Life Beyond Measure (16 page)

You may have questions here, Ayele. A better person than what? A better person who constantly is in search of enhancing that part of him that counts to him, not to any other authority. This was made certain as far back as when I arrived in Florida and the world there didn’t see anything but another black boy. In New York City, I lived in an area of all black people, and they saw me as just another one of them in the context of their lives. All along the way, there were signs that said, “You aren’t who you think you are,” blaring out to add, “Can you not see that you are not important? Don’t you know you’re barking up the wrong tree?”

All of the measures I took at that point to reverse the condition of my circumstances—the struggle to improve—I have attributed to compulsion rather than to what some may see as bravery. Apparently, it is not uncommon for people to see bravery in the acts of others but take a lesser view of their own heroism. Many have saved lives in dangerous situations without regard for their own safety,
only to reveal afterward that their only thought was to simply help someone in trouble.

This tells us that there must be a very thin line between bravery and cowardice. Since bravery stands as the true opposite of cowardice, and the latter may be easier to describe, let me offer my take on its essence. Cowardice is a moment when fear paralyzes one with the imminent threat of having something come down upon them with devastating force. It might be damage to one’s view of oneself, damage to one’s reputation, damage to one’s most treasured plans, damage to one’s legacy.

The weight of cowardice as it stands before an individual is always alarming, because it is one force rather than a combination of forces. It threatens to have a combination of devastating effects, and that makes it all the more frightening.

Fear holds everybody to it. You turn a corner on an evening going home and run into fifteen guys, and they throw you up against a wall. If they want your money, or if they want to teach you a lesson, or intimidate you—any number of things—and you’re forced to give up your command over choices in your life, the only one you have left is cowardice. And cowardice says: “Listen, make a deal with these guys for the least harm.” Once you make that decision, you surrender yourself to whatever the abuse is going to be.

Now, the challenge of cowardice comes in many other ways. Sometimes it comes slowly across a protracted period of time. And we fight against it as best we can. When you have to face something with no option to avoid it except to surrender in the face of that fear—it may be fear for your life, fear of losing your job, whatever the fear—once you surrender to that fear, you’re damaged. Surrender means, “I give up myself to your sacrifice.”

Some people can make that adjustment, as long as they are not fatally harmed. Their reputation may be damaged, but they’re able to live with that. They’re upset with themselves, dehumanized, but they’re at least only a damaged piece of goods rather than dead meat, or left powerless or whatever it is. They’d rather accept it and try to rebuild, at least being alive to fight another day.

But cowardice is debilitating; it saps your strength, it weakens you, sometimes to the point where it is difficult to recover. But, again, you may have been facing life or death, or loss of friendships, or your reputation, or your family’s circumstances, or your economic disposition. Whenever you are faced with those questions, cowardice can ameliorate the situation; cowardice can give you enough breathing room to survive long enough to correct some of it, so you look it in the face and say, “OK, I’m yours.”

In adults, the economic and social circumstances of our lives are the places where cowardice usually has the advantage. If you are in a predicament, and you’re dealing with a person who has the say over whether your job takes a turn for the better or for the worse, that can be a circumstance where the question of cowardice might arise.

If it is a question of your political persuasion, the question of cowardice might arise if the need in that circumstance is such that you are obliged to swallow your own politics and let it be known, dishonestly, that you are OK with a political position or activity that you actually think is reprehensible.

There was a point in my career that I remember uncomfortably when the conditions of my employment were possibly contingent on my signing a patriotic loyalty oath specifically renouncing Paul Robeson. He was my hero and my friend, a man to whom is owed a debt of infinite gratitude by every person of color who has ever
worked in any facet of the entertainment industry. When I think of the few people in whose presence I was starstruck—Robeson stands out above all. But because of his activism in civil rights and his possible association with left-leaning causes during the Cold War, he was under investigation by our government. Though in the final analysis I wasn’t required to sign the oath, I agonized over what to do in the interim. I could not and would not sign it, but whether those reactions were brave or cowardly came down to my deciding which master in my own conscience I was going to serve.

Every American person—black, white, brown, or yellow—who aspires to a good, moral, and ethical life is vulnerable in the face of those who threaten them and can do them and their loved ones harm. And there you go when cowardice has you in its sights. Very few of us, including me, are going to say, “All right, this is me, you understand, and I ain’t going to take any…” On the other hand, there are times when all it takes to vanquish the bullying forces is that which we, including me, are capable of doing by having the courage to say, “No, this is a line that can’t be crossed,” or to speak out against wrongs, at our own expense, and to say, “This is unacceptable. This will not stand.”

There are various scenarios in which the moment comes to choose between bravery and cowardice, young Ayele, and sometimes we must pause to summon courage if it is not instantly present. Often we succeed, yet sometimes we fail. After all, we are only human.

I
n preceding letters to you, dearest Ayele, I have written at length of what I know about facing fears and demons, about compulsions, and the narrow border separating bravery and cowardice. Those conclusions have come from actual incidents in my life that I recall again for you now—numerous close calls I have had with disaster. Some could have killed me; others could have left me damaged physically or emotionally, or could have otherwise altered the course of my life.

One of the earliest such life-and-death encounters occurred while I was still a kid on Cat Island, curious and too adventurous for my own good. You may have heard about this escapade from other sources, but I feel it is worthwhile to repeat it here as a cautionary
tale for you and your peers, lest curiosity ever get the better of you. This was the time when my impulsive exploration of the salt-pond tunnel nearly ended in my drowning. The one-hundred-foot-long, six-foot-deep, two-foot-wide tunnel, running from the sea to a pond where the water was collected to later evaporate into salt for the island’s inhabitants, was just too enticing for me to ignore. But the day I crawled into that long tunnel, with only a handmade gate holding the ocean at bay, could have been my last had I been able to open the gate from inside, as in my frightened state I foolishly tried to do. Water would have rushed in at fifty miles an hour, and I would have been trapped in the flood. The energies of the universe were with me that day when my efforts to push open the gate failed and I managed to extract myself from the tunnel.

Some time after, when my family left the island, Nassau presented its own dangers, two of which I engaged in freely and of my own accord. As to the first, there was a giant warehouse more than five stories tall that held cargo arriving in the Bahamas from the United States and other places. The building was wider than it was long, and the dock in front of it ran several feet out above the sea.

A small group of young boys engaged in thrilling leaps off the top of the building into the water on days when the building was closed. The danger of it soon swept me up. The trick was to stand at the rear of the roof of the building, then race forward as fast as possible, leaping mightily out and forward just as you neared the front edge—at enough of a distance to safely clear the dock below. To fail would have resulted in serious bodily harm, at the least. Luckily, the few of us lunatic enough to try it never failed.

While those episodes had their serious physical danger, another offered a peril of its own. Having seen my first movie in Nassau, I acquired a taste for them, as had my friend Yorrick Rolle—my part
ner in the enterprise we developed to earn money for movie tickets by selling the peanuts we bought and roasted. When our proceeds still weren’t enough to cover the tickets, we conspired to devise another way of getting into the theater.

I had noted a window that opened from the inside of the theater for ventilation purposes. It was a small window, and high enough that the theater manager could not imagine anyone climbing in. It was also a spot where passersby during the day would be hard-pressed to notice us sneaking in—unless they were up on a hill and could see us from that vantage point. So the way we worked it was, I would get up on Yorrick’s shoulders and climb inside. Once there, I could stand inside, lean the top part of my body back outside the window, and pull Yorrick up and help him get through the window.

After we were both inside, we crawled under a floor-length curtain that hung in front of an opening near the screen that led backstage. Our next move was to slither along the floor through the first few rows of seats, and if there were vacant seats about the fourth or fifth row up, we would listen carefully, then suddenly pop up and sit as if we had been there all the time. We did this often, with much success.

One day we snuck inside early, slithering into place so that we were sitting there before the movie started while people with tickets—honest people—came in and found seats. Suddenly, Yorrick and I each felt an urgent tap on the shoulder. We looked up, and standing there was a huge man, Mr. Baron Smith, the theater manager. “Get up,” he ordered us, adding, “come with me.”

I knew Mr. Smith, and my father knew Mr. Smith, and Yorrick and I knew we were in big trouble. Reform school was our next stop.

We meekly followed Mr. Smith into his office. He sat us down and said, “You know what you’re doing.”

We said, “Yes, sir.”

He said, “You know what’s going to happen to you.” Then he said directly to me, “I know Reggie. What do you think your father is going to say about you doing such a thing?”

I couldn’t defend myself, and he then turned to Yorrick, whose father he didn’t know, and said, “What’s your name?”

Yorrick told him, and together we tried to offer some kind of explanation, but mostly promised that we wouldn’t do it anymore.

So Mr. Smith said to me, “I tell you what I’m going to do. I’m not going to tell your father. I’m going to let you go, but if you ever, ever do this again, I’m not going to tell your father; I’m going to call the police.” Then he grabbed us up, led us to the front door, and shoved us out.

Outside, we must have run for about a mile. In those days, even small criminal infractions by young boys often meant long stays in reform school (as Yorrick later found out when he was arrested alone one day with a stolen bicycle).

There was another occasion that could have resulted in my spending years locked away. It occurred when I was fourteen and walking along an almost deserted Nassau street. An obviously older kid came riding by on a bicycle, going in the opposite direction. He was wearing biker gear and thus appeared to be from a family of means. When he drew near me and veered in my direction, I thought he was about to turn a corner behind me. Instead, he lashed out and punched me full in the face. When I recovered from my astonishment, I took off after him as he headed full speed toward Bay Street and the heart of the city. Angry, I searched as hard as I could, but I found no evidence of him or his bicycle.

What was the danger here? He was white and I was black, and if I had found him, I would have tried to beat the daylights out of him, regardless of any witnesses. In colonial Nassau, with its disciplinary
control over black people, my arrest and conviction would have been virtually assured. That day when I was unable to find him was a definite case of winning by losing.

Then there was my encounter with Cardod, a big guy—and an acquaintance, though not someone I considered a good friend. With a reputation for being unpredictable and having unusual behavioral patterns, he had never done anything to rouse my concern. Since we were usually out swimming or hanging with the same group, I saw no reason to be on my guard around him.

Then, one day after swimming, I was on the dock alone when Cardod showed up. We began talking, and suddenly he took a strange turn. I was amazed at the radical shift in his expression, and even more stunned at what happened next. He was carrying a piece of board almost four feet long, and all of a sudden, without warning, he hauled off and whacked me with it on the left arm. It was a very hard blow, and I was quite close to paralyzed by it.

Knowing his reputation for unusual behavior, I was petrified and didn’t know how to react. I could tell that he felt he had done what he wanted to do, and that was to intimidate me. Whatever the words were that were coming out of his mouth, they implied that he felt justified in hitting me. Meanwhile, two things were on my mind. One was that he was in some sort of unbalanced mental state, and the other was that I was in immediate danger, because if he whacked me again he could do great damage; that board was quite a weapon.

My thoughts ran the gamut:
I am offended, yes. What am I going to do about it? What can I do about it? Is my arm in such a shape that I won’t be able to fight him? Should I jump him, and then what happens if he whacks me again?
This was a point where the issue of bravery and cowardice came into play, and I was caught between the two.

But I soon realized that I was injured, he was armed, and there was little I could do other than go into a neutral state—a subject I’ll return to later on. It was enough to diffuse the situation. Afterward I would see Cardod around Nassau from time to time, and he acted as if absolutely nothing had happened. Yet every time I saw him, I felt enormous apprehension because of his unpredictability. It was a fear, a fear of violence being done against me and of having an even closer call with him. That feeling served to protect me from further harm, thankfully.

Cut to: Miami, Florida. I’m fifteen years old, out by myself at night, and being accosted by a swarm of cops. I’d heard a lot about this before arriving in Florida but wasn’t afraid; I had already been shaped as a person by then. Even before leaving Nassau, I knew that I had a huge resentment to being maltreated. I was always a reasonable person, but I do think I have a volatile thing inside me—an explosive potential when provoked that I try to keep out of harm’s way. In America, I knew to be watchful of that, and whenever it threatened to flare, I somehow managed to get control of it.

So though I was apprehensive, I was also angry when the cops decided to have some fun intimidating me—a young black boy alone on the streets at night, caught on the wrong side of town. They forced me to walk fifty blocks back into the black neighborhood. I knew that in Miami in the early 1940s they could have shot me, as they threatened to do, without consequence. But the fear of that did not quench the rage within me. Had I not suppressed it, I could have been just another black kid found dead of a gunshot in an alley, with little—if any—investigation afterward.

My time in Nassau was only a few years, and my time in Florida even shorter—but not as short as it might have been had the Klan found me. They came looking on the night after I had left a delivery
package at the front door of a woman who refused to accept it there and ordered me around to the back. I was new to the segregationist ways of Florida then, and had questioned her stance. “But I’m standing here with the package now,” I said, just before she slammed the door in my face. My perceived impudence resulted in a group of Klansmen showing up at my brother’s house, where I was staying. They apparently found out who I was and where I lived from people at Burdine’s Department Store, where I was briefly employed. Luckily, I was not at home, and when I did arrive later, the family spirited me away to live with other relatives in another neighborhood.

You no doubt will recall earlier letters describing the circumstances that led to my joining the army in the hopes of escaping the chokehold of New York City in the winter and my impoverished circumstances.

It is hard to imagine a more life-altering event than what might have happened had my bizarre plot to get out of the army gone bad many months later. Instead of returning to New York and an eventual career as an actor, I could have been stuck for twenty years in a prison. In brief, I will summarize this close call by saying that after several months of working as a qualified physiotherapist in a GI rehabilitation ward at Mason General Hospital at Northport, Long Island, I decided to give the appearance of having gone nuts. To begin with, I tossed a heavy chair at the head of the man in charge of the hospital, missing him by inches, and sending it crashing through a bay window. Locked up and still being questioned for that infraction, I soon upped the ante by pushing over a mobile steam table laden with food while it was making its rounds through the room where I was being held with other inmates. Many weeks of psychiatric sessions and much penitence for choices I came to regret later, I got my discharge.

But as you can conclude from the descriptions already given, being out of the army upon my discharge in 1945 and back in New York did not exactly put me out of harm’s way. Living very much close to the edge, I was back to dishwashing downtown while staying in a room of someone’s apartment at 127th Street between Lenox and Sixth avenues, for which I paid five dollars a week.

One night I came up out of the subway at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue and had the shock of my life: there was bedlam everywhere. There were buildings afire, people on the street going absolutely crazy, and cops shooting. A full-blown riot had broken out earlier, and because I had been working downtown and didn’t have a radio, I knew nothing about it.

I would learn later that the riot had been triggered by the behavioral pattern of the police in the area. Beyond a systematic profiling and scapegoating of black residents, they had done something that was so egregious—whatever it was, whether it was beating up or killing an unarmed suspect, or whether it had to do with corruption related to payoffs—that when individuals in the community witnessed it, one thing led to another.

I didn’t have any background on how the police were doing what their job required, which was to keep the community contained as a separate section of New York, almost as if it were detached. People there could go downtown to work, go shopping, or go strolling on Broadway, but few of them would look for housing in areas other than their own. There was a fundamental awareness on the part of downtown New York, Harlem, and all the boroughs as to the relationship between races.

So the accumulated resentment exploded while I was washing dishes downtown. Emerging into the middle of the pandemonium, I saw people breaking into places and looting. I suddenly found
myself inside a large grocery store. I don’t even know how I got there, but I was not there to steal anything. What was I going to steal, some canned goods off the shelf, some cookies or rice? No, I was drawn to the sense of danger. There were many people in the store, and I was reaching for nothing, but just being there in the presence of the chaos all around.

Suddenly cops came rushing into the store with guns drawn. I hightailed it to the rear of the store, presupposing there had to be a back-door exit. But every door I found was locked, and there seemed to be no way out. The cops were steadily moving through the store, and I heard gunshots. There was one last door, and I ran for it and it opened. I crashed in, shut the door, and looked around, but there was no exit; it was a storeroom. There was no light in the room, so I could see the searchlights of the police as they were approaching. When the light reached the door and it started to open, I collapsed onto some bags on the floor and played dead. My face was looking up and my eyes were closed, and I was holding my breath. I could see the light through my eyelids as the flashlight rested on me. Then, apparently being taken for dead as I had hoped, I remained frozen as the flashlight moved around the room until I finally heard the door close, and it was dark again.