There were other fathers along the way, men who reached out and gave me their hands. There was Mister Coleman, principal of the Cote Brilliante Grammar School where I was transferred when I was thirteen. He called me into his office once when I was in the seventh grade. I walked right up to his big oak desk, and he leaned back in his swivel chair and looked me up and down.
“I’ve got a problem you might be able to help me with, Richard. It’s about your job as a patrol boy.”
“Sure, Mister Coleman.”
“I’ve had complaints about how rough you are at the school crossing, Richard. You push the students, you use bad language. Now, I’ve watched you, Richard, and I know you’re one of our best patrol captains. You don’t let anybody cross until all the cars have stopped, you get right out there and make those trucks stay behind the white line. I don’t want to have to take your badge away.”
“Well, Mister Coleman . . .”
“How old are you, Richard?”
“Fourteen.” I was embarrassed at being behind.
“You’re a leader, Richard, a smart boy, a little older than some of the other students. They’ll do just what you tell them if you’re kind and strong. You’ve got to help them out on that corner, you can’t be hateful. You’re just like a father with a lot of children to watch after. Now go out there and keep those little kids safe.”
At three o’clock I ran out on my post and stood out there like a happy traffic cop, as straight as a man could stand, proud because everybody was looking at me, because kids couldn’t cross the street without me. Milkmen, laundrymen, they’d pull up their trucks and I’d make sure all the kids were on the sidewalk before I’d wave them through. The drivers would lean out and wave at me and call hello as they passed by. I was somebody.
I changed a lot those years at Cote Brilliante. St. Louis had a segregated school system and that school had been built for white kids. But after the war, when the neighborhood changed, it became a Negro school. It had trees and lawns and a beautiful brick building. I had to walk through a nice neighborhood to get there from North Taylor. I stopped shining shoes that year because I wanted to go to school clean, without polish all over my hands. I started taking books home with me. I still didn’t read them because it was too cold at home, but it was a good feeling to have them around. In the three years I went to Cote Brilliante, I only missed school when I didn’t have enough warm clothes.
The teachers were different, too. I guess Mr. Coleman set the tone. They talked to me, they listened to me, I got a chance to see Negroes in authority who didn’t seem bitter or out to get me. I got up in class and I talked, even if I really didn’t have anything to say.
“Miss Carter?”
“Yes, Richard?”
“If two and two is four, then what you’re really saying is that you have to subtract two from four two times to get zero. Or you could multiply two times two and then subtract it from four or from two plus two and still get zero. Isn’t that right?”
“Uh, I think so, Richard, but perhaps you better say that again, slowly. . . .”
I never read books so I didn’t really know things the way the other kids did, but all of a sudden I wanted to know. From all those years on the street I had a feeling that maybe there was more to things than just what was brought out in class. And so I tried to punch holes in the stories the other kids believed in (“I don’t think anybody could throw a silver dollar all the way across no river”) and show those kids they really weren’t as smart as they thought (“Did you ever see that gold in Fort Knox, how you know it’s really there?”).
I didn’t know the answers either, but I got to be a big man at Cote Brilliante. I got the reputation of a talker who could go on and on about anything at all. There was a school play about the United Nations, and I was invited to be an actor in it. I started to learn how to read the newspapers, and I could talk about the editorial page. And I was the big negotiator, the guy who broke up all the fights. Teachers would send for me to break up fights. Sometimes the big guys would come after me. A guy twice my size would grab me and push me against a wall and be all ready to knock my face in. I’d roll my eyes and look down at his feet.
“Baby, you better kill me quick. If you don’t, I’m gonna steal those cool shoes you wearin’.”
Now who could beat up a guy who said that?
Then I went to Sumner High and I was nobody again. There were a lot of wealthy Negro kids at Sumner, doctors’ sons who had their own cars. Every girl looked as clean and smart as Helene Tucker. The athletes and the rich boys and the brains were the big wheels at Sumner High School. The only attention I got was in Pop Beckett’s gym class. Pop was one of the first Negro graduates of Springfield College, in Massachusetts, probably the greatest physical education school in the country. He was tough. Rich or poor, everybody got hit one time or another in his class. He slapped me a couple of times for messing up, and it felt good to have somebody care enough to beat me for a reason. It got to the point where I started looking for it. Pop would stand up on the platform in front of the gym class, his face stony, his chest bulging out of his T-shirt, and I’d suck on my cheeks until my lips squeaked.
“Who was that?” Pop would roar.
“Me. It was me, Pop.”
Whop.
Or I’d yell out: “Pop, you stink.”
“That you, Gregory?”
“Yeah, Pop, it was me.”
“Get up here.”
Whop.
I became a big man in gym class because I was the only one who would yell at Pop and take my beating. I guess he knew why I was doing it because he never threw me out.
When school ended in June, Boo and Presley and I got jobs with the government flood control project on the levee. We told them we were eighteen years old. At $1.25 an hour, I figured I’d be able to get some nice new clothes for school next fall.
That summer was like a long bad movie. We had to load and pile sandbags up and down the banks of the Mississippi and it was so hot the soles of our boots got sticky and our shirts were like another layer of skin. Always wet, always muddy, and if you took your clothes off you died from sunstroke. We saw a lot of men die. Work all day, all night, puffing on cigarettes to keep the mosquitoes off, sleep where you drop, eat when the Red Cross truck came along with sandwiches and coffee. One of us always kept watch behind in case another man went crazy in the sun and started splitting heads with his shovel. We were loading hundred-pound sandbags one day and I’d been urinating blood for a week when the levee started shaking and the bags began to turn dark brown from the water seeping through. A Negro Army sergeant grabbed my arm.
“See my truck over there, boy? When the levee bust we ain’t gonna pick up no whites, hear, but you hang near the truck and jump in.”
And suddenly somebody was screaming: “It’s breaking, it’s breaking,” and water and bags and men were spilling and tumbling around us and Boo and Presley and I were running through muddy water, running until we fell down and got up again. Once we were so tired we just fell down and stayed there. The water came seeping up through the ground and we were running again, no place to lie down, nothing to eat. We passed three white men standing on top of a rock eating cheese sandwiches. They wouldn’t let us come up with them. One of them threw half a cheese sandwich down. Boo tore it in three parts and we were just about to bite on it when one of the white men grabbed his stomach and pitched over. We started running again. We got separated that night, and we didn’t see each other again for a couple of weeks, when the water went down and we all were sent home.
We were heroes when we got home. Momma was so glad to see us because she had read about a truckload of Negroes who had been drowned. Boo and Presley and I strutted around the neighborhood, and people bought us watermelon slices just to sit on their front porches and tell them how bad it was, how many people we saved. We lied our heads off. It was beautiful.
We had a lot of trouble getting our checks for that summer. An old white man with a turkey neck down at the Federal Building kept telling Presley and me to come back tomorrow. Finally, Momma came down with us and straightened things out and a few weeks later we got almost $500. For the first time, Presley and I went downtown to shop in the big department stores.
We were treated like dogs. We’d go into a place and a salesman would hurry away from his white customer. “What do you boys want?”
“Hat.”
“What color?”
“Brown.”
“What’s your head size?”
“Don’t know.”
“You have to know.”
“I’ll try it on.”
“Like hell you will.”
Wherever we went in the store, the detective would follow us. Couldn’t touch, couldn’t try things on. Funny though, they put our money right next to white folks’ money in the cash register. We got home and we spread out our clothes on the floor for everybody to see. There were more shirts and socks and underwear on that floor than in the whole wide world.
I felt a lot better going back to high school that year, wearing new clothes, feeling clean on the outside. When I heard that the track team got to take showers every evening after practice, I asked the coach if I could join. Sumner had the best Negro track team in the state and a brilliant coach, Lamar Smith.
“You run before?”
“Sure, coach, I do a lot of running.”
“Where?”
“Around the neighborhood.”
He shook his head. “We’ve given out all the lockers and uniforms for this year.”
“All I want to do is take a shower in the afternoon.”
He looked me over and kind of smiled. “All right. But you’ll have to bring your own sweat suit. And stay off the track and out of my boys’ way.”
That’s how I started in sports. Sumner had a fine athletic field. While the team ran inside the field, around the track, I ran outside, around a city block.
Every day when school let out at three o’clock, I’d get into an old pair of sneakers and a T-shirt and gym shorts and run around that block. In the beginning, I’d just run for an hour, then go and take a hot shower. And then one day two girls walked by and one of them said. “What’s he think he’s doing?” And the other one said: “Oh, he must be training for the big races.” I just kept running that day, around and around the block, until every time I hit the pavement pain shot up my leg and a needle went into my side, and I kept going around and around until I was numb and I didn’t feel anything any more. Suddenly, it was dark and the track team had all left. I could hardly walk home my feet hurt so much, but I couldn’t wait until the next day to get out there again. Maybe I couldn’t run as fast as the other guys, but I could run longer, longer than anybody in all of the city of St. Louis. And then everybody would know who I was.
I kept running all that fall and all that winter, sometimes through the snow, until everybody in school knew who I was, the guy who never took a rest from three o’clock until six o’clock. I don’t think I ever would have finished high school without running. It was something that kept me going from day to day, a reason to get up in the morning, to sit through classes with the Helene Tuckers and the doctors’ sons who knew all the answers and read books at home, to look forward to going a little faster and a little longer at three o’clock. And I felt so good when I ran, all by myself like a room of my own. I could think anything I wanted while I ran and talk to myself and sometimes I’d write stories on “My Favorite Daddy” and “What I’d Buy with a Million Dollars,” and I could figure out why people did certain things and why certain things happened. Nobody would point to me and say I was poor or crazy; they’d just look at me with admiration and say: “He’s training.” I never got hungry while I was running even though we never ate breakfast at home and I didn’t always have money for lunch. I never was cold or hot or ashamed of my clothes. I was proud of my body that kept going around and around and never had to take a rest.
After six o’clock I’d go to White’s Eat Shop and wash dishes in return for dinner. Sometimes I’d go downtown and sneak into a white hotel and put on a busboy’s uniform and get a good meal in the kitchen. The Man never knew the difference. “All niggers look alike.” And then I’d go home and go to sleep because I was tired and I needed a rest. I’d be running again tomorrow.
When spring came, the coach called me over one day and asked me if I’d like to run on the track. I ran against the guys on the team, and they were still faster than me, but I could keep going long after they were pooped out. Every so often the coach would walk by and tell me I was holding my arms wrong, or that my body was at the wrong angle, or my knees weren’t coming up high enough. But I was on the inside now and I was getting a little faster every day. By the time school closed in June I was beating the boys on the track team. The coach told me to report for track first thing in September. There would be a locker for me and a uniform.
That summer was the roughest I ever spent. The Korean War was on, and good jobs were opening up at ammunition plants. I lied four years, told them I was twenty-one, and went to work for a company manufacturing 105-millimeter howitzer shells. The unfinished shells weighed forty-five pounds each, and I had to pick up 243 every twenty minutes. I always had stomach trouble, never could wear a belt, and every time I bent over and picked up a shell my insides tore a little. But with overtime I could pull down as much as $200 some weeks. When the other workers found out how old I was, there was a lot of resentment. They’d slip up behind me with crowbars and shove the casings down the belt faster than I could pick them up. I’d be so tired when I came home it was a real effort to get out and practice my running.
Then they put me on the night shift, eleven o’clock to seven in the morning. “Keep the streets a little safer at night, one less nigger running around,” the foreman said. Now I did my running in the mornings after work, when the other folks were just going to their jobs. I kind of liked that, but it hurt not being able to be with Boo and my friends in the evening.
And then the foreman told another boss to put me down in the furnace pit. “Nigger can take heat better,” he said. Well, the system wasn’t going to beat me. I stood up next to that furnace, and I ate their goddamned salt tablets and just refused to pass out. They weren’t going to make me quit, and I wasn’t going to give them cause to fire me. I’d lean into that blazing pit until my face would sting, and when the lunch whistle blew I’d fall on the floor and vomit blood for half an hour and I’d clean it up myself.
It was all worth it. I could walk home at the end of the week and put money in Momma’s hand. We could go shopping with cash instead of the green tablet; we could walk into a supermarket instead of Mister Ben’s. I could stand at the check-out counter and listen to the cash register and my heart didn’t jump with every ring. Momma could pay some back bills and buy some new second-hand furniture and some clothes, and not have to go to the white folks’ every day. We had a little money around the house now, but we didn’t sign off relief. It was too hard to get back on.
I kept my job when school started. The band had a special music class at eight o’clock in the morning, one hour before regular classes started, and I worked out a deal with the bandmaster, Mr. Wilson, to let me take it. That way I could come to school right from the plant, and finish up classes and track practice early enough to grab a few hours’ sleep before leaving for the eleven o’clock shift. In return, I cleaned up the band room every morning, set the music out on the stands for the musicians, and kept out of their way. I liked sitting on the side and watching the band play, everybody working together to make a good sound, the bandmaster, a real sophisticated conductor with his baton, telling everybody when to come in, when to stop. I started watching the drummer. He seemed to be having the most fun, sitting there so cool, beating on that big kettledrum. When he brought those sticks down everybody heard him. He played all by himself, but he kept the whole thing going. I started tapping my hands on my knees along with him, and sometimes I’d get there a little earlier and take some licks on the drum myself. And after a while, when I was home, I’d keep time to the radio, beating a fork on one of Momma’s pots.
After school I’d be out on the track, inside the fence with my own uniform. There was a new coach, Warren St. James. And he started spending a lot of time with me, teaching me how to start, how to pace myself, when to make that closing kick. I learned fast because I was hungry to learn, and when the season opened I was running in dual meets, in the mile and the half-mile. I was doing well, finishing third and second, and once in a while I’d win a little race. But I was always tired, sometimes too tired to sleep before I went to work at the plant.
Momma came into the bedroom one evening, about eight o’clock. I was sitting up in bed, thinking about last week’s race and the mistakes I made, how I just didn’t have it at the end, how I couldn’t get those knees up high enough for the stretch sprint.
“Can’t you sleep, Richard?”
“No, Momma.”
“I don’t know why you don’t quit that old sport, Richard.” She sat down on the bed. She always sighed when she sat down. “I worry about you, Richard, you got so much trouble with your stomach and your mind drifts so.”
“Momma?”
“Yes, honey.”
“Remember when you took me to that old woman, I was a real little kid, and she said I’d be a great man some day.”
Momma took my head in her lap and rocked back and forth. “She saw a star right in the center of your head, and I knew it, oh, how I knew it. You’re gonna be a great man, Richard.”
“Momma, I’m gonna be a great runner, the coach said I could be a great runner. Momma?”
“Yes, honey?”
“I want to quit my job.”
And my Momma rocked me in her arms and I guess she thought about the green tablet with the picture of the snuff can on it, and getting up at six o’clock to put sacks on her shoes and she said: “Okay, honey. And don’t you worry, my special little man, we’re gonna be all right.”
That was my last night at work. The next morning I got to the band room and the bandmaster was staring out the window looking mad. There was a concert the next week, and the drummer was in the hospital.
“You read music, Gregory?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, I know you been fooling around with the drums. Now I want to try something. Whenever I tip my head toward you like this, see, I want you to hit the drum like this, hear, and when I . . .”
The drummer never got his job back. We got through that concert, and the one after that, and then it was football season and I was banging the big bass drum in the marching band.
Life really began to open up for me. Everybody in school knew me now, the athletic crowd and the musical crowd, and the girls that hung around both. I didn’t go out very much. I didn’t have money, and I was pretty shy. I could make quick talk outside the corner drugstore, or at a party, but when it came to that big step of asking a girl to have a date with me, I just couldn’t get those words out.
But I was all right, man. The band was taking big trips, to West Virginia and Illinois and Kansas, and we were playing Beethoven and Bach and Mozart, cats I never heard of. Once, just once, I invited Momma to a concert. I sat on the stage of the school auditorium, and I got sick and ashamed when I saw her come in wearing that shabby old coat, her swollen ankles running over the edges of those dyed shoes, that dress the rich white folks gave her, a little too much lipstick, the cheap perfume. They asked her to go sit up in the balcony. I should have got up and thrown that kettledrum right into the faces of all those doctors and society people and light-complected snobs sitting in the orchestra. But I didn’t. I just was glad she was up in the balcony where she couldn’t be seen by too many people.
I never wanted her at track meets. That was mine, all mine. Flagpole Gregory, they called me, Ironman Gregory. I could run all day. I had style. I wore argyle socks in the races and a handkerchief wrapped around my head. I had a little trick. When I came down the stretch I’d look up at the flagpole and make a little salute. Then I’d go into my closing kick and win going away. They thought I was very patriotic, that the flag gave me extra strength. Once in a meet against Vashon High, the other big Negro high school in St. Louis, some kids took the flag down, figuring that would beat me. I never even knew it.
Most of the meets were on Saturday, and I’d stay out until ten or eleven o’clock Friday night, talking with Mister Ben, or walking with Boo, or hanging around with the guys at the candy store and the poolroom. They’d tell me about a fight they were going to have with another gang, or some little bitch they were all going to screw, and maybe some of the boys would come by with some wine. I’d tell them I couldn’t make it, I was in training. I didn’t tell them I didn’t need it, I had something bigger going for me. Then, about eleven o’clock, when I was sure I was so tired I’d fall right to sleep, I’d go home.
I’d wake up early on Saturday mornings with a smirk on my face. I’d walk around the house, look at the peeling linoleum floor, the dirty dishes in the sink, all the raggedy shoes under the bed. I’d punch Garland on the arm and tickle Ronald and maybe pinch the girls. I’d hug Momma. “We’re all right, Momma, we’re all right.” And then I’d take that one big step out of the house, jump the stoop, and I was in another world.
I’d walk to the stadium through the early morning, my uniform bag swinging in my hand, and with each step my stomach would turn over again and the little hairs would start standing up on the back of my neck. When I got to the stadium I’d just wave at the guard and he’d open the gate for me. I didn’t even have to show him my competitor’s pass. “Good luck, Greg, as if you need it.” He’d wink at me and I’d wink back.
And the sun would be coming up high and it would still be cold under my sweater. I could feel the sweat under my armpits and between my shoulder blades and behind my knees. “Hey, Greg, hey, Greg,” and I’d never look around, just climb quietly up to the grandstand and sit on a wooden bench like any other spectator. They’d be running off the shot-put and high jump early and I’d just sit up there and watch. Just another spectator at the track and field meet.
The loud-speaker would crackle and snap: “Will all entrants in the one-mile run please report to the official’s table, will all . . .”
I’d stand up real slow, and feel this thing start to take me over, this monster that started at my toes like hot water flowing upward through a cold body. By the time I got down the steps I’d be on fire. I dressed fast in the locker room under the stands, put on my bright argyles, wrapped a handkerchief around my head. Then I’d walk out on the field and I knew I could crush the world.
“There you are, Gregory, I’ve been looking all over for you. Where you been?”
“I’m ready, coach.”
St. James looked me over. “You better be. I want to talk to you. That big boy from Vashon, he’s good, you have to watch his . . .”
“Don’t tell me about him, coach. You go on over and tell him about me.”
I got to the line with the other runners, and now, for just a moment, I was scared. God, I’m bringing 118 pounds of bones to this line, been training right, going to bed every night, trying to keep the rules, now . . .
Bang.
Let the pack get ahead of you for the first quarter, no need to get banged around and elbowed up there with the pace-setters burning themselves out. Take it easy, Greg baby, that’s the way, that’s the way. At the half they started falling back, the guys who don’t know how to run, the guys who smoked, the guys who don’t really have it. Take them now at the three-quarter, take one at the curve, get the other one coming off, and come around the straightaway and clean them all up. One by one. Don’t play with them, Greg baby, don’t play with them, just pass them by like snatching off weeds on the run like you used to do with Boo. Now you feel that thing, the monster, and you’re going, man, you’re going, ripping and running and here comes that bad dog. There’s only two up front now and they’re way over their heads, and here comes the flagpole, don’t forget to look up and salute, Greg, that’s your trademark. Somewhere Coach St. James is saying, “Goddamn. Look at that Gregory, look at that machine.” And my knees are coming up higher and higher and I’m running faster and faster and I pass those two like the Greyhound Bus passes telephone poles and the tape snaps against my chest and then, slowly, I’m off the stride, slowly, my head goes down, and, slowly, the thing inside of me lets go. The monster slips out, and I’m left all alone there, Richard Gregory, not Dick, not Flagpole or Ironman, just Richard. I fall on my knees and then on my face, and the grass smells sweet and my stomach explodes. “That . . . that . . . my last race, coach . . . no . . . more.”
“Come on, Gregory, on your feet. They’re getting ready for the relays.”
And I’m up again and waiting, and it starts all over, the hot water seeping up, the monster slipping back in. I can see our number three man hit the curve and slow down like I told him to and now I’m running and the stick hits my hand like an electric charge. I put my head down and I go and the charge stays with me because everyone else is ahead and they have to settle down and run a race, but I have to go out and catch them all. Now my knees are coming up again, higher and higher and higher than the flagpole, and I salute my knees and then I snap the tape again. This time, when I fall on the grass, I go right to sleep, into a dream world. I’m standing on the back of an open car riding up Fifth Avenue in New York City, ticker tape falling out of the buildings like a Christmas snow and everybody in the world is cheering me as I go by, except Big Pres who’s hanging his head. I’m asleep in the middle of a stadium and I don’t even hear them screaming my name.
I’d wake up screaming sometimes myself, my legs cramped and twisted under me. Momma would come in and sit down and take my legs and rub them gently.
“Anything makes a man like this here, he got to be crazy to go out and do it.” she would say. “What is it, Richard, inside of you makes you go out there? I’m really afraid for you, Richard.”