My folks gave me a chance at something better by putting me in Catholic school, where I thrived. I made friends. I got straight A’s. I showed promise. The teachers were impressed. They thought I was smart and encouraged me to aim high. Then someone found out about the family business and that blew my chance. They gave me the boot. Kicked my ass out into the cold.
I was crushed by this inexplicable rejection by people who professed love and forgiveness.
“Why’d they kick me out of school?” I asked my grandma. “What did I do?”
“Nothing, baby,” she said. “Some people just don’t know right from wrong, even though they think they wrote the book.”
Mama left it to me to discover that the world overflowed with hypocrisy, and it didn’t take long. Despite being expelled from Catholic school, I was forced by my stepmother to continue going to catechism on weekends. One Saturday a priest came on to me like a girlfriend. He snuck up on me and gave me a smooch on the lips. I ran home, bawling and heaving the whole way but especially hard as I told and retold the story.
“See, I was in church,” I explained. “And the guy there gave me some smooches.”
“Where?” my daddy asked.
“On the lips.”
“Where were you?” my Uncle Dickie asked.
“In the church.”
“Now who kissed you, baby?” my grandma wanted to know. “You said a man kissed you.”
“Yeah. The priest.”
Black preachers know God personally. Say, “You know, I first met God in 1929. Outside a little hotel in Baltimore. I was walking down the street, eating a tuna fish sandwich. In 1929, you ate anything you could get. And I heard this voice call unto me and the voice had power and majesty. And the voice said, ‘Psst.’ And I walked up to the voice and said, ‘What?’ And the voice got magnificent and holy and it resounded, ‘Give me some of that sandwich.’”
I knew it was serious when everyone gasped after I identified the molester as a priest.
“What else, honey?”
“Well, Mama, after he kissed me, he said that he’d like to call me someday.”
I saw my dad and Uncle Dickie past the point of being angry. Both held back laughter.
“And what’d you say?”
“I said, ‘Call me tonight, later tonight,’ and then I ran like hell,” I said.
The next move was debated. My grandma and some aunties wanted to let it blow over, but my dad and uncle realized that they could probably get some money by blackmailing the priest. They hatched a plan. If the priest called, they told me to goad him into making incriminating comments. They’d listen on another extension. They also told me to arrange a meeting, at which point they would surprise the priest and demand money.
“We’ll collar him,” my dad punned.
I was excited by the scam, but more so by suddenly being the center of attention. I also liked thinking about the monies my dad and uncle said we’d get. I thought that I might also get a cut and use it to go to the baseball games or the movies. Buy my way into the big time.
Later that night, the phone rang. My dad and uncle ran for the extensions. I nervously did my thing.
“Hi, baby,” I purred in the soft, seductive voice they told me to use.
“Oh, my little doll,” the priest said.
I heard the excitement in his voice. We cooed sweet nothings back and forth like that for a few minutes. I sensed my dad and uncle’s scheme working. Suddenly my grandmother heard what was going on and called a halt to the charade from her bedroom.
“Don’t do that to the boy!” she hollered.
Her loud, booming, angry voice threw me off the script and ended my lovey-dovey conversation with the priest before the crucial meeting was set. My dad and uncle scrambled into the kitchen. They made me promise to call him back. But then Grandma Marie yelled for us to get our ass into her bedroom and asked what the hell we were up to.
My father and Dickie denied everything. But I caved.
“Mama, I don’t want to do this,” I said.
Mama shook her head in disgust and ordered us to put an end to the scheming. It was disappointing. We had the priest hooked; however, she wanted us to throw him back as if he were a small bass. Then she urged forgiveness.
“Richard,” my grandmother said, “you’ve got to understand that everybody’s human.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Don’t ever forget it,” she continued. “No matter what they are. Everybody’s human.”
For a young black boy, that statement was hard to believe. It was clear that some people believed that they were more human than others. At my new school, Irving Elementary, I developed a crush on a little girl. She happened to be white. But she could’ve been any color, it didn’t matter to me. I just liked her.
One day, as a token of my affection, I gave her a scratchboard—the kind on which you scribble pictures and then lift up the plastic paper to erase the drawing. She promised to take it home and make it her favorite toy. I was pleased.
The next day her father showed up at school holding the toy. He looked mean. You weren’t supposed to look at fourth graders like that. He asked the teacher which “little nigger” had given his daughter the scratch pad. She pointed to me, and he ran straight up to me.
“Nigger, don’t you ever give my daughter anything,” he yelled.
That really put me back.
What the fuck had I done? Why was he calling me a nigger? Why did he hate me?
I mean, I knew. I knew it was because I was black. But still, I didn’t know why.
That shit is stuff that people like my grandmother warned me about. I also overheard others telling stories, nervously exchanging anecdotes and such, but you don’t believe it until you’re actually confronted by it. Like a holdup or attack. You see it on the news every night, figuring it’s always going to happen to someone else. Never you. But then some dude steps in your face and calls you a nigger.
If I was four and a half feet tall then, the girl’s daddy cut six inches off. Zap. Six inches of self-esteem gone.
That was my indoctrination to the black experience in America. They don’t teach that shit in school. But I’d learn, as every African American does to some degree, that such degradation and assault to one’s dignity has gone on since the slave ships brought black people from Africa to this land of equality and opportunity.
I couldn’t figure out why the teacher didn’t defend me. She didn’t say a word. My dad went to school the next day and confronted her. I’d never seen him so angry. I loved that he was defending me.
“How could you do that?” he asked. “How could you not say anything to that man?”
The teacher looked down. She shook her head, showing that she, too, was disgusted. At the man. At herself. My daddy gently patted her on the back. They reached some kind of understanding.
Then he turned to the little girl I’d tried to befriend.
“Did you get his present?” he asked.
“Yes,” she sniffled. “But he wouldn’t let me keep it.”
“That’s okay,” I chimed in.
Or so I said.
But I didn’t mean it.
My brain didn’t segregate people by race. My eyes didn’t see any one color. One of my favorite activities was going to the movies, where I lost myself in the fantasy projected on-screen. My heroes included Tarzan, Rhonda Fleming, Milton Berle, Kirk Douglas, Sid Caesar, and Boris Karloff. I loved Jerry Lewis. I wanted to be John Wayne. I saw the Red Ryder cowboy serials over and over, and one time I went in the back to look for Robert Blake’s Little Beaver character. I thought I’d be able to find him behind the screen. But the crew chased me out.
There were only a couple theaters in Peoria that allowed black people inside. But then, having paid for tickets and popcorn the same as white people, we were restricted to sitting in the balcony. It was the same as public buses and washrooms. Except the odd thing was, nobody I knew seemed to mind at the theater. They liked the balcony. The view was good, it was like a party, nobody threw shit on you.
But I wanted to sit up close, in the front row. You know how kids are? I wanted to feel as if I could jump into the screen.
However, one afternoon the manager grabbed my arm, yanked me from my chair, and told me I had to sit upstairs.
“In the ‘Colored Section,’” he said. “Up where all you people are supposed to be.”
“No, I ain’t gonna do that,” I said.
“Well, then you’ll have to leave.”
Niggers be holding their dicks. Some white people go, “Why you guys hold your things?”
Say, “You done took everything else, motherfucker.”
I loved the movies, but the manager didn’t give me a choice. I knew what was what.
So I left.