“When I was a member of the San Leandro School Board in the late sixties, early seventies, there was a man who lived across the street from San Leandro High School who used to call me every two weeks. He’d say, ‘When are you going to do something about all those black kids going to the high school? They don’t belong here.’ I’d say that they live in the district so they are entitled to go to that school. ‘No,’ he’d say. ‘I see them getting off of buses. They’re coming here from Oakland.’ I’d say, ‘No, they’re not. If they didn’t live here, they wouldn’t be attending that school.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve been counting them every day and there’s no way that many black kids live around here. They’re from Oakland.’ He was actually looking out his window and counting the black students as they left the building every day.”
—Mimi Wilson, former San Leandro School Board member, former president of San Leandro Fair Housing
In September, I began the third grade at Lewelling School, which was located conveniently next door to our apartment complex. On my first day, I walked over with Tracie, who was starting the first grade, and then I reported to Miss Hubbard’s classroom.
I walked into the classroom and it was nice. It was clean, just like everything else in that town. The blackboard was green and the teacher’s name was written on the board in yellow chalk. The top of the wall was lined with a train of covered wagons, each adorned with a letter of the alphabet written in cursive in both upper- and lowercase. The room was filled with desks. They were double desks, each with two children’s chairs.
I sat down at the desk closest to the door. A boy with light brown hair occupied the other chair.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” he said as he got up, walked across the room, and sat next to another brown-haired boy.
I sat alone watching the other boys and girls file in. Most glanced in my direction as I smiled. Some walked in pairs and found desks with two spaces to accommodate their friendships. Others looked at me and then scanned the room for a seat. A seat anyplace but next to me.
Finally, a little girl sat next to me as there were no other seats left. She was pretty, sporting long blond hair that was tied into two braids spruced up with red ribbons. She never took her eyes off me. She was staring. It felt weird.
“Hi,” I said.
“Can I touch your hair?” she finally asked.
“Uh . . . okay.” How else do you answer a question like that? She took her little hand, extended her index finger, and gently touched the top of my head.
“It feels weird,” she said.
The other kids in nearby seats were watching now. The girl pinched a little of my hair with her thumb and forefinger and rubbed it between them.
“It’s like a Brillo pad.”
The other kids laughed as I felt another hand touch my head from behind. I turned, startled to see a little boy sticking his finger in my neatly trimmed afro.
“It is!” he shouted with a laugh. The other kids joined him in laughter.
Soon, there were what seemed like hundreds of hands rubbing, pulling, tweaking, and massaging my hair.
“Brillo head!” one of the boys yelled, as the kids laughed.
“It does feel like a Brillo pad!” another boy said with laughter.
My stomach felt queasy. I wanted to go home. I contemplated getting up and walking out the door, when I was literally saved by the bell. As it rang, the kids let go of my hair and scrambled to their seats. I put my head down on my desk as the teacher walked in. As she started her beginning-of-the-school-year drill, I heard one of the kids behind me whisper to his desk mate.
“Brillo head,” he said with a snicker.
The boy next to him started to snicker as well. He tried to stifle it. The more he tried to keep from laughing, the more he laughed.
“Brillo head,” the second boy repeated.
This time, the girls at the double desk next to them overheard and they, too, attempted to suppress their giggles. One of them buried her head in her arms on her desk to hide her laughter.
The teacher continued with her spiel, oblivious to the hilarity ensuing right in front of her. The laughter was contagious. Stifled chuckles spread around the room like raging wildfire.
I learned to hate my hair. White kids always wanted to touch it. Nobody in town wanted to cut it. It was like no other hair I saw on a regular basis. I lived with all women and my sisters had their own issues with their hair. When they were little, they used to put sweaters on their heads to pretend that their hair was loose and mobile like that of the white girls they saw every day. Later, Tracie would have my mother take her into Oakland to a stylist who gave her some type of permanent that relaxed the strands, allowing her to swing her hair back and forth with every move of her head. She called it getting her hair “blond.” She thought that was what you called hair that could move.
Later, Delisa would ask for her hair to be “blond,” too, so that she could be like the white girls. Her permanent didn’t take though. Something happened that caused all of her hair to fall out. There was a bad reaction to the chemicals. Poor Delisa found that being bald was even worse than having “black” hair. The teasing she endured was relentless. Her self-esteem shattered in ways that I doubt are repaired to this day.
I, too, wanted hair like the white boys. I wanted to flip my hair out of my eyes and run my fingers through it. I wanted to stick out my lower lip and blow upward, breezing it off of my forehead when I was frustrated. I wanted their hair. I wanted hair that the other kids didn’t ask to touch.
From childhood to adulthood, I tried everything for “normal” hair. I tried straightening it with a hot comb, the result being a stiff, slightly scorched mop that retreated back to its original texture within a day or so. I tried grease. Grandma took me to Oakland, the only place to buy anything resembling African-American hair products, where I bought Dixie Peach that I slathered on my follicles by the handful. It stayed down but I still couldn’t move it. I couldn’t blow it out of my face and I sure couldn’t flip it.
When I was a teenager, I saw Smokey Robinson singing on television. He had these beautiful, shiny curls. Beautiful, shiny mobile curls. I went to an Oakland hair salon and got my first Geri Curl. It was curly all right. It moved. I could flip it out of my face. I had to. The grease and oil that had to be put on it daily in order for it to retain its form was profuse and disgusting. I had to stock up on spray bottles of oily “activator.” Without a daily dose, I had a mop of straw on my head. To make matters worse, it stained everything my head touched. If I rested my head against a chair or leaned against the backseat of the car, there was a gross, oily smudge.
Grandma hated it and blamed Smokey Robinson. When I worked with Smokey for the first time, years later, Grandma said, “Tell his ass he owes me for pillowcases.”
The upside to the Geri Curled hair was that at last, finally, white people stopped asking me to touch it. They didn’t want that greasy shit all over their hands, either.
In my early twenties, I finally settled on a texturizer. This was a process of straightening made possible by a smelly chemical rubbed into the hair by a stylist. The longer it stayed on, the straighter the hair would become. The only problem was that it burned like hell. It’s like covering your scalp with paper cuts and then soaking it in rubbing alcohol. The trick is standing the pain long enough to get the hair straight, but not so long that you literally develop open sores on your scalp. It was painful, but it worked. It was a process created by black people, for black people, administered by black people. That being the case, it was dismaying that the criticism I received for my hair being straight came almost exclusively from black people.
“You trying to be white,” they would write me after seeing me on television.
“Why are you ashamed of your natural hair, you Nat King Cole-looking motherfucker?” one letter read.
Not ashamed. Not really. I just wanted to flip it. Is that too much to ask?
“Brillo head,” I heard someone behind me say again.
I wanted to go home. I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to go back into my room where I could be safe and alone. I could feel my eyes welling with tears. No. I wouldn’t cry. Not there. Not then. I was my mother’s son.
“If I lose control, they win.”
Somehow, I managed. I made it through the morning. Since it was the first day, it was only a half day. At lunchtime, I was free. As the bell rang, I walked out of the classroom and ran home. I ran as fast as I could. I was in a race, only I wasn’t exactly sure who my opponent was. I didn’t know if I was racing the kids, their taunts, my sadness, or my anger at being “different.” I just knew that I had to run and I had to do it before I started to cry.
I made it to the apartment and zipped toward the stairs. My mother sat on the plastic-sealed couch, reading one of her True Story magazines.
“Hi, honey. How was your first. . . ,” I heard her say as I tore up the stairs, went into my room, and closed the door. I sat on my bed “Indian style,” my pillow in my lap. I laid my head against its soft fluffiness and rocked back and forth. Now it was okay. Now the tears could come. I was safe. I was alone. I was always alone. Everywhere I went then. There in my room, walking down the street, in that classroom full of kids, I was all alone.
“I’m all by myself,” I muttered as I drifted off to sleep against the moist pillow. My first day was indicative of my experience at Lewelling. School days were filled with loneliness, taunts, and isolation. Few called me Brian. “Brillo head” had become my nickname.
“Knock the shit out of them,” Grandma would say.
I didn’t want to fight. I wasn’t athletic and the few fights I’d had in my life had all ended with me bleeding from the mouth and in tears. Things deteriorated at school until I didn’t have a choice.
At recess, when the boys chose teams to play kickball, basketball, or soccer, initially I was one of the first boys picked. Their exposure to blacks had come primarily from watching Wilt Chamberlain, Hank Aaron, O.J. Simpson, and the like on television. It was their assumption that all blacks were good athletes. My ineptness soon became apparent. I couldn’t hit. I couldn’t kick. I couldn’t throw. I couldn’t make a basket. In football, I couldn’t throw or catch a spiral.
The other boys learned these skills from their dads. I didn’t have that luxury. Sylvester had once had a brief, fleeting feeling of fatherhood and took me to the park one Saturday. He wanted to throw the football around. He fired a bullet pass to me that hit me in the chest so hard that I hit the ground. After that, I was afraid of the ball. He’d throw it to me and I’d dodge it.
“You ain’t worth a shit,” he said, finally giving up in disgust. “Get your ass in the car.”
I didn’t like sports because I wasn’t good at them. I liked reading. I liked my comic books and reading the World Book Encyclopedia for interesting facts. These were not things expected of a boy. They certainly weren’t the traits expected of a black boy, at least not as far as the kids at school were concerned.
“What kind of colored kid are you?” one white boy asked as I wildly threw a basketball that sailed a mile past the backboard.
Once it became evident that I was lacking in the physical activity department, that I was weak and uncoordinated, that I wasn’t a threat, it was like blood in the water to sharks. It was open season on “Brillo head.” I fought daily. I fought before school, I fought after school. I fought at recess.
I was a godsend to the boys who had previously been the targets of the school bullies. They no longer had to worry about their own safety because everybody was focused on me. In fact, some of the boys who had been the school “rejects” were able to fit in with the other kids by beating me up. The oppressed became the oppressors.
School officials soon took notice of the fact that I was fighting a lot so they called my mother in for a conference. They wanted to know what my problem was. Why I was in so many fights. As if it were my choice; as if I were the aggressor. I just wanted to make friends. To fit in. To be normal.
It was decided that it might be better if I didn’t associate with the other kids outside of class. My mother came up with the brilliant idea that at recess I should just sit on the bench and read. The school officials agreed. I wasn’t allowed to play. So, for the next semester, every day at recess and at lunch I’d sit on the bench, a book in my lap, and watch the other kids play basketball, kickball, and four square. Sometimes, I’d hold my book up to my face so that when I felt sad, listening to the others running and laughing, they wouldn’t see me. This solution wasn’t really a solution. Unless I could somehow be dipped in bleach, I was destined to be a social outcast. My mother saw how unhappy I was. She knew the situation wasn’t good or improving. It was at this point that she got the bright idea to send me to the local Catholic school.
“The Catholic kids will be nicer,” she said. “They’re Christ-centered.”
My mother had been raised in the black Baptist church like Grandma and her mother before her and every other family member as far back as memory would allow. Grandma had grown up in the church, singing in the choir for over twenty years and revolving her life around church activities.
Grandma once told me that when she was a kid, all family life was centered around the Baptist church. Sundays would be spent in services, from morning until night, praying, testifying, and singing. They would break for the enormous meal that my great-grandmother would prepare in celebration of Sunday, and then return to the church for more worship. That was in Birmingham, but it continued in some fashion even after Grandma’s family moved en masse (parents, brothers, sisters, and every other relative) from Birmingham to Akron in 1945.
I vaguely remember it being a shock when my mother came home from work one day and announced that she was converting to Catholicism. I didn’t even know what “Catholicism” or “Catholic” meant. I thought that “converting” to it, whatever that was, involved having some kind of an operation. When she said that I was converting, too, I was terrified I’d have to go to the hospital and go under the knife.
I don’t remember Grandma arguing or trying to talk her out of it. My mother was always coming home with some new interest or radical diversion from various aspects of her life. I remember Grandma simply replying with her customary, “Shit,” when Mom broke the news. Other than that, she was fairly supportive. Grandma never became a Catholic, but she went to more masses than most Catholics I know.
My sisters and I were baptized at St. Sebastian’s Church in Akron in 1968, shortly after my fourth birthday. I remember it well. I remember holding lighted candles for the first time in my life and being more fascinated with the flame than the Latin words the priest was speaking. A woman my mother had met through her job at Ohio Edison was our godmother and her son our godfather, as Tracie, Delisa, and I began the lifelong trek of indoctrination. If you think that the list of black San Leandro residents was short, check out the list of black Catholics.
St. Felicitas church and school are located one mile, door to door, from the apartment complex we lived in. It was established as the sole Catholic parish in the Washington Manor area in 1953. Its mission, like those of most institutions of this type, was to create a community that was faithfully infused with Roman Catholic doctrine. Logic would dictate that Tracie, Delisa, and I would fit right in. We were, after all, Catholics. Sure, we didn’t know all of the rituals that those who had grown up in the church from birth were accustomed to. We weren’t regular mass attendees, so we weren’t sure when to kneel or stand or brush our foreheads and chins and all of the other things in the service that look like signals a catcher is sending a pitcher behind the batter’s back (am I praying or bunting here?), but we were fast learners and we were of the same faith. It would be a common frame of reference, no matter how tenuous.
The problem with being dropped into a Catholic-school situation is that, while the student population of a public school, especially one located next door to an apartment building, is transient, a parochial school’s student body is incredibly stable. At St. Felicitas, many of the families had been with the parish since its inception. Being good Catholics who followed the Vatican’s teachings on the evil that was birth control, there were families with eight, nine, and even ten kids, all of whom were matriculating through the church’s school. The kids knew each other from birth. Their parents socialized together. Their big brothers and sisters had studied with the same teachers and played on the same sports teams. Tracie, Delisa, and I were, for lack of a better word, interlopers. Black interlopers who had injected ourselves into their community. Their white community.
The beginning was rough. Very rough. As hard as it may be to believe, it was even tougher than it had been at Lewelling. I didn’t think that it was possible at the time, but I was even more of an outsider. The kids had their inside jokes and their stories from the funny things that happened in first grade and the days of their first communions. They had been there their entire educational careers, while I was entering my seventh school.
I became even more isolated. When the great sports expectations were dashed at recess and P.E., I was once again an outcast. Luckily my teacher, Lisa Carrion—a twenty-one-year-old who was teaching her first class—recognized my plight almost instantly. She made an extra effort to include me in classroom projects, even inviting me to her home to help her grade the other kids’ papers. I was just a little boy, but for the first time, here was a white person who treated me like, well, an adult. Almost like a peer. Grandma liked her, but she was always careful, always skeptical, as her life experience had taught her to be.
“You ain’t that woman’s equal,” she’d say, especially when I referred to Mrs. Carrion as “Lisa,” which she allowed me to do when I was helping her after school and on the weekends. “You ain’t that woman’s equal!”
She may have been right in an authority/subordinate type of way. After all, she was my teacher and she was an adult. The thing is that for the first time in my life, here was a grown-up who treated me like I was an equal. Here was a white person who didn’t look at me as “the black boy” or “the colored kid,” but as Brian. Her kindness made life bearable.
Almost. The fights continued, mostly after school now. Few wanted to get into the trouble that came with fighting on the campus of a Catholic school, so you’d be “chosen out” for a physical altercation.
“After school!” Someone would challenge, for the most innocuous of alleged transgressions. When school let out, I would have no choice but to go to the appointed place and duke it out. I always lost. As I’ve stated, I wasn’t a fighter. The more I lost, the more I was “chosen out.” Mom was right. Things were different here. Here, the bullies and bigots wore uniforms. There was no one to help me. Not even the Sisters of St. Joseph, whose order ran the school. Especially not the sisters.
It was lunchtime and I was sitting by myself on one of the orange school benches when two boys walked up to me.
“Hey, burr head,” one of them shouted in my direction.
I had been upgraded from “Brillo head” to “Burr head” here. Ah, the refinement of the parochial-school experience. I ignored them and buried my head in the comic book I was reading.
“You too good to talk to us, coon?”
Coon? Here was a new one. This place was really expanding my vocabulary. I continued to ignore them. They walked closer to me. Soon they were in my face.
“I’m talking to you,” the larger of the boys said. He was a transfer from Lewelling, just like me. He was a year older and had been held back, thus making him the “king of the school.”
“King of the school” was a designation given to the boy who had the reputation that implied that he could beat up anyone in the school. You rarely saw one of these kids actually fight, because the rep was good enough to scare off would-be contenders. Every once in a great while, somebody would want a legitimate shot at the title, declare the “after school” challenge and, if he won, which almost never happened, he’d be crowned the new “king.”
Our “king” was one of those grade-school kids so developed he looked like he paid child support. He snatched my comic book out of my hand and ripped it in half. I looked him dead in the eye.
“Fuck you,” I said. I don’t know where that came from. It just came out. I said, “Fuck you.” He heard, “Please kick my ass.”
The two boys grabbed me by the arms and dragged me into the boys’ bathroom to beat me up. I struggled, but I was not going to scream or cry for help. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. I wouldn’t lose control.
“They may beat me to a pulp,” I thought, “but I won’t let them win. I’ll never let them win.”
I was thrown against the bathroom wall just as I heard the bell ring. I watched as his majesty the king balled his hands into fists. As he was preparing to swing, the door opened. The boys’ heads snapped toward the sound just as Sister Ermina walked in. Sister Ermina was the principal. She was older, as most of the nuns were, and she had a face that was reminiscent of a French bulldog. She never wore a habit. None of the sisters wore them there. It was weird. I thought that they had to. I’d grown up watching The Flying Nun. Not only did I expect them to wear habits, I expected them to soar in formation with pelicans.
“What’s going on in here?” she demanded with the perpetual scowl that she wore on her face. There was always a scowl. She was a nun. Why did all of the nuns always look so unhappy? Is this what it means to give your life to God? Frowning all the time? Pissed off for no apparent reason?
“What’s going on in here?” she screamed again.
Silence. It was stone cold.
“I said, ‘What is going on here’?” she repeated.
I ran past the boys and over to her.
“They were going to beat me . . . ”
I didn’t get a chance to finish my sentence or my thought. A sharp blow to my left cheek stung me into silence.
“Shut up,” she said. “Get to class.”
“But . . .” I managed to get out, choking back tears. “They were going to . . . ”
She raised her hand to slap me again.
“I said, ‘Get to class’!”
The boys smiled as they filed past us with a polite, “Yes, sister.”
I rubbed my cheek, each stroke easing a little of the soreness. I went back to class and slunk down in my seat. Here, not only did the kids beat me up, so did the principal.
I heard my mother’s voice in my head.
“They’re Christ-centered.”
I didn’t remember the Bible story where Jesus slapped the shit out of the black kid. I must have missed catechism that day.
Grandma picked me up from school in the Chevy, so I didn’t have to fight on the way home that day. I’d already had my physical altercation for the afternoon. During the mile drive I was sullen, quiet.
“Boy, what’s wrong with you?” Grandma asked.
“Nothing.”
At home, it was obvious that something was wrong. I didn’t have a good poker face. I never did. The interrogation began anew.
“What the matter?” Mom asked.
“Nothing,” I said again. I was not spending another semester on the bench, watching the white kids play.
“I’m fine.”
“No you’re not. What’s wrong?”
I looked at the floor. Silent.
“Honey, I know you. I carried you for nine months.”
Why do mothers always play that card? You got laid, so here I am. Quit throwing it in my face.
“Honey,” she said, “you were once a part of me. I know when something’s wrong.”
She tucked a curled index finger under my chin, lifting my head to look me in the eye. Her eyes were warm, soothing. There is something about looking your mother in the eye. You can’t lie to her. There is some maternal power that comes from your mother’s gaze. It’s like sodium pentathol. You are compelled to tell the truth. I think that we could probably cut down the expenses of the criminal justice process by 90 percent if we let suspects’ mothers do the initial interrogation. She’d look her kid in the eye and ask about the bank robbery and he’d spill his guts on the spot.
Finally, I broke down and told her everything. I told her about the boys and the bathroom and being slapped by the principal. My mother was appalled. She grabbed the phone, called the convent, and confronted Sister Ermina.
“Did you put your hands on my son today?” she demanded.
“No. Of course not,” came the reply, which was so loud I could hear it through the receiver.
“You didn’t slap him? You didn’t hit him in the boys’ bathroom?”
“No! I would never do anything like that to one of our students.”
My mother hung up the phone and looked at me. Here a Catholic nun, a woman whose life was devoted to spreading the teachings of Christ, a woman who wore a wedding ring because she was, in effect, spiritually and symbolically “married” to God, had just called me a liar. What kind of a place was this? It was like the Bizzarro World in my Superman comics. Up is down. Down is up. Bad is good. Good is bad. The truth is a lie and lies are the truth.
“She says that she never touched you,” Mom said.
“But she did. She slapped me. I swear. I SWEAR!” I screamed, tears running down my cheeks. I thought, “Does anybody in this stupid city tell the truth?”
Mom picked up the phone again and called Mrs. Carrion at home. Lisa had endeared herself to my mother by her kindness toward me.
“Sister Ermina came by my classroom,” Lisa said, “and told me to keep better control of my kids. She said that there were some of my boys goofing around in the bathroom and she hit one ofthem.”
My mother’s face changed. It morphed into a combination of sorrow, anger, and disappointment as she slowly put the phone back on its cradle.
“I told you,” I said. “I told you.”
The cops lied about me. The nuns lied about me. Was I that bad a person?
Grandma, as usual, made no attempt to try and hide her disgust. She knew these people and she knew this place. The climate may have been a little milder, the drawl in their voices absent, but she’d known these people all of her life.
“I should go down there and slap her ass!”
“Suer!” Mom said, shocked.
“I ain’t gonna sit here and let her beat on the boy.”
“But you can’t do that. You can’t go beating up a nun!”
“Shit,” Grandma said. “Nuns. They can’t do nothing else, that’s why they nuns!”
It was a long evening, before it was finally decided that nothing would be done. I should steer clear of the principal as best I could. I should steer clear of the bullies as best I could. This was my life now and I’d better get used to it. Steering clear. This place was a minefield. The mines were laid everywhere and I didn’t know where they were or when they would explode. I might be walking down the street looking for the park, on the school playground, or in the restroom, and the enemy was everywhere. They wore uniforms, business suits, and sometimes even crucifixes around their necks. It was up to me to navigate the minefield and I had to do it alone. Mom and Grandma couldn’t hold my hand. I was alone. All alone.
I went back to school the next day and gritted my teeth. I endured the taunts and the slurs. I kept to myself as best I could. My sisters and I were the only blacks and we were just going to have to live with that.
Thirty years later I would discover an interesting fact. There was another with our complexion, a woman. A very prominent woman. Her name was St. Felicitas. For all of the racism, the slurs, and the ethnic putdowns we endured; for all of the times that strangers in this largely Catholic area would yell “nigger” from their car windows as my sisters and I walked down the street; for all of the hoopla over families of color living in the Washington Manor district, the area’s sole Catholic church was named after a black woman.
It turns out that St. Felicitas was a black slave who, along with her white mistress, was martyred for the faith—thus making her a candidate for sainthood. I attended St. Felicitas for four years and was never told this interesting piece of Catholic history. I’m virtually certain that the overwhelming majority of those worshipping in that parish at that time were not aware of the ethnic background of their patron saint. If they had been, I wonder if she would have been banished to the other side of the “invisible wall.” Or maybe that was the secret to residing in San Leandro if you were black. All I needed to be respected, treated equally, and not terrorized and harassed based on my race, was to be canonized. Christ-centered indeed.