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Chapter 4
BLACK POWER
When I was a boy, I used to wonder where my mother
came from, how she got on this earth. When I asked her
where she was from, she would say, “God made me,” and
change the subject. When I asked her if she was white,
she’d say, “No. I’m light-skinned,” and change the subject
again. Answering questions about her personal history did
not jibe with Mommy’s view of parenting twelve curious,
wild, brown-skinned children. She issued orders and her
rule was law. Since she refused to divulge details about herself
or her past, and because my stepfather was largely
unavailable to deal with questions about himself or Ma,
what I learned of Mommy’s past I learned from my siblings.
We traded information on Mommy the way people
trade baseball cards at trade shows, offering bits and pieces
fraught with gossip, nonsense, wisdom, and sometimes just
plain foolishness. “What does it matter to you?” my older
brother Richie scoffed when I asked him if we had any
grandparents. “You’re adopted anyway.”
My siblings and I spent hours playing tricks and teasing
one another. It was our way of dealing with realities over
which we had no control. I told Richie I didn’t believe him.
“I don’t care if you believe me or not,” he sniffed.
“Mommy’s not your real mother. Your real mother’s in jail.”
“You’re lying!”
“You’ll see when Mommy takes you back to your real
mother next week. Why do you think she’s been so nice to
you all week?”
Suddenly it occurred to me that Mommy had been
nice to me all week. But wasn’t she nice to me all the time?
I couldn’t remember, partly because within my confused
eight-year-old reasoning was a growing fear that maybe
Richie was right. Mommy, after all, did not really look like
me. In fact, she didn’t look like Richie, or David—or any
of her children for that matter. We were all clearly black, of
various shades of brown, some light brown, some medium
brown, some very light-skinned, and all of us had curly
hair. Mommy was, by her own definition, “light-skinned,”
a statement which I had initially accepted as fact but at
some point later decided was not true. My best friend Billy
Smith’s mother was as light as Mommy was and had red
hair to boot, but there was no question in my mind that
Billy’s mother was black and my mother was not. There
was something inside me, an ache I had, like a constant
itch that got bigger and bigger as I grew, that told me. It
was in my blood, you might say, and however the notion
got there, it bothered me greatly. Yet Mommy refused to
acknowledge her whiteness. Why she did so was not clear,
but even my teachers seemed to know she was white and I
wasn’t. On open school nights, the question most often
asked by my schoolteachers was: “Is James adopted?”
which always prompted an outraged response from
Mommy.
I told Richie: “If I’m adopted, you’re adopted too.”
“Nope,” Richie replied. “Just you, and you’re going
back to your real mother in jail.”
“I’ll run away first.”
“You can’t do that. Mommy will get in trouble if you
do that. You don’t want to see Ma get in trouble, do you?
It’s not her fault that you’re adopted, is it?”
He had me then. Panic set in. “But I don’t want to go
to my real mother. I want to stay here with Ma…”
“You gotta go. I’m sorry, man.”
This went on until I was in tears. I remember pacing
about nervously all day while Richie, knowing he had
ruined my life, cackled himself to sleep. That night I lay
wide awake in bed waiting for Mommy to get home from
work at two A.M., whereupon she laid the ruse out as I sat
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at the kitchen table in my tattered Fruit of the Loom
underwear. “You’re not adopted,” she laughed.
“So you’re my real mother?”
“Of course I am.” Big kiss.
“Then who’s my grandparents?”
“Your grandpa Nash died and so did your grand-ma
Etta.”
“Who were they?”
“They were your father’s parents.”
“Where were they from?”
“From down south. You remember them?”
I had a faint recollection of my grandmother Etta, an
ancient black woman with a beautiful face who seemed
very confused, walking around with a blue dress and a fishing
pole, the bait, tackle, and line dragging down around
her ankles. She didn’t seem real to me.
“Did you know them, Ma?”
“I knew them very, very well.”
“Did they love you?”
“Why do you ask so many questions?”
“I just want to know. Did they love you? Because your
own parents didn’t love you, did they?”
“My own parents loved me.”
“Then where are they?”
A short silence. “My mother died many, many years
ago,” she said. “My father, he was a fox. No more questions
tonight. You want some coffee cake?” Enough said. If getting
Mommy’s undivided attention for more than five
minutes was a great feat in a family of twelve kids, then getting
a midnight snack in my house was a greater thrill. I
cut the questions and ate the cake, though it never stopped
me from wondering, partly because of my own growing
sense of self, and partly because of fear for her safety,
because even as a child I had a clear sense that black and
white folks did not get along, which put her, and us, in a
pretty tight space.
In 1966, when I was nine, black power had permeated
every element of my neighborhood in St. Albans, Queens.
Malcolm X had been killed the year before and had grown
larger in death than in life. Afros were in style. The Black
Panthers were a force. Public buildings, statues, monuments,
even trees, met the evening in their original bland
colors and reemerged the next morning painted in the
sparkling “liberation colors” of red, black, and green.
Congas played at night on the streets while teenyboppers
gathered to talk of revolution. My siblings marched around
the house reciting poetry from the Last Poets, a sort of rap
group who recited in-your-face poetry with conga and fascinating
vocal lines serving as a musical backdrop, with
songs titled “Niggers Are Scared of Revolution” and “On
the Subway.” Every Saturday morning my friends and I
would pedal our bicycles to the corner of Dunkirk Street
and Ilion Avenue to watch the local drag racers near the Sun
Dew soft drink factory, trying to see who could drive the
fastest over a dip in the road that sent even the slowestmoving
car airborne. My stepfather hit that dip at fifteen
miles an hour in his ’64 Pontiac and I bounced high in my
seat. These guys hit it at ninety and their cars flew like birds,
barreling through the air and landing fifteen feet away,
often skidding out of control, sometimes smacking against
the wall of the Sun Dew factory before wobbling away in a
pile of bent metal, grilles, and fenders. Their cars had names
like “Smokin’ Joe” and “Miko” and “Dream Machine”
scrawled on the hoods, but our favorite was a gleaming
black, souped-up GTO with the words “Black Power” written
in smooth white script across the hood and top. It was
the fastest and its driver was, of course, the coolest. He
drove like a madman, and after leaving some poor Corvette
in the dust, he’d power his mighty car in a circle, wheel it
around, and do a victory lap for us, driving by at low speed,
one muscled arm angling out the window, his car rumbling
powerfully, while we whistled and cheered, raising our fists
and yelling, “Black power!” He’d laugh and burn rubber for
us, tires screeching, roaring away in a burst of gleaming
metal and hot exhaust, his taillights flashing as he disappeared
into the back alleyways before the cops had a chance
to bust him. We thought he was God.
But there was a part of me that feared black power very
deeply for the obvious reason. I thought black power would
be the end of my mother. I had swallowed the white man’s
fear of the Negro, as we were called back then, whole. It
began with a sober white newsman on our black-and-white
television set introducing a news clip showing a Black
Panther rally, led by Bobby Seale or Huey Newton or one
of those young black militant leaders, screaming to hundreds
and hundreds of angry African-American students,
“Black power! Black power! Black power!” while the crowd
roared. It frightened the shit out of me. I thought to
myself, These people will kill Mommy. Mommy, on the
other hand, seemed unconcerned. Her motto was, “If it
doesn’t involve your going to school or church, I could care
less about it and my answer is no whatever it is.”
She insisted on absolute privacy, excellent school
grades, and trusted no outsiders of either race. We were
instructed never to reveal details of our home life to any
figures of authority: teachers, social workers, cops, storekeepers,
or even friends. If anyone asked us about our
home life, we were taught to respond with, “I don’t know,”
and for years I did just that. Mommy’s house was an entire
world that she created. She appointed the eldest child at
home to be “king” or “queen” to run the house in her
absence and we took it from there, creating court jesters,
slaves, musicians, poets, pets, and clowns. Playing in the
street was discouraged and often forbidden and if you did
manage to slip out, “Get your butt in this house before
dark,” she would warn, a rule she enforced to the bone. I
often played that rule out to its very edge, stealing into the
house at dusk, just as the last glimmer of sunlight was
peeking over the western horizon, closing the door softly,
hoping Mommy had gone to work, only to turn around
and find her standing before me, hands on hips, whipping
belt in hand, eyes flicking angrily back and forth to the
window, then to me, lips pursed, trying to decide whether
it was light or dark outside. “It’s still light,” I’d suggest, my
voice wavering, as my siblings gathered behind her to
watch the impending slaughter.
“That looks like light to you?” she’d snap, motioning
to the window.
“Looks pretty dark,” my siblings would chirp from
behind her. “It’s definitely dark, Ma!” they’d shout, stifling
their giggles. If I was lucky a baby would wail in another
room and she’d be off, hanging the belt on the doorknob as
she went. “Don’t do it again,” she’d warn over her shoulder,
and I was a free man.
But even if she had any interest in black power, she
had no time to talk about it. She worked the swing shift at
Chase Manhattan Bank as a typist, leaving home at three P.M.
and returning around two A.M., so she had little time for
games, and even less time for identity crises. She and my
father brought a curious blend of Jewish-European and
African-American distrust and paranoia into our house.
On his end, my father, Andrew McBride, a Baptist minister,
had his doubts about the world accepting his mixed
family. He always made sure his kids never got into trouble,
was concerned about money, and trusted the providence of
the Holy Father to do the rest. After he died and Mommy
remarried, my stepfather, Hunter Jordan, seemed to pick
up where my father left off, insistent on education and
church. On her end, Mommy had no model for raising us
other than the experience of her own Orthodox Jewish
family, which despite the seeming flaws—an unbending
nature, a stridency, a focus on money, a deep distrust of all
outsiders, not to mention her father’s tyranny—represented
the best and worst of the immigrant mentality: hard work,
no nonsense, quest for excellence, distrust of authority figures,
and a deep belief in God and education. My parents
were nonmaterialistic. They believed that money without
knowledge was worthless, that education tempered with
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religion was the way to climb out of poverty in America,
and over the years they were proven right.
Yet conflict was a part of our lives, written into our
very faces, hands, and arms, and to see how contradiction
lived and survived in its essence, we had to look no farther
than our own mother. Mommy’s contradictions crashed
and slammed against one another like bumper cars at
Coney Island. White folks, she felt, were implicitly evil
toward blacks, yet she forced us to go to white schools to get
the best education. Blacks could be trusted more, but anything
involving blacks was probably slightly substandard.
She disliked people with money yet was in constant need of
it. She couldn’t stand racists of either color and had great
distaste for bourgeois blacks who sought to emulate rich
whites by putting on airs and “doing silly things like covering
their couches with plastic and holding teacups with
their pinkies out.” “What fools!” she’d hiss. She wouldn’t be
bothered with parents who bragged about their children’s
accomplishments, yet she insisted we strive for the highest
professional goals. She was against welfare and never
applied for it despite our need, but championed those who
availed themselves of it. She hated restaurants and would
not enter one even if the meals served were free. She actually
preferred to be among the poor, the working-class poor
of the Red Hook Housing Projects in Brooklyn, the
cement mixers, bakers, doughnut makers, grandmothers,
and soul-food church partisans who were her lifelong
friends. It was with them that she and my father started the
New Brown Memorial Baptist Church, a small storefront
church which still stands in Red Hook today. Mommy
loves that church and to this day still loves Red Hook, one
of the most dangerous and neglected housing projects in
New York City. On any given day she’ll get up in the
morning, take the New Jersey Transit train from her home
in Ewing, New Jersey, to Manhattan, then take the subway
to Brooklyn, and wander around the projects like the Pope,
the only white person in sight, waving to friends, stepping
past the drug addicts, smiling at the young mothers pushing
their children in baby carriages, slipping into the poorly lit
hallway of 80 Dwight Street while the young dudes in
hooded sweatshirts stare balefully at the strange, bowlegged
old white lady in Nikes and red sweats who slowly hobbles
up the three flights of dark, urine-smelling stairs on arthritic
knees to visit her best friend, Mrs. Ingram in apartment 3G.
As a boy, I often found Mommy’s ease among black
people surprising. Most white folks I knew seemed to have
a great fear of blacks. Even as a young child, I was aware
of that. I’d read it in the paper, between the lines of my
favorite sport columnists in the New York Post and the old
Long Island Press, in their refusal to call Cassius Clay
Muhammad Ali, in their portrayal of Floyd Patterson as a
“good Negro Catholic,” and in their burning criticism of
black athletes like Bob Gibson of the St. Louis Cardinals,
whom I idolized. In fact I didn’t even have to open the
paper to see it. I could see it in the faces of the white
people who stared at me and Mommy and my siblings
when we rode the subway, sometimes laughing at us,
pointing, muttering things like, “Look at her with those
little niggers.” I remember when a white man shoved her
angrily as she led a group of us onto an escalator, but
Mommy simply ignored him. I remember two black
women pointing at us, saying, “Look at that white bitch,”
and a white man screaming at Mommy somewhere in
Manhattan, calling her a “nigger lover.” Mommy ignored
them all, unless the insults threatened her children, at
which time she would turn and fight back like an alley cat,
hissing, angry, and fearless. She had a casual way of ignoring
affronts, slipping past insults to her whiteness like a
seasoned boxer slips punches. When Malcolm X, the supposed
demon of the white man, was killed, I asked her
who he was and she said, “He was a man ahead of his
time.” She actually liked Malcolm X. She put him in nearly
the same category as her other civil rights heroes, Paul
Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, A. Philip
Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Kennedys—
any Kennedy. When Malcolm X talked about “the white
devil” Mommy simply felt those references didn’t apply to
her. She viewed the civil rights achievements of black
Americans with pride, as if they were her own. And she
herself occasionally talked about “the white man” in the
third person, as if she had nothing to do with him, and in
fact she didn’t, since most of her friends and social circle
were black women from church. “What’s the matter with
these white folks?” she’d muse after reading some craziness
in the New York Daily News. “They’re fighting over this
man’s money now that he’s dead. None of them wanted
him when he was alive, and now look at them. Forget it,
honey”—this is Mommy talking to the newspaper—
“your husband’s dead, okay? He’s dead—poop! You had
your chance. Is money gonna bring him back? No!” Then
she’d turn to us and deliver the invariable lecture: “You
don’t need money. What’s money if your mind is empty!
Educate your mind! Is this world crazy or am I the crazy
one? It’s probably me.”
Indeed it probably was—at least, I thought so. I knew
of no other white woman who would board the subway in
Manhattan at one o’clock every morning and fall asleep till
she got to her stop in Queens forty-five minutes later.
Often I could not sleep until I heard her key hit the door.
Her lack of fear for her safety—particularly among blacks,
where she often stuck out like a sore thumb and seemed an
easy target for muggers—had me stumped. As a grown
man, I understand now, understand how her Christian
principles and trust in God kept her going through all her
life’s battles, but as a boy, my faith was not that strong.
Mommy once took me to Harlem to visit my stepsister,
Jacqueline, whom we called Jack and who was my father’s
daughter by a previous marriage and more like an aunt
than a sister. The two of them sat in Jack’s parlor and talked
into the night while Jack cooked big plates of soul food,
macaroni and cheese, sweet potato pies, and biscuits for us.
“Take this home to the kids, Ruth,” Jack told Ma. We put
the food in shopping bags and took it on the subway without
incident, but when we got off the bus in St. Albans
near our house, two black men came up behind us and one
of them grabbed Mommy’s purse. The shopping bag full of
macaroni and cheese and sweet potato pies burst open and
food flew everywhere as Mommy held on to her purse,
spinning around in a crazy circle with the mugger, neither
saying a word as they both desperately wrestled for the
purse, whirling from the sidewalk into the dark empty
street like two ballerinas locked in a death dance. I stood
frozen in shock, watching. Finally the mugger got the
purse and ran off as his buddy laughed at him, and Mommy
fell to the ground.
She got up, calmly took my hand, and began to walk
home without a word.
“You okay?” she asked me after a few moments.
I nodded. I was so frightened I couldn’t speak. All the
food that Jack had cooked for us lay on the ground behind
us, ruined. “Why didn’t you scream?” I asked, when I finally
got my tongue back.
“It’s just a purse,” she said. “Don’t worry about it. Let’s
just get home.”
The incident confirmed my fears that Mommy was
always in danger. Every summer we joined the poor
inner-city kids the Fresh Air Fund organization sent to
host families or to summer camps for free. The luckier
ones among my siblings got to stay with host families, but
I had to go to camps where they housed ten of us in a
cabin for two weeks at a time. Sometimes they seemed
closer to prison or job corps than camp. Kids fought all
the time. The food was horrible. I was constantly fighting.
Kids called me Cochise because of my light skin and curly
hair. Despite all that, I loved it. The first time I went,
Mommy took me to the roundup point, a community
center in Far Rockaway, once the home of middle-class
whites and Jews like playwright Neil Simon, but long
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C O N T I N U E D T O M O R R O W
since turned black, and it seemed that the only white person
for miles was my own mother. The camp organizers
set up a table inside where they removed our shoes and
shirts and inspected our toes for athlete’s foot, checked us
for measles and chicken pox, then sent us outside to board
a yellow school bus for the long journey to upstate New
York. As I sat on the bus peering out the window at
Mommy, the only white face in a sea of black faces, a black
man walked up with his son. He had a mustache and a
goatee and wore black leather pants, a black leather jacket,
a ton of jewelry, and a black beret. He seemed outstandingly
cool. His kid was very handsome, well dressed, and
quite refined. He placed his kid’s bags in the back of the
bus and when the kid went to step on the bus, instead of
hugging the child, the father offered his hand, and father
and son did a magnificent, convoluted black-power soul
handshake called the “dap,” the kind of handshake that
lasts five minutes, fingers looping, thumbs up, thumbs
down, index fingers collapsing, wrists snapping, bracelets
tingling. It seemed incredibly hip. The whole bus
watched. Finally the kid staggered breathlessly onto the
bus and sat behind me, tapping at the window and waving
at his father, who was now standing next to Mommy,
waving at his kid.
“Where’d you learn that handshake?” someone asked
the kid.
“My father taught me,” he said proudly. “He’s a
Black Panther.”
The bus roared to life as I panicked. A Black Panther?
Next to Mommy? It was my worst nightmare come true. I
had no idea who the Panthers truly were. I had swallowed
the media image of them completely.
The bus clanked into gear as I got up to open my
window. I wanted to warn Mommy. Suppose the Black
Panther wanted to kill her? The window was stuck. I tried
to move to another window. A counselor grabbed me and
sat me down. I said, “I have to tell my mother something.”
“Write her a letter,” he said.
I jumped into the seat of the Black Panther’s son
behind me—his window was open. The counselor placed
me back in my seat.
“Mommy, Mommy!” I yelled at the closed window.
Mommy was waving. The bus pulled away.
I shouted, “Watch out for him!” but we were too far
away and my window was shut. She couldn’t hear me.
I saw the Black Panther waving at his son. Mommy
waved at me. Neither seemed to notice the other.
When they were out of sight, I turned to the Black
Panther’s son sitting behind me and punched him square
in the face with my fist. The kid held his jaw and stared
at me in shock as his face melted into a knot of disbelief
and tears.
