Augusta was sin city: plenty of gambling, illegal liquor, and a lot of houses like the one I grew up in. The local government then was corrupt, the police could be bribed, and the law was whatever they said it was. It was like Phenix City, Alabama, on the other side of the state, just over the state line.
A lot of the corruption went back to Prohibition. Even after repeal, Georgia stayed dry for a long time, and a whole system of payoffs developed out of that. Augusta was also in the Bible Belt, and the ministers were all the time getting the city to crack down on the illegal activity. It just made it harder for the police to keep everybody happy. Half the time they were arresting you, and half the time they were looking the other way.
I got to Augusta at the end of 1938. The house was located in a section of the city called “the Terry,” short for the Negro Territory. The Terry stretched west from Fifteenth Street to East Boundary and south from the Savannah River to Gwinnett Street. The streets were mostly unpaved red clay and sand. Rows of cabins in alleys and on the short streets stood side by side with regular middle-class homes.
The Terry was mostly black, but in 1938 there were still some whites and lots of Chinese. Most of the Chinese kept to themselves; they owned stores and lived above them. During a riot in 1970 all the Chinese people were burned out, but back then there was no trouble. There was a Moslem group there, too. Today you’d call them Black Muslims, but we called them Mohammeds. They wore beards, plaited their hair in back, and had a temple that was closed to white people. All I remember about them is that as kids we didn’t care too much for their hairstyle.
Sometimes the Ku Klux Klan held parades right through the Terry. The funny thing was all the black folks turned out to watch. I never paid much attention. Kids just didn’t think about things like that.
All up and down Ninth Street there were gambling joints run by a man named John S. He operated wide open—every year he bought the police a brand-new paddy wagon. When he died they carried trunks full of money out of his place.
My aunt who had the house on Twiggs Street was named Handsome Washington, but everybody called her Honey. She was very intelligent, and she supported a lot of people. We had about twelve to fifteen men staying there, in and out, and the woman ran the house because she was the most intelligent. A lot of the men were ex-farm workers who couldn’t get jobs, and Honey just fed ’em all. She fed a lot of the people who lived in Helmuth Alley behind the house, too—young mothers who needed things. She brought them meat and sugar, and she gave them money for groceries. And she loved the children.
Honey just didn’t want to see anybody hungry. I started eating better there myself. I kept her cleaned out of hog jowls, which I really liked, and I ate tripe (cow belly) for the first time. Honey knew I liked potato pone, too, and she’d fix me one any time I wanted it and I’d eat the whole thing. She also tried to give me chitlins, but I never did like ’em. When I finally got where I could eat chitlins, I had to have a lot of vinegar on ’em.
Honey had a grandson living there who was a year older than me. His name was Willie Glenn, but everybody called him Junior. Since I was called Junior, too, he became Big Junior and I became Little Junior. We were as close as brothers—wore each other’s clothes, shined shoes together, and sometimes slept in the same bed.
The house itself was two stories, with a lot of rooms on each side. It must have been a funeral home at one time, because the rooms were so long. It was heated with stoves that burned wood and coal. In the winter Big Junior and I scoured the railroad tracks that ran nearby to pick up coal for fuel.
Honey paid off the police right along, but they still busted her about every three months. There was a detective who watched the house from Edwards’ Texaco station across the street. He’d see men come and go with the girls or he’d see one of my cousins pull up with a car full of moonshine they’d made out in the country. Usually the car was driven by Jack Scott, Honey’s brother, the honcho in the family and a really vicious man. Big Junior and I sometimes helped stash the liquor because we were small enough to get under the house where they kept it hid. There was a loose floorboard in the front room, and Honey sold it out of there for 25 cents a half pint. I guess the floorboard was supposed to fool the police, but they’d walk in and reach right down and pull up the whiskey.
Sometimes, when they’d bust her, she woudn’t even get all the way to the station before they’d let her go. Or sometimes they’d take her in and she’d pay her fine and be right back, and other times she’d spend a night in jail. It never seemed to make any difference; she was back in business right away.
When the police raided the place, they were always polite, at least for those days, because my people were extremely dangerous. The police usually called black people “niggers” and all that, but not at our house. That’s when I learned that police are not brave: they just have a job to do. There’s a whole lot of people badder than the police, and a lot of ’em were people in my family.
Everybody was afraid of Jack Scott and my daddy, who didn’t think anything about taking a gun right out of a man’s hand. They’d get in a scrape and a fella would pull a gun on ’em and be afraid to shoot because he knew if he missed he was a dead man. Jack or my daddy would dare ’em to shoot and then snatch the gun right out of their hands. Come home with a pocketful of pistols.
Jack wouldn’t give up his own gun, though. One time when the police came, Jack had a gun in his hand and refused to surrender it to them. He let them arrest him, but he wouldn’t hand over that gun. He just backed into the patrol car, still holding the pistol. “Now, shut the car door,” he said. “Lock it up and I’ll go to jail and come out with my gun in my hand.” And they took him away like that.
Jack mistreated me a lot. He didn’t live at the house, but he was around all the time and he beat me for nothing. Once, after a raid, Big Junior told Jack that I had told the police they were selling whiskey. I don’t know why Junior said that because I hadn’t told anybody anything. Anyway, Jack stripped me buck naked, hung me from the ceiling in a burlap sack, and beat me with a belt until I almost passed out. I stayed mad at him for a lot of years, but later on I wound up burying that man.
If any of the customers got too rowdy, they were taken care of by another cousin named Willie Washington. We called him Buck, and he didn’t take no mess. He was a big fellow, double-jointed, a sort of Joe Palooka. I once saw him pick up a fifty-five-gallon drum full of water. People stayed out of his way.
Believe me, there were some bad cats around there. Out in the street you might see two men lock hands and cut it out with knives. Each one had a knife in his free hand, and they’d cut each other until one of ’em fell out. Not shoot it out, cut it out.
If Buck wasn’t around, my daddy would take care of any problems. He was in and out of the house a lot, but he never lived there. During this time he worked a lot of different jobs; construction work, delivering vegetables for a truck farm by the levee, whatever he could find. He sure didn’t get rich at it. I remember he got paid $4 a week for delivering vegetables, and I was spending some of that four dollars.
I said he’s been a strange man for a long time. He had a strange sense of humor, too. Once, when I was about seven, he and a man he was working for had a bottle of gin they were having trouble opening. They handed it to me and asked me to open it. Back then I used to open everything with my teeth, thinking I was getting away with something. After I opened it and spit the cap out, they told me to drink some of it. I drank a little bit and handed it to my father.
“Naw, drink some more,” he said and pushed the bottle back to me.
It was mint gin, and that’s what fooled me—it tasted good. Before they could say anything, I chugalugged half of it. It made me drunk pretty quick and then I passed out. They got worried and carried me into a church nearby and dunked my head in the baptismal font. When that didn’t do any good, they carried me to a river branch, took off all my clothes, and put me in the water to try to bring me back to life. Finally I came to, but I staggered around for the rest of the day. Boy, when I got sober the next day, I didn’t want any more of that ever again. And I still don’t know why they wanted me to drink that stuff.
It was around this time that I got my hands on an organ for the first time. My father was working at Eubanks Furniture Store, and they let him have an old pump organ with one of the legs off it. He brought it to the house on Twiggs Street and propped it up on a cheese crate on the porch. He set it up in the morning, and when he came back that evening he saw all the men and women from the house and some of the neighbors gathered on the porch. Thinking there was some kind of trouble, he pushed his way through and found me sitting there playing “Coon Shine Baby” on that old organ. I had taught myself to play it in one day. I don’t know where I picked up that particular song, but I always figured it referred to Afro-American kids because they called us “coons” and they called us “shine” because we shined shoes. But I wasn’t thinking about that, though; I was just happy making music.
After that, Honey really started taking an interest in me. She would bathe me and talk to me and listen to everything I had to say. One time she was having trouble getting into her chifforobe. It was locked, and she’d lost the key. I said, “Don’t worry, Honey, I’ll get it open for you.” She looked at me real funny, like she was seeing me good for the first time. I went on out in the yard and walked straight to a spot where I found a piece of wire all bent up. I took it back inside and used it to unlock the chifforobe.
Honey, who was highly superstitious and knew things, thought she saw a definite sign with me. When she’d bathe me, she’d wash the hair on my arm, go crossways with it, and just stare at it.
“You’re going to be a wealthy man someday,” she’d say.
I’d laugh and say, “What you talking about, Honey?”
“You’re going to be very wealthy,” she’d say, pointing to the wet hair on my arm. “See the sign.”
I told Big Junior what she said. We laughed at her and told her she must be crazy. She’d just smile. Next time she’d bathe me, she’d say it again.
Honey was a good woman and I loved her to death, but she was a madam with other things on her mind. It was Aunt Minnie who acted more like a mother to me. I shared a room upstairs with Aunt Minnie, away from what was going on downstairs. She read to me, talked to me, held me close. I’d lie there and daydream and try to envision something better. I felt terrible about what went on in that house. I knew people could live a lot cleaner, because I saw some who did, and I wanted to be like them. But then the war came and the soldiers with it, and things got a whole lot rougher.