Only the Strong Survive
(Page 5 of 8)
Inside the emergency room, people were lined up at the admittance window like customers at a grocery-store checkout counter. Cut, crying, bleeding, moaning. Glen and Scotty wheeled Perkins into a shock room. Doctors and nurses swarmed over him, stripping off his natty herringbone pants, blood-soaked sweater, small gold neck chain, brown loafers, and socks. From the shock table, Perkins wrote his name and telephone number on the back of an envelope in response to a nurse’s question. Thanks to the EMTs and the emergency room, it was not O.C.’s destiny to become Houston’s 405th homicide victim in 1978 this November Friday night.
A housing survey by a citizen’s group in Fifth Ward produced these findings. One-third of the complaints were exterior defects: broken doors, holes in outside walls, sagging porches, broken chimneys. One-third were interior violations that could hardly be attributed to tenants: bad wiring, decaying plumbing, defective heating hook-ups, rat and roach infestation. And one-third of the violations were probably caused by tenant: broken windows, trash in the yard. The results pointed more to the negligence of the city and the landlord than to the tenant.
The Hustle
Blue has it made. He has left behind his boyhood home, a Fifth Ward shot-gun house, over near the Southern Pacific yard, for a quiet midtown apartment at $250 a month for one bedroom. The white cop who first busted him years ago called the shot-guns “breeding huts.” Blue hasn’t forgotten that phrase or the house with its newspaper windows and urine stench. It was up on bricks like all the others, and the only good memory he has from Schweikhardt Street is of creeping under the house in the damp darkness with his gingerbread-colored girl friend and exploring her body.
What pleases Blue these days are his shoes—twenty pairs, mostly Guccis and ‘gators, shined and sitting in neat rows in his closet eight floors up in midtown. Blacks have a thing about shoes, Blue thinks. Comes from having bunions. Bunions come from having to stand up all day walking, working, waiting in lines, lifting, parking cars. Bunions were an affliction of the Negro race, like high blood pressure after forty for eating too much salt.
Blue is a hustler and dope dealer, one of the best in each trade, who has never forgotten his roots. No matter where he travels—down to New Orleans for the Ali-Spinks fight, for instance—when asked his home, he always answers: “Fifth Ward, my man.” Every brother knows the Bloody Fifth. So he comes back almost every night to see friends and be close to business, parking his new white El Dorado near Broussard’s Restaurant across from Kelly Village and walking over to the concrete pavilion known as “the Block” to greet the young bloods jiving and hustling cameras, watches, rings, almost anything, out of grocery bags on the back seats of more modest cars parked around the cul-de-sac. Looking at the younger kids, he sees himself fifteen years ago, still traveling hard on the asphalt, shooting craps behind the basketball goal, trying to perfect his hustle. He was sure there was a game tonight and there was.
He perfected his soul walk long ago: heel first, leg dropping and bending slowly in a gentle, rhythmic, graceful stride. One arm swinging across the body, the other tucked inside the pocket of his Cassini mohair suit pants. Nothing hurried. Very cool. Blue looked like the Reverend Jesse Jackson, a man he much admired. He had once attended Jackson’s “Operation Breadbasket” meetings at the Capital Theatre in Chicago on Saturday mornings and had been spellbound by Jackson’s famous introduction:
“I am,” and the audience would answer, “somebody.”
I may be poor but I am somebody.
I may be unemployed but I am somebody.
I may be on welfare but I am somebody.
I may be down and out but I am somebody.
I am black and beautiful and I am somebody.
On and on. The technique was as old as West African call-and-response chants, and Blue never failed to respond. Every American black was first an African and every American black was once a slave, the only immigrants who didn’t come to American voluntarily and the only ones imported specifically for hard, mean rural labor. That’s why the chants and the blues meant something. How did Al Hibbler once define a “soul” singer? One who was raised in old-time religion, one who had been hurt by a woman, and one who knew what slavery was all about.
It was a woman’s hurt that put Blue on the streets seventeen years ago. She broke his heart, gave him a heavy bale to tote, for sure too heavy to carry around the halls of Wheatley. So one day he walked out and never came back. He knew the streets were vicious unless you had a hustle. He had seen the casualties, wasted lives with lost hopes reflected in their eyes, sitting down in Pearl Harbor or sleeping in Pig’s Pool Hall until the Pig kicked them out. You had to get it together, not become a disgrace to the race. You had to remember Malcolm.
Blue started by hustling pool at Pig’s, playing pros like Cannonball and Scratch for hours, watching the big games, copping moves, learning about discipline under pressure. From pool, most young hustlers graduate to “boosting,” reselling hot merchandise like the amateurs on the Block. The money isn’t bad. You buy the goods from shoplifters or addicts for 20 per cent of the selling price, resell it at 40 to 60 per cent, and turn a 100 per cent profit. But to make big money requires a lot of goods, too much time, and a considerable risk of getting caught with the stuff. Girls are better, dope better still.
There are three kinds of girls a pimp controls: working girls who bring in portions of their paychecks; shoplifters; and whores. Moving up the ladder of pimp success is like graduating from Italian Swiss Colony Black Port to Canadian Club to Chivas Regal, and from a used T-bird to a Deuce-and-a-quarter (a Buick 225) to a “Hog”: the Cadillac Eldorado. Most pimps begin with the working girls and end with the streetwalkers, where the money is. That was Blue’s progression.
Blue had his rules. He was frosty, cool, always kept a lid on his emotions. He never slept with his girls and used violence only when necessary, which was fairly often. Most important, he worked at always having the right thing ready to say when challenged. He kept his game tight.
“There are only three ways for a black man in America to make a lot of money,” mused Blue, as we cruised Jensen checking on his “bus stop” girls. “Singing rock ‘n’ roll, playing basketball, or selling dope. I don’t mess with hard drugs much. Just a lot of good weed. My partner is an old dude in east Fifth Ward you would think was a plumber. Man brings down a hundred thou a year and saves most of it for his kids.
“I don’t agree with the usual hustler love for lots of flash. You got to look prosperous, but that pimp hat, dashboard fuzz, ring-on-each-finger jive just brings attention from the police. Every hustler I know hates to work, and I do too. I will not “do eight” for the Man. Never. Man around here used to say, ‘You see me with a pick and a shovel, you get one, too, ‘cause I just struck gold.’ Right on. My ladies and reefer pay for everything. Now I’m looking for a crib and a respectable, light-skinned colored girl, a house north of here but not too far from Bloody Fifth. So that I can stay in touch spiritually, dig?”
From the earliest days, Houston has had wards. The city charter of 1839 divided the city into five wards (a sixth, created after Reconstruction, in 1874, was discontinued) using the corner of Main and Congress as the keystone. The city government was made up of aldermen elected from each ward. By April 1, 1906, when the first city commission took office, Houston had long outgrown its original five-mile township site, so the wards were abolished but the cultural boundaries remained.
Hope Springs Eternal
Standing at Lyon and Jensen after lunch, I heard poetry coming from the second floor of the old Woolworth Dimestore Building. It was a strong female voice that had a singing quality, the music of spoken incantation. The melody and the meaning she gave her lines told of self-pride and unbreakable endurance. Poetry in Pearl Harbor? The incongruity seemed ludicrous.
The voice came from a woman to whom the years had given an extraordinary beauty and eternal vitality. Here in the cockpit of the most ravaged sector of Fifth Ward, Barbara Marshall, age 45, came each day to teach potential dropout kids the beauty of words and the magic of theater. Her work as a teacher and as director of the city’s Urban Theatre was part of HOPE (Human Organizational Political and Economic) Development, Inc., the most grass roots-level of Fifth Ward’s social agencies.
HOPE was the city’s second antipoverty agency, begun in the long hot summer of 1967 with a $27,000 grant and the energies of the Reverend Earl Allen, a Methodist minister who had been with the Harris County Community Action Association. During the next few years, HOPE became a force in the black community, publishing the Voice of Hope newspaper, providing job-training programs, legal aid, employment help, and classes for children from poor families. HOPE flourished in the early seventies, housed in three buildings along Lyons Avenue. Its Black Arts Center became the focus of black cultural activities in Houston: plays in the Roxy Theatre; workshops for drama, art, music, and poetry at the headquarters; and a gallery and museum at the De Luxe Theatre, which housed the Menil Foundation’s Tribal Art of Africa collection.
My Library
