Hard Times (73 page)

That’s another thing. I don’t ever remember saying to my parents: I don’t want to do my homework. The work was there, you had to do it as part of your survival. Bred into you as part of your characteristic. The Polish people are famous for the belt. I remember my dad saying: go stand in the corner and kneel on some rice, that’ll teach ya. I remember many a time saying: Gee, dad, I can’t learn this. Well, get in that corner and kneel on that rice.

In them days you knew the parents were authority. You knew if you behaved anywhere, there was a lickin’ in store for you. A good solid whack. To this day I still carry a belt.
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I can say to myself: what’s good for me, what helped me to learn, and I’ve never been arrested for disobedience—these kids today, why are they getting away with murder, talking back with their elders? When I have kids standing in front of me: Who do you think you are, telling me not to do this? Who are you to say I can’t break this? I’d like to take a poke at ’em or take a belt and give ’em a couple of good whacks. Then they say: We’ll sue ya. In them days the father was the boss.

I remember running up the streetcar and meeting the father. Also I remember not running up to meet him because I had it coming for something I done wrong. What I did wrong, I can’t recollect today.

 

 

Oh, yeah. After all, he’s lost his bank account, he’s worked hard, he’s a foreigner, he can’t speak English, in fact he had to change his name in order to get a job. He was discriminated. I suppose he blamed a lot of things on this happening, on Hoover. I suppose he would take it out on the kids. But a kid could sense there was something wrong, and he’d stay away from the issue.

The people that were in the adjoining flat, they had to go on relief. They were Lithuanians and were very wonderful people, too, with their culture. They survived the Depression on potato bread, with gravy and soup.

Bones, beef bones, and there was a big hunk of meat besides. The beef bone, the celery, the cabbage, the beets or onions and tomato, all thrun in that pot. And what a fragrance! Today you don’t smell them fragrances. And loaves of bread. How can you forget the loaves of bread? They musta
been about ten pounds and about three feet in length. These are the reflections that I treasure.

I do remember this family getting for relief purposes prunes, which they used to make prune pudding. I remember raisins being in the diet of re-liefers.

In them days, you didn’t get it like today, $400, $500 because they have three kids. In them days you got a bag of groceries and this was it. You learned how to eat and make it last. Everybody learned how to prepare. If she didn’t know, she’d give it to somebody who knew how. And they divided between themselves. I don’t remember anybody ever being hungry.

As hard as it was, my mother was always able to put away two cents, five cents, ten cents, to make sure we worked ourselves out of that community. It was a good community, but they had their mind to progress farther.

Here I’m talkin’ about the hard life I had, here’s a guy comes through tellin’ ’em, well, we have to integrate, everybody’s gonna live equal. Oh no, not after the way I worked like I did, nobody’s gonna live equal. You start off rough, if you come rough into Chicago. You don’t start in equal with me. You go on the bottom rung and start climbing up. The Negro has got to learn. God put us in this world just to fight our way forward, up the ladder or down the ladder. Whether we’re black, white or green.

 

 

Chaos, chaos. I just dread. I don’t talk about it. Never be able to live. I’d be able to live. My house is almost paid off and the taxes are high. You wouldn’t believe you’re sitting on $900 a year taxes. Thank goodness I know how to make a buck. But if things keep on the way they are, and making me a Nazi between my neighbors and my Negroes, I won’t have no business.
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If a Depression hits, what would happen? It would be a civil war. There’d be murder, greed, there would be manifestation of such magnitude as has never been seen in this world. Money means nothing, it’s hunger. To get whatever another person has, I’ll take it away from ’em. If somebody doesn’t have it, they’ll do everything to get it.

 

 

Yes. If anybody knew how to make something to keep or last longer—they traded recipes, they traded clothes—they’d give hints and there was no what they call keeping up with the Joneses. If the lady across the street got color TV, I got a color TV. I’m against it. A lady down the street got an organ, you have got to get an organ.

 

 

Yeah, I know. See, everything is because somebody else has got it, you gotta have it. We gotta keep up with the Joneses.

 

POSTSCRIPT:
Before the conversation ended, he was asked one last question
:

 

 

“
Yes I do. I have a conflict inside of me. It hurts that I have to say to a Negro I can’t accept you as a neighbor because of the area. In front of my club, I took it upon myself to speak for open housing. And the people booed me. I did such a terrific job for open housing that they threw books at me and everything. When the vote came out, it was my hand only for open housing. I’m not really against integration, but the membership says to me: we’re going to be against integration. My club having four hundred people has made me president. That puts me in charge of their opinion. They tell me they can’t live with a Negro, and I believe it.

 

I’LL TELL YOU how naive I was. This was along 1930, 1931. When I first got to Chicago, I came into the Union Station, got into a taxi cab and told the driver, “Take me to the best Negro hotel.” He turned around and looked at me like I was a fool. He took me to the only hotel he knew. It was a whorehouse. I was never so hurt in my life. I don’t know what I imagined. Something, oh, fancy, like the Ritz. Only it wasn’t the Ritz.

I had a romantic notion about the black belt, the cabarets, the jazz—that was there, too. When we rolled out Michigan Boulevard and cut over to South Parkway, it was exciting. I walked around the streets, day and night, just like I did in Paris. It was a fantastic world. I met wealthy Negroes, but I knew nothing of the masses.

I was eating lunch on the South Side. I saw a group of Negroes marching by, marching by twos together, and silent. Not loud and boisterous. These people had a destination, had a purpose. These people were on a mission. They were going someplace. You felt the tension.

I still had my dessert to eat, but I was curious. I got in the back and marched along. I was dressed better than they were, but they showed no animosity toward me. I said to the chap next to me, “Where we going?” He said, “We just gonna put some people back in the building. They were evicted.”

It was a ramshackle building. A shanty, really. A solid crowd of black had formed and they were talking great … what Robert E. Park
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called an “indignation meeting.” They used to have these indignation meetings down South, where Negroes just let off steam because they couldn’t contain themselves, from some injustice that had been done. They’d lock the doors and have an indignation meeting and curse out white people. Here was action.

They moved out from the church just rags of covers, broken down bedsteads and a chiffonier back into the house. Then they had a spiritual meeting. The weather was below zero at the time. We stood there and heard the sirens. Police cars. Everyone grew tense. A frail, old black woman waved her hand and said, “Stand tight. Don’t move.” They started to sing: “… Like a tree that’s standing in the water, we shall not be moved… .” Then they sang another wonderful song, “Give Me That Old Time Religion.” (He sings a phrase, ending with “… It’s good enough for me.”) They added Communist words: “It’s good enough for Brother Stalin, and it’s good enough for me.” And they had other verses, like: “It’s good enough for Father Lenin, and it’s good enough for me.”

While they were singing, the tension was felt in the crowd. The sirens were there like a Greek chorus, coming from all directions. Somebody said, “It’s the Red Squad.” The old woman said, “Stand fast.” But they came through like Gangbusters, with clubs swinging. They pulled the old woman off, but in the general confusion, she disappeared in the crowd.

I didn’t run because I was so taken up with this great drama. I had never really felt the Depression and what it had done to human beings till then. I don’t know why I wasn’t clubbed. I was on the outside and I was better dressed.
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Truth is, the Communists made very little inroads with the Negro people. The Communists embraced many of the causes, but the black people didn’t take them seriously. For example, the Party would have a float in the Bud Billiken parade down South Parkway.
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But they really
didn’t penetrate. They raised issues that Negroes were interested in and they learned a lot from the Communists. They accepted help from anybody. Why shouldn’t they? They’d be damn fools if they didn’t.

One of the reasons the Communists flopped is they didn’t know how to deal with the Negro church. The church was the first Negro institution, preceding even the family in stability. Even in slavery where there was really no family tie, the first organization was the church. The Communists came in flat-footed with this vulgar Marxist thing. I was lucky I didn’t join. Now I say that, ’cause at my age, I don’t give a damn what I join. Hell, I mean, let them drop dead, the bunch of them.

 

 

Adam Clayton Powell’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, his dad had, had led that church and got a great deal of strength from it. Father Divine epitomized that whole period. He was the essence of it. Father Divine was God in a brass bed.

One time in New York, I was in the Village. There was a little fish and clam juice restaurant. A pretty little white girl worked there. She said, “I was born in Father Divine’s Heaven.” She was ten or twelve before she found out Father Divine wasn’t God. She was white as snow. She was from Crumb Elbow, that was his community. All his churches were called Heavens. He would buy hotels, and they’d be Heavens. He fed more people during the Depression than anybody.

That indignation meeting in Chicago shocked me to my depths. The grimness of hunger and no place to sleep, of cold, of people actually freezing to death.
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I remember the original lie-in. Negroes were out of work, after promise after promise after promise. One day a group of them lay down in front of the streetcar tracks. They all had white conductors and white motormen. They couldn’t come through. Mayor Kelly tried to make a deal with them. They were going to lay down and stop the God damn traffic from running through. They would erect a wall of human beings, a black wall. They hoped for jobs. They didn’t really hope for and didn’t get platform jobs. But there were people digging ditches for the utilities, just common labor. And Negroes weren’t on there. So they said, “We’ll just shut off the damn thing. It can’t work and we’re starving and these gangs of workers doing most of the menial work were white. Right in the black community.
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In spite of the Depression, there was hope. Great hope, even though the people suffered. To be without money is a disgrace in America today. The middle class looks upon welfare Negroes as morally corrupt because they haven’t worked. But in the Depression, there were so many whites who were on relief. So the Negro would look, and he wouldn’t see any great difference. Oh, there was a difference: a disproportion of Negroes on labor than on skilled jobs in WPA. But if Negroes were on relief, so were whites: we’re gonna have a better day. That was the feeling. That hope is gone. It’s crystal hard now. It’s hatred and disillusion.

 

 

Oh yeah, that was something. He broke the tradition. My father told me: “The Republicans are the ship. All else is the sea.” Frederick Douglass said that. They didn’t go for Roosevelt much in ‘32. But the WPA came along and Roosevelt came to be a god. It was really great. You worked, you got a paycheck and you had some dignity. Even when a man raked leaves, he got paid, he had some dignity. All the songs they used to have about WPA:

They had a lot of verses. We used to sing them:

When they got on WPA, you know what they’d mostly do. First, they’d buy some clothes. And tried to get a little better place to live. The third thing was to get your teeth fixed. When you’re poor, you let your teeth go. Especially, the child. If she’s got a rotten or snaggle tooth and that tooth may ache, dulled by aspirin or something or whiskey. Then they’d pull them out. They’d get their teeth fixed. WPA….