Six months after the police arrested me in my house and Uncle Roman came to my rescue, I lay curled up in a boxcar on a freight train heading for Chicago. It was a cold December morning in 1960, and I was eighteen years old. I had gone to sleep just hours before, and woke at the shrill cry of the train whistle. I came awake at once. You had to be on guard when you rode the rails. There was always danger from “yard bulls” looking to throw you off the train, and other hobos, poor as you were, looking to rob you of what little you had.
I loved the thunderous rumble of the freight trains. It was the sound of power. Watching the countryside roll by, I felt like I was finally controlling my own destiny. Every train north felt like passage into a new world. Despite the danger, I loved those smelly old wood freight cars, even those filled with livestock. Some trains, called “hotshots,” carried butchered meat for next-day consumption. To avoid spoilage, they got to their destinations faster than regular freights. It didn’t really matter to me how slow or fast they went, to me they were all carriage to freedom.
Chicago lay ahead, open as a naïve child. Even shivering from the cold, I sat contentedly in the corner with my arms wrapped around my legs. Every breath was a frosty cloud and I had to rub my hands together to keep up the circulation. Soon, the light grew bright enough for me to see through the cracks in the door. Whistle blasts told me we were stopping. I pushed the door open to look out. The wind froze my face, but surprising warmth ran through me. I was here. I had made it.
In the rail yard, there were dozens of tracks and hundreds of freight cars on the sidings. I was in Chicago, and I could see a cityscape of buildings rising like mountains in the distance. Chicago was different from anything I had ever experienced. There were no cotton fields anywhere. Skyscrapers lined every street and throngs of people crowded the sidewalks, holding their coats tight against the winter wind and darting in and out of fancy stores. Exhaust from the cars and trucks wrinkled my nose. A noisy mechanical plow rumbled through the streets pushing aside beds of snow. Trolley cars slid by with electrical connectors attached to overhead wires like shark fins, and telephone poles stretched ahead for miles.
So far, no one had called me nigger.
It was a good start.
I walked till I found myself on Cicero Avenue. Cold and tired, but so excited I could barely breathe, I put a coin in the pay phone on the corner and waited nervously for someone to pick it up.
After five rings, my aunt Shirley answered. “Hello?”
“Aunt Shirley, this is Richard.”
“Richard, is that really you? How is everyone at home?”
“I’m in Chicago,” I said, and she let out a shriek.
“You’re here? Where are you?”
I told her and she said happily, “Stay there, I’m on my way.”
The sound of her voice was a comfort. As I waited, my spirits couldn’t have been higher. I surely was in heaven, the place I had dreamed of, where anything was possible, where the problems and hatreds of the South were far behind. At that moment, I didn’t care about my dirty clothes or how much money I had. My thoughts were all about how here in Chicago I could finally find my own value, my own worth.
A big old Cadillac cruised by with a woman looking from one side of the street to the other.
I yelled, “Aunt Shirley, is that you?”
Grinning from ear to ear, Aunt Shirley parked at the curb and hopped out with outstretched arms. “Richard, I’m so glad to see you. When did you get off the bus?”
“I didn’t take the bus, Aunt Shirley. I hopped a freight train,” I said as she released her warm embrace.
“Richard, you should have told us you were coming.”
“I kinda left in a hurry, Aunt Shirley.” The truth was, my mom knew I was going, I just hadn’t told her when. I wanted to spare all of us the sad and tearful scene it would have been.
“Well, let’s go home and face your uncle. Is he gonna be surprised to see you,” she said jokingly.
I got into the car. Two children were sitting in the backseat. “Richard, this your cousin Franklin and your cousin Penny.”
“How you doing?” I said.
“We all right,” Franklin said, as his sister buried her head in his chest shyly. “You gon’ stay with us?”
“I hope so,” I answered.
The little girl examined me closely. “Why is your nose so big? It looks swollen. When’s it gonna go down?”
We drove the rest of the way in silence.
Uncle Roman and Aunt Shirley lived in an apartment on the west side of Chicago. Ten families lived in the building. Unlike the wooden dwellings of Shreveport, their building was dark red brick. The mailbox wasn’t at the curb but was actually attached beside the front door. As we walked up the unbroken steps to the apartment, I asked, “Can I see the shower that comes out of a pipe and cleans you?”
Aunt Shirley laughed. “I know what you mean. When I first left the country and saw that thing, I was shocked ’cause I was used to bathing in a number-three tub.”
The apartment seemed like a palace to me. There were three bedrooms, a bathroom, a dining room, and a living room. In the living room, two blue floral-print couches sat next to matching chairs. There were end tables with lamps, and a round table with ceramic figurines. A black-and-white television sat regally at one end of the room. The walls were full of family pictures, ceramic birds, and mirrors.
One wall held a big picture of Jesus. He was white. A Klansman once told me, “Jesus don’t let little ugly niggers like you into heaven.”
Aunt Shirley showed me the restroom. I had never used a toilet before. I didn’t know how it worked. She had to show me to pull up the seat and how to flush. After looking at the shower, I asked, “Aunt Shirley, can I see one of your towels?”
I couldn’t believe how soft it was. I rubbed it all over my face and hands. I must have looked silly. Aunt Shirley was trying to keep from laughing. Finally, she exploded. I joined her and we laughed until we cried.
Uncle Roman was surprised to see me when he came home. “Richard, does Julia know you up here?”
“No, sir,” I answered, afraid he would be angry.
All he said was, “No matter. I’m glad to see you. Now let me wash up.”
Uncle Roman was a construction supervisor. When he got home, his clothes, shoes, and face, were covered by so much thick white dust that he looked white. His large “white” hands looked tough and strong when he pulled off his yellow hardhat and vest. When he removed his dark green goggles, around his eyes were the only dark spots.
After Uncle Roman washed and changed, Aunt Shirley served us dinner at a long oval table with a lace tablecloth. She set plates, saucers, forks, spoons, knives, cups, and glasses, all a luxury to me. Uncle Roman sat at the head of the table like a king, and Aunt Shirley sat at the other end like his beautiful queen. Franklin and Penny argued over who would sit next to me. Penny won. Then Aunt Shirley set plates of hot food in the middle of the table, and the delicious aroma made my stomach growl. Kool-Aid was the drink of choice in Shreveport, but here they had real soft drinks.
After we said grace, I attacked the food like a hungry wolf.
“Richard, you had enough? Don’t be shy. Eat as much as you want,” Aunt Shirley urged.
Between mouthfuls, Uncle Roman said, “I’m happy you come here, Richard. You don’t belong in the South ’cause you too damn stubborn and strong-willed, just like I used to be. I never got Julia to understand that. I wanted to invite you here but I would never go behind my sister’s back. Whenever I discussed you moving here, Julia got so mad. We ain’t never had nothing but struggle all our life. I couldn’t understand why she wanted you to stay there to be a janitor like her, or maybe end up dead.”
His face grew pained as he looked into the distance. “When I was about your age, some white men spotted me in the woods while I was hunting. They stood me up against a tree and tied my hands around it. They ripped my shirt off and beat me until the flesh ripped from my body. Every time that whip hit me, I screamed.”
His eyes brimmed with tears. Aunt Shirley came from the end of the table and sat next to him, rubbing his arm compassionately as he continued.
“I remember asking God to let me die ’cause it wasn’t nothing to live for. Then a voice inside my head kept saying, ‘I’m a man. I’m a man.’ All of a sudden, I didn’t feel no more pain. Every time the whip cut into my skin, I whispered to myself, ‘I’m a man.’
“They left me out there to die, but old Mr. Beaumont found me and took me home. Julia and Mama doctored on me until I got better. But the scars never went away, Richard. Every time I came to Shreveport I begged Julia to let you go home with me but she say no ’cause things wasn’t as bad as they used to be. She’ll be mad at me when she find out you here, but I’ll deal with that. I might even be able to get you a job here. If I do, can you start right away?”
Hot food, nice apartment, family all around—and best of all, no Shreveport? I grinned happily. “Any time you say, Uncle Roman.”
As good as his word, Uncle Roman got me a job, working with him. We reported for work at 7:00 a.m. in freezing temperatures, and left at 4:00 p.m. Aunt Shirley rose early and filled our brown lunch bags with sandwiches she made from dinner the night before, and cookies she baked because Uncle Roman had a sweet tooth. He had a hot cup of coffee every morning but I never touched the stuff. Generally, I still don’t.
Construction was new to me and I didn’t know what was worse, the height or the cold. At the site, I saw right away why Uncle Roman’s face and hands were always white. We spent most of the day lifting sacks of concrete mix up dusty ladders onto scaffolds and pushing wheelbarrows filled with sand. We froze all winter, something new to a boy from Louisiana. I don’t think I have ever been so cold for so long. Coming home from a hard day’s work was always a pleasure, because Aunt Shirley had the radiator on in the apartment and it wrapped us up in a blanket of warmth.
Although I adjusted to the work and the cold, and as much as I appreciated Uncle Roman’s help, I knew I wouldn’t be here long. Being a laborer was no better here than in Shreveport. I had a different goal in mind, to be in business for myself. I wanted to start reading again and, to that end, I was astounded to learn I was allowed to go to the public library. Every time I went, I checked out seven books. My goal was to read one every three days. Waking each morning at three-thirty, my reading marathon began. I even read during the thirty-minute drive to and from work, and every night from nine to eleven-thirty. I read books on business, business management, accounting, geography, and the few I found on black history. I read books of every kind and soaked up information like a sponge.
After three months, my commitment to reading had not faltered. My intellectual muscles were growing as fast as my physical ones. New horizons opened. I thought about enrolling in the Illinois Institute of Technology in Cook County. A degree would mean I’d be able to vote, something I had never done before. It wouldn’t be easy to go to college. It was higher than I ever thought I could aim, but I was used to dealing with obstacles, so I knuckled down even harder and read even more.
One night at dinner, six or seven months after I arrived, Penny asked me, “Uncle Richard, why do you read so much?”
“In Shreveport, it was against the law to go to the library. If you tried, they would beat you up and throw you in jail so nobody else would go, either.”
She was amazed. “They beat you up for reading?”
“They figured, if you couldn’t read, you couldn’t vote. I want to make sure they let me vote. That’s why I’m going to college.”
Uncle Roman laughed. “Richard, in Chicago you don’t have to graduate from college to vote. Once you old enough, all you need to do is register.”
“Is that the only reason you wanna go to college?” asked Aunt Shirley.
“No, I want to be a businessman. I’m gonna make a difference in this world,” I said.
I saw a flicker of something cross Uncle Roman’s face that I couldn’t identify. “Well, it’s all well and good to have something you want to do,” he said. “But you shouldn’t give up a good job while you’re doing it, should you?”
“Uncle Roman, I don’t want to do construction for the rest of my life.”
He frowned. “It’s a good safe job. The pay’s regular. Look around you”—and his arm swept around the apartment—“it got us all this.”
That’s when it hit me. The look in his eyes. I understood it. I had seen it all my life. It was fear. Fear of getting ahead. Fear of being equal. Uncle Roman accepted the idea he could never have as much as white people. Looking at his apartment, his life, it all seemed okay, but compared to what? Seen through the lens of Shreveport, he had a great deal—but compared to the white people around him, he had nothing. The realization crashed down on me like a load of the bricks we worked with every day.
If you live long enough, experiences begin to repeat themselves. That dinner table was the beginning of wisdom. Chicago was not like Shreveport—it was far worse. Chicago was an illusion. The best things here were just as inaccessible to black people as they were back home. Maybe it was worse, because we were told they were within our reach. In Shreveport, you couldn’t go into the white museum or the white library. Was Chicago any better? Sure, I had access to libraries, but those in black areas were far less good than those in white neighborhoods. I realized that here black people thought they were free, but the same rules that applied in the South applied in the north. We still lived on the bottom.
Was this the promised land?
“You can even buy you a house up there,” Uncle Roman had told me when I arrived. He was right. You could. But most of the houses blacks could buy were so dilapidated you could see through holes in the floor right down to the next apartment. You could see the sky through the roof. Where were the black businesses and entrepreneurs? What did it say that working at the post office was the best job a black man could have? You’d live and die carrying a bag for white people all your working life, but at least it’s secure ’cause it’s federal. All the hard work Uncle Roman put in at his job, hour after hour hauling brick and cement into those big buildings, was no better than picking cotton.
When Chicago people came to visit us in Shreveport, they all talked about how much they had. “I have three cars in Chicago,” one claimed. In Shreveport we responded, “Wow, I just have an old mule. Maybe in Chicago, I could have three cars, too.” I saw people who did have three cars, and some had even more, but they were mostly broken-down wrecks that would never run again. I had been so stupid. I’d never really looked closely at the car Uncle Roman drove. It could barely make it there and back, and a couple of times it broke down.
The truth was right in front of their faces. They just wouldn’t see it. The police here hated us the same way, and beat us up the same way. The only difference was that the police here were more organized and could catch you quicker. Chicago had no ditches to jump, no woods to hide in. It was the same with food. Here, everything was in stores. It took money to eat. In Shreveport, we could always steal a chicken or pull food from the ground.
Segregation in Chicago was a fact. Racism was a fact. Separate schools were a fact. Ghettos were a fact. In Chicago, you were still called nigger. You were still beaten up. You were still shot. You were still poor. Even if you were doing as well as Uncle Roman and Aunt Shirley, white people could treat you any way they wanted to. They were the law. The pride that the North took in being so liberal and liberating black people from the South was the worst lie in the world because it could get you killed. It would get you killed.
In order for a lie to work, you have to believe it. I saw the truth. I wasn’t about to live that way. I was so disappointed in Uncle Roman it broke my heart. He told me when I arrived I could do anything I put my mind to, but in the end he didn’t really believe it. Did he ever think I would succeed? It made for a rift between us that grew worse every day and never healed, and soon I realized I had to leave his home and find a place of my own.
I had been paying Uncle Roman a sizable rent to live with him. I wanted to cut my expenses so I could send money home to my mom and my sisters. I moved into a cheap apartment on the west side of Chicago. It was depressing. Tenement buildings leaned against one another like drunks. I had never seen a neighborhood so disorganized, so filled with garbage, so filthy. In the hallway of my firetrap building, I daily passed people having sex, or doing drugs, and saw bodies sprawled out on landings or in the vestibule, unconscious or dead.
The apartment cost twenty-five dollars a week, but it wasn’t worth a penny. The water pipes leaked. The old refrigerator never ran right. Bugs infested the kitchen. Rats feasted on garbage and lived in basements and bit people while they slept. In the hallway, I saw rats bigger than the rabbits I hunted as a kid. I was so afraid of being bitten, I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake at night while the rats scurried inside my walls.
A week after I left Uncle Roman’s, I got a job working in the mailroom of a big commercial office building in the Loop, Chicago’s downtown commercial center and the seat of city government. It paid me $1.50 an hour. The office building was a welcome change from the construction site. No more overalls and heavy work boots; my new uniform consisted of dress trousers, a long-sleeve white shirt, and a bow tie, the first I’d ever worn. Feeling strikingly handsome and confident, I was sure I could work my way up.
Wanting the bosses to notice me, I worked harder than anyone. My energetic demeanor, however, disturbed some of my coworkers. One worker named Perry was a light-skinned Negro who had recently migrated from Huntsville, Alabama. Perry was the perfect example of a frightened Negro—no confidence, no courage, and no character. “Yes, sir,” was his instantaneous response, spoken with a bowed head to any white man, careful never to look him directly in the eye. I despised his cowardice.
In the next nine months, I was promoted twice, so I wasn’t worried when the department manager called me into his office one day, but Perry saw only darkness.
“I been here for two years and Mr. Hayes ain’t never invited none of us Negroes to his office unless he’s firing them,” he said nervously.
“I won’t be getting fired today,” I said confidently.
The boss, Mr. Hayes, a tall, thin white man in his fifties, was a clerkish type with reading glasses perched on his nose. From his desk, he motioned me in.
“Sit down, Richard. I hear you do all your work and then help everybody else. I like that. I also hear you are a good basketball player, as good as the pros.”
I looked directly into his eyes and he went on.
“We have a basketball team and I’d like you to play on it. Frankly, we’re terrible and we lost badly last year. I don’t want us to look like fools again. I spoke with the vice president and he agreed we can promote you. We’ll pay you good money, too, if you play. How does $125 a month sound?”
“How does $150 a month sound,” I countered. “I’d love to play for your team if $150 sounds good to you.”
He nodded grudgingly. “Let me talk to the VP and see what we can do. You can go back to work now.”
Two days later, Mr. Hayes informed me that I would be paid $150 a month during the basketball season. If we won the championship, they would pay me $200 a month, with another increase the following year. Having no faith in the legal system, I insisted the agreement be put in a written contract signed by all parties. They agreed. I couldn’t believe it. Now, I would be able to pay my rent, eat, and send money home.
Recruiting other black men from the neighborhood was easy. Going up against a “superior” white man’s team was an instant draw. Mr. Hayes and the company got their money’s worth. On defense, I shut the other teams down. On offense, no one could stop my hook shot. I averaged twenty-seven points a game and we won the championship.
As a result, my wardrobe became more stylish and fashionable, wing-tipped shoes, dress socks, pin-striped trousers with suspenders, starched white shirts, bow ties, and finally underwear, some of the first I ever owned. It was a new era for me. I was young, I was single, and I had money in my pocket. All that made me a very eligible bachelor.
That didn’t mean as much to me as it did to most other young men. I didn’t shun relationships with women, but I knew they could lead to problems. I found the women in Chicago the same as in the South, uneducated, compliant, and focused almost entirely on bearing children. They didn’t know any better. Malcolm X said that “a man cannot do better until he learns to educate himself.” Black women in Chicago were as poor as they were uneducated. They believed the myths passed down from generation to generation. They learned what their mothers told them, and their mothers had learned it from their grandmothers, all the way back to slavery.
I was ambitious. The women I saw around me and where I lived couldn’t help me gain any of my dreams. To reach an understanding before I ever made a commitment with any of them, I was completely honest and took nothing for granted. “I know what you gain if you’re with me,” I’d tell them. “What do I gain if I’m with you?” Sadly, they were all the same. They had no vision of success other than working at some mindless job that offered nothing in the way of improvement for them or for me, and having kids. I didn’t want to be involved in that type of relationship.
I asked my uncle what to do.
He told me, “You know that corner right there?”
“Yeah, I know where that corner is.”
He said, “I go up there and get me a girl and have sex two or three times a month. That way I don’t have no responsibility. You can do the same. If you don’t wanna do that,” he said, “the bathroom is in there.”
Recreation was not always easy.
Even when it came to sports, certain areas were still closed to me. I had learned to play golf at a country club in Shreveport. Only white people could be members, but Negroes could earn a little bit of money working in the kitchen cooking and serving food, or tending the lawns and bushes, or caddying for members and guests on the golf course. As a young boy, I caddied for lots of people, including one guest member, a well-known actor named Dale Robertson who starred in Westerns. He liked my caddying so much he actually gave me one of his clubs, an old number-one iron. From the time I was about ten years old, I hit balls with that club. As time went on, I fixed a couple of discarded clubs and an old putter lying around the clubhouse until I had enough clubs to play the whole course. I could only play at night, but I was a natural athlete and, long after hours, I would roam the course. I got to the point where I was sure I could beat most of the members, but that was a dream I never realized.
In Chicago, blacks couldn’t play on city courses so, for the fun of it, I used to borrow a friend’s clubs and go to a nearby park to hit balls. I was out on a grassy area, driving balls across a field, when a well-dressed white man carrying a few irons approached me. I had seen him here hitting balls before, probably his after-work exercise. He was a big, dark-haired preppy sort with a flattop haircut, a big jaw, and blue eyes, in his midthirties, wearing a shirt and slacks. He carried his golf bag and a full set of clubs in the trunk of a beautiful two-tone ’53 Buick Roadmaster convertible he parked in the little gravel lot nearby. I loved that car. It was salmon and beige and had those little chrome holes on the sides we called “Ghetto Bullets.” I dreamed of owning it every time I saw it. The idea of driving up to Uncle Roman’s apartment building in it made my mouth water.
He said, “You play golf?”
“I used to play golf,” I told him.
“Are you any good?” he asked me.
“It depends on how you mean that.”
He said, “You think you can beat me?”
I laughed. “Oh, yeah, it would be too easy, man.”
It made him mad. “No, you can’t,” he insisted.
I waved him off.
He said, “I’ll tell you what. If you don’t beat me, I’m gonna whup your ass.”
I said, “Well, okay, but if I beat you, I’ll whup your ass.”
His face got all steely hard. “It’ll never happen . . . ,” he said, and I swear I could hear the word “nigger” complete the thought in his head.
Of course, Preppie didn’t know I had caddied from the time I was ten years old, or that I used to hit at least a barrel of balls with that old number one iron—not a bucket, a barrel—every week. I was just fooling around in the park, but this was a serious wager. He was big enough and crazy enough to try to beat me up.
I teed up a ball and hit it a mile. It soared straight into the sky and dropped into the woods at the end of the field. As soon as I hit that first ball, his jaw dropped. It didn’t take any more than that to convince him he couldn’t beat me. Right then and there, he started making noises about how maybe this wasn’t really a bet and how maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.
“Well, I’ll tell you what, boy,” I said. “Now, you better hit that ball. Or I’m gonna whup yo’ ass.”
“Well, if I don’t hit a ball,” he stammered, “there’s no contest. No contest, no bet, right?”
I said, “Now, if you gonna hit that ball, hit it. You know that I’m gonna beat you either way.”
“Well, I’m not gonna hit the ball,” he said and turned to walk away.
I grabbed him, hit him, knocked him hard to the ground, and took his car. I drove it all around town. I was completely relaxed about the whole thing. I was so sure the car was mine, it never occurred to me it wasn’t. See, where I came from, whatever white people took from you wasn’t yours, it was theirs. There wasn’t any need to call the police because they’d come and beat you. If the white man came and took your meal, it was his meal. If he took your pig, it was his pig. The time the sheriff took my kill, it was his kill.
I took the guy’s car, it was mine.
You think that’s crazy? No, sir. It was the natural order of things. I could already imagine driving the car back to Shreveport and visiting my mama and sisters.
When I got to my uncle Roman’s house, he just looked at the flashy Buick, and me, in amazement.
“Man, you can’t afford that car. Where’d you get it?”
“I took it from a white man. He lost it hitting golf balls with me.”
Uncle Roman shook his head. “It don’t work that way, Richard. The police gonna be lookin’ for you in that car. You can’t keep it in front of where I live at. Here’s what we’ll do. When it gets to midnight, we’ll take the car and park it someplace else.” He shook his head again and sighed. “That car will get you killed, Richard.”
I didn’t listen. I drove it around. I wasn’t hard to find. Soon, the police stopped me. They had the license plate number from the report the man filed. The officer said, “If you don’t give that car back, I’m gonna have to lock you up.”
I still believed it was my car, even when they took it back from me and dragged me to the police station. Some of the policemen talked to me about it. They told me what I had done was robbery. That was the law.
Was it clear to me? they asked.
I said it was.
They said they were glad I understood. After all, the law was black-and-white.