Only the Strong Survive
(Page 2 of 8)
“Style is the thing, man. How you carry yourself, how you get with the nitty-gritty, how you wise up and be witty, how you show toleration, let people do their thing, showing respect but being cool and fearless. Black people got to deal with downtown and the ghetto. Whites can’t make it here. Too raw and tough. They have no soul—which to me means moving to basics without guise or disguise whether it’s food, music, or religion.”
Cootie grew up in a family of three boys and two girls. His mother, who died in 1963, worked as a seamstress, and his father, who at 78 suffers only from bunions, worked 32 years for Brown & Root. His family had the only set of encyclopedias in the neighborhood. He roamed Fifth Ward on his bike with his dog, carefully avoiding Denver Harbor east of Lockwood Street, where poor whites made life dangerous for blacks, and Frenchtown, the neighborhood north of Liberty Road, where the lighter-skinned, clannish Cajuns from Louisiana wanted no African black messing around their caramel-colored daughters.
He learned music and the love of jazz from his late brother, Marvin Charles, who played violin. In the summers, Cootie swam in the swimming holes (there were no public pools in Fifth Ward, and the only pool for blacks was in Emancipation Park across town)—Sandy Mountain near Buck Street, Seven-Up near the bayou, and one near the wood-processing plant in Southern Pacific’s Englewood Yard, the source of the pervasive smell of creosote that permeates Fifth Ward.
“Charlie Parker brought me to New York. I had to hear him blow because I knew from his music he hadn’t long to live. With the joints and jazz came heroin. I rode the train to New York the summer after I graduated from high school. You see, besides whiskey, heroin has always been the drug for blacks. Once you are down, you need that euphoria, something for the spirits.
“LeRoi Jones wrote somewhere that it changes the black man’s normal separation from mainstream society into an advantage, and he’s right. Nonparticipation in a basically irrational world seems legitimate to me. I have never stolen or been busted. Never been hospitalized except to take the cure some years ago. Now dope is everywhere. Kids, housewives in River Oaks sniffing coke. Diet pills. Viet Nam vets trying to kill their pain. But heroin here in Fifth Ward is scarce. Mexican connection dried it up. Plenty of everything else, though.”
Ghetto time is different. It falls into two categories: workdays and weekends, and summer (hot) and winter (cold). “Dead time”—time with no money—is spent in school, at work, in prison (“doin’ Big Ben”). Time is “low” on Monday, “high” on Friday when the eagle flies. Unlike in more affluent areas, where time is measured in rational, future-directed hours and days, time in the ghetto is personal and focused on the present. Time is now. Watches are for pawning. The expression “catch you later,” or simply “later,” is exact enough.
All in the Family
By 10:30 a.m. Agnes Brooks, 75, has left her modest, comfortable home on Benson Street for her charity work half a block away at Our Mother of Mercy Catholic Church, her church of fifty years. Once a week Mrs. Brooks and the other Legion of Mary Society ladies visit the sick in Fifth Ward, usually the elderly living alone. It was the church, she says, not herself or her late husband of 48 years, Osburn Brooks, that enabled her to raise a family of eleven children—five boys, six girls—in Fifth Ward, all avoiding jail, drug addiction, alcoholism, all except one earning college degrees, and all still living and working.
It is a formidable achievement to raise one child who escapes the many pitfalls of the ghetto, much less eleven, when every third teenager seems to be on the streets doing the junkie-nod among the whores and hustlers and old men clutching bottles of MD 20-20-. Around every corner there seems to be a joint, a bag of horse for $15, a bar where a young man searches for his manhood amid the screaming of the jukebox, the dancing, swaying, staggering, swaggering darkness of the crowds.
Mrs. Brooks fought the temptations of the ghetto streets every day and gave no quarter. It was a battle she did not intend to lose. “I had six children by 1937, and a public-health nurse told me to slow down, that my girls would be on the street because it was the Depression and that was easy money. I told her, ‘No, they won’t. Not as long as I’m alive. My father didn’t raise me to let my children become prostitutes.’ You don’t follow the crowd. You do right even if nobody else does. You treat white folks like anybody else. They’re folks, too. We had rules and discipline. But mainly I made sure my kids had no time for the streets. We all worked. If we were going to survive as a family, we had to, and I thank God and my church most of all.”
Osburn and Agnes Brooks moved to the small house on Benson and, as the family grew, they added on rather than move, so they could stay close to Mother of Mercy. All the kids began school at the church, the three oldest staying through all twelve grades, the rest graduating from Wheatley High School. Audrey, the oldest daughter, has retired from teaching in parochial and public schools. Osburn Junior got a PhD in theology and became a priest, teaching and working in Africa and New York. Osburn Senior remained a Baptist until 1972, two years before his death, when he requested that his religious affiliation be changed from Baptist to Catholic, answering his wife’s oldest prayer.
Osburn spent his life on the road, driving trucks for Cleveland Wholesale, Herrin Trucking, and Harris Transfer, so it was up to Agnes to keep things going. Until her children were in high school, she cooked all three meals a day for them. She earned extra money as a seamstress and as a housekeeper for the priest at Mother of Mercy. She made all the family’s clothes. Osburn’s job began at 5 a.m., and she always had his hot breakfast ready.
Since slavery, the black female has been the main source of family continuity. After the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the black man had to compete like everyone else for a wage. Poor whites, especially, didn’t like to lose. The “last to be hired, first to be fired” principle applied to black males made their employment the most vulnerable in the country. But black women could almost always find work in one of three places: a church, a white family’s home, or on the streets. Not until the twenties, when the first great female black blues singers opened up the world of entertainment, did the occupational landscape change.
Much has been said about the black American female-dominated family. But, as the books of Oscar Lewis and the plays of Sean O’Casey reveal, ghetto families in Mexico City, Puerto Rico, and Dublin are much the same. Where jobs are scarce, so are fathers. Is the unstable, “crumbling,” female-led black family in the U.S. better explained by its heritage of slavery, as the controversial Moynihan Report of 1965 concluded, or by the economic and social stresses caused by racism and exclusion from jobs and education?
One-fourth of American black families are broken up; one-third of American black children are fatherless. Certainly, divorce and separation remain the main causes of fatherless families, abetted by welfare laws that encourage fathers to leave their families. Often forgotten, however, are the alarming statistics regarding premature deaths in black males and the rate of illegitimate births among blacks, both of which help clarify the problem. After the age of twenty, one black man in ten will die before reaching forty, usually leaving children, as opposed to one white man in thirty. According to a 1973 survey, average black life expectancy in the U.S. is 65.9 years; white, 72.2. That means that 66 white males out of 100 will reach 65, and only 50 blacks. For females, 81 whites out of 100, compared to only 63 blacks, will reach age 62. It is simple enough: affluence can buy another decade of life.
The explanations behind the high rate of illegitimate black births are not complex. The Kinsey Report noted that 47 per cent of black females, compared to 42 per cent of white females, had premarital sex, but that 40 per cent of those blacks became pregnant as opposed to only 13 per cent of the whites. Not only are contraceptive devices more readily available to whites, so are the steps to take after pregnancy—abortion, forced marriage, or adoption. There are cultural differences also: having an illegitimate child in the ghetto is not a disgrace; it is in the more affluent parts of town. An illegitimate black child is less likely to ruin the mother’s chances for a “better marriage” or to destroy her social status.
Mrs. Brooks hasn’t heard of the Moynihan or Kinsey reports, and her children, although they grew up among the conditions described in these studies, have escaped their statistical categories. All eleven children are leading productive lives and making plans for a reunion with their mother next summer.
Like the children of the pioneers, ghetto children fashion toys from their landscape. Boys make cars by nailing together scrap lumber, using roller-skate wheels for tires, bottle caps for decoration, and a willow twig for a whip aerial. They take a sturdier, straighter willow branch and bend a bottle cap around the end for an arrow. Bows are made from oleander branches and twine, slingshots from half a broken bottle and a thick rubber band. Girls make flutes from bayou cane and dolls from bottles using ice twine for hair.
“Here’s the difference in all us peoples. ‘Colored people’ are those Uncle Toms who still think we on the plantations. ‘Negroes’ are those folks who don’t like the situation we live in but aren’t going to do anything about it. ‘Blacks’ are those of us who refuse to accept the way things are. Older folks are colored people; middle-aged folks are Negroes; and blacks are the young bloods like me.”—Franklin, eighteen, employed at Southern Pacific’s Englewood Yard.
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