
|
No
Other Life continued
My
earliest memory of a home in Philadelphia
was an
apartment building where my family lived at 914 East Passyunk Avenue.
That block of Passyunk was entirely Italian except for the apartment building
where only blacks lived, right in the middle of the block. In the earliest
years of my memory, the apartment was filled with people. That is, the
apartments on all three floors were occupied. Each floor had a common
bathroom in the hallway. They were cold-water flats, and my mother always
complained about the lack of heat in the winter, about the general lack
of upkeep. By the time I was five, there were only three families left
in our apartment. One was the Mays, a single mother with six or seven
children. They were very noisy and dirty, although I did like playing
with them. That is, I liked playing with them until they broke my toys.
My mother hated them, thought they were wrecking the apartment building
and shaming the race in front of the whites in the neighborhood.
The other family
I remember from 914 East Passyunk Avenue was the Evanses. They moved to
open a dry cleaning store on the corner of Fifth and Christian streets.
I really liked their oldest son, Ernest Evans, who once risked severe
injury by crossing over one second-story window ledge to another to get
us into our apartment after our mother had accidentally locked us out.
He was my hero after that. He graduated from South Philadelphia High School,
where most of my family went except for me and my sisters. He worked in
a poultry store in the Italian Market on Ninth Street, near either Carpenter
or Washington Avenue. Ernest Evans was a chicken plucker, a very nasty
job that involved not only cleaning the chicken of its feathers in boiling
water but killing the chicken in the first place. Many black boys had
that job in the Italian Market. Places like Giordanos at the corner of
Ninth Street and Washington Avenue was a popular place to work, if one
wanted that kind of job. It paid well, about $20 or $25 a week. Those
were good wages to a teenage boy from the working class. My mother began
to buy her chickens from the place where Ernest worked, Addios Poultry
Shop. Ernest also liked to sing. He very much wanted to be a professional
singer and hung around the offices of a local recording studio called
Cameo-Parkway. Henry Caltabiano, another poultry shop owner, introduced
Evans to Cameo-Parkway Records. Once in a while, in the summer time, on
the front steps, he would sing one of the latest rock-and-roll songs for
us kids grouped around. Only one house on the block had an air conditioner,
so during the summer, everyone was on the street all night. We thought
he was a very good singer; seeming so much older with his processed hair
and knit shirts. In truth, he was a passable singer with the strong appeal
of youth. In 1959, he had a decent hit record called The Class. He imitated
other singers very well. Indeed, he was doing an imitation of Fats Domino
one evening at the Cameo-Parkway studio when he got his stage name. Dick
Clark, then the host of American Bandstand, the most popular teen-age
dance show in the United States, taped in Philadelphia at that time, and
his wife were there. Clarks wife, impressed or amused by Evanss imitation,
suddenly gave him a new name, and it stuck. Ernest Evans became a rock-and-roll
star under the name of Chubby Checker.
The first record
I heard by Chubby Checker was in the summer of 1959, not too long before
Mario Lanza died, when he cut The Class for Cameo-Parkway Records. It
was a modest hit, but all of us who knew him on the block were very proud.
We used to sit on the front steps at nightmy two sisters, Jimmy and Albert
Barbera, who lived next door, Harriet Curci, and several other kids; my
sisters and I being the only black ones in the group and we would listen
to a white pop station called WIBG or Wibbage, Radio 99. We would wait
to hear Chubby Checkers record. Sometimes, one of the older kids would
call the station to make a request. And this side goes out for the cool
kids who hang out on Passyunk Avenue in South Philly, the disc jockey
would say, naming several of us, A request for one of their ownChubby
Checker.
I had heard a
song called The Twist a year earlier in 1958. My mother loved a singer
named Hank Ballard and bought all of his records: Work With Me, Annie,
Annie Had a Baby, Sexy Ways. She bought a Hank Ballard record in 1958
called Teardrops on My Letter. On the B-side was a tune called The
Twist. It got some airplay on the black radio station we listened to
in the house, WDAS. It was not a big hit, but it became a popular dance
among black kids in 1959. White kids picked it up from black kids. Dick
Clark felt he could cash in on the Twist as a teen-age dance craze but,
so one version of the story goes, not with Hank Ballard as the singer,
as he was an R-and-B artist associated with lewd material and a lewd stage
act. Chubby Checker was, essentially, not an R-and-B act; he was not associated
with black popular music, so, in a sense, he was a kind of raceless black
man. In any case, Checker made a hasty cover of the tune at Cameo-Parkway
for Dick Clarks American Bandstand show. In the late summer of
1960, the song, heavily promoted by Clark, hit number one on the charts.
However the story goes, it turned out to be one of the most politically
significant covers in the history of rock-and-roll music. For the first
time one black artist covered another and turned a song into a huge crossover
hit. And Checker became the first bona-fide black teen-age idol, a clean-cut
image for white kids. White girls loved him, and the powers and
princes of popular culture did not see this as a threat. For a few years,
Chubby Checker was one of the most powerful integrative forces in American
popular music. He was only 19 years old when The Twist went number one.
My mother was,
at first, shocked when she heard Checker singing The Twist. He sounds
just like Hank Ballard, she said. He did, indeed, every vocal inflection,
every Ballard mannerism, every nuance. It was uncanny. How can he have
a hit when he sounds just like Ballard? My mother never quite forgave
Checker that bit of plagiarism and, on principle, always preferred the
Ballard version of the song. We kids were proud of Chubby Checker anyway.
We were amazed that someone we knew had a hit record, was a recording
star. Another thing that amazed me when I grew older was that not a single
white kid I knew I had heard Hank Ballards version or heard of it. Ballards
The Twist was played on the local soul station, but Checkers The Twist
was played on both the local soul station and the white pop station. The
Twist as a dance lasted about six months among the kids I knew, among
my uncles and aunts, who were very young at the time. Soon after, kids
were doing the Stomp, the Gully, the Crossfire and the Watusi.
Chubby Checkers
career might have ended right there as a one-hit wonder except that the
Twist caught on as a dance for hip and not-so-hip adults. By the fall
of 1961, the Cafe Society began slumming at places like the Peppermint
Lounge at 47th Street and East Seventh Avenue. From 10:30 p.m to 3:00
a.m., one could find people such as Greta Garbo, Noel Coward, Tennessee
Williams and Elsa Maxwell dancing the Twist, or simply listening to a
five-piece band called Joey Dee and the Starlighters. Checkers The Twist
emerged again and became a number-one hit in early 1962. The dance was
so big that a new wave of whites began slumming at places like Smalls
Paradise in Harlem, owned at this time by basketball star Wilt Chamberlain,
to Twist and watch Negroes Twist. More whites began going to Harlem nightspots
than at any time since the Harlem Renaissance.
Meanwhile, stores
were flooded with Chubby Checker ties, Chubby Checker belts, Chubby Checker
towels, and even instructional records by Checker teaching the listener
how to Twist. He was not only the first black teen idol. He was the first
black to have merchandise marketed to the American public. In this civil-rights
era, Checker was truly, though very inadvertently, a remarkable figure,
something seminal in a political and sociological way. He made it seem
very natural to me for blacks and whites to be together. He was the personification
of integration, of the inclusive community. His estimated income for 1962
was a cool million. He released other successful records on Cameo-Parkway,
like Lets Twist Again, Its Pony Time (my favorite Checker record
even today), The Fly, The Hucklebuck (a Charlie Parker tune with vocals;
Parker sold the rights to the tune in a recording studio lavatory for
a drug fix), and Slow Twisting with another South Philadelphia singer,
Dee Dee Sharp. What did all this Twist madness mean? I dont know, Checker
said, People do it and they forget things.
At this time,
I was in the same fifth-grade class as Chubby Checkers youngest brother,
Spencer. And his middle brother, Tracy, was dating my oldest sister. He
would drive up in these fancy Cadillacs and Stingrays and the Italian-Catholicskids
and adultswould be very impressed. By the end of the 1962 school term,
Checkers family moved from the neighborhood to a big, $30,000 house in
a very upper-middle-class, integrated area of Germantown. Tracy continued
to date my sister for a while but that eventually petered out. One year
later, my family moved from 914 East Passyunk Avenue to a small house
around the corner at 918 South Sheridan Street, where I lived until 1975.
Once Chubby Checkers family and the Mays family moved, we were the only
people left in the building. At this time, there was a great deal of talk
about an Interstate being built that would run through this part of South
Philadelphia. There was a great deal of worry among the residents and
a good deal of resistance on the part of the Italians. The Crosstown Expressway,
as it was called, never happened, but the threat of it changed the demographics
of South Philadelphia and made it possible for a certain type of intense
re-gentrification to take place that largely resulted in loading more
black folk into projects or forcing them to other parts of the city.
The threat of
the Expressway made selling the apartment more difficult but not impossible.
My mother knew that very soon we would have to move. She had become very
friendly with the Italian family down the street, the Curcis. Their home
on Passyunk had a smaller attached home that fronted on a small side street
right behind Passyunk called Sheridan. One of their sons had been the
lodger, but he married and moved to New Jersey, so they were now looking
for a tenant. My mother came back home one day, ecstatic with the news
that the Curcis had decided to rent the home to us. I am not quite sure
why they did, as this was, without question, going against the conventions
of the moment. But we developed a very close relationship with this family
over the years, at least as close as a relationship between blacks and
Italians can reasonably get. All of the Curcis were especially fond of
me, which was sometimes a cause of embarrassment when I was with my black
friends. How come them dagoes like you so much? they would ask when
we were out of earshot. We moved into the house in the late spring of
1963. We were the only black people in the immediate vicinity of Little
Italy.
On the Thursday
before Labor Day, 1963, a black couple, Horace Baker, a lab technician,
and his wife, Sara, tried to move into 2002 Heather Road in a community
called Delmar Village in Folcroft, Pennsylvania, a short drive outside
Philadelphia. They were driven from the home twice that day by whites
throwing bricks and bottles. That night, the whites pulled out all the
plumbing fixtures in the home and wrecked the furnace and hot-water heater.
The family finally moved in on Friday, but a mob of 1,500 whites stoned
the house after they moved inside. Every window in the house was broken.
The doors were virtually torn off the hinges. One hundred state troopers
were required to prevent the mob from murdering or maiming the family.
On that same
Tuesday, the school year started and my mother was back on the job crossing
the Italian-Catholic kids. Many of the parents, the nuns, and priests,
mentioned the Folcroft incident to my mother, out of a kind of nervousness,
perhaps, as it was the age that put racial nerves on edge, or out of a
sort of kindness or an attempt to reach some understanding with the only
Negro most of them knew. Most were ashamed of what had happened. But many
told my mother that this business of integration cannot be forced. People
cant change overnight, they would say. Besides, not all families are
like yours, Florence. Not all families can fit in. Some make trouble.
I think this integration is going too fast. My mother would simply nod.
What, as a black person, could you say to a statement like that? After
all, as my mother told me and my sisters privately, it was the white folks
in Folcroft who were making all the trouble. The black family hadnt done
anything any of us could detect as causing trouble except move into a
house or try to.
As a black,
I have been getting kicked in the ass by this country for centuries, but
whats a few more decades of getting kicked in the ass if it makes you
white folk feel more comfortable with the fact that I might be a human
being, too! Well, excuse me for living! This was the common sentiment
I heard expressed at the black barbershop I went to. Dont stop suffering,
I remember hearing Malcolm X say sarcastically in a recording of one of
his speeches at the time. Just suffer peacefully. Or as another barbershop
patron put it: The Bakers got what they deserved. They aint had no business
moving out there in the first place with them white folks. I say this:
why should anybody think that my highest aspiration is to live next to
these dog-like white folks. Let em keep their goddam neighborhoods and
the sanctity of their white asses, too. There was, at this moment, and
for the rest of the time I lived among the Italian-Catholics, a certain,
unstated, but very compelling and dramatic kind of stress, as if one represented
ones whole race all the time, was the sole testament to its claim of
humanity. And yet there was a certain perverse, oddly ironic pride in
being considered the exception. I could scarcely understand it, then.
|
|