August 19, 2006--Saturday Story: "The Boys of Harlem"--Part Two
In Part One, the Rugby Rockets, at the end of the first half found themselves trailing the team representing the Harlem Boys Club by a humiliating 22 to 6. They were playing for the Championship of the City of New York. Back in the locker room, the Rockets’ coach, Mr. Ludwig, berated his demoralized team for playing like wimps. To inspire them to action, for the hundredth time, he told them about his experiences hitting the beaches of Normandy as part of the First Wave, on D Day, June 6th 1944. In spite of this attempt to rouse them, the boys in his charge only wanted to get through the second half and safely back to Brooklyn.
In Part Two, we find . . .
Mr. Ludwig smiled again. He felt that when the ramp, so to speak, was dropped to signal the beginning of the second half and the referee’s whistle blew, we would hit the hard-court beaches and no matter the incoming we would prevail.
His team of Jewboys was not about to be made into deodorant soap for the Boys of Harlem!
Or so he imagined.
Because just as we were wearily pulling ourselves to our feet and dragging ourselves back into the gym to complete our humiliation, little Stewie, wiping the last globule of vomit from his chin, in his bird-like voice squeaked, “Mr. Ludwig.”
Our coach, who was in full martial stride at the point of his straggling platoon, in his mind leading us back into battle, he was so startled by that unexpected chirp that he almost tripped as he stopped short and wheeled on Stewie, barking, “Yes, private? Uh, Stewie?”
“Mr. Ludwig, I’m still afraid.”
“Of what?” he asked incredulously.
“Of them,” Stewie whimpered. “One of their players told me that if we score more than 15 points by the end of the game we’ll never make it back to the subway alive.” The rest of us cringed at his report about this threat and wondered why not just forfeit the game right now and head for the subway.
Mr. Ludwig, though, had very different plans. “Even if they don’t score in the second half, which is unlikely, 15 points will not be enough to win. It won’t get the job done. They already have 22 points. We came all this way to win a championship. Not to put our tails between our legs and retreat like a bunch of cowards. So get a move on. There’ll be no shirkers on this team.”
And with that he executed an impeccable about-face and marched through the tunnel back into the gym. We crawled along behind him, and when we reappeared on the court the crowd of local people who had packed the makeshift grandstands greeted us with derisive whistles and mock cheers.
“Hey, white boy,” one shouted, “what do you have in those shorts?” I saw Charlie quiver and clutch a towel to cover the front of his pants as someone from the stands on the other side of the gym hollered back, “Not much!” which caused a rumble of raucous laughter to swell and then ricochet off the tiled walls from one end of the gym to the other.
* * *
It had not been like this back in Brooklyn. Our team had been together since elementary school, from PS 244 years days, and we felt we had become battle-hardened there during our race toward the Brooklyn Public School Championship. True, we lost in the semi-finals by two points (at the final buzzer I missed a jump shot that would have taken us into overtime), but we felt that we had given a good account of ourselves, as did our coach, the ubiquitous Mr. Ludwig, good enough so that he encouraged all of us, even after entering various high schools, to become members of the Brooklyn Boys Club, remain a team, the Rugby Rockets, and play in that league. He of course volunteered himself to be our coach. One more try for him at a championship before retiring on top and retiring on his pension to south Florida.
We did that and fared well enough to win the Brooklyn Boys Club league title, which qualified us for the city championship final against the Harlem team, after two wins in the elimination round, beating the Staten Island team in the semis. They collapsed toward the end of the second half under the withering two-one-two zone defense that Mr. Ludwig taught us (“total team defense” he had called it, using the hand-as-a-team analogy for the first time), which had become our specialty.
So we felt intrepid and confident when we trekked up to northern Manhattan, to Harlem, where the title would be determined in their gym—they had the best record in the city and had thereby earned home court advantage.
Half of the Rockets had never even been to Manhattan, and those of us who had ventured across the East River had not been north of Central Park. And the city was so segregated at the time that none of us had seen an all-black neighborhood. Diversity to us meant that there were three Italian and two Irish families living in our otherwise all-Jewish neighborhood. So when we emerged from the subway on 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, we were not prepared for what we encountered on that sparkling late spring Saturday afternoon.
As we walked south toward the Boys Club on 118th Street, though if we had thought about it, it should not have been much of a surprise to any of us, literally everyone we saw on the street, in cars, in the stores, on the stoops, hanging out on street corners, all were Negroes. It was as if we had entered a mirror-world where everything was reversed, where suddenly we had become the reflection. I felt that everyone was staring at us, as curious and suspicious of us and what we might be doing there as we were afraid of and shyly fascinated by them.
I was ashamed of my reaction to this obverse reality since being with a person of color was not so beyond my experience. When I was about seven, my parents welcomed into our home Henry Cross, the nine-year-old son of our maid, Bessie, who, while juggling the many jobs she needed to work at in order to support them could not care for him and her elderly parents who lived in South Carolina.
Henry quickly, in effect, became a version of an older brother. I idolized him. He taught me to ride a bicycle, when my father couldn’t, and read to me, when my mother wasn’t home. He made me laugh when he imitated our neighbors (he had mastered a perfect Jewish accent) and stood by my side to protect me from the local bullies—it was goy on goy, but mine was black and thus was imbued by the others with special powers. He knew how to play that edge, that bias and fear. And since he was in such demand to play on teams in our street games, he elevated my status as I both brought him and tagged along behind.
Then there were his Aunt Sis and Uncle Homer who lived in the cellar by the coal furnace of our street’s only apartment house. Uncle Homer stoked the fire and removed barrels of ashes and garbage while Aunt Sis swept and scoured the stairs and hallways in return for being allowed to live there, without having to pay rent, amid the cinders and trash.
Henry and I helped Uncle Homer with his work. He was ancient, to me at least a hundred, and could no longer do it alone. And while we were there, in this basement home, he told us stories about his life as a sharecropper in Fayette, Mississippi. How during the growing season he worked from stifling dawn to dusk behind a horse and plow; and how at picking time, he chopped the cotton by hand, filling long sacks that he dragged down the dusty rows. These were stories that transported Henry and me back to another time; and, nested with Uncle Homer and Aunt Sis by that hot furnace, those days with him were among the happiest and securest of my early life. Thus I was disappointed in myself to be so afraid of the black people we saw on the streets as we moved through Harlem.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” Stewie whined, interrupting my memories of the Cross family. In addition to his other afflictions, his bladder was no larger than a walnut, and he always seemed to have to pee at the most inconvenient times. And that day, at the corner of 121st Street and Amsterdam Avenue, it for many reasons was by far the least convenient time. “I can go in there,” he whimpered, pointing at a candy store called Bernie’s. He looked pleadingly up at Mr. Ludwig. “They must have a toilet. Is it OK for me to go in there?”
“Lloyd,” Mr. Ludwig commanded, “you’re the captain so take Heshy with you and go with him. And make it snappy. No need to wipe his ass. Just make sure he doesn’t get lost.”
Holding his crotch, Stewie didn’t wait for us and bolted into the store. Heshy and I followed with some trepidation, again not knowing what to expect.
Looking around, Heshy said, “It’s just like Krinsky’s, the candy store on his corner back in Brooklyn. And it did. With the same kind of long lunch counter that ran the length of the store, about a dozen leather-covered low-backed stools that swiveled on steel shafts, newspapers and magazines stacked in shelves just inside the entrance, two rotating circular wire racks in back stuffed with pocket books, and a wooden phone booth with an accordion-style fold-up glass door right next to the bathroom into which Stewie darted.
We stood just inside the front door taking it all in. Two boys about our age stood by the shelves of magazines flipping through copies of Life and Ebony, a magazine I had never before seen. Halfway up the counter there was a jet black man dressed in what appeared to be African garb. He was wrapped in a boldly-patterned scarlet robe that flowed to the floor, and on his head he wore what looked like a crocheted wool yarmulke. He was sipping a cup of coffee and spread before him on the counter was the Herald Tribune. Further down the counter, on the last stool, there was another man who looked much older. He was dressed in tattered work clothes—overalls that looked as if they had been charred in a fire and a threadbare denim shirt. There were two grimy shopping bags wrapped and knotted with rope on the floor beside him. He had both arms folded on the counter and was slumped forward with his head resting on them. He was fast asleep and even from a distance we could hear him mumbling something to himself. And all the way in the back, there was a light skinned man of about forty, dressed in a tweed jacket, who was rotating one of the racks of books. He selected one and brought it up to the front where we were and placed it by the cash register where the counterman joined him to ring it up. I caught a glimpse of the title. It was John Hersey’s Hiroshima.
“Thanks, Bernie,” he said to the white man who was clearly the owner. “See you later in the week.”
Bernie said, “I think you’ll like it. I served in the Pacific and had trouble putting it down when it first appeared in the New Yorker.”
As I was not expecting something so familiar, I turned to Heshy to see what he might be thinking. He stood there, also quite transfixed, and said, “Can you believe it, just like in Krinsky’s, they even have Breyers Ice Cream here!”
* * *
Mr. Ludwig gathered us in a circle in front of our bench and had us place all of our hands in a stack, one atop the other. He glared at us one last time as we broke the huddle with a less-than-enthusiastic grunt that served as a cheer--as much to motivate us as to signal to the other team that we were to be regarded as a serious competitive threat.
But since we were unable to fool ourselves much less them, we shuffled halfheartedly toward the center of the floor with little Stewie, trailing along with us, even though he wouldn’t be starting, so he could hide behind Arnie Schwartz, our widest body, before having to return to the bench where he would sit exposed and unprotected.
To be continued . . .
In Part Two, we find . . .
Mr. Ludwig smiled again. He felt that when the ramp, so to speak, was dropped to signal the beginning of the second half and the referee’s whistle blew, we would hit the hard-court beaches and no matter the incoming we would prevail.
His team of Jewboys was not about to be made into deodorant soap for the Boys of Harlem!
Or so he imagined.
Because just as we were wearily pulling ourselves to our feet and dragging ourselves back into the gym to complete our humiliation, little Stewie, wiping the last globule of vomit from his chin, in his bird-like voice squeaked, “Mr. Ludwig.”
Our coach, who was in full martial stride at the point of his straggling platoon, in his mind leading us back into battle, he was so startled by that unexpected chirp that he almost tripped as he stopped short and wheeled on Stewie, barking, “Yes, private? Uh, Stewie?”
“Mr. Ludwig, I’m still afraid.”
“Of what?” he asked incredulously.
“Of them,” Stewie whimpered. “One of their players told me that if we score more than 15 points by the end of the game we’ll never make it back to the subway alive.” The rest of us cringed at his report about this threat and wondered why not just forfeit the game right now and head for the subway.
Mr. Ludwig, though, had very different plans. “Even if they don’t score in the second half, which is unlikely, 15 points will not be enough to win. It won’t get the job done. They already have 22 points. We came all this way to win a championship. Not to put our tails between our legs and retreat like a bunch of cowards. So get a move on. There’ll be no shirkers on this team.”
And with that he executed an impeccable about-face and marched through the tunnel back into the gym. We crawled along behind him, and when we reappeared on the court the crowd of local people who had packed the makeshift grandstands greeted us with derisive whistles and mock cheers.
“Hey, white boy,” one shouted, “what do you have in those shorts?” I saw Charlie quiver and clutch a towel to cover the front of his pants as someone from the stands on the other side of the gym hollered back, “Not much!” which caused a rumble of raucous laughter to swell and then ricochet off the tiled walls from one end of the gym to the other.
* * *
It had not been like this back in Brooklyn. Our team had been together since elementary school, from PS 244 years days, and we felt we had become battle-hardened there during our race toward the Brooklyn Public School Championship. True, we lost in the semi-finals by two points (at the final buzzer I missed a jump shot that would have taken us into overtime), but we felt that we had given a good account of ourselves, as did our coach, the ubiquitous Mr. Ludwig, good enough so that he encouraged all of us, even after entering various high schools, to become members of the Brooklyn Boys Club, remain a team, the Rugby Rockets, and play in that league. He of course volunteered himself to be our coach. One more try for him at a championship before retiring on top and retiring on his pension to south Florida.
We did that and fared well enough to win the Brooklyn Boys Club league title, which qualified us for the city championship final against the Harlem team, after two wins in the elimination round, beating the Staten Island team in the semis. They collapsed toward the end of the second half under the withering two-one-two zone defense that Mr. Ludwig taught us (“total team defense” he had called it, using the hand-as-a-team analogy for the first time), which had become our specialty.
So we felt intrepid and confident when we trekked up to northern Manhattan, to Harlem, where the title would be determined in their gym—they had the best record in the city and had thereby earned home court advantage.
Half of the Rockets had never even been to Manhattan, and those of us who had ventured across the East River had not been north of Central Park. And the city was so segregated at the time that none of us had seen an all-black neighborhood. Diversity to us meant that there were three Italian and two Irish families living in our otherwise all-Jewish neighborhood. So when we emerged from the subway on 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, we were not prepared for what we encountered on that sparkling late spring Saturday afternoon.
As we walked south toward the Boys Club on 118th Street, though if we had thought about it, it should not have been much of a surprise to any of us, literally everyone we saw on the street, in cars, in the stores, on the stoops, hanging out on street corners, all were Negroes. It was as if we had entered a mirror-world where everything was reversed, where suddenly we had become the reflection. I felt that everyone was staring at us, as curious and suspicious of us and what we might be doing there as we were afraid of and shyly fascinated by them.
I was ashamed of my reaction to this obverse reality since being with a person of color was not so beyond my experience. When I was about seven, my parents welcomed into our home Henry Cross, the nine-year-old son of our maid, Bessie, who, while juggling the many jobs she needed to work at in order to support them could not care for him and her elderly parents who lived in South Carolina.
Henry quickly, in effect, became a version of an older brother. I idolized him. He taught me to ride a bicycle, when my father couldn’t, and read to me, when my mother wasn’t home. He made me laugh when he imitated our neighbors (he had mastered a perfect Jewish accent) and stood by my side to protect me from the local bullies—it was goy on goy, but mine was black and thus was imbued by the others with special powers. He knew how to play that edge, that bias and fear. And since he was in such demand to play on teams in our street games, he elevated my status as I both brought him and tagged along behind.
Then there were his Aunt Sis and Uncle Homer who lived in the cellar by the coal furnace of our street’s only apartment house. Uncle Homer stoked the fire and removed barrels of ashes and garbage while Aunt Sis swept and scoured the stairs and hallways in return for being allowed to live there, without having to pay rent, amid the cinders and trash.
Henry and I helped Uncle Homer with his work. He was ancient, to me at least a hundred, and could no longer do it alone. And while we were there, in this basement home, he told us stories about his life as a sharecropper in Fayette, Mississippi. How during the growing season he worked from stifling dawn to dusk behind a horse and plow; and how at picking time, he chopped the cotton by hand, filling long sacks that he dragged down the dusty rows. These were stories that transported Henry and me back to another time; and, nested with Uncle Homer and Aunt Sis by that hot furnace, those days with him were among the happiest and securest of my early life. Thus I was disappointed in myself to be so afraid of the black people we saw on the streets as we moved through Harlem.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” Stewie whined, interrupting my memories of the Cross family. In addition to his other afflictions, his bladder was no larger than a walnut, and he always seemed to have to pee at the most inconvenient times. And that day, at the corner of 121st Street and Amsterdam Avenue, it for many reasons was by far the least convenient time. “I can go in there,” he whimpered, pointing at a candy store called Bernie’s. He looked pleadingly up at Mr. Ludwig. “They must have a toilet. Is it OK for me to go in there?”
“Lloyd,” Mr. Ludwig commanded, “you’re the captain so take Heshy with you and go with him. And make it snappy. No need to wipe his ass. Just make sure he doesn’t get lost.”
Holding his crotch, Stewie didn’t wait for us and bolted into the store. Heshy and I followed with some trepidation, again not knowing what to expect.
Looking around, Heshy said, “It’s just like Krinsky’s, the candy store on his corner back in Brooklyn. And it did. With the same kind of long lunch counter that ran the length of the store, about a dozen leather-covered low-backed stools that swiveled on steel shafts, newspapers and magazines stacked in shelves just inside the entrance, two rotating circular wire racks in back stuffed with pocket books, and a wooden phone booth with an accordion-style fold-up glass door right next to the bathroom into which Stewie darted.
We stood just inside the front door taking it all in. Two boys about our age stood by the shelves of magazines flipping through copies of Life and Ebony, a magazine I had never before seen. Halfway up the counter there was a jet black man dressed in what appeared to be African garb. He was wrapped in a boldly-patterned scarlet robe that flowed to the floor, and on his head he wore what looked like a crocheted wool yarmulke. He was sipping a cup of coffee and spread before him on the counter was the Herald Tribune. Further down the counter, on the last stool, there was another man who looked much older. He was dressed in tattered work clothes—overalls that looked as if they had been charred in a fire and a threadbare denim shirt. There were two grimy shopping bags wrapped and knotted with rope on the floor beside him. He had both arms folded on the counter and was slumped forward with his head resting on them. He was fast asleep and even from a distance we could hear him mumbling something to himself. And all the way in the back, there was a light skinned man of about forty, dressed in a tweed jacket, who was rotating one of the racks of books. He selected one and brought it up to the front where we were and placed it by the cash register where the counterman joined him to ring it up. I caught a glimpse of the title. It was John Hersey’s Hiroshima.
“Thanks, Bernie,” he said to the white man who was clearly the owner. “See you later in the week.”
Bernie said, “I think you’ll like it. I served in the Pacific and had trouble putting it down when it first appeared in the New Yorker.”
As I was not expecting something so familiar, I turned to Heshy to see what he might be thinking. He stood there, also quite transfixed, and said, “Can you believe it, just like in Krinsky’s, they even have Breyers Ice Cream here!”
* * *
Mr. Ludwig gathered us in a circle in front of our bench and had us place all of our hands in a stack, one atop the other. He glared at us one last time as we broke the huddle with a less-than-enthusiastic grunt that served as a cheer--as much to motivate us as to signal to the other team that we were to be regarded as a serious competitive threat.
But since we were unable to fool ourselves much less them, we shuffled halfheartedly toward the center of the floor with little Stewie, trailing along with us, even though he wouldn’t be starting, so he could hide behind Arnie Schwartz, our widest body, before having to return to the bench where he would sit exposed and unprotected.
To be continued . . .
posted by Steven Zwerling at
6:07 PM
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