I have learned a thing or two about people who accomplish great things. They never see themselves as great. When I read all the “great” things I do, the things that make the newspapers or television, it’s amazing to me anyone believes it’s special. I don’t see it. I am nothing special. Maybe that’s why I realized at a very early age that any success I had in life would come from hard work. I can’t say I phrased it exactly like that, but I knew I had to do things myself. It started with getting a job. A job was not an option; it was a necessity. At five, I started sweeping Dr. Carter’s office. At eight, I cleaned the bottom of oil tanks after school. At nine, I went to work for the Louisiana Fence Company.
Everyone at the fence company worked as a team out on the road and in the fields. The lowest guy dug dry holes. The next poured in cement, the last put the fence post in and wrapped a tie-wire around the crossbeam to hold it all together. Of course, I dug holes. It was hot and boring work. Worse, times were getting even tighter in my family as R.D. added more kids to it.
I wanted to work up to the tie-wire position, which was easier and paid better. I thought, You don’t fail by trying—you fail by not trying. So I asked the boss for the promotion. He looked at me like I was crazy.
“You’re too young. We want someone older.”
To this day, I am not sure where I found the inspiration to say, “Boss, I’m old enough. I’m married and have two kids.”
His forehead creased like I had just told him I could fly. “Boy, you have to be joking.”
“It’s not a joke, boss.”
“Yeah? Let me see ’em,” he challenged me.
I knew a girl who had two brothers much younger than she was, so I told her to tell the little ones to call me Daddy, and took them all down to the job site. When the boss saw me, he sat back on his heels and gave a huge grin.
“Well I’ll be damned,” he said. “You niggers do anything, huh?”
He saw what he believed. I used to laugh to myself as he went around telling people, “You know that damned boy, you won’t believe it. He has two kids. I’ve seen them.” Any white men came on the site, he’d call them over and point, grinning. “Hey, boys, this damn monkey do have some children.”
I got the job with the better money and got called “monkey” from then on. In some ways, it was kind of a badge of honor, because if you look at the monkeys, or bears, or any animal you can think of, they take care of their family—except for my dad, that is. Respecting yourself and taking care of your responsibilities, no matter how young you were, was the way my mother brought me up. It was also how I brought up Venus and Serena.
The most important thing to teach children is to have respect for themselves, because no one is ever going to respect you unless you do. My kids were educated at an early age and learned to work at an early age. They were taught to love themselves so they would have the confidence to make good decisions and strong commitments. If a person doesn’t make a real commitment, he will never succeed. I surely don’t understand all these parents today who are always telling their kids how special they are, without them proving it. That’s not faith, it’s flattery.
Looking back, I suppose my life back then was somewhat of a contradiction. In the worst of environments, I had the best of upbringings. When the world tried to teach me I was nothing, less than nothing, someone who could be stolen from, I developed a self-worth that was untouchable. When my father never gave anything to me, I decided I was going to give my family everything I had.
The more I worked, the more I helped Mama and my sisters, and the prouder of myself I became.
“Mama, I’m the man of the house now, right?” I asked her one day.
She laughed. “How can you be the man of the house when you’re only a child yourself ?”
“Mama, I work three jobs to take care of us. When I get paid, I bring all my money home to you. We don’t need R.D. anymore, do we?”
Mama just stared out the window. I was angry because I wanted to be the man of the house so badly. Then she turned back and took my face in her hands. I can still see the hurt in her eyes and the flow of tears as she spoke.
“Richard, from this day forward you are the man of this house and R.D. won’t come round here no more.”
I hugged her so tight I almost suffocated her.
The money I brought home barely made ends meet but we survived. I used to go out in the woods and hunt bullfrogs to eat, and fish, and shoot rabbits, and steal chickens. We didn’t have a refrigerator. We had an icebox and used fifty-pound blocks of ice from the iceman. One day, I bought some meat from the market and found maggots in it. It was winter and we were so hungry I could not force myself to throw it away. I cooked it, maggots and all. It wasn’t the first time we ate tainted or spoiled meat. We couldn’t throw anything away, not even bad meat.
Caring for my family as best I could was where I first learned to be a father. My sisters were easy to grow up with and I think they were pleased by what I did for them. I made little carts and pushed the girls up and down the street in them. My sisters loved holidays, especially Christmas, and they believed in Santa Claus. Mama used to buy them bikes as presents from a store named Auto-Lite on East Seventieth Street, but she couldn’t afford them for all four. Helping Mama make their holiday perfect was my goal. For Christmas, I bought old bikes, spray-painted them, and put on new tires and rims so they looked brand new.
Personally, I didn’t celebrate Christmas or believe in Santa Claus. Mama tried to convince me otherwise, but I was adamant. It didn’t make sense to me why any white man would take a night out of the year to bring us gifts. Anyway, what did it matter if a man masked himself in religion one day and the next wore the white hood? One Christmas, I saw a white Santa Claus sitting in a department store inviting all the little white children to sit on his lap and share their Christmas list.
“Hop up here and sit on old Santa’s lap. What do you want for Christmas, pretty girl?”
The girl giggled and said, “A baby doll.”
Santa said, “Make sure you listen to your mama and daddy ’cause Santa knows if you been good or bad.”
The little girl gave him a big hug. He pinched her rosy cheek and she ran into her mother’s arms. He seemed so nice and kind, I decided to sit on his lap, too.
When I got to him, he said, “You better get your little nigger ass away from me, boy.”
By the time I was eight, Mama gave up and stopped buying me Christmas gifts. She also gave up trying to talk me into embracing a holiday created by and for white people. White people bought things for each other. White families celebrated warm and happy and full of good food. White store proprietors benefited because sales increased and profits soared.
The truth wasn’t lost on me, even at that young age.
When the turkey, stuffing, cakes, and pies were gone, we were still poor.
* * *
I thought my mother was a genius when it came to most things. When it came to how to get through life, I thought she was one of the most wrong-thinking persons I ever met. I suppose it couldn’t have been otherwise. She grew up in very different times. She couldn’t think differently. The idea of freedom never came her way. She just learned how to be the way she was and just accepted it.
My boyhood was a series of lessons in life. When I was little, I bought a piece of candy at the general store and when I went to pay for it, my hand accidentally touched the white owner’s hand. It was a solemn rule that black kids were supposed to put their money on the counter. He snarled at me, “Don’t you ever put your goddamn hands on me, boy. I hear that color of yours’ll wear off and I damn sure don’t wanna be a black-ass nigger like you.”
“Excuse me, sir,” I said, going through the subservient motions of bowing my head and lowering my eyes. From out of nowhere, a stick crashed across my back. I doubled over just in time to miss another blow. Severely shaken, I stumbled home like the drunks I’d seen, thinking bitterly all the way, They ain’t got no right to treat me this way. They ain’t got no right. I’m somebody, too.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that Mama’s accepting model of life was not for me. But where does a black child in the slums of Shreveport find a new model? Where does he find successful people to copy? Very few folks where I came from, if any, were successful, but there were some. I watched and wrote little notes and made little comments to myself. I tried to associate with people who were good role models. Mr. Macey was the manager of the A&P. I thought maybe I should be exactly like him because he was successful. Based on Mr. Macey, successful people had bald heads, big stomachs, and were extremely polite. But even he taught me something. He used to say, “Richard, success is nothing more than taking advantage of every opportunity.”
Mr. Macey was right. He had confidence. He had faith in himself. If I wanted to be confident, I’d have to have faith in myself. That became my first principle: To be confident, you had to have faith. But faith in what? Some of the black people I knew in Shreveport believed maybe you could be a preacher, a teacher, or work in a factory—but the number-one job was picking cotton. I had made my mind up long before that I was not going to pick cotton. I didn’t see one cotton picker or laborer that was successful at anything. So I tried to learn to do little things to build my faith, like seeing if I could walk down to East Seventieth Street, where there was a market, in ten minutes. When I could do that, I had set a goal and achieved it. I could have faith. A light went on in my head. Goals could be achievements. I had started the process of gaining faith in myself.
As a child, it was a great lesson that the process of setting and attaining a goal lets you gain faith in yourself. I kept it up. I learned how long I could run at top speed. I learned how far top speed would take me. I learned the time it would take for me to reach the woods where I could hide in safety if white people got behind me to beat me or kill me. I needed to run at top speed for nine minutes.
Soon, I learned that I had to be able to do better than that, because I almost got killed running only nine minutes. I was coming from downtown Shreveport and a white guy asked me, “Hey, aren’t you the kid that said something back to my wife? You called her by her first name, is that right?”
“Yes, that’s right,” I said.
“Well, haven’t you been trained to call her by her last name? Don’t you know you got to call her Mrs. or Miss?”
I said, “I don’t call no one that.”
He pulled out a knife and two or three of his buddies got behind me. I took off. I knew I could outrun them if I could make nine minutes. They would fall behind. What I didn’t realize was, they had a car. How dumb was I? In the nine minutes it took me to get to the area of safety, driving, they made it in four. They were waiting for me when I got there. What do you do when you’ve run at top speed and you get to the end and need more? I learned that fear can be a great incentive. When they came at me with bottles and knives, I ran until my heart was going to burst and the wind made my eyes tear from running so fast.
FEAR CAN BE A POWERFUL MOTIVATION became another rule of mine. From that day on, fear made me train myself to be able to run as fast and as long as I needed to run to survive. Fear of failure is a great motivation, too, especially if it’s linked to survival. I learned that to reach your best, sometimes you have to be scared, especially of failing. Fear works two ways. You may know who you fear. Sometimes, however, to win, you have to do something to make people fear you.
By the time I was seven or eight, I got sort of known for running. One time, in a store, a white kid said to me, surprised, “I can’t catch you.”
I said, “No, you can’t catch me.”
He smiled and his lips curled meanly. “But I will,” he said.
If you look closely at the back of my head on the left side, there’s a scar where he snuck up behind me and hit me in the head with a bottle. I heard people say, “Boy, he’s bleedin’ like a ho.” It didn’t matter. All I knew was I had to run—and if I could get ahead of him, he wasn’t going to catch me unless he was in a helicopter.
Fear creates theories. THEORIES MUST BE TESTED. That’s another rule. Every time he or the other white kids saw me, an incident would start all over again. So I came up with a new theory. They knew I was scared of them, so maybe the only way for me to stop them was to make them scared of me. I made a slingshot and when they started up with me, I shot them.
As they ran, I heard them say, “That nigger is crazy!”
It helped me a great deal. It restored my faith. They stayed away from me. But, as I say, theories must be tested. Kids learn a lot that way and parents should always remember it. My theory of retaliation worked just fine until they brought something more powerful than a slingshot. It’s called a rifle. They didn’t mind shooting you down there in Louisiana, and I got shot at quite a few times till I learned that my best bet was to stay far away from people I was not going to call Mr. or Mrs.
Test your theories. You will live longer.
* * *
I perfected my plans and my running, and the next fight I got in, to escape from the white guys who were after me, I ran from downtown Shreveport to my house, maybe six miles away. The running part didn’t bother me. I could now run fifteen miles or more easily. But I knew I’d have a problem ducking and dodging them this near to my house and, in the end, maybe lead them to where my family lived.
I veered off into the forest. At that moment, you would have seen me grinning. It wasn’t me who had a problem. Now they had the problem. I had a lot of hate in me in those days. No matter what Mama said, or what I was taught in school or church, I felt I was doing the right thing to fight back—to fight any way I could. By now, I could see the forest trees and hear the branches swept by the wind. I was the happiest human being in the world because I knew they were in deep trouble. They sure were.
Once I got into the woods, I led them into the dry undergrowth. With the wind blowing and them chasing, I set the woods on fire. I knew all the ways out, but they didn’t. I didn’t care. If they’d gotten trapped in there I would have been happy. They weren’t going to take a bottle to my head, or catch and beat me, not if they were running from being burned alive.
I think those people got out of the woods, but I left before I found out. When I got home, I sure couldn’t tell Mom what I did, because she had already told me how she felt about my anger at white people. It just would have convinced her I was going to hell for sure.
Unfortunately, subsequent events did convince her.
We were living on East Seventy-Seventh Street in the Cedar Grove section. To cross Seventy-Seventh at Fairfield Avenue, you had to walk past houses where white people lived. Lots of them had dogs, and if you walked past on the street, the owners turned the dogs loose to bite you. Sometimes, they’d wait for a black woman or a child to pass, then release the dogs from houses in front and behind, so there was no place to run when they charged.
They caught me good that day, walking down the street. Maybe I should have tried to run, but I was suddenly in between four or five dogs barking and nipping at me and wanting to bite the living hell out of me. For all my theories, even as fast as I was, I wasn’t going to outrun them. I had to stand my ground. I pulled out my slingshot and hit one or two and that backed them up for a moment. With nowhere to hide, I leaped up onto the front porch and crashed in through the front door. In those days, white people kept their guns in trophy cases or over the fireplace. I knew this because I had broken into lots of houses to steal things. Could I have gotten out the back and escaped? Maybe. But I had too much rage, too much fury, to back down. My blood was hot, my heart was pumping, and the one thing I knew for sure was that I had not done a damn thing to deserve being bitten by dogs.
I found a .22 caliber rifle and a .410 shotgun, both loaded. The dogs were still barking and snarling outside. I went through the front door and started shooting. I laid two dogs to rest, squealing, and I was just as ready to kill the others. They were coon dogs. They didn’t have sense enough to back off. I hit one with the .22 and he went down. The only reason I didn’t kill them all was a black lady named Sugar Doo, who lived near the corner of Fairfield, saw the commotion and yelled at me, “Child, I’m gonna tell your mama!”
I threw the guns down and ran off.
I hid for a while. The owners of the dogs called the police, but by that time, the local officer, Dale Baker, wouldn’t come get me. He thought I was a crazy nigger and I would just as soon kill him if he tried to take me to jail. That was more and more my attitude. The older I got, the more I was starting to live to die. I was like a lot of the black kids in gangs I saw, years later, when I lived in Compton.
When my mother found out what I’d done to the dogs, she shook her head sadly and told me, “You think those people are prejudiced? Richard, you just a kid but you the most prejudiced human being I ever met.” She walked away, shaking her head. “Sonny, you got more hatred in you than any child I’ve ever seen.”
I wanted to talk back and say, “Mama, what would you have done?” But I couldn’t backtalk her. Besides, I knew the answer. She would have accepted it. That did not make sense to me then, and still doesn’t, but I got what she was trying to teach me. Avoid things and you don’t have a problem. The way to survive was to live a life of evasion. You didn’t get into conflict. You didn’t pass by the house where you knew dogs lived. You kept to your own. You backed down. You were subservient.
That was what she desired for me, but I just could never be that way.
See, all I could think of was what would have happened if Mama or my sisters had been walking past those houses when the white people set their dogs on them.
It made me smile.