When it came to school, Mama started me out right. I learned my numbers and ABCs before I ever went. When I was very young, she would say a letter, then make me repeat it. Sometimes, I would have to stand in our front room for over an hour saying the ABCs.
At two, it was not easy to hold my attention. “Be still, Richard, and say your letters,” Mama chided.
By the time I was four, my mom would say the letter and I had to point to an object that began with the same letter. If I didn’t match the letter to the right object, Mama would hit my legs with a switch till they were on fire. I’d fidget from the pain.
“Boy, be still and listen. You got to learn to listen if you want to get anywhere in this world. Do you hear me, son?”
“You got to learn so you can teach your sisters. I don’t want no ignorant children.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mama was a great woman, and her smile lit up the room. An optimist, she always had something positive to say about people. She was kindhearted and loving, and would do anything to help anyone. She used to say, “I don’t know nothin’ bad ’bout nobody. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Ain’t no need for me to be selfish with people who in need, ’cause whatever I got, God gave me that.”
Mama did not have any college degrees, but she had a Ph.D. in the psychology of life. Rarely giving me a direct answer to a question, she preferred to make me think things through on my own. Today, parents do everything for their kids. Ask a question; get an answer. Look how smart Daddy and Mommy are. My mama wanted me to discover reason and understanding on my own. She had an unyielding determination that all of her children would be able to confront life on their own terms.
I can’t say Mama had specific aspirations for me. Being a lawyer or a businessman was an unrealistic dream back then. My mom simply believed that in order to be anything, you had to get an education. She would line us up and take us to the cotton field and we’d stand there for what seemed like an eternity.
Finally, she’d ask, “What y’all see?”
Being the oldest, I answered first. “I just see a whole lotta cotton, Mama.”
“You ain’t lookin’ deep enough,” she said. “What I see is work that ain’t gonna take us nowhere. All I see is aches and pain. All I see is white, the white man’s cotton, the white man’s land, the white man’s house, the white man’s money. You get your lessons like I tell ya to, and one day you ain’t gon’ have to work in no cotton field. You hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and I surely did.
By the time I was five, Mama had taught me the ABCs, numbers, colors, and how to write my name. After years of looking over her shoulder while she read the Bible, I was also a very good reader. We always read the Bible. It was the only book we had, because Negroes weren’t allowed to go to the library and check out books.
There was no kindergarten in those days, so I started school in the first grade. The name of the school was Little Hope, located on Seventy-Third and Line Avenue. The name was absolutely correct. Negroes had little hope there. With its ancient wooden frame and tin roof, Little Hope was just like the rundown row houses of our neighborhood. The school couldn’t afford a flagpole, so there was just a tired old American flag nailed to a long stick that was bolted to the tin roof. The other kids were proud to see the flag waving in the wind. I wondered how they could embrace such foolishness. Why did we clothe ourselves in the flag of patriotism and celebrate democracy when the chains of hatred and segregation bound us? Why did we put our faith in a world that was clearly out to kill us?
Failing to see what others saw in the flag, I came up with my own color scheme. Red, white, and blue painted a sordid picture. White represented evil intent and racial superiority. Red represented the shedding of innocent blood. Blue represented the senseless murders of my people. The truth could not be hidden behind a colorful rainbow.
Robbed of our heritage, we had no identity. We were just niggers, unlearned, unintelligent, and without hope.
Our school reflected my “color” scheme. Most of the windows were broken, with the panes filled in with cardboard. There were no air conditioners or heaters. In the summertime, we sweltered. In the winter, we froze. School started in September, an extremely hot month. To endure the heat, we sat in the playground under a shade tree. One water fountain trickled out a thin stream. Everyone would gather around and drink like thirsty animals despite the green slime and bird droppings covering it. There was one filthy outdoor bathroom. It was common to find maggots on the floor.
It was totally unsanitary. There was no place to wash our hands or faces after we came in from the playground, where we ate, too. Without a cafeteria, we all brought lunch. Mine was most often a piece of leftover cornbread. I’d forget it was in my pocket, so it usually turned into crumbs. The only saving grace was a one-room shack we called “the nickel lady’s house,” across from the schoolyard on Line Avenue, where kids who were fortunate enough to have a nickel or a dime could buy snacks.
Unlike the kids of today, no one made a fashion statement at my school. Boys wore dry-rotted shirts, and pants with holes in the knees. Girls’ hems hung from under their dresses. I never worried about being outdressed by the other kids. We all wore the same clothes every day and were all just as poor. No one had athletic shoes. We wore our Sunday-go-to-meeting shoes, the only ones we had. When we took them off to play, piles of patent-leather shoes and work boots sat in the dirt in the middle of the playground.
Shoes were the most difficult article of clothing to keep in good repair, because we kept outgrowing them and were too poor to buy new ones. Kids came to school with holes in their shoes, or no shoes at all. When I didn’t have any more shoes, I decided to make me a pair. I looked through the trash and found a pair of matching soles. I poked holes around the edges of each and ran fishing wire through the holes, knotting the ends so they couldn’t come out. Wrapping rags around my feet for socks, I stepped on top of the soles and pulled the fishing wire together over them. I twisted the wires together with pliers until the soles stayed on my feet when I walked. It was a creative but painful experience. All the kids admired my fancy shoes when I went to school, but as the day went on, the fishing wire slowly cut into me. Stubborn as ever, I refused to take off my new shoes. By the time I got home, my feet were swollen and bloody.
The next day I was back to barefoot.
* * *
My first-grade teacher’s name was Mrs. Williams, no relation to me, a small, fragile woman who looked too old to be working. There were more than forty children in our class, from six to fourteen. Mrs. Williams didn’t have a roll book so she scribbled our names in the back of her Bible. I was surprised she didn’t run out of room to write.
Mrs. Williams was a dedicated teacher and made the best of things. We were too poor to buy school supplies so she brought pencils, tablets, and bags of rocks from home. There were no desks, so we sat on old wooden chairs and held our tablets in our laps. We didn’t have books, so she wrote our lessons on the chalkboard and divided the class into two groups. One group worked on counting, using the rocks. The other copied lessons from the board.
Mrs. Williams made a lasting impression on me. Married to a preacher, she insisted we start each day with a prayer. Her prayers were so strong I felt like God himself was present in the room. I behaved, because I feared she would send the Holy Ghost after me. On the other hand, the principal, Mr. Green, was a stumbling drunk who did nothing to fix the school’s rundown condition. I hated how his breath smelled of alcohol whenever he walked by and patted me on my back. I used to see him behind the school drinking from a bottle in a brown bag. I also saw him passed out in an alley one weekend, only to reappear at school Monday morning in a badly wrinkled suit, his tired red eyes indicating his habit.
My fondest memory of first grade was meeting my best friend, Chili Bowl. He was just as poor as I was, and wore the same pair of overalls and suspenders every day, just like me. He never brought lunch, or had any money, so we shared what I had. He had an infectious smile and loved to play, but what fascinated me most about Chili Bowl was his thirst for learning. He was always trying to find a book to read to make himself smarter.
One day I asked him, “Chili Bowl, why you always lookin’ for somethin’ to read?”
“So I can get a good job when I grow up,” he answered. “My hands hurt when I pick cotton with my mama in the field.”
Chili Bowl was eight years old, the oldest of seven children. He was two years older than I was, but in the same first grade as me because he started late. His mother was always pregnant with another baby. People called his six brothers and sisters “side-steppers” because of their ages—six, five, four, three, two, and one.
Chili Bowl was in the same boat as me—he didn’t have a father. Curious about how his family worked, I walked Chili Bowl home one time. His house looked all raggly and spooky, so I asked, “Chili Bowl, do you see haints at night?” A “haint” was what we called a ghost or spirit.
“Ain’t no haints in my house,” he spat angrily.
I wasn’t so sure. The front yard was all scraggly weeds. In back, drying wash danced on the clothesline as a small black dog jumped and barked underneath, trying to snatch things. Nevertheless, a delicious smell flowed out the back door and caught my nose. Chili Bowl’s mother was cooking. She was young but looked very tired, and came out as we climbed the rickety stairs.
She said, “Richard, your mama know you over here?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I replied.
“Okay, but make sure you get your butt home ’fore dark,” she warned.
I nodded firmly. Believe me, the presence of haints assured it.
Once, Chili Bowl told me he was spanked because he broke a spoon. He had been digging holes in the yard and the spoon bent and broke. His mother slapped him upside his head and said, “I ain’t got no money to buy no spoon. What we gon’ eat with?”
He told me they had one spoon, one fork, and one knife. The family shared them at dinnertime. Sometimes, he had to eat with his hands. I wondered how they made it. The bedroom he shared with sisters and brothers didn’t have any furniture. The only thing in the room was a sheet filled with cotton. They used it as a mattress.
I had thought my family was surely the poorest family on our street, the poorest in the Cedar Grove community where we lived, and, without a doubt, the poorest in Shreveport. It came as a surprise to me that we weren’t actually the poorest family in town. At least we had forks and knives when we ate.
School was tough for me until I met Chili Bowl. Before he was there to protect me, I got into lots of fights. The older kids picked on me—especially about the size of my nose. I hated it. Chili Bowl made school much better. He protected me. My enemies were his enemies. He was so tough, even the older kids didn’t pick on me when Chili Bowl was around. It was a nice feeling.
After school, Chili Bowl and I would lie in the yard with our hands behind our heads, gazing toward the sky with twigs hanging from our mouths, a manly pose. We talked about all the things we wanted to do when we grew up.
“I wanna move away from here one day,” Chili said seriously. “I’m gon’ get me a good job, a fancy car, a big house, and have lots of money. I ain’t gon’ be pickin’ no cotton for nobody. I’m gon’ make somethin’ outta myself, Richard, you watch and see.”
Out of the blue, I asked, “You think God hears us when we pray?”
Chili Bowl hesitated. “My mama say he’ll answer all of our prayers, but so far he ain’t answered none of mine. We still poor.”
I laughed and got up and yelled at the sky. “God, do you hear us down here?” I picked up a stick and started banging on an empty can from the garbage, yelling at the top of my lungs, “God, are You up? God? God, are You up?”
Chili Bowl scowled. “What you doin’ that for?”
Laughing, I answered, “I’m trying to wake God up. He must be sleeping ’cause He ain’t answered none of my prayers, either.”
Chili Bowl and I had a lot in common—we both had nothing. To make some money, Chili Bowl redeemed empty pop bottles for their two-cent-each deposit. We decided to work together to gather and sell more bottles to save enough money to start a business, even though we had no idea how to start one. Our plan was to sell enough bottles to buy a foot-tub to harvest local fruit. Berries and plums were plentiful and we could pick and sell them.
Early the next morning Chili Bowl rode his bicycle to the candy store on Line Avenue to look for discarded bottles. He packed the bottles neatly in the wire basket on the front of his bicycle. As he crossed the intersection of Line and Seventy-Third, a car slammed into him and just kept on going. Everyone there said that it never even slowed. The squeal of tires and the sound of the impact was heard for blocks. When I heard the neighbors yelling, I ran to see what happened. There was my best friend lying in the street with broken glass all over him and blood flowing from his head.
I looked at the crowd around us and asked, “What happened?”
Someone said angrily, “A white lady hit Chili Bowl and just kept on going.”
I knelt next to his body and opened his eyes with my fingers. “Chili Bowl, can you hear me? Get up. Get up.”
He didn’t answer. He just died.
My heart felt so heavy. Warm tears streamed down my face. Just when I had found a friend, someone killed him. My anger was made bigger by the fact that the woman who hit him didn’t have the decency to stop. She left him in the middle of the street to die like a dog. I ran home as fast as I could. “Mama, she killed Chili Bowl. She killed Chili Bowl. A white lady killed him. She hit him with her car. I don’t have a friend no more.”
Mama placed her arms around me and said, “It’ll be okay. Sometimes things happen for the better, and work for the good of those that know the Lord.”
Tears ran down my face. “I know the Lord didn’t work me no good.”
“You’ll understand it better by and by,” my mother said calmly.
“By when, Mama?”
Life turned gray. I didn’t go fishing anymore. School became a horrible place again. Every day brought a new version of Chili Bowl’s death. As a joke, some kids lay on the ground and pretended to be dead, saying, “This is how Chili Bowl looked.”
I had no one at all to talk to, to laugh with, or to play with at school. The children got meaner and started picking on me again. My savior was gone. Chili Bowl could no longer protect me as he had in the past. The teasing and insults increased. The loneliness grew unbearable.
I knew what God was trying to tell me.
You are alone.