1

Early Days

Orange, New Jersey
January 30, 1915

While I was the first-born, I was not the first son, according to my father. He told me, during one of our man-to-man chats after I had become one of his favorite drinking buddies, that my mother had previously had an abortion of a baby boy about a year before I was born. For some reason I felt pre-empted. I was no longer the first son, one of the few things about which I felt good. I hadn’t realized that one of the hooks that bolstered my self-esteem was being the first-born. By the same token I could understand the emulation, respect, jealousy, and even, sometimes, deference that my brothers, Bobby and Wesley, expressed to me at various times. Later, when I needed to have proof of age to enter the Army in September 1943, I wrote the Orange, New Jersey, city clerk for my birth certificate and received it a week later. It was a document stating that I’d been born at Orange Memorial Hospital on January 30, 1915. My name on the document was Baby McGinnis. Apparently, my father had not claimed me as his child. I had never seen a marriage certificate around the house, nor had my parents ever celebrated a wedding anniversary, but I had never added that up to being a “bastard,” according to the mores of our neighborhood. It did not throw me; in fact, it added to my romantic notions about being a deviant, an outcast, a revolutionary, unbound by the prescriptions of a bourgeois and decadent society. No evidence of a legal marriage document has ever surfaced for my mother and father. For both of them it was a long marriage in the common law bound by a love relationship that was regarded as ideal among our friends and acquaintances.

Our family was of multiclass/multiethnic origins. In a six-generation span the family embraced the socioeconomic brackets from slave owner to “street nigger,” fed by a fertile mix of Dutch, Irish, Cherokee, Iroquois, African, West Indian, French, and perhaps everything but Czech and “double-Czech” American, as Paul Robeson sang in his stirring rendition of Earl Robinson’s “Ballad for Americans.”

My father’s father was George Gaither, a gambler, pool shark, and man-about-town who enlisted in Teddy Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders,” fighting in the Spanish-American War of 1898. Because of his veteran’s status on discharge, he was able to secure a position in the Bureau of Engraving in Washington, D.C. He never returned to New Jersey. How we got the surname Johnson is something of a saga in itself. My grandfather’s “cut buddy” was Eugene Johnson, also a gambler, and a hustler who specialized in dealing cards for big stakes. When my grandfather went off to war, he asked Eugene to look out for his woman—my grandmother Lethia Goode—and his kids. He did so with such love and affection that my father grew to love him and named me Howard Eugene after himself and the man he considered his stepfather. My father did not know that a Junior had to have exactly the same name as the Senior, so I was incorrectly called Howard Junior.

My father was a genius in all directions. Anything he attempted to do, he did well, at least; he oftentimes did things exceptionally well, and he was my role model for many years. I always strove to emulate him. Among his friends, I was known as “Little Monk.” My father’s nickname was established as “Monk” based on his agility on the basketball court and on the baseball diamond. I was known as “Little Monk” until I became significantly taller than my father at the age of twelve. I was already 5′10″ at the age of eleven, and by the time I was fourteen I had grown to six feet. By that time, my father’s buddies were jokingly saying, “That’s a mighty thick piece of spit” or “Monk, he can eat peanuts off your head.” The affectionate appellation “Little Monk” died a natural death as a result of the Mendelian behavior of height genes that skipped my father from my grandfather, who was 6′4″, to me, at 6′5″.

Whatever he lacked in height, my father compensated for in physical dexterity. His blinding speed, hair-trigger reflexes, coordination, and accuracy of throwing arm led him to stardom on such Black baseball nines as the McConnell Giants from Montclair, the Grand Central Red Caps, and the Lincoln Giants. The Lincoln Giants later became the Black Yankees.1 On the basketball court, those same athletic qualities allowed him to dazzle audiences all up and down the East Coast with the St. Christopher’s, the Independents, and the Puritans, who were later to form the nucleus of the world-famous Renaissance. “Fats” Jenkins, “Pappy” Ricks, George Fiall, and “Fats’s” younger brother, “Legs” Jenkins, were the members of this team. My father didn’t make the Renaissance team because of a conviction that put him in Sing Sing Penitentiary at a time when he should have been playing basketball. Bob Douglass, the manager of the team, was a West Indian entrepreneur who had come to Harlem about the same time as Marcus Garvey, sharing the same basic philosophy of bourgeois nationalism. He owned the Renaissance Ballroom, the Renaissance Basketball Team, and the Renaissance Theatre. All of these names were inspired by the term for the period after World War I called the Renaissance. It represented the belief among Blacks of that time that the defeat of the Triple Alliance in the war “to make the world safe for democracy” would result in a renaissance of the aspirations and hopes of African Americans that had been so rudely crushed in the post-Reconstruction overthrow of the Civil War gains over slavery.

Romeo Dougherty, the best-known Black sportswriter of that time, wrote many columns in the New York Amsterdam News and, later, in the Pittsburgh Courier, describing Monk’s exploits on the sports fields. The prison sentence responsible for my father’s not getting selected for the Renaissance team was never mentioned. Black athletes were not highly paid in those days, and my father’s transference of his skills into other, what he thought would be more lucrative, pursuits backfired on him.

In the 1920s, only a handful of Blacks had access through the rigid “Jim Crow” segregation of American society to more than a subsistence-level income. This caused many of the most talented, not-to-be-denied African Americans to move into various survival tactics known in our community as “hustles.” The general term for such people was “hustlers.” Monk had been prepared for this eventuality by his father and “stepfather,” who, hustlers themselves, took great pleasure in passing on their pool-playing, card-dealing, crap-shooting, and other skills of the demi-monde to the quite eager, apt, and talented Monk at a very early age. Monk became a great billiards and pool player. He was often called upon to take on out-of-town traveling cue stick artists when the betting reached high stakes. The local players would support him in the hope of winning back money they had lost to the out-of-town hustlers. Monk was steely-nerved and would rarely lose when the stakes were high. He prided himself on being a “professional,” and I was often witness to games in which a hundred dollars or more was riding on the outcome. Even under that stress, he could calmly and effortlessly run off fifty or sixty balls with tournament-level concentration to the incredulous consternation of the formerly arrogant visiting “pro.” He was considered to be in a class with the greatest Black pool hustler of all time, James Evans, who had once beaten the legendary Willie Hoppe in an exhibition match.

I can recall, after we moved to New York, walking into neighborhood poolrooms and finding all of the best local players refusing to play him for money. He was also a masterful manipulator of a deck of cards; in the card players’ argot, he was a first-rate mechanic. That meant he could do about anything he wanted to do with a deck of cards. As they said, “He could make a deck do everything but talk.” He could deal “seconds”—that is, withhold the desired card for himself at the top of the deck and deal the inferior cards underneath to his opponents. He could shuffle a deck so that all the aces would come up for him.

He could cut the deck exactly in half and then riffle-shuffle the cards so that they would be spread out in alternative sequence from each half of the deck. When times got really tight during the Depression, he would augment his own expertise with prepared decks. These specially prepared decks would have the desired cards, such as aces, sanded imperceptibly so that they would never come up in a cut. The cards could also be marked in a microscopic way so that only the dealer or his confederate could understand the marks which indicated the value of the card so that they could be read from the back. These cards were a type called “readers.” To my youthful astonishment, my father took me to a gamblers’ factory in New York City in the ’30s. The factory was located around 53rd Street and Tenth Avenue—right in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen, a territory that had once been the turf of the gang known as the Hudson Dusters. Owney Madden, one of the top chiefs of the Cotton Club mob, had been the most notorious leader of the gang. I now suspect that my father learned about this factory through his friendly connections with the Cotton Club owners when he was a waiter there. He and Madden had both done time in Sing Sing.

The factory was a veritable warehouse of gamblers’ “cheats”—wholesale, retail, and custom-made to individual gamblers’ specifications. While there was a spectacularly displayed array of phony cards, crooked roulette wheels, weighted cue balls that would not roll straight in big-money matches, brass knuckles, blackjacks (also called saps), bulletproof vests, holsters, pistols, and switchblade knives, it was the dice section that dazzled me most. Bust-outs, six-ace flats, roll-forevers, and other dice would make endless passes at the expense of unsuspecting “marks.” Bust-outs were dice that would automatically roll seven. They would be slipped into the game after an opposing bettor would establish a point and force him to lose his bet.

One of the arts much practiced by professional gamblers was the knack of substituting the crooked dice for the regular dice at the crucial moment of the big bet and then replacing the regular dice as soon as the crooked dice had performed their function or, at least, at some time before the “mark” had grown suspicious. Six-ace flats were dice that had two sides shaved so that the six and ace would roll up a larger percentage of times than any other numbers. The prescribed bets for the percentage player were “don’t come” bets based on the much higher number of craps that would be thrown (double sixes and double aces). The roll-forevers were dice with only fours, sixes, and fives on their six sides, meaning that a seven could not be thrown. The recommended procedure when these dice were in was to start out with a high bet and parlay, or double, the bet with each roll so that the stakes could be rapidly escalated for the quick impoverishment of the “mark.” Uncle Leon, my father’s brother, informed me some time after my father died that much of the lore of gambling had been passed down to the two brothers by my “hustling” grandfather George Gaither and his pal Eugene Johnson.

The same expertise demonstrated in the pool hall, the gaming room, or on the crap table was available on the sports field. Monk was often on the Black all-star nines that played postseason games with barnstorming white major league all-star teams, including Babe Ruth and others of his stature. The Black teams often won, thus dispensing with the argument that Blacks did not have the skill to make it on the ball field. I needed little convincing that Blacks were not an inferior species. Hearing my father recite Shakespeare by the yard, I became quite skeptical, at a very early age, of the prevailing idea that whites were the intellectual superiors of Blacks. Contrary to all the sociological studies on so-called Black lack of self-esteem, I was never ashamed of being Black. Frustration, anger, and rage were more often the feelings. We knew we were as good, but our talents were circumscribed by the rigidly imposed walls of segregation, even in a northern town like Orange, New Jersey. Even as late as 1941, Blacks were not allowed to sit in the orchestra of the local movie house, the Colonial Theater on Main Street.

On my grandmother’s side—that is, my paternal grandmother, Lethia Johnson—the family history is somewhat obscure. There must have been a mix of African, Cherokee, and European because of her walnut color, high cheekbones, ample lips, and muscular stride. When she had time to sit down and talk to me, she revealed her proudest moment: a visit to the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. She was just twenty-two years old then. I recall her mementos on the sideboard in her dining room—a pennant with the words “Chicago World’s Fair” emblazoned on it, a silver serving tray, and a glass paperweight with “Columbian Exposition” printed on the underside of it so that you could read the legend through the glass.

For many years she peppered her conversation with comments such as “Douglass would have said this” or “Douglass said that” or “Douglass wouldn’t have stood for that.” I used to wonder who this man she was referring to was, because the only Douglass I knew didn’t appear capable of the wisdom her Douglass espoused from time to time. It was only after many years of research and study on the life and activities of Frederick Douglass that I made the connection. Douglass’s last public speech was given at the World’s Columbian Exposition, and Lethia had been there to hear him in the flesh! That instruction during my early adolescence probably accounts for my longstanding identification with Frederick Douglass. I recall that she often spoke with scathing contempt for those she termed “Booker T. Washington Negroes.” She had nothing but scorn for some of our local Black leaders, who entered her books as “Toms.” And the way she emphasized the “T” in “Booker T” led me to believe she considered that it stood for TOM in no uncertain terms. She chose sides very early in the debates that raged between W. E. B. Du Bois and B. T. Washington after Washington’s Atlanta Compromise speech called on African Americans to put aside the struggle against segregation and focus exclusively on economic betterment.2

Grandmother Lethia was part of an enterprising family from Greenville, South Carolina. She had three brothers, each of whom made his mark in his chosen field. The oldest was George Goode, who became a headwaiter at the Palmer House hotel in Chicago. The second brother was James, who changed his name to Anderson because of his respect and admiration for a man who had raised him. The youngest brother was John, who became a barber and owned one of the most popular barber shops in Harlem during the ’20s near the corner of 117th Street and Seventh Avenue.

Uncle James left home at the age of fifteen to go to sea, then came to New York to live in what was then the San Juan Hill area around 64th Street and Tenth Avenue, a stone’s throw from what is now Thelonious Monk Place. He started a small mimeographed newspaper that he hawked for pennies on the subway. The paper prospered and continued as the Amsterdam News, named after Amsterdam Avenue, which is the name of Tenth Avenue after it reaches 59th Street. His editorials condemned segregation, supported the NAACP, protested lynching, defended Du Bois, and characterized the African American people as a developing nation as early as 1915, at least a decade before the Communist International had its debates on the character of the “Negro Question” in the United States. He hired Cyril Briggs as an alternate editorial writer, strengthening the radical orientation of the paper. Cyril, while at the Amsterdam News, joined with Harry Haywood and Harry’s brother, Otto Huiswood, to form a Black Marxist organization known as the African Blood Brotherhood. This organization existed before Harry Haywood was to sit with Joseph Stalin in the meetings that led to the Comintern Resolution on “The Negro Question as a National Question.”

The charge that the American communists imported their position on “the Negro Question” from Moscow had no significance to me, because I knew the role of Black radicals in the United States in developing the party line in this area. Cyril Briggs told me about my great-uncle’s leading discussions on the Negro nation years before Harry introduced the concept in the Comintern meetings.

Uncle James became prominent in the Republican Party, served as an Exalted Ruler of the Oddfellows, and was also a Mason. His wife, Hattie, whom he loved very much, died in 1919, and he began to drink heavily. During that period he came under the influence of his secretary, Sadie Warren. Sadie married a racetrack tout and pimp named Charlie Davis, at whose direction she convinced Uncle James to turn over the management and ownership of the Amsterdam News to her. He did so, much to the chagrin of my father and grandmother, about a year before he died in 1925 of the combined ravages of cancer and acute alcoholism. Later I came across a picture of Uncle James sitting next to W. E. B. Du Bois with a group of Black leaders who had assembled as a committee in 1913 to celebrate in Harlem the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Uncle James had on a morning coat and a starched collar with ascot tie and looked quite the dandy. It presented a very startling contrast to my recollection of him sitting while looking hopelessly out of my grandmother’s living room window in an alcoholic haze. He had to come to Orange, New Jersey, to literally drink himself to death.

My father had a sister, Corinne, ten years younger, who died of alcoholism in a basement in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Only many years later did I discover that alcoholism was a family disease and I was to inherit it in deadly proportions from both the paternal and maternal sides.

My mother’s name was Gertrude. On her side, the family history is well documented, though the documentation is studded with racist theoretical explanations of that history, for generations going back to 1791. Albert Payson Terhune’s novels about dogs (later the basis of the Lassie series on TV), set in the Pompton Lakes area of New Jersey, contained frequent references to the “Jackson Whites” or the “Jackson Blacks” and more frequently to the “blue-eyed niggers.” My mother told me when I started reading about the “blue-eyed niggers” that Terhune was referring to our relatives, and I always had a burning curiosity about that part of the family. More recently, a scholarly work based on a doctoral dissertation by David Stephen Cohen was published under the title The Ramapo Mountain People. The book names the DeGroats as one of the stable families of the group.3

My mother’s mother was Henrietta DeGroat. The DeGroats were considered one of the four most important and longstanding families among the Ramapo Mountain People, dating back to pre–Revolutionary War days.

My mother’s father was Frank McGinnis, a rough-hewn, heavy-drinking Irishman, who was exercise boy for the world-famous trotter Dan Patch, holder of the world’s mile record for many years, now enshrined at the Trotter’s Museum in Goshen, New York. I recall him coming home and beating my grandmother until she cried. I don’t remember her ever smiling. I think it must be then that I resolved never to drink, not knowing at the time that the family curse would catch up with me later.

Among the other families that formed the core of this people, called “tri-racial isolate groups,” were the “Van Dunks” (a corruption of the Dutch “Von der Doncken”; Adrian Von der Doncken was a member of the first New York state legislature), the DeFreeces or DeFreeses (an Anglicization of DesVries), and the Manns, who represented the British strain. There was some dismay on my part to discover that one of my ancestors, James DeGroat, was a slave owner, listed in the 1790 census. He was also identified as Negro, indicating or suggesting that there must have been interracial cohabitation among the Dutch and the runaway slaves who used this area as a refuge. However, James DeGroat could have been the progeny of a free Black woman and a Dutch man, though the possibility would have been unlikely. The Native American strain is not so easily traced, but there was much reference to our “Indian blood” at family “pow-wows.” They are still held every Thanksgiving in Hillburn, New York. This discovery of James DeGroat as a Black slave owner dismisses a myth that plagues writings on the “Jackson Whites” or “Blacks.” This literature is riddled with the assumption that an interracial heritage is a handicap. This fiction of the “tragic mulatto” occupied a central place in much of the literary production of the fin de siècle period when Jim Crow was riding high among Black as well as white writers. As the assumption is transferred from the literary medium to films, it crystallizes into a “given” and Hollywood presents us with obligatory stock characters, the renegade “half-breed” who can do no good or the Peola character of films like Imitation of Life, where the tragedy is that of a light daughter of mixed ancestry with a Black mother.

The influence of this mythology extends across disciplinary lines into the fields of anthropology and sociology, where high rates of alcoholism, incest, and other deviant behavior are accepted as givens also. So-called objective studies have fastened tendentiously on negative trends among the Ramapo Mountain People, excluding their success stories. Those who have climbed out of poverty and made it in America despite the obstacles that confront people of interracial extraction are conveniently overlooked. The norm has been accepted in our culture that racial purity is healthy—but such a norm, particularly after the experience of the Holocaust, is demonstrably pathological. Despite David Stephen Cohen’s effort to override previously established racist assumptions about the Ramapo Mountain People, his study shares this racism in no small dimension.

As sweeping as Cohen’s study would appear to be, he makes no mention of the fact that a Howard DeGroat was the president of Cortland State University College on the southern tier of New York state, an area to which many Ramapos migrated. Other rather significant omissions are the failure to mention the leadership of the struggle of the NAACP Hillburn chapter that led to a desegregated school system eleven years before the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. That struggle was led by a Van Dunk. No mention is made of my sister Winnie Johnson, a Cotton Club dancer who later went on to sing with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Nor are the community activities of “Pooch” Van Dunk and Vivian DeGroat, leaders of a community action housing program, or Terry Jackson, radio station commentator in Kingston, New York, considered worthy of notice. Because so few members of any family rise to prominence in our pyramidically structured society, it takes only a few omissions of this kind to build up a picture that is quite dismal. It is encouraging to know that a college-educated DeGroat is constructing a family history that will unearth the buried positives that Cohen and others, blinded by racism, have missed.

The Ramapos could very well be considered an Appalachian people, and I recall when I was a youngster in Orange that we called our cousins from the Ramapos “hillbillies.” My mother was quite proud of her ancestry and told us many stories about her relatives, quite a few of them laced with songs and sayings that had the flavor of the Pennsylvania Dutch, not to mention the expertise in the kitchen associated with them. Our favorite dessert was called “pig in a blanket”—cooked apples in a big boiled blanket of dough that were topped with a mound of delicious sauce.

My mother had three brothers, Albert, Theodore, and Sanford, and two sisters, May and Helen. She also had some first cousins, Bertha (Bea), Tina, Sarah, Peter, and John Marsh. Sarah was a stunningly beautiful woman who died at an early age. Bea, Tina, and Pete were heavy drinkers who used to visit us on Saturdays. They would spend their winters in Florida and their summers in Saratoga during the racing season. Often, after they had made big money at the track, they would come by the house to party, sometimes winding up dancing on the table to all our merriment with dresses uplifted and appeals from my mother to “please put your dresses down” while my father chuckled at her embarrassment. Pete was a tough customer when he was three sheets to the wind. He often got together with another relative named “Swat” Milligan. Milligan Alley in Orange was a dead-end street running off Hill Street between Center Street and Oakwood Avenue. The whole area has been wiped out by a throughway, part of the urban renewal evacuations of the ’60s. But at that time, when Pete and Swat had had a few, they were known to beat up policemen who dared to come into their turf on Milligan Alley—named, by the way, after Swat’s family. In fact, Milligan Alley was inhabited almost exclusively by Milligans, Marshes, Van Dunks, and Manns, all extensions of the Ramapos. This aspect of family tradition is continued in the borough of Ringwood on the street named DeGroat Lane.

My mother’s oldest sister, May, and their cousins Bea and Tina moved to New York during the post–World War I migration to Harlem, and I recall our family’s visiting Aunt May in her elegant apartment at 2424 Seventh Avenue in 1924 or 1925. Seventh Avenue, now Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard in Harlem, was a dazzling wayfare at that time with the most richly dressed people strolling up and down the avenue in clothing and with style that filled us small-towners visiting from the “sticks” with awe. It was the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, and a spirit of creativity, optimism, and confidence filled the atmosphere with pace-setting artists like Paul Robeson, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, Bruce Nugent, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, J. Rosamund Johnson, Rose McClendon, Claude McKay, Louise Thompson, and a host of others generating currents that rippled through every African American community in the nation.

Claude Winfrey, my Aunt May’s boyfriend, had a “seal brown” complexion, and he was usually smoking a Havana cigar of the same shade. Aunt May adored him and was instrumental in getting my mother and father to name my sister Winnie after him. Claude Winfrey was transposed to Winifred Claudia. My Aunt May was living a sort of dual existence at the time—during the day she was white, working as a hostess in a quite middle-class restaurant called Alice MacDougald’s, and at night, after a forty-five-minute ride uptown on the Fifth Avenue Coach Company’s double-decker bus, the Fifth Avenue–Edgecombe Avenue #2 line, she rejoined the Black community as one of Harlem’s elite “high yellers.” Aunt Tina and Aunt Bea also worked at Alice MacDougald’s as they too were able to “pass” because of their straight hair and light skin. Being light enough to “pass” didn’t faze them as far as being Black was concerned. They always spoke with some contempt about the racism that was openly expressed to them on the job by fellow employees who didn’t suspect that they were from the “enemy camp” (as they sardonically put it). In fact, my impression was that they enjoyed being part of the Black community more than the average Black because they experienced the coldness, greed, and competitiveness of white society first-hand. If they had any sense of superiority because they were light-colored, they compensated for it by usually having the darkest men in our social circle as their lovers.

I often heard them quote an old saying with a kind of erotic relish, “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.” Aunt Tina went with both Willie “the Lion” Smith, from Goshen, New York, and James P. (J. P.) Johnson, who often came to Orange to transcribe piano rolls for the QRS piano roll company, which had recording studios there. Orange was a center of that sort of activity because of the impact of Thomas Edison and his “talking machine.” The Edison Laboratories were in West Orange, adjacent to Orange.

Willie the Lion was a little lighter than Uncle Claude, a walnut shade. J. P. Johnson was about the color of blackstrap molasses, and if the saying had any validity then he must have been an awfully sweet man! Aunt Helen, my mother’s younger sister, had married Jim, a handsome man about the shade of Jackie Robinson, complemented by a mouthful of brilliant gold teeth, every one of them, and when he smiled there was so much gold you almost felt that a second sun was shining. Much importance was attached to shades of skin; we even referred to each other as “shades.”

All in all, my early environment was color-coded in a far more complex variety of colors than that of the white world, which might be described as a simple, one might say simplistic, Manichean world of good whites and bad Blacks. The multihued familial heritage of the Ramapo Mountain People and the additional multiethnic associations of my father—whose closest friends were a Jew, Joe Cash; an Italian woman, Chris D’Amato; and our barber, who was the most political Black person I had ever met in my life—prepared me very early for integrated living, and I never felt a moment’s discomfort in the presence of whites—yes, anger at their racism, but never any sense of being inferior to any group of whites on a personal level. In the financial realm, the feeling was different, but we knew that had nothing to do with talent. However, we were not immune to the pervasive racism that saturated our society. Racism infiltrated the Black community despite its being sealed off on the social level from the white community. My mother and father sometimes made jokes about darker folks than we, and, as I grew up with some darker schoolmates who were my closest buddies, I began to be embarrassed by the prejudice my parents demonstrated. Later, when I was an adult, an experience with hypnotic regression revealed even greater depths to my embarrassment.

My goal during the hypnotic regression was to go back in time as far as I could to attempt to recall the first time I felt anger. It took several efforts, the first attempt highlighting my becoming an atheist because I thought God had forsaken me when he caused, as I thought, my grandmother to die on my fifteenth birthday. The second attempt took me back to the age of six when I saw my father being stabbed, with blood running down his arm, in a street fight with a local bully and drunk who had abused my maternal grandfather in a barroom brawl. My third try took me back to the age of four, when my Uncle Sanford, coming back from the Army, stroked my head while calling me a “nappy-head little nigger.” That episode may have been completely conjured up in my desire to cooperate with my hypnotist, but it had the feeling of unchallengeable authenticity. That may be how most Black males develop a fairly universal antipathy to someone’s touching their heads and, more particularly, their hair. I still have an automatic “head-jerk” reaction when a white person touches my head. Even though I have had many welcome caresses during amorous encounters with white women, the aversion endured for many years. These hypnotic episodes revealed to me the early onset of racial feelings. They also told me that racism has a penetration into the American social fabric that is difficult to overestimate.

As the family grew, each new member added his or her voice to the complex interactions within the family circle. My first sibling was my previously mentioned sister Winnie, born December 3, 1917. Bobby (Robert Quentin) followed on January 27, 1921; Wesley Williams was born on March 26, 1923; and my youngest sibling, Shirley Gertrude, wound up the parade of Johnsons on November 23, 1925.

Bobby’s middle name came from a visiting nurse, Miss Quentin, who played an important role in teaching my mother many constructive things about hygiene, nutrition, and balanced diet that were to play a major role in the exceptional good health, drive, and energy of all the members of the family. Wesley was named after the son of a man who was greatly respected by my father, his supervisor, Chief Williams, when he was a “red cap” at Grand Central Terminal. Chief Williams’s son, named Wesley Williams, became the first Black battalion commander in the New York City fire department. With Shirley having our mother’s first name, Gertrude, as her middle name, I imagined that this was a signal putting an end to the further extension of the family.

In the desire to advance our family, my mother aggressively searched out the various religious institutions in our community. In hindsight, I believe she disapproved of my father’s buddies. We never heard an argument between them, but two different lifestyles were being placed before us. My father’s activity contrasted with and was sometimes overshadowed by my mother’s silent effort to achieve upward social mobility via the route of what might be called “denominational progression” in the churches of Orange. We started at tent meetings on the corner of Hill and Center streets, not far from the old Krueger’s brewery. I remember little about the tent meetings except for the music, which was loud, rhythmic, and highly persuasive, especially the rattling rustle of the tambourines. Our next stop on the church route to better days was Reverend Watkins’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. Reverend Watkins was a huge Black man who used to preach sermons that rang the rafters. Sometimes, as the good reverend got carried away with the emotions aroused by his own preaching, his juices would flow to such an extent that the spray from his mouth would baptize everyone in the first two rows of pews. I was only about eight years old then and dreaded sitting too close to the pulpit. We moved from Hill Street to South Street into a building owned by a Mr. San Giacomo behind which was a huge rag-and-junk warehouse with all the accompanying rats and smaller animal life. Down the street in the direction of Oakwood Avenue was St. Paul’s AME Zion Church, our next step upward on the church ladder. The only thing I recall about St. Paul’s was a Sunday school program in which I was to recite a poem or sing a song. Oh, yes, it was a song! I rehearsed and rehearsed it only to get up on that Sunday and break out crying in fright before I could finish the second line of “Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so.” That was to be my last public recitation until high school.

The final step in our journey of upward social mobility through the denominational route landed us in what I later learned was the top of the heap in our restricted and segregated Black community, the Episcopal church of Reverend George Plaskett, the Church of the Epiphany, on Taylor Street at the corner of Center not far from Orange Memorial Hospital, where I had been born. Reverend Plaskett was a vigorous, highly organized West Indian with a slight British accent and a very progressive outlook that enabled him to get the Church of the Epiphany to become a ward of Trinity Church in New York City. The reverend and his church were playing an important role in our exposure to ideas and cultural influences beyond our small town of Orange. He felt that what was happening in New York was something we should be exposed to, so he arranged for a busload of us to go to New York to see a Broadway matinee and in the evening to hear Harry T. Burleigh, whose magnificent voice was sensational. Some of the tunes he sang that night are still among my favorites. I was fortunate to have Reverend Plaskett soon take me under his wing. I became an acolyte and was given the honored assignment of reading the Psalms at Sunday evening services. Among the regular acolytes were Freddie Peniston, whose father was partial owner of Titan Hall, where my father had played basketball and where I was to reach semi-pro level with the Titan Junior Five. Freddie and I became buddies and I’ll always remember the Sunday dinners prepared by his mother during which the table really groaned under the weight of the delicious meals she used to prepare, especially the rich and crusty apple pies. Emerson Johnson was another of this handsome group of acolytes. Somewhere at one time there was another very tall six-footer about whom Carolyn Plaskett and I were to have an uproarious laugh over the simple fact that his name, Kerchival Messick, was so unusual.

Among the girls who graced the choir were Carolyn and Harriet Hardy. Their father was the director of the “colored” YMCA in Newark, and their mother played the church organ and directed the choir. Other choir members were Florence Rhodes, a second cousin of mine; Bea Sparrow (who was the natural daughter of the town’s leading physician, Dr. Walter G. Alexander, and whose brother, also a natural offspring, Albert, was called the bad boy of Epiphany); and Constance Calloway, whose family worked for the Dwight Morrows in Englewood. (The Morrows’ daughter, Anne, married Charles Lindbergh, and the tragedy involving the kidnapping and death of their infant son was to occupy our conversations for weeks.) Bea and her family often rode up to church services in what seemed like a half-block-long Packard, as if they were the Morrows themselves. A platoon of older men in the congregation provided us boys with role models of serious and successful men: Lawrence Sparrow; William Fenton; Albert Tilary, the organist; and Dan Wing, assistant pastor, who took us on a field trip to New York. The trip included a Broadway show (my first, Roberta, with Bob Hope in his first Broadway appearance) and the Episcopal church St. George’s, where we heard the great Black baritone Harry T. Burleigh, the regular soloist with the St. George’s choir, sing works by J. Rosamund Johnson and James Weldon Johnson.

My mother had certainly made the right choice in providing us with an instructive and inspiring environment. Reverend Plaskett not only had a fine congregation, he saw to it that the best minds in the Black community of the United States were brought in to share their wisdom with us. I recall listening in transfixed astonishment to figures such as Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and William G. Pickens of the NAACP speak to our Sunday evening services. I have no doubt that the scholarly rationality of Dr. Du Bois, the mellifluous voice of Paul Robeson, and the oratory directed against racism quite often laced with side-splitting comic asides by W. G. Pickens got through to me and influenced the development of my social and socialist vision, though, at the time, I certainly had little comprehension of much that they were talking about. But soon after a year at Epiphany, some of us formed a Sunday morning discussion group, in which my cousin Linton and I were the prime movers, to exchange ideas on what we called the fundamental problems of the world. In time the group crystallized into an organization called the JBS (the Junior Bachelor Society), all young men who were from the Church of the Epiphany. They were Teddy Moore, Prince Terrell, Joe Parker, Harvey Blount, Rennie Silvera, Burditt Stith, Emerson Johnson, William Sparrow, Cyril Riley, Linton (Marsh), Clement Smith, and I. As was probably to be expected with a group of hot-blooded adolescents, over time we lost sight of our original purpose of Sunday morning discussions on philosophy and the social problems of the globe and gradually became a Saturday night carousing group determined to score with a bountiful crop of beauties who were North Jersey’s claim to fame on the eastern seaboard in the Black community.

We did carouse as JBSers, but our Sunday group had evolved in two directions, both marked by an operative structure and a set of different activities. The first group, the JBS, was loosely formed with no designated by-laws, leadership, or officers. The leadership was ad hoc and transitory. The structure was nonexistent and its political outlook was anarchic in a very elementary sense. The JBS, as I said, was the group that had become a springboard for our girl-hunting all over the North Jersey terrain, which we called our happy hunting ground. The second group had more structure and provided most of the leadership for the Junior Branch of the NAACP of North Jersey’s Essex County. Our inspiration, organizer, and advisor was Mrs. Bertha Randolph, the portly, tall, and beautiful wife of the leading African American lawyer of Newark, Oliver Randolph. One Sunday a month, we met at Mrs. Randolph’s home in Newark to plan and carry out all the necessary work for the monthly meeting of the Junior Branch of the NAACP. The meetings usually had a program on Black culture and history, and we studied whatever aspect of the African American experience we could. This was not easy in the ’30s, with only a few stalwarts like Carter G. Woodson, Arthur Schomburg, J. A. Rogers, and W. Hansberry mixing the pitifully few exposed veins of the enormous but underground Black history.

One of the unforgettable moments in our experience was a second trip to New York. We had a joint meeting scheduled with Mildred Johnson, who headed the Junior Branch of the New York NAACP. Mildred was the daughter of James Weldon Johnson, the executive director of the national organization. We met in an office and hall owned by the adult organization on Seventh Avenue in the landmark architectural gem of an entire block of buildings that had become known as Strivers’ Row. To our utter delight, Mildred was able to arrange for her uncle J. Rosamund Johnson to come to the afternoon get-together and entertain us with his repertoire of show tunes and spirituals for which he and his brother, James Weldon, were already famous. It was my first time hearing the impressively melodic and moving tune “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which was to become the national anthem of the civil rights movement.

Mrs. Randolph was also a prime mover in another group of North Jerseyans in their twenties and thirties who were in touch with the cultural explosion in Harlem known as the Renaissance.4 The group of North Jerseyans with which Mrs. Randolph was connected decided to open up the first year of the decade of the ’30s with a major affair to be called the Beaux Arts Ball, the name taken from the famous Latin Quarter gathering on New Year’s Eve in Paris. It was held in the largest ballroom in the state of New Jersey, the Mosque Ballroom, part of a huge complex of offices and meeting halls, with its centerpiece being the Mosque Theater, a huge and beautiful movie palace. Devotees of the Harlem Renaissance were called in to lend a hand to the organization of the Beaux Arts Ball, which was planned to be the biggest and most successful event—social and political—of the decade. Jules Greene, the artist, supervised all the art work; Rae Olley, later to become the wife of Judge Ed Dudley, choreographed the dances and directed our play. Dudley Hill gave us a professional example for our acting in the play based on a traditional African folk tale. The inspiration of the mother continent was very strong in our cultural outlook, reflecting the nascent national consciousness that the Renaissance was evoking and raising to a new level.

We in the JBS were called in by Mrs. Randolph to take part in all of the myriad preparations necessary for making the affair a dazzling success, working as solicitors for ads in the journal designed by Jules Greene, acting in the play with all the required rehearsals, learning the African dances that were an important part of the play, and encouraging the more talented in our ranks to come forward for solo numbers in the all-star show that was to be the centerpiece of the ball. I, between the play and dance rehearsals, worked as a solicitor and collected a respectable batch of paid ads for the journal from small-business men in Orange like Drs. Catlett and Bynum, who had the pharmacy at the corner of Parrow and Hickory streets; Mr. George Corrin, the Realtor; and the Mellingers, who were friends of my mother’s and whose grocery store always had supplies for our family even when we could not come up with the cash. I also collected personal signatures that were to be scattered over the cover page at $1.00 per signature. In fact, James Weldon Johnson’s signature so impressed me that I changed my handwriting style to resemble his close-knit finishing school hand.

Once our rehearsals were finished, the greatest excitement was the ball itself. As busy as we were with our preparations for our part in the festivities, it was obvious to us that this night was to be an unforgettable one. I was almost fifteen years old, and every pore of my being was open to the impact of the ideas, reflected in every aspect of the ball. Cars were pulling up as we went in the stage entrance of the Mosque Ballroom with our costumes, disgorging couples dressed to the nines in the latest fashions. The raccoon coat, the hip flask, spats, knee-high flapper gowns, bobbed hair—all the styles mentioned by F. Scott Fitzgerald in his Great Gatsby were there in force. With our African heritage as resource and inspiration, style was not something we had to learn from the white bourgeoisie. As a matter of fact, we were the originators of much of the style that later found its way downtown to Park and Fifth avenues.

We from the JBS with our girlfriends were to be the tribespeople in the African village, the mise-en-scène for the African folktale–based play. We had much sport kidding around in our tribal loincloths, practicing our tribal dance taught us by Rae Olley and Dudley Hill. We enjoyed “gunning” our girlfriends in their more revealing grass skirts, typical of the ’30s style. Rennie Silvera, Linton Marsh (my cousin), Teddy Moore, Harvey Blount, Genevieve Green, Katherine Ashby, Connie Calloway, and Thelma Thompson were all part of the tribe—not to mention our own chief sex pot, Betty Duval.

Our play went on to an ovation at the stirring end, where the character played by Dudley Hill triumphs over the tribal enemies. It was the first half of the program with a lengthy intermission for the two or three thousand people having their drinks at the bar and indulging in the dance of the beginning of the decade, the Bump. The Bump was a furiously sensuous hip-to-hip, groin-to-groin, butt-rolling kind of dance with the primary movement a sex act–simulating, back-and-forth rocking motion that we called “dry fuckin’.” After much “Bumpin’ ” and slow grinding, the dancing and drinking during the intermission came to a halt. Act Two opened up with an intimate revue-style entertainment, the high point of which for me was cousin Linton singing in his light baritone voice “New Sun in the Sky” with all the optimism that carried over from the Roaring ’20s and that had not yet been wiped out by the crash of ’29. Another cousin of mine, Gene Rhodes, did a ballroom dance with the incredibly sensuous beauty Laura Nichols. New Jersey and New York Renaissance luminaries such as Henry “Kid” Collins and his wife, Elizabeth; Lacy Brannick; Harold Majors; Lawrence Sparrow, our sepia Prince of Wales, with his English drape suit and British posture; Albert Tilary, our church organist; Elwood Dean; Helen Harden; Johnnie Silvera; Walter Frye; and Kenneth Woodruff made it an unforgettable and gala evening.

Of the three Silvera brothers, the closest to me was Rennie, the youngest. Rennie was also good at track, specializing in the one-hundred-yard dash and pursuing the ladies. He was one of the most daring and wildest of the JBSers. He had a Model A convertible Ford that became the “cruising” vehicle for the entire JBS. One night he passed a red light and the cops came after us. They chased us for blocks until we escaped with a mad turn into Orange Park, where the car rolled over with none of us being hurt and all dispersing in different directions—a miracle if there ever was one.

Another event that reflected the influence of the Harlem Renaissance on the culture of the Black community outside of Harlem was held in Montclair, which had a reputation for having the most beautiful girls on the East Coast. The budding impresario who staged the event was a handsome and most articulate young Montclairan named Ralph Lenard Baker (accent on the nard, à la française). Some of us, when we were emphasizing our European rather than our African origins, went beyond the very affected Oxford accent, an indisputable symbol of class, onto the continent itself to cultivate a French or a German accent. So here we were in the first year of the Depression and Ralph Baker came up with a song-and-dance show called “The Fun Revue.” It was important to our family because it was the first time that my kid sister Winnie was to dance outside of Orange. Winnie did a beautiful tap number to the 1928 song “Doin’ the New Lowdown,” one of Bojangles’ hit numbers. The choice was prophetic, because Winnie later danced to the same tune with the man himself, Bill Robinson, known as the world’s greatest tap dancer, on the stage of the Alhambra Theater in Harlem.

All of this was manna from heaven for my omnivorous appetite for ideas, books, music, sports, and dance. My appetite seemed to grow the more it was fed. I was now in my sophomore year at Orange High School and was running on the track team, playing on the Junior Varsity basketball team and football teams, and was, at the same time—which was unusual then more so than now—making the honor roll as a top student in most courses of study. My closest rival on the monthly reports was Robert Hoffman, the son of a wealthy plumber of German extraction. He and I ran neck and neck for the best grades regularly. I was the kind of student who couldn’t wait to take the books for all the subjects home to read them through from cover to cover by the end of the first week of the term. This made it possible for me to get through my classes without doing any homework except for written assignments. This also made it possible for me to play basketball with the Oakwood Avenue YMCA team as well as the Junior team of North Jersey’s leading semi-pro team. Friday nights were a fantastic dream realized for my urge to play basketball. On Friday afternoons, our high school team usually played its games at 3:30, and then I would go home to eat and then return for the 8:00 P.M. games at the Y, then I would dash from the Y to Titan Hall, where the Titan Juniors would play the preliminary game before the Seniors. After the Seniors played, there was a dance, and despite the three basketball games, there was still enough energy to get out on the floor and do the Lindy Hop. I seemed to be inexhaustible. Whatever I asked my body to do was done without a second thought. My mentor and idol at the Titans was Jesse Miles, who had been one of the few Blacks to make the Orange High School Varsity. He was the manager and playing captain of the Titans. Jesse had always been a great admirer of my father as an athlete and moved on the court very much as my father did. He had his hair cut in the same way and had developed an unerring side court shot that bounced off the backboard and swished through the net at the same angle as the shot that was one of my father’s specialties. Jesse also encouraged me, overlooking my awkwardness from having grown too tall too fast for my muscles to get accustomed to the size of my bones, but I played regularly at center on the JVs and we got plenty of scrimmage playing the Seniors that made my basketball development quite rapid.

“Do-Do” Raymond, a fast-as-lightning forward, and Burke Harris were my favorite co-players, and later Venerable Evans from the Orange High School Varsity became one of my best friends. We had teamwork on the court that was superb, and we rarely lost a game.

At school, my scholastic ability was being observed and Miss McGovern, my Latin teacher, whose legs I still fondly remember, selected me to give a speech to the high school Friday assembly on the subject of “The Planned Society.” My assignment was to research the planning of Roman society under Julius Caesar and the Soviet Five Year Plan and compare them with American society in the ’30s. Needless to say, with my already developed class consciousness, my reading on the Soviet Union and the impact of its stated objectives of transforming a backward agrarian society into a rival of the United States in industrial strength hastened the emergence of a strong socialist outlook on my part. I was also reading books like Jack London’s Martin Eden, whose eponymous protagonist I identified with; he was the son of a poverty-stricken family who worked the longest hours to survive and send himself through college to become one of California’s most powerful men without ever losing his early socialist perspective. By the time I had made my address to the assembly, fulfilling one of my freshman ambitions—that is, to emulate Cyril Riley, who was president of the high school debating society and one of the few Black students to address the assembly—I was saturated with ideas about the need for planning in the United States to avoid the kind of disruption of peoples’ lives that a chaotic capitalist system brought in the crash of 1929.

But, paradoxically, one of my favorite activities was going to the East Orange Armory with Teddy Moore to see the regimental teams play polo. Teddy’s mother’s boyfriend was the cook at the armory, and we could get in for free. For me, it was an exotic and exciting episode. The sound of the horses’ hooves on the turf, the squeak of the leather saddles as the horses made sharp turns, the thudding crack of the mallet on the ball and the centaur-like attachment of the riders to their horses even on the most difficult, twisting turns, and the fact that the periods were called “chukkers” rather than halves or innings—all of it exuded an aura of fantasy, particularly the costs of keeping ponies, tack, outfits, and the leisure time to acquire the skill.

Teddy and I quickly became satiated with the rich diet—hastened by the idea that this sport was something that would be forever an academic one for our conceivably limited budgets.

Another experience continued to raise my sense of class and race even higher. Alexander Williams, a chef and a poker-playing friend of my father’s, needed an extra hand to work in his kitchen crew for ten weeks at a camp for wealthy white boys in Friendship, Maine. To my joy, I was selected to go—at a salary of $12.50 per week, which would be paid to me in one lump sum at the end of the ten-week stint. To my further joy, “Lanky” Jones, who had been a star on the Orange High School basketball team, which had gotten a statewide reputation for beating the Passaic High School Wonder Five, was going to be the first cook. Lanky had already graduated from Orange High and was playing intercollegiate basketball with the Morgan College team from Baltimore. I had seen his prowess demonstrated on the East Orange Armory court when Morgan played Lincoln and beat them soundly in what was an internecine rivalry. I looked in awe at Lanky and was soon to get the thrill of working out with him on the basketball court at the camp in Maine, Camp Wapello, during our breaks in thirteen-hour days in the afternoons. Lanky taught me his style of shooting and some moves that gave me quite an edge on my teammates when I returned to basketball practice in the fall.

But the work was terribly hard—long hours, peeling potatoes for a roster of 125 boys and staff of 50, all with the healthiest appetites sharpened by the cool breezes from the Atlantic Ocean that swept across the island that contained Camp Wapello. My responsibilities included setting the table, washing the silver and glassware, peeling potatoes and fixing other vegetables, and waiting tables during the meals. We really worked from sun-up to sun-down, actually; it was dark when we started and dark when we finished. Before I had gotten hardened to the routine, I wrote my family letters in which I transposed the address

Camp Wapello

Crotch Island

Friendship, Maine

to

Camp Mopello

Grouch Island

Hardship, Pain

All the labor, of course, was designed to make the camp experience of all these adolescent white boys a glorious one, and without ever having read Karl Marx at this point in my life, my class- and race-consciousness reached a very high level. It cost a family $300.00 to send their kids to this camp, plus clothing, for all aspects of camp life—transportation and so on. Some of the families had two or three sons enrolled, so to my Depression-educated mind on the value of a dollar, the expenses were astronomically high.

The highlight of the camp experience was the annual show, which was staged by a Hollywood director and screenwriter named Earl Baldwin, a friend of Glenn Stokes, the owner of the camp. Earl and his wife were driven by their chauffeur, who was Black, all the way from Hollywood in a Duesenberg that looked a block long. I later found out that the expression “It’s a doozy!” was derived from the name of that vehicle, and then and only then did I appreciate the expression as symbolizing the utmost of the utmost. The show was top-flight entertainment with songs, dances, and witty and really funny skits written by Earl, and to my delight I was selected to appear in the show, doing an imitation of Louis Armstrong. One of the counselors, Bill Eberhardt, a Princeton University senior and jazz buff, had gotten wind of my interest in jazz and played some of his records for me, among which was my first listening to Satchmo’s “I Surrender, Dear.” I fell in love with the tune to the extent of singing along with Louie. I got the song together, sang it, and polished off my appearance with a crudely conceived version of some of the tap steps that I had seen my sister Winnie perform. It went over big and helped whet my appetite for the stage.

The next year when I returned to the camp, I was something of a celebrity and I began to participate in many of the activities of the campers—swimming, playing volleyball and Ping-Pong, and working out with the tennis rackets. Sometimes my involvement led me to forget to report for kitchen duty and I got called down, to my chagrin, by both Alex and Lanky for getting “too big for my britches.” I now see this as a sign, anticipatory in its nature, of my rebellious character. The second year was also a sign of my growing up in another way. Being away from my close-knit family had given me a strong sense of self, and when my father looked for me to turn my pay over to him as I had done the first year, I said, “I think I should have my pay to spend as I want to. I earned it!” He shot his famous “drop dead” look at me and I realized I was no longer “Little Monk.”