A Conversation with the Mann (2 page)

More than anything in the world I wanted to gamble.

Not for the jazz of laying a bet, or the sake of wagering money. What I wanted was to stand at a table with all those people—suited
men, ladies in their best dresses—living high and living fast and living Cocktail Society. I wanted to see them do a Red Sea-part
as I made my way to the roulette wheel and listened to all their starstruck bits: “Great job tonight, Jackie.” “Heck of a
show, Jackie. Don't know when I cracked up as much.” “Would you mind saying hello to the Mrs., Jackie? She's such a big fan
of yours. It would mean so much.” I wanted them to fawn and gush and throw me their love same as they threw it at me when
I was performing, when I was standing three feet above them.

I wanted them to accept me.

Accept me? They couldn't even see me. I got paid nearly a grand a week, I got pulled back up onstage to do more time by the
biggest stars alive, I got standing O's … And when it was all over I got sent out the back door.

You know what went out the back?

Trash went out the back. Stinking garbage and rotting food and black comics got sent straight to the alley, never mind how
well they'd just done in the show room.

Danny Thomas had the audience swinging. He had to swing them hard to keep them from thinking back and recalling a bit I'd
done and murmuring about me. I was that good.

I felt warm. I felt vain. I felt a shot of pride, and it made me high.

And then I did it. No back-and-forth debate with myself, no working my way to a decision. I just did it. I just pushed open
the doors and walked out of the Copa Room and into the casino.

Loud as the casino was with all the pinging of slot machines and the mucking of chips, with crisp new money being crackled
across the green felt, I swear the second I took step one onto the floor the place went morgue silent and twice as cold. I
could hear every whisper. I could
hear
every look. Some of the looks said: Isn't that Jackie Mann? A few said: I didn't know this joint was progressive. Most of
the looks said and said quite clearly: What the hell is a nigger doing in here?

And all that big-star bravado I'd carried with me melted from their hot stares and quiet contempt. I got the shakes. I got
the sweats. I could feel a sheen of it collecting across my forehead. I remembered those pictures of the Little Rock kids,
the ones who'd integrated the high school. I remembered the Jesus-don't-lynch-me fear sopped up in their race memory that
seeped from the cracks in all that stoic jazz they put on. I knew that's how I must have looked just then: Jackie Mann, Negro
agitator for gambling rights.

But I kept on. Doing my best high-class bits, I swaggered Peter Lawford-style for the roulette wheel, my eyes on the prize.
A hundred-dollar bill came up out of my pocket. Let them all see. Let them see how big Jackie Mann plays. I just hoped they
couldn't see the sweat stain that Ben Franklin's face had soaked up from my palm.

So close to the table …

That's when I got stopped. Blocking my path, one of the casino housemen—horned into a suit that didn't begin to cover his
heft—planted himself between me and the roulette wheel.

“No” was all he said. That plain. That simple. That harsh. Not “I'm sorry, Mr. Mann” or “You know the rules, Mr. Mann” or
atleast “Hey, Charlie, beat it before you find out what hot water is.” He just said no like I was some dog he had to scold
for soiling his favorite afghan.

Everywhere else in the casino the stares got louder, they encouraged the chucker to do something about the uppity colored
who'd wandered into their playground.

I tried to peek around the guy. If I couldn't gamble, at least let me see the table up close. At least let me get tossed
from the floor having accomplished that much. Or that little. I couldn't hardly see anything. The goon was not an easy cat
to look around.

He said to me again, “no,” then cracked the knuckles of his right fist, weeded with black hair, in the clutch of his left
hand. The sound was the same as rocks getting crunched. This one got paid to deal with trouble. Trouble was what he was hoping
I'd give him. Hell, trouble or no, he was ready to throw me a beat down just for practice—one more in a string of abuses I'd
been taking the whole of my life.

Defeat crawled over me. Humiliation crawled with it.

From behind: a hand on my shoulder.

Swell, I thought. The houseman's got pals. A beating was about to come at me from all sides, front and back, panoramic and
in Vista-Vision.

Except … The houseman's eyes went wide and his lips started to jump around. A lyrical voice behind me said to the heavy, told
him: “It's okay. Charlie here's with me.”

First off I thought it was Jack Entratter, the hey-boy who fronted the Sands for its out-of-town owners, who'd stepped in
to square things for me. But as I looked, I saw the hand on my shoulder was dark-skinned. Dark-skinned to the point it made
me look octoroon. The sight of it was a sock that knocked me over to Queer Street.

What black man, what black man in Las Vegas in 1959 could put that kind of fear into a roughneck on the casino payroll?

I turned and I saw. I turned and I looked into the eyes, the one good eye, of Mr. Sammy Davis, Jr.

I
don't think you can imagine the loneliness of a child born different. Not physically different, not handicapped, not deformed
or marked. A child born different in a way you can't describe or recognize, but that's just as real as the kid with a bad
leg or mangled hand—always the outcast, always the one standing in a corner, ghosdike, watching the rest of the world parade
by. It's as if there's something about him, some odd and un-normal thing inside him, invisible but clearly advertising he's
not the same as everyone else. The response from everyone else being laughs and ridicule because they don't know what to do
with a kid born different except to mock it. And that feeling of not belonging, of lonely isolation in a world of people and
the knowing that you will never ever be like them and will never ever be accepted by anyone … It's a feeling that lasts a
lifetime. It's a scar that never fades.

I
WAS BORN IN
H
ARLEM.
More than that, the specifics, the exact where and when of the event, are lost to me. By the time I was old enough to want
to know those things about me I had no one to ask. My pop, Kenneth Mann, and I didn't talk much. My mother, Anna, I couldn't
talk to at all. What I can say for certain is the fondest memory I have of my childhood is the day I was able to leave it
all behind me.

I was an only child. The only child my mother would have, and the only child my father would want, and to say “want” is an
assumption, as he often made my desirability questionable. My father was a big man, over six feet and carrying nearly two
hundred pounds, and is best described as a combination of angry and pathetic. His anger was easy to understand. He was a black
man, and being a black man in the early parts of the twentieth century would be enough to give the mildest of men some rage.
He was a poor man, too. Even in the North, the industrial, progressive North, finding a steady, good-paying job was a trick
he never got down to habit. My father took whatever work he could: a shoe shine, a bathroom attendant, a janitor in the subway
system. A newsboy. A grown man, six feet plus, working as a newsie. “Don't Look” jobs, I heard my father call them. The people
you serve don't look at you while you clean their shoes, pass them a towel to dry their hands. Just do your work, make change
for their crisp new fives and tens, and give them a “Thanks yuh, suh” when you're done. To them you don't exist. You don't
matter. I said before: Pop's anger I could understand.

What I couldn't understand was him being so pitiful. It had to do with, I guess, his accident. About as far back as I can
remember my pop had been debilitated. At one point he had worked in construction. Not as any kind of skilled laborer or tradesman.
Blacks didn't much get the education needed for that kind of work, and if they did they just plain didn't get that kind of
work. So my father, like a lot of other black fathers, was a human pack-mule: lifting lumber, carrying bricks. Doing whatever
kind of labor was too much or too hard or too far beneath the whites. One day, on the job, he'd injured himself, his back
or hip lifting or hauling or doing whatever. I'm not exactly sure how. I'm not exactly sure how badly. He walked fine, without
much of a limp I could see. Had no problem with stairs or heavy loads that I could tell. But he was hurt. So he'd say. He
was hurt enough to stop working and start on the dole. Start, and never quit. Why should he? To his way of thinking, why should
he slave; why shine shoes or shill newspapers when he could be handed money? Why try when not trying paid the same? With nothing
else to do, he passed the hours with booze, and pretty soon, when a liquor buzz couldn't last him the day, he graduated to
grass and pills. Pop became an equal-opportunity abuser. He would drink anything too thin to eat. He would smoke anything
you could roll. In a tight spot, glue in a bag would do just fine. His highs expressed themselves with their own personalities.
The speed high that kept him jittery and dancing, eager to get somewhere even though he had nowhere to be. His booze high
was a sullen low that put heat to the anger he carried. It recognized no one, came at whoever crossed it with swinging fists
looking to pay back the whole world for all the no-good it'd handed him. And there was the weed high that kept Pop laughing
when there was nothing to laugh at. Didn't matter. Pop would make up things to laugh about, act a clown and laugh at himself
if he had to. He would make noises, do big, broad pantomimes of people who lived in the building. Put on a whole little crazy
act. Watching him was no different from watching a program on television. Better than that. A TV show didn't chase you around
the apartment, tickle you to the ground when it caught you. A TV show didn't take you, lift you in the air, smile at you with
a grin that was almost coonish but full of love, and tell you: “You my boy, Jackie. That's my boy.” And me and Mom would laugh
along and play along, and bad as things were, even though we were laughing at a man lifted on dope, for a while Pop could
make us forget the troubles we lived with. If I had to pick, without a doubt that was my favorite high. Thing of it was, the
pop I left when I went to school in the morning was never the same one I returned to at night. That made going home real frightening,
every step of the walk asking: Is there a hug waiting for me, or a slap? A story that won't end, or a whupping that'll go
on and on? Sometimes I'd be too scared to climb the stairs to the apartment. Long after the other kids had gone home for dinner
and there was no one to play with, I'd sit on the stoop of our building and try to listen through all the other noises that
fought each other in the city. If I could hear laughing from our apartment, I'd go up. If I heard screaming, crashing dishes
… Well, it got so I taught myself to sit on the stoop well into night when I had to.

But no matter the high, Pop was high. Always. The drink and drugs made him useless, and being useless—a father that was no
good for his family—that's what made him pathetic. That left caring for the family, what the three of us had that passed for
a family, to my mother.

My mother was beautiful. I remember that most about her. She was a very dark-skinned lady, from the Caribbean, or at least
her family was. She had soft features and was a little plump, which made her face more round than angular. Her hair had no
kink. It was wavy and near shoulder-length, what back then got called “good hair.” In my memory, my mother was without blemish.

What else I remember is Mom worked hard to give us what Pop's aid couldn't: decent food and wearable clothes. Our home, our
apartment—a couple of rooms off three flights of stairs—was what you would call a “make-do” home. We made do with bread when
there was no meat to stick between die slices. We made do with watery soup when there was no bread. We made do with the occasional
rat because they ate the cockroaches that infected every dark corner. In the winters we were always cold, but we never froze.
We were always hungry, but we never starved. Somehow, because of Mom, we always made do.

Mom was a domestic. Domestic was polite for maid. She was a cleaning woman for the white folks on the East Side and the Upper
West Side, any side of town she could find a floor that needed to be scrubbed, a toilet that could use some polishing. Mom
worked a lot. Work was easy for her to find. People liked her. She was honest. She was, I remember, cheerful. She would wake
up mornings early and fix me breakfast, doing little extras like cutting strawberries and leaving them for me to put on my
cereal, then go out into the dark before dawn to ride a subway to the first of four, five apartments or houses she would clean
that day. She would come home again, late, tired, but not so tired that she couldn't make me a meal, wash me, then put me
to bed. And every night after my mother turned out the light I would feel a butterfly kiss on my forehead. Then I would hear
her voice in the dark whispering to me: “You're a special one, Jackie Mann. Don't let nobody ever tell you otherwise.”

Special, she would say. Different, I would think.