Growing Up (27 page)

My ignorance of the world beyond schoolroom, baseball diamond, and family circle was remarkable even for a fourteen-year-old. Except for the previous year’s experience at City College I had spent my childhood in the blue-collar world where there was neither money, leisure, nor stimulus to cultivate an intelligent world view. I had never been exposed to art, nor attended a concert, nor listened to a symphony even on records. A phonograph would have been an impossible luxury for my mother. The fierce political passions of the 1930s, the clash of ideas about communism,
fascism, socialism, were very remote from the gray depths we inhabited. The debates that engaged the intellectual world filtered down to us in refracted and weakened distortions, like sunlight groping toward the ocean bed.

I knew about Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. They were bad guys. I thought of the world in terms of bad guys and good guys, and I knew Hitler and Mussolini were bad guys, though I didn’t know why. Franklin Roosevelt was a good guy of legendary proportions. All Americans were good guys, and America was invincible because it was on the good side of whatever the issue might be. Though Hitler and Mussolini were bad guys, they were also funny comic-opera figures, not only because they looked funny—Hitler with his silly mustache, Mussolini with his strut and bulbous jaw—but also because they acted as if they thought they could whip America. That was silly. Nobody could whip America.

At the movies one afternoon in 1938, my buddy John Heideman and I watched the usual newsreels of nastiness in Europe—Hitler taking the mass salute at Munich, Mussolini strutting like a rooster. In the middle of it, John nudged me and said, “America ought to go over there and clean the whole place out like a rat’s nest.” I had no doubt America could clean Europe out like a rat’s nest if it wanted to. And even if somebody had told me the United States Army consisted of only 227,000 soldiers and had equipment for only 75,000 of those, my confidence wouldn’t have fallen. By European standards our army may have looked “like a few nice boys with BB guns,” as
Time
magazine put it, but that wouldn’t have troubled me. For Americans, I’d have retorted, BB guns were enough to do the job.

What I knew of the world’s turmoil came mostly from “War Cards” which, like baseball cards, came packed with penny bubble gum. These depicted Japanese atrocities in China, Italian atrocities in Ethiopia, and slaughters of women and children in the Spanish Civil War. From these I knew that Japan was bad and China good, that Italy was bad and Ethiopia good. The lesson on Spain was confusing. One side murdered nuns and the other bombed helpless
villages, but I was uncertain which side was which, and hadn’t a guess what the Spanish war was about. The passionate quarrels in intellectual circles about Nazi and Soviet intervention in Spain, and its meaning, and what decent Americans should do about it—only the slightest sense of all this seeped down to the working-class world of southwest Baltimore.

On Lombard Street and in Belleville the great menace of the 1930s was the Depression, not fascism or communism. When I entered City College, where most of my classmates came from more sophisticated families, I was surprised to find boys my own age who worried about Hitler, Stalin, and the future of Europe. Many of my classmates were Jewish, and some talked about relatives in Germany and what was happening to them under Hitler. A few had refugee relatives from Germany living in their homes. One, I was startled to discover, called himself a communist and believed communism was mankind’s only hope. When he told me this I decided he was a crackpot, but went on enjoying his friendship. After all, he was a musician. I’d learned on Lombard Street that longhairs were supposed to be a little nutty.

My innocence of modern politics lasted until I went to Hopkins. As a senior in high school I was called for an interview before the Honor Society, a group composed of the school’s intellectual elite. Someone had put me up for membership. The interview turned out to be a trial, with the group’s president acting as prosecutor. After a few questions about my academic history, he asked, “What’s your opinion about the split between Stalin and Trotsky?”

I had no opinion.

“Why not?”

“I haven’t heard about it.”

My interrogator stared at me. Though he was about my age, he had prematurely thinning hair, a gray complexion, and a gaunt ascetic face, which made him seem much older. He wasn’t in my class and we’d never spoken before, but I’d heard of his brainpower. “You must know there was a struggle for power in Russia between the Trotskyists and Stalinists,” he said.

I confessed I didn’t. Eyebrows were raised in the jury box. The prosecutor looked at his colleagues and committed a little shrug, as though to say, “Need we waste more time on this clod?”

A defense attorney stood up, a boy named George Winokur. I scarcely knew him either, but for some reason he’d decided to take my case and somehow had got access to my grades. Like a lawyer leading a witness, he asked, “What was your last mark in Latin?”

It was high, very close to the top of the class. I was strong on the first century
A.D.
; it was the twentieth I was ignorant about. The prosecutor cut in. “Do you know who Leon Trotsky is?”

I didn’t.

“Never heard of Leon Trotsky?”

I hadn’t.

Winokur interrupted, trying to limit the damage. “You’ve also taken three years of French, haven’t you?”

I had.

“Would you tell us what your mark was in French last term?”

Since the French teacher marked “on the curve” and I’d scored highest in the class, my grade was 100. Winokur smiled in triumph. He was an admirer of Clarence Darrow and felt as if he’d saved another of society’s victims from the gallows.

“Very impressive,” sniffed the prosecutor in a tone that conveyed how unimpressed he was. “Now tell us about Stalin. Have you ever heard of Stalin?”

“He’s the dictator of communist Russia.”

“Well,” said the prosecutor, looking at the jury and feigning a smile, “he does know something. He’s heard of Stalin.” Then turning to me: “You’ve probably heard of Adolf Hitler, too.”

The United States was now at war with Hitler. I understood what I was being told. Though ignorant, I wasn’t dumb, and I refused to compound my own disgrace by dignifying his last remark with a reply. They convicted me very quickly, and not without justice, since my ignorance of the modern world hardly qualified me to join the elite.

Lombard Street society would have seemed barbaric to my
prosecutor and probably to most of the boys I admired at City College. To them, 1938 was the year of Munich, when Neville Chamberlain sold Czechoslavakia to Hitler for “peace for our time.” In Lombard Street, however, it was the year the dignity of the white race hung in the balance scales of history. While uptown Baltimore debated war and the future of civilization, the men of Lombard Street sat on their stoops in shirt-sleeves, puffed their pipes, and pondered a cruel theological mystery. It could best be stated as a question: to wit, why had God permitted Joe Louis to become the heavyweight champion of the world?

The racial doctrine of our neighborhood was “separate and unequal.” Black people were considered unworthy and inconsequential. There was “a place” for black people, and they were tolerable so long as they knew their “place” and stayed in it. Unfortunately, some became “uppity,” didn’t know their “place,” didn’t stay in it, wanted to walk right into the fancy downtown stores—Hutzler’s and Hochschild, Kohn’s—and try on clothes from the rack, clothes that white people might later want to try on. Most stores, of course, didn’t put up with that. They didn’t refuse to sell to blacks—”niggers,” as everybody in my neighborhood called them—but most refused to let them try on garments before buying.

My mother had taught me contempt for bigotry. Though she still had a good bit of old Virginia la-di-dah in her attitude toward blacks, she’d taught me to look down on race baiters as “poor white trash.” Blacks were to be judged just like white people, strictly on individual character and merit. On coming to Baltimore, I was shocked by the blatant racism candidly expressed daily in our new neighborhood. After a year or so there I was more shocked to hear my mother tell Uncle Harold one night, “I’ve got nothing against a Negro as long as he knows his place.” Racism seemed to be contagious.

The blacks’ place in our neighborhood was Lemmon Street, the back alley between Lombard and Pratt. There they lived in ancient brick dilapidations, tiny row houses two stories high and two windows wide with views overlooking the garbage cans of the
whites. There they were tolerated so long as they didn’t make an unsightly show of themselves around on Pratt or Lombard where whites presided. This social organization had been in place so long it seemed to have been divinely ordained. The superiority of the white man, the unworthiness of the black—these were assumptions at the very foundation of society. And yet, if this order had been divinely ordained, why, oh why had God permitted Joe Louis to become heavyweight champion of the world?

How could faith in the universal order be justified so long as Joe Louis, a black man, was allowed to pound white men senseless with so little exertion? Joe Louis was a living, breathing mockery of the natural order of things. He had won his title in 1937. Before then and since, he had agreeably stepped into the ring with every white hope willing to have his brains scrambled. Now at the peak of his art, Louis dispatched all comers with such finality that his challengers were called “The Bum-of-the-Month-Club.” The ease with which he did the job, often in a round or two without working up a sweat, was gall in the white supremacist’s soul.

Louis’s exercises were broadcast on the radio and eagerly listened to by the whole community. You heard those awesome words booming out of the speaker from faraway New York: “In this corner—wearing purple trunks—weighing 197 pounds—the Brown Bomber from Detroit—” And then the monstrous roar of that faraway crowd, the gong, the crackling voice of Clem McCarthy: “—Louis measures him—a left to the jaw, a right to the body—” And then it was all over, for Louis was not a man to dawdle at his work.

And then, always, up from dismal Lemmon Street, which lay beneath our open kitchen window, I’d hear shouts, cheering, clapping, a tumult of joyous celebration issuing from the houses where the blacks lived. Out front in Lombard Street, the silence of the tomb. Once again Joe Louis had offended the white neighborhood by giving Lemmon Street a good time.

Lemmon Street people never made much fuss outside their houses. In black districts of Baltimore, celebrators poured out of houses and bars, filling the streets and whooping with pleasure
each time Louis finished one of his executions, but there was none of this in white neighborhoods where blacks lived in the alleys. People in Lemmon Street obviously thought too much celebration would be indiscreet. As I discovered in 1938, though, their spirit was not completely lifeless. That summer I witnessed a spectacular development in racial affairs.

For months we had been occupied with the most momentous encounter in the history of sport: Joe Louis had signed to fight Max Schmeling for a second time. Schmeling was the only man who had ever beaten Louis, and he hadn’t just beaten him, he had battered him mercilessly, then knocked him out in the twelfth round. This triumph for the white cause had occurred in 1936. Afterwards, Schmeling published a gloating article in the
Saturday Evening Post
explaining how he had found Louis’s fatal weakness. Schmeling was a white man. A German, admittedly, and officially approved by Adolf Hitler at a time when Germans were not terribly popular, but, above all, he was a white man. White pulses pounded with anticipation as the second fight approached, and black pulses, for all I know, may have pounded with dread. The white neighborhood awaited the second fight with fevered hopes. Perhaps God had raised Joe Louis so high only to humble him at the fists of the great German white hope.

At last the night of the titanic battle arrived, and I settled by my radio to attend upon the pivotal point of the modern age. What occurred was not the turning of the tide at Gettysburg nor the stand of the Spartans at Thermopylae, but hardly more than a fly-swatting. At the bell Louis left his corner, appraised Schmeling the way a butcher eyes a side of beef—we all saw it over and over again in movie newsreels later—then punched him senseless in two minutes and nine seconds. Paralyzing in its brutal suddenness, it was the ultimate anticlimax for the white race.

From Lemmon Street I heard the customary whooping and cheering rise into the sour Baltimore night. I went to the kitchen window. Doors were being flung open down there. People were streaming out into the alley, pounding each other delightedly on the back, and roaring with exultation. Then I saw someone start
to move up the alley, out toward white territory, and the rest of the group, seized by an instinct to defy destiny, falling in behind him and moving en masse.

I watched them march out of the alley and turn the corner, then ran to the front of the apartment to see if they were coming into Lombard Street. They were. They seemed to have been joined by other groups pouring out of other neighborhood alleys, for there was a large throng now coming around into Lombard Street, marching right out in the middle of the street as though it was their street, too. Men in shirt-sleeves, women, boys and girls, mothers carrying babies—they moved down Lombard Street almost silently except for a low murmur of conversation and an occasional laugh. Nervous laughter, most likely.