Only the Strong Survive
(Page 7 of 8)
Peeking out my window, I saw—not four feet away—a boy about sixteen, dressed in dark pants, black T-shirt, and black cap, moving up the stairs with the certainty of a leopard. He jumped up on the railing, holding onto my apartment roof, and studied the leap he would have to make over the slat-board fence Mrs. Lovick had built along the roof edge to keep out young men in black outfits. He waited and listened. Then he crouched, jumped, straddled, swung his leg over, and landed on the roof. I was watching a burglary in progress, statistics coming alive, perhaps the first steps toward a career spent in prison, a large part of the pathology of the Fifth Ward unfolding before me.
The incentive certainly was there. Lovick’s did a good, steady business from 6a.m. until midnight. One call almost did all—the place sold meals, liquor, stationary, soap powder, and, of course, prescriptions from Moses Bismark Lovick’s pharmacy. Bismark Lovick was a hard working man. During the day, he ran a new pharmacy on Dairy-Ashford Road, eighteen miles away in the white enclaves of far West Houston, then drove his Mazda station wagon back to manage Fifth Ward Lovick’s until midnight.
Crouched low on one knee, the figure on the roof was trying to open the lock on the skylight window with a ball-peen hammer. He moved over to the shed that housed the air conditioner, but it gave no access to the store below. Downstairs, there was noise on the Staples side of Lovick’s, the sound of humming and sweeping. It was the drugstore cleanup man, dressed in his usual blue suit coat and humming the usual meandering, vague-sounding spiritual. The rooftop figure froze. He crouch-sprinted across the roof and dropped over the far side. The old man reached his favorite “I Cannot Get There by Myself” chorus and emptied his cardboard box of beer bottles and trash into the trash bin.
On one Fifth Ward block of lower-middle-class houses, the following burglary prevention devices were noticed: “Beware—Dangerous Dog” signs; burglar bars; barbed wire around a front porch; two-by-four planks nailed across a window; high, spiked fences; three-inch iron bands wrapped around window-unit air conditioners; floodlights.
“If you are running in Fifth Ward, you better be running laps.”—John, 16, pool player and street-corner teenager.
When we met at the Block after work one evening and I asked his name, he got off the car hood, hitched up his copper Sansabelt trousers, and said, “They call me Silky Slim.” He was not contributing to the unemployment rate among black teenagers—nearly 40 per cent—but had a job downtown with a moving company. Also, Silky Slim was his only nickname, which is unusual in the ghetto. Some young bloods have four: from parents, school, friends, and the street. Although he worked, Silky’s beat was the street, where he had had most of his experiences as a young man, free from adults, where he and his peers could set the rules and rituals. Hanging out with Silky, you developed a heightened sense of the value of the instinctive life.
“Niggers always had to shuck ’n’ jive to get along and keep a little dignity. Indians showed us what happens when you get tough with the white man. Ain’t none of them left. So as a kid you had a ‘rap,’ something to create a favorable impression and still have cool. You got your rap from ‘playin’ the dozens.’ That’s when you and your buddy had an insult contest, most of the time talking nasty about your mother. You know, ‘You momma so ugly sleep had to throw a sheet over her to get close.’ That’s the only nice one I can think of. Then he would come back at you. To win, you had to ‘cap his rap,’ come out with the baddest insult, and you had to keep cool no matter how bad his was.
“I learned about life on the street, what to wear, givin’ skin, a few hustles, and all about women and cops. I learned about waitin’ for things to happen because sooner or later they do. On the street you don’t have to Uncle Tom like you do at work and you get away from those Ivy League niggers that are always in the discos. With the brothers on the street is the only time I feel like a man.”
Be True to Your School
When the young of Fifth Ward are young no more, they will remember Wheatley High School. It serves as a major link and an agreeable meeting ground between generations, a rallying cry, and most of all, a tangible symbol of pride. What other high school in Texas can boast among its graduates two national politicians, one vice-presidential nominee (former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan and Congressman Mickey Leland); two great jazz musicians (Arnett Cobb and Illinois Jacquet); a world heavyweight boxing champion (George Foreman); two nationally known musical groups (Archie Bell and the Drells and the Jazz Crusaders); a law school dean (TSU’s Dr. Otis King); a Guggenheim fellow (dentist Dr. Marion Ford); pro basketball players (Dwight Jones and Tex Harrison); and pro football players (James Young and Godwin Turk).
Phillis Wheatley was a slave girl captured in Senegal when she was eight, brought to Boston in 1761, and bought by a wealthy tailor, John Wheatley, as a personal servant for his wife. Her first poem was published when she was seventeen, “A Poem by Phillis, a Negro Girl in Boston, on the Death of the Reverend George Whitefield.” Freed at age twenty, she went to London, where enjoyed great success as the “Negro Poetess.” In 1773, her poems were collcted in a book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.
One late afternoon, when the 1197 black, 125 Mexican American, and 8 white students had finished their classes and gone for the day, principal Charles Herald poured a cup of coffee and talked about the remarkable institution he heads. “For many, Fifth Ward is Wheatley High School. We have a very active alumni chapter in Los Angeles of over two hundred members. They gave Mickey Leland a special award last fall. And this is true all over the country, blacks who have moved from Fifth Ward still cling closely to Wheatley.
“Integration hurt us. Our best teachers and students went elsewhere, and, while we still have gifted individuals, our overall test scores are down. Still, about fifty per cent of our graduates attempt college,” said Herald. He’s right. The school’s average reading score in 1977 was in the bottom eleventh percentile, down a point from 1976. This meant that Wheatley students read worse than 89 per cent of the nation’s high school students. Low academic achievement is the main reason Houston Independent School District officials last year proposed to make Wheatley a model inner-city school with new educational programs, higher teacher salaries, and smaller classes.
“The seventies have brought peace and quiet, at least,” continued Herald. “No more television cameras to incite the students, as we had during the civil rights struggle in the sixties. We have the normal discipline and truancy problems of any high school and fewer pregnancies. A lot of dope around, I’m afraid, and the street always takes a toll. Hell, the street is fun. It was when I went to Wheatley. It’s not so fun when you get older.” Outside, kids were smoking cigarettes on the curb, dribbling a basketball down Market Street, striking out for a thousand different destinations, as they would when they left Wheatley for the last time. But they will be back, back to cheer the Wildcats, back for a homecoming dance or a speech by Congressman Leland, back to bask in the pride of the purple and white.
If tenants of the Fifth Ward shotgun houses fall behind with their $17.50-a-week rent, landlords go through the red-tape motions of sending bills and making telephone calls. If this proves unsatisfactory, many simply remove a tenant’s front door, leaving the house vulnerable to attack from everything.
The east end of Fifth Ward is dominated by Southern Pacific’s 23-year-old, 4½ mile-long, 359-acre Englewood Radar Yard, the largest train yard in the South. On its 113 miles of track, 60 trains a day—between 5000 and 6000 freight cars—are moved, pushed, shuffled to make up freight trains heading across the country. The Mexican Americans living in east Fifth Ward call the area el Creosote because of the smell emanating from SP’s wood-preservation plant. Here in Englewood Yard, the railroad will treat and ship 1.7 million crossties a year, valued at $22.1 million.
Rock of Ages
From the beginning, it was the black man’s religion that helped make bearable his most unendurable life in America. The primary function of the “praise houses” and “hush harbors” on Sunday was to develop a will to survive the other six days. In the church, blacks were able to break out of their isolation, cultivate a bond with other plantation slaves, aspire to leadership, and find personal affirmation and self-esteem. Here, a field hand or washwoman could exercise power like the white man did in politics. In every other social arena—family, job, business, government, school, home—the black man and woman were dependent on and controlled by the white man. Only in church—this still most segregated institution—were they truly free.
From the beginning, blacks were drawn toward the Baptist religion and its preachers’ fiery and emotional message of salvation and hope and the prospect of escape from earthly woes. The parables and songs about the oppression of the Jews and the Promised Land rang true. The total immersion of baptism was only a Christian reenactment of West African river ceremonies. So, from these one-room, whitewashed churches, built of Southern pine, sitting in the forest at the end of some red dirt road, came the beginnings of the black middle class, of black colleges and schools, of black acting, music, and political leadership.
My Library
