unc, don’t talk like that to my girl.”

“And you call yourself a Wilson!” Uncle Lemuel laughed. “Let me tell you something about the Wilsons. If a Wilson man meets a girl on Wednesday, he gets her little fruit cup by Tuesday—the day before.”

Clerow liked living with Pops and Uncle Lemuel in postwar Jersey City, attending Henry Snyder High School and working as a pinsetter in a bowling alley. Sometimes his capacity for happiness surprised him. Walking home from the bowling alley with the Statue of Liberty at his back, he’d whistle and do a dance step across the sidewalk. His spirits ebbed when he saw how people looked right through him. Whites and blacks alike paid no attention to the raggedy boy in patched pants, secondhand shoes, and shirts that were missing buttons. He was ashamed of his clothes, natty hair, empty pockets, and even his rear end. When his first girlfriend agreed to play doctor, he chickened out. “I didn’t want her to see the scars on my butt,” he confessed to Uncle Lemuel.

“So don’t show her the butt,” his uncle said. “Give her the flip side!”

Leroy Taylor and his Model T Ford were out of the picture by now. Clerow never knew what became of his biological father, but he learned a lot about his pops in the years they lived together, including his strange sleeping habits. “From the time my mother left, he never slept in a bed. Always in a chair by the kitchen stove, sitting up.” Pops would drink himself to sleep, sitting up in a stiff-backed chair as if waiting for his wife to come home, then stand up, stretch, and go to work in the morning, fixing the white tenants’ squeaky doors and leaky toilets, cleaning up their messes. Clerow loved his pops but he didn’t want to live like that. He wasn’t cut out to be a trucker like Eleanor’s husband, or a bartender like Uncle Lemuel. And while he had no idea how the blackface comics at the Mosque Theater got started, he was pretty sure it wasn’t by wasting their time on what he later called “slum nigger shit.”

In the winter of 1949, the year Clerow turned sixteen, his pops lugged a heavy cardboard carton up the stairs and said, “Looky here.” He sliced the box open. It held six quart bottles of bourbon. “We are about to have a very merry Christmas.”

Clerow’s big brother Lem, their uncle’s namesake, was sleeping over at the time. A boxer and semipro football player, Lem saw himself as a tough guy. He boasted that he could drink more of that whiskey than Pops. Drink him right under the kitchen table.

“Oh no, you can’t,” Pops said.

“Hundred says I can.” Lem carried a showy bankroll of twenty-dollar bills, which he began peeling off.

“Five hundred,” Pops said. More than he made in a month.

They made Clerow hold the stakes: a thousand dollars in twenties, tens, and a handful of Pops’s crinkly fivers and singles. The two men sat at the kitchen table, each with a quart of bourbon and a tall water glass in front of him. Pops filled his glass and drained it. Lem took longer to empty his. Pops poured another. After three big glasses, his whiskey bottle was dry. Lem, still working on his second glass, gave up. He snatched a handful of bills from Clerow and started for the door. Pops went after him. Clerow froze. The men reached the door at the same time. Pops kicked it shut, grabbed for the money with one hand and got a handful of Lem’s hair with the other. Lem got loose and ran through the apartment, Pops chasing him, twenty-dollar bills flying, Lem shutting doors and Pops shoving them open. At some point Pops came up with a hatchet. Lem slammed the bedroom door and began shoving furniture against it, cussing and hollering insults and threats, but he forgot the door behind him. Pops rushed in, waving the hatchet, and Lem threw the money at him and ran for his life.

When it was over, Clerow was breathing as hard as his pops. He didn’t know where he belonged, if anywhere, but it wasn’t here.