Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (35 page)

Honey Boy decided we should go on down to Patterson Park, the white pool. Some other friends of ours had been down there. They said it was clean, nothing in the water. Some of our friends was talking about how pretty the white girls was, but that didn’t faze Honey Boy. He was in love with Janice, but me and Pigmeat and Jimmy Edward wanted to see these blondes, brunettes, and redheads in skimpy bathing suits. We was curious and ready to go when Honey Boy first said something about it, but it seemed like he wasn’t really sure about going where things was supposed to be clean just ‘cause they was white. One night we went on up to the garage where Uncle Richard and some of our other uncles used to work on cars. Uncle Richard was sitting there sipping on some bourbon. He gave us a little taste as we was getting to be men. Uncle Richard loved all of us, but he was really proud of Honey ‘cause he saw himself in Honey Boy. Uncle Richard was born and raised in Baltimore, and he was in the gangs back in the time of World War II when gangs ruled Baltimore. Uncle Richard killed two men, and he didn’t do one day of time. Honey Boy stood up there on the hill and looked over to where the Clifton Park swimming pool was and heaved a big sigh in his chest. He was eighteen years old.

Honey looked over to where black folk gathered in the pool and hollered and laughed, and he said, “You got to fight to stay black, and you got to fight ‘cause you is black. I wonder why.”

Uncle Richard said, “Being black is being more full of life. You like a bottle of good wine that’s old and dark as blood. You make people jealous.”

Janice and Honey Boy was spending more time together. She was eighteen, too, and was heading off to Morgan State College. It was just over on the other side of Lake Montebello, a short ride from where we lived, but she and Honey acted like she was going to St. Louis or somewhere. We used to tease Honey and tell him he had the St. Louis blues, like the movie we saw at the Hippodrome movie house on Pennsylvania Avenue.

“You afraid Janice gonna run off with some jive ass from St. Louis, and I bet she will,” Pigmeat taunted him.

I added, “You know, Honey, I heard my mama say it’s a poor rabbit that ain’t got but one hole to run to.”

Jimmy Edward just laughed and said, “Y’all crazy.”

We saw Honey pick up some rocks, and we all got in the wind cause we knew Honey could throw a rock like Satchel Paige could throw a fastball, and we ran in three different directions so he couldn’t hit us all with the same rock. He had done that once before, or at least he said it was the same rock. I know all three of us was hurting at the same time, right upside our heads.

The first day we went to Patterson Park swimming pool Uncle Richard dropped us off ‘cause he didn’t have to work that day. I think he took the day off so he could ride us down there. When we was going through the white neighborhood, women was out there with cans of Comet and Ajax, scrubbing them white steps, and every now and then one of them looked at Uncle Richard’s car, a ‘64 Impala Super Sport that he had fixed up with a stereo he could flick on with one button. He didn’t have the stereo on that day. He was listening and watching.

Honey Boy was sitting up in the front seat, his head almost touching the roof of the car. He was taller than Uncle Richard and bigger than any of us. Honey Boy’s muscles had got like a statue, and he didn’t lift weights or nothing. He
just grew and filled out so he was like a body builder. He sat up there real quiet, going with the rhythm of the car as it went over the little bumps in the street, looking like a hunk of dark chocolate that God carved with a giant pocket knife and then made it hot enough to move but not melt with that hair like his mama and his great-grandpa Willy Little Bear just lifting up and bouncing on his head. Didn’t none of us say nothing. We didn’t talk like we did on the way to Clifton Park. We sat in the car like marines being taken inside enemy territory, and it was enemy territory ‘cause we wasn’t wanted in there.

Uncle Richard let us out, and it was a long walk from the car to the pool, going across the grass of the park next to a softball field. The park looked better than Clifton Park, with its statue and Eastern Avenue off in the distance. It looked like they took better care of it, like they had more space. There was white folk all around us, and some of them looked at us, and some of them ignored us. Fathers was out with little boys playing catch. Mothers was out with their little children in strollers, some of them letting the little babies try to walk, standing them up and then pretending to leave them. We walked to the pool house, with our towels and clean underwear tucked under our arms, wondering what it was going to be like to be in the pool with white people, to be wearing just trunks around white girls with that long hair, now that we all was getting hard-ons sometimes for no reason at all, just ‘cause our dicks took a notion to rise, wondering if we could handle the big Polish boys everybody told us ruled Patterson Park swimming pool. We thought all white people down here was Polish. We didn’t know nothing about Irish, or German, or Italian, except that white people had different colors of hair, like their heads was they flags.

Honey Boy didn’t have to fight in the locker room. Everything was copacetic. We walked through the cold shower and into the pool together, but we noticed that the smell and the
feel was different. We were used to the body odor of black folk at Clifton Park, a kind of funk that reminded you of ham and greens or Aunt Grace’s hot dogs. Here was something different, like a kind of spicy butter. It wasn’t like it was really bad or nothing. It was just so different it shocked us, made us pick up our noses and sniff and breathe deep, while we stood in the cold shower a few moments longer than we would have at Clifton Park, as if the cold water was gonna put a shield around us. Honey Boy stood under the shower looking like black ice. We walked out to the pool, and right away we knew we was the only black folk out there. The white people were so thick that the water looked white, like one wave that was flashing in a crazy river.

Pigmeat said the girls had real pretty legs, and they did it seemed. At first we studied the girls, looking at the ones who sat on the side to keep from getting their hair wet. Jimmy Edwards couldn’t see much without his glasses, but he said after the hair they was just regular faces. Me and Pigmeat asked him how did he know since he couldn’t see. Pigmeat liked them white girls, but I was afraid of them. I was shy with girls anyway, but I wasn’t afraid to be crazy about a black girl. There was some big gray fear between me and these white girls. Honey Boy didn’t study them long ‘cause he was watching them white boys, and some of them was big just like we heard. They was bigger than Honey, but Honey stood out like a tree blooming black in the midst of dogwoods, and we was the bushes that kept him company. Honey Boy had told us before we came down here that white girls had the same thing black girls had. The difference was black girls was made for us. Once Honey figured something out and came to a conclusion, that was all there was to it, nothing more to be said. He told us to swim. We eased into the water, and before long we had a lane to ourselves. One or two white folk smiled at us, but we didn’t know where those smiles came from.

We didn’t stay as long as we would have stayed at Clifton Park, even though this white pool was cleaner. We walked home in a tight bunch, looking at the white faces looking at us, most of them pretending to ignore us, but we knew they couldn’t ignore the only black thing moving through them. We got back to Aunt Grace’s and ate our hot dogs, but Honey Boy didn’t eat but five that day. He stood up and looked out the kitchen window in the direction of Clifton Park and said, “We goin’ back where black folk swim.”

We did for a few weeks, but some other black folk started to go to Patterson Park pretty regular. There was even rumors of fights starting when some boy got a feel on a white girl. Some of these black folk was girls, the fighting kind from down on Biddle Street near Gay Street. They carried knives and razors like the boys, and I even heard a few of them had guns. One day I saw them walking back from Clifton Park, and I knew they was from The Purple Funk. They was mean ‘cause they was angry about everything, and being angry had got to be the way it s’posed to be for them. Being angry gave them a high. Fighting gave them more joy than laying down and letting a boy push himself into them. Still all these folk had respect for Honey Boy.

We went back to Patterson Park. On one real hot and sticky day in that same summer, we walked down there. Uncle Richard was working, and Aunt Grace figured it was okay since so many black folk was going down there, although women think different than men. Uncle Richard said it was never gonna be alright, something was always gonna turn up and tighten in somebody’s stomach when black folk rolled into white folk’s territory like a wave taking over a town built near a beach. White folk get a warning that a storm is coming, but God is the somebody what sends it, and they can’t do much except tighten up everything and make sure they know how to swim. Swim is all they can do when we roll in, or fight.

We got into the water, and there was bunches of black kids, colored children Aunt Grace called us all. The white kids was different now. The girls sat on the side kind of pouting, and combing their hair and talking. It made me wonder why they came to the pool just to do that, and I guess they wondered the same thing. Pigmeat was staring at them, and he talked about how pretty they was with all that long hair, some of it the color of gold. Honey Boy slapped him, playing kinda but still a slap, and Pigmeat started crying. Me and Jimmy Edward looked at each other real funny ‘cause we didn’t never see Pigmeat act like that, and we just figured it had to be ‘cause Pigmeat felt like he had done been embarrassed by his big brother in front of all these white girls, and the children from The Purple Funk, who was all about respect.

That slap Honey Boy gave Pigmeat musta had something in it ‘cause pretty soon there was commotion bursting out here and there. Some boy pushed some girl in the water by sticking his hand in her face. A girl slapped another girl. Some boy pulled down the panties on a girl’s bikini. It was all colored children doing this stuff to other colored children, and white kids doing it to other white kids. One brunette grabbed a blonde by her hair and pulled her off the bench. Honey Boy laughed at that, and then the shit broke loose.

One of The Purple Funk girls pulled a white girl’s bikini top off and slapped her into the water. Her hand looked like it had dynamite in it when it hit the white girl’s face ‘cause her long brown hair went swinging around her head, as she fell kinda limp like into the water. We used to talk about slapping each other dead, but that was the first time I had seen a girl slap somebody like that, and the whole pool froze. The big Polish boys unfolded their arms from the corners they was standing in like they was the police. The lifeguards started blowing their whistles, and we all started shivering. Sometimes you could be in those pools real long and a cloud
came over and chilled you and made it feel like the temperature just dropped. Sometimes the temperature did drop. These chills made you feel like the water on you was ice. This time it felt like we was in the North Pole, in between floating icebergs, and God was gonna chop up things with an ice pick. He did.

Honey Boy got us together in a bunch and said, “Let’s get back up the way. Let’s go home.”

Honey never ran from nothing, but we didn’t disagree with him. The white people in the park stopped and started looking. Then a few of them started running ‘cause they could see there was fights all over the pool. The Polish boys had hell on their hands. One of them was on the ground with about five or six black kids all over him, stomping his ass. They wasn’t used to stomping. That’s something we did to each other. Stomping was the most humiliating thing you could do to somebody, and usually when you stomped somebody, it was all over. That was it. Folk walked away and left you to pick up your pride if you could find it, but the white folk just saw it as another step. On the news, they used the word
escalating
, like when they was talking about the war that was going on in Vietnam at the time. We got our clothes, and left the pool house. While we was walking, we saw white folk lined up on the sidewalk looking mean and angry, one line of them, and as we got closer we heard the word.

“Niggers!”

We got behind Honey Boy and bunched up close together, walking on each other’s tennis shoes. We was all wearing white, high-top Converse shoes, and we had just polished them the night before.

“Get your black asses up there where you belong,” one of them shouted out as we walked through.

“Dirty, stinking niggers! Don’t bring your black asses down here no more, you monkeys!”

Honey Boy didn’t have to tell us to be quiet ‘cause we knew we had six good blocks to go before we got to the train trestle where the train going back and forth to New York crossed and divided Blacktown from Whitetown in East Baltimore. Honey Boy did speak once we were through the thick of the crowd.

“Y’all go on in front of me, and when you see the train trestle, y’all start running. Hear?”

We was too scared to hear, but we moved in front of Honey. Rocks started landing in front of us, and we walked faster. We just thought Honey was walking, too. Rocks turned into glass bottles, and Pigmeat got cut on his leg kinda bad. The blood was squirting out in long streams. We heard Honey tell us to keep on, and we saw the train trestle, but it was hard to hear Honey. Before we started to run, we turned around, and Honey was fighting three grown white men. He picked up one and threw him into the marble steps, and he took one of the others’ head and banged it into a car fender. We started to call after him, but we heard a car horn blowing on our side of the train trestle. It was Uncle Richard driving down. He told us to get on up the street.

There was all kinds of noise, screaming and crashing and popping, but Uncle Richard went roaring down the street in his Impala and made a fishtail turn in the street. Honey jumped in, while white folks banged on the trunk, and Uncle Richard drove Honey on under where the New York train separated Blacktown from Whitetown. Janice, Aunt Grace, and Aunt Lois was there wrapping up Pigmeat’s leg, and Honey opened the car door. He looked funny, like the color was leaving him, making him ashy.